Please let it be true. I'll update this post with news as it comes...
3pm: The New York Times has just posted this article...
"Advisers to President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe are in talks with the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, amid signs that Mr. Mugabe may be preparing to resign, a Western diplomatic source and a prominent Zimbabwe political analyst said Tuesday. The negotiations about a possible transfer of power away from Mr. Mugabe come after he apparently concluded that a runoff election would be demeaning, a diplomat said."
10.30pm: BBC reporting denials of the story...
"Zimbabwe's opposition leader and a government minister have denied reports that a deal has been reached for President Robert Mugabe to step down."
Only a few years late but hey, what's the rush! Maybe now the Muslim Council of Britain will feel able to speak out against all the other atrocities committed by Muslim terrorists and dictatorships. Or maybe it will revert to crying "Islamophobia" when Muslim youths beat up a priest for being a priest and deploring the government for blocking al-Qaradawi's visa...
If you've seen or read about today's PMQs you will know that Cameron got lots of laughs for revealing that David Muir's favourite book is called "The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations". This may seem like just an effective cheap shot but it's actually a very significant thing. The full title is "The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations" and this is Amazon's synopsis of it:
"If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off it's head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Some organisations are just as decentralised as starfish, with no control centre or grand strategy. Think of craigslist and the original Napster, run totally by their own customers. Or Alcoholics Anonymous, which has thrived for decades as a loose network of small groups. Or even al Qaeda, which is so hard to destroy because its cells function independently. "The Starfish and the Spider", based on groundbreaking research into decentralised organisations, proves that this type of leadership is primed to change the world. Major companies like eBay, IBM, Sun, and GE are starting to decentralise, with great results. Decentralisation isn't easy for people who are used to the classic chain of commence organisation."
So the book of choice of Brown's chief strategist is about, of all things, the power of decentralisation! This "starfish approach" is antithetical to Brown's approach but central to David Cameron's. Interesting.
Americans aren't the only ones optimistic about Iraq. Sunnis, Shias and Kurds in Iraq are increasingly so about both the security situation and life in general (Okay, increasingly being the key word!).
Richard Perle's piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph is worth a gander as well:
"For a government fighting an unpopular war, five years is an eternity. In the sight of history, it's just a blink, far too short for considered judgment or a balanced accounting. But judges and accountants won't wait, so the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has renewed the debate about that action and its consequences - a debate dominated by the terrible costs, with almost no assessment of the benefits."
Here's a classic case of hypocrisy in Iran.
Reza Zarei, the chief of the police and of "moralisation" in Tehran, has been arrested after he was found naked in a brothel with six naked prostitutes. Official Iranian news outlets apparently don't find this newsworthy.
In other Iran-related news, a young journalist faces death by slow-strangulation for championing civil rights in Baluchistan, and a teenage homosexual studying in Britain faces deportation back to this joyous land despite a former boyfriend naming him during some pre-execution interrogation.
A majority of Americans now believe "the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals" in Iraq, according to the Pew Research Center. I imagine UK voters would be at least half as pessimistic as that, judging by the unceasingly negative media coverage and a poll this time last year showing that a puny 5% of Britons felt safer as a result of the war.
The Politico translates this into "Support for war effort highest since 2006". If that's an accurate way of reading it, McCain's unwavering stance on the war will continue to benefit him.
Grant Shapps MP is releasing an interesting study today on the under-discussed subject of the prison-to-homelessness cycle. Click here to download it.
FOI requests show that nearly one quarter of all released prisoners in the last four years, 78 000, have been released homeless, including a number from high security prisons. This is worrying because having stable accommodation reduces the chances of reoffending by 20%.
This report complements Nick Herbert's "rehabilitation revolution" well. The best way of reducing the amount of homeless ex-cons has to be making sure they leave custody with the necessary will and skill to do a honest day's work.
No need to rub your eyes, it's true - starting tomorrow BBC2 is running a week-long series on what life is like for white people in this country, which includes talking to members of a Working Men's Club in Bradford and a drama about a white family moving into a Muslim area.
In response, Newsnight have conducting some polling that will feature in tonight's show. It shows that a majority of white, working class people feel unrepresented, can't afford to buy homes, believe crime and life in general has got worse in the last decade, and believe that on balance immigration into Britain is a bad thing. White middle classes gave largely the same answers just not quite as strongly, with the main divergence being on immigration which a majority thought was a good thing.
As the poll shows, no political party can claim to be the true representatives of these people. Labour has let them down on crime and immigration but the Conservatives have some persuading to do. Contrast this to the Canadian Conservatives who have successfully pitched a gritty, conservative and anti-establishment message to "Tim Horton voters".
Castro has just announced his retirement.
BBC 24 had a video interview with the Chairman of the APPG on Cuba, Ian Gibson MP. He spoke glowingly of how Castro had held the country together against a superpower, and how many people both here and in Cuba will regard him as a hero. When presenter Martine Croxall questioned him about the tens of thousands of political prisoners, he brushed the issue off as a matter of dealing with people wanted to undermine the government... like the UK government does with terrorists!
Where shall we start in a list of reasons why this man is not a hero?
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