tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28981498735569013212024-02-19T06:56:40.370+01:00A Place in the AuvergneTHIS BLOG IS NOW CLOSED. IT WAS A PHOTO BLOG OF ONE YEAR (2008) OF MY LIFE, MIXED WITH NEWS FROM BEYOND THE AUVERGNE THAT CAUGHT MY EYE.
YOU CAN FOLLOW THE ODD TWITTER.
NO MORE BLOGGING FOR ME.Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.comBlogger351125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-44875415406825685802009-06-04T13:14:00.007+02:002009-06-04T14:16:26.356+02:00A Place in the Auvergne (Holiday rental)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp4TPM2csRVyPzSWHfUdIoxf8ey-PH1Zm_uKYFrx02FyOs7jwb3KDWoZjETGvO_AYCQc1UAh23a2RA62Iv8A9KGkOZsKZadCgQIj7WlSbrtgqiRgYXzQMhF3bHEquTa8JOS3YNwXh5lb4/s1600-h/gite_main.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 292px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp4TPM2csRVyPzSWHfUdIoxf8ey-PH1Zm_uKYFrx02FyOs7jwb3KDWoZjETGvO_AYCQc1UAh23a2RA62Iv8A9KGkOZsKZadCgQIj7WlSbrtgqiRgYXzQMhF3bHEquTa8JOS3YNwXh5lb4/s320/gite_main.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5343432704055492146" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Charming, two-storey, stone holiday cottage with stunning views in one of the most idyllic, least known corners of the Auvergne. (Parc National Livradois-Forez.)</span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; "><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">2 double bedrooms; shower-room; kitchen/living room with wood-burning stove.</span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; "><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Fully equipped (dishwasher; linen, travel cot, high chair, walking buggy and backpack for toddlers; maps, walking suggestions, terrific library.) No TV. </span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; "><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Ideal for walkers, writers, painters, mountain bikers, hang-gliders and skiers in winter (40 mins from Chalmazel; one of the best communes in France for kite-snow surfing and cross-country skiing).</span><br /></div></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">We can also offer (prices on request):</span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Guided farm visits (cheese makers, organic vegetables, honey, beef etc.) all within the same commune. </span><br /></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Creative writing classes</span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Music classes</span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Guided walks by mountain experts and naturalists</span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Special long-weekend walking visits; Pick-up from Lyon airport ( 2hr drive) or Vichy train station (3 hrs by direct train from Paris; 75 min drive)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Food and drink arrival box (all local produce)</span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Laundry service</span></li></ul><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; "><div style="text-align: left; "><br /></div><div style="text-align: left; ">Local bars and markets:</div><div style="text-align: left; "><br /></div><ul><li><a href="http://www.aubergevalcivieres.com">Auberge/bar</a> in the commune's bourg (10 min walk).<br /></li><li><a href="http://www.coq-noir.fr">Le Coq Noir</a> (Mountain jasserie museum, resto and concerts - 12 mins drive)</li><li>12 mins drive from market town of <a href="http://www.tourisme-ambert.fr">Ambert</a> (market day: Thursday a.m; one of the best markets in France according Patricia Wells' <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Food-Lovers-Guide-France/dp/041314660X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244117566&sr=1-1">The Food Lovers Guide to France</a>)<br /></li><li>Other markets: Montbrison (Saturday, 45 mins) Puy-en-Verlay (Saturday, 75 mins)<br /></li><li>Chaisse-Dieu: 30 mins<br /></li></ul></span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Completely independent from main house but shared courtyard (private access and terrace for holiday cottage).</span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">€300 per week (heating supplement in winter; €50 supplement for 2nd adult couple)</span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">For more pictures, please see below.</span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; "><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">For more information please contact belindawalthew AT sfr.fr.</span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><br /></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">To see pictures of the area throughout the seasons, explore the photos on this blog by date.</span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZSIv0826GlT2mBKMoD1vcpVI9qS3XO4aS6yxT8AY3_-zCgqjteCbgXjNk503SJzphmUPtk-vb_HuNigSpPNHt1DL_Tcxqv5LD9YNQat_S6dwbIS4zb8p0wdpiPfriHCxqaT4_ii8fc8E/s1600-h/vue.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZSIv0826GlT2mBKMoD1vcpVI9qS3XO4aS6yxT8AY3_-zCgqjteCbgXjNk503SJzphmUPtk-vb_HuNigSpPNHt1DL_Tcxqv5LD9YNQat_S6dwbIS4zb8p0wdpiPfriHCxqaT4_ii8fc8E/s320/vue.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5343432622182217442" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">View from cottage</span><br /></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBrxmSXDFQ8vc5NSdmMX2UwynH01kuGSrHAtqRmc818O2Rhsmxp-v24y2eM6bAEYQ1euAwrdLfhj6o7G5zclwlT77WKbLCKRpftnjhO16mCUboAExe2jsVVqx5mbtOt33SglBwY6l8DUo/s1600-h/godin.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 249px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBrxmSXDFQ8vc5NSdmMX2UwynH01kuGSrHAtqRmc818O2Rhsmxp-v24y2eM6bAEYQ1euAwrdLfhj6o7G5zclwlT77WKbLCKRpftnjhO16mCUboAExe2jsVVqx5mbtOt33SglBwY6l8DUo/s320/godin.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5343432326582897858" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><div style="text-align: center;">Wood-burning stove<br /></div></span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj02rw7Zg_sUy2MynrQXf1ne6QgBC7ReE2R28YZaOYYXSWF6XoDWn4Z1pYba8Of37qep_M7-orSBUiMedSfcIFz7NHrRN1sCEBKxM5PauffHF0Qa6F48RaH9fdPR348T_oQ8aPdlio4YvQ/s1600-h/salon.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj02rw7Zg_sUy2MynrQXf1ne6QgBC7ReE2R28YZaOYYXSWF6XoDWn4Z1pYba8Of37qep_M7-orSBUiMedSfcIFz7NHrRN1sCEBKxM5PauffHF0Qa6F48RaH9fdPR348T_oQ8aPdlio4YvQ/s320/salon.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5343432329406529458" /></a></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Salon</span><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAHnekFHWwOS_wZB20BGzK5onUvu9CUHX2WIyfBHLv4X77eJGnRQjqY-Jfl6G79ZGD9HXQLSqrXuNO5Ks7n8zmOxZKSAk5EEifEe5EmRKXByyI97yTXHqyTIU7u8JscXLeeWMIoNVaIzY/s1600-h/cuisine.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAHnekFHWwOS_wZB20BGzK5onUvu9CUHX2WIyfBHLv4X77eJGnRQjqY-Jfl6G79ZGD9HXQLSqrXuNO5Ks7n8zmOxZKSAk5EEifEe5EmRKXByyI97yTXHqyTIU7u8JscXLeeWMIoNVaIzY/s320/cuisine.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5343432332687195778" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><div style="text-align: center;">Kitchen<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYgdcpq6Cs5TMbtYFYvH8jsfOn8OB-Y38IeFlyONaKfvsZ7U4iY6yD45Oq1cS6F6Uesj6e0e5J5g3sNBsdrBM6gRdr2fs7_sOz8cpfycpwhZCJO21y2svJf7nifjLeF1dDt4jsYMM09RQ/s1600-h/chambre.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYgdcpq6Cs5TMbtYFYvH8jsfOn8OB-Y38IeFlyONaKfvsZ7U4iY6yD45Oq1cS6F6Uesj6e0e5J5g3sNBsdrBM6gRdr2fs7_sOz8cpfycpwhZCJO21y2svJf7nifjLeF1dDt4jsYMM09RQ/s320/chambre.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5343432334560683058" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><div style="text-align: center;">Main bedroom<br /></div></span></div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKHGBQ_5uHzZb88HvGrqKPDewkLOu74kfltYI7PgNKVWA4QdWBJfDlND0nfhdzewQfBQRxW9_zJMcFZKrqqw4KCrEdaGlAifjCiFAZ-EW-GnZ2dXN-y25jTtQjmZckehSYg9W6ScIAwXc/s1600-h/salledebains.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKHGBQ_5uHzZb88HvGrqKPDewkLOu74kfltYI7PgNKVWA4QdWBJfDlND0nfhdzewQfBQRxW9_zJMcFZKrqqw4KCrEdaGlAifjCiFAZ-EW-GnZ2dXN-y25jTtQjmZckehSYg9W6ScIAwXc/s320/salledebains.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5343432335973440514" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Shower-roo</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">m</span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2009<br /></div><br /><br /><br /><div>Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div><br /></div><div>Gite Holiday rental Cottage <br /><br /><br /></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-86167820457387052332009-06-03T13:05:00.004+02:002009-06-03T13:07:37.954+02:00THIS BLOG ENDED ON 31/12/08<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE </span>was a one year project (2008) to make a photo diary of one year in the Auvergne, mixed with news that interested me personally, taken from the IHT.</div><div><br /></div><div>I am no longer actively blogging but I'm thinking about Twittering now and again.</div><div><br /></div><br /><br />Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France<br /><br />Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment<br />http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/<div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-62238785971723757932008-12-18T05:13:00.007+01:002009-01-15T23:08:05.522+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Wednesday, 17th December 2008<div align="center"><strong></strong></div><p align="center"><strong><a href="http://www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-size:85%;">www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com</span></a><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></strong></p><p align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:85%;">runs from 1st January, 2008 - 17th December, 2008.</span></strong></p><strong><p align="center"><br /></strong><a href="http://www.aplaceintheauvergnepart2.blogspot.com/"><strong><span style="font-size:85%;">A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE (PART 2)</span></strong></a><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p><p align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:85%;">runs from 18th December, 2008 - 31st December, 2008.</span><br /></strong></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><br /></p><p align="center"><strong>0300</strong></p><br /><p align="center"><strong>Hardest freeze of the year; glacial.</strong></p><br /><p align="center"><strong>To surgeon for knee.</strong></p><br /><p align="center"><strong>Dark.</strong></p><p align="center"><strong><a href="http://www.aplaceintheauvergnepart2.blogspot.com/"></a></strong></p><br /><p align="center"><strong><br /></p></strong><br /><p>************************************************************************************</p><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/america/17transition.php">Bush prepares crisis briefings to aid Obama</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>AGRICULTURE, FOOD AND WATER</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/america/OUKWD-UK-USA-OBAMA-SECRETARIES.php">Obama announces agriculture and interior picks</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/america/OUKWD-UK-FINANCIAL-FUR-feature.php">Luxury downturn hits U.S. beaver trappers</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>*************************************************************************************</p><br /><br /><p>NATURE AND DEVELOPMENT</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/america/climate.php">Greenland melt seems to be picking up speed</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>*************************************************************************************</p><br /><br /><p>ENERGY</p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/opec.php">OPEC agrees to sharp cut in production</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/edf.php">EDF seals deal for U.S. nuclear power company</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/business/OUKBS-UK-AUTOS-BUSH.php">Decision on autos "relatively soon" says Bush</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/18chrysler.php">Chrysler to shut factories for a month</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/opinion/edcohen.php">Roger Cohen: Pan Am dies, America lives</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>*************************************************************************************</p><br /><br /><p>FRANCE</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/labor.php">Economy does little to help unions as they lose influence in France</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/technology/iphone.php">Regulator voids iPhone deal with Orange in France</a></p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/europe/paris.php">French steer away from Islamic militants in bomb scare</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/europe/OUKWD-UK-FRANCE-EXPLOSIVES.php">France boosts security in cities after bomb scare</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/17bnp.php">BNP Paribas shares plunge after loss</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/healthscience/face.php">Cleveland surgeons perform first major face transplant in U.S.</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>*************************************************************************************</p><br /><br /><p>OBAMA AND CHANGE</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/news/21gibbst.php">Between Obama and the press</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/america/letter.php">Boilerplate approach not a good fit for Obama</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/america/death.php">Georgia case sets lawmakers scrambling to refine death penalty sentencing</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/america/educate.php">Obama stirs excitement in early childhood education circles</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/opinion/edkennedy.php">And then there's the rest of the world</a></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>************************************************************************************</p><br /><br /><p>SECURITY / BOOK / INDIAPAKISTAN/ CHINA / AFGHANOTB</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/opinion/edgreenway.php">H.D.S. Greenway: The drum beating in Kashmir</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI-SUSPECTS.php">Indian police to quiz possible Mumbai "scouts"</a> </p><br /><br /><p><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI-PAKISTAN.php">Pakistan hopeful on India talks despite pause</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/asia/OUKWD-UK-PAKISTAN-VIOLENCE-AFGHAN.php">Rockets fired at Western force supplies in Pakistan</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-POLICE.php">Afghan police must fight crime and not Taliban says report</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/mideast/iraq.php">Bomb aimed at Baghdad traffic police kills 18 people</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/africa/17brown-iraq-reuters.php">Gordon Brown, in Iraq, says Britain's mission there to end next year</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/america/OUKWD-UK-BUSH-SHOES-LATINAMERICA.php">Latin leaders joke about Bush shoe attack</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/19/arts/bookfri.php">Book Reviews: 'The War Behind Me' </a></p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/africa/OUKWD-UK-RWANDA-GENOCIDE.php">U.N. court to rule on Rwanda genocide planners</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/africa/zimbabwe.php">Zimbabwe's neighbors dispute plan to overthrow Mugabe</a> </p><br /><br /><p><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/africa/OUKWD-UK-SUDAN-DARFUR-ABDUCTIONS.php">Activists accuse Sudan of Darfur abductions</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/asia/pirates.4-391799.php">China preparing to send navy ships to Gulf of Aden</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/europe/OUKWD-UK-SOMALIA-PIRACY.php">Chinese ship rescued from pirates in Gulf of Aden</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/europe/OUKWD-UK-SOMALIA-PIRACY-sb.php">Pirates hijack yacht off Somalia in Gulf of Aden</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/africa/OUKWD-UK-SOMALIA-CONFLICT.php">Eleven killed in fighting in Somalia's capital</a> </p><br /><br /><p><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/africa/OUKWD-UK-SOMALIA-UN.php">U.S. Somalia peacekeeping idea hits resistance at U.N.</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/17/america/US-Russia.php">Russians intends to test Obama on arms, U.S. official says</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/mideast/lebanon.php">Russia offers to equip Lebanon with 10 MIG-29 fighters</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL-VIOLENCE.php">Israeli missile kills Palestinian in Gaza</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/opinion/edmead.php">Change they can believe in</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/europe/OUKWD-UK-TURKEY-ALQAEDA-DETENTION.php">Turkey detains 15 suspected al Qaeda members</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>*************************************************************************************</p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>FINANCIAL RECESSION/CORRUPTION/ LOSS / RECOVERY /</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/euro.php">Dollar's autumn rally proves short-lived</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/morgan.php">Morgan Stanley posts $2.36 billion loss for quarter</a></p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/distress.php">Over $100 billion in U.S. commercial property in trouble</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/17yale.php">Yale's endowment drops 13.4%</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/leonhardt.php">American families will benefit from falling prices</a></p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/travel/17luxury-travel.php">Bargains pop up in the luxury suite</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/18madoff-detain.php">Madoff placed under home detention</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/middle.php">Madoff's biggest victim also helped sell the fund to others</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/17exposure.php">European banks tally losses linked to Madoff</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/europe/italy.php">Mafia boss hangs himself in Sicily after crackdown against Cosa Nostra</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/madoff.php">SEC concedes it missed early Madoff warnings</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/corrupt.php">Finding tools to fight corruption in emerging Southeast Asian economies</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/bank.php">Australian bank stops share sale and fires manager</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/america/kennedy.php">Kennedy surrenders privacy in bid for Senate</a> </p><br /><br /><p><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/america/illinois.php">Blagojevich impeachment inquiry meets resistance</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/opinion/edfriedman.php">Thomas L. Friedman: The Great Unraveling</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>***********************************************************************************</p><br /><br /><p>CHINA</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/hkinvest.php">Foreign companies still flock to China, study finds</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/col18.php">China needs more domestic reforms</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/18/business/OUKBS-UK-FINANCIAL-SEATURTLES.php">China goes on the road to lure "sea turtles" home</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/deal18.php">Opportunities abound for investors based in Asia</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>************************************************************************************</p><br /><br /><p>IMMIGRATION</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/opinion/edworkers.php">A cheap shot at workers, foreign and domestic</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>***********************************************************************************</p><br /><br /><p>LOSS</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/america/libya.php">Money from Lockerbie settlement helps New York school</a> </p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/17/africa/OUKWD-UK-ISRAEL-BUS-CRASH.php">Relatives of Russian crash victims arrive in Israel</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>***********************************************************************************</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/17adco.php">Churches welcome quirky approaches to spread their message</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p>***********************************************************************************</p><br /><br /><p>U.K.</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/17/business/17ukecon.php">U.K. jobless claimants top one million</a></p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/19/arts/trbites.php">Bites: London's Flash, a pop-up restaurant</a> </p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p><br /></p><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008 </strong></div><strong><div align="center"><br /></strong>Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment<br /></div></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-85296121708400772592008-12-17T04:13:00.014+01:002008-12-17T07:04:09.911+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Tuesday, 16th December 2008<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">IW</span>: </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Now, this is annoying. It's also emblematic of all that I have observed this year and that is loss, in this case, a loss of trust.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>16 days before the end of this project of a one year photo journal/world news blog, I exceed my photo upload quota with Google. </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>When I go to upload more photos I received, yesterday, this message: </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><div align="center"><em>You have exceeded your total photo upload quota.</em></div><div align="center"><em></em> </div><div align="center"><em>We're sorry, but you have exceeded your photo upload quota. For more information, take a look at this </em><a href="http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=62969" target="_blank"><em>Blogger Help page</em></a><em>.</em></div><div align="center"><em></em> </div><div align="left"><strong>So I clicked onto Blogger Help Page and received this message:</strong></div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><br /><em><strong>How can I get more storage for my images?<br /></strong>Images and photos that are uploaded through Blogger get stored in your </em><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/"><em>Picasa Web Albums</em></a><em>, which are part of your Google Account. The number of images you can upload is therefore dependent on the amount of space you are using on Picasa Web Albums. To find out how much space you have available, please see </em><a href="http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=61702"><em>these instructions</em></a><em>.<br />If you would like to purchase more storage space, the Picasa Web Albums help center can </em><a href="http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39567"><em>tell you how</em></a><em>.</em></div><div align="center"><a href="http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=62969">http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=62969</a></div><div align="center"> </div><div align="left"><strong>Indeed I would like to purchase more storage space because</strong> <em>"Images and photos that are uploaded through Blogger get stored in your </em><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/"><em>Picasa Web Albums</em></a><em>"</em></div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left"><strong>So I click onto </strong><a href="http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39567"><strong>tell you how</strong></a><strong>.</strong></div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><em><strong>Purchasing Storage: Purchase additional storage</strong></em></div><div align="center"><a class="print_page" onclick="javascript:urchinTracker('outgoing/printlink/en');" href="javascript:window.print();"><em>Print</em></a><em><br />Picasa Web Albums comes with 1GB of free storage - that's room to post and share approximately 4,000 standard resolution photos. This free storage can't be transferred from one product to another, but you can always </em><a href="https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage"><em>buy extra shared storage</em></a><em>.<br />You can also purchase extra storage by clicking the Upgrade Storage link at the bottom of your Gmail or Picasa Web Albums account. After clicking the link, you'll go to a Google Checkout page where you can select the plan you want. The storage plans are as follows:<br />10GB $20/yr<br />40GB $75/yr<br />150GB $250/yr<br />400GB $500/yr<br />Users who have their accounts removed for violating our Terms of Service or Program Policies will not be refunded.<br />Please be advised that the Google Checkout interface is in English and only supports purchases in U.S. dollars (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">USD</span>). </em></div><div align="center"><a href="http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39567"><em>http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39567</em></a></div><div align="center"> </div><div align="left"><strong>Fair enough: I click onto </strong><a href="https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage"><strong>buy extra shared storage</strong></a><strong>.</strong></div><p><strong></strong> </p><p align="center"><br /><em><strong>Purchase additional storage<br /></strong>With a Google shared storage plan, you won't have to worry about deleting files, pictures, or emails. After purchasing a storage plan, some of your individual Google services (e.g. email and photos) will share a single new storage space. </em><a href="https://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=65431"><em>Learn more</em></a><em> </em></p><p align="center"><em><strong>Please select a plan:<br /></strong>Your new plan will automatically renew, but we will contact you 30 days prior to charging your credit card.</em></p><p align="center"><a href="https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage">https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage</a></p><p> </p><p><strong>I don't feel I need to <a href="https://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=65431"><em>Learn more</em></a> - I've been told <em>"Images and photos that are uploaded through Blogger get stored in your </em></strong><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/"><em><strong>Picasa Web Albums</strong></em></a><strong><em>"</em>, that <em>"the number of images you can upload is therefore dependent on the amount of space you are using on Picasa Web Albums"</em> and that I can </strong><em><strong>"purchase more storage space". There is absolutely NO specific reference to the notion that this WON'T SUPPORT BLOGGER; indeed what it says is "After purchasing a storage plan, some of your individual Google services (e.g. email and photos) will share a single new storage space."</strong></em></p><p><strong>Given that e.g. - which means 'for example' - and given the facts of all the above direction from running out of upload quota on blogger to buying new storage and that Blogger is one of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Google's</span> key services, I assume that this WILL include Blogger.</strong></p><p><strong>So I make a purchase. </strong></p><p><strong>I arrive at my desk this morning to verify this.</strong></p><p><strong>My Picasa account is credited with 10 GB of storage, my credit card debited and I go to upload more pictures on Blogger.</strong></p><p><strong>Which I can't.</strong></p><p><strong>I'm confused, so I dig around and find that IF I had clicked on </strong><a href="https://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=65431"><strong>Learn more</strong></a><strong> at the purchase stage I would have read this:</strong></p><p><em></em> </p><p align="center"><em><strong>Shared Storage: Purchasing</strong><br />Google offers a way to purchase more storage space to use with some of its products (currently Gmail and Picasa Web Albums). This extra storage acts as overflow when you run out of free storage space in either product. If you've filled your free storage (5 GB and counting for Gmail or 1 GB for Picasa Web Albums), you'll automatically use your purchased space to store more pictures and messages up to your new storage limit.</em></p><p align="left"><em></em> </p><p align="left"><strong>So it's not a question of <em>'e.g email and photos'</em> but quite specifically ONLY <em>'Gmail and Picasa Web Albums'. </em></strong></p><p align="left"><strong>I am extremely annoyed.</strong> </p><p align="left"><strong>Firstly, my one year photo project has run out of space 16 days before its completion December 31st, 2008.</strong></p><p align="left"><strong><em>Critically, I always thought I would exceed my photo quota but it had always been suggested to me that I could purchase more storage space.</em> </strong></p><p align="left"><strong>Indeed, every time I went to upload an image I was told how much free space I had available and next to it appeared a question mark for more information:</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>If you click on this question mark (which I had done) you arrive at......</strong></p><p align="center"><em><strong>How can I get more storage for my images?<br /></strong>Images and photos that are uploaded through Blogger get stored in your </em><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/"><em>Picasa Web Albums</em></a><em>, which are part of your Google Account. The number of images you can upload is therefore dependent on the amount of space you are using on Picasa Web Albums. To find out how much space you have available, please see </em><a href="http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=61702"><em>these instructions</em></a><em>.<br />If you would like to purchase more storage space, the Picasa Web Albums help center can </em><a href="http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39567"><em>tell you how</em></a><em>.</em></p><p align="center"><em></em> </p><p align="left"><strong><em>So I was never concerned about running out of storage space</em> - I could always buy more because it is self-evident from the above message that Blogger images are stored on Picasa and you can purchase more storage space. There is no suggestion that Picasa does not support Blogger, quite the contrary.</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>Now I find myself, truly, stuffed. With 16 days of this damn year long blog to go.</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>The second reason I am annoyed is that I feel well and truly ripped off by Google who have lead me down the garden path through clearly misleading information.</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>Either there is a delay in transferring the capacity I now have with Picasa to my blog accounts with Google OR I have been well and truly conned (not to mention the inconvenience of running out of space on Blogger.)</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>So let's hope it's a delay. In the meantime, I proceed without images.</strong><br /></p><p align="left"><strong>*************************************************************************************</strong></p><p align="left">AGRI</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left"><strong>Chinese graduates recruited for rural work<br /></strong>By Dune Lawrence</p><p align="left">Bloomberg News<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />SONG PENG VILLAGE, China: Liu Hao, who graduated in June with a degree in manufacturing from a Beijing technical school, found a job he loves - in a village of 288 people surrounded by peach orchards.<br />"Even the villagers think it's surprising," he said. "They say, what's a college graduate doing coming here?"<br />Forty years after Mao Zedong forced millions of young people to leave their families and schools for a new life in the countryside, China is seeing another migration for very different reasons.<br />Mao believed that living among the peasants would transform the students into ideologically pure, proletarian laborers. Now the government is encouraging college graduates like Liu, 22, to help transform the countryside by taking their newly minted skills to rural areas where development has lagged behind the affluent cities and coastline.<br />"For Mao, it was really a political thing: He wanted to create a generation of revolutionaries," said Michel Bonnin, director of studies at the Center for the Study of Modern and Contemporary China in Paris. Now, as the world's fourth-largest economy feels the drag of a global recession and rising unemployment, students need jobs, and "there is a real need in these regions for people with some good education. This is more rational."<br />Many of China's current senior leaders spent long periods in the country or in remote provinces during Mao's Cultural Revolution. President Hu Jintao was sent to help build a dam on the Yellow River, carrying baskets of gravel for a year and earning 54 yuan a month, $7.88 at the current exchange rate.<br />Mao's program for high school students - "Shang Shan Xia Xiang," or "climb the mountains and go down to the villages" - did little for the communal farms that absorbed almost 17 million teens between 1968 and 1980. Bonnin, the author of a book on the movement, says the young people had few practical skills.<br />"I did not help the farmers," said Li Ping, 54, who earned 2 cents a day growing lettuce, string beans and pumpkins in a Sichuan village from 1972 to 1974. "They taught me what to do, because I had to know how to plow a field, how to plant seedlings, how to harvest. I knew nothing before I went."<br />Li, now the Beijing representative of the Rural Development Institute, a nonprofit based in Seattle, says today's college graduates perform a service by connecting villages to the markets and networks driving China's economy.<br />Liu Hao has signed on for three years as a cun guan, or assistant to the Communist Party secretary and village head of Song Peng Village, more than 60 kilometers, or 37 miles, northeast of Beijing. He's among some 20,000 people who began working as assistants and teachers this year in the program, which was created in 2006. The government wants to boost the total to 100,000 by 2012 and is offering incentives such as help repaying student loans.<br />The opportunity appeals to some young people who face a grim employment situation. China's growth has slowed for five consecutive quarters, and its 9 percent third-quarter expansion was the weakest in five years. Last month the World Bank forecast growth next year at 7.5 percent, which would be the slowest pace in almost two decades.<br />An estimated 6.1 million new graduates will enter the job market in 2009, joining 4 million from previous years who are still looking for work, Zhang Xiaojian, the deputy minister of human resources and social security, said Nov. 20. The unemployment rate for these young people is more than 12 percent, triple the official urban rate, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said in a report released Monday.<br />Liu was one of seven students accepted for the program out of 400 from his school who applied. Those who participate are motivated by practical ambition to further their careers, says Bin Wu, a senior research fellow at the University of Nottingham in Britain who studies sustainable development in China's rural areas.<br />Liu spends his time reading up on government policies related to medical services, innovative planting techniques and the safe use of firewood. Then he explains the policies to the villagers. Over lunch, he talks with animation about the art of pruning fruit trees and the need to better market the peaches that are his village's main product.<br />"If you really want to help people, you have to understand the countryside," said Liu, who has ambitions to work in government.<br />Having "college grads come here is great," said Jiao Shichun, 50, a villager who wandered into Liu's bedroom-office in the village headquarters. Liu "helps us analyze how to do things," he said.<br />Jiao's two daughters, 27 and 25, live in Beijing. The older one owns a car and an apartment and makes 6,000 yuan a month working for a makeup company.<br />They reflect a major obstacle to the government's plan: In China's 30-year capitalist evolution, the flow of population has always been from rural to urban, with some 200 million farmers-turned-laborers moving to manufacturing boomtowns such as Dongguan in southern China before the economic slowdown began sending many back home.<br />While the countryside has benefited from China's years of double-digit growth, per-capita income is still a third of incomes in the cities. Closing that gap requires educated people to stay and work in the rural areas for a long time.<br />"The problem is the value system," said Wu of the University of Nottingham. The popular perception is that higher education should be a ticket out of the countryside.<br />Yu Cuihong, 24, has a degree in computer and network engineering. Her mother and father, who are farmers, weren't entirely accepting at first of her decision to work as an assistant in a community near Liu's village.<br />"So many years of schooling, it was like it was all a waste," she said, describing their attitude.<br />In her spare time, she's preparing for graduate school and, even though her parents are now more supportive, she says she doesn't plan to return to the countryside if she earns another degree.<br />"It's not likely," she said. "I'm studying to get a better job."</p><p align="left">*************************************************************************************</p><p align="left">NATURE AND DEVELOPMENT </p><p align="left"><strong>OPINION</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>Can Africa trade its way to peace?</strong><br />By Herman J. Cohen<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The conflict in eastern Congo over the past 12 years has been as much a surrogate war between Congo and neighboring Rwanda as an internal ethnic insurgency, as a United Nations report underscored last week. The only way to end a war that has caused five million deaths and forced millions to flee their homes in Congo's two eastern provinces is to address the conflict's international dimensions. The role of Rwanda - which borders the provinces and which denied the accusations in the UN report - is of prime importance.<br />The international community has worked hard to resolve the conflicts among the various parties: the sovereign states of Rwanda and Congo as well as the assorted militias and private armies that are sponsored by these two governments and by opportunistic local warlords.<br />But despite the deployment of 17,000 United Nations peacekeepers, and many efforts at mediation with constructive American support, the situation appears intractable. The failure of international diplomacy is related to the economic roots of the problem, which began with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Until the economic conundrum is addressed, there is little prospect for a solution.<br />The genocidal war between the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi in Rwanda spilled into Congo, and the eastern part of that vast country has been unstable ever since. When Tutsi rebel forces took power in Rwanda in June 1994, more than a million Hutu fled to Congo, where they settled into refugee camps on the Rwandan border.<br />After two years of cross-border raids from the refugee camps by exiled Hutu soldiers who had participated in the genocide, the Rwandan Army attacked and destroyed the camps, with the quiet approval of the United States in the absence of another solution to the violence. Most of the Hutu refugees returned to Rwanda, but about 100,000 of them, along with the exiled Hutu soldiers, moved westward as a disciplined group into Congo's interior.<br />The Rwandan Army pursued the escaping Hutu and caught up with them near the city of Kisangani at the headwaters of the Congo River. The refugees were massacred, but the former Hutu soldiers escaped to neighboring countries.<br />The move against the refugee camps was the first step in a well-planned action by Rwanda in 1996 and 1997 to overwhelm the weak Congolese Army and, with the help of the Congolese opposition, overthrow the 30-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko. With logistical support from Uganda and Angola, the military action succeeded in less than three months. A new government in Congo was installed under Laurent Kabila, an exile handpicked by the Rwandans.<br />And from 1996 to today, the Tutsi-led Rwandan government has been in effective control of Congo's eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. This control has been maintained through intermittent military occupation and the presence of Congolese militias financed and trained by the Rwandan Army.<br />During these 12 years of Rwandan control, the mineral-rich provinces have been economically integrated into Rwanda. During this time, Congo's governments have been preoccupied with internal and external wars elsewhere, and have been unable to combat foreign control of the eastern provinces, a thousand miles from the capital, Kinshasa.<br />But two years ago, Congo held multiparty elections that were judged to be transparent and credible by international observers. For the first time in a decade, there was hope for stability. President Joseph Kabila (the son of Laurent Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001) turned his attention to trying to gain control of the eastern provinces. Unfortunately, this has led to increased conflict and suffering.<br />The main source of the current violence is an insurgent force of ethnic Congolese Tutsi commanded by Laurent Nkunda, a former general in the Congolese Army. He claims to be fighting to defend the Tutsi community from discrimination and from the former Rwandan Hutu fighters who have returned from neighboring countries and now operate in the forested hills of eastern Congo.<br />Nkunda's military operations, however, are aimed mainly against the Congolese Army's efforts to restore Congo's sovereignty over its eastern provinces. His force is well armed and financed by the Rwandan government. The armed Hutu presence in the provinces provides the Rwandan government with a pretext to justify its interference there.<br />Having controlled the Kivu provinces for 12 years, Rwanda will not relinquish access to resources that constitute a significant percentage of its gross national product. At the same time, Congo's government is within its rights to take control of the resources there for the benefit of the Congolese people. This economic conflict must be taken into account.<br />This provides an opportunity for the incoming Obama administration. Acts of war and military occupation aside, there is a natural economic synergy between eastern Congo and the nations of East Africa, including Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. The normal flow of trade from eastern Congo is to Indian Ocean ports rather than the Atlantic Ocean, which is more than a thousand miles away.<br />After his inauguration, Barack Obama should appoint a special negotiator who would propose a framework for an economic common market encompassing Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.<br />This agreement would allow the free movement of people and trade. It would give Rwandan businesses continued access to Congolese minerals and forests. The products made from those raw materials would continue to be exported through Rwanda. The big change would be the payment of royalties and taxes to the Congolese government. For most Rwandan businesses, those payments would be offset by increased revenues.<br />In addition, the free movement of people would empty the refugee camps and would allow the densely populated countries of Rwanda and Burundi to supply needed labor to Congo and Tanzania.<br />If such a common market could be negotiated, Rwanda and Congo would no longer need to finance and arm militias to wage war over the natural resources in Congo's eastern provinces. Without government backing, the fighting groups would either dissolve on their own or be integrated into legitimate armed forces.<br />If undertaken with enough will and persistence, a U.S.-led mediation to create a common market in East Africa could end the war and transform the region.<br />Herman J. Cohen was the assistant secretary of state for Africa from 1989 to 1993.</p><p align="left">*****************</p><p align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/"></a><br /><strong>Land ice melting fast, NASA satellite data show<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: More than two trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.<br />More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by the Grace satellite, said a NASA geophysicist, Scott Luthcke. The Greenland melt seems to be accelerating, he said.<br />NASA scientists planned to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Luthcke said Greenland figures for the summer of 2008 were not yet complete, but the ice loss this year, while still significant, would not be as severe as in 2007.<br />The news was better for Alaska. After a precipitous drop in 2005, land ice increased slightly in 2008 because of large snowfalls, Luthcke said. Since 2003, when the NASA satellite started taking measurements, Alaska has lost 400 billion tons of land ice.<br />In assessing climate change, scientists generally look at several years to determine the overall trend. Melting of land ice, unlike sea ice, increases sea levels very slightly. In the 1990s, melting Greenland ice did not make world sea levels rise; now that island is adding about half a millimeter to the sea level a year, a NASA ice scientist, Jay Zwally said.<br />Melting land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska has raised global sea levels about one-fifth of an inch in the past five years, Luthcke said. Sea levels also rise from water expanding as it warms.<br />Other research being presented this week at the geophysical meeting points to more concerns about ice melting because of global warming, especially sea ice.<br />"It's not getting better; it's continuing to show strong signs of warming and amplification," Zwally said. "There's no reversal taking place."<br />Scientists studying sea ice will announce that parts of the Arctic north of Alaska were 9 degrees Fahrenheit to 10 degrees, or about 5 degrees Celsius to 6 degrees, warmer this past autumn, a strong early indication of what researchers call the Arctic amplification effect. That is when the Arctic warms faster than predicted, and warming there is accelerating faster than elsewhere on the globe.<br />As sea ice melts, the Arctic waters absorb more heat in the summer, having lost the reflective powers of vast packs of ice. That absorbed heat is released into the air in the autumn. That has led to autumn temperatures in the last several years that are 6 degrees Fahrenheit to 10 degrees (3.5 degrees to 6 degrees) warmer than they were in the 1980s, said Julienne Stroeve, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.<br />That is a strong and early impact of global warming, she said.<br />"The pace of change is starting to outstrip our ability to keep up with it, in terms of our understanding of it," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the snow and ice data center, a co-author of the Arctic amplification study.<br />Two other studies presented at the conference assess how Arctic thawing is releasing methane - a potent greenhouse gas. One study shows that the loss of sea ice warms the water, which warms the permafrost on nearby land in Alaska, thus producing methane, Stroeve said.<br />A second study suggests even larger amounts of frozen methane are trapped in lake beds and sea bottoms around Siberia and they are starting to bubble to the surface in some spots in alarming amounts, said Igor Semiletov, a professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Late last summer, Semiletov found methane bubbling up from parts of the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea at levels 10 times higher than those of the mid-1990s, he said.<br />The amounts of methane in the region could dramatically increase global warming if they get released, he said. That, Semiletov said, "should alarm people."</p><p align="left">***************</p><p align="left"><strong>EU court backs carbon-trading system<br /></strong>Bloomberg News<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />LUXEMBOURG: ArcelorMittal and other steel makers are not discriminated against under European Union air-pollution rules that exempt industries with similar greenhouse-gas emissions, the European Union's highest court said Tuesday.<br />ArcelorMittal, the world's biggest steel maker, asserts that EU lawmakers unfairly excluded the aluminum and chemical industries from 2003 legislation that capped emissions of carbon dioxide in line with the Kyoto Protocol, the international global-warming treaty. That exclusion put ArcelorMittal and other steel makers, which are included in the system, at a "complete disadvantage," lawyers for the company had told the European Court of Justice.<br />Alongside the steel industry, the current system includes electricity, paper and cement. But the court ruled that limiting the scope during the initial stage of the carbon trading system "may be regarded as justified."<br />"In view of the novelty and complexity" of the system, the EU "could lawfully make a step-by-step approach for the introduction of the allowance trading" system, the court ruled.<br />The court's decision eliminates concern that the European Union may need to rewrite the rules of its greenhouse gas trading market, the world's largest. Governments, including in the United States, are scrutinizing the program as they consider their own policies to help protect the climate.<br />The European emissions-trading system, started in 2005, requires companies that exceed their quotas for CO2 to buy permits from businesses that emit less.<br />ArcelorMittal, which is based in Luxembourg, had no immediate comment.<br />But Gordon Moffat, director general of the European Confederation of Iron and Steel Industries, said his group was disappointed by the ruling.<br />"This legislation is discriminatory in our view," he said.<br />ArcelorMittal had argued that the legislation establishing the EU emissions-trading system should not have differentiated between steel, aluminum and chemical industries, which all emit CO2.<br />Lawyers for the EU and the French government had argued that including other industries at the start would have complicated the system and harmed its effectiveness.<br />The court ruled that the European Union avoided difficulties by excluding the chemical industry, which "has an especially large number of installations, of the order of 34,000." Including it would have "increased the administrative burden" of managing the new system, it said.<br />The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, in January proposed adding the aluminum and chemicals industries to the system starting in 2013 as part of a tightening of the regulations.<br />The case may affect a separate case ArcelorMittal filed at a lower EU court seeking to partly annul the legislation and receive damages. The European Court of First Instance, the second-highest EU court, at a hearing in April said it would wait for a decision in this case before giving its own ruling.Arcelor and KDI are fined<br />Separately, ArcelorMittal, Klockner Distribution Industrielle and eight other steel companies were fined a record 575.4 million, or $791.2 million, by the French antitrust regulator for price fixing, Bloomberg News reported from Paris.<br />Three ArcelorMittal units were fined a total of 302 million and KDI was fined 169 million, the Conseil de la Concurrence said. The fine was the highest ever by the regulator.<br />Clients, which were primarily builders and small and mid-sized companies whose scale prevented them from negotiating better prices, alerted the French Finance Ministry after noticing "suspicious similarities" in the prices they were being quoted, the Conseil said.</p><p align="left">*************</p><p align="left"><strong>Reef patterns show risk off Sumatra for another big quake</strong><br />By Henry Fountain<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />With coral reefs as their tea leaves, scientists are forecasting that in the next several decades there will be another major earthquake along the Sunda fault off Sumatra like the one that spawned the catastrophic tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004.<br />Kerry Sieh, formerly of the California Institute of Technology and now at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and colleagues write in the journal Science that a 2007 quake along a more southerly stretch of the fault represented only a first, partial rupture of that 400-mile section, which had been quiet for nearly two centuries. The researchers say this part of the fault, called the Mentawai section, is likely to be the site of at least one more major rupture.<br />As evidence, they point to the growth patterns of coral reefs in the region over the last 700 years. When a quake occurs, the seafloor rises up, effectively lowering the sea level so that shallow coral reefs are now above the surface. The reefs cannot grow upward, but their still-submerged portions grow outward.<br />The researchers found signs of this growth pattern roughly every 200 years going back to the 14th century, suggesting cycles of earthquake activity. But each cycle consisted of several major events over three or more decades. So the 2007 quake, they say, is just the first of a new cycle.</p><p align="left">******************</p><p align="left"><strong>Alcohol and aging adults: Part of the problem or part of the cure?</strong><br />By Jane E. Brody<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />Is alcohol a tonic or a toxin? The question is especially critical to older people, whose overall medical picture gives alcohol the potential to be a health benefit or a life-shortening hazard.<br />Yet experts say that doctors rarely ask older patients how much and how often they drink. Not knowing the answers to these questions can result in misdiagnosis, medical complications and life-threatening accidents. Doctors may also fail to recognize the symptoms of alcohol abuse, a problem that is expected to become increasingly common as baby boomers, who have been found to drink more than previous generations, reach age 65 and beyond.<br />At the same time, older people who are in good health should know that moderate drinking under the right conditions may improve their health in several important ways. In a comprehensive review in the October issue of The Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Maria Pontes Ferreira and M.K. Suzy Weems described the myriad health benefits and risks of alcohol consumption by aging adults.<br />In summarizing the findings in an interview, Ferreira, a registered dietitian, said that "although there are a lot of benefits from moderate alcohol consumption, you can't make a blanket statement; you have to look at the big picture."<br />"Moderate alcohol consumption can improve appetite and nutrition and reduce the risk of several important diseases, including cardiovascular diseases and diabetes," said Ferreira, a post-doctoral fellow at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. "But a lot of folks over 50 are already dealing with diseases associated with aging and medication use that can result in possible complications and drug interactions. And older people who abuse alcohol are consuming an inordinate amount of calories that can displace important nutrients."<br />Furthermore, Dr. Frederick Blow, professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical School and an expert on alcohol and aging, pointed out in an interview that "even at lower levels of consumption, alcohol can be problematic for older people."<br />"Because of an increased sensitivity to alcohol and decreased tolerance as one ages, lower amounts of alcohol can have a bigger effect," he said. "Older people get into trouble with doses of alcohol that wouldn't be a problem with a younger person."<br />Madeline Naegle, professor at the New York College of Nursing, fears that publicity about the benefits of alcohol has dangerously tipped the scales, prompting some people to think that "if one drink is good, two or three must be better."<br />"Recommendations about drinking must be qualified by the level of a person's health," she emphasized in an interview.<br />In an article on screening for alcohol use and abuse among older adults in the November issue of The American Journal of Nursing, she noted: "Often clinicians fail to ask, 'Do you drink alcohol?' when obtaining medical histories and performing routine examinations. Because alcohol consumption is such a common practice, questions about drinking are necessarily part of a general health assessment."<br />Evidence for the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption comes almost entirely from epidemiological, or population, studies that can reveal important associations but cannot prove cause and effect. There have been few randomized controlled clinical trials of alcohol use to definitively show that alcohol consumed in any amount by any group of people benefits health.The Benefits: That said, here is what the studies indicate. It's important to note that most findings refer to moderate consumption, defined as one alcoholic drink a day for women and up to two for men. Also, the benefits are confined to people who do not have ailments, like chronic liver disease, or take medications, like psychoactive drugs, that would render any amount of alcohol risky.<br />Heart disease. While many studies have emphasized the benefits of red wine to cardiovascular health and longevity, more than 100 studies in 25 countries have linked these benefits to moderate consumption of any type of alcoholic beverage. On average, moderate drinkers 50 and older are less likely to suffer heart attacks and die prematurely than abstainers and heavy drinkers.<br />Diabetes. Though it may seem counterintuitive, a controlled clinical trial of nondiabetic older women found that insulin sensitivity was improved among those who consumed two drinks a day. In studies of men with diabetes, drinking up to two drinks a day was associated with lower levels of factors linked to an increased risk of heart disease, like markers of inflammation and arterial dysfunction.<br />Dementia. Although excessive alcohol drinking can raise the risk of dementia in older people, "there are emerging data to suggest that moderate alcohol intake - one to three drinks a day - is associated with a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia," Ferreira and Weems wrote. In this case, they added, drinking wine confers the primary benefit; drinking beer, on the other hand, appears to raise the risk of dementia.<br />Osteoporosis. Several studies have suggested that elderly women who drink moderately tend to have better bone density. But chronic heavy drinking "can dramatically compromise bone quality and may increase osteoporosis risk," H. Wayne Sampson of Texas A&M University Health Science Center in College Station has reported for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Furthermore, skeletal damage from excessive drinking is not reversible.<br />Psychosocial effects. Although there is relatively little research on the effects of moderate alcohol consumption on mental and social well-being among the elderly, studies in retirement communities have noted an improvement in social interactions, health-related quality of life and survival.<br />Nutrition. Again, there is not a lot of research, but studies so far indicate that an alcoholic drink taken with meals can improve appetite and the consumption of calories and nutrients needed by many elderly people, Ferreira said.The Risks: Immoderate consumption of alcohol - more than three drinks a day - can be hazardous for people of all ages, but especially so for the elderly, who reach higher levels of blood alcohol faster and maintain them longer than younger people.<br />Yet, Blow said, "we don't do well identifying older people who are getting into trouble with alcohol."<br />Potential hazards include an increased risk of falls and vehicular accidents, a decline in short-term memory, a worsening of existing health problems and interactions with medications that may diminish the effectiveness of some drugs and increase the toxic effects of others.<br />Ferreira called alcohol abuse and alcoholism in aging adults "a silent epidemic." Naegle wrote that "many older people pursue drinking patterns established earlier in life and may not realize that continuing to drink the same amount of alcohol as they did when they were younger may place them at risk for health problems."<br />She recommended using diet and exercise to reduce cardiac risk; trying alternative relaxation methods like meditation, yoga and exercise; and, for those who drink, cutting down on the amount of alcohol consumed by mixing it with water, taking an hour to finish one drink and alternating alcohol with nonalcoholic drinks.</p><p align="left">****************</p><p align="left"><strong>U.S. report assails decisions on endangered species<br /></strong>By Charlie Savage<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The inspector general of the U.S. Interior Department has found that agency officials often interfered with scientific work to limit protections for species at risk of becoming extinct, reviving attention to years of disputes over the Bush administration's science policies.<br />In a report delivered to Congress on Monday, the inspector general, Earl Devaney, found serious flaws in the process that led to 15 decisions related to policies on endangered species.<br />The report suggested that at least some of those decisions might need to be revisited under the Obama administration.<br />Among the more significant decisions was one reducing the number of streams that would be designated as critical habitat for the endangered bull trout and protected from commercial use. That rule is already the subject of a lawsuit by environmentalists.<br />"The results of this investigation paint a picture of something akin to a secret society residing within the Interior Department that was colluding to undermine the protection of endangered wildlife and covering for one another's misdeeds," said the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Representative Nick Rahall 2nd, a West Virginia Democrat.<br />Most of the problematic decisions involved Julie MacDonald, a former deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks, who oversaw endangered-species issues and frequently clashed with scientists. The report does not accuse MacDonald of doing anything illegal, but criticizes her conduct severely.<br />"MacDonald's zeal to advance her agenda has caused considerable harm to the integrity" of the Endangered Species Act programs "and to the morale and the reputation" of the Fish and Wildlife Service, "as well as potential harm to individual species," Devaney said in a cover letter to his report.<br />Efforts to reach MacDonald by telephone Monday were unsuccessful. She resigned in May 2007 after an earlier inspector general report found that she had run roughshod over agency scientists and violated federal rules by giving internal documents to industry lobbyists.<br />After MacDonald's resignation, the Fish and Wildlife Service began a review of eight agency decisions that regional officials said MacDonald might have manipulated to reach a result that was not supported by scientific evidence. The review is still going on.<br />Devaney also criticized several of MacDonald's colleagues at the agency who, he said, aided and abetted "her attempts to interfere with the science" and "the unwritten policy to exclude as many areas as practicable from critical habitat determinations."<br />Spokesmen for the Interior Department declined to comment, saying they had not yet read the report.<br />Francesca Grifo, director of the scientific integrity program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group, portrayed MacDonald's case as a symbol of a broader pattern of manipulation of science under the Bush administration.<br />"Over and over again, in agency after agency," Grifo said, "we've seen where special interests bump up against scientific determinations, the science is set aside."<br />The wildlife service report is likely to function as a road map for the Obama administration as it reviews the Bush administration's decisions on whether to add species to the endangered list or to protect habitat.<br />In some cases, however, the decision has already been changed by a judge or the agency itself. In others, agency scientists prevailed despite efforts at interference, the report said.<br />The report also recommended new rules to limit the discretion wildlife service officials have on endangered species. Under current law, such officials have wide latitude over their decisions.<br />Under that "enormous policy void," Devaney wrote, officials are free to make decisions with "a wholesale lack of consistency, a process built on guess-work, and decisions that could not pass legal muster."<br />As a result, he said, much of what the agency does ends up in court, requiring expensive litigation and effectively creating a system in which lawsuits drive the regulatory process.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*****************</p><p align="left"><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>David Brooks: Lost in the crowd</strong><br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />All day long, you are affected by large forces. Genes influence your intelligence and willingness to take risks. Social dynamics unconsciously shape your choices. Instantaneous perceptions set off neural reactions in your head without you even being aware of them.<br />Over the past few years, scientists have made a series of exciting discoveries about how these deep patterns influence daily life. Nobody has done more to bring these discoveries to public attention than Malcolm Gladwell.<br />Gladwell's important new book, "Outliers," seems at first glance to be a description of exceptionally talented individuals. But in fact, it's another book about deep patterns. Exceptionally successful people are not lone pioneers who created their own success, he argues. They are the lucky beneficiaries of social arrangements.<br />As Gladwell told Jason Zengerle of New York magazine: "The book's saying, 'Great people aren't so great. Their own greatness is not the salient fact about them. It's the kind of fortunate mix of opportunities they've been given."'<br />Gladwell's noncontroversial claim is that some people have more opportunities than other people. Bill Gates was lucky to go to a great private school with its own computer at the dawn of the information revolution. Gladwell's more interesting claim is that social forces largely explain why some people work harder when presented with those opportunities.<br />Chinese people work hard because they grew up in a culture built around rice farming. Tending a rice paddy required working up to 3,000 hours a year, and it left a cultural legacy that prizes industriousness. Many upper-middle-class American kids are raised in an atmosphere of "concerted cultivation," which inculcates a fanatical devotion to meritocratic striving.<br />In Gladwell's account, individual traits play a smaller role in explaining success while social circumstances play a larger one. As he told Zengerle, "I am explicitly turning my back on, I think, these kind of empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. Well, actually, you can't be whatever you want to be. The world decides what you can and can't be."<br />As usual, Gladwell intelligently captures a larger tendency of thought - the growing appreciation of the power of cultural patterns, social contagions, memes.<br />His book is being received by reviewers as a call to action for the Obama age. It could lead policymakers to finally reject policies built on the assumption that people are coldly rational utility-maximizing individuals. It could cause them to focus more on policies that foster relationships, social bonds and cultures of achievement.<br />Yet, I can't help but feel that Gladwell and others who share his emphasis are getting swept away by the coolness of the new discoveries. They've lost sight of the point at which the influence of social forces ends and the influence of the self-initiating individual begins.<br />Most successful people begin with two beliefs: The future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so. They were often showered by good fortune, but relied at crucial moments upon achievements of individual will.<br />Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains.<br />Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.<br />It leads to resilience, the ability to persevere with an idea even when all the influences in the world say it can't be done. A common story among entrepreneurs is that people told them they were too stupid to do something, and they set out to prove the jerks wrong.<br />It leads to creativity. Individuals who can focus attention have the ability to hold a subject or problem in their mind long enough to see it anew.<br />Gladwell's social determinism is a useful corrective to the Homo economicus view of human nature. It's also pleasantly egalitarian. The less successful are not less worthy, they're just less lucky. But it slights the centrality of individual character and individual creativity. And it doesn't fully explain the genuine greatness of humanity's outliers.<br />As the classical philosophers understood, examples of individual greatness inspire achievement more reliably than any other form of education. If Gladwell can reduce William Shakespeare to a mere product of social forces, I'll buy 25 more copies of "Outliers" and give them away in Times Square.</p><p align="left">******************</p><p align="left"><strong>Obama's energy and environment teams face big challenges</strong><br />By John M. Broder and Andrew C. Revkin<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The team President-elect Barack Obama introduced Monday to carry out his energy and environmental policies faces a host of political, economic, diplomatic and scientific challenges that could impede his plans to address global warming and America's growing dependence on dirty and uncertain sources of energy.<br />Acknowledging that a succession of presidents and Congresses had failed to make much progress on the issues, Obama vowed to press ahead despite the faltering economy and suggested that he would invest his political capital in trying to break logjams.<br />"This time must be different," Obama said at a news conference in Chicago. "This will be a leading priority of my presidency and a defining test of our time. We cannot accept complacency, nor accept any more broken promises."<br />Shortly after Obama spoke, transition officials confirmed that he would select Senator Ken Salazar, a first-term Democrat from Colorado, as interior secretary. Salazar's appointment will complete the team of environmental and energy officials in the new administration.<br />The most pressing environmental issue for the incoming team will almost certainly be settling on an effective and politically tenable approach to the intertwined issues of energy security and global warming.<br />The point person for these issues will be Carol Browner, who was named Monday to the new position of White House coordinator for energy and climate. Browner, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, will oversee two former aides, Lisa Jackson, who was selected as the new agency administrator, and Nancy Sutley, who will be the chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Joining the group will be Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics whom Obama designated to lead the Energy Department.<br />Salazar, a former director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and state attorney general, is a farmer and rancher whose family has lived in Colorado for five generations. He is known as a staunch conservationist and an opponent of developing oil shale on public lands.<br />His appointment will leave a Democratic vacancy in the Senate.<br />Colorado, which voted for Obama 53 percent to 45 percent, has a Democratic governor, Bill Ritter, who will name a replacement to complete the final two years of Salazar's term. Salazar's brother John, a congressman, is among potential appointees to fill the Senate seat.<br />The intense ideological and regional rivalries that have stalled climate change legislation in Congress for years have not suddenly melted away. And even though Obama promises to give energy legislation a high priority, he first must stabilize an economy that is shedding jobs by the hundreds of thousands each month.<br />The new team faces political urgency to deliver on promises made by Obama on the campaign trail. One was his pledge to use a cap-and-trade bill for curbing heat-trapping gases as both the means of shifting investments away from energy sources that cause emissions of such gases and also as the source of the $15 billion a year he promised to invest in advanced energy technology. That figure may be dwarfed by spending on stimulus programs, including so-called green projects like building wind farms and making buildings more energy efficient.<br />Left unclear on Monday was how the new president's advisers intend to use the levers of government to get to the "new energy economy" Obama described. Also uncertain was what relationship they would forge with his powerful economic advisers.<br />"In policy terms, I think there are big questions about what priority will be given to direct public infrastructure spending versus tax-based incentives versus environmental markets versus direct regulation," said Paul Bledsoe of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan advisory group. "There is still a very profound debate on all of that."<br />The diplomatic tension is driven by the steps required to work toward a new global climate treaty, which the United States and nearly all other nations have committed to completing by December 2009. The last round of talks ended last weekend in Poland with few signs of progress on the main goal, limiting emissions of heat-trapping gases without hampering economic development.<br />It is widely felt that if the United States does not demonstrate concrete domestic steps to curb its emissions from burning fossil fuels, fast-growing developing countries will continue to balk at taking on obligations to cut their emissions. And while Obama will enjoy a larger Democratic majority than Clinton did in his two terms, the Senate has long made such steps a prerequisite for its required consent to any climate treaty.<br />The scientific urgency comes from the unanticipated recent growth in emissions of carbon dioxide in China, India and other countries with fast-expanding economies. This heat-trapping gas is the biggest concern because its long life, once the gas is released, causes it to build in the atmosphere.<br />Additional pressure comes from growing recognition that market forces alone are unlikely to drive the spread of nonpolluting energy technologies fast enough to matter where all the growth in energy use is at its peak, in the rapidly growing countries of Asia and Latin America.<br />Nathan Lewis, who leads a team at Caltech pursuing ways to greatly improve solar energy technologies, said the appointment of Chu as energy secretary sent a strong signal that Obama understood that any program on climate-friendly energy had to have three prongs: increasing efficiency, moving existing nonpolluting energy technologies more quickly into the market, and advancing on the frontiers of energy science in search of radical breakthroughs.<br />"Energy efficiency cannot be seen as Job 1 and the other stuff Job 2," Lewis said. "You've got to do them all as Job 1 because they all have to work."<br />Chu has spoken of using coal to generate electricity as an environmental "nightmare," but he acknowledges that the nation lacks the technology to replace it or clean it up in the near term. Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for utilities, said that any solution to the climate problem must address these costs and provide consumers and electricity producers time to adjust.<br />"There will be major costs," Kuhn said. "It's a question of trying to mitigate the costs as much as possible."<br />John M. Broder reported from Washington and Andrew C. Revkin from New York.Education secretary picked<br />Arne Duncan, the Chicago schools superintendent known for taking tough steps to improve schools while maintaining respectful relations with teachers and their unions, is President-elect Barack Obama's choice as secretary of education, Sam Dillon reported Democratic officials saying.<br />Duncan, a 44-year-old Harvard graduate, has raised achievement in the nation's third-largest school district and often faced the ticklish challenge of shuttering failing schools and replacing ineffective teachers, usually with improved results.<br />He represents a compromise choice in the debate that has divided Democrats in recent months over the proper course for public school policy after the Bush years. Duncan has argued that the nation's schools needed to be held accountable for student progress, but also needed major new investments, new talent and new teacher-training efforts.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*************************************************************************************</p><p align="left">ENERGY</p><p align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/16/business/17opec.php">OPEC plans further output cut</a> </p><p align="left">*************</p><p align="left"><strong>Energy projects put on hold in response to lower prices</strong><br />By Jad Mouawad<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />NEW YORK: From the plains of North Dakota to the deep waters of Brazil, dozens of major oil and natural gas projects have been put on hold or canceled in recent weeks as companies scramble to adjust to the collapse in energy markets.<br />In the short run, falling oil prices are leading to welcome relief for consumers across the globe, particularly in the United States, and even in countries where taxes represent a large share of the cost of gasoline and other fuels.<br />But the project delays are likely to reduce future energy supplies - and analysts say they may set the stage for another rapid spike in oil prices once the global economy recovers.<br />Oil markets have just gone through their sharpest-ever spikes and their steepest drops on record, all within a few months this year.<br />Now, with a global recession at hand and oil consumption falling, the market's extreme volatility is making it harder for energy executives to plan ahead. As a result, exploration spending, which had risen to a record this year, is being sharply reduced.<br />The list of projects delayed is growing by the week. Wells are being shut down across the United States, new refineries have been postponed in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and India, and ambitious offshore drilling plans are being reconsidered off the coast of Africa.<br />Moreover, investment in alternative energy sources like wind power and biofuels that had flourished in recent years could dry up if prices stay low for the next few years, analysts said. Banks have become reluctant lenders, especially to renewable energy projects that may prove unprofitable in an era of low oil and gas prices.<br />The precipitous drop in oil prices since the summer, coming on the heels of a vertiginous seven-year rise, was a reminder that oil, like any commodity, is a cyclical business. When demand drops and prices fall, companies curb their investments, leading to lower supplies. When demand recovers, prices rise again, starting a new cycle.<br />As familiar as the pattern may be, the changes this time are taking place at record speed. In June, some analysts were forecasting oil at $200 a barrel; now with prices under $50, no one knows how low they might fall.<br />"It's a classic - if extraordinarily dramatic - cycle," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of "The Prize," a history of the oil business. "Prices have come down so far and so fast, it's become a shock to the supply system."<br />The delays could curb future global fuel supplies by the equivalent of 4 million barrels a day within the next five years, according to Peter Jackson, an analyst at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Yergin's company. That is equal to 5 percent of current oil supplies.<br />One reason projects are being shut down so fast is that costs throughout the industry, which had surged in recent years, are still elevated despite the drop in oil prices. Many companies are waiting for those costs to come down before deciding whether to go forward with new projects.<br />"The global market has been turned upside down since the summer," the International Energy Agency, a leading energy forecaster, said in a recent report.<br />In today's uncertain environment, a slowdown in spending is inevitable, according to energy executives who are devising their budgets for next year.<br />Last year, spending on exploration and production amounted to $329 billion, according to PFC Energy, a consulting firm. That figure is certain to fall.<br />"We're in remission right now," said Marvin Odum, the vice president for exploration and production for Royal Dutch Shell in the Americas. But once the economy picks up, he said, "the energy challenge will come back with a vengeance."<br />Oil demand growth has weakened throughout the industrial world. The International Energy Agency projects that worldwide demand will actually fall this year, for the first time since 1983.<br />So much surplus oil is sloshing around the world right now that some companies, including Shell, are using oil tankers for storage.<br />Prices could fall as low as $25 a barrel, according to Merrill Lynch, if the demand slowdown extends to China next year, which looks increasingly likely.<br />Different companies have different price thresholds for going forward with drilling projects. But across the industry, a price drop this drastic has "a dampening effect," said Odum, the Shell executive. "The big uncertainty is how long this economic environment is going to last," he said.<br />The biggest cutbacks so far have been in Canada's heavy oil projects, where some of the world's highest-cost production is concentrated. Some operators there need oil prices above $90 a barrel to turn a profit.<br />StatoilHydro, a large Norwegian company, recently pulled out of a $12 billion project in Canada because of falling prices. Similarly, Shell, Nexen, and Petro-Canada have all canceled or postponed new ventures in the province of Alberta in recent weeks.<br />The drop in prices could crimp investments even in places where production costs are low. The Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, recently said he considered $75 a barrel to be a "fair price."<br />Saudi Arabia, which has invested tens of billions of dollars in recent years to increase its production, recently announced that two new refinery projects, with ConocoPhillips and the French company Total, were being put on hold until costs fall. In Kuwait, the government recently shelved a $15 billion project to build the country's fourth refinery because of concerns about slowing growth in oil demand.<br />The list goes on: South Africa's national oil company, PetroSA, on Thursday dropped plans to build a plant that would have converted coal to liquid fuel. The British-Russian giant TNK-BP reduced its capital-spending budget for next year by $1 billion, 25 percent less than this year.<br />In North Dakota, oil drillers are scaling back exploration of the Bakken Shale, a geological formation that was recently seen as promising but that is more expensive to produce that traditional fields.<br />"People are dropping rigs up there in a pretty significant way already," Mark Papa, the chief executive of EOG Resources, a small natural gas producer, recently told an energy conference.<br />Another U.S. producer, Callon Petroleum, suspended a major deep water project in the Gulf of Mexico, called Entrada, just weeks before completion because of what it described as a "serious decline in project economics."<br />According to research analysts at the brokerage firm Raymond James, U.S. drilling could drop by 41 percent next year as companies scale back.<br />"We expect operators to significantly cut their activity in the coming weeks due to the holiday season, and many of these rigs will not come back to work," the report said.<br />As scores of small wells get shut down, analysts at Bernstein Research have calculated that oil production in North America could decline by 1.3 million barrels a day through 2010, or 17 percent, to 6.14 million barrels a day.<br />This decline, rather than cuts by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, "will be the catalyst needed for oil prices to rebound," Neil McMahon, an analyst at Bernstein Research, said during a conference call this month.<br />The drop in energy consumption could afford some breathing room for producers who had been straining in recent years to match fast-rising demand.<br />But analysts warn that the world can ill afford a lengthy drop in investment in energy supplies.