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The Sunday Times - Give the north a go at running itself, by Simon Jenkins

I wouldn’t even begin to know where to start quoting that.

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

Telegraph - Watch out, or we’ll all be living in Slough, by Dan Kieran

Poor old Slough. This feels like kicking a dead dog but my point is that Slough’s ‘success’ is precisely why it’s such an unattractive place to live. Something the marketing men who are no doubt being paid great fist-fulls [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

Hey, guess what! I have a whole bunch of stuff to do! So here, mea culpa, me and my blog: love did tear us apart.

The Times - How Chairman Mao led China to humiliation The Great Helmsman’s mishandling of the nuclear crisis with the Soviet Union was a turning point in world history, by George Walden

[...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs · History · People and Current Events · Politics · Sports and Leisure · War and Peace

The Times - France and genocide: the murky truth How far was Mitterrand’s Government involved in the slaughter of hundred of thousands of Rwandans? By Linda Melvern (the author of Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide)

There is remarkable television footage shot in the first days of the genocide in Rwanda. It shows a large [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

Telegraph Blogs - If Tibet has the right to independence, so have EU nations, by Daniel Hannan

[Hans-Gert Pöttering, the President of the European Parliament] isn’t urging anything practical, like a boycott or sanctions; he simply wants athletes [in Beijing] to “give a signal”. This, of course, is how the European Parliament itself operates. [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

The Times - Olympic Games show China through a glass, darkly As the opening approaches, preparations reflect a disturbing side of the communist regime, by Jonathan Fenby (the China director at the research service Trusted Sources)

[U]nwittingly, the Olympics also reflect the downside of China’s hectic growth story and contain reminders of the nature of [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

BBC - World trade talks ‘failed again’

Marathon talks in Geneva aimed at liberalising global trade appear to have ended without agreement. Trade talks collapsed after China, India and the US failed to agree on import rules, officials said, but there has been no official announcement. Earlier, European [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

The Sunday Times - By ’eck, our funny accents are the envy of the world, by Jeremy Clarkson

As I write, a team of researchers at Leeds University is working its way through £460,000 of our money, preparing a language and dialect atlas of Britain in the 21st century. Good. This is an excellent [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

Telegraph Blogs - The Radovan Karadzic trial will be a travesty, by Daniel Hannan

“The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague was little more than a kangaroo court, though without the very real advantages of that kind of legal establishment, namely speed and economy.”

Pffff!

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

Last night Peter and I broke open a nice(ish) bottle of wine (Louis Martini: twelve dollars) to celebrate our negative-one month anniversary. So I figure it’s probably about time to let everyone know what’s going on.

The wedding’s in Menlo Park on August 20th. A Wednesday. The next day we’re getting on a plane, the day [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

The Sunday Telegraph - Why has China bought Mugabe a mansion? By Christopher Booker

It may not be surprising that, as befits any mad dictator, President Mugabe is now the proud owner of a palatial £4.5 million mansion in Harare and a similarly lavish country hideaway, each fitted with the latest electronic security systems, [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

Everyone (but especially Australians) click here.

Bonus: click here. But only after clicking on the above.

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

The Times - It’s a riot in the Japanese police… if only Notebook: The closest you get to a mob in Tokyo is sale time at Prada, by Richard Lloyd Parry

There are few more forlorn and pointless occupations in the world than that of the Japanese riot police. Consider their situation - plucked from [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

The Times - The UN decision on Zimbabwe is based on neither morality nor decency The Security Council has shown itself to be the enemy of human rights, by Stephen Pollard

There is an old, perhaps apocryphal story of a small girl who, watching the ranting, gesticulating Randolph Churchill, tugged at her mother’s skirt and [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

The Times - West suffers historic defeat as China and Russia veto Zimbabwe sanctions

Britain’s diplomatic strategy in Zimbabwe collapsed last night in an historic defeat for the West in the UN Security Council that will have repercussions across Africa and beyond. … Britain and the United States forced the draft [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs