Wednesday, 30th January, 2008

0801

WASHIGNTON
The economy may be slowing down, but Washington's ideas industry is booming.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research institution that was effectively broke seven years ago, just bought a $33 million vacant lot as the site for a new home. The Council on Foreign Relations is expanding its Washington office to a $60 million building. The United States Institute of Peace is erecting a $180 million headquarters of steel and white translucent glass.
Not least, the rapidly growing Brookings Institution - its operating budget is up nearly 50 percent in the past two years alone - just paid $18.5 million for a satellite building across the street from its headquarters...
"To a Wall Streeter, intellectuals are pretty cheap," said Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World." "There are wedding rings that cost more than I do."
A $20 million increase in the Brookings operating budget in the past two years, bringing it to $60.7 million in 2007, came largely from donations from a few individuals.




KUALA LUMPUR
For years this segregation was promoted as the best formula for social harmony in a country that advertises itself as "Truly Asia," a place where the palette of skin colors is as diverse as the mosques, churches and Hindu and Buddhist temples that dot the landscape.
But in recent months ethnic relations here have deteriorated to a level that many find alarming. After years of muffled tensions over religious conversions, government funding for minority schools and a longstanding system of special privileges for Malays, the dominant group, ethnic anger has burst to the forefront of Malaysian politics.




MOSCOW
In a speech Wednesday to officials of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, Putin declared that agents had to be on guard for foreign interference in Russia's affairs, especially during the presidential campaign.




BRUSSELS
Food industry groups, which won their battle against imposition of a mandatory traffic light system, still criticized the proposals as unworkable.
EuroCommerce, which represents the retail, wholesale and international trade sectors in Europe, attacked the requirement for a minimum type size of 3 millimeters for labels.
"Three millimeters is by far larger than the size used by newspapers. Are they not readable?" Xavier Durieu, secretary general of EuroCommerce, said in a statement. "This new requirement will also lead to an increase of the size of the packages, which goes against all the efforts made by the various actors and contradicts the commission initiatives to reduce packaging waste."

SHANGHAI

As unusually heavy snowfall and cold weather continued over much of the country Wednesday, the government stepped up emergency efforts to handle a crisis that threatened to become as much a public relations disaster as a logistical one.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flew to the southern city of Guangzhou, where more than 600,000 travelers had been stranded by the suspension of normal train services.

NAIROBI

So far more than 800 people have been killed and at least 300,000 displaced , with Kenya seeming to tear itself apart along ethnic lines.

TORONTO
An Air-Canada flight from Toronto to London make an emergency landing in Ireland after co-pilot became ill in the cockpit, an airline spokesman said.
"The aircraft landed without incident," a spokesman said. He could not confirm a report that the co-pilot had suffered a nervous breakdown.



LONDON
Pearson, the publishing company based in London, on Wednesday, ended an eight-year effort to establish itself as a force in German-language business journalism, agreeing to sell its 5o percent stake in The Financial Times Deutschland newspaper to its partner in the venture, Gruner+Jahr.

LOS ANGELES

One of the Big Media's most controversial executives is back after a period of quasi-forced retirement.

Stephen Chao was fired from a top position at News Corp, after, in seperate incidents, he hired a male stripper to disrobe at a company meeting and nearly drowned Rupert Murdoch's dog at a party.

Now he is forming a Web video coompany that he hopes to build into an educational alternative to YouTube.

The site, WonderHowTo.com, aggregates how-to videos from the mundane, (like "how to tie a tie" and "how to market your lawn-care business") to the strange ("how to do Criss Angel's vanishing toothpick trick") and the off-colour ("how to train our cat to use the toilet") and beyond.

LONDON

Shine [the managing director of Diamond Trading, de Beers' marketing division] said global supplies of diamonds would remain stable becauase of a lack of major new discoveries.

She said big polished diamonds, valued for their rarity by growing numbers of the exceptionally wealthy, would continue to be bid up to higher prices.

"Thee very rare diamonds, whether they are blues or pinks or big white stones, are going to continue to appreciate," Shine said. "Those that are very rare are like pieces of art. The number of billionaires is growing."

Shine said the very wealthy, whether American, Chinese or Russian, wanted exceptional stones.