<br />To meet the growth in global population and the rising affluence expected over the next few decades, the world will need to invest $12 trillion to increase its oil and natural gas supplies, according to the International Energy Agency.<br />"If we cut back dramatically on investments, we could end up in a situation where supply growth goes flat when the economy starts to recover," said Jackson, the analyst.<br />"The steeper the decline, the steeper the response."</p><p align="left">****************</p><p align="left"><strong>Hurdles face an Italian utility as it seeks to expand through mergers</strong><br />By Ian SimpsonReuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />MILAN: The Italian utility Hera finds itself encircled by potential rivals after the collapse of merger talks and with few options for a business combination as a way to spur growth.<br />Hera, a major multiservice utilities in Italy, faces political hurdles to possible mergers and has fewer prospects to develop its natural gas business in a country that imports 85 percent of its natural gas.<br />The best merger options for Hera, a big retail distributor of natural gas, include E.ON, the biggest German utility, which seeks to increase its Italian presence, and smaller regional companies like Iride and Enia.<br />Talks of a three-way combination of Iride, Enia and Hera broke down two months ago. But the companies have said they are open to renewed talks.<br />"From being a leading operator in north, north-central Italy at least, the company has gone into a situation of being encircled," said Alessandro Bianchi, chief executive of Nomisma Energia, a research group in Hera's hometown, Bologna.<br />Hera is controlled by the municipalities whose public utilities combined to form the company and it faces political uncertainty as the city of Bologna, its biggest shareholder, heads into municipal elections in April.<br />Fabio Sciscio, a corporate finance partner at KPMG, said Hera, with its share price halved this year, had been caught in the credit crisis that has halted merger activity.<br />Until markets revive, those negotiating a merger could be accused of settling a deal from a "weakness standpoint rather than from strength," a politically thorny point, he said.<br />Hera, which has a market value of 1.57 billion, or $2.17 billion, is the dominant utility in Emilia Romagna, a manufacturing region.<br />Its gas sales total about 2.3 billion cubic meters a year, or 81.2 billion cubic feet, with power sales at 4.3 gigawatt-hours.<br />Hera has made acquisitions a big part of its expansion plans, buying five small utilities since 2004.<br />A three-way deal with Iride, a Genoa-Turin company, and Enia, based in Emilia Romagna, would have created a utility reaching across much of the northern part of Italy.<br />It also might have given Hera greater access to gas, in part because Iride owns 30 percent of the natural gas group Plurigas, with the Lombardy utility A2A holding the rest. But the talks failed, with Hera citing difficulties over the timetable.<br />"The failure of the talks was a bolt from the blue." said Bianchi, the Nomisma chief executive. "I think that there is a strategic deficit in terms of size and in terms of supply" of natural gas.<br />He added that Hera could continue to buy smaller local companies but could be hemmed in by a merged Enia-Iride, the former monopoly Enel and the energy group Eni.<br />E.ON also is a potential rival, or merger partner, as it takes over the Italian assets of Endesa, a Spanish company, as part of an accord with Enel, which bought Endesa last year.<br />The management of Hera, however, has always ruled out a foreign partner, Stefano Gamberini, an Equita analyst, said in a research note.<br />Other options are politically unpalatable, he said.<br />They include expansion into northeast Italy, with its fragmented utilities sector; Acea of Rome, the biggest water company in Italy; or A2A. But A2A itself has been roiled by political squabbles since it was formed by the merger of the Milan and Brescia city utilities.<br />Acea has also undergone a management makeover by Italy's new center-right government and has been focused on talks with GDF Suez of France to develop electric power and gas businesses.<br />A deal with Acea could generate political sparks as well, since Rome's mayor is a former neo-Fascist and Bologna is a center-left stronghold known as the Red City, as much for its political history as for the red tiles on its roofs.<br />Hera trades at a price/earnings ratio of 9.75 for 2009 earnings, in line with other regional utilities, according to Reuters data. Its dividend yield is 7.35 percent for 2009 earnings, also in line with the sector.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">***************</p><p align="left"><strong>GE wins $3 billion Iraq power deal</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />NEW YORK: General Electric said Tuesday that it had won a deal to supply power generation equipment to Iraq worth about $3 billion.<br />The company's GE Energy division said that it would sell multi-fuel gas turbines capable of supplying 7,000 megawatts of electricity in Iraq, which has suffered through years of power blackouts.<br />That is enough power for about 5,446,000 homes, according to U.S. Department of Energy statistics.<br />The deal nearly doubles Iraq's electricity-generation capacity from current levels of about 6,000 megawatts per day, GE said.<br />About 120 GE power turbines currently operate in the country.<br />GE will also provide technical and management training for the equipment.<br />Shares of GE rose 44 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $17.39 in pre-market trading.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*************************</p><p align="left"><strong>Diesel, made simply from coffee grounds (ah, the exhaust aroma)<br /></strong>By Henry Fountain<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />In research that touches on two of Americans' great obsessions coffee and cars scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno, have made diesel fuel from used coffee grounds.<br />The technique is not difficult, they report in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, and there is so much coffee around that several hundred million gallons of biodiesel could potentially be made annually.<br />Dr. Mano Misra, a professor of engineering who conducted the research with Narasimharao Kondamudi and Susanta K. Mohapatra, said it was by accident that he realized coffee beans contained a significant amount of oil. "I made a coffee one night but forgot to drink it," he said. "The next morning I saw a layer of oil floating on it." He and his team thought there might be a useful amount of oil in used grounds, so they went to several Starbucks stores and picked up about 50 pounds of them.<br />Analysis showed that even the grounds contained about 10 to 15 percent oil by weight. The researchers then used standard chemistry techniques to extract the oil and convert it to biodiesel. The processes are not particularly energy intensive, Misra said, and the researchers estimated that biodiesel could be produced for about a dollar a gallon.<br />One hurdle, Misra said, is in collecting grounds efficiently there are few centralized sources of coffee grounds. But the researchers plan to set up a small pilot operation next year using waste from a local bulk roaster.<br />Even if all the coffee grounds in the world were used to make fuel, the amount produced would be less than 1 percent of the diesel used in the United States annually. "It won't solve the world's energy problem," Misra said of his work. "But our objective is to take waste material and convert it to fuel." And biodiesel made from grounds has one other advantage, he said: the exhaust smells like coffee.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*************************************************************************************</p><p align="left">FRANCE</p><p align="left"><strong>Did Sarkozy's stint change the EU for good?</strong><br />By Stephen Castle and Katrin Bennhold<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: Six months after France illuminated the Eiffel Tower in a deep cobalt blue to open its European Union presidency, the Czech Republic - which takes over the job in January - asked privately if the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, would take part in a handover ceremony.<br />Sarkozy, came the polite but firm reply, does not want to be the person who switches off the giant neon EU symbol on the famous Paris landmark.<br />The anecdote, relayed privately by an informed official, is telling. With his hyperactive political style, Sarkozy has dominated the European stage at a time of crisis and is making no secret of his reluctance to leave the limelight.<br />"I have loved this job," Sarkozy told the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday in his farewell presidency appearance there.<br />What is less clear is whether his eventful six-month presidency has fundamentally changed the EU - and French attitudes to it - or simply given a restless leader a tool to burnish his image at home and abroad.<br />"Was it just a parenthesis of bravado? Or will it be seen by historians as the beginning of a new Europe?" asked Dominique Moïsi, senior fellow at the French Institute of International Relations.<br />Few dispute that the French presidency had its successes. Although Moscow failed to implement the letter of a cease-fire in Georgia negotiated by Sarkozy, it did enough for the EU to resume formal partnership talks with Russia, the bloc's vast neighbor, key energy supplier and trading partner.<br />Then, as the international economic crisis took hold, Paris filled part of the vacuum left by the outgoing U.S. administration, helping convene a meeting of the most powerful global economies and coordinating a European response.<br />And last week Sarkozy persuaded all 27 EU nations to sign up to binding laws on how to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Despite making compromises to industry, this still left Europe in the vanguard of efforts to curb global warming.<br />Sarkozy's leadership has helped to reconnect the French with the EU, just three years after France - a founding member of the bloc - shocked itself and others by rejecting the EU's constitution in a referendum. In a BVA poll published Tuesday, 56 percent of the French approved of Sarkozy's EU presidency, while his domestic policies remain deeply unpopular.<br />Sarkozy has also surprised some by forging an alliance with Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, even inviting him to a meeting of countries that use the euro, which Britain has shunned.<br />Not everyone is pleased of course. Relations between Paris and Berlin are frosty. At a meeting in London with Brown two weeks ago, Sarkozy made clear his exasperation with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, for her reluctance to bolster government spending further to combat the slowdown, according to one diplomat who attended the meeting but is not authorized to speak about it.<br />Smaller and newer member states feel intimidated by someone who dispenses with the normal protocol at summit meetings and interrupts other leaders - as he did last week the Hungarian prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, according to a diplomat familiar with minutes of the meeting.<br />Diplomats complain of Sarkozy's mood changes. "He can be extremely charming," said one diplomat from a smaller member state, "but it is erratic and chaotic, rather as if he has woken up, it's a sunny day, he's in a good mood and he wants to pass that on."<br />The Czechs have also been angered by suggestions that Sarkozy might somehow stay on. Indeed, at a news conference in Strasbourg on Tuesday, Sarkozy said that "of course" the French "will be taking initiatives" after Jan. 1.<br />"For six months he felt like the king of the world - Bush was a lame-duck president and he was in the driving seat of the EU," Moïsi said. "Now Obama is coming in and he is no longer president of Europe. He will not accept such a demise."<br />After January, for example, France will still chair the new Union for the Mediterranean, set up last summer under the French presidency. The idea, floated by Paris, of regular summit meetings for leaders of euro-zone nations, chaired by Sarkozy, has not taken off - though some diplomats say further meetings are not impossible if the economic outlook worsens.<br />In some ways, Sarkozy has already forged a legacy. By lobbying for the G20 meeting in Washington in November and setting the stage for a follow-up in London in April, he has created a precedent that his successors cannot ignore. If the global economy continues to deteriorate, his ability as crisis manager might be called on once more.<br />"He is now an important leader in Europe and on the international scene and his positions have weight," said Hubert Védrine, a former French foreign minister under the Socialists, a political opponent who said he was initially skeptical about Sarkozy's ability to lead.<br />Sarkozy's main challenge, Védrine added, will be to maintain good relations with Britain, repair ties with Germany and then establish a close link with Obama. "Managing that equation will be key to his ability to remain influential beyond the presidency."<br />There is, however, a debate over what lessons to draw from the last six months. One of the deals struck under the French EU presidency was to pave the way for a second Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty - an accord meant to strengthen the EU as a world player that was rejected by the Irish in a first referendum last June.<br />If the treaty's supporters win the second vote, the EU will gain a beefed-up foreign-policy supremo and a new, permanent, president of the European Council - the body in which national governments meet - to take over the job Sarkozy is now vacating.<br />Advocates of the Lisbon Treaty have argued that Sarkozy's six-month tenure underlined the need for a permanent presidency. Opponents say that Sarkozy's success under current rules showed that the importance of institutional change is exaggerated.<br />Denis MacShane, a former Europe minister in Britain, said the French presidency raised the important question of whether leaders "like Sarkozy, Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel, will allow the appointment of a strong, world-respected, president of the council?"<br />Beyond squabbles, the main question, observers say, is whether recent crises suggest that Europe can operate as a bloc to balance the rise of the growing economic powers in Asia. Persistent divisions have weakened the EU's hand with Moscow. Tensions between France and Britain, and between France and Germany, have strained the EU's response to the economic crisis.<br />In Paris, diplomats are optimistic. As one senior official put it Tuesday: "The French presidency has shown that when Europe wants, it can have a voice."</p><p align="left">*************</p><p align="left"><strong>Bomb is found in Parisian department store<br /></strong>By Katrin Bennhold and Basil Katz<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />PARIS: A package of dynamite planted in a major department store here at the height of the Christmas shopping season was found by the police Tuesday and removed after a search that threw the streets nearby into confusion.<br />A group calling itself the Afghan Revolutionary Front said it had planted the explosives in the Printemps men's store. In a message to a news agency, it demanded the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan and warned that it would strike again if President Nicolas Sarkozy did not bring the troops home by the end of February.<br />Although it turned out that there was no detonator with the dynamite, the incident rattled nerves and revived memories of a string of store bombings in Paris in the 1980s.<br />The three Printemps stores on Boulevard Haussmann in central Paris were hastily evacuated in midmorning after Agence France-Presse told the police that it had received a warning in the mail.<br />In the half hour that followed, police officers discovered five sticks of dynamite tied together in a restroom on the third floor of the men's store.<br />A sniffer dog found the dynamite inside a toilet, French news reports said.<br />Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie and Mayor Bertrand Delanoë rushed to the scene, where bomb-squad vans on the normally traffic-packed thoroughfare looked eerily out of place against a backdrop of colorful Christmas displays.<br />"For the moment, we have found sticks of dynamite in just one location," Alliot-Marie said. She said that the dynamite was "relatively old" and had no detonator, adding: "From what we know so far, this was not a device that was intended to explode."<br />Sarkozy, speaking from Strasbourg in eastern France, said that security officials were analyzing the explosives. "Vigilance against terrorism is the only possible option," Sarkozy said in a live television statement.<br />As it is every year in the Christmas season, security has been tightened in various parts of the French capital. Gérard Gachet, a spokesman for Alliot-Marie, said the Interior Ministry had deployed an additional 1,500 police in the Haussmann district last week.<br />There was no sense of panic, in part because shoppers and sales staff were initially told that the evacuation was due to a "technical incident."<br />But as the police barriers were lifted and most parts of the store were reopened, a sense of unease spread as Parisians recalled a wave of explosions in department stores in 1985 and 1986 that killed seven people and wounded dozens.<br />Leonie Jean-Julien, 52, a seamstress in the Printemps women's store, was working there when Hezbollah bombs exploded on the ground floor and in the adjacent Galeries Lafayette department store on Dec. 7, 1985.<br />"Since 1985 I take this seriously," she said.<br />Jean-Julien and other Printemps employees said that the store had been on high alert for several days.<br />An editor at Agence France-Presse, André Birukoff, said the news agency had received an earlier warning that an attack on Printemps was imminent.<br />He said that one of AFP's journalists had received an anonymous telephone call on Dec. 10 saying that there would soon be an explosion at the department store. The caller hung up before identifying himself or giving any other information.<br />The warning statement to AFP on Tuesday said: "Send the message to your president that he needs to withdraw his troops from our country (Afghanistan) before the end of February 2009, or else we will act again in your capitalist department stores, and this time with no warning."<br />France has about 3,000 troops deployed with the NATO-led force in Afghanistan.<br />French terrorism officials and experts said they had no previous knowledge of the group, adding that some of the vocabulary it had used was atypical for Afghan and Islamic radical outfits.<br />But they warned that the incident Tuesday was especially worrying because it hinted that someone could attack an important target in the city with devastating consequences.<br />"These department stores are the ideal target, much like an airport, with a lot of people coming and going, and the psychological impact of it has already been felt," said Anne Giudicelli, director of Terrorisc, a terrorism consultancy.<br />Public concern here about the French military presence in Afghanistan grew after 10 soldiers were killed there in a Taliban ambush in August.<br />The ambush, in which 21 other soldiers were wounded, was the bloodiest attack against French forces since a 1983 bombing in Beirut killed 58 troops.<br />Sarkozy has strongly defended France's role in Afghanistan alongside its Western allies as part of the fight against global terrorism.<br />But his promise in April to commit additional French troops, which brought the commitment to nearly 3,000, was not popular.<br />Meg Bortin and Caroline Brothers contributed reporting.</p><p align="left">*****************</p><p align="left"><strong>Iran accuses Sarkozy of pharaonic arrogance<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />TEHRAN: Hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy was imitating the "arrogant" style of the pharaohs who ruled ancient Egypt, state television reported.<br />Sarkozy, an outspoken critic of Iran since coming to office in 2007, said on Monday he could not shake hands with Ahmadinejad because he had said Israel should be "wiped off the map." He also said Ahmadinejad did not represent Iran.<br />Ahmadinejad, who outraged the West in 2005 by calling Israel a "tumour" to be wiped off the map, accused Sarkozy in a speech at a rally in southern Iran of adopting "an arrogant pharaonic style" towards the Tehran government.<br />"Sir, no one in Iran has demanded to negotiate or shake hands with you," Ahmadinejad said. "Then why do you set conditions?" he asked in the speech in Khuzestan province, broadcast live on state television.<br />In Islamic tradition and the Koran, pharaohs are a symbol of arrogance and oppression.<br />Opposition to Israel is one of the fundamental policies of predominantly Shi'ite Iran, which backs Palestinian and Lebanese Islamic militant groups opposed to peace with the Jewish state.<br />Ahmadinejad insisted Iran had no intention of recognising Israel. "Whoever wants to negotiate with Iran should know that Iran will never recognise the Zionist regime (Israel)," he said to chants of "Death to Israel" and "Death to America."<br />"Those who want to negotiate with Iran, should know that Iran is calling for obliteration of crime, aggression, occupation and the genesis of Zionist thinking from the world."<br />The United States and Israel believe Iran's nuclear programme conceals a military programme.<br />Iran has been hit by three rounds of U.N. sanctions since 2006 for refusing to suspend its sensitive uranium enrichment work. France, like Washington, wants further international pressure on Iran to persuade it to stop the enrichment.<br />Tehran rejects Western allegations that it has secret plans to build atomic weapons and refuses to suspend what it says is a civilian nuclear energy programme.<br />Ahmadinejad said Iran would never yield to international pressure to abandon its nuclear activities. "Iran will not give up its obvious right (to nuclear technology) even one iota," he said.<br />(Writing by Parisa Hafezi, editing by Tim Pearce)</p><p align="left">*************************************************************************************<a href="http://www.iht.com/slideshows/2008/12/15/europe/1215yip.php"></a></p><p align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/slideshows/2008/12/15/europe/1215yip.php">2008 in Pictures</a> (IHT)</p><p align="left">*************************************************************************************</p><p align="left"><strong>Fed effectively cuts benchmark rate to zero</strong><br />By Edmund L. Andrews and Brian Knowlton<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The Federal Reserve entered a new era Tuesday, setting its benchmark interest rate so low that it would have to reach for new and untested tools in fighting both the recession and downward pressure on consumer prices.<br />Going further than analysts anticipated, the central bank cut its target for the federal funds rate to a range of zero to 0.25 percent, a record low, bringing the United States to the zero-rate policies that Japan used for six years in its own fight against deflation. The rate, the interest on overnight loans of reserves between banks, had previously been 1 percent, and a cut of a half-point had been widely expected.<br />It also means the Federal Reserve will have to reach for new and untested tools in fighting both the recession and downward pressure on consumer prices.<br />On Tuesday, President-elect Barack Obama echoed that view, saying the Federal Reserve was "running out of the traditional ammunition that's used in a recession."<br />The Federal Reserve decision, which affects the rate at which banks lend their reserves to one another overnight, was widely expected and to a large degree symbolic. Demand for interbank loans has been so low that the actual federal funds rate has been far below the target for a month and hovered at barely 0.1 percent in the last several days.<br />With its move, the central bank implicitly acknowledged that recession is more severe than Fed officials had thought at their last meeting in October.<br />A raft of new data on Tuesday offered fresh evidence that the central bank faced little danger that its easy-money policies would stoke inflation. Indeed, the data reinforced the impression that the much more immediate risk is deflation - a widespread and disruptive decline in consumer prices.<br />The U.S. government said Tuesday that the prices at the retail level fell 1.7 percent in November, the steepest monthly drop since it began tracking prices in 1947. The decline in the consumer price index was driven largely by the plunge in energy prices, but even the so-called core inflation rate, which excludes the volatile food and energy sectors, was essentially zero.<br />With less than two weeks before Christmas, U.S. retailers from Saks Fifth Avenue to Wal-Mart have been cutting prices to draw in consumers, who have sharply reduced their spending over the past six months. On Tuesday, Banana Republic offered customers $50 off on any purchases that total $125. DKNY offered customers $50 off for any purchase totaling $250.<br />Ian Shepherdson, who follows the U.S. economy for High Frequency Economics, said falling energy prices were likely to bring the overall consumer price index to below zero in January.<br />Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, has already outlined a range of unorthodox new tools that the central bank can use to keep stimulating the economy once the central bank runs out of room to cut rates further.<br />Those techniques include buying vast amounts of longer-term Treasury bonds. The Fed has already introduced a slew of lending programs in its effort to revive corporate and consumer lending. Later this month, the Fed will start purchasing $600 billion worth of securities that are backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other government-sponsored entities. The Fed and the Treasury are also introducing a joint program to buy up securities backed by consumer debt like automobile loans.<br />All of the new tools amount to printing money in vast new quantities, and the Fed has already started the process. Since September, the Fed's balance sheet has ballooned to more than $2 trillion from about $900 billion as the central bank has created new money and loaned it out through all its new programs. As soon as the Fed completes its plans to buy up mortgage-backed debt and consumer debt, the balance sheet will be up to about $3 trillion.<br />"At some point, and without knowing the timing, the Fed is going to have to destroy all that money it is creating," said Alan Blinder, a professor of economics at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. "Right now, the crisis is created by the huge demand by banks for hoarding cash. The Fed is providing cash, and the banks want to hoard it. When things start returning to normal, the banks will want to start lending it out. If that much money is left in the monetary base, it would be extremely inflationary."<br />In announcing its decision, the Fed said it "anticipates that weak economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for some time."<br />With the Fed cutting short-term rates as much as it can, its normal monetary policy tools cannot be counted on to provide an effective lift to the economy. That is the main reason why most economists say it is important to couple the Fed's efforts to stimulate lending with an expansive fiscal policy in which the Treasury would borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to increase government spending to make up for the decline in private consumption and investment.<br />While observing, at a news conference in Chicago, that he did not think it wise for a president or president-elect to second-guess the Fed, Obama said, "Although the Fed is still going to have more tools available to it," adding, "it is critical that the other branches of government step up, and that's why the economic recovery plan is so absolutely critical." Obama was meeting with his full economic team Tuesday. They are working with Congress to put together a stimulus package, estimated at $500 billion to $700 billion, that he hopes Congress will approve even before he takes office on Jan. 20.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">******************</p><p align="left"><strong>Goldman Sachs posts $2.12 billion loss<br /></strong>By Ben White<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Goldman Sachs's long run of profitable quarters came to an end on Tuesday as the bank announced a loss of $2.12 billion, driven by big markdowns on its large portfolio of proprietary investments in everything from Japanese golf courses to Chinese banks.<br />It was the first quarterly loss since Goldman went public in 1999 and demonstrated that even some of Wall Street's most skilled operators have not been able to overcome tough markets and sagging economies across the globe.<br />Goldman sidestepped earlier losses by staying out of the high-risk subprime mortgage market and taking an early bet against the housing industry in the United States.<br />But the bank has been unable to avoid taking big markdowns after nearly 30 percent declines across global equity markets in its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended in November.<br />Goldman's quarterly loss, which amounted to $4.97 a share, kicked off a run of what are expected to be poor banking results. Morgan Stanley is expected to announce a loss of around $400 million on Wednesday.<br />Revenue in Goldman's big trading and principal investment business was a negative $4.36 billion, in contrast to a positive $6.93 billion in the fourth quarter last year.<br />Goldman said it cut compensation and expenses and benefits by 46 percent in 2008, to $10.93 billion, reflecting lower payments because of poor performance. None of the firm's top seven executives will take a bonus for this year. Morgan Stanley has made a similar decision.<br />Employment at Goldman, which had been 32,569 at the end of the third quarter, decreased 8 percent.<br />Goldman Sachs has said it will reduce staffing by 10 percent, but some analysts say they believe that it will need to make deeper cuts to reflect declining revenue and a slowing global economy.<br />After the announcement, Moody's, the debt rating agency, downgraded the long-term senior debt ratings of Goldman Sachs to A1, from Aa3. Other ratings were affirmed, but the outlook on them remained negative.<br />Goldman shares, which are down 70 percent this year in the financial crisis, were up 7.6 percent at $74.17 in afternoon trading on Tuesday in New York. Analysts said the stock rose because the loss was smaller than many had expected.<br />"I think the number on people's radar screen was much bigger as they try to clear the books to start the next year," Tim Smalls, head of U.S. stock trading at Execution, a brokerage firm in Greenwich, Connecticut, told Reuters.<br />David Viniar, the chief financial officer of Goldman, said in an interview that about $1 billion in losses came in real estate investments, while $600 million came in a stake in Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.<br />"Over time, a lot of those are great investments," he said.<br />Viniar also reaffirmed the belief within Goldman that these were largely unavoidable losses that would be reversed as the market improved.<br />The same cannot be said for banks with huge holdings in subprime mortgages and related securities that may never recover much value, according to Goldman executives.<br />Viniar said that it was too soon to say when markets might recover but that huge efforts by governments in the United States and around the world should begin having positive effects.<br />"Economies around the world are quite slow, but governments around the world are throwing in enormous resources," he said.<br />"You don't know when they will kick in. They may already have kicked in, or they may kick in in a year."<br />Viniar, reaffirming a view privately expressed by Goldman officials, said he did not believe that the bank needed to make a major acquisition to help its balance sheet.<br />He noted that the bank reduced its balance sheet to about $885 billion at the end of the quarter, from $1 trillion last quarter. He added that $111 billion of that was free cash.<br />Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have transformed themselves into deposit-taking bank holding companies that have direct access to borrowing from the Federal Reserve, but are also legally bound to take less risk.<br />Speculation has centered on Goldman's buying a retail bank or a trust bank that manages money for large institutions and wealthy individuals. Goldman executives have looked at possible acquisitions but found none that were cheap and strategically useful.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*****************</p><p align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/16/business/gcon.php">Merkel concedes need for more economic stimulus in Germany</a> </p><p align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/16/business/autos.php">European car sales plunged in November</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/16/business/17marketsCLOSE.php">U.S. stocks soar as Fed cuts rate to lowest level ever</a></p><p align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/16/business/16ukecon.php">U.K. inflation risks falling below 1% in 2009, central bank warns</a> </p><p align="left">****************</p><p align="left"><strong>Paulson does not expect any more major financial institutions to fail during current crisis<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Tuesday that he did not expect any more major financial institutions to fail during the current credit crisis.<br />Paulson also said he had no plans to ask Congress to make the second half of the $700 billion financial rescue fund available before the administration of President George W. Bush leaves office on Jan. 20.<br />In an interview on CNBC, Paulson said he believed the actions taken by financial authorities in the United States. and other countries would allow all the systemically important institutions to remain viable.<br />The administration has obligated almost all of the first $350 billion in the financial rescue package approved by Congress on Oct. 3. There had been speculation that the Bush administration would ask for approval to begin using the second $350 billion in the bailout bill before leaving office.<br />But Paulson said Tuesday he believed the government had a "lot of firepower" at its disposal currently, including the rescue program and multibillion-dollar loan programs being used by the Federal Reserve and other banking authorities. For that reason, he said he did not see a need to request authorization from Congress to tap the second half of the rescue package.<br />The Fed on Tuesday said it had reduced the federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge each other, to a range of zero to 0.25 percent. That is down from the 1 percent target rate in effect since the last meeting in October. The aggressive move was greeted enthusiastically by Wall Street, and the Dow Jones industrial average closed more than 4 percent higher.<br />Separately, the Treasury Department announced that it had provided an additional $2.45 billion in direct purchases of bank stock involving 28 more banks.<br />The new group of banks brings to 116 those that have received government support through stock purchases. The administration announced in mid-October that the stock purchases would be the major way it planned to use $250 billion of the rescue program. The amount distributed to the banks so far totals $167.76 billion, Treasury said.<br />In his interview, Paulson said a top priority for his remaining weeks in office was making sure the transition to the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama flows smoothing during what has turned out to be the country's most serious financial crisis since the 1930s.<br />The Bush administration is continuing to look at ways to deal with the mortgage crisis, Paulson said, but had not yet decided to implement a proposal to try to boost housing activity by buying bonds and lowering mortgage rates to 4.5 percent.<br />Paulson said he was spending a lot of time on the effort to fashion a government lifeline for the Detroit auto companies.<br />The companies that need government loans to avoid bankruptcy "will get the money as quickly as we can prudently do it," Paulson said. "We need to do it, but we need to do it right."<br />Paulson refused to speculate exactly when the support from the government's $700 billion rescue program might be awarded to General Motors, Chrysler or Ford Motor, but said the administration was working to make sure the taxpayer was protected and that the companies presented a credible plan to achieve long-term viability.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*************</p><p align="left"><strong>Wall Street fraud leaves charities reeling</strong><br />By Stephanie Strom<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />NEW YORK: When Jeanne Levy-Church created the JEHT Foundation in 2002 to promote justice, equality, human dignity and tolerance, she tapped into investments run by Bernard Madoff.<br />Those investments were initially made more than three decades ago by her father, Norman Levy, who entrusted his real estate fortune to Madoff. Funded solely by regular contributions from Levy-Church, the foundation gave away more than $75 million over the next few years.<br />But on Monday, the young foundation announced that it would cease operations by the end of January - a victim of the same investments that made it a star in liberal philanthropic circles.<br />"The returns had been steady and strong for all these years," said Robert Crane, the foundation's chief executive. "It was shocking."<br />Around the United States, the nonprofit community is reeling from the Madoff scandal. At least two other foundations have been forced to close their doors, having lost virtually all their assets to what the authorities describe as a Ponzi scheme that depended on new investment money to pay off earlier investments.<br />Charities that depended on those foundations for financing, like the Innocence Project and the UJA Federation, and wealthy donors like the real estate billionaire Mort Zuckerman and the founder of the Ascot Partners hedge fund, Ezra Merkin, have now added the Madoff scandal to the list of reasons that fund-raising has been crimped this autumn. In some cases, the foundations had placed their money with Madoff directly; others had invested with funds that turned assets over to him. And some nonprofits relied on a steady stream of money from donors, like Levy-Church, with now vanishing fortunes.<br />"It's not catastrophic, but it does hurt us," said Madeline deLone, executive director of the Innocence Project, which was supported by JEHT in its work to use DNA evidence to exonerate improperly convicted criminals and to reform the criminal justice system.<br />The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, the Ramaz School and Yeshiva University are among the charities that invested in the Madoff funds, often on the advice of wealthy donors on their boards, and are now grappling with the fallout.<br />"We are just waiting to understand exactly what's going on," Marc Winkelman, secretary of the board of the Wiesel organization, said Friday. "It's of course an upsetting thing."<br />According to its 2006 tax form, the most recent available, the Wiesel Foundation realized a $310,520 gain that year on some $37 million of securities traded on its behalf by Madoff. It is unclear what portion of the organization's endowment that $37 million represents, and Winkelman did not return a call seeking clarification.<br />The tax forms show trading of well-known stocks like Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo and IBM, as well as government bonds, all of which may have led the Wiesel organization to believe that its investment portfolio was adequately diversified.<br />Yeshiva University lost $100 million to $110 million on investments in Madoff's funds, having already seen its endowment drop to $1.4 billion from $1.8 billion after turmoil in the markets this autumn.<br />In a letter to donors, the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington said it had $10 million invested with Madoff, or about 8 percent of its endowment as of Nov. 30. The organization said it would work to recover the money.<br />The North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System reported that it had a $5.7 million exposure to Madoff Securities in the form of a gift from a donor who insisted that it be invested that way. "The donor who contributed the funds has graciously agreed to reimburse the health system for any financial loss," the organization said in a statement.<br />The Ramaz School, where Merkin was on the investment committee, lost some $6 million invested with Madoff, according to a letter sent to board members and two parents whose children attend the school.<br />"It is a small part of our endowment," said Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the Ramaz principal. "We will be able to continue functioning normally."<br />Miriam Rinn, a spokeswoman for the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America, the umbrella organization for JCC organizations in the United States and Canada, said it was still working to determine how much it might have lost in the Madoff scandal. "We're shocked," Rinn said. But "we're still going ahead with all of our services."<br />The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation, which supports organizations like the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach in Florida, said it lost $145 million, or 45 percent of its assets at the end of last year, because of investments with Madoff.<br />"I was stunned and saddened to learn about the allegations against Bernie Madoff," Carl Shapiro said in a statement. "It is devastating to think that so many charities, individuals and institutions that had put their trust in Mr. Madoff have had their lives so negatively impacted."<br />He said his foundation would work to recover its investment and would honor all its commitments.<br />The SAR Academy, a Jewish school, had roughly a third of its $3.7 million in assets invested with Madoff, according to an e-mail it sent to donors and parents. That exposure was through the Ascot Fund, a charity to provide wigs for people with the baldness disease alopecia. That fund is run by Merkin, who is also the chairman of GMAC.<br />And Steven Spielberg's Wunderkinder Foundation, which supports organizations like Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the charity Children of Chernobyl, had investments with Madoff, although a spokesman said he did not know how much.<br />The Chais Family Foundation in Encino, California, announced over the weekend that its investments with Madoff had forced it to stop operating, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The foundation had $178 million in assets in May 2007, according to its tax form.<br />The Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation of Salem, Massachusetts, had about $7 million at the end of 2006, but was forced to shut down at the end of last week.<br />Jeanne Levy-Church and her husband, Ken Levy-Church, supported JEHT each year with a contribution from their Madoff funds. There will be no more contributions.<br />"Our programming is totally dependent on the ongoing funding, so for all intents and purposes it has ceased," said Crane, the JEHT Foundation's chief executive. "People with grants currently in hand will keep that money, of course, but we can't make good on pledges and grants that are for multiple years."<br />The foundation's 24 employees are losing their jobs, and organizations like Human Rights First, the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Juvenile Law Center are losing an important source of revenue.<br />Elisa Massimino, the executive director and chief executive of Human Rights First, said JEHT had been a "significant" supporter of the organization, particularly its work on national security and civil liberties.<br />"We are going to work aggressively to identify alternative funding for this work, and I am hopeful that there will be others - foundations and individuals - who will step up and help us meet this challenge," Massimino said.</p><p align="left">*****************</p><p align="left"><strong>Louis Vuitton drops plans for flagship store in Tokyo<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />TOKYO: LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world's biggest luxury goods company, has scrapped a plan to open a Louis Vuitton flagship store in the Ginza, the Tokyo shopping district, as a spreading recession takes the luster off designer brands.<br />LVMH has broken off talks over opening a store in a building that was scheduled to be completed in 2010, an executive for the developer, Hulic, said Tuesday.<br />An LVMH spokesman said the company had withdrawn from the project but declined to explain the decision or comment on its plans.<br />"We have not been able to reach an agreement with Hulic on a store development project in Ginza," said Yuri Matsueda of Burson-Marsteller, a public relations agent for Louis Vuitton Japan.<br />Awash with cash from a global luxury boom, fashion and jewelry brands poured money into lavish retail spaces in districts like the Ginza and Omotesando over the past two years.<br />News reports this year referred to a 10-floor Louis Vuitton emporium and restaurant to rival opulent new Armani and Bulgari towers in the Ginza.<br />A weak yen also encouraged such investments, tempting wealthy Japanese consumers to shop at home rather than Europe, luring buyers from all over Asia to Tokyo and offering foreign brands bargains on real estate.<br />While luxury goods companies gave optimistic sales forecasts as recently as May, banking on the wealthy to keep spending despite the economic slowdown, the mood has turned sour as the impact from the global financial crisis has grown.<br />Japan, the United States and much of Western Europe is in recession, and growth is slowing in emerging markets like China.<br />Several luxury companies have cut their outlooks and expect a grim Christmas season followed by an even gloomier 2009.<br />LVMH had appeared to be weathering the downturn better than others. It said in October that sales had risen sharply in the first week of that month, and sales in emerging markets were holding up.</p><p align="left">*****************</p><p align="left"><strong>Inquiry finds no signs family helped Madoff with fraud</strong><br />By Alex Berenson and Diana B. Henriques<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />NEW YORK: U.S. investigators have found no evidence so far that members of Bernard Madoff's family helped him carry out what may be the largest financial fraud in history, according to a person briefed on the case.<br />Madoff's sons, Andrew and Mark, and his brother, Peter, all occupied senior positions at his firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, whose assets were frozen after Bernard Madoff told law enforcement agents Thursday that he had defrauded investors of up to $50 billion.<br />Although the enormous scale of the fraud prompted widespread questions about whether one person could concoct all the necessary paperwork such a scheme would entail, Madoff, 70, had insisted that his family was not involved in the Ponzi scheme. He said it was "all his fault," according to a criminal complaint filed last week.<br />And so far, investigators have not uncovered evidence that contradicts those statements, according to the person briefed on the case, who was not authorized to comment publicly on it.<br />The person cautioned that the investigation was in its earliest stages, and that examiners could still unearth evidence that Madoff's family knew about the fraud or even helped carry it out.<br />But employees have said that Madoff's sons and brother all seemed shocked Thursday after the fraud was disclosed and Madoff was arrested. One of Madoff's sons had a substantial amount of money invested in the accounts that Madoff managed, investigators said.<br />John Wing, a lawyer for Peter Madoff, said Monday that investigators had not advised Peter that he was a target in the case, and that he was expected to cooperate with investigators.<br />Peter Madoff, 62, reported to work on Monday to help investigators and a court-appointed receiver take control of the firm's assets and examine its books, Wing said. "As far as I know, Peter Madoff has been 100 percent cooperative," Wing said. Peter Madoff was general counsel, while Andrew, 42, and Mark Madoff, 44, supervised the firm's stock-trading desks, which have so far not been implicated in the fraud. Both have worked at the firm since their 20s.<br />A person with direct knowledge of the information who was not authorized to speak for the sons said that Andrew Madoff and Mark Madoff had been told by the law enforcement authorities that they were not targets in the case.<br />"They are considered to be fact witnesses only, neither subjects nor targets," the source said. "They are cooperating totally."<br />A lawyer for Frank DiPascali, another senior Madoff employee, declined to comment on whether his client was being investigated or cooperating with the authorities. Madoff employees have said that DiPascali was the most important figure in the separate staff that worked closely with Bernard Madoff on the 17th floor of the firm's office at the Third Avenue building known as the Lipstick Tower in midtown Manhattan. That operation also had its own computer systems, and did not process its trades through the Madoff firm, they said.<br />Bernard Madoff told his sons that the trading was being done by European counterparties, said several people familiar with the history of the firm. The firm's stock traders and other support staff members worked on the 18th and 19th floors, where they were supervised by Peter, Andrew and Mark Madoff.<br />The complaint filed last week states that Bernard Madoff told two unidentified senior employees on Dec. 10 that he had defrauded investors. Those senior employees were Andrew and Mark Madoff, according to several people knowledgeable about the case who were not at liberty to discuss it publicly.<br />They then called a friend, Martin Flumenbaum, who is a partner at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, those people said. After they told Flumenbaum about their father's confession, he called U.S. government prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission.<br />On Thursday morning, Andrew and Mark Madoff met with government officials. The FBI then sent two agents to their father's apartment to interview him. He confessed and was arrested, according to documents filed in the case.<br />Since Thursday, Andrew and Mark have not been able to talk to their uncle or their father because they are considered witnesses in the case and must avoid pretrial discussions that might touch on their experiences.<br />One of Madoff's sons had "a meaningful amount of money" invested with his father and got statements that were no different from those received by other investors, the people said. Andrew and Mark have told associates that their father's confession suggested to them that the fraud had been going on for several years, one said.<br />Monday afternoon, a U.S. District Court judge appointed a trustee to liquidate Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the broker-dealer that was the core of Madoff's business. The trustee, Irving Picard, was appointed at the request of the Securities Investor Protection Corp., the government-chartered fund set up to help protect investors of failed brokerage firms.<br />"It is clear that the customers of the Madoff firm need the protections available under federal law," said Stephen Harbeck, the president of the agency.<br />But in a statement, the agency warned that "the scope of the misappropriations and the state of the defunct firm's records will make this more difficult than in most prior brokerage firm insolvencies."<br />Normally the agency can simply transfer a failing firm's customer accounts to a solvent brokerage house. That may not be possible in this case, Harbeck said. Moreover, since the agency does not know how much money is actually missing, it cannot determine how to apportion any customer assets that are recovered. The protections provided through the agency are available on its Web site, sipc.org/how/sipcprotects.cfm.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">***************</p><p align="left"><strong>Tax deduction may help duped Madoff investors</strong><br />By Lynnley Browning<br />Wednesday, December 17, 2008<br />For the legions of investors who appear to have been swindled in Bernard Madoff's giant Ponzi scheme, there may be a little relief.<br />U.S. tax rules allow investors who fall prey to criminal theft perpetrated by their investment advisers or brokers to claim a tax deduction stemming from their losses.<br />The rules, which are in part tied to definitions under state theft laws, could potentially put hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, in the form of tax breaks, back into the pockets of Madoff's stunned investors, including Mort Zuckerman, the publishing magnate; Fred Wilpon, the owner of the New York Mets baseball team; and wealthy investors from Florida to Europe.<br />But it is unclear whether the Internal Revenue Service will see things that way. The agency, which never comments on issues specific to individual taxpayers or cases, declined on Monday to discuss whether it would allow Madoff's investors to use the theft loss rule.<br />Gary Zwick, a tax lawyer at Walter & Haverfield in Cleveland, said, "It's fair to say that many people will take the position that the theft loss rules will apply, but the government may not take that approach."<br />Under the rules, investors may deduct their losses against 90 percent, and in some cases all, of their adjusted gross income. So an investor who lost $1 million to Madoff and whose adjusted gross income is $600,000 can claim a tax loss of $939,900. That is the result of $1 million reduced by 10 percent of the adjusted gross income, and minus a $100 fee that is applicable under Internal Revenue Service rules, according to Robert Willens, a tax and accounting authority who provided the example.<br />The rules permit losses stemming from theft to be deducted in the year in which the loss is discovered by the investor. They also allow investors to carry back such losses for three years - one more year than under the rules for capital losses - and to carry forward losses for 20 years. Investors must compute losses according to the adjusted basis in their investment, not the fair-market value.<br />For elite clients, the tax write-off may be the only positive outcome from what prosecutors have charged may be the biggest financial pyramid scheme in history.<br />But before investors can claim the deduction, they have to pass several hurdles.<br />First, they have to be reasonably certain that they will not recover their losses. Because proving that could take months, if not years, investors may have to wait until next year or later to be able to claim any losses on U.S. federal income tax returns. Investors who file claims for reimbursements are typically deemed to be in the process of seeking monetary recoveries.<br />It is not known whether Madoff put any of his investors' money in personal bank accounts outside the United States or used it to underwrite a lavish lifestyle. Any such assets could be a source of recovery for investors that the court-appointed receiver for Madoff's operations would try to find - and that could dilute any tax write-offs.<br />A formal declaration that Madoff's funds were bankrupt would help investors on the tax front. "Embezzlement followed by bankruptcy is a pretty good indication that you're not going to get your money back and have a theft-loss claim," said Mathew Richardson, a tax lawyer at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton in Los Angeles.<br />Investors who paid taxes on their Madoff investments in previous years might also try to seek refunds from the Internal Revenue Service.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">******************</p><p align="left"><strong>Breakingviews.com: Banker fails to practice what he preaches<br /></strong>breakingviews.com<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />Emilio Botín spoke too soon. After collecting the prize for "Bank of the Year" at a recent awards dinner in London, Botín, the chairman of Banco Santander, delivered a witty speech to the global banking elite. The chance to rib a captive audience of humbled rivals was too great to resist. Botín's theme? How to be a good banker.<br />The assembled finance professionals, representing the likes of Goldman Sachs and UBS, laughed and squirmed as Botín explained how Santander had managed to dodge the subprime bullet. He distilled his wisdom into three simple lessons:<br />One, if you don't fully understand a product, don't buy it.<br />Two, if you wouldn't buy a product for yourself, don't sell it.<br />And three, if you don't know your customers very well, don't lend them any money.<br />That was all very well - until the Madoff scandal broke on Friday.<br />Santander's own anticipated losses from the Madoff affair are tiny, at just 17 million, or $23 million. The bank hasn't been a big lender to funds of hedge funds invested with Bernard Madoff, a former chairman of Nasdaq. But it seems to have forgotten Botín's second piece of advice, as Santander's clients could lose 2.3 billion in the alleged fraud.<br />Moreover, Botín concluded his advice with a nod to Rudyard Kipling's poem "If," saying: "and if you do these three things, my son, you will be a better banker." As it happens, Botín's son and son-in-law are also victims of Madoff's apparent collapse. They run the Spanish fund manager M&B Capital Advisers, which also had exposure to Madoff.<br />At least Botín is in good company. Other so-called "winners" from the subprime banking crisis - HSBC, BNP Paribas and Unicredit - also have egg on their faces courtesy of Madoff. But none of them set themselves up for a fall quite so brazenly as the patriarch of Spanish banking. - Christopher Hughes </p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*******************</p><p align="left"><strong>Kidnapping expert is abducted in Mexico</strong><br />By Marc Lacey<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />MEXICO CITY: A U.S. security consultant who has helped negotiate the release of scores of kidnapping victims in Latin America was himself kidnapped last week in northern Mexico after delivering a seminar there on how to avoid that fate, officials said Monday.<br />The FBI and Mexican law enforcement officials are investigating the abduction, which took place on the evening of Dec. 10 in Saltillo, an industrial city that is a three-hour drive from the Texas border.<br />The consultant, Felix Batista, was giving security seminars for business owners in the state of Coahuila when he was abducted by a group of armed men. He is a former U.S. Army officer credited with helping to free hostages abducted by Colombian rebels.<br />Batista met with a group of police officials on Dec. 10 and later in the day was in a restaurant when he received a call on his cellphone that prompted him to get up and leave, officials told the media. A group of men then took him away, officials and local newspapers said.<br />"I do a lot of security consulting, and the last thing I think of is being a victim in the process," said Jon French, a former U.S. State Department official who runs his own security company, Problem Solvers, in Mexico City. "Talk about turning the tables."<br />Batista works for ASI Global, a security company in Houston. It operates a 24-hour hot line that aids clients with, among other things, responding to kidnappings.<br />"We're still gathering information on what occurred," said Charlie LeBlanc, president of the company. He confirmed that Batista had been kidnapped, but declined to say whether a ransom had been demanded.<br />LeBlanc said the company and relatives of Batista were working with colleagues and law enforcement officials for his release. "Our thoughts and prayers are with Felix and his family at this time," LeBlanc said in a statement.<br />Coahuila has not been among the most violent places in Mexico, a country where killings and kidnappings have soared, often associated with drug traffickers moving narcotics to the United States.<br />But Coahuila has not been immune. Two of its anti-kidnapping chiefs have been abducted in recent years.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*******************</p><p align="left"><strong>Lawyers question whether case against Blagojevich is airtight</strong><br />By David Johnston<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: When Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, announced the arrest of the Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, Fitzgerald said he had acted to halt a political crime spree that included what he called an "appalling" effort to sell off the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.<br />But some lawyers are beginning to question whether the juiciest part of the case against Blagojevich, the part involving the Senate seat, may be less than airtight. There is no evidence, at least none that has been disclosed, that the governor actually received anything of value - and the Senate appointment has yet to be made.<br />Ever since the country's founding, prosecutors, defense lawyers and juries have been trying to define the difference between criminality and political deal-making. They have never established a clear-cut line between the offensive and the illegal, and the hours of wiretapped conversations involving Blagojevich that prosecutors recorded, filled with crass, profane talk about how to benefit from the Senate vacancy, may occupy that legal gray area.<br />Robert Bennett, one of Washington's best-known white-collar criminal defense lawyers, said Blagojevich faced nearly insurmountable legal problems in a case that includes a raft of corruption accusations unrelated to Obama's Senate seat. But Bennett said the case raised some potentially thorny issues about political corruption.<br />"This town is full of people who call themselves ambassadors, and all they did was pay $200,000 or $300,000 to the Republican or Democratic Party," said Bennett, referring to a passage in the criminal complaint filed against the governor suggesting that Blagojevich was interested in an ambassadorial appointment in return for the Senate seat. "You have to wonder, how much of this guy's problem was his language, rather than what he really did."<br />In presenting his case, Fitzgerald said Blagojevich had crossed the line from deal-making to criminality, citing an example in the complaint in which the governor discussed with an aide obtaining a $300,000-a-year job from the Service Employees International Union in return for naming a candidate to the seat.<br />"We're not trying to criminalize people making political horse trades on policies or that sort of thing," Fitzgerald said. "But it is criminal when people are doing it for their personal enrichment."<br />But politicians routinely receive political contributions in return for their decisions, whether they involve making appointments or taking a stand on legislation.<br />And while prosecutors have brought increasing numbers of political corruption cases in recent years, they have done so using laws that make it a crime for an official to deprive the public of "honest services." They are based on statutes that never define exactly what conduct might be illegal, but what they do require is evidence that an official at least tried to seek something of value in return for an official action.<br />In the case of Blagojevich, it would be legal for the governor to accept a campaign contribution from someone he appointed to the Senate seat. What would create legal problems for him is if he was tape-recorded specifically offering a seat in exchange for the contribution. What would make the case even easier to prosecute is if he was recorded offering the seat in exchange for a personal favor.<br />The government has asserted that the wiretaps show that Blagojevich told his aides that he wanted to offer the seat in exchange for contributions and for personal favors, including jobs for himself and his wife. But talk is not enough. Any case will ultimately turn on the strength of the tapes, and whether the governor made it clear to any of the candidates for Senate that he would only award the seat in exchange for the favor or favors.<br />Several lawyers cautioned that the complaint presented last week was a snapshot of the evidence that Fitzgerald had amassed so far, in an investigation that is continuing. By arresting Blagojevich on Dec. 9, Fitzgerald acted without having presented his case before a grand jury. He is now likely to use such a panel to obtain more witness testimony.<br />Fitzgerald's decision to bypass a grand jury initially could signal a belief on his part that he did not yet have a fully prosecutable case on his hand, though it appears to have been prompted at least in part by the publication in The Chicago Tribune on Dec. 5 of an article that tipped off Blagojevich that investigators were listening in on his conversations.<br />Fitzgerald has also said he was worried that if he did not intervene, Blagojevich might go ahead with some of his schemes - including appointing a successor to Obama.<br />Christopher Drew contributed reporting from Chicago.<br />Illinois body votes to impeach<br />The Illinois House of Representatives voted unanimously on Monday evening to begin efforts to impeach Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic governor arrested last week in a web of corruption, including, prosecutors say, efforts to make money off the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama, Monica Davey and Susan Saulny reported from Springfield, Illinois.<br />Michael Madigan, the House speaker, appointed a committee to begin gathering evidence and testimony on Tuesday in an "abuse of power" case against Blagojevich. The lawmakers voted 113-0 to go forward with Madigan's plan.</p><p align="left">***************</p><p align="left"><strong>Questions rise about Caroline Kennedy's experience</strong><br />By David M. Halbfinger<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />NEW YORK: She has not held a full-time job in years, has not run for even the lowliest office and has promoted noncontroversial causes like patriotism, poetry and public service.<br />Yet Caroline Kennedy's decision to ask New York Governor David Paterson to appoint her to Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate seat suggests that she believes she is as well prepared as anyone to serve as the next senator from New York - and is ready to throw her famously publicity-averse self into the challenge of winning back-to-back elections in 2010 and 2012.<br />Some columnists, bloggers and even potential colleagues in Congress have already begun asking if she would be taken seriously if not for her surname. Representative Gary Ackerman, a Democrat from Queens, told a radio host on Wednesday that he did not know what Kennedy's qualifications were, "except that she has name recognition - but so does J. Lo," the singer.<br />Aside from a 22-month, three-day-a-week stint as director of strategic partnerships for the New York City schools, her commitments generally involve nonprofit boards: the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the American Ballet Theater, the Commission on Presidential Debates and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.<br />But friends and associates say that Kennedy, 51, is no dilettante, and that her career is replete with examples of the kind of hands-on policy work and behind-the-scenes maneuvering that could serve her well.<br />Last spring, she joined the search committee for a new director of the Harvard University Institute of Politics, where she and Senator Edward Kennedy, her uncle, are members of an advisory panel. The university wanted a big-name politician. But Kennedy argued for someone who would view the post as a career maker, not a career ender, others involved said.<br />Her choice was Bill Purcell, a two-term Nashville mayor. Her uncle, whose voice carried the greatest weight on the board, had fallen ill with brain cancer, and might have gone in a different direction, one insider said. But over six weeks, she patiently made her case and eventually won over members of the institute's board and Harvard officials.<br />"She's not shy about pushing people in a direction, and very good at doing it in a way that people don't even realize they're being pushed," said Heather Campion, a board member.<br />As one might expect, she is also the consummate insider: When Rupert Murdoch's young daughter was applying to the Brearley School, Kennedy, a board member who had attended the school and sent her two daughters there, wrote a letter of recommendation, according to a News Corp. spokesman.<br />Kennedy's work with the city's public schools has won much attention, but has not been widely understood. Hired in October 2002 to overhaul the schools' private fund-raising, she took on a haphazard operation and gave it a new mission: privately raising seed money to test new reforms, while trying to persuade New Yorkers to get involved in the schools in meaningful ways. Her $1 salary meant she did not have to fill out financial disclosure forms.<br />A rock concert in Central Park raised $2 million; a tag sale there drew tens of thousands of bargain hunters. Some of them, unwittingly, walked off with evening bags that had belonged to her mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, said Ann Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc., which sponsored the event. By the time she left in August 2004, she had raised more than $70 million for an academy to train reform-minded principals. Nearly 200 city school principals are graduates, the majority in high-poverty schools.<br />One of the more interesting hurdles Kennedy faces would be in telling her story to voters, and to interviewers. Like her mother, she has carefully guarded her privacy.<br />Yet Kennedy spent about six weeks barnstorming battleground states for Barack Obama and took to it with gusto: An aide recalled her strolling into a Republican headquarters near Ocala, Florida, and peppering voters with questions at every turn.<br />But in brief interviews during the Democratic National Convention, and on "Meet the Press" after she had helped Obama vet his potential running mates, Kennedy easily deflected the few serious questions she was asked.<br />She deadpanned to Tom Brokaw that his own name had come up in the vetting. And she dryly told Wolf Blitzer, "I just want to be with the best political team on television as much as I possibly can."<br />As a candidate or senator, she would presumably have a tougher time dodging questions.<br />Away from the cameras, Kennedy immersed herself in the vice-presidential search, joining Eric Holder, who became Obama's choice for attorney general.<br />"Eric was the quiet one, and she was the one that, really, when I said something, asked, 'Who? Why? How come?"' said Representative Joe Baca, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who met with them to analyze the contenders. "She did most of the talking."<br />Kennedy also took it upon herself to write a lengthy memo for Obama, a senior campaign adviser said. "I think she sized up the field in a way that was thoughtful and sophisticated and right," he said. "And I think it weighed heavily with him."<br />True to form, Kennedy declined to be interviewed for this article.<br />Kennedy has said that it was her children who got her to give Obama a look last year.<br />Elaine Jones, a retired head of the NAACP fund, speculated that Kennedy's children - her two daughters are in college and her son is in high school - were also the reasons she had not entered public life sooner.<br />"A fishbowl can adversely affect a child," Jones said. "Her mother found a way to keep her children real. Caroline, I think, wanted that for her children. So I think, without knowing it, subconsciously, she was trying to get her kids to this point."</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">***************</p><p align="left"><strong>Nervy investors spur rush at Swiss gold refiners</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 17, 2008<br />By Arnd Wiegmann and Lisa Jucca<br />Sealed off by grey concrete walls and barbed wire, the workmen in protective glasses and steel-toed boots at this smelter cannot work fast enough to meet demand from the nervous rich for gold.<br />This refinery near Lake Lugano in the Alps is running day and night as people worried about recession rush to switch their assets into something that may hold its value.<br />"I have been in the gold business for 30 years and I have never experienced anything like this," said Bernhard Schnellmann, director for precious metal services at the refiner Argor-Heraeus, one of the world's three largest.<br />"Production has dramatically increased since the middle of the year. We cannot cope with demand," said Schnellman, wearing a gold watch on his wrist.<br />Spot gold hit a record $1,030.80 an ounce on March 17. It fell below $700 in late October, partly because investors sold their holdings to cover losses in equity and bond markets hit by the credit crisis, and is now around $830 an ounce.<br />The trigger for the price to rise again could come from a much weaker dollar, making gold cheaper for holders of other currencies, and a renewed aversion to paper assets as governments and central banks pump large amounts of cash into the economy, stoking inflation.<br />Smoke billows as the molten gold, like glowing butter, is poured. To cool it, the worker drops it into water. It hisses as it hits. Once hardened in moulds, the gold bars are embossed with the refinery's seal. Workers wearing white gloves stack them into boxes like domino pieces.<br />Though Switzerland is not a gold miner, it is home to some of the world's largest refineries, which process an estimated 40 percent of all newly mined gold.<br />Argor-Heraeus is part-owned by the Austrian Mint and a subsidiary of Germany's Commerzbank. Commercial and central banks are its chief customers and it says it processes some 350-400 tonnes of gold and 350 tonnes of silver per year.<br />Customers buying gold bars, which can weigh more than 10 kg each, have to wait roughly a month, taking into account the year-end holiday season.<br />For those buying coins or ingots, which can fit into the palm of a hand, the delay is six to eight weeks. A year ago, these small products could be had within a couple of days.<br />Worries about the banking system globally have boosted worldwide demand for physical gold, the Gold Council said.<br />"Many (people) are afraid of leaving their money in banks," said Sandra Conway, managing director at ATS Bullion in London, which sells bullion and gold coins to institutions and the retail market.<br />"It's difficult to quantify, but I would say our turnover over the last three months has certainly doubled compared to the previous three months," she said.<br />FULL CAPACITY<br />Other Swiss gold refiners also say business is booming.<br />"Since the summer we have experienced a sharp rise in demand for certain gold products. The one-kilo bar has become very popular," said Fiorenzo Arbini, in charge of health and safety at Pamp, another large Swiss refiner.<br />"People used to buy certificates, now they want physical gold."<br />Schnellmann said the Argor-Heraeus smelter is operating at full capacity, three eight-hour shifts a day. Conquering the backlog by hiring is difficult, because each candidate has to undergo a security check.<br />Gold refiners were established in Switzerland to supply the watch industry and, later, jewellery-makers in Italy.<br />Switzerland's largest banks stepped in to replace a void in gold trading while the London gold market was shut after World War Two and again during a brief closure in 1968.<br />The former Soviet Union, another top gold producer, chose Zurich banks to handle most of its gold sales in the 1970s and 1980s.<br />"Gold has an image of being the asset of last resort. This could be viewed as old-fashioned but this is how enough people with enough money to matter think," said Stephen Briggs, a metals strategist at RBS Global Banking & Markets.<br />GOLD TOUCH<br />India, China and the Middle East remain the biggest gold importers, particularly for jewellery. But demand for physical gold has exploded also in Europe, the Gold Council said.<br />In Switzerland, home to the world's largest private banking industry, demand for gold bars and coins shot up six-fold to 21 tonnes in the third quarter of 2008, more than in any other European country.<br />Retail investment in gold rose 121 percent in the third quarter of 2008, an important contributor to the overall increase in global demand, the Gold Council said.<br />In that period purchases of gold bars by retail investors, who often buy through commercial banks, rose nearly 60 percent, notably in Switzerland, Germany, and the United States.<br />There was a surge of interest among professional investors shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September.<br />Private bank Julius Baer in October launched a fund to invest exclusively in gold bars stored in highly secured vaults in Switzerland.<br />"The fascination with gold has been there since the beginning of civilisation," said Schnellmann. "It cannot be explained: you can't eat gold, you cannot build anything resistant with it and yet people want to hoard it."<br />(Additional reporting by Pratima Desai in London; Editing by Catherine Bosley and Sara Ledwith</p><p align="left">**************</p><p align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/16/business/hsbc.php">HSBC may need to raise billions, some analysts say</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/16/business/fiat.php">Fiat plant closures may be signal to Rome</a> </p><p align="left">**************</p><p align="left"><strong>The mysteries that linger over Lehman's bankruptcy</strong><br />By Andrew Ross Sorkin<br />Wednesday, December 17, 2008<br />NEW YORK: It's a $138 billion mystery. In the early hours of Sept. 15, after the U.S. government refused to rescue a foundering Lehman Brothers, something odd happened. The Federal Reserve lent tens of billions of dollars to a subsidiary of the newly bankrupt bank.<br />In other words, government officials who had refused to risk taxpayers' money on Lehman before it collapsed did just that after it collapsed.<br />In the ensuing days, the Fed's initial $55 billion loan ballooned to $138 billion. That is more than the government spent propping up American International Group.<br />This mystery loan is just one piece of the larger Lehman puzzle. Who lost Lehman? Why, and how? Three months later, those questions still nag - and new ones keep coming.<br />A series of court documents that detail the Fed's loan have dribbled out in recent weeks, but they raise more questions than they answer.<br />Lehman might seem like ancient history by now, some ghost of a crisis past. Lehman - that was before AIG, before the Big Three automakers, before Madoff Securities. But no one, least of all government officials, has fully explained why Lehman, one of the grand old names of Wall Street, was allowed to fail while so many others were rescued.<br />Many people, at least on Wall Street, have come to view the decision to let Lehman die as one of the biggest blunders in this whole financial crisis. Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, called the decision "a genuine error."<br />Judge James Peck, who approved the sale of Lehman's carcass to Barclays, the British bank, said it was a shame that Lehman had failed.<br />"Lehman Brothers became a victim," Peck said in bankruptcy court when he approved the sale. "In effect, the only true icon to fall in the tsunami that has befallen the credit markets. And it saddens me."<br />The authorities are investigating whether Lehman executives misled investors about the firm's financial condition before it failed. But the authorities might be asking similar questions about executives at other banks if, like Lehman, those institutions had been allowed to go under.<br />The recently disclosed documents detailing the Fed's loan to Lehman's subsidiary cast some light on a failed effort to prevent Lehman's implosion from cascading through the financial system.<br />The loan, according to these documents, was a "carefully thought-out decision" to stabilize the market by propping up Lehman's broker-dealer business, LBI New York, so it could stay afloat long enough to "facilitate an orderly wind-down" of tens of thousands of trades with the other Wall Street firms. The unit was kept out of the Lehman bankruptcy.<br />That might seem like a reasonable explanation. But Henry Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, have said they did not have legal authority to lend any money to Lehman. The firm, officials said, did not have enough collateral.<br />"We didn't have the powers," Paulson insisted. He also said Lehman's bad assets created "a huge hole" on its balance sheet, adding that he had actually tried to find a way for the government to provide money to help support a deal between Lehman and Barclays, but legally could not. His explanation has evolved over time, however. He said the day after Lehman went bankrupt: "I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers."<br />Whatever the case, the Fed's loan to the Lehman subsidiary makes all these explanations increasingly hard to square. Paulson said Lehman had lacked the collateral for the government to backstop a deal between Lehman and Barclays. But then the Fed turned around and lent a Lehman subsidiary billions, based on that same collateral.<br />People involved in the process said the Fed had lent the money only as part of the "orderly wind-down," which would have been different from lending money to an ongoing concern, or in this case, an insolvent one.<br />Fed officials are not talking much about the loan. Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the nominee for Treasury secretary, have kept quiet on the topic. A spokesman for the New York Fed, which orchestrated the loan, declined to comment.<br />The Fed's loans were made through JPMorgan Chase, which, as a clearing bank, acted as a conduit for the money. JPMorgan, if you recall, was the bank that bought Bear Stearns, with the government's help, as that company was collapsing in March.<br />If there's a silver lining in this mysterious cloud, it is that Lehman paid the Fed back. Taxpayers did not lose a dime. As part of Barclay's deal to buy Lehman out of bankruptcy, Barclays agreed to take over the Fed's lending role and "step into the shoes of the Fed." (The Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. ended up staying open late to make the transfer.)<br />Still, Barclays and JPMorgan had a brief fight over the collateral posted for the loan, according to court documents. They eventually reached an agreement, but the values of the collateral and the specifics of the deal are confidential, making it difficult to determine exactly what happened.<br />Maybe the Fed's belated loan to Lehman helped avoid an even deeper crisis. As Barney Frank, chairman of the Financial Services Committee of the House of Representatives, said Sunday on the CBS News program "60 Minutes": "The problem in politics is this: You don't get any credit for disaster averted, going to the voters and saying: 'Boy, things really suck. But you know what? If it wasn't for me, they would suck worse."'<br />But until officials explain what happened, it will remain a mystery.</p><p align="left">******************</p><p align="left"><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>James Carroll: Windows and doors<br /></strong>Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />'We're here and we're not going anywhere," said the protest leader last week, "until we get what's fair and what's ours." With that, 200 laid-off workers began the occupation of the Republic Windows & Doors factory on Chicago's North Side.<br />The company owners, perhaps in violation of federal labor laws, had abruptly closed the plant. They had no choice, they said, citing the credit crunch. The workers claimed they were owed severance and vacation pay, and they were not ending their sit-in until they got it.<br />It was a throw-back moment. How many times had aggrieved protesters taken action, mounting illegal occupations, despite threats to good order and risks of arrest? Very quickly, protests expanded to target the banks that had left Republic Windows & Doors high and dry. "You got bailed out," picketers chanted at Chicago offices of Bank of America, "we got sold out."<br />The anger of workers would grow through the week, especially when this local grievance was followed by the Senate failure to rescue auto companies, with unions scapegoated. Hundreds of billions to bail out bankers, nothing for workers? The larger context transformed the Republic Windows & Doors contest into a kind of parable - a window on something larger.<br />Another parable unfolded last week, across the Atlantic. Before becoming the foreign minister of France, Bernard Kouchner was the founder and head of Doctors Without Borders, one of the most admired human-rights organizations in the world. But Kouchner now shocked his old allies by abandoning the humanist dream of decency-joined-to- power when he declared,<br />"There is permanent contradiction between human rights and the foreign policy of a state, even in France." When an idealist accepts a role of political power, he inevitably joins the ranks of realism. "To lead a country," Kouchner explained, "obviously distances one from a certain Utopianism."<br />The words from France were like a warning to the ardent supporters of Barack Obama. Don't expect so much. Power compromises; power corrupts; power is not so powerful; etcetera. Yesterday's "change" is today's utopianism.