Our friends at ODAC in South Africa have coined a delightful new “award” for institutional stubbornness and opacity. Bophirima District Municipality has today won the Rusty Padlock Award for being the most unresponsive, secretive, chronically non-compliant public institution in South Africa. ODAC also runs a rather less cynical Golden Key Award, which celebrates open and…
Bangkok, Thailand. September 7, 2008. Image: Shubert Ciencia (cc/by)
Our friends at IssueLab have a round-up of public interest research on US voting and elections that provides a refreshingly substantive break from the faux empiricism of daily tracking polls and instant pundit scorecards. IssueLab’s key findings: Racial disparities in the criminal justice system translate into higher rates of disenfranchisement in communities of color, resulting…
Norah Mallaney reports from the launch of the IREX Media Sustainability Index, which examines the working conditions for independent media worldwide. Today, the Center for International Media Assistance hosted an event to publicize the release of the International Resource and Exchanges Board’s (IREX) Media Sustainability Index (MSI). This report “provides in-depth analyses of the conditions…
Corruption in Afghanistan becomes an issue in the the US Presidential race, but solutions are hard to come by. In the September 26 presidential debate, both Obama and McCain acknowledged the potential security risk that Afghanistan holds for the United States. Obama repeatedly expressed his concern of the growing opium economy is Afghanistan. In a…
The second annual installment of the Ibrahim governance index, which aggregates third-party and original data to create a five point scorecard in every country in Sub-Saharan Africa. The summary lays out the Ibrahim Foundation’s focus: The essential political goods can be summarized and gathered under five categories: Safety and Security; Rule of Law, Transparency, and…