Unilateral action, for instance drone strikes, whether indiscriminate or not, may undermine moderate forces in the Yemeni government and make key local Yemenis less willing to tackle al-Qaeda themselves, writes George Readings.
For the second week running, a poll series has put Labour ahead of the Conservatives for the first time in three years. Just like last week’s Times/Populus poll, a ComRes poll for today’s Independent gives Labour a narrow lead, up three points on 37 per cent, with the Conservatives down five points on 35 per cent and the Liberal Democrats up two points on 16 per cent.
On Thursday, the UN’s High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing is due to report back after eight months of deliberations on this thorniest of issues within the international negotiations.
Amazingly, the private pensions paid in that same year were very slightly less – at about £35 billion. In other words, not one penny of private pensions paid in that year was at cost to the private pension sector: all were paid at cost to the government.
Even if the Tories won a higher share of the vote in 1945 and 1966 than they did this year, Cameron clearly achieved a better result than the eight occasions when another party won a majority (1945, 1950, 1964, 1966, Oct 1974, 1997, 2001 and 2005) or the one Hung Parliament where Labour was the largest party, in February 1974.
Following the terror alert at the weekend, there is widespread speculation President Obama will order more drone strikes on Yemen to tackle the threat posed by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Such a strategy, however, may cause more problems and result in an even greater threat.
The Coalition’s self-appointed champion of governmental transparency, Eric Pickles, has been criticised for failing to release information over potentially defamatory comments made about chair of the Electoral Commission, Jenny Watson, who his Department of Community and Local Government (DCLG) accused of building her “career on incompetence” and “milking the taxpayer”.
In his speech to Scottish Labour’s final conference before next May’s elections to Holyrood, Ed Miliband declared “Labour’s fight back has begun”, but what have we learnt from the weekend on Oban? First, these’s no love lost between the Liberal Democrats and Labour, with Miliband’s deputy Harriet Harman calling Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander a “ginger rodent”.
Labour’s former Climate Change Secretary has been quiet on green issues since his election. Effective opposition means holding the Government to account.
The UK economy grew by 0.8 per cent in the third quarter of 2010, twice as fast as expected by City economists. As in the second quarter, growth was boosted by a large increase in the output of the construction sector, but manufacturing output also increased strongly and there were solid increases in output across the service sector. Growth in the last three quarters has averaged an annual rate of 3.2 per cent.