<br />Meanwhile, however, Obama was displaying something else. Within a day of the occupation of the window factory in Chicago, the president-elect was asked about it at a news conference. One imagines the reporters' pencils poised to write down the predictable reply, something along the lines of, "Whatever the workers' grievance, no good purpose is served by unauthorized take-over ... violation of property rights ... law and order must be first ... etcetera." But that is not what Obama said. Instead, without hesitating, he declared, "The workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned - I think they're absolutely right. ..."<br />As if anticipating the failed rescue of automobile manufacturers, he added firmly, "... and understand that what's happening to them is reflective of what's happening across this economy."<br />Obama's unambiguous affirmation of the trespassers had an instant consequence. Now politicians and civic figures had cover, and a legion of them leapt to the defense of the laid-off workers.<br />In the past, American society has drawn a bright line between acceptable protests launched in the name of civil rights and unacceptable demands made in the name of economic rights, but Obama blurred that line with a simple statement: Workers have a right to what they have earned. That transparent truth trumped the usually controlling categories of legality, procedure and decorum.<br />Family members joined the workers in occupying the plant. Their determination was redoubled. After six days, the Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase restored the financing that the company needed to meet its obligations to the workers. A deal was made, and the occupation ended. The workers left the factory chanting, "Yes, we did."<br />And where does that leave utopianism? A few rescued workers are not the U.S. manufacturing base, which remains at risk. The constraints on Obama become clearer by the day, but so does what makes him different. His gut instinct is aligned with his supremely cool analysis. He is capable of choice and action. But among the various factors he is prepared to weigh in making policy, nothing ranks higher than simple fairness. That transparent truth defined the president-elect last week - a window and a door at once.</p><p align="left">***************</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left"><strong>How we got into this mess</strong><br />By Felix G. Rohatyn<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />New leadership is coming to the United States and it is none too soon.<br />When President Clinton sent me to France as his ambassador at the end of 1997, our economy was booming, the stock market was at an all-time high, our budgets were in surplus, the dollar was strong and our debt was shrinking.<br />Today, all that has been turned upside down. The United States, the richest nation in the world, has been nearly ruined. Our economy is not providing work for all Americans who need it; jobs continue to go abroad by the millions, and we are running huge deficits that grow exponentially day by day. The financial crisis in our markets has caused the credibility of our economic system to be challenged. Our currency has been devalued and we have taken on a staggering $10 trillion of debt.<br />What went wrong?<br />Barack Obama has already begun to improve our global standing and restore the admiration of America once held by millions of people around the world. But the economic problems he faces - at home and globally, for the two are inseparable - are daunting.<br />Looking back at how we got to where we are, I would say that two different phenomena transformed American economic behavior: the anti-tax, anti-government revolution of the '70s and '80s; and the culture of runaway greed.<br />The anti-tax revolution, conceived by conservative think tanks under the Reagan administration, and the steep tax reductions of the Kemp-Roth laws in the 1980s, created major deficits and provided rationale for a broad-based attack on domestic spending.<br />Active government became the enemy, deregulation became the economic religion and the market was left to deal with major problems and deficiencies in public services. Major weaknesses, such as our dependency on foreign oil and our loss of manufacturing competitiveness, went unattended.<br />Gradually, the stock market - and not real assets - became the bellwether of the U.S. economy. Paper wealth was the new standard and the concentration of wealth at the upper end of the income scale became astounding. As we entered the 1990s, the financial profile of America was dramatically changed.<br />These were the years of the stock market bubble, and they were followed by its collapse and the financial scandals that followed: Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and many others. They all had the same characteristics: Hundreds of thousands of employees lost jobs and savings, stockholders lost their capital, senior executives made fortunes and many of those charged with protecting the interests of investors and employees failed to do so.<br />Speculation, encouraged by the financial media, gradually replaced investment, with disastrous results. Coupled with the events of 9/11, a serious economic downturn brought into question the role of key components of our system, both legal and financial.<br />But while warnings were sounded, our economic policy continued to veer away from principles that had been followed by American presidents throughout the last half of the 20th century. Despite political pressures from the anti-tax campaigners and the political rhetoric of small government, all recent administrations - Democrat and Republican - had maintained a balance between the role of the government and that of the private sector. While the private sector remained dominant, a large role in economy policy-making was reserved for the government.<br />This concept was not supported by the Bush administration. Rather, the financial mores of the 1980s prevailed; greed overcame fairness and the creation of wealth became a fever that knew no limits.<br />It started with the compensation structure of corporate chief executives, it was driven by the stock market, and it persevered despite the disclosure of scandals and the economic hardship that millions had suffered when the market bubble burst.<br />In a book written some years ago, Kevin Phillips reported that in 1981 the average compensation of the top 10 American chief executives was about $4 million. By 2000 their pay was 50 times greater, averaging $200 million. Meanwhile, the average worker's pay increased by slightly more than the inflation rate; credit card debts piled up and people were sold mortgages they could not pay. Those trends could not be sustained.<br />For a year now, America has been in a recession that continues to deepen. In November, employers cut more than half a million workers, the largest monthly loss of jobs in 34 years. The government has had to rescue our largest banks, insurers and mortgage companies by providing unprecedented financing with necessary haste but apparently without strict controls or certainty as to outcomes.<br />As I write, the government is preparing to loan tens of billions of dollars to the auto industry - as it should do, but with careful oversight and regulation. It also seems likely that the Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson Jr., will use the remaining $350 billion of the financial industry bailout fund. Hopefully, a significant part of that money will be used to help struggling families stay in their homes.<br />The bright spot in this mess is that our leaders seem to be rethinking many of the economic and social assumptions that got us where we are - especially the notion that only a minor role is appropriate for the government in our economy.<br />There are other encouraging signs. Barack Obama's first act will probably be to sign a stimulus bill that includes major investment in public infrastructure. This is a long overdue investment that will create new jobs and make America more competitive. A stimulus package that finances "ready-to-go" projects is important, but in due course the new administration and Congress also should consider the possibility of setting up a special financing entity, such as a development bank, to deal with large infrastructure projects that are regional and national in scale.<br />Encouragingly, Obama also seems intent upon reducing our dependence on foreign energy and curtailing the economic and security risks that come with it. We must make government an active partner with business to shrink this dependence by penalizing excessive energy use and investing in energy-saving technologies.<br />Our dependence on foreign capital, as well as the huge budget deficits we are incurring, also must be reduced through greater fiscal discipline at home.<br />Finally, tax reform must provide a more equitable balance between the contribution of wealthy Americans and those of more limited means.<br />I am a capitalist and I believe that market capitalism is the best economic system ever invented. But it must be fair, it must be regulated and it must be ethical. Hopefully, we are ending an era when finance capitalism and modern technology were abused in the service of naked greed. I believe that only capitalists can kill capitalism and, sadly, in recent times they have come awfully close to doing so.<br />We're not out of the woods by any means. But with a leadership that knows we cannot stand more of the abuses of recent years or of the financial and social polarization that was their hallmark, our country will right itself.<br />Calvin Coolidge once said, "The business of this country is business." Today, that is truer than ever. It imposes on business and on our political leadership the responsibility of remembering that the basis of our democracy is fairness.<br />Felix G. Rohatyn, an investment banker and former ambassador to France, played a key role in preventing the bankruptcy of New York City in the 1970s.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">****************</p><p align="left"><strong>OPINION</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>The bear's market<br /></strong>By Viktor Erofeyev<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />My wife and I will soon stop visiting our Moscow friends. It's too frightening. We can't even eat. They all talk about the financial crisis. A real epidemic of verbal panic has broken out.<br />Who spent us into this crisis? That's the secret question among Russia's rulers. They don't believe in chance, or predictability, or conscience. They do believe in plots. Against Russia. The Orange Revolution was a plot, and the Rose Revolution. And behind them stands America.<br />And for our Holy Russia, the financial crisis is a mortal threat, similar to AIDS. Why? Because it is developing against the backdrop of another crisis - a crisis of confidence in the state.<br />The state in recent years has become, as in Soviet times, impenetrable. The actions of the powers on high are unpredictable; they change or violate the rules of the game, and the only logic that can be surmised is that they do things to strengthen the state - or at least they think they do.<br />This creates suspicion. The Kremlin says there is no financial crisis in Russia, and the population is supposed to accept this. The Kremlin partly believes itself because historical reality in Russia is usually constructed through words, not actions. To bolster its words, the Kremlin needs a foreign source for the crisis: Americans are to blame!<br />If words fail to cause the crisis to disappear, then it must be blown up to universal proportions to scare the population so the country can be turned into a military camp - again, for the good of the state. In this way, the issue is not the crisis but how to use it for the good of the state.<br />The target of these efforts - Russians - comes in three categories:<br />First are those who understand what the financial crisis is all about. These are the entrepreneurs, bankers, businessmen and oligarchs. They don't trust the state; they know the state will sacrifice them the moment it needs to. Private business will do everything to defend its interests, making deals with the state only for tactical reasons. Its primary response is to send its capital abroad. For that matter, the state itself, in the face of its hugely wealthy elite, is doing the same thing.<br />Therein lies the weakness of the "vertical of power" that our liberals are always going on about: When petrodollars are plentiful and the stabilization fund is a treasure chest, the state talks from a position of strength. When finances are sick, the state loses its voice.<br />The state, of course, explains our financial AIDS by yet another national affliction: corruption. But while officials express holy horror as the money they throw at the crisis disappears into a black hole, the fact is that the state itself is the father of corruption, because corruption is the sum total of its political and economic mistakes.<br />The population is also ambivalent about corruption. On the one hand, it sucks up the people's money; on the other, it's the only way to get anything done, a sort of black market of services. In a financial crisis, as in war, the role of corruption loses all limits.<br />The other two categories are larger than the business community. The second is the people who live in fear for their standard of living. Recently, preparing for a trip abroad, I stopped at a state bank to exchange rubles for euros. Some people overheard what I was doing and rushed over to ask me, Why are you changing money? Should we do the same?<br />This category includes the middle class and salaried workers - people scorned in Soviet times as petit bourgeois. They also distrust the state. They may not have regarded the state as their enemy up to now, but they do not trust in its competence or in its motives. They know there's a crisis - indeed, it's hard not to. Factories are closing or reducing their workforce. Ads are vanishing from television and magazines. The ruble, popularly known as "wood," is falling every day. And all the while global oil prices - on which Putin's myth of prosperity and stability was based - are falling.<br />The average Russian has a genetically negative memory. He knows that if you don't steal, you won't earn, and that if you earn, it will be taken away. He knows that one war ended yesterday and a new one starts tomorrow. He is neither liberal nor conservative; he has a philosophy all his own, a philosophy of the apocalypse. When he smells smoke, he jettisons all patriotic responsibilities. These are the breeding ground for future revolution - which, of course, will not spare these people, but will rob them once again.<br />The panic of this category is no less threatening to the state than the discontent of the business elites.<br />The state, however, does have a vast and irresponsible ally. This is the third category, the people who simply don't care. They have nothing to lose because they own close to nothing. They're not aware of the crisis because they live in a perpetual crisis, which they treat with vodka and indifference.<br />This is the ancient category known to this day as the "narod" - "the people." The narod believes in plots no less than its rulers do, and state television can convince it of just about anything. In essence, the narod is Holy Russia, unshakable in its eternal righteousness and holy patience, and also in its animosity to outsiders (including Europeans) and the rich.<br />The narod can be convinced that the crisis afflicts only the rich, and this is enough to fill them with malicious satisfaction. Obviously, the narod must be under the constant care of the state and the church, lest it degrade into a wild herd susceptible to the ideas of communism, fascism or anarchism.<br />But the narod, however venerable, is losing its standing. People who have emerged from the narod are no strangers to modernization and have grown in strength.<br />So the state cannot escape the fact of mutual distrust: It does not believe its people, and people don't believe the state. This is not easily changed in time of crisis; in the long run, it can lead to regime change or ruin.<br />More likely, since the state controls the political field in Russia and the opposition is in disarray, such a lethal outcome will be postponed, and the financial AIDS will lead only to a further impoverishment of the population and a harsher control by the state.<br />Viktor Erofeyev is a Russian writer and television host. Translated from the Russian by the IHT.</p><p align="left">***************</p><p align="left"><strong>Greek PM vows to fight corruption after 11-day protest</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />By Dina Kyriakidou and Daniel Flynn<br />Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis pledged on Tuesday to tackle corruption after 11 days of violence triggered by the police killing of a teenager and fuelled by public anger at scandals and a slowing economy.<br />About 100 youths attacked a police station in Athens, setting fire to a bus and four cars belonging to officers. Students briefly occupied state TV, interrupting the news, and violence flared in the northern city of Thessaloniki.<br />Also, for a second day farmers protesting at low prices cut off the main highway to northern Greece for several hours.<br />Karamanlis said helping Greeks -- a fifth of whom live in poverty -- was a priority but his options were restricted by the country's onerous debt, made worse by the riots that quickly spread across Greece and to some other European countries.<br />Greece's worst violence in decades was sparked by the December 6 shooting of a 15-year-old but fed off anger at high youth unemployment and unpopular economic measures as the global crisis buffets its 240-billion-euro (214.3 billion pound) economy.<br />"Long unresolved problems disappoint young people: the lack of meritocracy, corruption in everyday life, a sense of social injustice," Karamanlis told his parliamentary team. "The fight against them is hard and constant and we are committed to it."<br />Karamanlis, under fire for his hands-off reaction to the riots, said he underestimated the public backlash and the scale of a monastery land scandal besetting his government for months.<br />A parliamentary enquiry failed on Monday to seek any prosecutions for the deal, where a Mount Athos monastery got valuable state property in exchange for cheap rural land, costing the state millions of euros.<br />With more protests planned as the budget goes to parliament this week, Karamanlis said income-tax cuts will go ahead. But he warned against high expectations, saying Greece will spend 12 billion euros, about 5 percent of GDP, just to service its debt.<br />"Our top priority is to support those hurt the most ... (but) this debt is a huge burden that reduces the government's flexibility at a critical time," he said.<br />RESHUFFLE POSSIBLE<br />The opposition socialists, however, said Karamanlis and his party did not understand the severity of the economic situation.<br />"It is obvious they don't understand they've lost the trust of the people and, in these cases, the solution is always given by the people," said PASOK spokesman George Papaconstantinou.<br />Political analysts said the riots raised the prospect of snap elections and Karamanlis was likely to sacrifice some ministers to inject new blood into his conservative government.<br />"Today the prime minister accepted partial political responsibility," said Theodoros Livanios, director of research at pollster Opinion. "Karamanlis will soon announce a reshuffle of his government and will wait to see the success of this."<br />The spread between Greek debt and German benchmark bonds -- a measure of perceived risk -- reached its widest point in nearly a decade, at more than 2 percent. Analysts said the riots had compounded concerns over to the global economic downturn.<br />Shops and cars were smashed and looted in Athens and other cities for days. The National Confederation of Commerce estimates 565 shops were damaged in Athens alone, costing 200 million euros and ruining the Christmas shopping period.<br />About 20 student protesters occupied state television on Tuesday, interrupting the broadcast of the afternoon news for around 20 seconds and holding a banner reading: "Against State Violence." A state TV executive apologised to viewers and said the students threatened employees unless they were put on air.<br />Scores of schools and university buildings remain occupied by students in protest at the killing. The policeman who shot Alexandros Grigoropoulos was charged with murder and jailed pending trial, while his partner was charged as an accomplice.<br />Karamanlis' New Democracy party swept to power in 2004, vowing to clean up politics, but was soon hit by scandals. Weekend polls showed strong disapproval of the its handling of the riots, strengthening PASOK's ratings lead.<br />(Additional reporting by George Georgiopoulos and Tatiana Fragou, Writing by Daniel Flynn, Editing by Michael Roddy) </p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">************************************************************************************</p><p align="left"><strong>Naval patrols fail to deter pirates</strong><br />By Jeffrey Gettleman<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />ON THE ARABIAN SEA: Rear Admiral Giovanni Gumiero is going on a pirate hunt.<br />From the deck of an Italian destroyer cruising the pirate-infested waters off Somalia's coast, he has all the modern tools at his fingertips - radar, sonar, infrared cameras, helicopters, a cannon that can sink a ship 10 miles, or 16 kilometers, away - to take on a centuries-old problem that harks back to the days of schooners and eye patches.<br />"Our presence will deter them," the admiral said confidently.<br />But the wily buccaneers of Somalia's seas do not seem especially deterred - instead, they seem to be getting only wilier. More than a dozen warships, from Italy, Greece, Turkey, India, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, France, Russia, Britain, Malaysia and the United States, have joined the hunt.<br />And yet, in just the past two months, the pirates have attacked more than 30 vessels, eluding the naval patrols, going farther out to sea and seeking bigger, more lucrative game, including an American cruise ship and a 1,000-foot, or 305-meter, Saudi oil tanker.<br />The pirates are recalibrating their tactics, attacking ships in beelike swarms of 20 to 30 skiffs, and threatening to choke off one of the busiest shipping arteries in the world, at the mouth of the Red Sea.<br />UN officials recently estimated that Somali pirates had netted as much as $120 million this year in ransom payments - an astronomical sum for a country whose economy has been gutted by 17 years of chaos and war. Some shipping companies are now rerouting their vessels to avoid Somalia's waters, detouring thousands of miles around the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa.<br />The pirates are totally outgunned. They continue to cruise around in fiberglass skiffs with assault rifles and at best a few rocket-propelled grenades. One Italian officer said that going after them in a 485-foot-long destroyer, bristling with surface-to-air missiles and torpedoes, was like "going after someone on a bicycle with a truck."<br />But the pirates - true to form - remain unfazed.<br />"They can't stop us," said Jama Ali, one of the pirates aboard a Ukrainian freighter packed with weapons that was hijacked in September and is still being held.<br />He explained how he and his men hid out on a rock near the narrow mouth of the Red Sea and waited for the big gray warships to pass before pouncing on slow-moving tankers. Even if foreign navies nabbed some members of his crew, Jama said, he was not worried. He said his men would probably get no more punishment than a free ride back to the beach, which has happened several times.<br />"We know international law," Jama said.<br />Western diplomats have said that maritime law can be as murky as the seas. Several times this year, the Danish Navy captured men they suspected to be pirates, only to dump them on shore after the Danish government decided it did not have jurisdiction.<br />The American warships surrounding the hijacked Ukrainian freighter have intercepted several small skiffs going to the freighter, but let the men aboard go because U.S. officials said they did not want to put the freighter's crew in danger.<br />This seeming impunity is especially infuriating to the new cadre of private security guards, fresh from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, hired to tag along on merchant voyages as an added layer of protection. Burly men with tattooed forearms and shaved heads sipping Heineken and checking their watches are now common sights on the beaches of Oman, Kenya and Djibouti. They have their own ideas for dealing with seafaring outlaws.<br />"We should make 'em walk the plank," one British security guard said.<br />Despite tough talk, the guards are unarmed (because most countries do not allow them to bring weapons into port), so they are often forced to confront machine-gun-toting pirates with fire hoses.<br />Or worse. There was even a recent case, according to several security contractors, in which Filipino crew members pelted pirates with tomatoes in an attempt to stop them from scaling the hull of their ship. It did not work.<br />The Italian naval officers say the piracy patrols are helping: Already the Italians have rescued several merchant vessels surrounded by pirate skiffs. The Italian destroyer is part of a NATO mission that began in October.<br />"But the answer is to have a good, strong government on land," Gumiero said. "That's the only way to end this, for sure."<br />Yet strong government is nowhere to be found. The piracy epidemic is not so much a separate problem as a symptom of the failed state of Somalia - a place crawling with guns, gangs and criminals that has not had a functioning central government since 1991.<br />Many Somalia analysts think that it is about to get even worse. The Ethiopian military, which has been shoring up a weak and unpopular transitional Somali government, says it will pull out within a month.<br />The transitional government, split by poisonous infighting, seems on the brink of collapse. Islamic militants with links to Al Qaeda are poised to take over. Famine is steadily creeping toward millions of people, many withering away in plastic huts that are no match for the intense sun or the drenching rains.<br />UN officials are swinging into crisis mode, calling high-level meetings in East Africa and New York to address piracy and the greater Somali mess. Some UN officials are pushing to send in peacekeepers, but no countries are rushing to offer troops.<br />Some U.S. officials have proposed chasing the pirates on the shore and raiding their dens, which are well known but so far untouched. Somalia's transitional leaders, eager for any help, said they would welcome that.<br />"This is a cancer, and it's growing," said Abdi Awaleh Jama, an ambassador at large for the transitional federal government. "We have to extract it once and for all."<br />More than 100 ships have been attacked off Somalia's coast in 2008, far more than in any previous year on record. The economic costs are piling up, with higher insurance payments for shippers, higher fuel costs because of detours and new private security bills, not to mention the million-dollar ransom payments.<br />The cash-starved Egyptian government is poised to lose billions of dollars if ships from the Middle East and Asia stop using the Suez Canal, one of Egypt's biggest foreign-exchange earners, and go around Africa instead.<br />But the end of piracy could be an economic catastrophe for many Somalis. Their country exports almost nothing these days, and more legitimate forms of business have largely died off.<br />Entire clans and coastal villages now survive off piracy, with women baking bread for pirates, men and boys guarding hostages, and others serving as scouts, gunmen, mechanics, accountants and skiff builders. Traders make a nice cut off the water, fuel and cigarettes needed to sustain such oceangoing voyages.<br />Maritime experts say that the naval efforts will take time.<br />"Let's wait and see," said Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau in London. "You must appreciate it's a very large stretch of water, a massive area," he said, referring to the several hundred thousand square miles of sea where the naval ships are patrolling.<br />Then there is the nettlesome question of what to do with the pirates. Italian officers on pirate patrol seemed uncomfortable at the thought of actually capturing a real live pirate. There is not even a brig or place to hold the pirates on the destroyer.<br />"Our main goal is providing safe passage," said Fabrizio Simoncini, the destroyer's captain.<br />So far, they have done a decent job at that, escorting at least eight humanitarian ships with 30,000 tons of badly needed aid for Somalia.<br />The Indian Navy recently announced that it had arrested 23 pirates, though it is not clear where the suspects would be prosecuted. At an anti-piracy conference in Nairobi last week, British officials outlined a plan for their navy to capture Somali pirates and hand them over to Kenyan courts.<br />But according to Kenneth Randall, dean of the University of Alabama School of Law and an international law scholar, "Any country can arrest these guys and prosecute them at home, under domestic laws that apply."<br />"I'm actually surprised people think it's unclear," he said. "The law on piracy is 100 percent clear."<br />He said that international customary law going back hundreds of years had defined pirates as criminals who robbed and stole on the high seas. Because the crimes were committed in international waters, he said, all countries had not only the authority but also the obligation to apprehend and prosecute them.<br />Mohammed Ibrahim contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.</p><p align="left">*****************</p><p align="left"><strong>U.N. council allows Somali anti-piracy fight on land</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />By Patrick Worsnip<br />The U.N. Security Council on Tuesday authorized countries fighting piracy off the Somali coast to take action also on Somalia's territory and in its airspace, subject to consent by the country's government.<br />The United States said for the first time that the United Nations should deploy a peacekeeping force to war-torn Somalia and that Washington would push for a Security Council resolution by the end of the year to authorise one.<br />A surge in piracy in one of the world's busiest shipping lanes has pushed up insurance costs, brought pirates in the Horn of Africa country tens of millions of dollars in ransom and prompted foreign navies to rush to the area to protect merchant shipping.<br />But analysts say the international action has done little to deter the pirates, partly because the forces chasing them have not had the authority to take the battle onto land, where the pirates are based.<br />Tuesday's U.S.-drafted resolution, passed unanimously by the 15-nation council, extends that authority to countries that Somalia's interim government has told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are cooperating with it to combat piracy.<br />States "may undertake all necessary measures in Somalia, including in its airspace, for the purpose of interdicting those who are using Somali territory to plan, facilitate or undertake acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea," it says.<br />The Security Council session was attended by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who were at the world body for talks on a range of world issues.<br />Although the role of the Somali government was repeatedly stressed in the resolution, that government is weak and divided. The country has been in virtual anarchy since the collapse of a dictatorship 17 years ago. Islamists control most of the south and feuding clan militias hold sway elsewhere.<br />It was also not clear what kind of forces would engage in land or air operations against the pirates or whether the U.S. military would participate.<br />CONTACT GROUP<br />The resolution called on states to "take part actively" in the fight against piracy off Somalia.<br />It urged them to make agreements with countries willing to take custody of captured pirates to take law enforcement officials from those countries onboard their naval vessels to aid the investigation and prosecution of those detained.<br />On the day the resolution was passed, pirates hijacked an Indonesian tugboat used by French oil company Total off Yemen and a Turkish cargo ship was also reported captured. Around a dozen ships and nearly 300 hostages are being held in Somalia.<br />Rice told the council Washington would set up a contact group to promote anti-piracy efforts, including through sharing intelligence.<br />But, like other speakers, she said the piracy crisis was inseparable from the turmoil in Somalia. The United States "does believe that the time has come for the United Nations to consider and authorise a peacekeeping operation," she said.<br />"We believe that by the end of the year we should try and have such a Security Council resolution," Rice told reporters later. African countries favour such a force and South African envoy Dumisani Kumalo said, "It's what we've always wanted."<br />But U.N. officials fear a blue-helmet force would fail unless the situation in Somalia calms down.<br />Ban has proposed a multinational force with a wide mandate to pacify Somalia ahead of a U.N. peacekeeping force, but acknowledged that of 50 countries and three international organizations he had approached none had offered to lead one.<br />He told the council on Tuesday plans announced by Ethiopia to withdraw by the year's end its forces supporting the Somali government "could easily lead to chaos."<br />He suggested bolstering a so-far ineffectual African Union force in Somalia, helping the Somalis themselves to restore security and looking at setting up an international maritime task force to launch operations into Somalia.<br />(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">******************</p><p align="left"><strong>Man who threw shoes at Bush appears before judge in Baghdad</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: The Iraqi television reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush at a news conference appeared before a judge Tuesday and admitted "aggression against a president," a judicial spokesman said.<br />The television reporter, Muntader al-Zaidi, became an instant sensation when he called Bush a "dog" at a news conference with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on Sunday and tried to hit him with both of his shoes.<br />"Zaidi was brought today before the investigating judge in the presence of a defense lawyer and a prosecutor," said Abdul Satar Birqadr, a spokesman for Iraq's High Judicial Council. "He admits the action he carried out."<br />The court decided to keep Zaidi in custody. After the judge has completed his investigation the court may send him for trial under a clause in the Iraqi penal code that makes it an offense to attempt to murder Iraqi or foreign presidents. The sentence for such a crime could be up to 15 years in prison, Birqadr said.<br />Dheyaa Saadi, head of the Union of Lawyers in Iraq and one of its most high-profile attorneys, said that he had volunteered to defend Zaidi.<br />"I will introduce myself as his lawyer and demand the case be closed and Muntader be released because he did not commit a crime," said Saadi.<br />At a news conference with Bush and Maliki on Sunday evening in Baghdad's Green Zone, Zaidi, a reporter for Al Baghdadia, a satellite television network, rose from his seat and threw one of his shoes at Bush's head. He shouted: "This is a gift from the Iraqis. This is the farewell kiss, you dog!"<br />Bush ducked and the shoe missed him. Zaidi then threw his other shoe, shouting, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!" The shoe hit the wall behind Bush.<br />According to The Associated Press, Al Baghdadia reported that Zaidi had been "seriously injured" during his detention and called on the government to allow lawyers and the Iraqi Red Crescent to visit him. Later, however, one of his brothers said that he had spoken by telephone with Zaidi, who told him, "Thank God, I am in good health," The AP reported</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">****************</p><p align="left"><strong>U.S. plot suspects had no intent to kill say lawyers<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 17, 2008<br />By Jon Hurdle<br />Five Muslim men accused of planning an attack on a U.S. army base had no intention of following through even though they shared Muslim anger towards America after September 11, defence attorneys said on Tuesday.<br />The men, all born outside the United States, plotted but did not execute an attack on Fort Dix in New Jersey and discussed attacks on other installations including Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and the U.S. Coast Guard in Philadelphia, prosecutors say.<br />They were arrested in May 2007 and face life in prison if convicted.<br />In closing arguments after a seven-week trial in federal court, attorneys said two FBI informants who infiltrated the group tried to manipulate the defendants into planning the attack and buying guns.<br />One of the FBI's cooperating witnesses, Besnick Bakalli, told defendant Dritan Duka, that he wanted to "kill someone" but Duka rejected the provocation, Duka's attorney Michael Huff told jurors.<br />"We are good the way we are. We are not going to kill anything," Duka said in a conversation recorded by Bakalli.<br />But Assistant U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick, in his closing rebuttal, held up an M-16 and an AK-47 that the men are accused of buying and said: "They cannot credibly argue that these weapons are anything other than weapons of war."<br />The defendants are Mohamad Shnewer, a Jordanian-born taxi driver from Philadelphia, ethnic Albanian Duka and his brothers Shain Duka and Eljvir Duka, who ran a roofing business in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Serdar Tatar, a convenience store clerk born in Turkey.<br />With the exception of Dritan Duka, 30, the defendants are in their 20s.<br />Huff said his client had no knowledge of the discussions about jihad between defendant Shnewer and Mahmoud Omar, the other cooperating FBI witness.<br />Dritan Duka was mostly concerned about being victimized because he was a Muslim in post-September 11 America, Huff said. That fear was fanned by Omar who told him "this country, look, they catch you for anything," the court heard.<br />Troy Archie, an attorney for Eljvir Duka, argued that the defendants were caught up in Muslim anger towards America in the wake of September 11, but had no plans to kill American soldiers.<br />"Were they angry? Yes. Were they blowing off steam? Yes. Did they have an intent to kill? Absolutely not," Archie said.<br />The jury will be sequestered when it begins deliberations on Wednesday morning.<br />(Editing by Michelle Nichols and Xavier Briand)</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">****************</p><p align="left"><strong>Three Guantánamo detainees sent to Bosnia<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />An attorney for three Guantánamo detainees said Tuesday that they have been sent to Bosnia and were expected to be released to their families.<br />The attorney, Stephen Oleskey, said it was "a very happy ending," and "we are absolutely thrilled."<br />An unscheduled flight has delivered the men to police in Bosnia, where they were rushed into armored cars and taken to police headquarters. Oleskey says the transfer to police was a formality.<br />The transfers were the first releases from the prison made by the Bush administration because of a court order. There have been years of legal challenges over the detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which accepted its first detainees seven years ago next month.<br />The Algerian-born men had obtained citizenship from Bosnia and Herzegovina by the time they were detained in 2001. At the time, the U.S. government said it had evidence that they and three other Bosnians also originally from Algeria had been planning a bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.<br />The transfer was a signal that the administration was acknowledging its defeat in the first habeas corpus case to reach a full factual hearing since the Supreme Court ruled in June that detainees at Guantánamo had a constitutional right to contest their detentions in federal court.<br />After hearing a week of secret evidence in the case of the six Bosnians, a federal district judge in Washington, Richard J. Leon, ruled last month that the evidence presented by the government had not been sufficient to prove that five of the men were enemy combatants.<br />Leon urged the administration to free the men, and not to appeal the ruling, saying that seven years was long enough for them to get a court decision. The ruling drew international attention, in part because it was the first full court test of the government's detention evidence and because Leon, considered a conservative, was an appointee of President George W. Bush.<br />"It's tragic that it took seven years and the ruination of their lives to accomplish this," Oleskey said this week.<br />But he said it appeared the administration was continuing to resist a full acknowledgment of its legal defeat by continuing to hold two of the men ordered released.<br />The three men released were Mohamed Nechle, Mustafa Ait Idir and Hadj Boudella, a defense official said earlier this week.<br />The detainee for whom the Supreme Court ruling was named, one of the six Algerians who had been living in Bosnia, Lakhdar Boumediene, was not to be among the three released, evidently because he had been stripped of his Bosnian citizenship at the time of his detention because of questions about how he obtained it.<br />The Supreme Court ruling opened the door for more than 200 habeas corpus claims by other detainees, which are pending in federal court in Washington.<br />The case against the six men offered the latest example of the administration's pattern of changing strategy in its legal defense of the detention camp. On the eve of the hearing before Leon, the Justice Department said it was abandoning its claims about the embassy bombing plot. Instead, it claimed in court that the men had been planning to go to Afghanistan to fight Americans.<br />The Justice Department has not said whether it plans to appeal Leon's ruling. The transfer, which was expected to be completed Monday night, was the first indication that the government had concluded it could no longer fight to keep the men detained.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">****************</p><p align="left"><strong>Security flaw found in Microsoft browser<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />SAN FRANCISCO: Users of all versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser might be vulnerable to having their computers hijacked because of a serious security hole in the software that had yet to be fixed Tuesday.<br />The flaw lets hackers commandeer victims' machines merely by tricking them into visiting Web sites tainted with malicious programming code. As many as 10,000 sites have been compromised since last week to exploit the browser flaw, according to Trend Micro, a maker of antivirus software.<br />The sites are mostly Chinese and have been serving up programs that steal passwords for computer games, which can be sold on the black market.<br />But the hole could be "adopted by more financially motivated criminals for more serious mayhem - that's a big fear right now," Paul Ferguson, a security researcher for Trend Micro, said.<br />Internet Explorer is the default browser for most of the world's computers. Microsoft said that it was investigating the flaw and that it might issue an emergency software patch outside of its normal monthly updates, but declined to comment further.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">****************</p><p align="left"><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>A policy for preventing genocide</strong><br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />Darfur, Congo, Rwanda and, before that, Bosnia. It is hard to contemplate man's capacity for inhumanity without feeling despair. The world usually pays attention only after the killing has spun out of control, when ethnic, religious and political divides are rubbed so raw that the furies are infinitely harder to calm. By that point, the United States and others are faced with the agonizing choice of either intervening militarily or allowing the killing to go on.<br />A report by a task force headed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Defense Secretary William Cohen offers some hope, arguing that it is possible to prevent genocide before it spins out of control. It offers practical policy suggestions - what Albright calls a "mechanism for looking at genocide in a systematic way" - for the next administration.<br />The report says that early warning and prevention are key and calls on the White House to create a senior-level interagency committee directed by the National Security Council to analyze threats of genocide and mass atrocities around the world and consider appropriate preventive action.<br />When initial signs of mass atrocities are detected, the task force would also require the intelligence community to do a full policy review and prepare a crisis response plan. The goal is to engage leaders, institutions and civil society in affected communities urgently, and at an early stage when talk and other help may defuse the situation.<br />The task force urges the U.S. to spend an additional $250 million annually on crisis prevention and response efforts, with a portion going to help international partners, including the UN and regional organizations, build their capacity.<br />It is hard to generate political will to fix a problem before it has crested. But if there is any doubt about the need for a new policy and structure, consider the Bush administration's desperate failure in Darfur.<br />Four years after President Bush declared the mass killings there genocide, the horrors continue. As many as 300,000 people have been killed and 2.7 million driven from their homes. With the region increasingly engulfed in interrebel warfare, a political settlement appears to be further out of reach.<br />We hope President-elect Barack Obama and top aides will consider the report's recommendations before they, too, find themselves grappling with such agonizing choices.</p><p align="left">************</p><p align="left"><strong>Rwanda denies U.N. panel charge it aids Congo rebels</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />By Louis Charbonneau<br />The Rwandan government has rejected a report by a U.N. panel of experts that accuses Kigali of supporting Tutsi rebels in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, describing it as inaccurate and biased.<br />The government's rebuttal was contained in a seven-page document, obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, that attacked the main points in a report from the U.N. Group of Experts, which recommended expanding a list of individuals and firms facing U.N. sanctions for supporting rebels in Congo.<br />The report, which the U.N. Security Council is scheduled to discuss later this week, accuses Rwanda of supporting rebels loyal to renegade Congolese Tutsi Gen. Laurent Nkunda and the Congolese army of backing Rwandan Hutu rebels, some of whom are accused of participating in Rwanda's 1994 genocide.<br />"This report is a calculated move to shift blame away from the government of DRC (Congo) and the international community -- both of whom have failed to resolve the conflict in the eastern DRC despite numerous bilateral, regional and international initiatives in the last 14 years," Rwanda said.<br />The experts' report "contains dangerous inaccuracies and ill-intended information regarding the alleged support of the government of Rwanda to the CNDP," it said, referring to the rebel group led by Nkunda.<br />It also accused the experts of "downplaying the despicable genocidal ideology" of the Rwandan Hutu rebels in Congo.<br />The Rwandan rebuttal rejected the notion that the government has supported Nkunda and his rebels. Kigali had implemented "stringent measures to prohibit any form of support to CNDP from the Rwandan territory," it said, adding that some 67 of Nkunda's recruits are presently detained in Rwanda.<br />It also rejected the suggestion that Rwanda had been helping Nkunda's rebels recruit child soldiers and that Rwandan soldiers had been active in Nkunda's ranks. It said Kigali "was not aware" of any Rwandan bank accounts CNDP rebels might own.<br />Accusations that the Rwandan army had provided military uniforms, military hardware and support to Nkunda's rebels were unfounded, the statement said. It acknowledged, however, that Kigali had informed the panel it had arrested someone attempting to ship Rwandan uniforms to the rebels.<br />The Rwandan statement did not touch on one of the most damning charges in the U.N. report -- that among those accused of providing support to rebels loyal to Nkunda is Tribert Rujugiro, an adviser to Rwandan President Paul Kagame.<br />More than 250,000 civilians have fled fighting in eastern Congo between Nkunda's insurgents, Congo's army, local militia and Rwandan Hutu rebels since clashes broke out in August.<br />(Editing by Eric Walsh)</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">**************</p><p align="left"><strong>India-Pakistan talks seen stalled after attacks<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />By Sheikh Mushtaq<br />Tentative peace talks between India and Pakistan have stalled after the Mumbai attacks, India said Tuesday, and can only resume if Islamabad takes more decisive action against militant groups on its soil.<br />The talks, known as the composite dialogue, began in 2004 after the nuclear-armed neighbours almost came to the brink of war two years earlier over an attack on the Indian parliament blamed on Pakistan-based militant groups.<br />Those talks were thrown into jeopardy last month by the Mumbai attacks, which killed at least 179 people and which India has blamed on Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.<br />"There is a pause in the composite dialogue process because of the attack on Mumbai," Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee told reporters in the disputed region of Kashmir.<br />The peace process has brought better diplomatic, trade and sporting ties but little progress has been made on major disputes such as the divided Jammu and Kashmir region.<br />A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Islamabad said Pakistan was committed to the peace process while resigned to a pause in it.<br />"It's in the larger interests of the whole region," said the spokesman, Mohammad Sadiq. "If Mr Mukherjee says there's a pause, then there's a pause."<br />India, the United States and Britain have blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba and other affiliated groups for the Mumbai attacks, saying Pakistan must do more to stamp out militants.<br />Lashkar was set up to fight Indian rule in Kashmir and has been linked by U.S. officials and analysts to Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence military spy agency, who they say use it as a tool to destabilise India.<br />Pakistan in turn has promised to cooperate in investigations and has denied any official links to the Mumbai attacks, but has also said anyone caught in Pakistan will be tried in Pakistan.<br />DOMESTIC PRESSURE<br />India and Pakistan have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947. Fearing another conflict, Western leaders have urged India to show restraint and Pakistan to act decisively against militants.<br />Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been under domestic pressure to respond robustly to the Mumbai attacks.<br />"We are not planning any military action," Defence Minister A.K. Anthony told reporters in New Delhi.<br />"But at the same time, unless Pakistan takes actions against those terrorists who are operating from their soil against India and also against all those who are behind the Mumbai terrorist attack, things will not be normal," he said.<br />Washington has intensified diplomatic pressure to keep India-Pakistan relations from worsening and to keep Pakistan committed to the U.S.-led war on terrorism.<br />Pakistan has arrested scores of activists from an Islamic charity India says is a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, and says it will abide by a U.N. decision to put the group's founder Hafiz Saeed on a sanctions list of people and organizations linked to al Qaeda.<br />But a similar Pakistani crackdown on Lashkar and Jaish-e-Mohammad after the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament was widely regarded as a sham.<br />Mukherjee said it would be difficult to resume the peace process with Pakistan unless Islamabad demonstrated a firm resolve to stamp out such groups.<br />"Words must be followed by actions," he said.<br />(Additional reporting by Robert Birsel in Islamabad; editing by Paul Tait and Andrew Roche)</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">***************</p><p align="left"><strong>British troop casualties surge in Afghanistan<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />By Jonathon Burch<br />More British than U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan in the past six weeks, despite America having four times more troops in the country.<br />The steadily rising death toll comes as violence in Afghanistan has reached its highest levels since 2001, with Afghan and foreign forces locked in daily battles with an increasingly deadly and resilient Taliban insurgency.<br />Some 4,000 people, a third of them civilians, were killed in the first half of this year alone.<br />Since the beginning of November, 12 British soldiers have died, compared to only three U.S. soldiers in the same period, according to U.S. and British military statements. Three British soldiers were killed in a single suicide bomb blast.<br />A spokesman for the NATO-led force in Afghanistan said increased engagements and the tactics used by insurgents, such as roadside bombs and suicide attacks, were to blame, but the rise in British casualties could be attributed to no one cause.<br />"Over the past few weeks the Brits have been engaging the enemy pretty hard. If you engage the enemy, you come into contact with them," said British Navy Captain Mark Windsor.<br />"We've been having a bad time. I don't think there's any specific reason for it, apart from the fact that it's tough down there," he said, referring to Helmand, a province in southern Afghanistan where the Taliban have a strong presence.<br />Since the Taliban were toppled in 2001, the U.S. military has suffered more casualties than all the other 40 foreign countries with troops in Afghanistan put together, but it also now has nearly half the 65,000 international soldiers there.<br />The number of British soldiers to have died since 2001 is 133 compared to 629 from the U.S. military. The U.S. has 31,000 U.S. troops based in Afghanistan while Britain has 8,300, making it the second highest force-contributing nation.<br />The latest British soldier to die was hit by insurgent gunfire on Monday at a base in Helmand. Forty-seven British soldiers have died this year, more than a third of total British fatalities since 2001.<br />NO PROTECTION<br />One criticism levelled at the British military is that it uses insufficiently up-armoured vehicles to protect its soldiers on patrol, making them vulnerable to roadside bombs.<br />Thirty-seven British soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan while travelling in lightly armoured "Snatch" Land Rovers, the most commonly used troop-carrying vehicle.<br />Despite that heavy death toll, the Ministry of Defence said on Tuesday it would go on using the vehicles, despite persistent concerns raised by troops about their safety, while gradually introducing a slightly better protected version of it.<br />A retired British officer said that if British troops wanted to stay close to the Afghan people, and win them over, they would always face risks from mines and suicide bombers. And he said better armoured vehicles wouldn't necessarily work.<br />"There is almost no protection against a serious amount of plastic explosive," Colonel Bob Stewart, former commander of U.N. forces in Bosnia, told Reuters.<br />"If there is a requirement for British soldiers to be out on the ground with the population, doing the hearts and minds stuff, which there is, then there is going to be a greater risk," he said.<br />The number of wounded British soldiers has also reached its highest levels, with 59 troops very seriously or seriously wounded in the first 11 months of this year, Britain's MoD said.<br />In 2007, 63 British soldiers were seriously wounded, and only four were killed during all of November and December.<br />While the cold winter months in Afghanistan usually see a drop in fighting, U.S. military commanders have said there will be no let up this winter in the battle with Taliban insurgents.<br />(Additional reporting by Luke Baker in London; Editing by Charles Dick)</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">**************</p><p align="left"><strong>Pakistan militants kill rival and bring fear to valley</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />By Junaid Khan<br />Pakistani Taliban have killed one of their chief opponents in a north-western valley -- once a tourism centre -- where they are trying to impose a reign of terror, residents and officials said on Tuesday.<br />Violence has surged in the Swat Valley, 120 km (80 miles) northwest of Islamabad, since August when government forces launched a fresh offensive to clear militants from what was until recently one of Pakistan's main tourist destinations.<br />But residents of the scenic mountain valley and a senior government politician said increasingly brazen militant attacks were raising fear the military was losing control.<br />The militants killed one of their biggest rivals in the valley on Sunday. Samiullah Khan was a pir, or spiritual leader, who had raised a militia to fight the Taliban.<br />"They were chasing him for some time and found him at home. An exchange of fire took place in which the militants killed Pir and seven of his followers," said Gul Noor, police chief in the valley's Matta town.<br />The militants also captured 24 of Khan's men.<br />In a grim show of defiance, the militants dug up Khan's body on Monday and strung it up in Matta's main square, residents said.<br />A spokesman for the Taliban in the valley, Muslim Khan, said a Taliban council would decide the fate of Khan's 24 supporters.<br />The army has also been battling militants in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border, to the west of Swat.<br />Pakistan says it is committed to uprooting terrorism and has rejected Indian accusations levelled after last month's attacks in Mumbai that it is not doing enough to stop the militants.<br />In the latest violence in Swat, militants attacked the home of Afzal Khan Lala, a leader of the Awami National Party (ANP) late on Monday night, police said.<br />"REIGN OF TERROR"<br />The ANP is a liberal, ethnic Pashtun-based party and since February elections, it has ruled in North West Frontier Province and is part of Pakistan's ruling coalition government.<br />Khan was not at home and even his servants had fled in fear of the militants, Noor said.<br />Valley residents and another ANP politician complained the army wasn't doing enough.<br />"We called the army for help but they did not come and left us to the mercy of Allah," said resident Khaista Gul, referring to the Sunday attack on Khan.<br />Haji Muhammad Adeel, an ANP vice president, said the police were all but powerless to tackle the well-armed militants.<br />"We don't know who's controlling the region but at least we're not. The militants are operating openly," Adeel said.<br />"Police don't have the capacity to fight an insurgency and all this is happening in the presence of a well-trained army. What's going on?"<br />A senior military official in Swat acknowledged the insurgency being waged from remote mountains had intensified, but he said the army had a strategy.<br />"We're fighting a guerrilla war. They operate in small groups. They're not in towns but do use population as a shield," said the officer, who declined to be identified.<br />"They are trying to create a reign of terror among the local population and we have to tackle it and we're on it."<br />Separately, insurgents attacked a security check post in the Mohmand region on the Afghan border on Tuesday and seven militants and one soldier were killed, paramilitary officials said.<br />(Additional reporting by Shams Mohmand; Writing by Kamran Haider; Editing by Robert Birsel and Jerry Norton)</p><p align="left">*************</p><p align="left"><strong>The city bolsters its effort to shelter homeless veterans<br /></strong>By Leslie Kaufman<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />On any given night, a virtual army of 150,000 veterans are homeless across the nation, including an estimated 1,200 in New York City.<br />Bracing for the return of thousands of soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the midst of a deep recession, city officials have taken some unprecedented steps to prevent a next wave of veterans from also sleeping on its streets.<br />During the past year, the city has spent $2.3 million to remodel a dingy veterans shelter in Long Island City, Queens, replacing a large room filled with cots with 243 military-style prefabricated living cubicles, and given $14.8 million to build two apartment buildings, where residents will have access to on-site counseling within a mile of the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx. It has also lobbied to transform empty annex buildings at a veterans medical center in suburban Montrose into 96 units of two-year transitional housing, the first of its kind in the state.<br />And, perhaps most important, the city's Department of Homeless Services and the federal Department of Veterans Affairs have integrated with Project Torch, where veterans can pursue short- and long-term housing as well as other services, all in the same office something no other city has done, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.<br />The moves are being watched closely in Washington as a possible model for other communities hoping to avoid a homeless debacle like the one that followed Vietnam, and even those who have long been critical of the federal bureaucracy's handling of homeless veterans are cautiously optimistic. Rosanne Haggerty, whose group, Common Ground, pioneered the model of supportive housing in which counseling and other services are provided to enable residents to function independently and is running the Montrose project, said, "There is a lot to suggest that what New York is doing is really setting the standard."<br />Haggerty added, "We don't know if the perfect system has been built yet, but the relationships have been put in place so we don't repeat the shameful patterns of the past."<br />Peter Dougherty, director of homeless programs for the Veterans Affairs Department, said that over the past three and a half years, the department has worked with about 2,000 homeless veterans of the current wars; the city's Department of Homeless Services said that there have been a few dozen filtering though its system.<br />Dougherty predicted that there would be fewer homeless veterans from this war than from Vietnam, noting, "It is a very different demographic." The volunteer service members in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, particularly those in the National Guard, are older, more likely to be married and have attained higher levels of education and have stronger social networks to lean on.<br />But some advocates look at the crumbling economy and the high number of warriors with post-traumatic stress disorder and see an approaching tsunami of need. And they point out that Vietnam veterans did not appear on the streets in any large numbers until the mid-1980s, about a decade after the war ended.<br />New York, like many cities, at first treated the rise in homeless veterans as a short-term crisis. But the city estimates that on any given night, 625 veterans remain scattered across the shelter system and another 560 or so live on the streets (local homeless advocates say that number is low).<br />Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who made reducing chronic homelessness a priority upon his election, created a task force two years ago that focused on homeless veterans and was headed in part by Robert V. Hess, who retired as an army sergeant in 1979 and is the commissioner of the city's Department of Homeless Services.<br />A first goal was remodeling the city's veterans-only shelter, on Borden Avenue in Queens, a cavernous space that once housed 400 veterans on cots in communal rooms. Now, the rows of cots have been replaced by 10-by-6-foot cubicles with room for a bed, a dresser and a desk. The cubicles are subject to military-style spot inspections in which neatness can earn occupants privileges like the right to have a television or a radio.<br />Annie Belton, who served in the army from 1989 to 1992, called the remodeled shelter one of the best in the system, which she has used periodically for years. "I like the fact that I close my door and lock it," she said.<br />Next month, Jericho Project, a New York-based nonprofit organization, will break ground on the first of the two low-rise apartment complexes near the James J. Peters VA Medical Center, in the Kingsbridge Heights neighborhood of the Bronx, designed with copious amounts of blond wood and stainless steel doors.<br />Sixty percent of the 132 units, which will be subsidized by government grants and private donations, will house currently homeless veterans; the rest are reserved for veterans on the verge of trouble. "We are looking to focus on Iraq and Afghanistan veterans," said Victoria Lyons, Jericho's executive director. "We think we can catch them before they hit the street."<br />The most fundamental change, and the most challenging, has been coordinating efforts between Hess's operation and the sprawling Veterans Affairs bureaucracy.<br />The federal government has never provided permanent supportive housing the main tool now used by New York and other cities to keep mentally ill or addicted populations off the street. Conversely, New York generally has done well at providing housing, or at least short-term shelter, but has long waiting lists for substance-abuse and other counseling programs automatic entitlements for veterans.<br />Since early this year, any veteran who attempts to enter New York's vast municipal shelter system, or who is known by a Veterans Affairs medical facility to be in need of housing, has been sent to the same place: Project Torch, a few blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge, where four people from the city and at least eight from the federal veterans' agency work side by side to match people and needs, whether for hot showers, hot meals, doctors or housing advice.<br />Harold Edmonds, who served on the aircraft carrier Intrepid as a jet mechanic in Vietnam, took advantage of the service over the summer after he tired of sleeping in the band shell in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Over Thanksgiving, Edmonds, 62, said he moved into an apartment that Project Torch found for him on White Plains Road in the Bronx. "It's on the first floor. Everything is new."</p><p align="left">*****************</p><p align="left"><strong>Syria's Assad seeks Israeli stance on Golan</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />By Khaled Yacoub Oweis<br />Syria has drafted a document defining the boundaries of the occupied Golan Heights and was waiting for an Israeli reply through Turkish mediators, sources familiar with the talks said this week.<br />President Bashar al-Assad recently told Western officials that Damascus wants Israel to take a clear position on the territorial problem between the two countries before agreeing to push stalled peace talks forward.<br />The Syrian document sets the boundaries with reference to six geographical points, the sources told Reuters.<br />"The president was clear that Syria wants to know the Israeli view about what constitutes occupied Syrian territory before progress could be made," one of the sources said.<br />"According to Syrian thinking, Israeli agreement on the six (geographical) points could help seal a peace deal next year. But Israel may not be able to provide a response any time soon, when it is in such political turmoil," a second source said.<br />Indirect talks between Syria and Israel, which were suspended about three months ago after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert decided to resign over a corruption scandal, centre on the fate of the Golan Heights.<br />Israel captured the plateau in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it more than a decade later -- a move unanimously rejected by the United Nations Security Council.<br />The two countries held almost 10 years of direct talks under U.S. supervision that collapsed in 2000 over the scope of a proposed Israeli withdrawal from the Golan.<br />Bashar's late father, President Hafez al-Assad, refused to sign a deal that did not include the north-eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, a main water reservoir.<br />The late Assad regarded the north-eastern shore as an integral part of the Golan and said that Syria was in control of it before the war broke out on June 4, 1967.<br />Israel captured the whole eastern shore along with the surrounding plateau in the war. The shoreline has been receding for decades. Under the Israeli proposal, Syria would have been only metres short of the north-eastern shore.<br />FATHER'S LEGACY<br />Bashar has stuck to his father's line on the Golan.<br />A Syrian official said that the paper sent to Turkey includes reference to geographical points on the present north-eastern shore of the lake. "The document puts us on the water," the official said.<br />Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Shara said last month that "the Syrian definition of the June 4 line means the restoration of the north-eastern shore of the lake to Syria" and described Israeli arguments about the shoreline receding as invalid.<br />Diplomats in the Syrian capital said that even if the two sides make progress on the territorial question a deal might not follow easily because Israel now wants Syria to reduce its alliance with Iran and cut support for the Lebanese Shi'ite movement Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamist groups.<br />"The situation is more complicated than in 2000 with Syria's external ties coming into play. Syria also wants agreement on the six points without direct negotiations, which might be difficult," one of the diplomats said.<br />Syrian officials have said Israel has no right to set conditions regarding its foreign policy but acknowledged that the political map of the region would change if Damascus and Israel sign a deal.<br />Assad told his visitors that Syria had received a document from Israel through Turkey with queries about Syrian relations with neighbouring states after a possible peace, according to the sources. "The president said Syria has responded, but he did not say how," one said.<br />Olmert, who is still caretaker prime minister, has said he wants to renew the talks. Turkey also wants the talks to move to a direct mode from the four indirect rounds that have been held since April, the diplomats said.<br />A foreign official who has met Assad said the Syrian leader was not enthusiastic about holding a fifth round before the Israeli parliamentary elections in February, although European leaders have urged him to agree to one before then.<br />(Editing by Nadim Ladki and Samia Nakhoul)</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">**************</p><p align="left"><strong>Israel kills Palestinian militant in West Bank</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />By Wael al-Ahmed<br />Israeli troops killed a Palestinian militant from the Islamic Jihad group on Tuesday in the occupied West Bank, then warned of possible military steps in Gaza after gunmen there launched retaliatory rocket strikes.<br />Palestinian witnesses and security forces said Israeli undercover troops shot the militant, who was 20, outside a shop near the town of Jenin. They said he died on the way to hospital.<br />An Israeli military spokeswoman said troops had gone to arrest the militant on suspicion he was plotting to carry out attacks, and opened fire at him as he tried to flee arrest. Another 22 Palestinians were also arrested, a statement said.<br />Islamic Jihad issued a statement in Gaza vowing to retaliate using "all possible means," and saying it launched five rockets at Israel as its first response.<br />Three rockets struck near an Israeli town, causing no damage or casualties, Israel's army said, and Israel responded by shutting all border crossings with Gaza, and cancelling a planned shipment of humanitarian aid to the blockaded area.<br />Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said Israel's military was "not deterred from taking action in Gaza, but not racing" to do so.<br />"Quiet will be answered with quiet, but if the situation requires, we will act, and at the time and place and in the manner see deem appropriate," Barak told reporters while viewing a military exercise in the occupied Golan Heights.<br />A senior Israeli security source told reporters separately Israel has "all kinds of military plans that go from small operations to taking over Gaza," and that if rocket attacks from Gaza persisted "something will happen."<br />Hamas Islamists who seized control of Gaza a year ago from Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah group have said they may not renew an already fraying truce with Israel, Hamas sees as due to expire later this week.<br />Israel sees the truce as open-ended, but has responded to a rise in cross-border violence since early November by tightening a blockade of Gaza it had ratcheted up when Hamas rose to power last year, often shutting vital border crossings.<br />These border closings have restricted vital fuel and food supplies to many in the impoverished coastal zone, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians.<br />(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Dominic Evans)</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*******************</p><p align="left"><strong>Six powers consult Arabs on Iran's nuclear plans<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />By Claudia Parsons<br />The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany agreed with Arab diplomats to consult regularly on Iran's nuclear program, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Tuesday.<br />Rice was speaking to reporters after the six powers met representatives of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to discuss what Washington says are Tehran's plans to build a nuclear bomb -- a charge Iran denies.<br />"All there expressed their concern about Iran's nuclear policies and its regional ambitions," Rice said, adding that they all expressed support for efforts by the U.N. Security Council, the six powers and the U.N. atomic agency on Iran.<br />"Noting the utility of the consultations, the states present agreed that they will want to continue their meetings on a regular basis," Rice said.<br />Iran, which was not invited to the meeting at U.N. headquarters in New York, said Washington was "distorting the realities about Iran's peaceful nuclear program and about Iran's constructive role in the region."<br />Iran rejects Western allegations that it is secretly amassing the capability to build atomic weapons and refuses to suspend what it says is a civilian nuclear energy program.<br />The six powers -- Britain, the United States, France, China, Russia and Germany -- have led negotiations on three rounds of U.N. sanctions against Iran for refusing to suspend its uranium enrichment program.<br />BALANCE OF POWER SHIFTING<br />The Iraq war, which brought to power a Shi'ite-dominated government in Baghdad with close ties to Iran, has shifted the balance of power in the Gulf region, raising concerns among some Gulf Arabs about Shi'ite Muslim Iran's growing influence.<br />In recent years a number of Arab states have announced plans to develop nuclear programs for civilian purposes.<br />In a statement criticizing Tuesday's meeting, Iran's mission to the United Nations said the real concern for regional stability was not Iran but "the interference of the United States in the region and its tired divisive policies."<br />Asked whether the six powers, referred to as the "P5+1," and Arab diplomats had discussed further sanctions on Iran, Rice said the point had been to hold a first large meeting to build on informal consultations in the past.<br />"I think there's concern that there will need to be a way to finally (motivate) Iran to make a different choice concerning its nuclear ambitions, but this was not an effort to develop a common strategy," Rice said.<br />"I think what really did come through here was that these are countries that have very deep interests in how this issue gets resolved, and they want to continue consultations with the P5+1 on how this is all going to come out," Rice said.<br />The outgoing U.S. administration has suggested that a new round of sanctions against Iran would be justified since Tehran has not responded positively to an offer of economic and political incentives from the six powers.<br />Diplomats from some of the six powers say the process of negotiating new U.N. sanctions is on hold until U.S. President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January.<br />Obama, a Democrat, has said he plans a new approach to Iran and its nuclear program, including direct talks if needed, a break from President George W. Bush's isolation strategy.<br />(Editing by David Wiessler)</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">********************************************************************************</p><p align="left"><strong>OPINION</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>Saving the world's 'orphans'<br /></strong>By E.J. Graff<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />It's the time of year when we are deluged with appeals to save the world's millions of orphans. On TV, in the newspaper, in our mailboxes, we see sad-eyed children who are starved for food, clothes and affection. Surely only Ebenezer Scrooge (or his Seuss-ical incarnation, the Grinch) could turn away with a hard heart.<br />But when these appeals are combined with glamorous examples like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's world adoption tour, would-be humanitarians can arrive at a dangerous belief: Western families can and should help solve this "world orphan crisis" by adopting.<br />It's true that, sometimes, international adoption can save a child's life. But be very careful. By heading to a poor, underdeveloped, or war-torn country to adopt a baby, Westerners can inadvertently achieve the opposite of what they intend. Instead of saving a child, they may create an orphan. The large sums of money that adoption agencies offer for poor countries' babies too often induce unscrupulous operators to buy, coerce, defraud, or kidnap children from families that would have loved, cared for, and raised those children to adulthood.<br />How does this misunderstanding happen? One problem is the word "orphan." Unicef reports 132 million orphans worldwide. Unicef's odd definition includes "single orphans" who have lost just one parent, and "double orphans" being cared for by extended families. Admirably enough, Unicef is trying to raise money to offer assistance and support to these children's families, and to build functioning child welfare systems that will benefit entire communities. But few Westerners would think of these children as "orphans."<br />Another problem is that the abandoned or orphaned children who actually do need homes are rarely the healthy infants or toddlers that most Westerners feel prepared to adopt. The majority of children who need "forever families," as the adoption industry puts it, are five or older, disabled, chronically ill, traumatized, or otherwise in need of extra care. The exception is China, where the one-child policy led to an epidemic of abandoned girls. But China's abandoned babies are historically unique. In Africa, for instance, children may be orphaned because their parents have died of AIDS or malaria or TB. In the former Soviet bloc, the parents may have died or lost custody because of alcohol-related illnesses or domestic violence. In Asia, the children themselves may be HIV-positive or suffer from chronic hepatitis B.<br />But from an adoption agency's standpoint, these needy orphans are not very "marketable." So here's the bad news: to meet Western families' longings to adopt healthy babies, many adoption agencies pour disproportionately enormous sums into poor, corrupt countries - few questions asked - in search of healthy children ages three and under. Those sums can induce some locals to buy, coerce, defraud or kidnap children from their families. Traumatically, these children are deprived of their families, and families are deprived of their children.<br />Consider that, after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, institutionalized Romanian children desperately needed families. Thousands of generous Westerners went to Romania to adopt - but were swindled into buying babies directly from families who would not otherwise have relinquished. Similarly, for more than a decade in Guatemala, few Westerners were adopting needy abandoned children; far too often, they were effectively - albeit unintentionally - buying healthy babies solicited (in some cases, apparently, conceived) specifically for the adoption trade. Guatemala and Romania have halted international adoption because of widespread corruption. As the respected nonprofit World Vision UK put it, "The urge to adopt across continents is well meaning but misguided."<br />Don't harden your heart to those sad-eyed "orphans" - but don't feel guilty if you can't (or don't want to) become a Jolie-Pitt world adoption mission. Rather than trying to rescue a single child, which can induce trafficking, invest in and rescue a community, thus preventing children from being orphaned by poverty or disease. Buy supplies for underprivileged schools. Invest in clean water or housing. Go on a medical mission. And remember that most families - like your own - would do almost anything to keep their babies home and to raise them well.<br />E.J. Graff is associate director at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism.</p><p align="left">********************************************************************************</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left"><strong>OPINION</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>China discovers its future</strong><br />By Jack Ma<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />On a trip to Beijing just a month after the Olympics, I encountered the bluest skies I'd seen in years. Although the Games had ended weeks before, their legacy was still apparent. The clear skies reminded me of the China I'd grown up in, in the '60s, before rapid industrialization obscured the mountains surrounding the city.<br />I knew some haze might return soon, but I also realized that 2008 would be remembered as the year China looked in the mirror, understood itself and changed for the better.<br />Many people outside China were surprised by the physical changes the Olympics brought to Beijing - a modern skyline and breathtaking architecture, like the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube. But the legacy of the Olympics is not in the buildings, but in the transformation of the collective consciousness of ordinary Chinese.<br />This transformation marks a turning point as China moves into 2009 and beyond. China is now powered by youth and looks toward the future, not to the ways of the past. Technology plays a part in this transformation, but a renewed sense of idealism and spirit play a bigger role.<br />It is impossible to understand China's future without looking back on the last 12 months. As China entered 2008, the focus was on the Olympics. But before we could get to the Games, we had to clear some unexpected hurdles.<br />Early in the year, snowstorms crippled much of the country. Coming during the Chinese New Year holidays, the storms shut down transport and business at a critical time. To many, it was an ominous sign for 2008.<br />We faced another catastrophe on May 12, with the Sichuan earthquake. Once, we may have relied on the government to provide relief. But an overwhelming grassroots response to the tragedy surprised even the most cynical observers. It was the first time since the Cultural Revolution that I'd seen so many citizens selflessly helping others.<br />By the time the Olympics arrived, the country was unified in a way I'd not seen since my childhood. Even with China's imperfections, we were proud of our country. And, as the Beijing 2008 Games came to a close, we showed that we could deliver on our promise to host a successful Olympics.<br />A renewed idealism has emerged here. Though the young people of my generation were steeped in the ideals of building a stronger country, when the Cultural Revolution ended and we discovered that our ideals were based on false foundations, we largely turned inward.<br />In 2008, Chinese looked beyond themselves and learned to respect one another, respect the environment and respect life. As we banded together to help earthquake survivors and to volunteer for the Olympics, we rediscovered the values our parents shared when modern China was founded. In contrast to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, our idealism was based on pragmatism, not ideological fervor.