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It's been several weeks since the new year which means that gymns are finally starting to empty out as people once more drop out of their new fitness regime. Personally, my favourite machine at the gymn is the vending machine.

There's not been a huge amount in the news this week although I saw a headline "Shark Swims Ashore in New Jersey" - I didn't know sharks wore jerseys, or any clothing for that matter. That joke is of course also the answer to the question, "What did Delaware"

The ......

Earlier in the week I saw some protestors in London burning Israeli flags. Which was a pity given how much work the enslaved Chinese children put into manufacturing them. Oh wait, sorry, we're not supposed to criticise that particular human rights abuse, because there's money involved. There was also a protest in Scotland but the people there were too frugal to want to set fire to the newly acquired flags. I'm Scottish so I'm allowed to make that joke, like the one about how copper wire was invented when two canny Scots found a penny on the ground.

Talking about wars, it's Remembrance Sunday this weekend, I'm recording this on Saturday so I've not clue if it got interrupted by the Palestinian lot or the just stop oil brigade although it would be nice if the environmentalists sabotaged the cars of the Hamas supporters as they tried to drive into the capital. I'm also still waiting to see what the Just Stop Oil protestors response is to the carbon footprint of that war, you'd imagine they'd be all over it, an Israeli Merkava tank has a 1400 litres fuel tank and does just under 5mpg

Also in the news, Prince Harry spent more of his time hanging around with his lawyers, discussing how to go about suing more newspapers now that the supply of Netflix money has started to run dry. This time the grievance is about the Daily Mail bugging him. Although what goes around comes around, Prince Harry's been bugging people for years and don't get me started on that wife of his.

And talking about criminal activity, ITV have a crime drama out about the Yorkshire Ripper. I was watching it this week and there were some truly shocking scenes in it, like when you see cheap the cost of petrol was back then or what you could buy for a fiver. My local grocery store recently put a defibrillator up on the wall near the checkout, and I'm not surprised. If they put the cost of a dozen eggs up again they're going to need a second

Another US bank is on the verge of collapse, this time it's First Republic Bank and here's a joke for you Q: What do dubious woke financial institutions have in common with the Eiffel Tower? A: They're both Paris Sites

Only a week to go until the coronation and the household cavalry are practicing a new ceremonial duty. In preparation of Prince Harry possibly showing up they're preparing for the changing of the locks

I heard that a member of the royal family had died, turns out it was the TV show the Royale Family, it was Peter Marin who played Joe

Jerry Springer passed away and I'm imagining the funeral director asking whether the family will want a graveyard or a crematorium as the family fist-pump the air chanting Bury Bury Bury

Two members of the labour party walk into a bar and the barman asks why the long face? And they say it's because Dianne Abbot was talking to the media again. The MP claimed that Jewish people have never experienced This begs the question about whether she knows about how many people were killed during the holocaust, to which the answer is "no" because she's famously unable to count

Sotheby's is going to be auctioning off £7m of Freddie Mercury's personal belongings, if the auctioneer is looking for material, there's probably a joke in there about the Queen song Hammer To Fall

A new blood test can apparently diagnose Alzheimer's 30 years in advance, I guess if that’s the sort of thing you want to look forward too.
Parents in Wales are no longer entitled to smack. Which is good news of class-A drug users elsewhere.
Talking of which Taylor Hawkins from band the Foo Fighters has died. He was a drummer in Colombia so you can guess the rest of that story

This week there was a G20 conference to discuss the Ukraine situation and as expected it was about as useful as air conditioning on a motorbike. Russia which classes itself as a superpower is somehow managing to lose a war to a rag-tag collection of amateurs and even children who have been allowed to put down the x-box controllers in favour of actual military grade weapons. I saw a kid on the news who couldn't have been much over the age of 7, running around with an MP5 machine gun and I was fairly glad my son didn’t get any ideas of what he wants for Christmas. Mind you, it is a good example of how it may be relatively simple enough to beat standing armies but a determined populace and insurrection is always next to impossible to defeat. If Ukraine was an animal it would be a cat with 9 lives. Talking of which I remember years ago phoning a vet in order to get my elderly cat put down and the receptionist told me I'd have to book 9 appointments.

The one positive thing you can say about Vladimir is that he has at least been one of the most effective geography teachers in years with random folk down the pub now able to talk chapter and verse about cities that nobody had heard of 6 months ago although it might all be a waste of time he ends up leveling the place. Currently there's a solid possibility of that being the outcome, with huge stretches of no-mans-land in exchange for Russia annexing the Donbas region, all fairly similar to what played out in Cyprus 50 years ago. That is also outrageously ironic given how many Russian Oligarchs hold a Cypriot passport, in order to get EU citizenship. All in the meanwhile Western companies are facing demands not to sell their products in Russia. Curiously the tobacco industry are the latest to talk about pulling out of Russia, which makes you wonder whose side they're really on, the tobacco industry kills far more Russians every year than the Ukrainian army could ever dream of. Between that and McDonalds exiting Russia we may see the life expectancy jump 10 years, or it may all turn ugly, literally. Botox manufacturer AbbVie has decided to cease operations there after all. Perhaps that will be the twist of the screw that finally drags the shiny and suspiciously smooth skinned Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table...

Boat operator P&O have sacked 800 members of staff with immediate effect, which seems 'ferry' unfair.

Emma Watson used her BAFTA appearance to attack JK Rowling. If I were Rowling then I'd get set to work, writing a new Harry Potter film in which Hermione puts on a ton of weight, starts eating live snails

Fuel prices are still going up. I recently asked the wife if she wanted to go for a fancy dinner, with champagne and caviar and the like. She said she'd be happy just to go on a romantic drive up into the mountains and I pointed out I didn't have that kind of cash and if she'd seen the price of petrol

This is week 4 of the Ukraine crisis though and to be honest I'm running out of things to say about it. This week saw a strange turn of events as the traditionally left wing press started celebrating a group of New-Nazis who have been having success fighting the Russian troops. Clearly a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"

The Russian economy is in freefall and if the invasion is supposed to harken back to the old USSR then certainly that's reflected in the shops with shortages and peopled queuing to buy food. Despite this, Vladimir Putin showed up in a $13k jacket to give a rally to hundreds of thousands of supporters in Moscow. I don't speak Russian so I'm not entirely sure what he said but clearly the crowd loved it, or were being paid to love it. Maybe some old classic jokes like "Knock knock. Who's there? The KGB, we've come to arrest your husband." There's also a cringeworthy video of Putin kicking about online performing 50s hit Blueberry Hill. Anyway, if you want to see him then I guess he's banned from Ticketmaster but he's planning a 2nd gig in Ukraine. Or at least that's what I think he meant when said he was going to bring the house down.

Contrastingly This last week saw the British Prime Minister fly to Saudi Arabia in order to cut a deal for cheap oil and gas. He got nothing out of it, in stark contrast to the public who had to stump up the money to pay for the flight at a time when fuel prices are at an all time high. Although I guess there wasn't any wine so maybe it all cancels out in the wash.

