Pick of the Web
Put Chemical Ali on trial in Halabja
The arrest of Ali Hassan al-Majid, one of the old Iraqi regime’s most feared and hated figures, is an opportunity for his Kurdish victims to find belated justice.
Argentina and the IMF: will they benefit from hindsight?
Since taking office in May 2003, Argentina’s new president, Nestor Kirchner, has launched campaigns to reduce tax evasion and to reform the notoriously corrupt and inefficient state pension system. He has shaken up the Supreme Court and the leadership of the armed forces and let it be known that he will support any international efforts to extradite human rights abusers from Argentina’s 1970s “dirty war”.
All of this signals that Kirchner is serious about moving Argentina forward and putting behind it the dark days that the country has experienced since December 2001, when President Fernando de la Rua resigned in disgrace amid a collapsing economy, currency, and bank system.
My Great Korea Move
Another world is possible, and its name is Pyongyang. Iraq, France, Texas…North Korea. Dominic Hilton’s intrepid grand tour continues, and pulls out an exclusive from the Hermit Kingdom.
The gift of the net
The polarity between anarchy and oligarchy deforms Siva Vaidhayanathan’s vision of the future of the net. Beneath the rhetoric, he and Bill Thompson share a belief in the net's democratic potential. But Siva does point to a real danger: that state and commodifying forces will undermine the liberating ‘gift economy' that lies at the heart of the net.
The nail in the wood: an interview with Ismail Abu Shanab
Ismail Abu Shanab was a moderate by Hamas leadership standards. A ceasefire negotiator, he was prepared to consider the two-state solution. openDemocracy’s Paul Hilder interviewed him at his home in Gaza in July 2002, days after the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, leader of Hamas’s military wing. In this disturbing conversation, they talk about peace, violence, democracy, the US, bin Laden, and colonialism. One year on, Shanab shared Shehadeh’s fate.
Small is dangerous? Schumacher, science, and social development
The promise of micro-technology as a tool of social progress is balanced by fear of its use to reduce freedom and widen global divisions. The benign if flawed vision of E.F. Schumacher still holds lessons for how a better social application of science can serve the interests of the world’s poor and the planet’s sustainability.
Naked Games
Korea latest, Chinese capital, Cheap drugs and the WTO
A hard road in Iraq
The scale and severity of the casualties inflicted on United States troops in Iraq are increasing pressure on the Pentagon’s civilian leadership to share responsibility for the country’s security. But any such process is fraught with difficulties.
Biotechnology against food security: the choice for Africa
From Zambia to Ghana, African countries have very different attitudes to the application of biotechnology to food production. In a context of systemic inequality, the process raises key issues of good governance and global justice as well as science. Can the new technology be used to address poverty and advance sustainability, or will it be a means of increasing global corporate control?
Cedric Price: architect for life
Cedric Price, an architect more renowned for his ideas than his buildings, once proposed the concept of ‘Non-Plan’ in response to violations of landscape. Paul Barker, an ally in that campaign, remembers him.
The coming first world debt crisis
The reckless financial policies of leading western powers in the last two decades make it likely that the next seismic debt crisis will be in America, not Argentina. It can be avoided, says Ann Pettifor of the Real World Economic Outlook, only by serious efforts to bring regulation and balance to the international economy.
On going home
‘Return’ is a Palestinian dream, a compulsion, a wound. Is it also a curse? In retrieving the vision of a single, inclusive, secular, democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis, Omar al-Qattan argues that his people need to make a different return. It will not be to land irretrievably lost, but to the best of their own history, that they make the best of the future now available to them and their neighbours alike.
The perfect storm? The American media and Iraq
The American media’s coverage of the 2003 Iraq war reinforces the pattern established in the wake of 9/11: a combination of intimidation, collusion, inattention, and ethnocentrism. A leading scholar of the media charts a dismal period in US journalism and asks whether a turn of the political tide offers hope of its revival.
America's entrapment
United States forces in Iraq are responding to armed resistance against their occupation by recruiting agents of the old regime to enforce security. Their political masters see the presence of foreign militants in Iraq as confirming the logic of the ‘war on terror’. Is this grand strategy, or delusion?
Part 4: The nation-state vs. networks
Part 4 of The new information ecosystem: the nation-state vs. networks
Cooking up trouble
Indian restraint, Rwandan traps, Elite chefs, and right frontal lobes
Paying for the future
When will renewable energy technologies start to have a geopolitical impact?
By the Caspian Sea
The fierce post-Soviet conflict between the small Caucasian republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh is also one between geographies of the mind. The landlocked Armenians, condemned to history, better fighters, have the land; the Azeris have oil, sturgeon, and a Promethean shoreline. In an extract from ‘The Taste of Dreams: an obsession with Russia and caviar’, Vanora Bennett evokes the mysterious alchemy of the Caspian Sea.
The right of return: the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
For generations of Palestinians, the longing to return to lands and settlements lost in the catastrophe of 1948 is both at the core of their being, and the only route to justice for their people. But is such an aspiration either realistic or compatible with the creation of an enduring peace with Israel? Ghada Karmi, who has spent a lifetime in exile, defines the crucial choice.
The never-ending journey
A family of Roma origin displaced from Kosovo to England’s north-east are facing deportation back to Pristina. For them, outsiders in their homeland, it is a fearful prospect.
This week's editor
Europe from the bottom up
European debate
Democratic Wealth
Nuclear non-proliferation
Women and the Arab Spring
oDRussia at journalismfestival .com
Mali - the plot thickens
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Remote control war
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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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