<br />Perhaps the most significant development was the emergence of China's youth in a culture that has traditionally looked to its elders for leadership. But in 2008, younger Chinese showed they could rise to the challenges, devising new ways to support earthquake relief efforts and to assist at the Olympics. They claimed a voice of their own.<br />The world should cheer this development. When I look at my generation, born in the 1950s and '60s, they often seem so different from their counterparts in the West. But Chinese who were born in the '80s and '90s and came of age in the Internet era seem much closer to young people in the West. Through the Internet and information sharing, they have common interests, support the same basketball teams, share ideas and develop friendships around the world.<br />The gap dividing China from the West continues to narrow, and the Internet plays a very strong role. In early 2008, China leapfrogged the United States to become home to the world's largest online population. China now has over 250 million Internet users, up from just 20 million in 2000. Yet that represents an Internet penetration rate of less than 20 percent, compared to 70 percent in the United States.<br />So far, China's rapid Internet growth has been fueled by its young people and their huge appetite for online games, instant messaging and music and video sharing. But as these users enter their 30s, their attention will shift to business applications, like e-commerce. I believe that e-commerce will be the next boom sector in China, as businesses and retailers take advantage of the mass market of consumers already online. Even now, the Internet connects Chinese businesses and consumers to those in the West. This is just the beginning. E-commerce has the potential to unite the business world, just as the Olympics united the sporting world.<br />The pace of change in China continues to accelerate. For a culture rooted in the traditions of thousands of years, this is truly revolutionary. Yet, after looking in the mirror of 2008, China is a changed nation. Our soul has been strengthened, a new idealism has taken root and a hopeful generation of Chinese is more prepared than ever to carry the torch into the future.<br />Jack Ma is known as the man who introduced the Internet to China. He is founder and chief operating officer of Alibaba Group, the world's leading B2B e-commerce company.</p><p align="left">*********************************************************************************</p><p align="left"><strong>OPINION</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>The global political awakening</strong><br />By Zbigniew Brzezinski<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />A new president is assuming office in the midst of a widespread crisis of confidence in America's capacity to exercise effective leadership in world affairs. That may be a stark thought, but it is a fact.<br />Though U.S. leadership has been essential to global stability and development, the cumulative effects of national self indulgence, financial irresponsibility, an unnecessary war and ethical transgressions have discredited that leadership. Making matters worse is the global economic crisis.<br />The resulting challenge is compounded by issues such as climate, health and social inequality - issues that are becoming more contentious because they have surfaced in the context of what I call "the global political awakening."<br />For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination.<br />This pertains to yet another fundamental change: The 500-year global domination by the Atlantic powers is coming to an end, with the new pre-eminence of China and Japan. Waiting in the wings are India and perhaps a recovered Russia, though the latter is very insecure about its place in the world.<br />In this dynamically changing world, the crisis of American leadership could become the crisis of global stability. Yet in the foreseeable future no state or combination of states can replace the linchpin role America plays in the international system. Without a U.S. recovery, there will be no global recovery. The only alternative to a constructive American role is global chaos.<br />It follows that the monumental task facing the new president is to regain U.S. global legitimacy by spearheading a collective effort for a more inclusive system of global management. Four strategically pregnant words define the essence of the needed response: unify, enlarge, engage and pacify.<br />To unify pertains to the effort to re-establish a shared sense of purpose between America and Europe. To that end, informal but frequent top-level consultations are badly needed, even though we are all aware that there that there is no such thing yet as a politically unified Europe. The only practical solution is to cultivate a more deliberate dialogue among the United States and the three European countries that have a global orientation: Britain, France and Germany.<br />For many years, Europeans have complained they are excluded from decision-making, yet they are perfectly willing to let the United States assume the burdens of implementation. Differences over Afghanistan are but the latest example of that dilemma. It is to be hoped that the new U.S. president will make a deliberate effort to revitalize the U.S.-European dialogue.<br />To enlarge entails a deliberate effort to nurture a wider coalition committed to the principle of interdependence and prepared to play a significant role in promoting more effective global management. It is evident, for example, that the G-8 has outlived its function. Accordingly, some formula for regular consultations ranging in composition from G-14 to G-16 should be devised to bring together countries with geopolitical significance as well as economic weight.<br />To engage means the cultivation of top officials through informal talks among key powers, specifically the U.S., the European Triad, China, Japan, Russia and possibly India. A regular personal dialogue, for example, between the U.S. president and the Chinese leader would be especially beneficial to the development of a shared sense of responsibility between the only superpower and the most likely next global power. Without China, many of the problems we face collectively cannot be laid to rest.<br />Admittedly, China is economically nationalist, but it is also a fundamentally cautious power. It was Deng Xiaoping who best articulated how China defines its international approach: "Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership."<br />This underlines a significant distinction with Russia. Like Beijing, Moscow wishes to revise international patterns, but it tends to be impatient, frustrated and sometimes even threatening. Nonetheless, it is in the interest of the United States and of Europe to engage Russia. In so doing, America should seek agreements that enhance global stability, promote nuclear weapons reduction and deal with such regional problems as Iran.<br />America and Europe will have to find a way of reaffirming their commitment to the integrity of Ukraine and Georgia while conveying to Russia that their interest in these two states relates to the gradual construction of a larger democratic Europe and is not designed to threaten Russia itself.<br />To pacify requires a deliberate U.S. effort to avoid becoming bogged down in the vast area ranging from Suez to India. Urgent decisions need to be made, with Europe's help, on several potentially interactive issues.<br />The Israeli-Palestinian peace process needs to be a priority. The new president should state on the record that a peaceful accommodation between the two parties must: first, involve a demilitarized Palestinian state, perhaps with a NATO presence to enhance Israel's sense of security; second, the territorial settlement has to be based on the 1967 lines with equitable exchanges permitting Israel to incorporate the more heavily urbanized settlements on the fringes of the '67 lines; third, both parties have to accept the fact that Palestinian refugees cannot return to what is now Israel, though they should be provided with some compensation and assistance for settling preferably in the independent Palestinian state; and last, the Israelis will have to accept the fact that a durable peace will require the genuine sharing of Jerusalem as the capital of two states.<br />The United States will also have to undertake seriously reciprocal negotiations with Iran. That means abandoning the current U.S. posture that Tehran make a one-sided concession as a precondition to talks.<br />Finally, America's strategy regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan needs a basic reassessment. The emphasis should be shifted from military engagement to a more subtle effort to seek a decentralized political accommodation with those portions of the Taliban who are prepared to negotiate. A mutual accommodation should involve Taliban willingness to eliminate any Al Qaeda presence in return for Western military disengagement from the pertinent territory. The process should be accompanied by intensified reconstruction.<br />Let me conclude on a parochial note: Unfortunately, the American public is woefully undereducated about the wider world. Barack Obama will have to strive to make Americans understand the novel dimensions of global realities. Without sounding overly partisan, I believe that he has unique intellectual and rhetorical gifts for doing just that.<br />So let me end my remarks by asserting simply, "Yes, we can."<br />Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, is trustee and counsellor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). This article is based on his 2008 John Whitehead lecture at Chatham House, London. The complete text will be published in the January issue of International Affairs (London).</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">********************************************************************************</p><p align="left"><strong>OPINION</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>Expectations: What's in store for 2009?</strong><br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008 </p><p align="left"><br />The International Herald Tribune contacted a spectrum of smart people with three questions about what's in store in 2009:<br />What do you expect?<br />What do you hope for?<br />What do you fear?</p><p align="left"><br />AYAAN HIRSI ALI Somali-born feminist and writer<br />Given the gloomy state of the economy, I expect that 2009 will be a year of distress for many. Poverty is a relative matter. Some in the West will feel deprived if they do not get the big bonus they expected. Others will find themselves without jobs and will be faced with foreclosure and all the misery it entails. For many in those parts of the world that are truly poor, scarcity will pinch harder. Bitter conflicts over land, food and clean water will swell the numbers of the displaced and the starving. Funds once allocated for education, health care and sustainable development will be spent on emergency relief.<br />Although I fear that all of this will be blamed on the failure of capitalism, I hope for faith in free-market principles, wise fiscal policy and restrained spending.<br />I fear that 2009 will bring us closer to a nuclear war provoked by Iran's Islamic administration led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is unlikely that Ahmadinejad will be stopped by reason, diplomacy, economic sanctions or other peaceful means. The real challenge here - and he senses it - is that the West is reluctant to use military force to stop him. I hope that every nation that rejoiced at Barack Obama's election, especially the Europeans, will support his administration's efforts to prevent further nuclear proliferation. We should be prepared to use force against Iran if necessary, but only as a measure of last resort.<br />Another issue is the subjugation, rape and murder of women and young girls in the Third World - those who, in times of scarcity, are valued less. Realistically, I do not expect that defending the human rights of women and young girls will enjoy the same priority as, say saving the planet or the war on terror. But I would like to hope it might. I fear that if we don't stop gendercide against women, the attainment of these goals will prove to be a hollow victory.<br />BERTRAND DELANOË Mayor of Paris<br />The world needs to have the courage to ensure that policymaking meets the high-stakes challenges of the era. The economic crisis demands unprecedented regulation of the international financial system, and this implies courage on the part of our leaders. But there are other contemporary challenges, notably the environment, for which each nation is responsible, and the food crisis, which requires financial resources and profound change in the North-South relationship. The world is at a crossroads: Without political will, without real awareness, we risk the plague of nationalism and an ebbing of democracy, and with this the prospect of more conflicts of greater violence. So we must act now. And it is clear that the role of the United States will be decisive, with a new president, Barack Obama, whose success gives birth to much hope.<br />What I most hope for, as a citizen of the world, is that we make progress on the road toward peace in places where conflicts are bringing grief to our planet: that the Middle East may find a path toward reciprocal recognition of legitimate sovereignties; that Africa may free itself from endless wars; that India and Pakistan may move toward a reasonable reconciliation. And I hope that we may move forward in the essential combat against terrorism, which is a fanatical passion for death.<br />What I fear is that nothing, or almost nothing, of what I have just sketched out comes to pass. I fear that violence may increase despite the confidence in progress held by all those who wish to work for greater justice. I fear we will be unable to close the era that opened on Sept. 11, 2001. Doing so is, however, essential.<br />TZIPI LIVNI Israeli foreign minister<br />In 2009 I expect fateful choices. Free nations will need to find the inner strength to shape our common future or the forces of destabilization and extremism will shape it for us. This is especially true for the Middle East. Our region is undergoing dramatic changes, and conventional approaches will simply not suffice. Despite all the difficulties, I believe the peoples of the Middle East can reconcile the need to protect their distinct identities with the imperative of embracing our common humanity. I believe that an alternative peaceful reality for our region is attainable. But the people of our region and their leaders will need the collective wisdom, and courage, to choose it.<br />I hope for peace. I hope we can all take the decisions and actions necessary to make peace - and the vision of two states for two peoples - a reality. Not just a piece of paper, but a real peace for our children that will survive for our grandchildren. At the global level, I hope we can learn together how to harness new talents in areas such as green technology, agricultural innovation and the capacity to adapt to changing environments in order to address the challenges of the 21st century. From fundamentalist terrorism to food shortages, from global warming to the current financial crisis, we all have a responsibility to transform this period of global uncertainty into one of global creativity and renewal.<br />I fear that we will wake up to too late. There is a troubling asymmetry in the ideological battle being waged today. Those opposed to democracy and freedom regularly exhibit both passion and sacrifice, while too many democracies are complacent and pursue narrow self-interest. My people's history has demonstrated the high price of indifference. I have no doubt that the forces of extremism will be overcome. But I worry about the dangers of waiting too long before people remember that the freedom and opportunity we take for granted are precious ideals worth protecting and worth fighting for.<br />BAN KI MOON United Nations secretary general<br />I expect a new era of multilateralism. From my conversations with Barack Obama, I know that we can look forward to a new era of global cooperation. We will see a new and close partnership between the United States and the United Nations. With all nations working together, we will restore the global economy to health, whatever hardships might come. And I believe that we will do so in a spirit of fairness and solidarity. We will not retreat from our commitments to fight poverty and disease. We will defend the right of the poorest nations to grow and share in a renewed and truly global prosperity.<br />Let us be practical and put aside fanciful hopes for what might be, and focus on what must be. This will be the year of climate change, the one truly existential threat to the planet. We have 12 short months to Copenhagen, where world leaders will gather to hammer out a comprehensive deal to curb global warming. Amid our financial troubles, some ask whether we can afford to tackle climate change. The real question is: How can we afford not to? I hope to send a global climate change treaty to the world's governments - and see it ratified, by the U.S. Senate, among others, by the end of 2010.<br />Like Roosevelt, I believe the only thing to fear is fear itself. If we give in to fear - if we lose our political will and long-term perspective - we will see a cascading series of crises, spilling from nation to nation. If we turn inward, we will lose chances to make a difference in places like Ivory Coast or Bangladesh, both trying to organize democratic elections, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where war and peace are so delicately balanced. If we turn inward or embrace protectionism, trade and global growth will suffer. If we turn inward, we will miss generational opportunities. This coming year, we have a chance to pick up where Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan left off so many years ago, a hair's breadth away from abolishing nuclear weapons. We must not let fear cloud our vision of the future.<br />MIRA NAIR Indian filmmaker<br />I expect that Barack Obama will reverse George Bush's response to 9/11. Instead of punishing the world, Obama will proceed on the assumption that America not only needs the world, but it is a part of it. Because of the financial crisis, I expect people will learn to make do with less. And necessity, as we know, is often a great recipe for invention. So I expect great art to emerge from stripping away the excess.<br />I hope for India and Pakistan to talk to each other. The region must realize that we share a common danger. There are two ways to proceed: force or mediation. My hope is that the region - India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran - will come together to settle the major issues of Afghanistan and Kashmir. It's time the region looks to itself, rather than to the United States, for solutions to its problems.<br />In the realm of creativity, I hope for a greater comfort with hybridity in storytelling. The mainstream is no longer white. The interconnectedness of the world, the inspiration of Obama being from everywhere, the vigor of the movie industry outside Hollywood, all lead me to hope for a multiplicity of stories on screen in the future. At Maisha, our film school in East Africa, every young man and woman believes that he or she is walking in the footsteps of one of their countrymen, young Barack Obama.<br />What I fear is another war. The war psychosis since 9/11 has so strengthened the warmongers that I fear the possibility of another. And that would be devastating to my hopes and dreams of a new world led by Obama.<br />CHRISTINE OCKRENT French political commentator<br />I expect 2009 to be a year of considerable turmoil - economic, social and political. It will be more difficult than ever for people in charge to lead and prioritize issues. The perverse effects of globalization will be aggravated: nationalism, protectionism, unemployment in the rich countries.<br />I hope for Europe to play its part, and a decisive one. I hope our political and business leaders will make good use of the world crisis. The time could be ripe for a common or at least a coordinated agenda to prevent markets from going berserk again, to limit environmental damage, to fight the growing imbalance between the very rich and the very poor, to better feed and cure the people in need.<br />I fear the shortsightedness of our politicians, the selfishness of our wealthy societies, the flaring up of religious extremism as an answer to social anxieties, the inability to foster hope. And do you know what ? I am still an optimist.<br />ELLEN JOHNSON-SIRLEAF President of Liberia<br />I expect that the world will be a safer place in 2009, that war and carnage will be contained, and that the newly elected leadership of the United States will do more to ensure an interconnected world striving for peace through power sharing and consensus building in a new international order.<br />I hope that my administration will achieve more in restoring basic social services to our citizenry, and that our poverty reduction strategy will lift the spirits of ordinary citizens to dream the impossible. I hope that, as I promised in my 2006 inaugural address to the Liberian people, Liberian children who are smiling again can be assured of a future of hope and promise. On the international front, I hope that the global financial crisis that has shaken our faith in the invisible hand of capitalism will be resolved, and that there will be a return to the scaling up of investment in developing countries and frontier states such as Liberia.<br />I fear that if raised expectations from the new U.S. administration are slow in being realized, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could lead to deeper international cleavages and a return to the geopolitical rivalries and fissures of the Cold War, thus undermining multilateral approaches to global cooperation. Closer to home, I fear that uncertainties in certain countries in West Africa could lead to political turmoil and threaten progress in the consolidation of peace and development.<br />GARRISON KEILLOR American humorist<br />The rain will rain and the snow will fall and the seasons change and the small birds call and the compass will still point north and we will often recall November 4th which was a great day in so many ways - electing a good man regardless of race, yes, but I voted for Barack because he represents American civility, a combination of curiosity, ambition, humor and generosity, and I expect that the new administration will lift the spirits of our countrymen. I believe in heroes. I think we will all walk taller thanks to Barack's steadfast march to the White House.<br />I hope for a renaissance in America. So many people spent so much time stewing about and dreading the naked emperor and the miasma he created and now they can turn their minds to happier things, educate the young, exercise ingenuity, revive American manufacturing, move toward a green economy, lighten the work week, breathe deep, enjoy our good fortune living in this glorious land.<br />What I fear is blind violence, of course, such as in Mumbai, and its effect on civility. The thrashing of the banking system and the terrible losses inflicted on our friends and neighbors. The death of newspapers. The demise of literature, thanks to the arrogant idiocy of English departments. Prostate cancer, impotence, celibacy, spiritual purity.<br />ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER American academic<br />In 2009 I expect that Guantánamo Bay will be closed and that the United States will return to full compliance with the Geneva Conventions covering all citizens and subcontractors carrying out U.S. business anywhere in the world.<br />I hope for a reforging of the American social contract. Government would provide health care, expanded unemployment benefits to allow for extensive retraining, a higher minimum wage, and the equivalent of a GI bill for middle-class kids who can't afford college fees, in return for universal national service. There would also be much higher gasoline taxes and other incentives to move to a low-carbon economy, immigration reform and a renewed commitment to free trade. Not all of this can happen in the first years of an Obama presidency, but the foundations could be laid.<br />I fear rising social instability in China and Russia as a result of declining growth and increasing unemployment and hardship. In both cases, although particularly with regard to Russia, I worry that the government will seek to deflect domestic discontent by inventing, magnifying, or provoking a foreign threat and marshaling a nationalist response. I also fear a full-blown Islamist insurgency in Pakistan. Finally, I fear that Iranian leaders will create a crisis that will make Obama look very weak if he or his administration sits down to negotiate with them but that will allow them to paint him as "just like Bush" if he does not.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*********************************************************************************</p><p align="left">Ian Walthew:</p><p align="left"><strong>2009: What do you expect? What do you hope for? What do you fear?</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>I expect that the financial crisis is going to get worse, not least of all because investors and banks and regulators still don't know exactly what it is they are dealing with. I expect a depression, not a prolonged recession, although if the latter it will go on well into 2010. I think there is a one in 10 chance of a major nuclear terrorist attack in a major Western city, and those are pretty high odds of expectation. I don't expect Iraq to get better, but worse, and I expect Afghanistan to become a quagqmire just as it was for the Soviets. If those two things happen I expect either complete U.S. military withdrawal or the draft. I do not expect to follow the news at all next year because I can't watch a train crash. I'm ready.</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>I hope that Obama will not bail out the auto intustry but use a more intelligent stimulus plan. I hope for less corruption in business, from the markets to price fixing cartels to vested interests and elites in politics. I hope that the ICC is given some muscle to apprehend indicted criminals and that Europe, Russia and China step up to the plate to provide real military intervention for Darfur, Zimbabwe, the Congo and Somalia, to name but 4. I hope that the world turns its attention to the real global crisis, which is not the Western economy but the 2 billion people living on less than $2 a day. I hope that Obama moves decisively within 12 months to resolve both the Kashmir and Palestine disputes. I hope Obama realises that his intelligence services are the equivalent of GM.</strong></p><p align="left"><strong>I fear none of the above will happen and that Afghanistan, or rather Kabul and its Mayor, will fight a futile war, with NATO and India as its allies, a war already declared, against Pakistan (or rather its military and the ISI who may or may not bother with the pretense of a civilian government.) I fear Pakistan and India will go to war, especially if Pakistan becomes a fundamentalist state with an Afghan refuge to its rear; I fear Iran may aid Pakistan, I fear the Americans may become involved, as perhaps Israel. I fear that the neglected global food crisis will become worse and the fate of the 2 billion will move from horrific to catastrophic. I fear Obama cannot possibly fulfil the hopes and expectations vested upon him, nor solve the world's many pressing problems. I fear we are to enter a period of war, dissruption and personal survival where we will have to completely reorganise our lives here in the Auvergne. I am not personally fearful, because I know we can.</strong></p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*********************************************************************************</p><p align="left"><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></p><p align="left">A leader who gives hope<br />By Roger Cohen<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />LONDON: Mankind has received a jolt that might in the past have produced a war. More than $28 trillion has been lost from stock markets in the last nine months. That's the equivalent of about $4,300 for every man, woman and child on the face of the earth. Millions of people have lost their jobs; millions more will. Yet here in a major world financial capital, there is no blood on the streets and there are even shoppers at Harrods.<br />Gloom is certainly widespread as the city's masters of the universe bump down to earth. A flogged financial system has given up the ghost, revealing with its death throes that what's junk on the way in is junk on the way out. From New York to Paris, retail is buckling, restaurants are emptying and jobs are vulnerable. One in 10 U.S. homeowners with a mortgage is either delinquent or in foreclosure. Banks, however cajoled, still won't lend to each other. Economies, deprived of the credit that lubricates them, are jammed.<br />As Barack Obama, the U.S. president-elect put it, "There's a big problem, and it's going to get worse." One thing is certain about 2009: It will be ugly.<br />How ugly? Gasoline prices are down, but the bright side ends there. David Hale, a Chicago-based economist, described the U.S. economy as being in a "free fall." A further 3 million jobs could be lost next year, on top of the 1.9 million already shed in 2008, bringing the unemployment rate "to easily 8.5 percent." Recessions in the United States, Europe and Japan may lead to GDP declines of 1 to 1.5 percent. Collapsing commodity prices will slash African growth by half, to about 3 percent, while the Indian and Chinese growth rates will be cut by several points to about 7 and 8 percent respectively.<br />"The rest of the world has very good cause to be angry with the United States," Hale said. "This is an American-made crisis magnified by U.S. incompetence. Bush and Paulson will leave office in disgrace."<br />I have no qualms with that verdict on the U.S. president and Treasury secretary: They've been behind the curve throughout the great de-leveraging. The decision to let Lehman collapse turned a slow-motion financial crisis into a meltdown. But a strange thing happened on the way to bankruptcy court: While the world has redoubled cause for ire toward America, it is less angry today than it has been in a long time. Obama's election has turned people warm and fuzzy.<br />How the positive energy from that political change meets the negative energy of a deepening financial crisis will determine in large measure just how bad 2009 proves to be. Two wars and the global economy hang in the balance. The quality of Obama's leadership will be decisive to their course.<br />"If the United States can't get out of the recession in a reasonable period of time, it will be very hard to accomplish other foreign policy objectives because it won't have the resources or the will," Robert Hormats, the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, told me.<br />Obama has to wield U.S. power to restore confidence. Decoupling was a nice idea but the past months have shown that the world's fortunes are still heavily "coupled" with America's. The president-elect has assembled a strong economic team; he has gambled on a secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who has the energy to break the diplomatic logjam on several fronts; and he has promised a robust stimulus package. All this conveys a welcome sense of urgency. In the best scenario, the addition of fiscal action to monetary easing will begin to assuage fears by the second half of 2009. The housing sector will stabilize. Credit will begin to flow. Consumers will exit their funk.<br />Still, with Americans deluged in debt, and stock-linked U.S. retirement savings decimated, recovery will be slow. Here's where the rest of the world can help. China, France, Britain and Russia have already announced significant stimulus and stabilization packages. But Germany, with an economy big enough to make a difference in global demand, has been sitting on the sidelines.<br />Credit-card wielding U.S. consumers, who have been shelling out $10 trillion a year on the made-in-China universe, can no longer sustain the global economy; others, even in conservative Bavaria, are going to have to step into the breach. Brazil, the Gulf states, India and China all face tests of whether their increased wealth will now be matched by an increased sense of global responsibility.<br />Their emergent middle classes probably hold the key to long-term economic growth now that the industrialized world's indebted and aging consumers have run out of cash. If the new powerhouses do not deliver, a wave of disastrous protectionism could ensue. The jury is still out.<br />As it is on Obama, who comes to power with enormous hopes vested in him. He's already made mistakes - committing to a 16-month withdrawal from Iraq and opposing the U.S. free-trade agreement with Colombia come to mind - but he's also shown remarkable political acumen.<br />If he can change the lexicon, he will begin delivering on the hopes he has aroused. Language inspires; Obama wields it better than any recent president. I do not think the phrase "war on terror," which is in effect war without end, will fall often from his lips. The phrase contained within it the seeds of Guantánamo and an imperial presidency: Obama wants to close those chapters. The "with-us-or-against-us" paradigm is dead.<br />Obama spent only 10 years of his adult life in the split world of the Cold War, double that in a post-Berlin Wall world of growing interconnectedness. MAC - mutual assured connectivity - has replaced the MAD, or mutual assured destruction, of Cold War days. In our age, everything has been globalized - except politics. I expect Obama to be the first U.S. leader to govern with a strong sense of the global conversations that make online sociability a powerful political force.<br />Where Bush bridled, Obama will reach out. In 2009, it is possible that new initiatives aimed at engaging Iran and resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict will begin to redraw the map of the Middle East. The 30-year silence between Tehran and Washington is a devastating anomaly. Most Iranians are pro-American. Meanwhile, the main elements of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement are known: Extremists on both sides should no longer have a veto over it. If there is significant movement on either of these fronts, the world will become less dangerous.<br />But dangers persist, as recent events in Mumbai have shown. Nobody knows whether Al Qaeda terrorists will succeed in hitting the United States again. Extremist Islamist ideologies that preach death to Americans, Hindus, Jews, infidels of every stripe, democracies, tolerance, pluralism, open societies - in short that preach death to the modern world - are not in short supply.<br />They exist in Karachi, just as they exist in Algiers and the suburbs of French cities. The very modernity these ideologies despise ensures their spread through the Internet. But they are still minority ideas, confined to the fringes, and the world has learned a new vigilance.<br />What has become clear is that prevailing in this battle is not an affair of the United States but an affair of the world. There's little these days that can be solved alone: The global financial crisis has been another illustration of that. America, until now, has not taken on the full implications of this interconnectedness. Since it was barrier breaking that helped deliver the United States to the post-Cold-War zenith of its power, it has been hard to grasp in Washington that the same forces have now democratized power. America is less dominant than it was.<br />Understanding this power shift, and using it to his advantage, will be a fundamental test of Obama and will determine what he can accomplish in 2009 and beyond. He has to be the jujitsu president, using apparent weaknesses as new forms of strength.<br />Roger Cohen writes the Globalist column for the IHT.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">****************</p><p align="left"><strong>Arise and shine, America</strong><br />By Serge Schmemann<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />PARIS: After Barack Obama was elected in November, I and many other Americans living in Europe had the curious experience of being congratulated by total strangers in the street.<br />Certainly George W. Bush has been enormously unpopular abroad, and Obama was an overwhelming favorite around the world. But the congratulations were not simply about having "their man" elected; they also reflected a satisfaction - a relief - among many people that "their America" was back.<br />That got me thinking about the feelings toward America I have encountered in the many years I have lived and worked around the world - in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe East and West, Russia. I vividly remember entering a classroom in the black shantytown of Crossroads outside Cape Town, in white-ruled South Africa, when the teacher had the children rise and say in unison, "God bless America!" Another time, in Soviet Moscow in the 1980s, my children's riding instructor suddenly vaulted onto his horse from behind and galloped wildly around the riding arena with the reins in one hand. "Is that how Americans ride?" he asked me eagerly. "I learned it from 'Magnificent Seven'!" That was one of the few American movies allowed into the Soviet Union in those days - its theme of downtrodden people rising up against exploiters was evidently deemed ideologically acceptable. In reality, the film served only to reinforce a widespread adulation of America as a place that had to be the opposite of whatever Soviet propaganda said about it. America was the shining city upon a hill, in John Winthrop's prophetic words.<br />But if America fails to live up to this calling, Winthrop warned in that same sermon, "We shall open the mouths of enemies." I've encountered that, too: Palestinians burning the Stars and Stripes out of fury that Americans remain oblivious to their suffering; post-Soviet Russians cursing the United States for treating them dismissively as a defeated nation (a grievance Vladimir Putin has successfully exploited); Romans who light up the Colosseum every time a death sentence is commuted in the United States; and, of course, the global outcry over Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.<br />To be sure, there are many different sources of feelings for America, both pro and con. But those I've encountered most often boil down to America as a symbol of great hopes, and therefore, when it fails, as a profound disappointment. That disappointment is not "anti-American." It is the same as the shame many Americans have felt in recent years over the violation of so much of what we stand for in the world. It is, essentially, the other side of pro-Americanism - a belief that America can and must be better.<br />That is the meaning of the congratulations Americans have heard on European streets. The praise is both heartening, and worrying. Obama has already done a great deal to revive America's standing by his decency, eloquence, wit, idealism and multicultural roots. But the worry is that too many people have placed too many hopes in him. The first sign of that was the day after Obama's election, when Georgians flooded into the streets of Tbilisi urging him to stop supporting their president, Mikheil Saakashvili, who has been a favorite of Washington. There are bound to be more disappointments. America cannot emerge from its Middle Eastern wars and the global financial crisis either quickly, or with its powers and influence intact.<br />How Obama, the Americans and the world deal with these problems and expectations will be the theme of 2009, a year that is destined, or doomed, to be a pivotal one. On these pages, we have asked a variety of people to tell us what they expect, what they fear, and what they hope to applaud a year from now.<br />Serge Schmemann is the editorial page editor of the IHT.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">********************************************************************************</p><p align="left"><strong>Italian police stage a big anti-Mafia operation<br /></strong>By Elisabetta Povoledo<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />ROME: A sweeping anti-Mafia operation in Palermo on Tuesday dealt a serious blow to the Sicilian criminal organization as it was preparing to form a commission that would have coordinated high-profile crimes, officials say.<br />Nearly 100 arrest warrants were issued and more than 1,200 carabinieri were involved in the operation, which began at dawn, using helicopters and dog units. The arrests were the culmination of a nine-month investigation by Palermo anti-Mafia prosecutors into Mafia association, extortion and international drug and arms trafficking.<br />The operation Tuesday - called Perseus, after the mythological hero who beheaded Medusa - "severed all the strategically important heads of a new ruling structure that had to deliberate, as it once did, on all serious acts," the chief anti-Mafia prosecutor, Pietro Grasso, said, according to The Associated Press.<br />Footage provided by the carabinieri to Italian TV showed cars and police officers storming homes, with masked officers climbing gates and tearing down walls, while helicopters hovered above. Hours later, dozens of handcuffed suspects, some of them grinning defiantly, were shown being escorted out of a police station in Palermo and taken to prison.<br />Grasso said evidence from wiretaps and reports from at least three informants in recent months suggested that top mobsters from the Palermo area wanted to create a new commission that would deliberate on "serious matters" and criminal strategies with other Sicilian crime bosses.<br />"We don't know what they were planning," this time around, Grasso said. But investigators suspected it would be big.<br />The previous commission, known as the "cupola," was headed by Salvatore (Totò) Riina, known as the "boss of bosses," until his arrest in 1993. Under Riina, the commission adopted a strategy of attacking the authorities that culminated with the back-to-back killings of the top anti-Mafia fighters Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.<br />Bernardo Provenzano, who took over from Riina, pursued a less violent strategy and focused on traditional activities like infiltrating public projects or extortion from local businesses.<br />Public attention shifted to organized crime groups elsewhere in Italy: The Neapolitan Camorra became the subject of the best-seller "Gomorrah," now an award-winning film; and the 'Ndrangheta, based in the southern region of Calabria, made headlines with the 2007 killing of six Italians outside a pizza restaurant in Germany.<br />The crackdown Tuesday was the most important anti-Mafia operation since 2006, when several top bosses, including Provenzano, were arrested in Sicily over a period of several months. "If that operation brought the Mafia to its knees, Operation Perseus has ensured that it won't get up again," Grasso said.<br />Among those arrested Tuesday are the alleged heads of nine Mafia families as well as 14 area bosses, which control more than one family. All were from the Palermo area. Several were well known to investigators, because of both their criminal past and their age. "They re-exhumed older bosses for the commission," said Grasso, who added that up-and-coming criminals still looked up to the older generation. "They have the authority and are reliable."<br />The police intervened before the commission was constituted, and that may have prevented bloodshed between bosses vying for the top spot in the provincial commission. "We stopped them because they could carry out bloodshed and crimes," Grasso said.<br />They will be held without bail until a judge rules on the validity of the arrest. Carabinieri in Tuscany were also involved in the operation.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">***************</p><p align="left"><strong>A senior aide to Mugabe is shot</strong><br />By Celia W. Dugger<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />JOHANNESBURG: A Zimbabwean military commander who belongs to President Robert Mugabe's inner circle and is widely regarded as a key organizer of the brutal crackdown on the political opposition this year was shot in the hand Saturday during a nighttime ambush, the state-controlled media reported Tuesday.<br />The Mugabe government alleged that the shooting was an assassination attempt and part of a broader effort to destabilize the country, while a senior opposition official said in an interview that he believed it arose from an internecine battle within ZANU-PF, the ruling party, over who will succeed Mugabe, 84, who has been in power for 28 years.<br />In the feverish atmosphere of Harare, the capital, the shooting added yet another ominous and opaque episode to an unfolding political drama, sent a jolt of fear through opposition and civic circles, and sparked a fresh round of rumors that a state of emergency or military coup could be in the offing.<br />A cholera epidemic is now raging throughout the country, hyperinflation has rendered the Zimbabwean currency virtually worthless, and abductions of opposition and civic activists have spiked. This month, about 100 soldiers rioted in Harare to protest their inability to withdraw even their meager salaries from banks short of cash.<br />The article Tuesday in the state-run Herald newspaper did not offer evidence that the attack on the air force commander, Air Marshall Perence Shiri, was politically motivated, nor did it explain why the Saturday shooting had not been reported earlier.<br />Home Minister Kembo Mohadi was quoted as saying in a statement that the shooting was part of "a build-up of terror attacks targeting high profile persons, government officials, government establishments and public transportation systems."<br />His statement cited bombings in August of the main Harare Central station, road and rail bridges, as well as November bombings of the Criminal Investigation Department's headquarters in Harare and, again, the central police station.<br />Officials in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change dismissed the idea that the party had been involved in any of the incidents, saying the party remained committed to nonviolence.<br />Tendai Biti, the MDC secretary general, said in an interview that he was worried that Mugabe intended to use the shooting of Shiri - and the general environment of conflict and fear - to go after the opposition, as well as the faction in his own party that is out of favor. Biti said he believed Shiri's shooting was a result of internal battles within the ruling party.<br />"Mugabe can kill two birds with one stone," Biti said. "He can use it as a way of attacking us, and then attacking whatever faction of ZANU-PF he wants to decimate."<br />The MDC candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, won more votes than Mugabe in March elections but quit before a runoff in June after thousands of his supporters were beaten and more than 100 were killed.<br />Mugabe and Tsvangirai signed a power-sharing deal three months ago, but remain deadlocked over the division of ministries. The opposition insists on oversight of the police because Mugabe has retained control of all branches of the military. Both the police and the military have long been crucial to Mugabe's repression of his rivals for power.<br />Shiri himself has played a pivotal role in that story. In the 1980s, he was commander of the notorious, North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, which historians say waged a campaign of terror and murder aimed at civilians in Matabeleland, the stronghold of Joshua Nkomo, a nationalist leader Mugabe saw as a rival. At least 10,000 people are thought to have been murdered.<br />Officials close to Mugabe said in interviews in October that Shiri was among the military commanders who feared that the power-sharing deal with the opposition failed to protect them from prosecution for their roles in political violence.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">**********************************************************************************</p><p align="left"><strong>Detroit papers to trim home delivery<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />DETROIT: Beset by falling revenue, two Detroit newspapers said Tuesday that they planned to offer only three days of home delivery and would push their online editions instead, making the city the largest in the United States to have its daily papers undergo such a makeover.<br />The Detroit Media Partnership, which runs The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News, said it expected to cut about 9 percent of its work force but "hopefully" less, and there will be no job reductions in the newsrooms of either paper, said David Hunke, Free Press publisher and chief executive of the partnership.<br />"We're here because we're fighting for our survival," Hunke said at a news conference. "We're also here because we have an absolute resolve to not only save but rethink and rebuild two of the greatest newspapers in this country."<br />Hunke described the moves as "a geometric leap forward."<br />It is unclear where the job cuts would fall, said Ron Renaud, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 372, which represents drivers and other delivery personnel for the papers. He spoke after a meeting Tuesday morning with Detroit Media Partnership executives.<br />"Our decision to limit home delivery to three days a week reflects the reality that major newspaper markets are facing daunting economic challenges," Hunke said in a statement ahead of the news conference. "Advertising in this economy is down and costs are up. We can't live in the past."<br />The Detroit Media Partnership, which includes business and editorial operations for the newspapers, has 2,151 employees.<br />"They took a long hard look," Renaud said. "They feel they need to do something to maintain two newspapers."<br />The Free Press will be delivered Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays starting in March, while the News will be delivered Thursdays and Fridays. The News does not have a Sunday paper.<br />Renaud said the papers would still be printed and sold at newsstands every day. The partnership said subscribers would have daily access to electronic editions that would be copies of the printed edition.<br />Detroit would be the largest metropolitan area to have its daily papers changed so thoroughly. The Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb, recently cut its print edition to four days a week from six. In Arizona, The East Valley Tribune in suburban Phoenix next year plans to have print editions on four days instead of seven while regularly reporting news on its Web site.<br />The Christian Science Monitor will become the first national newspaper to drop its daily print edition and focus on publishing online.<br />"I'm skeptical," said Lou Mleczko, president of Local 22 of the Detroit Newspaper Guild, which represents 350 newsroom employees at the papers. "This is a sea change. No one has done it on this scale in North America."<br />Mleczko said not all readers will be able to change their habits and read the paper online.<br />A Detroit Media Partnership spokeswoman, Michelle Bassett, said the Free Press was the 20th-largest daily in the country, with a circulation of 298,243; the number doubles on Sunday. The News, which does not publish on Sunday, had circulation of 178,280 at the end of September.<br />The Free Press is owned by Gannett and the News by MediaNews.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">************************************************************************************</p><p align="left">U.K.</p><p align="left"><strong>British doctor is convicted in attack on Glasgow airport</strong><br />By John F. Burns<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />LONDON: A terrorism trial centering on the use of a bomb-laden Jeep to crash into the main Glasgow airport terminal in June 2007 ended Tuesday with the conviction of a 29-year-old British doctor with family roots in Iraq who was one of the two men who mounted the attack.<br />A jury found the man, Bilal Abdulla, a passenger in the Jeep Cherokee, guilty of two charges of conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to cause explosions in a series of three bungled car bombings in Glasgow and London over a 24-hour period that caused widespread alarm in Britain. The judge in the case will sentence Abdulla on Wednesday. Both charges carry potential life sentences.<br />The driver of the jeep, Kafeel Ahmed, an Indian-born engineer who made the bombs, died of burns received in the Glasgow airport attack, which failed when the flaming gasoline did not ignite gas canisters in the back of the Jeep. Two Mercedes-Benz sedans, also laden with gas canisters designed to be ignited by blazing gasoline, failed to detonate in the West End theater district of London the previous night.<br />A third man, Mohammed Asha, 28, a Jordanian-born doctor who, like Abdulla, worked in the National Health Service, was acquitted of all charges. Asha had been accused of providing cash and advice to Abdulla, but his defense counsel said that he had been duped into cooperating with the two bombers and that it was Abdulla who had loaded incriminating documents indicating terrorist sympathies onto Asha's laptop computer.<br />The trial, at Woolwich Crown Court in London, was one of a series of sensational terrorism trials in the past two years that have combined to foster widespread public anxiety in Britain about the risk of a major terrorist attack.<br />Only one such attack, the quadruple suicide bombings on the London transit system in July 2005, succeeded, killing 56 people, including the 4 bombers. But the British intelligence agencies have repeatedly warned that the country remains at high risk of new attacks.<br />Abdulla contended in his trial that he and Ahmed, the driver of the Jeep that crashed at the Glasgow airport, had intended only to "scare" people and to draw attention to what Abdulla described as the outrages committed by the foreign troops in Iraq.<br />But prosecutors said the intention of the Glasgow and London attacks had been to kill hundreds of people and to cause chaos throughout Britain. Experts at the trial testified that the fuel-air bombs, though amateurishly constructed, had the capacity to cause widespread death.<br />A notable feature of the trial was that it did not directly involve Islamic militants with family ties or training in Pakistan, in the pattern of many of recent terrorist trials in Britain.<br />Prime Minister Gordon Brown said during a weekend visit to the Indian subcontinent that three-quarters of all terrorist plots investigated by the British intelligence and security agencies involved links to Pakistan, the ancestral homeland of about two-thirds of the Muslims in Britain.<br />The 2005 London transit bombings, as well as an alleged plot in 2006 to bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic airliners in midair with liquid bombs disguised in soft-drink bottles, involved extensive ties to Pakistan. The airliner bombing trial ended in September with a jury convicting three men of conspiring to commit mass murder through suicide bomb explosions, but failing to reach verdicts on charges that the men had conspired to attack aircraft.<br />A new trial on those charges will begin early in 2009.<br />In the case of the Glasgow and London attacks, the plot had its origins in Iraq. Abdulla, the man convicted Tuesday, was born in Britain as the son of an Iraqi physician who had migrated from Baghdad.<br />The prosecution said he had masterminded the attacks as a revenge for the role of British and American troops in the invasion and occupation, including the bombing onslaught on Baghdad in March 2003 that began the war, witnessed by Abdulla on a visit to his family in the Iraqi capital.<br />The prosecution said Abdulla had also been influenced by links to the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that began shortly after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In a tape recording played to the court, Abdulla was heard condemning coalition troops for what he described as their indiscriminate attacks on Iraqi civilians. "The soldiers killed the young and the old," he said. "They do not discriminate between men and women, so why should we?"</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left">*******************</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left"><strong>Capello tries to change the way the English think</strong><br />By Rob Hughes<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />LONDON: "When I arrived," Capello said. "I did not understand why the same players were successful in their clubs, but not with England. After one game, I understood the problem completely."<br />A lifetime ago, a young golfer was told by his father "Don't tell anybody how good you are, show them."<br />Arnold Palmer, you could say, became as good as his father Deacon's words. Throughout most of that period of sporting history, the England soccer players have tended to do the reverse. They have talked a better game than they played.<br />Perhaps that is changing. Precisely a year ago, after England failed to reach the Euro 2008 finals, the country hired a foreigner to change the ways of players who were fabulously rich celebrities going nowhere as a national team.<br />Fabio Capello, a proven winner as a coach in Italian and Spanish club soccer, could barely string together a sentence in English last December. However, like Palmer senior, he knows that the first maxim of sport is that action speaks louder than words.<br />"When I arrived," Capello told journalists at a lunch in London on Monday. "I did not understand why the same players were successful in their clubs, but not with England. After one game, I understood the problem completely.<br />"I realized that the problem was in the mind of the players. Now we are better."<br />Better is an understatement. England has run up four straight victories in qualifying games for the 2010 World Cup, including a sound beating of Croatia, the team that ended its European qualification last year.<br />Capello brought some old-fashioned disciplines. He told his players how to dress, how to behave around his team camp. He introduced a dietary regimen so strict that some players' wives and girlfriends smuggled snacks inside their men's travel bags.<br />They think the Italian "Mister" didn't know this? It reminds me of João Saldanha, the supposedly strict Brazilian coach of the late 1960s, laughing in the knowledge that curfews on wine, women and song were there to be broken, just so long as he, the coach, was not confronted with the evidence of the breaches.<br />Players, Saldanha would argue over the very drinks that were confiscated from their rooms, will dare to be men given half a chance. But a team needs an aura of common purpose and togetherness.<br />So maybe, 40 years on, Capello is working the same routine? Maybe he is playing the father-figure, slightly detached from players who, after all, are there to perform in the same sport he once successfully played, for Italy against England?<br />His observation seems to be that England needed a psychologist more than a coach. For one or two, perhaps, a psychiatrist would not go amiss. They were paper tigers, boasting about their lifestyles, but inwardly afraid of the expectation heaped upon them.<br />England, the mother nation of organized soccer, has only once, in 1966, won the World Cup. That was at Wembley Stadium, which has been dismantled and rebuilt. Capello observed that it is in this new arena, packed to its 90,000 capacity, that the crowd and the players seem to have grown disillusioned with one another.<br />Capello himself uses the word psychology. He says now that the greater part of his first year has not been separating the good players from the bad, but convincing the players that with work, with a group spirit, with confidence, they could be better than they think.<br />A psychologist in a track suit bearing the three lions, England's crest?<br />"Good psychologist, bad players," retorts Capello, "makes it impossible to win. It is important to change the mentality of the players, but we need to have good players to win."<br />Once that penny dropped, the victories flowed. England beat Andorra, Croatia, Kazakhstan and Belarus in World Cup qualifiers, and ended 2008 by outplaying Germany to win 2-1 in Berlin. However, Capello believes that the turning point came not in victory, but in a defeat against France, in Capello's second game as England's savior.<br />"We lost, but in the dressing room I said to the players that I was happy because they made a step forward." The players, he remembers, thought him crazy. "But I told them I am happy because we played against the World Cup runner-up, in Paris, and for half an hour we played well. If we can play well here for half an hour, we can play the whole game like that."<br />Capello's problem is time with the players, and continuity. He has no game until a friendly in Spain next February; his time working with the players is confined to a handful of days around each international match often months apart.<br />All Capello's triumphs so far have come through drumming his mentality into players he could work with every day at AC Milan, Juventus and Real Madrid.<br />At 62, this is as much a challenge to Capello's adaptability. The language, which he understood better than he let on, matters less than the personality.<br />He watches players in their clubs, and stores up memories of errors from watching video recordings of England games.<br />"We have to eliminate mistakes," he said. "We want to get better, but we need time."<br />He is clear, uncomplicated and, at times, ruthless. And he looks for fresh talent.<br />"I am very happy for players that play with Aston Villa," he says. "They are young and are performing." He singled out two players who have appeared for England - Gaby Agbonlahor and Ashley Young - and one who has not, James Milner.<br />"He is a very interesting young player. He scored two goals for the Under 21 team against the Republic of Ireland, and these Villa players impress me for the future."<br />They are all forwards, all quick, and capable of playing on the wings. Their rise threatens Michael Owen and David Beckham, the icons of the past.<br />Owen has yet to be selected by Capello, and Beckham's chances of gaining the 108th cap he needs to equal England's former captain Bobby Moore depend entirely on what progress he makes at AC Milan.<br />Beckham is due to start a three- month loan with Milan. It will surprise nobody that his first sessions come on tour, on a commercial break in Dubai starting Dec. 29.<br />"I will watch him if he plays for Milan," Capello said. "If he doesn't play, he will not be in the squad. I will decide after talking to the coaches - not on sympathy." David Beckham, like Arnold Palmer, will have to show them if he can still be good.</p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left"> </p><p align="left"> </p><p align="center"><em></em> </p><p align="left"> </p><p><em><br /></em></p><div align="left"><em></em> </div><div align="left"><em></em> </div><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS {that I can no longer post} COPYRIGHT IAN <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">WALTHEW</span> 2008 </strong></div><strong><div align="center"><br /></strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Auvergne</span><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Auvergnate</span><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Auvergnat</span><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Auvergnats</span><br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Montmartre</span>/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </a><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-88157029211294545172008-12-16T08:52:00.020+01:002008-12-16T11:42:06.419+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Monday, 15th December 2008<div align="justify"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong>CIA needs help from real world </strong></div><strong><div align="justify"><br /></strong></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">OPINION</div><div align="justify">By Art Brown<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />VIENNA, Virginia: This is the article I never intended to write. For former CIA officers, the tipping point between debate-generating critique and "if they had only listened to me" pontification is easy to cross, and I had hoped to avoid the latter by simply refraining from attempts at the former. So let's be clear, I am not claiming to have been prescient. It took more than three years outside the agency for me to truly understand its problems and to see a possible solution.<br />To start with the bottom line, the CIA's human spy business is not answering the hardest questions. How can I know this, three years out of touch with the secret stuff? The answer is simple: because Osama bin Laden is still the head of Al Qaeda. And no one has been held accountable for failing to catch him.<br />By the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, every serving CIA officer - indeed, every American - knew that the agency had one prime mission: "Get him!" But, after more than seven years and billions of dollars, we have failed. I recognize much has been done to damage Al Qaeda but, make no mistake, no amount of "rendition" of bin Laden lieutenants can mask our failure to bring to justice the man who ordered 9/11.<br />There are other failures too, less dramatic perhaps but of even greater consequence. The clandestine creep of nuclear know-how threatens to put the worst weapons into the worst hands. If North Korea or Iran, or Shangri-La for that matter, claims the right to develop a nuclear fist, our intelligence services should know every detail about that program. Yet we collectively fail over and over again when North Korea tests a missile or nuclear reactor construction in the eastern Syrian desert come as a surprise. If the CIA's human spy arm was operating as a private business, it would be running at a loss. Think Detroit, not 007.<br />Why? First, the agency is simply too insular. It does not sufficiently tap into the expertise that exists across the breadth of America. The human spy components of the CIA live in a cocoon of secrecy that breeds distrust of outsiders. This is one reason very few officers have BlackBerrys. Despite their reputation as plugged-in experts on other countries, many CIA officers do not even have Internet access at their desks. Worse yet, they don't think they need it.<br />Second, the CIA has a terrible problem with quality control. When I was still there, for example, CIA spies reported on several occasions that Al Qaeda had plans to attack American military bases overseas - in countries that a quick Web search would have shown had no such bases. Quantity outweighed quality as folks in the spy business focused not on accuracy or impact, but on increasing amounts of product.<br />And that brings us to perhaps the most numbing factor, the lack of performance accountability. In my years in the agency, I cannot recall a single case where anyone was fired for failing to perform. I cannot even remember anyone being demoted. There is no job-threatening penalty for mediocrity. Think of this on Jan. 20, when we're likely to see bin Laden sending an inauguration greeting to the new president.<br />So let me float a proposal borrowed from the business world. If you want to find answers to the hardest questions, why not reach broadly into the expertise of the country and assemble the best spy team possible?<br />On Shangri-La's nuclear ambitions, it would probably mean including a few engineers who build our own bombs. They could make sure you understand the missing parts of the puzzle and how those parts may be hidden. You'd also want successful entrepreneurs who know how to make deals in Shangri-La and can point you to others who deal there more often.<br />It goes further. Good freelance reporters know how to find sources. The expertise of academia could be balanced with a seasoned detective or tough prosecutor adept at turning a crook. The more military the topic, the more military folks you would want on its pursuit. The spy business simply isn't that difficult. It is creativity, judgment and the ability to reach a goal on time that are hard to teach.<br />The agency would not lure these outside experts with a career or give them ranks or titles. That only breeds the ladder-climbing trap that sees newly minted CIA managers, six months into their assignments, planning how they might climb that next rung. Rather, the agency could compile advisory teams of accomplished Americans for a fixed period of service and then let them return to their respective fields. Their incentive would be the chance to make a real difference, with maybe a decent payment at the end if the project is a success.<br />Yes, there are some obstacles here. Using "normal" citizens in a covert role could require giving them legal protections that may not exist right now. Getting consensus among policymakers and Congress, and isolating the hard questions from the headlines of the day, will be a difficult challenge. And, more insidiously, wounded institutional pride at the CIA could generate bureaucratic knife-fighting by employees who would rather see the quest fail than give credit to "amateur" operators. The safe bet is that none of this will ever happen.<br />But is it not worth trying? It would certainly be worth breaking some existing rules if we could really assemble a better spying apparatus from the best parts America has to offer. We couldn't do much worse.<br />Art Brown, a 25-year veteran of the CIA, was the head of the Asia division of the agency's clandestine service from 2003 to 2005.</div><strong></strong><p><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong></p><p></p><p></p><p><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>It's interesting how little play the Bush shoe throwing incident on Sunday was given in Monday's IHT. They just didn't get it. Yet by Tuesday the IHT has caught up. Blind leading the blind.</strong> </p><p><strong>And now we've gone through another Obama Cycle: Obama and Race, Obama and Hope, Obama and Change and now Obama and Questions. The honeymoon is over.<br /></strong><br /><strong>Today I exceeded my web storage capacity with Google. For about €14 I purchased 10 GB for one year's storage. I think I'll buy Google shares after all.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>They tell me in 24hrs I'll be able to upload more photos.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Photos that were not uploaded were:</strong><br /><br /></p><div align="center">AGRICULTURE, FOOD AND WATER</div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="left"><strong>The novel that predicted Portland<br /></strong>By Scott Timberg<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />BERKELEY, California: Sometimes a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That's the case with "Ecotopia," a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known.<br />The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.<br />White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called "recycle bins" sit on trains, along with "hanging ferns and small plants." A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.<br />" 'Ecotopia' became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture," said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. "You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don't know where the term came from."<br />In the '70s, the book, with a blurb from Ralph Nader, was a hit, selling 400,000 or so copies in the United States, and more worldwide. But by the raging '80s, the novel, along with the Whole Earth catalogue, seemed like a good candidate for a '70s time capsule — a dusty curio without much lasting impact.<br />Yet today, "Ecotopia" is increasingly assigned in college courses on the environment, sociology and urban planning, and its cult following has begun to reach an unlikely readership: Callenbach, who lives in Berkeley, California, and calls himself a "fringe, '60s person," has been finding himself invited to speak at many small religious colleges. This month, the book's publisher, Bantam, is reissuing it.<br />"For a while it seemed sort of antique to people," said Callenbach, a balding and eerily fit man of 79, sitting in his backyard, which he was converting into a preserve for native plants. "They said the book is 'very Berkeley' and all that. But now that you go out into America and young society, it apparently doesn't seem that weird to them at all."<br />When he began working on his novel, Callenbach was a middle-aged editor of science books at the University of California Press. His marriage was crumbling, and he despaired over what he saw as an endangered environment. He spent three years writing the book, sending each chapter to scientists to make sure the science held up. Then the real work began.<br />"It was rejected by every significant publisher in New York," Callenbach said. "Some said it didn't have enough sex and violence, or that they couldn't tell if it were a novel or a tract. Somebody said the ecology trend was over. This was New York, circa 1974. I was on the point of burning it."<br />But he cobbled together money from friends — "I think they wrote me checks out of pity for my poor, about-to-be-divorced state" — and printed 2,500 copies. The first printing sold, as did the next, and after an excerpt in Harper's Weekly, Bantam decided to publish "Ecotopia."<br />The author now calls it "a lucky little book."<br />But not a classic book, the kind taught along with Herman Melville in American literature classes. Set at what seems to be the turn of the 21st century, and told through the columns and diaries of a reporter from the fictional New York Times-Post, the novel is not especially literary. Its characters are flat; its prose — well, call it utilitarian. And the plot, in which the narrator drops his skepticism and settles into Ecotopian life, thanks in part to a love interest, lacks sophistication. And yet the book has managed to find its place in the here and now.<br />Alan Weisman, author of last year's acclaimed "The World Without Us," a nonfiction chronicle of the planet after the departure of the human race, said the book was ahead of its time. Environmental writing in the early '70s was not especially concerned with shortage and sustainability, he said. "A lot of it was about preserving beautiful areas and beautiful species."<br />In fact, like other important environmental books, the novel's impact may be lasting. Writing has a special place in the environmental movement — "a literature with measurable effects," wrote Bill McKibben, in the introduction to "American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau," a new anthology. John Muir's essays and books about the Sierra Nevada gave the country national parks, just as Bob Marshall's writings about forestry led to the Wilderness Act, which has protected millions of acres of federal land.<br />So what has "Ecotopia" given us?<br />A great deal, thinks Professor Slovic of the University of Nevada, including the bioregionalism movement, which considers each part of the country as having a distinct ecological character to be cultivated. The green movement's focus on local foods and products, and its emphasis on energy reduction also have roots in "Ecotopia," he said. In fact, much of Portland, Oregon, with its public transport, slow-growth planning and eat-local restaurants, can seem like Ecotopia made reality.<br />"People may look at it and say, 'These are familiar ideas,' " Professor Slovic said, "not even quite realizing that Callenbach launched much of our thinking about these things. We've absorbed it through osmosis."<br />Daniel Brayton, who teaches English and environmental literature at Middlebury College in Vermont, plans to teach "Ecotopia" in his utopian fiction class. He sees the book's genius as its "big-picture environmental thinking," successfully predicting the big issues of today. "Callenbach got that right," he said. "He's looking at the total physical health of the social body."<br />"Ecotopia" has its critics. Feminists attacked it for its ritual war games, in which men don spears to work off their "natural" aggression, dragging women into the woods to celebrate. ( Callenbach said he was influenced by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and her idea that the sexes express aggression differently.)<br />Some were made uncomfortable by the way black people were excluded from Ecotopian society: most live in Soul City, which is less affluent and green than the rest of Callenbach's world. The author said he was reflecting black nationalist ideas of the time, as well as an early '70s skepticism about integration. "I probably would write it quite differently at this point," he said.<br />Brayton of Middlebury sees "a deep conservatism to the book," where categories like race and gender are unalterable. "In academia we call that essentialism."<br />Over the years, Callenbach's readership has changed, as hippies and New Agers have been joined by churchgoers. The author often visits St. Mary's College of California, a Catholic school near Oakland. "Ecotopia" is required freshman reading at the Presbyterian-affiliated Muskingum College in rural Ohio. And it's part of the curriculum at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution.<br />Callenbach hopes the book will resonate among the greening edges of an evangelical movement. But the novel's relatively free sex and liberal politics may limit that readership. Susanna Hecht, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, sees it as a counterpoint to Thoreau's more austere "Walden."<br />" 'Walden' is very Protestant," she said. "This is pagan, with a Zen relationship to nature."<br />But to Callenbach and many of his fans, "Ecotopia" is a blueprint for the future.<br />"It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now," he said. "But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center."<br />"And we'd better get ready," he added. "We need to know where we'd like to go."</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">***************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div align="left"><strong>China through hopeful eyes<br /></strong>By Annie Osborn<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />BEIJING: I came to China expecting to find what the Western media has been harping on for ages: a stifling political climate, even more stifling pollution and indescribable poverty. But though I looked hard for proof of what I'd read, I finally had to conclude that Beijing is not that scary. Of course, China has human rights and pollution problems, but life here isn't just a series of catastrophes.<br />I am awed by Beijing's skyscrapers that hold their noses up too high to see the pickup-sticks mess of hutongs and razed areas that barely come up to their second levels.<br />Beijing is gray, but there is an eerily colorful combination of old-fashioned neon lights that start to glow as the day dies and the garish, outdated Olympic propaganda banners. On the sidewalks, a few elderly men and women wearing simple button-down Cultural Revolution jackets brush shoulders with clumps of teenagers with spiky blue hair, piercings and designer (or counterfeit) jeans. Vendors sell open-fire popcorn beneath colorful, curvy, glassy architecture.<br />All of this is part of a new Beijing, and to see it grow and change every day is exciting for me, not frightening.<br />My Chinese host family and I talk about sensitive issues (Tibet, Taiwan, the dairy scandal) at dinner in our 12th-floor apartment. The living room looks out over the western side of the city; my host parents' room is partitioned off from the living room. My Chinese sister's room is plastered all over with David Beckham posters. My bedroom is all white except for my bed, which has a big pink spread covered in pictures of the animé heroine "Princess Rose."<br />My house is nothing like the courtyard homes with no plumbing or heat in which some of my classmates live; nor is it one of the shoddy, teetering high-rises to which so many former courtyard-home dwellers have been relocated. It is neither the worst place to live in Beijing nor the best.<br />A few weeks after I moved in, I listened to my Chinese host family's description of the dairy scandal. When my Chinese mother described the scandal over noodles and stewed asparagus, she did not directly blame the government; rather, she said that the small farmers hadn't been paid enough by the companies buying their milk, and so they had tainted their products with melamine to make more money. "Everything else," she said, "came from that."<br />Recently, the economic crisis usurped the dairy scandal. The view is that this isn't America's fault or the government's fault; it's a misfortune that must be faced while going about life normally. In middle-class China, a layoff means it's time for a new job. A stock market crash means it's time to reinvest. Besides, recessions and depressions are part of life, and Chinese people have all seen worse. "What goes up must come down," my Chinese mother reminded me.<br />On a drive to Hebei province with my host family one day, the pollution rendered visibility so bad that traffic was stopped for hours, and the highway became a ghostly, never-ending parking lot. But what fascinated me wasn't the gauzy sky. On one side of the highway were ancient, forgotten graves crumbling among the tall, slender trees of a newly planted orchard.<br />Across the road, willows shook their seaweed tresses over a trickling, dirty river. Everyone got out of their cars and walked around, chatting with strangers or surreptitiously snapping pictures of the 6-foot-tall foreigner in their midst (me). There was more to see than unclean air.<br />Part of what makes me hopeful in China is that people make the best of situations. A dairy scandal with disastrous health repercussions is also an opportunity to rethink the way farmers work, or to reassess a family's diet so that it's not only safer but also healthier. A bulldozed historical district can become a new arts center. My Chinese family isn't passive or apathetic, but optimistic. Everything else comes from that.<br />Annie Osborn, a junior at Boston Latin School, is studying with School Year Abroad in Beijing.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">****************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>Egyptian girl dies of bird flu</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />CAIRO: A 16-year-old girl died of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu Monday, the 23rd fatality and 51st case of the disease among humans in Egypt, state news agency MENA said.<br />Samiha Salem from a village in the central Egyptian province of Asyut caught the disease after exposure to sick household poultry, MENA quoted a health ministry official as saying.<br />The official said Salem began suffering symptoms a week ago, after two of the household ducks died and the remainder of the flock was slaughtered in the house.<br />Salem was subsequently admitted to hospital with a high fever, vomiting and diarrhoea, and then transferred to intensive care. She was treated with the antiviral drug tamiflu, but suffered a pulmonary infection and respiratory failure, and died Monday.<br />Her death is the first bird flu fatality in Egypt since April, and the first of the current winter season. The virus, which first appeared in Egypt in February 2006, tends to be less active in summer.<br />About 5 million households in Egypt depend on poultry as a main source of food and income, and the government has said this makes it unlikely the disease can be eradicated despite a large-scale poultry vaccination program.<br />Experts fear the H5N1 virus might mutate or combine with the highly contagious seasonal influenza virus and spark a pandemic that could kill millions of people. Since the virus resurfaced in Asia in 2003, it has killed more than 200 people in a dozen countries, the World Health Organisation (WHO) says.<br />Egypt has been the worst-hit country outside Asia.<br />(Writing by Aziz El-Kaissouni; Editing by Louise Ireland)</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center">NATURE AND DEVELOPMENT</div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><div align="left"><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></div><div align="left"><strong>The Glaxo-Gates malaria vaccine<br /></strong>Monday, December 15, 2008<br />Researchers have been trying for more than 70 years to develop a vaccine against the elusive malaria parasite without notable success. Two studies conducted in East Africa suggest that they are finally closing in on their goal. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation deserves credit for enabling this research to go forward when the drug manufacturer was unwilling, on its own, to take the financial risk to try to develop a vaccine.<br />The new studies showed that the most advanced candidate vaccine, made by GlaxoSmithKline, cut illnesses in infants and young children by more than half and could safely be given with other childhood vaccines that are already routinely administered throughout Africa. The results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine, along with an editorial that called the vaccine's performance a "hopeful beginning" toward prevention of the disease.<br />There is no guarantee of success. The studies were carried out in areas with relatively low transmission of malaria; no one knows if the vaccine will work as well where malaria is more rampant. And the vaccine must still undergo much larger trials next year.<br />Even a vaccine that is partially effective could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. It would bolster the gains already being made by insecticide-treated bed nets that prevent mosquitoes from spreading the parasite and by malaria pills to treat sick patients.