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Basic Cell Phone Acronyms You Need to Know : Ben Patterson : Yahoo! Tech

2007-05-24T06:22:00.000-07:00

Confused by the alphabet soup of cell phone acronyms? I don't blame you. Here's a cheat sheet that'll help you navigate the waters while your shopping for your next phone—or trying to get the most out of the handset you've got.

Most of the confusion arises when it comes to the various types of cell phone networks. For example, when I ask my aunts and uncles which networks their phones work on, they'll usually tell me their carrier instead of whether they're using GSM or CDMA—and frankly, before I started writing about cell phones for a living, I didn't know the difference, either. So first, let's start with a quick overview of the two main standard for cell networks:

Confused by the alphabet soup of cell phone acronyms? I don't blame you. Here's a cheat sheet that'll help you navigate the waters while your shopping for your next phone—or trying to get the most out of the handset you've got.

Most of the confusion arises when it comes to the various types of cell phone networks. For example, when I ask my aunts and uncles which networks their phones work on, they'll usually tell me their carrier instead of whether they're using GSM or CDMA—and frankly, before I started writing about cell phones for a living, I didn't know the difference, either. So first, let's start with a quick overview of the two main standard for cell networks:

GSM: Short for Global System for Mobile Communications, GSM is the most widespread standard for cell phones networks in the world. If you're a jetsetter who likes keeping in touch during your far-flung travels, you should go with a GSM-enabled phone, and here in the U.S., AT&T and T-Mobile are both GSM carriers. Besides the technical differences between CDMA and GSM networks (I'll spare you the details), the main distinction of a GSM phone is that it comes with a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card—a little plastic chip that, as its name implies, identifies your phone on the GSM network. If you take the SIM card out of your GSM phone and put it into another GSM handset, you'll be able to place and receive calls on the second phone using your own cell phone number. GSM phones are also capable of handling six-way conference calls.
CDMA: Short for Code Division Multiple Access, CDMA networks are much more prevalent in the U.S. than they are abroad, and while CDMA boasts many of the same features as GSM networks (including caller ID, call waiting, and text messaging), there are some key differences—namely, CDMA phones don't use SIM cards. Instead, your phone's identity and number are programmed into the handset by your carrier, and you can't easily switch numbers on CDMA phones as you can with SIM-equipped GSM phones. Also, CDMA phones can only handle three-way conference calls, versus six-way calls on GSM networks. Major CDMA carriers in the U.S. include Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and regional operator Alltel.

OK, so you've got your two main flavors of networks, but now I'm going to stir another variable into the mix: 3G. Here's the deal: GSM and CDMA are both considered second-generation, or 2G, networks (the first generation being AMPS, an analog network used mainly back in the 1980s). Unlike the old voice-only AMPS networks, digital GSM and CDMA networks can handle both voice and data calls, which means you can send text messages, surf the Web and get caller ID info. But data flows slowly over GSM and CDMA—think dial-up, only slower. Streaming video and music? Forget it.

That's where 3G, or third-generation networks, come in. These so-called 3G systems allow data to flow at speeds you'd expect from a home DSL modem or better—and at those speeds, you get features like streaming video and full-track music downloads. The main types of 3G networks include:

EV-DO: An add-on for CDMA networks, EV-DO (or Evolution-Data Optimized) delivers data speeds between 144Kbps to 2Mbps to CDMA cell phones, perfect for streaming video and music. Sprint offers EV-DO access through its Power Vision phones (which are typically a little pricier than standard models); on Verizon Wireless, look for the "V Cast" label.
UMTS and HSDPA: Both UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) and HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) are upgrades to GSM networks, and like EV-DO, they provide DSL and cable-like data speed. The only difference between UMTS and HSDPA (besides the technical nitty-gritty, of course) is that HSDPA is even faster than UMTS; for that reason, HSDPA networks are often called 3.5G rather than just 3G. In the U.S., only AT&T offers UMTS and HSDPA networks. (T-Mobile is busy working on its own HSDPA network, which should begin going online by the end of the year.)

Somewhere between 3G and 2G lies, naturally enough, 2.5G networks, which give you data speeds that are slightly faster than dial-up—no good for streaming video, but fine for messaging or mobile Web browsing. These networks include:

1xRTT: A variant of the CDMA standard, 1xRTT (or "1 times Radio Transmission Technology") gives you data speeds between 30Kbps and 90Kbps, a bit better than your typical 56Kbps dial-up modem. Most of the non-3G phones on Sprint and Verizon have 1xRTT capabilities.
GPRS and EDGE: The 2.5G flavors of GSM networks, GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) also give you data in the 30Kbps to 90Kbps range, with EDGE running slightly faster than GPRS. Again, most of the non-3G phones on AT&T offer either GPRS or EDGE, while T-Mobile—which has yet to launch a 3G network—only does GPRS and EDGE.

Whew! That's a lot of terminology, I know—and believe it or not, I've barely scratched the surface. I'll tackle more wireless acronyms in future posts; in the meantime, if you're curious about the technical details of the various cell networks, I'd suggest combing through Wikipedia, or check out Phonescoop's exhaustive glossary.

Basic Cell Phone Acronyms You Need to Know : Ben Patterson : Yahoo! Tech

Iran’s Centrifuges - New York Times

2007-05-22T19:58:00.000-07:00

For a U.N.-baiting, diplomacy-bashing crowd, the Bush administration has shown unexpected patience in trying to persuade the Security Council to punish Iran for its nuclear misbehavior. And for a foot-dragging, conflict-averse crowd, the Security Council has moved with alacrity in imposing two sets of sanctions on Iran just since December.

Unfortunately, Iran is still playing to type.

Iran’s Centrifuges
For a U.N.-baiting, diplomacy-bashing crowd, the Bush administration has shown unexpected patience in trying to persuade the Security Council to punish Iran for its nuclear misbehavior. And for a foot-dragging, conflict-averse crowd, the Security Council has moved with alacrity in imposing two sets of sanctions on Iran just since December.

Unfortunately, Iran is still playing to type.

Nine months after the Council ordered Tehran to suspend enriching uranium, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency say Iran’s scientists are close to mastering the process that would allow them to produce fuel for a nuclear weapon.

Some diplomats have begun arguing that now that the “point of no return” has passed, the Security Council should drop its insistence that Iran halt all enrichment — and the sanctions attached to that demand — and focus on trying to contain the size of the enrichment program and ensuring that inspectors can monitor the effort. That may well be where this will all end up. But it is far too soon to make that sort of concession, especially since Iran has a proven record of pocketing concessions and pushing its program ahead.

Given the urgency and ambition of Iran’s nuclear program, what is needed is a more urgent and ambitious international response. Let us be clear, this is not a call for more White House saber rattling and certainly not for military planning. There is no military solution. But unless Iran’s leaders are offered far more attractive rewards — yes, we’re talking about a grand bargain — and threatened with far more painful punishments — yes, that could mean another spike in world oil prices — there is no chance of changing their behavior.

That means that President Bush is going to have to put a lot more on the table, including a clear offer of full diplomatic relations and security guarantees should Iran agree to verifiably contain its nuclear ambitions. And it also means that the Europeans, Russians and Chinese are going to have to take a lot more off the table, cutting back diplomatic and trade relations if Tehran continues to push its nuclear program ahead.

It is hard to decide which is making Tehran more cocky these days: its scientists’ technical successes or America’s disastrous failure in Iraq. But its recent talk of rationing gasoline — now delayed — shows a clear and present vulnerability.

Until now, both Mr. Bush and his diplomatic partners have managed to sidestep any really tough choices when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program. The lesson of the new I.A.E.A. report is that the time for sidestepping has run out. What is needed is a frank and public discussion about the cost of Iran getting a nuclear weapon and what the world is willing to give and take away to try to prevent that.

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2007-05-21T22:27:00.000-07:00

Blogger Help : How can I create expandable post summaries?

Striking a new realism - International Herald Tribune

2007-05-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON:
Neither the Democratic takeover of Congress nor the beginning of the presidential campaign has yet started a meaningful foreign policy debate in the United States. In fact, setting aside Iraq, neither presidential candidates, Congress, nor the media have shown much interest in a serious conversation about the direction of U.S. foreign policy. And a majority of legislators and opinion leaders act as if Iraq were an isolated mistake resulting from the peculiar incompetence of the Bush administration rather than a logical consequence of the country's flawed post-Cold War foreign policy approach.
The problem is not new. When the United States became the only superpower, quite a few in the foreign policy elite could not withstand the temptation of triumphalism and a sense of unlimited possibilities. Near unanimity emerged between liberal interventionist Democrats and neoconservative Republicans, who together were able to dominate discourse on world affairs.
The American media's propensity to cover international relations through the prism of domestic politics helped to create the false sense of "Washington consensus." Those who have roles in previous administrations, connections to the current one, or a good chance to join the next one, enjoy the best access to op-ed pages and television.
The trouble is that while many of these people have impeccable academic credentials, few are analysts first and foremost. Many are members of a government-in-exile aspiring to return to power or work in businesses that depend on political connections. Such individuals naturally and understandably tend to be very careful to avoid defying the conventional wisdom; they are especially careful to avoid saying anything that could make them vulnerable to criticism.
Thus, in 2007, America has not yet had a serious debate about its role in the world in the 21st century. This is quite a contrast to the vigorous discussion of America's global mission at the end of World War II, which included lively exchanges on confronting the Soviet challenge, rebuilding Europe, moving Japan away from militarism, and creating a new structure of international organizations and regional alliances.
Today, beyond acknowledging that the United States is the only superpower with a unique mission and responsibilities, there is little assessment of the profound difference between America trying to play a global hegemon pressing mankind to take the direction it wants and, conversely, acting as a leader who genuinely strives to develop consensus positions reflecting not only its priorities, but also the interests and preferences of others.
While the choice is clearly not black and white, there is a choice. But do not expect to see much outside foreign policy journals.
Considerable evidence, for example, suggests that more even-handed U.S. management of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is essential to marginalize Islamic extremists. Yet presidential candidates are reluctant to offend Israel's supporters, and most members of Congress - from both parties - are running away from this explosive issue.
The conversation on Iran also has not gone beyond clichés like "no option should be off the table" and "dialogue might be a good idea." Most politicians, with the notable exceptions of Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, fail even to acknowledge that the U.S. policy of regime change gives Tehran less incentive to accommodate American preferences.
There is also little public dialogue on the rise of China. On this the Bush administration is more pragmatic than many Democrats in Congress, who engage in populist, protectionist posturing. But no American leader is asking how the U.S. insistence on overwhelming military predominance - as important as it is - will affect China's views of its security requirements.
Finally, while there is bipartisan frustration with Russia's undemocratic trends at home and growing assertiveness abroad, most see a need to obtain its cooperation on matters like nuclear nonproliferation, counterterrorism, and support of Western positions in the UN Security Council. But many in the American political class still find it offensive to suggest that Washington may occasionally have to accommodate the Kremlin to secure this help.
For almost 20 years, it has been fashionable in the United States to assume that America could guide the world toward market democracy, that this would advance U.S. interests and the wishes of mankind alike, and that it would be cheap. A whole generation of politicians, opinion-makers and specialists has been brought up to believe that foreign policy realism is unnecessary and even immoral.
But this self-serving naïveté increasingly clashes with the pragmatic requirements of protecting U.S. security and enhancing American influence. Behind the facade of artificial consensus, more and more people in both parties are raising questions about the direction of U.S. foreign policy. The question is whether their voices will become sufficiently loud and powerful before a new international crisis strikes.
Dimitri K. Simes, the president of The Nixon Center, is publisher of The National Interest. This article was adapted from an essay that appeared in that publication.
Striking a new realism - International Herald Tribune

The Jakarta Post - 'E Pluribus Ika', or the power of diversity in Indonesian society

2007-05-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

'E Pluribus Ika', or the power of diversity in Indonesian society

Robert Pringle, Alexandria, Virginia

Many Americans coming to Indonesia, whether for business or pleasure, are nervous about Islam. On the one hand they hear that Indonesia's tropicalized Islam is warm and friendly, not like the harsh desert variety. On the other hand they read about bombings and communal violence in places like Poso, wherever that might be.

The situation is complicated by the fact that most of us lack even stereotypical understanding of Indonesia, of the kind that we have for India and China, for example. Indonesia was never mentioned in our high school world history courses and we are not sure where it begins or end on the map. Do there really have to be so many islands?

A sampling of easily available punditry doesn't help much. We learn that Indonesia is still largely poor and uneducated, that it has been prone to dictatorship and Years of Living Dangerously, tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes and too many plane crashes, and that its capital goes completely under water periodically. No wonder all those "tribes" and religions don't get along.

The better informed among us may know that Indonesia's new, blissfully unguided democracy has been doing quite well, and that the current president and his running mate seem to be quite a capable pair, rather more so than the leadership we are experiencing at home.

But we are in a "Yes, But" frame of mind. Tell us that country X is doing well, and we are likely to reply "Yes, But what have they done for us lately?" and then produce a new list of worries: Corruption, unreformed judiciary, environmental disasters, and so on.

And so, regarding Islam in Indonesia, we are not satisfied that the fever chart of regional conflict has trended downwards since it peaked about five years ago, not least due to the major achievement of peace in Aceh. The same goes for the consistent inability of the Islamist parties -- those who would try to replace Indonesia's multicultural model with an Islamic State -- to win more than a small minority in every national election since 1955. (We have no idea of exactly what an Islamic State might be, partly because its advocates don't agree on that issue, but we assume it would mean oppression of women, cutting off thieves' hands, and worse.)

We dismiss the election results with the "Yes, but" notion that since the Islamist parties (with the Prosperous Justice Party or PKS in the lead) can't win openly on Islamist platforms, they must be plotting behind the scenes to "Arabize" Indonesia without daring to say so out loud. Locally they are already at work, taking advantage of Indonesia's decentralized democracy to enact sharia-inspired regulations in somewhere between five to ten percent of all cities and districts.

Fear of creeping "Arabization" tinged with paranoia is shared by quite a few foreigners who know the country relatively well, and also by some Indonesians. It reminds me of the way we Americans used to feel about the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) before it was eliminated in 1966 (granted that given its mass base on Java, the PKI probably had a more numerous following than the Islamists do today). Many foreigners fear that outward signs of religious observance -- the growing use of headscarves, the proliferation of prayer rooms in public places, and so on -- are signs of Wahabi-style fundamentalism, the intellectual underpinning of terrorism.

Think of Indonesian society as a huge tapestry, with many colors and patterns but also with quite a few loose threads. You can grab any one of them and pull, and you may not be sure exactly how much of the thread will break off in your hands, but you know that the entire fabric is not going to unravel.

It is a curious fact that Americans, of all people, have a hard time understanding Indonesian diversity despite our own relevant national experience. Obviously our diversities differ somewhat. Except for newly arrived immigrants, ours is a fairly well liquefied melting pot, whereas Indonesia's is still more gado-gado in consistency. Our national mottos, Bhinekka Tunggal Ika and E Pluribus Unum, mean the same thing.

I am told by John MacDougall, an American anthropologist currently working on a study of Darul Islam, that Bhinekka Tunggal Ika comes from am ancient Indian epic that assumes an inherent tension between "unity" and "diversity."

Indonesians I interviewed emphasize that when Islam arrived, it encountered many highly varied cultures. Numerous blendings of local and imported religious practice were the result. Now people everywhere like to think that their variant "is Islam," I was told.

But they also know that in other regions, people have their own ideas about how Islam should be practiced beyond the five basic pillars of the faith. And they realize, having grown up in gado-gado land, that they cannot impose their religious beliefs on others. More importantly, the vast majority doesn't want to.

Pick any province in Indonesia and you can find rich examples of deeply- rooted diversity, now in full flower under a truly democratic national regime. One of my favorites is West Sumatra, home of one of the few matrilineal Muslim societies in the world. As elsewhere, Islam settled here on a vibrant structure of Hindu and animist tradition.

West Sumatra has produced a astonishingly varied stream of national leaders over the years -- middle-of-the road first Vice President Mohammed Hatta, Islamist politician and prime minister Mohammed Natsir, Communist leader Tan Malaka, and many more. In addition to fostering local pride, this experience has accustomed the Minang people to acute intellectual diversity.

Visit the Padang museum and you will see, among other things, a guide to the gorgeous customary houses with their horned roofs, stylistically similar to bronze-age forms found elsewhere in Indonesia. You will also see a reverent display of the ancient and equally stunning pagoda-style mosques reflecting Hindu heritage.

When I visited Padang in February the city was just recovering from a comical episode which ensued when members of the city legislature tried to ban women from the streets during hours of darkness. The idea was quickly abandoned because Minang women, none of them shrinking violets, run all the markets and need to be at work before dawn.

While West Sumatra's diversity is particularly striking it illustrates themes common to the whole country: The long contest between traditional and modern Islam which, just like a shadow play, no one ever definitively wins; the interplay between ancient and less ancient cultural waves, and strong local identity combined with a sense of nationhood which, however imperfectly, embraces both Bhineka Tunggal Ika.

At the moment decentralized democracy, still very much a work in progress, is encouraging fledgling politicians to stretch their wings and play ethnic politics, sometimes with dangerous as well as amusing results. (We are quite familiar with this syndrome in the U.S.) In the long run, and no doubt after much more tinkering, democracy will give Indonesia's diversity the political breathing space it must have to survive.

The better that foreigners understand the depth and tenacity of Indonesia's diversity, the less they will be inclined to fear that the country is likely to succumb to ideological or religious regimentation.

The writer is a retired diplomat and historian, currently writing a short book on Islam in Indonesia sponsored by the United States -- Indonesia Society. He can be reached at rpringle9@comcast.net.

The Jakarta Post - 'E Pluribus Ika', or the power of diversity in Indonesian society

Venezuelan bluster? | Economist.com

2007-05-09T06:52:00.000-07:00

May 8th 2007
From The Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire

Hugo Chávez threatens to seize banks and a steel-maker

It should come as no surprise that Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, is again threatening private companies with takeover by the state. Emboldened by his landslide December 2006 re-election, he has moved to put additional sectors of the economy under state control. This is line with his goal of implementing his vision of socialism by increasing state authority over key parts of the economy. It is also designed to enhance his own already formidable power.

Just one month after his re-election, Mr Chávez shocked the market by declaring the energy and telecommunications sectors to be “strategic” and therefore subject to nationalisation. Within weeks of the announcement, the government had acquired controlling stakes in both CANTV (Venezuela's largest telecoms company, privatised in the early 1990s) and Electricidad de Caracas (EDC, a private electricity company), buying out US companies in both cases.

Most recently, in early May, he fulfilled a promise to a seize majority equity share and operational control of four heavy-oil joint ventures in the Orinoco oil basin. These were previously controlled by six foreign companies: US-based ConocoPhillips, Chevron and Exxon Mobil, along with the UK’s BP, Norway’s Statoil and France’s Total.

Threats to banks

Facing no significant opposition—indeed opposition political parties remain weak and Mr Chávez’s approval ratings are high—he has now laid his eyes on a foreign-controlled steel maker, Siderúrgica del Orinoco (Sidor), and the banking industry. In the case of Sidor, Mr Chávez has ordered the company to cease exports until it has met the needs of the domestic market, and has threatened to nationalise the company if it resists. Sidor is controlled by the Argentina-based Techint Group.

Mr Chávez has long tried to strong-arm financial institutions in the country, dictating, for example, that a share of their loan portfolios should go to priority sectors such as agriculture, small business and tourism. Now he wants banks to agree to lend to domestic industries at low interest rates. He has warned them that he could take them over, too, if they don’t comply.

It may be difficult for banks to protest or resist, especially since they have registered strong profit growth—up 33% in 2006—thanks to booming domestic credit demand amid fast-paced economic expansion (averaging more than 12% in the last three years). Even short of nationalisation, the government is said to be contemplating other reforms to the sector, which might include a cap on bank profits (with the excess going to social development projects), and further direct control over the setting of interest rates and the allocation of credit.

Free hand

Should the president decide to take such steps against Sidor or the banks, this would be facilitated by special decree powers that the National Assembly granted him in January. For a period of 18 months thereafter, Mr Chávez is empowered to issue decrees in 11 key areas without having to seek legislative approval. In any case, there is little risk that he would not get lawmakers’ authorisation, as the National Assembly is completely controlled by Chávez loyalists (the opposition boycotted the last legislative elections, leaving it with no presence in the body). The decree powers, therefore, serve only to give Mr Chávez the ability to move quicker.

Nationalisation of Sidor or the banks is not likely to be imminent, however. For one, Sidor is controlled by an Argentinian company, and Mr Chávez retains good relations with Argentina’s president, Néstor Kirchner. Moreover, the government already has much to absorb with the takeover of the phone and electricity companies, as well as operational control of the Orinoco oil ventures. It must reimburse the foreign companies for their seized assets as well as take over their debt obligations. The cost of this could be as much as US$10bn for the oil companies alone, according to some estimates.

Money to burn?

With a windfall in oil export income in recent years—oil brought in nearly US$59bn in 2006—and bulging foreign reserves, the Chávez administration has funds to spare. However, when combined with its other spending obligations, especially costly social programmes and subsidies, this will put further pressure on an already widening budget deficit. The deficit was equivalent to 1.8% of GDP in 2006, and the Economist Intelligence Unit projects it will grow to 4.9% of GDP this year. (The true fiscal picture is worse, because some spending is channelled off-budget via the state-owned oil company and the national development fund.) GDP growth itself is slowing—to 5.8% this year and 3.2% in 2008, according to our forecasts.

The radicalisation of policy under Mr Chávez, combined with signs of growing strains on the economy—evidenced not only in the deterioration of public finances and slowing growth but also persistent double-digit inflation, the highest rate in Latin America—are generating more fears among investors. The Caracas stock exchange index has been declining in recent days. Private direct investment has also declining for several years, and this trend is apt to be exacerbated since January. Foreign direct investment was negative last year. The reduction in investment will further lower GDP growth over the medium term.

In addition, the premium paid for the dollar on the black market has been climbing, with the bolívar weakening to around Bs3,950:US$1 (compared with a fixed official rate of Bs2,150:US$1), near to the low point in January of around Bs4,000:US$1. This will increase pressure on the government to devalue the official rate, although it will be reluctant to do so, given an annual inflation rate nearing 20%.

Political risks rise

Despite these negative trends, there are few obstacles to the government’s current policy mix—given its complete control of the legislature and significant influence over weak and politicised institutions. However, the government determination to radicalise its economic programme has the potential to destabilise the political environment, by provoking renewed objections from the opposition political class and also some discontent among more moderate or pragmatic members of the broad pro-Chávez coalition. With no presence in the legislature and little confidence in the impartiality of institutions, the opposition will express its discontent with the direction of economic policy via public demonstrations, keeping the risk of unrest high.

A deteriorating security environment will heighten tensions further, while a lack of checks and balances will raise the risk of heightened corruption and mismanagement, particularly in the context of the current huge expansion in public investment programmes. These risks do not present a challenge to Mr Chávez as yet, but could do so in the medium term. In particular, failure to deliver on issues such as crime, corruption, housing and inflation will eventually erode support for the government.

Venezuelan bluster? | Economist.com

France Under New Leadership - New York Times

2007-05-08T09:19:00.000-07:00

he French (like many Americans) have grown increasingly tired of their cranky and ineffective president, Jacques Chirac. With Nicolas Sarkozy they’ve certainly gotten a very different sort of leader. A graduate of a non-elite university, and the son of a Hungarian immigrant, he won this week’s election promising sweeping change to voters impatient with their country’s long economic and diplomatic decline. But to succeed, Mr. Sarkozy will need to keep his own impatience, and his destructive penchant for divisive rhetoric, under firm control.

Mr. Sarkozy hopes to strengthen ties with Washington while pursuing a more active role in Europe. A France that is neither reflexively anti-American nor in automatic lock step with Washington would be good for both sides of the Atlantic. To start, more active Franco-American military cooperation in Afghanistan and diplomatic coordination on Sudan could make a big difference.

Then there is the vexed issue of agricultural protection, and the vexing clout of French farmers. Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Bush are both avowed free-traders. A joint push to lower agricultural barriers could revive international trade talks and give African countries, including those with close ties to Paris, a fairer chance at development.

For most voters, the compelling issues were domestic, especially the challenge of invigorating an economy weighed down by decades of slow growth, high unemployment and suburban decay. Mr. Sarkozy’s call for tax cuts, smaller government, longer working hours and tougher labor policies won out over his Socialist rival’s contention that she could administer the needed economic jolts while preserving the security and comfort of the social status quo.

Mr. Sarkozy’s ability to carry out those changes will depend on how well his right-wing allies fare in next month’s parliamentary election and his ability to rally a wider political coalition for what will be painful and dislocating changes. Mr. Sarkozy will especially have to overcome the distrust of young urban immigrants, whom he has demeaned with insulting stereotypes and frightened with simplistic law-and-order prescriptions.

If Mr. Sarkozy means what he now says about being “president of all the French,” he needs to recognize that there are many equally legitimate ways of being French. And that the problems of poverty and unemployment require much broader solutions than simple law and order.

France Under New Leadership - New York Times

Tackling climate change | A bargain | Economist.com

2007-05-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

What it would cost to tackle climate change—about 0.1% of world GDP, a year

AFP

Get article background

THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up under the auspices of the United Nations to establish a consensus on global warming and what to do about it, has now completed its fourth assessment report. The first two parts, published earlier this year, about the science and the impacts of climate change, were designed to spread gloom. Change was happening, they said; it was mankind’s fault; and it was going to be damaging. The third part, released on Friday May 4th in Bangkok, is about mitigating climate change, and is designed to spread hope. Just as mankind caused the problem, it says, so mankind can stop it—and at a reasonable cost.

In some areas of economic activity, emissions could be cut with no cost to consumers or taxpayers. The heating and lighting systems of many buildings, for instance, are startlingly inefficient. Improving this would cut both emissions and bills. Economists are troubled by this, for it implies that people and businesses are not maximising their economic self-interest; yet the low take-up of energy-efficient lightbulbs suggests this is indeed the case. Governments are therefore beginning to tighten regulations on the energy efficiency of buildings, and to talk about, for instance, banning incandescent lightbulbs. The IPCC reckons that such measures could cut 30% of projected emissions from this sector at no extra cost.

Transport is trickier, because car ownership is rocketing and the demand for fuel is fairly inelastic. If people want to drive they are going to drive, unless governments jack up petrol prices to levels that are politically unacceptable. So for emissions to fall in the transport sector, new technologies, such as more efficient biofuels or electric cars, are needed. Given a big R&D effort in this sector, there is a good chance that those will be forthcoming.

Similarly, in power generation, there is scope for cutting emissions. The cost of renewable energy, such as wind and solar, has been falling. Nuclear generating technology has improved. Carbon capture and storage, which involves taking the carbon dioxide (or C02) out of power station flue gases and injecting it back into the earth, is also a possibility, though that technology is at an early stage.

Technological solutions to climate change, then, are available. But most of those on offer in the power and transport sectors cost more than fossil-fuel generated energy. Fortunately, economics comes to the rescue. Burning fossil fuels imposes a cost to society that is not reflected in their price. Economics says that it should be; and if it were, the price of using fossil fuels would rise in relation to the price of using renewable energy.

Unfortunately, the social cost of carbon is hard to calculate. Plenty of economists have tried, with unconvincing results. It requires estimating the impact of climate change on economic growth, which involves too many unknowns. So the IPCC report starts from the other end. Rather than trying to work out the social cost of carbon, and letting it feed through to reduce greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere, it starts from a manageable greenhouse-gas concentration and works backwards to a carbon price. Conveniently, it says the “social cost of carbon is at least comparable to, and possibly higher than carbon prices for even the most stringent scenarios assessed by the IPCC”.

And what is the right price? The report says that to stabilise greenhouse-gas concentrations at 550 parts per million (a level most scientists think safeish) would require a price of $20-50 per tonne of carbon by 2020-30. That is along the lines of the carbon price established the European Emissions-Trading Scheme, which varied between $6 and $40 in 2005-06. It has not bankrupted the European economy so far. The IPCC’s economic models reckon, on average, that if the world adopted such a price the global economy would be 1.3% smaller than it otherwise would have been by 2050; or, put another way, global economic growth would be 0.1% a year lower than it otherwise would have been.

The world would barely notice such figures; so one might think that climate change can be easily sorted. The problem, of course, is that the numbers work only if they are applied globally. If a few countries—even a few big countries—adopt a carbon price, it will make little difference. All the world’s big emitters need to do it. Which brings the world straight back to the problem that sank Kyoto. No country alone can make a difference, and it is in every country’s interest to ensure that everybody else bears the burden. As the IPCC report convincingly argues, the technology and the economics of this problem are easily soluble. It is the politics that is so difficult.

