Society

Few people have heard of Hon Lik, which is a pity because he’s probably saved more lives already than anybody else I have met. Twelve years ago, he invented vaping — the idea of getting nicotine vapour from an electronic device rather than a miniature bonfire between your lips. Vaping is driving smoking out at an extraordinary rate, promising to achieve what decades of public health measures have largely failed to do. And it is doing so without official encouragement, indeed with some official resistance. Via an interpreter, and sucking on an electronic pipe, Mr Hon told me how it happened. And here is the key point, the one that

Where would you rather live, Dewsbury or Bradford? I ask because it seems that there are probably some good property deals to be had in this particular corner of West Yorkshire right now, as a consequence of half the population decamping to Syria in order to blow themselves up. I mean, property was pretty cheap already — in Savile Town, Dewsbury, right in the heart of the Muslim ghetto, you can buy a nice grey stone cottage for not much more than fifty grand. Two beds, back yard, only a stone’s throw from the local sharia court and that vast mosque run by those jovial extremists Tablighi Jamaat. But it’ll be

In his latest encyclical Pope Francis will apparently describe global warming as a ‘major threat to life on the planet’. If the leaked reports are accurate, his Holiness is absolutely right. Here are some examples of the havoc ‘global warming’ has wrought in the past decade: Honduras:US-backed security forces implicated in the killing of more than 100 peasant farmers involved in disputes with palm-oil magnates. Kenya: Teenage boy shot in February this year while protesting against a ‘wind park’ in Nyandarua. Mt Elgon National Park, Uganda: According to a newspaper report, more than 50 locals killed by park rangers and 6,000 evicted to make space for a ‘carbon offset’ plantation.