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Something for all our resilence+networks+technology-loving readers from Gothamist, a proper blog for normal people (well, New Yorkers, anyway):
NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters yesterday that in a “relatively short period of time” people will be able to send “video and text straight to 911 to increase the flow of information.” Kelly didn’t go into details about [...]

So, farewell then the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), born after the two countries ended a massive war in 2000 and gently put down by a sorrowful Security Council on Wednesday.  It won’t really be missed, as it wasn’t one of the coolest missions out there.  It was one of the last old school, peacekeeping-equals-troops-stuck-between-two-states-that-had-a-big-war operations left [...]

While I’m amused by Harriet Harman’s apparent interest in the top job, I’m amazed by David Miliband’s. I thought he was smart. It seems to me he can’t help but emerge a loser from the present situation.
If he doesn’t make an outright challenge for the leadership now, he will look like he has bottled it, [...]

Daniel’s a hundred per cent right to call for an end to some of the more stupid measures taken in Afghanistan in the name of counter-narcotics work.  Take aerial spraying off the table? Absolutely. Avoid alienating farmers in order to avoid swelling the insurgents’ ranks?  Sign me up.
But I think we need to go much further than [...]

I am delighted to report that, unlike the prescient Daniel, my prediction that Turkey’s governing AK Party was on its way out has proved almost totally wrong. I say almost totally because, although the constitutional court has bucked the trend and allowed the party to survive, it has punished AK by withdrawing millions of dollars of [...]

 
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Even before his refusal to rule himself out of any leadership bid on the way to and during his press conference with the Italian Foreign Minister this afternoon (see above), the UK political blogosphere was unanimous about how to interpret David Miliband’s op-ed in [...]

I hope my fellow bloggers will forgive me this self-indulgent post, but I could not resist. You see, the FT has a leader about the Afghan drugs trade, arguing:
The first thing to say is that while crop eradication and locking up bad guys may be an important part of addressing the crisis, they are not [...]

These are testing times, my friends. Testing, troubling, traumatic times. We need a steady hand on the tiller, a good head on the shoulders, a top steerer in the driving seat. We need…Harriet Harman. (Cue Benny Hill-style music).
Yes, the sign of quite how bad things have got inside the government is that people are seriously [...]

Over at The Interpreter, Sam Roggeveen picks up on Alex’s post on Doha to wonder whether a concern for resilience automatically leads to protectionism:
On one level, it makes sense. If the aim of resilience is to build the capability for society to ‘take a punch’ and rebound, whether from a terrorist attack, natural disaster or [...]

Readers of GD will be familiar with my/ our claims that the focus on international terrorism has often been to the detriment of other risks. So interesting to note Richard Mottram comments in the FT recently on the relationship between science, technology and  terrorism. From the FT:
The challenge will be to engage a broad [...]

Yesterday, my colleague and former senior MoD official Nick Witney pushed out a report on the future of European security and defense cooperation. Few people have as good a standing to think about European defence issues as Nick. He set up and served as the Chief Executive of the European Defence Agency, the organization established to [...]

No-one quite wants to pronounce the patient dead just yet (US Trade Representative Susan Schwab: “This is not the time to talk about collapse … the US commitments remain on the table”; unnamed EU source: “It’s clearly not a success. But no one will want to say that it’s the end of the round”) - [...]

Take a two-party system. Drop it into a multi-connected, media frenzied world. And what you get is a system with two steady states and dramatic swings between the two.
When you’re in, you’re in big time. Everything goes your way. But once you’re on the slide, it’s a one way trip to the wilderness. This is [...]

The new PNSR report reminds me of a recent speech by Robert Gates on the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign. From his speech:
To do all these things, to truly harness the “full strength of America,” as I said in the National Defense Strategy, requires having civilian institutions of diplomacy and development that are adequately staffed and [...]

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Freed from the nice-guy constraints of being Josh on the West Wing, Bradley Whitford was clearly having a grand old time as a Machieavellian oil industry lobbyist in Burn Up on BBC2 last week; Neve Campbell and Rupert Penry-Jones (from Spooks) completed the ensemble [...]

National security reform is, I guess, one of the leitmotifs of this blog and both Charlie and I have written about this in its U.S and British forms.
Now, the U.S Project on National Security Reform (full disclosure: I advise the project pro bono) is about to publish its first report, Ensuring Security in an Unpredictable [...]

This is shocking. Mud is fast becoming a staple part of Haiti’s poor in one of Port-au-Prince’s worst slums. Clay-based food is now a major income earner as mud cakes are the only inflation-proof food available to Haiti’s poor.

From the Guardian:
As desperation rises so does production of mud cakes, an unofficial misery index. Now even [...]

After Jean-Marie Guéhenno’s comments last week on the perils of Darfur, here’s more plain speaking from a senior peacekeeper - in this case the Darfur mission’s commander, responding to a report criticizing his force…
General Martin Luther Agwai greeted the report’s recognition that the force was short of critical resources, saying that people had had unrealistic expectations. [...]

We overlooked last month’s Annual Disaster Statistical Review, but the numbers speak for themselves:
In 2007, 414 natural disasters were reported. They killed 16847 persons, affected more than 211 million others and caused over 74.9 US$ billion in economic damages.
Last year’s number of reported disasters confirmed the global upward trend in natural disaster occurrence. This upward [...]

Flying politicians out to developing countries to see poverty at first hand - and what aid programmes are doing to tackle it - is pretty standard fare for development NGOs.  But it’s slightly more unusual for politicians to take the chance to perform surgical procedures on people’s lungs.

That, however, is just what former US Senator [...]

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