Tackling climate change | A bargain | Economist.com

France's election | The final countdown | Economist.com

2007-05-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

The final countdown

May 3rd 2007 | PARIS
From The Economist print edition

A gripping election campaign draws to an end in France

AFP

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THIS weekend’s presidential election has captured the imagination of the French like nothing else for years. On Wednesday May 2nd, a huge 20m-plus people tuned in to a two-and-a-half-hour television debate between the Socialists’ Ségolène Royal and the Gaullists’ Nicolas Sarkozy—nearly as many as watched the 2006 World Cup final. Campaign rallies have drawn tens of thousands. Turnout in the first round of voting was at its highest since 1974. The burden of expectation about the start of a new era, after 12 stagnant years of Jacques Chirac, is almost worryingly high.

Both contenders have spent decades in politics, but there is a sense of novelty about this election. Neither has stood for the presidency before. Ms Royal is the first woman to reach the second round. Mr Sarkozy is the first candidate to stand whose father was not French (he fled communist Hungary after the war). Both have borrowed policies across the ideological divide. Both promise, in different ways, to make swift reforms to modernise France.

But it is the contest for the centre ground, not policy differences, that has dominated the final two weeks of the campaign. This is particularly necessary for Ms Royal, who trailed Mr Sarkozy in the first round, picking up 26% to his 31%. To secure a second-round majority, she needs a big share of the nearly 7m voters (18.6%) who backed François Bayrou, the centrist candidate. She ruled out any deal with him before the first round. Now she has been courting his voters unapologetically.

Having earlier refused to endorse either candidate, Mr Bayrou said on May 3rd that he would definitely not vote for Mr Sarkozy. He had already implicitly backed Ms Royal, taking part in a television debate with her. They disagreed over her economic policy—too state-centred, he said—but agreed about the need to strengthen democratic accountability. Ms Royal said that she would not rule out naming him her prime minister.

Ms Royal faces tricky manoeuvres. She is courting centrist voters and Socialist moderates, such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He could be her prime minister, she said; that may have surprised Mr Bayrou. Yet she also needs to make sure hard-left voters turn out. She even commissioned a report on globalisation and food security from José Bové, an anti-globalisation campaigner once jailed for trashing a McDonald's restaurant.

The one element that unites this improbable collection of bedfellows is hostility to Mr Sarkozy. In a particularly scathing attack, Mr Bayrou denounced his “temperament” and “taste for intimidation and threats”. Ms Royal has called him “dangerous” and contrasts her programme of “reform with calm and serenity” with his “path of brutality”.

Mr Sarkozy probably has the electoral arithmetic on his side, although the National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen called on his supporters to abstain, costing him some of the far-right’s 10.4%. He has a reputation for competence that Ms Royal lacks. Early in the campaign, she made a series of foreign-policy gaffes. More recently, she has changed her mind with baffling speed about an amnesty for illegal immigrants and a proposed new work contract for the young. Mr Sarkozy, by contrast, has kept a remarkably steady line, repeating his relentless call for more work, less tax, and respect for the law. If anything he has stepped up his right-wing message, attacking the “laxist” heritage of the student revolt of May 1968.

The debate largely confirmed those differences. Ms Royal dealt in generalities: “My tax will be at the level necessary for social justice,” she declared when challenged on pension reform. Mr Sarkozy sounded more the technocrat, sticking to his policy briefs. The evening’s big surprise was that Mr Sarkozy managed to keep his cool. Ms Royal, on the other hand, put in a feisty performance that erupted into downright testiness. On the subject of school places for disabled children, she accused Mr Sarkozy of “lying” and of “political immorality”. Mustering all his gravitas, and with a hint of irony, Mr Sarkozy replied: “To be president of the republic, you have to be calm.”

It is unclear whether the debate will help Ms Royal win over waverers. Having gained between 51% and 54% in every poll since the first round, Mr Sarkozy remains the favourite.

France's election | The final countdown | Economist.com

France's presidential election | Sarkozy steps ahead | Economist.com

2007-04-23T07:07:00.000-07:00

Nicolas Sarkozy takes a lead over his rival, Ségolène Royal, as the two reach the final round of France's presidential election

AFP

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THE French took a step closer to choosing their next president by voting Nicolas Sarkozy, on the right, and Ségolène Royal, on the left, into the second-round presidential run-off. According to early estimates of the first-round vote, held on Sunday April 22nd, Mr Sarkozy topped the poll, with just over 31%, securing a fair lead over Ms Royal, on 26%.

The vote, declared Mr Sarkozy, in a speech to supporters in Paris shortly after the estimates were announced, was “a victory for democracy”. Voter turn-out, at 85%, was the highest in a presidential election for decades. In blazing sunshine across the country, voters turned out en masse, forming queues at many polling stations and giving resounding support to the mainstream candidates—at the expense of the fringes. The two finalists now go forward to a head-to-head run-off vote on May 6th.

The biggest first-round surprise was the gap that Mr Sarkozy and Ms Royal managed to open up between them and the other 10 candidates. Only two of these stood a real chance of making it through to the second round: François Bayrou, the centrist, and the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen. In the end, Mr Bayrou, who had enjoyed a surprise surge in the polls during the campaign, achieved 18.5%—a massive jump from the 6.8% he secured in the 2002 election, but not enough to win him the second-round place and a chance to remake French politics at the centre that he had hoped for.

As for Mr Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, whose campaign message was a mix of crude xenophobia and anti-establishment populism, his 10.5% was for him an outright disappointment. Not only was it well below the 16.8% he achieved in 2002, when he evicted the Socialist candidate to win a place in the run-off. It was also his lowest score since 1974. At the age of 78, this was in all likelihood his last presidential election.

Mr Le Pen's feeble result was in many ways a validation of Mr Sarkozy's first-round strategy of chasing far-right voters with a hard line on immigration and crime. “It is not Mr Le Pen that I'm interested in,” Mr Sarkozy repeatedly said during the campaign, “but his voters.” They rewarded him with a first-round score for a centre-right candidate that has not been seen in France since 1974, when Valéry Giscard d'Estaing achieved 33% (and went on to win the presidency). It is all the more striking given the fact that Mr Sarkozy faced both a strong centrist, and far-right rival, this time round. He picked up voters not only from the far-right, but from the far-left too: in contrast to 2002, none of the eight other candidates scored 5%.

As the two remaining candidates begin an intense two-week campaign, ahead of the run-off, there are two big challenges. The first is how each will manage to appeal to the centre, after a first-round campaign in which they have both concentrated on consolidating their political bases. On the left, Ms Royal devised a high-spending programme and dressed it in old-fashioned, anti-market rhetoric. She will now need to convince voters in the centre, as well as fellow Socialist Party members from the social-democratic wing who had urged her to team up with Mr Bayrou, that she can speak to them too.

On the right, Mr Sarkozy's task will be to restyle himself as a reassuring, unifying figure after a campaign in which he has been accused of trying to divide the French with tough law-and-order and immigration policies. In each case, the question will be how to make this shift credibly. If the centrist Mr Bayrou decides to endorse one of the two candidates, this could help.

The second challenge is the head-on confrontation over ideas that did not take place during the first-round campaign. Because of the number of candidates, and strict rules governing equal access to the airwaves, the French have not had the chance to compare two competing visions of how to reform the country; there was no debate held ahead of the first round. Now, one is now planned between Mr Sarkozy and Ms Royal on May 2nd. Mr Sarkozy may be feeling the more confident. Four polls taken late on Sunday tipped Mr Sarkozy for victory on May 6th, giving him between 52% and 54% of the vote.

France's presidential election | Sarkozy steps ahead | Economist.com

What about the guns? - Yahoo! News

2007-04-19T19:03:00.000-07:00

Thu Apr 19, 8:22 AM ET

Cal Thomas is a conservative columnist. Bob Beckelis a liberal Democratic strategist. But as longtime friends, they can often find common ground on issues that lawmakers in Washington cannot.

Today: The Virginia Tech shootings and the gun-control debate.

Cal: The definition of tragedy ("a lamentable, dreadful, or fatal event") does not even come close to describing the horror the families of the dead and wounded at Virginia Tech must be experiencing. I have spoken at this school and can tell you this is a great university. No parent expects to send his or her child to college and have them return in a coffin. I know we agree in extending our heartfelt sympathy to the families and to the university.

Bob: Of course. As a father, I can only imagine that these parents believed as I did until recent years that a child is safe while in school. Friday marks the eighth anniversary of the murders of 12 students at Columbine High School in Colorado by classmates using high-powered guns. In October, the country witnessed the slaughter of Amish schoolgirls in Pennsylvania, again with a gun. How much of this can our children absorb without forever living in fear?

Cal: Though one lost innocent is too much, we can be thankful that this is, indeed, a rare occurrence. Regrettably, we have seen several high-profile attacks, as you mention, but one can't account for evil.

Bob: But one can account for weapons used to perpetrate evil. I'll agree there is very little we can do about lunacy, but there is plenty we can do about controlling guns, which are almost always the weapon of choice for these maniacs.

Cal: If "gun control" - which usually means more laws to keep criminals from getting their hands on guns - could be shown to prevent a mass murder such as the ones in Blacksburg or Columbine, that might make sense. But people bent on law-breaking will not be deterred by more laws. Do you really think more laws would deter a person who is willing to methodically kill dozens of innocent people? Washington, D.C., has some of the strongest gun laws in the country accompanied by one of the highest murder rates.

Bob: No doubt, there are thousands of illegal handguns in Washington, but I bet most of them come from just across the Potomac River in Virginia, where handguns are easy to buy. Cal, it appears that Cho Seung Hui, the student who did this horrific deed, bought these guns within Virginia's laws. Last month, he purchased a Glock 9mm pistol in Roanoke. The gun shop owner said Cho was "a nice, clean-cut college kid." Serial killer Ted Bundy looked like a nice guy, too. So you're still saying the current laws are good enough?

Cal: Nice try, Bob. Are you saying that whenever a law is broken, there is a need for a new law? Laws are put in place to provide the template for acceptable behavior. No law or additional restriction can redirect a deranged mind. By the way, I noticed that Australia's prime minister criticized the United States for our lax gun laws. Perhaps he should try a little self-reflection first. In 1997, Australia implemented a gun buy-back program and confiscated more than 640,000 firearms. The next year, homicides increased 3.2% and armed robberies shot up 44%. Maybe if just one person - a professor or student - had been armed, the shooter would have been stopped sooner.

Bob: That's just what we need - more students with guns. Did you know that the gun-happy Virginia Legislature, with the encouragement of their NRA (National Rifle Association) pals, has never made it illegal to take guns onto college campuses? Then again, our gun culture makes it nearly impossible to get any real change. I mean, the day of the killings, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino felt the need to defend guns. "The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed," she said. Unbelievable.

Cal: Funny you should mention the Virginia Legislature. Just over a year ago, a bill to allow for legal concealed weapons to be carried on Virginia college campuses died in committee. At the time, Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker applauded the move, saying, "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus." I wonder what he'd say today.

Bob: More weapons would merely increase the chances that simple disputes would be settled with bullets instead of words.

Cal: A cultural point needs to be made here. Crime is portrayed on TV with bloody scenes and graphic depiction of bullets destroying flesh. Video games, including a Columbine-themed one, desensitize kids. Violence consumes much of rap music. Young people learn that life is cheap. Attempting to impose more restraints through tougher laws will do little about the constraints we used to advocate on the human heart. You can't expect moral behavior when the culture won't teach right and wrong.

Bob: If only it was about just right and wrong. I still say it's about guns. The guns used in the killings were semiautomatic pistols, which let the shooter do the most amount of damage in the shortest amount of time - in this case, just a minute or two. The Glock's magazine held 15 rounds, which would have been illegal under the 1994 federal assault-weapons ban that expired under a Republican Congress in 2004, thanks largely to the NRA lobby. Yet the NRA still defends every imaginable weapon. The NRA's national convention in St. Louis just wrapped up on Sunday, less than 24 hours before the bloodbath in Blacksburg. Convention-goers were even given tips on how to conceal handguns. How quaint. Perhaps if the NRA leadership is available this week, they should go to Virginia Tech and explain to the parents of the dead and wounded why these weapons are so necessary.

Cal: You're regurgitating the flawed argument of the anti-gun lobby: It's the guns, not the people. I am not a fundamentalist on this, Bob. I agree that before people buy guns there should be an effective background check, with no guns sold to convicted felons, juveniles and people with records of drug and alcohol abuse. We have many such laws in place, but criminals will get guns if they want them. And I want the right to own a gun to defend myself and my family should law enforcement not be able to get to my home, or assist me when I am out in public. That is why we have a Second Amendment to allow me to do that.

Bob: The Second Amendment itself is debatable. But my position is the same as it was before this tragic week: I support a ban on all privately held handguns, period. In fact, I believe the manufacturing of handguns for private use should be outlawed.

Cal: I'm not going anywhere near that position.

Bob: I know that, and I know what I want is a non-starter politically. But how's this for common ground: Let's start with stricter gun-control laws in your home state of Virginia, with the first including a ban on any guns on college campuses. Then can we agree that the assault-weapons ban be re-enacted in Congress - a ban that President Bush has said he will sign - within 30 days. These types of guns serve absolutely no purpose. Most sportsmen don't want or need them, but criminals love them. And I know we can agree that our prayers are with all who suffered in Blacksburg this horrible week. What do you say?

Cal: As for the gun ban on campuses, I can't accept that. Again, lives could have been saved if one student had been armed to take out the killer. As for the assault-weapons ban, life went on for the 10 years that the ban was in place, so I'm not averse to reauthorizing it. But we shouldn't be lulled into thinking that this ban, or any gun ban, will be a deterrent to an evil mind. And of course my prayers are with the Virginia Tech community that had this evil unleashed upon them.

Bob: After what they've seen, they'll need prayers.

What about the guns? - Yahoo! News

The problem that is Wolfowitz - International Herald Tribune

2007-04-18T10:21:00.000-07:00

By H.D.S. Greenway
The Boston Globe

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

'Paul Wolfowitz is often mentioned as the most brilliant person in government. . . . He is the intellectual force behind a whole new way of looking at U.S. foreign policy. But for all of that [he] should be fired."

I wrote those words in July 2003. It was clear by then that the Iraq mission had not been accomplished in the previous May, as the president had said, and that we were in for a long, hard war made worse by Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld's "fatal combination of hubris and incompetence."

I could have added corruption. For we soon learned the extent of the wholesale corruption of the intelligence gathering process to promote the war, generated in the Pentagon and from Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

Generals who said that invading Iraq would cost more in money and troops than the Pentagon hoped were swept aside, and advice from anyone who actually knew anything about Iraq was willfully ignored.

As I write these words, Wolfowitz is still head of the World Bank, the job President George W. Bush chose for him in 2005 as a reward for failure at the Pentagon. But the time for him to be fired has again arrived.

Instead of the grand corruption of cooking the Iraq intelligence books, Wolfowitz has been caught in the squalid little impropriety of using his influence to get his World Bank girlfriend a job at the State Department, at a salary that exceeds that of the secretary of state herself. It is all the more ironic in that Wolfowitz made stamping out corruption a World Bank crusade.

The real problem with Wolfowitz, however, is that he is a compulsive idealist who cannot see that the price of his ideals may be too high to pay, or that they may do more harm than good.

No one is arguing that Wolfowitz's ideals are wrong. It would be very nice if Iraq were to become a democracy like the United States. It would be even nicer if this could transform the entire Middle East in our image. However, the occupation of Iraq will lead to neither.

It would also be a good thing if world corruption could be weeded out, root and branch, and it would be foolish to deny that the World Bank needed some shaking up.

However, just as a wiser man might have seen that going to war in Iraq was unjustified, unless weapons of mass destruction could be found, Wolfowitz might have seen that his usual practice of riding roughshod over colleagues and board members might be counterproductive to his goals at the World Bank.

A wiser man might have seen that suspending loans to such countries as India and Kenya because there was corruption to be found there, without consulting his own board, might be counterproductive to the ultimate mission of reducing poverty.

A wiser man might have seen that suspending aid to Uzbekistan after it ousted American troops might be seen as an American power play unbecoming to an international aid organization.

The same traits that marked his Pentagon job followed him into the bank - the arrogance, the hubris, and the neoconservative doctrine of going it alone and imposing America's way.

A wiser man might see that ignoring World Bank experts, board members and staff to push through your own agenda, relying on henchmen you had brought over from the Pentagon, might not be the best way to go about getting the bank's work done.

The astonishing thing is that he would be given another chance to practice his zealotry at the World Bank, especially after being the architect of a losing war strategy at the Pentagon.

If character is destiny, one sees a direct link between Wolfowitz's twin failures at the Pentagon and at the World Bank. One sees the danger of idealists who are so sure of their own abilities and truths that they are blind to the damage they do.

Wolfowitz could no more resist forcing his will and methods on the World Bank than Lenin could have kept his hands off corrupt old Russia.

So even if his goals are right, his methods are so deeply flawed and his presidency so badly damaged that it is unlikely that he can remain effective. As the Financial Times said, if Wolfowitz stays, the campaign for good governance will be seen as "not a believable struggle, but blatant hypocrisy."

Let his report card show "doesn't play well with others." But then, that will be the epitaph of the Bush administration.

H. D. S. Greenway's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.

The problem that is Wolfowitz - International Herald Tribune

Ruth Marcus - Missing The Exit Signs - washingtonpost.com

2007-04-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, April 18, 2007; A23

The central question in the debate over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz is one that no one seems to be asking: What is best for the institutions they head?

If self-preservation trumps institutional concerns for the two officials, that's not terribly surprising. No one wants to be publicly frog-marched out of a job, his reputation shredded in headlines.

None of us, as the poet Robert Burns explained, is particularly good at spying the louse on our own bonnet; few have the gift "to see oursels as ithers see us." Gonzales remains clueless about the damning implications of his own cluelessness, Wolfowitz defiantly oblivious to the untenable "do as I say, not as I do" nature of his own acknowledged mistake.

What's most disturbing is the apparent inability of the institutions involved to protect themselves, and the unwillingness, at least so far, of those with the power to do so to face that task.

The Imus trajectory offers a telling contrast. Certainly, Don Imus's words were horrible. But that is not the only reason why he is gone and Gonzales and Wolfowitz are not.

In the Imus case, the force of the free market worked with brutal efficiency. When advertisers bailed on the networks, the networks dumped Imus. There was a built-in institutional capacity for self-preservation.

Not so in the case of Gonzales and the Justice Department. Gonzales's fate has little to do with the best interests of the department, more to do with the best interests of George W. Bush. It hinges on whether the president decides that it's more of a political liability to lose Gonzales than to keep him, and on how much pressure the president feels from members of his party (who may or may not have the interests of Justice in mind) to dispense with loyalty to his longtime friend.

Why should Gonzales go? Let me count the ways. He has lost the confidence of lawmakers -- at least any who've been paying attention to his shifting stories and aren't reflexively supportive of an administration official. He's created turmoil and undercut morale in U.S. attorneys' offices across the country. He's shown himself to be a grossly negligent manager.

He has overseen the politicization of a fine department, stocking it to a far greater extent than his predecessors did with minimally qualified but ideologically pure minions. He has demonstrated neither an adept understanding of the critical issues that confront an attorney general in an age of terrorism nor the necessary (and promised) independence from a president he has spent his career enabling.

The U.S. attorneys mess is a symptom, not an aberration. The Justice Department deserves better than an attorney general who has to spend weeks closeted with aides to help him remember what he didn't know about what was happening on his watch.

The Wolfowitz situation is murkier, and in the end the bureaucratically inert bank may rouse itself to fire him. For a supposedly smart man, Wolfowitz behaved in an extraordinarily stupid way when he personally dictated the details of his girlfriend's generous pay and promotion package. Yes, the board of directors' ethics committee told Wolfowitz to deal with the matter and have Shaha Riza transferred out of the bank, but he handled it in a way guaranteed to make matters worse.

There's no doubt that much of the venom directed at him has little to do with how much his girlfriend was paid and a lot to do with his previous role, as deputy defense secretary in the Bush administration, as an architect of the war in Iraq. Layered on top of that is resentment over Wolfowitz's highhanded ways once he arrived at the World Bank and disagreement over his policy priorities.

So the question is not whether Wolfowitz did something wrong -- he acknowledges as much -- but whether it is so serious as to require his resignation. The argument that he must go because he's lost the confidence of the bank's staff and many shareholder countries doesn't carry much weight. These folks never wanted Wolfowitz in the job, so they'll leap at any chance to declare themselves hopelessly (unless he leaves) demoralized.

The more compelling argument for Wolfowitz's departure is the degree to which his blunder involves the same issue -- corruption and good governance -- that he has made the focus of his tenure. Equally important, this episode erupts as Wolfowitz is trying to raise billions to replenish the bank's lending fund, from the very donor governments that are most unhappy with him. It's hard to see how it's in the bank's interest -- no less that of the impoverished countries it is supposed to help -- for him to remain.

Ruth Marcus - Missing The Exit Signs - washingtonpost.com

Yahoo and Google | Boo-hoo | Economist.com

2007-04-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

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ANOTHER month, another string of victories for Google, the world’s emerging internet superpower. On Tuesday April 17th, in the latest sign that Google has the upper hand over all its rivals, Yahoo! disappointed analysts with its first quarter results: profits were down by 11% to $142m. Google’s share of web searches keeps going up. It now executes more than 64% of all searches, according to Hitwise, a market-research firm. Yahoo!, its main rival, appears stuck at about 21%, and distantly third, Microsoft’s MSN continues its decline, to below 10%. With both the most popular search engine and the most efficient system for placing sponsored text advertisements, Google dominates the lucrative and fast-growing market for so-called “paid search” advertising (where advertisers pay only for actual mouse clicks).

Google’s grip is tightening elsewhere. Last week it said it would pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, the web’s largest broker between online publishers and advertisers for “branded” or “display” advertisements (paying for views rather than clicks). This segment is growing as fast as paid search. Google also struck a deal with Clear Channel Communications, America’s largest radio broadcaster, to sell airtime on 675 radio stations to advertisers in Google’s network. Earlier this month Google said it will place advertisements with EchoStar, a satellite-TV operator, and also with traditional newspapers. Google is thus launching an all-out attack on the entire advertising market.

In the process, Google is bashing Yahoo!. It, along with Microsoft and Time Warner, owner of AOL, had also bid for DoubleClick and failed. Terry Semel, Yahoo!’s boss, has suffered a string of strategic defeats, having been outbid by Google for a stake in AOL and for YouTube, the leader in online video. Moreover, Mr Semel had recently been trying to defend against Google in display advertising, while hoping to attack it in paid search. Traditionally, Yahoo! has placed text advertisements on its search pages based only on how much an advertiser bids for a given search term (or “keyword”, such as “mountain bikes”); Google takes other variables into consideration and so makes its advertisements more relevant to web searchers, thus earning more revenues.

In February Yahoo! launched a new advertising algorithm, called Panama, that is meant to close this technical gap, but there is scepticism that it can make much difference. Advertising systems do not ride on their algorithm alone but also on their network of advertisers and publishers. Google’s network, in paid search, is now so large that advertisers cannot afford to abandon it. So Panama may only prevent Yahoo! from falling further behind.

Mr Semel’s other defence is to use the growing fear of Google among “old-media” companies to engineer various alliances to contain the enemy. In March Yahoo!, along with MSN and AOL, signed on to a new partnership with NBC and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which intend to form a joint venture in online video to counter Google’s YouTube. Last week Yahoo! expanded an advertising alliance with Viacom, which is currently suing YouTube. And this week, Yahoo! announced a deal with a consortium of newspaper publishers to run their content on Yahoo!’s websites, and to place advertisements on the sites of the newspapers.

For MSN the picture is even bleaker. Online advertising is still a minuscule part of overall revenues but is still crucial to Microsoft’s growth strategy. So far Microsoft is failing. Sarah Friar, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, estimates that Google will make operating profits of more than $5 billion this year, which will grow by 36% for the next three years and Yahoo! will make $3 billion and grow by 20%. Microsoft’s online businesses will make losses of $2 billion, and more in the next two years. Microsoft’s nightmare scenario, however, is that Google will at some point disrupt its core business of selling shrink-wrapped software. Google recently said that it would add presentation software to the word processing and spreadsheets that it already offers free online.

Google may face a downside to its expansion, as Henry Blodget of Cherry Hill Research, points out. Placing advertisements on its own search pages gives Google profit margins of about 60%; placing advertisements on other web pages, such as blogs, yields margins between 10% and 20%. As Google expands into new segments, such as broadcast, its margins will probably keep declining, especially as new media partners are likely to give Google only “left-over” inventory. So Google is far from becoming a monopolist but it is, for the moment, far ahead of its peers.

Yahoo and Google | Boo-hoo | Economist.com

Beautiful Beta: Adding a second sidebar to your Blog - part 2

2007-04-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

If you guys want to learn how to hack your blog, visit this for one of the tips
Beautiful Beta: Adding a second sidebar to your Blog - part 2

A massacre in Virginia | Murder at school | Economist.com

2007-04-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

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ON MONDAY April 16th, a gunman killed perhaps as many as 32 people at Virginia Tech university, in Blacksburg, Virginia. In the way of the modern world, somebody with a mobile-phone camera was nearby to capture it. The shaky, grainy recording shows little, but the audio is telling. One high pitched shot after another rings out, erratically but quickly. Witnesses initially described an Asian-looking gunman of university age, who carried at least one, perhaps two, semi-automatic pistols, with lots of ammunition. At the end of the rampage he was dead, perhaps by his own hand.

This is the deadliest university shooting in American history. In 1999 two outcast high-school students killed 13 others and themselves at their school in Columbine, Colorado, setting off an anguished national debate about bullying in school, violence on television and other such topics. In the hitherto most famous university-based murder spree, Charles Whitman killed 16 people, mostly shot sniper-style from the top of a tower at the University of Texas, in 1966. He had a brain tumour that may have affected his behaviour.

No one knows yet what led the young man to slaughter so many at the quiet university in this sleepy western Virginian city this week. But there are sure to be recriminations about how the day was handled. At around 7.15 in the morning, someone entered a student dormitory and shot several people, killing at least one. Police rushed to the scene, and other students woke to the sounds of gunshots, sirens and police milling around.

Most of the carnage came two hours later, in a different building filled with classrooms. The police will want to know where the killer went in the intervening two hours. Parents and students will want to know why, with the gunman still at large, the university did not cancel classes. The university was only “locked down”—with students forced to stay in their classrooms and dormitories—after the second round of killings. Students sat, some reading the news wirelessly on their laptop computers and instant-messaging with loved ones, until shortly after noon.

And as is always the case after such a tragedy in America, many will point their fingers at the country’s lax gun laws. The laws vary from state to state, and in southern states like Virginia, they tend to be the least strict of all. In that state, no license or training is required to buy a handgun, and buyers can avoid background checks by shopping at gun-shows. An investigation of course will follow. But, at the least, some will question Americans’ comfort with the easy availability of deadly weapons.

Similar atrocities have happened in countries with much stricter laws—at Dunblane in Scotland in 1996 and in Erfurt, in Germany, in 2002. But such events, elsewhere, lead to the laws being tightened even further. Inevitably individuals set on committing violence find some way to act, but with such effective tools as automatic pistols available to do so quickly and efficiently, the toll may be higher. In a country already jumpy about terrorism, it is a sobering reminder of the nearness of death.

A massacre in Virginia | Murder at school | Economist.com

The coming week | The week ahead | Economist.com

2007-04-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

A terrorist trial and various elections in the news this week

AFP

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• AFRICA'S most populous country holds a presidential election on April 21st, with the incumbent, Olusegun Obasanjo, scheduled to bow out from high office. It is a tense time in Nigeria, an oil-rich but troubled west African nation with some 140m people. The election has been marred by claims that the poll is being rigged in favour of Mr Obasanjo's preferred successor, Umaru Yar'Adua, a northern state governor. A popular opposition candidate, the vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, has in effect been blocked from running through legal manoeuvres. Amid fears of violence and chaos, customers have started withdrawing money from banks.

• THIS week the trial of José Padilla, an American accused of being part of a conspiracy to support al-Qaeda from inside America, is expected to begin. Mr Padilla was detained five years ago and was first accused of planning to use a “dirty bomb”; George Bush has already called him a “bad guy” and an “enemy combatant”. His detention without trial generated a great deal of controversy, with the Supreme Court asked to rule whether an American could be held for so long. The court avoided giving a ruling after a criminal trial date was finally set for Mr Padilla.

