What do you know about the nation of Nauru?
April 29th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
I am a fan of the American television series “Madam Secretary” which is broadcast in the UK on the Sky Witness channel. A strength of the series is that – as with “The West Wing” – it features very contemporary and controversial political issues. So, for instance, a recent episode highlighted the impact of climate change and featured the annihilation of the Pacific Island of Nauru.
I realised that I knew so little about Nauru but found information on Wikipedia:
Nauru, officially the Republic of Nauru and formerly known as Pleasant Island, is an island country in Micronesia, a subregion of Oceania, in the Central Pacific. Its nearest neighbour is Banaba Island in Kiribati, 300 kilometres (190 mi) to the east. With only a 21-square-kilometre (8.1 sq mi) area, Nauru is the third-smallest state on the list of countries and dependencies by area behind Vatican City and Monaco, making it the smallest state in the South Pacific Ocean, the smallest island state, and the smallest republic. Its population is 11,347, making it the third smallest on the list of countries and dependencies by population, after the Vatican and Tuvalu.
Settled by people from Micronesia and Polynesia c. 1000 BC, Nauru was annexed and claimed as a colony by the German Empire in the late 19th century. After World War I, Nauru became a League of Nations mandate administered by Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. During World War II, Nauru was occupied by Japanese troops, who were bypassed by the Allied advance across the Pacific. After the war ended, the country entered into United Nations trusteeship. Nauru gained its independence in 1968, and became a member of the Pacific Community (SPC) in 1969.
Nauru is a phosphate-rock island with rich deposits near the surface, which allowed easy strip mining operations. When the phosphate reserves were exhausted, and the island’s environment had been seriously harmed by mining, the trust that had been established to manage the island’s wealth diminished in value. To earn income, Nauru briefly became a tax haven and illegal money laundering centre. From 2001 to 2008, and again from 2012, it accepted aid from the Australian Government in exchange for hosting the Nauru Regional Processing Centre, an offshore Australian immigration detention facility. As a result of heavy dependence on Australia, many sources have identified Nauru as a client state of Australia
You can access the full Wikipedia page on Nauru here.
Posted in Environment, World current affairs | Comments (0)
50 years ago today, I joined the Labour Party
April 22nd, 2019 by Roger Darlington
I guess that I’m tribal in my politics: I’ve never missed an opportunity to vote, I’ve never voted anything other than Labour, and I now have half a century of continuous membership of the Labour Party.
The Party has been through many travails in that time and indeed is going through great difficulties now with Corbynism, anti-semitism and Brexit – but I’m sticking with it as the only possibility of a fairer government.
You can check out my political evolution here.
Posted in British current affairs, My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
“Observer” journalist Carole Cadwalladr calls out the tech giants in this TED talk
April 22nd, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Posted in Internet | Comments (0)
A review of the novel “Ordinary People” by Diana Evans
April 21st, 2019 by Roger Darlington
In the United States in 1976, there was the publication of a novel called “Ordinary People” by Judith Guest which four years later was made into a film of the same title that won four Academy Awards. I saw the film before then reading the book. In Britain in 2018, there was the publication of another novel called “Ordinary People” but this time the author is Diana Evans and the locale and characters are very different and the title borrows from a 2005 track by the singer John Legend.
The first novel involved an affluent white American family dealing with two traumatic events. The more recent novel revolves around two black British families facing the more ‘ordinary’ challenges of relationships and childrearing. Both novels are set over a year and, in the later case, the chronology is bookended by the election of Barack Obama and the death of Michael Jackson in 2008/09.
Melissa and Michael have been together 13 years, have two children, and live in the Bell Green part of south London. Damian and Stephanie are married with three children and live on the outskirts of Dorking. Both couples are in their late 30s. The issues that they face might seem quotidian but Evans has a wonderful writing style that makes this an enjoyable read even if there is no easy resolution on offer.
Evans is the daughter of a Nigerian mother and an English father and grew up in Neasden, north-west London. Her knowledge of the capital imbues the narrative as she writes of “one of those Londoners who perceived the south as another state” and comments that “London does not know what to do with snow”, while she captures well the struggles of modern urban life – especially for a woman – as she refers to “the strangulating domesticity” of a relationship and opines that “motherhood is an obliteration of the self”.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the new film “Red Joan”
April 21st, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Melita Norwood was a British civil servant who was recruited as a Soviet agent in 1937 and passed on valuable information about creation of the atomic bomb, yet managed to escape exposure until 1999 when she was 87.
Her story is the inspiration for this film in which the character is named Joan Stanley and played by Sophie Cookson as a young woman and Judi Dench at the time of her belated arrest.
It is a competent enough work with able performances and fine costumes, but there is no real excitement and too little of Dench.
You can learn about Norwood here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
How many candidates are there for the US presidential election of 2020?
April 20th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
The elections is not until November 2020 – 18 months away.
For the Republicans, Donald Trump has been running since he was elected to the White House in November 2016 with regular campaign rallies, the likes of which we have never seen before from an incumbent president.
For the Democrats, there is a massive field which keeps getting larger. The official tally is now 18 with the latest to declare being Eric Swalwell. You can check out the full list with very short pen portraits here.
However, in opinion polls the leading Democrat is someone who has not even declared yet: former Vice-President Joe Biden who has been facing accusations of inappropriate behaviour with a number of women.
As I blogged here, in such a crowded field, so far the Democrat candidates with the highest poll ratings are largely those with the strongest name recognition with little differentiation on policy or performance at this very early stage.
