This month 2 images caught my eye. First, the outpouring of grief and admiration for Nelson Mandela. There has rarely been a man who has captured so emphatically in his lifetime the essence of what it means to rise above…

In the 1950s Manila was the banking capital of Asia. The Philippines had more telephones per head than Hong Kong. The Philippines looked resurgent. Then came military dictatorship, assassinations of opposition politicians, including the father of the current President and…

Bilateral, regional and global trade agreements are all part of the modern landscape of international economic relationships. They are based upon a simple premise, that free trade is a good thing. At the purely theoretical level this is a tautology.…

There is little point in saying something for the sake of it. A journo, a politician, a blogger, is often faced with the problem because they’ve got to come up with something. Is it therefore an exercise in hubris when…

I have just finishing reading the posthumously published lectures of British Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm who died October 2012. Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (Little, Brown: 2013) is a good example of never judging a book…

In 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two respected Harvard economists, shot to fame for publishing a paper that seemed to support the view that once a national debt had crossed the 90% GDP threshold it would impact negatively on…

Words. Here is an example of some, imaginatively (and unexpectedly) cited by the ITU’s Trends in Telecoms Reform 2013. (And as an American friend remarked “anyone who takes an Alexander Hamilton quote from the 18th century and can relate it…

In the world of social media and instant online news feeds, what actually constitutes ‘news’ is rather problematic. The 140-character ‘news item’ planted on Twitter by hackers in April that bombs had gone off in the White House injuring President…

In March, two announcements were made pointing in opposite directions. First, Google announced the closing down of Google Reader, a news-feed app widely used by the cognoscenti of the up-to-date in everything. Yahoo! followed by announcing the purchase for nearly…

2013 is the year of the Water Snake in the Chinese zodiac. Water is considered to have the colour black, which conjures up the high levels of river pollution in China, so 2013 is also said to be the Year…

At Davos this month Tim Berners-Lee, regarded widely as the father of the World Wide Web, warned of silos that were disabling users from sharing their postings across websites. Giving the example of users placing their photo albums online, he…