• THE first round of voting to elect a new president takes place in France. The two favourites to go through to the subsequent run-off face a tough final week of campaigning. Nicolas Sarkozy, candidate of the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement, and Ségolène Royal of the leftist Socialist Party lead the polls but snapping at their heals with a late but faltering surge is François Bayrou, a centrist. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the perennial candidate of the far right, along with a host of other candidates may sway the outcome. The final week of campaigning could prove tricky for the gaffe-prone Ms Royal while Mr Sarkozy must hope that his tough-cop image persuades voters not to shift their allegiances to either Mr Bayrou or Mr Le Pen.

• BHUTAN is different. All citizens of the isolated and landlocked Himalayan kingdom are required to wear national costume and smoking is banned. Satellite television arrived only a few years ago, the national sport is archery and the reigning monarch once declared that “Gross national happiness is more important than gross national product”. Democracy is a new arrival too. The gradual shift from absolute monarchy to the constitutional kind is set to progress with parliamentary elections in 2008. Next week, to familiarise both voters and officialdom with the alien procedures of a democratic poll, the country will hold a mock election.

Industrialising the moon | Pie in the sky | Economist.com

2007-04-14T06:45:00.000-07:00

Russian boasts for lunar industrialisation fall short of reality

AFP

THE moon appears to warp the minds of some men. In folklore unlucky souls are said to transform into werewolves under its influence. But the malign sway of the Earth’s satellite is evident beyond the realm of fantasy. Despite putting men on the moon in 1969 America seems hell-bent on re-enacting the space race, this time pitting its efforts against those of the Chinese. Now a Russian company claims it could develop a system to exploit the moon’s natural resources and potentially relocate harmful industries there. This is lunacy.

Russia certainly has great prowess in space. In its former guise as the centre of power in the Soviet Union it launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. In a spectacular follow up, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space in 1961. Another triumph came in 1968 when the Russians sent a spaceship to orbit the moon with turtles aboard, returning it and its living cargo safely to Earth. An unmanned Russian spacecraft also landed on the moon ahead of the first manned landing by the Americans. Even after Neil Armstrong took his one small step, Russia has proved its superiority in keeping people in space stations orbiting the Earth. The Russian Soyuz rocket is a mainstay of satellite launches and would be used to rescue astronauts should any accident befall the International Space Station.

Nikolai Sevastianov, head of RKK Energia, the spacecraft manufacturer that helped achieve these Russian successes, this week boasted that his rockets could be used to industrialise the moon. So why were his remarks greeted with such scepticism? Mr Sevastianov told a news agency, “It is time to think about the industrial development of the moon. We are sometimes criticised for making such suggestions too early. But it is time to do this given the limits to natural reserves on Earth and the pace of civilisation’s progress. Nor can we dismiss the idea of outsourcing harmful industries into space.”

One reason for the cynicism is that the idea is absurd. A United Nations treaty passed in 1967 bans potentially harmful interference with the Earth’s original satellite and requires international consultation before proceeding with any activity that could disrupt the peaceful exploration of space, including the moon. A second problem is that landing on the moon has proved beyond the budget of any state other than America and of any private company to date. Russian rockets are perfectly capable of orbiting the Earth’s original satellite—as was proved 40 years ago—but landing involves a lot more capability and expense than is at present feasible. Moreover the proposals for “industrialisation” are woefully short on detail. Mr Sevastianov's claim is all to do with getting more money for his company.

In fact one of the best hopes for investment comes from space tourism. On Saturday April 7th, the fifth such holidaymaker entered space aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. Charles Simonyi, an American software developer, paid $25m for his ten-day sojourn at the International Space Station. The next holiday destination is the moon. Space Adventures, the tour operator that organised the first five packages, is offering two tickets to orbit the moon for $100m each. Launch would be aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. But the Soyuz system was designed in the 1960s and has been on the verge of retirement for many years. Unfortunately for Mr Sevastianov the Russian authorities have postponed indefinitely the development of a successor, despite RKK Energia having gone to the considerable expense of developing some new designs.

Hence the fuss. The new designs, which have been stuck at the concept stage for many years, were not put together with the purpose of a lunar landing in mind. Nevertheless, they could be modified for that purpose. Hence Mr Sevastianov’s exaggerated claims that a Russian company could help to industrialise the moon, if only the investment were forthcoming. It is unlikely to succeed. Like companies offering trips to that other inaccessible and stateless wilderness, Antarctica, Mr Sevastianov would be better off concentrating on tourism.

Industrialising the moon | Pie in the sky | Economist.com

ETimor candidate demands vote recount

2007-04-12T08:48:00.000-07:00

ETimor candidate demands vote recount

East Timor presidential candidate Jose Ramos-Horta demanded a vote recount Thursday despite making it to the second round, saying thousands of voters may have been harassed and threatened.

His remarks came amid growing questions about the conduct of the violence-torn nation's vote on Monday, the first presidential poll since the country won independence in 2002.

Although the bloodshed feared on voting day did not occur, doubts about the election have heightened fears that one of the world's newest nations could see a resurgence of political turmoil and violence.

"There has to be an investigation," said Ramos-Horta, the current prime minister, who qualified for the run-off against Francisco "Lu Olo" Guterres of the ruling Fretilin party.

He said more than 150,000 of 520,000 registered voters had not voted, despite a massive turn-out marked by hours-long queues and shortages of ballot papers, and called for the United Nations to hold an inquiry.

"Were they intimidated or simply did not show up?" said Ramos-Horta, who shared the Nobel peace prize in 1996 for his role in the campaign that eventually won independence from Indonesia.

"I ask the UN for an explanation," he said. "I think there should be another count."

An Indonesian human rights group said it had received reports that the ruling Fretilin, the most powerful political force in this country of one million people, had gone door-to-door to intimidate voters.

Ramos-Horta founded Fretilin as a resistance movement against Indonesia, which occupied the country in 1974 after former colonial power Portugal withdrew.

But he left in 1988, and Fretilin has since transformed from underground movement to mainstream political party -- and one repeatedly accused of using intimidation tactics against its opponents.

Rights group Yayasan HAK said it had received reports that Fretilin had harassed voters and even beaten up a priest and a journalist.

"They noted the identity numbers of people and said if you don't choose Fretilin, your number will show on the computer," said the group's spokesman, Jose Luis de Oliveira.

"Even if that's not true, people are afraid," he said. A Fretilin spokesman said the party did not encourage its supporters to use violence.

Meanwhile the election commission rejected a formal protest with similar claims filed Wednesday by five of the six candidates who did not make it into the May 8 run-off election.

"We have no legal basis to accept that," said commission spokesman Martinho Gusmao.

International observers have generally praised the conduct of the polls, but Yayasan HAK's de Oliveira said they did not have a proper understanding of the situation in the country.

"They cannot see or feel what's happening," he said.

A Timor analyst with the International Crisis Group, Sophia Cason, said election monitors had said they found discrepancies between local tallies and the national election figures as well as ballot boxes uncounted.

"That's what some of the observers from the parties are worried about -- that the figures just aren't adding up," she said. "So there seems to be some sort of discrepancy in some of the figures."

Final first-round results are due on Sunday.

Foreign peacekeepers have been on the streets of East Timor, formally known as Timor-Leste, for nearly a year after gang violence left 37 people dead and sent 150,000 fleeing their homes in April and May 2006.

ETimor candidate demands vote recount

France's presidential race | Watch your backs | Economist.com

2007-04-11T06:43:00.000-07:00

Watch your backs

Apr 10th 2007
From Economist.com

The favourites for France’s presidency face a tough campaign

AFP

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THE centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) and the left Socialist Party are France’s biggest by some way and their presidential candidates are well known. The UMP’s Nicolas Sarkozy has made much of his toughness on law and order, while the Socialists’ Ségolène Royal has promised to expand the welfare state and to encourage more public participation in politics. But as official campaigning gets underway this week, neither front-runner can rest assured of doing well enough in the first round of voting, on Sunday April 22nd, to make it to the run-off two weeks later.

The field is unusually crowded this time, at least at the front. A dozen candidates have qualified for the presidential ballot and the surge of François Bayrou, a centrist, has given the smaller parties added hope of influencing the outcome. Mr Bayrou’s rise has stalled for now, but he remains solidly in third place with some 18% of the support, according to a recent poll by LH2. The same poll gave Mr Sarkozy a lead of sorts, with 28% to Ms Royal’s 24%. Nobody has much margin for error.

Ms Royal, in particular, is on a tightrope. To her left are three Trotskyite candidates, a communist, and a well-known anti-globalisation activist, José Bové. Many socialist voters groaned when Ms Royal dared to state the obvious by saying that profits were necessary for a healthy economy. Nor were they pleased when she suggested that French homes should fly the national flag on Bastille Day. She is also prone to making gaffes on the campaign trail, especially on foreign affairs. One dismayed socialist told Le Monde that she had considered starting a petition to tame Ms Royal: “we’re voting for you, but shut up.” Socialist discipline may save her, however. The left remains traumatised by the 2002 election, in which the lacklustre Socialist candidate was beaten to a place in the second round by the far-right’s Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Mr Sarkozy also has his right eye on Mr Le Pen. Pollsters give Mr Le Pen 15%, but as many potential supporters are embarrassed to say they will vote for him, his real popularity may be higher than the polls suggest. Thuggish though he is, his anti-immigrant message appeals to some voters. Mr Sarkozy has tried to become a more palatable hard-man. He is popular for his hard stance on crime and hooliganism—acutely sensitive topics in France since an outburst of rioting in late 2005. Mr Sarkozy, who was then interior minister, risked accusations of flirting with the far right. Two words he used then—racaille (“scum” or “rabble”, used to describe the rioters), and “Kärcher” (the make of a high-pressure hose he said he would like to use to clean the streets)—have become permanently associated with him.

With the race tightening, sparks have begun to fly on a wide range of issues. Mr Sarkozy told a philosophy magazine recently that paedophilia and suicidal tendencies were probably genetic traits, provoking sharp criticism from Ms Royal and Mr Bayrou. But Mr Sarkozy got a fillip when Mr Le Pen denounced him as “the candidate who came from immigration”—a reminder of Mr Sarkozy’s Hungarian-Jewish origins. The other candidates denounced Mr Le Pen, and voters were reminded of Mr Sarkozy’s self-propelled ascent through France’s static political class.

There are two more wild cards in the election. One is voter registration, which is at a record high, with 2.9m more eligible to vote this year than at the last election in 2002. One explanation is the heightened interest of young French from immigrant backgrounds who plan to oppose Mr Sarkozy, though the lack of an incumbent may also have encouraged new voters to come forward. The second is the unusually high number of undecided voters—42% according to one poll. With France in an anxious mood about its economy, social model and place in the world, the possibility of surprises in the first round remains very much alive.

France's presidential race | Watch your backs | Economist.com

Timor-Leste | Happy ever after? | Economist.com

2007-04-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

Happy ever after?

Apr 9th 2007 | DILI
From Economist.com

Timor-Leste’s presidential election may not resolve the country’s conflicts

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“PEOPLE feel that they are sick of waiting, waiting for something good,” observed Xanana Gusmão, the president of Timor-Leste, a few days before his people voted, on Monday April 9th, to choose his successor. Few would disagree. Five years after the former East Timor won its independence, following a bloody separation from Indonesia and a period under the United Nations’ control, things still look gloomy.

Since last May, when the country’s security forces collapsed, a contingent of foreign police and soldiers, led by Australia, has barely kept the peace between rival political factions and street gangs. Tens of thousands of people, driven from their homes by the fighting, are living in tents in refugee camps. Dysfunctional government has kept poverty, child malnutrition and unemployment high, despite the money that has started rolling in from oilfields off the country’s shores.

Having suffered so much in the fight for self-rule, the Timorese seemed determined to exercise their right to vote, lining up outside the polling-stations before dawn on Monday. The UN mission seemed just as determined to prevent any trouble, flooding the entire country with peacekeepers and election observers. When the UN’s chief in Timor-Leste, Atul Khare, arrived by helicopter to inspect voting in Mahaquidan, a remote and drizzle-soaked mountain village, he found an orderly queue of around 100 locals, shepherded by policemen sent from Lisbon and Singapore.

There were only small outbreaks of violence in the run-up to the polling day, most of them quelled rapidly by the peacekeepers. However, the presidential campaign has only widened the country’s most damaging split—that between Mr Gusmão, the former leader of the armed resistance to Indonesian rule, and Fretilin, the former rebel movement’s political wing. Mr Gusmão accuses Fretilin of corruption and mismanagement. In turn, Fretilin’s leader, Mari Alkatiri, who resigned as prime minister after last May’s violence, claims that it was whipped up by Mr Gusmão’s supporters.

Timor-Leste’s presidency is influential but largely ceremonial. So Mr Gusmão is not seeking re-election. Instead he wants to swap jobs with his ally, José Ramos-Horta, who took over as prime minister when Mr Alkatiri quit. Throughout the campaign Mr Ramos-Horta—formerly the independence movement’s chief spokesman—has been seen as the favourite. His main rivals are Fretilin’s Francisco Guterres (also known as “Lu-Olo”) and Fernando Araujo (“Lasama”) of the smaller Democratic Party. Early results on Monday night seemed to confirm this but, if no candidate gets more than 50% of votes, it will go to a second round next month.

Shortly after the new president is known, a date should be set for parliamentary elections. In these, Mr Gusmão will seek the prime ministership, under the banner of his new party, the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction. Fretilin, which currently has about two-thirds of parliamentary seats, is furious that Mr Gusmão has chosen a name so provocatively similar to that of the National Council of Timorese Resistance—the alliance of parties, led by Fretilin, that campaigned against Indonesian rule in the late 1990s.

Both Mr Ramos-Horta and Mr Guterres are projecting themselves as healers and uniters. They and the other presidential candidates have signed a code of conduct promising to respect the outcome of Easter Monday’s election, or at least to challenge it only through the courts. But a substantial risk remains that the losers will take their grievances to the streets, testing the peacekeepers' capacity.

The underlying causes of Timor-Leste’s conflicts are many and complex. Mr Alkatiri’s sacking of almost half the army, for going on strike, triggered last year’s violence. But the strike had its roots in a simmering regional dispute between junior soldiers from the country’s west and their commanders, who are mostly from the east. The UN has been accused of laying the foundations for this conflict by mishandling the integration of former rebel fighters and pro-Indonesian forces into the army and police after independence. But underlying all of this are even older clan disputes, dating back to Timor-Leste's days as a Portuguese colony.

There were hopes, at independence, that the UN’s intensive, and expensive, efforts at nation-building would have reasonable chances in such a small and relatively homogeneous place as Timor-Leste. Alas, so far it is proving little easier than in, say, Afghanistan or Congo.

Timor-Leste | Happy ever after? | Economist.com

Climate change | All washed up | Economist.com

2007-04-07T21:28:00.000-07:00

All washed up

Apr 6th 2007
From Economist.com

As the evidence of global warming proliferates, so do the nasty consequences

AFP

WE WERE right, all along. That is the thrust of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body set up to pronounce authoritatively on the science of global warming. In 2001 it predicted that global warming would lead to many ills, including greater numbers of extinctions, growing shortages of water, higher incidence of tropical diseases, and lower yields from agriculture, fishing and forestry in some places. Now the scientists who write the reports say they have much stronger evidence that such calamities are indeed occurring—faster, in many cases, than they originally thought.

The previous IPCC report, in February, examined the evidence that the globe was actually warming. It called the trend “unequivocal”, and expressed “very high confidence” that it was largely man-made. The new report assesses the likely impact of global warming. It was released on April 6th, after a week of negotiations between scientists and governments over the wording. Representatives of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and America in partiuclar were said to have tried to water down the report, prompting a last-ditch all-night haggle.

The resulting document predicts the same sorts of consequences as its predecessor did in 2001, but with much greater confidence and precision, says Camille Parmesan, a professor at the University of Texas who vetted part of it. By her count, the chapter on current impacts alone rests on a review of over 1,000 academic studies, most of them already published—compared with about 100 last time around.

In a paper published in 2003, Professor Parmesan concluded that half of all species were already altering their behaviour or shifting their range in response to global warming. Others have found that some 26% of coral reefs have already died as a result of warming waters, and that the remainder will probably disappear if average water temperatures rise by another degree—along with the fisheries and tourism they sustain. In a synthesis of such studies, the report concluded that 30% of species face an increased risk of extinction if temperatures rise by 2ºC (3.6ºF).

This sort of finding suggests that the effects of global warming will be “non-linear”, says Paul Epstein, a Harvard University professor who has reviewed the entire report. For one thing, most projections of the impact derive from estimates of changes in average temperature. But many of the ill effects hinge on changes in the minimum temperature, which has been rising twice as fast. This trend is particularly strong near the poles, where the climate is changing fastest. Winters no longer get cold enough in many places to kill off different pests and diseases. So noxious species of ants and bees are marching northwards across America, ticks carrying Lyme disease are proliferating in Scandinavia and tropical highlands around the world are witnessing an invasion of mosquitoes carrying malaria, dengue fever and Japanese encephalitis. “The winter is the most wonderful thing that was ever invented for public health,” Dr Epstein says, “and we're losing it.”

Multiple factors will amplify the effects of global warming on agriculture and forestry. Warmer and drier conditions in many places will reduce yields. Meanwhile, pests such as tree-killing beetles and crop-killing fungi will both increase their range and breed more rapidly. And an increasing incidence of extreme weather, be it floods or droughts, will both damage crops directly and nurture species that prey on them. The poor, especially in tropical climes, will be hardest hit by all this, since they have little means of adapting to such changes.

The report is supposed only to inform policymaking, not to direct it. But the point of the frightening statistics about impending water shortages, epidemics and crop failures, says one of the authors, is to jolt politicians into preparing for the coming afflictions. In other words, the report intends to end the debate between those who think mankind's main effort should be trying to reverse climate change and those who would prefer to concentrate on adapting to its effects. Both strategies, it implies, are urgently needed.

Climate change | All washed up | Economist.com

Christian beliefs | Questions of faith | Economist.com

2007-04-07T21:27:00.000-07:00

Christian beliefs

Questions of faith

Apr 7th 2007 | SHREWSBURY
From Economist.com

Christians are divided about evolution and the creation

AFP

EASTER Sunday is an exuberant moment in the calendar of St Chad’s, the church where a doctor called Robert Darwin, sceptical about religion but conscious of convention, had his son Charles baptised in 1809. This year, as every year since the cylindrical building was constructed in 1790, worshippers at the main Anglican church in this old English town will give a lusty rendering of some familiar Easter hymns; and many will stroll down the nearby river bank where young Charles Darwin took “delight in fishing for newts”.

Mark Thomas, the vicar, easily reconciles his faith with local pride in a man who convinced many people that the Bible could not be literally true. As co-organiser of an annual Darwin festival, featuring lectures on religion and science, he cites Saint Paul’s adage that the “letter kills, but the spirit gives life” as a warning against literalism.

And in other English places linked with Darwin, there is often more emphasis on the scientist’s emollient personality than on arguments which raged over his work. In Cambridge, where Darwin studied theology, a play has just been staged that recounts the warm correspondence between Darwin and Asa Gray, an American botanist who shared his friend’s scientific interests but had conventional views on religion. The play is a spinoff from a project to publish 14,000 letters received or sent by Darwin, and to post some on the internet. As the play shows, Darwin’s scepticism in religious matters gradually deepened, yet his feelings for his friend were unaffected.

Among the 2 billion Christians celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ this weekend (this is a year when the moveable calendars of western and Orthodox Christians coincide) such cheerful negotiation of difference is often impossible. Arguments over how to interpret the Bible—and how to read the story of Creation in the first chapter of Genesis—continue to cause controversy both between Christian communities and within them.

Mr Thomas’s ultimate boss—Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the world’s 80m Anglicans—has dismissed literal readings of Genesis as a “category mistake”. Cerebral Christians like the archbishop endorse the view that instead of treating the Genesis account of the world’s creation in six days as a historical text, it should be read in the sophisticated way that Jewish commentators read it 2,000 years ago. In other words, the “days” of creation are not chronological periods but elements in a vision of the relationship between God, man and the physical world: a vision also implicit in the architecture of the ancient Jewish temple, as Margaret Barker, a Methodist Hebrew scholar, has argued.

But in the fast-growing varieties of Christianity—in the overlapping worlds of evangelicalism, fundamentalism and Pentecostalism—many prefer their faith simple, not sophisticated. As Samuel Rodovalho, an activist in Brazil’s Pentecostalist movement, puts it: “We are sure that the story in Genesis is true, and we are not very interested in scientific theories which say otherwise.”

Somewhere in between these stark convictions and the intellectual subtleties of Mr Thomas's Anglicanism, some intensive discussions about creation and evolution are in progress in the upper ranks of the Roman Catholic church, to which over 1 billion people (with varying intensity) adhere. While Catholic teaching regards a simple faith in the truth of Genesis as permissible, most Catholic scientists would agree with the late Pope John Paul II in saying that fresh evidence makes evolution “more than a hypothesis”. But Pope Benedict XVI has given hints that he wants to reaffirm certain other elements in his predecessor’s teaching—including the idea that signs of a deity are discernible in nature.

Benedict XVI has emphasised the Catholic view that human reason can discern the “divine reason” which formed the world. Ultimately this argument could complicate his hopes of reconciliation with the world’s 140m or so Orthodox Christians—whose medieval forebears clashed with Rome by insisting that communion with God differs from contemplation of the physical world. But in the short term, Vatican-watchers are keenly awaiting the publication of some minutes from an informal, but important seminar on creation and evolution that the pope convened last August.

Meanwhile none of these discussions will prevent the profusion of Christians in Darwin’s home town from celebrating Easter with gusto. In a grassy field opposite one of England’s best-known garden centres, Father Stephen Maxfield has turned a medieval church into an Orthodox parish. In a message to parishioners, he reflects on the instructions he has seen on a packet of sweet-pea seeds, saying, "the purpose of all plants is to reproduce.” “In a sense that must be true,” Father Stephen muses, “but it doesn’t account for the strangeness and wonder of plants, the beauty of their flowers and foliage, the properties of their seeds…Surely there is more to it?” Whatever has changed in Shrewsbury in 200 years, the townspeople retain their curiosity over matters physical and metaphysical.

Christian beliefs | Questions of faith | Economist.com:

Kosovo | What price independence? | Economist.com

2007-04-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

What price independence?

Apr 3rd 2007
From Economist.com

The UN is considering the tricky issue of Kosovo's future

AFP

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EIGHT years ago NATO planes were bombing Serbia. They were at the beginning of a 78-day campaign, which concluded with Serbian forces being driven out of Kosovo, its southern province. For much of that period diplomats from the big countries involved were in constant contact in a frantic attempt to end the war. With Russia's help, the bombing was brought to an end by a resolution at the UN Security Council. On Tuesday April 3rd the Security Council will discuss a plan for Kosovo's independence. Russia's involvement means that the session is not expected to be easy.

There are still no good solutions to the thorny problem of Kosovo, only less bad ones. As far as most western countries are concerned a workable plan for the future of the province is now on the table. Russia however rejects this settlement, which proposes independence. Kosovo was (and technically remains) a province of Serbia. The overwhelming majority of its 2m people are ethnic Albanians who want nothing less than independence. Serbia’s leaders do not accept this.

Ever since the end of the Kosovo war, the territory has been under the jurisdiction of the UN. Martti Ahtisaari, a former Finnish president asked by the UN to come up with a solution for Kosovo, delivered his plans to the Security Council on March 26th. In his accompanying report, Mr Ahtisaari did some plain speaking. He says that Serbs and Albanians have “diametrically opposed positions” and that “no amount of additional talks, whatever the format, will overcome this impasse.” His conclusion is that, “the only viable option for Kosovo is independence, to be supervised for an initial period by the international community.”

Kosovo is now under the jurisdiction of the UN, so a new Security Council resolution is needed to change this. If the Security Council accepts Mr Ahtisaari’s plan then not only will NATO’s current peacekeeping force stay there, but a large EU mission will help to supervise the police and judiciary. And the position of a powerful international governor general will be created, with the ability to sack local officials and strike down laws inconsistent with the Ahtisaari settlement.

Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia's caretaker prime minister, hopes Russia will veto this “plan to dismember Serbia.” Independence, he gives warning, “would be an act of violence against the law.” Russian officials meanwhile insist that more talks are necessary. They see Kosovo’s independence as a precedent under international law, something that the Americans, British and others reject.

Across the former Soviet Union there are several “frozen conflicts” bearing some similarities to Kosovo. One is in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan; another is in Transdniestria, a breakaway part of Moldova. Perhaps Russian officials believe that it is possible to keep Kosovo frozen too and thus avoid hard decisions. The problem is that Kosovo is near boiling point and could explode at any moment.

Western diplomats warn that if Russia blocks Kosovo's independence at the UN, violence is certain to breakout. Also, without a Security Council resolution Kosovo's Albanians are likely to declare independence anyway. This could result in an almighty mess with some countries, perhaps including America, recognising the new state but with many others, including EU countries, not doing so.

Mr Ahtisaari has told sceptics within the EU (Spain, Slovakia and Greece) that European unity is more important than their doubts. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, has thrown his weight behind the plan, as has the head of NATO. Western diplomats are worried that Russia will block a new resolution and spark a another conflagration in the Balkans. But Russia may not want to pick a fight against both America and the EU.

No doubt some secret, bilateral diplomacy is underway, with senior American diplomats asking Russia what it wants in exchange for supporting a new UN resolution. If there is a new resolution we may not know until the history books are written what price Russia extracted in exchange for its support.

Kosovo | What price independence? | Economist.com

Yemen's politics | Economist.com

2007-04-03T10:09:00.000-07:00

Yemen's politics

Apr 3rd 2007
From The Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire

A new corruption-busting prime minister is appointed

Ali Mohammed Mujawer, the newly appointed prime minister of Yemen, won a reputation as an effective opponent of corruption in his previous post as electricity minister. His clean-up efforts are reported to have included cutting off the power supply to a regional office of the ruling General People's Congress (GPC) for failing to pay its electricity bills for the past five years. The choice of Mr Mujawer reflects the concern of the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to convince international donors of the government's serious intent to press ahead with economic reforms and to combat waste and corruption. It also entails a division of labour between the roles of economic management, party politics--which will be the preserve of the outgoing prime minister, Abdelqader Ba Jammal--and security, which falls under Mr Saleh's remit.

Payback

Last November, following Mr Saleh's re-election, the government received pledges of US$4.7bn in aid over four years at a donor conference in London. One reason for the donors' munificence was the assurances from the government that procedures were being put in place to guarantee that aid would be effectively monitored and that funds would not disappear into the bureaucracy and informal economy, as has happened with previous such initiatives. The lion's share of the aid pledges came in the form of grants from Gulf Arab states, which not only have cash to spare as a result of the long oil boom but also have a vital interest in staving off economic collapse in their poor and populous Arabian neighbour. One of the least developed countries in the world—electricity coverage is only 30%, and 64% of the population do not have access to safe drinking water—Yemen is in dire need of external financial support.

Mr Mujawar, a French-trained economist, is expected to promote a number of younger technocrats to his cabinet. Donors will be watching closely to see what post (if any) is given to Abdel Karim al-Arhabi, who, as planning and international co-operation minister in the previous government, played a critical role in the success of the London conference.

The prime minister will take over stewardship of a five-year plan (2006-10), which aims to achieve average real GDP growth of over 7%, primarily through boosting capital expenditure and trimming current outlays. In order to achieve this, the government must make concerted efforts to eliminate subsidies, reduce the wage bill and contain defence outlays. However, it clearly still has a long way to go. According to the 2007 budget, the amount allotted solely to the oil products subsidy is greater than the total capital projects budget, despite the government's pledge in its five-year plan to cease all subsidies by 2010.

The Ministry of Finance has kept to its pledge not to include the London donor funds in its budgetary accounts. Its promise to keep the aid monies outside its Treasury accounts helped to assuage concerns among foreign donors that their contributions might not be directed into capital projects as intended, but instead be used to postpone much-need fiscal reform, or, more seriously, be lost to corruption. This has, however, caused the government to come in for sustained criticism from the parliamentary opposition, which has accused it of failing to tackle seriously the country's high poverty levels. It will be up to Mr Mujawar to address these concerns.

