by Richard Gowan | Feb 18, 2009 | Off topic
From the people who brought you the Inquistion and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, it’s trivia time!
Women are prouder than men, but men are more lustful, according to a Vatican report which states that the two sexes sin differently. A Catholic survey found that the most common sin for women was pride, while for men, the urge for food was only surpassed by the urge for sex.
The report was based on a study of confessions carried out by Fr Roberto Busa, a 95-year-old Jesuit scholar. The Pope’s personal theologian backed up the report in the Vatican newspaper.
“Men and women sin in different ways,” Msgr Wojciech Giertych, theologian to the papal household, wrote in L’Osservatore Romano. “When you look at vices from the point of view of the difficulties they create you find that men experiment in a different way from women.”
So what’s the final vice breakdown?
by Mark Weston | Feb 18, 2009 | Africa, Conflict and security
I gave a talk to senior civil servants at the Home Office last week, as part of Demos’s Leadership Masterclass on International Challenges and Counter-Terrorism. My talk was on West Africa, and particularly on how looming demographic changes there are likely to increase instability in a region that is already the world’s poorest and one of its most volatile. I argue that, at least in the long-term, Western security policy-makers would do well to keep an eye on the region. For an edited version of the talk, see after the jump.
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by Alex Evans | Feb 18, 2009 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2IaKWyl4Lc&NR=1[/youtube]
by Alex Evans | Feb 18, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global Dashboard
As the credit crunch pronounces the last rites on the great debt-fuelled consumer boom, things look pretty grim for suburbia too. But if suburbia was the spatial expression of the consumer economy, then what does the economic geography of the future look like?
Two recent articles by two different authors exemplify a crucial intellectual fault line in assessing prospects for the world’s cities. Richard Florida argues in the new edition of the Atlantic that mega-cities are set to flourish as centres of post-material innovation and creativity. James Howard Kunstler, on the other hand, argues that resource scarcity trends mean that we’re all heading for a much more localised world.
So who’s right – and why is it that despite largely overlapping analyses, the two authors reach such different conclusions? Find out after the jump…
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by Alex Evans | Feb 17, 2009 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development
I shouldn’t laugh, as clearly it behoves all right-thinking people to applaud examples of UN agencies ‘delivering as one’ wherever we may find them.
But still, perhaps one may be permitted a small chuckle of surprised delight upon receiving a press release from a UN agency proclaiming its assistance to the UN’s food task force – when the agency in question is the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Apparently the IAEA has helped 24 African countries to eradicate the deadly cattle disease rinderpest. Alas, details of how this has been achieved were not provided. But there is much enjoyment to be had in speculating.
IAEA have also provided this photo with their press release, which shows Dr. Chiklu Mba, the head of IAEA’s Plant Breeding Unit. Rather fabulously, the caption explains that he is “examining mutant banana samples”.
Join us here again at the same time next week, when the World Food Programme will be with us to set out their ambitious plan for making a success of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference in 2010.
