As Obama’s man David Axelrod put it, “Instead of ‘Super Tuesday’ it became ‘Super Glue Day’ for them”. After the rush of primaries in ten states across America came to an end, the results show that Mitt Romney has done enough to keep the chasing pack at bay, but has not completely lost them in his rear view mirror. Romney came away with a total of 415 delegates; Santorum proportionally keeping in tow with 176 .

The Kansas caucuses on Saturday played into the hands of the more conservative Santorum, boosting his delegate count to 217.  Attention has now turned to the next big prize – a winner-takes-all in California on June 5. In order for Romney to secure the nomination by then, he would need to acquire a 60% share of the remaining delegates up for grabs between now and then. This would require a better performance than the one witnessed on Super Tuesday, in which he grabbed nearer 50%.

Furthermore, the upcoming states of Mississippi and Alabama are southern, conservative states likely to play into the hands of Gingrich and Santorum.

On the other side of the sandwich of possibilities, in order for second place man Santorum to win the nomination he will need over 50% of the remaining delegates between now and the convention, and 15% above and beyond the average polling level he has been scoring during his best stretch of the campaign.

Such figures suggest that Romney will inevitably achieve the nomination, but with the contest being drawn out until the very end, unless the chasing pack unify around a single anti-Romney candidate who may be able to command the majority of future delegates. At present this looks like Santorum, although Gingrich may strike back with his plans in the Southern states to place himself in a bargaining position with Santorum.

What is for sure is that if a candidate drops out, the rules are complex in regards to who their delegates then pledge their votes to. These calculations depend on party rules, which vary on a state-by-state basis. Some redistribute the votes amongst the remaining candidates evenly, and others release their delegates from any pledge, giving them the freedom to vote for who they want. Often, these ‘freed’ delegates end up voting for the contender who wins their retired candidate’s endorsement.

It remains to be seen whether any chasing candidate can build up a bloc of delegates to muscle the nomination. Much depends on these delegates’ perceptions of how Santorum and Gingrich perform in the upcoming contests. Once again, the election has become a case of wait and see.

If you believe the American media, Mitt Romney should have had this wrapped up by now. With 123 delegates, he has just short of half of the total number available from states declared so far. This is a far larger lead than that enjoyed by the frontrunner in 2008. John McCain had 95 projected at this stage, with second place Romney at 83.

Today, the question is: what is different this time round? Second place is virtually tied – Gringrich (45), Santorum (44) and Paul (37). There is no-one who directly threatens Romney’s front-runner status. However, there is deep distrust of Romney amongst conservatives . Other serious candidates are not backing down. They are all fighting each other to try and clamber up the ladder to a successful party nomination. Republicans have been murmuring whether a new candidate is needed to rescue them.

Romney is their centrist candidate, which may be difficult for us on this side of the pond to believe. The others have no hope of challenging Obama, not only because they are even further away from the centre ground than Romney, but also because their continuous posturing to differentiate themselves from each other is turning into a freak show. This helps the Democrats tremendously, as whoever emerges victorious from the Republican Royal Rumble will be ‘damaged goods’ in the public eye.

There is no alternative to Romney that will be accepted because the party itself is splintering. The only candidate who is taking action to counteract this fracture is Ron Paul, who has subtly shifted his campaigning away from the front-runner, towards contender-of-the-week Santorum. This not only strengthens Romney by encouraging infighting among the trailing pack, but since the negative campaigning originates from Paul, it forces Santorum to draw his resources away from Romney in the effort to defend himself. Paul is in good shape, raising $4.5 million in January, and he is on track to outperform the competition in the last quarter of 2011. Will we see Ron Paul at the Treasury or even Vice President? We know for certain it won’t be in the State Department.

Santorum by comparison does not have a great deal of financial resources, and such distractions from Paul could be fatal to his nomination hopes. While all this is going on, Gingrich is raising more capital than Romney, and I expect Gingrich to make a charge in the near future.

Last time round Romney dropped out of the race after ‘Super Tuesday’, a day in which a number of states ran caucuses and primaries simultaneously. He won his home state Michigan over McCain, so doing so again is the very least he needs to do to have any hope of preventing this selection process turning into utter chaos.

The furore over a Syrian resolution in the United Nations has been swept up into a battle over vetoes laid down by Russia and China.

