Sunday, June 26, 2005

Technorati & Bloggers Support the Live8 Concerts

Technorati has gotten in on the Make Poverty History campaign, the Live8 Concerts, and the upcoming G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland by featuring all kinds of cool stuff at their site. If you are interested checkout the Technorati Live8 homepage and get yourself one of 3 nifty little Technorati Live8 badges like the one proudly displayed on this blog (scroll down and look right).

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Update June 27th:
The new Global Fund for Women Weblog has a good article on how the Live8 Concerts and the upcoming Gleneagles G8 Summit agenda should also focus on the contributions that women are making to the development of African societies and politics and why they need more support from world political and business leaders. Checkout the article Live8 and Beyond by the GFW president Kavita Ramdas. "Hat Tip" to the folks at Technorati Live8 for the lead to this article.

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There may not even be a Berlin Live8 Concert if this June 24th article from Reuters news service is correct " Lack of German Live8 sponsors a disgrace". Even Deutsche Welle is pissed off about the German business community and the German government's lack of support for the concert in their article titled "Live8 Organizers Lash Out at Berlin Apathy". I don't understand why anyone is surprised. After all, the German government's Finance Minister Hans Eichel heldout until the last minute on the recent African Debt Relief negotiations and then the politically embattled German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder made a TV appearance claiming he was for the African Debt Relief deal all along. Here is Der Spiegel International's spin on the debt relief story here and here.

Oxfam, the U.K. humanitarian agency, published an interesting report about EU countries not living up to their promises on development aid and debt relief titled EU Heroes and Villains . According to this report 21 of the 25 EU member countries are dragging their feet in honoring committments made more than 5 years ago at the Millenium Development Goals conferences. Countries such as Ireland, Germany, and Italy are way behind the highly touted number of 0.7% GNI to be contributed toward aid and development by wealthy countries. According to the report it is calcualted that Germany will reach this level of aid contributions by the year 2087. Hey, that's cool, Africa's poor and hungry and the poor in the rest of the developing world can wait, right?

I think that I will sitout the Live8 Concert in Berlin this time around 'cause I am still suffering from headaches, hearing loss, and flashbacks from that last big Rock concert years ago: Woodstock!

Have fun kids and give 'em Hell up in Gleneagles!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi
Thanks for stopping by at Under the Acacias, and for your encouragements. I like what you are doing here. Am trying to familiarise myself with Technorati - I'm still a bit of a "brussard", as they say in Burkina. Cheers.

BRE said...

You're the Man down in Burkina Faso Keith. An excellent blog and I wish that I could take more time to explore it thoroughly. The Big Man Upstairs is definately pleased with the work you are doing down there in West Africa, no doubt.

Technorati tags and services are rather easy to use, just checkout their site for Help files and/or ask other bloggers who use the Technorati services and tools regularly. Stop back by Jewels in the Jungle if you need more help. I need to start using TAGS more often as well on this blog.

Ciao for now.

Brian said...

"I'm in need of some good online resources (research papers, historical documents) re: the Congo under Belgian colonial rule and the years up to about 1994. I need this information in English or German. Can you help?"

Sorry, I couldn't find your email address on your website. But anyway, the two best books I've read on the topic were 'King Leopold's Ghost' by the American Adam Hocschild on the atrocities of Leopold's Congo. And 'In The Footsteps of Mr Kurtz' by the Belgian Michela Wrong primarily on Zaire under Mobutu. 'Lumumba: A Biography' by Robin McKown, while mostly about Patrice Lumumba, does have good information about Congo in the years immediately before and after independence.

While none of these are historical documents as such, I'm sure their respective bibliographies should be helpful.

Best wishes.