New Hampshire Primaries winners: Clinton and McCain
It's Clinton and McCain
NBC and the Associated Press are now calling the New Hampshire primary for Hillary Clinton, who leads Barack Obama 39 to 36. On the Republican side, John McCain was long ago called the winner, though his lead over Mitt Romney has narrowed to just five or six points. Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a real race. This is going to be exciting. More in the morning.....
Live Blogging on the New Hampshire Primaries
Update 04.45 GMT (Henning)
The unexpected has happened with the victory of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. This result again shows how carefully opinion polls before elections need to be interpreted. There will be some headscratching amongst pollsters now and there are some suggestions that the issue behind the huge error margin is race. People might lie to pollsters because they don’t want to come across as racist but vote differently in the secret ballot. Have also a look at Paul Krugman’s latest book “The Conscience of a Liberal” if you are interested in the issue of race in US politics...................
Ten issues that will shape the election after New Hampshire
The world's top think tanks
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James G. McGann of the Foreign Policy Research Institute has published a report (pdf) on "the global go-to think tanks." Here's the list, which was compiled from a pool of 228 nominees using input from a panel of more than 50 international experts:
- Centre for European Policy Studies, Belgium
- French Institute of International Relations, France
- German Institute for International Politics and Security, Germany
- Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Russia
- International Crisis Group, Belgium
- International Institute for Strategic Studies, United Kingdom
- Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Israel
- Japan Institute of International Affairs, Japan
- Royal Institute of International Affairs, United Kingdom
- Shanghai Institute for International Studies, China
The world’s third spaces, Saskia Sassen
A key yet much overlooked feature of the current period is the proliferation of partial, often highly specialised, global assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights once firmly ensconced in national institutional frames. These assemblages cut across the binary of "national vs global" - this being the usual way of attempting to understand what is in fact genuinely new.
The Top 10 Demands of the Striking Writers
The late night talk shows all returned to the airwaves last night. Letterman had his full slate of writers and was quite funny. He wore the fashionable new Strike Beard, which Robin Williams said made him look like General Grant, and in his opening crossed a picket line of high-kicking dancers.
The reading cure
The idea that literature can make us emotionally and physically stronger goes back to Plato. But now book groups are proving that Shakespeare can be as beneficial as self-help guides. Blake Morrison investigates the rise of bibliotherapy
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Presents Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust
Egon Schiele, Austrian, 1890-1918 Krumau - Crescent of Houses (The Small City V), 1915
ASAM's 2008 guide (in Turkish):
ASAM 2008 Bakış
5 Myths About How Americans Vote
No Longer Unimaginable By Eugene Robinson, Barack Obama may not be elected president, but it's impossible to deny that what we are witnessing is something new.
FT An Ottoman warning for indebted AmericaNiall Ferguson on empires past and present. As in the 1870s the balance of financial power is shifting. Then, the move was from the ancient oriental empires (not only the Ottoman but also the Persian and Chinese) to western Europe. Today the shift is from the US – and other western financial centres – to the autocracies of the Middle East and east Asia.
Normality or normalities?
For eastern Europeans, the myth of a free and prosperous West, of western normality, has been replaced by the observation of normalities, writes Mircea Vasilescu. Having joined the EU, Romanians are discovering that the West has problems by no means as exotic as they once believed.The oxymoron of normality
"Normality" has been close to the hearts of eastern Europeans during transition. Yet a comparative history of the concept in eastern and western Europe reveals meanings that are multiple, changeable, even oxymoronic.New cultural revolution arrives on a wave of creativity and confidence
A World Without Islam
What if Islam had never existed? To some, it’s a comforting thought: No clash of civilizations, no holy wars, no terrorists. Would Christianity have taken over the world? Would the Middle East be a peaceful beacon of democracy? Would 9/11 have happened? In fact, remove Islam from the path of history, and the world ends up exactly where it is today.
By Graham Fuller
BBC Global threat
Looking at the 2008 challenges for the fight against terrorism
New Years Resolutions - An Engineering Approach
Hugh Pickens writes "Four out of five people who make New Year's resolutions will eventually break them and a third won't even make it to the end of January says the NY Times. But experts say the real problem is that people make the wrong resolutions. The typical resolution often reflects a general desire. To engineer better behavior, it is more productive to focus on a specific goal. '.......Microsoft's Biggest Threat - Google or Open Source?
Privacy International Releases 2007 Report
The Role of Digital Networked Technologies in the Ukrainian Orange RevolutionSource: Berkman Center for Internet & Society (via SSRN)
“Subprime” Voted 2007 Word of the Yearby American Dialect Society
Social software – social intelligence?
Some thoughts…Consider this quote from Castells, talking about the difference between data, information, knowledge, wisdom, and judgement:
