Rowers across Oxford are pledging to eat at least one more portion of meat a week, in a bid to bulk up ahead of the rowing season. The #MeatPledge event, which aims to promote “fried chicken for everyone,” has gotten off to a strong start with women and men’s boat clubs across Oxford pledging their support. It is estimated that hundreds and thousands of portions of vegetables will be saved and a huge amount of carbon dioxide will be liberated into the atmosphere as a result of the pledgers.

Prospective pledgers are required to post their name, college, and tailor-made pledge on the wall of the campaign’s Facebook group. The prize for the college that signs up the most people to the pledge is understood to be £100 worth of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s finest. Oxford’s popular crewdating locations have also announced that they will be putting extra horse meat in their food in an effort to back the bid. One restaurant owner exclusively told The OxStew, “I support Oxford rowers!”

Curtis King, the founder of the campaign, told The OxStew, “I gotta tell you something – bacon is good for me! We want students all across Oxford to come together, have a cheeky gym sesh, and go grab a bucket of frie[n]d chicken together afterwards.”

Some keenly observant Oxford students have suggested that #MeatPledge is not actually about fitness at all, but is in fact an effort to undermine OUSU’s #VeggiePledge. OUSU, speaking in a personal capacity, commented, “We are so disappointed that not all Oxford students are willing to subsist on a diet of rice and beans for the rest of their life. Bacon is not good for you. If rowers are not careful we shall have to implement restrictions on the number of ergs that they can do in order to reduce the carbon footprint of students.”

When we put this Curtis King, he responded, “If you tell people to do that and do this and do that. You know what they’re gonna do? They’re gonna be miserable. When you do eat chicken your body really does like it. OUSU acts like it’s the Queen and we’re the sorry people.”

Varun Bassi, a sceptical Physics student at Hertford College, commented, “Isn’t #VeggiePledge eff ectively just Balliol and Wadham giving themselves prizes? I mean like, c’mon, obviously the colleges with most vegetarians who go vegan is going to win every time. This is yet another example of lefty students treating themselves to awards. Classic OUSU.”

Bill Geffalo, a student who bloody loves Dorney Lake, added, “The overbearing and obnoxious nature of Balliol and Wadham students left me unable to consume vegetables for days. It was only chicken nuggets that kept me going. Chicken nuggets are like my family.”

Meanwhile, one regular Park Ender told The OxStew a joke. “How do you know if someone is vegan? They’ll tell you,” she commented.

Students have until Friday 13th November to make that their pledge, which they can do in the #MeatPledge Facebook group.

Oxford University Press (OUP) has declared itself “institutionally naive”, following the news that it falsely defined Crimea as an exclave of Russia, when it is quite obviously the Autonomous Republic of Crimea within the independent Ukraine.

Tightly masked members of the Oxford University Russian Society have been protesting outside the OUP office all week. Their chanting has caused several noise complaints, and it has been supposed they were chanting “CRIMEA IS OURS”, although the masks have caused problems of clarification. One masked protester commented, “Meh Moxmord mess mare mah munch mof mwats”.

The OUP office’s curtains have been drawn all week, and 15 academics who govern OUP have yet to be seen to leave the building. However, at midnight last night a referendum was called, and TheOxStew can exclusively reveal that OUP has unanimously called for Russian intervention, with 99.9 per cent of the vote.

The OUP Press Office commented, “Fuck. I didn’t think it would come to this. It was a simple mistake, and I never thought anyone in Ukraine or Russia would ever read it, let alone cause such fuss that I can’t even get home and make myself a cuppa.

“I’m desperately hoping that the results of the referendum will calm the protestors, and I’m looking forward to being contacted by our new Russian governor. I’m also hoping this new allegiance will open our arms to all that Russia has to offer. I’ve recently discovered a great upcoming Russian novelist, and am looking forward to the response of my event proposal for later this month: OUP feat. Dostoyevsky.”

