Prabir Purkayastha analyses the toppling of the Mubarak government and its effect on Egypt and the rest of the Arab world.

Former Special Advisor to the United Nations Framework Conventions on Climate Change, Mukul Sanwal talks about the Cancun Summit on Climate Change.

Last year’s recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize escalated the war in Afghanistan a few weeks after receiving the prize. The award surprised even Obama. This year the Chinese government were foolish to make a martyr of the president of Chinese PEN and neo-con Liu Xiaobo. He should never have been arrested, but the Norwegian politicians who comprise the committee, led by Thorbjørn Jagland, a former Labour prime minister, wanted to teach China a lesson.

Head of the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee (OC) Suresh Kalmadi (56) attempted suicide by hanging in a toilet in the Games Village today. However, the ceiling collapsed, taking with it a part of the wall. The incident happened at 1.23 p.m.

The suicide attempt came to light when an unnamed Games official, who was answering the call of nature on the other side of the wall, unexpectedly found himself spraying the inside of a toilet rather than the outside.

Mr Kalmadi, it is reported, suffered minor injuries and was discharged after first aid.

“Poverty rates have reduced substantially in the world but the number of people in risk of falling into poverty has increased” announces the World Bank PovertyNet as world leaders gather in New York today to attend the UN summit on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The agenda for the summit has already been set. The latest UN review of the MDGs says:

Today, the new digital age is recreating a number of much older ideas. Producing software collaboratively and with various free software licenses is building a new digital commons. This is not all. We also have the Wikipedia, which at least in less politically contended areas, has produced a new encyclopaedia, again built collaboratively. Music, films and various other forms, earlier regarded distinct from software, are also in the process of discovering the new world where copyright rules only in the courts and cannot be maintained in the real one. It is this new age of knowledge, creativity and software commons that is confronting the old world of “intellectual property”.

Prof. Eben Moglen talks about how community based free software is changing the rules of global IT