The New York Times rarely lets humour intrude on its grey news pages, but the report from Mexico City on Rudy Giuliani’s crimefighting consultancy is a wonderful exception.
“The causes of crime in Mexico City have been studied to death and are known to one and all: poverty, inequality, judges who should wear masks instead of robes, police officers who make less than garbagemen and have the morals of mobsters. The police make as little as $250 a month; Mr. Giuliani’s fee would pay more than 1,400 of those starting salaries for a year.”
I disagree with most of what Iain Murray writes, but it seems extraordinarily wrong to me that he has lost his job because of writing a weblog.
This article from The Guardian made me stop mid-chew over breakfast this morning. “Scientists based in France have warned that, without radical and swift action, in 10 years’ time we really could have no bananas.”
The New York Times reports on some of the security measures being taken for next week’s Davos meeting. “In one of the tightest security moves in Switzerland’s history, the government has authorized spending a record $2.3 million to protect the more than 1,000 corporate chiefs, 250 political leaders, 200 media executives and 200 prominent social activists expected to attend the annual meeting in Davos, a fashionable ski village in the Swiss Alps.”
What’s new is not particularly the money or the deployment of forces (the Swiss government admit that they spent $2.1 million in 2001). It’s the tone of the government spokesperson. Livio Zanolari is paraphrased in the Times as saying that, “considering the economic advantages the forum brings to the region and to the country, it is money well spent”. Before the Forum went to New York last year, the Swiss government had to be dragged kicking and screaming (writing figuratively) to spend a single franc and deploy a single soldier.