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The Land Registry is looking for a special kind of candidate:

Senior Problem Manager: Responsible for managing all problems recorded in the Problem Management System. Leading the Problem Management team to minimise and, where possible, proactively prevent adverse effects on the business of all problems caused by errors…

Well, the UN may be down in the dumps about Darfur and the EU might be losing its bottle on Chad, but those NATO guys down in Kosovo don’t do fear, even if things are looking edgy.
NATO’s commander in Kosovo brushed aside security threats, saying the 16,000-strong NATO-led force known as KFOR was ready to [...]

Just as I was wondering whether Turkey’s Kurds still had reasons to be grumpy, up pops the country’s Supreme Court to ban the leading Kurdish political party, the DTP, and expel its elected MPs from Parliament. This has happened many times before - a DTP deputy describes Turkey as a “cemetery of banned political parties” [...]

Wired brings news of the latest counter-insurgency innovation from the US Army - ‘Human Terrain Teams’.  Some creative thinking about influence is underway:
Each team is getting a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish and software for social network analysis, so they can diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will [...]

The excellent Kevin Drum finds himself bewildered by the large gulf between his reaction to financial news and that of Wall Street:
I will never understand Wall Street. Here’s the latest:
Fed Official’s Remarks Send Stocks Soaring
Stocks soared on Wall Street today after a top Federal Reserve official appeared to open the door for additional interest rate [...]

Here’s an amusing Center for American Progress rip-off of the Mac advert to brighten up your morning.

Moises Naim is ruminating in this month’s Foreign Policy that “It’s fair to say that the Chinese government probably had no idea what it was getting into when it applied to host the Olympics in 2000. The world—and China’s place in it—have changed substantially since then, making the challenge for an authoritarian regime hosting the [...]

I’ll spare readers further extended commentary on the grim outlook for peacekeeping (although, just to add to the fun, it’s worth checking out the new piece by Charles Grant and Tomas Valasek of CER on how Bosnia can go bad too) but it’s hard to overlook Jean-Marie Guehenno’s challenge to the Security Council yesterday. [...]

Head over to the BBC website for some eye-opening commentary from (mostly Muslim) readers on the British teacher who has been arrested in Sudan for allowing her class to name a Teddy Bear Muhammed.
Some are outraged by the Sudanese government’s actions. One Londoner writes:
This is unbelievable. I’m fed up of reading and hearing stupid incidents [...]

International Alert have published an excellent new report (funded in part by CIC) entitled A Climate of Conflict: the links between climate change, peace and war.  It’s a great example of the kind of integrated approach that needs to become routine for governments and international agencies, marrying areas of work until recently seen as discrete from [...]

Classy commentary from Frank Gaffney Jr in the Washington Times:
It is fitting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chose the U.S. Naval Academy for the venue of today’s so-called Mideast peace conference. The reputation of that extraordinary institution in Annapolis has been sullied in recent years by a succession of rapes of young women.
Despite official efforts [...]

Time for an update on the peacekeeping shortage, which gets a lot of well-deserved attention in the current edition of The Economist. Oh that this could have been the last word on the matter - but things have got substantially worse since the magazine was being put to bed in the middle of last [...]

Dan Drezner is pondering how to answer all the people who ask him “how do you successfully pursue a career in foreign policy?”.  He finds that Peter Singer at Brookings proffers the following advice:
[M]ulti-taskers tend to advance further than pure specialists. People who can also convene and bring people, programs, and events together are more [...]

You know you’re in trouble when you need combat camels to save you. The latest masterstroke in the world’s response to the genocide in Darfur is to import specially trained Indian camels to transport African Union and United Nations peacekeepers around the province. The Sudanese government, the main aggressor in the conflict, has helicopter gunships, [...]

OK it’s Haaretz, a left-wing rag, but hey. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, they argue, is the pick of today’s rum bunch of global leaders. Without him, “belligerent Iran, medieval Saudi Arabia or shaky Pakistan (caught in the calipers of sinister madrasas and a state of emergency) would be setting the tone.” Haaretz even parades [...]

Yesterday, while railing against UNAIDS for its failure to provide accurate estimates of the number of people with HIV/AIDS, I was casting around for the first person to make the wrong-about-HIV=wrong-about-climate-change link.
I couldn’t find anything then, but our friend Claudi Rosett has now made the link:
Could there possibly be a certain parallel here between past [...]

My response to Alex’s post is - why wouldn’t Kevin Rudd take Australia back into Kyoto? The country is already tracking its Kyoto target and is quite capable of meeting it:
The Tracking to the Kyoto Target report projects the levels of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2008-2012. It forecasts Australia’s emissions to be 109 per [...]

What a coup it would be for the UN - and Ban Ki-Moon in particular - if one of Kyoto’s prodigal sons returned to the fold ahead of the Bali climate summit (running from 3-14 December). 
That’s exactly what could happen if Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd (profile here) wins Saturday’s general election there.  He’s [...]

In 2002, UNAIDS reported that:
There are 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS world-wide. 38.6 million of these are adults, 19.2 million are women and 3.2 million are children under the age of 15. Five million new infections with HIV occured in 2002 of which 4.2 million were adults and 2 million of them were women.
It [...]

Last week it was Gordon Brown’s first speech as PM on foreign policy; yesterday, his first on climate change and the environment.  I went along to listen.  An hour and a bit later, I emerged, having been duly told that “this is a challenge to which the human spirit, and our powers of ingenuity and enterprise, will rise”. Stirring [...]

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