"Better quality, bigger sizes, all colors - either whites or yellows or blues."

Diamond trading...sold $16.15 billion worth of rough diamonds in 2006...

KANSAS CITY, Missouri

"We all remember our intial encouters with Starbucks: the exoticism of new language, space, sounds, and smells, Vuelata [chief executive of Fahrenheit 212, an innovation consultancy in New York] said.

Tuesday, 29th January, 2008

0831

NAIROBI
Melitus Mugabe Were, a freshman lawmaker, could have been one of the keys to unlocking the crisis in Kenya, but he never got the chance.
On Tuesday morning, as he pulled up to the gate of his home, Were was dragged out of his car and shot and killed. "Whoever did this has killed the dreams of many," said Elizabeth Mwangi, a friend.



GURGAON, India
Mohammed, 25, said in an interview Monday that he had no idea that it was possible to sell kidneys. He had been picking up odd jobs in Delhi for the past two years and sending money to his family in Gujarat. Two weeks ago, he said, he was approached by a bearded man as he waited at the early-morning labor market by the Old Delhi train station. The man offered him an unusually generous deal: one and a half months' work painting, for 150 rupees a day, with free food and lodging.
He was driven four or five hours away, to a secluded bungalow, surrounded by trees, where he was placed in a room with four other young men, under the watch of two armed guards.
"When I asked why I had been locked inside, the guards slapped me and said they would shoot me if I asked any more questions," Mohammed said, lying in his hospital bed, wrapped in an orange blanket, clenching his teeth and shutting his eyes in pain. He said the men were given food to cook for themselves and periodically nurses would come to take blood samples from them.
One by one they were taken away for surgery.
"They told us not to speak to each other or we would pay with our lives," he said. "I was the last one to be taken."
Two beds away in the drafty isolation ward at the Gurgaon Civic hospital, Shakeel Ahmed, 28, a laborer from Uttar Pradesh, said he, too, had been promised well-paid white-washing work. After several days locked up with Mohammed, he said, a blood sample was taken and a few hours later, against his will, he received an injection that caused him to lose consciousness.
"I had no idea about kidney transplants, but when they made me lie down on the stretcher, I was terrified," he said. "I knew that these people meant to do evil to me. When I woke up a doctor said my kidney had been removed. He said I would be shot if I ever told anyone what happened."
The men said there were no post-operative medical checks and no discussion of money or other compensation.




FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida
"It's a very American invention," John Goldkamp, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, said of the commercial bail bond system. "It's really the only place in the criminal justice system where a liberty decision is governed by a profit-making businessman who will or will not take your business."...
In England, Canada and other countries, agreeing to pay a defendant's bond in exchange for money is a crime akin to witness tampering or bribing a juror - a form of obstruction of justice.


ATHENS
"We are seeing more and more victims turn into perpetrators," said Evangelia Vamvakaki, head of the Greek police's sex-trafficking unit. "It's a recent, and escalating, phenomenon."...
"The traffickers say, 'O.K., go home but come back with a new girl,' " said Vera Gracheva, an expert on former Soviet states at the countertrafficking office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, based in Vienna. "They do it - they are scared of what will happen if they don't."
Well-dressed and with full wallets, they return to their hometowns to lure girls - usually poor and desperate - with promises of easy cash.
"There are many cases they even approach relatives," said Mariana Yevsyukova of La Strada, a support group for trafficking victims in Ukraine.





FAILURES IN REBUILDING WIDESPREAD IN IRAQ
But the new report, released Monday by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent federal agency, examined nearly 200 Parsons construction projects contained in 11 major "job orders" paid for in a huge rebuilding contract. There were also three other nonconstruction orders. The total cost of the work to the United States was $365 million.
The new report finds that 8 of the 11 rebuilding orders were terminated by the United States before they were completed, for reasons including weak contract oversight, unrealistic schedules, a failure to report problems in a timely fashion and poor supervision by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which managed the contracts.
"There was a confluence of shortfalls here," said Stuart Bowen Jr., who leads the inspector general's office. "It was obviously an unworkable plan."



