27th July 2011
Today, 27 July, there is one year to go before the Olympic and Paralympic Games are held in London in 2012. President Rogge of the International Olympic Committee will be in London to issue an invitation to Romania and all other countries in the world to send their teams to compete in the London Olympic […]
27th July 2011
A busy few days, with a trip to Perth to recce for the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) meeting which will take place in October. Hosting a meeting for 54 heads of government and HM The Queen is quite a tall order, but we were impressed with the professionalism of Australian plans. It is shaping […]
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22nd July 2011
The following is a guest blog by Spencer Mahony, HM Consul & UKTI Regional Director for the South East US, British Embassy Washington. I love my job. One of the reasons I love promoting UK business is because of the variety of my work. Last week was a great example of the different ways in […]
21st July 2011
One of the striking things about Kyiv is the mixture of architectural styles across the city. This is true of the Ulitsa Desyatinna, where the British Embassy is a stone’s throw from the golden domes of the (rebuilt) St Michael’s Church and the mighty Soviet-era building that today houses our colleagues in the Ministry of Foreign […]
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20th July 2011
If she had lived, we would be celebrating her 90th birthday today. But sadly Hannah Senesh (born Aniko Szenes) was murdered in 1944. Disturbed by the Hungarian education system’s increasing discrimination on religious grounds, Hannah Senesh decided to emigrate from Budapest to the British Mandate of Palestine at the outset of World War II. She […]
20th July 2011
In June 2009 I wrote a blog extolling the virtues of Kyiv’s beaches and noting the challenges Ukraine was then having paying its monthly bills for gas from Russia. I noted the views of the international financial institutions (IFIs) that it would be easier to help Ukraine if the financial arrangements in the gas sector […]
19th July 2011
Our growing electricity needs, and the way we waste our energy, are one of the principal clauses of global warming in the world. All governments are grappling with the problem of rising demand and the contradictory need to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Bolivia is not immune. The British government recently published an Electricity Market Reform […]
19th July 2011
Guest blog: Deputy Head of Mission Esther Blythe attended last week the start of a three-day workshop hosted by the Romanian Foreign Ministry for Tunisian and Egyptian officials on the experience of democratic transition – focusing in particular on the practical challenges of managing the first post-transition elections. Here is what Esther thought of the […]
19th July 2011
It was an unusually “legal” week for me in Sydney last week, with Lord McNally, Minister of State for Justice attending the Commonwealth Law Ministers Meeting, and later in the week the Rt Hon Dominic Grieve MP, Attorney General, participating in a separate Quint meeting with his opposite numbers from Australia, the US, Canada and […]
18th July 2011
Who said the following? – “Ukraine knows that it can count on Britain as its friend in the European Union. We are, and will remain, enthusiastic advocates of Ukraine’s closer integration with the rest of Europe”; and – “It is the responsibility of true friends to speak honestly when they see something which concerns them”. […]
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