Remember the Sharpeville Six? They were six South Africans convicted of the murder of a local township leader who ‘collaborated’ with the apartheid regime. Their case became an international symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle. What happened? In early September 1984 in Sharpeville (south of Johannesburg) township protesters angered at rent rises converged upon the house of […]
More on European Foreign Policy – and Physics (or maybe Maths). Take two tennis balls, A and B. A is twice the size of B. By which I mean that the diameter of A is twice the diameter length (the straight line across the widest part of the inside of the ball) of […]
As readers of this website know only too well, the Kosovo case is fascinating and stunningly difficult on multiple levels simultaneously. Political, moral, precedental, timescale, ethnic, existential. The territory of Kosovo itself is smallish by international standards, ranking at 168th out of 249 countries listed in the CIA World Factbook – […]
The Times leader on President Sarkozy’s insistence that the ‘European’ economic model must now prevail over the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model: This is economically illiterate populism. No policymaker in the English-speaking economies believes in totally unconstrained and unregulated capitalism. You need to go to some fairly obscure corners to find anyone at […]
The Advisory Opinion hearings at the International Court of Justice on the Serbia/Kosovo question have started. The curious thing about this one is the actual question which the ICJ is tasked by the UN General Assembly to address: Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government […]
Via Samizdata this link to a magnificent address by C S Lewis back in 1944, The Inner Ring (scroll down towards the bottom to find it). This masterpiece is all about the idea that whever you are – school, work, art, politics – there is always an ‘inner ring’ of people […]
Physics-free David Miliband: The idea that the UK can maintain its influence in Beijing or Washington or Delhi or Moscow if we marginalise ourselves in Europe is frankly fanciful. In fact I would say the opposite; through leadership in Europe we augment our bilateral ties with other countries. Alone, we […]
Honduras has voted and in significant numbers. A good round-up here. The US State Department: We commend the Honduran people for peacefully exercising their democratic right to select their leaders in an electoral process that began over a year ago, well before the June 28 coup d’etat. Turnout appears to […]
Leaving aside possible criminal charges involving attempts to avoid FOI requests, there are all sorts of legal options in the UK and US alike for people wanting to challenge the way public funds have been invested in academic work on Climate Change which (it seems) fails to meet respectable standards […]
A reader points me to a piece from New Zealand which looks at claims that New Zealand is ‘warming’ – and argues that they are just not true, if data going back 150 years are anything to go by. So what’s happening with that data? Are NZ data inconsistencies and the […]