<br />That the candidate vaccine has gotten this far is a tribute to the power of charitable contributions to generate and sustain industrial interest. Glaxo had been funding development of a vaccine aimed at military personnel and travelers, but was unwilling to undertake pediatric studies without a financial partner. That's when the Gates Foundation came to the rescue. It has pumped in $107.6 million so far. Glaxo says it has spent about $300 million and expects to invest $50 million to $100 million more to complete the project. If all goes well, the vaccine could be submitted for regulatory approval in 2011.</div><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><div align="left"><strong>********************</strong></div><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><div align="left"><strong>Australia unveils targets to cut pollution</strong><br />By Meraiah Foley<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />SYDNEY, Australia: Australia announced plans Monday to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 5 to 15 percent by 2020, angering environmental groups that had lobbied for much deeper cuts.<br />In a policy statement, the government said the final target would depend on whether developed and developing nations, including major emitters like China and India, could agree to binding reductions under a new United Nations climate treaty next year.<br />If the world acts together to forge deep cuts, Australia will reduce its emissions by 15 percent of its 2000 levels over 10 years starting in 2010. If there is no agreement, Australia will cut emissions by 5 percent over the same period.<br />No matter what the short-term target is, the government said it was committed to reducing emissions by 60 percent from 2000 levels by 2050.<br />"There are many obstacles to achieving a strong international agreement by the end of the next negotiating round," the report said. "However, the least responsible path that Australia could take would be to do nothing while we wait to see how the rest of the world acts."<br />The announcement drew sharp criticism from nearly all of Australia's major environmental groups, which had been pushing for a short-term cut of at least 25 percent.<br />"This is a complete failure of a system," Christine Milne, a senator with the small Greens Party, told the national broadcaster. "Five percent is a global embarrassment; 15 percent is way below even the minimum the rest of the world wants to see," she said, pointing to the European Union's recent announcement that it would reduce emissions by at least 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2020.<br />Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who made signing the Kyoto Protocol on climate change his first act after sweeping to power last year on a platform of reducing Australia's emissions, said the targets were both responsible and appropriate to the times.<br />"They deliver necessary reform to tackle the long-term challenge of climate change, while supporting our economy and securing jobs during this global recession," Rudd told the National Press Club in the capital, Canberra, after his speech was interrupted by a pro-environment heckler who was led from the room by security staff members.<br />Without the targets announced Monday, Rudd said Australia's emissions would grow by about 20 percent over the two decades to 2020. Despite the criticism, the government has said the 5-to-15-percent target places Australia among the world's leaders on climate change.<br />Because of Australia's fast-growing population — mostly from immigration — the policy paper projected that even a 5 percent cut in emissions would represent a 27 percent reduction in Australia's per capita emissions from 2000 to 2020. By contrast, the European Union's minimum target would result in a reduction of 24 percent per person, the government said.<br />The targets announced Monday are part of a broader emissions trading program the government hopes to have in place by July 1, 2010. But Rudd must present his plans to Parliament, where his center-left Labor Party controls the House but not the Senate.<br />Spurred by business groups who say it would slow economic growth in already precarious times, the opposition Liberal Party and two independent senators have said they will push to delay carrying out the plan unless significant changes are made. More Articles in World »</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">*****************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div align="left"><strong>Philip Bowring: Australia: Bad times for 'lucky country'</strong><br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />SYDNEY: The "lucky country" has always been burdened by the "tyranny of distance." Thus it is taking time for the news to arrive that - for the time being - luck has run out.<br />Difficult times may lie ahead, something that is likely to frustrate Australia's ambition to become a global exemplar on climate change rather than the laggard it currently is, with one of the highest carbon emissions per capita in the world.<br />There is recognition here as elsewhere that stocks and the Australian dollar are down and unemployment and home foreclosures are rising, despite government efforts to boost the economy through infrastructure projects and drastic cuts in interest rates and taxes.<br />The workaholic Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, now in office for one year, is just the man to devise multiple initiatives to counter the global slump.<br />But what does not seem to have sunk in here is that, after a decade of favorable external circumstances, the shocks may go deeper than elsewhere in the developed world, let alone among the country's industrializing Asian neighbors. Rudd's initiatives may well fall on stony ground for the simple reason that Australia has had it too good for too long and that a decade of high economic performance has been due more to good luck than good management.<br />The impression given by media commentators here is that Australia will continue to do better than most of the Western world. The common view is that Asia in general and China in particular will ensure that the dip in demand for Australia's raw materials will be short-lived.<br />The government's very low debt levels give it plenty of leeway to run big deficits to offset falls in exports and investment. Its central bank is highly regarded, and though Australian banks have plenty of local bad debt, they have generally avoided the worst of the financial contagion in the West. Debt accumulation here partly reflects strong investment, not just consumption.<br />All this is true enough, but there is a darker story. Australian household debt relative to the size of the economy is among the highest in the world thanks mainly to a decade of rising property prices. This would not matter too much, given the low level of government debt, if Australians owed the money to one another, as is the case with Japan. But on a per capita basis Australia has quietly become the most heavily indebted major country in the developed world. Net foreign debt now amounts to $650 billion Australian dollars. Some of this is in Australian currency, whose high yield long made it attractive to Asian investors. But half is in foreign currency, so the farther the Australian dollar depreciates - and it is down 30 percent in the past four months - the bigger the burden on local borrowers and financial institutions.<br />This debt has mostly been accumulated over a decade in which Australia enjoyed an almost unprecedented, 40 percent leap in trade - the relative prices of imports and exports. This was due first to a decline in manufactured imports prices from China and elsewhere in Asia after 1998, and over the past five years to the rise in commodity prices, which peaked in mid-2008. Despite this windfall, Australia has been running an annual current account deficit of 4 to 5 percent of GDP - bigger than that of the United States.<br />The outlook now is for a commodity price downturn that could last five years, if past cycles are a judge. Meanwhile, Australia must pay more for manufactured goods from Asia, where currencies have been appreciating.<br />The true horror of Australia's external deficit will become clearer when prices of iron ore, coal and other raw materials negotiated during the boom fall closer to current spot levels, and when tighter global money exposes the cost of servicing foreign liabilities - currently about 4 percent of GDP.<br />Indeed, although its currency has fallen sharply, Australia can count itself lucky that it has not had the panicky flight seen in South Korea, a country with fewer debts and vastly greater foreign exchange reserves. In the future, Australia may have to decide whether to accept a lower standard of living, or sell more of its mines and farms to China.<br />For sure, the downturn in commodity prices may be short-lived. China's demand for materials may offset increases in supply. The terms of trade may not fall as fast as they rose. But be sure that it is these external factors, not Rudd's initiatives, that will drive the economy in the medium term.<br />Meanwhile expect a less confident Australia, dependent on coal for exports and power generation, to lag Europe and the United States in emission reductions.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">*****************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><div align="left"><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div align="left"><strong>Upstaging Obama on climate change<br /></strong>By Paul Taylor</div><div align="left">Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: He wasn't present and he isn't even in office yet, but Barack Obama was the elephant in the room at the European Union summit meeting last week on economic recovery and climate change.<br />The 27 EU leaders knew they needed strong agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and give their recession-hit economies a big fiscal stimulus to make themselves credible partners for the U.S. president-elect.<br />Europe's green deal had to be bigger, bolder and more ambitious to avoid being dwarfed when Obama announces his own clean energy program at his inauguration next month.<br />After the EU agreed on rules to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent by 2020, draw 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources and reduce energy consumption by 20 percent, the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, adapted Obama's campaign slogan to drive home the point.<br />"Our message to our global partners is 'yes, you can,"' he declared. "Yes, you can do what we are doing." He said the EU was asking Obama "to join Europe and with us lead the world."<br />President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, at the end of an energetic six-month presidency of the EU, proclaimed: "No other continent in the world is setting itself such binding limits as the measures we have just adopted."<br />Behind their hubris lay worries that the charismatic new U.S. president could grab the mantle of green leadership from Europe, even though the goal he has outlined so far is more modest: to stabilize U.S. carbon emissions by 2020.<br />"The risk is that the Europeans could be upstaged by Obama acting more radically than Europe," said Antonio Missiroli of the European Policy Center, a research firm.<br />There is also the perennial fear that Europe may not figure very high on Obama's radar screen and that he may care more about relations with emerging Asian economic powerhouses than with the EU.<br />"For Obama's agenda, Europe is neither very relevant nor an obstruction," Missiroli. "It doesn't tip the balance."<br />Sarkozy warned that Europe would look ridiculous if it abandoned its green ambitions just when the United States had elected a president who had made climate change a priority.<br />Officials in Brussels are talking enthusiastically of linking the European emissions-trading project with a future U.S. system to help create a global carbon market.<br />They may be in for a cold shower, given the likely resistance in the U.S. Congress to any binding cuts in carbon emissions.<br />Indeed, EU and U.S. officials are pessimistic about the chances of an international agreement in December 2009, when the United Nations will organize talks on a climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which Washington never ratified.<br />Some European leaders argued that the EU must take the lead precisely because of the problems Obama would face at home.<br />"An EU agreement will support President Obama, who will have great difficulty getting an agreement on a system of emissions trading," Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told her fellow leaders, according to an official record.<br />On the economy, too, Barroso argued that Europe and the United States should coordinate their recovery programs.<br />Yet the main European powers remain divided on the response to the recession, despite agreeing on paper to a program calling for a stimulus of about 1.5 percentage points of gross domestic product.<br />Obama has indicated that he is considering a far bigger fiscal jolt to the economy, given the scale of the U.S. recession.<br />The German finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, has branded Britain's sweeping cut in sales tax "crass Keynesianism," and all EU countries have rejected any across-the-board cut in the value-added tax.<br />On both climate change and the economy, Europe hopes to find a more cooperative partner in Obama, but perhaps with a degree of self-delusion about his interest in European solutions.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">***************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>Zimbabwe accuses Botswana of training insurgents</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />By MacDonald Dzirutwe<br />Zimbabwe has accused Botswana of training opposition insurgents to oust President Robert Mugabe, state media said on Monday, increasing tensions between the neighbours and adding to doubts over a power-sharing deal.<br />The United Nations said the death toll had risen to nearly 1,000 from a cholera epidemic that has put Zimbabwe under new pressure from Western countries.<br />Botswana's President Ian Khama is one of few African leaders to publicly criticise Mugabe. He has called for new elections after Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai reached deadlock over posts in a shared administration.<br />Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told the official Herald newspaper the government had evidence Botswana was giving military training to members of Tsvangirai's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) as part of a plot to remove Mugabe.<br />Botswana's foreign ministry said in a statement that Zimbabwe had failed to produce any tangible facts to support the allegations. Zimbabwe's opposition dismissed the accusations.<br />The justice minister said: "Botswana has availed its territory, material and logistical support to MDC-T for the recruitment and military training of youths for the eventual destabilisation of the country with a view of effecting illegal regime change.<br />"We now have evidence that while they (MDC) were talking peace they have been preparing for war and insurgency, as well as soliciting the West to invade our country on the pretext of things like cholera."<br />A cholera epidemic and Zimbabwe's economic meltdown have drawn new calls from Mugabe's Western foes for the resignation of the 84-year-old leader, who has ruled since independence in 1980.<br />In Geneva, the United Nations said on Monday the death toll from cholera had risen to 978. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the number of suspected cases stood at 18,413.<br />Prospects for rescuing Zimbabwe appear slim while Mugabe and Tsvangirai remain deadlocked over their September 15 power-sharing deal.<br />NEW ELECTION?<br />State media said at the weekend that Zimbabwe might be forced to hold a new election if a constitutional bill to set up the new government failed to get through parliament, where Mugabe's ZANU-PF party lost its majority in March.<br />The MDC said it was ready to take part in any new election, but only if held under international supervision. Tsvangirai beat Mugabe in the first round of a presidential vote but withdrew from a run-off, citing attacks on his supporters.<br />Opposition spokesman Nelson Chamisa dismissed Chinamasa's charges that the MDC was preparing an insurgency, saying Mugabe was trying to distract attention from growing foreign pressure and looking for an excuse to crack down on the opposition.<br />"How do you overthrow a non existing government?" Chamisa said. "They are setting the stage for an unprecedented onslaught on the opposition. Each time ZANU-PF is cornered they come up with all sorts of concoctions and fabrications."<br />Mugabe's government says the cholera outbreak is a calculated attack by former colonial ruler Britain and the United States, describing it as "biological warfare" to create an excuse to mobilise military action against Zimbabwe.<br />Chinamasa said the evidence against Botswana was now being handled by the Southern African Development Community regional group, which has been trying to push Mugabe and Tsvangirai to implement their September 15 power-sharing deal.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center">ENERGY</div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>Oil producers could face prolonged buyers' market<br /></strong>By Jad Mouawad<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />NEW YORK: With the economy in the throes of a global recession, oil producers are facing the toughest business environment in 25 years.<br />Oil demand is set to decline this year and next, the first drop since the energy shocks of the early 1980s. As economic growth slows down sharply, oil prices have collapsed from their summer peaks in record time.<br />The stunning speed of the downturn has fast become a nightmare for producers, who face shrinking revenue next year. Oil has lost 70 percent of its value, or $100 a barrel, since July and many analysts forecast further declines as the global economy worsens.<br />The OPEC cartel is meeting Wednesday in the coastal city of Oran, Algeria, to try to stem the drop in prices. Chakib Khelil, OPEC's president and the Algerian oil minister, suggested last week that producers would make "a severe production cut to stabilize the oil market."<br />Many analysts expect the cartel, which accounts for about 40 percent of the world's oil exports, to cut production by about 1.5 million barrels a day.<br />The problem is that OPEC's actions so far have had little effect on the market. Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries have already met three times since September, and agreed to trim their output by two million barrels a day, to no avail. Since the last time OPEC promised to cut production, the price of oil has dropped by 30 percent.<br />With demand falling rapidly, there are few reasons to expect the drop in prices to slow down. Oil futures in New York closed at $46.28 a barrel on Friday, after touching a low of $40 a barrel earlier this month. That is down from a peak above $147 a barrel in July.<br />With stagnating growth next year, global consumption could fall by 1.3 million barrels a day, or 1.5 percent, in 2009, according to Deutsche Bank. Many analysts now expect oil prices to reach $30 a barrel next year if the slowdown spreads to China, which is increasingly likely.<br />"With demand uncertain, the ball remains in OPEC's court," analysts at Raymond James, a brokerage firm, wrote in a market commentary last week. "Short of dramatic action by the group, crude has few near-term catalysts."<br />The OPEC meeting in Algeria will also feature a proposal by Russia, which is not a member, to reduce its own output along with OPEC.<br />Russian officials have been cozying up to the oil cartel in recent months as the drop in prices stings the country's petroleum-dependent economy. Last week, President Dmitri Medvedev signaled that Russia wanted closer cooperation with OPEC, and did not rule out joining the group.<br />But Russia's proposal is unlikely to weigh much on the market. Some analysts see the move as window dressing for the fact that Russian production will drop this year because of the government's restrictive policies, insufficient investments and hefty export taxes.<br />Part of the problem for OPEC is that producers simply cannot reduce their production fast enough to match the drop in consumption.<br />OPEC has found it much easier to keep discipline within its ranks when prices rise than when they fall. To prevent their revenues from falling too quickly, some producers have failed to trim their production as much as they promised.<br />Estimates of how much OPEC is currently pumping vary, as the cartel does not supply production numbers. Petrologistics, a consulting firm that tracks the movement of oil tankers, estimates that producers have reduced their output by about a million barrels a day in November.<br />Platts, an authoritative energy publication, estimated that OPEC's overall output dropped by 880,000 barrels a day in November, following the cartel's last agreement to curb production. That is still 852,000 barrels a day above the group's latest quota.<br />There is also some uncertainty about the level of Saudi production.<br />The cartel's top producer reduced its output by 500,000 barrels a day, bringing down its daily production to 8.9 million barrels a day, from 9.4 million barrels a day in October, according to the survey by Platts. That would mean the kingdom is pumping 400,000 barrels a day more than its official quota of 8.477 million barrels a day.<br />Uncertainty and a lack of proper data led the producers to defer a decision to cut production when they met in Cairo on Nov. 29. It takes about four to six weeks for any decision by OPEC to translate into lower imports for consumers.<br />But while the market doubts the determination of producers, the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, indicated last week that the kingdom was pumping 8.5 million barrels a day in November, a drop of 1.2 million barrels a day from its August peak production level. The announcement helped oil prices rebound last week.<br />Most OPEC members want to see prices rise from their current levels.<br />According to the Middle East Economic Survey, most producers have drawn budgets for 2009 that assume oil prices will be above $50 a barrel. Even Saudi Arabia has recently pointed out that it considered $75 a barrel to be a "fair price."<br />Members of the cartel know they cannot get to such prices anytime soon. The best the group can do is set the stage for a recovery in prices when the global economy eventually improves.<br />"There is going to be a lot of pressure on the OPEC ministers to defend prices," said Geoff Porter, an analyst at the Eurasia Group in New York. "OPEC has to strike the balance between an aggressive cut which will slow down the price fall, but it can't be so aggressive that it erodes their credibility if the members do not comply. They can't push too hard and have their members not respond."</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">*****************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>Obama hears cheers for energy team</strong><br />By Brian Knowlton<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />President-elect Barack Obama was planning Monday to name an energy and environmental team that advocacy groups praised as showing seriousness about conservation and global warming. But the economic crisis will make the changes Obama has promised more painful to pursue, and falling oil prices have lessened the sense of urgency.<br />On a busy day at the Chicago hotel that has become Obama's transition office, he also met in the morning with his top national security advisers to talk about Iraq and Afghanistan.<br />The energy and environmental team Obama was expected to announce has been warmly received by environmentalists and others.<br />It reportedly includes Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, for energy secretary; Lisa Jackson, a New Jersey environmental official, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency; Carol Browner, a former EPA head, as the top White House official on energy and the environment; and Nancy Sutley, a Los Angeles environmental official, to direct the White House Council on Environmental Quality.<br />Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, praised the choices, saying in a statement: "Mr. Obama is putting words into action that he will move toward clean-energy solutions, take on global warming and jump-start the economy. These are individuals who will restore scientific integrity to the federal government, protect public health and defend our country's natural resources."<br />Last week, after a meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, Obama called the fight against global warming "a matter of urgency and national security."<br />He has vowed to push the matter aggressively, urging consumers and employers to use less energy and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, while providing subsidies for the development of alternative energy sources.<br />But that will not be easy. Imposing a so-called carbon tax on companies - penalizing the worst polluters to reward the energy-efficient - will be particularly painful, adding to the cost of business for many companies already hard-hit by recession.<br />At the same time, the dramatic drop in oil and gasoline prices - pump prices are less than half what they were as recently as July - has lessened the sense of urgency for environmental change that was felt just months ago.<br />But a trend toward the increased use of mass transit has continued. And in Washington during the week surrounding Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20, transit will be tested as it rarely has been.<br />With projections that anywhere from two million to four million people will descend on the city for the inauguration of the country's first black president, transit officials said the area's roadways and transit systems will stretched, The Washington Post reported.<br />With waits for the subway system predicted to be hours-long - conceivably as long as eight hours immediately after the inaugural ceremony, when many roads will be blocked off - residents are being urged to stay home, if possible, or walk.<br />In a gesture seemingly meant to show confidence in mass transit while creating an image with historic resonance, Obama plans to arrive in the city on Jan. 17 by train. He and his family will board the train in Philadelphia, pick up Vice President-elect Joe Biden and his family in Wilmington, Delaware, then stop in Baltimore before ending the trip in Washington that evening.<br />"As part of the most open and accessible inauguration in history, we hope to include as many Americans as possible who wish to participate, but can't be in Washington," said Emmett Beliveau, the head of the inaugural committee. "These events will allow us to do that while honoring the rich history and tradition of previous inaugural journeys."<br />Across the country Monday, presidential electors gathered in state capitals to cast their votes in a largely ceremonial but constitutionally required procedure that formalizes a newly elected president's victory.<br />Barring the unexpected, Obama should receive 365 electoral votes to John McCain's 173 - not a blowout like the 500-plus votes received by Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, Richard Nixon in 1972 or Ronald Reagan in 1984, but also nothing like the 271 electoral votes George W. Bush received in 2000, one more than needed for election. The Obama numbers assume there will be no "faithless electors" - those who, as occasionally happens, decline to follow the will of the voters in their states</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">****************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>Driven out by mud in Indonesia<br /></strong>By Seth Mydans<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />RENOKENONGO, Indonesia: Her children insist, so every week or two Lilik Kamina takes them back to their abandoned village to look at the mud.<br />"Hey, Mom, there's our house, there's the mango tree," she said they shout. But there is nothing to see, only an ocean of mud that has buried this village and a dozen more over the past two and a half years.<br />The mud erupted here during exploratory drilling for natural gas, and it has grown to be one of the largest mud volcanoes ever to have affected a populated area.<br />Unlike other disasters that torment Indonesia - earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis - this one continues with no end in sight, and experts say the flow could continue for many years or decades.<br />The steaming mud keeps bubbling up from under ground, spreading across the countryside, driving people from their homes, burying fields and factories and forcing the relocation of roads, bridges, a railroad line and a major gas pipeline.<br />As the earth disgorges the mud and the lake grows, the land is sinking by as much as 13 meters, or 42 feet, a year and could subside to depths of more than 140 meters just one hour's drive from Indonesia's second largest city, Surabaya, according to Richard Davies, a geologist at Durham University in Britain who specializes in mud volcanoes.<br />Siti Maimunah, an environmental advocate, said people who live nearby have begun getting sick, with about 46,000 visiting clinics with respiratory problems since the mud eruption.<br />Siti, who is national coordinator for the Mining Advocacy Network of Indonesia, said the gas that emerges with the mud is toxic and possibly carcinogenic. "We worry that in the next 5 to 10 years people will face a second disaster with health problems," she said.<br />Various attempts to stem the flow have failed over the years. These have included a scheme to drop hundreds of giant concrete balls into the mouth of the eruption; they simply disappeared without effect. A project to divert some of the mud into the nearby Porong River has raised fears that the buildup of silt on the riverbed could cause severe flooding, possibly in Surabaya itself.<br />The continuing disaster has become an embarrassment to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who faces a new election next year, with groups of displaced people demonstrating in the distant capital, Jakarta.<br />Lapindo Brantas, the energy company that was doing the drilling, is indirectly owned by the family of one of Indonesia's richest and most influential men, Aburizal Bakrie, who is a major financial backer of Yudhoyono and serves in his cabinet as coordinating minister for the people's welfare.<br />The victims say compensation has been slow, with only a portion of promised funds delivered to them. Some 60,000 people have fled their homes and many, like Lilik, now live in nearby shelters and in a marketplace as refugees.<br />This is a particularly forlorn class of displaced people who mostly fend for themselves because, as victims of what is being called a man-made disaster, they receive little assistance from the government or from international aid agencies.<br />"So we live without hope," said Ali Mursjid, 25, who was in college studying to be a teacher before the mud volcano made him a pauper. "Nobody is willing to help us."<br />His village, Besuki, was only partly buried in mud, and it is a ghost town of empty houses and hard, cracked mud where children fly kites and shout to hear their voices echo.<br />This was a prosperous middle-class village, Mursjid said, where families like his hired laborers to work their fields. Now, he said, he and other residents had been reduced to begging.<br />"I felt so humiliated and embarrassed," Mursjid said. "But I had to beg because none of us had any food to eat. We took turns begging and shared the money."<br />The steaming mud erupted from the ground on May 29, 2006, as Lapindo, the energy company, was drilling near the industrial district of Sidoarjo. Its tunnel pierced a pressurized aquifer some 3,000 meters underground.<br />Experts on mud volcanoes say it was the drilling and inadequate safeguards in the bore hole that triggered the eruption of water, gas and mud that continues to flow, at about 100,000 cubic meters, or 3.5 million cubic feet, a day.<br />Lapindo insists that it was itself a victim, blaming vibrations from a major earthquake that struck two days earlier with an epicenter 300 kilometers, or 190 miles, away.<br />After listening to new evidence about the eruption, a conference in October of 74 petroleum geologists in Cape Town concluded that the drilling was the cause.<br />"There is no question, the pressures in the well went way beyond what it could tolerate - and it triggered the mud volcano," said Susila Lusiaga, a drilling engineer who was part of the Indonesian investigation team, according to a report on the conference by Durham University.<br />The debate over responsibility has severely limited the payments, said Elfian Effendi, executive director of Greenomics Indonesia, an environmental advocacy group.<br />After paying out 20 percent of a promised compensation package, Lapindo agreed this month to begin monthly payments equal to $2,500 to 8,000 families it said were eligible. But as part of the Bakrie holdings, Lapindo has been severely affected by the current economic downturn, and some experts question whether the full amount will ever be paid.<br />Since the first eruption in May 2006, there have been more than 90 others, most of them small but some explosive, said Jim Schiller, a political scientist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who has published a study of the disaster.<br />He described what he called the horror-movie progress of the mud, which continues to burst from the ground at unexpected times and places. "I've got pictures of them popping up in people's living rooms," he said.<br />The village of Renokenongo was buried during the biggest of these eruptions, in November 2007, when the weight of sinking earth burst a major natural-gas pipeline, killing 13 workers and sending a fireball into the sky.<br />"It was so big and so tall that I couldn't believe it was just fire," said Sukono, 40, who owned land and livestock and rented out farm machinery but now is jobless. "I thought it was the end of the world. It was so bright I thought the sun was rising in the west."<br />In the year since then, said Sukono, who has only one name, he and his family had struggled to accept the obliteration of their home and village. Their past is buried in the mud, and their future seems empty.<br />"My sons are traumatized," he said. "They say, 'Can't we live like we used to, like normal people?' My older boy asks, 'If things keep on like this, what will happen to my dreams?'<br />"I answer that I am optimistic," he said. "As a parent I have to be optimistic. I tell him I will help him achieve his dreams. But for me, I don't know."<br />Lilik, 30, who teaches kindergarten, said the visits to the levee by her former village calm her children, Icha Noviyanti, 11, and Fiqhi Izzudin, 5.<br />"People say its not a good idea to take the children there, but I think the opposite," she said. "I think it's very important for them to see their home and express their anger. They throw rocks at the mud and shout, 'Lapindo!"'</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">*****************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>After its big cuts, Detroit makes lots of small ones</strong><br />By Bill Vlasic<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />DETROIT: The threat of bankruptcy is evident every night at General Motors headquarters, when the lights are turned out early and the escalators and nearly all the elevators are shut down to save money.<br />Even though GM is rapidly running out of cash, the company's top sales executive recently asked that elevators to his 39th-floor offices keep running so his staff could keep working.<br />"This cost-cutting has touched every aspect of the company," said Mark LaNeve, head of GM's North American sales and marketing. "But my people are working until 8 p.m. and need the elevators to stay on."<br />As GM and Chrysler await word from the White House about emergency financial assistance, the two troubled automakers are cutting costs furiously to stretch what is left of their cash reserves.<br />Both companies, as well as the Ford Motor Company, have already eliminated tens of thousands of jobs and reduced overhead costs by billions of dollars in the last few years.<br />But as sales continue to plummet because of the weakening economy and the credit crisis, they are scrutinizing every budget line for potential savings.<br />Chrysler has closed cafeterias in some of its plants, as well as the executive dining room at headquarters. GM is stocking office supply cabinets with cheaper pencils, turning down the heat in plants, and trimming back its inventory of replacement parts for factory equipment.<br />"It's like an individual who has lost his job," said Ron Harbour, a manufacturing consultant who for years has advised Detroit's Big Three on how to streamline their plant operations. "If you absolutely don't need it, it's getting cut."<br />Even the industry's usually fancy coming-out party for new models — the annual North American International Auto Show in Detroit next month — will be a no-frills affair.<br />Last year, Chrysler's show-stealing stunt was a cattle drive through city streets to garner publicity for its new pickup truck.<br />There will be no theatrics this year, and Chrysler has even canceled its tradition of offering free food and drinks to hordes of executives and journalists in a Detroit firehouse near the auto show.<br />"We're going to have to tell them, 'Sorry guys, you're going to have to buy your own drinks and dinner,' " said Chrysler's vice chairman, Thomas LaSorda.<br />Time is running short for GM and Chrysler. Last week, their desperate bid for $14 billion in federal loans died in the Senate.<br />President George W. Bush has indicated that help could be forthcoming from the $700 billion financial rescue fund, and executives of both companies were in discussions over the weekend with White House officials on a bailout plan, according to several people with knowledge of the talks.<br />A White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said Sunday that any action on the auto bailout would have to wait until the president returns from a trip to Iraq.<br />Both GM and Chrysler have said they will run out of cash by the end of the year. Without federal aid, the companies are in danger of not paying suppliers for parts already delivered, which could start a wave of failures in the nation's vast network of parts manufacturers.<br />Both companies have said that filing for bankruptcy is a last resort and that they will continue to cut costs at every opportunity.<br />Last month, an additional 5,000 white-collar jobs were eliminated through buyouts at Chrysler, bringing to 32,000 the number of jobs cut at the company in the last three years.<br />"We must eliminate every unnecessary cost in every aspect of our business," Chrysler's chairman, Robert Nardelli, told employees by e-mail on Friday. "While a bridge loan is critical to manage through this financial crisis, we must continue to manage the factors under our control."<br />GM said Friday that it would idle 20 of its North American factories in the first quarter to reduce vehicle production drastically.<br />But companies are also making scores of cost cuts behind the scenes.<br />At GM, that means stocking offices with regular pencils instead of mechanical ones, holding dealer meetings on the phone rather than in person, and canceling sponsorships of charity golf tournaments and high-profile events like the Academy Awards.<br />LaNeve said his staff had shrunk in the last decade from 7,000 employees to 1,300, including a 25 percent reduction in the past year.<br />"It fries me to hear people say we aren't getting lean," he said. "I tell you, my people are working like dogs."<br />GM and Chrysler have slowed down or suspended work on a number of new vehicle programs and sliced their capital budgets.<br />LaSorda said that Chrysler had cut $2.4 billion in fixed costs this year, bringing such spending to $11.6 billion a year. "Next year, we'll be in the $10 billion range," he said.<br />Some of the cutbacks are sizable, like the planned shutdown on Dec. 31 of its underused SUV factory in Newark, Delaware Others are incremental, like not removing snow from the top floor of the parking deck at Chrysler headquarters, or substituting lunch wagons for cafeterias at assembly plants.<br />"Closing the cafeteria down in a plant can save $250,000 a year," he said. He said that with fewer employees, Chrysler does not need the spaces on the top floor of its parking garage.<br />During Congressional hearings on a proposed Detroit bailout, several lawmakers criticized the Big Three for not addressing their cost problems for decades.<br />All told, GM, Ford and Chrysler have cut more than 150,000 jobs in the United States since 2006. Still, the companies have stepped up their efforts this year because of the sharp decline in revenue amid a 16 percent decline in industry sales.<br />The head of Ford's Americas division, Mark Fields, holds a weekly meeting with senior executives to review every expense request of $10,000 or more.<br />"We look at things we never used to," Fields said.<br />One example he cited was eliminating daily cleanup crews for offices at Ford's headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan "Is it really important that we walk in our offices and there aren't fingerprint marks on the desk?" he said. "Now we clean them once a week."<br />Ford is not asking for immediate government assistance because it has a line of credit with private lenders it can tap into for some time.<br />But at GM and Chrysler, the cash cushion is virtually gone. GM has probably fallen perilously close to the $10 billion it needs to have on hand to pay its suppliers and make payrolls and interest payments.<br />To extend its cash — even by a few more days — the company is reducing its inventories of parts like axles, fenders and steering gears to bare minimums.<br />It has also begun a program called "share the spare," in which a group of nearby factories stock a single replacement part for production machines like conveyor belts.<br />By idling 20 of its factories in the first quarter, GM will also save on heating bills, maintenance crews and waste disposal.<br />Two days before Christmas, the entire company will begin its regular two-week holiday shutdown for all of its plants, offices and parts depots.<br />Some of the plants have scheduled downtime after the holidays as well. And if a bailout is not forthcoming from Washington, the lights might not come back on for some time, if it all.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">******************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><div align="left"><strong>Toyota delays opening of U.S. Prius plant</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />The Toyota Motor Corporation is delaying the start of production at its plant in Blue Springs, Mississippi, indefinitely as it copes with the downturn in the auto industry.<br />The plant was scheduled to begin production in 2010 and make the Prius hybrid.<br />Mike Goss, a spokesman for Toyota's United States arm, said Monday that the plant's construction was about 90 percent complete and that Toyota would finish the building. Installation of the factory's equipment and machinery, however, is being postponed indefinitely.<br />About 100 people hired to oversee construction and install human resources plans at the plant will not lose their jobs but will be assigned other duties, Goss said.<br />Although Toyota's sales in the United States have held up better than those of its Detroit-based counterparts, sales have declined steeply throughout the industry, which Goss said forced Toyota to delay the plant's opening.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="center">FRANCE</div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="left"><strong>On latest from Sarkozy, an editorial grain of salt</strong><br />By John Vinocur<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />PARIS: If you live in Europe and your president, or people speaking in his name, are talking up preparation "without delay" of an unprecedented European Union-Russia economic and security zone, would you think that might wind up big news in the local papers?<br />Or if, in the same breath, that presidential voice says it has won the battle for European leadership over Angela Merkel of Germany and, to boot, has made confidential military cooperation agreements with Britain that include nuclear weapons?<br />Funny thing how those assertions were presented to readers in France as nothing especially remarkable.<br />It's not that there's anything wrong with the alertness of editors here. Rather, the discretion (Page 10 or Page 6 placement concerning the clippings I'm looking at now) reflects the caution these days that meets much of what Nicolas Sarkozy says about the world.<br />The circumstances last week involved Sarkozy or whoever was authorized to speak for him (psst, you can bet the farm and the shack at the shore it was Sarko) attempting to recast him as a second-term Master of the Universe in 2009, regardless of his exit Dec. 31 from the EU presidency. Top-notch reporters from publications like Le Figaro and Le Monde were asked in to listen.<br />The result, from a collage of the newspapers' accounts, was another burst of the kind of language that makes the French president's critics say he is vain and erratic, bordering on the irresponsible; or his advocates seek to define him as dynamic, constantly inventive, and the only politician saving Europe from what Sarkozy calls "deathly boredom."<br />This time out, even through the light journalistic fog of imprecise attribution (akin to "the White House thinks" or "Downing Street believes"), Sarkozy outdid himself.<br />He proposed setting up, immediately, "a common economic space" between the EU and Russia that, protected by its own "security space," including Ukraine and Turkey, would effectively keep Turkey out of EU membership.<br />Don't mind the Russians, the presidential voice urged. And perhaps finding something reassuring in the falling value of the ruble and the Kremlin's dramatically diminished energy revenues, said, "a country suffering from so many serious problems could not throw itself at territorial conquests."<br />The contradictions were extraordinary. Only the week before, in Helsinki, Western countries meeting with Russian leaders effectively vetoed a plan, promoted by Sarkozy with Moscow's support, to hold a summit meeting in Paris in June on a "new security architecture for Europe." It had been widely dismissed as a plan to water down NATO.<br />Last Tuesday, Sarkozy's new line, accepting Russian opposition to Ukraine's possible entry into NATO, was, "If the Warsaw Pact existed and was installing missiles in Belgium, don't you think we'd support the pro-French part of Belgium?"<br />What missiles? None are planned for Ukraine. And, for that matter, what EU-Russian economic and security space?<br />A diplomat in Brussels, who tracks such concerns, said he never heard of it and, if past performance was a guide, tended to regard the proposal as another case of "throwing spaghetti against a wall and seeing if any sticks."<br />As for Merkel, Le Monde's version of the briefing said, "The Élysée considers that Mr. Sarkozy won the battle for leadership of Europe over Merkel. Abandoning the idea of a directorate of big countries, Mr. Sarkozy believes he brought over Greece, Portugal, the Netherlands, as well as Spain and Belgium, to his side, and in the process, reversed the balance of power."<br />Voilà. France 5, Germany 0. A perfect way to reassure the Germans on Sarkozy's calculability! Not to mention guaranteeing himself Eastern Europe's support for his 2009 game plan as antagonist to the Czech Republic's pro-American instincts when it assumes the EU presidency on Jan. 1.<br />The danger doesn't come from Russian arms, Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech foreign minister, said last week in remarks that could have been aimed at Sarkozy. "The danger is that the Russians don't accept the idea that we don't belong to their empire anymore. For them, everything has to be done with their permission. This is not a Soviet territory. You can't stop reminding them."<br />Then there's Britain. Le Monde's account reported "confidential agreements have been made to deepen military, notably nuclear, cooperation."<br />In Brussels, the dubious diplomat said, "this might come as a surprise to the British." If not, a party to a secret deal talking about it for publication could end up as an embarrassment for Gordon Brown.<br />Sarkozy certainly could not be doing Brown any domestic political favors either by lamenting, as reported, the poor state of the pound. Or by predicting, "London will finish up by adopting the common currency."<br />Indeed, that was exactly what a Sarkozy friend had told him would not be the most helpful thing for Gordon's new best friend to say.<br />Soon enough, according to some Europeans, Germans in particular, the Sarkozy fantasy and free-fire zone will reach its limits.<br />The demarcation would be Barack Obama's entry in the White House, bearing issues like Iran, Afghanistan, and France's capacity to function as a team player in the context of its return to NATO's unified command in April.<br />It's then that the rules allowing Sarkozy's seemingly boundless capacity to move from old friend to new, from passionate old position (as a would-be Atlanticist) to eager new standpoint (as a Gaullist reborn) grow very much tougher.<br />Obama will have too little time to waste - and too much power, credibility and persuasiveness - not to ask Sarkozy if he wants to risk a return to French irrelevance by promoting his own importance with a policy hodgepodge he and France can't deliver.<br />French editors seem to be the first to have understood.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">*****************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><div align="left"><strong>Designer 'Christmas trees' sold at Paris auction</strong><br />By Jessica Michault<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />PARIS: The fashion world gathered around 44 designer Christmas trees at the annual "Les Sapins de Noël des Créateurs" charity auction in Paris last week.<br />From Louis Vuitton's golden metal cone forged out of hundreds of LV emblems to Stella McCartney's eco-friendly tiers of cardboard disks and Jérôme Dreyfuss's stripped metal umbrellas stacked one on top the other and adorned with multicolored plastic bags, the "trees" came in all shapes, sizes and styles.<br />It was the first time that top name artists in the world of design had contributed to the auction. Designs by Norman Foster (which netted €8,500 or about $11,000), India Mahdavi (€8,000) and Jacques Rougerie (€5,100) were among the big bids. But it was the white column of circling shapes from Zaha Hadid that was the top seller of the night at €46,000. For art dealers and collectors at the event, it was a rare opportunity to acquire pieces by artists at a fraction of the price of their other work.<br />A total of €101,000 was raised for the Sol En Si charity organization that helps children and families living with AIDS. The fashion journalist Marie-Christiane Marek, who started the charity auction 13 years ago, said that the money would be used to create a residence in Togo for children orphaned by the disease. But as the total started to climb, more than tripling the sum raised last year, the charity will be able to build much more than originally planned.<br />No live Christmas tree was used in any of the designs, making all of the "trees" sustainable luxuries. Perhaps their only drawback is that they just might outshine all the presents tucked below their branches.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">**************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>Artworks of Yves Saint Laurent and Bergé to be sold<br /></strong>By Suzy Menkes<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />PARIS: Pierre Bergé sits four square on a leopard print sofa - a Picasso to his right and a Léger above his head - with the same pugnacious look as the bulldog, Moujik, who is sniffing round the late Yves Saint Laurent's apartment.<br />"Fashion has no connection with art - the entire idea of discourse between art and fashion has been invented," says Bergé, who spent 50 years with Saint Laurent acquiring fine art and supporting high fashion.<br />"I never thought that fashion was an art - not at all, but I think it requires an artist to do fashion," says Bergé. He might have added that it takes two artistic souls to juxtapose works of art, creating a home where each object seems to be in conversation with the other.<br />But these exceptional cultural dialogues are now over. After the death of Saint Laurent last summer, everything is to go under the hammer in February: Brancusi and Braque; Matisse and Mondrian; the gold and silver objects standing sentinel on a Jean-Michel Frank table; the Italian rococo chairs circling an Art Deco marble dining room table; and the 15 sinuous bronze mirrors created by François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne for the music room.<br />Until the auction, to be held by Christie's in February at the Grand Palais in Paris, with the support of Pierre Bergé Associés, collectors are flocking to see these extraordinary artworks that span so harmoniously historical periods and geographical continents.<br />Bergé is clear and concise about the diverse objects and how they are displayed, with only a masterpiece quality uniting them.<br />"Everyone can be an art collector, but you don't always have the same result," says Bergé. "Yves and I wanted a collection that was demanding. We did not buy art before we had money, except for the African bird." (He was referring to a carved wooden totem facing the windows of the long drawing room.)<br />"Our first object was in 1965 - a Brancusi sculpture - very expensive at the time," says the creative entrepreneur, talking about the abstract wood carving. He explained how the two partners worked with a pair of galleries in a period when you could still buy museum-quality modern art.<br />To sit in Saint Laurent's drawing room, the sun slanting over the Goya that the designer loved too much to loan to Madrid's Prado museum ("I had to have a photograph made for him to look at," says Bergé) is to witness a home of pure refinement.<br />Some art objects had emotional connections to their life as a couple: the lions - in silver or bronze, crouching and rampant - that Bergé gave to Yves on his birthdays, "because he was a Leo." Or there were memories of the early days, when Saint Laurent could still go out unrecognized, yelling at Bergé to slam on the car brakes because he had spotted "something marvelous" in an antique store on the Rue Bonaparte. The couple had taken a nearby apartment at No. 55 Rue de Babylone in 1972. What they found were copper and lacquer vases by Jean Dunand from the Art Deco period that was only just coming back into fashion.<br />Early Modernism forms the soul of the style at this duplex apartment. The sale in 1972 of the collection of the Belle Epoque couturier Jacques Doucet set the tone for the daring choices, which include a dragon-decorated 1920s armchair by Eileen Gray.<br />"A collection is like a dinner table. It is about who is invited, but also who is not there," says Bergé. "We would have liked to have Barnett Newman, Bacon and perhaps Pollock. But we were not didactic. We wanted objects that talk to each other. And we did our collection with a lot of passion, but with certitude."<br />The concept of an artistic faceoff, now a staple of museum shows, was born in the hôtel particulier of Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles. Bergé, 78, who first visited the mansion in his early 20s, talks about the "audacity of the mix" in the art.<br />Memories of an Edward Burne-Jones tapestry at the top of the grand staircase at the de Noailles residence translates in the YSL apartment as a Burne-Jones "Adoration of the Magi," executed in 1904, its fiery, russet Pre-Raphaelite colors burning brightly in the light and airy library downstairs. There, the framed "family" photographs on the bleached book shelves gaze out at the ancient Roman Minotaur sculpture in the garden.<br />Even without Moujik wandering the rooms, the apartment has a homey feel. At the bottom of the stairs, beside a pair of Chippendale chairs, an artistic medley is showcased in the "cabinets de curiosité," built by Jacques Grange, a close friend and interior designer. The contents include a cluster of cameos, rock crystals, agate chalices and ivory carvings.<br />Why disperse this magnificent collection? Bergé, who has supported the fight against AIDS for 25 years, hopes that the estimated €200 million to €300 million can be used to fund scientific research and to focus immediately on the AIDS crisis in Africa. After signing a PACS, the French civil union agreement, Bergé inherited the art in Saint Laurent's apartment and in his own neighboring home and decided that both collections should be sold.<br />In spite of Bergé's disclaimers, isn't there a genuine connection to the art in the haute couture archives, held at the Fondation Pierre Bergé/Yves Saint Laurent?<br />"Yves never had any pretension to be an artist. He called himself an 'artisan poétique,"' said Bergé, claiming that the geometric YSL Mondrian collection of 1965 had nothing to do with the color-block Piet Mondrian painting that the couple bought a decade later.<br />The first exhibition shown at the Fondation in 2004 told a different story. "Yves Saint Laurent: Dialogue with Art" took a strong position about fashion and art, the catalogue claiming that "only a translucent membrane separates and unites the bold renewal of forms at work in these two separate worlds."<br />Saint Laurent, while prizing the metallic breastplates created by the Lalannes for a midnight blue crepe dress he designed in 1969, had no doubt which artist had given him the most fun.<br />"It was Andy [Warhol], he was part of a whole universe that existed in 1966," said the designer at the show's opening. "He was a marvelous person, inspiring in everything he did. He had a magic when he and his clique came here from New York and we went out together."<br />The Warhol four-in-one images of Saint Laurent and of Moujik, as well as YSL Pop art dresses, were testaments to the links between artist and couturier. And no one could doubt the connection between the Braque-inspired dresses with winged bodices, the peasant blouses taken from a Matisse painting and the luscious embroidered jackets channeling Bonnard's grapes and Van Gogh's irises.<br />"But I never compared myself with these artists - that would be pretentious," said Saint Laurent. "I just tried to be an artist in my own métier."</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="center">A PICTURE OF A SNOW COVERED TABLE</div><p></p><p><strong>Review ordered of Guantanamo UK torture case</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />By James Vicini<br />The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday granted an appeal by four former Guantanamo prisoners and ordered further review of their lawsuit against top Pentagon officials for torture and religious abuse.<br />The justices set aside a U.S. appeals court ruling that dismissed the lawsuit by the four British citizens over their treatment at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba on the grounds they have no right to sue.<br />The Supreme Court sent the case back to the appeals court for further consideration in view of the high court's ruling in June that Guantanamo prisoners have the legal right to challenge their continued confinement before federal judges in Washington, D.C.<br />The four men -- Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal al-Harith -- were captured in late 2001 in Afghanistan and were transferred to Guantanamo in early 2002. Released in March of 2004, they were returned to Britain.<br />Their lawsuit named then-Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 10 military commanders. They claimed they were subjected to various forms of torture, harassed as they practiced their religion and forced to shave their religious beards.<br />In one instance, a guard threw a Koran in a toilet bucket, according to the lawsuit. They claimed violations of a U.S. religious rights law, the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution.<br />"This case presents the question of whether senior officials of the United States government can be held accountable ... for ordering the religious humiliation and torture of Guantanamo detainees," their lawyers said in the appeal to the Supreme Court.<br />"This case presents the opportunity to recognise and enforce rights that are at least as basic and essential to human autonomy -- the right to worship and the right not to be tortured," they said.<br />U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to close the prison camp after he takes office in January. There are about 250 detainees at Guantanamo, which was set up in January 2002 to hold terrorism suspects captured after the September 11 attacks on the United States by al Qaeda militants.<br />Most have been held for years without being charged and many of the prisoners have complained of abuse.<br />In dismissing the lawsuit by the four Muslims, the appeals court cited a lack of jurisdiction over the claims, ruled the defendants enjoyed qualified immunity for acts taken within the scope of their government jobs and held the religious right law did not apply to the detainees.<br />The three-judge panel ruled the prisoners were not covered by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because they "are aliens and were located outside sovereign United States territory" at the time of the alleged violations.<br />The Bush administration urged the Supreme Court to reject the appeal on the grounds that the appeals court's decision was correct.<br />"The court of appeals reasonably concluded that military detainees could not impose personal monetary liability on the nation's military commanders for overseas conditions of confinement during a time of war," Justice Department attorneys said.<br />The Supreme Court's action in reinstating the lawsuit was at least a temporary setback for the government.<br />(Editing by David Alexander and David Wiessler)</p><p></p><p>*******************</p><p></p><p><strong>Cheney want Guantanamo open until terror war ends</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 16, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Vice President Dick Cheney said on Monday the military prison at Guantanamo Bay could not be responsibly closed until the U.S. war on terror is over and he defended the practice of subjecting detainees to simulated drowning during questioning.<br />Cheney, in an interview with ABC News, said he was aware of the interrogation tactics used again Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, including the practice of waterboarding, which simulates drowning.<br />Asked if he thought, in hindsight, any of the tactics went too far, Cheney said, "I don't." Questioned about whether he thought the reported use of waterboarding on Mohammed was appropriate, Cheney replied, "I do."<br />The vice president was asked when the United States could responsibly close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which was set up to hold detainees in President George W. Bush's war on terror launched after September 11.<br />"Well, I think that that would come with the end of the war on terror," Cheney said, adding no one knows when that might be.<br />"In previous wars, we've always exercised the right to capture the enemy and then hold them until the end of the conflict.<br />"The same basic principle ought to apply here in terms of our right to capture the enemy and hold them," Cheney said, noting that in many cases the captives' home countries did not want them back and no other nation was willing to take them.<br />The vice president said Bush and many other people would like to close Guantanamo Bay but other issues had to be addressed first.<br />"That includes, what are you going to do with the prisoners held in Guantanamo? And nobody yet has solved that problem," Cheney said.<br />The United States is holding about 250 prisoners at Guantanamo and has released or transferred out another 520.<br />In another interview with conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, Cheney said Guantanamo "has been very well run" and the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama would have a difficult time closing it.<br />"Once you go out and capture a bunch of terrorists, as we did in Afghanistan and elsewhere, then you've got to have some place to put them," he said. "If you bring them here to the U.S. and put them in our local court system, then they are entitled to all kinds of rights that we extend only to American citizens. Remember, these are unlawful combatants.<br />"Guantanamo has been very, very valuable," he said. "And I think they (the Obama administration) will discover that trying to close it is a very hard proposition."<br />(Editing by Bill Trott)</p><p></p><p>*****************</p><p><strong>Pakistan won't let Britain question suspects<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />By Kamran Haider<br />Pakistan will not allow foreign investigators to interrogate Islamist militants detained over last month's attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said on Monday.<br />Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in Islamabad on Sunday he had asked India and Pakistan for permission for British police to question suspects arrested in both countries in connection with the Mumbai assault.<br />Gilani told parliament he had turned down Brown's request.<br />"I want to assure you that when I met the British prime minister yesterday, he asked if ... we would allow them to investigate those people. I said 'we won't allow it'," he said.<br />"It is our country and our laws will be implemented. We'll follow our laws."<br />The British foreign office did not comment directly on Gilani's remarks, but issued a statement which said: "We will continue to offer what support we can including police expertise, but will not impose it."<br />India, backed by the United States, has called on Pakistan to crack down on Pakistan-based militant groups after the attacks, in which 179 people were killed during a three-day siege in India's financial heart.<br />A British national and two people with dual British-Indian nationality were killed in Mumbai.<br />New Delhi blames Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a militant group it says was set up by Pakistan to fight Indian rule in the disputed Kashmir region, for the Mumbai attacks.<br />Islamabad has blamed "non-state actors" and vowed to cooperate with investigations, but has repeatedly said anyone caught in Pakistan would be tried in Pakistan.<br />Pakistan also says India has yet to share evidence from the attacks.<br />CRACKDOWN<br />Pakistan has cracked down on suspected Islamists since the Mumbai attacks, detaining scores of people, many of them members of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, an Islamist charity that India says is a front for the LeT.<br />A committee of the U.N. Security Council last week added the charity to a list of people and groups facing sanctions for ties to al Qaeda or the Taliban.<br />Gilani said the clampdown on the charity had been carried out because of the U.N. decision and authorities would take control of the group's projects to ensure they were continued for the benefit of the people.<br />Pakistan has frozen accounts of Jamaat-ud-Dawa and has detained some of its leaders.<br />Gilani said Pakistan was a responsible nuclear-armed country and would act to stop terrorism.<br />"I assure the world through this platform that we'll not allow Pakistani territory to be used for terrorism. We condemn terrorism wherever it is," he said.<br />Brown said he had asked Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh if he would allow British police, "if they chose to do so," to interview the lone surviving gunman held after the attacks, identified as Mohammad Ajmal Kasab.<br />He said he had asked Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari if British police could interview suspects held in Pakistan.<br />British government sources said British detectives were seeking more information on how Lashkar worked or information they could cross-reference with other intelligence, rather than any intention to launch a separate prosecution.<br />(Additional reporting by Avril Ormsby; Editing by Robert Birsel and Dean Yates)</p><p></p><p>*************</p><p><strong>Mystery grows over general's slaying in Pakistan<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD: Pakistani newspapers gave prominent coverage on Monday to a British media report that a retired general gunned down in Islamabad last month planned to blow the whistle on fellow generals' dealings with the Taliban.<br />Jang, Pakistan's biggest selling Urdu-language newspaper, ran a story on its front page headlined: "Gen. Alavi was against pacts with Taliban, Musharraf had sacked him."<br />The reports in Jang and other Pakistani dailies were based on a story published in the Sunday Times, and written by Carey Schofield. (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5337881.ece) Major-General Amir Faisal Alavi, a brother-in-law of Nobel prize-winning British novelist V.S. Naipaul, was shot dead along with his driver on the outskirts of the capital on November 19.<br />Suspicion initially fell on Islamist militants linked to al Qaeda and the Taliban, but an investigation by police and intelligence agencies has yet to come up with hard evidence.<br />"The investigation is going on but so far there has been no progress. We could not identify the murderers or the motive," said Sajid Kiyani, superintendent of police in Islamabad.<br />Schofield says Alavi, who had commanded the elite Special Services Group, gave her a copy of a letter he had had sent to army chief General Ashfaq Kayani in which he named two generals whose conspiracy resulted in his premature retirement more than two years ago.<br />Western and Pakistani analysts have long harboured suspicion that Pakistan has played a double game by supporting Taliban factions in the years since 2001, despite the heavy casualties suffered by its security forces fighting militants in the tribal region bordering Afghanistan.<br />EXPECTED TO BE SILENCED<br />A copy of the letter, dated July 21, 2008, with the names of the two generals blacked out, was reproduced on the Sunday Times website.<br />In the letter, Alavi asked Kayani to open an inquiry into the reason for his retirement and disciplinary action against the generals who had plotted against him.<br />He also asked for a military decoration and a post-retirement job that he believed would help restore his honour.<br />The British journalist said Alavi gave her a copy of the letter four days before he was killed, and had asked her to publish it in the event of his death.<br />She said Alavi expected to be killed as he had not received any response to his letter.<br />Alavi believed he had been forced out of the army because he had become openly critical of deals between Pakistani generals and the Taliban.<br />There is no mention of support for the Taliban in the letter, just a veiled reference that the purpose of the plot against him "by these General officers was to hide their own involvement in a matter they knew I was privy to."<br />Alavi wrote that he would "furnish all relevant proof/information" to an inquiry.<br />Reuters made several attempts to reach a Pakistani military spokesman for comment on the Sunday Times reports.<br />The Sunday Times report said Alavi mentioned a deal between a general and Baitullah Mehsud, who declared himself leader of the Pakistani Taliban late last year, to stop attacks on the army.<br />The military did reach a deal with militant tribesmen, including Mehsud, in the South Waziristan region in February, 2005. There were media reports at the time that the army had paid militants to stop attacking them.<br />Mehsud's group was blamed for many of the suicide attacks on security forces and Pakistani cities in last year, including one that killed former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the late wife of President Asif Ali Zardari.<br />(Reporting by Simon Cameron-Moore and Kamran Haider; Editing by David Fox)</p><p></p><p>*************</p><p><br /><strong>Shoe insult against Bush resounds in Arab world</strong><br />By Timothy Williams and Sharon Otterman<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: A day after an Iraqi television journalist threw his shoes at President George W. Bush at a news conference here Sunday, his act of defiance toward the American commander in chief reverberated throughout Iraq and across the Arab world.<br />In Sadr City, the sprawling Baghdad suburb that has seen some of the most intense fighting between insurgents and U.S. soldiers since the 2003 invasion, thousands of people marched in his defense. In Syria, he was hailed as a hero. In Libya, he was given an award for courage.<br />Throughout much of the Arab world Monday, the shoe-throwing incident generated front-page headlines and continuing television news coverage. A thinly veiled glee could be discerned in much of the reporting, especially in the places where anti-American sentiment runs deepest.<br />Muntader al-Zaidi, 29, the correspondent for an independent Iraqi television station who threw his black dress shoes at Bush, remained in Iraqi custody Monday.<br />While he has not been formally charged, Iraqi officials said he faced up to seven years in prison for committing an act of aggression against a visiting head of state.<br />Hitting someone with a shoe is a deep insult in the Arab world, signifying that the person being struck is as low as the dirt underneath the sole of a shoe. Compounding the insult were Zaidi's words as he hurled his footwear: "This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!" While calling someone a dog is universally harsh, among Arabs, who traditionally consider dogs unclean, those words were an even stronger slight.<br />The incident has been a source of embarrassment for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who, in a statement Monday, called the shoe throwing a "a shameful savage act" and demanded a public apology from Al Baghdadia, the independent satellite channel that employs Zaidi.<br />"The act damaged the reputation of the Iraqi journalists and journalism in general," the statement said.<br />As of Monday night, no apology from the station was forthcoming. Instead, the network posted an image of Zaidi in the corner of the screen for much of the day. Telephone callers were invited to phone in their opinions, and the vast majority said they approved of his actions.<br />Opponents of the continued American presence in Iraq turned Zaidi's detention Monday into a rallying cry. Support for the detained journalist crossed religious, ethnic and class lines in Iraq - vaulting him to near folk-hero status.<br />"I swear by God that all Iraqis with their different nationalities are glad about this act," said Yaareb Yousif Matti, a 45-year-old teacher from Mosul, a northern city that has is contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen.<br />In Samarra, one of the centers of the Sunni insurgency against American forces, Zaidi received nearly unanimous approval from people interviewed Monday.<br />"Although that action was not expressed in a civilized manner, it showed the Iraqis' feelings, which oppose American occupation," said Qutaiba Rajaa, a 58-year-old physician.<br />In Sadr City, thousands of marchers Monday called for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The demonstrators burned American flags and waved shoes in a show of support for Zaidi.<br />In Najaf, several hundred people gathered on a central square to protest Bush's visit Sunday to Iraq, and demonstrators threw their shoes at a passing U.S. military convoy.<br />But praise for Zaidi was not universal. His action ran counter to deeply held Iraqi traditions of hospitality toward guests, even if they are enemies. And those who have cooperated or welcomed the American presence in Iraq were far more apt to side with the government in their condemnation.<br />Ahmad Abu Risha, head of the Awakening Council in Anbar Province, a group of local tribal leaders that started a wave of popular opposition against Qaeda fighters in Iraq, said that he condemned what happened "because the American president is the guest of all Iraqis. The Iraqi government has to choose good journalists to attend such conferences."<br />Kamal Wahbi, a 49-year-old engineer in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, where pro-American sentiment is strong, said: "This is unsuitable action by an Iraqi journalist. His action served terrorism and radical national extremism. I think he could send the same message by asking Bush embarrassing questions."<br />Witnesses said that Zaidi had been severely beaten by security officers Sunday after being tackled at the news conference and dragged out. One of his brothers, Maythem al-Zaidi, said Monday that the family had not heard from Zaidi since his arrest, and that a police officer who picked up Zaidi's cellphone late Sunday had threatened the family.<br />It was unclear whether Zaidi had planned his actions beforehand, or whether - as his brother said - he had become infuriated by Bush's words of farewell to Iraqis and made a spontaneous decision to insult him.<br />Saif al-Deen, 25, an editor at the Baghdadia television network in Cairo, said Zaidi had been planning some sort of protest against Bush for nearly a year.<br />"I remember at the end of 2007, he told me, 'You will see how I will take revenge on the criminal Bush in my personal way about the crimes that he has committed against innocent Iraqi people,"' Deen said. He said he tried to talk his friend out of doing anything at the time, but that "he insisted he would do it."<br />Around the Arab world, the shoe throwing became the topic of the moment. In Syria, Zaidi's face was broadcast on the state television network, with Syrians calling in throughout the day to share their admiration for his gesture. Lawyers volunteered to represent him by the dozen.<br />In Lebanon, reactions varied by political affiliation, but curiosity about the episode was universal. An American visitor to a school in Beirut's southern suburb, where the Shiite militant group Hezbollah is popular, was besieged with questions from teachers and students alike, who wanted to know what Americans thought about the insult.<br />"It's the talk of the city," said Ibrahim Mousawi, a Beirut-based journalist and political analyst affiliated with Hezbollah. "Everyone is proud of this man, and they're saying he did it in our name."<br />In Libya, Zaidi was given a bravery award Monday by a charity group chaired by a daughter of the Libyan leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, Reuters reported.<br />The charity group, Wa Attassimou, also urged the Iraqi government to release Zaidi.<br />"Wa Atassimou group has taken the decision to give Muntader al-Zaidi the courage award," the group said in a statement, "because what he did represents a victory for human rights across the world." </p><p></p><p>********************</p><p><strong>For journalist who threw shoes at Bush, anger ran deep</strong><br />By Riyadh Muhammad<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: The brother of Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during a joint press conference on Sunday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said Monday that he was "proud of his brother - as all Iraqis would be."<br />Muntader al-Zaidi remains in Iraqi custody. When his brother, Maythem al-Zaidi, 28, called his cell phone at midnight, a man claiming to be one of the prime minister's bodyguards answered. Maythem al-Zaidi said that the bodyguard threatened, "that they will get us all."<br />Hitting someone with a shoe is a particularly strong rebuke in Iraqi culture. Although the president was uninjured, the incident overshadowed media coverage of the trip in the Arab world. And it has transformed Muntader al-Zaidi into a symbolic figure in the debate about the American military's presence in Iraq.<br />Maythem al-Zaidi said his brother had not planned to throw his shoes prior to Sunday. "He was provoked when Mr. Bush said this is his farewell gift to the Iraqi people," he said. A colleague of Muntader al-Zaidi's at al-Baghdadiya satellite channel, however, said the correspondent had been "planning for this from a long time. He told me that his dream is to hit Bush with shoes," said the man, who would not give his name.<br />Muntader al-Zaidi appears to have a long-standing dislike of the U.S. presence in Iraq. He used to finish his reports by saying he was in "the occupied Baghdad." His brother said that he hates the occupation so strongly that he canceled his wedding, saying: "I will marry when the occupation is over."<br />The correspondent for Al Baghdadiya, an independent Iraqi television station, had previously been detained in November 2007 for two weeks by "a particular party" - his brother did not reveal whether American or Iraqi - after videotaping the scene of an improvised explosive device that targeted an American Humvee. He was held again two months later for several hours by the American army without charges, his brother said. Other reports said he had been kidnapped by Shiite militants.<br />Muntader al-Zaidi was the head of the student union under Saddam Hussein and he earned a diploma as a mechanic from a technical institute before becoming a journalist. He worked at al-Qasim al-Mushterek newspaper, an Iraqi daily founded after the 2003 invasion, then he joined al-Diyar satellite channel, an Iraqi channel founded after the war. Two years later, he joined al-Baghdadiya satellite channel, another Iraqi channel, which is based in Cairo.<br />Maythem al-Zaidi contacted a judge to ask him if what his brother did is a crime under Iraqi law. The judge told him that he might serve two years in prison or pay a fine for insulting a president of foreign country unless Bush withdrew the case. "If they manage to imprison Muntader, there are millions of him all over Iraq and the Arab world," Maythem al-Zaidi said.<br />Maythem al-Zaidi said has been contacted from about 100 Iraqi and foreign lawyers offering their services free of charge - including Saddam Hussein's lawyer Khalil al-Dulaymi. When asked if he would accept Dulaymi's services, he replied, "Why not, we are all Iraqis."<br />The Rusafa office of Moktada al-Sadr organized a demonstration in Sadr City to support the shoe thrower. Across Iraq, everyone seems to have an opinion about the case.<br />According to his brother, Muntader al-Zaidi is "a calm man." Both of his parents are dead, and he has 10 other siblings. Maythem al-Zaidi said that his brother is politically independent, but several people who know him mentioned that he was a Baathist who turned into a Sadrist after the war.<br />Meanwhile, al-Baghdadiya satellite channel's Baghdad bureau chief is not responding to reporters to comment on the incident and he prevented all his staff of doing so.</p><p></p><p>*******************</p><p><strong>Shoe-throwing reporter is talk of Iraq<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />By Waleed Ibrahim<br />The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush has become the talk of Iraq, hailed by marchers as a national hero but blasted by the government as a barbarian.<br />The little-known Shi'ite reporter, said to have harboured anger against Bush for the thousands of Iraqis who died after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, had previously made headlines only once, when he was briefly kidnapped by gunmen in 2007.<br />TV reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi remained in detention on Monday, accused by the Iraqi government of a "barbaric act." He would be sent for trial on charges of insulting the Iraqi state, said the prime minister's media adviser, Yasin Majeed.<br />His employer, independent al-Baghdadiya television, demanded his release and demonstrators rallied for him in Baghdad's Sadr City, in the southern Shi'ite stronghold of Basra and in the holy city of Najaf, where some threw shoes at a U.S. convoy.<br />"Thanks be to God, Muntazer's act fills Iraqi hearts with pride," his brother, Udai al-Zaidi, told Reuters Television.<br />"I'm sure many Iraqis want to do what Muntazer did. Muntazer used to say all the orphans whose fathers were killed are because of Bush."<br />Zaidi shouted "this is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog," at Bush in a news conference he held with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki during a farewell visit to Baghdad Sunday.<br />The journalist then flung one shoe at Bush, forcing him to duck, followed by another, which sailed over Bush's head and slammed into the wall behind him. Throwing shoes at someone is the worst possible insult in the Arab world.<br />Zaidi was dragged struggling and screaming from the room by security guards and could be heard shouting outside while the news conference continued after momentary mayhem.<br />'BARBARIC'<br />The government said Zaidi had carried out "a barbaric and ignominious act" that was not fitting of the media's role and demanded an apology from his television station.<br />Al-Baghdadiya television played endless patriotic music, with Zaidi's face plastered across the screen.<br />A newscaster solemnly read out a statement calling for his release, "in accordance with the democratic era and the freedom of expression that Iraqis were promised by U.S. authorities."<br />It said that any harsh measures taken against the reporter would be reminders of the "dictatorial era."<br />The Iraqi Journalists' Syndicate said Zaidi's "far from professional" and irresponsible conduct had placed it in an "embarrassing and critical" situation. Nevertheless, it called on Maliki to release him for humanitarian reasons.<br />"It was the throw of the century. I believe Bush deserves what happened to him because he has not kept his promises to Iraqis," said Baghdad resident Abu Hussein, 48.