We have heard surprisingly little about the climate change jamboree currently underway in Cancun. Before last year’s Copenhagen summit, there was much hullaballoo. Gordon Brown told us that we had ‘fewer than 50 days to set the course of the next 50 years’. Yet he and 100 of his political counterparts could not stop the
Home The Office for Budget Responsibility said it thought economic growth for 2010 would be 1.8 per cent, not 1.2 per cent as it had previously predicted. It expected 330,000 public sector workers to lose their jobs over the next four years, not the 490,000 it forecast in June; 1.1 million jobs would be created
The great American journalist and satirist P J O’Rourke has died. He contributed a number of articles to The Spectator over the years. This diary from December 2010 was the last piece he wrote for our London edition. RIP. — New Hampshire Just back from London, 40 years to the week since my first visit. It was
President Saleh of Yemen has refused to hand over the terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki because it contravenes the Yemeni tradition of hospitality. If the fate of Hannibal is anything to go by, al-Awlaki had better run for it quickish. In 218 bc the Carthaginian Hannibal had famously led his army and elephants over the Alps to
Happy talk David Cameron wants to measure our happiness alongside GDP. The first measure of happiness — the Gross National Happiness index — was instigated by the former king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in 1972. — Heavily influenced by Buddhist teachings, it contained questions which might not strike many Britons as being important to
Part of the pleasure of the WikiLeaks revelations is that they confirm the view now universally reviled as ‘neocon’. Part of the pleasure of the WikiLeaks revelations is that they confirm the view now universally reviled as ‘neocon’. It emerges that whereas the public pronouncements of the Arab world all concentrate on Israel as the
Pecksniffian bureaucrats Sir: I bought your 27 November issue purely on the promising cover illustration and was not disappointed. Josie Appleton’s masterly article (‘A common sense revolution’) held up to deserved ridicule the Criminal Records Bureau, a classic example of a very worthwhile idea hijacked by as big a bunch of Pecksniffian bureaucrats as ever
