Adios Castro? Fears grow for veteran leader's healthReplace 'Fears' with 'Hopes' and the headline will be more accurate. The man has always attracted a curiously witless set of groupies devoid of anything approaching normal human decency and compassion as this remark to a woman whose father was murdered by Castro, Bonnie Anderson, by the former CNN president Rick Kaplan:
I know he killed your dad, but he's still a good guy in my book.
Firms could buy and sell permits to make alcoholic drinks or fatty foods under plans being put to Tory leaders.
The system would work along the same lines as carbon trading schemes aimed at tackling pollution.
The proposal, to be put forward at a Conservative summit on social responsibility, comes from an advisory group set up by leader David Cameron.
The advisers say companies that act responsibly could be rewarded by having less government regulation.
Britain's richest man has pledged £2 million to the Labour Party to save it from financial ruin after the cash-for-honours scandal, it was disclosed today.It's as if a dog owner gets fined for animal cruelty and raises the money by selling the mutt to a Korean restaurant owner, in front of the judge.
Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian-born billionaire, is to help the party pay off controversial loans taken from businessmen before the last general election.
Almost everyone agrees that one of the biggest flaws in the American strategy for invading Iraq is that there were too few troops to successfully contain an insurgency, thanks mostly to Rumsfeld's arrogance. So why has it become the received wisdom that the correct response to events in Iraq is to reduce further the number of coalition troops?
If Iraq is going to have any future oother than more bloodshed then there needs to be a concerted effort to make Baghdad a city where sectarian death squads don't rule the roost and there are clearly insufficient troops to do so at present.
Two boys suspected of spraying graffiti have been killed by a London Underground train.The use of the word 'boys' to describe a 19 year old and a 21 year old comes across a being a very deliberate choice. When a child is killed or maimed on public property then it is legitimate to ask whether some of the blame lies with the operators of the site for not preventing access, because the natural irresponsibility of children has to be taken into account. When Channel 4 describe a 21 year old man as a 'boy' it subtlely misapportions the responsibility for this tragedy on to the owners of the railway station.
Police said the pair, aged 19 and 21, ran in front of an oncoming train at Barking tube station, in east London, moments after a gang was seen spraying graffiti.
There must be an interesting "back story" to cabinet minister Ruth Kelly's decision to opt into private education on the grounds of her son's "substantial learning difficulties".The reason 'questons remain unanswered' is of course that unlike Ms Miller most people realise that they have no right asking such personal and intrusive questions about a child in the first place. Seeing as Fiona Miller's alcholic partner famously leaked patients' private medical records to the press in order to score political points it is perhaps unsurprising that the harridan takes this attitude to privacy.
Too many questions remain unanswered - how severe are the child's special needs; does he have a statement; was her decision to take him out of his state primary school really with the local authority's blessing; was the provision in her local authority really not good enough?
Who's ever heard of an "inorganic" food? The very currency of such a content-free phrase tells one all one needs to know about the level of scientific illiteracy in the market targeted by it.
The author has a massive chip on his shoulder about both Hitler and Stalin
BOSSIER CITY, La. — A pit bull puppy chewed off four of a baby girl's toes while the child's parents slept, police here said Monday.New born baby, pit bull puppy. The dog was obviously not an animal that predated the baby, they actually decided that after having a baby they should buy a pit bull terrier to go with it! At least one scientific study also backs up the idea that dangerous dogs attract stupid people:
People who own vicious dogs such as pit bulls have significantly more criminal convictions -- including crimes against children -- than owners of licensed, gentler dogs such as beagles, researchers reported on Thursday.Figures.
A study of 355 dog owners in Ohio showed that every owner of a high-risk breed known for aggression had at least one brush with the law, from traffic citations to serious criminal convictions.
And 30 percent of people who owned an aggressive breed of dog and who also had been cited at least once for failure to register it had at least five criminal convictions or traffic citations.
This compared to 1 percent of owners of low-risk, licensed dogs such as poodles, beagles or collies, the researchers reported in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence
The reason that uniform is not popular in continental Europe is that it does still have associations with Nazi youth. Making everyone look the same can of course be associated with making everyone think the same. Whilst we want to have discipline in schools, we certainly don't want to be bringing up a generation of Nazi youth.Professor Sheila Riddell of the Moray House faculty of education at Edinburgh University should be praised for her courage in uncovering the hidden agenda behind school uniforms.
