The Times (Continuación)

ReflexionesSocial

The idea that we can plan our lives is fairly new and very western. For thousands of years people assumed that their destinies were not in their own hands, but in the unpredictable grasp of gods or demons or chance or family history or destiny. Man proposes but God (or something ineffable) disposes – that was how everybody thought.

Now, however, we in the rich world imagine we can choose our fates; we can eliminate diseases, double our harvests, split the atom, uncover the mysteries of the moon and even hold back time.

This feeling of being in control began slowly, not much more than 300 years ago in the West with the scientific revolution, but in the 20th century it suddenly burst forth as a new religious belief.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Just before noon on Friday, June 19, the Islamic republic died in Iran. Its death was announced by its “supreme guide”, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had come to praise the system but buried it instead. Khamenei was addressing supporters on the campus of Tehran University, transformed into a mosque for the occasion. Many had expected him to speak as a guide, an arbiter of disputes – a voice for national reconciliation. Instead, he spoke as a rabble rouser and a tinpot despot.

At issue was the June 12 presidential election that millions of Iranians, perhaps a majority, believe was rigged to ensure the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a two-thirds majority.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica

Morgan Tsvangirai is due to arrive in London today as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. He will be seeking UK government support and pitching for foreign investment. How should we respond to such an appeal from a Government that is led by Robert Mugabe, a man to whom we have got used to saying “no”?

We are clear that we must support the new inclusive Government, whatever our strong doubts about Mr Mugabe. Mr Tsvangirai has bravely chosen to join a government with his erstwhile rivals as the only way forward for Zimbabwe.

The reformers who have faced torture and death in pursuit of democracy have chosen to make this Government work.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

I have been in Iran five hours a day every day in the past week. Although I'm in Canada, I've been virtually in Iran. I watched a live feed of street protests through a friend's webcam until it went dead after 48 hours because of the Government's internet crackdown.

During the past few days, I have become a communication hub. The government ban on texting via mobile phones, the jamming of the BBC Persian TV's satellite feed, the expulsion of overseas journalists and filtering of many foreign and Iranian news websites have forced me to send to my friends anti-filtering website links.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

The digital revolution is changing all our lives beyond recognition and today we shall set out how Britain must change with it. Whether it is to work online, study, learn new skills, pay bills or simply stay in touch with friends and family, a fast internet connection is now seen by most of the public as an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water.

Just as the bridges, roads and railways built in the 19th century were the foundations of the Industrial Revolution that helped Britain to become the workshop of the world, so investment now in the information and communications industries can underpin our emergence from recession to recovery and cement the UK's position as a global economic powerhouse.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalEconomíaEuropaMundoOriente Próximo, ,

Dictatorships, as well as democracies, depend on money, although North Korea and Zimbabwe would like to prove the contrary. Dictators have their own constituencies and their constituencies have their own costs.

The victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have been fraudulent; it is certainly bad news for the Iranian people and the world. It means that the theocratic dictatorship of Iran will not benefit even from the modest reforms promised by Mir Hossein Mousavi. The result will alienate the young urban middle class, particularly women. It will do nothing but damage to Iran's foreign relations.

It would be pleasant to suppose that the underlying trends of the economy would bring down this oppressive regime.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Barack Obama found it “exciting” and Hillary Clinton saw it as “a positive sign”. Others, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security adviser, went further and praised it as a “vibrant democracy”. A variety of useful idiots at home and abroad expressed similar illusions about the Iranian presidential election on Friday.

Many had hoped the exercise would dislodge President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the maverick who has vowed to chase the United States out of the Middle East, wipe Israel off the map and prepare the ground for the hidden imam, Shi’ite Islam’s “end of times” figure of retribution. In the event, the election turned out to be a choreographed affair designed to reinforce Ahmadinejad’s position as the leader of “resurgent Islam”.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Iran's presidential election was not supposed to be like this - days (and nights) of giddy excitement and political mudslinging and anarchic scenes of a sort that the tightly-controlled Islamic republic has not seen since the revolution.

It was meant to be a formality. The Guardian Council, a body of senior conservative clerics, would select a handful of candidates with impeccable Islamic and revolutionary credentials. The country would go through the motions of democracy to impress the outside world and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would duly be re-elected, as every other incumbent president has in the republic's 30-year history.

How could the Israel-hating, US-bashing, nuclear weapon-chasing President lose when he was backed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, by the Revolutionary Guard and its volunteer Basij militia, by state-controlled television and a nationwide government machine?…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

World's greatest player, world's greatest transfer fee, the world's two greatest clubs (or so they would say): what is going on in world football? A seismic shift in the balance of power or just hype? Here is your quick guide to the winners, the losers and the score draws.

The Glazer family

The rich just got richer. Eighty million pounds represents an addition of about 5 per cent to the net worth of the Glazer family, who have a controlling stake in Manchester United; OK, not quite, since selling Ronaldo means a fall in shirt sales next year, but that's not as important as you probably think - all merchandising sales by United last year produced less than £80 million for the club (largely thanks to the counterfeit trade).…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaUE a debate

Every autumn about 1,000 people are injured in the UK by fireworks. So what's unreasonable about regulating pyrotechnics and requiring people to stand 15 metres away from the most dangerous fireworks when they go off?

