Rail passengers will recall the terrible disruption last New Year, when there were major engineering overruns in Glasgow, Rugby and London. Tens of thousands of travellers were inconvenienced. Network Rail was fined a record £14m by the rail regulato...

With a huge effort that belied my 40 fags a day at the time, I managed to effect some kind of wiggly-lizard-on-hot-sand-type press-ups that got a pretty good laugh. Much later, after the show was broadcast, our producer was hauled into the controller...

Yet again, the BBC has been true to its exasperating self. As with Andrew Gilligan's Today programme broadcast, as with the mis-editing of "The Queen", as with the various phone-in scandals, the BBC has reacted late, and extravagantly, to a mistake t...

Problems that were once associated with the failures of society are blamed on parents. The parenting deficit is blamed for problems such as that of low achievements in schools, low self-esteem, drug-taking, obesity, crime and mental health problems. ...

The real mistake was to allow urban expansion after the war without attaching covenants (as is sometimes done around US airports), making it clear that by choosing to live in proximity to a major airport the house-owner was thereby disqualified from ...

Although his team has been brilliantly organised in terms of mastering the internet, fundraising and motivating younger voters, Obama has fought an almost passive campaign. Some of what he has done this year has actually been dull or mediocre, from h...

We've been ticked off by the EU for breaking the Maastricht guidelines on borrowing, as we no doubt will be again. Government spending is running way ahead of the targets set in the March Budget, as is borrowing. The split of regulatory functions bet...

As the residents of Ziarat and other villages bury their dead, the country's nervous government is desperately casting about for the billions it needs within the next six days to stave off financial ruin. After being rebuffed by what it considered to...

Now up pops another attempt. A team of British scientists announced this week that they had developed a purple tomato with health-promoting properties. They genetically engineered the plant's DNA by inserting a couple of genes from the snapdragon pla...

Most of the time, this kind of stunt would land someone in the slammer (imagine if a group of red-necks hanged a Barack Obama dummy from a tree). But right now, it's Hallowe'en week in Los Angeles – so, apparently, anything goes. As I write this colu...