LONDON
The leader of the Conservatives, David Cameron, has expelled from the party a member of Parliament who gave his son almost £50,000 in public money.
The lawmaker, Derek Conway, had said his son had been acting as a researcher while at college and that the money had been paid in salary to him.
But the House of Commons standards committe found the son had done little or no work for him, and Conway now faces a possible police investigation.






BEIJING
Chinese bloggers also have taken up Hu's cause. One blogger, Guo Weidong, wrote a poem that began:

Call on the Beijing government!

Immediately release Hu Jia!

The Chines people, shackled in chains, welcome the Olympics!

SAN FRANCISCO
In a blow to universal health care coverage in California and possibly its prospects nationwide, a state Senate committee has rejected a sweeping plan by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that would have offered insurance to millions of uninsured residents.
The Senate Health Committee defeated the plan Monday as Democrats and Republicans alikes said they found it too nebulous and potentially too costly for a state facing a $14.5 million defecit.
The loss in California, the nation's most populous state and often its most influential, bodes poorly for universal health coverage, an issue that just a year ago appeared to have found its moment.




VIEWS: MUSIC IN THE WORLD (Yo-Yo Ma)
Culture is a fabric composed of gifts from every corner of the world. One way of discovering the world is by digging deeply into its traditions. In music, for instance, at the core of any cellist's repertoire are the Cello Suites by Bach. At the heart of each suite is a dance movement called the sarabande. The dance originated with music of the North African Berbers, where it was a slow, sensual dance. It next appeared in Spain, where it was banned because it was considered lewd and lascivious. Spaniards brought it to the Americas, but it also traveled on to France, where it became a courtly dance. In the 1720s, Bach incorporated the sarabande as a movement in his Cello Suites.
Today, I play Bach, a Paris-born American musician of Chinese parentage. So who really owns the sarabande? Each culture has adopted the music, investing it with specific meaning, but it belongs to us all.

COMMENTARY: AN ASIA CENTUTRY? (H.D.S. Greenway)

DAVOS, Switzerland

Although the erosion of U.S. power, both hard and soft, under the administration of George W. Bush has been common currency in recent years, it was still a shock to me to hear it said, and generally accepted, that America was no longer known for putting a man on the moon, but for Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, the "twin pillars of incompetence" - a country over-stretched militarily that had squandered its legitimacy to lead. The role of America "as the sun around which other planets rotated" was changing. It was not a multipolar world either, but a nonpolar world.

FEMALE RAPPERS WITH AN INDIE ATTITUDE

Yo Majesty broke up for a few years, during which Baynham renounced her homosexuality, found God, married a male Christian missionary, got divorced then reclaimed her lesbian identity. Upon reuniting, the rappers began building a following through MySpace. That led to a recording contract with Domino Records, which will release their debut album this year.

LONDON

Jérôme Kerviel's unauthorized trades cost Société Générale €4.9 billion, but they also helped to turn the French bank's $3 billion of subprime losses into something of a sideshow.
At a time when investors in European banks are focusing on little other than the lenders' exposure to collateralized debt obligations and other securities linked to the struggling U.S. subprime market, a rogue trader can come as a welcome relief...

Société Générale last week revealed the second-largest write-down as a percentage of total subprime exposure at a European bank, after UBS, according to Lehman Brothers research. The lender said it would write off €1.1 billion, or $1.6 billion, related to the housing market and €550 million related to U.S. bond-insurance companies.
Elisabeth Meyer and Christian Charrière-Bournazel, Kerviel's lawyers, have accused Société Générale of seeking to "raise a smokescreen that would distract the public's attention from far more substantial losses that it had made in recent months, notably in the unbelievable subprime affair."

NEW YORK

"The foreign tourists don't go to the theater as much," she [Faith Hope Consolo, a chairwoman of the retail leasing and sles division of the reasl estate company Prudential Douglas Elliman] said. "Their No. 1 pastime is shopping."

GENEVA

Swiss watch exports increased 16 percent last year, the fastest pace in 18 years, as a surging Chinese stock market fueled consumption in Hong Kong.

Exports rose to a record $14,6 billion.

