Monday 8 July 2013


Clegg hit by cover-up claims over charity linked to wife which received £12million Government grant

'Nick Clegg was accused last night of mounting a Whitehall cover-up over claims that he helped fast-track Government funds for a charity linked to his wife.
Senior Tory MP David Davis condemned Mr Clegg’s officials for citing ‘personal reasons’ to prevent the release of emails relating to a £12 million Government grant allocated to Booktrust last year.
The money was awarded after lobbying by one of Mr Clegg’s aides, who drew attention to the fact that Miriam Clegg had hosted a lavish function for the charity.'
 

Egypt: on the brink of disaster

'Millions of Egyptians took to the streets earlier this week with legitimate complaints about Mohamed Morsi. They accused him of monopolising power, of assaulting the separation of powers between the presidency and the judiciary, of bearing down on journalists, and ruining the economy. These were genuine concerns after just one year and the throng was swelled by the deep resentment the Muslim Brotherhood itself had generated. This explosion was a long time coming.
Yesterday, however, hundreds of thousands more were on the streets demanding his restoration. Whether or not Mr Morsi had been good or bad, he had been their choice and they were being robbed of it. If you can take to the streets, they were saying, we can take to them too, and they did in provinces all over Egypt. That is one of the consequences of deciding the fate of regimes with military coups, however popular. Once you stage a coup once, you can stage another one again. Once parliaments are dissolved and constitutions suspended, the street becomes the only arbiter of legitimacy. It is, to say the least, ironic that the African Union called the coup for what it was and, notably, the European Union did not.'