Huthi rebellion

In announcing the new appointment, Mr Saleh made clear that he wished the outgoing prime minister, Mr Ba Jammal, to focus on his job as secretary-general of the GPC, with parliamentary elections on the horizon in 2008 or 2009. Of more immediate concern for the country's political leaders is the continuing rebellion in the north-western Saada province by radical members of the Zaydi sect, a branch of Shia Islam that is prevalent in this part of the Arabian peninsula. The revolt started in September 2004 when members of a Shia sub-sect led by Hussein Badr al-Din al-Huthi, the Believing Youth, began to sow dissent in protest against the government's co-operation with the US in its "war on terror". After sporadic clashes and a series of short-lived truces, heavy fighting between government forces and the Huthis broke out in January 2007, as Mr Saleh announced his intention of eradicating the group after it had killed several soldiers in a surprise raid on their military base. The anti-Huthi campaign has continued over the past two months, with heavy casualties reported on both sides, as well as among the civilian population.

Iranian role?

The government claims that the Huthis have benefited from external support, but has stopped short of making any specific accusations. The combination of Shia militancy and a strong anti-US stance suggests that the Huthis might see Iran as potential ally. The Yemeni foreign minister, Abu Bakr Abdullah al-Qirbi, said, after a recent visit to Tehran, that there was no evidence that the Iranian government was backing the Huthi rebels, but he added that the rebels had received support from "Shia religious circles", according to Al-Waset, a local weekly newspaper.

There have also been reports that Yemeni security forces recently shot down a pilotless reconnaissance drone with Iranian markings in the Hadhramaut area of south Yemen. However, the government has made no statement on the affair.

Politics this week | Economist.com

2007-04-02T18:24:00.000-07:00

Politics this week

Mar 29th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Iran captured 15 British sailors and marines at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Britain released navigational evidence indicating that they were taken in Iraqi territorial waters; Iran showed its captives on state television and said it would release the one woman it held. See article

Gunmen killed at least 70 Sunnis in Tal Afar in Iraq. Elsewhere, Iraq's deputy prime minister, Salam al-Zubaie, was hurt in a suicide-bomb attack. Nine people were killed in the assassination attempt, which occurred while Mr Zubaie, a Sunni, attended prayers.

Condoleezza Rice, America's secretary of state, persuaded Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, to promise to hold regular fortnightly meetings. Meanwhile, members of the Arab League, meeting in Riyadh, offered Israel peace if it withdrew to its pre-1967 boundaries and accepted the right of all Palestinian refugees to return. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah opened the conference and called America's occupation of Iraq “illegal”. See article

The government of Egypt won a referendum endorsing changes to the constitution which, it claimed, would strengthen democracy. Critics said the changes would in fact make the country less free. Amid accusations of ballot-rigging, turnout was just 27%. See article

Morgan Tsvangirai, the main leader of the opposition in Zimbabwe, was briefly arrested in a raid on his party's headquarters, two weeks after being beaten up by the police. President Robert Mugabe, who is under increasing pressure to step down, attended a meeting of regional leaders in Tanzania. See article

War-powers resolution

After weeks of manoeuvring, America's Democrats scored a legislative coup by passing a war-spending bill in the House of Representatives and looked set to do the same in the Senate. These link funding for the war in Iraq to a timetable for withdrawing American troops. George Bush said the plan would hamstring operations and promised a veto. See article

In the first trial under a new system of military courts to be held at Guantánamo Bay, David Hicks, an Australian, pleaded guilty to a charge of helping al-Qaeda fight American troops in Afghanistan. Mr Hicks's case has become a hot political issue in Australia, where the government has been criticised for not intervening on his behalf.

A fork in the road

AFP

In a big defeat for Quebec separatism, the Parti Québécois was beaten into third place in a provincial election by Action Démocratique du Québec, which favours an “autonomous” Quebec within Canada, and the Liberals, who clung on for a second term but with a legislative minority. See article

Colombia's government rejected a leaked report from the CIA which claimed that General Mario Montoya, now the army commander, had collaborated with right-wing paramilitaries during an operation against left-wing guerrillas in Medellín in 2002.

Chile's president, Michelle Bachelet, reshuffled her cabinet, sacking four ministers. She has faced criticism over a botched public-transport scheme in the capital, Santiago, and a lack of decisive leadership. See article

Police in Jamaica said that Bob Woolmer, the Pakistan cricket coach found dead in his hotel room, was murdered by “manual strangulation”. Pakistan, along with India, was surprisingly eliminated from the cricket World Cup being staged in the Caribbean. See article

Getting bolder

The war in Sri Lanka intensified. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam launched their first-ever air strike, on an air-force base next to Colombo's international airport. In the east of the country, government forces took an important Tiger base. Some 155,000 people have been displaced by the fighting in the east in the past six weeks. See article

The United Nations' food programme reported that North Korea had admitted it needed assistance to cope with food shortages.

Thailand's prime minister rejected military calls for an emergency decree to quell public protests. An election is planned for December.

Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, repeated in parliament Japan's 1993 apology for the military brothels set up in the second world war. He did not, however, retract controversial statements casting doubt on whether the prostitutes had been coerced.

To no one's surprise, Donald Tsang was re-elected as Hong Kong's chief executive by a committee designed to ensure China's man always wins.

China's president, Hu Jintao, visited Moscow for a state visit, marking the beginning of the “China in Russia” year. The two countries announced a joint effort to explore Mars and one of its moons in 2009.

And many more?

EPA

The European Union marked 50 years since its founding Treaty of Rome with a string of birthday bashes. European heads of government issued a “Berlin declaration” that avoided any specific mention of reviving the stalled EU constitution but instead used coded words about putting the club on a “renewed common basis” before mid-2009.

Nicolas Sarkozy stepped down as France's interior minister to concentrate on running for the French presidency. The latest polls have narrowed his lead over the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, with the centrist François Bayrou dropping back. See article

The United Nations envoy for Kosovo sent his plan for conditional independence for the Serb province to the UN Security Council. The Russians are threatening to veto any resolution not acceptable to Serbia.

Latvia and Russia signed a treaty demarcating their border, after a 16-year dispute since the break-up of the Soviet Union.

The Northern Ireland peace process culminated in a power-sharing deal between Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists and Gerry Adams's Sinn Fein. In May Mr Paisley will become first minister, with Mr Adams's second-in-command, Martin McGuinness, as his deputy. See article

A plan was unveiled to split Britain's Home Office. It will boost its focus on domestic security issues, such as terrorist threats, while prisons and probation will go to a new justice ministry. See article

Politics this week | Economist.com

Odd traditions | Fools' paradise | Economist.com

2007-04-02T18:23:00.000-07:00

Fools' paradise

Apr 1st 2007 | HELSINKI, MALABO AND PARIS
From Economist.com

Finland leads the world in weird sports and pranks

THE Finns like a laugh. Famous for an annual wife-carrying competition, for regular success at the world air-guitar championship and record-breaking hurling of rubber boots and mobile phones, Finland can now claim another accolade: its citizens are reportedly the world’s keenest pranksters. Celebrated for a full week at the beginning of April in the capital, Helsinki, and for weeks at a time in rural areas, the traditional “spring joke” in Finland has been raised to a national art form.

This long involved young men trying to catch the eye of women, typically by donning fancy dress (in the cold war a favourite was the garb of Soviet border guards) or through good-natured abduction—often in combination. More recently motorists have learned to watch for fake road-safety signs, which frequently cause springtime gridlock and collisions. Diplomats are increasingly wary of water-bomb attacks at functions—one thin-lipped European ambassador lodged a protest after being drenched in 2005. Even political leaders indulge. In 2003 the government apologised after stating that Finland wanted Sweden expelled from the European Union during a row about pickled herring.

But Finland’s enthusiasm is not unique. Dr Is Poli-Savon, an anthropologist at the Paris-based Fairpooll Foundation, says that in many countries fooling is seen as a celebration of the end of winter. “In modern societies it serves as a rare chance for semi-subversive behaviour within safely defined parameters”, he says. Polls conducted by his team of researchers suggest that, despite suspicions to the contrary, many different cultures do share a common sense of humour.

A surprising number of German adults take part in April Fooling, along with many French (see chart) who mark “poisson d’avril” by sticking paper fish on each others’ backs. Most Iranian jokers choose April 3rd, the 13th day of the Persian calendar, for mild joking. But not absolutely everyone sees the funny side. Adults in Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich speck of a country in west Africa, are reportedly the least inclined to find anything to chuckle about. Fooling by anyone over the age of 13 years recently became a criminal offence, with exceptions only for the president and his extended family.

Odd traditions | Fools' paradise | Economist.com

Art.view | Bubbles, booms and busts | Economist.com

2007-03-31T10:06:00.000-07:00

Bubbles, booms and busts

Mar 31st 2007
From Economist.com

Selling the history of financial speculation

THE FINANCIAL world is flooded with literature: on hedge-fund investing, portfolio theory, discounted cash flows; on options, kurtosis and PEG ratios; on alpha, beta and omega. There is so much noise—so many titles and so much repetition—that it is easy to forget that there was once a time when the most common market aids were the pencil, the tape and the telephone.

Christopher Dennistoun, a British antiquarian book dealer (and part-time stock trader), has spent 30 years collecting works on the history of the stockmarket and financial speculation. Some remain in print. Others, long forgotten, await resurrection. This is a field that lies well outside the interest of most booksellers, and it has prospered beneath the radar of the auction rooms.

Even though Mr Dennistoun has immersed himself in the subject, tracking down such arcane books has never been easy, which is why this set of more than 700 volumes is unique.

Only the University of Toledo’s Hess collection of books on Wall Street, with an emphasis on technical analysis, is reckoned to come anywhere near to what Mr Dennistoun is offering.

The golden era of speculation dates arguably from 1880 to 1960, when New York was predominant. But the collection starts well before that. The earliest example is a rare London jobber’s sheet issued on May 3rd 1698 by John Castaing “at his Office at Jonathan’s Coffee-house” that posts the prices of marketable securities all over Europe, from Hamburg to Cadiz.

The first great stockmarket crash occurred in 1720. For well over a year before that Daniel Defoe had been pillorying the stock-market manipulation and sham reports that were used to push up stock prices. As Mr Dennistoun’s copy of Defoe’s book, “The Anatomy of the Exchange Alley”, recounts, “’tis a compleat system of knavery; that ’tis a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by trick”.

The fury this generated is also recorded vividly in a series of copper-engraved satirical cartoons entitled “Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaascheid” or “The Great Mirror of Folly” (pictured below) that mock the bubble companies of the first great Amsterdam tulip scam.

The 19th century was also punctuated by another series of booms and busts, producing a body of “how-to” literature that described both how to make money and how to avoid being had.

Louie FascioloThe bottom of the market

But it was not until 1841 that the idea of crowd-driven market frenzy was formally introduced into Western literature.

In a remarkable three-volume series, “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions”, Charles Mackay, a precursor to Gustave le Bon and Elias Canetti, examined a range of speculative bubbles. There are chapters on the Amsterdam tulip mania, on the Mississippi scheme dreamt up by John Law (looking quite the gent in his buckled shoes and frockcoat weighed down with frogging), and on the “popular admiration for great thieves” such as Dick Turpin, Jonathan Wild, and Claude Duval, reckoned to be one of the most dashing highwaymen to haunt the roads of England.

By the early 20th century speculation was becoming more popular, and printing presses in Europe and America were working full tilt to turn out works on the stock market. Here you can see the beginnings of formal analysis. In 1898 “The Game in Wall Street and How To Play It Successfully” offered one of the first stock charts, showing points of accumulation and distribution. Meanwhile market theorists such as Robert Giffen, an English economist, and Samuel Benner (in “Prophecies of Future Ups and Downs in Prices”) tried to analyse market cycles and fluctuations, foreshadowing the work of men such as Nikolai Kondratieff and R.N. Elliott.

But it was the makers of huge fortunes, especially during the roaring 1920s, who captured popular fascination. Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and, later, Louis Auchincloss all wrote novels centred on men who made markets. Some were clean; the most exciting were not. Says Guy Prime, Mr Auchincloss’s hero: “I am a symbol of financial iniquity, of betrayal of trust, of the rot of the old Wall Street before the cleansing hose of the New Deal.”

Their models were men who went head to head, like Arthur Cutten and Jesse Lauriston Livermore. Livermore is still regarded as the quintessential speculator (he is the subject of three biographies), but it was Cutten, the self-styled “dirt farmer”, who was the most successful. In 1925 he is reckoned to have taken as much as a $15m profit from the wheat pits alone.

That said, his book, “The Story of a Speculator”, which he had privately printed in 1936, has to be the world’s driest attempt at autobiography. “I like to make money,” he begins. “I have made it because I like to make it”. Cutten may have faded from history now, but he lives on in Mr Dennistoun’s collection, a testament to man’s lasting desire to make a quick buck.

Christopher Dennistoun’s collection of books about stockmarkets and financial speculation will be offered for sale by Bernard Shapero Rare Books, London, in May. Price: £375,000 ($738,000)

Art.view | Bubbles, booms and busts | Economist.com

Iran | Stand-off in the Persian Gulf | Economist.com

2007-03-27T14:02:00.000-07:00

Stand-off in the Persian Gulf

Mar 27th 2007 | NEW YORK
From Economist.com

Iran has picked a ticklish time to act like a rogue state—probably intentionally

AFP

Get article background

AT FIRST blush it looks like a re-run. In 2004 Iranian forces, without provocation, snatched British sailors in the Persian Gulf. Last week Iranian forces, probably the Revolutionary Guard, did so again, detaining 15 sailors on patrol in small boats. But the later incident is proving to be the more worrying. In 2004, Iran’s government held the British sailors for a while, made them confess to crossing into Iranian waters, and let them go. This time, Iran evidently wants more.

This time the British insist that there is absolutely no doubt its sailors and marines were well on the Iraqi side of the Shatt-al-Arab, the waterway dividing Iraq and Iran. They were on a routine mission inspecting an Iraqi ship, something that Iranians have often monitored them doing. Iran, in particular the Revolutionary Guards who have reportedly taken the sailors to Tehran, is in a provocative mood. Shortly before the Britons were snatched last week the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, commemorating the Persian new year, delivered an unusually bristling and defiant speech for that normally cheerful holiday. He gave warning that Iran would strike back with all its capabilities at any invading enemy.

He was referring to the escalating tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme. America and Israel say that Iran is building bombs, and many think that one or the other may yet use an air strike to slow or end the Iranian efforts. Others are making their frustrations plain. In December, the UN’s Security Council passed mild sanctions on Iran. When the Iranians snatched the Britons last week, the council was close to passing new anti-Iran measures, targeting arms exports, a regime-connected bank, and individuals tied to the nuclear programme. The kidnap did not help the country’s case. It may have helped swing grudging members, including two Muslim countries (Qatar and Indonesia), behind the vote.

Even the new measures will not bite hard. But Iran may worry that it is losing more ground. A report last week in the New York Times suggested that Russia will no longer deliver fuel for an Iranian nuclear-power reactor it is building at Bushehr, unless Iran suspends enrichment. The Russians quickly denied it. But there may be cracks in the Iran-Russia relationship nonetheless. Russia may be getting exasperated over late payments, not politics. (Mr Ahmadinejad’s free-spending politics, along with a febrile economy, have pushed even Iran’s oil-rich finances into shaky territory.) Whatever the reason, Iran may be risking alienating its best friend among the permanent, veto-wielding members of the Security Council.

A final reason Iran may be causing mischief is the number of its own personnel in its adversaries’ hands. In December, American troops captured five Iranians at an office in the Kurdish part of northern Iraq. America says they are Revolutionary Guard troops, clearly linked to Iraq’s Shia militants. Iran says they are diplomats. Worse for Iran, a former deputy defence minister, Ali Reza Asghari, disappeared in March while in Istanbul. Iran insists that Israel’s Mossad or the CIA snatched him. But Mr Asghari seems likely to have defected. As a former high-ranking emissary from Iran to Lebanon’s Hizbullah, he is likely to know much about Iran’s international terrorist activities, among other things western countries would like to hear about.

Iran’s seizure of the British personnel thus may be a sign that Iran is feeling squeezed. But squeezed is not the same as weak. Iran hawks believe that the Islamic Republic has “sleeper cells” in Europe, America and elsewhere standing by ready to commit terrorist acts. The kidnapping is one way of reminding negotiating partners that Iran can be a great deal of trouble when it wants to be. But the reckless move is receiving greater international condemnation than Iran’s 2004 sailor-snatching. In raising the stakes, Iran is also dangerously raising the temperature of the nuclear diplomacy.

Iran | Stand-off in the Persian Gulf | Economist.com

The European Union | Don’t mention the constitution | Economist.com

2007-03-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

Don’t mention the constitution

Mar 27th 2007
From Economist.com

Germany tries to look to the next 50 years of the EU

AFP

YOUNG Berliners partied the night away, with free beer and sausages and a Danish hip-hop group made up of Catholics and Muslims. But this was the 50th birthday bash of the European Union, so politicians were not content to left the festivities take care of themselves. A couple of dozen men in suits, and a lady in a yellow jacket, felt compelled to issue a document (where would the EU be without memoranda?). Here was the EU’s real celebration: the Berlin declaration.

Afterwards, the suits and jacket dominated the front pages of German newspapers. It had all been, apparently, a triumph for Angel Merkel, chancellor and host. She had managed to create something—“a good feeling, a good atmosphere”, burbled an EU diplomat—out of nothing. Or perhaps, if you actually read the document, you might conclude she had created hardly anything out of not very much. It was the triumph of virtual politics.

“For centuries Europe has been an idea, holding out peace and understanding,” the declaration begins. Such rhetorical flourishes obviously require a wide latitude of tolerance but, even so, this was bit thick. For most centuries of its history, the idea of Europe was much more likely to be associated with wars of conquest than with peace and understanding. If peace was to be found anywhere (which it wasn’t very often), it was more likely to be encountered inside nation states. But in polite European society, nation states are not usually considered sources of good things.

“That hope [of peace and understanding] has been fulfilled,” the document continues. This is remarkably self-confident. Custom normally dictates a certain tentativeness at this point in official declarations. People prefer to make references to aims, not achievements. America’s Declaration of Independence talks only of “the pursuit of happiness”, not the catching of it; its constitution was established “in order to form a more perfect union”, not having created one.

Throughout most of the text, the Berlin declaration is a strange mixture. Parts are inoffensively correct: “the individual is paramount”. Parts are surprisingly correct: “we have a unique way of living and working together in the European Union”. Boastful but accurate: no other institution has entwined national and supra-national authority together in quite the EU’s way. And some is outright misleading: “The European Union wants to promote freedom and development in the world.” Well, it may want those, but in practice the common agricultural policy has done as much as anything to beggar African countries.

“Thanks to the yearning for freedom of the peoples of central and eastern Europe, the unnatural division of Europe is now consigned to the past.” Really? That was a very odd thing to say the day before Martti Ahtisaari presented his plan for the independence of Kosovo to the United Nations Security Council. In the western Balkans, Ukraine and Belarus the unnatural divisions of Europe have certainly not been consigned to the past—to say nothing of Turkey’s desire to erase a boundary further east by joining the EU.

The German government originally wanted the Berlin declaration to rise above day-to-day squabbles and to stand the test of time. Of course, it couldn’t really. Two parts provide a practical guide to what the EU thinks it is doing now, and what the German government (at least) hopes it will do next. The document includes a laundry list: “We will fight terrorism, organised crime and illegal immigration...we intend jointly to lead the way in energy policy and climate protection.” This is the lowest common denominator between countries such as Belgium and Germany who like the EU for its own sake and want it to do as much as possible, and countries such as Britain and Poland which want the EU to restrict itself to a series of specific areas.

The declaration ends with the German government’s own little wish list, which only has one item on it: “we are united in our aim of placing the European Union on a renewed common basis before the European parliamentary elections in 2009.” This is code for: we want to bring back the European constitution by that date, though the constitution is anathema to several countries, so the word itself cannot be mentioned in the text (nor will it be mentioned in the revised constitution itself).

Mrs Merkel hopes that leaders will agree on a timetable in June, and hold a big conference on a new constitution in the autumn. Whoever is president of France and prime minister of Britain at that point will therefore have an enormous headache dumped on them as soon as they take office. But, of course, they were not around to sign the Berlin declaration.

The European Union | Don’t mention the constitution | Economist.com

Iraq's refugees | Hollowing out | Economist.com

2007-03-26T19:14:00.000-07:00

Hollowing out

Mar 26th 2007
From Economist.com

Huge numbers of Iraqis have fled their homes

AFP

Get article background

ONE result of endless violence in Iraq is that Iraqis are voting with their feet. The ethnic and sectarian free-for-all has now displaced around 4m people, roughly a seventh of Iraq’s population. Of those driven from their homes, a few have made it to Europe and beyond: there are more Iraqi asylum seekers this year than any other nationality. Around half of those who have left the country have found shelter—but rarely work or permanent homes—in nearby countries, especially in Syria and Jordan. Damascus, Syria’s capital, now has fully Iraqi neighbourhoods where posters of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia militia leader, festoon the walls. It takes money and connections to make it out. So many of those who have left are from Iraq’s middle and professional classes, leaving crucial shortages of doctors, for example.

Many of those who could get out of Iraq did so in the early days. Now the borders are harder to cross, but displacement continues. The number of Iraqis fleeing for safer areas within the country is ballooning. Some 1.9m are now thought to be “internally displaced”, nearly as many as have left Iraq. They tend to come from Iraq’s centre, particularly Baghdad, and flee to the north and (to a lesser extent) the south. The spark seems to have been the bombing in February 2006 of a revered Shia mosque in Samarra, which threw Iraq’s Sunni-Shia conflict into high gear. Since then over 720,000 people have been displaced within Iraq according to estimates from the UN’s refugee agency. Each month, 50,000 more join them.

A new report by Refugees International, an NGO, gives a flavour of the plight they face. Poor Iraqis are entitled to rations of essentials like food and cooking oil. But their ration card doubles as their voter-roll card. To transfer it from one province to another is a bureaucratic nightmare few Iraqis can navigate, leaving them destitute when they move.

Ethnicity also matters. Arabs forced from central Iraq to the Kurdish north have trouble finding Arabic-language schools for their children. Single Arab males are viewed warily too. But in a particular irony, Kurds fleeing violence in the oil-rich but ethnically divided city of Kirkuk are turned away from the borders of the Kurdish enclave. The reason? Kirkuk’s status is to be put to a referendum later this year, and Kurdish leaders want to keep as many Kurds there as possible to vote the right way. Of all groups, it is easiest for an Arab Christian to move to Kurdistan.

Kristele Younes, a researcher for the report who is testifying before Congress this week, points out a number of the often bizarre reasons why Iraq’s internally displaced are in such a state. Neither Iraq’s American overseers nor the Iraqi government recognise their plight as a humanitarian emergency, requiring the direct and immediate attention of specialised agencies dealing with refugees, food or children. Instead, Iraq is seen as a development matter. Thus aid is channelled through government ministries the way it might be in the average poor country trying to get somewhat richer. The trouble is that Iraq more closely approximates to a failed state.

For the American government to admit the magnitude of the problem has been politically near impossible, however much noise is made about it. Iraqis who have worked for the Americans have been especially frequently targeted by violence and threats. As a result, America is planning to increase the numbers of Iraqis it will welcome as immigrants itself—from a shameful 202 in 2006 to 7,000 this year. Still stingy but better than nothing.

Iraq's refugees | Hollowing out | Economist.com

Changing the Blogger Title Tag ~ Widget-based

2007-03-25T07:59:00.000-07:00

Monday, November 13, 2006

Changing the Blogger Title Tag

This widget will change the Blogger's title tag to help amplify relevant keywords to your blog which improve the search engine ranking of your blog.

This is written for Blogger's Beta version and so it only works in Beta. If you're looking for the classic version, please visit Tech.Life.Blogged or Blogtimize!.

How does it work?

By default, your Blogger's title on the top left displays your blog title, and if it's in the items page, it'll include your post title as well.
e.g. Widget-based XML: Changing the Blogger Title Tag

It works the same way for labels and archives pages.

Installation

Find the following codes, near the top of your template:
Changing the Blogger Title Tag ~ Widget-based

Blogger Label Cloud

2007-03-25T07:47:00.000-07:00

Setup and configuration for Blogger in Beta Label Clouds

Comments and Problems can be reported at the home post for this at
Code for Beta Blogger Label Cloud

Here is the code and setup information to use the Label Cloud in Blogger Beta.
First you obviously have to have a beta blog and be using the layouts templates,
and you must have some posts labeled already. (There needs to be at least ONE label with
more than ONE entry or the scripts hit a bug - so have at least one label with more than one entry before
starting).

Make sure you backup your template before making any changes!

Log into Blogger and go to your layouts section. On the 'Page Elements' setup page
make sure you have a label widget already installed where you want it (it can be moved around
later). Then go to the Edit HTML settings and leave the widgets NOT exapanded. It will make
things easier to deal with.

Now the code comes in 3 parts. A section for the stylesheet, a configurations section,
and then the actual widget itself.

The first part to put in is the stylesheet section. The following code needs to be copied
and inserted into your stylesheet, which in the layouts is marked out by the tags.
Easiest thing to do is find the closing skin tag

Selengkapnya
Beta Blogger Label Cloud

The Middle East | Time for an Arab road map | Economist.com

2007-03-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

Time for an Arab road map

Mar 22nd 2007
From The Economist print edition

Israel's neighbours should seize the initiative to resolve the conflict with Palestinians

PALESTINIANS have been on the brink of civil war ever since Hamas swept the old Fatah elite from power last year. With a unity government sworn in on March 17th, they may have made peace among themselves. But does this welcome development bring them any closer to making peace with Israel?

The new cabinet is led by the same prime minister from Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, whose first government was ostracised by Israel and the world because it rejected three demands: renounce violence, recognise Israel and honour previous Palestinian agreements. This time members of Fatah, small centrist parties and independents have been given key ministries. But of the three tests, the government has agreed, in a roundabout way, only to “respect” earlier accords. Indeed, Mr Haniyeh declared that Palestinians were entitled to wage “resistance in all its forms” against Israel (see article).

Peace comes in half-steps

Does the creation of this government mark a moderate step by Hamas or a surrender by Fatah? Many Palestinians say Hamas is being more pragmatic: though it will not accept the three demands now, it might do so in the context of a credible peace. Israel disagrees, accusing Fatah of signing up to an extremist agenda. Israel is therefore refusing to recognise the new government or release its funds. And it has downgraded contacts with Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president.

Though Israel's exasperation is understandable, it would be wiser to take a half-step in response to what some see as a half-step by Hamas. It could for example give back some money for humanitarian needs and maintain contact with the moderates it has always talked to. America and Europe are already moving this way, and Israel risks isolating itself.

The Arab states have a role to play as well. At a summit in Riyadh next week their leaders intend to relaunch the peace initiative they signed in Beirut in 2002. This offered Israel peace and normal relations in return for a full withdrawal from the territories it occupied in 1967. But the initiative was stillborn, not least because it coincided with the Palestinian intifada and one especially terrible atrocity in which a Hamas suicide-bomber blew himself up in a hotel, killing 30 Israelis at Passover. Arab leaders did not utter a word of condemnation. The response of Ariel Sharon, then prime minister, was to send his army back into the cities of the West Bank, from which it had withdrawn under the Oslo peace accords.

The Arabs are right to try again. But this time they need to go beyond the simple declaration of a take-it-or-leave-it final deal. They should draw up their own “road map” to peace.

An international road map has of course existed for four years. This envisaged three steps. First would come an end to terrorism and a freeze on Jewish settlement in the occupied territories. The Palestinians would then get a provisional state with temporary borders. Only later would there be negotiation on a permanent peace. This map's defect was that it detailed the first steps but was vague about the destination. Without knowing that, neither side was eager to start the journey. The Beirut initiative suffers from the opposite weakness. It specifies a destination that no Israeli government could accept, since it entails Israel giving up every inch of land occupied in 1967 and implies letting all refugees displaced by the creation of the Jewish state return to what is now Israel.

In fact, as serious peacemakers on both sides know, any mutually acceptable peace would have to resemble Bill Clinton's “parameters” of 2000: Israel's withdrawal from most but not all of the West Bank, land swaps to make up for any chunks it keeps, a deal to share Jerusalem and the return of most refugees to a Palestinian state rather than Israel proper.

A good way to restart diplomacy would be for America and the Arab states to confirm that this is roughly how they see a final agreement. They might thus reassure Palestinians that they will get a fair deal, and assuage Israeli fears of being confronted with excessive demands. At the very least, the Arabs should indicate that their Beirut initiative was a starting point, not a final demand. An Arab road map might then offer Israel step-by-step rewards—such as greater diplomatic acceptance and economic co-operation—in return for each Israeli move.

