The political classes don t like this sort of thing. There s too much raw emotion involved. Like nervous prefects, they dismissed Davis as vain, egotistical, narcissistic and irresponsible. He was, said one commentator of my acquaintance, suffering from a mid-life crisis and probably knew he didn t have the brains to be Home Secretary, which is why he had bailed out.

That very much captures what is wrong with the Westminster village, which is so consumed with the talk of power, the jockeying for power, the acquisition and loss of it, that there is very little space left in the minds of journalists and politicians for principles and ideas. Yet that was what so much of last week in the House of Commons was about. Let us not forget that the Prime Minister won 42 days pre-charge detention by buying votes from nine hard-faced men from Northern Ireland, while 36 members of his own party stood up for the fundamental freedoms of our country. This was a moral defeat, not for Labour, but for Gordon Brown.
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But when you think of the magnificence of the gesture - in Cyrano's word, the panache - the wonderful departure from the norms of Westminster and the fatalistic reductions of the political classes, your support flies to him. Here was a man who threw dignity and prospects to the wind in order to defend 'the relentless erosion of fundamental freedoms'. After all, he said, what are MPs there for if not to protect Magna Carta?

Coincidentally, as he was saying this, Senator Barack Obama issued a statement welcoming the Supreme Court's rejection of the legal black hole at Guantanámo 'as re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus'.

Davis is right for the same reasons as Obama is, and many on the Labour benches who voted for the measure will eventually realise that.

Henry Porter: A magnificent gesture that we must support | Politics | The Observer

When a battle-weary David Davis got off the train home on Friday night, the condemnation of his colleagues ringing in his ears, he headed to his local pub for solace. His aides were waiting, with a sheaf of emails they stuffed straight into his hands.

They came from excited Tory activists, life-long Labour voters, ordinary people who had never written to politicians before: there was an offer of help from a Lib Dem constituency chairman and pledges of cash from pensioners. But one, he admits, gave him a lump in the throat : it was from a woman who worked on a local government project to encourage the alienated and unfranchised to vote. What he had done, she wrote, would make my job so much easier .

Suddenly, Labour is not laughing at David Davis | Politics | The Observer

The chief executive of the world's largest energy company has issued the most dire warning yet about the soaring the price of oil, predicting that it will hit $250 per barrel "in the foreseeable future".

The forecast from Alexey Miller, the head of the Kremlin-owned gas giant Gazprom, would herald the arrival of �2-per-litre petrol and send shockwaves through the economy. His comments were the most stark to be expressed by an industry executive and come just days after the oil price registered its largest-ever single-day spike, hitting $139.12 per barrel last week amid fears that the world's faltering supply will be unable to keep up with demand.

An ominous warning that the rapid rise in oil prices has only just begun - Home News, UK - The Independent

Question: What do America’s premier investor, Warren Buffett, and Iran’s toxic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have in common? Answer: They’ve both made a bet about Israel’s future.

Op-Ed Columnist - Thomas L. Friedman - Buffett and Ahmadinejad Bet on Israel’s Future - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Of the 564 members of the assembly present for the vote, only four voted to keep the monarchy.

The group met all day in a convention center to reach the agreement and even continued to work after the facility was bombed.

Two apparent bombs damaged the building about 8:20 p.m. local time, said a CNN journalist covering the meetings.

There were no reports of injuries, and the group was back working within 10 minutes of the blasts.

Even though the meeting went late into the evening, a small procession of people could be seen celebrating outside the convention center when the news of political transition was announced.

There was no immediate reaction from the palace, which has rarely commented on political developments in Nepal since King Gyanendra was forced to end his royal dictatorship and restore democracy after widespread protests two years ago.

The country's former rebels, the Maoists, then ended their 10-year communist insurgency and in April won the most seats in the assembly, setting the stage for the end of Nepal's monarchy.

Wow. Three years ago I thought of crossing over into Nepal from India, and the Maoists and the King were killing people. Now the Maoists are elected to run the government. Democracy in action.

Nepal abolishes monarchy - CNN.com

In the aftermath of the great Sichuan earthquake, we’ve seen a hopeful glimpse of China’s future: a more open and self-confident nation, and maybe — just maybe — the birth of grass-roots politics here.

Earthquake and Hope - New York Times

Ministers are to consider plans for a database of electronic information holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK, it has emerged.

I swear it's a game of who can come up with the most Orwellian proposal

maybe if we shoot everybody then there won't be any crime or any terrorists!!!

BBC NEWS | UK | Phone calls database considered

For Americans, what is happening each night in the French channel port of Calais is poignantly and shamefully familiar. As Caroline Brothers reported in The Times recently, clusters of poor people wait for darkness and a high-risk chance to crawl inside or beneath a truck to cross to a country that needs and welcomes their labor but refuses to legally recognize their presence.

Shame in Calais - New York Times

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran made another blustering claim this week: that his scientists are tripling the size of their nuclear fuel program. The fact that it made barely a diplomatic ripple is another reminder that the major powers are adrift on one of the major security challenges of the day.

As Iran works on its bomb, the world drifts - International Herald Tribune

A vast hunk of floating ice has broken away from the Antarctic peninsula, threatening the collapse of a much larger ice shelf behind it, in a development that has shocked climate scientists.
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"I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. We predicted it would happen, but it's happened twice as fast as we predicted."

Giant Antarctic ice shelf breaks into the sea | Environment | guardian.co.uk