THE MORE the initial shock caused by the attacks on New York and Washington wears off, the more cracks appear in the international coalition that George Bush's administration is trying to construct.
DIDN'T YOU feel sorry for Stella Rimington, that selfless public servant, who has been ostracised by the British establishment for telling us about her struggle to preserve freedom and democracy against the forces of darkness? The Guardian last week tried to hook us on its serialisation of Rimington's MI5 memoirs of how she "tracked, trailed, bugged and burgled some of the most ruthless spies, drug-runners, subversives and terrorists of her generation". Rimington was the first woman to head MI5 and the first security service chief to be named in public.
SURPRISE AND, at least initially, euphoria greeted the agreement on Zimbabwe's future that was struck last week in Abuja, Nigeria. President Robert Mugabe's government quite unexpectedly agreed that it would stop illegal seizures of white-owned land.
HUNDREDS OF Albanian football supporters travelling to watch their team play England in a World Cup qualifier were banned from entering the UK last week. Were these football hooligans intent on causing trouble? No.
I DO sometimes wonder whether someone as successful as Tony Blair can really be as stupid as he often seems. The Financial Times carried an astonishing article last week that plainly came straight from the great man himself:
"FOR THE past ten to 15 years we've been asleep. I hope we are once again awakening." These are the words of Gillo Pontecorvo, who at the age of 82 was one of the oldest protesters in Genoa.
The other day I heard George Robertson, secretary general of NATO and British defence secretary during the 1999 Balkan War, say, "We didn't wage war over Kosovo in order to replace ethnic cleansing by Serbs with ethic cleansing by Albanians."
Turkey has become the latest country to fall victim to the whirlwind of financial speculation. A huge outflow of money forced the government of Bülent Ecevit to announce on Thursday of last week that it was allowing the Turkish currency, the lira, to float freely on the foreign exchange markets. Within two days the lira had been devalued by 36 percent.
New Labour's ten-year crime programme, released on Monday, was full of "get tough" policies. It centred on 2,500 new prison places, 9,000 more police, allowing juries to see details of a defendant's convictions during a trial, and an army of private security guards backing up the police.
Labour's spring conference in Glasgow last weekend was a chance to see what is going on at the heart of the Labour Party. It brought together 3,000 Labour members from all over Britain to hear a series of speeches and, for all practical purposes, to hear the leadership launch the election campaign.
A trial judge at Newport Crown Court recently claimed there was no racial motive in the horrific murder of Jan Marthin Passalbessy on 20 June 2000. This was despite hearing evidence that the four killers convicted of the murder had called their victim "nigger" and "black bastard" during the attack.
I'm sure I'm only one of many thousands of anti-capitalist activists who bitterly regret having missed the World Social Forum (WSF) at Porto Alegre. At the end of last month 12,000 people from all over the world packed the capital of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul to attend this event. It was planned as an alternative to the bosses' shindig in Davos, the World Economic Forum.