Though such actions will not resolve anything at a stroke, they would over time strengthen moderates in both camps. The Arabs have more influence on Israeli opinion than they imagine, if they dared to use it.

The Middle East | Time for an Arab road map | Economist.com

Online video | Down the YouTube? | Economist.com

2007-03-23T18:49:00.000-07:00

The online-video site gets a heavyweight competitor

IT HAS been a terrible month for Google, the biggest search engine and the internet’s reigning superpower, and for its subsidiary, YouTube, the pioneer and precocious leader of online video. Users may love them, but the old-media companies, feeling increasingly exploited, loathe them, sue them, and gang up on them. And that matters, because neither Google nor YouTube, as quintessential “new-media” companies, own any of the content that they organise so well.

With the announcement on Thursday March 22nd of a new online-video venture between NBC Universal, the huge media unit of General Electric, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, almost every big media company is now, with varying degrees of hostility, aligned against Google and YouTube.

Viacom is suing them for $1 billion, alleging massive copyright theft; it is also teaming up with an innovative new online-television company, Joost, to make its videos available legally. Walt Disney is allied with Apple and its iTunes store, which is increasingly a squeaky-clean (in terms of copyright law) video retailer besides being a music store. And the NBC/News Corporation venture, which may yet be joined by Sony and others, embraces not only a vast library of video content but also an equally staggering distribution alliance. The videos will play not only on the venture’s new (as yet unnamed) site to be launched this summer, but on the websites of Yahoo!, Time Warner’s AOL, and Microsoft’s MSN, the three biggest web portals. At a stroke the venture will, legally, reach almost the entire American internet audience.

Of greater concern to YouTube, however, is the clear evidence that NBC and News Corporation both realise that they must not try to trap viewers on specific websites, but rather let them watch videos “on the sites where they live,” as Peter Chernin, News Corporation’s president, puts it. Teenagers will be able to post video clips on their own MySpace pages; even bloggers using independent services will be able to embed videos on their personal diaries. They will be able to discuss and annotate the clips and films with their own gossip, and thus be “social” in exactly the same way that YouTube allows. Just as on YouTube, the audience will be in control, by rating videos and spreading them “virally” throughout the entire web.

The only remaining difference will be that the content spread in this manner will be entirely and uncontroversially legal, and that advertising revenues will remain under the full control of the content owners. For the first time, it will be in the interests of the media companies to spill their best content onto the web. This is in stark contrast to the situation on YouTube today.

All this points to a clear trend. All over the chaotic and confusing field of online video, once naughty revolutionaries are suddenly becoming shockingly well behaved. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that accounts for a big chunk of all internet traffic, has in the past been used for illegal trading of films. But it recently announced a new identity, in which it licences films from Hollywood and shares the rental and sales revenues with the studios. Joost, which was launched by the founders of Skype and KaZaa, another peer-to-peer service that was once used to trade pirated music, has been designed from scratch to be impeccably legal and to make money for participating content owners.

The future, in short, appears to favour old-fashioned, professionally produced content from which traditional media companies can make money. This comes as a shock after a year when YouTube seemed to herald the dawn of a new and different media era—that of “user-generated”, or amateur, content.

Was YouTube—and the bigger “Web 2.0” movement that it symbolised—just a brief bout of silliness, an echo of the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s? It was not. YouTube has already changed society and democracy in lasting ways, by lowering the barriers to entry for talented amateurs to reach an audience, and by providing an outlet for the creative impulse of millions. This is hardly trivial. But what YouTube has not done is to make professional content less attractive. YouTube has earned its place in the history books; just not on a profit-and-loss account.

Online video | Down the YouTube? | Economist.com

Iraq | Counting the cost | Economist.com

2007-03-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

Counting the cost

Mar 20th 2007
From Economist.com

Four years after the invasion Iraq is still in turmoil

AFP/Reuters

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FEW will celebrate the fourth anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq on Tuesday March 20th. It was supposed to serve as an example of how to build democracy in the Middle East, but turned into a model for how to wreck a country. It was meant to give warning to rogue regimes and instead strengthened radical states such as Syria and Iran. It was intended to confront Islamist extremism at its source, but intensified the appeal of global jihad. It was planned as a demonstration of America’s global power, but ended up sapping its military might in a debilitating insurgency.

Even the final demise of Saddam Hussein, one of the vilest dictators in the world, went wrong. He maintained a striking self-composure in the face of sectarian jeering when he went to the gallows in December. The justifications for the war have collapsed. The pre-invasion rationale was to rid Saddam of weapons of mass destruction, but none were found. The post-invasion objective was the promotion of democracy, but this has fed sectarian tensions in Iraq and led to the rise of Islamists elsewhere, such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories. All that is left is President George Bush’s argument that however grim the situation may appear now, it would be grimmer still if America withdrew and abandoned the country to jihadists.

Could it have been different? Perhaps. American forces invaded Iraq with enough strength to defeat Saddam’s weakened army, but not enough to establish security. Looting and violence broke out from the moment Saddam’s statue was brought down in view of the world’s cameras, and violence has worsened every year since. The allies expected to take over a functioning civil service, but discovered the regime had been hollowed out by years of oppression and sanctions.

The disbanding of the army, and the removal of Baath party members, destroyed the remainder of the Iraqi state’s structure and flooded the streets with armed and angry men. Plans for the political transition to Iraqi rule were mired in confusion. Resistance to the American presence would probably have emerged, although the errors of the post-Saddam era undoubtedly aggravated the insurgency.

Mr Bush and his entourage dreamed of rolling back dictatorship and extreme Islamism in the same way that Ronald Reagan confronted and defeated communism in Europe. But the Middle East is different, not least because of Arab resentment of America’s alliance with Israel and the plight of Palestinians. Mr Bush’s lieutenants should have been forewarned by the Reagan administration’s experience in Lebanon in 1982. At the time, American-led multinational forces were perceived to be intervening on the side of the invading Israeli army and became the target for Shia militants, who pioneered the use of suicide car bombs against the American embassy and the marines’ barracks in 1983.

Mr Bush admits to making “mistakes” in Iraq but not to failure. He rejected the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that suggested a managed withdrawal and diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria. Instead he is redoubling his bet. He has appointed new commanders and ordered a “surge” of nearly 30,000 troops in an effort to stabilise the capital, Baghdad. American soldiers will now seek to protect the Iraqi population rather than trying just to kill and capture insurgents and terrorists. They are moving out of their secure bases into joint outposts with Iraqi soldiers and police. Success, Mr Bush said this week in a televised address, “will take months, not days or weeks”. But the president may be running out of time.

For many in Iraq, the surge is too little, too late. Most Iraqis have given up on America after four years of occupation and chaos, including the past year of particularly atrocious sectarian violence. Many have fled to neighbouring countries. In America, meanwhile, the advocates of “surge” worry that domestic support is dissolving. The war has sapped Mr Bush’s popularity and, with Congress now in Democrat hands, there is political opposition to the surge and growing demands for the troops to be brought home by autumn next year. The debate is no longer about how to achieve “victory” in Iraq, but how to limit America’s losses.

Iraq | Counting the cost | Economist.com

Iraq War forever alters D.C. landscape - Yahoo! News

2007-03-17T10:28:00.000-07:00

Iraq War forever alters D.C. landscape

By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer 57 minutes ago

Four years into the Iraq war, about the only thing that has not changed is President Bush's insistence the fight can be won.

With more than 3,200 U.S. troops dead and still no clear way out, the political landscape could not be more different.

Public support for the war has fallen to its lowest levels. Republicans have lost control of Congress because of voters' angst over the conflict. Even the president has acknowledged the tactical approach to the war must change.

The debate on whether to launch a pre-emptive attack against a nation has given way to this question: How soon should U.S. troops leave?

"The war that we the Congress authorized the president to engage in is different than the one we're in today," acknowledged GOP Rep. C.W. Bill Young (news, bio, voting record) of Florida, an ardent Bush supporter whose seat Democrats are targeting in the 2008 elections.

With sectarian attacks on the rise in Iraq, "I think we have to have a very serious appraisal of how you conduct yourself in that type of situation," Young said.

Young is not alone in questioning whether the U.S. is on the right track. Bush's critics and supporters alike say the four years of violence and the death toll has led to soul-searching over how far Congress should go to intervene in a war that has gone badly.

White House officials and many legal experts contend the Constitution gives the president supreme authority on foreign policy matters and control of the armed forces, whereas Congress' clearest option is to cut off money.

Democrats, reluctant to restrict that money for fear of being accused of abandoning the troops, are considering laws that would set a deadline for the war.

If these bills pass, Bush is expected to veto the legislation or ignore it.

But how much longer the president can hold out is uncertain. His Jan. 10 announcement that he planned to send in 21,500 more combat troops found support among most Republicans. Yet even they say the clock is ticking.

"If this current strategy doesn't work, the options aren't good," said Sen. John Thune (news, bio, voting record), R-S.D. If the violence continues, "you're going to see more and more people suggest we've got to do something different."

Such skepticism was rare in 2003 when the bombing began. Members of Congress lined up in support of the U.S.-led invasion; many were Democrats who did not want to appear reluctant to prevent another potential Sept. 11 attack.

Among those who voted in favor of the war are some of Bush's chief critics, including Democratic presidential contenders John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.

Since then, public sentiment toward the war has changed dramatically. Almost three-fourths of people in the U.S. supported the war when it began in March 2003, while one-fourth opposed it, according to Gallup polling at the time.

Last month, AP-Ipsos polling found that not quite four in 10 people surveyed agreed with the decision to go to war and six in 10 opposed — the same levels of support found by a recent Gallup poll.

The inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq did not help in maintaining support for the war. The claim that Saddam Hussein possessed such weapons was a main justification the administration used for the war.

Public acceptance of the war eroded as American casualties mounted and U.S. troops, initially focused on Sunni insurgents, instead had to grapple with Sunni-Shiite violence. This past week, the Pentagon said the violence was taking on aspects of a civil war.

Military officials agree that the task of easing that bloodshed is best accomplished by Iraqi security forces, once they become capable.

Other blows to the once-popular war effort were revelations of American forces abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha. Most recently there have been reports of substandard care of wounded troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

One political marker was last October when Virginia Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record) declared the war was "drifting sideways." A prominent Republican on military issues, Warner stood beside Bush in 2002 as the president signed into law the congressional authorization for the war.

But four years later, upon returning from a trip to Iraq, Warner said he had lost confidence that the Iraqi government was making progress and worried that sectarian violence had consumed Baghdad.

After the elections, Warner proposed a congressional resolution stating opposition to the president's plan to augment force levels. The resolution drowned amid partisan bickering and was never voted on, but it attracted enough Republican support to worry the White House that it was losing its support base.

In another sign of the changing times, news of al-Qaida member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession that he masterminded Sept. 11 and plotted some 30 other attacks quickly gave way to another development. House Democrats won their first vote on a war spending bill that would demand the president pull troops out of Iraq before September 2008.

As that confrontation looms in the full House, Bush's supporters say they will continue to review their options to bring troops home.

Young says regardless of everything that has happened, he is not thinking of abandoning his president. But when asked if the war is winnable, Young's response was more one of optimism than anything else.

"It has to be" winnable, he said. "We can't let terrorists continue to threaten the United States."

Iraq War forever alters D.C. landscape - Yahoo! News

Conservation | Spot the difference | Economist.com

2007-03-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

Spot the difference

Mar 17th 2007
From Economist.com

Conservationists claim to have found a new species of big cat. But this is just the latest case of species inflation

EPA/Reuters

TAXONOMIC history has been made this week, at least according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a conservation group. Scientists have described a new species of clouded leopard from the tropical forests of Indonesia with spots (or “clouds”, as they are poetically known) smaller than those of other clouded leopards, with fur a little darker and with a double—as opposed to a “partial double”—stripe down its back.

But no previously unknown beast has suddenly leapt out from the forest. Instead, some scientists have proposed a change in the official taxonomic accounting system of clouded leopards. Where there were four subspecies there will likely now be two species. A genetic analysis and a closer inspection of museum specimens’ coats published in Current Biology has found no relevant difference between three subspecies described 50 years ago from continental Asia and from the Hainan and Taiwan islands. The 5,000-11,000 clouded leopards on Borneo, the 3,000-7,000 on Sumatra, and the remaining few on the nearby Batu islands can now, the authors say, claim a more elevated distinction as a species.

What this actually means is fuzzy and whether it is scientifically important is questionable. In any case, biologists do not agree what species and subspecies are. Creatures are given Latin first and second names (corresponding to a genus and species) according to the convention of Carl von Linné, who was born 300 years ago this May. But Linneaus, as he is more commonly known, thought of species as perfectly discrete units created by God. Darwinism has them as mutable things, generated gradually over time by natural selection. So delineating when enough variation has evolved to justify a new category is largely a matter of taste.

Take ants and butterflies. Ant experts have recently been waging a war against all types of species subdivision. Lepidopterists, on the other hand, cling to the double barrel second names from their discipline’s 19th- century tradition, and categorise many local subclasses within species found over wide areas. Thus it would be futile—if one were so inclined—to attempt to compare the diversity of ant and butterfly populations.

The traditional way around the problem is to call a species all members of a group that share the same gene pool. They can mate together and produce fertile offspring. Whether Indonesian clouded leopards can make cubs with continental ones remains unknown but seems probable. Instead, the claim the claim this week is that genetics and slight differences in fur patterning are enough to justify rebranding the clouded leopard as two significant types. Genetically, that makes sense if many DNA variations correlate perfectly between members of the two groups. The authors did find some correlation, but they looked for it in only three Indonesian animals. A larger sample would have made the task more difficult.

One thing is abundantly clear: conservationists who are trying to stop the destruction of the leopards’ habitat in Borneo and Sumatra see the announcement of a new species of big cat as a means to gain publicity and political capital. Upgrading subspecies to species is a strategy which James Mallet, of University College London, likes to call species inflation. It is a common by-product of genetic analysis, which can reveal differences between populations that the eye cannot. Creating ever more detailed genetic categories means creating smaller and increasingly restricted populations of more species. The trouble is that risks devaluing the importance of the term species.

The problem of redefining species by genetics is the creation of taxonomic confusion, a potentially serious difficulty for conservationists and others. Take for example the recent proposal to add the polar bear to the list of animals protected under America’s Endangered Species Act. That seems all well and good. But study the genetics and it transpires that polar bears are closer to some brown bears, than some brown bears are to each other. Go by the genes and it seems that the polar bear would not count as a species in its own right (and thus might not enjoy the protection afforded to species) but should be labelled a sub-species of the brown bear.

Conservation | Spot the difference | Economist.com

Rural unrest in China | Economist.com

2007-03-15T19:22:00.000-07:00

Rural unrest in China

Mar 15th 2007
From The Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire

Worries about poverty and instability in central China

A stand-off between around 20,000 protesters and more than 1,500 police and paramilitary forces in China's Hunan province has ended in bloodshed, with scores of people injured and a middle-school student beaten to death by the police, according to eye-witness reports. The incident not only highlights China's persistent problems with rural unrest, but also underscores the rationale for the central government's preoccupation with social stability and improving rural livelihoods.

China's government continues to make some effort to address the root causes of rural discontent. Most recently, it has announced increases in spending on rural healthcare and education, as well as plans to expand the rural social insurance and welfare systems. However, significant challenges remain. Central government spending on rural development continues to fall short, with local governments expected to provide most of the funds for public services in the countryside. Also, the actual implementation of policies promulgated in Beijing depends crucially on the co-operation of local governments, which are often complicit in the land seizures and corruption that fuel rural protests.

Abuse of power

The protest in Hunan was apparently sparked by a sudden doubling of public-bus fares during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday, when many people travel to visit their families. In the resulting clashes, several police vehicles and public buses were torched, at least one person was reportedly killed and many protesters were arrested.

The protest is the most recent manifestation of widespread discontent in the Chinese countryside, which is being fuelled by poverty, inequality, corruption, rising healthcare costs and illegal land requisition. According to one official source, there were around 23,000 "mass incidents" in 2006, down from 26,000 in 2005. This implies that some progress is being made, although the reliability of these figures and the definition of what constitutes such an incident remains open to doubt (other official sources put the number of mass incidents in 2005 at 87,000). As in previous cases, the ostensible reason for the Hunan protest seems disproportionate to the scale and violence of the incident, pointing to deeper discontent that was only waiting for a trigger to manifest in major unrest. (Local officials have reportedly acknowledged that the protest was an expression of underlying resentment against corruption.)

Good intentions

China's top leaders, some of whom have served in China's less-developed western provinces, continue to push reforms aimed at addressing the root causes of rural social unrest. In early March the ministry of finance announced that central government spending on healthcare would rise by 90%, while education spending would rise by 40%. At the current session of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislative body, in Beijing, the central government announced it would spend Rmb392bn (US$50.6bn) on rural development, an increase of Rmb52bn over 2006 and of Rmb94bn over 2005.

The central government funds will be used to expand China's social-welfare system, which aims to establish a minimum living allowance for the rural poor, and the rural co-operative medical system. To reduce discontent produced by lay-offs from state-owned enterprises, the government also plans reforms to its unemployment insurance and work-related injury compensation schemes. Land-use conversion regulations have also been tightened in an effort to reduce unrest provoked by unfair seizures of land. For example, local governments must now record land sales as "on-budget" income, and certain types of projects--such as golf courses and theme parks--have been banned on undeveloped land. Enforcement efforts have been strengthened by sending out teams of auditors to review land rezoning arrangements by local governments. The NPC will also pass a new private property law which, while stopping short of reforming the rural land-tenure system, reiterates the legal requirement to compensate farmers adequately for the expropriation of their land.

Implementation challenges

Although the government appears to be serious about tackling rural problems, its efforts face many obstacles. First, despite being increased to Rmb392bn in 2007, central government spending on rural development remains woefully insufficient. Given that local governments continue to be expected to shoulder most of the burden of rural healthcare and education, the impact of the recently announced increases is likely to be disappointing. The central government's spending on rural welfare continues to pale in comparison to allocations for urban workers. (In 2006 allocations for rural living allowances for China's rural population of 600m totalled Rmb4.2bn; the budget for the minimum living support insurance, which is issued to the estimated 22.3m urban poor, was a much more substantial Rmb13.6bn.)

Another significant obstacle is that the central government in Beijing relies to a large extent on local governments to implement its policies. In many instances, however, local governments are the perpetrators of--or at least complicit in--the abuses suffered by the rural population. This is particularly true with respect to the unfair expropriation of farmers' land for urban and industrial development. Cash-starved local governments have a strong incentive to seize farmers' land, reclassify it as urban, and lease it to developers at a massive profit. Profits from land-conveyance fees paid by developers and investors for long-term rights to use the land have become an increasingly crucial source of local government revenue, without which, ironically, they could provide even fewer public services.

Even where funding is adequate and the local government is co-operative, many national-level programmes are in an early stage of development and require a challenging degree of co-ordination between various levels of government. China's unemployment insurance system, which has no system for individual accounts, is a good example. Participation has been patchy and protection for migrant workers continues to be particularly poor. Out of an estimated 120m such workers, fewer than 450,000 have received unemployment allowances, with many employers avoiding contribution payments.

Despite these obstacles, government efforts to improve rural livelihoods may be aided by ongoing structural changes in the economy, such as rising food prices and labour costs in urban areas. Falling food prices over the past 15 years have been a crucial reason for rising rural-urban inequality, as Chinese farmers' incomes have stagnated relative to those in the country's booming urban areas. However, food prices--and hence rural incomes--appear to be on the rise as a result of the falling supply of arable land, increased demand for agricultural products and a shift away from grain production to higher-value-added crops. Rising wages in China's coastal factories will also boost remittances by migrant workers to rural areas.

Harmonious countryside?

Ultimately, inadequate support for basic public services in rural areas may constrain economic growth in rural areas, limiting the government's efforts to reduce poverty and create a "harmonious countryside". Access to basic healthcare and other public services in many areas now requires the ability to make an up-front payment, providing a powerful incentive for China's 600m rural dwellers to save any surplus income rather than to spend it or to make productivity-enhancing investments in their farms or enterprises. As a result, the failure of the government to channel sufficient resources to the countryside could slow rural development, making it more difficult to deal with the social and economic problems associated with rural-urban inequality and rapid urbanisation.

In political terms, however, expressions of rural discontent such as the riots in Hunan appear to pose little direct threat to the central government. Many such protests appear to be spontaneous, and the government typically moves quickly to arrest the organisers and to placate everyone else. In addition, few aggrieved rural citizens seem to hold the government in Beijing primarily responsible for the incompetence or abuses of local officials. One sign of this is the constant stream of rural petitioners arriving in Beijing with the hope that the central government, much like the emperor in feudal times, will assist them if informed of their plight.

Rural unrest in China | Economist.com

Inside al-Qaeda's brain? | Economist.com

2007-03-15T19:21:00.000-07:00

Inside al-Qaeda's brain?

Mar 15th 2007 | NEW YORK
From Economist.com

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an al-Qaeda bigwig in American custody, admits to a baffling number of wicked deeds

AFP/EPA

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THE image of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that is best known to the world is of him looking bedraggled and confused, cranky and unkempt in a white t-shirt shortly after his capture in Pakistan in 2003. But a different picture of the al-Qaeda leader was presented to the world on Wednesday March 14th, when the Pentagon released an incomplete transcript of a detention hearing held at Guantánamo Bay earlier in March to assess whether he should be considered as an “enemy combatant”. Mostly in English, Mr Mohammed presents himself in a rather straightforward fashion, proud but not defiant, claiming to be a soldier not a terrorist. He even describes al-Qaeda’s leaders and George Washington as “doing the same thing”.

The headline story is that Mr Mohammed, who did not have a lawyer present, has confessed to being an al-Qaeda leader, a friend of Osama bin Laden, and to planning the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington, DC—things that were already widely held to be true. But it is hard to know what to make of the appearance, now, of these or his other statements. He claims credit for a bafflingly large number of incidents and murders, including the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, the nightclub bombing in Bali in 2002, terrorist attacks on Israelis and Kenyans in Kenya in 2002, and the failed “shoe bomber” attack of 2001.

He also describes a tremendous number of other acts of aggression that were apparently planned—though it is unclear whether this means merely thought about, or actually prepared for—but never carried out: assassinations of “several” former American presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; the destruction of skyscrapers in New York, Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles; bombings of London, of the Panama Canal, of Israeli embassies and much more. In all he confesses to at least 30 assorted attacks or planned attacks.

It is probably true that Mr Mohammed has been ill-treated, possibly even tortured, by his American captors. Parts of his testimony were redacted, including details of the CIA prison where it is assumed he was kept. But some of his claims on torture are not censored: “I know American people are torturing us from seventies. [REDACTED] I know they talking about human rights. And I know it is against American constitution, against American laws.”

But he also appears to make clear, in the transcript, that he is not speaking under duress. The picture that emerges is not unlike the portrait painted by America’s official report on September 11th: that of a grandiloquent, boastful, egotist, “the self-cast star, the superterrorist”. There may be much in that: Mr Mohammed is reckoned by American intelligence agencies to have been extraordinarily active in terrorism, in many parts of the world. Although, by laying claim to any terrorist attack he could remember or dream up, he may perhaps cast doubt on the reliability of the admissions he offered.

Ultimately the transcript is at least as much about propaganda as it is about a legal process. The Pentagon released it, presumably, to help persuade any doubters that al-Qaeda really is as dangerous and deranged as it appears. For his part, Mr Mohammed suggests that the legal process is a sham: he says that America designates as an enemy combatant anyone it so wants.

But he takes part in the process as a means to promote his own warped thinking. Although bragging of all his plots and killing—he says he decapitated Daniel Pearl, a young Wall Street Journal reporter, with his own “blessed right hand”—he says he is not a monster. He claims that al-Qaeda sought rulings from religious scholars before carrying out their attacks and tried not to kill children. But, he concludes, the “language of war” is killing; America, after all, did not send Saddam Hussein roses but “a bombardment”.

Inside al-Qaeda's brain? | Economist.com

U.S. and Iran call Iraqi conference a 'first step.' - International Herald Tribune

2007-03-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON: Both U.S. and Iranian diplomats Sunday cautiously welcomed as an important "first step" the results of the regional meeting in Baghdad that brought a rare face-to-face encounter between the two sides.

The conference Saturday, meant to inject new diplomatic vigor into the search for a solution to the violence in Iraq, came on a day when President George W. Bush approved a significant military step, sending an additional 4,700 troops to that country — many in support roles — on top of 21,500 approved earlier. He will also send 3,500 more troops to Afghanistan.

The Iraq deployment risked leaving the White House further at odds with Democrats, who on Thursday announced a plan for most U.S. troops to leave Iraq by Aug. 31, 2008.

The U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, said of the conference there Saturday, "As a first step, it was a good meeting."

"I did talk to the Iranian across the table, and also I shook hands with him and talked two minutes or so with him," he told NBC-TV in an interview aired Sunday. "But most of the exchanges were across the table, dealing with Iraq issues." He added that there were "no direct bilateral substantive talks other than shaking hands."

In Tehran, a Foreign Ministry spokesman called the conference a constructive "first step" in promoting Iraqi stability. The spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, said that his country hoped a proposed follow-up meeting would be successful, The Associated Press reported.

But the sides also traded accusations — the Americans saying that Iranians had smuggled highly lethal explosives to Iraqi insurgents, the Iranians that the Americans had "kidnapped" a half- dozen Iranian officials who are being held in Iraq.

At one point, the U.S. envoy, David Satterfield, pointed to his briefcase and said it contained documents proving that Tehran was arming Shiite militias in Iraq. Abbas Araghchi, an Iranian deputy foreign minister, retorted, "Your accusations are merely a cover for your failures in Iraq."

The Iranians, Khalilzad said, contended that their officials in U.S. custody were diplomats — five of them based at the Iranian Consulate in Erbil — and should be released.

But Khalilzad said on NBC that the Iranians were associated with the Revolutionary Guards of Iran, "and the Quds Force is part of the Revolutionary Guard, and the Quds Force has been providing some of the weapons that we have talked about."

Still, he said, Baghdad had asked U.S. officials to expedite their investigation, and "we're doing that" — without making promises or setting deadlines.

The ambassador said that he had also asked Syrian officials to crack down on illegal border crossings into Iraq.

The most immediate outcome of the conference was an agreement in principle to form working groups on border security, fuel imports and refugees, and to hold another regional meeting at the foreign minister level, as early as April. Iraq and Iran lobbied for it to be held in Baghdad, while the United States pressed for Istanbul.

The working groups would involve only technical experts from Iraq's six neighbors.

Given the depth of tensions, the Iraqis' greatest achievement seemed to be to get so many countries with frosty relations to sit in the same room. Delegations were also present from other neighboring countries as well as from Bahrain, Egypt, Russia, France, Britain, China, the United Nations, the Islamic Conference and the Arab League.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq opened the conference with a plea to Iraq's neighbors to back his efforts to control the violence engulfing the country. "Confrontation of terrorism, dear brothers, requires ceasing any form of financial and media support and religious cover, as well as logistical support and provision of arms and men that would turn out to be explosive tools killing our children, women and elders and bombing our mosques and churches," Maliki said.

Despite enormous security preparations and a complete shutdown of roads leading to the Foreign Ministry, where the meeting was held, two mortar rounds landed nearby but caused no casualties.

"This is very normal; it happens all the time," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said he told the delegates. "I'm surprised there were not more attacks."

Suicide bombers killed at least 30 people Sunday in Baghdad. A car bomber attacked a truck carrying Shiite pilgrims who had celebrated the religious rite of Arbaeen in Karbala, killing 19, Reuters reported. Another suicide bomber blew himself up on a minibus in northeastern Baghdad, killing 10 people.

The Bush administration has recently focused much of its attention on Iran, pressing Tehran to halt its nuclear program and charging that it has not only armed and financed militants throughout the region, but provided Iraqi militants with devastating explosive devices.

Khalilzad said that beyond the rhetoric of the Baghdad meeting, what mattered was what Iran did next.

"We will be monitoring their behavior," he said. "That's what ultimately will count."

Zebari told CNN that he was heartened that the Iranian side had been "willing to discuss" the allegations that Iranians were arming insurgents.

Perhaps seeking to ease pressure on the country, Iranian state television said Sunday that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wanted to brief the United Nations Security Council on Tehran's civilian nuclear plans and its plans to pursue "peaceful nuclear technology."

The Baghdad meeting was generally applauded in Washington, though skepticism persisted that Iran and Syria did not share the U.S. interest in a stable Iraq.

"I don't think you can expect to see a flowering of diplomatic relations in one meeting," said Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia, on ABC-TV, "but this is a very important confidence- builder."

