Climate change: green fatigue
Communities in Hokkaido and five prefectures of the Tohoku region, we are told, have had record levels of accumulated snow as of 25 February.In the Sukayu district of Aomori city along the Hakkoda mountain range, the snowpile measured 5.61 metres, a record for all...
UK politics: a wasteland of democracy
Brexit - the first year - New e-book by Richard North Log in Tweets by @eureferendum Trending... Brexit: the ayes to the right ...
UK politics: Eastleigh by-election
UK politics: Eastleigh by-election Richard North, 01/03/2013 Follow @eureferendum More than usual hyperventilation has attended this by-election, with some pretty bizarre predictions, even by the rather low standards of British political commentary. For what it is...
Horsemeat fraud: it’s all our fault
At last the Polish have admitted the obvious about horsemeat adulteration. They say they have found horse DNA in beef stored at three storage facilities in central Poland, after three samples from 121 tested proved positive. Eighty more await examination. The meat...
Eurocrash: a national nightmare
Bankia we are told is a symbol of the Spanish housing and credit crisis. The group was formed in the wake of the financial crisis from seven troubled savings banks - and then evolved into a national nightmare.And what is a national nightmare today, could become – and...
Horsemeat fraud: more adulteration emerges
The "little England" media seems largely to have abandoned the horsemeat fraud story, even though results from European testing are pouring in, leaving Le Figaro to exclaim, "European supermarkets flooded with horse meat"."Fraudulent products", says the paper, have...
Food fraud: “what’s in your fish fingers?”
From 1,247 identified samples of fish purchased from retail outlets in the United States, 33 percent (401) were mislabelled. That has been the finding of a survey on seafood fraud by the conservation group Oceana (full report here), which has been running in the US...
EU politics: money down the drain
Last year, the National Audit Office was reporting that the Rural Payments Agency, which administers EU farm subsidies, had incurred penalties as a result of weaknesses in management and administration to a total value of £590.4 million since 2008-2009, including...
German politics: Merkel goes gay
It isn't only Mr Cameron who is having trouble in his party with gay marriage. German chancellor Mrs Merkel seems to be having similar ructions with her own CDU.According to Handeslbaltt, there are increasingly hostile noises coming from senior party members. Most...
Horsemeat fraud: gibberish but very little action
While the Italians were trying to work out whether they had a new local government, or not, the business of their real government went on in Brussels, not least with the Agriculture Council meeting.Here, the repercussions of the weeks of publicity over horsemeat were...
