Earlier this week former British prime minister Gordon Brown emerged from hibernation to lobby for a bold new plan to push education up the global agenda. The world has made progress in recent years but, Mr Brown reports, 68 million kids still get no education. Worse, he warns, cuts to aid budgets mean that we […]
“A classic PR idea gone bad” was one of the derisory reactions to the news on August 16th that Tony Blair is going to donate the profits (the advance alone is £4.6 million, around $7 million) from his forthcoming memoirs to a charity helping ex-servicemen in Britain. That may well be true, although Mr Blair is adamant that […]
The Big Society was supposed to be the big idea that would sweep the leader of Britain’s Conservative party, David Cameron, into power in little more than a week’s time. Yet Cameron is struggling to sell the Big Society to the voters. The niggling problem he seems to be facing is that while the Big Society sounds OK, no one quite […]
Can government aid budgets survive the financial crisis and, if not, what next for the billion people living in poverty? Michael spoke at a couple of fringe events at the British Labour Party’s annual conference in Brighton this week. Beleagured Prime Minister Gordon Brown used his main speech to make a raft of spending commitments, […]
“This week Ashton Kutcher (aka @aplusk) broke the one million mark in Twitter followers and introduced Oprah (@oprah) to the phenomenon. He’s also using his fame and Twitterlebrity to raise awareness of malaria and ask fans to support Malaria No More in sending insecticide-treated mosquito nets to African countries where they are needed most.” So […]