At this weekend’s Reform conference in Birmingham, the opening speech will be given by a man who wasn’t even a member of the party until four months ago. James McMurdock stood in what was once a Tory safe seat. Against the odds and after three recounts, he won, and is now Reform’s accidental member of
Israel’s security cabinet met in a bunker in the ministry of defence in Tel Aviv on Monday night. The main item on the agenda was Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia whose missiles and rockets have forced tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes in the north. The meeting lasted into the early hours of Tuesday.
First, the good news. The Irish government is about to receive a €13 billion windfall in the form of back taxes from tech giant Apple, after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled against the company. That should pay for a good few social homes in a country that has an even bigger housing crisis
A few weeks ago, I was present when my aunt, a Canadian citizen born in the UK, chose to die through euthanasia, or as it is euphemistically called in Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying or MAiD. Being British, I wasn’t familiar with the process. What I saw horrified me, but it was also chillingly seductive.
There is always much to look forward to on a holiday with friends in France (the day one supermarket sweep, boules under plane trees, foie gras on demand); but, for me, one of the greatest joys is the hire car. That’s entirely due to my indulging in the niche pastime of driving around in the
Kyiv The young amputee had a question. We were sitting once again in the rehab centre in Kyiv, and I was looking at the same sort of injuries I saw last year: the missing limbs, the cranial scars, the withered hands and feet that no longer obeyed their owners’ commands. The difference was that Vladimir
It would be tough for any country to lose 7-0 in a World Cup qualifier, but when the losing team is China, and the thrashing is at the hands of arch-rival Japan, it is deeply humiliating. The defeat was ‘shameful’, according to an editorial last week in the Global Times, a state-controlled tabloid, while the
For the first 50 years of the corked bottle, there was no easy way to get into it. The combination of cork and a strong glass bottle came together around 1630 but the first mention of a device to open the bloody thing wasn’t until 1681. Cavalier get-togethers must have resembled the teenage parties I
