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October 29, 2004

Who's secure now?

The government talks a lot about 'national security' but voices asking 'security for whom' go unanswered. If we are safe, why don't we feel safe? And if the Howard government's actions in Iraq and elsewhere are making us less safe, what can we do about it? These are some of the questions raised in the Seventh Annual Hawke Lecture, Security for Whom? Redesigning Security, Reinforcing Human Rights, delivered by Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International on Wednesday 8 September 2004. The full text of her speech is at http://www.hawkecentre.unisa.edu.au/events/lectures/2004AHL_speech.htm
Posted by belinda at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2004

European story

It'll be bigger than Ben Hur any time soon so any journalist who reports on Europe needs to know where to find the latest info, especially on the new member states who have been admitted. The EU itself is a good place to start as it has a Directorate dedicated to European enlargement at http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement . For a fuller story and a very useful, targeted set of links, go to the feature article, Sources on EU Enlargement, by Kay Renfrew at http://www.freepint.com/issues/300904.htm#feature. You can take a quiz to see if you have it right. It's at http://www.europaquiz.org/.
Posted by belinda at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2004

Bottom line

The World Bank's World Development Report 2005 is just out at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDR2005/Resources/complete_report.pdf. It's all about making money this year since its subtitle is A better investment climate for everyone. Why the focus on investment? According to the Report, the investment climate is central to growth and poverty reduction, and it urges governments around the world to tackle costs, risks, and barriers to competition. The Report draws on surveys of more than 30,000 firms in 53 developing countries, but also includes country case studies sponsored by the World Bank itself.
Posted by belinda at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)

From the horse's mouth

DocuTicker is a daily update of new reports and other research culled from various US sources, including think tanks, research institutes, and government agencies. It's a pretty mixed bag, done in the form of a blog, but it's searchable. Could be a good source of story ideas.
Posted by belinda at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2004

Answers to questions

Don't know a genome from a garden gnome? Head off to ActionBioscience (http://www.actionbioscience.org/) where you can get an easy intro to questions of genetics, biodiversity, biotechnology and other hot button issues. The site wants to teach people the basics and isn't out to make a buck out of it. Could be handy for journos new to the science or medical round.
Posted by belinda at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2004

Make them pay

London started charging people to take their cars into central London, and guess what? It worked. Fewer cars now enter the charging zone, public transport use is up, travel time is quicker for all road users and the money made from charging drivers is going towards improving public transport even more. What is wrong with this picture? Nothing, which is why other countries are looking at the London experience as a way forward for car-choked cities. Read this success story at http://www.apo.org.au/webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=00923.
Posted by belinda at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

Dismal anniversary

Twenty years ago, the term ‘spin doctor' made its public debut in the pages of the New York Times. Rodney Tiffen deplores the inexorable growth of spin doctoring in a piece on Australian Policy Online. (http://www.apo.org.au/webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=00920). He says while spin doctor is a term everybody uses, no one owns up to being one. Tiffen is also sceptical about the "howls of protests from journalists about the pernicious influence of spin doctors". If journalists did their job properly, he says, spin doctors would not be able to do theirs as well as they currently do.
Posted by belinda at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2004

Getting involved

We Media: The Impact of Participatory Media on Election 2004, a free Media Center Webcast, is freely available for viewing at http://www.mediacenter.org/content/5124.cfm. The Media Center is part of the American Press Institute. Particpants include Stephen Bromberg, Executive Editor, FoxNews.com, Dan Froomkin, columnist, WashingtonPost.com and Jehmu Greene, President, Rock the Vote Foundation.
Posted by belinda at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)

New view

They're much better served for alternative news voices in the US than we are in our tiny little country. With the launch of a new site, AltWeeklies, you can now find news and arts reporting from around 125 alternative newsweeklies in one spot. The site is at http://www.altweeklies.com/gyrobase/AltWeeklies/. From the site: 'Updated throughout the work week, AltWeeklies.com will help readers find the latest news about politics, crime, social issues, the environment, health, sex, food, film, music, art and books--all with a different perspective from what is generally found on wire-service and daily-newspaper Web sites.'
Posted by belinda at 02:51 PM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2004

Know your enemy

The Terrorism Knowledge Base is a look-up tool for groups, regions, countries, incidents, legal cases and documentation. Find it at http://www.tkb.org/. You can use the map to find regions or you can search for groups by name, e.g. Abu Sayyaf, al Qaeda. Groups that are linked to what you searched for are also made available in the results.
Posted by belinda at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)

