Welcome

Lots of Theresa May news week. I don't think there's been this much activity at Westminster since that time Cyrill Smith discovered it was possible to clear his internet search history. Over last 7 days, MPs had had a bit of time to read the details of the Brexit paper that Theresa May put out last weekend and was about as popular as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip

David Davis resigned, as did Boris Johnson along with a number of lesser known ministers and it's currently a case of seeing whether e ......

If you wanted a great visual analogy for Theresa May's premiership then you could do worse than watch a news report on those kids stuck in a cave in Thailand. They're trapped, in the dark and at risk of not making it to the end of the month, and that's just the Prime Minister. Mind you, because those kids have been living under a rock for the last week so they haven't had watch the round-the-clock build-up leading to a football match. Very similar to those other football matches you get most Saturdays. If you want to watch Harry Kane kick a ball around for 90 minutes in a game where half players aren't from England, the Premiership starts in a little over a month's time.

So, the Brexit deal though, what is it? Well you're best asking a civil servant in Brussels, they're the ones that appear to have written almost every page of it seeing as how Mrs May is apparently devoid of ideas. No doubt the interesting parts will be hidden in the appendixes, like when Gordon Brown managed to destroy all the final salary pension schemes by hiding extra taxes in the small print. Will there still be EU regulations for companies not trading with Europe? Will the UK still be majority voted into migration quotas? Will Guy Verhofstadt get majority voted into getting a new haircut? I doubt even the Germans could pull that off.

Right now, let's play a game: imagine that Theresa May has just handed you a wrapped up birthday present, you don't know what's inside but the wrapping paper has the same vague shape as a bottle of wine and it's the same sort of weight of a bottle of wine. Then you open it up and it's an empty bottle of wine but Theresa tells you that in spite of the critics, it's actually a fantastic gift because you can use it to decant wine into in case you need to store some.

Perhaps the idea is that this deal is purposely designed to fall apart so that we can get a no-deal Brexit, something that many want but which is broadly politically unsellable to the public at large. Except that unfortunately Theresa's not that sort of leader, remember that she spent the weekend at Chequers, not Chess.

Wow, summer's here and it is hot out there, call me Sylvia Plath, because it feels like my head's in an oven. But with spring gone it's not just the weather losing it's cool, the internet is all up in arms because Donald Trump is going to be electing a new judge to the US Supreme Court.

Justice Anthony Kennedy is stepping down after several decades on the bench, although at 81 years old who can blame him. When I'm that age the only bench I'd want to be on would be in a nice park somewhere. I say "who can blame him" but apparently the answer is: any self righteous person with a twitter account, a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker and a shade of narcissism, but it's the internet, narcissism goes without saying. Anyway what now, perhaps the judicial system has a method for appointing his successor or there's a formal electoral system honed over centuries of legal development? Not quite, this is much more like the process for electing people to the house of lords or FIFA or the EU commission, namely it's up to the whims and fancy of whoever's currently in office. It's like when the management at work change what type of tea and coffee are going to be in the breakout area. And much like that large box of weird herbal tea in that kitchen, the new supreme court justice is going to be hanging around for decades to come.

With a majority in both the congress and senate, the President can put in pretty much anyone he likes which is either a bad thing or a good thing, depending on your political persuasion, and whilst the president does admittedly have a large knowledge and history of how courtrooms work, it is mostly limited to civil actions like defamation, trademark infringement and bankruptcy proceedings. Therefore we're likely to see someone from a list of party approved names being parachuted in.

The thing with the supreme court though is that they don't actually make the law, all they do is establish what badly written or ambiguous laws mean. If you don't like their interpretation of something, pass a new law or a constitutional amendment to fix it in writing. If you don't have the seats to do that then try to win some more of them. Ultimately, the supreme court is but one part of the US government and if you're on the left and you don't control any of the other parts, you can hardly complain at this stage about not being able to put your ideas put into practice.

