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Barney Rubin does know how to start a blog post:
Last week I was at a meeting in Madrid to discuss a “Political Solution” to the conflict in Afghanistan. Among the topics discussed was prospects for talking to the Taliban. I was surprised, however, at how literally some of the participants seemed to take it. One [...]

Banned from discussing issues of national security with the media, officials and serving officers from the MoD have turned their attention to the internet. Civil servants have been busy editing Wikipedia. Some 5,614 changes to the website were made from Ministry of Defence computers, 1,500 from the Department of Health, 103 from the DCMS and [...]

Alex and I have recently posted on the WFP’s appeal for more funds as the price of food continues to rise. Last week the price of rice began to shoot upwards sparking fears of a major rice shortage in Asia. According to experts global rice stocks are at their lowest since 1976. However some commentators [...]

The latest move in the long game between Turkey’s hardline secularists and its moderate Islamist government is perhaps the most worrying yet. The chief prosecutor in the country’s constitutional court has filed a petition to close the governing AK Party and ban its leaders from politics for five years, including Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan and [...]

A useful travel guide for would-be migrants, from Foreign Policy magazine. My only quibble would be their listing of Spain as one of the best countries to migrate to. This might be true if you’re a retired Brit with a fondness for sherry or cheap wine, but it will be interesting to see how tolerance [...]

The current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review should be required reading for foreign policy wonks as well as aspiring hacks.  It has a great piece on how marines  in Iraq turned to a blogger in New Jersey to track the patterns of insurgent attacks - as well as a thoughtful dismissal of  indie documentaries on the war.  [...]

Yesterday morning Charlotte Green, the BBC newsreader collapsed in a fit of giggles on the Today Programme. Having listened to an item about the oldest known recording of the human voice she got the giggles. Listen here. The result is very amusing to listen to and thousands of calls to the switchboard asking to hear [...]

A few weeks back the Guardian noted the transformation of Guinea-Bissau, a tiny, jungly and desperately poor country on the tip of West Africa, into the world’s first “narco-state.” Presumably this phrase means that its economy relies on drugs, though it has never been clearly defined and Guatemala and Afghanistan have also laid claim to [...]

‘Any attempt to map the internet is bound to fall frustratingly short of its true complexity, or to be so complex as to be illegible’. True - but by using the Tokyo subway map as a template the internet can be better understood.

Frank Furedi on Spiked earlier this year:
From global warming to obesity, bird flu to terrorism: 2007 was the year when the threat of an apocalypse became an everyday, even banal public issue. It was a year of ceaseless alarmist warnings about an ever-expanding number of calamities facing the planet…
One consequence of Western societies’ obsessive preoccupation with [...]

From Edge, via Mapping Strategy:
It is customary to think about fashions in things like clothes or music as spreading in a social network. But it turns out that all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow through social networks, and this process obeys certain rules we are seeking to discover. We’ve been [...]

As Charlie noted earlier this week, the World Food Programme has again called for half a billion extra dollars to cope with higher food and transport costs.  (The FT just doesn’t seem to tire of running this story: it first appeared on July 16 last year, and made the front page then as well.)
While no-one’s [...]

…you may have noticed that all is not well.  The British troops in Basra (both of them) are needless to say staying out of the way.  But as the Yorskhire Ranter reports,
…inevitably, the US authorities seem to have swallowed the “southern surge” thing, and are now pressing for more British troops to be sent - not [...]

A new report by the Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief (Acbar) says the international aid effort in Afghanistan is in large part “wasteful and ineffective”, with as much as 40 per cent of funds spent going back to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries. This is worrying but not really news…
As far [...]

Record commodities prices have given countries like China, Singapore, Russia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and UAE control over trillions of dollars, which they have stowed away in sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), that are now hovering over the global financial system like mighty hoovers, sucking up whatever assets cross their path.
The SWFs have, in the last 12 [...]

° The number of armed conflicts around the world has declined by more than 40% since the early 1990s.
° Between 1991 (the high point for the post–World War II period) and 2004, 28 armed struggles for self-determination started or restarted, while 43 were contained or ended. There were just 25 armed secessionist conflicts under way [...]

Avaaz’s current petition, calling on China to begin “meaningful dialogue” with the Dalai Lama, looks set to pass has now passed the one million signature mark some time later today, which will make making it comfortably the largest petition ever organised on the internet.  Sign it here.
[Update: and they've also just won political video of the [...]

According to today’s FT:
The World Food Programme has launched an “extraordinary emergency appeal” to governments to donate at least $500m in the next four weeks to avoid rationing food aid in response to the spiralling cost of food. The WFP, the United Nations agency responsible for relieving hunger, said in a letter to donor countries [...]

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