openDemocracy

Gareth Young invited me to ‘The Future of England’.  A debate that followed the annual general meeting of the Campaign for an English Parliament. In plucky fashion it was held in the House of Commons on the day of the State Opening of Parliament. There were more than a hundred crowded into Committee Room 10....

President Medvedev’s announcement that he is considering reducing the number of time zones in Russia has evoked a sense of déjà vu in Samara. Previous attempts have all failed and Medvedev would do well to think hard before proceeding, warns Vladimir Zvonovskyread more...

Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now in Parliament to give the Secretary of State power to amend copyright law by statutory instrument, effectively allowing he and his successors to do anything, without parliamentary approval or debate, provided it is done in the name of protecting copyright. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing has the details:read more

Obama urges North Korea and Iran to change course On the final leg of his tour of East Asia, US President Barack Obama has used a joint press conference with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to urge North Korea and Iran to change their nuclear stances or face sanctions in the future.read more...

At seven minutes, it was certainly a short speech. The main focus was clearly on building a manifesto platform on the economy, the budget deficit, and social care, to fight the next election.  But this was also the first Queen's speech since Westminster's name was dragged through the gutter by expenses and the last before an imminent general election....

Barroness Buscombe, the new Tory chair of the Press Complaints Commission, is reported to be considering extending the remit of the PCC to include blogs.Anyone who knows anything about how the PCC works (or doesn't) will know that this is a very bad idea and potentially a serious threat to the independence and integrity of blogging....

It is a great pleasure to read a contemporary appreciation of Byzantium which stresses its civilisation of quality, intelligence and success, and even a model from which we can learn. It is especially refreshing as it suggests that the stereotype of Byzantium, its very name an insult, may finally wane.read more

Rising personal debt, global imbalances, excessive bank leveraging and reckless financial risk-taking all played a key part in the current economic meltdown. But there is another factor that has been largely ignored - the role of wages.read more

Contributed by Alex Holland, associate editor of The Samosa, a new website with a focus on South Asia and British asians. For a full discussion of the left's divergent reactions to the policing of protest, see Stuart White at the Next Left.Unlike some on the left, I do see a role for police surveillance of domestic protest groups....

Watch Dispatches on Channel 4 this evening at 8pm. Peter Oborne presents a brave expose of the British lobby in the UK. Not that they do anything illegal, just that they should do it in the light. openDemocracy, supported by OurKingdom has published the pamphlet that accompanies the programme. You can read it, and the publishers statement by Tony Curzon Price, oD's Editor-in-Chief, HERE....

Western leaders have warned that time is running out for Iranian leaders to meet international demands on their nuclear plans. US President Barack Obama has stated that Iran has failed “so far” to give positive signals over the deal put forward by the governments of the US, France and Russia, which depend on Iran sending its uranium overseas to be processed. read more

Despite the promises of the Obama administration, the peace process in the Middle East appears to be in a profound crisis.read more

On Wednesday, senior US officials disclosed that the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, had cabled the White House last week expressing reservations regarding proposed troop increases. In a meeting held on Wednesday to discuss future US strategy in Afghanistan, in which Eikenberry participated via video link, the president discussed the cable with theaAmbassador.read more

A month ago, Democratic Audit teamed up with Unlock Democracy and OurKingdom to launch a new pamphlet, The Unspoken Constitution, satirising the UK’s constitutional arrangements. Inspired by a suggestion made in jest by Graham Allen MP, the document seeks to condense vast tomes of evidence about the UK’s manifold democratic deficiencies into a ‘spoof’ constitution of a few thousand words....

Stalin has suddenly become the point of reference in Russia today.  Not really suddenly, of course – there was the TV programme “Name of Russiaread more

As Ian Parsley noted at OurKingdom last year, the wall may be down in Berlin, but there are still plenty of them in Belfast. The BBC this week highlighted the work of some of the people who are trying to change that.Among them is Tony Macaulay, who outlined the scale of the problem at a recent talk in London.There are 88 barriers, they arent all walls....

The Dutch disease There is currently much discussion of the fact that the effects of the global crisis are more serious in Russia than most other countries because of the Dutch disease. Indeed, the resource dependency of the Russian economy contributes to major instability: when oil prices are high, the economy grows faster than other comparable countries, and when they are low, the Russian economy falls faster....

Gordon Brown is a troubled man so the prevailing wisdom goes. He does have his demons to seek, from his flawed personality to the ghost of Tony Blair that won’t quite leave the stage. He is widely seen in the media as an unattractive mixture of indecision, control freakery and paranoia....

Openness and security seem two diametrically opposed states of being. read more

Abdul Malik al-Houthi, a commander of the Shia rebels fighting the government in Yemen, has called on Saudi Arabia to end attacks against his group, rejecting accusations of Iranian help and links to a foreign political agenda. This week, Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s northern neighbour, launched an offensive against the rebels after they staged a cross-border raid.read more

Nouriel Roubini, professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, who called the coming crash in 2006read more

Along a disputed sea border off the west coast of the Korean peninsula, South and North Korean warships have fired at each other, leaving a North Korean vessel heavily damaged. Each side blamed the other for causing the skirmish.read more