8 Mar 2008

08 March 2008

In this issue

Featured articles

No sleep till Denver: Hillary, the unlikely underdog, takes it to the wire

It was meant to be the night that Barack Obama sealed the deal. The presidency seemed almost within his reach. Then, against the odds, like the villain in a horror movie, Hillary came back from the near-dead. And by the end of Tuesday night — with a thumping win in Ohio and a victory in the popular vote in Texas — she had earned the right to take this contest to Pennsylvania on 22 April and, maybe, all the way to the convention in Denver in August.

Water, Prozac, management consultants: all completely useless

According to one serious front-page newspaper report, all those bones found on the site of that former children’s home in Jersey were actually left-over props from an edition of Bergerac. The whole place is taped off, they’ve had the floppy-eared sniffer dogs in and the supposedly grisly, horrible revelations have been leading our news programmes for a week or more. Now it may well be not multiple murders after all, but merely fake stuff left for John Nettles to find many years ago, before he forsook the Channel Islands for the scarcely gentler parish of Midsomer.

Beware the politician posing as a scientist

One of the fond delusions of our age is that scientists are a breed apart from ordinary mortals, white-coated custodians of a mystery, with authority to pronounce on any scientific issue,,however far removed it may be from their own field of expertise. A shining example was the status given to Sir David King, who has just retired after seven years as the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. In 2000, when he was appointed just before the foot-and-mouth crisis, Professor King’s speciality was ‘surface chemistry’.

If God proved he existed, I still wouldn’t believe in him

Martin Rowson just doesn’t buy the ideology that comes with God. Even a personal appearance by the Almighty wouldn’t do the trick, he saysThe syphilitic atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose career in philosophy came to a sudden halt when he couldn’t stop himself cuddling a carthorse outside St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, believed the death of God was an enormity from which mankind could only recover by willing itself to stand in God’s place.

It is not US Marines who should be on trial

After 9/11, the United States had the sympathy of the world on its side. Yet as we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, this sympathy and trust has been entirely eroded, and during the making of my film, Battle for Haditha, I saw exactly how and why this change of heart and mind has taken place. Many of the ex-Marines that took part in the film enlisted aged 17, believing they were fighting in a just cause to protect democracy and the integrity of the United States.

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