The actor and convicted liar Jussie Smollet has been sentenced to jail for that fictional attack he made up and reported in 2020 to gain publicity. Perhaps he will file file an appeal against the decision to lock him up in the same cell as his attacker

And Saudi Arabia just executed 81 people in one day. You’d think that would behead-line news.

But talking about oil-rich countries with grisly human rights records, the news is still dominated by the war in Ukraine. This week's events have seen Russian Oligarchs around the world having their assets frozen. It's not often I have much in common with Roman Abromavich but this week for the first time neither of us were able to withdraw a million quid from the bank, and neither of us are in control of a Premiere League football team. There was a strange angle to the sports teams side of things as a number of sponsors are distancing themselves from the clubs which is a fantastic win for the fans, being able to buy a football shirt that for once isn't also emblazoned by logos for other things.

The extension of cancel culture to commercial products and companies is an odd one and it is of course unsurprising to see it applied in farcical and nonsensical ways. The US has seen people trying to ban the sale of Vodka, despite only about 1% of it being imported and this is all after a number of people tried to make Chinese takeaways taboo following the coronavirus. First Chinese food and now vodka, I'm frankly terrified that Italy decides to invade somewhere, although I guess if they did then I might lose 2 stone.

So how is the war going though. All things considered, very badly. There are rumours that Russian reconnaissance drones have turned up in Croatia asking for asylums. Russia has a fantastic rail system and the ability to muster large amounts of equipment but apparently still don't know how to maintain a supply chain of more than about 80 miles and Kiev is about a hundred miles past the Russian border so watching them try to capture it is like watching my kids trying to get the ice cream out of the top of the freezer. This week a Ukrainian man out walking his dog found an abandoned 9K330 SAM missiles system in a nearby wood. He then, for real, updated the Wikipedia page, listing Ukraine as one of the countries who own that system now. Good luck buying missiles for it though, I suspect that's where the arms companies make all the money, and surface to air missiles are probably like a really expensive version of topping up the ink on your printer.

This week:
Australian cricket legend Shane Warne just passed away so perhaps it will be his ashes that the team will be playing for later this summer. Sorry, that's in poor taste, he must be spinning in his grave. "Spinning" (geddit?)
London is still looking for a new head of police after Cressida Dick's forced resignation. London of course has an ever increasing problem with knife crime and the government want a new commissioner to take a stab at it.

And Australian TV show Neighbours is to finally end after 37 years on air. The show's theme tune talks about how "everybody needs good neighbours" and that brings us onto this week's main story which is how Ukraine has a particularly bad set of neighbours, at least to it's north and east, let's hope that Romania has no plans to plant a leylandii bush along its Ukrainian border, blocking out the evening sun. This week saw further escalation of the conflict and for a scary couple of hours there were worries that a nuclear power plant being shelled might turn into something a dozen times worse than Chernobyl. Subsequent investigations have apparently ruled everything be ok, although I was frankly unsure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that the plant got a "glowing report"

It is still quite remarkable how fast the situation has escalated. A few weeks ago there were "no plans to occupy Ukraine" and how they occupy half the country, it certainly shows that civil servants can do policy change and process paperwork when they really need to. Not in the UK though and Boris, give him some credit, has chosen to turn down the opportunity to get his name in the history books when it comes to this war, although he has been through the wars (metaphorically speaking) of late and he did of course remember to take the opportunity to use the bad news about a potential nuclear meltdown to cover up the shameful nepotism of him giving Gavin Williamson a knighthood. "Sir" ?! Maybe “sir”-iously bad at his job. Elsewhere, France and Germany have also stayed out of the Ukraine conflict, although Lufthansa have stopped flying passenger planes anywhere near the region there making many wonder if perhaps the Luftwaffe will be flying planes to Ukraine on the basis that they still have a lot of unfinished business in the region.

So what next then? Here's one way way to ratchet down the tension I thought of: maybe the Prime Minister could phone up the Kremlin and point out to Putin that he could save 350m per week by pulling out. Actually, you know perhaps not, if it was Boris told him that he'd probably believe it this time around...

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine finally kicked off this week with the troops rolling in to capture Chernobyl, which seemed somewhat of an odd place to want to capture, it's like if the Chinese launched a war against Japan and their first strategic target was weird island with the thousands of cats living on it. Anyway I guess it made sense in a way because it's not like anyone in NATO wants to risk bombing them there, it's bad enough when a drone accidentally hits a school or hospital, let alone striking and restarting a nuclear meltdown. And besides, the Russian military emblem is a two headed eagle so perhaps the military were hoping to see one of those birds in the wild.

Anyway, the newspapers got to work quickly, especially the people who write pun-based headlines for the tabloids. They were 'Russian' to get the jokes 'Putin' to the banner headlines. As to the other papers, The Times and the Telegraph have had some wonderful maps and the Sunday supplements have some cracking goulash recipes. The BBC of course has an article about African American haircuts and whether school dress codes are institutionally racist and I'm imagining that the Sunday Sport has a special report on Ukrainian asylum seekers, although all of the girls featured will be 18 yer old blonde bombshells.

Unfortunately though in the real world it's real bombshells at play and the mayor of Kiev told residents to stay safe by going into the Subway although how a 12" sandwich is supposed to help during a war is anyone's guess. That's the wrong type of sub! And what should the west's reaction be? It's quite a moral dilemma, millions could die but then a protracted war could push up the price of petrol by 20p/litre. Sanctions are of course going into effect and it has been suggested that Russia should be cut out of the SWIFT global bank transaction system, crippling their economy for years. Another response has been to ban Russia from being allowed to compete in the Eurovision Song Contest this year, especially after rumours that Vladimir was planning up to sing either "Don't Stop Me Now" or Boom-Bang-A-Bang. It's also been decided that the Champions League Final will not go ahead in St Petersburg as planned although we're all in trouble if they choose to play the match in the Sudetenland. There's also talk of removing access to western internet services like Amazon or Netflix (or as as it's called in Russia, "Njetflix") or possibly Twitter where as of the time of writing Vladimir Putin is still a free member. Steve Bannon and Donald Trump of course got banned from Twitter for being bad people but Vladimir Putin is literally trying to launch a 3rd world war and yet that's apparently ok. Talk about a war of words eh?

Arnold Schwarzenegger was involved in a nasty car accident, so presumably the police are looking to speak to Linda Hamilton or Robert Patrick
The Conservative Party has put in some paperwork with the Electoral Commission to rename itself “The Conservative Work Event”
Professional attention-seeker, conman and part-time magician Uri Gellar has claimed that an alien invasion is imminent, although perhaps he just doesn’t know how to spell “Russian”

Because this week’s main story has been the growing build up on the Ukrainian border with everybody itching for war, except those who live in Ukraine itself. They stand to do about as well in a war with Russia as Bermuda will do competing with Russia at the upcoming Winter Olympics. There were quite a few options for that metaphor, other competing sides include Eritrea, Trinidad, Togo and famously snow-free Saudi Arabia who were possibly only invited so that the Chinese hosts could boast about their comparatively clean human rights record.