Naturally I’m upset at the developments in Syria over the past year, especially having spent some time in Syria a few years ago as a student at the University of Damascus, and experiencing so much of what the great people of this country have to offer the world. Despite this, the media coverage, as with Libya, has been far from  impartial, and now they have gone a step too far in painting Russia and China as pariah states with the use of their vetoes.

What has been overlooked is that the vote was forced to take place, with Russian UN Ambassador saying “the work we have been doing in the Security Council has not been finalised.” The Telegraph reports that the west miscalculated and forced the vote in the belief that Russia was playing for time, and would not veto it without their proposed amendments. Their amendments placed demands on the ‘insurgents’ similar to those imposed on the Syrian regime. They fear that explicitly supporting the uprising would amount to regime change, like that experienced in Libya. Russia and China’s concern seems to be not whether it is best for Assad to go or not, but whether that is a question that the United Nations can answer at all. Russia believes that changing the balance of the national dialogue amounts to domestic interference. This seems fairly reasonable. Both sides have argued that the other’s proposals do not reflect the reality of the situation in Syria. We don’t really have a clear impartial picture of what is happening inside the country, and the UN would be wise to deliberate more carefully before passing any resolution.

Interestingly, there is another major player in the United Nations that also strongly supports the need for resolutions to be based on impartial observations– The United States of America. In 2002, the United States announced that it will not back any Security Council resolution against Israel that did not include a condemnation of the ‘terrorist’ groups hostile to that state. This position has become formalised over the years, and is now referred to as the Negroponte doctrine. This was last used in 2011, and in this instance the United States vetoed against all other members of the Security Council. Was this not an even greater act of defiance towards the international community than that being displayed today by Russia and China?

Every call for the events in Syria to be treated impartially, should be matched by a call for events in Israel to be treated similarly. For every interest in Tartusthere is a Bahrain. I really do fear that the media coverage here in the ‘free world’  is encouraging ‘tunnel vision’ and crude simplifications of the complex world of international relations. For that we all lose, as it makes a mockery of the public, which leads to a cheapening of politics. Before we know it, politicians are forced to take a stance because of a national psyche – like America to Israel, Argentina to the Falklands, Russia to its neighbours. Then the cycle tragically begins again.

Two weeks, and two primaries later, we’ve seen dynamics of the GOP nomination race violently flip flop from Romney, to Gingrich and back, getting more polarised as the campaign progresses.

Gingrich took a decisive lead with South Carolina, returning four times the slice of the pie he achieved in New Hampshire. This week Romney reversed that with a win in Florida. What is clear is that this is fast becoming a two horse race. Both Sanctorum and Paul have been left to fend in a second division. This is ultimately good for the Republican

Party in that the debate will help establish a clear leadership candidate.

Returning briefly to my previous entry, in South Carolina, the predicted Colbert protest vote through campaign surrogate Herman Cain, registered only 1.1%, with 6,326 votes. This was enough to be classified in the results, which is an achievement in itself. After the suspense of the build up to the vote, Colbert’s fictional exploratory committee was hastily dismantled after accomplishing its goal to raise awareness of the bizarre role of the Super PACs.

Florida also gave some insight to the politics within the Republican party itself. The state party voted to pull their primary forward, aiming to benefit from an early influence in the race. The idea was to bank more revenue from advertising, with the hunch that this race was going to come down to momentum of the candidates rather than counting individual votes at the national convention. The state paid a price with this rebellion to party line, with the national party wiping out half of the states delegates at the national convention. This is just short of the total number of delegates of Iowa and South Carolina combined. What would you think if you were an ordinary Republican from the sunshine state?

This penalty resulted – by state party regulation – to Florida keeping a winner-takes-all delegate allocation, which again broke national party rules regarded holding winner-takes-all prior to April 1. In response, all the national party could muster is to give the Florida delegates, inconvenient hotels, and the worse seats at come the national convention – which will be held in Florida. I kid you not. Gingrich announced he is appealing this decision, but it’s not the hotel or the seats he cares about.

I am starting to see faint comparisons with the last Labour leadership election. Here, as in then there are two leading candidates, one has popularity with core grass roots, while other is criticised to be too far towards the centre, but is seen by many as more electable chief executive. It will be interesting to see which way they will choose.

