If you name a teddy bear Mohammed in Sudan, you face barbaric and draconian punishment. But if you avoid going to Sudan in the first place, which is a good idea, then you are at no risk of such lunacy.
America is different. Its laws are just as mad (under a system where your sentence is [...]

Veteran satirist Tom Lehrer said that the world of comedy changed in 1973 when the greatest living war criminal, Henry Kissinger, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. ‘At that moment, satire died. There was nothing more to say after that’.
If, during Bono’s cosying up to the G8 last summer, I’d done a sketch about him [...]

Remember the article on Kiva, the website that links up microcredit lenders with borrowers?
The Sharpener article was mentioned in the European Tribune, and from it was picked up by the Daily Kos — and Kiva have now had a rush of new lenders, able to fund every loan application available on their website! As a [...]

Microcredit — lending small amounts of money to poor people to help them set up small businesses — is not a new idea; it started in the 1970s when Muhammad Yunus set up Grameen bank. Since then, Grameen has proved outstandingly successful, lending over $3 billion and empowering millions of people.
A new twist on this [...]

This place has been hideously left wing for a week while Blimpish and I have had our backs turned, so I thought I’d rustle up some hate-filled bile to even the score.
Today Gordon Brown announced his plan to save Africa from poverty, which he hopes, in vain, to tie up at the G8 summit in [...]