GlobaLab weekly round-up: 24/02/07-02/03/07

This (late) update is a hasty one because over the last 2 weeks the real world is distracting me from the virtual… but this is what I collected from my feeds…

Africa

• Test your African geography: 54 countries in 10 minutes. It seems simple, but you’d be surprised how many island-states you will forget…! [via AIDG]
• The Economist reassures us on the benevolent change in nature of the diamond industry, and the near disappearance of blood diamonds. Wishful thinking, I am afraid. [via Africa Unchained]
• The NY Times offers not one, but two reviews of Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Bamako, the surrealist tale of a mock-trial of the World Bank and the IMF in the Malian capital. If you have a chance, don’t miss this extraordinary movie.

Middle East & North Africa

• Bad news from Egypt, as a Abdel Kareem Soliman becomes the first blogger to be jailed in the country for insulting Islam and the President. Amnesty International said the ruling was “yet another slap in the face of freedom for expression in Egypt”. An on-line campaign to free Karim has been launched with the support… er… of the American conservative Cato Institute…
• Hossein Derakhshan discusses Internet censorship and how to beat it in Iran on the Guardian Unlimited.

Globalisation debate

• A couple of exchanges on Demos’ Greenhouse about a recent event they hosted with John Ralston Saul, a renowned philosopher, novelist, political penseur, who has provocatively pronounced the “end of globalism“. A quick scan, and it seems this provocative statement could simply be re-phrased as the rejection of neo-liberalism. Had he framed the debate in these terms, it would have sounded less plausible, slightly rehashed and probably less marketable than the grand statement above. But then, we all need to make a living.

ICT and creativity

• One for the geeks. Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media is Matthew Hurst’s impressive blog about his core interests: computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, data/text mining, gis, strategy, weblogs, online personal media. His is the beautiful map at the top of this entry – a whimsical image of the blogosphere from the edge of the core. [via La Russophobe]
• Y for Yendetta predicts the future of the digital divide: not access, not education, not gender, etc., but laziness: “Suis-je bovvered?” Good point, actually… [via Andrew Chadwick]
• Ming the Mechanic tells us about Wikipatterns, a ‘Wiki collecting patterns of practices for how to launch a successful Wiki. And anti-patterns for how not to do it‘. Wikid.
• AIDG has some fantastic entries, from one about the Battle of the Bulbs: Incandescent vs. CFL (Video) to another one about The Great Firewall of China, a site that lets you test whether your URL is being blocked in China (GlobaLab is, probably because it’s wordpress).

International Development

• Suzanne Smith on PSD blog puts an end to years of heated debates about the role of private finance investment in reducing poverty: ‘If you have ever doubted the importance of the finance sector in reducing poverty, a new paper will set your mind at rest. More finance sector development leads to more investment in tractors and fertilizers, leading to more food‘. If only we had more World Bank experts telling us children what’s right and what’s wrong, we’d all sleep better at night…
• Meantime, always on PSD, new research reveals that privatization in 2005 has hit new records, with ‘transactions concentrated in China, Czech Republic, Hungary, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Turkey and Ukraine and the top ten deals are largely in banking and telecommunications‘.

Russia

• Siberian Light rounds up the events of the week, and these posts in particular have captured my imagination: ‘Copydude has posted photos of a bunch of Nashi activists running around Kaliningrad – dressed as 500 rouble notes‘ – ‘My morning with Yulia Tymoshenko – Laurence Jarvik posts his observations on her recent press conference in Washington. It seems she has ambitions of a tilt at the Ukrainian presidency in 2009′ – ‘Sean looks at Russia’s brand of capitalism and democracy‘ – ‘Tim Newman explains why Russians hate Americans‘ and ‘ The US has decided it wants a missile defense site in the Caucasus. Captain’s Quarters thinks its a blunt message to Putin that the US will not be cowed’.

Environment

• Juan Freire reviews a recent article on the Washington Post about Bruce Sterling’s self-congratulations about the green dot bubble and another one on the NY Times about Stewart Brand as An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’. Excellent read for the Spanish-speakers.

Corporat Social (ir-)Responsibility

• Corporate Watch updates us on how The Curse of Gold is Transforming the Pacific Island of Papua New Guinea, how Disney sweats over sweatshop charges in China, how Protests are Mounting against Canada’s Goldcorp Inc. in Honduras and how Earthjustice and Alaska Natives are protesting against drilling plans in the Beaufort Sea.