<br />Parliamentary reaction was mixed, with some saying Zaidi chose the wrong venue for his protest. Others cheered.<br />"Al-Zaidi's shoe is the most famous shoe in the whole world," said Fawzi Akram, a Turkman lawmaker loyal to anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.<br />A Libyan charity group chaired by leader Muammar Gaddafi's daughter, Aicha Gaddafi, gave Zaidi an award for bravery.<br />Zaidi, now in his late 20s, spent more than two days blindfolded, after armed men kidnapped him in November 2007. He said at the time that the kidnappers had beaten him until he lost consciousness, and used his necktie to blindfold him.<br />He never learned the identity of the kidnappers, who questioned him about his work but did not demand a ransom.<br />Colleagues say Zaidi resented Bush, blaming him for the bloodshed that ravaged Iraq. It did not appear that he had lost any close family members during the sectarian killings and insurgency, which in recent months have finally begun to wane.<br />(Additional reporting by Haidar Kadhim and Wissam Mohammed; Writing by Michael Christie; Editing by Dominic Evans)</p><p></p><p>*****************</p><p><strong>Nine Iraqi policemen killed in suicide attack</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: Nine policemen were killed and 31 wounded when a suicide bomber drove a car full of explosives at their checkpoint west of Baghdad on Monday, as attacks resumed after a period of uncommon calm, a police source said.<br />He said most of the wounded were policemen. The attack took place in the Khan Dhari area on the western outskirts of the Iraqi capital.<br />Another police source put the death toll at three, with 30 wounded.<br />Violence has dropped sharply in Iraq over the past year, but car bombs, roadside bombs and other attacks remain common.<br />Last week a suicide bomber killed 50 people in a crowded restaurant near the northern city of Kirkuk.<br />The Kirkuk suicide bombing marred what had otherwise been an unusually peaceful week in Iraq after the years of sectarian bloodshed and insurgent violence that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.<br />The religious holiday of Eid al-Adha saw tens of thousands of people emerge from sandbagged homes in Baghdad and take to the city's parks and fair grounds.<br />(Writing by Aseel Kami, editing by Michael Christie)</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>*********************</p><p><strong>Bush makes surprise visit to Afghanistan</strong><br />By Steven Lee Myers<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />KABUL, Afghanistan: President George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Monday morning and asserted that the United States would not walk away from the conflict here despite rising violence and instability.<br />Air Force One arrived in the predawn darkness, five-and-a-half hours after leaving Iraq, and the details of the Afghanistan trip were shrouded in even greater secrecy than the first stop in Baghdad. En route, Bush said that he wanted to pledge that the United States would not relent in the effort to strengthen Afghanistan, even as he steps down in 36 days.<br />Asked how the military operation here would change as his administration — and that of President-elect Barack Obama — prepared to send additional forces to the country to shore up a increasingly difficult and dangerous situation in Afghanistan, he said:<br />"It's the same mission we had before: to have this young democracy to develop the institutions so it can survive on its own, not to repeat the mistakes of the 1980s, which is to achieve an objective and leave, and to deny a safe haven for Al Qaeda."<br />Bush's visit to Afghanistan was only his second; the first was in March 2006. His visit on Sunday to Iraq, by contrast, was his fourth. While security has improved greatly in Iraq, it has worsened in Afghanistan, something that Bush attributed to "a quiet surge" of American and NATO forces over the last year that had resulted in increased engagement with Taliban and Qaeda fighters.<br />That has led to a series of high-level policy reviews and visits by American officials — the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and now Bush, in the last week alone.<br />"If I remember violence went up when we went to Iraq with more troops," he said. "So the objective is to provide enough security so that a political system can provide a stable platform for, you know, economic viability, good education, good health care."<br />The administration has already signaled an increase in troop levels: the American commander here, General David McKiernan, has said as many as 20,000 more could be needed, bringing the total American force here to more than 50,000. Bush did not in any way acknowledge a chief criticism of his administration: that the war in Iraq had distracted the administration from the war in Afghanistan.<br />"This is a country significantly larger than Iraq, and significantly poorer; the infrastructure is difficult," he said. "Nevertheless, the mission is essential. We cannot, you know, achieve our objective of removing — the safe havens, kicking out Taliban — and say, 'O.K., now let's leave.' "<br />Journalists traveling with Bush were allowed to tell one superior and their spouses about only the first leg of the trip, but not about the visit to Afghanistan, reflecting a higher degree of concern for security. Air Force One landed with its lights off.<br />Bush was expected to meet with American troops and Afghan leaders later during the trip. Speaking to hundreds of cheering and whooping American troops after deplaning, Bush rallied them for what he warned would be "a difficult and long effort."<br />"We want to do the hard work now," he said.</p><p></p><p>*********************</p><p><strong>Bush talks with Karzai on Afghan visit</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />By Matt Spetalnick<br />President George W. Bush told Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Monday the United States would stand by the war-torn country despite a transition of power at the White House.<br />Moving from one war zone to another, Bush flew secretly from Baghdad to Kabul, landing under cover of darkness for talks with Karzai and meetings with U.S. troops spearheading the fight against a resurgent Taliban.<br />"I told the president you can count on the United States. Just like you've been able to count on this administration, you will be able to count on the next administration as well," Bush told a news conference in the Afghan capital alongside Karzai.<br />On a farewell visit to Baghdad on Sunday, meant to mark greater security in Iraq after years of bloodshed, an Iraqi reporter called Bush a "dog" and threw his shoes at him.<br />After Air Force One touched down at Bagram air base outside Kabul under heavy security, Bush strode across the tarmac and into a giant tent where hundreds of troops greeted him with raucous cheers as he thanked them for their service.<br />"I am confident we will succeed in Afghanistan because our cause is just," he told them.<br />Bush, who has already ordered a troop increase in Afghanistan, appeared to lend tacit support to President-elect Barack Obama's pledge to increase troop levels even more after he takes office on January 20.<br />"I want him to succeed, I want him to do well," Bush said of Obama. "I'd expect you'll see more U.S. troops here as quickly as possible in parts of the country that are being challenged by the Taliban."<br />Obama has promised to make Afghanistan a higher priority, saying the Bush administration has been too distracted by the unpopular Iraq war to pay Afghanistan the attention it deserves.<br />But Bush said much progress had been made in Afghanistan since U.S. and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001 for sheltering al Qaeda leaders behind the September 11 attacks and said dozens of roads, schools and hospitals had been built.<br />But an Afghan reporter challenged Bush, saying the United States had failed to make good on promises to bring security.<br />"I respectfully disagree with you," Bush replied. "I just cited the progress. It's undeniable. I never said the Taliban was eliminated, I said they were removed from power. They are lethal and they are tough."<br />Bush was due to leave Afghanistan after his visit of several hours, but his next destination was not announced.<br />COOPERATE WITH PAKISTAN<br />Bush also said it was important for the United States to keep working with Pakistan to pressure militants along its border with Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants in al Qaeda are believed to be hiding out in the remote, lawless region.<br />"If Pakistan is a place from which people feel comfortable attacking infrastructure, citizens, troops, it's going to make it difficult to succeed in Afghanistan," Bush said. "The more we can get Pakistan and Afghanistan to cooperate, the easier it will be to enforce that part of the border regions."<br />Bush was making his second trip to Afghanistan since 2001.<br />Some 65,000 foreign troops are in Afghanistan, including 32,000 from the United States, struggling to combat worsening insurgent violence that has sparked alarm in Western capitals.<br />"No question that violence is up," Bush said. "But one reason why the violence is up is we're now putting troops in places where there hadn't been troops."<br />U.S. Army Gen. David McKiernan, commander of NATO forces and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, has requested four more combat brigades and support units -- a total of more than 20,000 troops.<br />One of those brigades is scheduled to deploy in January.<br />Washington's ability to send more forces to Afghanistan depends largely on being able to pull some of its nearly 150,000 troops out of Iraq, where security has improved sharply, but commanders caution the situation remains fragile.<br />Some NATO partners have resisted Washington's push for higher troop levels in Afghanistan causing friction within the alliance.<br />"The mission is essential. We cannot achieve our objective of removing al Qaeda safe havens by kicking out Talibans and saying 'OK, now let's leave," Bush said.<br />Asked if Pakistan was doing its part in its border areas, Bush said Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was determined.<br />"He said so publicly and he said privately. He looked at me in the eye and said 'you don't need to talk to me about extremist violence. After all my wife got killed by extremists'."<br />Karzai said the Afghan people would not allow the United States and the international community to abandon them "before we are really on our feet or we are strong enough to defend our country and have a good economy," and then joked, "and before they have taken from President Bush and his administration billions and billions of more dollars."<br />"You better hurry up," Bush replied.<br />(Additional reporting by Golnar Motevalli; Editing by Bill Tarrant)</p><p></p><p></p><p>*********************</p><p><strong>Iraqi justice system falls short, rights group says</strong><br />By Campbell Robertson<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: Iraq's central criminal court, the country's chief judicial institution, has fallen short of international and Iraqi constitutional standards of due process and has failed to provide "basic assurances of fairness," according to a report released Monday by Human Rights Watch.<br />The report portrays a system under which defendants are often abused in custody and held for months or even years before being referred to a judge. When cases are heard, the defendants are often left without adequate defense counsel to answer charges, which are frequently based on secret informants, coerced confessions and flimsy evidence, the report found. Juvenile detainees are often held with adults, it found, despite an Iraqi law ordering them to be held separately.<br />The court was created in 2003 by the United States-led coalition provisional authority to hear cases of serious offenses, including terrorism. The systemic failures of the court are in part due to an overwhelming caseload, the result in part of widespread arrests in 2007 as part of the surge operations in Baghdad, the report said.<br />The court also hears cases of detainees in American custody who are referred to an Iraqi judge. While the report criticizes the coalition for referring only a small fraction of the thousands detained, the backlog hampering the court is expected to get worse after Jan. 1, when, under the terms of the Iraqi-American security agreement, the Americans begin releasing or transferring all detainees into Iraqi custody.<br />At that point, detainees will be turned over to the Iraqi authorities within 24 hours, and their cases will be governed by Iraqi criminal law.<br />"I think the new caseload will probably make it even worse," said Joseph Logan, a researcher in the Middle East and North Africa division for Human Rights Watch and the main author of the report. "A dramatic increase in the number of cases funneled into the Iraqi system is going to create a strain at every point."<br />Human Rights Watch investigators were allowed to attend a series of investigative hearings and trial sessions at two branches of the court in Baghdad in May; they also were allowed to examine court documents and interview detainees, judges and lawyers.<br />At the hearings attended by Human Wrights Watch, judges often dismissed cases for failing to meet basic standards of proof. But, while judges did recognize the shortcomings, the high number of dismissed cases — often after a defendant had been in detention for months — only underscores how broken the system is, Logan said.<br />Iraqi law is still heavily focused on confession and testimony. Forensic evidence is rare and, because of the security situation, testimony often comes from secret informants. But though there are opportunities to challenge the reliance on secret testimony, the report cites a number of cases in which court-appointed defense lawyers either failed to appear or said nothing during proceedings.<br />A defense lawyer who often works at the central criminal court in Baghdad said cases were often assigned with little or no time for preparation.<br />"They call the lawyer as the trial is beginning or about to begin and tell him, 'This is the case and you are the defense lawyer,' " the lawyer, Mohammed al-Faisal, said. "In such a situation, the lawyer does not have enough time to prepare the case or study it. The court does not give either the lawyers nor the accused their rights in this matter.<br />Adding that he often comes across defendants who report being abused while in detention, Faisal said, "There are too many violations."<br />The criminal court had no immediate comment about the report.</p><p>*********************</p><p><strong>Israel bars critical UN human rights official</strong><br />By Isabel Kershner<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />JERUSALEM: Israel on Monday turned away Richard Falk, the United Nations Human Rights Council special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, saying he was "unwelcome."<br />Falk, an American, arrived in Israel on Sunday. He was held at the airport and placed on the first available flight back to Geneva, his point of departure. A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said Falk had been informed in advance that his entry would be barred.<br />A professor of international law at Princeton University, Falk has long raised hackles here for what are seen as hostile and unpalatable views.<br />He has compared Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi atrocities and has called for more serious examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Pointing to discrepancies between the official and other versions of events, he has written that "only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book."<br />In his capacity as UN rapporteur, Falk issued a statement this month describing Israel's embargo on Hamas-controlled Gaza as a "crime against humanity," while making only cursory reference to Hamas rocket attacks against Israel. Israeli officials expressed outrage.<br />When he was appointed by the Human Rights Council last spring, the Israeli representative said it was "impossible to believe that out of a list of 184 potential candidates," the members had made "the best possible choice for the post."<br />The U.S. and Canadian representatives also expressed concerns about Falk's possible bias. The Palestinian representative said it was ironic that Israel was "campaigning against a Jewish professor" and called the nomination "a victory for good sense and human rights."<br />Israel objects to the mandate of the special rapporteur on grounds that it ignores all human rights violations by Palestinians, either against Israelis or against other Palestinians. More specifically, it objects to Falk.<br />A statement issued Monday by the Foreign Ministry noted that in the past three years, Israel had "welcomed" visits by seven special rapporteurs of the Human Rights Council and two other senior UN representatives. In Falk's case, it continued, his "vehement publications" made it "hard to square his appointment" with the council's own requirements, which call for envoys to be impartial and objective. The council's own procedures require its envoys to operate with the consent of the state concerned.<br />Regardless of Falk's views, some Israelis questioned the wisdom of banning him, noting that it would hardly make his reports more sympathetic.<br />Jessica Montell, the executive director of Btselem, an Israeli group that monitors human rights in the occupied territories, said that even if Israel had "legitimate concerns about Professor Falk's mandate," barring his entry was "an act unbefitting of democracy."</p><p></p><p>*********************</p><p><strong>OPINION</strong></p><p><strong>'Terror' is the enemy</strong><br />By Philip Bobbitt<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />Generals are not the only ones who prepare to fight the previous war. Our experience with 20th-century nation-based terrorists - the IRA in Ireland, the PKK in the Kurdish areas of Turkey, ETA in Spain's Basque country, the FLN in Algeria and others - still dominates much of our thinking about how to deal with 21st-century global terrorists.<br />Indeed, the lack of new concepts may well be as deadly to our national security as any lack of vaccines.<br />New approaches to dealing with global terrorism must first be integrated into our foreign security policies generally. Allies in Europe must be reassured that the United States will not violate the human rights accords to which we are a party. America must also devise a policy that aligns the interests of Afghanistan, India and Pakistan while isolating the terrorists that threaten them all. We must seek common ground against our universal threats - global terrorists and pirates, the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons and civilian catastrophes - even if, in other contexts, these nations are our adversaries.<br />The "war on terror" is not a nonsensical public relations slogan, however unwelcome this conclusion may be to Pentagon planners or civil liberties advocates. The notion of such a war puzzles us - who would sign the peace treaty? - because we are so trapped in 20th-century expectations about warfare. But success in war does not always mean the capitulation of an enemy government; rather, it varies with the war aim.<br />In a war against terror, the aim is not the conquest of territory or the advancement of ideology, but the protection of civilians. We are fighting a war on terror, not just terrorists. That is evident from the list of targets in the attacks in Mumbai, India, in which national liberation terrorists from Kashmir were apparently the outsourced operational arm of a global network with far more ambitious, and more anti-Western, objectives. The Mumbai terrorists did not even bother to issue demands; what they sought was terror itself.<br />Pakistan is not just India's or Afghanistan's problem. "Homeland security" is a dangerous solecism when we are fighting a global adversary. If terror is our adversary, then our own health system, for example, is only as secure as the most vulnerable health system overseas that might spawn an epidemic that could quickly reach our shores.<br />We must use available international institutions - like the International Criminal Court, to which pirates and other terrorists could be rendered - whenever possible. Yet we must not shrink from augmenting them, for example, by creating a global body similar to NATO including other democracies, by enlarging the United Nations Security Council to include other great states, and by giving new security responsibilities to the Group of Eight.<br />Our legislators need more foresight, stockpiling laws for emergencies just as we stockpile vaccines. Perhaps the most obvious would be a provision to replace members of Congress who might be killed or disabled in such numbers that the House of Representatives itself is unable to act. This could easily have occurred on 9/11 if the fourth plane had struck the Capitol, which would have plunged the country into months of martial law.<br />Finally, the Obama administration can have no higher priority than forging links with the private sector to protect what has become the electronic foundation for contemporary life. Unless the government can persuade private companies to harden themselves to cyber-attacks, the deregulated and fragmented owners of our digital backbone will inevitably underfinance such protection.<br />This last observation points to the interrelation between the three arenas of the war on terror: 21st-century terrorists, the commodification of weapons of mass destruction, and the increasing vulnerability of highly developed nations like our own. Educating our public about this new tripartite threat will place enormous demands on our leadership.<br />Preventing any attacks on the United States since 9/11 is something for which the Bush administration must be given credit, but credit must also go to the American public, which decisively rejected offshore penal colonies, spurious rationalizations for warfare, secret torture chambers and contempt for the constitutional and international laws that would forbid such practices. Indeed, by selecting a former law professor as its new president, the country has thoroughly dismissed the notion that law is an obstacle rather than a guide to achieving security.<br />Philip Bobbitt, a law professor at Columbia and the author of "Terror and Consent: The Wars for the 21st Century," is a former senior director at the National Security Council.</p><p></p><p>*****************</p><p><strong>Britain sends 300 fresh troops to Afghanistan</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />LONDON: Britain has sent 300 extra troops to Afghanistan and has pledged $10 million to ensure that next year's presidential elections in Afghanistan are free and fair, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday.<br />Brown, who Afghanistan, India and Pakistan over the weekend, told Parliament that additional U.K. troops have been sent to southern Afghanistan to reinforce soldiers fighting the a resurgent Taliban.<br />He said the troops, sent from a British base in Cyprus, will remain in place until at least August.<br />Brown did not say whether Britain will send large numbers of extra troops to Afghanistan next year. The United States plans to send around 20,000 additional soldiers to try to stem terrorism and to provide security during the presidential election campaign.<br />With the additional troops, Britain has 8,300 soldiers based in Afghanistan, mainly in the southern Helmand province.<br />Brown said that, if President-elect Barack Obama requests help from allies, other NATO members must agree to share a greater burden of fighting.<br />"It is vital that all members of the coalition contribute fairly," Brown said. He said NATO members would discuss the issue further at an April summit.<br />Four British marines were killed in two attacks in Helmand on Friday, bringing Britain's death toll to 132 since 2001.</p><p></p><p>*******************</p><p><strong>Suspected U.S. missile strike kills two in Pakistan</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />PESHAWAR, Pakistan: A suspected U.S. drone aircraft fired a missile into a house in Pakistan's North Waziristan region on the Afghan border on Monday, killing two people, Pakistani security agency officials said.<br />U.S. forces in Afghanistan, frustrated by a spreading Taliban insurgency that is getting support from militant enclaves in northwest Pakistan, have stepped up strikes by pilotless drones despite Pakistani objections.<br />There was no immediate information about the identity of the two people killed in the strike in the village of Tabi, 5 km (3 miles) east of the region's main town of Miranshah, the two security agency officials said.<br />North Waziristan is a known al Qaeda and Taliban stronghold.<br />U.S. forces have carried out nearly 30 air strikes in Pakistan this year, according to a Reuters tally, more than half of them since the beginning of September.<br />The attacks have killed more than 220 people, including foreign militants, according to reports from Pakistani intelligence agents, district government officials and residents.<br />The United States and Afghanistan have long pressed Pakistan to do more to eliminate the militant sanctuaries in remote ethnic Pashtun areas that no government has ever controlled.<br />Pakistan, under fresh international pressure to eliminate militants after last month's assault on the Indian city of Mumbai, says the U.S. strikes violate its sovereignty and undermine efforts to fight militancy by inflaming public anger.<br />India has blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group it says was set up by Pakistan to fight Indian rule in the disputed Kashmir region, for the Mumbai attacks.<br />(Reporting by Alamgir Bitani; Editing by Robert Birsel and Michael Roddy)</p><p></p><p>********************</p><p><strong>3 Germans kidnapped in southern Yemen<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />SAN'A, Yemen: Tribesmen kidnapped a German aid worker and her parents in southern Yemen on Monday and were holding them hostage, demanding the government release imprisoned clan members, Yemeni officials and a tribe leader said.<br />The aid worker, who is based in Yemen, and her visiting mother and father were snatched by Bani Dhabyan tribesmen in Dhamar province, located about 65 miles south of the capital, San'a, a Yemeni security official said.<br />A Bani Dhabyan clan leader confirmed members of his tribe had kidnapped the Germans and warned the government against using force to free them. He said the Germans were the tribe's "guests" and would not be harmed.<br />The clan leader spoke to The Associated Press by telephone but would not give his name, fearing government reprisals. He would not provide further details but said he was not directly involved in the kidnapping and was trying to mediate.<br />The security official said the kidnappers were demanding the release of two tribesmen detained four months ago in connection with another kidnapping case.<br />The government sent troops to the area and detained several tribesmen for questioning, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.<br />In Berlin, German Foreign Ministry spokesman Jens Ploetner said the three Germans were missing, and "we must assume based on current information that the three were kidnapped." He said Berlin was "working to clarify the situation" but would give no further details.<br />The German and Yemeni officials did not identify the captives.<br />Tribesmen in Yemen frequently take foreign tourists hostage to pressure the government on a range of demands, from freeing jailed clan members to improving roads, hospitals and schools in their area. In the majority of cases, the hostages are freed unharmed.</p><p></p><p>******************</p><p><strong>Christian missionaries stir unease in north Africa</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />By Tom Pfeiffer<br />A new breed of undercover Christian missionary is turning to Muslim north Africa in the search for new converts, alarming Islamic leaders who say they prey on the weak and threaten public order.<br />Missionary groups say the number of Moroccan Christians has grown to 1,500 from 100 in a decade and that Algerian Christians number several thousand, although no official figures exist.<br />They say their message is reaching thousands more, thanks partly to satellite TV and the internet.<br />The Koran states no-one can be forced to follow one religion, but many Muslims believe that to abandon Islam is to shun family, tribe and nation and bring shame upon relatives.<br />"Many Muslims told me 'If I find you I will kill you'," said Amin, a young man from northern Morocco who did not want to give his full name for fear of reprisals.<br />Amin said he became aware of Jesus Christ after dreaming that a figure dressed in a white robe approached him in a forest and handed him a Bible.<br />"When I told my father I had become a Christian he just stared at me without speaking. Then he said: 'From now on, you are not my son. Go to those people, let them feed you and give you a home -- we'll see who cares for you'," said Amin.<br />He left town, stopped his studies and now lives from translation work offered by a Christian missionary group.<br />Mission groups in North Africa range from broad alliances such as Partners International and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship to small Baptist and Pentecostal churches based in the Americas and Europe, according to their Web sites.<br />Their activity is growing as churches turn their focus to places where the Christian message is rarely heard, said Dana Robert, world Christianity professor at Boston University.<br />"With the internet and the increase in travel, you have a democratisation of missions where anyone who feels like it can go anywhere they want," said Robert. "The new breed of missionary doesn't have the same historical training as the older established denominations, nor necessarily the cultural training, so there's a bull-in-a-china-shop effect."<br />PERSECUTION, EXPLOITATION<br />Converts recount stories of persecution as evidence of the risks they run. These are impossible to verify, but one said he heard a newly converted Moroccan was thrown from a balcony in a shopping mall by two acquaintances, leaving him paralysed.<br />Another said people of a town in eastern Morocco threatened to decapitate a convert unless he renounced his faith.<br />Islamic leaders say missionaries exploit people with a weak understanding of their religion, target the poor and the sick and try to win over north Africa's Berbers by telling them Islam was imposed on them by Arabs.<br />"These are unethical methods," said Mohammed Yssef, general secretary of the Superior Council of Ulemas, Morocco's highest religious authority. "Islam is the religion of God. It is neither Arab nor Berber.<br />"When people respond positively (to missionaries), it is when they don't have their full freedom," said Yssef. "Once they recover their normal health and situation, they recover their ability to decide."<br />The missionaries deny exploiting the weak. They say their clandestine status means they have to set up businesses or language schools at which converts are sometimes employed.<br />"Three years ago I began praying about parts of the world that had not taken up the Gospel," said Tyler, a member of an Ohio Baptist church who set up Project North Africa in Morocco. He said that his work could be disrupted if he gave his surname.<br />"The goal is to give a clear presentation of the Gospel and address things people might have been told -- for example that the Bible is corrupt or that we worship three gods."<br />He said he was preparing the ground for colleagues, mostly from South America, who would learn Morocco's dialect and seek to set up small businesses to fund the group's evangelical work.<br />The convert Amin said hundreds of Moroccan Christians gather every year in Sale near the capital Rabat to celebrate Christmas, protected by police. But the meeting is an exception and indigenous Christians say they worship alone and in secret.<br />FAILURE<br />Christian communities existed in north Africa until Arabs arrived from the east from the eighth century, and most of the local population adopted Islam.<br />Attempts to re-Christianise the area were a failure that came to be symbolised by Frenchman Charles de Foucault, who tried to establish a Christian community in the Algerian desert.<br />His example of abject poverty failed to inspire the local Tuareg to convert, and Muslim insurgents shot him dead in 1916.<br />French settlers built striking churches in Casablanca, Rabat, Algiers and Tunis to symbolise their imperial "civilising mission" but congregations dispersed after independence.<br />Morocco's government says it practises religious tolerance but the Christian presence is low-key. St. Peter's Cathedral in Rabat does not ring its bells and churchgoers are all foreign.<br />Moroccan Christians worshipping there would risk arrest and Archbishop Vincent Landel told Reuters he would not baptise a Moroccan convert as it is against the law.<br />He said U.S.-funded missionaries had made life harder for the Roman Catholic church in north Africa.<br />"It upsets everything because all these evangelical converts lack restraint and discretion -- they do any old thing," he said. "And to Muslims there's no difference between a Catholic, an evangelist or a Protestant, so in their minds the head of all the Christians must be the Catholic Archbishop."<br />"ONE WAY TO HEAVEN"<br />Outside the cities, the visible Christian presence is limited to small communities from Roman Catholic orders who lead charitable work including medical and wealth-creating projects, but avoid preaching.<br />They rely on smooth relations with the authorities, but in Algeria the climate has soured in recent months after a series of trials against local Protestants accused of proselytism.<br />The constitution of Algeria, the birthplace of St. Augustine, a Berber, allows freedom of conscience but a 2006 law strictly regulates how religions can be practised and forbids attempts to convert Muslims.<br />"We shouldn't kill one another in the name of religion," Algerian Religious Affairs Minister Bouabdellah Ghlamallah told Liberte newspaper. "That people come from the U.S. and France to spread ideas contrary to national unity, that's the danger."<br />A Christian community that employs 70 women making embroidered Berber ceremonial clothes in Algeria's restive region of Kabylie works towards cohabitation among religions.<br />"We are in the service of beauty which is a quality of God, and that is also mentioned in the Koran," said Sister Elizabeth Herkommer, who runs the project.<br />Missionaries like Tyler take a more radical line.<br />"If there is just one way to heaven, it is my responsibility to show it," he said. "If you had the cure to the AIDS virus, would you not want to take it to the people?"<br />(Additional reporting by Algiers and Tunis bureaux; Editing by Tom Heneghan and Sara Ledwith)</p><p></p><p>******************</p><p><strong>Brown urges Obama to press on Mideast<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />By Matt Falloon and Carolyn Cohn<br />U.S. President-elect Barack Obama must make the Middle East peace process an urgent priority, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Monday.<br />The outgoing Bush administration had wanted an agreement on Palestinian statehood by the end of this year, but a lack of progress has left hopes pinned on a fresh approach from Obama when he takes office in January.<br />"The 22 Arab states calling on President-elect Obama to prioritise achieving a comprehensive plan is a very important development indeed," Brown told reporters after talks with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.<br />"We are very much of the same view... We are working hard to ensure that progress is possible during 2009."<br />The 22-member Arab League wrote to Obama about the issue last week, and the quartet of Middle East peace negotiators -- the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia -- is due to meet at the United Nations on Monday.<br />Brown, who is scheduled to hold talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Tuesday, repeated his call for the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from occupied land and a freeze on settlement expansion.<br />"We have consistently called for Israel to dismantle settlements," Brown said. "Everybody now sees the contours of what a two-state solution would look like ... One of the blockages to that is clearly the settlement issue."<br />"I hope in the coming days we can move further and faster towards the peace settlement that everyone wants to see happen."<br />Olmert, who will remain as interim prime minister until a new election is held on February 10, has tried to clamp down on illegal settlement outposts, but around 300,000 Israeli settlers remain among 3 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.<br />HEALING THE RIFT<br />Fayyad, whose Western-backed government is based in the West Bank, said his administration was making every effort to heal its rift with Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian movement which controls the Gaza Strip and is expanding in the West Bank.<br />"Everything that can be done should be done in order to reunite the country," he said. "It is an absolute requirement for there to be reunification of our country for there to be reconciliation."<br />Attempts by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to reunite the factions in the West Bank and Gaza and form a unity government have failed despite more than two years of talks.<br />At a Palestinian investment conference later on Monday, Fayyad also said economic help would not bring peace on its own.<br />"Ours is a political conflict and it requires a political solution," Fayyad told the conference. "Focussing on so-called economic peace instead of actual peace simply will not cut it."<br />The leader of Israel's right-wing Likud party Benjamin Netanyahu, tipped for victory February's election, is proposing to focus peace efforts on bolstering the Palestinians' frail economy rather than on an imminent statehood deal.<br />Brown told the conference Britain would provide the Palestinians with $240 million (159 million pounds) over three years in help.<br />At a similar investment conference in May in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, foreign investors, many from Gulf countries, pledged to pump $1.4 billion into Palestinian businesses.<br />However, oil prices have dropped sharply and much of the world has fallen into recession since then.<br />(editing by Kate Kelland and Dominic Evans)</p><p></p><p>****************</p><p></p><p><strong>Powers press Israel to ease Gaza cash crunch<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />JERUSALEM: Middle East envoy Tony Blair, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank issued a joint appeal to Israel on Monday to lift restrictions on the transfer of cash to banks in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.<br />They said the Israeli restrictions were undermining the Palestinian banking sector, making it harder for Gazans to cover basic needs and weakening the Western-backed government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.<br />Israel allowed armoured trucks carrying 100 million shekels (17.2 million pounds) into the impoverished coastal enclave last Thursday to partially ease a severe cash shortage.<br />But the sum fell far short of the 250 million shekels that Abbas' government, headed by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, said was needed to pay its 77,000 workers in the Gaza Strip, which Hamas Islamists seized by force in June 2007 from secular Fatah forces loyal to Abbas.<br />In a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Blair, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and World Bank President Robert Zoellick said current restrictions on the regular entry of shekels could boost the role of the black market at the expense of the regulated banking system.<br />Compounding the problem, Israeli commercial banks have decided to sever ties with their Palestinian counterparts, citing the government's designation of Gaza as a "hostile" territory following Hamas' takeover.<br />"The aggregate and, no doubt, unintended result of these policies is to weaken the institutions of Prime Minister Fayyad's government in Gaza," they wrote in the letter, dated December 12 and released on Monday.<br />Israel said it was doing its part.<br />"Israel will continue to act in order to maintain a routine transfer of the required banknotes into the Gaza Strip," said Mark Regev, Olmert's spokesman.<br />Citing a severe shortage of cash, Gaza banks shut their doors earlier this month. Western officials said Fayyad's inability to pay salaries in the Gaza Strip in full and on time would undercut Abbas in his power struggle with Hamas.<br />In contrast to Fayyad, Hamas has largely been able to pay salaries to its own workforce in the coastal territory, Palestinian and Western officials say.<br />Blair represents the Quartet of Middle East mediators -- the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.<br />Defence Minister Ehud Barak approved the transfer of the 100 million shekels following a request from Israel's central bank, which said it did not want to be responsible for the possible collapse of the Palestinian banking system.<br />Barak's decision was denounced by some fellow Israeli cabinet ministers, who asserted the cash should be withheld to increase pressure on Hamas to free a captive Israeli soldier.<br />In addition to banknotes, Israel has tightened restrictions on the flow of goods to the Gaza Strip in a bid to weaken Hamas.<br />(Reporting by Adam Entous; Editing by Katie Nguyen)<br /></p><p>****************</p><p><strong>Joint Chiefs chairman must adapt to a new boss</strong><br />By Elisabeth Bumiller<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: As President-elect Barack Obama convened the first meeting of his national security advisers on Monday, there was just one person at the table that the new president did not choose to have there: Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.<br />Mullen, who was selected by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for a two-year term, has been on the job for a year. Come January, he will face perhaps the biggest challenge of his career — pivoting from one commander-in-chief to another, in the middle of two wars. Friends describe him as an even-tempered, intellectually curious and politically astute presence who sees the world beyond the immediate battles of the Pentagon and White House — all skills they say will serve him well in the new administration.<br />"He's not a jumper or a screamer, he looks at things to make them better for the long term," said Admiral Dennis Blair, a retired Pacific Fleet commander who is expected to be named by Obama as director of national intelligence. "He's an incredible networker, too."<br />In the last year, Mullen has sought advice from the retired generals who revolted against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, reached out to the former army chief who was vilified for saying more troops were needed in Iraq and invited to dinner prominent Democrats like Gregory Craig, Obama's choice for White House counsel. His efforts may have been an attempt to soothe the military after the cataclysmic Rumsfeld, or an anticipation of a change of administration — or both.<br />Mullen, the son of a former Hollywood press agent whose clients included Anthony Quinn and Julie Andrews, has a world view that friends say is closer to that of Obama than to Bush.<br />He was initially opposed to the Bush administration's troop escalation, or "surge," has long been in favor of diplomacy with Iran and considers Pakistan — where he traveled in early December to press military leaders to crack down on the terrorist group behind the Mumbai attacks — one of the most dangerous countries in the world. As the man in charge of training and equipping the military, Mullen's desire to ease the strain on forces fighting on two fronts may well dovetail with Obama's desire to draw down American troops in Iraq.<br />In short, Mullen, 62, could be more influential in an Obama administration than he has been in the Bush administration, where he has been overshadowed by the success and showmanship of General David H. Petraeus, the commander of United States forces in the Middle East and the former top commander in Iraq. Friends say that Mullen sees an opportunity to assert himself in the traditional role of chairman, as the president's top military adviser, particularly if General Petraeus, who joined his fortunes with President George W. Bush to sell and oversee the surge, no longer has a direct line to the Oval Office.<br />So far, Obama has not met with Petraeus, who is based at the headquarters of the United States Central Command in Tampa; Obama has met with Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whom the president-elect has asked to stay on in the job.<br />"I'm encouraged by the fact that he said he's going to listen to his military commanders," Mullen said in a telephone interview this week, recounting a meeting he had with Obama in Chicago on Nov. 21. Mullen declined to discuss the substance of the conversation other than to say "it was a good initial meeting — we talked about a lot of things." He discounted any concern on the part of senior commanders that Obama had not served in the military.<br />"By and large, I've found that those who really care about us and learn about us and are supportive of the military, having served in the military isn't a requirement," Mullen said.<br />In preparation for his new commander-in-chief, Mullen is overseeing the final stages of a comprehensive military strategy review of the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan — one of four such studies in the government — to guide Obama in his first days as president. More quietly, he has also had initial conversations with his top commanders about potential changes in the "don't ask, don't tell" law that allows gay men and lesbians to serve in the military as long as they keep their sexual orientation secret.<br />Obama has taken a strong stand against the law as a moral issue, although his team has signaled that he will not push for repeal in the early months of his administration to avoid the kind of blowup that engulfed President Bill Clinton when he sought to lift an outright ban on gay men and lesbians in the military in his first days in office. (In a cautionary tale for Mullen, that 1993 storm raged in part because General Colin Powell, who was the holdover chairman of the Joint Chiefs from the first Bush administration, publicly disagreed with what became a Clinton compromise solution of "don't ask, don't tell.")<br />Fifteen years later, Obama is of the view that "don't ask, don't tell" is long out of date and that it is time for gay men and lesbians to serve openly. "The president-elect's been pretty clear that he wants to address this issue," Mullen said in the interview. "And so I am certainly mindful that at some point in time it could come." A friend of Mullen said that he had begun to think about practical implications like housing, but Mullen said there had been no formal planning or task forces on the issue.<br />In the meantime, Mullen's supporters say that he is very different from his two predecessors, General Richard Myers and General Peter Pace, who were sometimes derided by critics within the military as "Stepford generals" because of their acquiescence to Rumsfeld.<br />"He's not dogmatic or doctrinaire, and he's also not a lap dog," said Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold of the Marine Corps, who retired in 2002 after objecting to Rumsfeld's plans for a small Iraq invasion force and then aired his views in Time magazine as part of what became known as a "revolt of the generals" against Rumsfeld in 2006.<br />Newbold is now consulted by Mullen, as is General Anthony C. Zinni, who led the United States Central Command in the 1990s and was another retired general who called for Rumsfeld to step down.<br />"Under Myers and Pace, nobody wanted to talk to me, but I've heard from Mullen a lot," Zinni said.<br />Mullen's Hollywood past would not seem to suggest a future as the nation's top military officer — his father was also the press agent to Ann-Margret, Peter Graves and Dyan Cannon — but in the interview he said that his family taught him the importance of communications and the Fourth Estate, and that it was by and large a stable life of Catholic schools and relatively modest means. As the oldest of five children, Mullen needed a scholarship for college, and he got one when he was recruited to play basketball for the Naval Academy at Annapolis.<br />To the amazement of his family, he took to the life instantly. "I got there and met the best people I've ever been around in my life," Mullen said. Among his acquaintances in the class of 1968 were Blair; Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia; and Oliver North, the Reagan-era official who secretly sold weapons to Iran to support the anti-Marxist rebels of Nicaragua.<br />These days Mullen throws regular dinners at his 19th-century home on a small naval compound near the State Department, where the walls are not hung with medals but framed show bills from nearly every Broadway show that he and his wife have attended. Recent guests have included Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush who enraged the second when he publicly warned against war with Iraq. Scowcroft is now advising Obama.<br />Mullen has also reached out in recent weeks to retired General Eric K. Shinseki, who was reviled by the Bush administration for saying publicly on the eve of the Iraq war that far more troops would be needed than had been committed by Rumsfeld's Pentagon. Shinseki has since been named secretary of Veterans Affairs by Obama.<br />So how hard is it to change commanders in chief in the middle of two wars? "Not that hard," said Blair. "I think people way overestimate that." </p><p></p><p>**************</p><p><strong>The bars of central Cairo: Echoes of a bygone era</strong><br />By Paul Schemm and Sebastian Abbot</p><p>The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />CAIRO: Armed with a bottle of Egyptian brandy and a bowl of steaming chickpeas, Hatem Fouad keeps watch each night over a historic slice of Cairo that is in danger of dying: the bars that once flourished amid the sweeping boulevards and graceful roundabouts of the city's European-style city center.<br />The former police officer is part of a cadre of older Egyptian men who frequent drinking holes and belly dancing cabarets chronicled by the Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz in the 1940s and popular with Cairo's artists and intellectuals until the late 1970s.<br />Many of these establishments have fallen into disrepair and disrepute as Egyptians grow more observant of Islam, with its prohibition on alcohol, and the country's elite migrates away from the traffic-choked streets of the now crumbling central city.<br />"They were part of an Egypt that doesn't exist anymore," said Alaa al-Aswany, who immortalized the remnants of the Cairo bar scene in his best-selling 2002 novel "The Yacoubian Building." He was talking about the heyday of the bar and nightclub era - when anyone from King Farouk, Egypt's last monarch, to the British playwright-composer Noel Coward, might show up in a Cairo club.<br />"This Egypt was very liberal, very tolerant," he said. "You had the bars, you had the synagogues, you had the churches, you had the mosques. Everyone was absolutely allowed to practice religion, to go and drink or whatever."<br />Cairo at the time was filled not just with Egyptians, but with Jews from various Middle East countries, Greeks, Italians and other Europeans who frequented the bars and restaurants sprinkled among the downtown's ornate belle epoque buildings. Mahfouz's novels describe the wealthy patronizing these establishments and the denizens of Cairo's medieval back alleys sometimes venturing into the brightly lighted downtown for a drink.<br />The 1952 ouster of Farouk and the nationalization of businesses chased away many of the Europeans. Then, in the 1980s, millions of Egyptians returned from working in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia with both money and the kingdom's strict interpretation of Islam.<br />They formed a new Egyptian middle class that had little interest in spending the night drinking Egypt's Stella beer and Bolonachi brandy in places like Bar Massoud, a hole in the wall on a busy street in the Bulaq neighborhood of central Cairo.<br />"There used to be seven bars in this area. Now there are only two. It's because everything is forbidden now," said Magdy Michel, who owns Bar Massoud and, like most of Cairo's bar operators, is Christian.<br />As middle- and lower-class Egyptians increasingly turned toward Islam, the elite migrated to trendy bars in wealthier Cairo neighborhoods.<br />"The rich people and the high-ranking people in the regime, when they drink they don't go to the downtown bars, so they don't need these bars," said Aswany, the author.<br />He added that to assuage Islamic fundamentalists, the Egyptian government has made it difficult for bars to get or renew liquor licenses. Central Cairo bar owners also say they face pressure from police officers demanding bribes and threatening to arrest customers.<br />"We get harassed by the lower-ranking police officers," said Michel at Bar Massoud. "Corruption is everywhere."<br />Fouad, the former police officer, said he had to talk to "some friends" to avoid trouble with the law at his favorite drinking spot, the Gemayka - pronounced like the Caribbean island. "The police don't bother us here," he declared.<br />Many downtown bars like Bar Massoud and the Gemayka have a speakeasy feel, with men drinking and trading jokes behind windowless, nondescript facades meant to avoid scrutiny from the street outside.<br />The barmen work hard to make sure their customers keep coming. They scurry about offering complimentary fava and lupin beans, cucumbers and occasionally yogurt to coat the stomach. Vendors wander in throughout the night hawking newspapers, peanuts and even full meals.<br />In some bars, the entertainment is firmly traditional, featuring recordings by the legendary Arab diva Umm Kalthum, whose music transfixed the Middle East for four decades until her death in 1975. The mournful nostalgia of her hourlong ballads fits well with a scene that feels as though it is living on borrowed time.<br />In most bars, though, satellite television has made its inroads, and the customers watch bad Hollywood action movies with Arabic subtitles.<br />It is a far cry from the 1940s, when central Cairo's greatest attraction was cabarets where the Middle East's best belly dancers shimmied their hips. Now the top dancers are often from Brazil or Russia and tend to appear at the city's five-star hotels, hastening the decline of the old venues downtown.<br />One exception is the Shahrazad, a belly dance club under ceilings nine meters, or 30 feet, high, with velvet curtains and large Arabian Nights-style murals that were recently renovated by Egypt's largest alcoholic beverage company - part of an effort to restore downtown establishments to their former glory. The company also produced a map of central city bars and cabarets in an attempt to attract young Egyptians and foreigners.<br />"If we can bring tourists and foreigners back to downtown, I think it is good for Egypt," said Philippe Saintigny, head of marketing at Al Ahram Beverages, which produces Stella beer - a brand founded in 1897 and now produced under the guidance of the Heineken brewery of the Netherlands.<br />One downtown bar, Hurriya, has managed through the years to attract both Egyptians and foreigners, especially students from The American University in Cairo.<br />Saintigny pointed to Hurriya - Arabic for "freedom" - as proof that "trendy people" can be lured to the city center. He said his company was motivated by the need to develop its business in a country where the more liberal outlook of the past often is forgotten.<br />"We know in this country that you have pressure against alcohol," he said. "So we want to show that Stella is part of the heritage of this country also."</p><p></p><p></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0fc-GnV3MUkSzp6J-QuNvNI2YPqvQopLXBC-wBc0dbxzt2BaJnSu95tJXVBqn_MenLgdJMHfSXjkLDid0Gs7DBPXZEP0-JvTDpYYIf_cBbIQv4ZW8I4etl22ntCjKcSqhGByVPGn7hkM/s1600-h/DSC03338.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280295499022788418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0fc-GnV3MUkSzp6J-QuNvNI2YPqvQopLXBC-wBc0dbxzt2BaJnSu95tJXVBqn_MenLgdJMHfSXjkLDid0Gs7DBPXZEP0-JvTDpYYIf_cBbIQv4ZW8I4etl22ntCjKcSqhGByVPGn7hkM/s320/DSC03338.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Book Review: 'Panic'<br /></strong>Reviewed by Janet Maslin<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />Panic The Story of Modern Financial Insanity By Michael Lewis 391 pages. W.W. Norton & Co. $27.95.<br />"Panic" is packaged to look like Michael Lewis's own 21-year chronicle of financial hysteria, beginning with the crash of October 1987.<br />This book does cover that terrain. But it is an anthology of work by Lewis and many others rather than a single narrative, and in some ways that structure is liberating. By drawing on pre-existing journalism, Lewis, a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, need not feign naiveté to capture the conditions leading up to this and each successive money meltdown. Nor need he pretend to be surprised at the paucity of useful lessons that these crises have brought.<br />Though he only edited "Panic" (a book whose full proceeds will go to the nonprofit teaching and publishing organization 826 National and to the Greater New Orleans Foundation), Lewis has thoroughly invested himself in presenting its stories. Some of his own work is excerpted here. And he has written illuminating introductions to the book's separate sections. Each section traces the arc of a single panic, with some (the collapse of the Thai baht in 1997) less fathomable than others (the late 1990s boom and bust of the Internet, culminating in the dot-com cataclysms of 2000).<br />The range of "Panic" incorporates both fatuous, blue-sky feature writing ("If you do this carefully, it's like picking money off trees," says a screenwriter turned investor, in the summer of 1987) and densely theoretical analysis. This book includes a glossary of finance-related alphabet soup (M-LEC, LIBOR, CDO, SIV) and terms like tranche, quant and the Phillips curve.<br />Most of the book is quick, simple and straightforward. If "Panic" does not offer much in the way of long-range wisdom or prevention strategies, it's loaded with spooky nostalgia and mordant humor. It harks back to the days when the Dow Jones industrial average's surge past the 2,500 mark was "now so high that investors sometimes get a kind of queasy altitude sickness," as Stephen Koepp put it in Time magazine. It quotes quaint talk of "the rush to commercialize the global computing web known as the Internet" (Laurence Zuckerman in The New York Times). It nods to the flashy excesses of James Cayne, the soon-to-be-Ozymandian chief executive of now-devastated Bear Stearns.<br />Through all this, "Panic" provides a full range of gaffes, goofs and gotchas, and a spirit of schadenfreude. Its governing principle: The best diversion from one's own mistakes is to read about everyone else's.<br />"A Brand-New Kind of Crash" is the book's opening section, complete with one especially ominous warning. "The crash of 1987 marks the beginning of the Age of Financial Unreason, when panic became just another, quotidian aspect of financial life," Lewis writes. "At the time, to a lot of people, it felt like the end of something. In retrospect it appears to be more of a beginning."<br />The specific triggers of this event, like portfolio insurance, are duly taken into account. What interests Lewis just as much are the sound effects ("I-yi-yi-yi-yi," moans one woman looking at an electronic stock ticker, as reported in The New York Times), the anachronisms (General Motors stock is considered "the bluest of the blue" and a safe haven from turbulence) and the impact on individuals. Today, Faith Popcorn's 1987 prediction that compulsive yuppie spenders will become compulsive nonspenders ("one house, one car, one raincoat") still seems to apply.<br />"Foreigners Gone Wild" would be this book's flattest section were it not for an excerpt from "How the Eggheads Cracked," Lewis's Tom Wolfe-ish 1999 story in The New York Times Magazine of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, describing the post-Salomon Brothers life of the firm's "young professors," whose bodies were "merely life-support systems for their brains, which were in turn extensions of their computers." His measure of this particular crisis is its way of flummoxing such heretofore dauntless guys.<br />"The New New Panic" describes the wild ups and downs of the Internet joy ride. This section is most frightening in showing what a single piece of doomsday journalism (Jack Willoughby's "Burning Up" in Barron's) could do to investors' expectations. It is most outlandish in describing, in "Fumble.com" from Salon, how dot-com advertising gravitated to the Super Bowl - with ad rates so high that it was possible for a start-up to squander more than half its seed money "in less time than it takes to soft-boil an egg."<br />The scariest part of "Panic" is "The People's Panic," about the subprime mortgage collapse. Fortunately, Lewis has the wit to open this section with Dave Barry's views on how to get rich in real estate: "You don't have to take any risk, or work hard, or even have a central nervous system. That's how profitable real estate is!"<br />When this book went to press, one big firm had collapsed, five chief executives had been fired, and 50,000 Wall Street jobs had been lost. Events have gotten way ahead of "Panic" since then. But early warnings are here. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are doing fine, because if they weren't, we'd be facing "some economic scenario that is probably as severe as, if not worse than, the Great Depression," Freddie's chief economist tells The New Yorker in 2002.</p><p></p><p>***************</p><p><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></p><p><strong>Some questions for Timothy Geithner</strong><br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />Timothy Geithner, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for Treasury secretary, has some explaining to do.<br />As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Geithner was a key decision maker in September when the government let Lehman Brothers fail and then, two days later, bailed out the insurer American International Group for $85 billion.<br />Those decisions proved cataclysmic. The markets and the economy have yet to recover from Lehman's failure. The bailout of AIG dealt a further blow to the Fed's credibility - and, by extension, Geithner's - because it was an abrupt reversal from the no-new-bailouts stance that had applied to Lehman and, initially, to AIG. Together, the decisions showed that several months into the financial crisis, officials lacked the information and the insight to correctly call the shots.<br />Making matters worse, the Fed and the Treasury have changed their story about how the calamity unfolded. No one expects a perfect performance in the thick of a crisis. But an after-the-fact revision of what happened at best raises questions and worse, looks like an attempt to dodge accountability.<br />In testimony before Congress on Sept. 24, about a week after Lehman's collapse, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that the failure of Lehman posed risks but that the firm's troubles had been well known for some time and investors recognized that bankruptcy was a significant possibility. Bernanke said Lehman's default, "while perhaps manageable in itself," combined with the "unexpectedly rapid collapse of AIG" to create a global financial tempest. In other words, Bernanke, Geithner and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson believed the system was stable enough to withstand Lehman's downfall.<br />The story changed as they were proved wrong and as the government's obligations to prop up the financial system rose precipitously. In a speech on Dec. 1, Bernanke said "legal constraints" prevented the Fed from rescuing Lehman, making a bankruptcy "unavoidable." Translation: Not our fault!<br />The law allows the Fed to make emergency loans when the financial system is in danger, provided that the lending is "indorsed or otherwise secured" to its satisfaction. The Fed has accepted all manner of dubious assets in exchange for its various loans as the crisis has deepened. In a speech on Oct. 15 and in his Dec. 1 speech, however, Bernanke said Lehman's collateral was insufficient. Secretary Paulson also invoked a lack-of-legal-authority argument in a speech last month to explain Lehman's demise. Why didn't they say so at the time?<br />The burden is on Geithner to clear up the matter. If legal constraints precluded a Fed intervention in Lehman, why weren't they mentioned at the time? Did Fed officials consider asking Congress for the necessary authority? There was plenty of time to do so because, as Bernanke noted last September, the collapse of Lehman was a long time coming.<br />The revised version of the story sidesteps questions about whether the bailout of AIG - arranged by Geithner - was influenced by the specific needs of some of the insurer's counterparties, like Goldman Sachs.<br />Geithner should be asked at his confirmation hearing to explain which firms were threatened by an AIG collapse, in what amounts and how those entanglements justify an ongoing bailout. Geithner must also explain how such entanglements came to be the norm on his watch. His answers will help shed light on whether he is sufficiently distant from Wall Street to reform a system that has proved catastrophically unstable.</p><p><br /></p><p><strong>****************</strong></p><p><strong>From Paris to Tokyo, more Madoff victims emerge<br /></strong>By Jon Menon and Charles Penty<br />Bloomberg News<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />MADRID: More banks, from Paris to Tokyo to Madrid, emerged Monday as victims of Bernard Madoff's alleged Ponzi scheme.<br />BNP Paribas, the biggest French bank, said Sunday that it has as much as €350 million, or $472 million, at risk from Madoff's investment advisory business. Nomura Holdings of Japan has ¥27.5 billion, or $302 million, at risk from Madoff's funds, while Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria of Spain may face up to €300 million in losses.<br />Madoff, 70, was arrested by federal prosecutors Thursday and charged with operating what he told his sons was a long-running Ponzi scheme in the New York-based firm's business advising rich people, hedge funds and institutions. He told senior employees that the firm was insolvent and "had been for years," prosecutors said in the criminal complaint.<br />"A frothy market encourages slack oversight," said Peter Hahn, a fellow of finance at London's Cass Business School. "Whenever something like this happens, everyone who has been hit will comb through their investments."<br />The Madoff collapse comes as banks and investment companies are reeling from falling asset prices and sputtering economies after the U.S. subprime mortgage market crash. Financial firms have reported almost $1 trillion of credit losses and writedowns since the start of 2007, data compiled by Bloomberg show.<br />Madoff, who had advised the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on how to regulate markets, described his investment management operations as "one big lie," prosecutors said. Investors have disclosed about $24 billion of investments in Madoff's funds, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.<br />Ira Sorkin, a lawyer at Dickstein Shapiro in New York representing Madoff, did not reply to a phone call and e-mail seeking comment. Sorkin said on Saturday that the situation was "a tragedy."<br />BNP Paribas fell as much as 9.8 percent in Paris trading after reporting its Madoff exposure and suffering a setback in its plan to buy the Belgian operations of Fortis. The Brussels Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the sale of Fortis assets must be put to investors for a vote before Feb. 12. The court decision complicates BNP Paribas's plan to complete the purchase quickly and preserve Fortis's customer base.<br />BBVA, the Spanish lender, said it may face losses from the hedging of structured products linked to Madoff. BBVA acted for other financial institutions and investors to set up products linked to third-party funds that had invested in Madoff Investment Securities, the Bilbao, Spain-based lender said in a filing Monday to market regulators in Madrid. BBVA has no direct investments in Madoff.<br />Banco Santander, a Spanish rival, said Sunday that its hedge fund unit invested €2.33 billion of client funds with Madoff. The bank's Optimal Investment Services unit placed money with Madoff through its Optimal Strategic U.S. Equity fund, the Spanish lender said.<br />"It's not Santander's own money, and they're not to blame, but of course it will be taken as something negative," said Alberto Espelosin, a manager at Ibercaja Gestion.<br />Santander dropped as much as 4.9 percent in Madrid trading Monday. Santander, based in the Spanish city of the same name, lost 53 percent of its market value this year. BBVA advanced 4 cents, or 0.5 percent, to €8.36.<br />Royal Bank of Scotland could lose as much as £400 million, or $601 million, on investments linked to Madoff. The bank, 58 percent owned by the government, said it had "exposure" through trading and collateralized lending to funds of hedge funds invested with Madoff.<br />Natixis, based in Paris, said Monday that it has as much as €450 million of client funds invested with Madoff.<br />Man Group, Europe's largest publicly traded hedge-fund company, has about $360 million invested directly or indirectly in funds linked to Madoff. The investments in two Madoff funds represent 0.5 percent of Man's total assets under management, the London-based company said.<br />HSBC Holdings, Europe's largest bank by market value, may have about $1 billion at stake, The Financial Times said, citing people close to the situation. Brendan McNamara, a spokesman for HSBC, declined to comment on the matter.<br />The list of victims of the alleged scheme may also include the real-estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman, the foundation of the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, Senator Frank Lautenberg and a charity of the movie director Steven Spielberg, The Wall Street Journal reported, without saying where it got the information.<br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><strong>U.S. prosecutors try to determine the extent of a trader's vast losses<br /></strong>By Diana B. Henriques and Alex Berenson<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />NEW YORK: The epicenter of what may be the largest Ponzi scheme in history was the 17th floor of the Lipstick Building, an oval red-granite building rising 34 floors above Third Avenue in the Midtown business district here.<br />A busy stock-trading operation occupied the 19th floor, and computers and paperwork filled the 18th floor of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.<br />But the 17th floor was Bernard Madoff's sanctum, occupied by fewer than two dozen staff members and rarely visited by other employees. They called it the "hedge fund" floor, but U.S. prosecutors now say the work Madoff did there was actually a fraud scheme whose losses Madoff himself has estimated at $50 billion.<br />The tally of reported losses climbed through the weekend to nearly $20 billion, with a giant Spanish bank, Banco Santander, saying Sunday that clients of one of its Swiss subsidiaries had lost $3 billion.<br />On Monday, HSBC Holdings, the global bank based in Britain, said it had $1 billion at risk after providing financing to funds that invested with Madoff.<br />A major Swiss bank, Union Bancaire Privée, indicated Monday that it also had hundreds of millions of dollars in client assets under management at Madoff's failed firm.<br />The list of prominent victims grew as well. According to a person with direct knowledge of the business of the real estate and publishing magnate Mort Zuckerman, he is on a list of victims that already included the owners of the New York Mets baseball team, a former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League and the chairman of GMAC, the U.S. consumer financing giant.<br />Some of the biggest losers were members of the Palm Beach Country Club in Florida, where many of Madoff's wealthy clients were recruited.<br />And the 17th floor of his building is now an occupied zone, as investigators and forensic auditors try to piece together what Madoff did with the billions of dollars entrusted to him by individuals, banks and hedge funds.<br />So far, only Madoff, the firm's founder, has been arrested in the scandal. He is free on a $10 million bond and cannot travel far outside the New York area.<br />But a question still dominates the investigation: How could one person have pulled off such a far-reaching, long-running fraud, carrying out all the practical chores the scheme required, like producing monthly statements, annual tax statements, trade confirmations and bank transfers?<br />Firms managing money on Madoff's scale would typically have hundreds of people involved in these administrative tasks. Prosecutors say he claims to have acted entirely alone.<br />"Our task is to find the records and follow the money," said Alexander Vasilescu, a lawyer in the New York office of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.<br />So far, he said, investigators could not shed much light on the fraud or its scale. "We do not dispute his number - we just have not calculated how he made it," he said.<br />Scrutiny is also falling on the many banks and money managers who helped steer clients to Madoff and now say they are among his victims.<br />While many investors were friends or met Madoff at country clubs or on charitable boards, even more had entrusted their money to professional advisory firms that, in turn, handed it on to Madoff for a fee.<br />Investors are now questioning whether these paid advisers were diligent enough in investigating Madoff to ensure that their money was safe. Where those advisers work for big institutions like Banco Santander, investors will most likely look to them, rather than to the remnants of Madoff's firm, for restitution.<br />Royal Bank of Scotland said Monday that it could lose as much as £400 million, or about $613 million, from trading and collateralized lending linked to the Madoff funds.<br />Man Group, based in London, said its institutional fund of funds business had about $360 million invested in two Madoff funds.<br />Nomura Holdings, the biggest investment firm in Japan, said Monday that it had ¥27.5 billion, or $303 million, in exposure but that the effect on its capital would be limited.<br />And Nordea Bank, the Nordic region's largest lender, said it had invested €48 million, or $66 million, in Madoff's Fairfield Sentry fund.<br />Losses of this scale simply do not seem to fit into the intimate business that Madoff operated.<br />With just more than 200 employees, it was tight-knit and friendly, according to current and former employees. Madoff, 70, was gregarious and empathetic, known for visiting sick employees at the hospital and hosting warmly generous staff parties.<br />By the elevated standards of Wall Street, the Madoff firm did not pay exceptionally well, but it was loyal to employees even in bad times.<br />Madoff's family filled the senior positions, but his was not the only family at the firm - generations of employees had worked for Madoff and invested their savings there.<br />Even before Madoff's funds collapsed, some employees were mystified by the 17th floor. In recent regulatory filings, Madoff claimed to manage $17 billion for clients - a number that would normally occupy far more than the 20 or so who worked on 17.<br />One Madoff employee said he and other workers assumed that Madoff must have had a separate office elsewhere to oversee his client accounts.<br />Nevertheless, Madoff attracted and held the trust of companies that prided themselves on their diligent investigation of investment managers.<br />One of them was Walter Noel Jr., who struck up a business relationship with Madoff 20 years ago that helped earn his investment firm, Fairfield Greenwich Group, millions of dollars in fees. Indeed, over time, one of Fairfield's strongest selling points for its largest fund was its access to Madoff.<br />But now, Noel and Fairfield are the biggest known losers in the scandal, facing potential losses of $7.5 billion, more than half its assets.<br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>Collateralized loans, without the collateral<br /></strong>breakingviews.com<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />Two types of institutions have lost money as part of Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion scam: those who invested with him, and those who lent money to those investors. The folly of the lenders is, in some ways, even more breathtaking than that of the investors.<br />The likes of BNP Paribas, HSBC and Royal Bank of Scotland are nursing losses after providing supposedly collateralized loans to Madoff "feeder" funds. How these feeder funds operated is slightly murky. Although they weren't technically part of Madoff's operation, he was their investment manager.<br />The feeder funds leveraged themselves with money from banks so that they could juice up the returns they offered their clients. Banks looked at the apparently steady returns produced by these feeders and, when they extended loans, were prepared to take only modest haircuts - some observers think as little as 10 percent - on the supposed collateral. If all the assets have vanished, as now seems possible, it's not just investors who will be wiped out. There will be no collateral for the banks, either.<br />Banks' shareholders will be asking how on earth this happened. The answer seems to be that the collateral the banks thought they had didn't exist. The banks thought the feeder funds had all sort of liquid securities. But this was a fiction.<br />One might have thought that the banks would have checked to make sure the collateral was there - or at least insisted that there was a proper custodian to watch over it. But in at least one case, breakingviews has learned, the "subcustodian" - the entity contracted by the main custodian to watch over the collateral - was none other than Madoff himself.<br />How the banks made such an elementary error is a mystery. But one clue may come from the fact that none of the banks so far revealed as wearing the dunce's hat is big in prime brokerage - and therefore may not have known what it was doing. - Hugo Dixon and George Hay<br />THE ATTRACTION OF CON STORIES<br />Bernard Madoff may go down as one of the biggest stock market fraudsters ever. But even if the losses from the New York fund manager's alleged Ponzi scheme reach $50 billion - Madoff's own estimate - he will remain a bit player in the ongoing market collapse.<br />The capitalization of the world's stock markets has declined by $26 trillion since July, according to the World Federation of Exchanges. To that destruction of value, $50 billion adds an almost trivial 0.2 percent.<br />But not all $50 billion sums are alike. For Lehman Brothers, which once had that much market capitalization, the sum supported a balance sheet many times larger. For Madoff, the effect of the loss will be magnified in a different way - by wounding the trust on which financial markets are built. Too many Madoffs and the whole financial world would collapse.<br />Still, Madoff's purported wicked ways haven't garnered so much attention only because his practices could set an ominous precedent. There is something enthralling about stories of confidence men - those rare criminals who simultaneously inspire and betray trust - that can enthrall both unwary and otherwise sage investors.<br />The psychological drama of con men has entranced many writers: Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, John le Carré. The authors, like the dupes, have often been seduced by the fraudsters' almost magnificent ability to take advantage of human weakness.<br />In retrospect, Madoff looks anything but magnificent - more like a schemer, or perhaps a foolish man caught up in a fast-expanding web of lies. But for many years, he was able to charm many rich people who should have known better.<br />That ability - and the caliber of the victims - means that Madoff's bit part in the financial crisis could easily translate into a major motion picture. A clever director will give the audience the satisfaction of seeing the villain unmasked and punished. But the film is likely to linger on the years of dishonest glory. Deception is dangerous, but it comes with a certain glamour. - Edward Hadas<br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><strong>Factbox: Who was exposed to Madoff?</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />Investors around the world have scrambled since Friday to assess potential losses from an alleged $50 billion fraud by Bernard Madoff, the prominent Wall Street trader arrested last week.<br />Following are some of the companies from outside the United States with exposure:<br />HSBC has potential exposure of about $1.5 billion, the Financial Times reported, citing unnamed people close to the situation. The exposure is from loans it provided to institutional clients, mainly hedge funds of funds, that wanted to invest with Madoff, the FT reported.<br />GRUPO SANTANDER, the largest Spanish bank, said its investment fund Optimal has a €2.33 billion, or $3.05 billion, exposure to Madoff Securities.<br />MAN GROUP said it is exposed through RMF, its institutional fund of funds business, which has approximately $360 million invested in two funds that are directly or indirectly sub-advised by Madoff Securities.<br />BBVA, the No.2 bank in Spain, said its international operation has about €30 million in exposure to Madoff and it sees a maximum potential loss from Madoff-linked investments of €300 million.<br />ASCOT PARTNERS According to a Wall Street Journal report, the fund where the former GMAC chairman Jacob Ezra Merkin is a money manager has an exposure of $1.8 billion.<br />ACCESS INTERNATIONAL ADVISORS According to a report by Bloomberg, Access has an exposure of $1.4 billion.<br />AXA, the French insurer, said it has negligible exposure to Madoff, well below €100 million.<br />BARCLAYS Any exposure for the British bank Barclays to Madoff would be "minimal", a person familiar with the matter said, but Barclays declined to comment.<br />UNION BANCAIRE PRIVÉE, a Swiss bank that invests in funds of hedge funds, has lost about 1 billion Swiss francs, or $850 million, according to Le Temps, citing unnamed bankers.<br />ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND said it had exposure through trading and collateralized lending to funds of hedge funds invested with Madoff, with a potential loss of around £400 million, or $597.9 million.<br />NATIXIS, the French investment bank, said it could have a €450 million indirect exposure to Madoff<br />BNP PARIBAS, the French bank said, it has a potential €350 million, or $464.3 million, exposure.<br />REICHMUTH, a Swiss private bank, said its fund of funds Reichmuth Matterhorn had an exposure to investments linked to Madoff that amounted to about $325 million.<br />NOMURA said it had a ¥27.5 billion, or $303 million, exposure related to Madoff, but the impact on its capital would be limited.<br />UNICREDIT, the Italian bank, said its own exposure was around €75 million, while in its Pioneer Investments unit, some funds were exposed to Madoff "indirectly through feeder funds."<br />SOCIÉTÉ GÉNÉRALE of France said its exposure was negligible, below €10 million.<br />MAXAM CAPITAL MANAGEMENT, a fund, has lost about $280 million on funds invested with Madoff, according to a Wall Street Journal report.<br />EIM GROUP, a fund of hedge funds, said it has a $230 million exposure, Le Temps reported.<br />FAIRFIELD SENTRY, a $7.3 billion hedge fund run by Walter Noel's Fairfield Greenwich Group, had accounts with Madoff Investment Securities.<br />KINGATE GLOBAL FUND, the $2.8 billion hedge fund run by Kingate Management had invested in Madoff Investment Securities.<br />UBS, the Swiss investment bank has a limited and insignificant counterparty exposure, its spokesman told Reuters.<br />BENEDICT HENTSCH, a Swiss private bank, said its exposure to products linked to Madoff amounted to 56 million francs or less than 5 percent of assets under management.<br />BRAMDEAN ALTERNATIVES, a British asset manager, said almost 10 percent of its holdings were exposed to Madoff.<br />BANESTO of Spain said it had insignificant exposure, but declined to disclose the size.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>Siemens to pay $1.3 billion in fines<br /></strong>By Carter Dougherty<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />FRANKFURT: Siemens, the German engineering conglomerate, closed the book Monday on wide-ranging criminal investigations in the United States and Germany by agreeing to pay a record $1.34 billion in fines to settle bribery allegations.<br />In Washington, Siemens's general counsel, Peter Solmssen, signed an $800 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to end an inquiry into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The fine is, by a colossal margin, the largest ever imposed under the U.S. antibribery legislation, now 31 years old.<br />Munich prosecutors, whose trailblazing work revealed the outlines of a major system of slush funds and illegal payments, also announced a deal with Siemens that would cost the company €395 million, or $540 million.<br />While the company itself is now in the clear, the German authorities are still looking into potential wrongdoing by former Siemens employees that could result in criminal charges.