Anyway, Russia has hundreds of thousands of troops mobilized and up against them are of course Ukraine's smaller and less well equipped army but also a population of 44m people who seem willing to arm themselves and fight an insurgency if the worst should happen. You also have the US, probably and perhaps other troops from the UK and anyone else who needs a distraction from home affair. Perhaps Emmanuel Macron will commit French troops if he thinks it will give him a boost in the polls, just as Boris is looking at it largely with an eye to causing a distraction from Partygate. I heard the expression “killing 2 birds with one stone” but this distraction would be more like the stone that killed the dinosaurs. Probably with similar global repercussions too. I saw snow falling the other day and after glancing up up I asked my neighbour if the bombs had started dropping in Kiev yet. The most interesting commentary on the whole question on what to do comes from America where both the right and left and split on the decision. The democrats spent 4 years complaining about Trump not standing up to Putin but also don’t want to spend the next decade grinding out an expensive war. On the right it’s the usual arguments of Imperial Exceptionalism vs telling countries in Europe that they should maybe spend a bit more on defense and stand up for themselves for once. There’s a lot to be said for how President Trump was only one in modern history to not drag the US into a war and if the US does end up sending thousands of troops to their death in Eastern Europe it will be interesting to see Trump on TV explaining how to left wing news commentators about how it never happened on his watch and how if they want to stop the war they should have voted for him.

In the news:
A British man died off the coast of Australia after being eaten by a great white shark. The family made a comment about how he “died doing what he enjoyed” which begs the question: what sort of person enjoys spending their free time being ripped apart by a shark

Angry complaints from environmentalist who claim that the COP conference has failed and that the world is burning, but then Greta Thunberg also said that the soon the world will be under water, so that takes care of the fire I guess, problem solved.

But if we are looking to bring on the apocalypse then look no further than Eastern Europe, specifically Belarus or perhaps Ukraine where Vladimir Putin has been rumoured to be looking to send in troops and grab himself a new country for Christmas in the way that you or I might go out and buy a new television or a car. Although I guess that Putin might end up with a fleet of new Citroen C4s if the army misunderstand his order to stock up with plenty of C4.

So what has been happening in that part of the world? Tensions between Belarus and Europe have been high for a long time, president Lukashenko is an old school autocrat with no regard for things like democracy or popular opinion. In many ways he would be the perfect politician to be working for the EU but instead they’ve been at loggerheads over a number of issues and things really escalated back in May when he forced a Ryanair flight in Belarusian airspace to land so that he could arrest a journalist. More recently he’d been facilitating thousands of refugees to travel into Europe. There are daily flights from Turkey to Belarus where the army then help you reach the Border with Poland. Again, you’d think the EU would love this guy, it’s pretty much the game that France has been playing with the English Channel. Anyway, people are now being murdered as they try to cross Westward and there are rumours of vigilante groups patrolling the forests at night. There are also threats to turn off the gas pipelines this winter and for the environmental campaigners that spend their spare time gluing themselves to the roads, death and human suffering pales into comparison to the idea of energy companies burning coal to make up the shortfall.

At this point though Vladimir Putin has very generously offered to take it upon himself to invade northern Ukraine and use it as a starting location to police things if they get more out of control. That’s like me ordering 3 or 4 cases of wine, just in case I need additional cardboard boxes to store Christmas decorations in. In response the Polish army is doubling the number of troops on standby and Joe Biden is probably looking forward to anything that might create a distraction from the rapidly escalating economic disaster he’s presiding over. As for the UK, it’s a very scary time indeed. The last time an aggressive army crossed over the Polish border, it started a world war, but if it happens again, this time Britain will be fighting on the same side as the Germans for once. Not even Nick Clegg was desperate to rejoin Europe if it meant doing it that way.

This week:
There was also a cabinet reshuffle in the UK and there were reports that a lot of government ministers were sweating worst than the Prime Minister on Fathers Day
I saw a a report from Louisiana about a 200lb alligator on the lose that had eaten someone. Presumably though it was actually a 100lb alligator, at least before dinner
A number of venues are asking for proof of a negative test before they let you in, I have an old friend who’s taken to carrying around the letter saying he failed the 11-plus. It’s not that kind of test, no wonder he failed it…

But the big story was the news that Australia has canceled a deal to buy Submarines from France and will instead be doing a deal with the UK and America. The land down under is putting some boats down under (the ocean surface). This is all part of the ever increasing militarization of the pacific region as the US and Australia square off against China in what people are calling a new cold war, possibly inspired by the general trend to keep commission things based on 1970s & 80s nostalgia. I recently read a history book about year 1984 and you forget how different the world was back then, even the countries had different names like Oceania. I believe the author, a Mr G Orwell ended up writing policy for the European Commission.

Anyway, the submarine deal. The Australians had previously offered to pay €90bn to purchase diesel electric submarines but this last week this was torpedoed when they decided to buy nuclear submarines from a join UK-US proposal. There’s a sense of irony now that after Australia opted to literally go for the nuclear option, France has metaphorically gone for the nuclear option, recalling its ambassadors from Australia and the United States and accusing the UK of destroying any remaining sense of post-Brexit camaraderie. If you ask me, I think France probably did that, when they decided to task their navy with assisting economic migrants who wanted to sail from Calais to Britain. They’re now demanding compensation from the 3 countries involved, if I were in charge I’d send them a tanker full of cheap Ozzy wine, processed American cheese and a bill for the HMS Sheffield. Maybe appoint Katie Price as an ambassador while I’m at it in order to kill two birds with one stone.

Let’s finish with a submarine joke. A British, an American and a North Korean captain are bragging about their submarines and how long they can stay underwater. The British captain starts off saying: "Our submarines can stay underwater for 6 months before having to resurface!". The American replies: "Pff, that's nothing. Our submarines can go for a whole 3 years and never have to come to the surface once!". At this point the North Korean starts laughing and says: "Oh boys, that's really cute and all, but we launched a submarine in 1968 and it hasn't surfaced yet!".

This week let’s compare and contrast two different protests.
In Kabul, there was a women's’ rights protest, they are demanding the right to have an education and a job and the government responded with tear gas and weaponry but I guess is not terribly surprising, the White House after all left behind a bountiful collection of equipment for the new government to brutalize the crowds with. There was a video this last week of the Taliban flying around in a a captured US helicopter and I’m not sure if the US Air Force still paints glamour models on the side of it’s warplane, if so then they'll have to get out a paintbrush to edit them. it wouldn’t surprise me if one day we saw lady in a veil painted onto the lady on the side if a captured F16. All things considered, the situation is deeply unpleasant, especially for the Russian & Chinese arms dealers who’ve undoubtedly missed out on a lot of sales opportunities.

