A volcano hit Tonga on Saturday (January 15) and generated a shock wave around the world. If there were any reason to doubt our interconnectedness — the extent to which our lives are linked — that eruption blows it away.

The world is finding out, in double quick time, about…

Our part of London has been wassailing for nearly a decade and this year- the eighth wassail — was particularly splendiferous.

Upwards of a hundred people turned up in the Pleasaunce, a walled 19th century garden, many wearing a wassail crown (of fake leaves on fake boughs that were twisted…

The other day I watched as someone posted a fairly anodyne comment onto a social media platform. It was about a local survey of traffic schemes. A tonne of abuse erupted; some people started metaphorically dancing around the boxing ring, their linguistic fists bunched and at the ready. …

…dictatorships end ignominiously

With impeccable timing, the BBC has released secretly recorded phone calls between Tunisia’s former dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and trusted advisors, 11 years after people power forced him to flee the country.

Ben Ali, who died in exile in Saudi Arabia in September 2019, left Tunisia on January 14…

Listen to the full broadcast of NPR’s January 11 interview with Donald Trump and you enter the metaverse.

It becomes clear that nearly 12 months after the former president was reluctantly forced to vacate the White House, he lives (or at least pushes) an alternate reality. …

Vaccine sceptics sometimes label government policies that bar the unvaccinated from restaurants and public buildings as vaccine apartheid.

What are they referring to?

Vaccine and mask mandates at Broadway shows in New York?

Covid passports, as imposed by Greece and France as early as July?

Italy’s requirement since October for…

Journalists generally gets a stream of useless press releases, which aren’t even redeemed by humour or the wit of the writing. But a British rubbish removal company’s recent, very newsy pitch for attention was riveting. It came off the back of Blackberry’s January 4 announcement that its iconic devices, which…

Will Britain become “one of the first major economies to demonstrate to the world how you transition from pandemic to endemic”?

I ask the question. A British cabinet minister made the statement.

Raising the prospect of a further cut to the isolation period for people who test positive for Covid-19…