<br />Crucially, Siemens avoided either a guilty plea or a conviction for bribery, allowing it to maintain its status as a "responsible contractor" with the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency. Without this benchmark certification, Siemens could have been excluded from public procurement contracts in the United States and elsewhere. German authorities are preparing a similar certification.<br />The fine in the United States was nearly 17 times more than the next-largest imposed for overseas commercial bribery. Yet it still represents victory for Siemens, because it is far below what might have been levied under the U.S. Justice Department's guidelines.<br />With $1.36 billion identified as potentially corrupt payments worldwide, a fine of up to $2.7 billion would have been possible. But the U.S. authorities said in court papers filed in Washington that they were impressed by the company's efforts to identify wrongdoing and prevent new occurrences.<br />"Compared to other cases that have been brought, we have been dealt with very fairly," Solmssen said by telephone.<br />Shares of Siemens, based in the southern German city of Munich, initially rallied on the news, which was lower than what investors had anticipated as settlement talks entered their final phase this autumn.<br />"Before Siemens started giving hints, we would have expected much more," said Roland Pitz, an analyst at UniCredit in Munich. "The employees must be celebrating."<br />Gerhard Cromme, the Siemens chairman who had to juggle the sudden departure of a chief executive as a result of the crisis, and a two-year distraction from its core business of manufacturing energy, medical and other industrial equipment, allowed himself just a few smiles as he announced the deals in Munich.<br />"Siemens is closing a painful chapter in its history," Cromme said at a news conference.<br />The U.S. deal includes a $350 million payment to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle alleged accounting rule violations, which Siemens neither admitted nor denied. Siemens falls under U.S. jurisdiction because its shares are listed in New York.<br />Siemens pleaded guilty to circumventing and failing to maintain adequate internal controls, a requirement of the antibribery law, and will pay $450 million to the U.S. Justice Department. Three Siemens subsidiaries also pleaded guilty to more specific charges.<br />The Siemens approach was also striking for its alacrity. The Baker Hughes settlement took five years, but Siemens, determined to end a persistent distraction to a new management team, pulled it off in less than two.<br />Munich prosecutors are still investigating former Siemens employees, and say they have not ruled out criminal charges. So far, they have leveled only minor charges of failing to effectively supervise the company against two former chief executives, Heinrich von Pierer and Klaus Kleinfeld, which could result at most in fines.<br />"This investigation will continue as planned and might take considerable time," Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld, the lead Munich prosecutor, said in a statement Monday.<br />But the company itself is no longer in danger of being charged. "We have wrapped up all of the potential claims against Siemens arising out of the alleged conduct in both countries," Solmssen said.<br />Michael Hershman, a co-founder of the global antibribery group Transparency International, said that the Siemens fines, though lower than what could have been imposed, obscure other damage to the company, notably to its battered reputation.<br />"This has been an extraordinarily expensive lesson for Siemens," said Hershman, a consultant who helped revamp Siemens's ethics rules after the scandal broke. "I'm not disturbed it was not higher, because the cumulative costs were much higher."<br />The next-highest fine imposed by U.S. authorities for bribery was $48 million, paid by the oil field services company Baker Hughes in 2007.<br />Siemens' stock closed down 30 cents at €47.15 in Frankfurt on Monday. On the New York Stock Exchange, where Siemens is also listed, Siemens was up 51 cents, or 0.80 percent, at $64.43 in afternoon trading.<br />As is typical of foreign bribery settlements in the United States, Siemens agreed to pay for a four-year monitoring scheme that will produce reports for U.S. authorities on the company's progress in keeping to new ethics rules.<br />But for the first time, the U.S. agencies agreed that a non-American, the former German finance minister Theo Waigel, would lead the effort. The U.S. law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher will assist him, Solmssen said.<br />Hershman, the consultant, said Waigel's appointment could encourage European investigators, who have generally lagged behind their U.S. counterparts in prosecuting commercial bribery, to employ the same tactic.<br />"Putting yourself in the shoes of a European corporation, it seems to me they would accept the notion of a monitor if it is someone who understands the local legal system and operations," Hershman said.<br />But the monitoring does put pressure on Siemens, which harvested accolades for setting up an extensive compliance system, to keep up the pace. Solmssen said Siemens would do so by negotiating "integrity pacts" with competitors, which allow them to trade information on possible corruption in their fields.<br />Although Siemens is suffering under the global economic downturn, there has been no evidence that changing business practices has hurt their bottom line.<br />"We have to continue to make it clear from the most senior levels of management that we are committed to compliance and doing clean business everyday," Solmssen said. </p><p></p><p>*******************</p><p><strong>Illinois governor says he has no plans to resign</strong><br />By Susan Saulny<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />CHICAGO: Talk about mixed messages.<br />Not long after the Illinois attorney general, Lisa Madigan, told a national television audience that Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois was thinking of possibly resigning here on Monday, the governor's spokesman broke some news of his own.<br />Not only was Blagojevich not resigning, the spokesman, Lucio Guerrero, said, but he was planning to go to work on Monday and study a few bills that might at some point require either his signature or veto — including one that will be hammered out in a special legislative session in Springfield that would strip him of his coveted appointment power over President-elect Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat.<br />"He has no plans of resigning today or tomorrow," Guerrero said on Sunday. "He still signs bills as governor, and he wants to see details."<br />The empty Senate seat is at the heart of a sprawling criminal case against Blagojevich, a 52-year-old Democrat who was arrested Tuesday on charges that he schemed to trade Obama's old seat for money and favors.<br />Madigan is a longtime rival of Blagojevich who has expressed interest in the past of one day being governor herself, and she has requested that the State Supreme Court declare the governor unfit for office. Madigan acknowledged on CBS's morning news show, "Face the Nation," that her assertion was based on "rumors in the media." But not before they set off a firestorm of speculation.<br />Her spokeswoman, Robyn Ziegler, said of her remarks after the television appearance: "She has no inside information about anything."<br />The rumor began swirling here over the weekend after The Chicago Sun-Times published an article saying that someone close to the governor said he might make a decision about resignation as early as Monday.<br />Guerrero denied it then and now.<br />The back-and-forth over such a serious case has become more like comedy. The governor's every move is scrutinized — Where is his car parked? Why is he making strange faces on his porch? — in an effort to predict the future of state government. In the absence of any official statements or appearances by Blagojevich, the public and journalists are making do with what little they have.<br />"It's like tail-chasing," said Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. "Part of it is that there are so many unprecedenteds at the same time. So everybody's playing with a rule book they've never seen before, and at the center of all this is a governor who is not known for rational behavior. So any story just suddenly becomes like sky-writing. 'Oh, he's leaving! Oh, he's staying!'<br />"Really, nobody knows what the next step is," she said, adding that it may well be resignation on Monday.</p><p></p><p>*******************</p><p><strong>Caroline Kennedy to seek Hillary Clinton's Senate seat<br /></strong>By Nicholas Confessore<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of an American political dynasty, has decided to pursue the United States Senate seat being vacated by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, a person told of her decision said on Monday.<br />The decision came after a series of deeply personal and political conversations, in which Kennedy, whom friends describe as unflashy but determined, wrestled with whether to give up what has been a lifetime of avoiding the spotlight.<br />Kennedy will ask Governor David Paterson of New York to consider her for the appointment, according to the person told of her decision. The governor was traveling to Utica Monday and could not immediately be reached for comment.<br />If appointed, Kennedy would fill the seat once held by her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy.<br />Kennedy has been making calls this morning to alert political figures to her interest.<br />Kennedy's decision is likely to have a major impact on the governor's considerations as he mulls who should succeed Clinton. Already, some other Democrats have pointedly questioned her credentials for the job. United States Representative Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat, said last week that he did not know what Kennedy's qualifications were, "except that she has name recognition — but so does J. Lo."<br />Others, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg have praised her abilities.<br />Kennedy first telephoned the governor on Dec. 3 to inquire about the job, but Paterson described that conversation as "informational" and said it was clear that Kennedy had not decided whether she wanted to pursue the position.<br />But since then, she has begun reaching out to key political figures in New York, including Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the State Assembly, and Thomas DiNapoli, the state comptroller. She has also hired Knickerbocker SKD, a prominent political consulting firm headed by Josh Isay, a former chief of staff to Senator Charles Schumer, to advise her.<br />Kennedy's family members, especially her cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr., have urged her to seek the post.<br />Clinton has said that she would not vacate the Senate seat until she was confirmed as President-elect Barack Obama's secretary of state, which is expected to occur in January or February, and the governor has said that he would wait until then to make the appointment. But he has also said that he might make his selection known before then, to allow whomever is chosen to prepare for the new role.<br />Kennedy, 51, a resident of Manhattan's Upper East Side, took an unusually public role in Obama's campaign, and the two became friends. Obama appointed Kennedy to the panel that vetted potential vice-presidential candidates for him.<br />Before that, Kennedy had devoted much of her time to charitable works and institutions linked to her family, like the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, of which she is president.<br />Others likely to be considered for the Senate seat are members of Congress including Kirsten Gillibrand, a rising star in the Democratic party who represents an upstate district; Thomas Suozzi, the Nassau County chief executive and a former candidate for governor; and the New York State attorney general, Andrew Cuomo.</p><p></p><p><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><strong>U.S. Supreme Court allows suits over cigarette marketing</strong><br />By David Stout<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Tobacco companies suffered a defeat in the Supreme Court on Monday when the justices ruled that the companies can be sued by smokers who contend they were deceived by advertisements promoting "light" cigarettes.<br />In its 5-to-4 ruling, the court did not state that such advertising is, in fact, misleading. Rather, it concluded that lawsuits accusing the cigarette-makers of fraudulent conduct can proceed.<br />The ruling was a victory for a group of plaintiffs from Maine whose suit accused the tobacco companies of violating the Maine Unfair Trade Practices Act by fraudulently advertising that their "light" cigarettes delivered far less tar and nicotine than regular brands.<br />The plaintiffs contend that the tobacco companies knew that habitual smokers who turned to "light" cigarettes would typically inhale more deeply to make up for the feeling they missed from the old-fashioned unfiltered cigarettes. The suit was filed as a class-action claim on behalf of all smokers of Marlboro Lights or Cambridge Lights cigarettes, made by Philip Morris.<br />The defendants, Altria and its Philip Morris USA unit, tried to get the suit thrown out by relying on the federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, which states that "no requirement or prohibition based on smoking and health shall be imposed under state law with respect to the advertising or promotion" of cigarettes that follow federal labeling requirements.<br />A federal district court sided with the tobacco companies, finding that the federal labeling act pre-empted the state law. But the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed the district court, concluding that the federal labeling act "neither expressly nor impliedly pre-empts" the smokers' fraud claim.<br />"The merits of the dispute are not before us," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote at the beginning of the majority decision, which was joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.<br />To win their suit, the decision emphasized, the complaining smokers still have to prove that the companies' "use of 'light' and 'lowered tar' descriptors in fact violated the state deceptive practices statute." But even though not ruling on the merits of such suits, the Supreme Court delivered a victory to smokers who claim to be aggrieved.<br />Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissent asserting that, contrary to the majority's interpretation of the law and events, the smokers' claims under state law ought to be "expressly pre-empted" by the federal labeling act. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr. joined the dissent.<br />Altria contended that it could still prevail in lawsuits accusing it of fraud. "We continue to view these cases as manageable, and the company will assert many of the strong defenses used successfully in the past to defend us against this very type of lawsuit," Murray Garnick, the company's senior vice president and associate general counsel, told The Associated Press.<br />But a lawyer for the plaintiffs had another perspective. "Had the court gone the other way, it would have been open season for the tobacco companies to continue to perpetrate fraud on the tobacco-consuming public," David Frederick, who represented the Maine smokers, told the AP<br />The American Heart Association said it was pleased with the ruling. "Smokers who have been deceived by Big Tobacco's dubious marketing practices are now in a better position to hold the industry accountable," M. Cass Wheeler, chief executive of the association, said in a statement.<br />The majority ruling went against a recent trend of court rulings limiting state regulation of business and deferring to federal power. Justice Stevens noted that "we have long recognized that state laws that conflict with laws are 'without effect.' " On the other hand, he observed, when Congress enacts a law whose language can be interpreted more than one way, courts normally accept the reading that goes against pre-emption. More Articles in Washington »<br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><strong>Paul Krugman: European crass warfare</strong><br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />So here's the situation: The economy is facing its worst slump in decades. The usual response to an economic downturn, cutting interest rates, isn't working. Large-scale government aid looks like the only way to end the economic nosedive.<br />But there's a problem: Conservative politicians, clinging to an out-of-date ideology - and, perhaps, betting (wrongly) that their constituents are relatively well positioned to ride out the storm - are standing in the way of action.<br />No, I'm not talking about Bob Corker, the senator from Nissan - I mean Tennessee - and his fellow Republicans, who torpedoed last week's attempt to buy some time for the U.S. auto industry. (Why was the plan blocked? An e-mail message circulated among Senate Republicans declared that denying the auto industry a loan was an opportunity for Republicans to "take their first shot against organized labor.")<br />I am, instead, talking about Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and her economic officials, who have become the biggest obstacles to a much-needed European rescue plan.<br />The European economic mess isn't getting very much attention here in the U.S., because we're understandably focused on our own problems. But the world's other economic superpower - America and the European Union have roughly the same GDP - is arguably in as much trouble as we Americans are.<br />The most acute problems are on Europe's periphery, where many smaller economies are experiencing crises strongly reminiscent of past crises in Latin America and Asia: Latvia is the new Argentina; Ukraine is the new Indonesia. But the pain has also reached the big economies of Western Europe: Britain, France, Italy and, the biggest of all, Germany.<br />As in the United States, monetary policy - cutting interest rates in an effort to perk up the economy - is rapidly reaching its limit. That leaves, as the only way to avert the worst slump since the Great Depression, the aggressive use of fiscal policy: increasing spending or cutting taxes to boost demand. Right now everyone sees the need for a large, pan-European fiscal stimulus.<br />Everyone, that is, except the Germans. Merkel has become Frau Nein: If there is to be a rescue of the European economy, she wants no part of it, telling a party meeting that "we're not going to participate in this senseless race for billions."<br />Last week Peer Steinbrück, Merkel's finance minister, went even further. Not content with refusing to develop a serious stimulus plan for his own country, he denounced the plans of other European nations. He accused Britain, in particular, of engaging in "crass Keynesianism."<br />Germany's leaders seem to believe that their own economy is in good shape and in no need of major help. They're almost certainly wrong about that. The really bad thing, however, isn't their misjudgment of their own situation; it's the way Germany's opposition is preventing a common European approach to the economic crisis.<br />To understand the problem, think of what would happen if, say, New Jersey were to attempt to boost its economy through tax cuts or public works, without this state-level stimulus being part of a nationwide program. Clearly, much of the stimulus would "leak" away to neighboring states, so that New Jersey would end up with all of the debt while other states got many if not most of the jobs.<br />Individual European countries are in much the same situation. Any one government acting unilaterally faces the strong possibility that it will run up a lot of debt without creating much domestic employment.<br />For the European economy as a whole, however, this kind of leakage is much less of a problem: Two-thirds of the average EU member's imports come from other European nations, so that the Continent as a whole is no more import-dependent than the U.S. This means that a coordinated stimulus effort, in which each country counts on its neighbors to match its own efforts, would offer much more bang for the euro than individual, uncoordinated efforts.<br />But you can't have a coordinated European effort if Europe's biggest economy not only refuses to go along, but heaps scorn on its neighbors' attempts to contain the crisis.<br />Germany's big Nein won't last forever. Last week Ifo, a highly respected research institute, warned that Germany will soon be facing its worst economic crisis since the 1940s. If and when this happens, Merkel and her ministers will surely reconsider their position.<br />But in Europe, as in the United States, the issue is time. Across the world, economies are sinking fast, while we wait for someone, anyone, to offer an effective policy response. How much damage will be done before that response finally comes?<br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>NZ regulator to prosecute airlines for price fixing</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />WELLINGTON: New Zealand's competition watchdog is to take legal action against 13 airlines and seven individuals for alleged price fixing and cartel behaviour in the air freight market, a charge denied by the national carrier Air New Zealand .<br />The Commerce Commission said the airlines had colluded to raise the price of air freight by imposing fuel surcharges for more than nine years.<br />Air New Zealand's general counsel John Blair said it has been co-operating with the regulator's investigation, but it found no basis for the charges, and the commission has repeatedly refused to share its evidence with the largely state-owned airline.<br />"This is clearly an approach designed to justify their existence and seems more about grandstanding than about getting to the bottom of the allegations," Blair said in a statement.<br />Air New Zealand would vigorously defend the case, Blair said.<br />The commission said the alleged price fixing would have caused more harm to New Zealand because of the country's distance from its markets.<br />"It will have resulted in increased costs for exporters and importers and higher overall prices for many consumer goods," said Commission chair Paula Rebstock.<br />The airlines to be prosecuted are: Air New Zealand ; British Airways ; Cargolux International; Cathay Pacific ; Emirates ; Garuda International; Japan Airlines ; Korean Airlines ; Malaysian Airline Systems ; Qantas ; Singapore Airlines ; Thai Airlines ; and, United Airlines .<br />Shares in Air New Zealand, about 76-percent owned by the government, last traded unchanged at NZ$0.84. The stock has lost 56 percent so far this year, compared with a 33.4 percent drop in the benchmark top-50 index.<br />New Zealand's international air cargo market is worth around NZ$400 million (146.7 million), and during the time of the alleged offences, airlines would have earned about $2.9 billion.<br />The Commission has already prosecuted three airlines for not co-operating with its investigation, with a court decision due in January.<br />Competition authorities around the world including those in the European Union, United States and Australia have taken action against airlines for price fixing in the air freight market.<br />Last week, a court in Australia ordered Qantas to pay A$20 million for price fixing on cargo charges between 2002 and 2006.<br />(Reporting by Gyles Beckford; Editing by Valerie Lee) </p><p></p><p>*****************</p><p><strong>The U.S. railroad disability board that couldn't say no</strong><br />By Walt Bogdanich and Nicholas Phillips<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />After learning that most of her career employees were retiring early and getting disability payments, the Long Island Rail Road's president, Helena Williams, set out in October to learn more about the obscure federal agency in Chicago that was dispensing the money, a quarter of a billion dollars since 2000.<br />But when Williams asked to attend the next meeting of the agency — the federal Railroad Retirement Board, rail workers' version of Social Security — she got a surprise.<br />The board, with about $34 billion in assets, had not met formally in nearly two years, and no new meeting was scheduled. The three board members, all full-time presidential appointees, rarely met even in private, employees of the agency say.<br />Operating out of public view, with little scrutiny from Congress and even from its former inspector general, the retirement board has become the agency that cannot say no, last year approving virtually every single disability application it received — almost 98 percent. It did not matter where rail employees lived or where they worked.<br />An examination of the board by The New York Times, including dozens of interviews and a review of government records, found a disability program plagued by labor-management infighting, weak standards and a failure to use tests that could better weed out specious disability claims.<br />Since its inception, the board has been so riven with conflicts that it took a half century to update what were supposed to be temporary disability standards, leaving in place until 1998 archaic diagnostic terms like "cretinism," "imbecility" and "middle-class moronism." Simply having a "repugnant" scar could qualify someone as disabled.<br />The board's newer standards have not made much of a difference. Nor has the $10 million the board has spent over the last five years on physician consultants to help evaluate applicants; the approval rate has actually risen since 1965, when it was 96 percent.<br />"It doesn't require a lot of evidence," said Dr. Erlinda Berendi, a private contractor who reviews some of the board's occupational disability decisions.<br />The program's troubled history includes its former inspector general, William Doyle III, who chose to investigate waste, fraud and abuse from his home in Florida, 1,100 miles from the board's Chicago headquarters, records show. In the early 1990s, Doyle received thousands of dollars in awards from board members he was supposed to monitor — two are still in office — a practice that has since been outlawed. He later settled accusations of expense account fraud, agreeing to pay the federal government $35,000.<br />If Doyle's tenure was unusual, the way he ended his career was not: He retired on a disability, records show.<br />"I found that there had been little oversight of the activities of the board members or the entire agency," said the current inspector general, Martin Dickman, who investigated Doyle and wrote a report on what he found. "I admit that I had not anticipated the strange circumstances with which I was to be confronted."<br />The board has failed to heed several of Dickman's proposals to make the board work better, including that every disability applicant undergo two medical screenings, rather than one.<br />Investigations Under Way<br />More than a half-dozen state and federal agencies are now investigating the retirement board's disability payments to former LIRR employees. In September, two days after The Times published the results of an eight-month investigation that documented those disability payments, federal agents raided the board's Long Island office.<br />The LIRR's disability rate, which since 2000 has ranged between 93 percent and 97 percent for retired career employees, is three to four times that of the average railroad. Workers at other railroads get disabilities just as easily, but they file for them less often because, unlike LIRR employees, they can't retire early with a private pension plan to supplement their disability pay.<br />The disability program is one of a range of benefits provided by the retirement board, which also include survivor, unemployment and sickness payments. Workers and their employers pay taxes to support the board.<br />Labor officials defend the disability program, saying that any possible problems affect only the LIRR, and that changing the overall program would diminish protection for workers in a still-dangerous occupation.<br />"It is a program that works," said James Brunkenhoefer, national legislative director for the United Transportation Union. "If labor and management put the money in the pot and we decide how our money is distributed, and the only role government plays is to be the holder of that money — what is the problem?"<br />Rail industry officials say the entire program needs fixing. "The fact that we continue to have a 98 percent grant rate evidences the fact that it is difficult to weed out people who try to game the system," said Jerome Kever, management's representative on the three-member board, each of whom makes about $150,000.<br />The labor representative, V.M. Speakman Jr., considered the board's most influential member, declined to be interviewed in person or by telephone. Aides said he was unavailable or out of the office.<br />Upon further checking, The Times learned that Speakman usually does not work from the retirement board's office. In e-mail exchanges, Speakman who, records show, lives in the Chicago area, declined to say how many days this year he worked at headquarters. He added, "Inasmuch as I telecommute, my primary office is my home and is fully equipped to handle all agency business."<br />As a presidential appointee, Speakman said, he is on duty at all times.. "I am fully engaged in all issues related to the Railroad Retirement Board," he said.<br />Speakman and Kever, the longest serving board members in the agency's history, were first appointed by former President George Bush in 1992. Michael S. Schwartz, the board's public representative and its chairman, was appointed by the current President George W. Bush in 2003.<br />Schwartz said the current controversy over disabilities is unfortunate, because the board spends most of its resources smoothly administering other services for its 600,000 beneficiaries.<br />The board has sought to portray the cost of occupational disability as an internal matter. In a statement, it pointed to its financing from the taxes on all railroad employees and companies.<br />But that is only part of the story.<br />The board automatically re-evaluates all occupationally disabled workers to see whether they qualify for total disability. In most cases, the board concludes that they do, entitling them to early Medicare coverage and lower taxes. What's more, under a 1951 law, the burden of paying most of these benefits has shifted to Social Security. Of the $3.6 billion that Social Security transferred last year to the retirement board, $418 million was for disability payments.<br />At Social Security, which offers total disability benefits to nonrailroad workers, the approval rate is 55 percent. The retirement board's rate is 70 percent.<br />The board has never studied why these grant rates are different. But Steven Bartholow, a board lawyer, said Social Security reviews about a third of those cases and reached a different decision on just 4 percent in 2006 and 2007.<br />Setting Standards<br />The retirement board, while accustomed to disagreements, had never seen anything like it.<br />In December 1996, outside its headquarters, just steps from the elegant shops lining Michigan Avenue's Magnificent Mile, rail workers were picketing over the board's attempt to toughen disability standards. "Don't Steal from the Cripple," one sign read.<br />Inside the wood-paneled boardroom on the eighth floor, protesters turned up the heat. "Stop the charade," they chanted over and over, becoming so loud that board members had trouble communicating.<br />The board was about to make one of the most important decisions in the disability program's 50-year history: establishing permanent standards for the first time. Congress had created the occupational disability program in 1946, when railroad work was particularly hazardous and injured employees found that they had no marketable skills outside the industry.<br />Speakman objected bitterly to what was taking place, saying the board had not fully vetted the proposed changes. He believed they needed updating, but with union members benefiting from the old rules, Speakman had not led the fight for changes.<br />That was left to the rail industry, which had to find workers to replace those who retired early. "You can't just walk off the street and become a railroader," said Bonnie Huneke, Union Pacific's general director of disability prevention and management. "It's a unique job and takes a pretty substantial amount of training."<br />Railroad officials complained that disability benefits were given for medical conditions regardless of whether they actually impaired one's ability to work.<br />The conditions themselves were often vague. A worker, for example, could be considered disabled with "moderately severe antisocial ideas." What constituted an antisocial idea was open to interpretation.<br />Over the years, a succession of efforts to change those guidelines had failed. The board, meanwhile, had continued to award disability benefits — with predictable results. In 1984, the General Accounting Office said it sampled total disability awards and found that the board had erred in 21 percent of the cases.<br />Six years later, a federal commission studying the board's solvency recommended that new employees be placed under Social Security and private pension plans, and that occupational disability benefits be limited to 24 months.<br />Those recommendations were quickly discarded after the board solved its money problems by raising taxes on workers and employers.<br />To resolve the five-decade standoff, management hired a consulting firm, which in 1993 recommended discarding the old rules and having examiners focus more on whether specific physical ailments impaired one's ability to perform specific jobs.<br />This proposal eventually led to the protests at the retirement board.<br />"This office will not participate in such actions, and we'll remove ourselves from the premises," Speakman announced. "Let's go." And he walked out. Afterward, Kever and the board's consumer member and chairman at the time, Glen Bower, voted for the changes.<br />A national rail strike was averted when both sides agreed to negotiate further. A compromise was reached in July 1997, and the old standards were finally updated early the next year.<br />As it turned out, the new standards had little effect on the board's grant rate. A 2000 internal audit by two doctors, one appointed by management, the other by labor, found that as many as 20 percent of the disability awards were unjustified.<br />The board tinkered with the process again and settled on a procedure: An applicant's own doctor submits a physical evaluation but makes no decision on whether the worker is occupationally disabled. Claims examiners look at the quality of those evaluations and assess how ailments might affect one's ability to perform certain tasks.<br />Examiners can request a physical evaluation by an independent doctor, but that occurs in fewer than 30 percent of the cases, a board official said.<br />For quality control, Berendi, the contractor working for the board, samples 120 occupational disability cases a year. Her company, Consultative Examinations, also filed more than 6,000 case reviews of workers being considered for a total disability, according to board officials.<br />Despite all this, the board's grant rate hardly budged. A second audit was released this past June.<br />"I didn't realize how few were rejected until I did the audit," said Dr. Natalie Hartenbaum, one of two doctors hired to review a sample of 100 cases. All but one were approved, she said, and that denial was reversed once missing information was provided.<br />The labor-appointed doctor found that the medical evidence always supported the examiners' decision. Hartenbaum disagreed, saying she could find no evidence that the board even used a highly regarded test, called a functional capacity evaluation.<br />Dr. Robert McLellan, a specialist in occupational health at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, called the test "a very important tool to better assess someone's work capacity," adding: "We do it commonly."<br />Berendi, who has the authority to order a functional capacity evaluation, agreed that it is helpful. "They can actually look at what the patient can or cannot do, rather than speculate," she said. Should the right situation arise, Berendi said, she would ask for the test even though it is expensive.<br />So how many tests did Berendi order last year? Zero.<br />And of the 120 cases she reviewed last year, how many disability decisions did she disagree with? According to board officials: zero.<br />Proposing Changes<br />Since taking over as inspector general in the mid-1990s, Dickman has made a number of recommendations aimed at improving the agency's operations. He has proposed that Social Security assume part of the agency's duties and that a chief executive replace the three-member board because it is inefficient and subject to internal conflicts. The board has rebuffed him each time.<br />Congress has not been much help. "It might be the only program that two congressional committees have fought over who would have to deal with it," said David Lucci, a former legislative counsel for the board. "There's no glory in that work," he said, adding, "It presents some hard problems just like Social Security does, and the population is very vocal."<br />The agency has remained a relatively low priority in Congress. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, whose jurisdiction includes the board, said in 2003 that it "applauds the RRB's improvement efforts" and supports its current structure "so that rail beneficiaries will continue to receive excellent customer service." In the last couple of years, a committee staff member said, the panel focused on more pressing issues: Amtrak and rail safety.<br />The rail unions, which have remained powerful even as the nation's labor movement has ebbed, have aggressively defended their interests at the retirement board. Management has largely avoided a showdown, choosing to spend its political capital in other areas, including contract issues, according to current and former board officials.<br />"The unions have been successful not only in getting a separate system, but keeping it," said William Kaufman, a former director of retirement claims for the board.<br />Robert Jungbauer, a labor lawyer in Minneapolis, says that rail workers need a federal disability program, and he points to a congressional hearing last year that examined unreported injuries in the industry.<br />"Management wants to understate and underreport the injuries to the government," he said. "I would rather see an engineer on pain pills drive golf balls than drive a locomotive."<br />Williams, the LIRR president, believes that a lack of accountability is a problem for the board. "I was certainly surprised and concerned to learn that they had not met in almost two years," she said. "I'm not familiar with government boards or agencies that don't meet on a regular basis."<br />Board members say they communicate electronically, making frequent meetings unnecessary.<br />Speakman, the labor representative since 1992, would not grant an interview to The Times because, he said in a statement, his words would distract officials from dealing with "the Long Island Rail Road issue."<br />The Academy of Rail Labor Attorneys also encouraged members not to publicly discuss the disability controversy.<br />Some policy analysts say that with the changing nature of railroad work, the board has outlived its purpose.<br />"That board should not exist," said Richard Parker, an economist who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Parker said there was nothing structurally unique about the rail industry that merited a system separate from Social Security.<br />"They succeeded in creating this board," he said, "that has essentially been self-recreating for no good purpose other than bureaucratic entropy."<br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/business/16markets.php">Wall Street stumbles as data remain bleak</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/business/16econ.php">U.S.industrial production drops 0.6%</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/business/asiaecon.php">Data suggest more pain to come in Asia</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>With rates falling, Fed seeks new tools to fight recession</strong><br />By Edmund L. Andrews<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Having printed more than $1 trillion in new money since September, yet still failing to stop the U.S. economy from sinking, the Federal Reserve is expected to enter a new era of cheap money this week.<br />On Tuesday, policy makers are expected to lower their target for the overnight federal funds rate to 0.5 percent, a record low.<br />In itself, analysts said, the decision will be anticlimactic. Because demand for interbank loans has been so low, the actual Fed rate has been close to zero for a month. The real change will be in how the Fed tries to fight the recession from here on.<br />After Tuesday, the Fed will have to resort to mostly untested tools for promoting growth, because it cannot reduce its benchmark interest rate below zero. Its goal will be to drive down borrowing costs wherever credit markets remain paralyzed. But the approach is much more complicated than raising or lowering a single rate, and it could have unintended consequences.<br />Analysts say the current recession, which began a year ago, is all but certain to break the postwar record for duration, 16 months. But it could also set a record for depth.<br />The economy has already lost two million jobs this year. Analysts predict the unemployment rate, at 6.5 percent, could hit 9 percent by the end of next year.<br />The Fed must now turn to an approach called "quantitative easing," because it involves injecting money into the economy rather than aiming at an interest rate. The Fed has almost no experience with this approach.<br />"This is a whole new world," said Richard Berner, chief economist at Morgan Stanley. "You don't have a whole lot of historical precedent for knowing how this is going to work and what the unintended consequences could be."<br />The risks include provoking inflation or yet another speculative bubble. Economists generally agree that the Fed's long stretch of easy money from 2001 through 2004 contributed to the bubble in housing prices and the surge in reckless lending.<br />For now, neither Fed officials nor most private economists see evidence of inflation or a bubble. If anything, forecasters are worried about the kind of deflation Japan experienced in the 1990s.<br />Indeed, the Japanese central bank used quantitative easing for years when Japan was mired in chronic price deflation and had reduced its benchmark interest rate to zero. The results were not good, and it took Japan nearly a decade to break out of the mire.<br />Although Fed officials have denied it, they actually began a form of quantitative easing months ago. Since the financial crisis erupted in August 2007, the Fed has created a raft of new lending programs that have lent hundreds of billions of dollars to banks, Wall Street firms and money market funds.<br />Until three months ago, the Fed financed that lending with its existing reserves, mostly Treasury securities. Because it was simply exchanging its cash or Treasuries for hard-to-sell securities, the programs did not increase the total amount of money in the financial system.<br />But since September, when the Fed started to run low on Treasuries, it has been creating new money at a blistering pace. As a result, the Fed's "balance sheet" has ballooned to just over $2 trillion last week from about $900 billion in September.<br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>After a day of quiet, riots resume in Athens</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />ATHENS: Youths protested outside the main police headquarters of the capital Monday, pelting riot police officers with flour and other objects to protest the shooting death of a teenager. Riot forces responded with tear gas.<br />An estimated 2,000 youths at the rally blocked one of the main avenues of Athens, chanted slogans and set fire to trash bins before dispersing. Two demonstrators were arrested.<br />Students also staged peaceful blockades of several other busy roads Monday in the capital and protested at the main court complex, where five people arrested during riots last week were to appear before an examining magistrate. Riot police officers guarded the complex and no disturbances were reported.<br />Greece has experienced the worst riots in decades after a 15-year-old boy died Dec. 6 in a police shooting. The riots quickly spread from Athens to more than a dozen cities. For a week, youths smashed and burned stores and cars, and hurled gasoline bombs and rocks at riot forces, who responded with stun grenades and large amounts of tear gas.<br />Dozens of people were hurt in the rioting, while hundreds of shops were damaged or looted and more than 200 people arrested. The policeman accused of killing the teenager has been charged with murder and is being held pending trial.<br />But the protests are widening focus from anger at the police to a general show of anger at the increasingly unpopular conservative government and the economic hardships faced by many Greeks.<br />The opposition Socialist leader, George Papandreou, on Monday repeated calls for early elections.<br />"The government cannot deal with this crisis," he said. "It cannot protect people - their rights or property - and it cannot identify with the anxiety felt by the younger generation."<br />Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, whose party has only a single-seat majority in Parliament, has repeatedly rejected demands that he resign and call early elections, saying the country needs a steady hand in a time of crisis.<br />Sunday was the first trouble-free day since the killing of the teenager, but some groups, mostly leftist students, have vowed to keep up the protests until the government addresses their concerns.<br />Protesters have called for riot police officers to be removed from the streets, for the police to be disarmed and for growing social inequality to be resolved.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilj_b9IT0902y4qhaaI2RZFmihtFgKVOI7QLY_c042lCBwT7UrVv1M7HyQQ50FBK0yRgnk3QvpixEweaBUYsQ1Z3thaAAE6i2ohPvMhlQ9E8QgmfLZvgIIaFJSLr2YrDu6LnNk8R6reQ0/s1600-h/DSC03339.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280295498523168834" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilj_b9IT0902y4qhaaI2RZFmihtFgKVOI7QLY_c042lCBwT7UrVv1M7HyQQ50FBK0yRgnk3QvpixEweaBUYsQ1Z3thaAAE6i2ohPvMhlQ9E8QgmfLZvgIIaFJSLr2YrDu6LnNk8R6reQ0/s320/DSC03339.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><strong>Thomas L. Friedman: Cars, Kabul and banks</strong><br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />If there is anything I've learned as a reporter, it's that when you get away from "the thing itself" - the core truth about a situation - you get into trouble. Barack Obama will have to make three mammoth decisions after he takes the oath of office - on cars, Kabul and banks - and we have to hope that he bases those decisions on the things themselves, the core truths about each. Because many people will be trying to throw fairy dust in his eyes.<br />The first issue will be whether to bail out Detroit. What is the core truth about Detroit? Auto executives will tell you that it's the credit crisis, health care, retirement costs and unions. Sure, those are real. But the core truth is that for way too long Detroit made too many cars that too many people did not want to buy. As even General Motors conceded in its apology ad last week: "At times we violated your trust by letting our quality fall below industry standards and our designs become lackluster." Walk through any college campus today. You don't see a lot of Buicks.<br />Over the years, Detroit bosses kept repeating: "We have to make the cars people want." That's why they're in trouble. Their job is to make the cars people don't know they want but will buy like crazy when they see them. I would have been happy with my Sony Walkman had Apple not invented the iPod. Now I can't live without my iPod. I didn't know I wanted it, but Apple did. Same with my Toyota hybrid.<br />The auto consultant John Casesa once noted that Detroit's management has gone from visionaries to operators to caretakers. I would say that they have now gone from caretakers to undertakers. If they are ready to bring in some visionaries and totally restructure - inside or outside of bankruptcy - so they can make money selling cars that people will want to buy, then I say help them. I'd hate to see the Detroit auto industry go under. But if all we are doing is prolonging auto undertakers, then we have to let nature take its course.<br />After Detroit, Obama will be asked to bail out Afghanistan. Watch out. The tide has turned against America there because too many Afghans don't want to buy U.S. politics, or, more precisely, the politics of America's ally, the corrupt government of President Hamid Karzai. That is "the thing itself."<br />The main reason America's Iraq bailout - aka "the surge" - has had a positive effect is that Iraqis voted with their own guns and their own lives, taking on both Al Qaeda and pro-Iranian Shiite militants. Iraq has avoided bankruptcy for the moment - a total meltdown - because enough Iraqis wanted what we Americans were selling: freedom from extremists. That is the thing itself, and right now I'm not seeing enough of that thing in Afghanistan. Beware of a Kabul bailout.<br />But maybe the most flagrant area where we continue to avoid looking at "the thing itself" is with our banks. What we are dealing with there is the effect of a credit bubble that began in the late-1980s with the advent of global securitization - the chopping up and bundling into bonds of everything from home mortgages to student loans to airplane leases, and then selling them around the world.<br />When you take this much leverage and this much globalization and this much complexity and start it in America, and then blow it up, you have a nuclear financial explosion. The deflating of this credit bubble is so wealth-destroying that even the most prudent banks have been ravaged by it.<br />What to do? The smartest people I know in banking are praying that Obama's Treasury Department will tackle "the thing itself." That is, do a real analysis of what the major banks are worth in a worst-case scenario. Then determine if, on that basis, they have viable, survivable equity-to-asset ratios.<br />Those that do should get more government investment. Those that are close should be forced to find new investors and merge. And those not viable should be shut down and have their bad assets bought by a government-owned body (which would sell them over time) and their deposits shifted to healthy banks to make those banks even healthier. Some experts believe we still need to close 1,000 banks.<br />This process will be painful, but probably by the end of a year the market will clear, investors will come in, and the surviving banks will be ready to lend to each other and you and me. The "thing itself" here is that banks still don't want to lend because they still don't know the true value of their own balance sheets, let alone anyone else's.<br />The market has to clear. We can do it painfully and quickly, as we did with the dot-coms, or we can be Japan and drag it out.<br />So whether its cars, Kabul or banks, we have to stop wishing for the worlds we want and start dealing with the things themselves. If Obama does, his first year will be excruciatingly painful, but he could have three years after that to be creative. If he doesn't, I fear that cars, Kabul and banks will dog his whole presidency. </p><p>***************</p><p><strong>OPINION</strong></p><p><strong>Obama's first trip<br /></strong>By Michael Fullilove<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised that in the first 100 days of his administration he would "travel to a major Islamic forum and deliver an address to redefine our struggle."<br />Egypt, Turkey and Qatar have been suggested as possible sites for such a speech. But the best candidate is the country in which Obama lived as a child: Indonesia.<br />Choosing Indonesia would throw light on the diversity and richness of Islam, which is not, contrary to lingering perceptions, practiced solely by Arabs or only in the Middle East. Indonesia, home to the world's largest Muslim population, does a reasonable job of managing its considerable religious heterogeneity. An Indonesian setting would help Obama to reframe the debate in the West about Islam and terrorism.<br />Indonesians have been both victims and perpetrators of terrorist attacks, including the deadly Bali bombings. The government in Jakarta is an important partner in the effort against terrorism.<br />Selecting Indonesia would demonstrate that Obama takes democracy seriously, given that Indonesia is the third-largest democracy in the world. It would show that President George W. Bush's misshapen democratization agenda has not turned his successor into an icy realist.<br />Reminding the world of Obama's origins could help counter anti-Americanism. Who would have thought the United States would elect a president with memories of wandering barefoot through rice paddies and "the muezzin's call at night"?<br />Finally, picking Indonesia would indicate that Obama is serious about rebalancing America's foreign policy. It would show that he understands the shift of global power eastward, and telegraph that Washington is finally going to take Indonesia - the linchpin of Southeast Asia - seriously.<br />Obama was criticized in the campaign as offering speeches rather than solutions. But there is no better way to make an argument than with a speech - and for this speech, there is no better place to make that argument than Indonesia.<br />Michael Fullilove, the program director for global issues at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.</p><p></p><p>**************</p><p><strong>Obama seems to take soft line on lobbying by appointees' spouses</strong><br />By Charlie Savage and David D. Kirkpatrick<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Linda Daschle is one of the most important aviation lobbyists in town. Daschle is also the wife of Tom Daschle, whom President-elect Barack Obama has chosen to be the next secretary of health and human services.<br />Tom Downey is the founder and chairman of a lobbying firm with dozens of clients, including several with interests in energy policy. Downey is also the husband of Carol Browner, Obama's likely choice to be the next White House energy czar.<br />Obama's selection of Daschle and Browner to high-level positions illustrates a potential loophole in his pledge to keep special interests at a distance.<br />The ethics code that Obama imposed on his transition team takes a hard line against lobbyists. People are disqualified from working on any matters they lobbied about within the past year, and currently registered federal lobbyists are barred from playing a significant role - regardless of the issues they lobby about.<br />But Obama's embrace of Daschle and his presumed choice of Browner suggest that he will take a softer line on lobbying by the spouses of the officials he puts into his administration.<br />In a town where influencing the government is a main industry, Thomas Susman, an expert on ethics rules who is also a lobbyist for the American Bar Association, said issues surrounding spousal lobbying presented a particular ethical challenge.<br />"On the one hand," Susman said, "you say a spouse shouldn't be disenfranchised from his or her professional activities because his or her spouse goes into government. But it does seem to me that a spouse ought not be allowed to lobby an agency or on issues under the control of the spouse in government."<br />In the presidential campaign, Obama railed against influence-peddling in Washington and pledged to hold his administration to a higher standard.<br />"Your voices should speak louder than the whispers of lobbyists," Obama told a crowd in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in September.<br />Stephanie Cutter, the transition spokeswoman, said Obama's team was writing "ethics rules for an Obama administration that will meet every commitment made during the campaign."<br />"To prevent conflicts of interests," she added, "administration officials will recuse themselves from any issue involving a spouse, and spouses will be banned from lobbying relevant agencies."<br />In a bid to avoid conflicts, Linda Daschle has announced that she will leave her lobbying firm - where colleagues represent health care clients - and plans to start her own practice, which will not accept clients with interests in health care policy. Downey has not disclosed his plans, but Cutter said if Browner became energy czar, Downey's firm would no longer accept energy or environment-related work.<br />Joan Claybrook, the president of Public Citizen, a government watchdog group, said it would be going too far to require spouses of administration officials to give up their careers and "go do something else, like home-decorating."<br />The business dealings of family members created a headache for Obama's team even before the election.<br />After Obama selected Senator Joseph Biden Jr. as his vice-presidential nominee, Republicans pounced on the fact that Biden's son, R. Hunter Biden, was a lobbyist. He quit his firm in September.<br />Obama's selection of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to be secretary of state raised related issues. Since leaving the White House, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, has collected tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees and donations to his presidential library and charitable foundation, including from foreign governments.<br />As a condition of his wife's selection, Clinton agreed to disclose the identity of donors, to take no new donations from foreign governments and to let the administration review his speaking schedule.<br />The working relationship between the Daschles, who married in 1984, has come under scrutiny before. After three people died in the 1994 crash of a small plane operated by a friend of Tom Daschle, he was accused of helping his friend's firm evade oversight, and his wife was accused of helping her husband hide his efforts.<br />Both Tom Daschle, who was then the top Senate Democrat, and his wife, who then worked for the Federal Aviation Administration, were cleared of wrongdoing.<br />Daschle has been a lobbyist since 1997. Some early clients had an interest in health policy, like the drug maker Amgen and the tobacco giant Philip Morris. In recent years she has mainly represented aviation companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.<br />Browner, a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is a principal at the Albright Group, an international consulting firm. She married Downey in 2007.<br />Downey later founded a lobbying firm whose past clients included energy companies like Chevron and Standard Renewable Energy Group, several foreign countries, and the Albright Group. In 2006, the couple worked together on issues related to a Dubai company's purchase of a U.S. port operator.<br />His firm's current clients include the government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae, as well as Securing America's Future Energy, a nonprofit that advocates reducing dependence on foreign oil.<br />John Broder contributed reporting.</p><p><br /><br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL1VB34CWKE8tFgZH7NGaZqPKTWdq7LPQmatGd6VjOe1MgrR5txxjn8NlKgf2ZWwYupIyZMO832WRIYl4RBHZB7RIAjDA6QrhcxJ9vH_ZXDPBnFJnL3JveTiwUNRB5DE8MnLsu8rhCrMo/s1600-h/DSC03340.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280295487715158962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL1VB34CWKE8tFgZH7NGaZqPKTWdq7LPQmatGd6VjOe1MgrR5txxjn8NlKgf2ZWwYupIyZMO832WRIYl4RBHZB7RIAjDA6QrhcxJ9vH_ZXDPBnFJnL3JveTiwUNRB5DE8MnLsu8rhCrMo/s320/DSC03340.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>World's friendliest countries for expats<br /></strong>By David SuttonForbes.com<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />The country that once welcomed the tired, poor, huddled masses is now asking for a little reciprocation. And Canada, Germany and Australia are heeding the call.<br /><a title="" href="http://www.forbes.com/travel/2008/12/09/relocate-world-countries-forbeslife-cx_ds_1210friendly_slide.html?partner=iht" target="_blank">In Pictures: World's friendliest countries</a><br />They top a list of the countries most welcoming to expats. There, relocators have a relatively easy time befriending locals, joining a local community group and learning the local language.<br />Canada is the most welcoming; almost 95 percent of respondents to HSBC Bank International's Expat Exploreer Survey, released last week, said they have made friends with locals. In Germany, 92 percent were so lucky and in Australia 91 percent befriended those living there. The United Arab Emirates was found to be the most difficult for expats; only 54 percent of those surveyed said they'd made friends with locals.<br />Behind The Numbers<br />The study surveyed 2,155 expats in 48 countries, spanning four continents, between February and April 2008. Respondents rated their country in four categories: ability to befriend locals, number that joined a community group, number that learned the language and percentage that bought property.<br />"We conducted this survey to better understand expatriate needs and get insight into the emotions of expats. The banking business is all about trust, especially with the recent credit crisis," says Martin Spurling, CEO of HSBC Bank International and Head of HSBC Global Offshore. "We want them to build a relationship with their wealth manager regardless of where they travel."<br />For Americans, traveling abroad to start over is becoming increasingly common. America used to have it all: good jobs, booming economy, skyrocketing stock market and plentiful housing. What a difference a year can make. The boom has gone bust and people are now heading for the exits en masse - with an eye abroad.<br />It's no wonder they find Canada so welcoming. It has an accessible language, diverse culture and low levels of government corruption, says Patricia Linderman, editor of "Tales from a Small Planet," an online newsletter for expats.<br />It also has other expats. This is important, Linderman says, since even the most gracious locals already have busy, established lives and can be unwilling to put in the effort to befriend someone they know could leave within several years.<br />"I'm not suggesting that it's good to live in an 'expat ghetto'. It's immensely rewarding to live among local people and make friends with them," she says.<br />Linderman says other expats are important because they share similar needs like making friends and adjusting to life in a new country. They also understand the frustrations daily life brings.<br />"A significant expat community," she says, "also means that there will be at least one truly international school, expat support groups and amenities like English-language bookstores."<br />Team Work<br />Joining a recreational sports team or community group can help speed integration. Almost half of respondents reported taking this action, with Germany leading the pack at 65 percent. Churches, organizations and schools provide good places to forge friendships with people who possess common interests and beliefs.<br />"When I was an expat in Hong Kong, I became a member of the local football club and found it was a fantastic way of meeting like-minded people," says Paul Fay, head of marketing and communication at HSBC Bank International, of his expat experience in Hong Kong. "Particularly in Asia joining these clubs works to your advantage."<br />Australia scored high in friendliness but ranked last when it came to joining a group. That's because expats in Australia tend to be younger, with 51 percent in the 18-34 age group, and may not need organized groups to facilitate meeting new people.<br />Groupthink is less of an issue in Germany, since meeting people there is relatively easy.<br />"I'm not surprised that Germany is a popular choice whether you are going for a short-term cultural experience or a long-term job assignment," says Robin Pascoe of expatexpert.com, a Web site for families living and working abroad. "Germany has fantastic international schools for the kids of expats."<br />Germany is also considered middle-of-the-road culturally, according to Neil Payne, who works for Kwintessential, a translation services company in the U.K. Anyone you stop on the street can talk to you in English, he says. What's more, "working conditions are also very well respected and there is a nice delineation for work life and social life, which we don't have in England."<br />China, India and United Arab Emirates scored low overall because cultural differences from the West made integration difficult.<br />This doesn't surprise Payne.<br />"Our experience is that people do struggle and find it hard to adapt," he says. "It's the psychological difference: so far removed from what Western expats are used to."<br /><a title="" href="http://www.forbes.com/travel/2008/12/09/relocate-world-countries-forbeslife-cx_ds_1210friendly_slide.html?partner=iht" target="_blank">In Pictures: World's friendliest countries</a><br />Still, says Fay, don't eliminate a country simply because of a language barrier.<br />"Cantonese and Mandarin can be very challenging for Western expatriates," he says, "though for those who are resilient and do invest, it can be an incredible experience."<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2KHS3bQwTZNxX-UWcU2Kwjt3qkhTVbBidh0noDao8WtAMOOPexFnTOP9gYg4fzFi4oZqJgASl9mJFrm4nxjw50Y7M-OfAlqTL1plTFQiuaWYDl9YInkL2f6rXY3rXa6U586nClehPCQ0/s1600-h/DSC03341.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280295491498989698" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2KHS3bQwTZNxX-UWcU2Kwjt3qkhTVbBidh0noDao8WtAMOOPexFnTOP9gYg4fzFi4oZqJgASl9mJFrm4nxjw50Y7M-OfAlqTL1plTFQiuaWYDl9YInkL2f6rXY3rXa6U586nClehPCQ0/s320/DSC03341.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Goldman is expected to report an end to profitable run<br /></strong>By Ben White<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />Goldman Sachs, long the envy of Wall Street, has not reported a loss since the stock market crashed in 1929. But the panic of 2008 is about to put an end to its long, profitable run.<br />After dodging the kind of losses that crushed rivals when the financial crisis first erupted, Goldman is now expected to join the swelling ranks of Wall Street's losers. Analysts expect the bank to post a quarterly loss of about $2 billion, or $5 a share, on Tuesday.<br />Like most banks, Goldman is suffering as its investments plunge in value. But a loss for Goldman — a firm at once admired and loathed by its rivals — would punctuate a year of grim news for the financial industry and underscore how even the mightiest in the industry have fallen.<br />"I think if there is one message to be taken away from what is likely to be the worst quarter in Goldman Sachs's history, it is that no one is immune," said Michael Mayo, an analyst at Deutsche Bank.<br />Goldman is beginning what is expected to be yet another round of weak earnings from major financial companies. Morgan Stanley, Goldman's perennial rival, is expected to report a quarterly loss of about 37 cents a share, or $400 million, on Wednesday.<br />Senior executives at both Goldman and Morgan recently said they would forgo bonuses this year in light of the troubles in the industry. Both firms have accepted billions of dollars from the government as part of an industrywide rescue.<br />But both of these banks, longtime leaders in traditional Wall Street businesses like advising, mergers and acquisitions and underwriting securities, are in the midst of a painful transition. Many wonder if they will ever recapture their former glory, or at least their former profits.<br />Confronting uncertain futures, both firms took the radical step in September of transforming themselves into traditional bank holding companies. While that move gave them access to emergency financing from the Federal Reserve, it also restricted their ability to use leverage, or borrowed money, to stoke profits.<br />Both banks are reducing the size of their balance sheets by selling assets and raising new funds. Goldman is likely to have reduced the size of its balance sheet to $700 billion or $800 billion from $1 trillion in its most recent quarter. But analysts say Goldman will have to shrink even further or make a significant acquisition to bring in new cash.<br />"I have a more important issue than the loss in the quarter. And that is, how do you fund the balance sheet going forward?" said Glenn Schorr, an analyst at UBS. "Who is going to give you unsecured debt and at what price? I think they might need to either continue to shrink the balance sheet or buy a bank or an asset manager. Or else they are just hoping the respirators the government has them on are good enough and will be around long enough to help them make it through."<br />Goldman has looked at nearly every bank in the country, but found none it could buy at a palatable price without getting saddled with bad assets, according to people close to the matter. It has rejected the idea of a deal with Citigroup given the deep problems plaguing that financial giant.<br />Goldman would be more inclined to buy a bank that manages money for large institutions, corporations and affluent individuals like State Street, Northern Trust or Bank of New York Mellon. All those banks, however, trade at higher stock market multiples (share price compared with earnings) than Goldman, making a purchase difficult.<br />Goldman shares, which closed Friday at $67.74, are down nearly 70 percent this year. The brief rally that ensued after Warren Buffett sank $5 billion into Goldman as a vote of confidence in September has largely evaporated.<br />Goldman has also had to deal lately with the kind of relentless rumors that swirled around Bear Stearns before its emergency sale in March, and that dogged Lehman Brothers before its bankruptcy in September, though Goldman is far healthier than either of those investment banks were at the time.<br />Wall Street has buzzed that Goldman might embark on a new round of jobs cuts, on top of the 10 percent reduction it has announced. Goldman employed 32,569 people at the end of the third quarter.<br />Executives at the company have steadfastly denied the speculation, attributing it to uninformed outsiders as well as to internal grousing by employees just learning they were part of the 10 percent cut. Even so, many analysts say Goldman will have to reduce its payrolls further.<br />Strains are clearly showing. Goldman recently said it might require employees to work longer in order to receive full retirement benefits. The move could reduce costs, but it would cause people to remain at the bank longer rather than reducing head count.<br />Instead, Goldman is likely to continue taking advantage of government programs like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's offer of three-year guarantees on senior unsecured debt issued by qualifying banks, while trying to increase deposits by corporations and affluent individuals to shore up its balance sheet.<br />Goldman executives also argue that their markdowns on equity holdings do not amount to write-offs and that the values will recover over time. Jeff Harte, an analyst at Sandler O'Neill & Partners, said the markdowns would be, in a way, reassuring.<br />"You almost think, given what equity markets did this quarter, that they better have these losses or you would lose faith in how they mark their assets. Lehman avoided a lot of losses, and you always wondered how they did it," he said.<br /><br />***************<br /><br /><strong>Fannie Mae acts to protect renters from eviction</strong><br />By Charles Duhigg<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />In a move that could provide relief to thousands of renters who face eviction in the United States but draw the U.S. government even deeper into the housing market, the loan giant Fannie Mae has said that it will sign new leases with renters living in foreclosed properties owned by the company.<br />The announcement Sunday is the first countrywide effort to provide widespread relief to renters ensnared by the unfolding mortgage crisis, and it will effectively transform Fannie Mae - a government-controlled mortgage finance company - into a national landlord. It could also increase pressure on private lenders to establish similar programs and on lawmakers to pass renter-relief measures.<br />"There are renters all around the country who have been holding up their end of the bargain and paying their rent faithfully, but the landlord got into trouble, and so the renter is now unfairly facing eviction," said John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a consumer advocacy group. "It's really good news that Fannie Mae is doing this. Now the question is whether private sector will follow suit."<br />In recent months, skyrocketing foreclosure rates have exposed as many as 70,000 renters to evictions, even though many never missed rent payments, according to analysts who track housing data. In many U.S. cities and states, renters can be evicted after their home goes into foreclosure, regardless of how long their lease stretches into the future.<br />Many financial institutions - including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America - have policies to evict renters after foreclosure, company representatives said.<br />Fannie Mae's initiative is expected to initially benefit as many as 4,000 renters living in foreclosed homes owned by the company. Fannie Mae has traditionally only bought and sold mortgages. But when a loan held by the company goes into foreclosure, Fannie Mae gains ownership of the underlying property until it is resold to new investors.<br />Fannie Mae owned 67,500 properties in foreclosure at the end of September, according to the company's most recent filings. Most of those were owner-occupied. Under the new policy, former owners will most likely not be eligible to rent homes they lost in foreclosure.<br />Last month, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the other government-controlled mortgage giant, temporarily suspended foreclosures and evictions until early January. Fannie Mae will now offer renters in foreclosed properties month-to-month leases until the property is resold. A company representative said program details were still being worked out.<br />"While it may be sometimes tougher for us to sell a property when people are in it, we understand that lots of people are in tough situations right now," said Chuck Greener, a Fannie Mae spokesman. "If a renter wants to stay in their home, we'll make that happen. And if they want to move out, in many cases we'll help them pay for the move."<br />A spokesman for Freddie Mac said the company was looking at a number of options, including a program similar to Fannie Mae's, but that no decisions had been made.<br />The companies' regulator, James Lockhart of the Federal Housing Finance Authority, issued a statement Sunday saying that he expected both companies to quickly update their policies regarding renters living in foreclosed properties. Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by Lockhart's agency this year and now operate in a conservatorship.<br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Chartists see a late 2009 recovery<br /></strong>By Atul PrakashReuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />LONDON: European shares will decline again next year and, although there will probably be less volatility, it could be late 2009 before a sustained recovery starts, according to analysts who use technical charts to predict behavior of the markets.<br />These so-called chartists say the technical picture looks quite similar to the Great Depression, which led to deflation and a surge in unemployment. But if the market does start recovering late next year, then 2010 could see a bull market.<br />Most European share indexes are expected to witness similar trends, with the FTSE 100 expected to fall about 25 percent to a bottom some time next year, after slipping 35 percent so far in 2008.<br />Germany main index, which dropped more than 40 percent in 2008, has potential to fall another 20 to 25 percent more in 2009 before bouncing back, they said.<br />"This tremendous 'double top' on ultra-long-term charts suggests an absolutely massive bubble, which forms from 1987 to date and is still not been unwound completely," said Nicole Elliott, a technical analyst with Mizuho Securities. "It's an unstable investment environment. We have still got more of that to come."<br />A double top occurs when prices form two distinct peaks on a chart. A double top is only complete when prices decline below the lowest low - the valley floor - of the pattern.<br />Chartists provide a view based on patterns in the graphs of securities or indexes - looking at measures such as relative strength and moving averages along with chart patterns such as flags and double tops.<br />Some technical analysts said the cycles of long-term charts showed that the downtrend will not be complete until the start of 2010, suggesting 2009 would be a difficult period for equities but moves would be smaller and slower than seen since May 2008.<br />"Most of the cycles are pointing higher in 2010, which means that we should have a probability to see a bull market in 2010," said Michael Risner, head of equities technical analysis at UBS Investment Bank. "Would that be a strong bull market? I don't believe so. The bull market from 2003 and 2007 was one of the longest bull markets and the likelihood to see the same again in 2010 is quite low."<br />Some chartists say the market might experience a "mean reversion bounce" in the first quarter of 2009 as from a historical perspective, the market is aggressively oversold. But the rally could be short-lived and markets might slip again.<br />Mean reversion theory suggests that stock prices eventually move back toward the mean or average, which could be the historical average of the price or any other relevant average.<br />"A retest of the bottom of the bear market in 2003 is possible, and if that breaks then the market is in real serious trouble," said Cliff Green, an independent analyst, referring to a low of around 3,280 points seen by the FTSE 100 index in early 2003. "We are not out of the woods yet."<br />Technical analysts also say stock indexes were biased toward the upside because of the way they are constituted.<br />A company that performs badly eventually gets booted out of the index and replaced by a growing company, marginally improving the performance of the benchmark.<br />Phil Roberts, a technical analyst at Barclays Capital, said that a recovery in the stock markets could be visible in the second half of next year but that 2009 would not see as severe a downturn as 2008.<br />"But it's going to take a little while to get going," Roberts said. "It's going to be a struggle next year."<br />He also said a combination of momentum and other chart indicators suggested hat the moves were part of a large corrective process that has been in play for some time.<br />Chartists said the global scale of the current economic crisis and its breadth made it unprecedented. But the destruction of wealth was comparable to the Great Depression.<br />"From a technical point of view, it's pretty much a copy-paste of the market behavior in 1930s," said Risner, the UBS analyst. "We are in a deflationary down-spiral at the moment. The authorities have to manage the swing in the financial systems away from deflation to inflation. And if we get that turn - and we should get that turn next year - we will see a rally in the financial markets."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS4ZupRacBIn_aNq6gU0M20A0zkjhQ5EQ-Kkqv3FTaw6kD9inLyJgg_Nv2gg-iOPlep1i8EyXyx443Pk-Xrt_YnkTiQKCBpIq5aA1o_mH1BpdyVLrFB7OpZMMwAqZPS9yoAvK-nyC4-Fg/s1600-h/DSC03342.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280295483104902786" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS4ZupRacBIn_aNq6gU0M20A0zkjhQ5EQ-Kkqv3FTaw6kD9inLyJgg_Nv2gg-iOPlep1i8EyXyx443Pk-Xrt_YnkTiQKCBpIq5aA1o_mH1BpdyVLrFB7OpZMMwAqZPS9yoAvK-nyC4-Fg/s320/DSC03342.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Odp_V0f92QmGwuKlweTVhudSH_CncohNfhjbAUxactb8rfjpDcAmggRWWtA5Ps60nEv0zTzrp9OW_gaoZGtaz2yDVF5OXbOp15vYyAPF45oAkZIgPNOJ1s7P2bcDCZE-BdjupRj6ZK4/s1600-h/DSC03343.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280295249807671138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Odp_V0f92QmGwuKlweTVhudSH_CncohNfhjbAUxactb8rfjpDcAmggRWWtA5Ps60nEv0zTzrp9OW_gaoZGtaz2yDVF5OXbOp15vYyAPF45oAkZIgPNOJ1s7P2bcDCZE-BdjupRj6ZK4/s320/DSC03343.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1eU24owmru2SkrZGCQlhQrCHte8Ccyrbf_IJFufjWadcvC5xlryiFEF6VF45eoCSKkyeL5gHYC17aC12J_BFZJ2V02NCQeWKz8d70K_gHE16n-JQUSg3kWm_PYHrgBeWo5etGGCqfZN0/s1600-h/DSC03344.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280295243028145234" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1eU24owmru2SkrZGCQlhQrCHte8Ccyrbf_IJFufjWadcvC5xlryiFEF6VF45eoCSKkyeL5gHYC17aC12J_BFZJ2V02NCQeWKz8d70K_gHE16n-JQUSg3kWm_PYHrgBeWo5etGGCqfZN0/s320/DSC03344.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6L1yO-JORt_Bik7NhByb15jK4ifSubZEG97KZHT0ajMYkBEFEP-SWBWOsGllPHZL5xgqeo73itxF6glqg_u6FpoIL9lrrnx3RfWwiUITntfQY7oxqGxhWASqIcsFXFdA_PMFxFU8k5T4/s1600-h/DSC03345.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280295245004568818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6L1yO-JORt_Bik7NhByb15jK4ifSubZEG97KZHT0ajMYkBEFEP-SWBWOsGllPHZL5xgqeo73itxF6glqg_u6FpoIL9lrrnx3RfWwiUITntfQY7oxqGxhWASqIcsFXFdA_PMFxFU8k5T4/s320/DSC03345.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Sej1KtKAtPnxvMdMu70sgpeeAkmb-g5hsMOj1S2gSmZhy093Vd2wJt0dmBvYwDYsBHOAqvNuUuRxLrOnI89AawsIzxptsUur-a-QTj8b_lsREBVOV5E3GqnFyLT43a3xhG2dWgxUEiU/s1600-h/DSC03346.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280295245718587426" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Sej1KtKAtPnxvMdMu70sgpeeAkmb-g5hsMOj1S2gSmZhy093Vd2wJt0dmBvYwDYsBHOAqvNuUuRxLrOnI89AawsIzxptsUur-a-QTj8b_lsREBVOV5E3GqnFyLT43a3xhG2dWgxUEiU/s320/DSC03346.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOy_i0j0QolsnY7bJuEYmMUE5RG00Vr7-Ka6LLA_zwUg1zKd0o-o0h9D-_QHZB3CRtKcLoiLq-mj-_cHuV5yiHS_NtklDEdJrvU-w_CvH2zidMgQ_WkwFTnKOE1vGSGA_3Q_eR9LiHtEE/s1600-h/DSC03347.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280295237392930210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOy_i0j0QolsnY7bJuEYmMUE5RG00Vr7-Ka6LLA_zwUg1zKd0o-o0h9D-_QHZB3CRtKcLoiLq-mj-_cHuV5yiHS_NtklDEdJrvU-w_CvH2zidMgQ_WkwFTnKOE1vGSGA_3Q_eR9LiHtEE/s320/DSC03347.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVgLOSXtFzNpVnN2IxsbIkPKbVS6sZA6levMdAZqNgulEh_vZS_-7JeJvSWDBcKJ47AWvsQf0OBxGULWMIGsRq1RPGF-Fm4bqtqRWXMbajm0R4CEWaGJTvoEiLqF4J-Z5IwbOSMZpH2_k/s1600-h/DSC03350.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294985243597010" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVgLOSXtFzNpVnN2IxsbIkPKbVS6sZA6levMdAZqNgulEh_vZS_-7JeJvSWDBcKJ47AWvsQf0OBxGULWMIGsRq1RPGF-Fm4bqtqRWXMbajm0R4CEWaGJTvoEiLqF4J-Z5IwbOSMZpH2_k/s320/DSC03350.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_JRpx2UlF8QFzaL1hzGQoKcT4aPlxz0nai3LS6_6lylEAt_FbUqHg6CtsO8tde3APpNcwT2oDEtfZ6bYmRp-ZoCWuF_PhcMLw3ltDaUR7vB5UBF3XBHuis9tdZwzhFU3Votgtd8ugjkg/s1600-h/DSC03356.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294986159537650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_JRpx2UlF8QFzaL1hzGQoKcT4aPlxz0nai3LS6_6lylEAt_FbUqHg6CtsO8tde3APpNcwT2oDEtfZ6bYmRp-ZoCWuF_PhcMLw3ltDaUR7vB5UBF3XBHuis9tdZwzhFU3Votgtd8ugjkg/s320/DSC03356.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdxLYmmktB131d-nCyU6Byrj-wIZ_qg3H2dVcUNj9Ybi7jDkQ-KR2jVoxcuXMljnSr9dPTDPDoz9iPKukBsn5P09mxCKt9LcKotHU1ch1wmPjXT_PsvhLaslAJKV2iltFC-lwsUprcWSY/s1600-h/DSC03357.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294977507930354" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdxLYmmktB131d-nCyU6Byrj-wIZ_qg3H2dVcUNj9Ybi7jDkQ-KR2jVoxcuXMljnSr9dPTDPDoz9iPKukBsn5P09mxCKt9LcKotHU1ch1wmPjXT_PsvhLaslAJKV2iltFC-lwsUprcWSY/s320/DSC03357.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSj8PMK2fN7DohBwiqhzbW_d_f0S-y9yltnWtRe_fOXYnWOeu_1J7O1MJ8E6DUvWnsgQBtPujtkVNWe64Pnx1z7FDtLqFzAm-T4Bwx-5OsbJU3hY_NToP6NO6P-lcdgBZ8UsPzaK77a3s/s1600-h/DSC03358.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294978400796418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSj8PMK2fN7DohBwiqhzbW_d_f0S-y9yltnWtRe_fOXYnWOeu_1J7O1MJ8E6DUvWnsgQBtPujtkVNWe64Pnx1z7FDtLqFzAm-T4Bwx-5OsbJU3hY_NToP6NO6P-lcdgBZ8UsPzaK77a3s/s320/DSC03358.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong>Utopia by the sea<br /></strong>By Patricia Leigh Brown<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />In the early mornings, when the ocean is enveloped in fog and the scent of wild iris hangs in the air, the possibility for solitude can be found on a wind-tossed path. Deer eyes stare from slender meadow grasses, and a curve in the trail along the headlands can unexpectedly yield a squadron of pelicans zooming skyward on ocean thermals.<br />At Sea Ranch — even the name has an aura — it is possible at once to lose and to find yourself on a path, following it past tumbledown picket fences to a driftwood throne on a secluded beach. When the architects Charles W. Moore, Joseph Esherick, William Turnbull, Donlyn Lyndon, and Richard Whitaker and the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin conceived this place along a mystical 10-mile stretch of California coast in the early 1960s, they courted the wind. They measured it, observed the way its salty gusts sculptured the cypress trees.<br />Eventually, they would tame the wind in architecture, its force poetically echoed in the angled plank roofs and slanted towers of the original building, Condominium One, an austere Shaker-like ode to nature's power and the first of many groundbreaking structures at Sea Ranch.