Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office Blogs

A unique insight into UK foreign and development policy

23rd December 2011 Bucharest, Romania

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by Raluca Bragarea

Head of Communications, Bucharest

Santa’s for everyone

Blog post by Cora Motoc and Peter Thomas from the Political team in the British Embassy As we all know Christmas is all about giving.  So for the second year running the British Embassy was very pleased to participate in the “Santa’s for everyone” campaign by collecting toys and clothes to donate to urban and […]

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23rd December 2011

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by Greg Dorey

Diplomat

Poverty matters

I arrived in Addis Ababa just a week ago, as British Ambassador to Ethiopia. And one of the first things I wanted to do was to see how British development assistance is working in this very poor country – but one that is making impressive progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals. So on Wednesday […]

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23rd December 2011 Windhoek, Namibia

Marianne Young

by Marianne Young

High Commissioner, Windhoek

Looking back on my first six months in Windhoek

It is incredible to believe that I have now been in Namibia for six months. The time has flown by and it has really been a wonderful experience. The world has seen an extraordinary number of things happen on the international playing field in 2011: uprisings in north Africa, numerous natural disasters, some significant deaths […]

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23rd December 2011 Athens, Greece

Aspa Giannopoulou

by Aspa Giannopoulou

Digital Diplomacy Officer

'Going for Green' lands in Athens. A GREAT opportunity

Velodrome

The first time I watched this film was during a screening organized internally for Embassy staff back in January 2011. “Going for Green – Britain’s 2012 Dream” was commissioned by the FCO, and tells the story of how the Olympic Park is being built in an environmentally sustainable way, as set out in the legacy […]

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23rd December 2011

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by Peter Beckingham

Former governor in Turks and Caicos Islands

From wedding feast to global business – never under-estimate the Parsi influence for good in Mumbai

I was fortunate recently to attend my first ever Parsi wedding. Two of the 40 or so Parsi staff in the Deputy High Commission in Mumbai, Nazneen (our press officer) and Burzin ( a member of the UKBA team), were  getting married, and they had been kind enough to invite my wife and me to […]

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22nd December 2011

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by Leigh Turner

Ambassador to Austria and UK Permanent Representative to the United Nations and other International Organisations in Vienna

EU-Ukraine Summit interview

Ahead of the 19 December EU-Ukraine Summit in Kyiv, I did an interview on 15 December with the Levyi Bereg website.  It was published today.  You can read the full interview here (in Russian).  We will be putting up an English translation shortly on the interviews and speeches page of our Embassy Website.

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22nd December 2011

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by Nigel Baker

Ambassador to the Holy See (2011-2016)

We are a Christian Country

2011 has seen a year of activity commemorating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. This Bible, possibly the single most influential text in the English language, was a great achievement of its day. But it also had lasting impact. In a speech last weekend to mark the anniversary, Prime Minister David Cameron said […]

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