This one will run and run. And run. Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, senior Al Qaeda operative, has kindly communicated with us via a guest blog at Iowahawk to decribe what happens when his new room-mate arrives in Paradise (RUDE WORD ALERT ADVISORY): Yo brosephus, what’s crackalackin’ with the booty smackin’? Longtime […]
We have returned from Florida and I am emerging from jet-lag, just in time to appear today on the BBC World Have Your Say radio programme this afternoon on the rather incoherent subject of Privacy. If you are interested the link to the programme is here, until it fades away. I […]
Here is a Guardian piece about virtual money on the Internet. It’s by Aleks Krotoski: Aleks Krotoski has been writing about interactivity since 1999. She has a PhD in the social psychology of relationships in online communities It’s not quite clear to me what her point is here: Trust has become […]
Have a look at these impressive figures for the surging Facebook phenomenon across the ‘Muslim world’. Egypt has added 450,000 new users in the past month. Saudi Arabia (a much smaller country) has added 420,000. These are absolutely big numbers, the more so since (by definition) they represent better-off web-savvy […]
"…there are about 50,000 people who read my blog daily. If I don’t write, three days later the blog will be read by 20,000 people. In a week, the number of readers will be 2,000 people and, two weeks later, only your mother will go and see if you wrote […]
Here’s something I sent to the Evening Standard – not sure if they used any of it: Perhaps the most difficult moral and legal question of our time is this one: “who is my neighbour?” Domestic law has moved a long way from an earlier tradition that what went […]
Today is the 8th anniversary of the assassination of Serbia’s dynamic young prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. And as the years drift by, Balkan conspiracy theories spread their twisted tentacles in more and more directions. Here for those who can use Google Translator are the mutterings of close Djindjic spin-doctor Vladimir […]
Here is Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski yesterday in Washington: Events in the Middle East show that we are fast entering a new phase in the spread of democracy, or at least a new pluralism. People living under dictatorships are finding out who they are. They are realising that the […]
I have previously written here about the FCO’s approach to ‘consular’ work (ie helping British nationals overseas). See eg here: The media love to pounce on allegations of FCO staff being unkind or inefficient when they find British citizens overseas who have hit trouble. For every hundred people who write in to you […]
(Apologies to Iain Dale’s readers and other readers – an earlier version got garbled) Ed West at the Telegraph puts the issue with commendable boldness: No Arab country has ever produced a democracy, or at least a lasting democracy; none of the 22 member states of the Arab League are classified […]
