GCM (GCM)
Sheikha Hasina stopped GCM opening its Phulbari coal mine so that the coal had to come from India. This allowed Hasina to take a backhander. In the end she had to send in her troops to murder about 1,500 students who wanted a job in Bangladesh. Hasina was then rumbled and sentenced to death - by which time she had disappeared to India. But this suggests to me that coal will eventually come from Phulbari. And the question then arises: what is GCM worth? It is too early to say
1 day ago1 min read
The American century
is the subject of a David Dimbleby series on Radio 4 each Tuesday at 9.00 a.m. (and presumably at other times when repeated). Today's effort kicked off with Bretton Woods, the 1944 conference attended by 700 delegates in New Hampshire. It is well worth listening to. Quite why Dimbleby calls the programme the American century is not explained given that Amercia may have been economically dominant but it has continued in exactly that role in the current century. I suspect that
2 days ago1 min read
Barry Cryer strikes again
There are three parrots on a perch in a petshop. A man comes in and asks how much the first one is. '£100,' says the shopkeeper. 'What does it do?' 'It quotes Shakespeare,' says the shopkeeper. 'How much is the next one?' asks the man. '£200.' 'Why so much?' the man asks. 'It can squawk Bach, Beethoven and the whole classical repertoire,' says the shopkeeper. 'What about the last one?' '£500.' 'Bloody Hell. What can it do?' asks the man. 'No idea,' says the shopkeeper, 'but t
4 days ago1 min read
Niall Ferguson
One of the reasons I wrote so many history books, says Niall Ferguson in The Free Press, was to ensure people “learned the lessons of history” – like the vital lesson that anti-Semitic language can easily explode into genocidal violence. So it’s with profound dread that, today, I see this ancient hatred normalised and trivialised. Influential American conservatives like Tucker Carlson calmly tolerate revisionist “anti-historians” like Darryl Cooper, who deny the Holocaust and
5 days ago2 min read