PARIS
Marchet, the union representative, described the most recent suicide, which occurred last June, as having involved a trader in his thirties who worked in the equities and derivatives department.
"This trader was interrogated by two of his supervisors about some unauthorized trades that he made, involving around €9 million," Marchet said. "Nobody told him that he was fired, but after the meeting he went straight to his desk and emptied out his affairs and walked out of the towers," he said, referring to the two, 100-meter, or 330- foot, buildings that comprise the bank's offices in La Défense.
The trader, a father of two young children, then jumped from a nearby footbridge to his death.
The suicide was still being investigated internally by the bank's workplace safety committee, Marchet said. While a full explanation for the man's actions was not known, he said it seemed clear that workplace stress had played a role.
The other two suicides took place in 2005 and 2006, according to two other union officials.
In 2006, a man working in back office operations killed himself on the suburban train connecting La Défense with the city center.
A year earlier, an older man employed in risk control had committed suicide inside the bank, the officials said.

LONDON
The Louis Vuitton ad, meanwhile, aims to promote the brand itself, rather than a specific product. A Vuitton bag makes only a fleeting appearance in the ad, which asks, "Where will life take you?"
"It is supposed to touch our clientele and viewers in ways that perhaps other media will not touch," said Pietro Beccari, Vuitton's head of marketing. "This is a way to say Louis Vuitton is different. It is something éphémère, but also something that stays."

LONDON

A housing market bubble of historic proportions is unwinding in the United States, raising the risk that the current period of poor economic growth there could be measured in years not quarters.
While the first problems emerged in subprime lending, it has become clear that housing is falling across geographies, price categories and borrower types.
And with momentum now behind a fall, the implication is that the process will take a long time and destroy trillions of dollars of capital.
"It is such a big crisis that it is of historic importance," the Yale University economist Robert Shiller said last week in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "It may represent a major turning point and we will see years of falling home prices and associated economic weakness."

NEW YORK

U.S. investigators are seeking information from the Wall Street investment banks Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley regarding their activities related to subprime mortgages...

Goldman and Morgan Stanley are among 21 banks sued on Jan. 10 by the City of Cleveland. The city alleges that fee-hungry banks created a forclosure crisis by offering mortgages that borrowers could not afford but which could be packaged into securities that investors could buy.

Monday, 28th January, 2008

o833

PRAGUE
A specialist in Czech smallness and a historian of culture, he summed up Ztohoven's larger meaning in a neigbhorhood bar. "When people are making fun of something, they are making themselves free of it," he said. "That's the condition of the small nation. It's a defense for everyone in the globalized world."
"I think the goal of Czech mystification is to show us that we live in a world continually mystifying to us - the politicians, the advertisers."



PARIS
"This can function a little bit like a drug," said Jean-Claude Marin, the Paris prosecutorm at a news conference in central Paris on Monday. "There is a dependency on this complicated game of betting on the markets, and there is a sort of spiral in to which it's difficult to exit."

In a detailed, hour-long briefing Marin portrayed Kerviel as an earnest, if somewhat naive "boy" who had told the police that he concealed his trades because he wanted to enhance his reputation as a trader and to earn a bonuses...

BRUSSELS
"We will not sign an agreement until there is full cooperation" from Belgrade with the UN war crimes tribunal, said the Deputy Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans of the Netherlands. The Netherlands resisted appeals from virtually every other EU government to sign the accord, known as the Stabilization and Association Agreement.

ISTANBUL

A Turkish court on Monday sentenced a college professor to 15 months in prison for insulting the memory of Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, but immediately suspended the sentence, saying it would be applied only if he committed another offence...

"I understand the position of the judge: He wanted to save himself," Yayla said. "He didn't have the courage to free me."

CRETEIL, France
A court sentenced six French charity workers to eight years in prison in France on Monday after they were convicted in Chad of trying to kidnap 103 orphans from Dafur.

TORONTO

Canada will extend it's military mission in Afghanistan only if another NATO country puts more soldiers in the dangerous south, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday, echoing the recommendation of an independent panel to withdraw without additional forces.

NAIROBI

The trouble in Kismu began at 8.00 a.m. Monday when young men from the Luo ethnic group set fire to a bus believed to be owned by the Kikuyus, a rival ethnic group. Witnesses said the passengers had escaped and the Luos had been exacting revenge for what happened the day before when a mob of Kikuyus trapped 19 Luo people inside a house and burned them to death.

