The British Department of Energy and Climate Change has been closed in a series of sweeping changes to the government unveiled by the new prime minister, Theresa May. Its functions, which include representing the UK at international climate talks, responsibility for meeting carbon targets and levying subsidies for green energy, have been transferred to a …
More than 100 suspected drug dealers have been killed – either shot dead by police or murdered by unidentified vigilantes – since the election of Rodrigo Duterte as the Philippines’ president. On a recent weekend police officers killed eight known “drugs personalities” in the southern town of Matalam. Duterte was elected in May, having promised …
Continue reading ‘The deliberate murder of suspected drug dealers’ »
A friend of ours made the following comments in an email, and I want to pass them on (having secured his agreement) because they represent a point of view I haven’t heard expressed in the media (or which I have missed if it has been): “Multinational, multilingual unions do not last forever. Although the use …
Rising seas, raging storms, melting ice and forest fires are exposing artefacts that have much to tell us about our history on Earth – from sunken shipwrecks to the ancient waste dumps filled with bones, shoes and carvings that are emerging all over the Arctic and further south. They could soon be lost forever, destroyed by …
Infrastructure was once at the heart of American public policy. Works such as the Los Angeles Aqueduct, Hoover Dam, and the Interstate Highway System transformed the economy. Today, the US spends significantly less, as a share of G.D.P., on infrastructure than it did fifty years ago. The Washington Metro is in such a state that …
