A good Lynch-ing, further establishing pairriage, in the “Live Free or Die” state.

Spinning — nay, dizzily pirouetting — at the egress: Be sure not wear you best togs when being swept into that dustbin of history.

Tony Blair has mounted a final, passionate defence of his foreign policy, beseeching rich nations and African leaders to keep up his agenda of “liberal interventionism” after he leaves office next month.

The Prime Minister, who has sent British troops into conflicts in five countries since being elected in 1997, insisted the UK must remain willing to take a hand in the affairs of other states.

As he continued his valedictory tour with a visit to South Africa, Mr Blair said he still believes that it is right for governments to try to project western values around the world. “International politics should not be simply a game of interests but also of beliefs, things we stand for and fight for,” Mr Blair wrote in a magazine article. [At gunpoint, Mr. Blair? At long last, have you no conscience, sir? — voxd] Article

Keeping up with the kidnappings in Nigeria’s oil region.

Nigerian rebels from the oil-producing Niger Delta who had promised to release six foreign hostages on May 30 have yet to do so and have not given any explanation for the delay. Article

Related:

A protest by villagers at a major oil export pipeline complex in Nigeria entered a third day on Thursday and no crude was flowing through the facility, a protest leader said.

Villagers from K-Dere occupied the pipeline hub at Bomu, which feeds the Bonny shipping terminal, on Tuesday and forced Shell to shut 150 000 barrels per day of output.

“The lines are still shut. They are not flowing. We locked up the place and slept here last night,” said Teddy Penedibebari, who is leading the protest.

Shell, the biggest foreign oil operator in Nigeria, had said it was “ramping up production” on Wednesday, but confirmed that output was still down by 150 000 bpd on Thursday.

[snip]

Shell suspended production in Ogoni 14 years ago because of popular protests, but the area is still criss-crossed by pipelines and many residents are still aggrieved about oil spills and what they see as a history of neglect.

Shell had only just resumed normal production levels at its 400 000 bpd Bonny terminal before Tuesday’s attack on Bomu.

Exports remain under a force majeure, a legal measure exempting Shell from its contractual export obligations. Article

More:

The main militant group in Nigeria’s Niger Delta says it is willing to stop its violent campaign only if the new government frees its jailed kinsmen.

Newly sworn-in President Umaru Yar’Adua has said the crisis in the oil-rich region will be his priority and has called for a ceasefire.

But the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta said he must show “genuine willingness” for dialogue.

The government must prepare for more violence if it fails to act, Mend said.

The militants have waged a sabotage campaign for more than a year in the under-developed region, including kidnapping dozens of foreign oil workers.

The activities of the militants have led to a more than 25% cut in oil production.

Criminal gangs in the region have used similar tactics to obtain ransoms for the release of captives.

[snip]

Analysts say putting an end to the Niger Delta violence will be a slow and frustrating as hostage taking has become a very profitable business and the proliferation of arms in the region all combine to make the militants very powerful. Article

No sympathy for the charged whatsoever, but it is going to be quite the task to empanel an impartial jury.

Robert Alan Soloway, 27, from Seattle, appeared in a US court yesterday, accused of a series of federal crimes including mail fraud, email fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

US authorities said such was the scale of his activities, web users could easily notice a reduction in the amount of junk email clogging their inboxes.

“He’s one of the top 10 spammers in the world,” said Tim Cranton, a lawyer and director of Microsoft’s Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. Article

Paddy Ashdown’s stellar and universally lauded term in the Balkans entitles his views to be given weight above and beyond those of the usual pack:

This book is his opportunity to say what he thinks about international administration, not just in Bosnia but generally. He recognises that he has an uphill task: Iraq has mercilessly exposed the hubris and stupidity of much American and British thought about spreading beneficent political ideas to oppressed peoples. He is properly scathing in his account of the US failure to plan for the administration of Iraq. The question any citizen must ask today is: has anything of this colonial role in any post-Cold War intervention worked?

[snip]

Here, at a time when we in Britain might be at risk of swinging from Blair’s excess of interventionism to an equally damaging extreme of endemic non-interventionism, Ashdown sets down clearly some important propositions. The first and most fundamental is that there remains a need for international efforts at state-building. He is consistently clear that outside powers cannot simply ignore problems of state-failure and post-conflict reconstruction. If such problems are left to fester, the results will return to haunt us, as they did in the case of Afghanistan when left to its own (and the Taliban’s) devices after the departure of the Red Army in 1989.

Ashdown’s second key conclusion is that some valuable results have been achieved by international administrative assistance. East Timor is one such case: despite the setback in 2006 when the UN had to authorise a re-intervention, the role of the UN and Australia in assisting the creation of a new state was positive. Similarly in Bosnia, the extensive - albeit ill-planned - role of outsiders since 1995 has helped to prevent a reversion to war, and has started a deeply divided community on a road that leads, potentially, to EU and Nato membership.

The third and most important conclusion is that international assistance in state-building needs to be stripped of lazy political rhetoric and cultural blinkers. Ashdown is scathing about the shallow Western belief that holding elections is the key proof of advance towards democracy. He reminds us that, in occupied Germany after 1945, it took four years to lay the groundwork for the elections. Indeed, elections can be damaging if they do not take place in a framework of honest institutions and an impartial judiciary. They may merely reinforce the cronyism of government and the depth of ethnic divisions in a society.

[snip]

From all this follows the book’s central conclusion: that planning for the post-conflict phase is no mere add-on, but should be an integral part of all political and military planning for international action in divided communities. There should be no models or templates; every divided society is divided in its own way. There must be involvement of neighbouring states. There must also be an attempt to get agreement of local and regional partners about the goals of the international assistance. All these lessons were shockingly ignored in Iraq - but it may not be too late to take them into account in other cases, including that key case where they have been applied in part but not as a whole: Afghanistan. Article

This comes across as salesmanship of the glitz of technology rather than as something meaningfully utilitarian, as well as a program and system that will end up costing more in maintenance and manpower dedicated to its functioning rather than to its function than common sense would deem prudent.

Schools in Korea could soon be guarded by hi-tech robots that will patrol their grounds, according to reports.

The Korea Times reports that a pilot scheme will get underway at a school in Seoul this week, testing out the robot – named ‘OFRO’ – along with an associated security system called KT Telecop. Article

Noted FYI:

The Vatican will install solar photovoltaic panels on the roof of its Paul VI audience hall in a comprehensive energy project that will pay for itself in a few years, according to the brains behind the idea.

The solar array will power the building’s heating, cooling and lighting systems year-round, Pier Carlo Cuscianna, head of the Vatican’s department of technical services, told the Catholic News Service.

“The Paul VI hall was chosen first for a number of reasons: Cooling and heating the large audience hall makes it one of the top energy guzzlers in the Vatican, and its roof was in need of repair,” the news service quoted Cuscianna as saying. When completed, the project will include more than 1,000 panels, according to Cuscianna, and the excess electricity generated will be added to the Vatican City grid. Article

40 years later, still a Sgt. It really does seem like only yesterday.