GCSEs: sloppy grammar will cost pupils’ one in 10 marks Pupils face losing more than one in 10 marks in their GCSEs for poor spelling and grammar amid fears that too many teenagers start work with poor literacy skills. Helpful story and excellent government policy-shift. But amazing how the Telegraph’s […]
Crawf Minor is not blonde, female or especially buxom. So he probably won’t feature in the sexist mass media A-level celebrations/commiserations orgy. Yet he has cause to celebrate this morning: 4 x A* Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Chemistry 2 x A Advanced Further Maths, Latin Next stop: Cambridge University in […]
Almost the defining characteristic of an active sense of community is that it is only aroused when people perceive that the established structures of control are failing. And while that might result in a lot of engagement, it is too volatile to be trusted Here she is. Zoe Williams, Guardian […]
Andrzej Lepper, turbulent leader of Poland’s left-populist Self-Defence party, yesterday was found dead. Apparently by hanging himself in his party office in Warsaw Where to start? The English Wikipedia page gives the basics of his lively career, describing how he came from a modest rural family background and with little formal education […]
So much going on in the world. Most of it unambiguously bad. Tension in Kosovo. Tension in the Turkish army. Libya duly quagmired. Famine in Africa. Something or other going in and around North Korea. And so on. Yet bigger even than those problems, each of which is capable of […]
Remember the Bonn Powers for Bosnia and Herzegovina – the supposed authority bestowed on the High Representative by the ‘international community’ to allow him/her to remove recalcitrant Bosnians from office or otherwise ‘move forward’ the ‘peace process’? The impressive thing was that as far as I could see the Bonn Powers […]
My article in DIPLOMAT about Diplomatic Loyalties has been recycled by Grassroot Diplomat, a site run by Talyn Rahman. She opens with this ambitious statement: Imagine this. You are a diplomat representing your birth country, but your heritage lies with two other states from your parents and you are married […]
Autonomous Mind kindly gave a link and supporting comments to my recent piece about Negotiation Training. And, via Twitter, he asked for More on the Carrot/Stick negotiating paradigm. So, here it is. The psychology of diplomatic negotiating is a vast, interesting and almost unanalysed subject. A couple of years ago […]
Sorry to have been a bit quiet, folks. I have been in Vienna with ADRg Ambassadors giving negotiation training to Senior Inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency. These Inspectors have a unique and important job, namely to help check what is going on out there in the world’s civilian […]
Just as we glumly slump in the face of another outburst from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the mighty Iowahawk strikes yet again. It takes rare erudition and even rarer imagination to link one of the world’s most famous poems (nearly 200 years old) to the fiercely straining underpants of a bratty American […]
