So sad to hear of the death of my friend Candace Vadala, who under the name Candida Royalle (her website is here) was a pioneering maker of erotic films for women and a feminist fighter for free expression, having been a pornographic film actress in the 1970s. For the last few years she’d been working on [Read more…]
It’s refreshing to experience a general election in which the polls and the pundits are proved massively wrong. It’s especially invigorating when the stakes are as high as they were on thursday. After all, a different result could have had huge domestic and international ramifications in fairly short order, [Read more…]
In the aid world you hear a lot of rhetoric about “transparency” and “accountability”, but both are in troublingly short supply. This is especially the case at some of the powerful mega-charities. So it was good to see this OpEd piece in the London Times by Stephen Pollard calling for more openness in the UK charitable sector. [Read more…]
When I was living in New York in the 90s I always liked Memorial Day Weekend. It marked the beginning of Summer of course. And if I was out at the beach I would make sure to visit one of the little war memorials that all the Long Island villages have, and pause in front of [Read more…]
Rare (and well-done) BBC R4 programme on the shrinking British Army regimental system. Very much worth checking out. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03y0l8w
Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper today carries a disturbing report of a Pakistan Taliban video telling the Kalash people – the 3500-strong pagan tribe who live in three remote valleys of the North West Frontier (and about whom I wrote here ) that they must convert to Islam or face death. The survival of the Kalash — whose paganism is [Read more…]
Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Seamas Heaney, Hugo Chavez, David Frost and James Gandolfini probably had the most obituaries this year. Here’s my own goodbye list: Richard Beeston – Foreign Editor of the London Times and the great foreign correspondent of his generation. Rick was only 50. Roger Ebert – A great film critic, the first [Read more…]
It is probably a good thing that the UK government’s plans to privatize defence procurement (part of what is euphemistically called the “Defence Reform Bill”) have been dropped, at least for now. The idea had been to replace the Defence Equipment and Support Agency with a “government owned, contractor-operated” body. There is no question that the [Read more…]
I was a “witness” on BBC Radio 4’s “The Moral Maze” debate show last night (13.11.13). The link is here. A good debate but it was remarkable that the issue of corruption and waste in emergency aid delivery did not even come up….
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