Pick of the Web
'Selected Poems,' Fernando Pessoa
“The writing of Fernando Pessoa reveals a mind shaken by intense inner suffering.”
The United Nations in Bush's firing-line
Behind the United Nations oil-for-food scandal is a Bush administration attempt to undermine the organisation and dismantle international law, argues Dan Plesch.
Iraq's burning month
A Katyusha rocket attack on United States warships in Aqaba, Jordan, is a telling indicator of the evolving al-Qaida menace.
Mourning in America
The United States government is not merely incompetent but criminally negligent in its response to Hurricane Katrina, argues Thomas R Asher.
What to do with the United Nations?
The United Nations is at a pivotal moment in its sixty-year history. Can it become an instrument of democratic global governance? Daniele Archibugi & Raffaele Marchetti draw on the various proposals for UN reform to suggest a new way ahead based on transparency and legality backed by political action.
Bush's second Gulf disaster
New Orleans, a chilling reminder of what happens when governments fail to protect their citizens, demands a political answer: accountability, says Terry Lynn Karl of Stanford University.
New Orleans or Baghdad?
To Andrei Codrescu inside New Orleans, the militarism of the state’s response to disaster reinforces the city’s subversive otherness to American empire.
Katrina's triple failure: technical, ethical, political
The experience of disaster management around the world has three lessons for the United States, says Michel Thieren.
Political storms follow the management of natural disasters with the inevitability of flash floods after a hurricane. The “who to blame” question makes the most noise in a disaster’s aftermath, but immediate, finger-pointing reactions often identify the wrong culprits.
Hungarian Originals: three poems
openDemocracy presents poetry from “At the end of the broken bridge: XXV Hungarian Poems”, a special anthology published by Carcanet and the Scottish Poetry Library featuring poems in the original Hungarian and in new translations from leading Scottish poets.
Regarding New Orleans
“Disasters, large and small, natural or otherwise, are always proximate. Learning to live with that is not what sets the people of New Orleans apart, it is what binds them to us.” Rob Walker draws truth from tragedy.
Mozilla's 'magic pixie dust'
Open standards are just as important as open debate: Becky Hogge explains why openDemocracy recommends the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
The victory and defeat of Solidarnosc
The images accompanying this article come from the Wyspa Institute of Art exhibition “Dockwatchers” inside the Gdańsk shipyard.
From the exhibition catalogue:
“With ‘Dockwatchers’, happening alongside the official celebrations of the 25th anniversary of Solidarność, Wyspa targets beyond officially represented history. It asks about oral histories, cracks in memories, abandoned visions and desolated heroes. "Dockwatchers" addresses the person, the individual, caught up in political and historical processes, whose personal memory is inscribed in collective experiences, the official representations of history and various forms of commemoration and mythologisation.”
After Katrina, a government adrift
The aftermath of Katrina reveals how sectarian conservative politics have brought disrepair and neglect to the heart of American politics, says Godfrey Hodgson – democratic government must be revived.
It is not just the levees of New Orleans that are weak. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, George Bush’s predicament reveals serious breaches in the way the American government works – weaknesses that result from the domination of sectarian conservative politics in the country’s administration and culture.
Boycotting Israel: a reply to Linda Grant
Those opposing a cultural and academic boycott of Israel should examine the South African precedent, says Jacqueline Rose.
The Hurricane and the Empire
The paralysis of official America in face of the New Orleans disaster exposes the systemic failures of United States politics, argues Mariano Aguirre.
The aftermath of the coastal catastrophe in the United States is deeply instructive about the nature of United States politics and society.
'Nana', Ai Yazawa
From the official announcement last month, it is the event that Japan has been waiting for. Next week’s election? Hardly. This September in Tokyo, it’s all about Nana: the ultimate manga for girls.
Zimbabwe's calvary
Zimbabweans are facing new dangers at home and no respite when they flee.
Joseph Rotblat's humanity
Joseph Rotblat - nuclear physicist, Pugwash organiser, disarmament campaigner, Nobel peace laureate, eternal Pole, world citizen – has died at the age of 96. Brian Cathcart remembers him.
Katrina: a disaster guide
openDemocracy staff – Alexandra Matine, Anju Srivastava, Antoinette Odoi, Charlie Devereux, David Hayes, Maryam Maruf and Sarah Lindon - digest reactions to the United States’s Gulf coast catastrophe, survey the views of bloggers and columnists, and post a brief guide to essential sites for news, images and opinion.
The politics of tragedy
The unfolding disaster that has consumed the Gulf coast of three American states – Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi – is an environmental catastrophe and an immense human tragedy.
'The Republican War on Science,' Chris Mooney
“A compelling and frightening account of (the US) government’s increasing unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate research and ideologically driven pseudoscience.”
This week's editor
Europe from the bottom up
European debate
Democratic Wealth
Nuclear non-proliferation
oDRussia at journalismfestival .com
Mali - the plot thickens
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Remote control war
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Conference coverage from 50.50
Articles exploring the themes of the fourth international Nobel Women's Initiative conference May 28-31. Jennifer Allsopp and Heather McRobie will be reporting for 5050
Articles exploring the themes of the fourth international Nobel Women's Initiative conference May 28-31. Jennifer Allsopp and Heather McRobie will be reporting for 5050
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Dan Hancox Revel, Riot and Rebellion
Martin Rose Bliss Was It in that Dawn to Be Next Door
Vron Ware Up in Arms
Jim Gabour Sunday Comics
James Warner Standing Perpendicular, as books do
Markha Valenta Inter Alia: religion, politics, culture
Paul Rogers on Global security
Mary Kaldor on Human security
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