Obama plays 'King Lear'...

I am not so sure that the prophets of doom in the US are not right. The financial press here is giving some pretty dire indicators – debt 100% of GDP. That puts you guys up there with Ireland and Portugal. S&P have just downgraded the US debt-forecast and there are rumours that its AAA rating is in danger of being downgraded too.

The Republicans seem to be in a mood to make swingeing cuts. Like PBS grants. That should do the trick, and have the added advantage that all TV will be crap not just most of it. O is reported to be promising huge cuts but we have no reports of where they will fall. He is beginning to sound like King Lear

'I will do such things --What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be The terrors of the earth!

Never mind. It’s déjà vu time again.

BP is back on the front pages.

Quote of the week from Bob Dudley (I wrote it down as he said it). ‘BP has been deeply impacted by the deaths.....’.

The AGM was mobbed by impoverished protesters who had flown in from America for the occasion. There were no reports of Gulf protesters demonstrating against Halliburton. But it doesn’t appear as if Bob has got the golden bullet after all. I had a peep at BP shares afterwards. They have dropped from a year high of 655 to 458, about 40% by my simple arithmetic. Of course, the conventional view is that BP, like so many others, is too big to fail. Just like ICI, PAN Am, TWA, perhaps?

Brussels justice. Out of 54,689 arrest warrants issued so far the commission can only quote a handful against serious criminal or terrorist suspects. These people could have been extradited under national systems that protected the entire population who are now unprotected from unjust extradition”.

Conservative backbench MPs are putting pressure on David Cameron to resist the European Court of Human Rights’ demands to lift the ban on prisoners’ right to vote. They claim that an estimated 8,000 ECHR rulings have not been implemented by other countries in the past. The article quotes a leaked Government document confirming that “the direct sanctions for failure to comply with [ECHR] judgment are political rather than judicial. We are not aware of any country that has been expelled from the Council [of Europe] for non-execution of a judgment.”