
Great news: the British government has done a 'U-turn' and signed up to the international ban on cluster bombs.
Clearly the British Prime Minister is a keen reader of this blog....
U.K based Journalist, author and broadcaster. Covering: Current & international affairs, history, sport (horse-racing & football), books, films, television, and plenty of other topics too.... 'Stranger than Fiction', my biography of Edgar Wallace, is available here: http://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/index.php/biography-books/stranger-than-fiction-25294.html and here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stranger-than-Fiction-Wallace-Created/dp/0752498827 and also via the right-hand bar.
Hardcore Eurovision-sceptics will doubt it, but there was a time when the continent's annual music-fest did actually produce good music. The golden age of Eurovision - like the golden age of football, television sitcoms and most other things which really matter - was the 1970s.
The strength of 70s Eurovision was shown by the quality of the songs that didn't win. Italy's Gigliola Cinquetti would have romped home in any other decade with her beautiful ballad Si, but had the bad luck in 1974 to come up against a Swedish outfit called Abba. The 1975 contest was another classic, won by the Dutch group Teach-In, with Ding a Dong, arguably the best winning song of all time.
"It's not the language that we need right now, and I think it's language that's reflective of George Bush. We have had a foreign policy of bluster and sabre-rattling and tough talk, and in the meantime we make a series of strategic decisions that actually strengthen Iran."