LONDON
"I had a certain fear of exposing myself too much in my work for a long time," he [Patrick Stewart] said. "A lot of what performing to me had been was elaborate, and at times quite clever, concealment. Someone once said of acting that it is 'telling beautiful lies,' and well, it became just no longer satisfactory to work that way."

Sunday, 27th January, 2008

o955

Suharto, Indonesia's ruler for 32 years, dies at 86

His rule had not been without accomplishment; he led Indonesia to stability and nutured economic growth. But these successes were ultimately overshadowed by pervasive and large-scale corruption, repressive militarized rule and convulsion of mass bloodletting that took at least 500,000 lives when Suharto took power in the late 1960s...

In his last days, a parade of the country's power elite visited the hospital to pay their respects.

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia
"I miss Yugoslavia," said Toha, a 33-year old Slovene entrepeneur..
"We didn't have anything," he said. "Neighbours baked each other cakes; we had a leader we trusted. I remember my mother crying when Tito died. I was only 5, but I knew the world was about to change."

NAIROBI

In one incident, witnesses said at least 7 people and possibly as many as 14 had been burned to death after they were trapped inside their house.

"The situation is very bad," said Grace Kakai, a police commander. "People are fighting each other and trying to drive them out of the area. We have to evacuate people."

JERUSALEM
As an indication of the altered Israeli attitude, the state told the Supreme Court, which was meeting to hear a petition against Israeli efforts to cut electricity and fuel to Gaza, that industrial diesel fuel needed to run Gaza's main power station would now be supplied regularly, although in amounts that do not meet Gaza's needs for uninterrupted electricity...
Sari Bashi, Director of of an Israeli advocacy group, Gisha, part of the cour case, said that "this is part of a stop-start game that continually pushes Gazan residents to the brink, pushing them over, then pulling them back temporarily." She said that "for the last several months, Israel has been slowly reducing Gaza residents to desperation."

MOVIES: Britain, Jan 18-20
1. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (20th Century Fox)





NEW YORK
During the daylong hearing, Drain [a federal bankruptcy judge] who spent roughly an hour on the terms of the payouts and the compensation consultant who devised them, said he would approve Delphi's bankcruptcy exit plan only if the $87 million in incentive pay scheduled for management was reduced, to $16.5 million. Delphi agreed to the cuts...
Bubnovich said the $87 million reward was justified if managers were able to bring Delphi out of bankcruptcy. But in court Drain undressed Bubnovich and his work. He noted the consultant could provide no explanation for why he tied $87 million to the sole criterion of Delphi's emergence from bankcruptcy protection.
"The question raised by the unions, and frankly by me, is whether that analytical process bears any relation to reality," he said in the hearing, according to the transcript.





NEWS ANALYSIS - A DANGEROUS OBSESSION: MEAT
Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world's tropical rain forests.Last week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the rain forests for crop and grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250 square miles, or 320,000 hectares, were lost.
The world's total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the past 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, a projection that one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, said was resulting in a "relentless growth in livestock production."...
Grain, meat and even energy are roped together in a way that could have dire results. More meat means an increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, an increase some experts say will contribute to higher prices.This will be inconvenient for residents of wealthier nations, but it could have tragic consequences for those of poorer ones, especially if higher prices for feed divert production away from food crops. The demand for ethanol is already pushing up prices and explains, in part, the 40 percent rise last year in the food price index calculated by the Food and Agricultural Organization.Though some 800 million people now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This is the case in spite of the inherent inefficiencies: About two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.The environmental impact of growing so much grain for animal feed is profound. Agriculture in the United States - much of which now serves the demand for meat - contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in U.S. rivers and streams, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.





VANTAGE POINT (George Vescey): NFL gets a free pass on doping
While baseball fans fret over the continuing drug investigations, football lumbers toward the Super Bowl without incurring much angst over its assorted scandals.
Why is that?...
I don't suppose there is one football coach in America - from junior high school up - who can really afford to ask how his players grew so big so young. Don't ask, don't tell.

PARIS
"France is back, yes, France is back," said Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner in an interview. "We are pursuing a policy that represents something new - activisim, realism, involvement, even confidence."