What is the reaction to all this in Islington? Workers and feminists of the world unite, perhaps a march down Whitehall or a demand that the UN or the EU step in? Well there was a protest in London this last week over that most British of topics, the weather. Extinction Rebellion are blocking the entrance to the science museum over the decision to let the oil company Shell sponsor an exhibit. There is of course a sense of irony in that these same people normally spend their time pleading with the public to listen to the science and trust the science and yet are now actively preventing access to the science.

This is the same style of deeply annoying yet not terribly effective protesting the Fathers For Justice types did a few years ago, I’m waiting for one of them to dress up as Issac Newton and scale the side of the science museum with a banner about how the public don’t understand the ‘gravity’ of the situation, geddit? Instead we’re left with a bunch of left wing student activists and bored housewives throwing paint on buildings, blocking roads and using spurious environmental reasons to attack things they don’t like anyway, like the thought of working class people going on a beach holiday to Spain. Fast food is another target of their wrath and I saw someone on the news complaining about the carbon cost of how McDonalds ships meat from industrial plantations in Latin America - this presumably implies that they’re getting their avocados not from Waitrose but from an allotment in Surrey. It’s very easy to suggest banning gas heating but not all of us have the luxury of spending January at our second home in Tuscany. There is a sense of “do as I say not as I do” that is only really bettered by being told to take personal responsibility by Boris Johnson, father of seven.

But logic and reason play no part in this and it never has. Many in the environmental movement would look at the struggle of Rosa Parks and see it not as a civil rights issue but about someone trying to use a bus that uses petrol, the sort of thing should be banned anyway and replaced with a lane. Perhaps the deafening silence over the human rights abuses in Afghanistan specifically and Asia generally, is due to a solemn respect for people who are following Greta Thunberg’s advice and actively dragging their country back to a pre-industrial way of life. Subsistence agriculture, no air travel, no consumer goods and shanty towns made from recycled materials.

There are people in the UK making lucrative careers out of suing the government over green issues like whether or not schools should serve meat or whether fixing the roads constitutes a hate crime against the planet. I’m waiting until they try to ban Santa Claus because he hands out coal to the naughty kids. It’s all a good example of how those who complain most about society are generally the people that contribute the least to it. I just wish that when it came to Extinction Rebellion they’d get on with the first part of their mission statement

Yet more depressing news this week after the death of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts. Apparently Mick told Keith Richards that there'd be no Charlie on the next tour and Keith asked if smack would still be allowed? For now I guess I'm still working out how many drummers have to die until Ringo becomes the best 60s drummer alive, by default. And in the mean time a brand new hearse has been ordered and they’re waiting for someone to "Paint It Black”

Film aficionados might remember the song Paint It Black from Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrik’s film about Vietnam but when it comes to depressing war stories then this week we’re still talking about the shambles that is the forced withdrawal from Afghanistan. If you need a pick-me-up and ever feel useless, just remember that it took 4 presidents and 20 years and trillions of dollars to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. The situation is a literal definition for missed opportunities, up there with the last season of Game of Thrones or choosing to name that railway HS2 rather than Trainy McTrain Face.

Never mind Game of Thrones, the only TV Show on offer now of course is “I’m an Afghan Translator Get Me Outa Here” as we’ve now reached the ghoulish stage of proceedings where those who helped keep the peace are now the first on the new government’s kill-list. A list that is admittedly shorter than it was last week, although sadly for sickening and avoidable reasons. This is a Kafkaesque situation whereby the beaurocracy that lined the pockets of civilian contractors was left behind, thus providing the Taliban with a state of the art database listing the names, addresses and accomplishments of everyone that helped maintain vaguely western ideals. Ideals like being able to go to school or read Harry Potter listen to the aforementioned Rolling Stones. Ironically they might like some of the Stones' songs, like Street Fighting Man, Sympathy for the Devil or Jumping Jack Flash grenade.

So how are the woke western media covering the story? They hate the army but presumably they also dislike the taliban's views on liberal feminism. Well the Guardian has a story about how female chefs are paid less than men, there’s someone talking about the gender politics in the movie Frozen and apparently Honda’s humanoid robot ASIMO is the colour white because of racism. That’s some real oppression for you isn’t it. There was recently a story about how it is apparently wrong to be helping girls in Afghanistan because doing so maintains a mindset of colonialism and it's referenced as “white saviour complex” The thing is that if I was a 12 yo girl living in the mountains of Afghanistan I’d be pretty keen for a saviour, of any colour white or otherwise, to come and save me round about now. But what would I know, I’m a bloke and I own a car so what do I know. Perhaps those civilians are screaming out of joy, like when Taylor Swift or Justin Timberlake take to the stage. Then Justin Timberlake could sing that song with the line, “Don't be so quick to, walk away” It’s sad that an 18 year old disco song makes more sense than anything coming out the white house.

Whilst I was away on holiday, the US decided to pull out of Afghanistan and the country collapsed faster than Diane Abbott getting into a deck chair. The Taliban are back in charge and they have lots of ideas for what to do with the place, like a much bigger and more violent version of one of those tv home makeover shows. Maybe they'll convert the spare bedroom into an arms depot and in the garden how about a water feature except instead of water it’s the blood of the innocent and the kids tree-house will double up as a gallows because contrary to the media’s suggestion, the place is far from a lawless wild west. Quite the opposite really, say what you want about Taliban the tend to be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", an expression first used by Tony Blair around the time he got the UK involved in the country. It’s just a shame that in that list of ‘causes of crime’ they also tend to include things or “owning a smartphone” or “being a woman” When it comes to the new government's policies I actually misread things and mistakenly thought they were being quite progressive when they said that, like many western countries, that they didn’t want drivers licenses to just have 2 gender options, albeit rather than adding options they want to restrict ownership back to men only.

Anyway, the regime change was quite swift owing to the former Afghan president fleeing the country “to avoid bloodshed.” Presumably his own. He’s currently living it up in the UAE having smuggled $160m out of the country’s treasury. I guess that’s something a lot of people aspire to doing though when they’re fired from a job. As for everybody else trying to flee the country, there were ghastly scenes broadcast on television with images of babies being thrown over barbed wire fences and people dying in the struggle to board what few planes there were. In many respects it reminded me of the last time I flew with Ryanair, albeit there’s not a Wetherspoons in Kabul. On viewing the scenes Harry and Meghan were “left speechless” which made for a pleasant change from their usual torrent of inane touchy feely rubbish.