Blog Babble and random weird stuff

• Global Ideas Bank refers to a fascinating article by Ethan Zuckerman on WorldChanging about Who’s Happy and Why.

GlobaLab weekly round-up: 17/02/07-23/02/07

Africa

• Reuters launches its first African news website [via Wanabehuman].
• The NY Times published two interesting reports, the first one on a different Sudan to the one we are used to hear about, one in which oil-wealth is transforming elite lifestyles in Khartoum, the second one about how the arrival of the Last King of Scotland in Kampala has stirred old painful memories and bursts of national pride.
• British-South African mining giant Anglo-American is returning $3bn to shareholders after reporting a 46% rise in annual profits in 2006, and certainly contributing to South Africa’s first budget surplus. This is the same company whose subsidiary Anglo-Gold Ashanti has been targeted by the CAFOD’s Unearth Justice campaign, accused of paying dire little attention to the social and environmental impact of its operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
• But mining continues to be big business in Africa, and this week Mauritania got its first copper mine [via Sociolingo]
• Greg Houle on African Update writes an interesting commentary to an Economist article about the dichotomy that donor nations and organizations are facing in Ethiopia.
• And more on the usual China-Africa issue, but this time it’s about the success of inventive South African companies in China, and the reasons behind it [via Africa Unchained]

Environment

• The opening of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai will mark the unveiling of the newly constructed eco-city of Dongtan. The first of four eco-cities to be built in China by Arup, Dongtan will be ecologically friendly, with zero greenhouse-emission transit and self-sufficient water and energy systems. Read more on carljames’ blog.
• Tree-Nation is a Barcelona-based project that wants to plant 8 million trees in Niger, in the shape of a giant heart. Their hope is that this re-forestation campaign will help the environment and the people of the country, as media continue reporting on the unstoppable march of the deserts, from Rwanda to Cameroon. What is particularly interesting for me is their incredibly innovative use of the Internet (especially the on-line map) to achieve this purpose [via Sociolingo].
• The EU Observer lashes out at those corporations – such as Exxon Mobil – that fund NGOs in Brussels to spread doubt about the human causes of climate change. Wanabehuman has a good overview of how the global media have dealt with the issue, and in particular with the IPCC report published last week.

Innovation & Information Technologies

• The BBC reports on a 2.3m euros European scheme which will develop robots able to learn from people and interact with them emotionally, something which futurist Ray Kurzweil [and Kevin Kelly before him] had already suggested a while back when explaining how the boundary between man and machine is bound to disappear.
• The Audio and Video edition of NGO-in-a-Box is a toolkit that lowers the entry level for NGOs, non-profits and media activists wanting to use audio and video for social change. It is a collection of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools, documentation and tutorials that introduce you to the world of FOSS and the low-cost technology that is transforming the balance of forces in the realm of media production [thanks to Kathleen].
• Always on FOSS, Spartakan reports on another European meeting to promote open software that will take place tomorrow and Sunday in Brussels.
• GlobalNomad reports on 3DLiveStats, an application that allows the visualisation of any data on a 3D globe.
• Wanabehuman reproduce an article by Stephen Coleman about New Media in a global era. Essential read for anyone interested in the political potentials of the Internet, although you should also look at this post by Richard Sambrooks on SacredFacts, pointing out that most news on the net ultimately come from two sources: AP and Reuters. He also links to a good article by the Washington Post on the Demise of the Foreign Correspondent.

Middle East

• The IAEA publishes its report (PDF) on the Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and Relevant Provisions of Security Council Resolution 1737 (2006) in the Islamic Republic of Iran, basically stating it is towing the line, but not 100%, prompting declarations by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iran will defend its nuclear programme to the bitter end.

