Good question: Why do Asian investors depend on American capital markets? Given the near breakdown of key sectors of the American market, one might expect Asians to bring their money home. Quite the opposite has happened: Asian currencies have fallen sharply against the American dollar… What does America have that […]
Feuding as he already is with his lead FCO department, Craig Murray sits down to write a strong speech on Uzbekistan human rights issues. He sends a draft to London, to FCO Human Rights Department led by his old pal (and mine) Jon Benjamin – himself something of a post-Sovietologist […]
A reader prompted by my Nagorno-Karabakh posting writes: I was interested in the part of this post where you refer to the negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan and in particular the Russian negotiator’s cabinet of diplomatic curiosities and arguments over the placing of commas and use of the word ‘the’. (Reminiscent of […]
A phrase which these days is hard to eradicate from bureaucratic discourse is ‘positive feedback’. It is used in the sense of asking around for views on an issue/paper/person and getting views ‘fed back’ (positive views, or negative views). Quiet how this scientifically precise phrase came to acquire this trite new […]
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 […]
Just when I thought that there was nothing new to say on the subject of Leaked Ambassadors, along come two of them. First, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is said to have described the Western mission in Afghanistan as ‘doomed‘. The source? A French diplomatic telegram leaked in Paris, said to be […]
Sarah Palin did well last night in her debate with Joe Biden, and Biden in turn landed good shots. Democracy at work. Maybe despite all the spinning and media/blogosphere ravings one way or the other, Obama just has to keep it steady to win: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin […]
In the Instapundit live coverage of the excellent Palin/Biden debate last night there was this: Reader David Rensin emails: "He didn’t just call the citizens of Bosnia ‘Bosniacs’, did he?" Yeah, he did… … Plus, Stephen Green emails: "Jim Dunnigan and Austin Bay use the word ‘Bosniaks’ in reference in Moslem […]
Via Volokh Conspiracy an interesting account of the way top chess Grandmaster Vishy Anand prepares to face his rival Vladimir Kramnik over a long series of games. How best to focus Vishy’s analysis – on countering Kramnik’s likely strong systems, or hammering his (relatively) weaker ones? Which reminds me of the famous […]
Denis MacShane reviews Chris Patten’s book about future trends. In it he swipes at Conservative policy on Europe: In Berlin recently, David Cameron promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty were he to become prime minister and the Treaty were not to be ratified. That would mean that the first […]
