‘Anybody here got any student debt?’ asks Bernie Sanders halfway through his speech at a rally in a small university on Monday. He then starts conducting a fake auction. ‘What are some of the numbers you got? You? 35,000. You? 55,000? Who else? A young lady here… 100,000 dollars. You win! I don’t know what
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thenextrefugeecrisis/media.mp3″ title=”Laura Pitel and Migration Watch’s Alanna Thomas discuss the second migrant crisis”] Listen [/audioplayer]In Istanbul, signs of the Syrian influx are everywhere. Syrian mothers sit on pavements clutching babies wrapped in blankets; children from Homs, Syria’s most completely devastated city, push their way through packed tram carriages begging for coins. Arabic adverts offer
Last week Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, tabled proposals which the government hopes will form the basis of the UK’s renegotiated relationship with the European Union. Politically, the proposals may be just the job: a new commitment to enhance competitiveness, proposals to limit benefits to migrants, recognition that member states’ different aspirations for
Last week the indigenous white population of Cologne took to the streets once again to celebrate their annual ‘Crazy Days’ spring carnival. I stepped out of the hotel at ten o’clock on the morning of the designated ‘women’s day’, wondering how the women of Cologne had reacted to the events of New Year’s Eve, and
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thenextrefugeecrisis/media.mp3″ title=”Simon Barnes and the Sea Watch Foundation’s Dr Peter Evans discuss whales” startat=1400] Listen [/audioplayer]Last week a sperm whale was beached at Hunstanton in Norfolk and there was much horrified concern. A terrible sight, lying there like a small cottage on the immensity of the beach, 46 feet long and 30 tons, surrounded
I covered another stabbing the other day, a particularly nasty one this time. An 18-year-old was repeatedly knifed in the stomach and beaten over the head with a baseball bat. Witnesses told me he’d been outside his mum’s tower-block flat in Islington, north London, when he was rushed by a group of about ten or
Lately, people only have to look at me to splurge their deepest, darkest secret. Last May, they did a terrible thing. They voted Tory. Now they’re contemplating greater deviance: voting to leave the EU — if only, they say, the campaign was fronted by someone they could believe in. And who do they want? The answer
Take a quick look at the UK buy-to-let market and you might find it tough to understand exactly what it is that makes it so very popular. Dealing with tenants is difficult and boring. House prices have a horrible tendency to go down as well as up (Londoners — ask anyone living in the north
At the risk of sounding like Neville Chamberlain, how bizarre that we should be panic-selling our stock-market investments in reaction to the news of a slight economic slowdown in a faraway country to which we export little and whose direct investments in our own economy created fewer than 5,000 new jobs last year. Throughout the
Scrapping the cuts to tax credits. Ring-fencing health care, and spending a few billion on a high-speed rail link from London to Birmingham. Despite all the howls of outrage from the left about austerity, for a country that was meant to be broke, we have a government that still throws around a lot of cash.
I had been trying to get to Aleppo for ages, but was unable to do so because rebel activity had cut off the city from the outside world. Syrian government military successes at the start of January meant there was at last a safe road. I hired a driver, was allocated a government minder (very
Back in 1882, exactly 100 years before I was born, the Four Nations rugby competition was formed. It was originally contested between England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and the fortunes of the different teams have varied through the years. Scotland and England shared early successes, but with the turn of the century came numerous changes.
