Waking up to the catastrophic news of Israel’s attack on the flotilla that was trying to break the blockade of Gaza, my snap reaction was that this event had the potential to trigger a chain of uncontrollable consequences. Nothing has since happened to reassure me that this was an early-morning overreaction.

Perhaps most worrying is the potential for friction between Israel and Turkey, countries that once enjoyed an unexpectedly good relationship (£2.5bn in bilateral trade in 2009). Turkey was the aid convoy’s main national sponsor, leading Israel’s unions to retaliate with a boycott of the country.

According to one Israeli union leader:

Turkey had been wiped off the workers unions’ travel maps. In a survey we conducted among the participants in the semi-annual union heads forum, we found that Israel’s workers’ unions have had enough of Turkey’s hostility toward Israel, which in the past had been characterized by verbal attacks by the country’s prime minister, but had now shifted to active attempts to harm Israel’s sovereignty. The tourism boycott is a weapon that will send a message to Ankara that words and deeds have consequences.

But Tel Aviv may now be the capital to discover that deeds have consequences that can go well beyond a boycott. The Turkish government is reported to be threatening to send more boats sailing towards Israel’s coast, but this time to give them a naval escort. That would put the two countries on track towards a very dangerous confrontation.

Bradley Burston, writing in Haaretz, is also worried:

Perhaps most ominously, in a stepwise, lemming-like march of folly in our relations with Ankara, a regional power of crucial importance and one which, if heeded, could have helped head off the First Gaza War, we have come dangerously close to effectively declaring a state of war with Turkey.

“This is going to be a very large incident, certainly with the Turks,” said Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the cabinet minister with the most sensitive sense of Israel’s ties with the Muslim world.

Let’s hope the Turkish government continues to pursue its grievances with Israel through the international system, rather than putting the two countries’ navies on a collision course. Otherwise this grim year could get soon get much worse – yet again.

Update: Channel 4′s Faisal Islam points to NATO’s charter, presumably with Turkey in mind.

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence…

An armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack… on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.

Update II: NATO will meet on Tuesday at Turkey’s request. According to an unnamed diplomat:

NATO does not really have instruments with which to deal with the follow-up from this type of affair. Turkey has not invoked article five which envisages all allies coming to the aid of a member country that is the victim of an attack.

But, given that numerous Turkish citizens appear to figure among the casualties, it is understandable that (Ankara) triggers political dialogue with its partners.

Update III: One to watch is the Irish boat – MV Rachel Corrie (yes, that Rachel Corrie) which is yet to reach Israel:

Five are onboard the Irish-owned vessel, MV Rachel Corrie, and all are safe. The ship was one day behind the main flotilla and is still on its way to Gaza.

Among the passengers on the Rachel Corrie are Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire and former UN Assistant Secretary-General Denis Halliday.

Does it sail on towards a second confrontation? And if so, how will the Israelis react?

Sweet God, can Britain be trusted with anything these days?

Britain is facing a revolt against its rule of a group of Caribbean islands, amidst a gathering political and economic crisis in the country.  The Foreign Office suspended parliamentary democracy in the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) last August after a group of visiting MPs uncovered evidence of widespread corruption in the territory, one of 14 colonial outposts for which the UK still has responsibility.

But an investigation by The Independent has found that the economic situation in the country has deteriorated sharply since then, and islanders are demanding a financial bailout of tens of millions of dollars.  Problems facing the British-appointed governor, Gordon Wetherell, include:

• Debts of tens of millions of dollars, which have left the TCI government unable to pay its bills and trying to impose swingeing cuts;
• The collapse of one of the country’s leading locally owned banks, which wiped out the savings of thousands of depositors and businesses;
• Doubts over the future of a legal investigation set up last year to prosecute former ministers accused of taking bribes.

Now, this is bad. Happily, the genius of British politics offers a solution: David Laws.

(Spoiler alert: what follows is not entirely unserious in intent.)

