I’ve been remiss in my blogging lately, an unfortunate consequence of too much travel and too many realworld demands. So I’ve missed a couple of interesting stories, each of which would be worth a post had I the time to write one. So instead, a multi-topic roundup of things I’ve wanted to blog and failed to…

- I’ve been enjoying the comments I’ve received from friends on my photo post from Pittsfield. I’m glad that saying some harsh things about a city that I love dearly has prompted some discussion. And I’m especially glad that it’s inspired some friends to write on related topics. Blair Benjamin, a classmate of mine at Williams and now a pillar of the local community development scene, offers his own thoughts about New England milltowns, filtered through the lens of poetry and literature. He’s caused me to add at least two books to the vast pile beside my bed… (I’m vaguely terrified that the post I made on Pittsfield is now the #6 match for a search for “Pittsfiled MA” on Google. Why am I guessing this won’t make me very popular with the local tourist bureau?)

- JD Lasica and Dan Gillmor have launched a new project, “The Principles of Citizen Journalism“. It’s a set of “screencasts, slide shows, podcasts, tutorials, tip sheets and interviews with thought leaders in citizen media”, including yours truly. I don’t really remember what I told JD the last time he pointed a videocamera at me, so I am looking forward to seeing that video as well. This is one of the many resources that Dan and his friends at the Center for Citizen Media will be providing over the next few years - it looks like a fantastic set of resources for people interested in using their online writing as a space for reliable, verifiable journalism.

- On the subject of blogging and standards… I have very little useful to add to the discussions about “mean kids” and the malicious posts that caused Kathy Sierra so much pain. Like many bloggers, I got called by different international media networks for my “take” on the situation - unlike David Weinberger, who got pinned down by CNN, I fled the country and avoided being interviewed on a subject that I don’t know a ton about. David’s post about his interview experience, and the tricky balance between condemning cyberbullying and supporting the possibility of anonymous speech online reveals just how tricky these issues can be. Yes, people take advantage of anonymity to do hateful, stupid things. But eliminating anonymity isn’t the way to go - it’s just too important for whistleblowers, dissidents and other people we need to hear from.

I’m glad that Andy Carvin is organizing a “Stop Cyberbullying” day, but I think that bullying and abuse are part of our online culture, and one of the uglier legacies of a technology that’s both tried to urge people to “own their own words” while making it possible to hide behind a screen. I’m also interested to learn more about Alan Herrell, who is friends with my friend Doc Searls and has written a letter to Doc distancing himself from the abusive comments, offering the explanation that his machine was hacked and his identity stolen to abuse Kathy. This is a very interesting development in the history of identity theft - people spend a great deal of time and energy developing their online persona and reputation - the idea of having one’s machine compromised and posting comments or posts that I’d not want to be associated with gives me a bit of a chill.

- Andrew Heavens has joined an exclusive club in Ethiopia - the group of blogs banned within that nation. Andrew has been very careful to be fair and neutral on his blog, in no small part because he’s a working journalist in Addis Ababa, but he’s finally stepped outside the lines somehow. He seems refreshingly unconcerned, mentioning, “…it was getting a bit embarrassing being the only one left behind.” Andrew’s blog is still very much worth reading - via Tor, perhaps if you’re in Addis. His recent coverage of an Ethiopian woman attacked with acid by a spurned lover is a very powerful and important piece of journalism.

- My friend Andrew Young has a great piece in Slate on human rights video and YouTube. Andrew’s story could serve as a manifesto for what we’ve tried to do with the Global Voices/WITNESS video hub and what WITNESS will go on to do with their own site. Worth reading for anyone interested in how citizen media can lead towards real political change.

Last year, I came to Doha for the Al Jazeera Forum and broke every rule I have for myself as a traveller. I try very hard to make sure I get at least one good walk in every city I visit, to make sure I eat as many meals as I can outside of the hotel, and generally come away with some sense of what a city’s like, even if I’ve had only a brief visit. But last year’s Forum was such a whirl of activity, I literally didn’t manage to leave the hotel save for a guided tour of the station’s headquarters. I’d hoped to go from the station out to dinner with friends, but the Danish Cartoon situation was erupting, and I spent my evening discussing and arguing about the situation with friends who were hanging around the newsroom.

