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Flickr / nedrichards (CC-BY-SA)
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The United Kingdom will not allow an official representative of Israel’s security services into the country, according to an Israeli report, until Israel promises, in writing, not to abuse British passports. Israel has so far refused, the report said.
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British politicians waited 50 years to debate each other on television. Those clever Internet hooligans wasted no time mocking the results.
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YouTube / itnnews
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After glad-handing a difficult voter who told of her concerns about immigration, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown retreated to the sanctity of his car, where he promptly described the woman as “bigoted.” Unfortunately for Brown, he was wearing a live microphone at the time.
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Flickr / stringberd
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European retailer Primark has gotten itself into some hot water. The clothing chain halted the sale of padded bikini tops for girls as young as 7 years old after advocacy groups and politicians criticized the store for “premature sexualization and unprincipled advertising.”
Posted on Apr 14, 2010
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Graham Whitehouse / WDM (CC-BY)
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Gordon Brown has announced that the U.K. will hold elections May 6. A few weeks ago it was a near certainty that Conservatives would win the day, but a few polls show Labour surprisingly close to holding on to power. For the first time, the three major party leaders will debate each other live on telly. (continued)
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aquamarinepower.com
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Hoping to become the “Saudi Arabia of tidal energy,” the Scottish government is offering 10 million pounds to spur innovation in wave power. Some say the incentive is unnecessary, since private companies are already racing to figure out the best way to generate electricity from the ocean.
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White House / Paul Morse
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That U.K. inquiry into the Iraq war has already spoken to two prime ministers, but Sir John Chilcot’s panel would like an American take on things. Senior officials from George W. Bush’s administration, and maybe even W himself, have been cordially invited to give evidence.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Could Prime Minister Gordon Brown pull off the biggest political upset since 1948? Britain’s Conservatives are ascendant, but there’s reason for Brown to hope.
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Illustration from sanctumsolitude and Marc Mongenet
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America isn’t the only country trying to eat its way to happiness. A new study predicts that by the year 2020, 81 percent of adult British men and 68 percent of women will be obese or overweight. (continued)
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Flickr / davemacvac
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British defense giant BAE has agreed to pay the UK and U.S. governments almost $800 million in penalties after it finally admitted guilt in the face of long-running corruption allegations. The deal allows the company to avoid being placed on an international arms trade blacklist.
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Flickr / World Economic Forum
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Sticking with a position that appears based more on pride than empirical reasoning, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair waded through six hours of questioning at an inquiry in London with a resilient defense of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Nicole Ketchen
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Before the invasion of Iraq, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s top legal adviser warned that the use of force was “contrary to international law” and “would amount to the crime of aggression.” (continued)
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The British PM has announced a plan to spend the equivalent of nearly half a billion dollars providing free laptops and broadbrand Internet access to 270,000 low-income families. The program will need parliament’s blessing.
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AP / Nasser Nasser
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Both the U.K. and U.S. temporarily closed their embassies in Yemen “for security reasons” on Sunday after increasing concern about al-Qaida threats in the capital city of Sana’a. Yemen has been under heightened scrutiny after the 2009 Christmas Day attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner was traced to the Middle Eastern country.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Marie Brown
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Perhaps inspired by reports that President Obama plans to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Gordon Brown said Monday that Great Britain would deploy an additional 500 soldiers to the region. (continued)
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The former U.K. ambassador to the U.S. has publicly admitted something of a truism: The plans to invade Iraq did not give time to U.N. weapons inspectors to do their job, and coalition forces “found [themselves] scrabbling for the smoking gun.”
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Flickr / World Economic Forum
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In a surprising last-minute move, Tony Blair has dropped out of the race for the European Council’s presidency, a position for which he was an early favorite.
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AP / Rafiq Maqool
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By Jane Merrick, Brian Brady and Kim Sengupta —
Seven out of 10 Britons back The Independent on Sunday’s call for a phased withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan as a landmark report by Oxfam this week exposes the real human cost of the war.
