By David de Winter - Sports Writer Saturday sees the start of the 101st edition of the world’s most famous bicycle race, the eponymous Tour de France. And where does this three week lycra-clad epic begin? Paris? Non. Some chic, picturesque village in the south of France? Absolutement non. The Alps or Pyrenees? Of course not. Yorkshire? Mais oui. Quite why the organisers of a French race have decided to hold ‘le grand départ’ in England is beyond me...

  By Luca Foschi You do not fix history with a drone. What we are witnessing today in Iraq is the slow collapse of a century-long geopolitical partition drawn up in a secret document by United Kingdom and France, in one of their last acts as imperial powers. In May 1916 diplomats Mark Sykes and François Gorges Picot signed an agreement that reshaped the Near East, previously ruled by the Ottoman Empire who were siding with Austria-Hungary and Germany during the First...

  By Valentina Magri “Money doesn’t make you happy” is the typical saying that you state when you want to raise the spirit of people dissatisfied with their personal finances. But if you live in the UK, you should forget it, cash is king. Money and happiness Basically, there are two main views over the link between money and happiness. According to Easterlin, happiness comes from money until a saturation point (Easterlin paradox). Once you overcome this boundary, the correlation...

At the High Court on May 13th 2009, Fisher Athletic were wound up. The debts had begun to mound and results hadn't been going their way since a player exodus preceded a thrilling season in which Wayne Burnett’s (current Dagenham & Redbridge manager) missed out on the Conference after losing to Hampton & Richmond Borough in the play-offs. Following a meeting it was decided that a supporter’s trust would take charge of club matters moving forward, a trust that reluctantly...

By Toby James The Illusion Of Choice And Big Business’s Position In Food And Drink There is a lot of money in necessities. The food and drink industry commands vast amounts of capital, yet much of this is under the control of a surprisingly small number of brands. Coca-Cola claims ownership of at least 13 other brands, each the king of its respective sector of the soft drinks industry. Fanta, Sprite, Dr Pepper, Schweppes. Many of these brands have ‘diet’ or...

By Sally Waterston, director of Business and IT Consultancy Waterstons Limited Everything goes in cycles; fashion, the weather, Information Technology and even manufacturing. It feels sometimes as if we are like a pendulum as a country, racing after the next new thing and piling all our hopes on it in the name of strategy and forward thinking. When we started this business in 1994 we had a few customers who offshored their production and seemed to be very successful at...

By Simon Richardson Around a year ago, I was in the middle of a gruelling battle against drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), taking a cocktail of drugs with horrific side effects and fighting for my life. If you’d told me then that just over a year later I’d be a fully trained soldier and planning to cycle the length of Great Britain, I’d never have believed you. But here I am. I wanted to mark a year free of TB by setting...

  Dr Barbara Kubicka, MD, CIME/ICAM, MBCAM Aesthetic Physician Too often, dermatologists and non-surgical skin treatment practitioners think in terms of delivering treatments.  It’s simple – a patient asks for botox injections or dermal fillers, you give them some and everybody’s happy – right? Actually, at my skin clinic in Belgravia/Knightsbridge, we work very differently, putting the patient before the treatment programme. That means understanding who they are in quite some detail. To really get a detailed picture of what...

By Emma Raw When you think of the top athletes in the world, how do they get ahead? Take a look at the FIFA World Cup teams. These athletes train nearly every day together - they always have a buddy to train with. They have that extra support that keeps them motivated and determined. Well, you can think of fitness training in this way too. When you hit the gym make sure you ask a friend to come along with...