Still lots of football going on out there with more passes than Diane Abbott on Mastermind. But elsewhere, this week saw the US involved in what was either described as mass human rights abuses on the Mexican border, or the culmination of decades of mismanagement when it comes to immigration. President Trump was keen to stress that this was actually the continuation of an Obama-era policy which only made the situation more confusing really, what would possess the president to actually embrace one of Obama's policies?

To do some fact-checking though, president Obama did oversea the deportation of over 2m migrants just as he did a lot of other things that people don't like to remember like when he wasn't relaxing quite a few gun laws in between shooting basketball hoops and of course shooting people from the air with drones all across the Middle East. Nonetheless, we live in a social media age and families (illegal migrants or not) locked up in cages don't play terribly well in an election year. Also, it is worth noting that president Trump got elected largely because of his unwillingness to put the dreams and wishes of illegal migrants ahead of those who already live in impoverished parts of the US.

Nonetheless, the United Nations human rights watch stepped up to condemn the US. This of course is the same human rights council that's headed up by Saudi Arabia which always seemed strange: a bit like making Richard Dawkins the pope or asking Gordon Brown to look after your money. Up until now the Saudi's have mostly used their position of power to line their pockets or occasionally put out a press release about Rohingya Muslims being persecuted in Burma. But then they also started criticising Isreal's behaviour in the West bank and now they're bashing the US itself so I guess it's time for Washington to call for fresh elections, by which I mean presumably give the role to the highest bidder, just as long as it's not Russia, or Saudi Arabia again (unless they've learnt their lesson)

The world cup has kicked off, or at least the ball has been kicked, the cup itself remains safely in the cabinet, much like David Davis in spite of his threats to the contrary. The football tournament though, that's being held in Russia over the next couple of weeks. If you're an England fan it's not long to wait until that moment when they fail to win and Gareth Southgate is forced to inevitably resign over his sole responsibility for England failing to be the best team in the entire world, no doubt accompanies by tabloid headlines about the team being Putin their place. Mind you, I keep saying world but the USA aren't in the tournament, nor are the Italians, the Dutch or Chile, China, India. Scotland haven't even qualified for the tournament since France 98, although I guess that at least shows a strong level of consistency, something that many teams, notably England, lack.

Anyway, if football's your thing then all your top footballing stars are there on the telly for you to gaze at. But back to the world of politics, it's not just Luis Suarez who's biting off more than he can chew. Today saw the news that the US is going ahead and imposing tariffs of 25% on Chinese exports accusing Beijing of intellectual copyright theft. In retaliation the Chinese said they'd do likewise with anti-US rate increases of 25%.

For something going down in price though, compare and contrast to the Labour Party's Jezfest music+politics festival this weekend where ticket prices have been slashed by around 70% after people discovered you could apply for free ones if you asked nicely. For once I actually agree with some of the socialists on this one: they're complaining and saying that it's not right for some people to just get given things for free when others have had to work to pay for them.

Anyway, for now I've got some money down on Germany to win the world cup and no money down for the north London socialism festival if either of those things are of interest then enjoy the weekend.

This weekend Canada hosted the G7 conference, a political get-together with a level of expectation and excitement akin to watching the numbers on a microwave ticking down before your substandard dinner. These meetings are supposedly meant to help the worlds biggest economies sort out ideas, which is no doubt why they don't invite China or India to the big economies get-together. To add insult to injury, Germany gets invited twice, once as itself and once as its puppet the EU.

President Trump was first out of the blocks to get on the headlines, raising the question of why Russia wasn't at the summit. That was one of those G7 "thing's you're not supposed to ask" questions, he may as well been asking if a waitress was single or quizzing Theresa May with a series of questions predicated with the expression "never have I ever" with Emmanuel Macron standing by to pour a line of Sambuka shots.

Frankly it's a sound point though, unless you invite Russia to the table, any discussion to do with Asia, the Middle East, Energy or banking is essentially null and void. As worthless mind as all the other platitudes that will no doubt be given out across an expensively laden Canadian banqueting table, all as part of the grand game of distraction from the news back home.

