Yalta and Syria....the big bear still growls

I'm currently reading the final volumes of Winston Churchill's History of the Second World War, and how he, Stalin and Roosevelt set up the tentative agreement that the United Nations would preside over future world safety - but that any initiative by the council to invade a country would have the power of veto by any one of "the big five": the US, the UK, France, and (later) China. And of course, Russia.

This uneasy agreement still has its ructions today, with Vladimir Putin vetoing any intervention by the UN into Syria. Where innocent Poles suffered under Stalin, so innocent Syrians are suffering under Putin's Russian-supplied chemical weapons.

The last Frost report

In Roman times it became the tendency to execute messengers of bad news. Such a thing would never have happened to David Frost, who became as valuable to the news as the news itself.

Not just the reporting of it, but also the observance, and the comment. The satire boom on television owes a huge debt to him. It is also testament to his career that films and dramas such as Frost/Nixon were made about him. But Sir David had his own cinema career too. In The V.I.P.s  in 1962 he cheerfully stalks Orson Welles's film director (vaguely based on Orson Welles himself.)