Mr Laws has, readers will be aware, had to resign as Chief Secretary of the Treasury for reasons that need not (and, I think, should not) concern us. This is a pity, as everyone seems to agree that he is the only person alive capable of reducing the British budget deficit in a competent fashion. Since he resigned, pretty much all of Whitehall and Fleet Street has concluded that they’d like him back sharpish.

There is a simple and happy solution here. Governor Wetherell of Turks and Caicos, who also seems to be a perfectly decent fellow, should be moved to some more fiscally sound speck of our imperial residue. Mr Laws should take his place, with a mandate to fix TCI’s budget in short order. Everyone would agree that he has then paid his penance – and then some – so we could have him back in government pronto.

That would still leave us with BP on our roster on national shame, but whatever.

Five years ago today, I had a chicken korma for dinner. I know this not because of quality of the curry (it was, as I recall, not bad) but because about half way through the meal I got a text message from a friend. This announced that the French had just voted “non” to the EU constitution.  I had been working on the possibility of a British referendum on the constitution. This suddenly seemed rather irrelevant.

That French “non” arguably started a period of political drift in Europe that, in spite the protracted passage of the Lisbon Treaty, has never really ended.  If you start talking about major reforms to the EU, it’s not long before someone says “but that will mean referendums!” And everyone knows that referendums mean trouble – not only because of the French experience but also because of the Dutch “nee” to the constitution that followed a few days later, and Ireland’s vote against Lisbon in 2008.

With the EU struggling to save the Euro – and almost every pundit in existence talking about the power-shift away from Europe – it’s tempting to look back and ask if things might be better if the French had said “oui” in May 2005.  There’s an alternative universe in which the constitution came into force in 2006 or 2007, the new EU structures were tried and tested before the financial crisis struck and, as a result, European leaders still treat the Union as a stirring political project.

But, before you shed a tear for this EU that never was, it’s worth recognizing that there’s another alternative EU universe out there in which a French “oui” led to an even worse crisis than we have today.  I explain how this could have happened in a short essay to mark the anniversary of the French vote:

A French Oui and Dutch Ja would not have marked the end of debates about the constitution. Instead, they would have signaled the start of a vicious referendum campaign in Britain that could have altered EU politics permanently.

Other countries also still had to vote on the constitution. The outcome looked very dicey in Denmark and the Czech Republic. But the political calculus was clear. If some smaller member states voted No while Britain said Yes, the constitution would get through in the end. If Britain voted No, a much more radical solution might be necessary.

Having spent much of 2004 and early 2005 chewing over polling data on British attitudes to the constitution, I am pretty sure it was on course to be rejected. The pro-constitution lobby included some awfully nice people – but they were just too nice to win. Some expected then Prime Minister Tony Blair to revitalise the campaign, but his grip on the country was waning.

If the then prime minister could not inspire the British to embrace the constitution, some politicians in France and Germany thought they could terrify them into doing so. By spring 2005, there was muttering about an “exit strategy” or, rather more credibly, a “Norwegian option” (leaving the EU but remaining in the European Economic Area) for Britain. This would have got a lot louder before a referendum.

Had Britain ended up teetering on the edge of a No vote in the spring or summer of 2006 – the likely poll dates – it would have been treated rather as Greece has been this year. It is easy to imagine a lot of talk about how German (or French, or Dutch) voters could not be expected to allow one trouble-making country to thwart their political dreams.

There would have been other strident voices in the mix. The Bush administration, yet to plunge into the grim torpor of its final years, might well have intervened vocally on behalf of its British allies. Warnings from Washington about Britain’s essential role in EU-US relations would have been counter-productive, reopening the wounds of Iraq and pushing France and Germany to form a united front as defenders of the constitution.

If Britain eventually rejected the constitution, it is unlikely that Tony Blair could have stayed in office, leaving Gordon Brown to take the reins of an exhausted Labour Party. Brown might have had to call an early election – with the Tories the guaranteed winners.

It would have been a sour victory. With Britain’s European status in doubt, the pound would have plummeted while City bankers looked for nice places to live near Frankfurt.