This week Theresa May would have probably travelled to anywhere to escape the mess back at Westminster. There were threatened resignations over her inability to act decisively on Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn even outplayed her at Prime Ministers Questions. I imagine he probably celebrated by buying himself a new hedgerow to drag himself through for next week's back-to-normal disheveled appearance.

Theresa claims or believes that she has enough supporters to get by as is. Except the Flat Earth society claims to have supporters all over the globe and you can probably see a logical contradiction in that one too...

This week I thought I'd do a quick roundup of some of the various news stories from around the world. Like a Chinese buffet of news, except of course with less cat meat.

In America President Trump decided to implement a series of import tariffs on steel and aluminium which may or may not be illegal although I imagine that if it does go to court then the devil will be in the detail and the lawyers will probably spent most of the time arguing about whether the metal is spelled aluminium or aluminum. I said the devil would be in the detail, correction, the devil will be in a suit and be billing his client hundreds per hour.

In Korea, they're edging ever closer to that Peace Summit and I suppose that there's a fear/expectation that if they don't finally sort things out then President Trump might come down on them hard with an iron fist. Even if that iron fist would first have to likely pay a 20% export tariff thanks to the previous story.

Italy has new leadership this week after the Five Star Movement & the League (the winners in Italy’s recent general election) finally succeeded in their second attempt in putting together a coalition deal. To the losers I'd say don't worry, elections in Italy are like London busses. Or perhaps to use a more Italian analogy, they're like young ladies at Silvio Berlesconi's house, specifically there's an inappropriate number of them.

Spain also has a new ruler, there's was a change of leadership after King Felipe ousted the old prime minister following a corruption scandal and put Pedro Sanchez in charge of the country. I saw a picture of them in the newspaper with a caption underneath saying that Mr Sanchez was to the King's left, which kind of goes without saying really, he's a Spanish socialist he's probably to everyone's left.

In the UK the Daily Mail's celebrity sidebar has spilled over onto the news section with dozens of photographs from the Epsom Derby. In amongst the hats and the shoes, there's the Queen, celebrities like Liz Hurley and if you like both the queen AND celebrities, Helen Mirren's there too. I always feel it's a real shame that in spite of all the hats, the Queen never wears her big golden crown hat to the races. Mind you, maybe palace officials hide it in case she gets ideas about handing it over to a bookmaker.

Breaking news as the Korean Peninsula might be prepared to break out into all-out full-scale peace. Recently a book fell on my head and I only had my shelf to blame, but the the blame for the inability to agree to a peace deal for the past 60 years? Well that's long and complicated and largely above the pay grade of our current generation of politicians. Most recently, President Trump has been keen to sort out a peace deal as a grand plot twist to his real life reality tv series. Actually, when it comes to President Trump and Kim Jong Un there's more of a "will they won't they?" thing akin to Ross and Rachael from Friends. A show that was presumably syndicated in Pyongyang under the title "Our Enemies"

Anyway, "what's been going on?" you ask. Well a few weeks back Kim said that he was ready to denuclearize and give peace a chance, then after everyone agreed it emerged that his nuclear site had blown itself up and that was why he was suddenly coming to the table. Then both Mike Pence and John Bolton mentioned Lybia and even people with as little knowledge of the outside world as North Korea are aware that after Lybia gave up its weapons, the Americans organised for Colonel Gaddafi to be executed as part of a populist uprising.

Going back to that tv show analogy, it's a bit like if Trump made jokey references The Walking Dead or if Kim asked President Trump if he enjoyed that House Of Cards episode where Kevin Spacey is shot.

Where are we now then? Well North Korea is no longer a proper threat and they'd quite like to go back to where they were a few years ago, with access to oil and food and medicine. South Korea would probably quite like access to some of the North's slave labour manufacturing and logging production so with any luck the situation will revert to where it was 30 years ago, when America still had a popular screen entertainer as president.

