(Picture by Laura Mann – it shows my favourite election poster, with the exception of a poster for a local candidate in Malakal who promised to spread corruption.)

I know, you expect me to comment on the Sudanese elections. But I have been wrong too many times now about what was going to happen or how one can explain certain events. I will for now be a good historian, wait until everything is over, and then give you my enlightened, or maybe less enlightened opinion. Instead I will give you some links you can read and play with in the meantime.

The Electionnaire by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, where you can answer questions and find out, whom you would vote for and what the issues are (which noone really ever talked about).

SudanVoteMonitor which collects reports from all around the country on how the voting is going. They also have some fancy Google Maps overlay of all the incidents –think Web 2.0 meets Sudanese elections. A less fancy but possibly more substantial list of violations is published daily by the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies.

For news on the elections you can check the Southern Sudanese biased Sudan Tribune or you can check the differently biased Al Jazeera International. On the blog of some very distinguished Sudan academics you can read some intelligent commentary, I especially recommend the post on the complexity of the whole exercise. For some visuals you can check out the pictures my flat mate Laura took of campaign posters. She also posted translations of most of them.

Last but not least you can check out the website of a Sudanese anti-government pressure group called Girifna who has been quite outspoken lately.

The upper chamber of the Parliament is burning. Being German that does give me the creeps. Anyway, it has been burning since hours and the fire fighters can’t get through. For a while they tried to attack the fire with helicopters – yes the ones which they usually use to fight fire in the jungle. That’s the urban jungle of Cairo for you. They seem to have given up on that though. I guess, when dropping water or powders from a great height in a city, the collateral damage would be rather devastating.

Imagine there is a strike and nobody shows up. Well, if the strike would have worked, that would have been precisely the goal. In that sense the altered Brecht quotation does not really fit totally. But first things first. Today was supposed to be a national strike here in Egypt. All workers and government workers in especially were called upon to stay at home today. As AFP points out: “It is unclear who initiated the call which snowballed after some 25,000 employees at the textile plant in Mahalla announced plans to strike from Sunday over low salaries and price hikes.” The call for a national strike seems to have appeared first on Facebook and made its way by SMS and email all around the country. The strike was supported by a large coalition of opposition parties, NGOs and other organisations. Additionally there was supposed to be protests in Cairo. The outlawed but popular opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, said it supported the strike but would not join it, as Voice of America puts it.

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In the past years the American government has made it easy for me to know what I do not want; the Iraq war, Guantanamo, unilateralism, denial of world climate change, tax cuts for the super rich which ruin the American budget and generally a government which cuts down on civil rights and liberal values. And of course Dubya is a Republican and therefore it seemed obvious to seek salvation with the Democrats. But now the American elections are coming closer and it seems time to form an opinion. More importantly to form an opinion based on what I want, not on what I do not want.

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The European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, Charlie McCreevy proposed to extend copyright protection on music from 50 to 95 years. McCreevy might be a smart man and he might have noble reasons to propose such a change, but why exactly would he propose such a change now? Yes, a lot in copyright should be changed, but in general the period should be shortened, not extended. But instead of using this window of opportunity and propose to rethink copyright in Europe, McCreevy proposes a singular change in one field, which makes the copyright law even more complicated than it is already. McCreevy argues that this is not about the super stars such as the Beatles, but about little known studio musicians who depend upon copyright payments for their pension. While such a move might be appreciated by the artists, in the end most of them will not profit from this at all. The only real benefactors are the music industry and a handful of superstars. The consumers on the other hand – and the society as a whole – would suffer from such a move.

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