China in Africa: neo-colonialism? - no comments

My friend Dan runs the blog, Hii Dunia (Kiswahili with Arabic roots meaning ‘this world’), which focusses on issues in International development, global politics and the environment.

In the second part of a series, we see the historic basis of China's relationship with the world, the conflict between their ideological and economic motives for support for African states, and finish with the following quote from Howard French:

"At one time many African countries, whether colonies locked in liberation struggles or fledgling, often non-aligned states viewed China as a progressive ally and counterweight to the west. But those days are gone, and increasingly, China’s involvement in Africa is pure big business."

Hii Dunia gratefully encourages anyone wishing to contribute to the site with original, relevant material.

Recommendations / Greasemonkey - 7 comments

I've posted a couple of times about our recommendations facility: your chance to give thumbs-up to your favourite posts from the B4L bloggers, allowing us to identify the most popular articles, and the bloggers who have published the most such pieces.

At the moment, all 'votes' are collected by clicking the "Recommend" link on our various recent posts pages. This is fine if the post is less than two days old, and you do all your reading through this one site.

Now we offer you the chance to recommend articles from within the very blog that published them. How - are we going to somehow 'add something of our own' to that site to make it possible? In a way, yes.



Firefox users (please use version 1.5 if you possibly can) may use the well-established Greasemonkey extension, which is available here, to achieve just that.

What is Greasemonkey? Well, it's a tool that lets you run custom 'scripts' in a secure environment on any browser page you load. You can download it here (it's tiny), or - if that doesn't work - by clicking on the most recent version here.

Once installed, restart Firefox.

Now, all you need do is visit our script's page.

It won't look like much, but if Greasemonkey is installed OK, at the top of the page will be a red monkey logo and, on the right, an "Install" button.

Click that button, it's perfectly safe. Once again, no personal information is transmitted in either direction.

Next time you load up a page in Firefox, check the bottom of the Tools menu. There'll be a menu at the end named "User Script Commands", containing two options. If there isn't, try reloading the page.

• Recommend page to Bloggers4Labour - select this to recommend the page you have open before you. It should, of course, be a page from a Labour-supporting blog that is 'on our books'. Any other page will give you a surprisingly patient and tolerant warning message. If the vote went through, we'll tell you, together with the current score for that page.
• View Bloggers4Labour recommendations - select this to visit our page with all the scores.

Hope that's clear, and you find the new facility useful and interesting.

Thanks to Andrew Brown for the inspiration.

Incidentally, if you're a developer and want to know how the system works, or need detailed assistance, I'm happy to assist, however, a small donation (say £5.00 or equivalent) - see PayPal link at foot of page - will greatly increase the likelihood that I am able to take time out to help.