A frontline despatch for dog enthusiasts visitng the EU I’ve crossed Afghanistan twice, narrowly avoided a domestic terrorist bomb blast in Spain, climbed the foothills of Mount Annapurna in sneakers, and had an audience with the Dalai Lama’s personal tutor in northern India, but nothing has proved more challenging than arranging a visit to the Netherlands for Christmas in…

So I woke up at 4am, drove to the ferry with my eldest daughter Emily and Tilly the border collie, and got to Harwich at 7.30am to drive on to the boat sailing to the Netherlands. You have to go through these huge doors (the bow literally parts in two…

Hi Angulem, thank you for your enquiry and comments. As you probably know, Nostradamus didn't specify precise details of the events he had seen in some spirit world he had rare access to. The interpretations are added to, revised, even revealed, through the ages - a lot of it is backward-looking reinterpretation. So this quatrain about the abdication of Prince Charles - Quatrain 10/22 - was explored by Mario Reading in his 2005 book, "Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies for the Future". More here - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nostradamus-king-charles-harry/

This week warm hubs became operational in Cambridge for the first time. The warm hub concept first emerged in England in the autumn of 2022. A cost of living crisis — gestated during Covid-related lockdowns, with the UK’s economic recovery stymied by the impact of post-Brexit regulations — combined with…

REIMAGINING THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD FOR THE AGE OF SUSTAINABILITY — This week Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said that “only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster”. He added: “It is a tall, and some would say impossible, order to reform the global economy and almost…

Is Prince Harry the ‘King of the Islands who never expected to be king’? — Why do people get so angry at Prince Harry? The announcement of his new book, ‘Spare’, due on sale in the new year, has prompted frothing and outrage in the UK. He’s been called ‘privileged’, ‘selfish’, ‘spoilt’, ‘arrogant’, ‘rude’…. why? Prince Henry Charles Albert David, Duke of Sussex, Earl of…

After the assassination of JFK, God decided they needed a lie-down, so they put the nightwatchman on duty. Being a bit of a rookie, the nightwatchman struggled for a while and made some pretty basic errors. Wars were allowed to go on longer than they should, and the cap on…

HOW CORONAVIRUS IS TEACHING US SKILLS WE WILL NEED FOR THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY — Did you hear about the first driverless car that killed a pedestrian? It happened in Arizona in 2018, when Elaine Hertzberg was pushing her bike across a road in Arizona, and an Uber-owned self-driving Volvo drove into her. The Volvo’s software initially classified her as an unknown object, then as…

Part Two of the series describing the UK in 2022 It’s New Year’s Eve, but this is no ordinary end-of-year for the UK. It’s less like a party and more like a wake where some folks get stupid drunk and behave like idiots. Others already have a hangover from previous antics and aren’t much aware of how the next chapter…