On the Open Democracy website earlier this month, the philosopher and Scottish nationalist Tom Nairn posted an essay on the English postman as symbol of decline.

War | After the attacks of 9/11, Americans “rightly demanded, and obtained, a firm and verifiable number” of the victims, says John Sloboda, head of the Oxford Research Group of Britain, writing on the human rights site Open Democracy.

Even now, much of that group-think remains evident in Washington. The latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine asserts that "the US projection of power into Afghanistan and Iraq, and today's tensions with Russia over the political fate of central Asia and the Caucasus, have only bolstered Mackinder's thesis". In a new essay for opendemocracy.net, Prince Hassan of Jordan has similarly spoken of how "the struggle for control of the 'energy ellipse' from Eurasia to the Straits of Hormuz" has revealed the resonance of Mackinder's thinking "for the political power plays of today".

Curran talks about how this group is optimistic about the power of “citizen journalists”, arguing that the power to communicate and disseminate has been transferred to the people thanks to the internet.

As examples, Curran cites Voice of San Diego and OpenDemocracy.

HNews is in a useable form, and all that is really needed now to give it a chance at success and to potentially help develop new business models for news is that content producers choose to implement it. The problem, Moore clarified, is that to truly demonstrate its usefulness requires a lot of content to be marked up in this way and therefore it is difficult to show its full potential until many organisations have signed on. Value Added News is creating its own search engine to help clarify the ways in which it can be used. OpenDemocracy has integrated the format to the majority of their articles and the AP will start having its English-language text processed in mid-November, with a goal of moving on to other forms of assets later. 

“Abandoning the programme entirely or involving Russia too deeply in it
without consulting Poland or the Czech Republic can undermine the
credibility of the United States across the whole region,” read the former
leaders’ letter, which was republished on the Open Democracy human rights
website.

Unless you read the Spanish press, you are unlikely to have picked up his words of support to the Belarus strongman Lukashenko or his endorsement of Robert Mugabe. The Open Democracy website has a long piece by the Mexican leftist Enrique Krauze on Chávez's links to antisemitic ideologues in Venezuela.

The Americas re-elect: George Washington's ghost

Women in the Arab Region are heard

Losing and Finding Russia

They have launched a developmental search engine that takes advantage of the new microformat. Currently, the search engine only indexes content from OpenDemocracy.org.

For a much richer, more nuanced report on what is actually happening inside Iran now and on how and how not to respond to these developments, read Mahmood Delkasteh in OpenDemocracy.

I can't vouch for Delkasteh's claim to have participated in the 1979 revolution, but his stunning piece also links an Open Democracy symposium and other commentaries published there on Iran that are among the very best I've found. Here is a website that has earned its distinction because its contributors believe in democracy intelligently, not ideologically, opportunistically, or in terms of Wilsonian power-wielding that so often asphyxiates the democratic power it claims to promote.

Open Democracy. Leading global news site with in-depth articles and debates on subjects ranging from the creation and purpose of a united Europe to motorway culture and the world climate after September 11th. Includes excellent list of web resources about the current situation in the Middle East.