Mrs Mugabe has got involved in another scandal, this time the alleged beating of a model in a Johannesburg hotel. Should she be given diplomatic immunity to help her return home without prosecution? Yes! Thus: The government source accepted the view widely held by legal experts that Grace Mugabe was not […]
Ignore the new version. The 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell is the real thing. See this extended sequence of wonderful drawing and colour, included for no obvious reason other than to show wonderful drawing and colour: The ‘star’ is Major Kusanagi of Section 9, a special police unit. Kusanagi is a […]
Way back in 2009 I wrote a piece for DIPLOMAT about the lore and logic of expelling diplomats, usually for spying. The Internet has eaten it, but here are some extracts: You know the story. Only too well. Your spouse yells at you for what you have done. Or for […]
My piece on the withdrawing by Australia of its ambassador to Indonesia following the execution in Indonesia of two Australian citizens described this move in rather uncharitable terms: The real problem with withdrawing an ambassador ‘in protest’ is that it actually is a gesture of weakness, of faux toughness You […]
I have emerged from my various Public Speaking sessions with different United Nations colleagues, Only to be plunged into a new venture: an online course on Diplomatic Protocol and Etiquette. Today’s principles of diplomatic protocol including the idea of diplomatic immunity itself trace back over 2000 years. The core principle […]
My latest piece at Telegraph Blogs – on state eavesdropping: What safeguards might we want within this wide range of different activities so that the government does all these things reasonably but does not overstep the mark in using information technologies improperly against its own citizens? Something like this: • […]
What to make of the Bradley Manning verdict – guilty on multiple counts? My first reaction is “good!”. Here is a silly if not mentally ill squirt who abused a position of trust and leaked vast quantities of American classified material, most of it things he could not even have […]
Every now and again an article comes along that assembles all one’s own inchoate half-thoughts into a free-flowing stupendous whole. This time Charles Moore delivers on the plight of wretched US über-leaker Edward Snowden: Acting in the name of a morality which disdains allegiance to the rule of national law, […]
I have quoted Australian satirist Tim Blair here now and again. He is famous (justly) for Blair’s Law: … a theoretical construct that claims an alliance or shared empathy between far right and left groups and extremist Islamists. Blair describes this perceived alignment as an "ongoing process by which the world’s […]
Here is former UK Ambassador Craig Murray being rightly pleased with himself that his blog is right up there among the most influential blogs in the UK at least according to ebuzzing: According to the ebuzzing (formerly wikio) rankings, this is the third most influential political blog in the UK – […]
