A new edition of the Index of Global Philanthropy is available online.

The Index of Global Philanthropy is the sole comprehensive guide to American private giving abroad. The Index documents contributions from foundations, corporations, charitable groups, universities, religious congregations, and individuals. The latest numbers show that American private giving amounts to three and a half times the totality of official U.S. foreign aid.

This 2007 Index, the second annual edition, is the first to include private giving from developed donor countries besides the U.S. It is the first to compare developed countries' total assistance--both private and government--to the developing world. Probing the efficiency of private versus government aid for the first time, the Index also highlights examples of private aid programs that have had a profound impact on the lives of poor people in the developing world.

The Failed States Index for 2007 ranks the states based on twelve indicators of insecurity. It is from Foreign Policy magazine and The Fund for Peace:

The complex phenomenon of state failure may be much discussed, but it remains little understood. The problems that plague failing states are generally all too similar: rampant corruption, predatory elites who have long monopolized power, an absence of the rule of law, and severe ethnic or religious divisions. But that does not mean that the responses to their problems should be cut from the same cloth....

ResourceShelf ? Resource of the Week: International Not-for-Profit Law Center Online Library

Resource of the Week: International Not-for-Profit Law Center Online Library
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
The International Center for Not-For-Profit Law (ICNL) is an international not-for-profit organization that promotes an enabling legal environment for civil society, freedom of association, and public participation around the world. ...

We discovered an amazing gem here -- ICNL's Online Library, "a searchable directory of legal documents, court cases, reports, and other civil society resources from countries around the world. ICNL's Online Library currently contains 2338 resources from 144 countries in 37 languages." Access is quite straightforward -- dropdown menus allow you to browse by country and/or language, and a text box is available for a simple keyword search. Directly below the search form is a brief list to the most recently added documents, with links. To give you some idea of what this database contains, we spotted the following new items during our visit Wednesday morning:
+ Canada - Ministry of Government Services: Consultation Paper - Modernization of the Legal Framework Governing Ontario Not-for-Profit Corporations (English)
+ Afghanistan - Decision of the Cabinet of Ministers on Foreign Funding (English)
+ Saudi Arabia - Draft Regulations of Associations and Civil Organizations (Arabic)
+ Regional: World - Checklist for CSO (Civil Society Organizations) Laws (English)
+ Slovakia - Structural and Systemic Issues Surrounding the Establishment and Management of Endowments in the Czech and Slovak Republics (English)

Documents are in PDF format. Brief, free registration is required to access the full text.

Features - Legal Protection of Cultural Property: A Selective Resource Guide | LLRX.com

The LLRX site has been redesigned. It is a great place to find guides to legal research in many topics -- the newest is this one on the Legal Protection of Cultural Property. The site is an excellent starting point for researching the law of a particular country or topic -- using the search box at the top.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The Fourth Assessment Report is coming out -- Reports of some of the Working Groups and a Summary for Policy Makers are available on the website. Prof. Adil Najam is listed as lead author of the chapter on Sustainable Development and Mitigation.

beSpacific: Global Incident Map Displays Terrorist Acts, Suspicious Activity, General Terrorism News

GlobalIncidentMap.com: "This free public service website was created to give the public, law enforcement, military, and government individuals a new way to visualize, and become instantly aware of terrorism and security incidents across the world...While this website employs much automation, the news gathering itself is not automated - news items are located, reviewed, and manually entered into the database...Immediately below the map there is a scrolling list of the most recently added incidents - click an item of interest to get to the full incident description and links to related news items, as well as a more precise satellite/map image...This page automatically reloads every 420 seconds." Users may search by type of incident, country, date/time and city.

NPR on the Media interview with Morgan Clements, founder and publisher of the Global Incident Map