Europe/EU

• The European Commission shows its social side, after the publication of its vision for the single market of the 21st century, in which priorities appear to lie with the single market’s impact on citizens and consumers and – only in third place – businesses. It also mulls rewards for companies improving work safety. Is this a first sign that the reasons behind the constitutional debacle is beginning to be understood by the Eurocrats? Perhaps, but the Presidency holder and other unnamed Member States are hardly making any progress on the matter. Will the Adam Smith Institute do any better? I suppose we all know what its suggestions will come down to…
• The Commission has also been exploring ways to ‘talk with Central Asian dicators‘, a move considered premature and ‘strategically naive’ by Crisis Group, which has pointed out the failure by the EC to address the depth of Russian influence on the incumbent regimes.
• Remember the controversy between France and Turkey over the proposed law that was going to make it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide? Well, it’s now dead letter.
• Nanne reviews the prospects, nature and essential priorities of the Balkenende IV government in The Netherlands, probably the most comprehensive report on Dutch politics I have ever read (ok, the first one too…!)
• While Edward Lucas mulls over the relation between Sweden and its northern neighbours – especially scary Russia – from the pages of his blog (and the Economist).
• Lots of stuff happening in Italy, with Prodi’s government falling, then rising back to Palazzo Chigi (notice the identical picture used by the BBC, a clear Freudian slip over the nature of Italian politics). A few days earlier, the President Napolitano had become embroiled in an ugly argument with Croatia over the foibe massacres. A Fistful of Euros has an interesting entry on this subejct, as well as an excellent overview of Italy’s dire economic problems.

International Development

• Paul Currion talks to Sanjana Hattotuwa about ICT4Peace, OLPC and Technology for Social Change;
• Paul Harvey on the ODI weblog discusses the pros and cons of cash instead of food aid;
• And Chris Monasterski on PSD reviews a recent study by the Social Science Research Network on the economic lives of the poor.

Russia

• And finally, for those of you who enjoyed reading Siberian Light’s interview last week of La Russophobe, here’s his second take, this time with Sakhalin-based blogger Tim Newman, aka White Sun of the Desert.

GlobaLab weekly round-up: 10/02/07-16/02/07

More on the Africa and China debate

• William Gumede on the Washington Post strikes another point against China in Africa, outlining why its antics are condemning the continent to a further period of underdevelopment…
• … but receives a good response from Andrew Mwenda, who argues that the debate is misplaced, and calls for more trade to help the continent rise out of poverty. He makes an interesting point on the alleged ‘lack of conditionality’ debate: ‘arguments that Chinese aid is good or bad because it does not have conditionality is misplaced. Conditionality has consistently failed to work. A lot of studies on Africa have demonstrated this. What China is doing in Africa is not changing direction, but offering more of the same’. [both via Africa Unchained]
• And Paolo de Renzio from ODI jumps into the debate, asking a simple, yet powerful question: ‘Amidst all the noise, however, the most deafening roar is that of China’s silence. Its silence on the vision it has for a different world order. Should the international community engage with China in dialogue at this higher level, rather than focus narrowly on good governance in Africa?’

South Asia

• Jonathan Power on WanabeHuman (probably the best discovery in the blogsphere of the month!) discusses the potential of an Islamist threat to army rule in Pakistan;

Environment

• Nanne on European Tribune offers a detailed summary of a summary of the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report, for those of you interested in where the climate change debate is going…
• John Vidal report on the Guardian on how Monsanto helped create one of the most contaminated sites in Britain [via Corporate Watch].
• And always Corporate Watch reports on cracks that are already appearing along the BTC pipeline, requiring urgent extra monitoring.

Russia

• In the style of the great journalistic coups of the past, Siberian Light interviews La Russophobe, the enfant terrible of the Russian blogsphere;

Innovation and Technology

• Jon explains the wonders of LED bulbs, which apparently last 40 times as long and use one-tenth the energy as incandescent bulbs.
• Flemming Funch has a brilliant entry on world monitoring sites, from emergencies and disasters going on right now on the world map to a site that allows you to see who’s blogging in the world right now!

The US in the Middle East

• Newsweek reports on Bush’s new enemy, the Quds Force – a paramilitary arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – and questions the intelligence that has led to recent accusations that they would be providing weapons used against US troops in Iraq;
• Laura Rozen quotes NPR: ‘The US is going to let 7,000 of the two million Iraqi refugees into the US. By contrast, Syria has taken in one million Iraqi refugees, but now says it can take no more. Forty thousand Iraqis are fleeing Iraq every month’.

Economy and International Development

• Much to the horror of debt-relief campaigners, the Guardian and the BBC report on a British High Court ruling, which allows British Virgin Islands-based Donegal International to sue Zambia for a $42m repayment for a debt that the African nation owed and which the company purchased at less than $4m (£2m). Oxfam urges campaigners to send an angry message to the company’s CEO.

