A Bit More Detail

• Malta, it seems from this New Statesman take, is facing serious problems of corruption through its role in international finance.
  
• The establishment of a new maritime border between Australia and East Timor threatens Australia's borders with adjacent Indonesia. ABC reports.


• Ireland has established a scholarship program for Choctaw students as a sign of thanks for Choctaw aid during the Irish Potato Famine. The Irish Post reports.


• This Slugger O'Toole article suggests that the disparity in living standards and income between the Republic and Northern Ireland is not nearly so vast as GDP would suggest.


• The Map Room Blog shared this Ordinance Survey's April Fool's Day joke, of a fake but realistic island.

FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation may be turning a blind eye to the illegal movement of players into Asia.

Timor-Leste, also known as East Timor has been improving steadily in recent years, and just recently moved ahead of Indonesia, the country it broke away from at the turn of the century, in the FIFA rankings.

[. . .]

A large part of Timor's improvement has been done through the recruitment of Brazilians with no discernable links to this poorest nation in Asia. And neither FIFA, the AFC or the local FA will say how they qualify.

According to FIFA regulations, a player born in one country can play for another country if they have lived there for five years as an adult, and get citizenship. But none of Timor's Brazilian contingent appear not to have lived or played in the half-island nation as adults—if at all.

[. . .]

They would also qualify to play for the Asian side if they had parents or grandparents from there. However, despite a Portuguese colonial legacy in Timor-Leste, there is no strong history of immigration between the two countries.

"Until 2000, I would say there was no migration, and since then it has been limited, mostly via marriage," says Damien Kingsbury, a Melbourne professor who specialises in politics and security in Southeast Asia, particularly Timor-Leste.

Portuguese bonds are a pretty good investment. The 10-year bond is yielding 6.7% — that’s 2.7 times the yield on German bonds. Unless Portugal repudiates past-due interest payments (and in postwar debt restructurings, only Argentina has done that) bondholders would come out ahead as long as the haircut on debt principal is less than 25%. (To be fair, the math is a bit more complicated, because it depends on when Portugal defaults, but that serves to make the bonds more attractive.) In other words, the East Timorese deal is far from charity.

[. . . The purchase has the obvious additional benefit of buying some Portuguese goodwill, which ain’t nothing, considering that Portuguese aid averaged €42.6 million per year between 1999 and 2009. Moreover, Portugal has been cutting foreign aid significantly, so buying goodwill could have a big return. Considering that East Timor will earn €34.4 million per year on its investment, that is a pretty cheap way to buy goodwill.

From Portugal’s point-of-view, however, there is no charity. First, the loan is a drop in the bucket compared to the country’s total debt of €145 billion. Second, the loan is being made at commercial rates, and will involve buying existing sovereign debt, not the provision of new money. Third, it might not all involve Portuguese sovereign debt: the Timorese authorities have added the following weasel words: “Investments could be made in highly successful public or quasi-governmental enterprises that guarantee high returns.” Considering that $700 million is a legal maximum for East Timor, which has to invest 90% of its assets in U.S. Treasury bonds, the implication is that the Portuguese government will get less than that.

In other words, Portugal will get a small amount of help from a source with every incentive to lend it money regardless of political connections.

• First came Marcela Valente's "Blogs – a Shortcut to Fame?", an article examining how some Argentine writers have been gaining national and international fame thanks to their blogging, winning awards and spinoffs and the like. The writers interviewed don't expect blogs to displace more conventional forms of literature, but rather to supplement and enrichen the media universe.
  
• Servaas van den Bosch's "China in Africa – South-South Exploitation?" wonders, after observing the situation in Namibia, whether the ongoing influx of Chinese investment in Africa is actually helping the continent as a whole, with the frequent use of imported Chinese workers, the very low wages paid to African workers, and the undermining of local industry with cheap Chinese imports, additionally gaining a back door into European markets through the various Europe-ACP trade agreements.


• Finally, Mario de Queiroz interviews East Timorese president José Ramos-Horta on the subject of East Timor. Ramos-Horta hopes that oil exploitation and good agriculture will help East Timor grow out of its structural poverty, the products of more than four centuries of Portuguese colonialism on top of the devastating Indonesian occupation and continuing political instability.

With the Beijing Games fast approaching, Olympic Committees around the world have been getting busier.

Athletes from Portuguese-speaking or Lusophone countries Angola, Portugal, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe, East Timor and Mozambique will be in Macau training for the Beijing Games, which starts on August 8.

On Saturday, the Portuguese-speaking countries Games Organising Committee (ACOLOP) met for its 12th general assembly, where the forthcoming Lisbon Games were one of the main topics of focus.

“It really empowers us to know that, through sports, we are contributing to bring together brothers and sisters from different continents and sharing a common language”, said Manuel Silvério, president of the Executive Committee, adding that this was “one of the prime objectives of our association: to promote cultures, our language and our friendship”.

The games which will be held next year, was one of the main issues discussed over the weekend, as it is an issue which is considered “important” and a priority for the Portuguese Olympic Committee (COP).

“We want the second Lusophone Games Lisbon 2009 to be the best multisport event Portugal has ever held”, said Vicente Moura, President of COP.

The Lisboa 2009 Games will be held between July 11 and 19 next year, and officials have announced the event will comprise 10 sports, mainly: Football, Futsal, Athletics, Basketball, Beach Volleyball, Table Tennis, Judo, Taekwondo, Volleyball, and one demonstration sport, Paralympic Athletics.

However, these are still yet to be confirmed, once members' opinions are gathered.

Also at the meeting, members chose the Games' mascot, “Xama”, which means “flame” in Portuguese, and is a “funny orange and yellowish character,” a statement by the committee released yesterday said.

With the second edition of the Lusophone Games about to roll in, the third edition is already being discussed and the General Assembly has already marked the official start for welcoming bids to organise the 2013 Games.

In addition, with Brazil wanting to host the 2016 Olympic Games, members of the general assembly showed their support and encouragement towards the Brazilian nation.

HAD he been president of Indonesia, not France, Charles de Gaulle might have modified his famous saying about cheeses and asked how to govern a nation with over 700 different languages. The answer, as elsewhere in South-East Asia, was to impose a “national” tongue.

As the region’s countries became independent, most wanted their citizenry to speak the same indigenous language. But choosing an acceptable candidate sometimes proved difficult, laying the ground for “language wars” that still rage.

A new collection of essays ["Language, Nation and Development in South-East Asia", edited by Lee Hock Guan and Leo Suryadinata]* from the Singapore-based Institute of South-East Asian Studies (ISEAS) reviews the region’s struggles to build monolingual nations. Several themes emerge: first, globalisation is forcing governments to reconsider restrictions on daily use of English; second, with the economic rise of China, governments increasingly see their ethnic-Chinese populations as assets rather than threats; and third, democratisation and decentralisation may revive local and tribal languages. Each of these trends may undermine the quest for a unifying national language.