From our UK edition
It’s back to school day in Westminster and one of the first items on the agenda will be David Cameron's announcement on accepting more Syrian refugees. Exactly how many extra asylum seekers Britain will take in is, according to the Sunday Times, likely to be between 10,000 and 20,000. Someone who is particularly pleased with this is Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary and Labour leadership contender.
From our UK edition
It is probably safe to say that the negotiations with Iran aren’t going very well. As the 30 June deadline for a final agreement looms America’s top negotiator Wendy Sherman has just announced that she will resign shortly after, telling the New York Times that it has been 'two long years' in that position. Meanwhile the Iranians are now saying that they want the deadline for reaching an agreement extended, with the Obama administration insisting that’s not an option. To make matters worse unconfirmed reports have recently emerged claiming that a delegation of North Korean nuclear weapons experts have been paying regular visits to Iranian military facilities.
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Following months of speculation, Tony Blair has finally announced he is standing down as the Quartet Representative to the Middle East after eight years in the post. It is tempting to ask whether anyone will notice. His time in the job has been marked by a stagnation of the Peace Process, a hardening of the position of increasingly belligerent Israeli governments and a growing distrust among the Palestinians. Tony Blair himself had long become an irrelevance in negotiations. The truth is that Blair was hamstrung from the moment he took the job (immediately after he stood down as Prime Minister in 2007). He was never a 'Peace Envoy', although there was hope in some circles that he would bring the lessons of Northern Ireland to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
From our UK edition
I have escaped this rather depressing election campaign by retreating to my home in la France profonde — to be precise, in Armagnac, in the heart of Gascony. My only outing, from which I have just returned, was a brief visit to New York, travelling there and back in the giant Airbus 380. The purpose of the trip was to drum up US support for the thinktank I founded in 2009, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and its campaigning arm, the Global Warming Policy Forum, in the company of our outstanding director, Benny Peiser. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, the GWPF has a global reach, and its international influence is growing.
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I’ve never been terribly keen on actors. I prefer hairdressers and accountants. And teachers and builders and lawyers. I may even prefer politicians and footballers to actors. It’s a modesty thing. No profession demands more attention. And no attention is less warranted. Everywhere you look, there they are pouting and grimacing on billboards and TV screens, like oversized teenagers. How have we come to this? These people dress up and pretend to be other people — for a living! It wouldn’t be quite so bad if that were all they did. But these days actors are taking over our public space in a way that is unsettling and impossible to ignore.
From our UK edition
Conventional wisdom suggests that Islamic State and its affiliates have mastered social media. Yet the group's real talent lies in dominating the traditional media cycle and using sensational violence to goad its enemies into overreactions. Hours after Isis released one of its more gruesome videos showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians on the shores of Sirte, Egyptian fighter jets pummelled several Isis targets in Derna. The Egyptians claim to be fighting the terrorists by propping up General Khalifa Haftar’s anti-Islamist Operation Dignity. However, if the Egyptians want a UN-resolution authorising international military intervention in Libya, this must be resisted.
From our UK edition
One good thing has come out of the fuss over the pope’s comments about it being ok to smack your children (so long as their dignity is maintained); it has flushed out the former Irish president, Mary McAleese, as tiresomely conventional in much the same way as her predecessor, Mary Robinson - the very incarnation of PC. Shame, because I’d been a fan until I read her letter to the Irish Times on Saturday criticising the pope for his remarks, on the basis that they’re at odds with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which, apparently, has zero tolerance when it comes to corporal punishment. Actually, make that two benefits to flow from the row.
From our UK edition
Whether by chance or bold design, the Royal Opera’s two Christmas shows were written at precisely the same moment, between 1857 and 1859, and both mark a high point of refinement in their respective traditions. Both Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Verdi’s Ballo in maschera sometimes give the impression of being entranced by their abstract musical fantasy; the drama on stage is suspended, drawn out, barely engaged with as the characters and audience peer down into the writhing or transfixed world being created in the orchestra pit. In my view, neither composer ever did anything better in musical terms. But sometimes you feel that there is no hope for Ballo.
From our UK edition
The latest half-witted United Nations official to stick the boot into the United Kingdom is one Francois Crepeau, UN 'Special Rapperteur' (nope, sorry, don’t recognise the term), on the Rights of Human Migrants. Crepeau, who comes from the useless part of Canada, said that British fears about immigration were 'utter bullshit'. He added that if the British people voted for Ukip it would 'not be cool'. Mr Crepeau’s intervention made me 30 per cent more likely to vote Ukip next May – and if Farage suggested we leave the UN as well as the EU, make that fifty per cent.
From our UK edition
Mark Steyn once wrote of the United Nations: ‘It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the U.N.’ It’s a maxim that works double for Fifa, world football’s governing body, which has just cleared future World Cup hosts Qatar and Russia of any wrongdoing but managed to criticise the FA. The BBC reports: ‘As for Russia, they have also been cleared, although the report noted its bid team made “only a limited amount of documents available for review”.
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What exactly, I found myself wondering, would jihadists do without modern four-wheel-drives? Car ads are customarily shot on the French Riviera's Grande Corniche or on a very particular road in Tuscany that all art directors know. But the sight of 43 brand new and coruscatingly white Toyota Hiluxes rolling across the infernal Syrian-Iraq border added a hard-edge nightmare venue to the ad-man's soft-focus dreamscape. If there's a micron of comfort to be had from the horrors of the Middle East, it's that the medievalising ISIS has a keen admiration for the consumer goods their despised enemies manufacture. In an earlier conflict, The New York Times called the same Hilux 'the ride of choice' for Somali pirates.