So currently the leading contenders are the four Bs: [Joe] Biden, Bernie [Sanders], Beto [O’Rourke] and [Pete] Buttigieg. But it is still very early days …
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
How free is your country’s press?
April 18th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
The respected organisation Reporters Without Borders (RWB) each year publishes a review of the state of press freedom all around the world.
This year, the top five are Norway, Finland, Sweden, Netherlands and Denmark. The bottom five are Vietnam, China, Eritrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan. You can see a ranking of 180 countries and a global map here.
The UK rose seven places to number 33 on the list and RWB made these comments. The US fell to 48 and RWB made these observations.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
What are we going to do about the growing challenge of dementia?
April 14th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
I have previously done a posting about my participation in a study looking at the health risks which might predict the onset of dementia. The study, conducted by Imperial College in London, is called CHARIOT PRO – a abbreviation for Cognitive Health in Ageing Register: Investigational, Observational, and Trial studies in dementia research: Prospective Readiness cOhort Study.
The study – led by the world-renowned Professor Lefkos Middleton – involves over 400 of us aged between 60-85 – each of whom has a study partner – who are given cognitive tests and health questionnaires every three months. This weekend, hundreds of the participants and study partners gathered at Imperial College for four and half hours of briefings on the nature of dementia and the research being conducted around it.
For most of human history, average life expectancy was around 30 years but today it is over 70 years and still rising. This means that, for most of history, dementia has not been an issue but, since it was first diagnosed by the German physician Aloysius Alzheimer in 1901, the number of sufferers has grown and grown worldwide and, as longevity increases and birth rates fall, the proportion of the population suffering dementia will increase.
The headline message of this weekend’s meeting was that so far every study testing a drug with sufferers of dementia has failed to work, so now the focus is on trying to identifying what might tell us who is most likely to develop dementia so that they can be given drugs before the symptoms become apparent.
This requires a well-structured, long-term examination and the CHARIOT PRO study is currently one of the top five in the world on the issue of dementia,. Originally participants were signed up for three and a half years, but this weekend we were advised that funding has now been agreed to carry out testing for a further year. So I’m probably in this project until I’m approaching 75.
Posted in My life & thoughts, Social policy | Comments (2)
The making of American power (5): Trump’s foreign policy
April 12th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
This week, I attended the last session of an excellent eight-week evening class at London”s City Literary Institute. The title was “The making of American power: US foreign policy from the Cold War to Trump” and our able lecturer was Jack Gain. Week 8 of the course was about President Donald Trump’s foreign policy over the last two tumultuous years.
One point made was that what Trump has said – in tweets and speeches – and what he has done – in actual events – have not always been the same. So he originally questioned the whole necessity of NATO but subsequently confined himself to calling for each NATO member to spend 2% of its GDP on defence – a call made by Obama and other presidents . He branded the North Korean dictator “rocket man” but has been willing to meet him twice – something no other president has done.
Another point is that, when one looks at the actions rather than the words, Trump has not always been as different as liberals feared or as conservatives hoped, so there has been more continuity in American foreign policy than might be appreciated. After all, Obama was keen for the US to pull back from overseas adventures and unwilling to engage in Syria.
In an interesting article for “Foreign Affairs”, neoconservative Eliot A. Cohen observes:
“What explains this continuity? Part of the reason is that Trump seems to have a short attention span, little understanding of how the federal government works, and a tendency to get distracted by domestic political fights. Insider accounts of the administration should be taken with a grain of salt, but they paint a consistent picture. In an anonymous New York Times op-ed, one insider described being told by a “top official” that “there is literally no telling whether [Trump] might change his mind from one minute to the next.” It is unsurprising that a man who by some accounts gets most of his news from television cannot get a grip on the vast complexity of the U.S. government.
The Times op-ed points to a second, undeniable fact: Trump faces unprecedented opposition from within his own administration. This opposition has only grown as Trump has replaced his initial cadre of advisers. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton are both more familiar with Washington than their predecessors and more adept at telling the president what he wants to hear. Both hold views of foreign policy that are not wildly distant from those of establishment Republicans; they just take care not to rub them in Trump’s face.”
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (1)
The Conservative Party is dying – literally
April 10th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
“Younger and older generations have always been politically different, but never by this much. The generational schism exposed at the last General Election was unprecedented. The gap between the youngest and oldest voters was three times the post-war average – a fifty percentage point increase on the median gap since 1945. Age, rather than class or income, is now the best predictor of vote intention.
This report confirms that age polarisation is not only here to stay but that
the gap between younger and older generations is growing. The Conservative vote is ageing at a faster rate than the general population, largely due to the party’s failure to convert large numbers of young potential voters. It is an extraordinary finding that 83% of Conservative voters are now over the age of 45. Just 4% are under the age of 24 years old.Meanwhile, Labour’s reliance on younger voters is growing. A sizeable proportion of older voters will now not even consider voting Labour, imposing a hard electoral ceiling and threatening the party longer-term as the population ages. In terms of composition, however, Labour remains much more generationally balanced: 53% of Labour voters are over the age of 45 and 47% under the age of 45.
The net result of these trends is that the “tipping point age” – the median age at which a voter is more likely to be Conservative than Labour – is now 51 years old, up from 47 at the 2017 General Election. Before the 2017 campaign, the tipping point was 34 years old.”
This is an extract from the summary of a report entitled “Generation Why?” published this week by the Conservative think-tank Onward. You can read the full report here.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)