I can hear a few Euro-federalists muttering (if there are a few left) that what I’m describing here is not a crisis for Europe, just a crisis for Britain.  And there definitely was and is a camp of people in Brussels who feel that the EU can only achieve its potential by sidelining the Brits – and lots of Brits would be happy to be sidelined.  But the sort of fight I’m imaging here would have had unpredictable side-effects.

If, for example, France and Germany had shoved Britain out of the EU, a lot of other reasonably pro-British governments (I’m thinking of Denmark, Poland, etc.) would have been left deeply unhappy.  I can imagine headlines about France imposing a “Diplomatic Terror” on the rest of the Union, with Jacques Chirac as a latter-day Robespierre.  Cooperation on issues like the Balkans and Iran would have suffered.

It might not have been that nasty.  Charles Grant of the Center for European Reform published a widely-read paper in March 2005 looking at ways to navigate out of the crisis that would follow a British “no”.  Perhaps a “soft landing” could have been devised.  But, given the sort of diplomatic hysteria we’ve witnessed over the Euro crisis, I wonder if the voices of reason would have triumphed over Britain.

On balance, I think that the French voters may have saved the EU from some very unpleasant blood-letting with that “non” back in 2005.  I certainly wasn’t betting that the future would be bright for British EU analysts like me.  The day after that vote, and that korma, I moved to the United States.

Yesterday, I blogged about Hillary Clinton’s speech on the U.S. National Security Strategy at Brookings.  Since then, a good few pundits have popped up to knock the NSS, taking issue with its emphasis on international cooperation.  Here’s Les Gelb:

As for Mr. Obama’s strategic desire to build cooperation with nations around the world and get international institutions effectively on Washington’s side, forget about it—at least in any short or medium term. Most nations don’t do a damn thing and aren’t prepared to sacrifice a penny to what they see as “an American cause.” No amount of American niceness and understanding will change that.

And here’s the rather more measured Will Inboden:

Much of the document is devoted to heralding worthy things like “engagement,” “cooperation,” and “partnerships.” These are all essential methods of foreign policy, of course, but they are more means rather than ends in themselves.

Since hearing Clinton speak, I’ve had the chance to talk to a number of serious U.S. foreign policy types – a lot of them committed fans of the UN and other multilateral, cooperative outfits. But it’s fair to say that most of them at least shared Inboden’s qualms – and more than one agreed with Gelb. The general view seems to be “international engagement’s great, but what are your intended outcomes?” Another frequent question is “OK, if we try cooperation, when will we know that it’s working?”

What if cooperation turned out to be working on an issue like Iran, well, today? Look at this story about the growing tensions between Moscow and Tehran:

In one of the worst rows between the two countries in decades, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday admonished the Kremlin for bowing to what he said was U.S. pressure to agree to sanctions. Ahmadinejad bluntly warned President Dmitry Medvedev to be more cautious or risk being seen as an enemy of the Islamic Republic. The Kremlin told the Iranian president to refrain from “political demagoguery.”

When asked by a reporter about Ahmadinejad’s tirade, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he viewed the comments as “emotional.” Underscoring Moscow’s growing impatience with Iran, Lavrov said that Russian leaders had tried repeatedly to resolve the dispute but that Tehran had failed to respond properly.

“To our great regret, during years — not just months — Iran’s response to these efforts has been unsatisfactory, mildly speaking,” Lavrov said at a briefing in Moscow.

There may be posturing here (of course there is, Ahmadinejad’s involved). But it does look as if the U.S. strategy of working closely with Russia on Iran is having some impact. As American diplomacy improves, Iran’s gets creaky. Does that guarantee our security? No. Does it suggest that U.S. advocacy of international cooperation might alter other powers’ strategic calculations? Yes. Perhaps we’ve all been too busy asking if international cooperation works in theory to spot that it’s working in practice.

Hillary Clinton just spoke on the new U.S. National Security Strategy at Brookings.  Having been in the audience, the bits that stick in my mind are:

• Clinton defined the tensions inherent in globalization as creating a “race between the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration”, which is snappy;
• She spoke convincingly about the paradox that while the U.S. needs “strategic patience and persistence” in applying “indirect power” in cases like Iran, these virtues are hard to maintain in the high-speed information age;
• We want to shift from a “multi-polar world to a multi-partner world”.

