Link Banana

The Big Picture really should try to do a post about this. Even Passport’s rather small picture is impressive.

More than 10,000 people have been mobilized to clean up green algae that has invaded the Olympic sailing venue in Qingdao, Shandong, China. The Qingdao Olympic Sailing Committee estimates that the area will be cleared before July 15.

Apparently it’s going to China. Blake Houshnell calls a chart of China’s cement use “staggering,” while Joshua Keating points out the recent uptake in theft of India’s manhole covers is being blamed on China’s ravenous demand for iron.

Teddy Roosevelt’s famous model for diplomacy was “Talk softly but carry a big stick.” Barack Obama’s model for diplomacy is… Winnie the Pooh?

Mr Danzig [an Obama advisor] spelt out the need to change by reading a paragraph from chapter one of the children’s classic, which says: “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. But sometimes he thinks there really is another way if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it.”

(via Passport)

Because we hadn’t already heard it 1000 times. Also, I realize a lot of this is just noise, but — like Blake Houshnell — I’m wondering what Spain has against McCain.

I’d have never thought that this problem:

Over the past year, the District has fought to eliminate thousands of vacant buildings, sharply raising property taxes to force owners to sell, lease or occupy their real estate. But officials can exert no such pressure on more than a dozen derelict properties that have added a dose of blight to some of Washington’s grandest neighborhoods.

Each of the buildings served as an embassy or diplomatic residence for countries including Liberia and Malaysia, the Philippines and the Republic of Togo. Legally considered foreign soil in almost all cases, the buildings are exempt from property taxes and the fine print of the city’s building code.

(via Passport)

Well not really. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, widely called “the mastermind of 9/11,” is refusing to take a lawyer because the United States allows same-sex marriage. He explained:

I will not accept anybody, even if he is Muslim, if he swears to the American Constitution,” he said, vowing to follow Islamic shariya and scorning the U.S. Constitution “because it allows for same sexual marriage.”

(via Passport)

Where Bolivia’s indigenous women meet the WWE. (The link is to a video story.)

(via Passport, who have some breathtaking images of the sport)

It’s a pretty clever idea: rather than wasting money for adspace in periodicals or buses, drop that money from the sky and take advantage of the free coverage that brings.

(via Passport)

This may surprise people:

The number of sex workers in New Zealand does not appear to have increased since legislation decriminalising prostitution became law, according to a new report.

(via Passport)

Speaking of Mr. Keating, he also points out an interesting story from China Digital Times. Confusion about whether or not Zimbabwe’s government received the shipment that South African dockworkers refused to unload remains. On one hand:

THE ZIMBABWEAN government said yesterday that weapons carried by China’s so-called “ship of shame”, the An Yue Jiang, had arrived in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, despite an international campaign to prevent the 77 tonnes of arms reaching President Robert Mugabe’s regime.

On the other:

But China’s Foreign Ministry said the An Yue Jiang was on its way back to China, and denied reports the weapons had arrived in Zimbabwe.

“These reports are baseless and purely fictitious,” spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement on the ministry’s website (www.fmprc.gov.cn).

“The Chinese side has already said many times that the weapons sold to Zimbabwe will return on the An Yue Jiang. The ship is currently on its way back to China,” Qin said.

You probably missed it — I nearly did — but Joshua Keating points out that three important things happened yesterday:

Israel and Syria, technically at war since 1967, are holding historic peace talks in Turkey that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described as a “national obligation.” The Lebanese government negotiated a compromise with Hezbollah, ending 18 months of violence and political deadlock. And Pakistan’s government defied the U.S. by agreeing to withdraw from Taliban-controlled territory in exchange for security guarantees.

They also make the point that this is clear sign of the current irrelevance of the United States to world politics.

Passport has pulled some maps from an interesting study, “Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis” (PDF).

They divided the world up into sub-national swathes of land and analyzed population and disaster data going back about thirty years for six disaster types: drought, flooding, cyclones, earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides. For reasons of data accuracy and availability, the results are relative rather than absolute likelihoods that disasters will occur in various corners of the globe.

