In the final three months of 2010, the number of unemployed rose by 44,000 to 2.5 million. The primary victims have been the young. Some 965,000 16- to 24-year-olds are now out of work. The number of people in long-term unemployment, having been out ...

The pollution of the Ecuadorean Amazon was a dirty business. And Chevron has fought dirty over the past 18 years in an attempt to evade responsibility for the crime. The oil giant has gone to enormous lengths, and considerable expense, to undermine t...

It is true that not all forests in England are well-managed; nor are afforestation schemes everything they might be, with their uniform rows of conifers. But the extent of the Coalition's miscalculation was clear from the moment it mooted its ill-con...

Who, just a few weeks ago, would have predicted protests on the streets of Manama or Tripoli? Yet, even if 2011 turns out to be the Middle East's answer to Europe in 1848, can we imagine the dominoes from Tunisia and Egypt tipping into Iran? Can we r...

In part, perhaps, it is a function of size. The NHS has 1.3 million employees whose impersonal structures mitigate against the development of real bonds between individual staff and patients. Too often the NHS seems focused on the interests of staff ...

David Cameron's press people were promptly asked whether another cat was in the offing to replace Humphrey, who quit during the Blair era. The Coalition denied it, and then, in a major political U-turn, announced the imminent arrival of Larry. Much t...

For too long the industry's showpiece beanfeast has seemed like some cultural hangover of Thatcher's notorious claim that "there is no alternative", insisting on promoting the same infantile modes with ever-decreasing returns. Small wonder that a gen...

The company left Ecuador in 1992 and no longer has assets in the country that could be seized. It argues that the ruling is fraudulent and lacking in scientific evidence, and in any case it fulfilled its cleaning-up responsibilities. In a wider sense...