Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office Blogs

A unique insight into UK foreign and development policy

16th August 2013 Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Heat

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 […]

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15th August 2013 Singapore

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by Tom Crawley

Southeast Asia Science and Innovation Team

Smarter, Faster – Life Lessons from F1

One of the things which make this job so enjoyable is getting to bring really inspiring people to the region to talk about great UK innovation. This week we’ve hosted Mike Gascoyne, long-time Formula One technical director, and current CTO of the Caterham Group, who generously agreed to visit Singapore and Malaysia to talk about […]

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14th August 2013 Windhoek, Namibia

Marianne Young

by Marianne Young

High Commissioner, Windhoek

An Anglo-German labour of love, devotion and educational excellence in northern Namibia

I have just spent the most fascinating evening with a remarkable Anglo-German family in Kunene Province, north western Namibia, en route to the far north to see the effect of this year’s drought emergency. Gillian and Reiner Stommel are based five hours drive north of Windhoek where they run Otjikondo School, which they founded in […]

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14th August 2013

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by Nigel Baker

Ambassador to the Holy See (2011-2016)

The Wisdom of Father Brown

The following is a guest blog by Steve Townsend, Deputy Head of Mission. It was announced this week that the Bishop of Northampton has started the investigation whether there is a case for canonisation for G K Chesterton.  This prompted me to go back to his best-loved creation, and one of my favourite fictional characters, […]

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13th August 2013 Havana, Cuba

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by Tim Cole

Former British Ambassador to Cuba

From Honiara to Havana for health reasons

I met the Ambassador of the Solomon Islands a few weeks ago. The Solomons (Honiara is the capital) are in the Pacific Ocean over 13,000 km from Cuba and they only have a few embassies around the world so you might wonder why they have recently opened one in Havana. The Ambassador, Simeon Bouro, explained to […]

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13th August 2013 Chevening, UK

A Botswana Chevening Scholar Visits The Mother of Parliaments

Our latest blog entry is by Bogolo Joy Kenewendo, a 2012 Chevening Scholar from Botswana. Bogolo is studying for an MsC in International Economics at the University of Sussex. If you are a Chevening scholar and are interested in submitting a blog entry for the Chevening Conversations blog, then please email us at fcoscholarships@fco.gov.uk. This is a story of […]

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12th August 2013

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by Paul Madden

British Ambassador to Japan

UK economy returns to sustainable growth

That was the principal message of Permanent Secretary at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, Martin Donnelly, when he visited Australia last week. He said that the UK’s GDP growth was expected to reach around 1% this year and perhaps 2% next year. Australian economists and business people he met shared this positive assessment. […]

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