Radovan Karadzic appears before the Hague Tribunal today. Kurir (a Belgrade newspaper with pronounced populist tendencies) quotes his lawyer as saying that Karadzic will not accept the start of ICTY proceedings until his laptop and 50 disks are returned to him. These items containing all the elements of his defence and […]
The words "modern management techniques" and "whelk stall" come to mind: Labour was plunged into open warfare as Gordon Brown’s allies launched a series of highly personal attacks on leadership rival David Miliband. Did ‘sources at Number 10’ and ‘Brown’s allies’ and ‘an MP close to Brown’ really say stuff […]
This report as picked up by Iain Dale and others asserts that: Internet users will be protected from abusive bloggers and malicious Facebook postings under proposals to set up an independent internet watchdog, The Daily Telegraph has learnt. The body, made up of industry representatives, would be responsible for drawing […]
The FT attempts to describe how this morass of trade rules complexity has hit the rocks (Note: deliberate mixed metaphor). See also this. When one has worked in Diplomacy for as long as I have, one realises just how little one knows. So on this subject I have primitive instincts/prejudices […]
Craig Murray has commented on my earlier post about EU policy towards Uzbekistan: You make the somewhat childish debating error of asserting that because I have said that US republicans do something, I am claiming that only US republicans do that thing. I have in fact published numerous pieces, both on my […]
Oliver Miles picks up on my reference to the possible indictment by the ICC of the President of Sudan and commends to me to an article by Palestinian author and editor Rami Khouri: Whose Crimes? Against Whose Humanity? This is a good article of a certain Arab liberal genre – well […]
Peter Preston gives a rather overwritten analysis of Serbia and its prospects for joining the EU – see eg the obscure Paul Anka reference. Why, he asks, is the EU mumbling about bringing the former Yugoslavia space (plus Albania) into its ranks? Partly because the EU mumbles about everything. Partly […]
One of the things British diplomats do in foreign parts is study the local media, to keep up with the obvious news but also to follow in a deeper way what makes those societies tick. Armed with good basic background understanding, they then fan out to talk to the editors […]
This article is fascinating for its Manifest Badness, on so many levels simultaneously. It’s all about: the latest example of a noticeable social trend, one that we shall call, obviously, “dolliness”, after the woman who embodies its spirit. Think of the Spice Girls tour and the Sex and the City […]
A familar argument heard against the the 1996 Dayton Peace Accords in Sarajevo is that in setting up a two Entity structure for post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina they ‘legitimized genocide’, namely by accepting Republika Srpska as one of the two Entities (the other being called, somewhat confusingly, the ‘Federation of Bosnia […]
