Belfast Blogs.com

I stand corrected.I have been languishing under the delusion that blogs were a time-killing online goof, something that people slightly too intelligent for Bebo read and post in between checking their email compulsively and viewing hilarious clips on Youtube during the quiet times at work.For sure, there is the odd blog in America or someplace that breaks news about political scandals. Or there's the occasional one by some British chick talking about her sex life or living in France, who got to turn her blog into a book.But basically, apart from these rare and well-known exceptions, it seemed to me that blogs don't really make an enormous impact in the world. I can see their potential, the benefits of the medium and the format. But at this point in time, they're below the tipping point...

Lhasa is burning today. The town on the roof of the world, the inspiration for Shangri-La, the spiritual home of Tibetans is aflame.Tibetans are demanding their freedom, which was taken from them by a military invasion nearly fifty years ago by the Chinese communists.Tibet is NOT part of China. It NEVER WAS part of China historically. The Tibetans speak their own language, have their own venerable history, their own religion and their own rich culture. They aren't Chinese and never will be.So instead, China seeks to eradicate them. This is the world's quietest genocide, a murder of an entire culture by the slow process of murder, arrests, tortures but also mass immigration into their land from Han China, the Sinization of their towns like Lhasa.In an astonishing display of compromise, the...

Hot on the heels of the recent independent international panel report into 76 deaths in the 1970s, now we have Northern Ireland's Police Ombudsman report into collusion.Thank you, Nuala O'Loan for your brave and comprehensive report into the biggest scandal of the entire 'Troubles' period.It is now incontrovertible that the state's police and security services routinely colluded with Loyalist gunmen in order to bring about the murder of Catholic citizens of Northern Ireland.No doubt the Paisleyites will be suddenly silenced, as they always are when evidence of the wrongdoings committed against the Catholic community of the six counties are highlighted.But with the DUP's eternal ranting about murderers and terrorism, with the UUP's continuing demands for Nationalists to ally themselves to...

It's time to scrap the Gardai and start again. I was thinking this around the time that the Patton reforms in the North were announced years ago. If there is a police force on this island in desperate need of reform, it's the Gardai, not the PSNI.Now, that's not to suggest that all is well with the Nips. It's not. But they have moved on from the sectarian nature that the RUC once displayed and are continuing to move in the right direction, in a climate which still makes proper community policing extremely difficult.It's time, as Mairtin O'Muilleoir has pointed out, for Sinn Fein to endorse the PSNI, so that they can help to achieve the final reforms necessary to make the PSNI truly a police force for all in the North.But what about the keystone cops of the Republic? This week they finally...