This proves nothing but is a cautionary example perhaps:

For 23 days since her daughter went missing, Karen Matthews has answered questions. Some, such as whether she can identify discarded items of clothing and toys found near her home on an impoverished estate in West Yorkshire, are distressingly necessary parts of a huge police effort to find nine-year-old Shannon.

There is growing disquiet that other questions, posed by the media, have gone far beyond necessity and lifted the lid on an uncomfortable hypocrisy in British society.

I remember reading that at the time, about a month ago now, and thinking it was a rather silly piece. The ‘questions’ the writer dislikes concern the fact that the woman has had seven children by six fathers. The suggested hypocrisy is that some might think this worth discouraging. When the piece appeared it struck me as a regrettable attempt to shut down discussion over whether dysfunctional families should really be encountered without any thought to the aggregate consequences of such tangled relations. It is a stroke of particularly bad fortune for the writer of those ostentatiously pious sentiments, though, that the woman has since been taken into police custody in connection with the disappearance of her own daughter. Journalists all worry about whether those we defend might let us down, but that is a rather unhappy twist of events by anyone’s standards.

(As seen at DCist)

The New York Times obituary contains much I had not known:

Preparing for “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” he read hundreds of Michelangelo’s letters and practiced how to sculpt and paint convincingly. When filming “The Wreck of the Mary Deare” (1959), in which he played the pilot of a salvage boat, he learned deep-water diving. And he mostly rejected stunt doubles. In “Ben-Hur,” he said, he drove his own chariot for “about 80 percent of the race.”

“I worked six weeks learning how to manage the four white horses,” he said. “Nearly pulled my arms right out of their sockets.”

There is something of the American sense of self-reliance there, without which the NRA connection is less intelligible. The obituary also mentions that he had been a strong supporter of Martin Luther King. This ought not be surprising perhaps. More Republicans than Democrats supported the Civil Rights Act after all. The obituary is generous from a paper as firmly opposed to gun rights as is the New York Times and the news of Mr Heston’s death an opportunity to remember that American advocates of the 2nd amendment no more reliably conform to the stereotype of the gun nut than do opponents necessarily sit around drinking lattes and complaining that they are not taxed enough. Charles Heston was a very talented orator as well as an actor, but precisely because his speeches, many available on YouTube, are not at all typical of the ‘my cold dead hands’ coda for which they will probably be remembered.

‘We shall go on to the end… We shall never surrender.’

The text beneath translates as ‘Kosovo is Serbia’. What the great man would have made of revanchist Serbs invoking his memory to protest the self-determination of the Kosovars is a tricky one to imagine. Certainly in his youth Churchill was uncompromising on seccession. Writing to Bourke Cockran, an Irish emigrant of great eminence in American politics at the beginning of the century just past, Churchill explained that he could no more contemplate Home Rule for Ireland than could Russia free Poland or Austria her component parts. Of course, Churchill changed his mind about Ireland, though not about India. Though the question is unanswerable, my guess would be that Churchill would have found himself on the other side to that on which the Serbs have enlisted him. The rights of small nations, which he and Lloyd George particularly invoked at the outbreak of war in 1914, was not cant on his part.

Incidentally, the particularly stern looking Churchill in the iconic photo the Serbs have purloined, and electronically reversed it seems, resulted from an ingenious strategem on the part of the photographer - he pinched Churchill’s cigar seconds before shooting which produced exactly the effect at which he was aiming.

This proves nothing but made me chuckle:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway….

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

The snippet is from the Washington Post in 1922, as seen here on the Weekly Standard Blog.

The Jerusalem Post ran a small item yesterday:

Following an Israeli campaign, Facebook decided to allow residents of some Jewish settlements the option of listing Israel or Palestine, settlers said Tuesday.

Last week, members of the social networking craze who are Jewish settlers living in the West Bank were incensed to discover that they had to choose “Palestine” as their state, not Israel, when filling out the address section of their profile pages.

Embroiling himself in the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict cannot have been something Marc Zuckerman foresaw when setting up Facebook.

MSNBC published a piece yesterday  discussing how immigration into Ireland is increasing attention in Irish churches. This is, of course, perfectly true, but the opening does not instill confidence:

DUBLIN, Ireland - Less than two years ago, St. Audeon’s Catholic Church was dying. It offered one sparsely attended weekly Mass in Latin and was on the brink of closure.

I’m not sure what measure of attendance would qualify in the author’s estimation as ample rather than sparse, but I well remember Sundays in St. Audeon’s from 2006 and there was often three or four hundred people present, as there are in St. Kevin’s on Harrington Street whither the parish has relocated.

Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard spent time last week in Israel. His account of his conversations is a very succinct survey of how the Israeli political landscape lies, but his comment on how Israeli and American analysts differ in assessing what is broadly similar data on Iran’s intentions is striking:

Basically, the two countries approach intelligence differently. According to one former intelligence official we spoke with, and I see no reason to doubt his analysis, American assessments of the Iranian program are shaped almost entirely by the intelligence failures of the Iraq war. That is to say, the American intel community was burned by the failure to find WMD in Iraq, and is thus extremely fearful of overhyping the threat from Iran. On the other hand, the assessment of the Israeli intelligence community is shaped by another event, the Yom Kippur War. They fear underestimating the capabilities of their enemies as they did then, and will err on the side of caution in order to avoid a repeat. Still, one got the sense that the Israelis and their American counterparts are not really so far apart on their estimation of Iranian capabilities, at least privately. 

It is, of course, wholly natural that how security establishments in different countries approach their foreign policy and intelligence questions is shaped by their own historical experiences. Goldfarb’s illustration is a reminder here in Ireland that we are perfectly capable of falling in good faith into a similar tendency. We are possibly already doing so by taking the Northern Ireland peace process as a template for conflict resolution elsewhere, which the reasons for doing so do not bear great scrutiny. This is something I have written on with Dr Rory Miller and Peter Nolan for the British Israel Communications and Research Centre, here, as has Lord Trimble for Conservative Friends of Israel, here.

The Irish Cabinet may have managed to spend half a million euro between themselves on their St Patrick’s Day travel last year, but that pales in comparison somewhat with the expenses incurred by the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Nancy Pelosi personally billed the American taxpayer $3million for her first nine months, including $16,000 for flowers.

The Weekly Standard carries a useful reminder that human rights abuses in China are not confined in occassional crackdowns:

Tomorrow Beijing will put on trial one of its most ardent human rights campaigners. Hu Jia, 34, faces charges of “inciting subversion of state power.” Evidence to be used against him includes articles he posted on an overseas Chinese-language website and statements he made during interviews with foreign journalists.

For his work as an activist, Hu, a devout Buddhist, has been called “modern China’s conscience.” He called attention to the plight of AIDS orphans whose parents were victims of a scandal involving tainted blood at public blood banks. In June 2004, he was detained for attempting to lay a wreath on Tiananmen Square to honor the victims of the 1989 crackdown on democracy demonstrators.

In February 2006, Hu was abducted by agents of the Beijing public security bureau, driven with a hood over his head to a rural location, and held captive for 41 days. Although suffering from hepatitis-B, Hu was denied medication while his kidnappers interrogated him concerning a hunger strike he had joined to protest police brutality in China.

Meanwhile, Dick Roche has said that he did not think it his duty while representing the country in China over the St Patrick’s Day festivities to draw the attention of his hosts towards Irish disapproval of the violent repression afoot in Tibet. ‘I think the appropriate way’ he is quoted this morning as saying ‘is to do it at home’, by which he means from Dublin rather than when face-to-face with those responsible. Not out finest hour.