The study focuses on more significantly populated areas amounting to about half of the world’s land area. It approaches loss as potential damage to that which is “valuable but vulnerable includ[ing] people, infrastructure, and environmentally important land uses.” And what’s more, based on data from a Brussels-based research center, the study hints that disaster frequency is increasing.

Speaking of language, Portugal has given in and accepted Brazilian spellings of words. (Also, congratulations to the BBC employee that came up with the title: “Reform spells change for Portugal.” Get it?)

The agreement standardises numerous spellings and adds three letters - k, w and y - to the alphabet.

A large majority of lawmakers backed government proposals to phase in the changes during the next six years.

(via Passport)

Joshua Keating makes an interesting point about Francis Fukuyama’s “the end of history” and a few other clichés:

Why does it seem as thought every big-think piece on the last two decades of foreign policy must include at least one instance where the author trots out Fukuyama just to kick him in the teeth? Is there really no other way to describe early-90s, capitalist triumphalism than using this one phrase?

But “The End of History” is hardly alone. There are a number of convenient phrases and quotes that seem to pop up again and again as convenient shorthand for writers discussing big, complex foreign policy ideas. It’s for this very reason that FP has a blanket ban on article submissions begining “Since the end of the cold war…” or “In the wake of Sept. 11…”

Passport has collected a few maps that show the extent of the damage done by the cyclone that struck Burma over the weekend. This before and after set is, as is usually the case with hurricanes, rather striking.

In addition to getting a new president today, more than a few people are beginning to fear that Russia planning to go to war with Georgia. Passport quotes a Russian journalist saying:

Nobody wants war, but both sides are doing everything to spark a military conflict. This is not the first time this situation has arisen. Recall how World War I began. States wanted only to protect their national pride and frighten their opponents. But at some point, the tensions escalated sharply and, coupled with mass mobilizations of their armies, the conflict in the Balkans spun out of control with tragic consequences for the entire world. This scenario could be repeated in the Caucasus.

For Slate, Anne Applebaum said roughly the same thing.

No kidding. I’ll leave the explanation to Mr. Hounshell:

A teenage rap duo in Chicago has recorded a track, aptly called “The Economist,” that extols the British publication’s breadth and brevity and samples podcast commentary by correspondents Edward Lucas and Anthony Gottlieb.

“The style in which they write is simple and concise, how do they get their sentences so precise?” the rappers wonder.

And the chorus is a gem, too: “He reads the Economist so he can get the gist, its solid competence gives him confidence that his intelligence is correct.”

The rappers also weigh in on accusations that the Economist pushes a particular line: “Yes, they have a bias; it’s pro-democratic. And pro-free trade; they are very emphatic.”

Jay-Z it is not. But it is funny stuff.

Foreign Policy’s Passport put together a quick rundown of all the impressive-sounding jobs held by Castros in Cuba. I have to admit that I’d never even realized that Fidel Castro had children.

Inhabitants of the Greek island of Lesbos are up in arms:

The man spearheading the case, publisher Dimitris Lambrou, claims that international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world.

He says it causes daily problems to the social life of Lesbos’s inhabitants.

In case you hadn’t heard, the word “lesbian” in a gay context derives from the poet Sapphos, who was from Lesbos and lived in the seventh century BCE. She wrote openly of a sexual desire for other women.

(via Passport)

A BBC corespondent recently visited Chechnya (the site of a long-time separatist war against controlling Russia) and made an eerily familiar conclusion:

“The locals are idiots,” fumed one Muscovite as the spring sun became comfortably warm and the delay continued. He did not know that the Chechen next to him had just said the same to me about Russians.

I did not feel that the north Caucasus was about to explode again. People are exhausted and the rebels are now thought to number only a few hundred.

But the missing and the dead have relatives and Chechnya has a long tradition of blood feuds.

There are countless unemployed young men.

Moscow must persuade them and their younger brothers that they have a future. If not, joining the militants may appeal more than joining the police.

A new generation of fighters may yet challenge the Kremlin’s control over Russia’s southern edge.

(via Passport)