Alissa J. Rubin reported from Baghdad.

U.S. and Iran call Iraqi conference a 'first step.' - International Herald Tribune

Online encyclopedias | Fact or fiction? | Economist.com

2007-03-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

Fact or fiction?

Mar 10th 2007
From Economist.com

Wikipedia's variety of contributors is a strength and a weakness

Photodisc

The idea of an encyclopedia—a compendium of all the best available knowledge—is as tempting as it is flawed. Truth does not always come in bite-sized chunks. And the notion of an infinitely elastic internet encyclopedia, always up to date and distilling the collective wisdom of the wired is even more tempting. When open to all comers, anonymously, the problems are even more glaring.

This week a senior Wikipedia editor, who used the pseudonym Essjay, turned out not to be a professor of religious studies as he claimed, but in fact a 24-year-old college drop-out. That has highlighted both the strengths and the failings of the world’s biggest online encyclopedia, which now boasts well over 1.5m articles. The “Encyclopedia Britannica”, by contrast, has a mere 120,000.

Essjay (or Ryan Jordan in real life), got away with his pretence because Wikipedians jealously preserve their anonymity. With most entries, anyone can edit without even logging in; or they can create an entirely fictitious online identity before doing so. The effect is rather like an online role-playing game. Indeed, it is easy to imagine some sad fellow spending the morning pretending to be a polyglot professor on Wikipedia, and then becoming a buxom red-head on “Second Life”, a virtual online world, in the afternoon.

That anonymity creates a phoney equality, which puts cranks and experts on the same footing. The same egalitarian approach starts off by regarding all sources as equal, regardless of merit. If a peer-reviewed journal says one thing and a non-specialist newspaper report another, the Wikipedia entry is likely solemnly to cite them both, saying that the truth is disputed. If the cranky believe the latter and the experts the former, the result will be wearisome online editing wars before something approaching the academic mainstream consensus gains the weight it should.

Wikipedia has strengths too, chiefly the resilient power of collective common sense. It benefits from the volunteer efforts of many thousands of outside contributors and editors. If one drops out, another fills his place. People are vigilant on issues that interest them. When mistakes happen, they are usually resolved quickly. This correspondent’s modest Wikipedia entry was edited this week by an anonymous contributor who posted a series of entertaining but defamatory remarks; a mere four minutes later, another user had removed them.

Constant scrutiny and editing means even the worst articles are gradually getting better, while the best ones are kept nicely polished and up to date. Someone, eventually, will spot even the tiniest error, or tighten a patch of sloppy prose. Mr Jordan, for all his bragging, seems to have been a scrupulous and effective editor.

The most tiresome contributors do get banned eventually, though they can always log in under a new identity. Other shortcomings are the subject of earnest internal debate too, such as Wikipedia’s inherent bias towards trivial recent events rather than important historical ones. That is already changing, slowly, though subjects of interest to northern white computer-literate males are over-covered, while others are laughably neglected.

Wikipedia is the biggest collaborative online encyclopedia, but not the only one. Citizendium, supposedly launching soon, aims to be like Wikipedia but without anonymity, and with more weight given to recognised experts. Conservapedia aims to offer a version of the truth untainted by Wikipedia’s liberal secular bias on issues such as evolution.

So how useful is Wikipedia? Entries on uncontentious issues—logarithms, for example—are often admirable. The quality of writing is often a good guide to an entry’s usefulness: inelegant or ranting prose usually reflects muddled thoughts and incomplete information. A regular user soon gets a feel for what to trust.

Those on contentious issues are useful in a different way. The information may be only roughly balanced. But the furiously contested entries on, say, “Armenian genocide” or “Scientology”, and their attached discussion pages, do give the reader an useful idea about the contours of the arguments, and the conflicting sources and approaches. In short: it would be unwise to rely on Wikipedia as the final word, but it can be an excellent jumping off point.

Online encyclopedias | Fact or fiction? | Economist.com

OpinionJournal - Potomac Watch

2007-03-09T07:06:00.000-08:00

BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Friday, March 9, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

The meltdown among House Democrats over Iraq is rightly being described as the first big test of Nancy Pelosi's leadership. It's also an early example of just how much political damage the antiwar left is capable of inflicting on their new speaker.

Ms. Pelosi has been backed into a tight corner over President Bush's $100 billion request for war funding. Hoping to quell a revolt from a liberal bloc that wants out of Iraq, pronto, the speaker unveiled a new, new plan yesterday that includes a timetable for withdrawal--to begin as early as July. Ms. Pelosi needs to win this vote, the first real showdown over Iraq. But it's becoming increasingly clear she can do that only by sacrificing her moderate wing, which opposes her plan and could pay heavily for it in next year's election.

Talk about a downward spiral from just a few weeks ago, when Ms. Pelosi stepped in to save Senate Democrats from their own Iraq irresolution. Ms. Pelosi's own approach was politically clever, if nothing else. The House resolution criticized the troop buildup, making Congress look as if it were taking a stand against President Bush--even if it had no binding force. Yet it also contained a sop about the "bravery" of those troops and vows of "support," words designed to coax war-weary Republicans into joining with Democrats. Republican leaders were privately admitting they were beat, and even the White House was bracing for as many as 70 GOP defections.

Had Ms. Pelosi served up that vote quick, she may have presided over a stinging bipartisan rebuke to the administration's troop buildup and gained some breathing room. Instead, Madame Speaker gave into the lure of a Bush-bashing event, stretching the resolution "debate" over a week. That delay was more than enough time for her liberal base to get beyond her control.

Or rather it was enough time for Pennsylvania antiwar vet John Murtha to wrest the debate away from Ms. Pelosi and let the faithful know what they could expect under his sway. As the House debate got rolling, Mr. Murtha crowed to a liberal blog that the non-binding resolution was just the "first step" in cutting off funding for the troops. He also laid out his strategy for avoiding accusations that Democrats were abandoning soldiers in the field. Instead of just cutting off the money, his party would create new backdoor "readiness" standards that the administration would be unable to meet. In one fell interview, Mr. Murtha put Ms. Pelosi in a box.

Republicans who might have been tempted to vote for the resolution thought better of signing up for Mr. Murtha's "slow bleed." Only 17 jumped ship on the resolution vote, far fewer than even the giddiest White House official might have hoped. What might have been seen as a Congress-wide rebuke of Mr. Bush fizzled into a party-line vote by the opposition. Poof went a key Pelosi victory.

Mr. Murtha managed to do much more than just unite Republicans--he blew apart his own party just as it turned to the war supplemental. The sizable Blue Dog and moderate wing might have been willing to stick with their leadership on a non-binding resolution, but made clear they couldn't vote for anything the public might perceive as cutting off troop funding. Some, such as Blue Dog leader Allen Boyd went further, voicing wariness of any bill that micromanaged the war.

Many of these moderates were the key to Ms. Pelosi's electoral victory last year, as she well knows. More than a few eked out wins in conservative districts because of their promises to approach Iraq as adults. And most have spent recent weeks reminding their leadership that if they are forced to walk the plank on an out-of-Iraq vote, they are in fact being forced to walk the plank in next year's election. In other words, poof might go Ms. Pelosi's majority.

By last week, Ms. Pelosi showed signs of bowing to intelligent thought and cleansing the supplemental of Iraq poison pills. But her antiwar wing once again wasn't in a bowing mood. Mr. Murtha had, after all, promised them red meat, and a clean supplemental was merely tofu. The cofounders of the 70-strong Out of Iraq Caucus, including the never-sensible Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee, declared their whole contingent would bolt unless the bill brought the war to an end. Without them, Ms. Pelosi would only be able to pass a war-funding bill by teaming up with Republicans and Blue Dogs to defeat her own base. Which would hardly count in Ms. Pelosi's mind as a victory.

Her withdrawal plan of yesterday was therefore a capitulation to her liberal bloc. And the only folks truly delighted were Republicans. Minority leader John Boehner has had good reason to worry about the political consequences of his party voting down its own president's request for war funding. By yesterday afternoon, the GOP had declared the new Pelosi plan a troop funding cutoff that equaled "retreat" and felt confident they could lay a supplemental defeat at the door of the Democrats. Mr. Bush jumped in with cover for the shakier elements of his party by promising a veto.

The message to Ms. Pelosi is that she'll have to cobble together a victory from within her own party. Toward that end, she and appropriations chief David Obey have already turned to good-old-fashioned bribery. There is talk that the $100 billion "war" supplemental will include an extra $20 billion in goodies. At least $4 billion would be emergency agriculture spending aimed at Blue Dog southerners for their struggling farmers back home. A huge dollop would go to children's heath care, Katrina and homeland security. And to provide further coverage against accusations that Democrats don't support the troops, there's billions more for veterans and troop health care. So much for Ms. Pelosi's promise of fiscal discipline.

The joke is that even if Ms. Pelosi can buy the moderate wing to her side, her proposal still might go . . . poof. And why? Her liberal wing, of course. After all the speaker's concessions, antiwar critics were still griping yesterday that the withdrawal proposal left Mr. Bush too much flexibility over the timing. Reps. Lynn Woolsey and Ms. Lee introduced their own amendment to the legislation that would demand a complete withdrawal by year-end. Ms. Pelosi is loath to give them a vote, since the amendment would surely fail and allow Mr. Bush to note that even Congress is against withdrawal. The question is if her liberals will give her any choice. They certainly haven't up to now.

Ms. Strassel is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, based in Washington. Her column appears Fridays.

OpinionJournal - Potomac Watch

When interest rates hit 32%, there ought to be a law - Yahoo! News

2007-03-09T07:01:00.000-08:00

When interest rates hit 32%, there ought to be a law

2 hours, 32 minutes ago

Wesley Wannemacher of Lima, Ohio, charged $3,200 on a new Chase credit card in 2001 to help pay for his wedding. That put him $200 over his credit limit - and into a riptide of penalty fees and interest rates.

Wannemacher told a Senate panel Wednesday that he had paid Chase $6,300 over six years, nearly double his initial debt. Despite that, he still had a balance of $4,400.

Like Wannemacher, millions of consumers have been caught in spiraling debt as credit card issuers have flooded them with solicitations, then squeezed them with record-high fees and usurious interest rates for the slightest infractions. Such rates would be illegal in several states, but not in the states that the issuers call home.

For years, the Republican-controlled Congress ignored consumer outcries as the industry flooded Washington with campaign cash to protect its outrageous practices. Now, with the Democrats in control and probing those practices, the industry has made a few grudging changes. But some of the most egregious policies remain:

•Many card issuers hit consumers with penalty rates of up to 32.24% for a variety of infractions, most commonly late payments. Adding to the unfairness, the sky-high rates can apply to customers' entire balance, not just new charges.

•Some issuers impose these onerous rates on cardholders who pay them on time, but are late paying another creditor. That's akin to a mortgage holder raising your rate because you paid your phone bill late. Citi announced last week that it was dropping this much-criticized practice.

•Many banks impose fees of up to $39 - nearly three times what they were in 1995 - for paying even one minute late or going over a credit limit. In one of the most abusive practices, the fee is imposed repeatedly every month the customer remains over his limit. That's what happened to Wannemacher on his Chase account. Chase said it would end that practice.

These egregious practices, sky-high rates and the dense language that obscures them are plainly designed to suck consumers dry. Issuers surely have a right to rein in those who don't pay their bills, but only in a way that enables customers to get out of debt - not buries them in it. Lenders who are so incompetent that they extend credit to people who can't handle it deserve some of the blame and some of the bill.

With all the traps awaiting consumers, issuers should have to disclose every rule and penalty in clear English. Instead, a federal study last fall confirmed what just about every customer knows: The fine-print disclosures are too complicated for many consumers to understand.

Moves in recent days by Chase and Citi to end some punitive practices are helpful, but consumers can't rely on the good graces of issuers feeling heat from Capitol Hill.

Wannemacher's six-year struggle to pay off his ballooning debt with Chase shows why. Only after he agreed to testify before the Senate did Chase suddenly call and forgive his $4,400 balance.

Unless Congress is planning to intervene individually in the case of every consumer caught in a web of credit card debt, it should set some markers to ensure that credit card issuers behave better than loan sharks.

When interest rates hit 32%, there ought to be a law - Yahoo! News

Wikipedia's sticky wicket - Yahoo! News

2007-03-09T06:57:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia's sticky wicket

The Monitor's ViewFri Mar 9, 3:00 AM ET

Students in history classes at Middlebury College this spring may have to change the way they do research for papers or tests. Although they can consult the online encyclopedia Wikipedia for background, they are not allowed to cite it as a source.

Professors who drafted the new policy at the Vermont college praise the free website as a "wonderful innovation." They note the more than 1.6 million entries, the up-to-date bibliographies, and the links to relevant, often more reliable sites. But they caution that its open-editing system, which allows anyone to write or edit entries anonymously, carries a risk of error.

Just this month a dark cloud fell over Wikipedia's credibility after it was revealed that a trusted contributor who claimed to be a tenured professor of religion was actually a 24-year-old college dropout. He was also one of the appointed "arbiters" who settled disputes between contributors.

For the many "wiki"-type sites – ones that compile knowledge with volunteers – such an ethical misstep would be a test of their ability for internal correction. But it also reinforces educators' warnings to students to be "informationally literate" in how to use the six-year-old Wikipedia and to rely more on the thousands of more-scholarly databases online.

Wikipedia not only challenges the concept of what an encyclopedia is; it also raises an intriguing question: What qualifies as intellectual authority in an age of information overload, when society relies increasingly on the Internet?

Some critics are troubled by what they regard as a tendency on the Web to value anonymous, collective thought over individual intellect. Some claim Wikipedia devalues traditional scholarship. Supporters counter that the online encyclopedia's constant and easy revision of articles only strengthens their credibility. Fans also praise Wikipedia for "democratizing" knowledge, pitting pedigreed academics against amateur scholars.

Globalization and technology are creating other sociocultural changes that challenge old notions of expertise. When people can now more easily, say, sell a house, write a will, or file a complex tax return, they defer less to authorities, among them lawyers, clergy, teachers, and other professionals.

The Internet's ability to empower individuals with an illusion of infinite knowledge challenges even notions of reality. Like Pontius Pilate's question – What is truth? – supporters of Wikipedia are asking "Whose truth?"

Is information on the site absolute fact or simply a matter of group consensus? Is any information accurate only by agreement of those with extensive credentials using peer review, or do the masses have a voice?

If other schools follow Middlebury's lead, the collective effect could encourage Wikipedia to raise its standards. Scholars, too, might benefit from using "wiki" practices, such as open access and wider input.

Middlebury's policy serves as a reminder about the need to carefully sift any information on the Internet. Over time, users will force sites like Wikipedia to build up the same trust and reputations now granted to established institutions such as universities or old-style encyclopedias. Truth, like truthfulness, must be demonstrated.

Wikipedia's sticky wicket - Yahoo! News

Jim Hoagland - 'What Has Happened to Dick Cheney?' - washingtonpost.com

2007-03-08T21:18:00.000-08:00

By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, March 8, 2007; A23

Is the vice president losing his influence, or perhaps his mind? That question, even if it is phrased more delicately, is creeping through foreign ministries and presidential offices abroad and has become a factor in the Bush administration's relations with the world.

"What has happened to Dick Cheney?" That solicitous but direct question came from a European statesman who has known the vice president for many years. He put it to me a few days ago -- even before the discovery of a blood clot in Cheney's leg and the perjury conviction of Scooter Libby, his former chief of staff, brought headline attention to the volatile state of the vice president's physical, emotional and political health.

It is not new for Americans to question whether their leaders have become delusional. Editors at The Post directed reporters to find out if Jimmy Carter had suffered a nervous breakdown when he retreated to Camp David for 10 days in 1979 and abruptly fired five Cabinet officers. Remember the hubbub over Al Haig's "I am in control here" and other Captain Queegish remarks, or Richard Nixon's talking to portraits?

What is unusual is for foreigners to think about a vice president at all and to question what effect the VP's moods and internal policy defeats have on America's standing in the world.

But what goes up must come down. In the first term, Cheney was styled as the most influential vice president in history -- in more lurid versions, an evil puppeteer pulling George W. Bush's strings. So now his irascibility in television interviews triggers diplomatic cables analyzing his equilibrium -- as well as inspiring a booming industry of scathing cartoons and television one-liners here at home.

And it is not over. Reports of a new defeat lie ahead for the hard line on Iran and Syria that is associated with Cheney's office if this week's meeting of ambassadors in Baghdad produces progress on Iraqi stability. Diplomats tell me that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has persuaded Turkey to host a ministerial conference next month that will include Iraq's neighbors, the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and the Group of Eight nations, and that she will attend.

Rice is credited by administration sources with having told Bush in January that he should devote his final two years in office to seeking diplomatic agreements with North Korea and Iran and an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. That account emphasizes that Rice is not simply outflanking Cheney in intermittent internal policy battles but has won full agreement and support from the president on the strategic goals and methods she and her diplomats are pursuing.

This remains to be confirmed by events. But it is clear that Bush has always been much more the decision maker than the Cheney-as-puppeteer image conveyed. It is not just recently that Bush has failed to follow Cheney's counsel:

On Iraq, Bush overruled Cheney on going to the United Nations for a second use-of-force resolution and then listened much more closely (and disastrously) to policy prescriptions from proconsul L. Paul Bremer and others. On Iran, Cheney came to office with relatively more relaxed attitudes than Bush. Cheney's attitudes may have been formed by his experiences as chief executive of Halliburton, an oil services company that has sought out business contacts with that nation.

There is much to credit in Cheney's frequent protestations that unmitigated loyalty to Bush is more important to their relationship than the policy advice that Cheney gives the president. It is advice that he never discloses to associates in the Cabinet or to the few diplomats he sees.

"It is so mysterious that his recent public hints at discomfort with the new policy directions reverberate with us like muffled cries of outrage," says one ambassador here.

The Libby trial revealed serious splits between Cheney and Bush's political team, led by Karl Rove, who suffered no legal consequences for his role in the scandal. The trial also served as another exercise in showing how Cheney has empowered his critics at home and his foes abroad: His excessive concern for secrecy and control by the executive branch has given new credibility and fundraising ability to the Democrats and to civil liberties organizations here, and it has won sympathy around the world for prisoners who may well be terrorists.

So listen up, diplomats: However beleaguered, Cheney will not resign over the president's refusal to take his advice. The only force that could drive him to that dramatic step would be that unshakable sense of loyalty to Bush, who desperately now needs a vice president in stable physical, emotional and political health. That is the equation you want to be watching.

jimhoagland@washpost.com

Jim Hoagland - 'What Has Happened to Dick Cheney?' - washingtonpost.com

Print Story: Chavez vs. Bush on Yahoo! News

2007-03-08T21:15:00.000-08:00

Thu Mar 8, 7:08 AM ET

As President Bush starts a five-nation trip to Latin America today, he will be stalked by Venezuela's oil-rich autocrat Hugo Chavez, who likes to call Bush "the devil" and to refer to the United States as "the empire." When Bush makes his first stop in Brazil, Chavez will be in neighboring Argentina leading an anti-Bush rally. When Bush calls on ally Colombia, Chavez will be in Bolivia. And so it will go.

Chavez wants a public competition, which Bush seems tempted to join. In a speech this week, Bush laid claim to the legacy of Venezuelan freedom fighter Simon Bolivar, and he announced a plan to send doctors to give free medical care in the region, much as Chavez is dispatching Cuban doctors.

But the truth of the matter is that neither Bush nor Chavez is much liked in Latin America - and for all the oil money Chavez is throwing around, few want to ally with him. What's needed is a laser-like focus on the deeper causes of an anti-American, leftist tide that has been sweeping the region and gave Chavez Venezuela's presidency.

For all of Bush's unpopularity, the United States retains enormous influence. Trade is expanding, and burgeoning Hispanic immigration is adding deep personal ties, just as it once did with the Irish and Italians.

But the United States has focused its attention elsewhere since 9/11, and in that time, disillusionment has set in with the U.S.-favored policies once expected to turn the region into a post-Cold War oasis of stability and democracy. The policies - of capitalism, democracy, free trade and tough austerity measures to pay off large debts - are blamed in many South American countries for economic hardships and wide disparities between rich and poor. Bush's failure to follow up on early promises to focus on the region has further swelled a "pink tide" of leftist leaders.

There's a simple if long-term answer: Deal with South American countries with the pragmatism they most want, while helping them adjust to the ups and downs of capitalism. Bush's agenda makes a promising beginning. In Brazil, he will focus on ethanol, which Brazil and the United States are developing as an alternative fuel. In Mexico, immigration is on the agenda. In Colombia, the focus is on the long-standing anti-drug effort.

As former governor of Texas, Bush rightly boasted as he became president that he understood the issues. That attention was derailed by 9/11 and the Iraq war. It isn't too late to get it back on track - with the first task to ignore Chavez's taunts.

Print Story: Chavez vs. Bush on Yahoo! News

The time is ripe for the US to engage Syria on Mideast issues - Yahoo! News

2007-03-08T21:13:00.000-08:00

The time is ripe for the US to engage Syria on Mideast issues

By Helena Cobban,Thu Mar 8, 3:00 AM ET

The evenings are still chilly as shoppers browse Damascus's new up-market shops for the latest European fashions. But in the side streets, vendors are selling crunchy green almonds, and as the seasons turn you can sense a new self- confidence in a regime here that just a year ago was considered by many Middle East observers to be close to collapse.

This self-confidence was evident in the 70-minute interview I conducted with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem on Feb. 28. Mr. Mouallem welcomed the fact that the Bush administration has said it will participate in the meeting planned for March 10 in Baghdad, where Washington will have its first direct, high-level contacts for several years with representatives of Syria and Iran. (Iraq, its other neighbors, and the other permanent members of the Security Council will also all be there.)

Until recently, the Bush administration worked hard to isolate both Iran and Syria. In December, President Bush curtly ignored the Iraq Study Group's advice that he engage these two politically significant neighbors of Iraq in an energetic new diplomacy on both Iraq and Arab-Israeli peace. Now, he has shifted toward following one part of that recommendation.

Mouallem, a very experienced professional diplomat, portrayed Syria as eager to be forthcoming regarding Iraq. He described Washington's decision to take part in the March 10 meeting as, "a partial step in the correct direction." But he said Syria still seeks the US's help in launching "a comprehensive dialogue on regional issues, starting with the Arab-Israeli issue, which is the core issue in the region."

Last November, he made an official visit to Baghdad, and in January, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani made a state visit to Syria. (Mr. Talabani is one of the many members of the present Iraqi government who found refuge in Damascus during Saddam Hussein's years in power.)

Mouallem said he judges that the first priority in Iraq should be for the Iraqi and US governments to work out and announce a clear timetable for a total withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. He declined my invitation to specify or estimate the length of this timetable, saying only that it should be linked to the rebuilding of Iraq's own security forces "on a truly national basis."

He added, "No one is thinking about imposing defeat on the US forces. On the contrary, we are trying to find an honorable withdrawal for them."

Mouallem said Syria fears the prolongation of Iraq's current instability for two main reasons. First, instability has sent "more than a million" Iraqis fleeing into Syria, placing a heavy burden on the country's health and education systems. (Many Syrians say the displaced Iraqis have sent rents and property prices skyrocketing, and some resentment has started to build.)

Second, he warned of the risk that the lethal sectarianism that has dogged Iraq might spread further afield. "Why are the Americans not helping to lower the sectarianism in Iraq?" he asked. "We have an enormous fear of sectarian fitna [social breakdown]." He did not spell out that Syria might itself provide fertile ground for sectarian agitators, since there have in the past been signs of serious discontent from ethnic and religious groups that feel excluded from governmental power. He said only, "We in Syria are proud that we are a country of tolerance and coexistence without any discrimination on a religious or ethnic basis."

Mouallem also warned of the dire consequences – for the US and for global stability – that would follow any military attack on Iran. He expressed the hope that neighboring Lebanon could resolve its current political crisis peacefully. And he described Syria as eager to resume the peace process with Israel that was broken off in 2000. He even indicated that, once "comprehensive" peace talks resume with Israel, Syria would not necessarily wait for progress for the Palestinians before moving forward in its own talks with Israel. (A much fuller account of the interview is available at my "Just World News" blog.)

After following Syrian and regional politics for 30-plus years, I judge that the new Syrian self-confidence projected by Mouallem is pretty well founded. In my few days in Damascus, I've also had good discussions with independent analysts and veteran activists in the country's human rights movement and its tiny liberal political opposition. From these people, I learned that the failure of the Bush administration to remake Iraq and the fact that the US now seems so bogged down there have sent a strong signal to all Syrians that their country is no longer at risk of undergoing any American project for coercive regime change. Indeed, it seems that Washington has come close to concluding that it needs Damascus's help if it is to minimize the damage from the imbroglio in Iraq.

For both regime supporters and opponents here, the events in Iraq over the past three years have provided a horrifying object lesson of what can result from any too-rapid, coercive, and ill-studied a push for "democratization" in the Middle East. The dissidents I talked with stressed that the push for democracy must be gradual, and driven by forces internal to the country.

With the Middle East poised on a knife-edge, it seems a good time for Washington to engage seriously with Syria. Let's hope the March 10 meeting leads to an intensification of such engagement.

• Helena Cobban is a Friend in Washington for the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The views expressed here are her own.

The time is ripe for the US to engage Syria on Mideast issues - Yahoo! News

Court blocks access to YouTube in Turkey - International Herald Tribune

2007-03-07T18:04:00.000-08:00

PARIS: A court in Turkey on Wednesday ordered blockage of all access to YouTube, the popular video-sharing Web site, over a video deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

The ban followed a week of what the media in Turkey dubbed a "virtual war" of videos between Greeks and Turks on YouTube and came as governments around the world — including France — grappled with the freewheeling content now readily posted on the Internet.

The largest Internet provider in Turkey, Turk Telecom, immediately complied with the ban and cut off access to the site.

"We are not in the position of saying that what YouTube did was an insult, that it was right or wrong," Paul Doany, the chairman of Turk Telecom, told the state-run Anatolia news agency. "A court decision was proposed to us, and we are doing what that court decision says."

Visitors to the site in Turkey on Wednesday afternoon were greeted with the message first in Turkish and then in English: "Access to www.youtube.com site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/384 dated 06.03.2007 of Istanbul First Criminal Peace Court."

YouTube expressed dismay over the move, adding that the offending video had been removed and that the company was working with the government to resolve the situation.

"We are disappointed that YouTube has been blocked in Turkey," the company said in a statement. "While technology can bring great opportunity and access to information globally, it can also present new and unique cultural challenges."

A later court ruling said the service could be restored after YouTube removed the offending material, Anatolia reported, but it was not clear when that would be.

The ban comes as Turkey struggles to prove its human rights credentials to the European Union and as governments around the world grapple with content posted to the Internet by private citizens.

YouTube faced a court-ordered national ban in Brazil for several days in January after footage of a model cavorting in the sea with her lover kept reappearing on the site.

Separately, activists in France this week warned that a recent law against posting video of violent acts would stifle free expression.

The French law, which was intended to criminalize "happy slapping" — acts of violence committed for posting on the Internet — could also criminalize the recording of police brutality, activists said.

"I don't think the French government intended to attack user-generated content, but that is the effect," said Julien Pain, a spokesman for the press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders. "If someone films a policeman wrestling someone to the ground, that can be considered a criminal act."

While the French law has provisions to protect professional journalists or those who record violence to turn it over to the authorities, passersby remain liable for fines of as much as €75,000, or nearly $100,000, and five years in prison, Pain said.

"This law removes protection for citizen-journalists or bloggers who would want to record the violence if riots start again in the Paris suburbs," Pain said. "The distinction between professional and amateur journalists is no longer valid since all Internet users are now in a position to create and disseminate information."

The video that prompted the ban in Turkey allegedly said that Ataturk and the Turkish people were homosexuals, according to news reports. Insulting Ataturk is a criminal offense in Turkey. In a front page story, the newspaper Hurriyet said thousands of readers had written to YouTube complaining about the video.

For Turkey, the ban will present a further hurdle as concern grows in Brussels that Ankara is flouting free- speech norms necessary to join the European Union.

In recent weeks, Turkey has pledged to revise a controversial law that makes insulting Turkishness a crime. The law — Article 301 of the Turkish penal code — has resulted in prosecutions against leading Turkish intellectuals, including the author Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel laureate, and Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist murdered in January.

But the government has refused to drop Article 301 altogether, while the law against insulting Ataturk, which has given rise to the YouTube case, is considered even more sacrosanct.

