Law & Order: SVU.

Last night in the US a very special episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU) was broadcast. The story centred around a young, black, female pop star who was viciously assaulted by her young, black, male popstar boyfriend. Despite this and ignoring everybody's advice the woman kept returning to the man time and time again. Although the episode along with all the others carried the disclaimer about the events being purely fictional you can't help but feel that this was somehow inspired by the Rihanna and Chris Brown story. Obviously we won't get to see this episode in the UK for another 18 months to 2 years and even then I may not watch it. After all we all know how the story ends.

While from personal experience I know that it's never a great feeling when aspects of your life form the perfect basis for stories about the most heinous crimes committed in New York City I feel I should mention this. That's because it perfectly underlines my point that for people who work around these sort of things there is nothing complicated or mysterious about Rihanna and Chris Brown's reunion. In fact you could go so far to say it's just another day at the office which itself raises serious questions about the conduct of Chris Browns probation officer.

On a completely related note France has announced that it won't even be attempting to put together a United Nations (UN) force for Mali until April 2013 at the earliest. Even with immediate adoption it will be a minimum of two further months before that force is ready for action. That date can of course slip back even further if by some miracle Chris Brown isn't indicted on multiple counts of perverting the course of justice, fraud etc come April 5th (5/4/13). That would put the Mali conflict at serious risk of the fall of colliding with the very messy fall of the Assad government in Syria.

So I think I should point out that we're not talking about fitting Brown up for some crime for the sake of international diplomacy. Instead we're talking about removing the protection that has so far prevented Brown being prosecuted for crimes he has already committed.


14:15 on 28/2/13.