Cassilis

Week 5 and we have everything from cyber warfare to culture lessons in the classroom. As always please flag anything worthy you think I might have missed...

Demos

• Remember the fuss over government proposals for 'five hours of high-quality culture a week' for all pupils? In a consultation paper written by John Holden Demos challenges "cultural professionals and educationalists to provide a new and coherent direction for creative learning and for encouraging creativity through culture"
• It may be a few weeks old now but I'll still flag the Everyday Democracy Index again because it's a fascinating ongoing study - a "tool for assessing the democratic health of European countries across many different dimensions. That includes not just formal dimensions of democracy but also more everyday features of democracy – how important democratic principles and practices are to the cultures of workplaces, to people’s community life, to the way they interact with public services, and even to the way they talk to their friends and family." Well worth a read if you missed it before....

The Council on Foreign Relations

• The CoFR carries Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell's yearly 'Annual Threat Assesment' to the Senate Armed Services committee - interesting read and a document that normally attracts more attention globally than it has this year. I think there's something else going on politically in the States at the moment but can't recall what...
• Also a fascinating 'backgrounder' on the evolution of cyber warfare - last years attack on Estonia's computer infrastructure has caused some panic in intelligence circles around the globe and this short piece looks at how some of the big players have reacted.

The Henry Jackson Society

• A couple of good papers from HSJ - the first has a bit of a pop at Lord Malloch Brown and looks at the risks of 'blind aid' to developing countries in Africa without any sort of scrutiny on service delivery - "It may in fact fall into precisely those 'patrimonial' hands that have created problems of governance and development that necessitate aid in the first place".
• The second paper suggest European Libyan policy is cynical and that the EU & US have overstated the claims about Libyan reform - it also decries the claims that "Libyan rehabilitation is evidence that [the] policy of slow, deliberative engagement works"

Labels: Think Tank Roundups