Some good comments from readers on my (too) long piece about the US Missile Defence decision. Two take a different view, arguing that Putin’s Russian government is not motivated by crude nationalism, and that if one stacks up various decisions taken in recent years by the USA/West it is not […]
Last year I wrote some pieces about How to Negotiate. These and other pieces with an implicit or explicit Negotiation theme are linked here. Such as this one: It does not follow that being bloody-minded or even threatening force actually works. So much depends on context, the objective balance of […]
President Obama has cancelled a plan to build US anti-missile defence radar facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic. This move has been hailed by Russia’s President Medvedev as a "wise decision". Which, of course, prompts the ignoble thought that if the Russians like it so much, something must be […]
Researchers and experts have been studying the history of fairy tales and have traced different versions of Little Red Riding Hood all round the planet and back into history: Whilst the European version tells the story of a little girl who is tricked by a wolf masquerading as her grandmother, […]
Former Ambassador Craig Murray has thrown himself back into the blogging ring after some self-doubt. He has a long post about the Lockerbie/Megrahi business, which covers the ground with the volleys of adjectives and adverbs one has come to expect: The Tories have shown their blood-baying, American bum-sucking true colours. […]
A consignment of weapons clandestinely sent from North Korea to Iran is intercepted by the UAE. Pretty big news for the UN Security Council and the different sanctions regimes against North Korea and Iran alike, huh? Of course not, when the USA is chairing the UNSC: At Ambassador Rice’s news briefing, […]
This Libya business gets worse. Now the UK government is tangled up in explaining what it did or did not to to help victims of IRA terrorist bombs get compensation from Libya, source of the IRA’s Semtex explosives. Here is a piece about the basic legal claim involved. To my long-lost […]
Talking of education, President Obama’s idea of exhorting America’s children to work hard via a nationwide address to schools is (of course) encountering resistance as did a similar initiative by President Bush in 1991: … Critics are particularly upset about lesson plans the administration created to accompany the speech. The lesson […]
The UK’s ‘devolution’ arrangements are complicated and either stupidly inconsistent or elegantly tailored to meet varying local requirements, depending how you look at it. Here is the official summary: Devolution of powers Following referendums in Scotland and Wales in 1997, and in both parts of Ireland in 1998, the UK […]
It is always fascinating to read original official documents, in this case a selection of papers about the decision to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted for the Lockerbie bombing. So have a look here. Yet it all seems … incomplete. Where are the letters and emails from/to the […]