Quite a lot if it's the EU deciding it and you live in Spain. The 15-metre rule hidden in a 2007 directive caused protests, and the Madrid Government opted out from it. The regulation would have robbed many of the country's best-known fiestas, including the fallas in Valencia, and San Juan in Barcelona, of their essence. Festivities going back to the Middle Ages would have been regulated out of recognition.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

Benito Mussolini notoriously saw himself as a new Augustus, a 20th-century reincarnation of Rome's first emperor. Sixty years later (and almost as far to the Right), Silvio Berlusconi seems more reminiscent of Augustus's stepson and successor, the emperor Tiberius, who ruled the Roman world from AD14 until he was smothered in his bed in AD37 by the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard (Rome's equivalent of the Head of the Security Services).

Rumour of sexual frolics with adolescent favourites on secluded Mediterranean islands are no doubt the most newsworthy thing that the Italian Prime Minister and Tiberius have in common. Mr Berlusconi has chosen Sardinia as the playground retreat of his old age.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesIslam y Mundo Árabe

For the past week or so, the Middle East has been abuzz with speculation about Barack Obama's “historic address to the Muslim world” to be delivered in Cairo on Thursday. During his presidential campaign, Obama had promised to make such a move within his first 100 days at the White House.

In the event, the first 100 days came and went without Obama delivering on his promise. Nevertheless, he granted his first interview as President to Saudi television and, later, made a speech at the Turkish parliament in Ankara. On both occasions he highlighted the Islamic element of his background and solemnly declared that the “United States is not and will never be at war with Islam”.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

The blusterbuss that is Silvio Berlusconi is firing full blast and all Italy is, yet again, watching him fight his way out of his latest troubles. They include his umpteenth brush with Italy’s magistrates, a damning legal judgment that he bribed David Mills, the British lawyer, a cool $600,000 to commit perjury; divorce, for the second time, in this Catholic country – a divorce blamed by Veronica Lario, his wife, on her septuagenarian spouse’s “consorting with minors”; and his implausible friendship with a Neapolitan family remarkable only for the beauty of Noemi Letizia, their daughter.

Any one of these scandals would destroy most politicians.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

The decision by the United Nations' Human Rights Council to resist setting up an inquiry into the conduct of both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military in the recent hostilities is shocking and indefensible. Its rejection too of the advice of the UN's own High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, that such an inquiry was needed, is even more aberrant.

And the resolution that the council did adopt, which implies that no human rights abuses occurred at the hands of the Sri Lankan Government, flies in the face of all the evidence that is emerging, not least from investigations by The Times.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

Korea has been such a huge and intractable problem for so many decades now that it is easy to think of it as just an unpleasant fact of life, like drizzle or midges or the aches and pains of age. There it lies on the far side of the world; we know something's wrong over there, but we can't always remember what.

The Korean War was the one that our grandfathers were too old for, and our fathers too young. We could probably find it on an atlas, but it would take a while. No one we know has been on holiday there.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalEconomía

As the dust settles after the Great Depression That Never Was, the worldwide financial crisis is starting to look less like the seismic historical transformation so widely expected. With every week that passes, President Sarkozy's predictions about the death of Anglo-Saxon capitalism sound more premature, while ahistorical comparisons with the end of communism in 1989 seem ever sillier.

And yet it is clear that some permanent changes in the global balance of power really are occurring, as I saw this month while visiting Brazil and South Africa, two large economies hard hit by the crisis in statistical terms, but seemingly more emboldened by the experience than depressed.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

There is a narrative about the prison at Guantánamo Bay that has stubbornly clung to the collective conscience since those first, notorious photographs emerged in early 2002 of the detainees in orange jumpsuits shackled inside open-air cages and ferried to interrogation sessions in wooden wheelbarrows.

Combined with a litany of Red Cross reports alleging abuse and torture inside the jail, and terrible tales of beatings told by many of the 550 inmates who have been released in the past seven years, the common assumption is this: Guantánamo Bay is a modern-day gulag, a filthy, wretched chamber of horrors filled with the screams of innocent men.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

When a man walks down the street firing a gun over your head, it is difficult not take it personally. When a dictator with a million-strong army and a well documented dislike for the “imperialist aggressors” of the West, lets off a nuclear weapon, it feels much the same. This sentiment informed foreign reaction to North Korea's nuclear test yesterday, from Washington to Tokyo to Helsinki: how dare he do this to us?

“North Korea's attempts to develop nuclear weapons, as well as its ballistic missile programme, constitute a threat to international peace and security,” President Obama said. But there is another way of thinking about North Korea and its dictator, Kim Jong Il, just as there is about the armed loser who shoots up the neighbourhood.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalIglesia CatólicaEuropaUnión Europea, , ,

Understandably distracted by our own little crisis of trust, we have perhaps not taken in the apocalyptic import of a bigger one across the Irish Sea.

Perhaps it is a vague sense that we knew it all; perhaps reluctance to engage with the horrid details of the Ryan report into child abuse by Irish clerics. Perhaps some think it is old history, a 1950s horror. Maybe there is even a decorous sense that — as a new Archbishop of Westminster is enthroned here — it is tasteless to dwell on the wickedness deliberately concealed by his Church right into the 1990s.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

A Victorian historian said that Britain “conquered... half the world in a fit of absence of mind”.

Chinese Communist Party leaders are not normally associated with absentmindedness, but rather with cool, calculated, long-term strategic thinking. Yet China might well now be building a mixture of influence and obligation - the modern version of an empire- in quite a British way, and one that promises to cause increasing tension with its giant neighbour and regional rival, India.

Events in Sri Lanka, as that nation finally brings an end to a quarter-century-long civil war, are the latest example of China's growing overseas reach.…  Seguir leyendo »