Down by Park End, The OxStew found students in, to be quite frank, an absolute mess. A fresher studying Geography commented, “I wrote about OUP’s geography textbooks in my personal statement. This revelation has really shaken me up, and may affect my legitimacy as a student. Can we please just leave it I’d rather not talk about it, it’s really upsetting —”

A third year, wanting to remain anonymous, commented “I don’t know what the word ‘exclave’ means, I have never heard of Crimea, and I don’t actually give a shit, as long as I can still get stuff free on SOLO.”

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian embassy refused to comment, but did send The OxStew a leaflet advertising Ukraine’s University Press (UUP). They are set to release a new textbook, entitled ‘Geog 3.0’. UUP were reluctant to confirm the textbook’s content, but they did however refer us to the Oxford University Press Wikipedia page, where Ukrainians have flocked to express their disgust.

At the moment of printing, the Wiki description of OUP stands as “an exclave of Liverpool”. The OxStew can confirm that we are pretty sure that this is not in fact true, and that OUP is either part of Oxford or Russia.

It was announced this week that the end of 2015 would see our climate warm by 1°C compared to pre-industrial levels. As we enter what is ‘uncharted territory’ according to the Met Office, the issue of climate change is no longer an issue just for slightly mad environmentalists and hippies.

Fortunately, there are signs that climate change is, somewhat belatedly, being recognised as a problem that needs to be taken seriously. Amber Rudd, the Energy and Climate Secretary, recently said, “Climate change is one of the most serious threats we face, not just to the environment, but to our economic prosperity, poverty eradication and global security.” The issue is obviously serious if this comes from a government doing its best to remove subsidies for the renewable energy sector.

Whether your interest is in human rights, engineering, technological innovation or simply making a living, you cannot fail to be affected by climate change – particularly if the world exceeds its 2°C warming target. This fact is the theme behind this year’s Oxford Climate Forum, a student run climate-change conference taking place this week.

One of this year’s keynote speakers at the forum is Bianca Jagger. As the Founder, President and Chief Executive of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, she is a leading voice for human rights globally. Her concern over climate change stems from the inevitable challenge it poses to human rights. Arguably, the great climate migration has already begun, with life in many island nations on the brink of becoming untenable.

On Tuvalu, for example, saltwater intrusion has made farming increasingly difficult. The rains that provide drinking water are becoming unreliable and by the end of the century all of the nation’s land could be underwater. Just last year, a court ruling in New Zealand granted residency to a family from Tuvalu, with part of their lawyers’ argument being that climate change had made their life on the islands almost too difficult.

There is also a plan underway to relocate thousands of indigenous Guna people from their islands in the Caribbean Sea to the Panamanian mainland as rising sea levels and the increasing frequency of storms flood settlements and farmland. If we cannot stem COâ‚‚ emissions and the rising tides then we may face the mass movement of millions of people: a terrible prospect that will be made worse by the fact that the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees still fails to recognise climate change as a valid factor for refugee status.

The future of technological innovation is also set to be shaped by climate change. As governments move away from traditional energy generation based around fossil fuels, lots of research and development is being done on finding ways to reduce the cost of renewable energy technologies. In the UK this has been somewhat undermined by the recent cuts to subsidies for the solar power industry, which have already forced two companies into administration. Similar cuts look likely to also hit onshore wind farms in coming years. But millions of pounds are being poured into research, not only into power generation technology, but also into carbon capture, nuclear energy and electric cars. Whole new areas are opening up but these areas desperately need engineering and technological expertise.

Even the financial sector cannot remain unconcerned about climate change. A changing, uncertain and volatile climate increases the risk of investments, especially in the longer term. We might also ask when investors will finally begin to look beyond fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. Some would argue that this should have already started, with divestment campaigns – including the Guardian’s ‘Keep it in the ground’ initiative – spearheading lobbying efforts. Investors and financial advisors will have to know how climate change will affect both their clients’ investments and their own.

Given the enormity of climate change as a global issue, the Oxford Climate Forum, beginning later this week on Friday 13^th November, promises to be an important and highly relevant event. There will be a wide variety of impressive speakers giving addresses from a range of perspectives. Matt Brown, the director of a management consultancy will be giving a speech, along with Sally Copley, Oxfam’s UK Campaigns Director, in addition to a range of others.