But thus ends America’s decades long involvement in the country and we can instead welcome in a war-mongering caliphate on side with the Russians and Chinese. Brought not to the world by President Trump but by sleepy Uncle Joe Biden who is senile enough the he probably thinks that Soviet Union is still trying to invade the place. There was an astonishing story about him this week when it was revealed that Osama Bin Laden personally intervened to prevent an attempted assassination attempt on him 10 years ago when he was still Vice President under Obama. This was on the logic that he was so profoundly incompetent that he would be an Al Qaeda asset if he got in the Oval Office. This last week he even gave an interview where he claimed his son had fought in Afghanistan (which he didn’t) and that he was in the Navy (which he wasn’t). That wouldn’t even make sense, the place is a landlocked country. I feel sorry for him really, he’s an elderly man who’s suffered two aneurisms, has a heart condition, clearly has dementia and is being abused by his handlers and the rest of the Democratic part. But we are where we are. Afghanistan will revert to being theocratic hellscape and tens of thousands of people will literally be put to the sword, but at least the cabinet that allowed it all to transpire was diverse. In a couple of months when ghastly footage comes out of girls being whipped to death for the crime of not covering their face. it might look painful but at least nobody’s feelings will be being hurt on Twitter

The UK election about a month away and the chosen date (December 12th) is Frank Sinatra's birthday so depending on the result it will either be a case of "That's Life" or "Send in the Clowns" or perhaps Jeremy Corbyn will win in which case it's a case of "Fly me to the Moon"

But for voters in Buckingham, it's an especially exciting election because local MP and Speaker of the House John Bercow is stepping down so they actually get to vote in his constituency for the first time in a decade. Bercow's resignation is presumably part of the overall Westminster rebuilding that's seeing other forms rot and damage removed from the building. In his place Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the MP for Chorley, is going to be doing the job and please many by promising to bring back the more traditional aspects of the speakers job like the wig, robes, integrity and not being married to someone who sees the job as a way to make money from gossip magazines and the Daily Mail's celebrity sidebar. As for Bercow, I hope that he channels his Napoleon complex and applies for a job as an impersonator on the far and distant island of St Helena.

With a new speaker though, one of the lesser known parts of the handover is that the speaker gets a new scotch whisky made up for serving at the bars in Westminster. I actually got my father one of the Michael Martin bottles years back as a birthday gift and they're exceptionally good quality if you know anyone with access.

It's at this stage that I was going to spend a few minutes reciting some more John Bercow jokes but I'm already fed up with the mention of his name think David Cameron is the king of that skill really. He once told an anecdote about how Simon Burns (Health Minister) had bumped his car into John's. A furious Mr Bercow proceeded to storm out of his apartment shouting, "I'm not happy!" at which point Simon responded "Well, which one are you?"

Oh well, I always think it's important to be able to say at least one good thing about anyone, however bad they are, and so I'll end by saying that at least he's not been allowed to vote on anything this past decade. That's it really, all I can think of out of a decade of demented, delusional attention seeking arrogance.

Perhaps Iran should change its name to Irate because there's trouble afoot in the Strait of Hormuz after 2 oil tankers were attacked this week although I've been out that part of the world and frankly I don't see how a fire could have burned the boat worse than the regular day to day weather.

Anyway, the US has been quick to call out Iran as the mastermind behind it all, which seems a missed opportunity. Call me old fashioned but I would have liked to see the US organise a heads of state summit to discuss it, get everyone to agree to holding it on a train and then make it the Orient Express, heading to the scene of the crime, with a lengthy reveal whereby president Trump eventually reveals that he's solved it. And by solved it I mean not the tanker thing but the overarching regional issues at state, by means of a military strike while everyone was messing around on a 19th century steam train for a month.

Of course in the real world. Iran says it "categorically rejects" US claims of it being hind the attack. Contrast that with the US perspective: that Iran is itching for a fight and it's obvious by the way that it's purposefully placed its country so close to all the American military bases in the region

I could quote some proper news here perhaps, "The blasts in one of the world's busiest oil routes comes a month after four oil tankers were attacked off the United Arab Emirates." but let's skip to the end because really this is all he-said-she-said stuff, a topic fairly familiar to the President at this stage. I will say that if this incident were to quickly escalate into full-scale war, it will only be due to the Prime Minister's resignation and the UKs paralysis that the country avoids getting sucked into World War 3. And wouldn't that be a turn up for the books, Theresa May accidentally becoming the best PM ever.

This week President Trump visited the UK and then headed over to France for the D-Day commemorations, personally I'd have done it the other way around: stock up with wine at the lower French prices before going to the Queen's party - are you expected to bring a bottle when you show up at the palace? Who knows, maybe he'd already bought a 40oz bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label at Duty Free when he was at the airport.

Back to the news, President Trump flew into London for the first part of his trip where the first order of business was to wind up the protestors by popping into a petrol station with his Cadillac which weighs over 6 tons and goes through petrol at an equivalent rate to an oil refinery that's caught fire, that should certainly have annoyed them. He met with the Queen, unquestionably one of the world's most respected stateswomen, as well as Theresa May, who's unlikely to represent Britain overseas in any capacity again unless she goes on I'm A Celebrity in a couple of years. Nobody really knows what chit-chat went on at the state banquet although given that she's going to be kicked out of her house in a little while from now, perhaps she asked him for property advice, given how that's his field of expertise. President Trump is go good at property, he even became a billionaire by losing money!

After the trip to Buckingham Palace, it was on to the south coast, the English Channel and then France for the 75th anniversary D-Day commemorations. It's good to see everyone paying their respects; this weekend for instance it's the UEFA Nations League, Portugal v Netherlands - in other words, none Germany's big guns! A poignant ceremony in France though, I vividly remember during the 50 year commemorations, watching the elderly WW1 veterans and realising that one day soon they would all be gone and the tens of thousands of WW2 veterans would similarly be reduced to just a handful, and so it has come to be. One day in the far and distant future I'll likely open a Sunday newspaper and read an interview with the last living survivor of the Falklands war, before turning to an Editorial about why Vladimir Putin's brain, kept alive in a in a glass jar, shouldn't be allowed to continue running for president in Russia. Oh well, more on that story in a few decades.

Earlier this week I was wondering if Elton John liked Lettuce, then I realised that he was more of a rocket man. Well someone else who likes rockets is Kim Jong Un after satellite images this week revealed that the oversized dictator decided to rebuild the rocket launch site that had previously been destroyed.

Talks between the US and North Korea broke down recently so the communists decided to mark the occasion by rebuilding some rockets which will also almost certainly break down and fall into the sea of Japan.

Specifically reports came out that North Korea's main rocket launch site at Sohae had been rebuilt. However, this is a facility that has only been used for rocket tests, not missile tests and it’s been suggested that perhaps they want to launch a satellite rather than a bomb. But then we live in an age when Elon Musk put a car into space so who knows, watching a list of ongoing space projects has become like the prize conveyer belt on the Generation Game although I guess that reference wouldn't make sense in a country like North Korea where making a fool of yourself using a potters wheel is followed by a visit from the state police rather than humorous facial expressions from either Larry Grayson or Bruce Forsyth depending on how old you are. It's strange isn't it to think that Brucey grew up in an era when North Korea was a bastion of free market capitalism?

