If you name a teddy bear Mohammed in Sudan, you face barbaric and draconian punishment. But if you avoid going to Sudan in the first place, which is a good idea, then you are at no risk of such lunacy.
America is different. Its laws are just as mad (under a system where your sentence is [...]

Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas, in his last briefing paper as Director of non-profit foreign policy analysts Chatham House, is suitably damning of our dear foreign policy obsessed PM - with a few nice little digs to boot:
“In Blair’s case, of course, the focus on foreign policy may have been accentuated by the difficulty of playing a [...]

Kendall Myers, a senior US state department analyst, has called the Anglo-American relationship “one sided” and implied that Blair was essentially an idiot for wasting his time. Some choice quotes:
It was a done deal from the beginning, it was a onesided relationship that was entered into with open eyes… there was nothing. There was no [...]

After a postponement due to Iraq’s airports being closed in the aftermath of the bombings last week, Iraq’s President, Jalal Talabani, has now been able to visit Iran. Today he met Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As Supreme Leader, Khamenei is the real power when it comes to Iranian foreign policy.

A strained Senate needs help, but the aid has been embargoed
 
“Great is the power of habit,” Cicero told us, “it teaches us to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain.”  Cicero was, of course, a Roman senator, dead for some time now.  However, with a little imagination, he could be thought to be talking [...]

Noone’s going to like me for saying this, but I’m going to say it anyway:
The Democrats will lose the midterms. And that’s probably all they deserve.
Don’t get me wrong – that’s not what I want to happen. What I want is for the Republicans to be thrown out on to the street, and for the [...]

On the 12th of October 2000, al Qaeda conducted a suicide bomb attack on the American destroyer, the USS Cole. Seventeen members of the crew were killed in the attack.
Those who define terrorism as the deliberate killing of innocent civilians might find it difficult to argue that this al Qaeda suicide bomb attack was terrorism [...]

Sharpener readers with good memories may recollect that there is a certain common theme to my posts. They all have something to do with citizenship and passports (in a rather formal sense). This one is no different. It’s about David Hicks, the Australian detainee in Guantanamo Bay, who discovered belatedly that he was entitled to [...]

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? - John Maynard Keynes
If you wanted to encapsulate in a single incident the reasons why the voters in just about every major democracy are losing faith in their politicians right now, you could do worse than to go back to Washington University, St [...]

Late Friday trivial post. Good stuff on Chris Muir from the redoubtable Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings. You may not think much of cartoon pages of US newspapers, but however desperate they are for material, not one so far runs Day by Day (tagline: as funny as the title is original, a take-off of Doonesbury with far fewer characters, no intelligence to speak of, poor repetitive draughtsmanship, and homeless puppy’s eagerness to please aimed unashamedly at wingnut bloggers).

Much has been said about the recent Israeli attacks on Lebanon and blockade of that country, with the apparent intention of putting back the Lebanese economy by 20 years.

[Israeli] Army Chief of Staff Lt-Gen Dan Halutz said the Israeli military would “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years” if the soldiers were not returned.

Here I intend to approach the subject from a point of view of European (and especially European Union) foreign policy

Everyone is talking about this. Mike Power: “Paxman should have wiped the floor with her” [my emphasis], Andrew Ian Dodge “man did she stuff Jeremy Paxman”, Guido (curiously silent), Blairwatch.
Like Mike, I think Paxman “should have wiped the floor with” Coulter. But he didn’t. I admire Paxman; he adds to the gaiety of the [...]

Over the last nine years, it’s become a pretty standard rhetorical trick to compare the progress of the Conservative party with that of Labour’s years in wilderness during the 1980s. David Cameron bangs on endlessly about the party’s need to come to terms with the modern world, while pundits endlessly debate whether the party has yet had the “clause 4 moment” that will symbolize its break with the past. “Oh, I think Cameron was a mistake,” someone said to me the other day. “They’ve chosen a Blair when they needed a Kinnock.”

“Real Madrid can eff all, you arse-face arsing arse-heads”
I’m not trying to raise the Sharpener’s rude word count, nor shock you with poor grammar. I’m simply quoting the finest panel of Medium Large’s recent Brit Week. (That’s just the latest cartoon: there are usually weekly archives, and the last one should be here, but [...]