Clinton spoke a lot about China.  That’s not surprising as she’s just back from Asia.  She also highlighted America’s commitments to Japan and South Korea – again, a sine qua non given current events in that part of the world.

She didn’t mention Brazil in her main speech, which one questioner assumed was a rebuke over Lula’s efforts to befriend the Iranians.  But, rather gracefully, Clinton admitted that Brazil has a “theory of the case” when it comes to dealing with Iran – she even gave a fair summary of this theory, before saying she disagrees.

What was missing?  Europe, big-time.  NATO got two mentions in the main speech, and was raised in a follow-up question.  Answering, the Secretary of State complained about the Alliance’s “sprawling” committees.  The EU hardly featured at all.

UPDATE: read far better-informed commentaries on HC’s speech here.

FURTHER UPDATE: the speech transcript is here.

The UN has had peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo for a decade. Congolese President Joseph Kabila, hoping to show he’s not reliant on the blue helmets, wants the force to go in 2011.  Almost every outside analyst thinks that this could precipitate a disaster, with militias running rampant, the hopeless Congolese army unable to cope and the country’s neighbors moving in to gobble up territory.

The UN hopes that it will be able to keep at least some troops – maybe about 6,000, compared to the current 20,000 – to protect civilians in the especially vulnerable eastern Congo. This would do some good, but how much? The peacekeepers were thoroughly outmaneuvered by militias in the east in 2008, and I’m not sure that a reduced presence could do more than stifle low-level violence. What is to be done?

Over at World Politics Review, David Axe quotes Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings, who argues that the U.S. and its friends should tell Mr. Kabila (still in a very precarious position) that it’s time for more peacekeepers, not fewer:

“Ideally, we’d see an entire American brigade, but that’s not realistic. Barring that, how about a battalion doing a mission along the lines of Special Forces, doing intelligence-gathering and planning? . . . That would enable a country like France, which is not as globally committed but is afraid to stick its neck out [to deploy troops]. We need more Western forces. There’s not much of an alternative if the mission is to do what it was designed do.”

I’m afraid that’s not going to happen, although I applaud O’Hanlon’s advocating an idealistic but unpopular line. France is trying to cut back its presence in Africa, and there are huge obstacles to it playing a role in the Great Lakes region – the locals haven’t forgotten the questionable French part in the Rwandan genocide.

But I think that there may be a broader fallacy here: the idea that getting new combat forces into the Congo is what’s needed in the first place. Yes, the UN has struggled with 20,000 troops – but as I think O’Hanlon himself once noted, you might need up to 200,000 to stabilize somewhere on the scale of Congo. Rather than focus on numbers, I’d try to see if there are any light-weight ways the U.S. can affect the  political decision-making of Mr. Kabila and his neighbors (especially the hawkish Rwandans).

Here’s one possible formula.  While the UN should maintain the 6,000 troops on active protection duties, the U.S. should deploy around 100 military observers to operate in the UN framework.  Why?  The UN already has a bunch of observers in Congo, and the U.S. is said to have spooks and special forces in the east.  But American colonels and captains publicly monitoring the situation would send a clear message to the Congolese and their neighbors that Washington wants calm.  This American mini-presence would also play a tripwire role: it’s one thing to outflank and embarrass standard UN infantry, but quite another to play games in front of U.S. observers.

What makes this option half-credible is that the Obama administration has already thought about sending more military staff officers on UN missions – the President said so himself last year – so this idea is not too far from current policy.  That said, the U.S. has just 10 military experts in UN operations at present (the figures are here).  2 of them are in the Congo.  The Pentagon is rumored to be unenthusiastic about  helping the UN – but 100 personnel is not beyond the realms of the possible.  They don’t need to be O’Hanlon’s green berets… though that would be nice.

I don’t think that 100 Europeans would have the same effect.  China, which has invested a lot in the Congo, could send more observers or regular troops and reinforce the American message.  I can see this proposal running into lots of quibbles, but it might be just the low-cost, high-profile help the UN needs in Congo now.

