My students taught me that everything was personal - history, politics, foreign relations - but this approach creates boundaries as well as connections
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oD TodayTraders are so far split on the question of where the price of rice will be in 3 months time with predicted cost at $216, the same as it was for March. Do you disagree with their take on the food crisis situation? What will the price of rice be in July?
The wisdom of the crowd was throughly with Mugabe remaining President past April 30 but the predictions continues with the Who will be the next president of Zimbabwe? market. Will he hang on by hook or by crook in the secound round of voting or will a face-saving deal be recached that sees him exiting the top job in favour of a compromise candidate? Roger Southall has a great analysis of the situation in his article South Africa and Zimbabwe: the end of “quiet diplomacy”?.
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We're implementing a sea change in our commenting policy here at openDemocracy. For a long time, we've allowed anybody to comment on our articles, and while this has brought a very high level of debate to the site on some issues, it has failed to really provide conversation between you, our readers, and the authors and editorial staff who comprise openDemocracy as a publisher.
We'd love to change that, and we hope that our new commenting system is going to achieve that goal. We'll be moving all comments posted on articles over to be completely moderated, initially by our editorial team here in the office, as well as some authors, but increasingly by the community itself.
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A question to Martin Wolf and Paul Collier on the world's food crisis: can we all be both vegetarian and libertarian?
JZ has written an important new book: "The Future of the Internet (and how to stop it)".
The PDF can be downloaded here, and you can buy it here
But it has a beautiful HTML edition here.
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Varnished with a pale yet discernible mixture of complacency and pomposity, the developing assumption of late regarding America’s sub-prime crisis is that greedy, careless borrowers, and not bankers, should be held accountable for much of the emerged mortgage mayhem.
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With the crisis continuing in Zimbabwe over the as yet undeclared election results our Will Robert Mugabe still lead Zimbabwe on May 1st? market has only one week left to run. Do you think anything significant will happen in the next week or will Robert Mugabe stay on?
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The Democratic presidential candidate race has not only torn the party in two but is increasingly highlighting weaknesses on both sides. A strident aspect to Hilary Clinton’s foreign policy appeared today, painting Barack Obama in the more mature light. When asked how she would respond to an Iranian attack on Israel, Clinton shockingly promised to "obliterate" Iran were she president. As Obama rightfully pointed out, using words such as "obliterate" "doesn’t produce good results". Not to be outdone, however, he did manage to add that he would deal with Iran ‘forcefully’ – let there be no fear of that.
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You may have noticed that our banner spot is now occasionally filled with Google AdWords.
We've experimented in the past with Google Adsense, and we stopped when, after the Thai coup, our coverage of Thailand was attracting Google's advertisments for "Thai Massage Parlours". When the Google sales team rang us a month ago proposing a new set of services, they assured us that we could now filter out unwanted ads. So if anything appears that you find untoward, please leave a comment in this blog, and we'll see if we can get the filter to work properly.
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The world
wakes today to exciting news: US
President George W. Bush has set a new national climate target. While
others seek to reduce emissions, the US will now look to at least stop
increasing them. By 2025.
As the clock
winds down on the Bush era, it is worth considering the consequences of his decision
to stand still on climate change. America is now at least eight years
behind the rest of the world. It will take a long time and a lot of work to
catch up and there is, as yet, little evidence to suggest that the next president
can do enough.
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Half a century past a promised date, Nepalis have finally voted in an election to the Constituent Assembly (CA) that will write its constitution. The Constituent Assembly on its first sitting is expected to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic.
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In 2004 Greece dazzled the world by staging an Olympic Games in which the country’s ancient and modern culture was wonderfully displayed. Visitors to Athens were impressed by the way in which parts of the urban environment had palpably improved, defying the city’s image as a smog-ridden concrete jungle. In the Plaka district next to the Acropolis, where cars have been banished and the noisier night-clubs have been silenced, strollers could enjoy an agreeable mixture of classical remains, Byzantine churches and modern tavernas.
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Egyptian bloggers worked round the clock telling the world about a workers' revolt that shook their country, as thousands rioted at a textile mill in Al Mahalla, demanding better pay and protesting against increasing prices. They were also among the first casualties of the unrest, which left two people killed, scores injured and an undetermined number of activists, organisers and mere spectators behind bars. Their coverage came in the form of blog posts, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, Flickr shots, Facebook messages and all other online tools they could get their hands on.
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New Delhi this week played host to a summit of African leaders, lured to India by the
promise of strengthened economic ties with the rising "Asian giant". The
event was smaller than its counterpart two years earlier in Beijing,
when China
wined and dined fifty African countries. But the signal is clear: Indian
ambitions are as global as Chinese ones. New Delhi
knows it cannot afford to cede further "strategic
space" to Beijing.
And Africa, which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acclaimed as the "land of
awakening" and "our mother continent", is a growing arena for
the contest of Asia's duelling realpolitiks.
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With Zimbabwe, China and the Olympics all in the news in recent weeks we have a number of markets covering them.
The sight of symbolic attacks on a symbol (the flame) of a symbolic representation of war (the games) may seem too layered even for our mediatised sensitivities. And yet .... the protest works for me. I asked Grace and Kanishk in the office today, and neither could muster much enthusiasm for the games. I asked David (our Front Page editor) later on, and he remarked: "... it all seems overdetermined, don't you think? the games, Tibet ... it's a big year".
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As Turkey's ruling
Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party / AKP) prepares to lay out
its defence today against the Turkish constitutional court's attempts to shut
it down, Ipek Kuran argues that the court case is a chance for the AKP to
prove its secular credentials. Much of the western press has painted the
ongoing legal wrangle as one pitting the politically-motivated secularist
judiciary against the democratically-elected Islamists of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan's party. But in the eyes of many Turks, Erdogan's party has dallied too
long in the controversial arena of symbols, playing majoritarian politics in
spite of the law.
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My two previous posts from the Summit are on OurKingdom:
Lots of programs - but where are the progressives?
Want to feel good about the short term world outlook?
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With forests of skyscrapers rising in
Shanghai, fantastical
contents emerging off the coast of Dubai, and fibre-optic arteries pumping
knowledge from the heart of India's IT boom, it is difficult not to be
impressed by the pace of transformation across Asia. Tremendous change is afoot
in much of the region, greased in places by growing oil revenues and elsewhere
by decade-old programs of liberal reform that now seem to be bearing fruit. This
goes beyond the putative "Asian giants" of India
and China;
with many smaller countries also sharing in the economic success, a whole
continent seems to be on the rise.
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Yousaf Raza Gilani is sworn in as Pakistan's new prime minister by the very president he wants to displace
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