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Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

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Zed Books's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/zed books
Bio: Zed is celebrating 30 years as one of the most distinctive voices in independent, progressive publishing. Over the last three decades we have published more than 1,000 titles. Each of these book... (More)

All Books Blogs

Where was Canada when Congo's election turned violent?

By Zed Books at Dec 05, 2011


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There are 32 million registered voters in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is about the size of Western Europe but with a fraction of the infrastructure. Ballots for last week's election travelled to remote regions by canoe, delivery men portaging like nomads to reach the farthest of the polls, which totalled 63,000.

Adding to the logistics crisis was a purported negligence from the international community. Fewer foreign dollars and fewer electoral observers made it to Congo's polls this time around than during its 2006 presidential race. Some claimed the international community had abandoned Congo to its own questionable devices, allowing disorganization to descend into violence.

And so it went. Armed men attacked voter kiosks and hijacked delivery trucks loaded with ballots; their gunfire killed at least five. Some ballots were found marked before polls opened. Other polls failed to open at all, upsetting crowds with tempers heated by long lines and the central African summer. Polling stations were set on fire.

Where was Canada while voting racked up a death toll in Congo, a country that's inherited billions in foreign aid dollars? Six Canadian election observers were deployed to a country with 72 million people. This wasn't enough.

We don't know for certain that sending 60 or 600 Canadians would have saved lives, stopped ballot stuffing or police brutality. But it couldn't have hurt.

"Neutral parties can literally mean the difference between peaceful elections and violent protests," says Glenys Babcock, policy analyst and president of Pragmora, a Toronto-based think-tank.

Babcock is a former consultant to the World Bank who specializes in policy and advocacy measures to develop peace in post-conflict countries. She recently travelled to Congo, where locals told her that neutral observers instilled confidence in the fate of their country's election.

Her group, Pragmora, unsuccessfully petitioned the Canadian government to send more observers.

It's not clear why Canada sent so few.

Click here to read more.

 

For more information about Congo, read 'Congo Masquerade' By Theodore Trefon

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