UPDATE: the Security Council agreed the first reduction of the DRC force today.

We interrupt our regular coverage to bring you breaking news from Geneva: WTO negotiators have managed to agree on something in the Doha Round!

Unfortunately, what they’re agreeing on is that we’re screwed, as ICTSD reports:

A meeting of senior officials from 19 WTO members last week was valuable primarily for helping participants reach “a common diagnosis” of the “seriousness and depth” of the problem governments face in trying to conclude the Doha Round trade talks, officials said.

Plus ca change. In other news, negotiators at the NPT review conference had been underway for 19 hours as at 6.30am UK time today – but John Duncan, the UK’s Ambassador for multilateral arms control, tweets that they’re “still some way from an agreement”.

Come on, multilateralism. Give us something this year. Anything.

With things looking very bad on the Korean peninsula – and quite a few experts wondering whether the Pyongyang’s aggressive behavior is a sign that the regime is falling apart – it’s worth rereading an article Robert Kaplan wrote for the Atlantic in 2005 entitled “When North Korea Falls”.  This looks at what the U.S. and other big powers would have to do if a war led to the collapse of central authority in the North:

In order to prevent a debacle of the sort that occurred in Iraq—but with potentially deadlier consequences, because of the free-floating WMD—a successful relief operation would require making contacts with . . . various factions of the former North Korean military, who would be vying for control in different regions. If the generals were not absorbed into the operational command structure of the occupying force . . . they might form the basis of an insurgency. The Chinese, who have connections inside the North Korean military, would be best positioned to make these contacts—but the role of U.S. Army Special Forces in this effort might be substantial. Green Berets and the CIA would be among the first in, much like in Afghanistan in 2001.

Obviously, the United States could not unilaterally insert troops into a dissolved North Korea. It would likely be a four-power intervention force—the United States, China, South Korea, and Russia—officially sanctioned by the United Nations. Japan would be kept out (though all parties would gladly accept Japanese money for the endeavor).

How would this intervention work, and where would it lead?

South Korea would bear the brunt of the economic and social disruption in returning the peninsula to normalcy. No official will say this out loud, but South Korea—along with every other country in the region—has little interest in reunification, unless it were to happen gradually over years or decades. The best outcome would be a South Korean protectorate in much of the North, officially under an international trusteeship, that would keep the two Koreas functionally separate for a significant period of time. This would allow each country time to prepare for a unified Korea, without the attendant chaos.

Following the Communist regime’s collapse, the early stabilization of the North could fall unofficially to the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) and U.S. Forces Korea (which is a semiautonomous subcommand of PACOM), also wearing blue UN helmets. But while the U.S. military would have operational responsibility, it would not have sole control. It would have to lead an unwieldy regional coalition that would need to deploy rapidly in order to stabilize the North and deliver humanitarian assistance. A successful relief operation in North Korea in the weeks following the regime’s collapse could mean the difference between anarchy and prosperity on the peninsula for years to come.

And you think Afghanistan’s hard?

Last night saw a well-attended late night debate in the Commons on the proposed 55% for dissolving Parliament, which I picked up on when it popped up in the initial coalition agreement.

The debate was initiated by a Conservative backbencher, Chris Chope, indicating the potential for the bill itself to trigger an early backbench rebellion when it is finally debated.

The Liberal Democrat Deputy-Leader of the House, David Heath (“without wishing to sound too much like Mr. Pooter, I want to record the fact that the hon. Gentleman has given me the opportunity to be the first Liberal Minister to speak from the Dispatch Box since Sir Archibald Sinclair on 16 May 1945″), defended the Coalition’s proposal:

A strong Parliament is able to remove the Government of the day. A strong Government should not be able to remove the Parliament. That is the distinction that we are trying to address.

The Government will still have to resign if they lose the confidence of the House, and that will still be on a simple majority. There is no ambiguity about that. If the Government lose a vote of confidence, they are no longer the Government of the day.

He was very light on details though, suggesting the  level of the threshold was open for debate, while admitting that, as in Scotland, a time limit would need to be set to ensure that “a zombie Government that had] lost the confidence of the House” from sticking around in office.

