Every day things are getting worse in Syria. Today the Syrian regime started what looks like an all-out assault on the key city of Homs, reportedly killing more than 200 people. The attack took place as the UN Security Council prepares to vote on a draft resolution backing an Arab call for President Bashar al-Assad to give up power. The problem has been the lack of information about events on the ...

An interesting take on vigilante films, such as Death Wish and for that matter, Dirty Harry: "But film critics are such inveterate moralists, directing their principled scorn on every deviation from strict correctness and crossing with the light, right? Not in any world we’ve seen. Something in the vigilante film seems to foment a strident exception to typically (and reasonably) agnostic...

Am I dicing with death every morning and evening? The Times would say so. I cycle to work, and, for the past two days, the Times has given over its front page to a campaign on cycling safety. The campaign is in most respects commendable — I like the specific proposals — but it emphasises the urgency of the issue by giving a very grim impression of the risks that cyclists face. ‘B...

In December 1976 Paddy Ashdown put to the local party in Yeovil a plan for winning the constituency for which he had been recently selected and where the party was third at almost every election. Thirty-five and a bit years on, it still reads as a pretty good plan. 1. We should adopt a three-election strategy

Analyzing the New York Giants - New England Patriots game has been done in virtually every possible way by nearly every available pundit! Are there any unique ways left? Handicapping a Super Bowl or a horse race! As a young man I was a somewhat frequent visitor to the horse track. As a frequent visitor, I would spend a great deal of time pouring over the Racing Form trying to pick the eventual rac...

Labour has just marched into the trap that George Osborne set them and voted against the benefits cap — again. As one gleeful Tory says, ‘we’re going to make sure everyone in the country knows how they voted on this.’   I suspect that in every Labour-held marginal that the Tories need to win to get a majority in 2015 the benefit cap will feature prominently on Tory lit...

Indirectly of course but we thank her anyway! Just in case you needed confirmation that the Obama's lie squarely in the upper regions of the 1% the President so loathes and takes every opportunity to vilify, a breaking story has emerged out of the rumor mill regarding the First Lady's recent purchase of $50,000 worth of lingerie! I have to draw(s) the line, however, at the unsubstantiate...

Ah, primary season is in full swing.. Welcome to the Watcher's Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the 'sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the...

In the first of a series of monthly posts on Huffington Post, Lynne Featherstone outlines the case for changing perceptions of body image, and the success of the campaign so far: Every day people are confronted with images of the ‘perfect’ body that just don’t reflect the diverse society we live in. These unrealistic images

Performance data for secondary schools was published last week, and there is an important difference between the latest figures and those that have been published in previous years. For the first time we are publishing separately the GCSE achievements of looked after children and children on free school meals at each and every school –