We’ve seen intriguing developments in the past week concerning the greatest non-candidate of the Republican presidential primaries, satirist Stephen Cobert.

Real-life Democrat Cobert, host of fake right-wing news show ‘The Cobert Report’, has been poking fun at federal laws concerning the funding of political campaigns.

While donations to candidates’ campaigns are regulated, two recent federal rulings have encouraged the rise of the so-called ‘Super Political Action Committees’ or ‘Super PACs’. These allow corporations to raise unlimited funds to campaign in support of a candidate- without the need for there to be regulated coordination between the actions of the ‘Super PACs’ and those of the official campaign itself.

What may seem bizarre to the British is that this ‘freedom’ stems from a 19^thcentury ruling of the Supreme Court which counts corporations as individuals in terms of freedom of expression. The ruling prohibits infringement on their ‘free speech.’ The power of corporations over elections was further reinforced in a 1976 ruling, which formally equated money with ‘free speech’.

Last week a poll in South Carolina placed Cobert at five percent, ahead of major candidate Jon Huntsman who subsequently dropped out of the running at the weekend. This led to Cobert’s announcement that he was exploring entering the race in South Carolina, placing his own ‘Super PAC’ into the hands of fellow satirist- and ‘Daily Show’ host- John Stewart.

This ‘Super PAC’ has already launched TV adverts in South Carolina portraying race leader Mitt Romney as a serial killer. This mocks the notion of corporations equalling people in terms of freedom of speech, using Romney’s career as a successful management consultant (where he liquidated troubled companies) to illustrate the point.

With no option in South Carolina to write-in names on the ballot, on Monday Cobert called for those who support him to place a vote for ex-contender Herman Cain who is ironically still on the ballot paper.

With wild media coverage of the faux possible candidacy, comes the real possibility of a ‘Cobert Effect’. There is speculation that Cobert could hurt libertarian Ron Paul due to their mutual appeal to younger independent voters.

We’ll just have to see if a protest vote materialises this Saturday.

This post had been sitting in draft format for over a year, but never the less it’s ever topical. After conducting the research in 2010, I opted to spend two weeks out in Beijing, on the joint summer school between the London School of Economics, and Peking University, studying a mid-level undergraduate course on Multinational Business Finance. My reasons were:

1. Topic - Related directly to my immediate career, and as such received funding.
2. Intensity - Two weeks. That’s less holiday spent than many other courses, and also a week less than the LSE’s London summer school despite the courses being of the same number of hours.Travel – I got to travel to China, and experience the Asian dragon first hand.
3. Prestige - Both the LSE and Peking University are leading institutions globally.
4. Price - Coupling socialist Europe and communist China means that two week course was cheaper than even the London three week summer school and cheaper than the majority of summer schools.

I want to confirm that is was an excellent experience, and one I would definitely consider doing again, and there were a surprising number of professionals as well as students.

For 2011, I decided to stay in local with the LSE’s London summer school, although I had been seriously considering Utrecht’s offerings. LSE-Peking this year, have now entirely shifted to very niche China specific subjects, removing the mix of more general theoretical courses with China as a case study as with 2010.

So, lets begin the review for 2011.

London School of Economics

LSE runs four different summer schools. The courses focus on economics, finance, management and other social sciences. These courses are all intense. Compared to 2010, prices have crept higher.

The first is the London summer school. This is divided into two sessions of three weeks, where a student is able to study for one module. Modules are the same as a standard  UK university module, or an the LSE half-module (7.5 ECTS).  The cost of which is approximately £1300 for students and £1725 for everyone else (one session), with additional bonus of accommodation being free if you’re in London like myself. 10% discount available for summer school, LSE students and alumni (and I even received this as an external student).

The second is the Executive summer school, designed to provide very specific training for professionals, again in London. There are two sessions lasting one week but do have the added advantage of a good networking occasion. Cost is very high, at least £3000 per week session. This is aimed at those with a lot of corporate income, or corporate backing.

The third is the LSE-PKU Summer School held in Peking University in Beijing as seen last year. This summers school is similar material to the LSE London summer school, but offers courses with a Chinese emphasis. The number of courses are limited, and there are a few shared with the London summer school. However it is both cheaper and compressed more than London, two weeks in length, and costing £1050 as opposed to £900 in 2010. With student/alumni and early discount, this is £850, only £40 more than the equivalent last year.

