America’s National Intelligence Council has warned that the world is entering an unstable and unpredictable period in which the advance of Western-style democracy cannot be taken for granted. By 2025, it says, the US will have lost its global dominance. It sees a fragmented world with conflict over resources rising, and nuclear proliferation and nuclear conflict becoming more likely.

The Third World War tells the story of what could happen if sane minds do not work together.

Britain’s National Health Service plans to let medical researchers have access to patient’s private files – a move that the key data watchdog organisation has called ethically unnacceptable. Here the advance of technology, the desire for information and post Nine Eleven anti-terror values are coming together. In the minds of many a better a safer world is one in which in know as much about each other as possible. As yet, there is little serious debate as to how far it should go.

Security Breach   

I have swapped Security Breach for Third World War on my website home page because the issues of Pakistan and North Korea may loom large as we prepare for a new US presidency.  The US is striking inside Pakistan. North Korea is threatening to close its border (again) with South Korea. There is a leadership vacuum in both countries and China is sending extra troops to its border with the North. 

In Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of  Congo and elsewhere in Africa, African regional and Western global leadership has failed over many years partly because there is no identifiable beacon to which those societies can aspire. The most successful transformations from dictatorship to democracy have been in eastern Europe lured by specific benchmarks laid down by the European Union, and in East Asia, where South Korea and Taiwan were mentored towards good governance and elections by the United States. Nothing similar exists in Africa.

According to Andrew Lycett in the Guardian, Quantum of Solace is the precise equation of the amount of comfort necessary between two people if love is to flourish. If this figure is zero. there can be no love.  Ian Fleming created a short story, with little action, from the title in which Bond, being told this over dinner, said, ‘when the other person not only makes you feel insecure but actually seems to want to destroy you…you’ve got to get away and save yourself.’ 

You learn something everyday. 

My very good friend and most brilliant cartoonist and illustrator, Candy Gourlay, is helping me feed this blog straight into Face Book. Slowly, I think we are getting there. So with this ‘test’ blog, I’d just like to say thank you, Candy, for those wonderful cartoons from the Philippines and Vietnam that are still framed and on my wall and may I highly recommend everyone to visit Candy’s site www.mumatwork.co.uk  

Marshal Zeringue is a fun creative person who runs sites about books. First he asks authors to describe what is happening page 69 or their books, now he’s asking hwo they enviseage it being made into a movie. This is what I put for Security Breach with apologies to the producers who now have it under option. Click here: Security Breach The Movie

Fresh from the packed launch party of fascinating people for The Man Who Invented History — Travels with Herodotus by Justin Marozzi,  one of the most brave and brilliant travel writers of this generation. Although Herodotus died some 2,500 years ago he had plenty to say on issues similar to those that concern us today such as the Iraq war and the financial crisis on which he said, “Often God gives man a glimpse of happiness then utterly ruins him.”  

I can’t recommend it enough.

www.justinmarozzi.com

The Mobile Identification at Scene (Midas) project will enable police in Britain to make biometric fingerprint checks on people in the street on handheld technology about the size of a Blackberry. The fingerprints will be compared against records on a national database known as Ident1 that holds information on 7.5 million people. Midas will be in widespread use in Britain within the next eighteen months.