John Quiggin welcomes the agreement to commence power-sharing talks in Zimbabwe, though there’s obviously still some scepticism about. Crikey has a very useful links page to comments from Zimbabwean blogs.
Archive for the 'International' Category
It’s been ages since we’ve done a competition. I’ll donate $300 for the best entry in a microfiction comp to Medecins Sans Frontieres. The idea is to write a story in 300 words or less. Must be prose. No haikus! The theme is “The Postmodern Pirate Queen”. In your story, you must include the phrases “peg leg” and “time streams”. Steampunk is a suggested but not compulsory genre. That’s all!
Suggestions on judging and criteria solicited. And matching donations encouraged! You have til midnight on Saturday.
It was a very easy contrast to make for the media - while World Youth Day 2008 has been acclaimed as a success by the Catholic Church in Australia, Anglicans were tearing themselves to pieces, with the decennial Lambeth Conference reduced to a farce. A large number of quasi-schismatic conservative bishops boycotted, having earlier set up a quasi-church outside the Anglican Communion’s traditional structures at GAFCON in Jerusalem.
What’s all the fuss about? Teh gay.
Continue reading ‘Homosexuality not actually work of the devil, report finds’
Russia’s state-run Rossiya TV network is conducting an online poll to decide who is the greatest Russian of all time.
The results thus far are dispiriting. In first place is the last Tsar, Nicholas II, followed closely by Josef Stalin (who wasn’t even Russian) with Vladimir Ilych Lenin (who was largely Tatar, German, Jewish and Swedish rather than Russian) in third place. In fourth place is 20th century popular singer Vladimir Vysotsky with Tsar Peter the Great fifth. No sign of Mikhail Gorbachev or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the poll, but Nikita Khrushchev is in the final 50. Andrei Sakharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky are in but aren’t on the leaderboard, unlike those lovable rogues Boris Yeltsin and Ivan the Terrible.
Are LP readers better judges of Russians than Russians themselves? I’ll put in a plug for Gorby, Jules Martov, Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky and call for your responses. If nothing else, this thread might bring Fyodor out of the woodwork.
In contrast to the media coverage earlier in the year when the People’s Republic of China suffered such an overwhelming public relations disaster in the context of protests from human rights and Tibetan activists against the Olympic torch, very little has been heard of Tibet in the mainstream media of late. All that we’ve seen lately in the Australian press is the solemn warnings from the Australian Olympics Committee that any athletes wearing an innocuous t-shirt with a generic human rights message offered to those interested by the Australia Tibet Council would be immediately sent home. Lest they annoy the Chinese government, and violate the “spirit of the Olympics” presumably. The corporate sponsored Olympiad brooks no petty “mixing” of politics and sport, of course.
Continue reading ‘Tibet, human rights, history and the 2008 Olympics’
I’m not sure if it’s in the BBC’s charter, but the venerable public broadcaster is allegedly trying to reach out to people with disabilities, and to increase social awareness of disability issues. Through such charming initiatives as their online Paris Hilton like trash celeb persona - “Disability Bitch”:
“Hi, I’m Disability Bitch. I’m disabled and I love it. Everyone should be disabled. Everyone should be like me.
“I own an extensive collection of colour-coordinated wigs and an even more extensive collection of colour-coordinated mobility aids, all of which complement my natural beauty…
Whatevs, darl. But there’s more. She’s not an all purpose disability bitch, but part of a reality tv franchise. In pursuit of its social inclusion agenda, the BBC is running a reality tv show - “Britain’s Missing Top Model” - the premise of which is that chicks missing limbs or in chairs can also be teh hotness and get to be in glossy fashion mags. It’s “Stylish, sassy, chic … disabled?”… The idea, I guess, is supposed to be that disability is no barrier to objectification. Continue reading ‘Disability and body image and reality tv’
It sounds like some dumb reality tv show, doesn’t it? But we all know who didn’t get voted out of the house.
As almost everyone in the world knows, it’s election year in America.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (don’t ask, you already know the answer!) might be in trouble. Iraq might be - kinda, sorta - an election issue. But if - like me - you’re following the American Election via either the blogosphere or (oh noes!) the MSM, you’d notice a huge disconnect between how big an issue climate change is here, and how totally miniscule it is in the U S of A.
I hope Al Gore might have something to say at the Democratic Convention.
