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It may be too soon to determine what has trigged the current violence in Beirut. Some analysts have suggested Hezbollah took advantage of a labour strike on Wednesday by using it as a political opportunity and the strike quickly escalated into a flashpoint over Lebanon’s 17-month-old political crisis.
What is more clear is that the Lebanese [...]

One of the trends we’ve seen in investment banking over the last two or three years is what PWC calls the ‘global war for talent’. Local banks in rich emerging market countries have more money to spend than their troubled rivals on Wall Street, so they’re hiring the top talent from western banks to join [...]

Last year I held a seminar at Demos on Silent Risks Tackling organised crime in the 21st century. A central argument put forward by the panel of experts was that as much of the harm done by organised crime remained hidden from the public eye the scale of the threat was still not widely [...]

What are the connections between climate change and migration? Not as obvious as one might think… one of the conversations we’ve been having in the coffee break is the lack of hard evidence when it comes to the relationship(s) between development, conflict, and climate change and the increasing difficulty to demonstrate cause and effect. Rhetorically [...]

A diplomat who shall remain nameless offers three rules of thumb:

Don’t mistake activity for action
Don’t mistake access for influence
Don’t mistake experience for expertise

A civil servant friend told me yesterday that the Cabinet Office has just issued guidance that all senior civil servants (that’s deputy directors and upwards) are now allowed to blog, publicly, in their own names, about the issues that they work on. 
Fascinating if so - but not surprising, given the approach being signalled by Tom [...]

PR week, the gossip-laden magazine for political apparatchiks and comms people will no doubt set tongues wagging with their latest installment of Brown baiting. According to the mag rag:
Hordes of senior Labour special advisers are said to be passing their CVs to headhunters and recruitment consultants amid concern that their stock is falling. With Gordon [...]

In our Progressive Governance paper, Alex and I argued that ad hoc ‘shared platforms’ are a vital part of the management of a globalised world, particularly at times of rapid change. In Newsweek, David Rothkopf provides a glimpse of how these platforms have swung into action during the current financial meltdown:
To get a sense of [...]

There isn’t a think-tank, policy institute or academic department anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a cupboard or entire room given over to hoarding vast quantities of unread pamphlets from years gone by.  When I was at the Foreign Policy Centre in London, we actually had a whole cellar (although the FPC has moved [...]

Robert Mueller the head of the FBI, believes the West can achieve victory over al-Qaeda within three-and-a-half years.
In a speech to Chatham House Mueller describes the West confronting a three-layered threat from al-Qaeda:
The top tier is the core of the organisation which has established new sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The middle tier is the [...]

Soaring corn prices hit ethanol profits (The Times)
Darling accused of failing to spot credit danger (The Times)
IMF head calls for global action on turmoil (The Financial Times)
‘We are aiming for climate disaster’ (The Guardian)
Web could collapse as video use soars (The Telegraph)
Soaring price of food ‘may lead to riots’ (The Telegraph)
Economic Woes Render Growth [...]

Istanbul

London

Paris

British readers of Global Dashboard may think the headline is a description of Britain’s relationship with the US. But you would be wrong. Kevin Rudd, the new Australian Prime Minister has apparently brought shame to the billabongs and indignity to the ‘bush capital’ with his mock salute to the US President. This may be the [...]

The US military wonders whether it makes sense to co-opt bloggers:
Since the start of the Iraq war, there’s been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs — and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops’ time. The other [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
As Ethan Zuckerman observes, this kind of remix culture approach to campaigning has been called “user-generated swiftboating“…

In late 2006 Manuel Miranda accepted an offer by the Department of State to join their diplomatic mission in Baghdad as a Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Prime Minister’s legal office and the Government of Iraq on legislative process.  In the following year he established the Office of Legislative Statecraft. When he left in 2008 [...]

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