Newspapers deliver news you to in an environmentally unfriendly, complex and redundant way. They then charge you for reading it. A model crashing before our tired eyes. But suppose … things are turned round. What if they gave you news for free via the Internet – and charged you instead […]
Back from Sweden. There the blogosphere is a mighty force in Swedish society. In a country of a bit more than 9 million people there look to be nearly 250,000 blogs. It looks as if the government there are struggling to work out how to deal with this formidable citizen […]
Remember my disagreement about South Africa’s Peaceful Transition? Well, it was so peaceful that they have made a movie about all the violence: "The period between [Nelson] Mandela’s release from prison [February 1990] and the first democratic election [April 1994] was extraordinarily violent. More people died in that four-year period […]
A former top MI6 officer has some brisk things to say about the way foreign policy is made in the UK these days – and the consequences: Mr Inkster said the world was moving from "being policed by America to be policed by nobody" and the danger of an increasingly […]
On a cheerier note, a public thank you to Mr Wrinkled Weasel and his wife Kirstine for hosting me for lunch in Edinburgh on Saturday. WW (aka Ged Eastick from the family that invented Golden Syrup) and I somehow got in touch a few weeks ago via all this blogging […]
My colleague Craig Murray throws down the gauntlet; There is an interesting link between Charles and I on torture … All the CIA rendition flights to Uzbekistan came from Szczytno-Szymany in Poland. We now know that the CIA had both use of that airbase and a secret torture prison nearby.https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,621450,00.html I […]
My posting below on Torture has prompted various comments, some of which have come from people arriving here via my former FCO colleague Craig Murray’s site and who support strongly his insistence that Torture Does Not Work. See for example Moo: I hope you’re not seriously suggesting two things: that torture works and […]
Oh Lordy. Craig Murray has called me the leading FCO sock-puppet on the Internet. Read his characteristically muddled piece for yourselves. Here is the reply which I have posted on his site (Note: links added for ease of reference): Craig, Dear. Oh. Dear. Are you really insinuating that somehow I […]
Always good to see a writer going for a big shot and sending the ball loftily out of the ground. Meet Nick Cohen weighing in to the current British leadership. But his concluding point is the key one: But Britain isn’t a police state or anything like one. In real […]
Some titles and some writers draw you to read the texts concerned, as moths mesmerised by the bright flame flit to their doom. Who is going to walk past Goodbye to the suburban porn star by Mark Steyn? Not, methinks, you. If only for his gallop through the Carry On films: Carry On Nurse, […]