You don’t have to be a tree-hugger to take an interest. A warming future will affect us all, no matter what priorities we have.

For tickets and more information on the 2015 Oxford Climate Forum, please click here.

To be Singaporean in Oxford is to exist in an odd space combining fierce national pride in some instances with second-hand embarrassment in others. We lament that taps in Oxford cannot dispense the potable, lukewarm water that ones in Singapore do, and that, unlike Singapore’s MRT, the Tube in London is a Wi-Fi black hole. The first time I went to Oxford Street in London, and the shops started closing at 6pm, I was flabbergasted: in Singapore, they close nearer to midnight.

But our material plenty belies a poverty of liberties. At the same time as we celebrate all these things, we find it hard to explain to our international schoolmates that, yes, sodomy is illegal in Singapore; that we sentence people to death for drug trafficking; that two years’ conscription for males is a fact of life in a country that has never been in any sort of war; and that our government recently arrested and charged a 16-year-old boy for uploading a profane YouTube video. And it belies how shackled we are by internalised inferiority with regard to race.

When I went back to Singapore for the summer, a friend invited me to participate in focus group discussions for some government statutory boards. The fee for each participant would be S$50 (£23) – but Caucasians, she told me, get S$75 as a matter of course. When I asked why, she ventured that the private companies that conduct such surveys “value Caucasians’ opinions more.” This example, though no doubt extreme, is symptomatic of attitudes towards race in Singapore.

Unlike most Asians in Oxford, Singaporeans speak English as their first language. It is a part of our culture that speaking English well denotes educational and social superiority. The problem is that it also often entails doing it in a Western, and preferably American accent. We are more self-conscious about accents in Singapore than perhaps anywhere else. Part of the reason for that is that, since we can to some extent alter our  accents, or ‘code-switch,’ depending on our  surroundings, the accents we adopt reflect more our personal choices and values than our origins.

It is a delicate balance that the Singaporean Oxonian straddles: speak authentically but possibly unclearly, or imitate as best we can the neutral ‘British’ accent that we perceive? There are no easy answers. Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, famously spoke thus of his experience reading law at Cambridge in the 1940s.

“In Singapore, you didn’t come across the white man so much. He was in a superior position. But there you are [in Britain] in a superior position meeting white men and white women in an inferior position, socially… They have to serve you and so on in the shops. And I saw no reason why they should be governing me; they’re not superior. I decided when I got back, I was going to put an end to this.”

He obviously did not believe the white man to be superior to him, and left Britain determined to secure independence for the then-colony. Yet he spoke in stilted Queen’s English during his student days, and retained its twang for the rest of his life.

Peter Galbraith, a former Politics and Economics student at St Catherine’s College, returned to his alma mater on 27th October to deliver a talk on Syria, Iraq and ISIS. Highlights of his career include helping to uncover Saddam’s Hussein attempted genocide of the Iraqi Kurds, being the first US Ambassador to Croatia during the Balkan Wars and uncovering election fraud as Deputy UN Special Ambassador to Afghanistan during the 2009 Afghan presidential elections. Galbraith has also been one of the most vocal supporters of an autonomous Iraqi Kurdish state. I caught up with him after his talk to discuss the state of the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, the US-Iran nuclear deal and a potential resolution to the Syrian conflict.

The Syrian Civil War, in which more than 200,000 Syrians have lost their lives, has been dragging on for more than four years with no end in sight. This has led a group of states, headed by Russia, to argue that any possible solution to this conflict has to include finding a compromise and maintaining at the head of Syria its current president, Bashar Al-Assad, the autocrat whose despotic regime sparked the outrage that led to the beginning of the conflict.

