I have been working in these last few days and weeks on a couple of documentaries. The most important of which is a shocking film showing alleged war crimes in the Sri Lankan civil war.
It will be going out at 11pm on 14th June on Channel 4, and was shown to the UN Human Rights Commission on Friday.
So I wake up this morning ready to focus on another news day and suddenly think what a strange mix of matter swirls around our world.
On Saturday I had to dash to the Hay Festival – not an easy dash as anyone who has been will know. I did an onstage interview with Mohammed El Baradei on a video link from Cairo – he ran the IAEA nuclear watchdog in Vienna during the build up to the Iraq War – and he talked about endless US interference with his work. I also interviewed Rolf Heuer – an inspirational German particle physicist who runs the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the Swiss/French border near Geneva.
He never let on, in our fascinating dialogue, that he would today announce that the collider has scored a huge success in capturing and holding “anti-matter” for some sixteen minutes. I’m not even going to try to begin to talk about it here, but I concluded when I spoke to him, that the work of his team at CERN in unravelling the history of the universe will have a profound impact on the future survival of us all. So today’s breakthrough is positive and significant. So that’s the good news.
The bad news is more or less everywhere else. Gathering storm clouds over the UK economy. The appalling killing of Syrian demonstrators on the Israeli border on the disputed Golan Heights. The continuing slaughter of protesters inside Syria and the chaos in Yemen.
And the strange manoeuvrings of the Chinese navy in the South China Sea. Actually it may be worse than that. China’s Defence Minister says his country is pursuing “peaceful development”. But protesters in two Vietnamese cities this weekend argued otherwise. They accuse the Chinese of attacking a Vietnamese oil exploration boat. And China and the Philippines are at loggerheads over an atoll upon whose beaches both nations have been trying to unload oil drilling materials.
It won’t be the lead story tonight, but I’m beginning to think that this year in our world is one of the most challenging and potentially unstable in many years. So much happening – so little time to report it!
Follow Jon Snow on Twitter: @jonsnowC4
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