I once objected to some Jehovah’s Witnesses building a Kingdom Hall locally because there were bound to be knock on effects. Reddit? But this is a good example of knock on effects in the real world. The US decided that it wouldn’t trade oil with North Korea unless they completely gave up the bomb research and also the slave labour camps. And the knock on effect is that the North Koreans decided to walk away and go back to normal because they think no deal is better than a bad deal. I wonder if there’s some kind of lesson to be learnt there.

There was an especially high level of filler in the news this week, yet more articles about Brexit not to mention a selection of social and environmental stories that are about as newsworthy as if Fiona Bruce hosted a debate over whether to add the milk before or after the teabag. Yet in the mean time the world actually came pretty close to starting World War 3 this week when military tensions between India and Pakistan rose higher than an estimate for Jeff Bezos’ divorce bill.

The way that India and Pakistan were acting, you’d think that one of their cricketers had been tampering with the ball but in actual fact an Indian fighter jet crossed into Pakistan to attack militants who'd killed 40 Indian troops in a suicide attack. That's the official story although I don't personally understand how you kill people who've already been involved in a suicide bombing, at least not successfully. Cut to the chase and Pakistan shot down the jet and detained the pilot, later returning him as the situation was de-escalated. From what I read, India and Pakistan did both asked for Britain's help during the crisis but were disappointed when the UK interpreted this as a request for diplomatic assistance rather than a request for BAE systems to send a boat full of high-tech weaponry to help them settle the issue once and for all. That whole angle is especially confusing as I imagine that Theresa May would frankly jump at the chance to utilise nuclear was as a distraction from events back home.

In the mean time of course, Kashmir remains a fantastic Led Zeppelin track but it's also an unresolved and unending attritional conflict, like sticking a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same room. And certainly while the peaceniks would like both sides to disband their nuclear weapons, the only way that's likely to happen any time soon is if they throw them away attached to the top of an dozen ICBMs. The first two world wars were of course mostly set in Western Europe, unless you watch the US directors cut where there's a bunch of extra scenes set in Japan. But most people expect the 3rd war in the franchise to have a new location, possibly Southern Asia. Except that like most film franchises it's all about the Chinese market and you only need to see the war machines they're building in the South China Sea to see that they've profoundly misunderstood the Hollywood hashtag of #meetoo

There have been a lot of ludicrous scare stories in the press about how Brexit will lead to war, pestilence, the deaths of millions, Jimmy Savile coming back to life, all the iPhones being rounded up and other similarly sensationalist nonsense. To be honest I doubt anything could be worse than the current situation where Tony Blair is given air time and political debate is reduced to discussing how everything from healthcare or the price of a train ticket is as a result of Brexit, or sometimes a conspiracy involving Russia.

Well it seems that Vladimir Putin has been inspired by what he's read online and decided to literally plan for a "nuclear option" - and not the sort of nuclear option that Jeremy Corbyn often talks about, involving a strongly worded letter at a poetry workshop in Hampstead. I'm talking the sort of nuclear option where atomic weapons explode in a radioactive blast and the only people who end up surviving are the poor folk who'd already had to spend nearly an hour stuck on the broken down underground train that ultimately saved them. Be prepared for endless rants on post-apocalyptic Question Time about whether rich pensioners should qualify for the nuclear winter fuel allowance.

This week Russia announced that it's suspended its involvement in the IRNF Treaty designed to prevent weapons research, following moves by America to up its game. In all honesty very little has changed because both countries have been secretly developing new weapons for years anyway. To a large extent the US and Russia have been sitting on weapons systems designed in an era when there were 2 Germanies and vodka only came in one flavour: vodka. The admission from both sides that they're keeping their weapons up to date and not reliant upon punch cards is a bit like when the US was condemned by the left for formally recognising that the Israeli capital might actually be the city whin which the government is located and not Tel Aviv

Nuclear weapons are one of these topics where in the real world it comes down to facts vs feelings and anyone who tries to simplify it down to a good vs bad argument is almost certainly incorrect or attention seeking. But then we already know that thanks to nuclear physics, the world is divided into protons, neutrons, electrons and morons.

This week saw the loss of music legend Aretha Franklin after her final major hit turned out to be morphine. I imagine that she's up there singing, RESPECT while recently deceased Barry Chuckle follows the line "you know what it means to me" with "means to you" Aretha passed away on the 16th which was also the same date that Elvis died and the same date that Pete Best was kicked out of the Beatles, thus loosing out on a lot of money, but at the same time avoiding having to ever spend time with Yoko Ono. Anyway, a great loss to the world of music and so I decided to listen to some Aretha as I drew the cartoon this week, as did my neighbours next door, partly because they too like her music but mostly because I happen to have an insanely loud stereo system and it would be a great shame not to use it once in a while. Lord help the folks down the road when Jimmy Page passes away.

Anyway, once person who came out to pay their regards was President Trump who commented on the business dealings he'd had with her in the days when he was involved in the entertainment industry. I half expected him to follow it up by trying to reach across the racial divide by saying that some of his favourite vinyl records were black. But by that point people were starting to talk about Paul Manaford's trial so the discussion was quickly shifted to that of the much talked about military parade in Washington DC.

The idea for a parade was apparently inspired by a French one through Paris that the president saw. I'm going to be honest, when I think about military forces marching through the streets of Paris, it's not necessarily French troops that spring to mind but Mr Trump insists that the footage was in colour so let's give him the benefit of the doubt. The current estimated bill is $90m which is lot, but it has been nearly 30 years since the last military parade in DC. Anyway, it's now been postponed for a year, officially due to reasons of cost. Unofficially of course though, 2019 would be a better year for it anyway: the 18-month long US election cycle will be kicking into gear then and the president, unable to rely on a despised opponent this time around, might need a jingoistic crowdpleaser to get the country behind him, especially if he can hand the invoice over for congress to deal with.

Two stories this week and just like spellings of the word Colour, one is from the UK and one from America.

Let's first talk about Boris Johnson was embroiled in a row after making comments about women wearing the Burka resembling a postbox, a row possibly inspired by the thought that the next tory leadership election will involve sending out thousands of postal ballots to the party faithful. The comment or joke or hate speech or leadership stump, depending how you view it, attracted support from Mr Bean actor Rowan Atkinson in The Times as well as The Guardian who published the same joke in an opinion piece several years ago, oh wait no, they came out on the side of political correctness this time, rather than feminism. If you want my take on it it's pretty simple to tell the burka and a post box apart: one is for first and second class mail, the other is for second class females across most of the Arab world. There's 200m women out there by the way if anyone wants to take a break from discussing gender pay differences at the BBC to focus on something more substantive.

