» Publishers, Monetize your RSS feeds with FeedShow: More infos (Show/Hide Ads)
On Thursday, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission reported to Congress that there had been a steep rise in attempts to infiltrate and disrupt US government websites. Although the commission noted that these attacks come from all over the world, it went on to highlight the People’s Republic of China as the largest single source.
Gareth Young invited me to ‘The Future of England’. A debate that followed the annual general meeting of the Campaign for an English Parliament. In plucky fashion it was held in the House of Commons on the day of the State Opening of Parliament. There were more than a hundred crowded into Committee Room 10. I enjoyed it and came away thinking it would last and grow. Not least because it was not the usual gathering of middle-class disenchanted.
International aid today and its origins
Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now in Parliament to give the Secretary of State power to amend copyright law by statutory instrument, effectively allowing he and his successors to do anything, without parliamentary approval or debate, provided it is done in the name of protecting copyright.
Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing has the details:
Obama urges North Korea and Iran to change course
On the final leg of his tour of East Asia, US President Barack Obama has used a joint press conference with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to urge North Korea and Iran to change their nuclear stances or face sanctions in the future.
It is widely accepted among those working in, or on, international organisations, from the UN to the EU, UNDP, NATO or the World Bank, that statebuilding offers a way out of contemporary conflicts around the world: local, civil, regional and international conflicts, as well as complex emergencies, and for developmental issues. Most policymakers, officials, scholars and commentators involved think that they are applying proven knowledge unbiased by cultural or historical proclivities to the conflicts of others. This is not the case.
Oliver Richmond argues that the grand liberal peacebuilding project has failed. Societies and states subjected to peacebuilding and statebuilding by the international community on a large scale – Afghanistan and Iraq spring to mind – have not been transformed, and the expected benefits have not trickled down to their people. He is right to claim that such interventions fly in the face of the lessons of history.
Rebuilding "fragile" and "failing" states is a declared priority of most western governments. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has issued a rash of policy statements and guidelines to help donor countries think through how best to restore public institutions, accountability, and service delivery capacities in countries prone to and emerging from wars.
Parliamentary rebellions, we might be led to believe, are a declining practice that ought to be revived, since they are integral to a strong Parliament. This view needs revising on a number of counts.
The latest research by Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart of the University of Nottingham was reported in the Telegraph on Tuesday, demonstrating that the pronounced tendency for Labour MPs to rebel that emerged during the Tony Blair premiership has continued under Gordon Brown. During the parliamentary session just ended, Labour MPs rebelled on 74 occasions, a rate of 30 per cent. Moreover, since 2005 a total of six whipped votes have been lost by the government, a post-war record for a party with a majority of more than 60. What should these figures mean to those with an interest in democratic reform?
A new history of the Workers' Party inspires Robin Wilson to reflect on a movement that helped to change the face of modern Ireland
Ever since the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent war of independence, progressive politics in Ireland has been bedevilled by the dominance of the ethnicised version of republicanism which was then first enshrined in martyrdom and later became the official ideology of the southern Irish state.
That this ‘revolutionary’ movement parodied the paramilitarism of Protestant integral nationalism resisting ‘home rule’, and that it only prevailed because of the repressive British response to the 1916 Putsch and the subsequent efforts to impose wartime conscription are historical ironies long lost. Throughout the 20th century, the discourse of the ‘men of 1916’—including the masculinism—set the terms against which all radical currents of opinion positioned themselves.
Most starkly, while the extension of the franchise to all adult males in the 1918 Westminster election allowed Labour to flourish in Britain, forming a minority government within a matter of years and a radical, reforming government after the next global conflagration, in Ireland, the republican leader Eamon de Valera declared that ‘Labour must wait’ and for two generations after this electoral abstention Labour politics were retarded as patterns of political affiliation were established by the civil war over the 1921 treaty with Britain defining the Free State. The party was to be perennially confined to be junior partner in a coalition dominated by one or other of the ‘civil war’ parties, never empowered to institute the Keynesian economic and Beveridgean welfare policies which underpinned social-democratic success in post-war Europe.
In today’s globalised world, those predominant parties, Fine Gael (whose predecessor wing of Sinn Féin backed the treaty) and Fianna Fáil (which split from an SF rump in 1926 having been on the opposing side), have become zombie categories, their particular historical roots and domestic ideological affiliations increasingly irrelevant. FG was identified following its emergence from a quasi-fascist movement as the party of ‘order’, while FF set its objectives as the reunification of Ireland, divided by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, and promotion of Irish, defined by De Valera’s 1937 constitution as the ‘first official language’—all ill-starred political goals.
At seven minutes, it was certainly a short speech. The main focus was clearly on building a manifesto platform on the economy, the budget deficit, and social care, to fight the next election. But this was also the first Queen's speech since Westminster's name was dragged through the gutter by expenses and the last before an imminent general election. So, where was the bold action we were promised to redistribute power and rebuild trust in politics?
Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, Tariq al-Hashemi, has vetoed part of the country's new election law, casting doubt over plans for general elections in January. Al-Hashemi, a member of the presidential council that has veto power over legislation, said on Wednesday he objected to Article One of the law approved by parliament earlier this month because it did not give a voice to displaced Iraqis abroad, many of whom are Sunni Muslims.
While politicians are busy participating in the numerous celebrations, exhibitions and extravaganzas in and around Berlin this year, they carefully avoid a question that has to be asked after two decades of a unified Germany, and that is the question of where we are. Unifying a country after decades of separation with entirely different development patterns on both sides is not a question of formal legal adoption of a common constitution, but a process of growing together. And it is time to take stock of this process.
image/jpeg ( 32 ko) It is time to distinguish aid myths from aid realities. The current aid pessimism is unwarranted. The overwhelming evidence is that aid can help and that it does help. Of course, aid can be improved. But so can other public welfare programmes. It is self defeating and frankly disingenuous to set unrealistic expectations about aid performance. In fact, taxes used for aid save more lives than taxes used for any other purpose. Yet, it is axiomatic that aid quality is as important as aid quantity and that aid quality could be improved.
What do we know?
Barroness Buscombe, the new Tory chair of the Press Complaints Commission, is reported to be considering extending the remit of the PCC to include blogs.
Anyone who knows anything about how the PCC works (or doesn't) will know that this is a very bad idea and potentially a serious threat to the independence and integrity of blogging. This is especially so given the fact the PCC is run by people in the mainstream media who have an obvious interest in restricting the activities of bloggers.
Born in Bhutan, a Himalayan country of less than a million inhabitants, this woman will probably never again see her homeland; this photo was taken in one of the seven refugee camps in the southeast of Nepal where over a 100.000 Bhutanese of Nepalese origin - like her- have lived since the early 1990s.
image/jpeg ( 227 ko) It is a great pleasure to read a contemporary appreciation of Byzantium which stresses its civilisation of quality, intelligence and success, and even a model from which we can learn. It is especially refreshing as it suggests that the stereotype of Byzantium, its very name an insult, may finally wane.
Rising personal debt, global imbalances, excessive bank leveraging and reckless financial risk-taking all played a key part in the current economic meltdown. But there is another factor that has been largely ignored - the role of wages.
After sustained pressure from the United States and Europe to do more about corruption in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has unveiled plans to set up a new taskforce. The unit will cooperate with the FBI and the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, according to the government.
Details of the plan came out after the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, had urged the Afghan government to create an “anti-corruption commission”. She also called on Karzai for a “major crimes tribunal”.