Greece is on the brink – so they say – of bypassing the EU for a bailout and going directly to the IMF. Europe wants to see Greece reduce its budget deficit before agreeing on a rescue mechanism. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, backed calls in the Bundestag to allow the EU to expel countries [...]

Last week, there were two big stories involving marine wildlife in captivity, one that ended in the loss of human life and one near-miss catastrophe. The first was an ‘attack’ by a killer-whale trainer at a Sea World amusement park in America. The second was that a crack appeared in a gigantic aquarium full of [...]

Michael O’Leary has really lost it this time. This is absolutely bonkers. And members of the Opposition who try to gain political capital from a mess that does not exist outside of O’Leary’s head should be warned that their self-respect is at stake. I say all this as a rabid anti-FF voter (I am an [...]

I’ve started writing book reviews for the Irish Times, and in a few weeks I’ll be on a panel at the Dublin Book Festival talking, from what I know so far, about the art of literary reviewing. Since I am not all that experienced, and want to formulate some ideas to talk about, I might [...]

Around the office, dozens of little restaurants and cafes have been shutting their doors over the last few weeks. It seems like one or two closes every day. The other day, an old friend came to meet me for lunch. She sent me a text five minutes before we were supposed to meet at a [...]

I didn’t even know JD Salinger was still alive until recently, when his lawyers stopped publication of a book, written by a bit of a self-professed jokester hack, about Holden Caulfield as a grown-up. I think that was last year. When Salinger, at the age of 91, died last week, I forgot that I remembered [...]

A big decision by the US Supreme Court has put the future of democracy in a bit of a pickle, and the fallout is likely to be felt around the world in just a few generations of elections. The court last week ruled five to four (along conservative versus liberal lines) that the US Government [...]

I recently had a conversation with a friend regarding the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. He’d sent a funny email as soon as he heard – about how US bankers had somehow caused it in order to deflect attention away from the seven- and eight-figure bonuses some of them are getting. But as the scope of [...]

My eight-month-old son got a bath in slightly warmed Evian bottled water over the weekend, while our water was off. We weren’t going to bathe him at all, but after two barfs and an explosive poo, the wipes weren’t working anymore and the house had begun to smell like an alleyway full of drunks in [...]

In Uganda, where, according to The New York Times, mobs beat people to death for crimes as small as stealing shoes, the authorities recently attempted to enact the death penalty for homosexuals. Only the threat of reduced foreign aid by donor countries has pushed Uganda to step back from execution (by hanging) and penalise gays [...]