Next to America though where Donald Trump, satisfied with the progress of his trade war with China decided to expand the scope of his presidential vision by announcing a new Space Force. The move came as a blow to toy manufacturers who've used names like Space Force along with Star Battles or Transformingers to sell knock off 3rd party rubbish to kids down the market. The kind of toy manufacturers who back in the 80s would have sold you a Back To The Future toy that where the DeLorean looked suspiciously like a grey Ford Granada from another toy set. Anyway, back to the Space Force, there's currently a 'choose your favourite logo' website which - this being America - of course leads onto a political donations webpage because frankly the President's 2020 campaign will likely cost more than the actual Space Force will. Alas for most of the fun science fiction imagery, the new branch of the military will most likely be responsible for cataloging boring things like the position of spy satellites and the like. If it does resemble Star Trek in any way, it'll be more like when the fans are arguing about plotholes in intricate detail from their mother's basement. But then I'm more of a Battlestar Gallactica fan myself anyway.

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.

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.

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.

It's the end of December and the end of 2017 and it's possibly the end of the line if you're the sort of person who originally became a politician or a tv celebrity to get close to the young female interns. Of course I'm joking, Kevin Spacey got into show business for the young male interns, he's probably looking forward to 2018 because he thinks there's 2000 of them.

Talking about "end of the line" though, one of the stories I'm sure we'll see a lot more about in the future was this week's announcement that Israel is going to name a new subway station after president Trump. Perhaps the president thought that he'd improve his poll ratings amongst minorities by associating himself with an "Underground Railroad". Either way, at least the new station will give the Israelis somewhere to hide when the bombs start dropping. The bombs of course being those ones that everyone from Dwight Eisenhower to Obama and everyone inbetween has been selling to the region. Asking the US to mediate that peace process is like asking a mousetrap producer to intervene in the battle between Tom and Jerry

But for now, finish off that Christmas port and start planning for 2018. We'll have fresh Brexit news all year as well as the same old stale Brexit news, plus loads more Trump news now that Twitter have interceded and increased the character limit on his tweets. Plus the Russia stuff is going to keep on coming with the regularity of dysentery on a cheap cruise ship. The Fifa World Cup is being hosted by Russia this upcoming summer. I suppose most people wouldn't mind Russia rigging elections if they gave all the voters a Rolex watch and a briefcase full of money like they did with that election to decide which country would host the football tournament. As I'm sure Vladimir Putin has no doubt said many times before though, they've got the world by the balls.

Robert Mugabe's leadership is something that the news organisations seem to refer to as "controversial" which is of course a polite way of saying you'd trust him to manage your economy the way you'd trust Harold Shipman to manage your end of life care. It's like if the newspapers had described the Kray twins as "cheeky chappies" or the BBC were moaning that the ISIS leadership seemed "set in their ways"

Anyway, Mugabe has been in charge of Zimbabwe for decades now, pushing forward with his own form of nationalism which is a self-described version of Marxist-Leninist African socialism. Skip to the end a bit and it roughly translates, unsurprisingly, into money for no-one, murder and famine for everyone. Perhaps that's somewhat harsh, I will admit that he does seem to have spread the poverty and misery in a very egalitarian manner.

In the 1980s Mugabe led the transition of power away from Ian Smiths apartheid regime, then once he was in control he began to run the place a bit like how David Moyes ran Manchester United. Things finally come to a head with a coup led by the military. This largely comes down to the classic succession problem of who becomes the dictator after the current dictator dies, it's why the Roman Emperors ended up spending the 3rd century murdering each other with a pace akin to a bad soap opera.

Robert Mugabe is still revered by many though, especially because he's 93 years old and it's a culture where older gentlemen are very much held in respect. His wife however is a different story, she's more of a Hilary Clinton figure except with more corruption and embezzlement and essentially as I said she's more of a Hilary Clinton figure and the military want to make sure there's eventually a return to proper elections and normal government. So we now have the bizarre situation where Mugabe's in power but not in charge, he's essentially a constitutional monarch, exactly the same as Queen Elizabeth, who he hates. Ain't irony a glorious thing eh?

Another week and it’s pretty much still the same shouting match from Spain. The central government in Madrid has said that it’s going to take back direct control over Catalonia, while the seperatists have declared that they’re going to prepare an imminent motion for independence. But nobody’s actually done anything, it’s like a nightclub bar at 9 o’clock and everyone’s waiting for someone else to go onto the dance floor first. I guess Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood would be the girls standing round a handbag, knocking back Sambucas before eventually being thrown out for attacking Theresa May with a stilleto shoe, possibly in response to changes to the benefit system, possibly because she was looking at them funny, or possibly just because it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and they don’t like the English. Back to Spain though, they love football, so in the absence of any proper developments maybe a better analogy for both sides in the conflict is: “take a shot at goal or pass the ball”

Also in the news this week though has been the release of 2800 previously classified files on the Kennedy assassination. And around 30,000 files will remain secret because presumably it’s an open and shut case and the CIA don’t want have to waste anyone’s time. I could waffle on about the various conspiracy theories but frankly I’d rather outsource that to the part of the internet that isn’t x-rated videos or Instagram pictures of cats. It has been 54 years since the “lone gunman assassination” or “deep state coup” - depending on where you stand on the issue - and 54 years is almost the same amount of time, as there is YouTube content about the events of Dealey Plaza back in 1963. Lest to say I’d trust a promise from Nick Clegg from before I believe the the contents of the Warren Commission but for now let’s all agree to disagree until we actually get to see what it is that the CIA are so desperate to never let us read.

Rather than focus on one main news story, this week we saw the launch of 4 new things so I thought we’d go through each of them one at a time:

Starting with #1, the Bank of England started handing out the new £10 note. Some journalists and campaigners were keen to point out that it’s first note produced in a while with a lady on it, while more observant commentators took the time to flip it over and look at the other side of the note where the Queen’s been sitting for the past 6 decades. But let’s just for once celebrate the sight of banknotes being rolled out in the city, rather than rolled up, into little tubes on a Friday night

Moving on, if you’re lucky enough to have hundreds of those new notes on you, you can get yourself the new iPhone. I was hoping they’d finally roll out changing the name of the phone’s charger to the “Apple Juice” but they basically brought out one the same thing as before but it’s got a better camera, a bigger screen and a price high point high enough that it puts the US debt ceiling debate into perspective.

Less glamorously we also go the launch of the Grenfell Tower enquiry. The iPhone costs hundreds of times more than a ten pound note and this public enquiry will no doubt cost tens of thousands of times more than the expensive iPhone. There’s been a lot of angry debate about what the scope of the enquiry should be, should it be limited to health and safety, public housing generally, the potential prosecution of ministers etc. In a unique twist of events though, it’s the first enquiry in a while where nobody’d been angrily demanding that the scope should be broadened to consider whether Tony Blair should be prosecuted for war crimes, so a first time for everything I guess…

Finally, as we’re talking about launches, you can’t mention the word “launch” without the words “North” and “Korea” not long behind it. There’s been a lot of differing opinions from various sections of the press about what’s going to happen with Kim Jong-Un and WW3. Never a newspaper to shy away from conspiracies, the Daily Express went with an article about how biblical prophecy and the dimensions of the Pyramids at Giza have calculated that the rapture is scheduled for the 23rd this month, so presumably if you want to visit the US or Northern Asia you might want to get a cheap flight in the next few days before it goes up in flames like the comment section on a Guardian article about Brexit.