As a man with years of experience in hands-on negotiations and disputes in the Iraqi-Syrian region, Galbraith provides a refreshingly pragmatic assessment of the current state of the Syrian conflict. He is obviously aware of what a fair end to the conflict would look like. Yet he seems more interested in actually ending this war, rather than pursuing some far-fetched ideal resolution whose lack of plausible application only delays an actual end to the war, and thus costs more lives. As he says, any deal that involves maintaining Assad in power is “an unjust agreement, but the continuation of the war is even more unjust”.

He continues on to explain that “there’s no justice in Assad remaining… but what’s the alternative? It’s fine to say Assad must go…but he isn’t going. So the question is, how can you achieve peace, or some kind of settlement that will bring peace, [that] will preserve  the multi-confessional, multi-religious, multi-ethnic nature of Syria? It’s hard to see how you get there except by having some arrangement that includes Assad. It’s not desirable, but I would argue that it’s better than the alternative of an indefinite continuation of the war.”

Galbraith’s view of an improved Middle East has at its heart an independent Kurdish state. He has always had a special interest in the fate of the Kurdish people, who are a minority in Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran and have been at the forefront of the fight against ISIS. He sees in the Syrian conflict an opportunity for the Kurdish people to emancipate themselves and redetermine the arbitrary lines between states drawn by the French and British after the First World War.

Speaking of the Syrian Kurds, Galbraith notes that in his trip to that region in December 2014, he noticed that “they have gone from being rebels in charge of an area to having many more attributes of a government.” It is obvious that Galbraith believes that the conflict in Syria and Iraq offers the possibility of stable and peaceful Kurdish states rising from the region’s ashes.

Yet he is more sceptical about the possibility of a unified Kurdish state, which would span Syria, Iraq, Turkey and possibly Iran. He explains that at least among the Iraqi Kurds, who currently are the closest to having a sovereign Kurdish state, “there is no desire for it”. Because there are more Kurds in Turkey (11-20 million) and Iran (8-10 million) than in Iraq (5-7 million,) a unified Kurdish state would imply having to “share [the Iraqi Kurds’] resources with a much larger population” and probably being “ruled not from Erbil (the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan) but from Diyarbakir, in South-East Turkey”. For these reasons, Iraqi Kurds might feel better off on their own.

It is easy to reduce the Kurds to one ethnic group with homogeneous interests, but it must be remembered that each Kurdish minority has its own history of cultural identity and struggle. This contrast between Kurdish minorities is best illustrated by the continued Turkish financial and political support for a sovereign Iraqi Kurdish state, while the Turkish state is simultaneously in an open conflict with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), a rebel group that has led the fight for Turkish Kurdish independence for the past thirty years.

As such, Galbraith concludes that “there is not a desire nor a drive for a Greater Kurdistan” in the Iraqi Kurds, which should make one reflect, if a Greater Kurdistan is off the table, on what the future of Kurdish minorities in Syria and Turkey might look like if the ethnic tensions that rock the region subsist or even possibly worsen.

Galbraith also discussed the US-Iran nuclear deal, and its impact on the Middle Eastern region. Galbraith believes that the deal is “a very good deal from a Western perspective,” partly because of “the overwhelming prospect for change” that Galbraith witnessed in the Iranian population on a recent trip over there. He observes that “the mullahs [a term used to characterise Shi’ite clerics] seem to have lost control of society,” in that the Iranian population seems ready to move on from the stringent religious laws imposed by Iranian religious leaders and embrace more liberal values; “this deal has strengthened those who want change.”

Generally, Galbraith sees a “common interest” between the US and Iran on geopolitical matters, be it the preservation of the Iraqi government or the defeat of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. As such, the deal strengthens one of the more stable states in the Middle East, while preventing their possessing weapons of mass destruction in such a troubled region.

All in all, Galbraith distinguishes himself from what can be found in academic journals or everyday newspapers. He puts pragmatic perspective over armchair-theoretic daydreaming when   it comes to the Middle-East. He presents the cold, hard facts and searches for the most effi cient solution over the morally ideal, or “just” solution.

You might agree or disagree with such a cynical point of view, but it is important to keep one’s thoughts on the Middle East grounded in reality. No matter how desirable a utopian outcome might be, we have to start moving forwards from what is happening there right now.