The Bartlett Diaries: Good News on a Bad News Story.

As if we needed more examples of how messed up the mandatory detention system is… A national disgrace.

Jim Moore: Oh yea, real smart: >Rice Wants Nations to End Hamas Govt. Aid.

Since I began reading Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation : The Conquest of the Middle East I can’t help but think that the media coverage over here is grossly inadequate. I read an SMH article that glazed over huge issues, and trotted out that old favourite “the peace process” getting “back on track” (if you manage to read the book, you know why I glaze my eyes over when I read that).

Makes me want to buy a subscription to the Independent (which I might yet do) to get Robert’s take on the situation.

The other thing that the book has done is make me want to spend a coupla hundred bucks and buy one for the government and shadow foreign affairs ministers (along with some other pollies) - the parallels between the current situation and past conflicts abound - and some extremely prescient comments by past politicians (such as Churchill) are just simply too extraordinary to ignore.

Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) have listed what they consider the Top ten under-reported humanitarian stories of 2005.

WorldChanging: Remittance - New Ways to Send Money Home.

An interesting article, but one pull quote really caught my attention:

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of remittance income to most African nations and many developing nations. Nworah cites a figure of $300 billion dollars sent from diasporas to developing nations via remittance. In Africa, the amount of money remitted by diaspora workers - $17 billion per year - is larger than the amount of foreign direct investment in Africa, and rivals official development assistance grants or loans ($25 billion per year). In some African nations, remittance represent as much as 27% of the gross domestic product of some nations. …

Community voice mail [via Evhead]

Community Voice Mail provides free, 24-hour nationwide voice mail to people in crisis - connecting them to jobs, housing and hope - a deceptively simple concept with extraordinary impact.

I’ve heard of a similar service here in Australia - can’t remember the name. From memory (which is slim, obviously, they also provided a postal address). Anyone know of the Australian service?

Amnesty is running an SMS campaign to save Van Tuong Nguyen. If you can spare the 1 minute and $0.55 it’d be great if you could show your support.

Andrew Bartlett: Terror-fy. An absolute must read. Really! Why are you still here?!?

Kathy Sierra: Creating Passionate Users: How to spend your marketing and ad budget. Very interesting note about the Sarah McLachlan video. Top work!

Dan Gillmor: Bush Rediscovers Presumption of Innocence. Please read it to make sense of the next bit…

Absolutely! This is one of the things I had on my blogging to-do list. When I heard this on the radio I nearly choked on my coffee! How does Bush expect anyone to take him seriously when there are such serious discrepancies in his actions.

That post I hinted at on Saturday is on its way which talks a bit more about this in relation to the proposed “terror laws”.