PARIS

Michel Hirstel, 62, a retiree who lives nearby and who, like many French people, has been avidly following the story, described the scene as "very exceptional.""What's so surprising about this to me is that they brought this young man so quickly to the financial police headquarters," Hirstel said."What is a little bit revolting to me is that people are attacking this young man. But this bank has been playing with fire for a long time," Hirstel said, referring to Societe Generale's leadership in financial derivatives products.

SAN JOSE, California
Sony uses E Ink in its e-book Reader, which it introduced in 2006, but the Kindle has a feature that neither Sony nor many e-reader predecessors ever possessed: Books and other content can be loaded wirelessly. from just about anywhere in the United States, using the high-speed EVDO network from Sprint.
This may turn out to be a memorable day in the history of convenience - our age's equivalent of that magical moment that FedEx introduced next day delivery and people asked, "How was life possible before this?"

SUBPRIME PARIAHS BECOME STARS
Under the stewardship of Dow Kim and Thomas Maheras, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup built positions in subprime-related securities that led to $34 billion in write-downs last year. The debacle cost chief executives their jobs and brought two of the world's premier financial institutions to their knees.In any other industry, Kim and Maheras would be pariahs. But in the looking-glass world of Wall Street, they — and others like them — are hot properties. The two executives are well on their way to reviving their careers, even as global markets shudder at the prospect that Merrill and Citigroup may report further subprime losses in the coming months.Maheras, who left his job as co-president of Citigroup's investment bank this fall after being demoted, has had serious discussions with several investment banks, including Bear Stearns, about taking on a top management position, people who have been briefed on the situation said. And he has also been approached by investment firms willing to back him to the tune of $1 billion or more if he decides to start his own hedge fund, these people said.Kim, who until last spring was a co-president at Merrill Lynch with oversight of the firm's trading and market operations, has been crisscrossing the globe in recent months raising money for his new hedge fund, Diamond Lake Capital.The ease with which Maheras and Kim have put themselves back in play is a reminder that for many top Wall Street executives, humiliation and defeat need not result in a professional exile.
And they aren't the only ones. Zoe Cruz, the Morgan Stanley co-president who was forced to leave her job after $10.8 billion in subprime losses, has been approached by investment banks, hedge funds and private equity funds about a senior management role, people briefed on those discussions say....
Rightly or wrongly, there is not likely to be such a generosity of spirit for Jean Larkin, who until recently was a sales executive in Citi's prime brokerage division. Larkin was a 17-year veteran of the firm and was coming off a profitable year for the unit, during which it increased its market share. Last week, just days before getting news of his bonus, he was laid off. Larkin, who is 43 and lives in New York, would not comment on his departure, but people who have spoken to him say he had no idea that his job was at risk. People who know him say he does not hold out high hopes of finding another job anytime soon.

ROME

It is hard to know much about the piece of sushi on your palate or the tuna steak in the market. The level of mercury "depends on the species, the size, the age, and perhaps the fishery," said John Kameko at the University of Hawaii. "Tuna supply is global in nature."

MADRID

A group of Islamic extremists in Frankfurt were planning an attack in Germany, according to a would-be suicide bomber captured by police in Spain, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported Sunday.

Saturday, 26th January, 2008

0846

CARACAS

Warning that the United States faces an economic crisis, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, urged his Latin American allies to withdraw their billions of dollars in international reserves that they have in U.S banks...

"We shoud start to bring our reserves here. Why does that money have to be in the north?"

WASHINGTON

A large U.S. spy satellite has lost power and could hit Earth in late Febuary or early March, government officials said. It was not known where on the planet it might come down.

BEIJING

The minister of civil affairs, Li Xueju, said the government began paying "subsidies" to nuclear test veterans last year, Xinhua, the state run news agency, reported Saturday. It was the first public acknowledgement of the benefit.

China conducted 45 nuclear tests at its remote Lop Nur site in the western region of Xinjiang - 23 of them in the atmosphere - between 1964 and 1996, when it signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban. There have been reports of increased incidences of cancers and other diseases in the population around the test site.

SANA, Yemen
[In 2002] Saleh hit on an idea that he hoped would satisfy both his American and Islamist partners: "al hiwar al fikri," or intellectual dialogue. This was an effort to inculcate the idea that Islam, properly understood, does not condone terrorism. Sessions began with hundreds of former jihadists who remained in prison with charges.