The European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, has been particularly concerned by Article 301, which attracted global criticism last year when Pamuk was put on trial for telling a Swiss newspaper that more than a million Armenians were massacred by Ottoman Turks during World War I.

Krisztina Nagy, spokeswoman for the EU expansion commissioner, Olli Rehn, who is overseeing Turkey's EU accession process, declined to comment, saying the commission was still trying to confirm the facts surrounding the YouTube case.

But other EU officials said privately that the abrupt decision to block access to YouTube would give ammunition to thsoe who argue that the avowed secularism of Turkey does not sufficiently safeguard free speech.

The latest controversy comes as Turkey is going through a difficult period in its relations with the EU following the decision late last year by Union leaders to partially suspend entry negotiations over Ankara's refusal to open its ports to Cyprus, an EU member.

Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting from Brussels and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.

Court blocks access to YouTube in Turkey - International Herald Tribune

How can U.S. stay on top of the world? - Yahoo! News

2007-03-07T08:52:00.000-08:00

How can U.S. stay on top of the world?

By Antoine van AgtmaelWed Mar 7, 6:52 AM ET

South Korean carmaker Hyundai recently had to deny newspaper reports that it is a leading candidate to take over Chrysler. True or not, it already has a $1.1 billion plant in Alabama and now beats Toyota in performance quality, according to the J.D. Power survey. Less than five years ago it was the joke of a Jay Leno show.

Hyundai is just one of the many profitable firms in emerging markets that produce just about everything consumers consume. Within hours of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' recent unveiling of the stylish new iPhone, shares in Taiwanese electronics giant Hon Hai Precision Industry shot up. Founded in 1974 as a marginal manufacturer of TV-set-tuning knobs, Hon Hai today produces PCs for Hewlett-Packard and Dell, PlayStation game consoles for Sony, motherboards for Intel, cellphone handsets for Nokia and Motorola, and now Apple's new iPhone. Other examples can be found everywhere.

While our attention was focused on the "new economy" a few years ago, "new economies" quietly stole the show. We are in the midst of the greatest shift in the global economy since the Industrial Revolution. This time, the economic epicenter is shifting away from the developed world to emerging markets in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.

Market scare

Sharp moves in the Dow Jones used to scare or exhilarate investors worldwide. Last week's 416-point drop in the U.S. stock market, together with a sudden reversal in markets around the globe, was the first time that a sell-off in China triggered such a major loss in market values - one that was far larger than the entire Chinese market. It was not only an overdue reminder that investors get scared from time to time - usually after periods of over-enthusiasm - but also demonstrated the dramatic and growing impact of what I call the "Emerging Markets Century."

What are we in the USA and the rest of the developed world to make of the fact that so much of what we consume is produced in the former Third World? One thing is that America (but also Europe and Japan) will need to get used to the idea that we are no longer the center of the economic and political universe. Even more important, we should resist the knee-jerk reaction of protectionism that would likely stifle innovation.

Yet, in the USA, we have been slow to accept this new reality. Countries such as Mexico, South Korea and Russia are no longer basket cases in need of rescue. Emerging markets now own three-quarters of the world's foreign exchange reserves, and their purchases influence U.S. mortgage rates. The brain drain is reversing just as budget and current account deficits (the broadest measure of a nation's trade gap) have crossed over into the developed world.

The world is not flat; it is tilting, with the USA rapidly moving from unquestioned dominance to greater dependence. And this is only the beginning. Twenty-five years from now, emerging markets will make up more than half of the global economy (up from 21% today) as the General Electrics and Microsofts of the future will increasingly hail from these new economies.

More than ever, the global economy is not a zero-sum game. More handsets, refrigerators and beer are sold in emerging markets than in mature markets. U.S. exports to emerging markets have increased 338% over the past 20 years, much faster than domestic demand. One billion new consumers and investors will turn many emerging markets into middle-class economies. Smart American corporations are already seeking their growth in emerging markets. GE plans to double its sales in emerging markets from 15% to 30% by 2010. Goldman Sachs built an important franchise in China. Dell and GM increasingly produce in India and China for the local markets.

Maintaining our edge

But that is clearly not enough to keep our competitive edge. Many more corporations should develop a clear emerging-markets strategy, embed their young managers with local families (as Procter & Gamble already does), build crucial local relationships, establish international focus groups to tailor products to local tastes, and form business alliances with this new breed of companies. And our universities should focus more on creative problem solving and integrate study and work experience abroad if we want students to be comfortable with foreign languages and cultures.

When we look at history, a creative response has often succeeded where protectionism has failed. President Kennedy's inspiring call to put a man on the moon when Russia seemed to be "winning" provided the United States decades of technological superiority. Today, leading U.S. universities remain the best, while creative companies such as Google and Apple are more than competitive.

As a nation, we need a "National Competitiveness" campaign that sets ambitious goals such as developing a successor to the internal-combustion engine, but also tackles legacy issues (high cost of health and pension benefits for current, older and retired workers), places more emphasis on creativity in education and gives infrastructure a much-needed face lift. The choice between protectionism and a creative response to the tectonic shift in the global economy (and global power) could well become one of the key issues in the next presidential campaign. Instead of complaining and agonizing about this new competitive threat, our focus should be on turning it into an exciting opportunity.

Antoine van Agtmael is chairman and CEO of Emerging Markets Management, LLC. He recently published The Emerging Markets Century: How A New Breed of World-Class Companies is Overtaking the World.

How can U.S. stay on top of the world? - Yahoo! News

Iran and Saudi Arabia | An odd couple | Economist.com

2007-03-06T11:55:00.000-08:00

ran and Saudi Arabia

An odd couple

Mar 5th 2007 | CAIRO
From Economist.com

The leaders of Iran and Saudi Arabia talk

Reuters

Get article background

IRAN and Saudi Arabia are Muslim heavyweights, the one a Shia republic and a sworn foe of the United States, the other a staunchly Sunni monarchy and America’s oldest Arab ally. Decades of quiet rivalry between the two, echoing ancient Arab-Persian tensions, have lately intensified over Iraq, Lebanon and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, among other things.

Yet if the Persian Gulf neighbours are an odd match, their leaders make for an even more ungainly pair. Iran’s diminutive and ostentatiously rumpled president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is prone to incendiary rhetoric. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, by contrast, is a retiring, avuncular type, fond of playing croquet. So it is that when Mr Ahmadinejad sought an audience with the Saudi king this week, eyebrows across the region rose.

They rose more sharply still in Washington, DC. George Bush’s administration wants to punish and isolate Iran for its suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons. This has meant, among other things, pushing friends such as the Saudis to consolidate an anti-Iranian block of “moderate” regional powers, to fan Sunni fears of Shia expansionism, and to support the elected government of Lebanon against a challenge mounted by Iran’s main ally in that fractiously fragile country, the Shia militia-cum-political party Hizbullah.

For the Saudi king to host Mr Ahmadinejad would seem, then, to represent a snub to American policy. That impression might be reinforced by the note of understanding signalled by the two leaders. According to the Saudi version, they agreed that the “greatest danger” facing Muslims is “the attempt to spread strife” between Sunnis and Shias, and that efforts should be made to close ranks. The blunter Iranian version said they had agreed to find ways to foil “the enemy's conspiracies” aimed at setting Muslims against each other.

The Saudis may reckon that the region's increasingly tense mood makes this a bad time to inflame sectarianism. Some would even concur that a plot is afoot to weaken Muslims by dividing them. And they are certainly not happy with their longstanding American ally, whose policy blunders in Iraq, and inaction over Palestine, have proved costly and embarrassing.

From the Iranian perspective, it may have been important for Mr Ahmadinejad to play the role of a statesman. He faces rising dissent at home, both for his government’s poor economic performance and for the dangerous isolation produced by his belligerent rhetoric. What better way to assuage anxiety, and boost his pan-Islamic image, than to be shown making friends with Sunni rivals?

Yet, away from hand-holding poses for the cameras, Mr Ahmadinejad’s brief visit to the Saudi capital was likely to have been less than harmonious. Saudi officials remain privately adamant about the need to counter what is perceived as Iran’s destabilising role in the region. The kingdom recently, for example, reasserted Arab ownership of the Palestinian issue by reconciling clashing Palestinian factions, one of which, the Islamist group Hamas, had previously turned to Iran for support. Moreover, the Saudis remain deeply sceptical of Iran’s protests that its nuclear plans are peaceful.

For its part, Iran’s government is quietly alarmed by the Saudis’ potential—as yet restrained—to make life difficult for them, for instance by directly sponsoring anti-Shia militias in Iraq and Lebanon, or Sunni separatist movements inside Iran’s own restless Khuzestan and Baluchistan provinces. The Iranians also know that if push comes to shove, the Saudis and their Arab allies in the Gulf could hurt Iran’s economy by flooding oil markets. Saudi Arabia also maintains a tight military alliance with Pakistan, a nuclear-armed Sunni state on Iran’s borders, which just happens to have tested long-range missiles lately, and to have hosted a meeting of Muslim foreign ministers that pointedly excluded Iran.

In other words, Saudi Arabia’s seemingly friendly diplomacy may actually add to, rather than reduce, the pressure on Iran to curb its regional ambitions. Later this month, the kingdom is hosting a much bigger gathering of Arab heads of state. Despite Mr Ahmadinejad’s efforts to widen his circle of friends, Iran’s allies in that meeting are likely to be few and far between.

Iran and Saudi Arabia | An odd couple | Economist.com

Paul R. Pillar - What to Ask Before the Next War - washingtonpost.com

2007-03-03T22:56:00.001-08:00

What to Ask Before the Next War
Don't Let the People Who Brought Us Iraq Define the Questions

By Paul R. Pillar
Sunday, February 4, 2007; B07

Imagine that the famously flawed intelligence judgments about Iraq's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been correct. What difference would that have made to the American effort in Iraq?

The Bush administration would have had fewer rhetorical difficulties in defending its decision to go to war, even though any discoveries of weapons programs would have confirmed nothing about the use to which Saddam Hussein might someday have put such weapons or whether Iraq would eventually have acquired nuclear weapons.

But the war itself would be the same agonizing ordeal. An insurgency driven by motives having nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and little to do with Hussein would still be going on.

Iraq's sectarian divisions and intolerant political culture would still have pushed it into civil war. Iraq would still have become the latest and biggest jihad, winning recruits and donors for al-Qaeda and boosting the militant Islamic movement worldwide. And the United States would still be suffering the same drain of blood and treasure in Iraq and most of the same damage to its global standing and relationships.

This thought experiment highlights how problems with the policy process (or, rather, the lack of a process) that led the United States into the Iraq quagmire went beyond the administration's manipulation of intelligence on weapons programs and terrorist relationships. The administration so successfully shaped the policy question around its chosen selling points involving these two issues that what passed for a national debate gave little attention to important questions about the likely nature and consequences of a war. The debate was largely reduced to contemplating the terms of a pseudo-syllogism: Hussein has weapons of mass destruction; Hussein supports terrorism; therefore, we must use force to remove Hussein.

Now, an accelerating debate about Iran and its nuclear program shows signs of the same dangerous reductionism. Some argue for an airstrike against Iranian nuclear facilities sooner rather than later. Whether the Bush administration will act on such advice in the next two years is uncertain, but it is taking confrontational steps, including augmenting forces in the Persian Gulf and raiding an Iranian consulate, that increase the chance of heightened tension escalating into a military clash.

A long argument over many barely addressed issues would be needed to get from a belief that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons to a conclusion that a military strike, or even policies that increase the risk of U.S.-Iranian hostilities, is advisable. One issue is the uncertainty of the intelligence about Iran's nuclear program, although this is getting some discussion thanks to the recriminations about the intelligence on Iraq.

Other questions that need answering include:

What would be the urgency of taking forceful action, given that the announced estimate is that Iran is still several years from acquiring a nuclear weapon?

How malleable (and how well-defined) are Tehran's intentions, and what changes in Washington's policy might lead Tehran to abandon a weapons program? Even if Tehran's intentions do not change, what other options would impede or slow its nuclear program? If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, how would that change its behavior and affect U.S. interests? In particular, why would deterrence, which has kept nuclear peace with other adversaries, not work with Iran?

The likely hardening, concealment and dispersal of Iran's nuclear facilities raise questions about the impact any military strike would have on the program. How much would Iran's nuclear efforts be set back, especially given that bombs are not very good at destroying knowledge and expertise? Would the Iranian response be appreciably different from that of Iraq after Israel bombed its nuclear reactor in 1981 (Iraq redoubled its nuclear efforts while turning to different methods for producing fissile material)?

The most neglected questions concern other consequences of a U.S. strike or any other U.S.-Iranian combat, even if such combat did not lead to a prolonged occupation. How would Tehran respond to an act of war? What terrorism might it launch against the United States? How would it exploit U.S. vulnerabilities next door in Iraq, where it has barely begun to exploit the influence it has assiduously been cultivating? What other military action might it take, with the risk of a wider war in the Persian Gulf?

Other effects concern Iranian politics. How much would the direct assertion of U.S. hostility strengthen Iranian hard-liners, whose policies are partly premised on such hostility? How much would it add to all Iranians' list of historical grievances against the United States and adversely affect relations with future governments?

Broader regional and global ramifications include the impact on the oil market, whether other Middle Eastern nations would be less willing to cooperate with the United States and the prospect of exacerbating the damage the Iraq war already has dealt to U.S. standing worldwide.

Some might argue that the worst case that could ensue from an Iranian nuclear weapon is so bad that it trumps all other considerations. But there is no more reason than there was with Iraq to consider the worst case of only one side of the policy equation. And the worst case that could result from U.S.-Iranian combat is plenty frightening: thousands of Americans dead from retaliatory terrorist attacks, a broader war in the Persian Gulf, $150-per-barrel oil, a global recession and more.

That's not the most likely case -- neither is a vision of Iranian-generated mushroom clouds -- but it is plausible that substantial portions of that scenario would materialize.

Avoiding the next military folly in the Middle East requires that the agenda for analysis and debate not be so severely and tendentiously truncated as before Iraq. Not only must proponents of military action not be allowed to manipulate the answers, they also should not be allowed to define the questions.

The writer, a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, teaches security studies at Georgetown University.

View all comments that have been posted about this article.

Paul R. Pillar - What to Ask Before the Next War - washingtonpost.com

Dan Froomkin - Bush Daring Dems on Iraq - washingtonpost.com

2007-03-03T22:56:00.000-08:00

ush Daring Dems on Iraq

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, February 6, 2007; 12:50 PM

The White House's political strategy on Iraq is coming into focus.

Faced with a bipartisan rebellion against the decision to put more troops in harm's way, White House political aides are concentrating less on winning support for the president's policies -- and more on trying to maneuver the Democrats into taking action they can depict as cutting off funds to the troops.

The new strategy was neatly executed by Senate Republicans yesterday, after much consultation with the White House. They prevented the Democratic leadership from bringing to the floor a nonbinding resolution that would have put a solid majority of the Senate -- not just Democrats, but several Republicans as well -- on the record as opposing Bush's escalation plan.

With "support the president" now a losing proposition, the White House is turning to "support the troops" as their political failsafe.

Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray write in The Washington Post: "A long-awaited Senate showdown on the war in Iraq was shut down before it even started yesterday, when nearly all Republicans voted to stop the Senate from considering a resolution opposing President Bush's plan to send 21,500 additional combat troops into battle. . . .

"The White House worked closely with Senate Republican leaders on strategy while conducting an aggressive outreach that involved assurances from military leaders to wary GOP senators, in addition to personal interventions by Bush."

Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny write in the New York Times that the Republican action "short-circuited what had been building as the first major Congressional challenge to President Bush over his handling of the war since Democrats took control of Congress last month. . . .

"At issue is a compromise resolution drawn up chiefly by Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, that says the Senate disagrees with President Bush's plan to build up troops and calls for American forces to be kept out of sectarian violence in Iraq.

"The deadlock came after Democrats refused a proposal by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, that would have cleared the way for a floor fight on the Warner resolution in return for votes on two competing Republican alternatives that were more supportive of the president.

"One of those alternatives, by Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, would declare that Congress should not cut off any funds for forces in the field. That vote was seen as problematic for Democrats because many of them opposed any move to curtail spending, raising the prospect that it could have attracted the broadest support in the Senate."

On the NBC Nightly News, John Harwood of CNBC told Brian Williams: "This is fascinating, Brian. We are learning that President Bush may have more ability to hold Republicans together on Iraq than many assumed after the 2006 elections."

E. J. Dionne Jr. writes in his Washington Post opinion column: "It is now a standard talking point for supporters of this war, from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard to Vice President Cheney himself, to try to block any statement by Congress of its views, except through a vote to block funds for Iraq.

"'The Congress has control over the purse strings,' said Cheney, who on most other occasions insists upon the executive's supremacy over Congress. In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer last month, Cheney added: 'They have the right, obviously, if they want to cut off funding, but in terms of this effort the president has made his decision. . . . We'll continue to consult with the Congress. But the fact of the matter is, we need to get the job done.'"

Bush himself has also endorsed this view. In an interview with members of the Wall Street Journal editorial board last week, Bush for once actually championed Congress's constitutional authority to flout him in matters of war.

"WSJ: There's a lot of discussion in Congress about putting caps on troop levels or defunding or saying you can't deploy, as commander in chief, troops in Baghdad. Do you think Congress has the constitutional authority. . . .

"GWB: I think they have the authority to defund, use their funding power. . . .

"WSJ: You do?

"GWB: Oh yeah, they can say 'We won't fund.' That is a constitutional authority of Congress."

And while many Democrats seem skittish about challenging the president on funding, fearing it would play into his hands, one exception is Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russell Feingold, who had this to say on MSNBC last night: "[M]y concern on the Democratic side is, we're being too timid. We've got to take on this war directly."

Feingold says the public wants "legislation that says that here's a time frame during which this war needs to end, let's say six months from the enactment of the bill, and that the Congress is going to cut off the funding for the war.

"If we, as Democrats, don't start talking like that, and respond to what the public really thinks, then we're only going to have ourselves to blame for the Republican ability to sort of finesse this and massage it. . . .

"[T]his idea that somehow we're going to take away something from the troops that are there already, that's just not true," Feingold said. "Our proposal is that the troops will be out of there. That's the safest thing for the troops is to not be there.

"And that's what our proposal would do. It wouldn't take away their equipment. That's just one of the red herrings or phony arguments that the Republicans use, and usually effectively scare the Democrats into not standing up for what is right, and that is to end this mistaken war and get back to fighting the real issue, which is those that attacked us on 9/11."

Dan Froomkin - Bush Daring Dems on Iraq - washingtonpost.com

David Ignatius - Expect The Worst In Iraq - washingtonpost.com

2007-03-03T22:52:00.000-08:00

Expect The Worst In Iraq

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, February 7, 2007; A17

Somehow, after four years, the debate on Iraq is still animated by wishful thinking. The White House talks as if a surge of 20,000 troops is going to stop a civil war. Democrats argue that when America withdraws its troops, Iraqis will finally take responsibility for their own security. But we all need to face the likelihood that this story isn't going to have a happy ending.

That was the underlying message of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, released last week. It warned the administration that if the sectarian conflict continues, as it almost certainly will, "we assess that the overall security situation will continue to deteriorate." The current conflict isn't just a civil war, the analysts noted; it's worse -- with criminal gangs, al-Qaeda terrorists and Shiite internal feuding adding to the anarchic state of the country.

And for critics of the war who favor a quick American withdrawal, the analysts had this stark warning: "If Coalition forces were withdrawn rapidly during [the next 12 to 18 months] . . . we judge that this almost certainly would lead to a significant increase in the scale and scope of sectarian conflict in Iraq." With U.S. troops gone, the analysts forecast, the Iraqi army would collapse and al-Qaeda attacks inside and outside Iraq would surge. "Massive civilian casualties and forced population displacement would be probable."

In this bleak situation -- where, as everyone keeps repeating, "there are no good options" -- what's the right course for U.S. policy? A useful approach may be to start planning, not for the best but for the worst. Congress and the administration should begin thinking about potential catastrophes in Iraq -- and about how to protect the core national interests of the United States and its allies.

In thinking about catastrophic outcomes, I have been guided by a paper that was privately circulated last week by Robert Jervis, a professor of political science at Columbia University. He begins with this assessment: "The U.S. will withdraw its troops from Iraq at some point, and when it does, if not earlier, the situation is likely to deteriorate badly. This could be a truly dreadful time -- it could be a tsunami sweeping over the entire region."

So how to protect vital American interests amid this tsunami of violence? I would offer several basic precepts, drawn from conversations with experts in and out of government:

· Contain the sectarian violence. The United States can't stop the Iraqi civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, but it can try to keep this conflict within Iraq's borders. Here lies the great danger of the new strategy of "realignment" that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice outlined in an interview with me last month. In seeking to rally Sunni Arab moderates to combat Iran and its proxies, the United States risks expanding the Sunni-Shiite fault line from Iraq to the region as a whole.

This is a dangerous course. The risks were summed up by Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League. The war in Iraq "opened the gates of Hell," he told me, and if the conflict expands to Iranian-backed Shiites and Sunni Arabs, "we will enter Hell itself." America should not encourage this descent into the inferno.

· Protect the oil. The United States should be planning with its allies how to secure the region's oil supplies. We have done it before: Persian Gulf oil exports continued through eight bloody years of the Iran-Iraq war, thanks in part to U.S. naval escorts and reflagging of tankers. America should help prepare a similar international effort now, including new pipelines that avoid the Gulf altogether.

· Shield the Iraqi population. America hasn't been able to stop the civil war, but U.S. troops can reduce the slaughter and help provide humanitarian relief for what's likely to be a growing tide of refugees fleeing the battle zones.

· Talk with the neighbors. Facing the prospect of a catastrophic outcome in Iraq, the United States must engage in dialogue with all the regional states, including Syria and Iran. America shouldn't initially offer any deals, much less "grand bargains," but it should talk about mutual security interests and explore where they converge.

· Push for Arab-Israeli peace. The one thing everyone in the region seems to agree on -- from Israel to Saudi Arabia -- is the need for a Palestinian state. The Palestinians themselves can't offer Israel a meaningful peace agreement now -- they're too weak, angry and disorganized. But the Arabs, led by Saudi King Abdullah, can. That's the breakthrough Rice should pursue.

These crisis management steps won't stop the catastrophe that is unfolding in Iraq, but they could mitigate its effects, which may be all we can hope for. And the benefit of worst-case thinking is that things occasionally work out better than expected.

The writer co-hosts, with Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.

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David Ignatius - Expect The Worst In Iraq - washingtonpost.com

The Iran Option That Isn't on the Table - washingtonpost.com

2007-03-03T22:51:00.000-08:00

he Iran Option That Isn't on the Table

By Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh
Thursday, February 8, 2007; A21

As Iran crosses successive nuclear demarcations and mischievously intervenes in Iraq, the question of how to address the Islamic republic is once more preoccupying Washington. Economic sanctions, international ostracism, military strikes and even support for hopeless exiles are all contemplated with vigor and seriousness. One option, however, is rarely assessed: engagement as a means of achieving a more pluralistic and responsible government in Tehran.

The all-encompassing nuclear debate comes as Iran's political landscape is changing once again. As America became reconciled to a monolithic Iran, represented by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his brand of rambunctious politics, the results from December's local elections suggest Iranians were doing otherwise. Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric and populist posturing did not impress the Iranians who turned out in large numbers to elect city councils and members of the Assembly of Experts. Voters favored pragmatic conservatives and reformers who oppose their president's policies abroad and his economic programs at home. Despite this show of dissent, though, it would be a mistake to assume that Iran's regime is about to fall or that a democratic spring is looming.

Iran has long appeared ready for democracy. It has a literate, youthful population that is immersed in world culture, is at home on the Internet, is keen to engage the West and is above the anti-American anger that dominates the Arab street. No other Middle Eastern country has as much civic activism or a population that has voted as often in elections at various levels. But positive social and cultural indices have so far not translated into a political opening. Iranian society may be ready to embrace democracy, but Iranian politics is not ready to accommodate it.

Iran does not have an organized pro-democracy movement. The reformers who were swept to power in 1997 never coalesced around a coherent platform, nor did they produce a political party. Their movement inspired activism and student protests, and it changed the style and language of politics, but its lack of organization ultimately cost it the presidency in 2005. Reformism was popular but politically ineffective.

The clerical regime has also proved to be enterprising in facing demands for reform, particularly by using elections to manage opposition within the bounds of the Islamic republic. Economic isolation, supported by international sanctions, has kept the private sector weak, which has in turn denied supporters of change levers they could use to pry open the regime. The public sector accounts for more than 80 percent of the Iranian economy, and the constitution gives the clerical leadership most of the power. The problem facing democracy is not so much the state's theocratic nature as it is the enormous domination it enjoys over the economy, society and politics. For democracy to succeed, the state's domination of the economy and society must be reduced.

For too long, Washington has thought that a policy of coercion and sanctions applied to Iran would eventually yield a responsible and representative regime. Events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe suggest that containment eventually generates sufficient pressure to force autocratic elites to accommodate both international mandates and the aspirations of their restless constituents. Ironically, though, U.S. policy has buttressed the Iranian regime, which has justified its monopoly of power as a means of fending off external enemies and managing an economy under international duress.

More than sanctions or threats of military retribution, Iran's integration into the global economy would impose standards and discipline on the recalcitrant theocracy. International investors and institutions such as the World Trade Organization are far more subversive, as they would demand the prerequisites of a democratic society -- transparency, the rule of law and decentralization -- as a price for their commerce.

Paradoxically, to liberalize the theocratic state, the United States would do better to shelve its containment strategy and embark on a policy of unconditional dialogue and sanctions relief. A reduced American threat would deprive the hard-liners of the conflict they need to justify their concentration of power. In the meantime, as Iran became assimilated into the global economy, the regime's influence would inevitably yield to the private sector, with its demands for accountability and reform.

It is important to appreciate that Iran has a political system without precedent or parallel in modern history. The struggle there is not just between reactionaries and reformers, conservatives and liberals, but fundamentally between the state and society. A subtle means of diminishing the state and empowering the society is, in the end, the best manner of promoting not only democracy but also nuclear disarmament.

Vali Nasr is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of "The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future." Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic."

Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh - The Iran Option That Isn't on the Table - washingtonpost.com

Tom Vilsack - Congress Must Act On Iraq - washingtonpost.com

2007-03-03T22:48:00.000-08:00

Congress Must Act On Iraq

By Tom Vilsack
Saturday, February 10, 2007; A17

Think of the last time you were in a public place with 1,000 people -- a sports event, a Fourth of July parade, a concert.

Now imagine all 1,000 of those people dead.

If the number of American military deaths in Iraq in recent years is any guide, that's how many Americans will die in that country in the next year if Congress doesn't act immediately to take our troops out of harm's way in Iraq's civil war.

Now imagine the 5,000 more Americans likely to be wounded and maimed if Congress doesn't fulfill its duty to get our young men and women out of Iraq's war zone.

In each of the past three years, more than 820 American soldiers have been killed in the war. Given the increased violence this year, America is on pace to lose more than 1,000 soldiers in Iraq. Over 23,000 American soldiers have been wounded since the war began, nearly 6,000 each year. It is time for us to clearly say that our troops must be brought home now.

Military commanders in Iraq, the Iraq Study Group and the American people have all said the status quo is wrong. Further, the president's closest intelligence and military advisers state in the latest National Intelligence Estimate that Iraq is in the throes of a civil war and that the capacity of U.S. troops to influence the outcome is severely limited. This war will end only with a political solution -- not a military one.

Members of Congress have a constitutional and moral obligation to exercise their authority to stop funding President Bush's failed policy in Iraq. Not eventually, but immediately.

The war in Iraq and the president's mismanagement of our military resources have recklessly endangered our national security and depleted our military and National Guard units across America. By nearly every standard, the homeland security of our country has been weakened and compromised by the president's policies and a lack of congressional oversight.

It has been said that all our options in Iraq are bad, but some options are worse than others. Leaving American troops in harm's way while acknowledging that they have little to accomplish is the worst-case scenario. Congress has the ability to pull our combat brigades out of the most violent areas, maintain a strategic military presence in northern Iraq and bring the rest of our troops home now.

Nearly a year ago, I went to Iraq to hear firsthand from U.S. troops, military leaders and Iraqis.

This is what I heard from our military commanders: If the Iraqi government can't provide better security for its people in six months, U.S. troops in central and southern Iraq should leave. That time has now come and gone -- and so should our servicemen and women who are needlessly in danger.

Unfortunately, this administration refuses to listen to our military leaders or our citizens. So the question is: What will Congress do?