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By far the best thing to come out of Britain’s expenses scandal is this video series of ducks lampooning the shenanigans of elected officials. It’s part of a campaign to bring an open primary to the U.K., but forget the politics and enjoy the poultry.
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hotpot.se
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Here’s an oddball out of the empire: A new British study suggests that a girl’s “visual diet” affects attraction. Girls who attended same-sex schools were found to prefer more-feminine boys. (For boys in all-male schools, there was little or no indication they preferred more-masculine girls.) Maybe it’s a British thing?
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Screenshot of "Telescreens" from the film "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
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With millions of cameras watching its citizens’ every move, Britain is already one of the world’s leading surveillance states. Now the government wants to go even further, putting cameras in 20,000 private homes “to make sure children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals,” reports the Telegraph. Update
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
Posted on Jun 12, 2009
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World Economic Forum
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U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has lost three members of his Cabinet in three days, adding to a heap of political casualties that originally grew out of an expense claims scandal. The latest dropout, James Purnell, has called on his former boss to “stand aside to give our party a fighting chance. ... ”
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arcent.army.mil
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Six years after the disastrous invasion of Iraq, Britain’s armed forces have formally ended their combat mission in the war-torn country. Believing that their role is finished, U.K. government officials handed over control of their base to the U.S.—not Iraqi—military.
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tonyblairfaithfoundation.org
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As Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair played down his religious passions, but he confesses to the BBC, “I’m really and always have been in a way more interested in religion than politics.” Now that he’s a free man, Blair is launching something called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which hopes to bring people of different religions together. You could always start by not bombing them.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If there is a trend in democratic nations now, it is toward younger politicians who express disenchantment with the status quo, more by questioning past approaches than by offering fully worked-out alternative systems.
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AP photo / Eraldo Peres
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During a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Brasilia on Thursday, Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made the startling assertion that the current worldwide economic catastrophe was caused by “white people with blue eyes.” Perhaps that last detail was thrown in to graciously let brown-eyed Brown off the hook.
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The Guardian / Frank Baron
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Growing evidence of British complicity in “unacceptable activities,” including participation in U.S. torture practices, has prompted Prime Minister Gordon Brown to publish the rules that determine how U.K. intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 can interrogate suspects.
Posted on Mar 18, 2009
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tumblr.com
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The world economy this year is likely to grow at a rate of only 0.5 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund, which re-evaluated its figures after the U.K. officially entered into recession last week. The growth rate, as projected, is the lowest in more than 60 years.
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AP photo / Mahmoud Badri
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The UK’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a surprise trip to Iraq on Wednesday, followed by the announcement that British troops will begin pulling out of Iraq at the end of this coming May.
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U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Jeremy Lock
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As his country teeters on the brink of collapse, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, are pointing fingers at the U.K. as the source of the recent cholera outbreak that has killed hundreds in the African nation.
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americaslibrary.gov
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The British Defense Ministry has leaked news that it will begin a phased troop withdrawal from Iraq. The drawdown will bring to an end a torrid, near-six-year love affair with the U.S. that began with coordinated intelligence failures and eventually led to jointly invading a sovereign country under cover of a “war on terror.”
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timesonline.co.uk
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It seems the British have found a way to cope with the global economic crisis. A survey by the Terrence Higgins Trust, a UK AIDS charity, found that sex is the most popular free activity in the empire, beating out window shopping and going to a museum.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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The British government is planning to “significantly reduce” the country’s online file-sharing of copyrighted content, by at least 50 percent, in the next three years through a sequence of warning letters, Internet account suspensions and ultimate expulsion from Internet access.
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msnbc.com
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An ongoing Swedish study has shown that 70-year-olds are more likely now to have sex—and women to have orgasms—than in any decade since the 1970s. Sixty-eight percent of married men and 56% of married women reported having sex after turning 70, an increase of about 15% in both cases.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Britain’s Ministry of Defense is making public secret documents related to unidentified flying objects and alleged contacts with aliens. The records, collected between 1978 and 1987, include observations from the public as well as military personnel.