Blogs and readers and trust

The US-based Associated Press Managing Editors runs a project called the National Credibility Roundtables Project. Details can be found at http://www.apme-credibility.org/index.html. It includes a Credibility Roundtable Database to facilitate the use of newspapers for research. New on the site are the results of various Readers Speak surveys, one of which concerns blogging. Apparently one in five US Internet users reads blogs and the reasons readers have for following blogs vary a lot -- from getting a new slant on existing news stories to finding out about stories not on the radar anywhere else. Journalists are urged to read and use blogs as good sources of new story ideas. The site is worth a look -- there's a lot there.
Posted by belinda at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2004

Work in progress

A new web page for finding newspapers online is at http://www.newspaperindex.com/. It's not complete -- the Australian section has very few papers listed. For Australian papers, you'd be much better off at Australian Newspapers Online (http://www.nla.gov.au/npapers/) but the newspaperindex site would be useful for finding papers from other countries. The site will be updated so perhaps the Australian section will expand then. The site also links to PressDisplay (http://www.pressdisplay.com/) which is a site like NewsStand (http://www.newsstand.com/) and NewspaperDirect (http://www.newspaperdirect.com/) for digital replicas.
Posted by belinda at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

Forgive and forget?

To break the ongoing "lend-and-forgive" cycle that heavily indebted poor countries face, the international community should "significantly" increase grants and debt relief, says US Treasury Secretary John Snow in an article on www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/041004/2004100427.html. The IMF discussed the issue of debt relief for poor nations at their annual meeting on Oct. 2-3. You can read or join a featured discussion on whether the IMF should forgive debt or not at globalEDGE (http://globaledge.msu.edu/) or just trawl through the IMF info at http://www.imf.org/external/fin.htm for facts and figures and directions. For anyone wanting country insights or international business resources, globalEDGE is a great starting point.
Posted by belinda at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2004

Health and superannuation facts

With so much political bombardment of voters about Medicare, health and aged spending and whose handout is bigger than someone else's, two new reports may be timely for voters trying to sort fact from fiction. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has produced Health Expenditure Australia 2002-03 which gives the real picture of what was spent and what will be spent next. It's at http://www.aihw.gov.au/publications/index.cfm/title/10043. Also just out is NATSEM's look at superannuation lump sums. It asks the question: What happens between ages 50 and 69? Research by NATSEM shows the majority of Australians are contributing very little to the cost of their retirement. Since 1992, almost every employee has had superannuation put aside for them under the Superannuation Guarantee, so where does this superannuation go? There is a popular misconception that, on average, Australian retirees enjoy ‘the good life'. NATSEM's evidence contradicts this. Read more by following the links from http://www.apo.org.au/linkboard/results.chtml?filename_num=01796.
Posted by belinda at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)

Toeing the line

Peter Manning addressed the Brisbane Institute on 21 September on the topic Is Australia an intelligence and media colony? He asks: "Why is it that on several key issues, particularly since September 11, our Press appears to have given up the role of reporting fair down the middle, keeping a distance from Government spin and resisting with skepticism the overblown rhetoric of war? Is the Press afraid of being accused of being un-Australian, traitors, pinkos or extremists? I do not believe boatloads of asylum seekers threatened Australia, I do not believe the Palestinian narrative gets a fair go in our media and I did not believe we should have gone to war in Iraq. I am more concerned with a trend that seems to threaten our democracy. The trend towards a compliant Press." An edited version of his remarks can be found at http://www.brisinst.org.au/resources/manning_peter_media.html.
Posted by belinda at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)

October 05, 2004

World report card

The IMF has just released a new World Economic Outlook. These present the IMF staff's analysis and projections of economic developments at the global level, in major country groups (classified by region, stage of development, etc.), and in many individual countries. The latest is at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2004/02/index.htm. Issues include how demographic change will affect the global economy and whether the currently bright prospects in Asia will be scuttled by macroeconomic policy mistakes.
Posted by belinda at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)

As it was

Anyone wanting to see front pages chronicling the September 11 attacks can find them at the Screenshot Archive of Online News Sites: September 11, 2001. The site includes more than 250 news and other Web sites from September 11, 12, and 13, 2001. You can browse by publication or by country of origin.
Posted by belinda at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2004

Suicide statistics

The World Health Organization has created a big resource on suicide prevention at http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/. They have recently released a report on suicide, claiming it has claimed a million lives this year, and that the toll could rise to 1.5 million by 2020. In Europe, suicide kills more people per year than road accidents, and firearms are overwhelmingly the means of choice. The site has a colour-coded map of suicide numbers and has figures with suicide rates and absolute numbers of suicide by country. Eastern Europe has the highest numbers, with Muslim countries by contrast having fairly low counts. Anyone concerned could also visit the site of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (http://www.med.uio.no/iasp/).
Posted by belinda at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)