Europe/EU

• Edward Lucas lashes out not once, but twice from the Economist’s pages at Poland’s ‘pig-headed’ government led by the Kaczynski twins, depicted as ‘vengeful, paranoid, addicted to crises, divided and mostly incompetent‘. An unusually politically-savvy position for an Economist correspondent to take, given Poland has taken in a record $14.7 billion in foreign investment last year, and the economy is growing at almost 6% a year.
• Eurozone reviews Germany’s 2.9% GDP growth in 2006, which has allowed the German economy to outgrow the US one in per-capita terms.
• Clive Matthews/Nosemonkey reports on racial representation in the European Parliament (from a Guardian article stating that of 785 MEPs – representing 492 million people from 27 countries – just 9 are not white) and does an excellent round-up of the major European blogs, from debates on the future of the constitution to the French presidential elections.
• Mariann Fischer-Boel starts warming up to her new blog-toy, reporting from her recent US trip where she discussed farm subsidies and the future of the WTO Doha negotiations: ‘My discussions in Washington showed that the Farm Bill will be written very much with domestic concerns in mind. DOHA does not seem to be high on the agenda in farm bill discussions. This is a very different approach to ours, where we reform first and then look to lock these reforms into a WTO agreement‘. Is my euro-speak rusty, or is the pot calling the kettle black?
• And finally, for those of you who are wondering what happened to the oneseat campaign (which collected over 1m signatures to try and stop 200 million euros being spent every year to move the European Parliament between Brussels/Belgium and Strasbourg/France), read Nanne’s entry on trading seats and proposals to try and woo France’s bruised ego on the subject!

GlobaLab weekly round-up: 03/02/07-09/02/07

Global

• Jon finally starts his own blog, so he’ll stop writing lengthy obscure comments on my blog, and will have fun playing with his own toy. Check it out. It’s already a classic.
• Al Gore moved a step closer to sainthood when he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, in a move which has prompted Arianna Huffington to wonder if anyone has ever won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize in the same year? It certainly makes me wonder if he won’t become a candidate to another – altogether more important – race…

Africa

• Arms to Africa? Alan Hudson at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) steps into the debate on the BAE Systems sale of expensive air traffic control systems to Tanzania, opening it up to broader questions of policy coherence towards reaching the Millennium Development Goals;
• The Gates Foundation displays its double standards and lack of coherence for investing into oil companies that are operating in Nigeria and are causing those very health problems they are trying to solve;
• The Guardian reports on how Kenya fell in love with its stock market. From trendy businessmen, to farmers from the provinces, everyone seems to be profiting from this bull market, but how long will it last before it bursts? [via Africa Unchained]

Europe

• Giuliano Amato (former Italian PM, now Minister of Interior and chair of the Action Committee for European Democracy) writes an insightful piece on the FT about the future of the Constitution (or how we might quietly be allowed to bury it, while pushing forward by other means those bits that matter, like an EU Foreign Minister!) [via Nanne]
• J. Ignacio Torreblanca takes the lead from the recent revelations by El Pais, in which US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is said to have admitted to Europe’s Foreign Ministers that the US did violate their sovereignty to kidnap and remove from their territories suspected terrorists, to assess the (positive) state of Europe’s nascent public sphere.

Russia

• Jérôme Guillet on Foreign Policy gets Gazprom and Russia off the hook, and blames instead the European leaders, who are trying to distract the public from the mess they’ve made of European energy policy;
• The Hermitage Foundation ranks Russia just below Communist China in their Index of Economic Freedom, a statement that is already generating fierce arguments across the blogsphere on the nature of economic freedom and on the motives of the Foundation itself [via Siberian Light];

The United States

• That old fox of George Soros causes a huge mayheam when he proclaims that the US should not fail to recognize its mistakes in Iraq, in the way Germany, Turkey and Japan did, and adds that the country needs to start thinking about a process of de-Nazification. Read Steve Clemon’s powerful commentary on the issue, which lashes out at Soros’ most vitriolic attack, Martin Perez’s The Madness of King George. [via The Huffington Post’s Blog];
• Barack Obama ends months of speculation by launching his presidential bid, which will pitch him against Hillary Clinton in an attempt to revitalize the Democratic Party’s chances of success.

