Week in Review

This week your Observer got abused for daring to publish a link to Hack Attack listing some pseudonymous presumed candidates for next month’s elections. You may have noticed that we also gussied up our image just a bit with a new banner at the top of the page, taking one of the LSE’s seemingly numerous animal mascots as our own.

We finally reached an end to the latest Letter Scandal on Thursday, with Education & Welfare officer Ruhana Ali (genuinely) and General Secretary Fadhil Bakeer-Markar (more grudgingly) apologizing and accepting that it was a mistake to include references to their positions in the Students Union in a letter endorsing Ken Livingstone for mayor.

LSE Director Howard Davies romped around Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, bloviating on all things financial and political on a blog provided by the Financial Times. The director even attempted to establish his mastery of new media by linking to Wikipedia.

Despite the possible shuttering of the London Student paper, Houghton Street is awash in new student publications for the new term. Not everybody is terribly pleased with the arrival of some of them, however, and we’ll see what the Students Union decides to do as other uni’s have banned one of the papers.

And, of course, we had the raucous UGM (you can find the full 100+MB video of the session from LooSE TV here) that finally showed what kind of pull the SU can muster, if only it decides to consider motions on terribly contentious and controversial issues like the Israeli/Palestinian crisis. The motion ultimately failed, but only just. I wonder what they’ll come up with for next week? Whatever it is, you can be sure that we’ll be covering it.

More Davies at Davos

Our fearless director has delved deeper into the new media world of blogs with a pair of posts for the FT from the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. Although sadly the director didn’t engage in any more frivolous external linking (apart from several internal links to FT stories related to his posts, he limited himself to official sites like un.org, number10.gov.uk and conservatives.com), he has been engaging in a classic blogging disorder: fostering conspiracy theories.

In this case, Davies was referring to the recent massive losses at Société Général, the French bank, and its relationship to the American Federal Reserves recent Corporal Jones-esque slash of interest rates at the beginning of this week. Indulging in his inner tin-foil-hatted conspiracy nut, Davies muses: “was the cut a response to the activities of a rogue trader, rather than to signs of a weakening global economy? If not, then was the cut a response to a misleading market move?”

This morning, meanwhile, Davies brings his attention back across the Channel to focus on British politicians at Davos. He gives good marks to the prime minister, describing him as the “alpha male” of the forum, who was seemingly “everyblankingwhere”. Conservative leader David Cameron, meanwhile, came across as “well informed and reasonable” in a discussion on the use of the internet as a tool for terrorism.

With the forum concluding this weekend, we may have to savour what few further posts Davies pens in the next two days. Something tells me that, despite his apparent enthusiasm for the form, he will not launch a director’s blog upon his return to the LSE next week.

<sarcasm>A pity, that</sarcasm>.

UGM Apartheid Motion Fails

While there is yet to be an official announcement from the Students Union itself, multiple sources have been reporting the defeat of the apartheid motion, so we can remove the heavily couched language of earlier posts and state it straightforwardly: the motion failed by a reported vote of 285 for the motion, 292 against the motion and 16 abstentions. It was quite a close call, with the vote differential being less than ten (and less than the number of abstentions), which goes to show how voter mobilization can play a crucial role in the outcome, and also reveals how the proponents of the motion failed to convince 16 potential supporters who were in attendance. This is definitely one of those instances that help remind you that each vote does indeed count, and perhaps some people who had strong opinions for the motion but did not vote will be regretting that decision. We’ll be interested to see what the fallout of this vote is, and next week’s UGM may be an interesting one to attend.