Новости за 25.07.2015

There is no doubt that cancer survival in the UK compares poorly with other European countries, and that this is due to delayed diagnosis (“Call to get radical with cancer tests”, 19 July). However, the problem lies with the late referral of patients to hospital by GPs, who have been incentivised not to make unnecessary referrals. Your article seems to think that the solution is to reduce the time to diagnosis (after referral) from two months to one month by offering GPs access to expensive diagnostic tests. Читать дальше...

Political crises in the Middle East and North Africa since 2011 have either produced extreme violence or caused countries to dissolve into civil war. The territorial settlement that followed the defeat of the Ottomans in 1918 is collapsing, but there is no clear sign of what will replace it, other than conflicts which nobody knows how to end.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to realise that the Labour Party’s turmoil at the moment is genuine and it runs deep. If the definition of being alive is the ability to feel emotion and pain, then Labour is living its life to the full, to put it mildly. Talk of its extinction, therefore, is wide of the mark. A wave of monumental indifference would kill it off right now, but instead every party figure that I talk to is so emotionally fraught about the future of Labour they are prepared to fight to keep the party together... Читать дальше...

The Labour leadership contest rolls onwards and occasionally presents an absolute gift to Photoshop enthusiasts, such as Yvette Cooper’s recent comment during the LBC radio debate, comparing the four contenders to the 1970s group Abba. As far as pop music analogies go, however, there is one that might have been more contemporary and apt. Is Cooper the Taylor Swift of British politics, and Liz Kendall the Nicki Minaj? Does that make Andy Burnham Ed Sheeran? And has Jeremy Corbyn even charted?

David Cameron’s motives are entirely cynical, but his decision to go for an early referendum on our membership of the European Union in June next year should be welcomed. We report that the Prime Minister intends to hold the vote 18 months before the deadline that he set himself in January 2013 and which he repeated in the Conservative manifesto.

The Government is turning the English language inside out in an effort to dress up drastic cuts in spending on things we need as “cold, hard economic sense”. Ministers seem to be competing in a “Britain’s got austerity” contest with the Chancellor in the role of Simon Cowell. Last week, we heard Amber Rudd, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, indirectly criticise her predecessor, Greg Barker, usually the sharpest pinstriped Tory in the room, of being a socialist and pushing an anti-growth... Читать дальше...

If I’ve learned one thing from writing this column for the past 15 years, it’s who gets easily offended. There are the vociferous fans of Paul McCartney. There are Scientologists. There are the Scots and the Welsh. And there are cyclists. Cyclists are a particularly angry bunch – possibly it has something to do with the constant leg shaving or maybe it’s the effect of tight Lycra around the genitalia? Whatever, they are angry and, what’s even worse, unbelievably self-righteous.

Having lost an election that was there to be won, the scale and scope of the defeat inflicted by Ed Miliband upon the Labour Party – and, more importantly, those for whom the party exists to serve – continues to be revealed in excruciating detail.

I know we’re not supposed to believe a word that opinion pollsters say these days, but one fact from YouGov last week struck a chord. Buried beneath the sensational finding about the apparent frontrunner in the Labour leadership race was the news that a driving force behind Jeremy Corbyn’s surge is that a third of Labour’s 55,000 new members since the election are under 30, and that most of them are no more than 18.

You may not have heard of Jason Rezaian, but he is the Tehran correspondent of The Washington Post. More importantly, he is one of four Americans currently imprisoned in Iran. The son of an Iranian father and holder of dual citizenship, he faces charges of espionage, of “collaborating with foreign governments” and of producing “propaganda against the establishment”. The accusations are patently trumped up – except in the eyes of Iran’s paranoid security apparatus which sees reporters, and Iranian-American reporters in particular... Читать дальше...

One of the most intriguing films to hit the nation’s cinema screens this year is Guy Myhill’s directorial debut, The Goob. Its distinctiveness lies not so much in the elemental subject matter – this includes first love and a gauche school leaver’s uneasy dealings with his mother’s lairy new boyfriend – as its setting, 60 miles out of London in a Fenland hamlet where the chief source of employment is fruit-picking, and the principal recreation stock-car racing on a beaten-up track watched by an audience of slack-jawed teenage girls. Читать дальше...

An old pal of mine was at it again the other day. She’s one of those newspaper columnists who is very democratic. She kicks everyone, and does so rather entertainingly. I like to think it’s with tongue in cheek, but it’s hard to be sure.

The most remarkable thing a politician said last week was: “As I wind down my presidency...”. Barack Obama, interviewed by Jon Sopel for the BBC, began by listing his reasons for visiting Kenya this weekend. “As I wind down my presidency, I’ve already had a number of visits to Africa, but this gives me an opportunity to focus on a region that I have not been visiting as President,” he said. 

What a difference three years can make. At London 2012, David Rudisha produced the best individual performance inside the Olympic Stadium in a procession to gold and the world record. Yet after injuries to his knee – which required surgery – and calves, the only man to run under 1min 41sec for 800m looks ever more mortal.

Will she stay or will she go? On Saturday's evidence, Jessica Ennis-Hill's involvement in next month's World Championships in Beijing would appear to be a formality.

David Weir’s return to the Olympic Stadium today will bring back memories from the heady days of London 2012 but it will be accompanied by a sense of regret.

Greg Rutherford was athletics' answer to the fifth Beatle, the third British Olympic gold medallist on Super Saturday who barely merited a second glance. Given the chance to become first amongst equals, on his return to the scene of his greatest triumph, he endured painfully symbolic failure.

F or half-a-dozen strides, Usain Bolt levitated. His feet kissed the wet ground with a courtesan's ardour and he did enough to win. Awe gave way to relief that the Great Redeemer was back. Gratitude quickly mutated into obsequiousness.

Users of Ebay and other online sales sites are facing a tax crackdown following government plans to obtain data on millions of internet transactions.

Jessica Ennis-Hill's coach Toni Minichiello had described the athlete's return to the Olympic Stadium for the first time in two years as "D-Day".

It was supposed to be Usain Bolt at his most beatable. Instead, he sauntered to victory in a manner that only Bolt can.

The real horrors happen when people think they know something but don’t. On Thursday, we published this headline: “Bon vacances? French roads blockaded as farmers escalate protest against low prices.” (That is the picture, above.)

At the end of the 1990s, one of the most intractable issues facing the Northern Irish peace process was policing. Catholics made up 45 per cent of the province’s population – but just 8 per cent of its police. The existing force was seen not just as unrepresentative, but institutionally biased in favour of the Protestant majority.

On some level, I must have known this hateful day would dawn. In some distant, thickly veiled corner of the subconscious, I guess the certainty had been festering away for a while.

Discovering fresh details of the Speaker’s travel and accommodation costs would never have been possible but for the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act.