It is seldom that Mongolia makes the news headlines but it did at the beginning of July. A rare republic in their part of the woods with Russia and China as neighbours, Mongolia’s people protested against alleged vote rigging forcing the President to declare a state of emergency.

I knew so little about Mongolia, I couldn’t e

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The report in question provides a fairly neutral discussion on a recent ruling by the highest administrative court in France, denying a woman the right to French citizenship.

The reason the woman did not receive her citizenship, although her husband is French and she has been living in France for several years, is because sh

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This really funny bit of Western Wisdom popped up in one of my social bookmarking collections. It’s all about this old wisdom that says when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, this article says that in business or in life generally we often try a myriad of other strategies with

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Question: what is it about governments, big business, institutions, non-profits, charities etc that they want to keep the poor poor? Alright, as generalisations go, this one is one of my better ones. Two articles that made me think this appeared in the media today.

e first one was in the Independent and discussed the farming

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What is it about the situation in Zimbabwe that has produced one of the most severe cases of stick-your-head-in-the-sand-itis that one can imagine. Watching a video on the online New York Times on the refugees streaming into South Africa got me into such a state that tears were running down my cheeks.

Of course, as part of d

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Watching what my younger daughter gets up to in geekland is always interesting. She is one of the early adopters of digital technology. Thanks to her I have been a Twitter member since January 2007, months after she had joined of course, and had a page on Facebook before most other Old Timers. An iPhone made its way into our UK

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Do we really eat that much because we are unhappy? Or are we fat and unhealthy because we just lack sel-discipline and eat whenever we want to.

If we have no self-discipline, then all the diet books are not going to make a difference in any case. Then we really do need the jaw stitched up, or our intestines cut up. But if w

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What makes a hero, and could these attributes be present in the top leaders whether those in public office or in commerce? This is a subject that has been written about ad nauseam and is a big issue in MBA’s. It is always felt that leadership determines the success or otherwise of an organisation.

It could be that heroes, an

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Those who are willing to work, should be able to find a job that pays a living wage. The people he spoke to felt that if you were ill, you shouldn’t have to file for bankruptcy. Your children should be able to go to good schools and attend college without the parents having to go into huge debt.

The people also felt that the

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Which one of the three states of love is the one for you? Lust, romantic attraction or attachment?

For a different view on what love is all about, check anthropologist Helen Fisher's studies conducted at Rutgers University. She and her team put people under MRI tests to see what love does to the brain and how we feel when w

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We tolerate bad behaviour just because the person seems to be artistic or musical. We think because they produce great art they are excempt from the rules of behaviour and that they don't need to have any moral code that they need to live by. And we reward these people with celebrity status often plus huge earnings and rewa

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Would it be reasonable to allow armed forces personnel to describe their work place conditions and poor salaries on their pages in Facebook and MySpace? Or is the UK Ministry of Defence in their rights to prohibit this kind of exposure and prosecute personnel already guilty of this public exposure.

 

What do

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This is the world we live in. Personal freedoms are squashed whether by governments or religious fervour. Remember those ubiquitous CCTV cameras in the UK. The work place is structured and controlled to ensure that individual creative thinking is reduced to a minimum.

Education produces drones and is focused on ensurin

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One thing that really surprised me about the UK when I first moved across was the number of furnished homes that were for rent. One hardly comes across that in South Africa where most people accumulate their own living things.

It’s not uncommon for the locals to pack a few boxes, tuck them under the arm and saunter off to their n

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During my search through cyberspace to find the best live reports on Steve Job’s Keynote speech at Macworld yesterday, I came across an ad that had the caption ‘In Steve we Trust’. Very funny. See it on Popular Mechanics’ website.

It’s entertaining writing about Apple and possibly even, dare one, mentioning something negative abo

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