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flickr.com
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In the first policy announcement of his mayoral term, London’s newly elected Boris Johnson has banned the consumption of alcohol on all public transport —including buses and trains—in the capital city beginning June 1. The ordinance is criticized by many transport unions, which foresee serious problems in its enforcement.
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AP photo / Alastair Grant
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To say it was a politically interesting week would be a case of British understatement: London gained a new mayor—Boris Johnson, who beat incumbent Ken Livingstone to become the first Conservative to win the office—and Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party took a drubbing in local elections across the U.K. on May Day.
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AP photo / Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi
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Last month’s election in Zimbabwe is yet to be resolved. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai believes he defeated President Robert Mugabe fairly, but a recount and a runoff may happen before the contest is finally decided. Meanwhile, opposition supporters say Mugabe’s party is attacking them as he holds on to power.
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churchtimes.co.uk
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Following a heated debate, the British House of Lords approved an amendment that does away with the UK’s long-standing common law against blasphemy—a watershed moment that some believe was too long in coming.
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time.com
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A critique often leveled at those who wage wars is that they don’t belong to the class of citizens whose children go to fight them. Not so in the case of England’s royals, as 23-year-old Prince Harry has been fighting (albeit by choice) on the front line in Afghanistan, giving him the chance, he says, to be “a normal person for once.”
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Petar Pismestrovic, Kleine Zeitung, Austria
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Kosovo’s declaration of independence has prompted both condemnation and cheers from world leaders. Whether in the U.N. Security Council or the European Union, global opinion is divided. In particular, the declaration has served as a flashpoint for tension between the United States and Russia, an ugly reenactment of the kind of jockeying for influence that was supposed to have been buried with the Cold War.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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The UK’s Times Online certainly chose a very particular frame for its profile of John McCain’s wife, Cindy, as evidenced by the headline: “Flawed Cindy McCain Has a Grudge List.” Further down, Mrs. McCain gets a bit more credit when writer Tony Allen-Mills predicts she’d make a “formidable but flawed first lady.” There appears to be a pattern at work here.
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mcclatchydc.com
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BBC: “The UK will hand over control of Basra to Iraqi forces despite failing in its goal to establish security there, an MPs’ [members of Parliament] report says. The city is dominated by militias and the police contains ‘murderous’ and ‘corrupt’ elements, the report added.”
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guardian.co.uk
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The British government’s Foreign Affairs Committee will look into charges by a number of sources, including human rights groups and a retired U.S. general, that sovereign British land has been used as a CIA “black site” prison. The island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, has been leased to the United States and is the site of an American military base but remains British territory.
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AP photo / Nabil al-Jurani
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The British government is planning to downsize its military presence in Iraq this May by 800 to leave a total of 7,000 troops, a move Defense Secretary John Reid insists is not meant to signal a “handover of responsibility” to Iraqi forces, according to the BBC. Updated
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AP photo / Jerome Delay
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As the U.S. government is learning much too late, democracy is not a one-size-fits-all application that can be lifted from one culture and grafted onto another. Here, UK reporter Ian Black from the Guardian Unlimited takes a look at what’s really going on politically and culturally in Iraq according to a prominent historian and his Iraqi contacts.
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If the muted response from his normally rambunctious audience was any indication, Bill Maher might have crossed a line on Friday, but he deserves praise for confronting a senseless taboo, exploring the death of Princess Di without the usual beatification and self-flagellation.
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Patrick Cockburn —
British forces face a major dip in morale as they prepare to leave Basra—an exit viewed by some as a retreat from a situation that’s become more chaotic and dangerous than it was before. The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn apparently agrees, arguing that the British troops “wholly failed” in their “least successful military campaign since Suez in 1956.”
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A British committee investigating possible UK involvement in extraordinary rendition has found that the U.S. ignored British intelligence caveats and concerns, possibly straining a historically close intelligence relationship. The committee also recommended a ban on cooperation that could lead to secret detention, which it said “is of itself mistreatment.”
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