Peter Rhodes on a songbird, a strange old lady - and who's brave enough to slap the handcuffs on Putin?
Quietly forgotten by us all in the haggling over Ukraine is the awkward fact that two years ago, in March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC), following an investigation of war crimes, issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and other Russians for crimes of unlawful deportation and transfer of children during the war.
And what that means under international law is that if Putin leaves Russia and arrives in any of the 125 countries which recognise the ICC, he could be instantly arrested and shipped off to the Hague for trial. Excellent, right? Now, the tricky bit.
How would the average chief of police in one of those 125 countries react to the news that Putin was about to land at his local airport? Give all his officers 24-hour leave, perhaps? This may seem rather unprincipled but it greatly reduces the police chief's chances, at some time in the future. of falling out of a window.
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer and his “coalition of the willing” (willing to do what?) reckons it could raise a peacekeeping force of more than 10,000 troops to monitor the front line between Russia and Ukraine and report any outbreaks of fighting. To put this in context, the border between the two warring states is about 1,400 miles, which works out at about one squaddie every 250 yards. Good luck with that, lads.
Auntie Beeb is a strange old lady. Some nights she pushes the boundaries of common decency so far that her TV dramas have to be preceded with warnings of offensive language. But other times she is as meek and prudish as a maiden aunt.
Take Sunday's Tweet of the Day (Radio 4) which introduced us to that chirpy little bird, the wheatear. What it didn't tell us is how the wheatear, which has a distinctive white rump, got its name. This came about when some sensitive Victorians agreed that the old folk name for the bird was unsuitable for polite conversation. As a dictionary tells us: “Its English name has nothing to do with wheat or with ear, but is an altered (perhaps bowdlerised) form of white-arse.”
See, Auntie? The sky has not fallen in.
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