Development Blogs.com

Last week I used aerial photos to show the looting of IDP camps near Goma. Today I located one of the camps on Google Earth. Here’s last week’s photo, overlaid on the satellite image: Aerial view of Mugunga IDP camp (c) UNHCR/Masako Yonekawa 2007 The satellite pictures would have been taken a few months ago - here is what the site looked like then: Spot the difference To see how much further you can take this sort of thing, take a look at the extraordinary Crisis in Darfur project....

Had more hard questions been asked about the legitimacy and proportionality of the use of lethal force in August in Kinshasa and February in Bas-Congo, might this have led to greater restraint and fewer deaths last week? I don’t know, but here’s the puzzle: Nurturing and coaxing a political process through the challenges of an unstable post-conflict environment is no easy task. Compromises need to be struck. Dialogue requires good access to powerful people who don’t like criticism, so what do you do if they break the rules and do bad things to the people you (and they) are supposed to protect? You want to give people faith that things are improving, to avoid starting riots, and to maintain a good working relationship with your host government. But if you downplay...

Geneviève, a trainee waitress, with freshly made strüdel. (More photos on Flickr.) While still besieged the other day, I mentioned my fear that ‘a casualty of the conflict has been our new Viennese café, so badly needed, which opened only on Monday.’ This prompted a few concerned enquiries and even a suggestion that I might have succumbed to stress-induced delusion. Gun battles are not good for business, unless security’s your game. But I am happy to report that Café Mozart has survived its turbulent opening week and is up and running again. There are a few bullet holes in the smart yellow façade, but luckily nobody was hurt and the place was not looted. Café Mozart is run by a group of Salesian nuns, with funding from private donors in Austria, and Caritas. Profits...

The City of Boston slips quietly into the ocean. Bonobos aren’t the only ones with something to teach us about cooperation. After 300 million years of trial and error, cockroaches have found ways to make effective collective foraging decisions. (And don’t get me started on the ants.) So, apes do it, ants do it, even coral polyps do it: Somehow, spineless, brainless, eyeless, earless, immotile marine animals that meet all our criteria for zero intelligence manage to synchronize their activities to ensure survival. But the question remains, faced with the prospect of, you know, doom, aka The End, can we adapt our collective behaviour in time? Read more in The Thirteenth Tipping Point, by Julia Whitty. I assure you it’s not at all dull. And there are dolphins in it....