Going forward I need to remember that if I'm ever looking for a quick topic about which to blog, I just need to take a look at the latest developments from the UK on surveillance. First there was using ubiquitous surveillance to make art. Now there's surveillance imitating art...
While the attention of the international news is fixed on the Mumbai attacks, I just want to pause to note that there is a growing tide of sectarian violence in Nigeria, which has claimed another 300 lives in the past few days. The strife in Nigeria provides a window into the types of complex ongoing conflicts that combine ethnic tensions,...
Both pretty and pretty fascinating. See this post at Catholicgauze and this one at Gene Expression. Also, tdaxp relates this map to a deflation of Russian power....
Coming Anarchy has this post on the possibility of Greenland becoming an independent country, noting that Greenland this week voted with a supermajority of more than 75% to receive greater autonomy from Denmark. This may even lead to independence for this enormous island of just 56,000 people. For more on "arctic nationalism," including recent events in the Faroe Islands, check out the...
I just came across (a little late I'm afraid) this notice for a program that the Complex Terrain Lab had in London called "BattleSpaces: Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare." The speakers were Geoff Manaugh of the excellent BLDGBLOG (he has a post on the event here) and Antoine Bousquet, lecturer on international relations at Birkbek College. The...
Edward Lucas has an essay in The Economist on political philosophy and the (r)evolution of central and eastern European politics centered on 1989. His essay begins: They gripped the world, but left political philosophers yawning. According to Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher, the revolutions that overturned decades of totalitarian rule in central and eastern Europe in 1989 were marked by a...
(Professor Martin Scheinin, whose mission and report on the US and counterterrorism and human rights I discussed below, was kind enough to post a substantive response to my earlier post, "Try or Release." Particularly since I was quite critical of that report, let me move Professor's Scheinin's response up to its own post. Apologies for not noticing it earlier -...
That's the interesting argument raised in this cert. petition in Abbott v. Abbott. Although certiorari is warranted based solely on the conflict among the federal courts of appeals, certiorari also should be granted because the Fifth Circuit’s holding conflicts with the interpretation overwhelmingly adopted by the foreign courts that have addressed this issue. In construing the terms of a...
Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has been criticized by some as being invisible, at least compared with his rock-star predecessor, Kofi Annan. However, he has emerged as UN frontman for a new campaign from the UN for a plan for a simultaneous global jobs and economic recovery program together with green program. The SG's program is outlined in op-ed form...
Thanks to Deborah for that thoughtful response re the administrative detention debate ongoing now ...
As a follow-up to Peggy's very interesting post below on the performance of global versus non-global law firms, let me raise an issue that has, for obvious reasons, disappeared in the last year, but which was a topic of discussion in 2007 and might well re-surface at point in the future: law firms going public via an IPO and listing...
In the Wall Street Journal editorial Ken mentions below, Goldsmith and Posner argue -- in defense of their thesis that Europeans ignore international law if it is not in their interest to obey it -- that "when nations led by Europe created the International Criminal Court (ICC), they purported to limit the Security Council's power to delay or halt ICC...