Congress has the constitutional ability and the moral responsibility to pass legislation cutting off funding for the status quo.

Not one soldier will or should be deprived of ammunition or armor.

A modest number of peacekeeping troops would temporarily remain in northern Iraq, protect civilians against sectarian violence, discourage Iran from border incursions and help maintain regional stability -- without recklessly endangering American lives.

As governor, I called 43 Iowa families after their loved ones had been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. These soldiers and their families made a tremendous sacrifice to protect our freedom and help keep America safe. Make no mistake, our soldiers have done the job they were asked to do, and they have done it well. But too many of these patriots have made the ultimate sacrifice.

Supporting a cap on troops is really just support for staying the course with a failed policy. A toothless congressional resolution is meaningless. And a delay in congressional action will guarantee that more American soldiers will die.

Those who voted for the war, those who voted to continue to support the war and those who voted to continue funding the war can all surely vote to stop the war and do what's right for our military personnel and nation.

Not in 2008 or 2009, but now.

The writer, a former governor of Iowa, is a Democratic candidate for president.

View all comments that have been posted about this articleTom Vilsack - Congress Must Act On Iraq - washingtonpost.com

Victory Is Not an Option - washingtonpost.com

2007-03-03T22:46:00.000-08:00

Victory Is Not an Option
The Mission Can't Be Accomplished -- It's Time for a New Strategy

By William E. Odom
Sunday, February 11, 2007; B01

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Its gloomy implications -- hedged, as intelligence agencies prefer, in rubbery language that cannot soften its impact -- put the intelligence community and the American public on the same page. The public awakened to the reality of failure in Iraq last year and turned the Republicans out of control of Congress to wake it up. But a majority of its members are still asleep, or only half-awake to their new writ to end the war soon.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Americans do not warm to defeat or failure, and our politicians are famously reluctant to admit their own responsibility for anything resembling those un-American outcomes. So they beat around the bush, wringing hands and debating "nonbinding resolutions" that oppose the president's plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

For the moment, the collision of the public's clarity of mind, the president's relentless pursuit of defeat and Congress's anxiety has paralyzed us. We may be doomed to two more years of chasing the mirage of democracy in Iraq and possibly widening the war to Iran. But this is not inevitable. A Congress, or a president, prepared to quit the game of "who gets the blame" could begin to alter American strategy in ways that will vastly improve the prospects of a more stable Middle East.

No task is more important to the well-being of the United States. We face great peril in that troubled region, and improving our prospects will be difficult. First of all, it will require, from Congress at least, public acknowledgment that the president's policy is based on illusions, not realities. There never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq. Most Americans need no further convincing, but two truths ought to put the matter beyond question:

First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly "constitutional" -- meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.

Strangely, American political scientists whose business it is to know these things have been irresponsibly quiet. In the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion, neoconservative agitators shouted insults at anyone who dared to mention the many findings of academic research on how democracies evolve. They also ignored our own struggles over two centuries to create the democracy Americans enjoy today. Somehow Iraqis are now expected to create a constitutional order in a country with no conditions favoring it.

This is not to say that Arabs cannot become liberal democrats. When they immigrate to the United States, many do so quickly. But it is to say that Arab countries, as well as a large majority of all countries, find creating a stable constitutional democracy beyond their capacities.

Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation. (In 1914, a majority of the public favored supporting Germany against Britain.) Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis' rising animosity toward the United States. Even supporters of an American military presence say that it is acceptable temporarily and only to prevent either of the warring sides in Iraq from winning. Today the Iraqi government survives only because its senior members and their families live within the heavily guarded Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and military command.

As Congress awakens to these realities -- and a few members have bravely pointed them out -- will it act on them? Not necessarily. Too many lawmakers have fallen for the myths that are invoked to try to sell the president's new war aims. Let us consider the most pernicious of them.

1) We must continue the war to prevent the terrible aftermath that will occur if our forces are withdrawn soon. Reflect on the double-think of this formulation. We are now fighting to prevent what our invasion made inevitable! Undoubtedly we will leave a mess -- the mess we created, which has become worse each year we have remained. Lawmakers gravely proclaim their opposition to the war, but in the next breath express fear that quitting it will leave a blood bath, a civil war, a terrorist haven, a "failed state," or some other horror. But this "aftermath" is already upon us; a prolonged U.S. occupation cannot prevent what already exists.

2) We must continue the war to prevent Iran's influence from growing in Iraq. This is another absurd notion. One of the president's initial war aims, the creation of a democracy in Iraq, ensured increased Iranian influence, both in Iraq and the region. Electoral democracy, predictably, would put Shiite groups in power -- groups supported by Iran since Saddam Hussein repressed them in 1991. Why are so many members of Congress swallowing the claim that prolonging the war is now supposed to prevent precisely what starting the war inexorably and predictably caused? Fear that Congress will confront this contradiction helps explain the administration and neocon drumbeat we now hear for expanding the war to Iran.

Here we see shades of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy in Vietnam: widen the war into Cambodia and Laos. Only this time, the adverse consequences would be far greater. Iran's ability to hurt U.S. forces in Iraq are not trivial. And the anti-American backlash in the region would be larger, and have more lasting consequences.

3) We must prevent the emergence of a new haven for al-Qaeda in Iraq. But it was the U.S. invasion that opened Iraq's doors to al-Qaeda. The longer U.S. forces have remained there, the stronger al-Qaeda has become. Yet its strength within the Kurdish and Shiite areas is trivial. After a U.S. withdrawal, it will probably play a continuing role in helping the Sunni groups against the Shiites and the Kurds. Whether such foreign elements could remain or thrive in Iraq after the resolution of civil war is open to question. Meanwhile, continuing the war will not push al-Qaeda outside Iraq. On the contrary, the American presence is the glue that holds al-Qaeda there now.

4) We must continue to fight in order to "support the troops." This argument effectively paralyzes almost all members of Congress. Lawmakers proclaim in grave tones a litany of problems in Iraq sufficient to justify a rapid pullout. Then they reject that logical conclusion, insisting we cannot do so because we must support the troops. Has anybody asked the troops?

During their first tours, most may well have favored "staying the course" -- whatever that meant to them -- but now in their second, third and fourth tours, many are changing their minds. We see evidence of that in the many news stories about unhappy troops being sent back to Iraq. Veterans groups are beginning to make public the case for bringing them home. Soldiers and officers in Iraq are speaking out critically to reporters on the ground.

But the strangest aspect of this rationale for continuing the war is the implication that the troops are somehow responsible for deciding to continue the president's course. That political and moral responsibility belongs to the president, not the troops. Did not President Harry S. Truman make it clear that "the buck stops" in the Oval Office? If the president keeps dodging it, where does it stop? With Congress?

Embracing the four myths gives Congress excuses not to exercise its power of the purse to end the war and open the way for a strategy that might actually bear fruit.

The first and most critical step is to recognize that fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy. Getting out of Iraq is the pre-condition for creating new strategic options. Withdrawal will take away the conditions that allow our enemies in the region to enjoy our pain. It will awaken those European states reluctant to collaborate with us in Iraq and the region.

Second, we must recognize that the United States alone cannot stabilize the Middle East.

Third, we must acknowledge that most of our policies are actually destabilizing the region. Spreading democracy, using sticks to try to prevent nuclear proliferation, threatening "regime change," using the hysterical rhetoric of the "global war on terrorism" -- all undermine the stability we so desperately need in the Middle East.

Fourth, we must redefine our purpose. It must be a stable region, not primarily a democratic Iraq. We must redirect our military operations so they enhance rather than undermine stability. We can write off the war as a "tactical draw" and make "regional stability" our measure of "victory." That single step would dramatically realign the opposing forces in the region, where most states want stability. Even many in the angry mobs of young Arabs shouting profanities against the United States want predictable order, albeit on better social and economic terms than they now have.

Realigning our diplomacy and military capabilities to achieve order will hugely reduce the numbers of our enemies and gain us new and important allies. This cannot happen, however, until our forces are moving out of Iraq. Why should Iran negotiate to relieve our pain as long as we are increasing its influence in Iraq and beyond? Withdrawal will awaken most leaders in the region to their own need for U.S.-led diplomacy to stabilize their neighborhood.

If Bush truly wanted to rescue something of his historical legacy, he would seize the initiative to implement this kind of strategy. He would eventually be held up as a leader capable of reversing direction by turning an imminent, tragic defeat into strategic recovery.

If he stays on his present course, he will leave Congress the opportunity to earn the credit for such a turnaround. It is already too late to wait for some presidential candidate for 2008 to retrieve the situation. If Congress cannot act, it, too, will live in infamy.

diane@hudson.org

William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, was

head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan. He served on the National Security Council staff under Jimmy Carter. A West Point graduate with a PhD from Columbia, Odom teaches at Yale

and is a fellow of the Hudson Institute.

View all comments that have been posted about this article.

Victory Is Not an Option - washingtonpost.com

Zalmay Khalilzad - A Shared Stake in Iraq's Future - washingtonpost.com

2007-03-03T19:44:00.000-08:00

A Shared Stake in Iraq's Future

How the Oil Agreement Points the Way Forward

By Zalmay Khalilzad

Saturday, March 3, 2007; Page A15

Under the national hydrocarbon law approved this week by Iraq's Council of Ministers, oil will serve as a vehicle to unify Iraq and will give all Iraqis a shared stake in their country's future. This is a significant achievement for Iraqis' national reconciliation. It demonstrates that the leaders of Iraq's principal communities can pull together to peacefully resolve difficult issues of national importance.

Resolving concerns about control of oil is central to overcoming internal divisions in Iraq. The country has the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and more than 90 percent of federal income comes from oil revenue. The effective and equitable management of these resources is critical to economic growth as well as to developing a greater sense of shared purpose among Iraqi communities.

The goal of Iraq's leaders was to draft a law that ensured that all Iraqis could be confident they would receive their fair share of the benefits of developing the country's resources, that the revenue from oil and gas would enable a decentralization of power while maintaining national unity, and that Iraq would adopt the best international practices for the development and management of its mineral wealth. By these standards, the hydrocarbon law is a great success. It:

· Reaffirms that oil and gas resources are owned by all the people of Iraq and contains a firm commitment to revenue-sharing among regions and provinces on the basis of population.

· Establishes a predictable framework and processes for federal-regional cooperation that demonstrate the government's commitment to democracy and federalism.

· Creates a principal policymaking body for energy -- the Federal Council on Oil and Gas -- that will have representatives from all of Iraq's regions and oil-producing provinces.

· Ensures that all revenue from oil sales will go into a single national account and that provinces will receive direct shares of revenue, thereby significantly increasing local control of financial resources.

· Establishes international standards for transparency and mandates public disclosure of contracts and associated revenue and payments. This is essential to build confidence in the new political order and to counter corruption.

The law defines a role for the Oil Ministry that is primarily regulatory, which is the modern standard and which will also harness the market to achieve the optimal development of Iraq's resources. It provides the legal framework to enable international investment in Iraq's oil and gas sectors, a break from the statist and overcentralized practices of the past. It also requires best practices in environmental protection and field management and development, ensuring that the environment is not damaged and that hydrocarbon assets are not wasted by poor practices of the past.

While the draft law will need to be enacted by the Iraqi Council of Representatives when it returns from recess, the prospects for passage are excellent because all the major parliamentary blocs are represented in the cabinet. Companion legislation will be required in several areas, and Iraqi leaders hope to complete the entire package of hydrocarbon legislation by the end of May.

Arriving at this agreement was not easy. It has taken other countries years to complete such legislation. While negotiating this law presented special challenges for the federal government, the Kurdistan regional government and the leaders of key political blocs, the approval of the draft by the Council of Ministers sets a precedent for problem-solving and cooperation that is critical to the stabilization and development of Iraq.

This is the first time since 2003 that all major Iraqi communities have come together on a defining piece of legislation. A national reconciliation that stabilizes Iraq can be achieved if similar compromises are made on the future of de-Baathification and on amending the constitution. The agreement on the oil law should give us confidence that Iraqis are willing and able to take the steps needed for Iraq's success.

The writer is the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Zalmay Khalilzad - A Shared Stake in Iraq's Future - washingtonpost.com

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey - Europe's Runaway Prosecutions - washingtonpost.com

2007-03-03T19:42:00.001-08:00

Europe's Runaway Prosecutions

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

Wednesday, February 28, 2007; Page A19

An Italian court announced this month that it is moving forward with the indictment and trial of 25 CIA agents charged with kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric. These proceedings may well violate international law, but the case serves as a wake-up call to the United States. Overseas opponents of American foreign policy are increasingly turning to judicial proceedings against individual American officials as a means of reformulating or frustrating U.S. aims, and action to arrest this development is needed.

The Italian case involves a 2003 CIA mission to apprehend an Egyptian cleric named Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr. Suspected of terrorist ties, Nasr was seized in Milan and transported to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured. This was, of course, an "extraordinary rendition" -- a long-standing and legal practice that generally involves the cooperation of two or more governments in the capture and transportation of a criminal suspect outside of normal extradition proceedings. It was through such a rendition that the terrorist "Carlos the Jackal" was delivered for trial to France from Sudan in 1994.

The United States has used extraordinary renditions as part of the war on terrorism, but the continuing value of this tactic, particularly in Europe, is questionable. One of the primary European objections to the concept of a "war" on terrorism is the fear that U.S. forces will treat Europe as a battlefield. Although this fear is specious -- international law has long provided that, even in wartime, a nation cannot pursue its enemies into the territory of friendly countries without their express permission -- extraordinary rendition gets uncomfortably close to U.S. military operations on European streets. Moreover, unlike many other aspects of U.S. policy, extraordinary rendition can probably be abandoned without severely undercutting the war effort. That being the case, and given the obvious and increasing hard feelings the policy has prompted in Europe, extraordinary renditions should end.

Yet the United States must still vigorously resist the prosecution of its indicted agents. If they acted with the knowledge and consent of the Italian government (as The Post's Dana Priest reported in 2005), they are immune from criminal prosecution in that country. Although foreign nationals traveling abroad are ordinarily subject to local judicial authority, international law has long recognized an exception for government agents entering another country with its government's permission. As Chief Justice John Marshall explained in The Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon (1812), an early Supreme Court case involving the immunity of a French warship in American waters, "[o]ne sovereign being in no respect amendable to another . . . can be supposed to enter a foreign territory only under an express license, or in the confidence that the immunities belonging to his independent sovereign nation, though not expressly stipulated, are reserved by implication."

Because of this general rule, elaborate Status of Forces Agreements are negotiated before the troops of one state are stationed in another. These agreements usually narrow the jurisdictional immunities to be enjoyed by American troops stationed abroad, although under the NATO Status of Forces Agreements, to which Italy and the United States are both parties, America retains primary jurisdiction over offenses committed by individuals on duty -- as would have been the case here. If the Status of Forces Agreement does not apply -- as it might not, because intelligence agents are involved -- then the general rule applies. In either case, it is up to American, not Italian, authorities to determine whether any offense was committed in the capture and rendition of Nasr.

Unfortunately, the effort to prosecute these American agents is only one instance of a growing problem. Efforts to use domestic and international legal systems to intimidate U.S. officials are proliferating, especially in Europe. Cases are pending in Germany against other CIA agents and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- all because of controversial aspects of the war on terrorism. These follow Belgium's misguided effort to pursue "universal jurisdiction" claims for alleged violations of international law, which also resulted in complaints against American officials including Vice President Cheney and former secretary of state Colin Powell. That law was amended, but the overall problem is unlikely to go away. The initiation of judicial proceedings against individual Americans is too attractive a means of striking at the United States -- and one often not subject to control by the relevant foreign government.

Accordingly, Congress should make it a crime to initiate or maintain a prosecution against American officials if the proceeding itself otherwise violates accepted international legal norms. Thus, in instances where there is a clear case of immunity, U.S. prosecutors could answer proceedings such as the Italian indictments with criminal proceedings in U.S. courts. By responding in kind, even if few overreaching foreign officials are ever actually tried, such a law would create a powerful disincentive for these kinds of legal antics.

The authors served in the Justice Department under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and have been expert members of the U.N. Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey - Europe's Runaway Prosecutions - washingtonpost.com

Anne Applebaum - The Gall To Speak Her Mind - washingtonpost.com

2007-03-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

It is not an inspiring sight to watch the United States Senate turn the most important issue facing America into a political football, and then fumble it. Yet that is what now seems to have come from a once-promising bipartisan effort to finally have the debate about the Iraq war that Americans have been denied for four years.

The Democrats’ ultimate goal was to express the Senate’s opposition to President Bush’s latest escalation. But the Democrats’ leaders have made that more difficult — allowing the Republicans to maneuver them into the embarrassing position of blocking a vote on a counterproposal that they feared too many Democrats might vote for.

We oppose that resolution, which is essentially a promise never to cut off funds for this or any future military operation Mr. Bush might undertake in Iraq. But the right way for the Senate to debate Iraq is to debate Iraq, not to bar proposals from the floor because they might be passed. The majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, needs to call a timeout and regroup. By changing the issue from Iraq to partisan parliamentary tactics, his leadership team threatens to muddy the message of any anti-escalation resolution the Senate may eventually pass.

As it happens, the blocked Republican alternative, proposed by Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, itself represents an end run around the Senate’s constitutional responsibilities. The rational way to oppose cuts in funds is to vote against them, if and when any ever come before the Senate. Mr. Reid should not be shy about urging fellow Democrats to vote against this hollow gimmick, which tries to make it look as if the senators support Mr. Bush’s failed Iraq policies by playing on their fears of being accused of not supporting the troops.

America went to war without nearly enough public discussion, and it needs more Senate debate about Iraq this time around, not less. The voters who overturned Republican majorities in both houses last November expect, among other things, to see energized Congressional scrutiny of the entire war — not just of the plan for an additional 21,500 troops but also of the future of the 130,000 plus who are already there.

Another Republican resolution, proposed by Sen. John McCain, gives the appearance of moving in that more promising direction by ticking off a series of policy benchmarks and then urging the Iraqi government to meet them. But listing benchmarks is one thing. It is another to spell out real consequences for not meeting them, like the withdrawal of American military support. Instead of doing that, the McCain resolution hands an unwarranted blank check to Mr. Bush’s new Iraq commander, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus. It breathtakingly declares that he “should receive from Congress the full support necessary” to carry out America’s mission.

Frustrated by the Senate’s fumbles, the House plans to move ahead next week with its own resolution on Mr. Bush’s troop plan. When the Senate is ready to turn its attention back to substance again, it should go further.

Senators need to acknowledge the reality of four years of failed presidential leadership on Iraq and enact a set of binding benchmarks. These should require the hard steps toward national reconciliation that the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki continues to evade and that the White House refuses to insist on.

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Anne Applebaum - The Gall To Speak Her Mind - washingtonpost.com

The death penalty | A lethal habit | Economist.com

2007-03-02T21:16:00.000-08:00

A lethal habit

Mar 2nd 2007 | NEW YORK
From Economist.com

Is the death penalty gradually falling out of favour in America?

AFP

ANGEL DIAZ took part in a robbery in Miami, in 1979, and was convicted seven years later of killing a bar manager during the crime. In December the state of Florida executed him by lethal injection. But Mr Diaz took twice as long to die as is usual, and some thought they saw him grimace in pain when he should have been unconscious and paralysed. When it was finally over, he had foot-long burns on each arm.

A report into his grisly last moments was released on Thursday March 1st, with recommendations for Florida’s new governor, Charlie Crist. It concluded that what happened to Mr Diaz will almost certainly happen again—the needles that punctured his veins went in too far and injected the drugs into his flesh, requiring a second injection. And yet the report merely recommended better training for execution teams, and the elimination of one of the three drugs in the execution cocktail (the one paralysing the prisoner, which may mask whether he is in pain), along with other tweaks. The death penalty is safe in Florida for now. Florida is keener on the death penalty than most states, although Texas, Virginia, Missouri and Oklahoma each execute more. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1977, just over 1,000 people have been executed, with a peak in 1999. Since then, however, America’s ardour for executions has declined. Not only are fewer on death row actually being executed. From 317 in 1996, the number of new death sentences has dropped steadily to 114 last year. By law, only jurors who agree in principle with the possibility of the death penalty are allowed to serve on capital juries. This, naturally, tends to bias juries towards the death penalty. Yet even those who theoretically agree with death sentences are showing themselves more reluctant to hand them out.

The trend is matched by federal jurisprudence and by actions of the states. Execution is typically a state affair under laws chosen by state legislatures, but takes place within federal legal guidelines. In the past few years, the Supreme Court eliminated two of the most egregious kinds: in 2002 it stopped executions of the mentally retarded; in 2005 it called a halt to the death penalty for those who were minors when they committed their crimes.

Many big states have begun to move tentatively against the death penalty, too. In 2000 Illinois’s governor imposed a moratorium on executions, saying he couldn’t be sure that the process was working properly. In 2004, New York’s state Supreme Court struck down the execution law in the state on similar grounds; the state legislature has declined to reinstate it, leaving New York with a de facto moratorium. A commission in New Jersey reported in January that there is little chance that state's execution law can be made to conform with the state’s constitution, and recommended doing away with it.

Washington state last year came within one judicial vote (in a 4-5 split) of binning the death penalty, after a confessed murderer of one woman was put to death while a serial murderer of 48 victims had received life in prison after co-operating with the authorities. By one count last year, the death penalty was “on hold” in some form in eight states, thanks to the evidence that it is applied arbitrarily (as in the Washington example), incompetently (as in the Diaz case), incorrectly (Florida has released 22 prisoners from death row on grounds of innocence in 34 years), or with racial bias (blacks get it more often than whites).

Does this glimpse of a trend mean America as a whole may yet abolish the death penalty? Not any time soon. Public opinion continues, heavily, to support its use. But when pollsters add the option of “life without parole” to their questions, the death penalty’s support drops to about even with non-death punishments. The use of the death penalty may yet become rarer, if not extinct, in America.

The death penalty | A lethal habit | Economist.com

French politics | The third man | Economist.com

2007-03-01T07:46:00.000-08:00

The third man

Mar 1st 2007 | PARIS
From The Economist print edition

The rise of François Bayrou makes the election more exciting

AFP

Get article background

THE byways of French politics are littered with men once tipped to be president. The voters have a genius for humbling favourites and exalting outsiders. Add the fact that presidents are elected in a two-round system, and surprises are always possible. In 2002 the surprise was unpleasant: the far right’s Jean-Marie Le Pen beat the Socialist candidate in the first round. To their dismay, the voters had to choose between Mr Le Pen and the incumbent, Jacques Chirac, in the run-off.

This time the surprise may come from a politician best known for being nice. François Bayrou, a perennial also-ran, has climbed past Mr Le Pen to be the “third man” of the moment. A new opinion poll this week gives him 19%, within hailing distance of the Socialist challenger, Ségolène Royal, on 25.5%; the centre-right UMP candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, is on 29%.

Mr Bayrou’s big plan is to assemble a coalition uniting the left and right. He talks about the possibility of naming a prime minister from the left. (His ideal would be a younger version of Jacques Delors, a former European Commission president.) A devout Roman Catholic who takes a liberal line on issues such as gay rights, Mr Bayrou is a father of six (and grandfather of 10), who when not politicking writes history books and breeds horses on the family farm in the Pyrenees. He heads a rump centrist party, the UDF. His government experience is limited to a stint as education minister a decade ago.

A French television host once dubbed Mr Bayrou the “horse whisperer”, after the book and film of that name. It conjures up a compelling image of Mr Bayrou persuading a skittish electorate to accept reforms with soothing murmurs about left-right pacts. His love of horses is authentic: even as he explains his policy on Iran (he would support tougher sanctions), he takes a call from his farm, and swears softly on learning of a stillborn foal.

Yet Mr Bayrou rejects the idea of a skittish France, fearful of change. Instead, he paints the French as deeply distrustful, in search of “guarantees” that reforms are “fair”. Coalition rule offers just such a guarantee, he argues. “If you do not have a broad-based government, citizens will think reforms are being pushed for reasons of ideology.”

Mr Bayrou derides his rivals for proposing to spend France’s problems away. He has called for tighter control to eliminate budget deficits. He wants to encourage longer working hours, and says that France must learn to love entrepreneurs. But some of his policies carry a whiff of populism. With French workers in a funk about globalisation, Mr Bayrou has joined those accusing China of undervaluing its currency. Mr Bayrou says the yuan is “400% undervalued”, and wants pressure put on Beijing. Does he believe China will suddenly revalue enough to allow European producers to compete on price? At least the question should be put, he retorts.

If Mr Bayrou were to win, his path to victory might in hindsight look obvious. Mr Sarkozy has slalomed between talk of liberal reforms and an authoritarian tone aimed at those who backed Mr Le Pen in 2002. That has done Mr Bayrou the favour both of hurting Mr Le Pen and of driving middle-class conservatives to the centre. Mr Bayrou has also benefited from the wobbliness of Ms Royal’s campaign. She has had to shore up her core vote by embracing Socialist orthodoxy and surrounding herself with the old party elephants.

The two main candidates’ partisanship would be good news for Mr Bayrou if he somehow squeaked into the second round. Head to head with either Mr Sarkozy or Ms Royal, he could be seen as the least bad option by a majority of voters, handing him outright victory.

Yet that would still be a big surprise. Mr Bayrou’s support base is soft; pollsters always have trouble measuring Mr Le Pen’s strength; voters on both left and right remember 2002 and are likely to rally to the front-runners in the closing days. For all Mr Bayrou’s comforting talk of coalitions, many French people still take a tribal view of politics. The odds are on a Ségo/Sarko run-off. But the race has a third man who cannot be written off.

French politics | The third man | Economist.com

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Industrialising the moon | Pie in the sky | Economist.com

ETimor candidate demands vote recount

ETimor candidate demands vote recount

France's presidential race | Watch your backs | Economist.com

Timor-Leste | Happy ever after? | Economist.com

Climate change | All washed up | Economist.com

Christian beliefs | Questions of faith | Economist.com

Kosovo | What price independence? | Economist.com

Yemen's politics | Economist.com

Politics this week | Economist.com

Odd traditions | Fools' paradise | Economist.com

Art.view | Bubbles, booms and busts | Economist.com

Bubbles, booms and busts

Selling the history of financial speculation

Iran | Stand-off in the Persian Gulf | Economist.com

The European Union | Don’t mention the constitution | Economist.com

Iraq's refugees | Hollowing out | Economist.com

Changing the Blogger Title Tag ~ Widget-based

Monday, November 13, 2006

Changing the Blogger Title Tag

Blogger Label Cloud

Setup and configuration for Blogger in Beta Label Clouds

The Middle East | Time for an Arab road map | Economist.com

Online video | Down the YouTube? | Economist.com

Iraq | Counting the cost | Economist.com

Iraq War forever alters D.C. landscape - Yahoo! News

Iraq War forever alters D.C. landscape

Conservation | Spot the difference | Economist.com

Rural unrest in China | Economist.com

Inside al-Qaeda's brain? | Economist.com

U.S. and Iran call Iraqi conference a 'first step.' - International Herald Tribune

Online encyclopedias | Fact or fiction? | Economist.com

OpinionJournal - Potomac Watch

When interest rates hit 32%, there ought to be a law - Yahoo! News

When interest rates hit 32%, there ought to be a law

Wikipedia's sticky wicket - Yahoo! News

Wikipedia's sticky wicket

Jim Hoagland - 'What Has Happened to Dick Cheney?' - washingtonpost.com

Print Story: Chavez vs. Bush on Yahoo! News

The time is ripe for the US to engage Syria on Mideast issues - Yahoo! News

The time is ripe for the US to engage Syria on Mideast issues

Court blocks access to YouTube in Turkey - International Herald Tribune

How can U.S. stay on top of the world? - Yahoo! News

How can U.S. stay on top of the world?

Iran and Saudi Arabia | An odd couple | Economist.com

Paul R. Pillar - What to Ask Before the Next War - washingtonpost.com

Dan Froomkin - Bush Daring Dems on Iraq - washingtonpost.com

David Ignatius - Expect The Worst In Iraq - washingtonpost.com

The Iran Option That Isn't on the Table - washingtonpost.com

Tom Vilsack - Congress Must Act On Iraq - washingtonpost.com

Victory Is Not an Option - washingtonpost.com

Zalmay Khalilzad - A Shared Stake in Iraq's Future - washingtonpost.com

A Shared Stake in Iraq's Future

How the Oil Agreement Points the Way Forward

Who's Blogging?

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David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey - Europe's Runaway Prosecutions - washingtonpost.com

Europe's Runaway Prosecutions

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Anne Applebaum - The Gall To Speak Her Mind - washingtonpost.com

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