News that Chinese democracy supporter Chen Guangcheng has sought asylum in the US Embassy in Beijing prompts me to link again to a piece I write for DIPLOMAT magazine about famed episodes of Embassies sheltering people fleeing from their own government. Not forgetting the diplomacy of Wonder Woman: This theme features […]
Back to Vienna today to give a course on Advanced Negotiation to a distinguished international organisation. Away all this week, so blogging may well be light. One of the points I make is that issues are like Shrek – they have layers. So part of any negotiation is working out […]
Here is my former FCO colleague George Fergusson, characteristically standing tall after a wretched mugging attack in which he lost an eye: The old Etonian and Oxford graduate, whose family has a proud history in the British Army and diplomatic service, underwent surgery on Saturday at Western Eye Hospital in London, but doctors […]
Our Consul-General in Miami is my old friend Kevin McGurgan, who learned some of the darker arts of public diplomacy when we served together in chaotic conditions in Sarajevo in 1996/97. Time moves on. KM is now busy in and around his corner of the USA promoting the London Olympics […]
Come on, smart readers with all those fancy Maths skills. What’s wrong with this? Update The awesome power of Twitter: the first right answer answer is provided within little more than seconds by Graeme Pietersz @gpietersz who has one his sites here (but you still have to work it out – […]
British readers may not yet be up to speed on the canine aspects of the US Presidential race. Basdically, Democrats have been sniping at Mitt Romney for a long car journey he made years ago with his dog unhappily on the car roof (car woof?). Republicans have seized on a […]
I have written at length here and else where about the moral and policy challenges arising from engagement with wicked regimes elsewhere in the world. See this piece in January about the lawsuit against former MI6 officer Sir Mark Allen over his alleged role in ‘rendition’ to Libya: In the real world […]
Every now and again you see something which you were not expecting. Something which falls into no known category of analysis, logic or meaning. Such as this. The screaming racist cake from Sweden. Wow. Update: here’s the explanation. It’s nothing but über-EU Gay/black Afro-Swede post-modern performance art irony. Move along folks, nothing […]
Here is my latest Telegraph blog piece, this time on the dilemmas in negotiating with a country such as North Korea where the usual options of Persuasion, Carrot or Stick seem to make little impact: Many humans (and even some governments) aren’t donkeys. So another layer of analysis applies. As […]
Update I now also have a piece over at Commentator which elaborates on the material below. * * * * * The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has pronounced on a case brought against Russia by a number of Polish relatives of victims of the Katyn Massacres. Even […]