Information Technology and Innovation

• See this webcast from the World Economic Forum’s panel discussion on The Impact of Web 2.0 and Emerging Social Network Models, starring Caterina Fake (Flickr), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Chad Hurley (YouTube), Mark G. Parker(Nike) and Viviane Reding (EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media) – the most intersting bit arrives 35′ in, with a discussion on democracy and Web 2.0.
• Read these three pieces of a global picture that is emerging of governments and corporations moving away from Microsoft and towards open source. 1) France: the French automaker Peugot Citroen has announced that over the next several years they will be integrating up to 20,000 Novell SUSE desktops as well as 2,500 SUSE servers into their facilities. (Let’s hope that, in Novell, Peugeot Citroen hasn’t bought a lemon.) 2) Sweden: the Swedish Armed Forces has made a decision to migrate its Windows NT servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 3) Russia. VE3OGG writes: “It would seem that after the recent Russian piracy debacle that could see a school headmaster jailed in a Siberian work camp for purchasing pirated copies of Windows for his school, the Ministry of Education in Russia has decided that the school boards will no longer be purchasing any commercial software.” [via Jon]

GlobaLab weekly round-up: 27/01/07-02/02/07

 

Global

• Much to its participants’ relief, and to the world’s indifference, the World Social Forum came to an end in Nairobi. While some of us were there to tell (and espeically to experience the scorching African sun) …
• … others – namely Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, Firoze Manji and Patrick Bond from Pambazuka News – were beginning to raise questions about how un-representational and undemocratic this event has become.
• But when even the World Bank’s President, Paul Wolfowitz, has no money to buy new socks, what hope is there for those billions still living in poverty?

Africa

• Sudan was refused for the second year in a row the position of chair of the African Union, following a meeting of African leaders in Addis Abeba, on the grounds of its refusal to allow a peacekeeping mission in Darfur [via Patrick].
• China’s President Hu Jintao begun an eight-nation tour of Africa, which has already brought him to Cameroon – where he approved $100m worth of grants and loans – and Liberia – where a possible package of investment in a special economic zone is expected to create some 50,000 jobs in the next 10 years.
• Human Rights Watch takes on Nigeria’s oil corruption, accusing local governments of squandering rising revenues that could provide basic health and education services for the poor.
• The FT reports that Aureos Capital, one of the most experienced private equity groups in Africa, is aiming to raise $400m for a ground-breaking bet on the potential of smaller companies to build businesses spanning the continent [via Timbuktu Chronicles]

EU/Europe

• David Calleo aligns himself with the social concerns of many Euro-sceptics, and criticizes free trade as the last religion of the West. He’s clearly not heard about Richard Dawkins‘ concern that we are progressively becoming delusional…
• Marie-Jose Garot makes a compelling case on Blog Europa for building a European political community as a prerequisite for any constitutional citizenship, although her suggestion of doing this by establishing a European military service doesn’t seem to me the most appropriate was of promoting the EU’s founding principles of peace and mutual tolerance. Nor am I sure I want to model Europeans’ sense of citizenship on the US’ idea of patriotism…!
• DJ Nozem contemplates a proposal by French MEP Alain Massoure that would reform the CAP in exchange for the UK giving up it €7.5 billion-a-year rebate…
• … and Clive Matthews reports on Timothy Garton Ash’s latest (and super-heroic) plan to construct Europe’s identity by letting its citizens tell its story. Could be interesting, but could also be incredibly messy, judging by the first vitriolic exchanges.

Russia

• Joseph Nye explains on the Huffington Post’s blog the four reasons why Russia will not be a major power in 2020 [via Siberian Light]
• … but this didn’t stop the Economist Intelligence Unit declaring it the 10th largest economy in the world [also via]

Latin America

• Hugo Chavez declares the start of maximum revolution, and is given full powers by Congress to turn Venezuela in a socialist country. Not a good sign, given Latin America’s legacy… [via Patrick]

Development Economics

• The Foundation for Development Cooperation – Australia’s only international development think tank! – has published a report on the role remittances from migrant workers can play in many coutries’ economies, and arguing that financial products urgently need to be developed to make it easier to send, receive and manage international money transfers [via Africa Unchained].
• Ethiopia takes on Starbucks while Papua New Guinea sues mining giant BHP Billiton: which one will be the next mediatic frenzy ‘a la Blood Diamond‘ on how the Western corporations are destroying the world?

Information Technology and Innovation

• Chris Anderson discusses hyperlocal journalism and the vanishing point theory of news in a throught-provoking piece about the future of information [via Juan Freire]
• And finally, the European eGovernment Society launches a call for papers for its 6th international conference, which will take place in the lovely town of Regensburg, in Germany [via Spartakan]!