The plan is to push legislation through before the Summer recess.

Via @MarthaKearney

Over at E!Sharp, I’ve just published a piece arguing that Catherine Ashton’s tenure as the EU’s foreign policy chief could be defined by a crisis somewhere:

Catherine Ashton needs a good crisis. While all eyes have been on the fight to save the euro, the EU’s foreign policy chief has been focused on setting up the new External Action Service. Her supporters argue that she will be judged on how well this bureaucracy works – so she should not get distracted by bad news from, say, Thailand or the Koreas.

That is true up to a point. But Ashton is canny enough to know that real foreign policy influence comes from being able to take the lead in solving a crisis that others cannot stop. Call this “Sarkozy’s First Law of International Politics”. The French president may be a bit volatile, but he won kudos for his personal diplomacy during the 2008 Georgian war.

“Hold on!” some readers will be crying, “what about Haiti, doesn’t that count?” My answer, sadly, is no: the January earthquake was a disaster and a tragedy, but I’m thinking about a political crisis.   People shooting at each other and all that.  So far, Ashton has been spared having to deal with that sort of thing.

Where might her first big crisis come from? Africa and the Middle East are both likely options.

There are signs of new trouble in Sudan and Congo, two countries the EU has tried to help stabilise. If either blows up, Ashton may find that European leaders – increasingly disinterested in African affairs – are all too willing to let her orchestrate their response.

The Middle East is another matter. Any crisis in the region is likely to centre on Iran, and Britain, France and Germany will all want a say in how to manage it – but may have very different solutions in mind. Ashton might find herself struggling to forge a consensus.

Harder still would be any crisis involving Russia, especially a new war in the Caucasus. Baroness Ashton would have to navigate between a bloc of member states from the eastern EU demanding a hard line on Moscow and some older members urging caution. Leaders in both camps would want to take the reins – President Sarkozy, for example, might argue that he should repeat his 2008 diplomatic dealings with Dmitry Medvedev. Ashton would find it hard to claim she represented a truly common EU foreign policy.

Isn’t this all a bit alarmist? Possibly. I’ve previously called for the EU to brace for nasty crises that never materialized – check out two of my Cassandra moments here and here. Then again, I failed to predict the 2008 Georgian crisis. But one thing is certain: at some point, Ashton will face a crisis, and have to decide whether or not to seize it. How she performs will have a decisive impact on her reputation.

So is the UK government opening central government job vacancies up to external applicants or not? That, after all, is what the new Coalition announced it would do just a week ago, when it said in its Programme for Government that:

We will open up Whitehall recruitment by publishing central government job vacancies online.

Sounds great, right? But then came this morning’s Treasury press notice with details of the government’s first £6bn of spending cuts – and news of a total freeze in civil service recruitment. Specifically, it says:

The civil service recruitment freeze will apply across Government departments, agencies and NDPBs. The only exceptions will be for: the graduate Fast Stream which is already underway; individual business critical appointments, all of which will require authorisation from the Secretary of State; and key frontline posts, which will require the authorisation of the appropriate Chief Executive, with monthly updates provided to the appropriate Secretary of State, Permanent Secretary or Head of Department.

Now you might suppose that even if there’s a civil service recruitment freeze, existing civil servants will still be able to apply for new posts within their existing departments – unless of course the plan is also to suspend promotions, staff moving to overseas posts and so on. 

And indeed an official I’ve spoken today confirms that of course people will still move from one job to another within their departments.

But in that case, can someone please explain to me in what sense, exactly, the government is “opening up Whitehall recruitment”?

Having refused to testify against Charles Taylor, the thuggish former Liberian president currently being tried at the Hague for war crimes, it now seems likely that the supermodel Naomi Campbell will be subpoenaed instead.

The story goes that after a dinner party hosted by Nelson Mandela at his home in South Africa, Ms Campbell was visited in her hotel room in the middle of the night by envoys sent by Taylor, who presented her with an enormous uncut diamond. Campbell allegedly told Mia Farrow about the gift the following morning, but has since denied receiving it to anyone who asks.