It's the weekend of the Royal wedding, the television equivalent of a mandatory powerpoint presentation at work. But crack open some sparkling wine and raise a glass to the thought of a half hour news program featuring no mention of Brexit, Russia meaningful content. For those small shops up and down the land selling small flags and London bus keychains, it's truly a day of celebration. Or if you have zero interest in the whole thing, why not go for a day out at the Legoland in Windsor which I suspect has fairly low attendance and short queues for the rides this weekend.

The press coverage really built all week, culminating in the wedding itself although I personally think it's a missed opportunity not to try sending an undercover reporter along to the stag do or hen night, presumably pretending to be an Arab prince like they always do to snare corrupt politicians. It would be nice to see, for instance, whether princess Anne could out-drink Kate or whether Harry uses Euros at the 'gentleman's club' - as compared to £20 notes which are all of course small pictures of his grandmother.

The wedding itself though, Prince Charles stepped in to walk Meghan down the aisle after her father was unable to attend due to health reasons. He was recently exposed trying to make money out of the event by staging some paparazzi shots and he has subsequently apologized although will presumably have to spend the rest of his life on medication as well as on the lookout for a white Fiat Uno. I'm joking of course, Prince Phillip prefers the new hybrid-electric Fiat 500 these days, there's some great finance deals out there right now and the Queen is, as we know, thrifty.

So what now? Presumably lots of drinking and normal news service will be restored sometime into next week when Theresa May once more refuses to rule out a customs arrangement. With any luck, Harry and Meghan might be persuaded to have a child in March 2019, just to take the edge off the Brexit stuff.

More fun and games in Syria this week, Israel launched an air attack and left the sort of destruction you normally only see when the Daily Mail runs an article about binge drinking and British town centers on a Friday night. In response, Bashar Al-Assad, wanting to look like a strong military leader, no doubt quoted that famous line by Lt. Colonel Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, namely "where are all those darned tomahawks coming from?!"

So what's happening then? Well Syria is currently home to Iranian military advisors and the whole thing is a bit reminiscent of the 1950s when the US had military advisors in Vietnam. Sure a decade later that was openly a US-Russia thing but for a long time it was a Vietnamese civil war, just as for now Syria is technically on the winning side because it's fighting itself. Assad has made suggestions that foreign intervention has threatened to escalate the situation beyond a cold war. I don't think there's any chance of a cold war though, have you seen the weather forecast for Damascus? 70 degrees in the shade.

All this is in the same week as the Iranian nuclear deal has started to unwind with the US reimposing sanctions but the EU desperate to keep trade open; largely because they love cars in the Middle East and both Germany is very keen to sell the new S-Class in Tehran. The US is shut for business though as far as Iran is concerned though although that didn't stop Oliver North back in the 1980s and I'm not sure where the UK stands on the whole deal, although I'm sure that the sales director at BAE systems (the weapons division) is following it closely, call me cynical.

The US has spent the week watching the President Trump/James Comey/Stormy Daniels stories continuing to move along with the sort of pace normally more associated with a snail, or a car in London ever since they closed half the roads for bicycle use only. I think the plan is that if Robert Mueller's evidence doesn't turn out to be conclusive enough, Trump will have already been in office for 8 years so he'll have to legally vacate the White House anyway.

So let's talk about London though. There were local elections this week and Jeremy Corbyn had spent weeks planning his next moves and what to do after Labour managed to seize councils like Barnet and Wandsworth as well as all those towns and cities that the metropolitan types only hear about when they're watching Match Of The Day. Unfortunately, things didn't really go according to plan and it was a surprisingly good night for Theresa May, that's an expression you rarely hear about these days.

The Conservatives took control of Barnet council along with Plymouth and other decentish wins all over the place. Although the big story of the night was really the revival of the Lib Dems, Vince Cable was even sighted on television without his trademark hat on. It says a lot that if you've see a LibDem politician on television in the past 6 months, it was probably a BBC4 documentary about the Iraq War. Nonetheless, they made good gains in London and you can't fault them, at least they're honest about what they stand for. Compare and contrast with UKIP who depending on the time of day are either a protest vote, a Brexit lobbying group, a tax write-off for donors, a way for Henry Bolton to meet young ladies or in some cases actual politicians with local policies they want to pursue. Unfortunately UKIP is a lot like many other acronyms, in that you have to look it up on the internet to find out what they stand for. The problem with ideological parties generally is that for the most part they don't get enough numbers at the ballot box to win power, but the problem for parties with no ideology is that they end up with Theresa May, the political equivalent of that DVD player you keep meaning to stick in the spare room on give to charity.