So this year, I came prepared. I arrived in Doha a day before the Forum began so I’d have a fair chance at actually seeing some of the city. And I did my research. Or tried to. You see, Doha isn’t exactly a tourist mecca. Asking people who live in Qatar what they do for fun, more than one person answered, “We go to Dubai.” One of the better guide sites I found was titled, “Qatar is NOT the most boring place”. Well, with a recommendation like that, how can you go wrong? But most travel guides seem to agree that Doha is a pretty quiet town - perhaps the strongest praise I found was: “Not the most exciting place in the world, but if you make the effort you can have a very enjoyable stay.”

So I set out this morning, jetlagged, with camera and city map in tow for a walk. And Qatar isn’t the most boring place - that’s Lubbock, Texas, in case you were wondering. But Doha is very much a work in progress. Walking out of my hotel, I counted at least a dozen new buildings surrounded by cranes. There’s clearly an (international, expatriate, pan-Muslim world) army of construction workers here… somewhere. But they weren’t at the souk, the market district of the city. Midday on a weekend, this part of the city couldn’t be described as sleepy. I sometimes turn or move in my sleep, and the souk was even less active than that. I walked to the harbor, where wooden dhows are being rebuild into floating restaurants and enjoyed the breeze off the startlingly blue water. Joggers run on the Corniche, and families play in the shade of palm trees. It’s pretty idyllic, but less fun if you didn’t pack running shoes or children to entertain you.

So where is everyone on this beautiful spring day? In the mall. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people are in the City Center Mall, a five story complex optimistically described as comparing with America’s best malls. (I’m not a mall fan, so I’ll leave the details of that comparison alone, save to say that most American malls aren’t centered around grocery stores…) There’s a United Nations worth of people eating lunch in the food court, from short-haired, thick-necked Americans next to me (who are almost certainly from the nearby military base) to Filipino parents with children in communion dresses to women in dress ranging from short skirts through to hijab. It’s tempting to spend the whole day watching people order Kentucky Fried Chicken and guess where in the world they’ve come from.

But just down the air-conditioned corridor is the perfect way to spend a Saturday in Doha: watching hockey. Ice hockey. It’s the “Fire on the Ice” championship series, the finals of an ongoing competition of hockey teams from around the gulf. I watch the first two periods of the Qatar Breakers, who get crushed by the Dubai Mighty Camels. The Breakers have a tendency to pick up penalties, which is deadly in five on five hockey as you can give up a lot of goals while you’re a man down. It’s hockey, but not quite as we know it - the ice here in Qatar is almost a square sheet, so it’s a very unusual shape for players to cover. The puck is a hard rubber ball, probably because the ice is so soft a puck wouldn’t slide well. And anything more aggressive than a solid forecheck seems to get you four minutes on the bench…

There’s several hundred people watching the game, leaning over the ice on four tiers of balconies. The guys around me - Filipino and Indonesian construction workers enjoying their weekend - want to know what country the players are from. Almost everyone has a Canadian flag patch on their jersey. “Is this the Canadian national team?” Uh, no. But they’d do very well in a pickup game onn your local rink, and I’ve got major respect for anyone who manages to get in ice time while living in the Persian Gulf. It’s got to be a disconcerting audience to play for - everyone in the crowd laughs when someone falls on the ice. I try cheering good saves and good checks for a bit, before discovering that I’m attracting about as much attention as the players.

So yes, hockey in the Persian Gulf. I’ve got pictures to prove it - alas, I packed the wrong cable, so you may have to wait until I’m back in the states to see the evidence. (Bless you, Jonathan. I owe you one and will get you back when I’m next in the Netherlands…) But take it from me - if you’re in Doha on a Saturday, be sure to catch a hockey game. I’m sure they import Canadians every weekend for the general amusement of the working public. Here’s hoping that they start curling on Sundays sometime soon…

• kubatanablogs.net ? Blog Archive ? Do these “open hands” represent Zimbabwe’s opposition party?
  Taurai has a wonderful piece of absurdity from Zimbabwe - a gospel album banned because the open hands, raised in praise, on the cover reminded censors of the open hand logo of the opposition MDC party
  (tags: africa zimbabwe freespeech censorship)

There’s very little that’s stranger than going to someone else’s conference. Every group, every profession, every occupation in our country has its periodic gatherings, usually in interchangeable hotels in interchangeable cities. When you attend lots of these, they’re comfortingly familiar. When they’re conferences for industries you’re not a member of, they’re just kinda weird.

