Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, who from his initial ‘alternative-facts’ gaffe set himself up as another Comical Ali (Saddam Hussein’s Information Minister), has put his foot in it again. His off-the-cuff comment that Assad was worse than Hitler, since the latter never chemical bombed his own people, has caused a storm … Read more
Boris Johnson, UK Foreign Secretary, isn’t have a good week being labelled as America’s poodle for cancelling his Moscow trip to leave the field clear for Rex Tillerson; then the G7 Summit refused to back his loudly-proclaimed demand to impose further sanctions on Russia for Assad’s CW attack. Though the murmurs are that … Read more
A cautionary tale about never mixing family and business. Scots chef Gordon Ramsay with an international restaurant empire used to have his father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson, as his right hand man. In 2010 Ramsay alleged that £1.4 million had disappeared to finance Hutcheson’s secret life with a hidden other family and additional womanising. Now … Read more
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is off to the lion’s den in Moscow on Wednesday (on present schedule) to tackle the Russians over their support for Syria, but hoping to de-escalate any future confrontation by persuading them to back away from Assad. He’s stopping off at the G7 summit today (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, … Read more
A late surge by far-left Communist Jean-Luc Melanchon, now overtaking scandal-mired Republican Francois Fillon in the polls, is turning the upcoming French election into a bookie’s paradise. It’s anyone’s guess how it will shake down. The Tony Blair-ish charm of the inexperienced young centrist thruster Emmanuel Macron may not be enough to see him to … Read more
Nikki Haley, the USA Ambassador to the UN has the unenviable job along with Rex Tillerson of trying to divine the President’s flip flopping foreign policy. Despite having no foreign affairs experience and being a pre-election Trump critic she seems rapidly to be becoming a leading spokesman for the White House and … Read more
Whether an intended consequence or not, Trump’s Syria missile strike appears to have killed any notion he was on side with the Russians. [He also managed to obliterate the Chinese premier’s visit news-wise which won’t have gone down well; nor the implicit hint that he’s capable of doing the same to North Korea. … Read more
Mars trine Pluto, this week’s signature influence, has certainly made its mark with the Russia underground bombing on Tuesday, a nerve agent gas assault against Syrian civilians and now the Trump strike against the Assad military airport believed to have made the attack. Heavy Pluto influences tend to hang around over several days in … Read more
Syria just keeps getting worse. Now there are reports of almost certainly sarin (nerve agent) gas being used on civilians, with more than 80 dead including 30 children and 20 women in the north of the country. One father buried twins in a mass grave where 22 members of his family were also … Read more
Fox News, part of the Murdoch media empire, already reeling from the ousting of their chairman Roger Ailes over sexual harassment charges, is now embroiled in more allegations that they paid off multi-million dollar harassment and inappropriate behaviour suits against their top presenter Bill O’Reilly. Two major advertisers have now pulled their … Read more