Please donate to our appeal for child soldiers here.Few people have expressed the agony of child soldiers so movingly as Ishmael Beah. Rescued as a teenager from a life of enforced killing in Sierra Leone, he found a new life in the US, became an acc...

Yet for three hours on Sunday night, you could be forgiven for thinking that the emotional temperature of the entire nation was set by our sporting achievements. The BBC did a magnificent job of presenting the Sports Personality of the Year – and wer...

Much attention will now focus on whether the former Chief Whip was unfairly hounded from office. After all, not only is the substantiating evidence apparently fraudulent, but CCTV footage only now made public also suggests the spat was much shorter t...

I make both assertions without knowing Mitchell very well or being able to judge whether or not he would have been an effective Chief Whip. But his career was wrecked without any definitive evidence and careers should not be wrecked on such a flimsy ...

The shops of the Strand were lavish in their profusion of pies, puddings, currants, raisins, spices, candied peel and sugar mice. Hansom cabs clattered down the cobbles of gas-lit streets, and ladies in poke bonnets, mantled against the cold, purchas...

Last year, a third of all adults attended a Christmas service, with the older generations more assiduous than the younger. That is a large number. And there is no reason to believe that the crowds of worshippers this year will be smaller. Yet last we...

Three adventurous tourists in Australia decided to go for A and B.The men, swimming at Litchfield national park, were curious about the sleeping croc, and decided to film as one went to check it out a little closer. As one of the most aggressive crea...

Reed says: "this “first black” rhetoric tends to interpret African-American political successes — including that of President Obama — as part of a morality play that dramatizes 'how far we have come.' It obscures the fact that modern black Republican...

Perhaps it would be best to ignore these hateful propagandists, but, as users searched for more information on the sect this week, they dug up a Russell Brand interview in which the English comic takes a "loving" approach to two representatives of th...

The Atlantic Wire has kindly put together a list of the world's worst words and phrases - with explanations as to why exactly we find them so annoying.Todd Akin's rather offensive creation of "legitimate rape" has made the list, as he actually though...

With millions being spent on gadgets, jewellery and other expensive presents over this time, many homes are packed to the rafters with goodies; while shoppers are walking the streets with hundreds of pounds worth of items at any given time. And if yo...

What possible justification can there be for such discrimination against the Church of England and the Church of Wales? There will undoubtedly be gay couples who are members of the Church of England, and who will wish to have a religious ceremony. Th...

But that’s what the Queen wanted. And the mats, made by the Gloucestershire firm of Lady Clare (product placement to die for) are “heat-resistant to 100 degrees”, according to a Downing Street briefing that was long on irrelevant details and short on...

Warnings of a "demographic time bomb" are far from new. But despite the dire predictions of ever-rising numbers of the elderly relying on a dwindling cohort of working-age adults, so far all attempts to deal with the consequences have been piecemeal,...

Well, perhaps you couldn’t exactly call it fun. Perhaps you couldn’t exactly say that spending most of the weekend writing cards to people you never see, and then setting off to do your Christmas shopping, and then going home without a single present...

The latest chapter in this real time rendition of Time’s Arrow is the arrival of a living, breathing milkman to our home. Not your bog standard Unigate Bernie. This one has the amazing name of Paul Bravo. He turned up outside our front door last Satu...

In the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, libertarianism is about “minimisation of the role of the state”. Of course, this includes economics – so far, so UKIP.But libertarianism is about social issues too, which is where Ukip’s claims to be ‘li...

 As we drove to a base of one of the many rebel groups in the Central African Republic, the terrain triggered memories of my own war years. The villages with burnt-out ruins of houses and the hesitancy on the faces of the people brought vivid flashba...

Pushing through new legislation at this time will be hugely contentious and fiercely opposed by all those concerned with the administration of justice, including the majority of the senior judiciary. It will ultimately costs hundreds of millions in r...

In the 1890s, Mahatma Gandhi was convinced that the British were able to rule India because they were meat eaters, while the locals were vegetarian.During the famine of 1914-17 drought stalked the villages in India. Brahmist farmers were forced to gr...

It was in northern Pennsylvania in the spring of 1999, three years after the shootings in Dunblane. What began as a kind invitation home for the weekend by a prospective American love interest, ended with me being frogmarched into a snow-capped fores...

They persuaded Big Boi, aka one half of history's greatest ever hip hop duo, OutKast, to sit down in a nice cosy leather arm chair and read aloud from Dr Suess's Chrimbo classic, How The Grinch Stole Christmas. As well as bringing his delightful rumb...

He gets a chance to show off his talents, when some lady from a radio station politely asks "Will you do us the honour of spitting off the lyrics from Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer?" She hardly has time to finish her sentence, before DMX is sucking h...

Through a decade of campaigning by some of the poorest people in Britain, largely. This column has made no secret of its affection for the community organisers of Citizens UK, and its subsidiary London Citizens. For 10 years, they have brought togeth...

Don't answer that you bigot. I'll tell you. They are as follows...'Straight acting.''Non-scene.''No camp guys please.''Real blokes only.'Time and time again, you see the same sentiment popping up and revealing the harsh truth: a lot of gay men don't ...

While no-one likes being displaced from their well-appointed window seat with a table and handy 240-volt socket for laptops and mobiles only, no one really likes doing the displacing, either. Successfully getting someone to shift their ass without c...

But it should not be. Poor decision-making and an absence of effective editorial responsibility have lain behind almost everything that has gone seriously wrong at the Corporation in recent years, despite the presence of elaborate chains of highly pa...

As we have been reminded this week, the Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor – the job currently held by Chris Grayling – retains the power to appoint the court's chief executive and other administrative officers. And as we also learnt, this is no...