amazing images i have seen in the history of modern royalty. a choir on the deck in the pouring rain, one of the great choirs. one of the great orchestras singing royal britannia. let s listen to this. [ horning horns honking ] you are watching live pictures of the culmination of a remarkable 90 minutes, the queen s diamond jubilee here in london t is pouring with rain it has been horrendously cold, but nothing has dampened the spirits of the occasion. it has really been something incredibly special and you see her majesty, the queen there a fitting image with a large umbrella, leaving the royal barge, followed by her long-supportive husband, prince philip, other senior members of the royal family. they have had an incredible afternoon, pretty well incident-free and i think everyone has had a cracking time and there will be people all over the world watching this thinking you brits are completely mad. and you know what, we are. so, we are proud of it and we are pa
which appears to hope that syria s president assad will negotiate his own departure, seems utterly doomed. instead, america, the western world, indeed, the civilized world should attempt to dislodge the assad regime. but is there a smart way to do it? for a number of reasons military intervention is unlikely to work well in syria. unlike in, say, libya, syria is not a vast country with huge stretches of land where rebels can retreat, hide, and be resupplied. syria is roughly one-tenth the size of libya, but with three times as many people. perhaps for this reason the syrian rebels have not been able to take control of any significant part of that country. the geopolitics of military intervention are also unattractive. in egypt and even in libya all major regional powers, world powers were on the side of dislodging the regime or at least passively accepting that it would happen. in syria that s not the case. iran and russia have both maintained strong ties to the assad regime,