New this year is the Macroeconomics Summer Programme, aimed for postgraduate students in the field of economics. Courses are very specialized, but not being an executive summer school, comparable in cost with the other two summer schools at £1300 for two weeks for students.

Helsinki Summer School

Operated jointly by a number of institutes, this summer school focuses on urban planning and environmental issues. The courses are lasting half a day at most. The school lasts three weeks, seem to have plenty of time to do other things while you are there, and costs only 450 euros and are worth 6 ECTS.

Utrecht Summer School

Joint venture between Utrecht University and the HU University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht has the largest range of courses, covering the sciences, social science and humanities. Courses vary between 1 week to 6, prices vary from 400 to 5000 euros, which makes it very affordable. Beyond this, a very important selling point is the courses range from pre-University to PhD level.  This is a very well established summer school, first running in 1987 and has a busy social calendar as well.

One point to note in particular are that some courses take place in locations around Europe, especially in the fields of the EU and business. Examples include global justice at The Hague, case study of European textiles industry in Italy, visiting the European Parliament in Brussels, history of art in Florence and Berlin, and looking at European integration in Estonia.

Copenhagen Business School

A good range of business modules at undergraduate and graduate level at Copenhagen Business School. These course last six weeks and you’re required to take two. There are a few intense 3 weeks courses. According to the number of hours that should be studied, this is full time and will require a lot of independant studying. There is an alterative intense version of these courses, that take three weeks followed by a three week project/exams. This summer school is extremely cheap, costing for undergraduate, £207 to some postgraduates at roughly £612. The time required out limits how useful this is.

University of California, Berkeley

A top-tier institution in California, with a huge range of courses. Like Copenhagen, they tend towards studying multiple courses along the whole duration of the two month summer school, which limits its use for those in work. Strangely for the US, for the amount of studying you do – on paper at least, it looks very reasonable and comparable to European institutions in price – costing about $6000 for the whole session. Few courses are three weeks, others are six, eight or ten weeks. I’ll let you guess which side of that the quantitative subjects are.

I’ll look at some more summer options in a future blog post.

Invicta this month, before a hiatus (for exams) until June.

Had a mini-drama against Lee, on the first point there was a little scrap, with a single light. For some reason there was some confusion and being semi-conscious I read it as Lee’s light going on. I thought it was off the floor as I didn’t feel anything, and was set myself up for a restart, with some confusion when I was asked to go back to the start line. At this point I queried if that was a point, which I got confirmation on, but said that I was pretty sure that didn’t hit. The point was canceled. Then realisation hit home that was was called was actually my point and so I canceled my own 1-0 lead! Threw for the rest of the poule fight, and lost that 5-2 in the end.

In the DE, I faced another fencer from my poule, and made mistakes in losing this one. After the first period I was 10-5 up. Second period he kept his arm extended more, and somehow managed to pull back to 13-11. At this point I switched for the first time to my new pistol grip, and landed a double, and two hits in a row. At 13-14, I was hoping for one more hit to level the score, but unfortunately it went the other way. I am very disappointed at losing such as big lead, and from discussions in the intervals with by-standers, it was my shoddy recoveries which I was exposed on.

No points for this competition, rank will certainly drop after as I will not be competing until Invicta.

Essex is one of the the hardest competitions on the calendar, and I have since calculated the NIF count was 67. This is not too far off the Miller Hallet this year. The big difference with Essex is that it is a single wave competition, in which the top fencers are unleashed from the very start. In my poule of seven, three were in the top 50, and another in the top 100.

I was far more relaxed than at the previous competitions which I think is showing now I am gaining more competitive experience. The poules went quite well, 3 wins, 3 loss, with the surprise of dispatching the UK number 16. Unfortunately I ended up against the UK number 28 again in the Direct Eliminations (after getting a bye into the L64 and points), and went out 52nd overall. I felt I fenced well, and did not feel intimidated by the top fencers I had to face. I was still too aggressive and noticeably I lost most of my points on overreaching lunges. However I was able to pick up at a point in three of the poule matches with an initial long range lunge due to people underestimating my reach.

The point haul should send me into the 170s in the national rankings. Slough is next on the calendar at the start of next month. Looking for at least a L32!