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I’ve got a short piece about organised crime on the Guardian’s blog Comment is Free. From the intro:
The annual report from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, published yesterday, is a mix of self-congratulation and spectacular underachievement. While the rhetoric from politicians has been to get tough on organised crime, the reality is more humbling: we [...]

A post I wrote last week described a “push” approach to AIDS prevention - circumcise men, tell people to use condoms, encourage them not to sleep around too much etc. The World Bank is trying a different tack, using a “pull” method instead: pay people not to get infected and let them work out for [...]

After a period of silence on the “Iran file”, the P5+1 will present Tehran with a new incentive package to convince the Iranians to suspend their enrichment program and enter negotiations. This is the second time the five permanent members offer a package. The first time was in 2006, which was rejected by Tehran.
Nobody thinks [...]

According to the latest Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index (CFPI), 60% of Americans say reducing energy dependence would strengthen their nation’s security “a great deal.” The report shows that the public has begun to zero in on economic and energy issues, and believe that becoming less dependent on other countries for their supply [...]

…or so suggest the exit polls after today’s national elections - see why here.

From a piece on the credit crunch in the current London Review of Books, the sort of opening that you find yourself reading more than once…
Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St [...]

Yesterday, I gave a couple of talks at a Diplomatic Academy of London conference on ‘transformational public diplomacy’ (pdf – and read an earlier post here).
One talk drew heavily on my Wilton Park speech on evaluation (read it here), but I also spoke about technology’s impact on diplomacy. The full text is after the jump [...]

A typically forthright and sensible article from former WTO head Mike Moore in the New Zealand Herald argues that we need more globalisation, not less, in response to the food crisis. He berates rich countries’ wrongheaded fuel subsitution policies - biofuels - as “a populist Green response to global warming that does the opposite of [...]

One of the trends we’ve seen in investment banking over the last two or three years is what PWC calls the ‘global war for talent’. Local banks in rich emerging market countries have more money to spend than their troubled rivals on Wall Street, so they’re hiring the top talent from western banks to join [...]

Asks William Saletan over on Slate. Actually he raises a number of questions about whether suicide bombings are increasing around the world, why they might be and if so what can we do about it. The stats are revealing. According to
an article by Robin Wright of the Washington Post last week:
Suicide bombers conducted 658 attacks [...]

Would you rather be a member of the liberal left on the western or eastern side of the Atlantic right now?  Not easy.  Labour’s in free-fall.  The Democrats are devising innovative ways to lose an election that they should own.  But Jackie Ashley at the Guardian still sees cause for hope: Gordon might be the [...]

Nothing is more viral than a political gaffe – just ask Hilary Clinton. But what about EU accession policy? Well, in the Balkans anything goes.
Twenty days ago I wrote a piece about the EU’s policy in the region on ECFR’s website. I recommended “reverse conditionality” – in other words that the
EU should give three countries [...]

The Conservative foreign affairs spokesman William Hague issued a press release on Tuesday calling on David Miliband, foreign secretary “to take urgent action with regard to the Chinese ship, currently heading to Uganda carrying arms bound for Zimbabwe”.
From the FT blog:
Hague’s intervention sent the Foreign Office into a spin, as officials pored over atlases trying [...]

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On Saturday, Alex and I presented our paper on multilateralism and global risks to heads of state at the Progressive [...]

Straight from Boston Dynamics comes RoboDog. Don’t be put off by the shot of it going up the hill, watch the bot in the car park with a human and skidding on ice… its realistic but a tad disconcerting.

Following David’s post on morons - Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party goes walkabout in her constituency… is the stab proof vest really necessary?

The latest move in the long game between Turkey’s hardline secularists and its moderate Islamist government is perhaps the most worrying yet. The chief prosecutor in the country’s constitutional court has filed a petition to close the governing AK Party and ban its leaders from politics for five years, including Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan and [...]

The current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review should be required reading for foreign policy wonks as well as aspiring hacks.  It has a great piece on how marines  in Iraq turned to a blogger in New Jersey to track the patterns of insurgent attacks - as well as a thoughtful dismissal of  indie documentaries on the war.  [...]

Yesterday morning Charlotte Green, the BBC newsreader collapsed in a fit of giggles on the Today Programme. Having listened to an item about the oldest known recording of the human voice she got the giggles. Listen here. The result is very amusing to listen to and thousands of calls to the switchboard asking to hear [...]

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