I spoke at a gathering of elections officials and monitors in Washington DC yesterday. This is a field I know nothing about, other than that it’s important: if you want free and fair elections, someone has to run them, and someone else has to watch them. My usual speaking topic - citizen media - seems pretty far from the field of elections, but there are some good reasons why electionfolk should be watching our space closely. As citizen media becomes a new space to discuss political activity and build political movements, censorship of this medium is something election monitors need to take as seriously as censorship of the press or the broadcast media.

I spoke a bit about some of the online shenanigans that preceded the 2005 Kyrgyz elections and led to the Tulip/Lemon revolution. Reports from my colleages at the Open Net Initiative suggest that some sites were made inaccessible through denial of service attacks. Others were hacked, so the youth activist site KelKel suddenly began urging youth to “have fun while you’re still young” and avoid politics…

These sorts of attacks weren’t unfamiliar to my copanelist Fernando Agíz Bitar, a Mexican elections expert. He began his talk with the story of an opposition politician giving a speech in his hometown, to great acclaim. When the candidate mentioned the incumbent president, the audience responded with boos and jeers. The state-controlled TV station edited the footage into a story about the opposition candidate being booed and jeered in his own hometown, a narrative that was completely false and damaging to his presidential prospects. This, Bitar reminded us, happened as recently as 1994. The rise of citizen media isn’t the first time we’ve had to ask questions about the reliability of media accounts, just a new opportunity to triangulate between accounts offered in independent, state-controlled and local media.

The panel was good fun, but the rest of the conference was a little disconcerting. Like any other group, election administrators have their own acronym-studded lingo that’s utterly incomprehensible to outsiders. And they’ve got a trade show as well - a floor filled with different sizes and shapes of voting boxes and electronic voting systems. (”Clear” seems to be the recommended color for your voting box, in case you were wondering. Evidently it’s the new black.)

I’m counting this trip as part of April, a month where my intentions to travel less this year are revealed for the transparent sham that you all knew they would be. I’m giving seven talks in the next four weeks, up and down the east coast of the US, and one this weekend in Doha, Qatar. As I did last year, I’m heading to Al Jazeera’s annual forum to participate in a panel, blog the event, and catch up on the wide world of “anti-hegemonic journalism”, as the academics are calling it these days. (I hope to talk about citizen media as an alternative and complement to state aligned media, hegemonic media as well as anti-hegemonic media…) I’m very much looking forward to hearing about whether Jazeera considers Al Jazeera International a success and whether other media outlets in the region are starting to figure out how to do a better job of integrating blogs and other citizen media into their coverage, as wel as catching up with all my friends in Doha.

Alvin Snyder took me to task for my presence at the Jazeera Forum last year, pointing out that I’d accepted airfare and lodging in exchange for my talk - this is true of basically every talk I give these days. Some fraction of the talks I give include “honoraria” or speakers fees - my talk in Doha does not. For more than you probably want to know about my take on accepting reimbursement, speakers fees, etc., please see my disclosure on my blog.

Disclosures, by the way, were one of the most interesting questions raised in the questions after our panel. An Australian elections official mentioned that he’s in charge of implementing a new system where anyone paid for political speech has to disclose the payments they’ve received after they cross a certain threshhold (A$ 10,000, I believe.) The idea is to prevent me for shilling on behalf of Bill Richardson while accepting thousands of dollars from his campaign. (He hasn’t offered, and I haven’t been shilling.) The most ethical US bloggers are already very careful about this sort of disclosure - David Weinberger won’t mention John Edwards on his blog without mentioning that he’s an unpaid campaign advisor. I pointed out that bloggers who accept campaign money and don’t disclose are already taking a huge risk to their reputations - it’s become customary to “out” bloggers who are on payrolls and haven’t disclosed their financial arrangements. It would be fascinating to see Australia implement a scheme where bloggers accepting substantial payments would be required to add some sort of human and machine-readable disclosure to their sites, and where an election monitoring agency would spider those sites to ensure the proper disclosures are made.

