Greece can attempt to sell bonds, but it's unclear if anyone would buy them because they would necessarily be subordinate to the hundreds of billions of dollars in outstanding bonds on which there is a strong risk Greece will default.
Germany has offered to second a few hundred tax collectors to Greece, and had this offer refused.
]]>Less specialist: Fitbit Charge HR. Much better at detecting activity than the WiiFit U pedometer I'd been using for the last few years; the website is nicely integrated and makes calorie-counting sufficiently convenient that I actually do it.
Oh, and upgraded from an iPhone 4S to a 6S+; much prettier screen, you can use an 80x50 ssh terminal on it indefinitely, reliable two-day battery life, but not as huge a boost in capabilities as I'd have expected from having multiplied lots of the meaningless benchmark numbers by five.
]]>Makes the point that the mud of Flanders is much nastier stuff to have in wounds than the dust of the Transvaal, meaning that for a few years the lessons of the Boer War were counter-productive in WW1.
]]>And it's a really weird place, because much of it doesn't have the concept of a friendly stranger. A whitefella gets by because he's clearly a space alien and he's brought his own supplies; but the next tribe along, speaking a language as different from yours as Turkish is from Dutch, are enemies as dangerous as an equal number of cassowaries [I'm have said 'wolves', but there are no large mammalian predators in New Guinea]
]]>There is a significant terraforming operation going on there - when the Gobi dust gets loose and blows away it is a pollution hazard in the rich cities of the plain almost as bad as the endogenous coal-fired pollution hazard, and so really quite large numbers of trees are being planted in the hope of breaking the wind and holding the loess down.
It is only the very aggressive American attitude to wilderness protection that means that more bits of North America aren't being terraformed as we type.
]]>( http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/04/baathists-behind-the-islamic-state.html and http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-show-structure-of-islamist-terror-group-a-1029274.html )
" Confiscated documents of former Iraqi Baathist officer "Haji Bakr," an IS leader recently killed in Aleppo, indicate his detailed plans to create a caliphate based on meticulously calculated spy and security networks (although no Quran could be found in the house) "
I imagine it all boils down in the end to whether you hate zealots more than you hate Persians; being a non-religious Sunni (in the sense of that old joke about whether someone's a Protestant or a Catholic atheist) in contemporary Iraq is not comfortable.
]]>That's good to know. I was quite alarmed to see (the reporting was very low-key, but http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34659199) dozens of serving Royal Marines (and hundreds of veterans) assembling in Parliament Square to protest Blackman's murder conviction, if only because dishonorably discharging dozens of Royal Marines for violating the very clear regulations the MoD has about members of the military not attending political protests, marches, rallies or demonstrations is going to be at the very least a bit awkward.
]]>The interesting time will be when we see the first anti-Chinese pogroms, and the first nationalisation-without-compensation of Chinese property; and in particular when we see how Big Brother Chang in the East reacts to them.
]]>The question of why the kind of Briton who thinks this is a good idea tends to go to Bangkok instead is an interesting one, I imagine it's down to ultra-stereotyped portrayals of the submissive Thai versus the sassy African-American.
(yes, yes, African-American stereotypes could not readily be less relevant to Ethiopian Ethiopians; but the stereotypes exist to hit people before they've thought that far)
]]>Building and staffing primary schools is much harder - you need many more for a given population, and whilst interning at a hospital in a developing country is a standard rite of passage for a medical student's career, interning at a school in Ethiopia isn't something a trainee teacher usually contemplates. Similarly, whilst being a foreign senior surgeon teaching local junior surgeons isn't straightforward, being a foreign senior teacher trying to train local teacher-trainers is a whole new level of cultural difficulty.
Building basic sanitation is a nightmare, because you have to dig trenches. Vast lengths of trench, across land owned by vast numbers of people whom you'll have to negotiate with. Building a sewage-works and staffing it with secondees from the Ministry of Public Works until you can get local staff trained up is trivial in comparison with trying to build a local plumbing industry.
]]>I am almost inclined to think of Chinese investment in Africa as yet another example of the Global Savings Glut; the Chinese have some spare money, the Ethiopians are willing to let them invest it, individual Chinese businessmen are willing to run stalls at bazaars in Addis Ababa.
But I haven't been there and looked yet, and it may be that there's something which would be absolutely obvious on the ground and doesn't show up in random perusal of world media./
]]>There's also a good deal less anti-Chinese sentiment than there is anti-Western sentiment, because these are places which scarcely had a Chinese visitor before 1995.
]]>