This week the UK saw an assault of royal commemorative plates being launched with Kate giving birth to another child and Prince Charles cracking open a tincture of homeopathic champagne to celebrate. The baby weighed just over 8 pounds making it just slightly heavier than the special commemorative supplement you'll be removing from this week's Sunday paper; I guess it's up to you whether you use it for lighting the barbecue or stash it away in a cupboard as an investment, it could potentially triple in value and be worth more than a fiver in years to come.

Prince William was very excited to announce the new heir, although later a palace official sat down with him and explained that the doctor had sad new "heir" - not hair "hair" - and that he should just embrace the bald look. Come on William, it doesn't matter how much you try to look like Bobby Charlton, it's still not going to help England get past the World Cup's group stages.

Talking about crazy haircuts though, this week has saw President Trump busy as always. He arranged a visit to the UK scheduled for July, he phoned into Fox & Friends and invited his french pen-pal Emmanual Macron over to play. Those letters presumably go along the line of J'habite dans le White House, chest terrific. Macron actually has pretty respectable hair so Trump made a point of supposedly brushing alleged dandruff from his shoulder during a press conference. Later Melania was sporting a eye-raising white chapeau hat and Kanye West managed to anger 10 million twitter followers after posting a picture of his Make America Great Again Trump baseball cap, It was all rather strange. In the middle of it all, Emmanual Macron made a speech about globalism and Iran although given France's recent track record with the middle east and islamic extremists, he would perhaps be better trying to focus his efforts on gastronomy and convincing President Trump to not add Ketchup to a New York strip steak.

On Saturday morning the world awoke to the news that North Korea had promised to give up its nuclear testing and missile launches. And I'm guessing Kim Jong Un woke up with an absolute stinker of a hangover and vaguely remembered making promises the previous night that he maybe regretted the morning after the night before. For him, I imagine phoning up Donald Trump at midnight is his equivalent of phoning an ex-girlfriend 10 minutes before the pub closes.

Maybe I'm being disingenuous and this was all a result of weeks of diplomacy, strategic use of twitter, a grand combination of Chinese economic intervention, John Bolton bringing fresh ideas to the diplomatic table maybe some more tweets from president Trump, some nudging from the Russians and some additional twitter diplomacy with Fox & Friends of course being kept in the loop at all times.;

Or perhaps it's just that the North Koreans's have finally figured out that Uranium is pretty expensive and that they've had to decide between Kim's taste for nuclear weapons and his taste for, well, anything on a plate, he's not fussy. He prefers chocolate cake to uranium yellowcake and I'd make some joke about the type of "rocket" that's green, leafy and makes up a salad except he's more the sort of chap that orders a dozen fried crispy wontons for a starter. I suppose I'd do the same mind if I lived right next to China.

It's only when North Korea returns to the news though that you realise how lucky we have it in the west. The UK government recently lost the paperwork for the Windrush generation and as a result they'll likely receive compensation. In North Korea the government is somewhat more strict about people having the correct documentation and their definition of a 'labour camp' makes the uk Labour Party's summer camp discussing Brexit policy look quite appealing in comparison. Well I don't know, 10 years in the frozen tundra vs 10 days listening to Emily Thornberry devising a coherent foreign policy. And you know I still prefer Kim's fondness for fried chicken compared to Jeremy Corbyn's veganism.

One of the problems with Syria is that we can either let President Assad remain in charge or we can force him out and let ISIS fill the power vacuum. It's like in the Star Wars prequels when Liam Neeson helped destroy that droid army but then he died and Jar-Jar Binks became a senator.