• multimachine : Intermediate technology machine tools
  Fascinating metalwork machine designed to be buildable in developing nations from auto parts, usable for a very wide range of metalworking activities. Open source hardware design at its best
  (tags: opensource recycling technology africa tools)
• Egypt dials back political reform | csmonitor.com
  Egypt is changing the constitution to illegalize the Muslim Brotherhood, radically restrict democratic protest. And America - which provides extensive financial support to Mubarak - is offering “muted” criticism, if any…
  (tags: africa egypt freespeech uspolitics)
• BUY (LESS) CRAP!
  One clever designer’s response to the (RED) campaign from bono
  (tags: activism Africa charity culture philanthropy)
• Does Shopping for a Good Cause Really Help? - Newsweek Business - MSNBC.com
  Newsweek looks at (RED) and the questionable impact of charity through consumption. What would Reverend Billy think?
  (tags: charity marketing philanthropy africa AIDS)
• How_to_build_a_multimachine
  Wicked clever design for a lathe/drillpress/metal milling machine, made from scrap automotive parts and designed for use in the developing world. Really quite an impressive design.
  (tags: tools africa developingworld DIY)
• Foreign Policy In Focus | China in Africa: It’s (Still) the Governance, Stupid
  Brilliant Akwe Amosu article on understanding the new relationship between China and African nations
  (tags: Africa china hibiscusproject globalvoices)

Coming home from college for vacations, I took a bus that ran from Williamstown, MA to New York City. The day college let out for the semester, the bus would be full of fellow students heading south. I sat with Dennis, a year ahead of me in school, a chainsmoking, fast-talking New Yorker. We passed through Pittsfield, MA, 20 miles south of the college and he said, “My nightmare is that I’ll end up in one of these little, godforsaken, end of the earth towns and get stuck here forever. Can you imagine?”

I could. I remember thinking that it wouldn’t be that bad. I grew up on a dirt road in a town without sidewalks. Any town where you could walk to the library seemed cosmopolitan in comparison. But it didn’t seem cool to disagree with him, so I smiled and nodded as we drove south.

Seventeen years later, I live just north of Pittsfield, just south of the town where we went to college. I’ve lived in this house for eight years, and I still don’t know Pittsfield well. I get my mail in Williamstown, drink my coffee there and know many of the people by face, if not by name. While I pass through Pittsfield every third day, I know only a few places: the hospital, North Street, the ballpark.

There are two kinds of towns in the Berkshires - mill towns and orchid towns. The orchid towns - Lenox, Stockbridge, Great Barrington - are in the culture business, delivering picturesque food and lodging to tourists who come to see the theatre and hear the symphony. The mill towns, for the most part, are no longer in business.

In North Adams, the business was electronics - capacitors, built by Sprague Electric. In Pittsfield, it was transformers, then plastics, built by GE. At its peak, GE employed 13,000 people at the Pittsfield plant. By the time I moved to the area, it employed less than a thousand, and had left enough PCBs in the soil and nearby waterways to turn much of the city into a brownfield.

North Adams is transforming, slowly. The Sprague plant now hosts the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Decaying houses on River Street have been rebuilt into a high-end hotel. There are plans to redevelop Pittsfield, but no one’s holding their breath, especially for the area near the GE plant. The city is huge in comparison to North Adams, far too big for its current population. The bright spots of the city, the businesses we try to patronize - an African grocery store, a burrito shop, a pan-Mediterranian restaurant - are too far from one another to feel like there’s a neighborhood with the potential to transform.

I came into this part of Pittsfield again a few years ago by train. There’s a single train a day from Boston, and it was the logical way home at the end of a long trip. We arrived in late afternoon, passing through dense, green forests and the shadows of hills. Out of the green, we suddenly pulled past industrial parks, decaying warehouses, scrapped cars. For a moment, I thought, “Tough town. I wonder where we are?” And then I realized I was home.

Photos from March 24, 2007, taken near the GE Plastics Plant, Tyler Street, Pittsfield. Full set here.

• Global Voices Online ? Blog Archive ? Part Two: Inside the school of the Egyptian blogosphere
  Sami ben Gharbia interviews prominent Egyptian bloggers about the connection between blogging and political activism in Egypt
  (tags: egypt freespeech censorship globalvoices)
• Email humor making the rounds 3-21-07 | Needlenose
  It’s Bono’s fault… a joke about everyone’s favorite socially conscious rock star…
  (tags: humor africa)

Amir Mohamed Meshal, a twenty-four year old American from Tinton Falls, New Jersey, travelled to Somalia in December to help the Union of Islamic Courts rebuild Somalia. When Ethiopian forces, with the backing and support of the US military, helped install the transitional federal government, he found himself in an active war zone. Like many people caught in Mogadishu, he fled south, to Kenya.