From our UK edition
The old cliché that ‘nothing happens in August’ has again been brutally disproved. From the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war to the Russian invasion of Georgia six years ago, August is a month often packed with violence — but rarely more so than this year. In Syria, Christians are being crucified for refusing to convert to Islam. In northern Iraq, there are reports of mothers throwing their children from mountains rather than leaving them to the jihadis who are parading the severed heads of their victims. Russian convoys are rolling towards the Ukrainian border as Vladimir Putin tests the resolve of the West. Barack Obama has watched this unfold from his holiday spot in Martha’s Vineyard; David Cameron from the Portuguese coast.
From our UK edition
It's fashionable nowadays to claim that young people in Britain don't know how to have a good time. There's certainly plenty of evidence to suggest we’re avoiding the drugs our parents' generation got their kicks from. Fraser Nelson discussed this in The Spectator last November, arguing that Britain's youth were becoming more abstemious: 'Marijuana, LSD, speed, cocaine — surveys show that every drug you can think of is plunging in popularity amongst the young. The proportion of under-20s who say they have taken drugs in the past month has halved over the last decade. Only two drugs are on the up and both are legal: Ritalin and Modafinil, stimulants that can power students through ten-hour study sessions. 'It's a long way from Woodstock.
From our UK edition
Sexism is more ‘in your face’ in Britain than in other countries, a United Nations investigator has claimed. I can see why the UN’s Rashida Manjoo might think this – for better or worse, sexism is a topic that features frequently in British publications. I imagine the Pakistani, Egyptian and Sudanese press don’t give it quite as much coverage. I’m going to assume this was the official’s logic: we write about it a lot, ergo it must be prevalent. Her research would have been easy. All those tweets about #EverydaySexism. A cabinet with fewer women than men. Page Three! We’ve got a problem. Send help. Except that we really don’t. Feminism has reached its fourth wave, and by and large, women are doing ok.
From our UK edition
The tense situation in Ukraine has escalated overnight. A deadline has passed for pro-Russian agitators to vacate government buildings in eastern Ukraine or face military action. There is no indication that the agitators have retreated. Meanwhile, reports from Kiev suggest that the government is trying to raise volunteer militias – perhaps in an attempt to avoid deploying the country’s armed forces, which would antagonise Russia. Last night a special session of the UN Security Council, called by Russia, was the scene of disagreement between Russia and the western powers. Ukraine and the western powers say that Russia is behind this unrest; as Vladimir Putin tries his hand at provatskiya (as described by Anne Applebaum in the Spectator recently).
From our UK edition
‘We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.’ So wrote Vladimir Putin in The New York Times in September last year. Last week, he invaded Ukraine. A system of ‘international law’ which gives a man like President Putin the right to decide whether a proposed action is legal or not, is morally bankrupt. Yet that is how the United Nations Security Council functions – and that is why Western democracies should not shrink from taking action even when the Russian veto stands in the way. President Putin’s New York Times piece was about Syria. He was appealing to the American public not to assist Bashar al-Assad’s opponents.
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Warsaw - As reports flood in of devastation in the Philippines, pressure is growing on ministers attending United Nations talks in Poland to prove that on-going climate change talks are not a waste of money. While it is impossible to blame a single event on climate change, the World Meteorological Organisation has warned that warming oceans and rising sea levels make the impact of ‘super storms’ like Typhoon Haiyan far worse and, perhaps, more frequent. So, what are our leaders doing about it? Well, 10,106 people have gathered in a football stadium in Warsaw to produce more hot air discussing a global deal to cut emissions. The annual UN jamboree is not known for being whiter than white when it comes to jumping into bed with the enemy.
From our UK edition
Last Tuesday, word began to spread in Whitehall that the United Nations were set to release a highly critical report about the Under-Occupancy Charge, aka the 'Bedroom Tax' to everyone but the government. Downing Street wanted to ignore the report, yet when it emerged that the UN’s Special Rapporteur was lined up for Wednesday's Today programme, a plan was drawn up to fight back. Grant Shapps was activated and he fired the starting gun on what would be one of the more bizarre media wars this government has got into.
From our UK edition
Today has not been a good day for multinational organisations. Both the European Union and the United Nations have made fools of themselves. José Manuel Barroso’s claim that a European renegotiation would lead to another war on the continent revealed the warped mindset of the Eurocrat class. Indeed, if we’re talking about what’s likely to cause extremism to rise in Europe, austerity imposed on countries from the outside seems a more likely bet than powers flowing back to democratically elected national governments. The United Nations’ embarrassment came from the absurd claim of its official Raquel Rolnik that the so-called bedroom tax, which isn’t actually a tax, infringed ‘human rights’.
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The first couple of evenings there was just me and a middle-aged couple swimming decorously up and down. On the third day it changed. There were three more people, spread out at the shallow end. You would not have thought that an extra three people in a decent-sized pool could have caused such irritation and havoc. They contrived to occupy an inordinate amount of space and move around in a way that caused maximum disruption. Sometimes they swam widths; sometimes diagonals. They would stop and change direction without warning. Sometimes they floated with their toes under the rail, or disappeared under water and surfaced far too close for comfort. And when they swam, they swam splashily, in a clumsy, improvised way. The two other length-swimmers generally left before I did.
