A witty observation attributed to Croatia’s late President Tudjman had it that when one travelled East from Zagreb, the next properly Christian city one came to was … Manila. In other words, Croatia was (he believed) civilised Europe’s frontier with sprawling Asiatic, un-Christian despotism and cruelty. Yet as recent events have shown, maybe […]
First Iain Dale. Then Boris Johnson. They both look forward to an Obama victory. Maybe they should read this. Or this view from Paul Rubin: Democrats draw their political power from trial lawyers, unions, government bureaucrats, environmentalists, and, perhaps, my liberal colleagues in academia. All of these voting blocs seem […]
Daniel Finkelstein eloquently spells out the already eccentric view that the honest way to describe a Disaster is not to proclaim a Triumph: There is room for plenty of argument about whether the crisis could have been averted by better management. But this is almost beside the point. What matters […]
Can this stuff be for real? Or is it a spoof site trying to make North Korea look ridiculous by emitting spoof communistic nonsense, a sort of uber-Commie Postmodern Generator putting Marxist phrases in random order and thereby making no difference to the senselessness of the outcome? Thus: Pyongyang, October 13 […]
Foreign policy is – at root – simple. Identify a clear and fair-minded position. Then use all available sticks and carrots to pursue it. And don’t give up quickly, lest you lose impetus and credibility. Thus one might think that Russia’s August power-play to slice off parts of a fellow […]
Chapter 7 of Craig Murray’s book describes his first serious skirmish with the FCO, over a speech he makes about human rights. By the date of the speech he has been in Uzbekistan exactly 56 days. His nonetheless bold aim: … to fracture what I believed had become a conspiracy of silence by […]
Remember the Mark Steyn trials testing the limits of Free Speech in democratic Canada? He has been acquitted. Which he thinks is a cowardly decision by the Tribunal concerned: Because we spent a ton of money and had a bigshot Queen’s Counsel and exposed the joke jurisprudence and (at the […]
Michael Totten has written a good piece about the Nagorno-Karabakh problem, albeit as seen from the Azerbaijan side of things. We tend to think that the Soviet Union broke up ‘peacefully’ (just as we inaccurately think that South Africa’s transition from apartheid was ‘peaceful’). This is because the vastness of the […]
Here, if you can face it, are some of the Weathermen, not so young now but yet burbling on about their wondrous contribution to world affairs.
Articles assessing the dire state of public health in Russia keep appearing. Here is another. Some numbers: … remember tuberculosis? In the United States, with a population of 303 million, 650 people died of the disease in 2007. In Russia, which has a total of 142 million people, an astonishing […]