GlobaLab weekly round-up: 20-26/01/07

Globalization

• Angela Merkel, perhaps inspired by Gordon Brown’s recent celebration in India of the wonders of free-trade, reassures us from the chilly heights of Davos about the universal benefits of globalization…
• … while dozens of hungry street children in Nairobi – clearly unaware of her speech – raid one of the reception tents of the parallel World Social Forum, stealing food destined for the global delegates
• Orion mulls over the arrest of six environmentalists, sentenced to prison in Eugene, Oregon: are they terrorists, or the first-responders to a planetary emergency?

Africa

• China gives the Central African Republic $15 mln worth of debt relief and aid, the fifth African country to receive such aid over the past few days
• Ali Mufuruki – writing in Business in Africa – argues against more foreign aid interventions and for a renewed effort by Africans to become masters of their own future and start fixing their own problems [via Africa Unchained]
• The Globalist takes inspiration from The Last King of Scotland to start looking into how to get Uganda right

Information Technology & Innovation

• The BBC reports on technologies at war, and how they have changed the life of ordinary people in Iraq… [via Ebed]
• … while Hillary Clinton makes full use of the Internet for her newly-launched presidential campaign, reports the Washington Post [via Jon]

Russia

• Russia quietly repairs its troubled relations with Georgia, while bolstering its ties with Japan

Europe

• A ‘vague’ (sic!) scent of elitism pervades Miguel Mesquita da Cunha’s commentary of the risks of increasing democracy in the European Union, perhaps forgetting that it is quite hard to get people’s support for a common endeavour without explaining to them what they’re buying into. Or perhaps he thinks the EU doesn’t need the Europeans’ support?
• And finally, everyone has been wondering why the Danes are the happiest people in Europe. Apparently, the secret is not having too many expectations in life…!

PS: on the 23rd, a great Polish writer and journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, died aged 74. This entry is dedicated to him and to his restless search for the soul of Africa.

GlobaLab weekly round-up: 13-19/01/07

 

Proudly presenting a new (but not innovative, alas) weekly format to try and share with you some of the interesting things I am spotting on the net and across the blogsphere, but which I cannot comment on widely for lack of time and/or want. I am not sure this will be the way forward – too many people are seemingly using this diffused system, leading to a sort of informational climax, without the corresponding pleasure – but let’s see how it goes…

Europe/EU

• J. Ignacio Torreblanca and José M. de Areilza discuss Vicepresident Günter Verhuegen’s recent question “why do small Member States need a Commissioner each, after all?”
• Clive Matthews comes to the EU’s defence, questioning reports of mistakes in its expenditure …
• … but criticizes attempts to prevent the new far-right Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty group – which Margot detests so vehemently – from gaining public offices, arguing instead for the right to see them collapse due to soon-to-come bickering and obtuse in-fighting
• Polish Gazeta Wyborcza and Dutch De Volkskrant open a joint forum to talk about Europe across the divide (via DJ Nozem)
• The Economist’s Edward Lucas sees (unsuprisingly) market liberalisation as the only possible answer to Russia’s energy shenanigans
• Demos’ Molly Webb ponders the essence of social movements: optimism or rebellion? (I’d say anger…)

Africa

• Rosemary Ekosso reproduces Open Society’s review by Michael Homan of the ills of the aid industry in Africa
• Joe Dougherty writes about the difficulties of being a small entrepreneur in Africa today [via Pienso]

Russia

• Fedia Kriukov takes issue with the Economist calling Stalin ‘a mass murderer’… bless!

Middle East

• Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, better known as Hoder, talks about blogging and politics in Iran to Haaretz (via Foreign Poliy blog) …
• … while the rest of the Iranian blogsphere reacts with dismay to a new law requiring them to register their websites and blogsites with the authorities

Information Technology & Innovation

• The European Commission reveals that opensource saves 12 billion Euro in private software development costs annually and that Europe could close its innovation gap with the US by pushing opensource
• Firefox continues to steal market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer [both via Jon, who hopefully will start writing something on his shiny new blog]
• GetActive and Net Squared nominate the 59 smartest and IT-savvy non-profits on line, including some old favourites, and some new discoveries [via Pienso]
• And finally, Geert Lovink on Eurozine formulates a theory of weblogs as decadent artefacts that remotely dismantle the broadcast model [via]

Emperor Niyazov’s missing clothes

After some 30 minutes of brain-damaging Italian TV news – mainly focusing on the shenanigans of a secondary-school male teacher who has decided to start cross-dressing during class hours, shocking the students and their outraged parents – I had to rely on the BBC website and Nosemonkey’s blog to find out that Turkmenistan’s dictator Saparmurat Niyazov has suddenly died of a heart attack, aged 66. Another one bites the dust.

