We have a weakness for practical ideas. Hendrik Tiesinga’s is a big one, a sensible political economy, with a basic wage! Angela Phillips tackles journalism, its survival and how to pay for it as citizens become producers as well as consumers. Her message finds a warm echo in openDemocracy's own new era. As someone who gets this summary you are already a supporter, so forward it on to someone new and ask them to join us.

The use of existing economic power to dissolve social bonds and entrench inequality alarms OurKingdom: with Stuart Weir (on privatisation-as-enclosure), and Colin Leys and Barbara Harriss-White (on the commodification of everything), while Melissa Benn(on education-as-business) joins in from 50:50.

OK also looks at the Falklands/Malvinas 30 years after the war between Britain and Argentina: Anthony Barnett calls for peace,Gerry Hassan says the war shows what kind of country Britain remains, Peter Presland sets out clearly London’s despicable and infuriating treatment of the Chagos islanders to illuminate British hypocrisy and Jeremy Fox offers a sweeping history of how Argentina came to be. Another symposium on the Falklands and the birth of Thatcherism is promised.

Elsewhere there are signs of political unfreezing: in Russia, where in oDR Alexei Levinson, Grigorii Golorov, and Dmitri Travin assess the protest upsurge and a returning Putin’s options; in Burma, Joakim Kreutz advises caution over Aung San Suu Kyi’s victory; and in France, Nicolas Lebourg and Patrice de Beer (who surveys the Presidential campaign) peer through the atmosphere after the Toulouse tragedy.

Paul Rogers’ column returns to the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran, and coolly charts the likely scale of a war of ‘targeting’.

The personal dimension is with us in tributes to figures from the cultural and academic worlds: the Palestinian-Israeli theatre director Juliano Mer Khamis and the Bangladeshi scholar Jalal Almagir, and Ali Gohar finds in an Afghan custom a resource for the future.

 
Three links not to miss:
 
Gregory Shaya on the Myth of the Fourth Estate

Evan Osnos on the lunar eclipse of election year, 2012

Robert Haddick on Syria as prologue