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Niall Ferguson: Will Europe Act to Avoid an Economic Cataclysm? – The Daily Beast

May 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

With the sap rising and the governments falling, all the European powers are merrily acting in national character.

In the midst of a severe financial crisis, the French have just elected a champagne socialist on promises of a 75 percent top tax rate and a lower retirement age. The Greeks also had an election in which the established parties lost to a ragbag of splinter groups. The outcome of the election was that they need to have another election. (Cue Zorba the Greek theme music.) Meanwhile, the wailing gloom of the flamenco emanates from Spain, where youth unemployment is now around 50 percent.

Within a few hours of arriving in [continue reading in new window...]

 

Filed Under: Analysis & Opinion, Country, EU, World News Tagged With: , ,

Underwear bomb plot: British and US intelligence rattled over leaks – guardian.co.uk

May 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Detailed leaks of operational information about the foiled underwear bomb plot are causing growing anger in the US intelligence community, with former agents blaming the Obama administration for undermining national security and compromising the British services, MI6 and MI5.

The Guardian has learned from Saudi sources that the agent was not a Saudi national as was widely reported, but a Yemeni. He was born in Saudi Arabia, in the port city of Jeddah, and then studied and worked in the UK, where he acquired a British passport.

Mike Scheur, the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, said the leaking about the nuts and bolts of British involvement was despicable and would make a repeat of the [continue reading in new window...]

 

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Will Ignorance Break-up the UK? – The Guardian

May 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Devolution and the separation of the English mind

These local elections will measure the role of English ignorance towards Scotland and Wales in Britain’s disintegrating union.

Those of us who wish that the people of this country thought more about their own history, to better understand who they are and take reasoned decisions about their future, can sometimes be guilty of looking back at our own schooling through rose-tinted glasses.

True, we can at least be grateful that we did not endlessly study the Nazis to the exclusion of most of our own history, as too many children still do today. But the history that I devoured at school and university was British history in name only. In reality it was English not British. Most people educated in England know little about the history of either Wales or Scotland, let alone Ireland. And this ignorance carries a price.

That price is England’s institutionalised indifference about the non-English parts of Britain. When the English think about their country in the world, there is a [continue reading in new window...]

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Spy in the sky: Is it only a matter of time before drone technology is used in civil society? – The Independent

April 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Spy in the sky: Is it only a matter of time before drone technology is used in civil society?Their killing power is immense and the surveillance possibilities are endless. Perhaps its no wonder that the awesome potential of unmanned aerial vehicles is now being so energetically explored – from the battlefields of Afghanistan to the London Olympics.

The world’s first glimpse of a killer drone in action was over the English Channel: a Royal Navy patrol boat reported “a bright horizontal flame” in the sky. The device emitting the flame had stubby wings and was shaped like a rocket, and was travelling from the French coast at more than 200mph. Too small and too fast to be intercepted, it arrived in England’s Home Counties [Continue reading in new window...]

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UK economy in double-dip recession – BBC News

April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The UK economy has returned to recession, after shrinking by 0.2% in the first three months of 2012.

A sharp fall in construction output was behind the surprise contraction, the Office for National Statistics said.

A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of contraction. The economy shrank by 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2011.

BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders says [Continue reading in new window...]

Filed Under: Economy, EU Tagged With: ,

British Peer Lord Ahmed suspended after ‘offering £10m bounty on Barack Obama and George Bush’ – Telegraph

April 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A controversial British peer has been suspended from the Labour Party amid   reports that he offered a £10 million bounty for the capture of President   Barack Obama and his predecessor President George W Bush.

Lord Ahmed, 53, who in 1998 became the first Muslim life peer, was reported to   have made the comments at a conference in Haripur in Pakistan.

A Labour Party spokesman said: “We have suspended Lord Ahmed pending   investigation. If these comments are accurate we utterly condemn these   remarks which are totally unacceptable.”

According to Pakistan’s Express Tribune newspaper Lord Ahmed offered the  bounty in response to [Continue reading in new window...]

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It is “an unprecedented step that will see Britain adopt the same kind of surveillance as in China and Iran”

April 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Police and intelligence officers are to be handed the power to monitor people’s messages online in what has been described as an “attack on the privacy” of vast numbers of Britons.

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, intends to introduce legislation in next month’s Queen’s Speech which would allow law-enforcement agencies to check on citizens using Facebook, Twitter, online gaming forums and the video-chat service Skype.

Regional police forces, MI5 and GCHQ, the Government’s eavesdropping centre, would be given the right to know who speaks to whom “on demand” and in “real time”.Home Office officials said the new law would keep [Continue reading in new window...]

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Internet activity ‘to be monitored’ under new laws in the UK – Telegraph

April 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Internet activity ‘to be monitored’ under new laws

Ministers are preparing a major expansion of the Government’s powers to monitor the email exchanges and website visits of every person in the UK, it was reported today.

Under legislation expected in next month’s Queen’s Speech, internet companies will be instructed to install hardware enabling GCHQ – the Government’s electronic “listening” agency – to examine “on demand” any phone call made, text message and email sent, and website accessed in “real time”, The Sunday Times reported.

A previous attempt to introduce a similar law was abandoned by the former Labour government in 2006 in the face of fierce opposition.

However ministers believe it is essential that the police and security services have access to such communications data in order to [Continue reading in new window...]

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British, French ships join US carrier in Strait of Hormuz – Yahoo! News

January 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

British and French ships joined a US carrier group in a six-strong flotilla of warships which passed through the sensitive Strait of Hormuz, Britain‘s Ministry of Defence said Sunday.

The ministry said a Royal Navy frigate, HMS Argyll, was part of a US-led carrier group to sail through the waterway which Iran has threatened to close over Western moves to impose new sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

A spokesman said: “HMS Argyll and a French vessel joined a US carrier [Read full story...]

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