Sunday, 5 February 2012
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Leading article: What Whitehall could learn from WashingtonMonday, 6 February 2012
One striking result is that a majority of ministers have been in their current jobs longer than their most senior civil servants. Both in principle and in practice, this need not necessarily be a bad thing. A perennial complaint from outsiders who ha...
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John Kampfner: For Russia and China, the Arab Spring only offers a warningMonday, 6 February 2012
Beijing's approach to diplomacy, while less strident than Moscow's, is transparent – an onus on state-imposed "stability", hard-headed national economic benefit and non-interference. From the suppression of dissent to trading partnerships with emergi...
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Leading article: Snow does not justify a third runwayMonday, 6 February 2012
Looking through the same metropolitan lens, we should say, for fairness's sake, that the capital managed to keep the traffic and public transport moving. This was an improvement on last year – helped, no doubt, by Sunday morning traffic being relativ...
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Leading article: Fairness is more than fine wordsSunday, 5 February 2012
It was alleged, when Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, made these arguments in a speech last week, that he risked being anti-business. The Independent on Sunday is no more against successful businesses in competitive markets than are the British people...
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DJ Taylor: All hail Patten, champion of a clever BBCSunday, 5 February 2012
All this, in the context of recent BBC history, is the equivalent of lightning out of a clear sky, and one would love to be a fly on the wall of the office of director-general Mark Thompson as he and Lord Patten set about the task of outraging the ph...
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Patrick Cockburn: The death of the American dream in AfghanistanSunday, 5 February 2012
The decision, revealed by the US Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, with deliberate casualness to journalists on his plane, is an admission of failure. The US has an army of 90,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and is spending $100bn a year, but has still be...
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Paul Vallely: Must honour really be a thing of the past?Sunday, 5 February 2012
We know this is wrong. A teacher friend of mine was suspended for nine months pending a trumped-up allegation that he had hit a pupil. You hear similar stories about teachers being falsely accused by pupils with a grudge or crush on them. An accusati...
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Matthew Bell: As time goes by, a night in Rick's Café means more than ever beforeSunday, 5 February 2012
But how did this happen? How did a standard Hollywood romance, one of hundreds churned out by Warner Brothers in the 1940s, became engrained in Western culture as possibly the best-loved film of all time? It helps that the script is a catalogue of ov...
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Sara Malm: You can't teach your children how to be street smartMonday, 6 February 2012
Over-protection is the most horrific of the non-criminal ways of abusing your children. Trust me, I attend university with many a result of it. The NSPCC seems to disagree with Chris Cloke, head of child protection awareness, dishing out advice suc...
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Is it me, or does a Smartie sarnie sound tasty?Monday, 6 February 2012
If I sound obsessed with what's in your lunchbox, it's because I am. I love to know what people are having – I ask my husband every evening (Pret sandwich, FYI). Even in the office cul-de-sac where I sit there is plenty for the dietary anthropologist...
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Letters: The FalklandsMonday, 6 February 2012
Flood the disputed territory with privileges, invitations to important national events, encourage all kinds of contacts, free movement etc. and target the younger generation in particular rather than those in power at the moment.It will take time but...
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Leading article: Moscow learns how to keep out of the newsMonday, 6 February 2012
In the past, several things might have happened. The anti-government protest would have been banned; the riot police would have crack ed heads, and the pro-government marchers would have been co-opted as an advance guard. The result would have been v...
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Patrick Strudwick: Time to teach pupils how to fail betterMonday, 6 February 2012
But if the school were to offer other similar themed weeks then I would mark them up to an A* with a big smiley face in the margin. Here then is my alternative national curriculum for Generation Y Me?The joy of loneliness. By 2031 almost a fifth of B...
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Harriet Walker: 'February is the best month to detox'Sunday, 5 February 2012
Personally, I like to eat brandy butter straight from the tub off a fork. So mine never melts and neither do my good intentions – they both just sit there, furring my arteries, while I get on with being inactive and think no more of it. Basically, wh...
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Jane Merrick: Mine's a pint of Everything in ProportionSunday, 5 February 2012
This was technically a contraband half pint, as minutes earlier the Parliamentary authorities had ordered the Strangers' Bar staff to stop selling the ale, seizing the pump plate with its offending picture of a bikini-clad, bunny-eared blonde. The pi...
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