In Kenya, he was arrested and held so he could be questioned by FBI agents, who were concerned that he might be associated with Al Qaeda - US involvement in “stabilizing” Somalia appears to be based on the premise that the Union of Islamic Courts might create a safe haven for terror by controlling Somalia. The FBI concluded that Meshal had no terror connections. The US State department contacted his family in New Jersey and told them that if they sent a plane ticket, Amir would be able to come home.

But at some point in February, he and between 63 and 150 people who’d been arrested in Kenya, fleeing Somalia, were deported back to Mogadishu and then transferred almost immediately to detention facilities in Ethiopia. It’s unclear what will happen to him now - if the Ethiopians determine that he was an enemy combatant, he could face the death penalty or life in prison.

According to Shashank Bengali and Jonathan S. Landay, writing for McClatchy Newspapers, the US State Department isn’t demanding his release from custody: “‘We have asked that his case be handled in a timely and a fair manner in accordance with local laws and procedures,’ said Gonzalo Gallegos, a State Department spokesman in Washington.” In other words, good luck with the Ethiopian judiciary, kid. Elizabeth Kennedy, writing for the AP, comes to a different conclusion: “They [the US State Department] have furiously objected to the circumstances behind his presence in Ethiopia, a steadfast U.S. counterterrorism ally.” Given the amounts of military and financial support the US is giving Ethiopia, I find it hard to believe that those objections were too furious, or the young man would be headed home to New Jersey.

The US government knows that the Ethiopian justice system leaves much to be desired - over a hundred journalists and oppositiion activists are imprisoned in Addis Ababa for vague charges of “incitement to genocide”, which appears to translate as “opposition to the Zenawi government.” Accusations of torture and mistreatment within the Ethiopian prison system are widespread.

Evidently we’re more interested in our own citizens when they claim to be Al-Qaeda affiliated. Daniel Joseph Maldonado was also arrested when fleeing Somalia. He confessed to training with Al Qaeda and was extradited to Texas, where he’s facing charges.

The Kenya Human Rights Council is referring to these deportations as “extraordinary rendition“. This shameful technique is one in which the US government turns over suspects to governments which we know practice torture so that we can get information from suspects without getting our hands dirty. It’s unclear to me that this is, in fact, what’s occurring here - the FBI had questioned Meshal extensively and determined he was not a threat. But it’s also not at all clear why the US State Department allowed Meshal to be extradited to Ethiopia and why they’re not raising bloody hell to get him released.

The background to this situation - which doesn’t just affect Meshal but a large number of other detainees deported from Kenya - is the inexplicable involvement of the US military in a third front in the “war on terror”. Not content with our complicated involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US government provided air support, training, financing and, quite possibly, boots on the ground to support the Ethiopian army’s invasion of their neighbor. Prior to the invasion, southern Somalia had reached a low level of stability - it has now descended again into street fighting and warlordism. There’s been little discussion of US involvement in the horn of Africa in the US press beyond triumphalism about chasing Al Qaeda out of the country. I’d like to think that the situation of a young man from New Jersey will bring some attention to the situation and my government’s role in it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Kenya’s role in these deportations is causing predictable anger and dissent within Kenya’s muslim population, who worry that Kenyan muslims may be arrested due to suspicion of Al Qaeda affiliation. The World Cross Country Championships are taking place in Mombassa tomorrow and Kenyan authorities expect widespread protest against these extraditions.

Why isn’t the US government demanding Amir Mohamed Meshal’s immediate release from Ethiopian custody? I have high hopes that we’ll hear more about the situation in the next few days. This is one of those stories where blogger interest may prevent the situation from disappearing under a wave of interest in Democrat/Republican showdowns in US congress - please link to the McClatchy story if you’re as concerned as I am about this situation.

The Washington Post has a story on Meshal today as well, and includes the quote: “An intelligence official said the CIA was not involved in Meshal’s case, and the State Department said it had formally protested the transfer. It has not officially sought Meshal’s extradition from Ethiopia, however.” The headline for the Post story is “U.S. Presses for Release of American Held in Ethiopia” - it’s not entirely clear to me how that paragraph aligns with the headline. Is the State Department negotiating with the Ethiopian government for Meshal’s release, or merely filing a nominal protest?

