MicroHawk's NewsScan

COLOMBIA: Microcredit Growing Steadily at 15 Percent a Year - IPS ipsnews.net

The more than 1.2 million microenterprises operating in Colombia are responsible for around 50 percent of all employment. And many of these small businesses owe their existence to the microfinance system, according to a report by Visión Económica, a local business research group.

via ipsnews.net

Want More Retweets? Always Tell People ‘What’s Happening?’ In 100 Characters (Or Less) - AllTwitter

In November 2009, Twitter went live with its controversial internal retweet functionality, which allowed uses to quickly share anything published to Twitter with one click of a button. However, this new mechanism didn’t allow any kind of annotation of tweets, which meant that users were unable to amend or add comments to retweets. This is still true today, and this has meant that Twitter’s internal retweet has not been as widely adopted as the company might have liked. Indeed, many influencers and Twitter veterans steadfastly refuse to ever use this kind of retweet.

It’s these people you need to be mindful of, as the old-hands of Twitter are often the people who get your tweets out there and in front of the desired eyeballs. But if people have to edit your tweet to make it short enough for them to add their thoughts – or even just to fit in the RT @username part – you will suffer one of two mishaps: either they’ll have to modify your tweet so much that all the good stuff is gone, or they simply will not bother.

via www.mediabistro.com

London Calling: “Our Great War Is a Spiritual War” | Politics | Religion Dispatches

Through the 1980s and ’90s, British sociologists tended to argue that soccer hooliganism was an attempt by traditional soccer fans—hyper-masculinized working class youth who had been edged out of attending matches by rising costs of a more commercialized, celebrity-fueled sport—to reclaim the sport and some measure of social dignity and authority. For such fans, though many soccer “yobs” count banning orders as badges of honor, the FSA was a particularly cruel blow that continues to offend.

And now, it seems, the offense has left the stadium environs and extended into the marketplace, where disenfranchised British youth are no more able to afford the Nikes and iPads and flat-screen TVs that are ceaselessly spun into their psyches as inaccessible markers of meaning and status, than they are tickets to a Premier League match.

via www.religiondispatches.org

8 Trillion on Our Military Addiction? Why the Price Tag of the National Security Complex Should Scare the Hell Out of You | | AlterNet

The killing of Osama Bin Laden did not put cuts in national security spending on the table, but the debt-ceiling debate finally did.  And mild as those projected cuts might have been, last week newly minted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was already digging in his heels and decrying the modest potential cost-cutting plans as a "doomsday mechanism” for the military. Pentagon allies on Capitol Hill were similarly raising the alarm as they moved forward with this year’s even larger military budget.

via www.alternet.org

Is Democracy as We Know It on Its Way Out? | | AlterNet

On both sides of the Atlantic -- from the fires that raged in large stretches of London, to the political chicanery that brought the U.S. economy to its knees in early August -- the institutional framework that came to define modern democracy in the 19th century is in deep trouble. 

via www.alternet.org

Technology Will Take on a Life of Its Own - By Ayesha and Parag Khanna | Foreign Policy

They may be octogenarians now, but pick up a copy of the Tofflers' most famous books -- Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) -- and you will quickly wonder why anyone bothers to write the redundant meta social and political commentaries that drown us today. These books, written when we were children, contain such stunning and prescient insights, encapsulated in elegant yet racing prose, that they ought to be essential reading four decades onward. Indeed, you couldn't be blamed for thinking they had just been published this year.

via www.foreignpolicy.com

Police and Thieves: Making Sense of the English Riots - Working In These Times

After witnessing several nights of turmoil, the people of the United Kingdom are still trying to comprehend what just happened. There's no simple explanation for this apparently leaderless and rudderless uprising in London and several other cities. But amid the grim ashes and street clashes, the message of rage has seared itself into the public consciousness, rekindling an age-old tinderbox of class warfare.

via www.inthesetimes.com

The Great Hiroshima Cover-up | The Nation

The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for twenty-five years, and the shocking US military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. While the suppression of nuclear truths stretched over decades, Hiroshima sank into “a kind of hole in human history,” as the writer Mary McCarthy observed. The United States engaged in a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race. Thousands of nuclear warheads remain in the world, often under loose control; the United States retains its “first-strike” nuclear policy; and much of the world is partly or largely dependent on nuclear power plants, which pose their own hazards.

Our nuclear entrapment continues to this day—you might call it “From Hiroshima to Fukushima.”

via www.thenation.com

The Hidden Casualty of the Debt Deal | The Nation

Most of the endless rehashing of the debt deal has correctly focused on the fact that corporate interests and Tea Party politics have prevailed again, at the expense of the middle class, children in poverty, students and the elderly. But in understanding the long-term impact of this drawn-out debate, too little attention has been paid to the blow it has dealt to the foundational principles of our democracy.

via www.thenation.com