Blog posts

At long, long last, we are beginning to see some real progress on debt relief. Every year, a few weeks before the G8 heads of state/parliament meeting, finance ministers from the G8 meet to hold some discussions which will inform the agenda for the later meeting. This year, the focus was heavily laid on poverty reduction initiatives and reports are that a deal has been reached for enhanced debt relief. Larry Elliott’s coverage in the Guardian is worth a look and Jubilee Debt Campaign have a good breakdown of the deal, but in simple terms what has been agreed is total debt cancellation for countries reaching completing the HIPC process. Until now, completion of HIPC only led to a reduction of the debts to ‘sustainable levels’ (often anything but sustainable) and many of the highly publicised ‘debt cancellation’ deals were in fact little more than deferments of loan repayments. ...

I’ve been playing with the new Technorati design on and off since we got back from the UK last week. The new design is a huge improvement, making it much easier to get to information and seeming to me to make the site much more approachable for a newcomer. It’ll be interesting to see what feedback they get on that count now the beta’s gone public. Dave Sifry and Niall Kennedy have the lowdown. ...

I think I’d taken the BBC far too much for granted until I left the UK. The current podcast trial that lets me listen to The Today Programme’s (by no means to be confused with NBC’s Today Show) key interview at my leisure each and every day is ever so welcome, where once I rarely tuned in as I expected to hear the key points repeated ad nauseum throughout the day. Via Dan Hill’s excellent City of Sound I came across this transcript of a speech new Director General of the BBC Mark Thompson made recently at the Churches Media Conference. It’s proof that careful quoting of Desmond Tutu will lend any speaker a degree of gravitas, but it also displays an encouraging grasp of the breadth of issues confronting mainstream media. Think what you will of the departure of his predecessor, or the drastic measures he’s tried to take (and I’m still not sure what to make of either of those) but he’s clearly worth listening to. ...

One of the many things keeping me busy of late has been the process of transferring the many tapes (!) of the various talks at this year’s Festival of Faith and Music into a digital form. We’re going to be making them available for download over the next few weeks. You can find the first three installments – David Dark’s first keynote, David and Sarah’s joint workshop, and Steve Stockman’s contribution on “U2 and Justice” – at the Calvin Student Activities Blog. ...

One of the key arguments regularly levelled against anyone who openly critiques capitalist structures is that viable alternatives are hard to come by. While this argument is often poorly targetted as there is a legitimate role for many in calling out the failings of existing systems, one strong theme in much anti-capitalist activity over recent years has been that a single overarching alternative is not what is needed. Instead, many argue, we should be looking for a finer grained approach to socioeconomic structures that empowers communities to find what works best for them, and then thinking how those systems can work together. ...

For a while now I’ve been talking about writing some classes to ease use of Atom in PHP, primarily as a base for an implementation of the Atom Publishing/Editing Protocol. I’ve been putting it off, partly due to time restrictions, and partly because the Atom Syndication Format isn’t quite an approved standard yet and I didn’t want to have to spend too much time keeping up with drafts. Atom is rapidly approaching stability, and a little time over the weekend has led me to start work on some code. Rather than just write a parser for Atom I decided to follow the lead set by Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser, which makes working with feeds in python a breeze, and have begun to shape some classes that I hope will provide a similar level of flexibility and abstraction for PHP coders. ...

It’s been too long since Anne Lamott last had a column up at Salon, and the new book, while wonderful in parts, was largely recycled material. So I’m deeply grateful to Josh Marshall ( Talking Points Memo) that he’s included Ms. Lamott among the participants in his new project, TPMCafe (“Politics, Ideas & Lots of Caffeine”). You can find her three entries to date right here. This brings me to a second point about which I care passionately: How does a nice Christian girl like myself help foment revolution? ...

One of the many strands of discussion that has surfaced since Bob Geldof officially announced the Live 8 events to highlight anti-poverty discussions at this year’s G8 summit and called for a million people to march in Edinburgh has been focussed on police fears about the event. We should probably be used to police scaremongering in advance of a major summit by now. Past summits of this sort have been the scene of some violence. From the Seattle WTO ministerial in 1999 through to the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001 there was a sense of escalation, with each summit bringing new waves of protest and increasing casualty figures. Events culminated in Genoa with the brutal killing of a protestor by a young police officer, numerous police injuries, and thousands of peaceful protestors being tear-gassed. Sadly but unsurprisingly, the violence grabbed the headlines and quickly became amplified out of proportion. ...

Regular readers of this blog will have heard me talk about Local First before. In short, it’s an organization that seeks to encourage people living in and around Grand Rapids to support locally owned businesses. Local First will be hosting a street party outside Bistro Bella Vita tomorrow (Saturday 4th) from 2-10pm, alongside the annual Festival of the Arts. We’re hoping to be there early on. With Bistro Bella Vita supplying food and drink it should be well worth stopping by. ...

Sometimes it can be tempting to think that there’s some contest between heads of government to see who can be the most callous without raising a major outcry. If there is, George W Bush has almost certainly taken the lead by claiming that the USA couldn’t support Gordon Brown’s proposed International Finance Facility because ( as the BBC reports him saying) it doesn’t fit our budgetary process. The International Finance Facility is part of a package of proposals Brown is looking to take to the various G8 meetings due to take place in the next few weeks, culminating with the main G8 summit in Scotland next month. Brown is proposing 100% debt cancellation funded by a sell-off of some of the IMF’s gold reserves (which have increased in value of late due to the rising price of gold), a significant increase in development aid from the richest countries, removal of trade subsidies by which rich countries flood poor country markets with cheap goods (destroying indigenous business), and the International Finance Facility that would allow poorer countries to borrow money against promised future aid (in effect allowing them more control of the flow of aid facilitating more strategic use). ...