Reino Unido (Continuación)

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It is disappointing that the debate on aviation's role in climate change is guided more by emotion than facts. George Monbiot's call for a freeze on all new airport construction, and the introduction of a national quota for landing slots, is a case in point (Drastic action on climate change is needed now - and here's the plan, October 31).He lays much of the blame for climate change at aviation's door, but he ignores some basic truths. UN scientists from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimate aviation's contribution to global carbon emissions to be just 2%. To put things in perspective, road traffic contributes 18% globally, while the fossil fuels used to generate heat and power contribute 35%.…  Seguir leyendo »

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What is it about a desert that drives men mad? On Monday morning the prime minister stood on the Afghan sand and said: "Here in this extraordinary piece of desert is where the fate of world security in the early 21st century is going to be decided."

Tony Blair was talking to soldiers he had sent to fight the toughest guerrillas on earth for control of southern Afghanistan. He told them: "Your defeat [of the Taliban] is not just on behalf of the people of Afghanistan but the people of Britain ... We have got to stay for as long as it takes."…  Seguir leyendo »

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Curves are in fashion. Not just in The Sun and Vogue, but also in The Economist, Prospect and, well, The Times. In a recent Spectator article William Skidelsky pointed out that many of the latest fashionable intellectual ideas are based on graphs.

It started with Malcolm Gladwell’s incredibly successful book The Tipping Point, for instance, in which he argued that the incidence of, say, criminal behaviour or the purchase of Hush Puppies travelled along a similar curve to that of an infectious disease.

More recently Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail provided a graphical account of the rise of the internet.…  Seguir leyendo »

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I am passionate about this! cried Tessa Jowell as she gave evidence on the London Olympics to MPs yesterday. And I thought, oh no, give me politicians who are not passionate; give me politicians who can add up.

Like the Chancellor. I bet Gordon Brown is worried and furious about these Games. The extent to which the Treasury trusts the Olympic planners is clear from the fact that they have demanded a contingency fund of 60 per cent of the budget for cost-overruns, compared with a normal construction contract which would require just 20 per cent. London 2012 has, and always did have, the makings of an economic nightmare about it: a massive, unfunded infrastructure project on sites we didn’t yet own, built on land contaminated to a degree we hadn’t yet discovered, with uncertainties from transport to security to, well, everything, but with one unyielding and deadly certainty to it: we had to do it by the summer of 2012, a fixed and extremely brief timescale.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Polly Toynbee has launched a magnificent but spectacularly dangerous argument for mass surveillance across Britain (CCTV conspiracy mania is a very middle-class disorder, November 7). With sweeping brush-strokes she trashes concern over CCTV, DNA databases and identity cards as a middle class "righteous indignation" underpinned by a sinister and self-absorbed "moral blindness". For Ms Toynbee, the battle against "gross inequality" is the only game in town, and we middle-class conspiracy nuts are getting in the way of solving that problem.

"The world is a dangerous place," she argues. "A heating globe threatens drought, war and mass migration ... Terrorists may blow up proliferating nuclear power stations."…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalTerrorismo InternacionalEuropaUnión Europea

You have to work a little to crack the Da Eliza code. Most headline writers, last week, stopped at the MI5 chief's flurry of oddly precise figures: 30 petrifying plots pending, 200 terrorist groupings identified, 1,600 dodgy individuals under surveillance. And even when you got beyond such chill statistics, there were still red herrings swimming around. "It's difficult to argue that there are not worse problems facing us, for example climate change," she suddenly announced halfway through her timber-shivering lecture. Espionage boss demands more loft insulation? Where's the blood-stained brick road to Jerusalem there?

But then she began talking about "the roots of terrorism" and the coding grew more transparent.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaDefensa y SeguridadInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

The director-general of MI5 has given us a chilling assessment of the full extent of the Islamist terrorist threat. Last week she revealed that the security services are now monitoring 30 plots and at least 1,600 suspects. Many intend to cause mass casualties on the streets of Britain.

Eliza Manningham-Buller is a dedicated and highly professional public servant not given to flights of fancy. Her warning is one we must heed. We are now dealing with an enemy that has the will to massacre thousands of innocent people. Our task is to deny them the means to do so.

There is much common ground between the political parties and leaders on this.…  Seguir leyendo »

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In the week that American people displayed their disappointment over the war in Iraq, in Britain the poppy, symbol of remembrance, was drawn into controversy.

Jonathan Bartley, the director of a Christian think tank, Ekklesia, has urged people to wear white poppies, which he believes to be more Christian. He argues that political correctness obliges public figures to wear red ones or face uproar. Certainly Channel 4’s Jon Snow attracts criticism for refusing to sport a poppy while on air. He believes that newscasters should avoid wearing “anything that represents any kind of statement”.

At a time when even President Bush has lost confidence in what the Iraq war is achieving, we are bound to ask: what is it that we remember at this time of year?…  Seguir leyendo »

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On November 11 1937 an ex-serviceman, Stanley Storey, interrupted the two-minute silence at the Cenotaph. Breaking through the crowd, he screamed "All this hypocrisy!" and something that sounded like "Preparing for war!" The police gave chase and, yards from the prime minister, clambered on top of him and muffled his cries.It turned out that he had escaped from a mental asylum. But his shattering of the two-minute silence struck a chord. The Daily Mirror argued that the silence was now "a silence of shared impotence ... what is the use of paying homage when every day we drift nearer and nearer to another war?"…  Seguir leyendo »

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On the stroke of 11 o'clock this morning, Peter Brierley will be standing in the foyer of Tesco on Commercial Street in Batley, west Yorkshire, with a trayful of poppies and a collection tin, when he will pause and bow his head to remember his dead son. Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley died on March 30 2003, a week into the Iraq war and having just crossed the border from Kuwait, when the Landrover he was travelling in hit a piece of debris, overturned and crushed him.