AMMAN

Dr. George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a hard-line Marxist group that shocked the world with a campaign of airline hijackings and bombings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, died Saturday of a heart attack in Amman...

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, ordered three days of mourning and flags lowered to half-staff in the Palestinian territories.

BAGHADAD

In other violence, a former city official was fatally stabbed along with his wife and daughter in their home in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in north eastern Baghdad...

The attackers stormed the two story house late Saturday, killing Ahmed Jwad Hashim, his wife and their daughter, and leaving a visiting nephew seriously wounded.

COMMENTARY (Roger Cohen)
GREENVILLE, South Carolina
Something is going on in America. Even in this depressed corner of the country, a place where trains no longer stop and poor families get water from shallow wells, you feel it. A political campaign has become a movement with Barack Obama at its head.




DAVOS, Switzerland
Four speakers debate the future of design
[Paola Antonelli of MoMa] also believes that the yearning for privacy - or Existenzmaximum, as she calls it - will be an increasingly important issue for designers in the future.



CANNES
The mainstream music industry is coming to recognize a price for a digital song that might be good enough to compete with the underground exchange of tunes on the Internet: free.







NEW DEHLI
Last year, a Tehelka reporter spent six months undercover in the western state of Gujarat, where more than 2,000 Muslims were killed during a pogrom in 2002. The undercover footage showed Hindu nationalists confessing to murder and rape. The transcripts were published in November. The next issue, headlined "India Writes Back", contained only reader mail, most expressing deep shock. Nonetheless, the chief minister of the State, Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who was implicated in the sting, was re-elected last month.




LONDON
But even these [contagious] ideas don't really spread until chatter grows on the Internet. So some agencies are now willing to go directly to the Web even with a mainstream campaign like Nescafe videos in France.
"It proved that online can be a mass strategy, that ordinary people can be your media strategy," said Julien Braun, the founder of Blogbang.

Friday, 25th January, 2008

0757

LONDON

The reader's suggestions included "Dipso, Fatso, Bingo, Asbo, Tesco"; "One Mighty Empire, Slightly Used"; "We Apologize for the Inconvenience"; and - the choice favoured by 20.9 percent of the readers - "No Motto, Please, We're British."

ASSEMBLED GENOME IS A STEP TOWARD ARTIFICIAL LIFE

Taking a significant step toward the creation of synthetic forms of life, researchers reported that they had manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium by stictching together its chemical components...

Some activist groups said that Venter was goingtoo far, too fast, this time and that synthetic biology needed outside regulation to prevent the introduction of dangerous organisms, created by evil intent or by innocent error.

NAIROBI
"It's totally unsafe here," said Peter Geche, a taxi driver in Nakuru on Friday afternoon. "So many people have been killed by arrows."

BERLIN

Eric Kastner, believed to have been Germany's last World War I veteran, died Jan. 1 in a nursing home in Cologne at the age of 107, his son, Peter Kastner, said.

Kastner had just graduated from high school in 1918 when he entered the army, his son said. He was sent to the Western Front to fight in France, but was never sent to the front lines.

Kastner rejoined the military in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II. At the end of the war, he became a judge.

VIEWS: FLIGHT SAFETY (George Bibel)

GRAND FORKS, North Dakota

In 23 of the 27 DC-10 airplanes destroyed in accidents, 90 percent of the passengers have survived. In one 1989 crash in Sioux City, Iowa - a crash so violent that the plane broke into multiple sections and a fireball erupted - 185 of the 296 passengers and crew members survived, including a baby placed on the floor (as instructed).