Maybe we could force Assad out and have an election in Syria, and the Russians definitely won't try to rig it with the hundreds of personal they have all over the country. If you've ever been to a carnival and watched a stallholder superglueing coconuts to the stands before opening for for business, that's basically an analogy for how Vladimir Putin would organize a free and fair Syrian election.

Nonetheless, this week saw the US, UK and France begin a bombing campaign, supposedly in retaliation to a chemical weapons attack but largely because there's lots of domestic problems at home and they all need a distraction. In the US former FBI director James Comes has been doing the rounds, with a primetime Sunday interview and presumably and appearance on an episode of Sesame Street brought to you by the letter "P"

In the UK, Theresa May always needs something new to keep people occupied when Brexit threatens to make its way onto the news agenda, and in France there'a a big walkout by the SNCF rail workers so they're distracting from a rail strike with a missile strike.

In reality the whole Syrian fight actually comes down to two rival plans to bring oil and gas into Europe via Syria, one American and one Russian. Unless you're a Momentum supporter in which case it's about Israel because of course ISIS are run by Mossad, Rupert Murdoch is personally in charge of dictating UK military policy and the Rothschilds were responsible for Ed Sheeran.

A number of years ago in London I saw a sign in the pub warning about thieves operating and after I was asked to pay £7 for a pint I realised that they were mostly standing behind the bar. However, this week saw a violent crime wave epidemic in London coming to world prominence as the city overtook New York's crime rate.

As with many other problems in London like the cost of living or the mostly lackluster performance of football clubs' the Champions League, there are lots of underlying causes. But (sticking to crime for now) anyone being interviewed about it will likely put it solely being down to too little money or too much immigration. Actually, a lot of football fans would probably use those two excuses as well. In the US London's crime wave is being portrayed as a 2nd amendment isssue with the underlying problem supposedly being that people are banned from literally bringing a gun to a knife fight.

Every advocacy group likes to give their own spin though, some members of the SNP will probably put the blame on there being too many English people and I'm guessing that in the coming days the green party will almost certainly produce a chart showing a perfect correlation between rising crime and rising levels of atmospheric carbon. Of course in London itself the Mayor is saying nothing because there's upcoming elections and he thinks that keeping out of the media spotlight will probably play better than admitting that he's presiding over the crime equivalent of a burst sewer main. For what it's worth I'd say take a look at Camden or perhaps Shadwell, both areas seem to have been unaffected by the the up-spike in violence crime in spite of having huge immigrant populations and less money to spend than one of the fools who got into Bitcoin at the wrong time.

Here's an idea, perhaps the problem can't be summed up in a soundbite cause it's actually slightly nuanced and quite complicated: it's like Oceans 11 rather than Jaws 11. Getting all the guns and knives off the street is like getting all the antisemitism out of the Labour party, it's not going to happen any time soon and certainly not while Sadiq Khan is too busy playing Candy Crush Saga rather than getting out and doing some work.

It's Easter weekend so maybe you're watching this before heading out to a church service or in many cases, the pub. Just be sure to look out for Russian spies because if you see someone lying in the street in the gutter outside Wetherspoons then it could be that it's in fact a former Russian businessman or outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. I'm sure that nerve gas is a good excuse if you return home and you're met with questions about why it took 6 hours to go to the shops and why you're now stumbling around like Shane McGowan attempting to play hopscotch. I digress.

Anyway, the past week saw Russia and the West expelling each other's diplomats: 150 or so, from each side. There was even a mildly amusing incident when New Zealand promised to send all the spies and diplomats back to Moscow but there weren't any in the country at the time. It's a small place mind and more of a red wine drinking sort of a place at that. As for Mr Skripal, he remains in a critical but stable condition, his daughter Yulia's condition is said to be improving and Theresa May is probably concerned that someone, in this case a doctor, is using the term "stable" to refer to something other than Brexit for once.