I know what you’re all thinking, and a commentator responding to Judd’s entry on Niyazov’s death on the Think Progress blog confirmed my suspicions: poisoning is the forte of the KGB, heart attacks instead of the CIA…! And indeed, speculation on the causes and consequences of Niyazov’s departure will mount furiously over the coming days and weeks, with fears of instability already spreading like fire across the blogsphere. But while Central Asia is still calm, we should take the opportunity to reflect on what kind of authoritarian madness Turkmenistan – one of the most repressive and closed countries in the world, according to Human Rights Watch – has just endured for the last 17 years.

Niyazov, leader of the Turkmen SSR, supported the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 and retained control of the country after the fall of the Soviet Union, becoming the first (and so far only) President of Turkmenistan [Wikipedia]. He pushed through a constitution that concentrated power in his hands and embarked upon a megalomaniac career as president for life. While other post-Soviet countries suffered disorder and, in some cases, revolutions or war, Niyazov lorded over Turkmenistan with a sprawling security apparatus and a fantastically well-developed personality cult [NY Times].

Mr. Niyzazov forbade independent news media and opposition parties, jailed rivals or drove them to exile, and imposed his name, words and image on all manner of public discourse and life. Amongst others, he renamed the town of Krasnovodsk, on the Caspian Sea, Türkmenbaşy after himself, in addition to renaming several schools, airports, streets, a meteorite and even the months and days of the week after himself and his family. His pronouncements, many of them disconnected from the normal affairs of state, were sometimes strange enough to assume an irreverent life on the Internet [NY Times].

For example, he claimed, in his masterpiece Ruhnama (for, lucky us, he left penty of writings behind him) that the Turkmens invented the wheel, the use of iron and steel and most great inventions of the world; indeed, such is the greatness of the Turkmens that they founded the greatest empires in history, including the Sejuk, Ottoman and every other empire in the Middle East and West Asia.

In fact, Niyazov’s legacy is far greater than these pearls of wisdom and the thousands of monuments to his inferiority complex that litter Turkmenistan’s squares, as Global Witness explains in a press release issued today:

Between two and three billion US dollars of Turkmenistan’s public funds are held by the Turkmen Central Bank at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt […]. Further billion-dollar foreign reserve funds of oil, gas and cotton revenues, which were under the sole control of Niyazov, are also believed to be held at Deutsche Bank. Evidence suggests that many of Niyazov’s bizarre prestige projects, including golden statues and palaces, were paid for out of these funds.

Clearly, the emperor forgot to share with his beloved subjects the profits of Turkmenistan’s large gas reserves, the 5th in size in the world, and a vital supply to Russia’s Gazprom. Emerging from such a catastrophic political scenario and with the prospect of gaining control over such a huge bounty, I have very little hope that Niyazov’s successor will be anything more than a brutal scavenger. I hope (but doubt) history will prove me wrong…

Russian Easter

From the BBC:

Dozens of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Russia have been required to suspend operations after missing a deadline to register. Human Rights Watch is one of the bodies that have failed to clear the red tape in time – but it vowed to keep working.

It’s an old story: for months now the Kremlin has been waging a more-or-less open war against Russian and international NGOs operating inside the country, especially when they deal with human rights issues.

Meantime, Ella Pamfilova – Chair of the Council of Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights under the President of the Russian Federation, and Chair of the Civil G8 2006 (I wonder how large her business cards are) – visits London to talk about (you guessed…!) political leadership at acevo‘s International Conference on Third Sector leadership.

I wonder how Mary Kaldor must have felt about sharing the table with her…

Anna Politkovskaya killed

A sad week for Russia and for human rights worldwide. Anna Politkovskaya, outspoken critic of the Kremlin’s dealings in Chechnya and special correspondent for the Novaya Gazeta, was shot dead in the lift of her apartment block in Moscow. So far, not a word from President Putin…