Doomsday: set your clocks
The aftershocks of 11 September brought another unwelcome change this week. The Los Angeles Times, among others, reported that the hands of the symbolic Doomsday clock are being moved for the first time in four years.
The clocks time registers the threat of nuclear disaster. Its movements are monitored by the board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. On Wednesday, they reset the clock for the first time since India and Pakistan conducted tests of nuclear weapons in 1998, when the hands were moved forward to nine minutes to midnight. The closer to midnight, the greater the threat. It now stands at 11:53pm.
The board has been considering the move since November. It was not reset immediately after the terrorist acts, said spokesman Steve Koppes, because of the uncertain nature of what is going on in the world. Now things are more certain. Chairman of the board George Lopez believes that after 11 September, The international community simply hit the snooze button rather than raising the general alarm, and Stephen Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin sees the prospect of al-Qaida using a nuclear weapon as no longer an issue to worry about in the abstract.
The clock at the University of Chicago was started in 1947 at the time of 11:53pm, two years after the Bulletin began as a newsletter for scientists working on the Manhattan project. Since then, the furthest it has been away from midnight is 17 minutes, which was in 1991. But the clock has been more than 10 minutes away from midnight for only 15 of the past 55 years.
openEvent
This week Jorge Semprun, one of Europes foremost political and intellectual combatants, spoke at the Institut Francais about how he saw the status of women in society as the litmus test for democracy. He was referring directly to the problem of Islam for Europe. Even if we have to avoid all the clash of civilization theories which target Islam as the main enemy of the western world, he said, even if we deny Huntington and Berlusconi, I have to say, the fall-out could be serious and dramatic.
His words are yet another expression of the importance and difficulty of this issue. It is an issue openDemocracy seeks to address. On the 6th March, openDemocracy will be hosting the event 'Women in Britain: the losses and gains of modernity' at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. For further details and contact information, please visit our Events page.
Kenya test me on that?
Mwalimu Masoud Mwahima, the mayor of Mombasa, found himself in an embarrassing situation this week when he was the recipient of some not-so impressive high-school exam results. Mwahima sat the exams last year in lieu of a bill currently doing the rounds of Kenyas national parliament that would require all councillors to be educated to at least high school level. He probably shouldnt have bothered.
According to BBC news reports, a city education official in Mombasa told the AFP news agency that Mwahima had scraped through the exam with a humbling Grade E. E, incidentally, is the lowest possible grade in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Examinations (KCSE). Understandably, Mwahima was not available for comment, and an aide refused to comment, saying his boss education, or otherwise, was a private affair.
Even worse, if the bill is passed into law, it would require all mayors to have a degree. The Diary looks forward to hearing which institution accepts Mwahimas application.
Nevertheless, the mayors poor exam score has helped trigger a debate between Kenyan policy-makers about the meaning of democracy (presumably not one of the questions that came up on the high-school exam paper). President Daniel arap Moi is said to want a higher standard of literacy among those running Kenyas local authorities, although he himself only managed eight years at school. Meanwhile, outraged mayors insist that academic abilities are not an integral part of being a good leader. Who holds office they say, is entirely in the hands of the electorate, not the examiners.
Hermit unearthed
Weird News Online, that staple of high-level journalism, reports that British soldiers on a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia have come across a man unaware that the war was over.
The man not Slobodan Milosevic goes by the name of Illija Panincic, although he has not heard it spoken for a while. For the last however many years (the war ended six of them ago) Panincic has been hiding in an abandoned cabin in the mountains surrounding the town of Sipovo, feeding on twigs and berries. According to these reports the hermit was very surprised to learn that the war he had fled was over. British soldiers are said to be travelling great distances to deliver food to him.
Quoting them on that
It is best that the United States, as the only global military superpower, deploy its energies militarily rather than on social work.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the International Herald Tribune.
Contact the Diary editor: dominic.hilton@opendemocracy.net
