Rachel Reeves MP, Labour’s Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, responding to George Osborne’s speech to the Federation of Small Businesses dinner, said:

Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalize or decriminalize drugs in the United States. Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and replacing it with a system of treatment for problem users and addicts. Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. One decade after this unprecedented exp...

It is with nodding regret that we witness the repeat violence in Egypt and count the 200+ dead last night in Syria.   Those who lauded the freedom after Mubarak was deposed in Egypt had very short-sighted views of the real world. Whoever was most organised and best financed would always win the power vacuum - the extremists !!   Those who use the muslim faith as a weapon seem to hate fel...

By now, most of you are familiar with the revolt currently going on against the Assad regime in Syria, which is being suppressed with great brutality. Literally thousands have been killed by Assad's forces, beefed up with Hezbollah fighters from next door Lebanon. Recently, a UN Security Council resolution backed by the Arab League that condemned the violence and called for Syrian leader Bash...

Republican frontrunner opens new line of attack on Barack Obama after last week’s jobs figures, claiming real unemployment rate is above 15%

The ECB’s action has brought a liquidity crisis to an end, but it is unlikely to spur lending in the real economy, writes Edward Chancellor, who thinks concerns about the solvency of Europe’s periphery will remain

UK welcomes revised draft of European fiscal treaty as ???real progress???

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...

Joe Kennedy always claimed he'd avoided the crash of 1929 by getting out of the market as soon as he noticed that even shoe shine boys were talking about hot shares. His logic was that as soon as everyone started piling into the market, shares prices would cease to reflect real underlying values and instead they'd bubble up right until the inevitable correction. In the same spirit, I think I see t...

It’s not as if this hasn’t been explained enough times. For one thing, the model used by the MIT scientists didn’t make precise “predictions”, but projected what was likely to happen if certain trends continued, allowing for “adjustable assumptions” of resource use. Their real finding was not that collapse was likely to occur by a