Barack Obama said on Tuesday that “human and systemic failures” were to blame for allowing a would-be terrorist on to a Detroit-bound aircraft on Christmas Day, placing the responsibility for the security blunders at the foot of the US government.
Delivering a hastily arranged statement at a marine base in Hawaii, where he is on holiday, the US president said that the mistakes were “unacceptable” and ordered preliminary investigation results to be delivered to him on Thursday.
There are now 65 generals in the Army, with 43 major-generals, 17 lieutenant-generals and five four-star generals. In addition there are 190 brigadiers, a one-star rank; 20 more than in 1997. The figures were rovided in a written answer in the House of Commons.
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There are more than 30 admirals in post in the Navy: two four-star admirals, six vice-admirals and 25 rear-admirals.
In the RAF there are 36 top brass: three air chief marshals, nine air marshals and 24 air vice-marshals.
Tories believe that the party will reap the benefit of a late “Cameron bounce” north of the Border in the last few days of the coming general election campaign.
Party strategists have pinned their hopes on undecided voters opting to go Conservative because they believe that David Cameron is heading for Downing Street.
Two woman killed in Christmas coach crash
Published on 23 Dec 2009
Two woman have died and 47 other people were injured after a coach overturned on an icy road in Cornwall.
In a letter responding to the Liberal Democrats in Scotland Mervyn King says if [an independent] Scotland kept the pound, the bank's monetary policy committee may set rates with no input from north of the order. The Liberal Democrats initiated the correspondence.Like, at present, the Bank's MPC gives two hoots about any developments whatsoever outside London.
Goldman Sachs has threatened the UK Treasury with plans to move up to 20 per cent of its London-based staff to Spain in a standoff over tax andI'm far from sure that 20% of the staff would be prepared to go. Spain does indeed sound nice for a holiday (and each year I spend three or four months there) but think of the disruption to family life - the children's schooling, the friends and relatives, the cultural life, the need to find property to live in and to dispose of existing housing. And the clincher - relatively few Spaniards speak English.
bonuses.
"Things are getting held up by procedural wrangling," said Miliband. "People can kill this agreement with process arguments. It will be tragedy if we cannot reach an agreement on substance, but it will be a farce if we cannot agree on process."
So Signor Berlusconi doesn't wear a vest. The more fool he. Didn't his mother tell him to wrap up warmly?David McLetchie, the former Scots Tory leader, is to head the party’s general election campaign in Scotland in a move that will be seen as sidelining David Mundell, the Shadow Scottish Secretary and the only Conservative MP north of the Border.
The decision to overlook Mr Mundell as general-election co-ordinator will also fuel speculation that he is unlikely to become Secretary of State for Scotland if David Cameron becomes Prime Minister next year.
Details of private phone calls from Gordon Brown’s Scottish home, including a call of 2 hours 42 minutes call to a mystery address in Canterbury, were made public yesterday.
The time, length and geographical destination of 21 calls were disclosed when the BT bills submitted as part of his expense claims were published by the House of Commons. The numbers were blacked out.
The cigarette and booze industries have been hit by a "hidden" excise charge this year, after the Government failed to cut the duty to make up for higher VAT.
There were no changes to alcohol and tobacco duty rates in yesterday's pre-Budget report, after they had been increased a year ago to offset the temporary reduction in VAT. Industry expects predict that the impact of VAT going back up to 17.5 per cent on 1 January and no respite in the burden on excise duties would add up to 18p on a packet of cigarettes and at least 6p on a pint of beer.
Even before we’ve trawled through the small print on pensions and tax changes, the pre-Budget report has lived up to the billing. Scorched earth, poison pill, you can choose your metaphor but the key point is that this was a political statement designed to protect Labour’s sectional interests, boost its core vote and stuff the Tories at every turn.
The measures likewise: for example, a whacking great increase in the value of the state pension (2.5pc when inflation is negative?!), ditto other benefits, represents a gratuitous increase in the cost of entitlements, in the knowledge that the Conservatives need to review them downwards. Reckless, unaffordable, yet how can the Tories reasonably be expected to reverse that one?
The Tories are now on 38 per cent, down one point since early November, while Labour is up one point at 30 per cent. This is the first single-digit lead found by Populus this year.
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The Liberal Democrats have continued to improve their position this month, up two points at 20 per cent, with other parties two points down at 12 per cent.
The precedents of Bohemian Rhapsody are as much in the 19th-century classical traditions of rhapsodic, quasi-improvisational reveries – like, say, the piano works of Schumann or Chopin or the tone-poems of Strauss of Liszt – as they are in prog-rock or the contemporary pop of 1975. That's because the song manages a sleight of musical hand that only a handful of real master- musicians have managed: the illusion that its huge variety of styles – from intro, to ballad, to operatic excess, to hard-rock, to reflective coda - are unified into a single statement, a drama that somehow makes sense. It's a classic example of the unity in diversity that high-minded musical commentators have heard in the symphonies of Beethoven or the operas of Mozart. And that's exactly what the piece is: a miniature operatic-rhapsodic-symphonic-tone-poem.
... we need to create wealth and quality of life, not by putting carbon into the atmosphere but by taking it out. We need to build, in short, a low carbon economy. And not just at home: our aim must be to do this in every major economy of the world.
This will involve change: a shift from the energy dictatorship of oil and traditional fossil fuels to the efficiency, self-reliance and security of low carbon energy systems, which will be the engine of growth and job creation over the coming decade.
RBS board may quit if £1.5bn bonus plan is vetoed
Zac Goldsmith, the Tory candidate for Richmond, and one of David Cameron's closest advisers on the environment, insisted yesterday he would not be corrupted by power, and said politics had to enter a new era of transparency and integrity to regain trust, including on green taxes.
