Have you ever wanted to start an internet cafe (or internet bar, wangba, as they call it)? Were you put off by all the red-tape — in Chinese? Fear not, here is the complete regulations concerning starting and operating internet cafes in China, translated (and heavily abridged) by me. (I actually did this as part […]

I love libraries, and I practically grew up in one. Whenever my mother didn’t know where I was, she would call the kind librarians at Hamar Public Library (the white building), and they’d usually found me in a comfortable couch reading a book. I knew them all by name, and I still drop by once […]

In my endless search for internships, I spent a while last night looking at different UN sub-organizations, and read up a bit on the topic of how to get a job there. I thought others might be interested, so here are the major pathways into the UN system, as far as I can ascertain (this […]

This Thursday I was at the Bloor St. Cinema (an excellent independent cinema) to see “The War and Peace Trilogy” (a very impressive documentary put together by Indymedia) and listen to a speech by Amy Goodman. Amy works at DemocracyNow, a radio show based in NYC and broadcast around the USA.
Saturday I went to […]

A Survey of Chinese Peasants is a book that was released while I was in China, and created a huge stir. Originally it was meant to be banned, but somehow the book, which is hugely critical of the communist party - but mostly the power-abusive local cadres in rural villages - made it out in […]

So, the much heralded elections are underway - with problems galore. Apart from the obvious logistical problems of organization in a country with no infrastructure and mostly illiterate voters, and the fact that Taliban has threatened “global jihad” there seems to have been widespread and blatant fraud, leading to all of the other fifteen candidates […]

I am currently reading the Ingenuity Gap by Homer Dixon (who is teaching at the University of Toronto). So far, his book is entertaining, but hasn’t really given me that much new insights - however it did provide me with a few new stats that I found very interesting.
1) The biggest human structure in the […]

The elections are over in Kazakhstan, in fact they were about two weeks ago, but never too late to write a few words. Politics in Central Asia is, though usually very interesting and sometimes quite incestous, rarely reported in big headlines. The four countries that I’ve been to and know a bit about, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, […]