Tim Worstall

A 15-year-old schoolgirl has become France’s hottest literary property after writing a book about a teenager who loses her virginity at 14. He’s bidding for the film rights, of course, he just can’t decide whether to direct or take the leading male role himself.

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However, Lord McNally suggested in an interview with The Daily Telegraph that the new legislation would go further, in effect creating a privacy law. He conceded that there were concerns that a privacy law had been created through successive rulings by judges. Some, such as Mr Justice Eady, have been heavily criticised. Lord McNally said: [...]

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No, I have no idea what this is about either. “Ace Combat Assault Horizon PS3 X360″….mebbe a shoot ‘em up game?

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In reality, there is not one single part of government – or the whole of the public sector, for that matter – anywhere in the UK where sustainable development has as yet been properly mainstreamed. And by properly mainstreamed, I suggest DEFRA continues to use the old Sustainable Development Commission definition as in “sustainable development [...]

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So, Ritchie tells us that stock market volumes have fallen and the roof hasn’t fallen in. Thus all of us who chided him over his backing of a financial transactions tax are wrong. So volume and value have fallen, dramatically. And has liquidity collapsed as some predicted? No, it hasn’t. Has the supply of capital [...]

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Greg Philo (for it is he, how could Adam Smith’s old Glasgow University have come to this?) tells us that the solution to all of our woes is a simple 20% tax on the accumulated wealth of the top 10%. A straight 20% haircut of all their property, pensions, equities and all the rest. Forgive [...]

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The traditional North/ South divide is creeping further south as the impact of the recession widens the economic gap in Britain, an academic claims. Oh aye? But as Government cuts are introduced, towns marginally on the south side of the divide, such as Leicester, Warwick and Lincoln, could begin to struggle and be pushed on [...]

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In a set of 21 papers published by the Royal Society, the scientists from many disciplines and countries say that little more land is available for food production, but add that the challenge of increasing global food supplies by as much as 70% in the next 40 years is not insurmountable. OK, good. “Plant breeders [...]

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“A full-blown graduate tax of say 5% on earning for the rest of your working life faces considerable opposition,” a senior government source said. “It creates an incentive for people to leave the country and study abroad.” No it doesn’t you twat. It creates an incentive to get the education here for free then go [...]

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So, The Lancet publishes a paper which shows that home births have a three times greater risk of death of the baby. Midwives are outraged. Then we get obstetrician saying that perhaps a quarter of births are suitable for home births. Midwives point to Holland where the mortality rate is very low which has one [...]

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Standard Chartered chief executive Peter Sands said at its results recently that he was increasingly concerned about where to be domiciled: “London is still the world’s centre for international banking. It is our preferred solution to be here, unless we are hopelessly disadvantaged.” Well quite. There’s all sorts of reasons why the banks won’t move, [...]

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Think tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF) look at how much food, fuel and other resources are consumed by humans every year. They then compare it to how much the world can provide without threatening the ability of important ecosystems like oceans and rainforests to recover. This year the moment we start eating into nature’s [...]

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“This is the machine you write books with, dad.” Yes, my boy. The machine comes with the stories in it. You just have to let them out. They put the windows in so you can see them before you try them out.

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Still another recurrent argument from the Thurmond era has it that no judge should overrule the voters, who voted 52 to 48 percent in California for Prop 8 in 2008. But as Olson also told Chris Wallace, “We do not put the Bill of Rights to a vote.” Yup, quite, liberty and human rights trump [...]

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That was before the police found the body of a man thought to be one of Japan’s oldest, at 111 years, mummified in his bed, dead for more than three decades. His daughter, now 81, hid his death to continue collecting his monthly pension payments, the police said. Alarmed, local governments began sending teams to [...]

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Sometime between the late Seventies and now, the rules of children’s party games changed. I couldn’t say precisely when, because a generation passed between the day I last joined in as a cake-guzzling infant and the day I first presided as a haggard parent. Bit of a stunner, isn’t it? The gap between generations is [...]

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Precisely because everyone else does learn English we should be learning other languages. Foreigners will go on learning English, regardless. The British have an obligation, it seems to me, to reciprocate. Call it what you like – mutuality, courtesy, fair exchange, good practice. Not to do so is in every sense hateful. A self-exemption. A [...]

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Suddenly I was seeing coppers armed with submachine guns on the streets of London, which can be slightly unnerving to a former armed robber, believe me. Noel Smith

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Laurie Penny on music videos: The distinction must be made here between legitimate concerns about protecting young women from abuse and the contempt for female sexuality in general suggested by the term “sexualisation”. When feminists speak about objectification and abuse, we tend to be dismissed, precisely because those words still speak truth to power, frightening [...]

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Farmers face losing thousands of pounds in public subsidies for protecting Britain’s wildlife That can be read as saying that because they’ve been protecting Britain’s wildlife the farmers will lose the subsidies. Infelicitous phrasing at best…

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