Spiegel Online International carries all sorts of excellent pieces, beautifully written in or translated into English for a wider audience. This one about Islamic extremists in Sarajevo is thought-provoking. And not all the thoughts are positive: The obliteration of Israel is heralded in a torrent of words. "Zionist terrorists," the […]
I did not make the Orwell Prize ‘longlist’. Sigh. You’re right. I am twisted and bitter about it. A good number of the blog entries submitted by the Longlist winners have little if anything to do with politics, and in certain cases little if anything to do with good writing. […]
Who does not swing by Arts & Letters Daily, if not daily at least often? Here is the sparkling Denis Dutton, the force behind it: What surprises me about the resistance to the application of Darwin to psychology, is the vociferous way in which people want to dismiss it, not even to […]
Here is the Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on the allegedly awful treatment of Binyam Mohamed, anything which might cast light on his background conveniently omitted: The UN Convention against Torture states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may […]
Close your eyes and try to imagine what Germany, Japan and China will look like 30 years from now, that is, when a newly-issued long-term bond will mature… … Imagination fails in the case of Europe and Japan. One out of every four Germans today is older than 60, and […]
Vanessa Neumann (DIPLOMAT magazine editor at large) is a white child of the oligarchy connected to Venezuela. So she knows a thing or two about what is going on there.
The latest Stonewall Workplace Equality Index has been published. The FCO is delighted with its rating (53rd place, above the Ministry of Justice but below HM Revenue and Customs): Commenting on the achievement Sir Mark Lyall Grant, FCO Board Diversity Champion for Sexual Orientation, said: “I am delighted that the […]
Here is a good account of where Mark Steyn hit the target and missed a few too when he met the Canadian Standing Committee on Government Agencies of the Ontario legislature recently, to explain why he is unimpressed with the state of free speech in Canada: Looking back, I can’t […]
Here are two handy quotations: It is very hard to be optimistic about revenues. The problem is not just the recession, for that has barely begun. The problem is structural. Too much of the revenue comes from high-earners… The top 1 per cent of income-tax payers contributes more than 20 […]
My new observations on this ever-fascinating subject are in the latest Total Politics (free registration needed for the E-zine). See eg: Yeltsin’s Moscow before that (1993-96) was fascinating in big policy terms, but a grinding, debilitating place to live in. In late August the air abruptly went chilly as the Russian […]
