Keys Corner

The British government wants to offer the chance to all school children to learn Mandarin and Arabic: The schools secretary, Ed Balls, said UK plc increasingly needed children to learn the languages of countries where Britain had “very important business contacts”.

All secondary schools should offer lessons in Mandarin, he said, citing a poll . . . → Read More: Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous?

The headline above is from Charlemagne’s notebook (a blog by an Economist contributor). Similarly Train breaks down: Continent cut off from the Times.

Quite in the spirit of the more well known apocryphal headline “Fog in Channel. Continent isolated” attributed to the London “Times” in the early 20th century. Let’s wish Eurostar a . . . → Read More: Snow over Channel, Continent cut off

Watch the video first. Just one viewing, please. Hit pause when the question appears, before you watch the rest. You will be asked how many changes you noticed, so pay attention!

What was your score? Mine was 2, which is pretty unobservant, I think . . . → Read More: How observant are you?

The Copenhagen Climate Summit starts tommorow. One editorial, with a stark message, will appear in 56 newspapers in 45 countries tomorrow:

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have . . . → Read More: Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation

The following probably seems quite normal to any German reading this, after all we had price controls on practically everything here until July 2001 (Shops couldn’t offer products more than 3% under list price without breaking the law.). Even today there are still price controls for books, maps, and sheet music in Germany.

. . . → Read More: German price controls

Seth Weintraub pitches an interesting idea in Computer World:

… I think the SD card is going to replace the DVD drive on most of Apple’s laptops going forward. If you really need a DVD, you’ll be able to buy an external USB Superdrive – but that option will mostly be a safety . . . → Read More: Will the DVD go the same way as the floppy?

Reading the newspapers at the moment, you could be excused for thinking the prices for everything have been climbing steeply – oil by 50% in 2008, and in the last 12 months it has doubled in price, all manner of foodstuffs and other raw materials such as steel.

So I was surprised, today, . . . → Read More: Stay off the bleeding edge

We didn’t have any opportunity to post to the blog in the later part of our holiday, and we’ve been back home since last weekend, but had little free time. However, we have now loaded some of our photos – particularly those we took in Valencia, which we loved – on Picasa.

If . . . → Read More: Back home now

The US government is going to show the rest of the world what it understands democracy is:

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq’s money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation . . . → Read More: A fine example of democracy