Some might think this romantic, but the diamond, if it existed, was a blood diamond from Sierra Leone, Liberia’s nextdoor neighbour, and was paid for with the weapons and soldiers deployed in that country’s vicious civil war.

This, of course, could stain Campbell’s impeccable reputation. She has said she does not want to testify because ‘Taylor has done some terrible things,’ (er, I think that’s why they want you to testify dear) and because she is ‘concerned for her safety.’

By 1997, Sierra Leone’s war was already several years old and approaching its most apocalyptic stage. Already, thousands had been killed or had hands, lips, legs or noses cut off by men and boys funded and supplied with weapons and drugs by Taylor, who needed Sierra Leone’s diamonds for his own insurgency in Liberia (which itself caused a quarter of a million deaths). So Taylor had already ‘done some terrible things’ by the time he allegedly gave Campbell the diamond. Perhaps Campbell hadn’t researched his past (she is a busy woman), but what is Mandela’s excuse for inviting him to dinner?

Apparently, Campbell promised Farrow she would give the diamond to Nelson Mandela’s Children’s Fund, but the Fund denies having ever received it. This could get interesting.

Question: what does the following sorry tale have to do with the G20?

Two gay men in Malawi, convicted this week of unnatural acts and gross indecency, were sentenced Thursday to the maximum penalty allowed by law, 14 years of hard labor in prison.

Answer: Canada recently invited Malawi (currently heading up the African Union) to join the Toronto meeting of the G20 in June, along with Ethiopia, the Netherlands, Spain and Vietnam.  Cue a certain amount of embarrassment in Ottawa:

“Cases like this are cases we condemn,” Mr. Cannon said Thursday, hours after the two men were sentenced. “We will be following this case as every other case. Canada has a great reputation internationally because we stand up for human rights, and speak out on … things that need to be denounced.”

Well said, Mr Cannon. Will Canadian PM Stephen Harper and other liberally-minded G20 leaders say similar things to Malawi’s President, Bingu wa Mutharika, in Toronto?  The White House has announced that it “appalled” by the ruling, so Barack Obama might mention it.  Or perhaps Prime Minister Zapatero could use his guest status in Toronto to explain how gay marriage is legal in Spain, as it is in Canada?

Perhaps everyone will maintain a tactful silence.  But the gay rights movement has a golden opportunity to put Malawi on the spot by creating a rumpus around the G20… which would be far more interesting than the usual anti-globalization protests.

Global Dashboard asks hard questions about whether communities and systems are resilient enough to survive catastrophes.  But I don’t think we’ve ever asked this, taken from a website for people who run laboratories:

How Can I Prepare My Animal-Research Lab for an Earthquake?

Reader Question: I am new to California and recently felt the ground shake for the first time. My colleagues seem to take it lightly and say I shouldn’t be concerned about mild tremors, but I think I should have my animal-research lab prepared for the possibility of a serious earthquake. How do I go about that?

Expert Comments:

In California and other areas at risk, earthquake preparedness is a key component of safety training. The Principal Investigator is responsible for ensuring that all laboratory staff members are adequately trained to protect themselves and the animals in their care.

A disaster plan, directed by the attending veterinarian, should be in place, covering proper food storage, electrical system backup and other preparations to safeguard animals in the aftermath of an earthquake. The plan should address what happens once buildings can be re-entered or in situations when they cannot be safely re-entered.

There must be clear instructions on how to humanely secure animals undergoing procedures when an evacuation becomes necessary. For example, no laboratory animal should leave the building in an evacuation. Animals should always be returned to their cages unless there is an immediate threat to human safety.

If an animal is undergoing surgery when an evacuation becomes necessary, good judgment must be used in deciding how to safely end the procedure or whether euthanasia is necessary.

Yep, I can absolutely imagine staff diligently guiding their lab rats back to their cages during a major earthquake. And the thoughtful discussions of whether euthanasia is an option for little Frodo the Laboratory Gerbil while the tremors hit… or maybe not. Face it, cute animals, when catastrophe comes you’re on your own.