Current Affairs

Salon debunks today’s Telegraph panic-piece by noted hysteriac Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, where it is claimed that the Chinese government are about to dump the greenback, causing the US economy serious problems.

The odd website planningdisaster.co.uk is campaigning against the new Planning Bill, and specifically the idea that NIMBYs won’t be able to stand in the way of developments like places for disabled servicemen’s families to stay in. OK, like wind farms, roads and airports. The website is

The new EU treaty draft has been published – pdf available here. This American-sounding statement caught my eye on page 5: “The Union shall act only within the limits of the competences conferred upon it by the Member States in the Treaties to attain the objectives set out therein. Competences not

And another thing! A few commenters on that same thread are going on about how this is much worse than cash for questions (back in the mid 90s), but the key thing to remember, and which is often forgotten, is that the cash for questions row was about MPs making

Political debate and trust has sunk to such a low level in this country that several mouth-breathing contributors on Nick Robinson’s Newslog are saying things like “isn’t it convenient that the announcement of no charges in the cash-for-honours affair came as the polls closed in the two by-elections”

An interesting article in today’s FT (here for those with FT.com subscriptions), which should be posted to every UKIP member in the country. In summary, it says that the EU is becoming an important rule-maker for the rest of the world, because of the size and influence of

Congratulations to Shriti Vadera, Gordon Brown’s no-nonsense special advisor, who makes in into the Lords, and into a junior ministerial office at DfID.

Link. via Innocent Newsletter.

I don’t normally read the Daily Mail, or its website, but I had to go over and check out how it reported the research from Keele University (pdf) that showed an endemic disregard for the law among the soi-disant respectable middle class. The Daily Mail’s article is here,

I thought the Olympic logo was bad enough, but a user on Metafilter points out: [The] logo looks like Lisa Simpson giving someone a blow-job. Once you see it this way you will never be able to see it as being anything else. Nooooooo!