At the same moment, 109 miles away, Pam Bradley will put down her scissors in the hairdressing salon she owns in Rugeley, Staffordshire, and think of her son Nicholas, who has just returned to Basra on his second tour of Iraq.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalTerrorismo InternacionalEuropaUnión Europea

Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist, and Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller may have little in common. I do not know whether the Director-General of MI5 believes in God and nor am I certain that Richard Dawkins believes in Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller.

But I do. And whether or not she was thinking in these terms when she spoke to the Mile End Group at Queen Mary, in East London, on Thursday, it strikes me that at the heart of her discreetly bellowed talk (nothing carries like a lowered voice) was an idea that Professor Dawkins has done much to popularise: what he has called the concept of the meme.…  Seguir leyendo »

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I think I must have a chip missing. An operational fault makes me quite oblivious to the dangers of government agencies (excepting the NHS) abusing my personal information to trap me or tax me or otherwise attack my basic liberties. Just as I blithely assume that no one at London Transport is remotely interested in the details of every Tube journey registered on my Oyster card, so I fail to see that the Home Secretary, no matter how nasty I might be about him, will want to access my entry on the national register and write horrid things in it.

I just don’t think I’m that important.…  Seguir leyendo »

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The world is a dangerous place. A heating globe threatens drought, war and mass migration. Terrorists may blow up proliferating nuclear power stations. Ministers are preparing for a 1918-style flu pandemic.So on a scale of threats to Our Way of Life, where would you place CCTV and speed cameras, electronic health records, DNA storage or ID cards that carry the same information as passports? Most people are not in a delirium of alarm about the Big Brother potential of any of these. Mori finds that about 80% of people support the idea of ID cards (though only 39% think the government will introduce them smoothly, which is another matter).…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Henry Porter, the London editor of Vanity Fair (THE GUARDIAN, 03/11/06):

Up until now the best ally of governments and big corporations who wish to place every individual under total and unwavering surveillance has always been ignorance. People have simply failed to grasp the threat posed by individual surveillance systems and the way a range of technologies can reach out to each other almost of their own accord to create new pathways of exchange.But with the publication of three important reports this week - one in this newspaper about the NHS database - there can be no excuse for saying "I have done nothing wrong so I have nothing to fear".…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 03/11/06):

IN THE EARLY 1880s one Alphonse Bertillon, a French policeman, came up with a revolutionary scientific idea for identifying criminals: Bertillon argued that certain physical characteristics — earlobes, the length of the left middle finger and so on — do not change over an adult lifetime, and no two adults could have the same measurements. By systematically recording these features on known criminals, the French criminologist declared, the police could develop a foolproof method for identifying crooks.

This system of anthropometry, or Bertillonage, was enthusiastically embraced by police forces throughout Europe and America. In 1884 Bertillon triumphantly identified 241 repeat offenders, several of whom were duly guillotined.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By George Monbiot (THE GUARDIAN, 31/10/06):

It is a testament to the power of money that Nicholas Stern's report should have swung the argument for drastic action, even before anyone has finished reading it. He appears to have demonstrated what many of us suspected: that it would cost much less to prevent runaway climate change than to seek to live with it. Useful as this finding is, I hope it doesn't mean that the debate will now concentrate on money. The principal costs of climate change will be measured in lives, not pounds. As Stern reminded us yesterday, there would be a moral imperative to seek to prevent mass death even if the economic case did not stack up.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Peter Preston (THE GUARDIAN, 30/10/06):

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make totally inchoate (or, as the Electoral Reform Society would say, a world-beating "test-bed" for voting systems). Yes, it's Scotland, with the land Ruth Kelly calls England only a few yards away over the border. And yes, it's a world-beating mess that only mass boredom with the intricacies of democracy, inflicted by too many Liberal Democrat party broadcasts over the years, prevents us from recognising as absurdity. Step back for a moment and contemplate this unmade bed.

Voting systems matter because different systems yield different results, and are custom-built to do so.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Roy Hattersley (THE GUARDIAN, 30/10/06):

The critics have got it wrong. How the royal family behaves is not the issue. The Queen may well, as some newspapers have suggested, be working so hard that her health is endangered. On the other hand, it is equally possible (as other reports claim) that the Prince of Wales was driven to uncontrollable fury by the suggestion that he should be taxed in the same way as his future subjects. But to base judgments about the future of the monarchy on the conduct and character of the sovereign and her successor is to reduce the constitutional debate to the level of triviality that Jeremy Paxman managed to sustain for almost a whole book on the subject.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 27/10/06):

IN THE LONG and grim tradition of alcoholic Scottish brawls, this is one of the oddest: the Scottish Health Minister, Andy Kerr, has squared up to the Benedictine monks in Devon who make Buckfast tonic wine, the powerful concoction of red wine and caffeine that has long been favoured by Scottish drinkers as a swift, cheap path to oblivion.

Buckfast, or “Buckie”, holds a particular place in the affections (and wrecked metabolism) of the Scottish drunk. Among hardened drinkers it is known as “What the Hell are you looking at?”, “Wreck the Hoose Juice” and “Coatbridge Table Wine”.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury (THE TIMES, 27/10/06):

Coming back from a fortnight in China at the beginning of this week, into the middle of what felt like a general panic about the role of religion in society, had a slightly surreal feel to it. The proverbial visitor from Mars might have imagined that the greatest immediate threat to British society was religious war, fomented by “faith schools”, cheered on by thousands of veiled women and the Bishops’ Benches in the House of Lords. Commentators were solemnly asking if it were not time for Britain to become a properly secular society.…  Seguir leyendo »