Things I'd like to do and places I'd like to go in 2007.
Visit Turkmenistan to cover the election of the new leader. I went there 18 months ago and it fulfilled all my expectations of an Orwellian nightmare for the 21st century. I'd like to see what happens next - and ride some of their amazing .
Meet at least two potential presidential candidates for the 2008 election in the US. This will probably be easier than meeting candidates to the Turkmen presidential election - not least because there's more choice. Even though it's nearly two years to go, 12 possible candidates have made moves for the Democratic Party, 15 for the Republicans.
Visit somewhere that might do well out of global warming. Not to prove it's a good thing... polluting the planet is daft whatever its effect on mean temperatures. But I'm also sure that poverty is more of a problem than climate change in most of the places affected. Timbuktu is possibly one such place - it's been raining more heavily in some years recently, pushing back the desert. The bad news there is that the rain is washing away the ancient mud buildings, and more water is not what they need anyway - if it's dirty water.
Spend a night on manoeuvres with counterinsurgency trainees in the US training facility at . I'm trying to work out why a new counterinsurgency field manual and plenty of training haven't made more of a difference to the way the US army is operating.
And...
Get up to stage 2 in British Horse Society tests.
Whatever you wish for, a Happy New Year!
We have heard a lot on World Update from visitors to Mogadishu about the stability brought to Somalia by the Islamic Courts Union.
Supported by businessmen who wanted someone to enforce contracts and punish thieves, the Union quickly established Islamic law and removed the warlords' barricades at which wild-eyed men with guns had extracted bribes from anyone trying to move around. They started to take territory around the country.
To understand why the US, which keenly wants stability in Somalia (in order to deny Islamic extremists another failed state in which to operate) is unwilling to accept the Islamic Courts Union as progress, it's worth reading some declassified documents chronicling US relations with the Taliban in the 1990s.
Comments here, please, once you have read below.
Read the rest of this entry
Victor Bulmer-Thomas, outgoing director of Chatham House, otherwise known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, says Tony Blair has weakened Britain's influence in the world by backing George Bush's Middle East policy.
He's also helped made the Middle East region more dangerous, according to this .
Saad Jawad, professor of political science in Baghdad, thinks that's right, and goes further: if Mr. Blair had not decided to back the US in the invasion of Iraq, that might have preserved British influence enough to change that policy when it began to look like a failure by the end of 2003.
From Iraqis, he said, Bush and Blair get the blame jointly.
Ann Clwyd, Tony Blair's human rights envoy, told us there were many instances where Britain's influence had affected US policy - but she couldn't tell us because it was confidential.
Your comments, here please.
Here are some images from our trip with the Pope.
Istanbul's police practice helicopter flight paths around the Aya Sofia Museum.
The head of security at Aya Sofia who kindly let us turn his office into a studio.
Our cafe studio by the Bosphorus in the garden of the Dolmabahce Palace.
Doreen Walton and I once spent a week living with a family in the English Midlands who were taking part in an experiment in which they tried to live on the same amount of energy as a family in India.
The climate in Haryana state in India is not as warm as you might think, not in February anyway, when we carried out the experiment.
And the family in India was rather wealthy by local standards. Each of their three daughters had a motor scooter and they had a family car.
Nonetheless, the English family froze - one of the memorable images I have from the experiment is Doreen and the two daughters of the Midlands family huddled under a duvet in the front room talking about food to take their minds off the cold.
But that was not tough enough for Doreen, oh no!
Read the rest of this entry
| 11:58 UK time, Friday, 29 December 2006