But that might not occur. And even if it does, and that and all the Arnie stuff aside, it’s going to be pretty much a side issue. Lord only knows what we can do, but those of us who, like me, are Democrats Overseas, might consider a bit of lobbying. But we might think as well about remembering that climate change is a global issue, and trying to get the Australian government to use whatever leverage it has to get it treated as such. Continue reading ‘The World’s Top Emitter’
Other aspects of World Youth Day 2008 have been discussed in previous posts which can be accessed here. In this post, I’d like to concentrate on why it is being held in Sydney at all.
Dr Paul Collins is probably one of the best known commentators on Catholic affairs in Australia. A former priest, he had his own run in with Cardinal Ratzinger and the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith a few years ago, which didn’t stop him from writing a rather upbeat assessment of the prospects of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy in God’s New Man. Some of the hopes he had in 2005 have now dissipated and he takes a rather jaundiced view of the Church’s prospects in his new book - Believers: Does Australian Catholicism Have a Future?
Collins is on the “progressive” wing of the Church, and to pose the question in the terms he does implies a view that Catholicism in Australia is in crisis. But it’s worth noting that view is firmly shared by the conservatives, and in fact World Youth Day’s Australian sojourn is supposed to be a big part of the cure for the faith’s ills.
What is the price of a human life?
Priceless, you might say, but if you did you’d be wrong! Everything has a price these days including human lives.
An Associated Press study has discovered that the US environmental protection agency (EPA) values a human life at $6.9 million, down from $7.8 million five years ago. So life comes cheaper in Bush’s USA.
Not since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon has there been an urban innovation…oh, hang on…
Not since the gardens of Versailles have we seen…oh, wait…
Not since ivy…
Ok, so it’s not really a new concept - but there is something enormously appealing and compelling about the vertical gardens designed by Patrick Blanc, which have transformed more than a few nondescript buildings and shopping malls across Europe.
Using a kind-of trellis system and felt impregnated with seeds, Blanc can design growing walls which live off grey water and nutrients drip-fed from the top of the structure. The system is lightweight and doesn’t damage the building, as it’s suspended a few inches out from the surface.
Continue reading ‘Could this turn cities into carbon sinks?’
As the uncle travelling Matt of LP, I’ve had my first missive on U.S. education published over at Online Opinion.
Feel free to have a gander, and comments are welcome below.
The legal justification for America’s military presence in Iraq is UN resolution 1770, which expires in August. Negotiations for a “Status of Forces Agreement”, which would provide continuing legitimacy to the US presence, have hit a major snag with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki insisting that any timetable contain a timetable for American withdrawal. There’s some good analysis from Juan Cole, who observes:
McCain increasingly looks like he is stuck in 2007 with regard to Iraq policy, and Obama looks more and more like the man of the future.
Crooks and Liars notes that John McCain was asked about what would occur in the eventuality of an Iraqi request for a withdrawal in 2004:
Question: “What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there?”
McCain’s Answer: “Well, if that scenario evolves than I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because — if it was an elected government of Iraq, and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.”
McCain, of course, has been hammering Obama for supporting a phased withdrawal, which is precisely what Al-Maliki is calling for.
While here in Australia, the debate about climate change grinds through the technicalities (which I am still trying to chew my way through), things are happening overseas. At the G8 summit, the commnique on the environment and climate change contained far stronger language than the last one.
The key bit of the communique, which can be read in its entirety at the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s website, is as follows:
We seek to share with all Parties to the UNFCCC the vision of, and together with them to consider and adopt in the UNFCCC negotiations, the goal of achieving at least 50% reduction of global emissions by 2050, recognizing that this global challenge can only be met by a global response, in particular, by the contributions from all major economies, consistent with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.
Continue reading ‘G8 commits to numerical targets, even if inadequate’
Whatever life is still left in the idea of universities as hotbeds of radicalism, it might soon be moving into the retirement village along with hundreds of thousands of former college Professors.
This article from the New York Times paints a fascinating portrait of the generation gap in academia: between that of a tenured, formerly radical and idealistic generation and that of the sessional, moderate and empiricist young Turks poised to take over.
If you can suspend for a moment your disbelief at the poetic license the reporter took in framing such generational stereotypes, the raw statistics from the report are a highlight in themselves: Continue reading ‘The Long March through the bowling clubs’
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