29th September 2013 Tashkent, Uzbekistan
On Friday the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) published the first part of their fifth Assessment Report on climate change. The Assessment Reports are a summary of the best available scientific knowledge, and are each divided into three parts: on the physical science basis; on impacts of climate change, vulnerabilities, and means of […]
19th September 2013 Tashkent, Uzbekistan
I visited the Ferghana valley for the first time at the end of last week which means, I think, that I have been in all the viloyats of Uzbekistan except for Surkhandarya. I’ll try to get there before the end of the year. My first impression of the Valley was the contrast between the arid […]
21st August 2013 Tashkent, Uzbekistan
On Sunday I set off out of Tashkent to find the ancient city of Kanka, which the UNESCO website describes as “unique as a monument of history and human culture and the town-planning history of Uzbekistan, and included in the list of ten great sites of ancient cities of Central Asia”. It isn’t really a […]
16th August 2013 Tashkent, Uzbekistan
British people are famous for talking about the weather. But last week and the week before nobody in Tashkent seemed to be talking about anything else, with temperatures in the forties, and records being broken in Samarkand and elsewhere. The Ministry for Emergency Situations sent out, apparently for the first time ever, text messages with […]
9th July 2013 Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Recently I travelled to London to attend the annual Foreign Office Leadership Conference, which brings together the heads of our diplomatic posts from around the world, and senior officials based in London. It’s a chance to discuss the big issues that are facing all of us, and to hear from Foreign Office ministers and ministers […]
19th June 2013 Tashkent, Uzbekistan
I visited Muynak recently with a senior representative of the British parliament. I’d read a lot about the Aral Sea, since the 1980s when I first worked on Soviet issues (as they were then). It’s one of those things – not by any means unique to the former Soviet Union – that illustrates humanity’s ability […]
31st May 2013 Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Last week the orchestra of the Tashkent Conservatoire performed an evening of British music, sponsored by mining company Rio Tinto. My colleague Lottie Waller joined the orchestra for the occasion, and blogs below about her experience. On 22 May I played the ‘cello in the student orchestra of Uzbekistan’s State Conservatoire, with around 75 of […]
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10th May 2013 Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Our Defence Attaché and I spent Thursday morning laying wreaths at two sites in Tashkent – the Sorrowful Mother monument in Independence Square, and the Volgograd Memorial Cemetery – along with other Ambassadors and military attachés, to mark what in the Soviet Union was known as Victory Day and in Uzbekistan is now the Day […]
29th April 2013 Tashkent, Uzbekistan
On Saturday, along with the Rector of Westminster International University in Tashkent (WIUT) and the Counsellor from the Russian Embassy, I was on the panel to judge the teams competing on a “Model G8” that the British Embassy’s Political and Public Diplomacy team organised in co-operation with WIUT. Sixteen students from top universities in Tashkent […]
23rd April 2013 Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Yesterday, 22 April, was Earth Day – since 1970 a day of events around the world to “acknowledge the amazing planet we call home and take action to protect it”. I spoke in the morning to students at the National University of Uzbekistan about the British government’s response, domestically and internationally, to the challenges of […]