This week marked the 1-year countdown to Brexit. Mrs May did a small tour around the UK, making generic speeches and invoking all the sparkle and excitement of a car going in for its annual service. If you were watching the news and accidentally reset your TV and had to sit through 5 minutes of it retuning all the channel listings, you didn't really miss a lot. Certainly you wouldn't have missed much about Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party's ongoing anti-semitism row, it's not as if the BBC or the like would want to run too many stories about their Messiah in the week leading up to Easter.

Finally, talking about not reporting the news one of the things that the press seem to me missing out in the Skripal case is the link between Sergei the man who was poisoned and Christopher Steele - the former British spy who compiled the dossier alleging that Trump colluded with Russia. Something to go look up now if you've got a spare half hour to waste on youtube and have some tinfoil to hand with which to construct a hat for yourself.

When it comes to news, this week has been more packed than Boris Johnson's vocabulary or Dianne Abbott's lunchbox. We finally got some headway on Brexit, HR McMaster was sacked and France had another terror attack: woowzers and I thought my local supermarket was bad on a Friday

But in the background has been the slow burning social media data story involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. At first I thought Cambridge Analytica was the stage name of one of President Trump's former girlfriends, or current girlfriends if rumors are to be believed. But it's actually a fairly dull number-crunching sort of a company based near London's Canary Wharf financial district.

During the 2016 US election, they essentially collected and analysed voter data for the Trump campaign which would normally be fine, they're a political data insight company and that's what they do, just like how Bloomberg provide financial data or how the Daily Mail's website provides all the news data you could ever need, assuming that your main interest in current affairs is focussed primarily on gossip, celebrity fashion, diet advice, and columnists complaining about how the new blue passports will be manufactured in France. Although personally I'd rather we got them made in Catelonia or somewhere else in Europe with a strong separatist movement, just to inspire them on a bit.

Cambridge Analytica though, from what's come out so far the naughty part was that they got access to everyone's data because they lied and told Facebook it was part of an anonymous academic study, rather than a key part of gaming the US electoral system for Donald Trump's political benefit as well as their financial benefit. It's sort of like if I walked into a BMW showroom and drove off with a car because I lied and said I was from head office and we were using it in an advert. Except Facebook is also a company whose business model is that it makes money by selling data, so if you're annoyed about them giving/selling your personal information to Cambridge Analytica then it's sort of like if you were the owner of that aforementioned BMW dealership and the chap taking the car for a spin was that chap out of Ant+Dec who got charged with drinking driving this week. Whether it's Facebook or otherwise, trusting a private company and it's shareholders with a lifetime of sensitive and often embarrassing personal information makes about as much sense as going on holiday and trusting Damien Hurst to look after your pet shark.

It had been a while since President Trump fired anyone and that's supposed to be his catchphrase after all so this week he decided to get rid of Rex "Texan Exec" Tillerson. The whole thing has been widely described as "unprecedented" in so much has the former oil executive managed to stay in the role for over a year before being shown the door but the two never got on. That seemed a shame really as with Rex's petrochemical background and Trump's famously shoddy regard for building contractors, the pair could easily have literally gotten on like a house on fire.

I always imagined that Rex saw the whole job as a networking opportunity until oil giant Saudi Aramco finally organised it's New York share listing and offered him a job there but that's all supposedly been delayed until 2019 now so he decided to stop with the niceties. I say "niceties" - he allegedly called the president a "F*****g moron" during a discussion last summer about whether the US should instigate a nuclear war or not. We've all been there I suppose, you're in a brainstorming meeting at work where there's 'no bad ideas' and then someone suggests doubling ICBM capacity and all of a sudden HR gets involved and someone's asked to leave.

Anyway, for now at least it'll likely all blow over when HR McMaster leaves, as is rumored to be happening in the next week or two. I should maybe have added a spoiler alert there but maybe some of the viewers have already read the book anyway and actually no, that's Game of Thrones I'm thinking of there sorry. For now though, Trump has appointed CIA Director Mike Pompeo to the secretary of state job and so the game continues. I'm sure Vladimir Putin will be quaking in his boots, boots that many suspect contain a concealed knife like in that James Bond film.

