Five actual or potential conflict situations around the world deteriorated and two improved in December 2010, according to the latest issue of the International Crisis Group's monthly bulletin CrisisWatch.
Côte d’Ivoire was gripped by political crisis as incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo refused to cede power after losing to rival Alassane Outtara in the late-November presidential runoff polls. Post-election violence claimed the lives of at least 170 people and more than 15,000 fled to neighbouring countries.
Message from Journalist Robert Parry Building a truthful historical narrative may seem abstract but has powerful implications and needs your support, says Robert Parry.
Obama Should Read WikiLeaks Docs Before re-upping his Afghan strategy, President Obama might first read WikiLeaks' evidence on the folly, advises Ray McGovern. January 3, 2011
The Danger of Pro-Israel Extremism The hasty demonizing of Israeli critics as “anti-Semites” has hurt hopes for peace in the Middle East, writes Lawrence Davidson. January 2, 2011
Birth of Pakistan's Islamic Extremism While helping the CIA fight Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Pakistan adopted Islamic extremism, notes Alvaro Vargas Llosa. December 31, 2010
Ready or Not? Protecting the Public from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism
In the eighth annual Ready or Not? Protecting the Public from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism report, 14 states scored nine or higher on 10 key indicators of public health preparedness. Three states (Arkansas, North Dakota, and Washington State) scored 10 out of 10. Another 25 states and Washington, D.C. scored in the 7 to 8 range. No state scored lower than a five. . . . Thirty-three states and Washington, D.C. cut public health funding from fiscal years (FY) 2008-09 to 2009-10, with 18 of these states cutting funding for the second year in a row.
Pakistan: An elite police commando from the provincial police force who was assigned as a bodyguard for the governor of Punjab Province murdered the governor today in Islamabad. The commando dropped his weapon and surrendered to the police, bragging that he was proud he killed a blasphemer. With that, Pakistan's political crisis deepened.
Lots of buzz today about RSS (dying or not dying).
If you're not using it, can I strongly suggest you give it a try? I use Newsfire. Not sure the particular readers matters, though.
Here's what you need to know:
It's not particularly difficult to keep up with 200 blogs you care about in less than hour using an RSS reader.
RSS provides home delivery. Instead of remembering where to click, or waiting for a post to get all buzzy and hot, the good stuff comes to you. Automatically and free.
Subscribing to a blog is easy. Just click here for my blog, for example. In Newsfire, you can paste the URL of any blog and it automatically finds the RSS feed for you.
RSS is quiet and fast and professional and largely hype-free. Perhaps that's why it's not the flavor of the day.
Phi Beta Iota: The Public Daily Brief done by Winston Maike (RIP) out of Australia can be seen at the Archives. With his death and the economic crash we had to discontinue–but on a shoestring, we covered all ten threats, all twelve policies, all eight demogrpahics, once a week, in eight pages, AND a single one page presidential-level summary for all 30 factors. 6,000 people were receiving that weekly document. OCS/FBIS does not offer anything helpful to Whole of Government–if they did, they would have focused on RSS to individual action officers across all the Departments and agencies, with the added value of using that to bond classified subject matter experts with the larger community of open source experts through the non-intelligence action officers. 100 T-1 lines into an existing septic tank does not impress us.
Using terminology sometimes used in the DoD special operations community, article below conveys a strong suggestion that in organizing and staffing its operation at Khost, CIA failed to discriminate between enthusiasm and capability. Based on knowing nothing more about the case than is available to the public, there seems to be a lot to agree with in this article, which seems to get better the farther into it you read.
2. A quotation long reputed to be associated with Marine Corps Drill Instructors is, “Let's be damned sure that no man's ghost will ever have cause to say, ‘if your training program had only done its job.'” The obvious supposition is that you actually put people through the training program. That may not have happened here.
Phi Beta Iota: Click on Silent Stars to read the entire piece, link posted for the record. Toward the end the article gracefully provides an indictment of CIA's incompetence across multiple fronts.