COMMENTARY: TWO CHEERS FOR WALL STREET (David Brooks)

The Greed Narrative goes something like this: The financial markets are dominated by absurdly overpaid zillionaires. They invent complex financial instruments, like globally securitized subprime mortgages that few really understand. They dump these things onto the unsuspecting, sending destabilizing waves of money sloshing around the globe. Economies melt down. Regular people lose jobs and savings. Meanwhile, the financial insiders still get their obscene bonuses, rain or shine.
The morality of the Greed Narrative is straightforward. A small number of predators destabilize the economy and reap big bonuses. The financial system is fundamentally broken. Government should step in and control the malefactors of great wealth.
The Ecology Narrative is different. It starts with the premise that investors and borrowers cooperate and compete in a complex ecosystem. Everyone seeks wealth while minimizing risk. As Jim Manzi, a software entrepreneur who specializes in applied artificial intelligence, has noted, the chief tension in this ecosystem is between innovation and uncertainty. We could live in a safer world, but we'd have to forswear creativity.
The United States has generally opted for financial innovation. This has worked out pretty well. America has enjoyed 25 years of strong economic growth, in part because capital has been efficiently allocated to companies that can use it well.

Financial instruments like adjustable-rate and subprime mortgages have allowed millions of people to get homes they could not otherwise purchase, and research shows that most of these tools have been used intelligently.
Hedge funds have proliferated to help investors manage risk. These things exist precisely because investors want to smooth out volatility. In the old days, a blow to, say, the Texas economy could have dried up lending in Texas, but now funds flow globally, and money from one part of the world can shore up weakness in another.

LOS ANGELES
Federal agents raided the Silk Roads Gallery in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the Bowers Museum in Santa Anna and Mingei International Museum in San Diego as part of a five-year investigation into the smuggling of looted antiquities from Thailand, Myanmar, China and Native American sites.

BRAZIL

Back at the bar, the handsome, white jacketed, slightly craggy bartender is chatting and gesturing to Paulistan regulars in Portuguese, Spanish, English and Italian... It's his friendly , highly personal exchange that also reveals a pair of Brazil's secret weapons in its arsenal of boom economy assets - warmth and multilingulism.

CAPE TOWN
Leading gold and platinum mines stopped production Friday as the South African government declared a national electricity emergency in the face of power outages have caused chaos and threatened to choke economic growth. The government said there was no forseeable end to the electricity shortages. The mines were shut so that workes would not be trapped underground.

NEW YORK

The art market and the broader economy dramatically diverged this week. As the world bourses nose-dived, auctions in unrelated areas of the art market demonstrated that art buyers are as bullish as ever.

Thursday, 24th January, 2008

0923

Wednesday, 23rd January, 2008

0909

Tuesday, 22nd January, 2008

0840

ROME (VIEW: Carlo Ungaro)
Kabul in the 1970s was not as Westernized or "sophisticated" as it is today; and, of course, it was - at least superficially - the most tranquil of cities.
It was typical of most of us "Westerners," however, to interpret the wrong signs as indications of progress and potential for future development. We were thrilled at the existence of "The 25 Hour Club," a nightclub where we could drink alcohol, eat snacks and dance (Westerners only).
On rare occasions we were accompanied by select - read "elite" - Afghan friends. We seemed to believe a new Age of Enlightenment had dawned when a "Marks and Sparks" supermarket opened. We were finally able to buy many items we deemed essential to a civilized life - cocktail sausages, corn flakes, etc.
Returning to Afghanistan 30 years later, I found the same attitudes magnified by the thrill of being on a front line. The essential question asked by almost no one back then, and that very few seem to be asking now, is to what extent do these superficial signs of "Westernization" benefit the local population? To what extent do these "developments" actually favor, rather than hinder, the path toward authentic progress?




WASHINGTON
The percentage of U.S. Army recruits with high school diplomas dropped last year, continuing a trend that has strengthened since the start of the Iraq war, according to a report made public Tuesday.
National Priorities Project, a research group that analyzes federal data, found that nearly 71 percent of army recruits graduated from high school in the 2007 budget year.
The army's goal is 90 percent high school graduates, which it has not met since 2004.





NEW YORK
Recent laboratory tests performed for The New York Times found so much mercury in tuna sushi that a regular diet of even two or three pieces a week at some restaurants could be a health hazard for the average adult, based on guidelines set out by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Eight of the 44 pieces of sushi The Times purchased from local restaurants and stores in October had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market.




GAZA
John Ging, Gaza director of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which helps the 70 percent of the population who are registered as refugees, called the Israeli cutoff of goods and fuel "collective punishment" and "counterproductive."
Israelis in border towns deserve security and protection, Ging said.
"But the Israeli response is a retaliation, which is equally illegal, against the civilian population of G