Finally, talking of people departing there was a bit of unfortunate science news this week as Stephen Hawking passed away. I'd like to imagine that when asked, Jeremy Corbyn would have responded by paying tributes to "The Greatest Mind of our time" before adding "and Diane Abbott will be a great Home Secretary" before admitting to having not read the news that morning.

Big news in the world of diplomacy, bigger than Kim Jong Un's waistline even. It was announced that President Trump and Kim Jong Un are going to be meeting in person. This marks a big shift in diplomacy from both the North Koreans as well as the president who has spent the past year or so conducting international affairs via Twitter with all the dexterity of a drugged horse

The meeting itself could be a set-piece historic event like the Yalta Conference in 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt met with Stalin, or that time that Ronald Reagan met with Humphrey Bogart oh actually no wait that was when he was still an actor. Anyway, it's a first date of sorts though so perhaps the president will decline the usual offers from CNN or the BBC and get one of the reality show networks like Bravo to cover the event. If things go badly then it would certainly be better for everyone if it ended up with one of them throwing a glass of wine across the table, as compared to launching an thermonuclear strike.

If we're not comparing Trump to FDR then who? Kennedy dealt with the Cuban Missile Crisis and certainly Mr Trump wants to be perceived as a similarly new modern kind of president like Kennedy: a media savvy change from a presidential style of old. I don't know if Stormy Daniels a new albeit trashier version of Marilyn Monroe although certainly it wouldn't surprise many people if the the CIA turned out to already be looking to hire a "lone gunman"

In more cold-war-style news, the Russians have been busy too: Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia collapsed last weekend in Salisbury after being exposed to a nerve agent. There's 180 military investigators although obviously at the moment then anyone could be to blame (innocent until proven guilty after all!) which is presumably why the newspapers have to use the term "nerve agent" rather than "Russian agent" but the backstory is that in 2006 the former Russian military security colonel was convicted by the Russian government of passing secrets to MI6 and in 2010 he was then offered asylum in the UK. It sounds very hospitable for the British government really to do that although you have to remember that back then the government were dishing out passports and visas like confetti at a ticker tape parade. Anyway, the government never lies and you can definitely always trust what the spy agencies tell us so I suspect that we won't find out the real truth until things eventually get declassified in 50 years time. For now though, if you're a Russian dissident who's been passing on state secrets then try and stay safe!

It's snow joking matter, the UK's been so cold that pickpockets have been keeping their hands in their pockets and the counter-terrorism police have considered extending their remit to combat both ISIS as well as just regular Ice.

It's been a while since the UK last had a winter, nearly a year in fact and as usual their's the shots of slow moving motorways, roving reporters wandering deserted small town high streets and my favourite, the shot of hundreds of children sledging and hanging out at the park. It's never explained why the school run was was impassible, leading to the closure of schools, yet the road down to the nearest big snowy hill was apparently clear. In the mean time however, lots of trains have been cancelled although Southern Rail customers have been told that trains will run the usual timetable, by which I mean that you may as well roll a dice if you want to know whether your train will be there. And Scotland was forced to issue a red weather warning which is obviously worse than an orange weather warning but it's still probably preferable to a yellow ice warning.

The snow has also given the news agencies something to talk about other than Brexit. There were a series of speeches this week with very little in the way of new information and it's telling that most people were less interested in Jeremy Corbyn's opinion on the customs union than they were in a few inches of snow landing in his North Islington constituency. Northern Ireland remains a point of contention with the EU attempting to force a situation where a no-deal outcome would involve North Ireland somehow retaining all EU rules and oversight, effectively coming under the sovereignty of Brussels rather than London. A policy presumably borrowed from Nicola Sturgeon. Theresa May decided to borrow an idea too, suggesting "5 tests" purposely designed to fail - an idea borrowed from Gordon Brown and the Euro debate. That's where we are, British leadership relying on borrowed ideas from one of the worst prime ministers in the past half a century.