The Foreign Service Journal, October 2007

O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 11 York City Mayor Michael Bloom- berg’s vow that diplomats would pay up like everyone else under the new congestion-pricing plan for the city he has worked out with the U.S. Depart- ment of Transportation has been undercut by the State Department. According to the Aug. 19 New York Post , fine print in the deal giving $354 million in federal transportation funds to support the city’s anti-traffic pro- gram grants the State Department authority to waive fees on “vehicles owned or operated by any foreign government or international organi- zation.” U.S. officials have been arguing in London courts that assessing such fees as the congestion charges levied by London in 2003 against foreign governments violates the Geneva Con- vention’s prohibition on collecting taxes from foreign governments. As of April, the U.S. topped the list of embassies refusing to pay the charge, with outstanding fines that totaled approximately $3 million. Second was the Nigerian Embassy, owing about $1.5 million, followed by the mission of Sudan and Japan. Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-conges- tion plan must still win legislative approval, and opponents have seized on the State Department clause. “It is galling that an Iranian diplomat could pay nothing while a senior citizen C Y B E R N O T E S Site of the Month: http://del.icio.us Del .icio.us , which describes itself as a “social bookmarking” site, allows users to tag, save, manage and share Web pages from a centralized source. As a way to store bookmarks (favorites) on the Web instead of on your home computer, so that you can access them from anywhere, it is an obvious boon for peripatetic FS folks. It is also — and this is the ‘”social” part — a way to share your bookmarks with others and sample their favorite finds, should you choose to do so. After registering for a free account, users can begin saving bookmarks and set their accounts to either public (anyone can view the collection of links) or private. Instead of organizing the links in folders, as on a computer, users tag their links. There’s no limit on the number of tags that can be given to a link. Users can also search for links on del.icio.us , either within their own collection or across the entire Web site. Because all of the links have been specifically added by a user (or users), it is a good way to discover smaller fun or useful Web sites that don’t appear on the first page of results from the larger search engines. Del .icio.us is also a handy way to back up bookmarks in the event of a computer meltdown, as the accounts are Web-based and can be accessed from any terminal with an Internet connection. For a user-friendly presentation of what the site is all about, see http:// del.icio.us/about/. For the story of its creation as a hobby by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and its purchase by Yahoo in 2005, see http:// del.icio.us/help/team . Yahoo has pledged to “provide the site with the resources, support and room it needs to continue growing the service and community.” — Anna Wong Gleysteen, Editorial Intern