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Gideon Rachman’s amusing piece in the FT today about conspiracy theories brings to mind the little visited but nevertheless glorious section of the US State Department website given over entirely to conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Our friends at Foggy Bottom have graciously spent hours diligently rebutting a veritable galaxy of theories, ranging from old favourites (President [...]

As the US-EU bidding war hots up over what should replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012, expect to hear plenty more about the ‘AP6′ - or, to give it its full title, the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (official website here).  The AP6 group of countries (the US, Australia, China, India, [...]

Most coverage this morning of the Bush-Brown summit at Camp David stresses the extent to which both men were at pains to defuse any perception of a bust-up. But Benedict Brogan (the Daily Mail’s political editor and one of the best bloggers around on UK politics), who has been travelling with the Brown party, has [...]

The Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins first described the idea of ‘brittle power’ in a book published twenty-five years (!) ago. Modern energy systems, he warned, were highly vulnerable to shocks, ‘easily shattered by accident or malice.’
In a recent interview with the excellent Grist magazine, Lovins describes his efforts to promote a more resilient energy [...]

According to Wesley Clark, in the weeks following 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld was hoping to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, [with] Iran.”
Clark’s account in full:
About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy [...]

WatchMojo.com has a useful analysis of the new Facebook Platform (the thing that’s recently caused your Facebook newsfeed to be overrun with invitations to add applications of one kind or another). Among the striking statistics cited recently by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, they note that Facebook claims:
- the 25 and over age group is [...]

Readers will already be aware from news coverage that US Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales’s testimony at the Senate didn’t go so well earlier this week (here’s the NY Times coverage if you want it; since then, Democrat Senators have issued a subpoena to Karl Rove and recommended that Gonzales be investigated for perjury). 
But most of the [...]

We haven’t tended to engage much with Iraq on GlobalDashboard, in my case largely because I’m not sure I have much to add - though I’ve long felt that Democrats calling for withdrawal don’t seem to have much of a strategy underpinning their position. But when two serious experts on completely opposite ends of [...]

Rachel Morarjee has a good feature in the FT today with gloomy news on Afghanistan.  Especially alarming, she writes, is the decision by donor agencies to channel aid towards provinces with more instability, or higher opium cultivation rates - predominantly in the south of the country.  Moral hazard?  You bet:
This approach overlooks the massive development needs in [...]

Global Dashboard contributor (and my brother) Jules Evans has a superb piece in this month’s Prospect magazine about Stoicism and cognitive behaviour therapy.
The article’s based on his recent interview with Albert Ellis, the originator of CBT, who died yesterday (see also the obituary in today’s NY Times): it’s the last interview Ellis gave before he [...]

Lots of hopeful coverage last week about the find, made by Boston University researchers, of a massive underground lake in Darfur. The Independent was pretty typical:
In the dry wasteland of Sudan’s war-racked Darfur region, the imprint of an ancient 8,000sq-mile underground lake has been discovered by geologists from Boston University. If confirmed, a lake as [...]

Some blunt words from the US’s new envoy on HIV and AIDS, Anthony Fauci, who says:
“For every one person that you put in [antiretroviral] therapy, six new people get infected. So we’re losing that game, the numbers game.”
How refreshing to see a leading global issue ambassador being blunt about the central numbers, rather than spinning [...]

The UN Security Council decided on Friday to terminate the mandate of UNMOVIC - the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, itself the successor to the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) established in 1991 to oversee post-war dismantlement of Iraq’s CBRN arsenal. Condi Rice and Margaret Beckett had written wrote a joint letter to the Security [...]

David Miliband’s first speech as Foreign Secretary, given at Chatham House earlier today, is worth watching (transcript on the FCO website here). He’s proposing to simmer the UK’s ten current international priorities down to perhaps three, mooting radicalisation, climate change and the EU as his “starters for ten”.
Especially welcome was the emphasis on Foreign Office [...]

Earlier this week I went to an event attended by various senior policymakers discussing global risks and the inadequacy of the international system to deal with them. The discussion went along predictable lines for the most part, but there was a glorious moment when a senior World Bank executive said:
Clearly, it’s national sovereignty that’s [...]

Regular readers of GlobalDashboard know that we’re big fans of fourth generation warfare theorists William Lind and John Robb. Both writers have warned persistently that 4GW isn’t just something that happens “over there”, in Anbar or Helmand. It’s “over here”, too, whether “here” is low-intensity war in Mexico (see the Economist on Mexico’s [...]

Usually when you see phrases like “oil crunch in five years”, you assume that you’re being addressed by a peak-oiler who is about to go on to explain to you the composition of the canned food stash that he’s secured in his attic. So when you realise that you’re actually reading the FT, and [...]

The FT has a big interview with David Miliband this morning (stories here on Iran and here on Britain as a ‘global hub’; transcript here). Most of the FT’s questions are country- or region-specific, but there’s an interestingly candid point at the very end, after the FT have asked him to sum up. Here’s his [...]

Catching up with recent posts on John Robb’s Global Guerrillas blog, I find a small ray of sunshine for a bright summer’s day:
We’ve all heard the term “suicide bomber.” So what do you call a person, infected with a deadly biowarfare agent, that travels the public airways from city to city, purposely spreading the contagion [...]

Two great pieces on intelligence in the Washington Post over the weekend. RJ Hillhouse is worried that the US’s national security is being outsourced:
Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune, [...]

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