• To some in Paris, sinister past is back | Chicago Tribune
  Disturbing story from Paris, Texas about racial disparity in crime sentencing - a white youth who killed a black man sentenced to community service while a black teen with no record who shoved a hallway monitor getting seven years in juvenile prison…
  (tags: law race racism texas)
• Kasper Hauser Sketch Comedy
  Wonderful parody of This American Life, spot on in terms of parodying Ira Glass’s delivery and the predictable quirks of a TAL episode
  (tags: podcast humor radio)
• BBC NEWS | Africa | EU monitors to avoid Niger Delta
  EU has decided it’s too dangerous to monitor Nigerian elections in the Bayelsa, Rivers and Delta States. These are, of course, states where para-military presence could lead to widespread election fraud.
  (tags: nigeria elections africa)
• New Technique Lets Bloggers Tackle Late-Night News Dumps - March 21, 2007 - The New York Sun
  Blogswarms tackle “document dumps”, where a government agency tries to drown a story in an avalanche of released documents. Interesting implications for NewAssignment-style journalism
  (tags: journalism uspolitics blogswarm sunlightfoundation newassignment)
• Abu Aardvark: Baathism on the Nile
  Mark Lynch’s take on proposed changes to the Egyptian constitution and the tepid reaction in the US media: “Mubarak is about to do exactly what he always accuses Islamists of secretly planning: win an election and then use his majority to abolish democra
  (tags: egypt africa democracy freespeech uspolitics)
• Backstory: Congolese radio show gives war victims a voice | csmonitor.com
  Excellent piece on a radio show that uses SMS, personal interviews to let citizens in Ituri ask questions about justice in the wake of civil war. Women organize “listening clubs” to bring people together to hear the program
  (tags: radio SMS telephony africa DRC)
• Digital Security and Privacy for Human Rights Defenders
  Dmitri Vitaliev’s comprehensive guide to online security for human rights activists. Very much worth a read.
  (tags: humanrights privacy censorship security internet)
• BBC NEWS | Africa | No Angolan ‘troops for Zimbabwe’
  Angola denies that it’s sending troops to Zimbabwe despite confirmations from Zim government. Possible that Zim government is using this as a threat against activists without being able to back it up.
  (tags: zimbabwe angola africa)
• modal minority: africans don’t exist
  Teju Cole on a particularly egregious NYT article about African travel, which focuses on the high cost of going on wildlife safaris. Why do discussion of Africans in America travelling to Africa? “It’s just not going to happen. Not unless we are writing i
  (tags: africa blogs citizenmedia)
• Study Exposes ‘Search Spam’ - Yahoo! News
  Forthcoming paper from MSresearch suggests that up to 75% of Blogger blogs are splogs
  (tags: blogging spam internet)
• Boing Boing: Supporters work to free Egypt blogger Kareem (NPR “Xeni Tech”)
  Xeni’s story on the FreeKareem situation and the crackdown on online speech in Egypt
  (tags: africa egypt middleeast globalvoices)

• A time bomb of trauma in Iraq | FP Passport
  Attention is being paid to PTSD in American soldiers who’ve served in Iraq - but what about psychological trauma suffered by Iraqi children? What will Iraq be like in 10-20 years when adults running the country have suffered so much psychological strain?
  (tags: iraq uspolitics)
• Searching for King Leopold’s treasure | FP Passport
  Great post from Blake Hounshell - because it’s so difficult to explore DRC, companies are looking at a Brusells museum’s maps of the country looking for minerals. Wouldn’t it be great if Belgium gave this collection to DRC as pennance for its colonial inv
  (tags: mining economics DRC)
• All-female unit keeps peace in Liberia | csmonitor.com
  An all-female unit of Indian UN peacekeepers is inspiring Liberian women to go into the police force… and is a way for the UN to address the problem of rapes and sexual assaults by peacekeepers in poor countries
  (tags: liberia india women UN)
• Mail online - Peter Hitchens
  “Caring about a foreign injustice is futile unless you have the means to express your concern through effective, sustained action. It is an impulse designed to make the carer feel good to himself, and look good in the eyes of others, rather than to do goo
  (tags: africa zimbabwe UK uspolitics)
• Shorpy | The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog
  Blog of photos from 100 years ago in the US. Many are reminiscent of current photography in the developing world - interesting to think about internation development on that sort of timescale, ala Hans Rosling
  (tags: blogs blogging culture photography history)
• Violence in Somali streets claims 20 - Los Angeles Times
  20 killed in violence against Ethiopian, government troops in Somalia. “”We do feel on the balance that the situation in Somalia is moving forward in a generally positive way,” says US ambassador in charge of Somalia. Must be a Bush appointee.
  (tags: somalia kenya ethiopia africa uspolitics)