It’s possibly just days until Doomsday and it’s a face-off between Trump and North Korea with everything on the line! It’s a standoff like in a card game in a James Bond film, except that in a bizarre twist, Sean Connery’s wig is the most realistic hairpiece present at the card game.

But back to the latest threat, this time to nuke the remote US territory of Guam. They say that they want to create hell in the Pacific and I think that’s dreadful because Lee Marvin starred in a move called “Hell in the Pacific” and it was amazing and I don’t want to bring his good name into disrepute. But cut to the chase, essentially it’s a scary time to live in Guam and I like World War 2 movies the same way that Radio 4 likes liberal sociology professors.

Of course it’s not just Guam, If you live in North Korea it’s a pretty scary time too, albeit for entirely domestic reasons. Here’s a great North Korean joke for y’all: Why did they chicken cross the road? And the answer is: he didn’t. There are no chickens. The government ate all the chickens and soon you will be forced to die in a war procreated by the apparatus of the state.

Yeah I know, it loses something in translation I suppose. Say what you will about American foreign policy, at least it’s country that gave us folk like Louis CK, Seinfeld, Richard Pryor Chris Rock and Tina Fey, not to mention Al Gore and his latest film, go see it, it’s hilarious, I’m joking of course.

North Korea is very much like a petulant attention seeking child and this week they got annoyed that we’d been paying too much attention to the other children, I mean countries, mostly the rolling human tragedy unfolding in Venezuela. Of course, if North Korea was a badly behaved child in the back of a car I suppose they might have shouted some swear words, but that’s more of an Anthony Scaramucci thing. He was sacked this week, forced to go after just 10 days, I’ve had milk that lasted longer than some of the people in the White House.

But back to North Korea, they’re not actually a metaphorical child, they’re a dangerous country with a military and a missile programme so they decided to tell the world that they’re soon going to be able to launch a nuclear weapon at New York. And that’s pretty worrying because, as the song says: if you you can make it there you can make it anywhere. Let’s just hope that the US responds to the threat in a calm and rational way. With regards to that economic collapse I mentioned underway in Venezuela, President Trump has decided to throw, economic sanctions in the ring so who knows. Perhaps China will be cajoled into dealing with it in exchange for Trump hotel loyalty points or something.

Of course, I should add that none of this really matters in the real world because I just looked at the BBCs front page and they’re actually leading with a different news story about making washing machines marginally more eco-friendly. Top investigative journalism there chaps. The Daily Mail in contrast is leading with photos of Cristiano Ronaldo's pregnant wife and the Daily Sport is, well it’s not family friendly really so I’ll stop here why not.

The opposition benches have been very keen to demand more public spending but it’s not as if Theresa’s not meeting them half way. She’s already pledged an extra £1bn worth of public spending, albeit heading for Northern Ireland as part of the cost of keeping the government in power. At £100m each, The DUP MPs are costing the same as top premier league footballers; ironically the last great premiere league footballer from Northern Ireland was George Best & he’d probably feel very much at home in the house of commons with its subsidised bars. The way I look at it really is that Mrs May spent £1bn to live on Downing Street but in the context of the London property market, that’s nothing too out of the ordinary.

But for a reminder of what proper government spending or waste looks like, let’s take in the glorious sight of the new white elephant Aircraft carrier HMS Elizabeth which we got a look at this week. That was Gordon Brown that signed off on that one, £6bn and rising so far. Plus more if the pound goes down further against the dollar. Plus we’re going to have to buy fighter jets to put on it. Those would be the F35s and those who’ve been following the development of that other money pit will likely have ideas about what the F stands for. In a show of technical prowess it turns out that the boat runs on Windows XP and given how behind schedule it’s all been, I wouldn’t be surprised if the rooms inside were kitted out by Carole Smiley and Handy Andy. Given government incompetence, it frankly wouldn’t surprise me if the hull turned out to be covered in Grenfell Tower cladding. But in the mean time if it doesn’t work or if the F35s never arrive, I suppose we can just park it in the Thames Estuary and ask Boris to advertise it as a small regional airport.

Last week President Trump decided to try out his new toys by launching a strike at Syria to show Assad that he’s the boss. This week, Syria’s already fixed the holes in the runway, presumably using some kind of secret military technology that is unavailable to the pothole division at my local council. The problem with the Syrian conflict is that it’s essentially the Assad Regime vs ISIS so if you want to do anything, it means you really have to state which of those two sides you support. It’s as if you’re a bouncer backstage in the green room and a fight breaks out between Bill Cosby and Justin Bieber and you think you should probably step in. Except that actually, you’re not a bouncer, you’re a the hot-tempered owner of the largest army in the world and Russia’s piling billions of dollars of military hardware into that fight in a place where the ground is quite literally made of petrol because it’s the Middle East. And that scenario is ludicrous anyway, Bill Cosby can’t get a television gig these days for love nor money.

While this was happening, there yet another 2 terror attacks, in Sweden and Germany. And the US is, as we speak, manoeuvring an aircraft carrier towards North Korea so that should end well. North Korea is of course the place where socialism grows but nothing comes out apart from tales of human misery. Very much like a dinner party at Ed Miliband’s house I suppose.

Where then in all of this is that Beacon – that guiding light – of liberal democracy, the British Parliament? Well, right now it’s on recess for Easter and I’m sure the cabinet are all observing that religious moment of thought by getting stuck into some chocolate and gorging themselves. How very Christian.

Last year the Remain campaign came out with some ludicrously over-exaggerated claims about what Brexit would mean: 3 million jobs lost, huge tax rises as well as the Islington branch of Waitrose having replace all the artisan Polenta dip with lard or whatever it is that Nick Clegg thinks poor people eat. However, now that Brexit is happening, they’ve decided to double down those stories and the latest claims is that a full scale military war with Spain is coming our way. I imagine that if it were to happen then thanks to cuts in the defence budget it may well end up being settled by a drunken brawl outside a nightclub on the Balearic islands; I don’t know what’s worse really, a shot from a G36 assault rifle or a Club 18-30 quadruple shot of cheap ouzo drunk out of a shoe. The whole thing is utterly bonkers though, even General Franco didn’t try invading Gibraltar and he kinda had a thing for starting wars in Spain.

And talking about Fascists, this week Ken Livingstone came out of his house again and again and again to talk about Hitler and he was subsequently suspended for calling the Labour party into disrepute. The historical point he was claiming is at best dubious but the thing to take away really is that apparently you can be suspended or expelled from Labour if you say things that make the party look unprofessional or disreputable, which I suppose would at least explain why the leadership have kept their mouths shut when asked about policy or what they think about Brexit.

Anyway, for now, if we get drafted into a war with Spain, I’ll see you on the beach, mine’s a pint of San Miguel and otherwise see you next week!