<br />The wind still holds sway at this once-idealistic second-home community, where man and nature are engaged in an intricate dance. Sea Ranch has achieved a sort of a cult status among architecture mavens, who house-gawk rather than bird-watch, bearing a glossy tome by Lyndon, a spiritual dean of Sea Ranch, as a guide. They come to see a style forged by A-list architects (shed roofs to deflect the wind, windows punched through redwood boards) but perhaps more than that, to pay tribute to a big idea: the then-radical notion, influenced by Halprin's experience on a kibbutz, of open land held in common and houses designed in deference to nature.<br />Since moving to the Bay Area nine years ago, my family and I have rented numerous houses at Sea Ranch, a place that for me has become the psychic equivalent of a tubercular Victorian's healing in a sanitarium. Over the years, I have gotten to know Halprin's landscape intimately, savoring the way the trails lead to salty cliffs alive with nesting cormorants and into dark, enchanted forests straight out of the Brothers Grimm.<br />Like many, I fantasized about what it might be like to experience some of Sea Ranch's most iconic houses, the ones designed by the guys who dreamed up the place before the sad arrival of what might be called Sea Ranch sprawl. This past summer, I finally got my wish, indulging in architectural promiscuity by renting Moore's fabled Unit 9 in Condominium One, a complex now on the National Register of Historic Places; an Obie Bowman-designed Walk-in Cabin; a Binker Barn designed by Turnbull; and, as the drum-rolling crescendo, or so I thought, one of the original Esherick houses tucked into a now-fetishized cypress hedgerow.<br />The timing was fortuitous: the Sea Ranch Lodge, the community's dated, killer-view hotel, is about to be Post Ranch-ified, as Passport Resorts, whose principals created the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur and other high-end lodges, proceeds with an expansion. The company envisions a luxurious watering hole with 15 or so house-size cottages serviced by motorized carts spilling down 52 acres of now-pristine meadow.<br />They will by necessity be marketing seclusion. Just getting to Sea Ranch, about two and a half hours from San Francisco, requires negotiating a stomach-churning, acrophobia-inducing sliver of Highway 1. The payoff is a relatively undiscovered, unspoiled swath of California coast — bordering Sonoma and Mendocino Counties and nicknamed Mendonoma — that mercifully has yet to be mythologized à la Mendocino village or Big Sur.<br />CHARLES MOORE called Sea Ranch his "Mother Earth." All I could think of when I stepped into Unit 9 was that the little rat had kept the best place for himself.<br />I had this revelation while sipping coffee from a vintage Vignelli-designed mug in Moore's kitchen — a riot of painted checkerboards overseen by a textile of frisky Indian goddesses. A misty cauldron of waves was churning madly against the cliffs that Condominium One, widely considered to be one of the most influential buildings of the 1960s, seems precariously perched upon. My teenage son, Gabe, and his two pals were still asleep, white iPod wires in their ears, visions of a winged cow, a wooden dinosaur, a shadow puppet, toy blocks spelling out M-O-O-R-E and a fragment of a Corinthian column dancing on wooden beams over their heads.<br />A restless global wanderer and voluminous author who collected university appointments the way he did Oaxacan clay pigs (Yale, UCLA, Berkeley, etc.), Moore, who died in 1993, possessed an infinite capacity for joy that was expressed in his architecture. "I think that fairy tales have a great deal to teach us architects," he once wrote. The way that most magical adventures, he observed, "end in time for tea seems to me worth careful looking into."<br />His twinkly view of the universe lives on in Unit 9, which has been delightfully frozen in amber by his family, who still own it, down to the papier-mâché ponies and abalone shells inserted into the 14th-century tile ceiling fragment on the wall. It thus has become a shrine for architects, whose rhapsodies fill the guest register.<br />Hovering gluttonously over the ocean, the condo was Moore's salon-by-the-sea, filled with students and a blizzard of manuscripts. Today, it is a powerful argument for the afterlife, an indoor fairy tale with a four-poster bedroom loft held up by logs, creating a cozy shelter underneath. For Gabe and his friends, Pete and Gabe D., a cadre of teenage Coppolas equipped with a digital movie camera who had resoundingly rejected Moore's leftover jigsaw puzzles of Queen Elizabeth in Parliament and the Tokyo subway system, it was the perfect place to plot a literal cliffhanger.<br />My most vivid memory of Moore, whom I interviewed six years before his death, involved the spectacle of the architect as human periscope, swimming in the pool around midnight at his compound in Austin, Texas, and clutching a flashlight aimed at the water so that he'd be able to spot wayward tarantulas.<br />Puttering around the kitchen the morning of my visit, admiring Moore's global tchotchkes, I realized things were getting weird. "Where does Charles keep the vacuum cleaner?" I muttered to myself. "I wonder if Charles has a steamer."<br />I knew Moore had worked his magic when I found Gabe sprawled on the turquoise cushions of the saddlebag — a trademark Moore feature in which windows project out of the main space — gazing at the horizon. "Hey, Mom," he wondered. "If you went straight across the ocean, where would you be?"<br />Daydreaming is the emotional agenda at Sea Ranch. It's a place to watch a hummingbird with your coffee or to observe a deer grazing improbably on a sloping grass-covered green roof.<br />It is a place to drink too much wine while being transfixed by harbor seals with your college roommate and then being unable to find your way home in the foggy dark. The possibility for both discovery and community undergirds Sea Ranch, an early example of ecological planning that, for better and worse, spawned suburban wannabes across the country. The founding ideal, shaped by Halprin and his all-star cast, was that 10 stupendous miles of California coast were something to be shared rather than subdivided.<br />The early architecture was communal and modest, with houses clustered perpendicular to the ocean so that everyone would have a view, leaving the meadows open and held in common. Houses were sited to settle into the landscape, like quail nesting. "This wasn't a place to show off your architecture," said Whitaker, now a 79-year-old renegade. "Buildings were meant to be like geodes, ordinary rocks on the outside with the inside going gangbusters."<br />Too much of that philosophy has bitten the proverbial dust, a long, bloody tale of politics, real estate, public access to the coast and the sad disconnect between taste and money. Today there are essentially two Sea Ranches: The southern portion, planned by Halprin et al.; and the later more suburbanized north, with cul-de-sacs and palazzos along the bluffs.<br />But plenty of the genuine item survives, including the Moonraker Athletic Center, one of three recreation centers with pool, tennis court and family sauna (this is California after all). Along with miles of hiking, biking and horse trails and a Scottish-style golf course, the centers are major perks for renters, who must dangle passes from their rearview mirrors. Moonraker is a stark, weathered cathedral of chlorine, all but buried in an earthen berm.<br />AT the Obie Bowman Walk-in Cabin I rented, the first challenge was finding the door. Spatial organization has never been my forte. Anxiety mounting, I finally spied a padlock attached to a sliding barn wall. Eventually, I realized it was the door. Architects! I cursed.<br />The conceit of the Walk-in Cabins, a remote gathering of 15 troll-like dwellings in a kingdom of redwoods in the hills above Highway 1, is that no cars are allowed. They are left about a quarter-mile down a dirt road, which sounds romantic until you realize that your garbage has to walk out the same way.<br />Make no mistake. Sea Ranch is not pussyfooter terrain. I was reminded of this fact when, traveling solo this time and relieved at having found the front door, I perused the welcoming material: a form to fill out should I spot a mountain lion, with blank spaces for size, color, tail and attitude.<br />Bowman, who still works in Healdsburg, was a shopping center designer in Los Angeles when he took a trip up the coast and discovered Sea Ranch. After the Walk-ins were completed in 1972, he remarked that the spartan cabins, recipients of umpteen design awards, were about the size of the restrooms in his shopping centers.<br />In contrast to the Moore condo, with its drama-queen ocean views, the Walk-ins are about quietude, the light feathering through the redwoods. With its compact loft bed, wood stove and twee kitchen, it all felt a bit like inhabiting a lifestyle magazine edited by the redwood-dwelling activist Julia Butterfly Hill.<br />One of the pleasures of a rental, of course, is imagining the real owners (the tip-off here may have been the stuffed gnome in a basket). Exhausted, I hiked down to the ocean, where the harbor seals were sunning on the rocks like old couples by the pool in Miami Beach. They seemed to have the right idea. So I hiked back up to the cabin and promptly collapsed on the deck into savasana, the yoga corpse pose. I let the breeze, sun and scent of pines lull me before soaking in the hot tub (life is tough at Sea Ranch).<br />The only sign of fellow humans in the dense thicket were scattered lights at dusk — the home fires burning in our little warren of Prius-driving hobbits.<br />EVERY visit to Sea Ranch has a mood. I have watched migrating gray whales breach the surface from Walk-On Beach, experienced a near-tsunami with pelting rain followed by brilliant sun at Christmas. During abalone season, when divers routinely lose their lives (three so far at Sea Ranch this year), bulbous wet-suited figures with inner tubes around their waists scramble down rocks to plunge into the churning kelp-ridden abyss.<br />Like the weather, houses set a tone. And it was an exhilarating one in Barn Dance, one of 17 Binker Barns designed by William Turnbull, who died in 1997 and designed the houses to be replicated around Sea Ranch. As soon as my husband, Roger, and I opened the wooden door — artfully carved in quilt-like patterns — we knew we'd hit pay dirt.<br />The house is poetry in wood, a beautifully fashioned breakfront in architecture. Built like a barn, with plank walls and crisscrossing beams with exposed bolts, it felt like a totally chic abstraction of Nebraska, with an airy central space soaring to the roof and a staircase winding up to an interior bridge leading to the bedrooms. The dining area and kitchen had me convinced I could cook like Thomas Keller. They were enfolded in lustrous Douglas fir, with light streaming ethereally through clerestory windows.<br />Roger promptly deposited himself on a lounge chair beside the fireplace, becoming positively ecstatic when he discovered the owner's voluminous CD collection, including the obscure "Veedon Fleece"*/ by Van Morrison, with whom he is obsessed. Shortly thereafter he proclaimed, "I want to live in a Turnbull house!"<br />Warmed by radiant-heat floors, I cracked open the guest register, in which the owners had charmingly chronicled their own escapades, including a week of nonstop rain in which they hunted for mushrooms and watched bygone episodes of "The West Wing."<br />Gualala, a village nearby, offers escape valves for the stir-crazy: a couple of excellent restaurants; a fine-foods store, a bookstore, a first-rate crafts gallery and even an au courant design store, Placewares (Mendocino and the Anderson Valley wineries are a curvy hour-and-a-half drive away).<br />The most popular hangout at Sea Ranch is the Twofish Baking Company, which has morphed into an ad hoc community center for the growing number of full-timers, many of them aerobic grandparents.<br />But there remains a psychic divide between people who are drawn to Sea Ranch for its history and those who regard it as a generic seaside resort. The impending transformation of the lodge is causing some fear and loathing. "A highly processed destination resort, with all sorts of pleasure amenities, will bring people with different expectations and a less deep commitment to the place," said Kenneth Wachter, a demography professor at Berkeley who was walking his poodle not far from the house he and his wife bought on their honeymoon 26 years ago.<br />Arguably, Sea Ranch's most hallowed ground are the Hedgerow Houses, a group of genteel rustic shacks that Joseph Esherick tucked inconspicuously into a row of wind-blown cypress trees not far from Black Point Beach.<br />Along with Condominium One, they define the Sea Ranch style. Esherick, a master craftsman of space who died in 1998, used to say that "the ideal kind of building is one you don't see."<br />For renters, the prime Hedgerow House is the one that Esherick designed for himself, a sophisticated cottage with ship-like woodwork that seems to all but disappear into the meadow grasses.<br />A mere 875 square feet, the house is made from inexpensive materials though its spatial arrangements are quite complex. Ironically perhaps, the current owner, Jim Friedman, builds $10 million to $20 million 20,000-square-foot houses for a living. "The Esherick house has taught me that really great architecture doesn't require gilding a lily," he said.<br />Sadly, the house was already spoken for, so the rental agency, Sea Ranch Escape, suggested an alternative Hedgerow House also designed by Esherick.<br />So it was a crushing blow to open the door and find pickled woodwork, wall-to-wall carpeting and Venetian blinds — a Motel Esherick. Trying to cheer me up, Roger gamely kept chanting "location, location, location."<br />Nevertheless, I began to suspect that our abode wasn't even an Esherick because the conventional arrangement of spaces was so un-Esherick-like. Several days later, a Deep Throat with access to the historic files confirmed that the house was designed in the manner of Esherick by Van Norten Logan, a little-known architect turned land investor.<br />It was then that I felt the palpable presence of the ghost of Joe Esherick returning to my beloved Sea Ranch.<br />"Never trust a real estate agent," he whispered.<br />IF YOU GO<br />In the Zen sense, it's hard to go wrong with any house at Sea Ranch (just don't forget to bring your own sheets and towels). The nicest agency to deal with is Ocean View Properties (707-884-3538; www.oceanviewprop.com; $200 to $250 a night for William Turnbull's Barn Dance). Rams Head Realty rents a number of homes at Sea Ranch, including the Redwood Cottage Walk-in Cabin (800-785-3455; www.ramshead.com; $342 for two nights). Sea Ranch Escape (707-785-2426; www.searanchescape.com) has the largest collection of prime rentals by classic architects, including Unit 9 ($468 to $525 for two nights ) and the real Esherick house ($761 for two nights).<br />Sea Ranch 101: "The Sea Ranch" by Donlyn Lyndon and Jim Alinder (Princeton Architectural, 2004); "The Sea Ranch ... Diary of an Idea" by Lawrence Halprin (Spacemaker, 2002); "The Place of Houses" by Charles Moore, Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon (University of California, 1974); "William Turnbull: Buildings in the Landscape" (William Stout, 2000); "Appropriate: The Houses of Joseph Esherick" by Marc Treib (William Stout, 2008). The Sea Ranch Association Web site (www.tsra.org) is also an excellent resource.</div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Ferry capsizes in the Philippines, killing at least 23</strong><br />By Carlos H. Conde<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />MANILA: At least 23 people died and an additional 33 were missing after an overloaded passenger ferry capsized off a northern Philippine province, the coast guard said Monday.<br />The authorities said they had recovered 23 victims who had drowned after huge waves overturned the Maejan, an interisland ferry carrying 102 passengers, just 50 meters, or 165 feet, off the shoreline of Cagayan Province north of Manila on Sunday morning. Most of the survivors managed to swim to shore.<br />Officials said the area of the tragedy is known for its big waves and strong current. The Associated Press quoted Joseph Llopis, the mayor of Calayan Island, the origin of the ferry, as saying that hours before the ferry capsized, "three children fell into the sea as the vessel was lashed by huge waves." One of the dead was a 1-year-old child.<br />Llopis said many of the victims were traveling to the mainland to buy food for Christmas. "There'll be no festive mood. Many of the dead were breadwinners," Llopis said, according to The Associated Press.<br />The coast guard, in a statement, said the Maejan was buffeted by "big waves and strong current until it was dragged and capsized." The local police said that the ferry was entering the mouth of the Cagayan River when it capsized. Rescue boats and small planes had been dispatched to look for survivors.<br />Vice Admiral Wilfredo Tamayo, chief of the Philippine Coast Guard, said the Maejan was authorized to carry only 50 passengers and that, according to him, criminal charges would be filed against its owners for overloading the ferry.<br />Accidents at sea are common in the Philippines, particularly toward the end of the year, when the monsoon season peaks.<br />Last month, a passenger ferry capsized in the central Philippines after being struck by strong winds. More than 40 people were killed.<br />In June, the Princess of the Stars, a passenger ship with 850 passengers and crew, sank in the central Philippines after being lashed by Typhoon Fengshen. Only 57 people survived; the authorities are still trying to recover bodies.<br />The world's worst sea disaster since World War II occurred also in the central Philippines, in December 1987, when the passenger ship Dona Paz collided with an oil tanker, killing more than 4,300 people.<br />Apart from negligence and the unsafe state of many passenger vessels, storms and typhoons play a crucial role in these tragedies. About 20 storms and typhoons batter the Philippines every year.<br />On Monday, officials said a tropical storm was nearing the country and threatens to turn into a typhoon in the following days.</div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiat5rpcp1JpH5dDPrnEEc1cZSS_hOh3sFjM_G2bjg7bT9WUrhxPDVtQFARyLMAZBYuNLtM80dlMEmlGwtcp5-G8bjVaaNVtrtKHEvbM9UkQ-aCmZQJsjr0DhcwSOD1Bqx2OwS373uk4js/s1600-h/DSC03359.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294976936614962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiat5rpcp1JpH5dDPrnEEc1cZSS_hOh3sFjM_G2bjg7bT9WUrhxPDVtQFARyLMAZBYuNLtM80dlMEmlGwtcp5-G8bjVaaNVtrtKHEvbM9UkQ-aCmZQJsjr0DhcwSOD1Bqx2OwS373uk4js/s320/DSC03359.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtcs17GEy24ITQMR87JE6JME9uQwcIhfkCDW5cM9_nE_OX1MTgi9s-Ni4rxsqQ1-UKH8FzMeGLYesvAUUoQsv9wyO0gDQiQYgqz5bPnpIEhBa4UY2ZmzJbpAzPKv9ZONM8n25sKa-E4TY/s1600-h/DSC03361.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294747695577762" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtcs17GEy24ITQMR87JE6JME9uQwcIhfkCDW5cM9_nE_OX1MTgi9s-Ni4rxsqQ1-UKH8FzMeGLYesvAUUoQsv9wyO0gDQiQYgqz5bPnpIEhBa4UY2ZmzJbpAzPKv9ZONM8n25sKa-E4TY/s320/DSC03361.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUDY2Wlb_xis1g6p60cq1VKOLgUbxHQv4hmgI8tEw0S2nTsJxXC54ZaMhhrIqACExU8aDDwPXVsLCunZAmruixS4hY9hAK4iRVhd2IIHz893ZYJzWnzJ4QXvqJ0z6VOVvEvW1pFhW7nrg/s1600-h/DSC03362.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294744914346018" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUDY2Wlb_xis1g6p60cq1VKOLgUbxHQv4hmgI8tEw0S2nTsJxXC54ZaMhhrIqACExU8aDDwPXVsLCunZAmruixS4hY9hAK4iRVhd2IIHz893ZYJzWnzJ4QXvqJ0z6VOVvEvW1pFhW7nrg/s320/DSC03362.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin-6hMDKWgTmIpwMQv3ANe2DvV-XIuT63IOzxe8NtsVdQgG6pQpHV_QecLRW-8ir4WGfatpn8VNhYT8hsyF8XrIFlIs4wnH4tdOPMEx9izeWg5Z9CfHYPearhSq3p2WdlMpF8GWeSfEQw/s1600-h/DSC03363.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294741833005826" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin-6hMDKWgTmIpwMQv3ANe2DvV-XIuT63IOzxe8NtsVdQgG6pQpHV_QecLRW-8ir4WGfatpn8VNhYT8hsyF8XrIFlIs4wnH4tdOPMEx9izeWg5Z9CfHYPearhSq3p2WdlMpF8GWeSfEQw/s320/DSC03363.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZD-IRYxDzAE98bftfzOM5JrdKQZ7SbgT5W2MEBxaKvj0HhLYwOFiywUawlzlUdWvNn0gRdl4MaShtMt9R1NT2Sm9Xu5zpDXaldex1V_7ZIRt7DAyLlUQ-q4gJNg2zy4smNWMOodYN-WE/s1600-h/DSC03364.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294741527988354" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZD-IRYxDzAE98bftfzOM5JrdKQZ7SbgT5W2MEBxaKvj0HhLYwOFiywUawlzlUdWvNn0gRdl4MaShtMt9R1NT2Sm9Xu5zpDXaldex1V_7ZIRt7DAyLlUQ-q4gJNg2zy4smNWMOodYN-WE/s320/DSC03364.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ5snmKFMK-TiTFlipABt6PL56ONB0lWNM6-pP5yotZPDdTdGGPika2vru1-hcquUOTGekPogyXi10m5LAdbjF7kpIf1bgZYVshenHI3euzb-g7Cew21ihM5MrwcodEYpS-sEHv5IRqZA/s1600-h/DSC03366.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294739594980962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ5snmKFMK-TiTFlipABt6PL56ONB0lWNM6-pP5yotZPDdTdGGPika2vru1-hcquUOTGekPogyXi10m5LAdbjF7kpIf1bgZYVshenHI3euzb-g7Cew21ihM5MrwcodEYpS-sEHv5IRqZA/s320/DSC03366.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong>Germany arrests two in suspected neo-Nazi stabbing<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />BERLIN: German police have arrested two suspects over the stabbing of a German police chief and are investigating several other people active in the neo-Nazi scene, prosecutors said on Monday.<br />Alois Mannichl, 52, police chief in the southern city of Passau, was seriously injured when he was stabbed in front of his home on Saturday. Police said the attacker made threats with language used by far-right supporters.<br />"Mr Mannichl's description fits the two (arrested people). We're now investigating them," prosecutor Helmut Wachl was quoted as saying by Passauer Neue Presse daily.<br />The stabbing of Mannichal, who had taken a firm stand against far-right supporters in recent years, shocked many in Germany.<br />"This is an escalation of violence to a level we haven't seen in the right-wing extremist scene ... in decades," said Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, adding Mannichl had been a target of far-right hostilities in past months.<br />Politicians from across the political spectrum condemned the attack, with some calling for tougher sanctions on neo-Nazi crime and others saying Germany should reconsider a ban on the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD).<br />Right-wing parties including the NPD, which Germany's Office for the Pretotection of the Constitution describes as racist and anti-Semitic, have made gains in local elections, particularly in regions with high unemployment.<br />Germany's top policeman said in August German neo-Nazis appeared to have made a tactical shift and were increasingly turning to violence.<br />Media said Mannichl's attacker had rung his victim's doorbell and told him: "Greetings from the national resistance, you left-wing police pig. You're not going to trample on our comrades' graves any more."<br />He then rammed a knife into his body, reports said.<br />A few months ago, Mannichl had ordered the arrest of several neo-Nazis after individuals tried to place a flag with a swastika onto the coffin of a far-right activist at his funeral, media have reported.<br />Although Nazi symbols, such as swastikas, are banned in Germany, parties like the NPD can get public funding because they are legitimate political parties.<br />(Reporting by Kerstin Gehmlich; editing by Ralph Boulton)</div><div></div><div>****************</div><div></div><div><strong>Russian skinheads jailed for racist killing spree<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />By James Kilner<br />A Moscow court jailed a group of skinheads on Monday for murdering 20 migrants in a racist killing spree, part of a wave of violence against immigrants in Russia.<br />Attacks on migrant workers have risen this year and political analysts fear the global economic crisis, which is hitting Russia hard, may aggravate the problem.<br />Led by a student of religious icon painting, the seven teenaged skinheads killed the migrants and tried to murder 12 others between August 2006 and October 2007.<br />"Even in Russia, this was an extraordinary attack because of the number of crimes committed," said Alexander Verkhovsky from the SOVA Centre, which tracks racism in Russia.<br />Television pictures from the court showed the group's members with close-cropped hair standing behind a glass wall grinning and smiling.<br />The judge sentenced them to between six years' imprisonment and 20 years' hard labour.<br />Resentment towards migrants, mainly from the former Soviet states in Central Asia and the Caucasus, has grown among the margins of Russian society since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.<br />Now analysts worry that that global economic crisis which has halted a decade-long economic boom in Russia may boost frustration against migrants further.<br />"Of course there is a high chance that attacks on migrants will increase, partly because there will be more migrants here looking for work and partly because the press has been telling people that immigrants are taking their jobs," said Gavhar Djuraeva, from the group Migrants and the Law.<br />While pledging to fight racism, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said immigrant quotas should be halved, a slogan pro-Kremlin youth groups have since echoed in protests.<br />Last week, Tajikistan made a formal complaint to the Russian government after the severed head of a Tajik worker was found near Moscow. A nationalist group said it had beheaded the worker in retaliation for the rape of a Russian girl.<br />Many of the estimated 10 million migrants work on construction sites, in markets and as road sweepers in Russia and attacks on them have already risen this year, according to figures from the organisation Moscow Human Rights Bureau.<br />Its figures show that from January to October, 113 migrants were killed in racist attacks and 340 were injured -- up from 74 dead and 320 injured for the whole of 2007.<br />Verkhovsky from the SOVA Centre said there was a difference between a surge in attacks by racists, who often film the events on their mobile phones to boast of their exploits, and by people blaming immigrants for the economic slowdown.<br />"More people may support nationalist groups because of the economic crisis but they are unlikely to participate in violent attacks," he said.<br />(Editing by Andrew Dobbie)</div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>In Georgia, stir over plan for black colleges</strong><br />By Robbie Brown<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />ATLANTA: As Georgia faces a potential $2 billion budget deficit, a state senator has created a stir with a plan for reducing education spending: merge two historically black universities in Albany and Savannah with nearby mostly white institutions.<br />The proposal was made this month by Seth Harp, a Republican who is the chairman of the State Senate Higher Education Committee, and quickly drew condemnation from many black educators, politicians and alumni.<br />But supporters say the plan would not only save millions of dollars but also reduce racial segregation in state-run universities.<br />"Institutions supported by taxpayers should be diverse, educating men and women of all colors and creeds," wrote Cynthia Tucker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who is black. "There is no longer good reason for public colleges that are all-white or all-black."<br />The plan appears unlikely to be adopted by the Georgia Board of Regents, in part because of the vocal opposition from black educators.<br />"Historically black institutions play a vital role in the community, the state and the nation," said Dwayne Ashley, the president of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund, which supports black colleges. "They provide educations to a number of young men and women who might not otherwise attend college."<br />Research suggests that black students often perform better academically at historically black universities. These institutions, which are legally required to admit students of all races, achieve graduation rates similar to mostly white universities, even though they often admit students with less preparation, said Marybeth Gasman of the University of Pennsylvania, an expert in black higher education.<br />Harp's plan would merge the historically black Savannah State University with Armstrong Atlantic State University, and the historically black Albany State University with Darton College. In both cases the black schools would keep their names.<br />"When you look at Savannah and Albany, those communities really need only one school each," Harp said. "The fact that two of these schools are historically black has less to do with my proposal than the economics."<br />But he added, "We really need to close the chapter of segregated schools and create a unified system."<br />The Board of Regents is not seriously considering the plan, said John Millsaps, a spokesman for the board. "It's not really on the radar screen," he said. "There's not a lot of traction. It's mainly a proposal by one individual."<br />But that did not stop an outpouring of opposition. Alumni and faculty members of the black universities sent letters of protest to the governor, and Ruby Sales, the founder of SpiritHouse Project, a social justice organization, drafted a petition to save the black schools.<br />"This proposal would continue a long history of white officials implementing an economic plan that disintegrates institutions in the black community," Sales said. "Black educational history has been decimated under these types of desegregation plans."<br />Harp's proposal is not without precedent. During desegregation, white and black schools were routinely merged, including the landmark 1979 union between the historically white University of Tennessee campus in Nashville and the black Tennessee State University.<br />But Peter Sireno, the president of Darton College, said in a statement that the school was "surprised by the idea suggested by Senator Harp."<br />"It is my understanding that discussion of institutional mergers is not on the Board of Regents' agenda at this time," Sireno said. "If and when it is on the agenda, we will address it at that time."</div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBph8LmTgfJrc-sfdxlIDBKnZIfHyzspgQNllNgP84OymFvTwPvap9GzwjxmCsUZSzawHzM69zpp0Q3N-V5kqXdJIHYYDnv12suklzFDFvOi35jdP2lEos0HFY7PEfG6O4U3MpbQrkaBU/s1600-h/DSC03367.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294527739776786" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBph8LmTgfJrc-sfdxlIDBKnZIfHyzspgQNllNgP84OymFvTwPvap9GzwjxmCsUZSzawHzM69zpp0Q3N-V5kqXdJIHYYDnv12suklzFDFvOi35jdP2lEos0HFY7PEfG6O4U3MpbQrkaBU/s320/DSC03367.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqNvKdhpBnsp468guWmKgnwZYibePWeibQAc6RzALeuC-KZvKXpDFpiVmXeT4SfeyA3hVXNt1-QZGwbqcxNq2ThfbD2lt9n_KM8pcQBfw_U8ll2Z8u_t6kGQTGanCK8lB39R9bY3fRKSg/s1600-h/DSC03368.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294525415823362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqNvKdhpBnsp468guWmKgnwZYibePWeibQAc6RzALeuC-KZvKXpDFpiVmXeT4SfeyA3hVXNt1-QZGwbqcxNq2ThfbD2lt9n_KM8pcQBfw_U8ll2Z8u_t6kGQTGanCK8lB39R9bY3fRKSg/s320/DSC03368.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4AEwPphsUOl7aPKIe3IiEmcRZUVbnZLIfP7gABLMRtAdZkvZv2VXBOp0HWjU3YrKjwPG7AqTtbfFNgIQaq1ZBpVxaB_y5mLVJARHZG2MAH_It1yUtWvLkNoDXdQt14Dj-PLFQYGmlFA8/s1600-h/DSC03369.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294524057059634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4AEwPphsUOl7aPKIe3IiEmcRZUVbnZLIfP7gABLMRtAdZkvZv2VXBOp0HWjU3YrKjwPG7AqTtbfFNgIQaq1ZBpVxaB_y5mLVJARHZG2MAH_It1yUtWvLkNoDXdQt14Dj-PLFQYGmlFA8/s320/DSC03369.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiZhZq02kjgqTcQkwxdltVDs4Te1gogKMV8TzWC6i0tAaiL2pfCcvt3-TS90vHGndKWiSsYuq4k4F7W9oGMA9oxBgFQOLWoXaK-QLJdSm34-SQcHLE-rgqkHc45yAMAawsuJ9-WN_LCAE/s1600-h/DSC03371.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294523367122082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiZhZq02kjgqTcQkwxdltVDs4Te1gogKMV8TzWC6i0tAaiL2pfCcvt3-TS90vHGndKWiSsYuq4k4F7W9oGMA9oxBgFQOLWoXaK-QLJdSm34-SQcHLE-rgqkHc45yAMAawsuJ9-WN_LCAE/s320/DSC03371.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ7hh7R6wjfCpbrVkrcxdJmD3PbqUHx3Au-C108YqNDYswxiXolfYgn5lgxwM9qjo4JHpUnw7DKRzXZN1uQfiU38w0aJpkKC0shnQlWFOL3i-ocLEBiYixCPO7TN7H-q5TgCkYbD51N0w/s1600-h/DSC03372.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294515692587746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ7hh7R6wjfCpbrVkrcxdJmD3PbqUHx3Au-C108YqNDYswxiXolfYgn5lgxwM9qjo4JHpUnw7DKRzXZN1uQfiU38w0aJpkKC0shnQlWFOL3i-ocLEBiYixCPO7TN7H-q5TgCkYbD51N0w/s320/DSC03372.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRxFgWiSlNO6jGO9aV70EP36MkdJDFVYmsg4vQCUkg67OY60nxMy3qbL7Mk4SR_64pyjuOrbHC1m8Sklxh18zrfKc5EkDZb-tAZvn4P6-AqTDIzw6TffAG8VS8egNqCAuthe0ZtcS_B4k/s1600-h/DSC03373.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294296022174082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRxFgWiSlNO6jGO9aV70EP36MkdJDFVYmsg4vQCUkg67OY60nxMy3qbL7Mk4SR_64pyjuOrbHC1m8Sklxh18zrfKc5EkDZb-tAZvn4P6-AqTDIzw6TffAG8VS8egNqCAuthe0ZtcS_B4k/s320/DSC03373.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIEpI_C9xEH93gyq2EDAgLpM87nSOcBGRkSxtKGyNZ-CeSf6YKcD2xquD3d-Fk5hAF-g3xXhXYzxOatTSHUrdpY41PfaRH8axhXa3ashI2G18DcKMsr5_7Iv4pBDdMVqqR6g0p2pgkySM/s1600-h/DSC03374.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294293237754050" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIEpI_C9xEH93gyq2EDAgLpM87nSOcBGRkSxtKGyNZ-CeSf6YKcD2xquD3d-Fk5hAF-g3xXhXYzxOatTSHUrdpY41PfaRH8axhXa3ashI2G18DcKMsr5_7Iv4pBDdMVqqR6g0p2pgkySM/s320/DSC03374.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji0GyMO9EyGBUd898B_dPZvyOyp61tY_8QbWuKd4Fcobn_0svywzUly1M70WNSJJczuDYMdFa9DMahUceqwZHKha7kc425zPYzOmyAh2x3vf18RNdPxFRVVpkYa0AOQjjRIAwc9awnCYI/s1600-h/DSC03375.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294286868517090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji0GyMO9EyGBUd898B_dPZvyOyp61tY_8QbWuKd4Fcobn_0svywzUly1M70WNSJJczuDYMdFa9DMahUceqwZHKha7kc425zPYzOmyAh2x3vf18RNdPxFRVVpkYa0AOQjjRIAwc9awnCYI/s320/DSC03375.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisaPLKDHIvbJY79Qy0q0S5WzWSFfwB_s1ZtHRCNSB-cjg4yOGaHaJ2HbkQr0vysJxaZ4ANSlPmzpzCbsjBotzto5wTzHmsVtQz3tOdCAIuN19bUyiUFYAfb1cwdxgREOeU5HLpkyj_ReY/s1600-h/DSC03376.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294284206054290" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisaPLKDHIvbJY79Qy0q0S5WzWSFfwB_s1ZtHRCNSB-cjg4yOGaHaJ2HbkQr0vysJxaZ4ANSlPmzpzCbsjBotzto5wTzHmsVtQz3tOdCAIuN19bUyiUFYAfb1cwdxgREOeU5HLpkyj_ReY/s320/DSC03376.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK8avRzdLRNi6KS4woW8Bw6GNefN2ct4RB6nqSVokSeBwV8SkO5V3H3zv00t9VAl9SVTrLcRNdMMpHcdzz48wqtxMdVK1hlW9rmVeb-0ZcczGRsKMYBqsGIRyxyjF9mTgEOHfonhSbths/s1600-h/DSC03377.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294278803082610" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK8avRzdLRNi6KS4woW8Bw6GNefN2ct4RB6nqSVokSeBwV8SkO5V3H3zv00t9VAl9SVTrLcRNdMMpHcdzz48wqtxMdVK1hlW9rmVeb-0ZcczGRsKMYBqsGIRyxyjF9mTgEOHfonhSbths/s320/DSC03377.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpQSfA77zw9uaEsiZcLq8cwFBtu7HlJOnP5KuWGLM3g9FtDQzERONtmQ4Ocggyv0lGnqOyeyYZys_p4zGSTixdUOqSDWYFD5L09vdQbYQi6QghD55XETLwupkl4eRE_-d-fYbMBzT6LVo/s1600-h/DSC03379.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294077110461810" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpQSfA77zw9uaEsiZcLq8cwFBtu7HlJOnP5KuWGLM3g9FtDQzERONtmQ4Ocggyv0lGnqOyeyYZys_p4zGSTixdUOqSDWYFD5L09vdQbYQi6QghD55XETLwupkl4eRE_-d-fYbMBzT6LVo/s320/DSC03379.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivhZkpmg2WpBn49xpPiJ20tnXJDmMDStTRIE0-b3Ml02sSTcLycwEDwJNi0pewgI3AReYY9aMDJnyBcItb45y4K2gSYKACWvubfeLoahiXY9EXbCvp85h7C_d3hEo0CGcWqLjN-FjhjHM/s1600-h/DSC03380.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294070498698690" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivhZkpmg2WpBn49xpPiJ20tnXJDmMDStTRIE0-b3Ml02sSTcLycwEDwJNi0pewgI3AReYY9aMDJnyBcItb45y4K2gSYKACWvubfeLoahiXY9EXbCvp85h7C_d3hEo0CGcWqLjN-FjhjHM/s320/DSC03380.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrHtjAKy6_Y2WTjCDd61L4pHLr-MzvoCMEnvLUqVIYs-f2xSpRYYK1Ik6cheRT51wR1l4_3DApTJHPf01E6sfeM4Aa4yLwEw_K3UrpiP6eJT_exC6JrpdWcRBe2joG0Yd6uXCWuZUcB34/s1600-h/DSC03381.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294071860244866" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrHtjAKy6_Y2WTjCDd61L4pHLr-MzvoCMEnvLUqVIYs-f2xSpRYYK1Ik6cheRT51wR1l4_3DApTJHPf01E6sfeM4Aa4yLwEw_K3UrpiP6eJT_exC6JrpdWcRBe2joG0Yd6uXCWuZUcB34/s320/DSC03381.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg54coq8_IMrTmJ2qU4mDTjjZlPtihmtvbgkt2ugtVUBXkDKigbU9tZ4jDI1o0mbD64S5qlUSZ1UFGkPzn_bZpopuHEx6b7niVaAybqW8SeV2SdTyJ38zNzCyndVKhfQ-8Klfvuuyo6f0Y/s1600-h/DSC03382.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294071836049794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg54coq8_IMrTmJ2qU4mDTjjZlPtihmtvbgkt2ugtVUBXkDKigbU9tZ4jDI1o0mbD64S5qlUSZ1UFGkPzn_bZpopuHEx6b7niVaAybqW8SeV2SdTyJ38zNzCyndVKhfQ-8Klfvuuyo6f0Y/s320/DSC03382.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1REZq12FlI2XJ3jMw4UNwXhLwBLsjlE5ckquAmANoBVxp-7DWA5OhMna48vckOULgzoF4vygba51wA7muDgVwOOLrA2zaNdNY2jF6rx0Lu-WknqRa9PzyDvBc7t3OCw1REr6UVdNwd4Y/s1600-h/DSC03383.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280294066399943282" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 166px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1REZq12FlI2XJ3jMw4UNwXhLwBLsjlE5ckquAmANoBVxp-7DWA5OhMna48vckOULgzoF4vygba51wA7muDgVwOOLrA2zaNdNY2jF6rx0Lu-WknqRa9PzyDvBc7t3OCw1REr6UVdNwd4Y/s320/DSC03383.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSX97KIYmrxgdCoW8DIMMYrxndnAZQrhp7cXAsJuZlKEEX9LvNDAIFDVby64GJ_j3hfpc0kNYLo52J5m1pOFGavZGPROUE2Aft-Rnp9HC1lIAsHcKp2-TD2KBuYto5HINQNd_XWmJC_m4/s1600-h/DSC03384.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293825266908402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSX97KIYmrxgdCoW8DIMMYrxndnAZQrhp7cXAsJuZlKEEX9LvNDAIFDVby64GJ_j3hfpc0kNYLo52J5m1pOFGavZGPROUE2Aft-Rnp9HC1lIAsHcKp2-TD2KBuYto5HINQNd_XWmJC_m4/s320/DSC03384.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGa6ko2V13AjO3Ji3-jAYUm7jek_c95DE5rYhq_zRAWkCFzA0TVWAUkb-dEsfIhIMKx7iSfqWjZgz8MOzqJiFp8zPZrfX9Xx5OTVGkknyIN8c-kw582Yil5uBzsd-jnBGhuflPTBbO4ys/s1600-h/DSC03385.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293824593175602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGa6ko2V13AjO3Ji3-jAYUm7jek_c95DE5rYhq_zRAWkCFzA0TVWAUkb-dEsfIhIMKx7iSfqWjZgz8MOzqJiFp8zPZrfX9Xx5OTVGkknyIN8c-kw582Yil5uBzsd-jnBGhuflPTBbO4ys/s320/DSC03385.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh90NAOaStubdYnHyGdnmzFKNmi0S_XZEt21x587NYncaiVVeGNl2z6lMQoGfnYrn75awVW8wfFUbuLGA2gtMEG-gqXUCO63NFTa1SJDR38jRm9p8klclsveqURchBGcnctqa_1IoFi9L0/s1600-h/DSC03386.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293821346129250" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 193px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh90NAOaStubdYnHyGdnmzFKNmi0S_XZEt21x587NYncaiVVeGNl2z6lMQoGfnYrn75awVW8wfFUbuLGA2gtMEG-gqXUCO63NFTa1SJDR38jRm9p8klclsveqURchBGcnctqa_1IoFi9L0/s320/DSC03386.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilp809RqiUyL0rhwy2AjcrtDag23R4Cu4cYdK-vowolJsM9eZk0han9bW6QltFdkPao_rR7PljVJYlGaMn_PZN6PWQj_KIcv2HQmWZMG2cafzHCVDt2wsH5KpRVUE0rwS6vuW_8DBbwEk/s1600-h/DSC03387.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293819298269842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 183px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilp809RqiUyL0rhwy2AjcrtDag23R4Cu4cYdK-vowolJsM9eZk0han9bW6QltFdkPao_rR7PljVJYlGaMn_PZN6PWQj_KIcv2HQmWZMG2cafzHCVDt2wsH5KpRVUE0rwS6vuW_8DBbwEk/s320/DSC03387.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxyy-2lxSqvre2Bzj6CAChoTosYFoplPQt9BZaIoy7WiAFJzTaOiM-h359VwuXBFK6OHawvjOhtLxskh3qBoELB1ChBeX7wzP3QD28QQpPNxHs1SK4BQ0g3J9VKTcrTZj2DYlp131RkzI/s1600-h/DSC03388.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293818005526706" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 198px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxyy-2lxSqvre2Bzj6CAChoTosYFoplPQt9BZaIoy7WiAFJzTaOiM-h359VwuXBFK6OHawvjOhtLxskh3qBoELB1ChBeX7wzP3QD28QQpPNxHs1SK4BQ0g3J9VKTcrTZj2DYlp131RkzI/s320/DSC03388.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju7mYPgKUOgzDIaHDdWFrOsuezNyveodt3tnyrbDdpqEJpcG6LTC76Q_1qlY_dexcsolfFVIuslAPMUOivCGMu5nGlO2FyKjem2iYOqSbu3uTc-ryj2uTLMlsMIcx7j9WArzMZgNM13xc/s1600-h/DSC03389.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293505029940898" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 138px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju7mYPgKUOgzDIaHDdWFrOsuezNyveodt3tnyrbDdpqEJpcG6LTC76Q_1qlY_dexcsolfFVIuslAPMUOivCGMu5nGlO2FyKjem2iYOqSbu3uTc-ryj2uTLMlsMIcx7j9WArzMZgNM13xc/s320/DSC03389.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZU7-s9xh2wlg_o8RsrBA3aFwQSj1bHsNviuUrCaj8X6AUejZxWuGxXoy-XKhrP4A2ZSrnW50mrZ1uxbkziF5PMajmk5bJQJR4aG6yhNEE5hjd-izuaidz1JJKmWqhYBc5n3gfd1wgius/s1600-h/DSC03390.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293500196433538" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 190px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZU7-s9xh2wlg_o8RsrBA3aFwQSj1bHsNviuUrCaj8X6AUejZxWuGxXoy-XKhrP4A2ZSrnW50mrZ1uxbkziF5PMajmk5bJQJR4aG6yhNEE5hjd-izuaidz1JJKmWqhYBc5n3gfd1wgius/s320/DSC03390.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4Q3U73zLG0vD5VZSLN_QmolRyzniJyCTI5rWnvP-r-Rcl3cZX7-5M9x3aH2jDh8gxgsf5KfDkudos6zRvZXOW2J-obJYCNz1_rPlpWJNaJgBmBhmKk1snpwDgV7wlbLL3OS09vzRynvk/s1600-h/DSC03392.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293490726246402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 284px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4Q3U73zLG0vD5VZSLN_QmolRyzniJyCTI5rWnvP-r-Rcl3cZX7-5M9x3aH2jDh8gxgsf5KfDkudos6zRvZXOW2J-obJYCNz1_rPlpWJNaJgBmBhmKk1snpwDgV7wlbLL3OS09vzRynvk/s320/DSC03392.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjssZ_Et85m80BEGpagMklCSGPoG3G3-Dl10A0kTQSoy1gWBn4LMkOQp4d6y7tXzZoAzDO6QB5iFXrim7npeeWfr2QdmuCZ46HZfmoupvyFTWMgD1BxdOSXcHL29Oo0ZxW96d4owneZQMM/s1600-h/DSC03393.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293491524973682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjssZ_Et85m80BEGpagMklCSGPoG3G3-Dl10A0kTQSoy1gWBn4LMkOQp4d6y7tXzZoAzDO6QB5iFXrim7npeeWfr2QdmuCZ46HZfmoupvyFTWMgD1BxdOSXcHL29Oo0ZxW96d4owneZQMM/s320/DSC03393.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLlWBbp8iYqves218jpqJa-BPq9XuBdbcOP4fW2qxJoCf2gx_FhdmEdJh0TmiT3-DBINtPkb1e6PEbAkTeBR3rfDjFSVzcir-aJ4MPFqJL7d3yK9F1Q7sb5ctijH912Y2AlDscitVWGZQ/s1600-h/DSC03394.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293493600467042" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLlWBbp8iYqves218jpqJa-BPq9XuBdbcOP4fW2qxJoCf2gx_FhdmEdJh0TmiT3-DBINtPkb1e6PEbAkTeBR3rfDjFSVzcir-aJ4MPFqJL7d3yK9F1Q7sb5ctijH912Y2AlDscitVWGZQ/s320/DSC03394.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIyEuag6Q3nPwtrTGOAmvKVcl1qEBvK_c6qZCNpDbY4GibW8LIzZ2ScQUtQefiVHQfwRNbAKE2ScmPzVAEOnwPIAMW-Ea8m5Sbdv35qjsKSQhu_acdFObXZ4LrsL5qAZaLr2iSttcPXW4/s1600-h/DSC03395.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293280426980002" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIyEuag6Q3nPwtrTGOAmvKVcl1qEBvK_c6qZCNpDbY4GibW8LIzZ2ScQUtQefiVHQfwRNbAKE2ScmPzVAEOnwPIAMW-Ea8m5Sbdv35qjsKSQhu_acdFObXZ4LrsL5qAZaLr2iSttcPXW4/s320/DSC03395.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqngJU9YX32lQ9odS5b_wt2BgsBrru3g7GAKKwW3k9rryxhEO-JW0RnifmdQMBPBt19sW5oSvXn6TNk9CSpMu-ogfRmwvt2_RITkcf5xA5S1PJvFuqX0wo02lOTxrDl7AZZxQdhDlzoG4/s1600-h/DSC03397.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293278751325650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqngJU9YX32lQ9odS5b_wt2BgsBrru3g7GAKKwW3k9rryxhEO-JW0RnifmdQMBPBt19sW5oSvXn6TNk9CSpMu-ogfRmwvt2_RITkcf5xA5S1PJvFuqX0wo02lOTxrDl7AZZxQdhDlzoG4/s320/DSC03397.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS_x1FbUpM54DD9RijsXvGlgZz183XWrB5XtqjO2SXKx4lHPnfpxRc6v4A4s6hZ7gvBGxEp3DfTjXdWdEN0eJ6FqDXkmXY3MFYTSNQx4z0eNGGbT6o6I5Urp69KnJu_5vFDfg4WFPGGT4/s1600-h/DSC03398.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293279414062114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS_x1FbUpM54DD9RijsXvGlgZz183XWrB5XtqjO2SXKx4lHPnfpxRc6v4A4s6hZ7gvBGxEp3DfTjXdWdEN0eJ6FqDXkmXY3MFYTSNQx4z0eNGGbT6o6I5Urp69KnJu_5vFDfg4WFPGGT4/s320/DSC03398.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXw6lv7vYhYlwz_qQOvC0W-tNM1TREeEQPrApz43AqL7SL4kjP8B8yi2JxO4-vFxwpeebGxcnWy_lECY1B3YBMTQitiVt7cKxv7_qnihQjDJhMC-8LLo_zVqyPk1WuTLwLgY6KX9eoNig/s1600-h/DSC03399.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293277622270642" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXw6lv7vYhYlwz_qQOvC0W-tNM1TREeEQPrApz43AqL7SL4kjP8B8yi2JxO4-vFxwpeebGxcnWy_lECY1B3YBMTQitiVt7cKxv7_qnihQjDJhMC-8LLo_zVqyPk1WuTLwLgY6KX9eoNig/s320/DSC03399.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>Ever the optimist, as newspaper industry falters<br /></strong>By Richard Pérez-Peña<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />SAN JOSE, California: Dean Singleton expanded his newspaper empire at the worst possible time, in the worst part of the United States he could have chosen, and he has been paying the price ever since in plummeting advertising and shrinking papers. Yet somehow, even in today's adverse climate, he professes optimism.<br />In 2006 and 2007, as prices for newspapers were peaking, Singleton's company, MediaNews Group, bought this city's daily, The San Jose Mercury News, and more than 30 smaller San Francisco Bay Area papers. He gambled his company on California just as the bottom was about to fall out for newspapers, especially here.<br />"In retrospect, the timing was not good," said Singleton, the chief executive and vice chairman and a major shareholder in the company, which is privately held. "But in our business, you buy newspapers when they're for sale. If we could have foreseen the current economic downturn in the state, it might have changed our views, but we couldn't foresee that."<br />The news about his industry seems to get worse by the day. Last week, Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy protection.<br />And Moody's Investors Service said MediaNews was approaching the point where its debt, almost $1 billion, would be nine times its annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization - technically putting the company in default.<br />MediaNews's credit rating is far below investment grade, indicating a high risk of actual default, but Singleton insisted that the debt was manageable. He said MediaNews's primary lender, Hearst, was also a major shareholder, with a significant interest in keeping MediaNews afloat.<br />"I don't see any other large newspaper company in danger of following Tribune," which was much more leveraged than its peers, Singleton said.<br />In a rare burst of good news for him, new industry miseries could work to his benefit - outside California - by weakening or eliminating competitors to two of his newspapers, The Denver Post in Colorado and The Pioneer Press in Minnesota. In the first case, E.W. Scripps Co. recently put The Rocky Mountain News up for sale and said the paper might close; in the second, The Star Tribune, which has defaulted on its debts, said it needed to cut $30 million in costs and win concessions from its unions.<br />MediaNews had a lot of company in buying newspapers just as revenue began to collapse, for prices that, even then, analysts warned were inflated. McClatchy bought Knight Ridder; Tribune Co. bought all its own stock to go private; separate private investors bought The Star Tribune and The Philadelphia Inquirer; and there were many smaller deals. All those buyers are suffering now, and newspapers cannot find buyers even at a fraction of the prices offered two years ago.<br />Despite the risks, Singleton contends that in the long run, California - particularly the Bay Area - is the place to be.<br />"I have no doubt that The Mercury News's revenue base will perform better when things turn around than almost any newspaper in the country," he said.<br />Others are not so sure. "The Bay Area has been the canary in the newspaper coal mine, and that was recognized a long time ago by a lot of people," said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst at the firm Outsell. "The impact of the Internet has been heavier here and earlier here than anywhere else in the country."<br />Sites like Craigslist and eBay, which have long fueled the migration of advertising to the Internet, began in the Bay Area, and are more entrenched here than in any other part of the United States.<br />Already known for squeezing costs as hard as anyone in the industry, Singleton and his team have been cutting spending at a furious pace, trying to keep pace with tumbling revenue.<br />His detractors among analysts and journalists concede that in this market, any owner would have to make deep cuts. But they say he was already inclined to a slash-and-burn approach that is little more than a prescription for having the newspapers do steadily less, and do it less well.<br />"There's no newspaper in the country that I know of that's not suffering," said John McManus, a journalism professor at San Jose State University. "But Dean Singleton has hollowed out the Mercury News."<br />MediaNews, a national chain based in Denver, has been concentrating on California since the 1990s. It built two extensive networks, in the Bay Area and in Southern California, with dozens of small suburban papers and a few larger ones like The Oakland Tribune and The Los Angeles Daily News.<br />But a complex set of deals in 2006 and 2007 greatly increased the company's California presence. They gave Singleton control of his two largest California papers, The San Jose Mercury News and the nearby Contra Costa Times; a string of small daily and weekly Bay Area papers; and The Daily Breeze, near Los Angeles.<br />Singleton, 57, has assembled what was intended as his greatest achievement, an arc of papers around the Bay, dominating most of the region, with the Hearst's troubled San Francisco Chronicle in the middle. It allowed the first large-scale application of his belief that pooling resources - including journalists - among several newspapers in the same region would cut costs.<br />Many functions have been consolidated, like printing five newspapers at the San Jose plant. But the question now is whether the savings are enough to avert debt default or a fire sale of assets.<br />"We do make money, but I couldn't get into how much," said Mac Tully, publisher of the Mercury News. "We're revenue-challenged, no question." Singleton said much the same about the company as a whole.<br />The company does not publicly report financial data, but MediaNews executives acknowledge that its revenue, like the entire industry's, had fallen sharply. Last summer, the company negotiated new terms with its creditors and paid down some debts.<br />"We still have more leverage than we wish we had," Singleton said, referring to the company's debt. "I don't know if we bought enough room for the long term or not, but we certainly believe we did."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/business/medianews.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/business/medianews.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div></div><div>IW: No this really is clutching at straws</div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Details of governor's arrest show newspapers still relevant</strong><br />By David Carr<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />For the past few years, newspapers have been smacked around for lacking relevance, but the industry has finally found a compelling spokesman: Rod Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois.<br />According to the criminal complaint filed by the U.S. attorney, Blagojevich, while allegedly trying to set a price for a U.S. Senate seat, also spent a significant amount of time going after the press, especially The Chicago Tribune, whose editorial page had been calling for his impeachment.<br />The governor, a Democrat, said he would withhold financial assistance from the paper's owner, Tribune, in its effort to sell Wrigley Field, a baseball stadium in Chicago, unless the newspaper got rid of the editorial writers. "Our recommendation is fire all those (expletive) people, get 'em the (expletive) out of there and get us some editorial support," he told his chief of staff, John Harris.<br />Who says the modern American newspaper doesn't matter?<br />There is no evidence that Sam Zell, the chief executive of Tribune, or any of his colleagues followed through on Blagojevich's demand for retribution. Gerould Kern, editor of The Chicago Tribune, said Sunday, "Since I have been editor, I have not been pressured in any way on our coverage of the governor, our editorial page positions or the staffing of our editorial board." Tribune has acknowledged that it received a subpoena but declined to comment further.<br />In a city and state where corruption is knit into the political fabric, a solvent daily newspaper would seem to be a civic necessity.<br />But if another governor goes bad in Illinois - a likely circumstance, given the current investigation and the fact that the last governor, George Ryan, is serving six and a half years on corruption charges - what if the local paper were too diminished to do the job?<br />It is not an implausible scenario. Last week, it was reported that the two daily newspapers in Detroit, a city whose politicians have been known to get their hands in the till as soon as voters pulled the lever, will cease home delivery on most days of the week and print a pared-down version for newsstands those days, with cuts in staff to match.<br />And on Dec. 8, the day before Blagojevich and Harris were arrested, Tribune, which has almost $13 billion in debt, filed for bankruptcy protection. It was less than a year after Zell, a man with a fondness for distressed assets, took control of the Tribune chain - which owned 11 other newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, and 23 television stations - in a deal structured around an employee stock ownership plan that involved $8 billion in new debt.<br />Things have not gone as planned since then. The worst ad recession since the Great Depression, combined with that crushing debt, has compelled the company to sell assets - Newsday, a daily newspaper on Long Island, New York, was sold last spring for $650 million - and cut staff.<br />The Chicago Tribune newsroom, which had a staff of 670 in 2005, has gone through several rounds of cutbacks and buyouts that has left the newsroom with 480 employees.<br />Some of the losses have been dear. This summer, Maurice Possley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on criminal justice, left, in part because he didn't believe the newspaper was still interested in the kind of investigative stories he worked on.<br />In November, John Crewdson, another Pulitzer-winning reporter, was laid off from the newspaper's Washington bureau. Two of the newspaper's five staff members who covered state government are now gone. Ann Marie Lipinski, the newspaper's editor and a longtime supporter of The Chicago Tribune's aggressive brand of journalism, left last summer, and in September, a redesign with fewer articles arrayed over less space was put in place.<br />Almost since the day Blagojevich took office, The Chicago Tribune has shown readers that the governor's primary interest was not always the public interest. And the paper's reporting helped expose the outside clout of Antoin Rezko, the convicted fixer with ties to both Blagojevich and President-elect Barack Obama.<br />Although much of the current investigation is being led by the office of the U.S. attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, the newspaper did its own work, including pointing out that the governor's wife, Patti, had received more than $700,000 in real estate commissions, with much of the money coming from people who did business with the state. In the indictment, she also pays tribute to the newspaper's effectiveness, shouting in the background as her husband talked about Tribune, which also owns the Chicago Cubs baseball team. "Hold up that (expletive) Cubs (expletive)," she said. "(Expletive) them."<br />It is the highest sort of compliment, if rather profane.<br />This week, the paper continued to work every angle on the Blagojevich investigation, and follow some of their own. But some people at the newspaper, and those who have left, wonder whether The Chicago Tribune's commitment to covering corruption is sustainable.<br />"I couldn't be prouder of the people that are there and the job that they have done," said David Jackson, an investigative reporter who worked on the Rezko coverage and is now on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. "But both as a citizen and a journalist, you have to wonder whether the paper will have the resources moving forward to continue to do that work. I am worried that the paper will be so diminished under Zell that it won't be able to play that role."<br />Crewdson was not so concerned. In an e-mail message, he said the financial condition of his former newspaper would not "have kept Fitzgerald from finding out what he wanted to know and going wherever he wanted to go."<br />Financial problems aside, Zell has publicly ridiculed the focus on long-term investigative projects, once telling an investors' conference in New York, "I haven't figured out how to cash in a Pulitzer Prize."<br />Kern, the current editor, said that if anything, the past week confirmed that The Chicago Tribune had the conviction and muscle to cover its backyard aggressively.<br />"This was an extraordinary week for The Chicago Tribune," he said. "On Monday, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and on Tuesday, this huge story broke. There are two messages there. One, that the business model has to be reinvented and two, the importance of doing public service reporting. In the future, we will be doing fewer things and doing them better, and this kind of reporting will be a pillar of what we continue to do."<br />Possley, who left the newspaper last summer, said he was encouraged that someone, at least the current governor of Illinois, felt that the biggest daily in Chicago was important, however reduced its circumstance.<br />"What The Tribune was doing with its reporting and on its opinion page was clearly a source of deep concern to Blagojevich and in a sense, you love to see that," he said. "You have to worry when they start not to care. Then they begin to act as if they are in a vacuum, and that won't be good for anyone."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/technology/carr.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/technology/carr.php</a></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div><strong>Blagojevich's political personality is a study in contrasts</strong><br />By Monica Davey<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />CHICAGO:<br />Governor Rod Blagojevich is a polished speaker who can win over elderly women at luncheons in southern Illinois with his earnest attention, and eloquently recite historical anecdotes from the lives of the leaders he says he most admires - Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Robert F. Kennedy, Alexander Hamilton, Ronald Reagan.<br />And yet, Blagojevich, 52, rarely turns up for work at his official state office in Chicago, former employees say, is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush.<br />He calls the brush "the football," an allusion to the "nuclear football," or the bomb codes never to be out of reach of a president.<br />In 1996, a Democrat who shared a campaign office with Blagojevich, John Fritchey was told that his stepfather had suffered a serious stroke. He walked over to Blagojevich, who was making fund-raising calls, and shared the news.<br />"He proceeded to tell me that he was sorry, and then, in the next breath, he asked me if I could talk to my family about contributing money to his campaign," recalled Fritchey, a state representative and a critic of the governor. "To do that, and in such a nonchalant manner, didn't strike me as something a normal person would do."<br />Yet even political figures like Fritchey say they were stunned by his arrest last week on charges of conspiracy and soliciting bribes.<br />Many who know the governor well say that as Blagojevich's famed fund-raising capability has shrunk in recent months and, as his legal bills have mounted after years of federal investigation, he seems to have transformed from what Fritchey considered callous into something closer to panicked or delusional.<br />"It's hard to imagine what could have been going through his head for this to reach such a brazen point," Fritchey said. "The irony is, had he simply delivered on the promises on which he campaigned rather than pursuing his belief that success would come through an abundance of fund-raising, his path might look like he wanted it to."<br />Now, officials at all levels are calling for his resignation or impeachment. And the public image he had cultivated as an agent of change in Illinois has been subsumed by the stories about his conduct in private. Today, he barely has an ally in sight.<br />Neither Blagojevich's spokesman nor his lawyer, who has said that Blagojevich feels that he is innocent of the charges against him, would consent to be interviewed.<br />Whatever else may have come apart within Blagojevich in recent months, one quality, unabashed ambition, has been a constant, his colleagues and his critics say. Even with approval ratings that had sunk to 13 percent as details of the federal investigation into his administration had seeped out over the past three years, Blagojevich, incredulous prosecutors say, still spoke in his recorded conversations in the past six weeks of the possibility of remaking his political future and running for president, perhaps in 2016.<br />Blagojevich rose to power from unlikely roots. His father was a steelworker from Serbia and his mother collected tickets for the Chicago Transit Authority.<br />He graduated from Northwestern University, and received his law degree from Pepperdine University, working to help pay for it.<br />Back in Chicago, he worked briefly as an assistant prosecutor. But Blagojevich's political career may have been sealed the day he met his future wife, Patti Mell, at a fund-raiser in 1988 for her father, Richard Mell, a ward chief on the Northwest Side and a powerful alderman for more than three decades. Three years later, he was doing precinct work for Mell. Not long after, Mell suggested he run for state representative - with the help of Mell's vast ward operation.<br />Blagojevich spent four years in the state House, six years in the U.S. House of Representatives, and then, in 2002, he ran for governor.<br />The moment could not have been more welcoming for a Democrat. Governor George Ryan, who was by then engulfed in a corruption scandal, did not run for re-election, and the Republican who did had a long record of public service but an unfortunate last name: Ryan.<br />Blagojevich focused his campaign on pledges of reform and clean government, and won. Once in office, even amid accusations of campaign donations being exchanged for state jobs, Blagojevich continued to promote himself as a lonely fighter against the gargantuan pressures of lobbyists and lawmakers - pressing for tougher ethics laws, appointing inspectors general and sending state employees to "ethics training."<br />Before the cameras, Blagojevich was a cheery presence - the No. 1 Cubs fan, an Elvis buff, an avid runner who jogged through the annual twilight parade before the State Fair, darting back and forth to shake as many hands as he could find.<br />Behind the scenes, though, members of Blagojevich's staff saw a different man: one who was deeply concerned about his appearance (particularly his signature black hair, which he ignored suggestions to change) and who usually worked from his home or his North Side campaign office and could often be seen, mid- or late-morning, making a run of 6 miles, or 10 kilometers, trailed by his security team.<br />"God forbid you make a mistake," said one longtime former employee. In December 2003, the employee recalled, Blagojevich flew into a rage because he thought he was late for a holiday tree-lighting ceremony in Springfield, and his two young daughters - who were visiting with Santa Claus in the parlor of the Governor's Mansion - did not have their shoes on yet. "You're trying to sabotage my career!" the employee recalled Blagojevich screaming at staff members, as he charged into the parlor. "You're the worst!"<br />At Christmastime in 2004, a nasty spat cropped up between Blagojevich and Mell and the fallout stretched well beyond the family, offering some of the clearest public hints of Blagojevich's coming troubles.<br />Blagojevich shut down a landfill operated by a relative of Mell, saying it was taking types of waste it was not licensed to accept.<br />Mell accused Blagojevich of shutting the facility as a personal vendetta against him, and then accused his top fund-raiser of trading appointments to state commissions and boards for campaign donations, just the image Blagojevich had been trying to avoid.<br />After his arrest Tuesday, Blagojevich met with almost no one, other than lawyers and ministers. In 2005, not long after his spat with his father-in-law was made public, setting off more corruption investigations, Blagojevich reflected on his work and said it had changed him in a way.<br />"What I've discovered since I've been governor is that there's a certain loneliness to this job," he said in an interview. "There's a loneliness and a certain sadness because you have to isolate yourself to some extent. There are so many people who want so many different things from you."<br /></div><div></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div><strong>Politico and Reuters join in newspaper venture<br /></strong>By Richard Pérez-Peña<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />Politico, the upstart news source from Washington, and Reuters, the venerable wire service, have joined forces to offer articles to newspapers and sell advertising on the papers' Web sites, the latest step in the rising competition among electronic news media to fill the void left by the shrinking print business.<br />Politico recently began offering papers a limited number of free articles, and beginning this week the papers that sign onto that service, the Politico Network, will also see the stream of daily output from Reuters and choose up to 10 articles and 10 photographs each day to use in print or on the Web.<br />Politico would gain the right to sell ads on the newspapers' Web pages containing the Politico and Reuters articles - though not the printed pages - and would share the revenue with the papers.<br />At the same time, Reuters, which also has an editorial partnership with the International Herald Tribune, will begin carrying most of Politico's work on its news wires.<br />"Admittedly, this is an experiment," said Jim VandeHei, executive editor of Politico. "But we're sure there's a need."<br />At the same time, CNN is trying to build a wire service for print media to compete with the dominant player in that field, The Associated Press, and news services focused on finance, like Bloomberg News and Dow Jones Newswires, are expanding their coverage of general-interest news. Meanwhile, newspapers face new competition from Web-based local news operations that are springing up.<br />The new service would be free for six months, and the partners could charge for the Reuters content after that.<br />But until then, Politico would offer Reuters a foot in the door at a large number of U.S. news operations, said Christoph Pleitgen, the managing director of Reuters News Agency, which is based in London.<br />He said his service had just 15 newspaper clients in the United States, compared with more than 1,400 for The Associated Press. The Politico Network, introduced in September, already has more than 60 newspapers and more than 40 broadcasters as clients.<br />"If we can, through this, engage with potential clients we don't have a relationship with, that's fantastic," he said. "There absolutely is an untapped market."<br />Politico, created less than two years ago, hired a staff that included well-known newspaper and magazine journalists and quickly grew into one of the most popular U.S. sources of news on Washington and the political campaigns, with more than three million unique visitors each month.<br />A mostly online operation that also has a small-circulation newspaper, Politico is owned by Allbritton Communications, which has a chain of television stations.<br />Like The Associated Press, Reuters is a global news service, founded in the mid-19th century, with thousands of journalists, but Reuters is not a serious competitor for U.S. clients. It is especially strong in business and international coverage, but it has a fraction of The AP's resources in the United States, where it does not cover local news, an AP staple.<br />Politico's informed political coverage, sometimes spiced with attitude from its writers, complements Reuters' sober style and Washington coverage that often reads as if written for a non-U.S. audience. And as other news organizations shrink or abandon their Washington bureaus, Politico is expanding from a staff of about 85 people before the election to an expected 105 to 110 in the next few months.<br />Politico is pitching its network to newspapers as an important new revenue stream, but it remains to be seen how well it can deliver on that promise. A paper can agree to use up to five Politico articles a week and receive 50 percent of the ad revenue that Politico sells on those Web pages; or up to 10 articles a week, and receive 40 percent; or up to 15 articles, and receive 30 percent.<br />Newspapers fare best when they can sell their online ad space themselves, but they typically sell less than half that space. They turn the rest over to ad networks, which pay the papers a small fraction - often less than 5 percent - of what papers earn on their own.<br />Roy Schwartz, Politico's vice president for business development and marketing, said it could get much higher rates than the networks by offering a specific, generally upscale audience, rather than the scattershot approach of the networks. Where a large paper might get $20 for every thousand readers for an ad, he said, "we're targeting $10," he said, with up to half that amount going to the paper. By comparison, the same paper might get $1 or less from an ad network.<br />Although the Politico Network is three months old, it has barely begun selling ads on newspaper sites. And with the U.S. economy in recession, the ad market is contracting, even online.<br />"We're confident there's a market," Schwartz said. "We'll find out."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/business/politico.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/business/politico.php</a></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Chinese reporter chasing corruption claims disappears</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />By Emma Graham-Harrison and Yu Le<br />A Chinese newspaper reporter investigating a suspicious real estate deal has not been seen since hotel security tapes showed five men pushing him into a car two weeks ago, his son and a newspaper said on Monday.<br />The case appears to be the second in recent weeks involving journalists who colleagues said were targeted for probing graft in a part of north China rich in both coal and corruption claims.<br />Guan Jian, reporter for the small Network News (Wangluo Bao) paper, was seized from a hotel lobby in north China's Shanxi province on December 1 and forced into a waiting four-wheel drive.<br />Video footage from the Jinjiang Inn, published in the Beijing News, showed Guan in the lobby when the men arrived. He has not contacted his family since, his son told Reuters.<br />"His friends couldn't reach him, his colleagues couldn't either. At first we thought he had just gone on a reporting trip, but then after several days when he still wasn't in touch, we got worried," Guan Yufei said in a phone interview.<br />He travelled to Shanxi to look for his father, who was in the provincial capital, Taiyuan, investigating claims of illegal land-use by a real estate company with official connections.<br />The younger Guan came back with only tapes of the apparent kidnapping, but said he was hopeful his father was still alive.<br />"We have basically confirmed that he has not had a 'mishap'," Guan told Reuters. He declined to say more for fear of jeopardising the search for his father.<br />The Network News held a meeting to discuss Guan's disappearance and decided the best course of action was to work with local police to try to find him, a colleague told Reuters.<br />Police in Taiyuan told Reuters that they were investigating the case, but declined to comment further.<br />RISKS TO JOURNALISTS<br />Guan's disappearance highlights the danger to reporters probing corruption in a country where officials are often close to business while also wielding power over police and courts.<br />Killings of reporters are virtually unheard of, but beatings, detentions and arrests are a risk for those who take on the powerful.<br />Guan's case follows the controversial arrest of a reporter from powerful state broadcaster China Central Television who was seized from her home in Beijing earlier this month by Shanxi prosecutors who claimed she took bribes.<br />The television reporter, Li Min, was investigating the prosecutors for a story when they travelled to Beijing to seize her, Chinese media said.<br />Provincial officials are not always able to extend their local power to control journalists in Beijing, whose employers often have government connections of their own.<br />A lawyer working for Li's family said that she appeared to be the victim of a "terrifying" abuse of power to silence her work.<br />"This is a crude trampling on citizens' constitutional rights to exercise oversight and criticise (officials)," the lawyer, Zhou Ze, said in a written statement.<br />A communist official from northeastern Liaoning province was sacked at the start of this year after he accused a journalist in Beijing of libelling him and ordered police to arrest her.<br />(Editing by Nick Macfie)</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGLMRJukWZE6FxtNI-S79CkqSQfrjQ6UDfcxp_skBxGVD-8gB3bFCZFWsDVmVixowjZKMYGwiegcDPSFS0dNjXF8isBzeycuL3DIt6ZdaGyl59pWCqC-Zv9ugePd6nvnTNDpsGZcy14BY/s1600-h/DSC03401.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280293271425287794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGLMRJukWZE6FxtNI-S79CkqSQfrjQ6UDfcxp_skBxGVD-8gB3bFCZFWsDVmVixowjZKMYGwiegcDPSFS0dNjXF8isBzeycuL3DIt6ZdaGyl59pWCqC-Zv9ugePd6nvnTNDpsGZcy14BY/s320/DSC03401.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>British government moving to prevent home repossessions</strong><br />Bloomberg News<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />LONDON: Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Monday increased the amount that the British government would make available for lending to first-time home buyers by a third in an effort to help the struggling construction industry.<br />The increase, which brings the amount to £400 million, or about $600 million, was announced as the chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, was seeking the support of the biggest British banks for a £1 billion mortgage program aimed at preventing home repossessions.<br />Darling and Business Secretary Peter Mandelson are to meet chief executives from leading banks at the Treasury on Tuesday to discuss measures to increase lending to homeowners, small companies and consumers. Darling also published details Monday on how the mortgage package would work.<br />The money will be lent to first-time home buyers interest free for five years and can be used as a deposit for up to a third of the price of a house. The plan will be offered on selected unsold properties on developers' books.<br />The government said in September that it would lend £300 million for the program. With house prices falling and expected to fall further next year, buyers taking advantage of the offer risk owing more than the immediate value of their property.<br />"It's clear that the long-term demand for housing remains high," said Michael Ellam, a spokesman for Brown. "It's for individuals to decide from their own circumstances what to do."<br />The group meeting on Tuesday, known as the Lending Panel, will begin work on solutions to unclog lending channels. "We are going to do more in the next few days," Brown said in Parliament. "We want to do everything we can to move the economy forward."<br />The mortgage guarantee is meant to provide households with confidence that they will not lose their homes even if they become unemployed.<br />Under the plan, the Treasury will guarantee payments to banks, allowing homeowners who would normally have been refused a payment holiday to defer "a proportion" of payments by up to two years. Darling now wants a concrete commitment from the eight largest British lenders, who account for 70 percent of mortgages, to sign up to the plan.<br />The measures follow Brown's announcement of a £50 billion program to bolster the capital of British banks and other initiatives to revive lending to businesses and consumers. The government is frustrated that banks continue to ration credit even as cash from the rescue package begins to flow.Aid plan lifts Irish banks<br />The promise of a bailout valued at €10 billion, or $13.6 billion, breathed some life into battered Irish bank stocks on Monday, but mounting criticism over a lack of detail from the government limited the stocks' gains, Reuters reported from Dublin.<br />The government said Sunday that it would bolster bank capital by tapping funds set aside during the economic boom to cover future state pension obligations. Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said he would meet with banks over the next few days and expected to deliver definite proposals by early January.</div><div></div><div></div><div>****************</div><div></div></div><div><div><strong>RBS sees possible 400 million loss from Madoff fund</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 15, 2008<br />LONDON: Royal Bank of Scotland Group said on Monday it had exposure through trading and collateralised lending to funds of hedge funds invested with Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities.<br />* If as a result of the alleged fraud the value of the assets of these hedge funds is nil, RBS's potential loss could amount to approximately 400 million pounds</div><div></div><div></div><div><br /><br /></div><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong> </div><div align="center"><br />Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-49768558402031813882008-12-15T16:13:00.012+01:002008-12-15T17:29:20.684+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Sunday, 14th December 2008<div align="center"><strong>U.S. security </strong></div><strong><div align="justify"><br /></strong> </div><div align="justify">OPINION</div><div align="justify">By Peter Bergen<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: A few days before the presidential election, the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, told a group of intelligence officials that the new administration could well be tested by a terrorist attack on the homeland in its first year in office. "The World Trade Center was attacked in the first year of President Clinton, and the second attack was in the first year of President Bush," he said.<br />President-elect Barack Obama made a similar observation when he told "60 Minutes" that it was important to get a national security team in place "because transition periods are potentially times of vulnerability to a terrorist attack." During the campaign, Joe Biden warned that "it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy."<br />Should we be worried? In fact, the probability of a Qaeda attack on the United States is vanishingly small, for the same reasons that for the past seven years the terrorist group has not been able to carry out one.<br />President Bush and his supporters have often ascribed the absence of a Qaeda attack on the United States to the Iraq war, which supposedly acted as "flypaper" for jihadist terrorists, so instead of fighting them in Boston, America has fought them in Baghdad. Other commentators have said that Al Qaeda is simply biding its time to equal or top 9/11.<br />The real reasons are more prosaic. First, the American Muslim community has rejected the Qaeda ideological virus. American Muslims have instead overwhelmingly signed up for the American Dream, enjoying higher incomes and educational levels than the average.<br />Second, though it is hard to prove negatives, there appear to be no Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States. If they do exist, they are so asleep they are comatose. True, in 2003, the FBI arrested Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker who met with Qaeda leaders in Pakistan after Sept. 11 and then had a plot to demolish the Brooklyn Bridge with a pair of blowtorches, a deed akin to trying to blow up the Statue of Liberty with a firecracker. But he is an exceptional case. Two years after his arrest, a leaked FBI report concluded, "To date, we have not identified any true 'sleeper' agents in the U.S."<br />Third, when jihadist terrorists have attacked the United States, they have arrived from outside the country, something that is much harder to do now. The 19 hijackers of 9/11 all came from elsewhere.<br />Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 Trade Center bombing, flew to New York from Pakistan. Today's no-fly list and other protective measures make entering the country much more difficult.<br />Fourth, the Bush administration has made Americans safer with measures like the establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center, where officials from different branches of government share information and act on terrorist threats. As a result of such measures, scores of terrorism cases have been aggressively investigated in the United States.<br />But despite the billions of dollars invested in all these efforts and the thousands of men and women who get up every day to hunt for terrorists, the resulting cases have almost never involved concrete terrorist plots or acts.<br />Of the so-called terrorism cases since 9/11, many have revolved around charges of "material support" for a terrorist group, a vague concept that can encompass almost any dealings with organizations that have at one point engaged in terrorism. And in the cases where a terrorist plot has been alleged, the plans have been more aspirational than realistic.<br />If Al Qaeda can't get people into the country, doesn't have sleeper cells here and is unable to garner support from the American Muslim community, then how does it pull off an attack in the United States? While a small-bore attack may be organized by a Qaeda wannabe at some point, a catastrophic mass-casualty assault anything along the lines of 9/11 is no longer plausible.<br />This is not to say Al Qaeda is no longer a threat to our interests. It has of course regenerated itself on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan since 9/11, and as the 2005 attacks on the London subways and the foiled 2006 plot to bring down airliners leaving Heathrow Airport showed, it remains a grave danger to Britain.<br />In addition, Al Qaeda's inability to attack the American homeland for the foreseeable future does not then mean that it can't kill large numbers of American living overseas. If the 2006 "planes plot" had succeeded, British prosecutors say, as many as 1,500 passengers would have died, many of them Americans.<br />The incoming Obama administration has much to deal with, between managing two wars and the implosion of the financial system and car industry. But the likelihood of a terrorist attack on the United States in its early stages by Al Qaeda is close to zero.</div><div align="justify"><br /><em>Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of "The Osama bin Laden I Know."</em></div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="center"><strong>Hollow reserves</strong> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify">EDITORIAL<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have put enormous strains on the U.S. military. The last seven years have been especially hard on those serving in the National Guard and other reserve forces, who too often have had to shortchange their families, finances and careers to accommodate repeated and unexpected tours of active duty overseas. Many are tired and demoralized.<br />American communities that depend on the National Guard to provide the first line of domestic defense are also being shortchanged. The years of prolonged overseas deployments have stretched Guard units dangerously thin and left the Guard with barely 60 percent of the equipment it needs to carry out its basic missions. That raises serious doubts about the Guard's readiness to respond to either a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.<br />These problems arose because the Bush administration badly underestimated the number of troops needed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has had to rely far too heavily on the National Guard and the Reserves to make up the differences.<br />More than 450,000 people serve in the U.S. Army and Air National Guard, and somewhat less than 400,000 in the army, navy, marine and air force reserves. Roughly half a million of these part-time soldiers have fought in Iraq or Afghanistan. At one point in 2005, nearly half the United States front-line fighting forces in Iraq, and more than half in Afghanistan, came from the Guard and the Reserves.<br />Those percentages have come down since Robert Gates took charge of the Pentagon and began addressing the problem, in part by beginning an expansion - long opposed by the Bush White House - of the active-duty army and marine forces. But over 20 percent of American forces in Afghanistan and over 10 percent in Iraq still come from the Guard and the Reserves.<br />Reserve units are meant to be sent overseas, although only for limited periods in national emergencies or as part of full-scale wartime mobilizations. Most reservists, like Guard members, have civilian jobs and family responsibilities. Their units are generally the last in line for getting new equipment and maintaining combat readiness.<br />Guard units sent overseas experience similar problems. And their overuse abroad creates a dangerous void in their home states. Governors throughout history have depended on locally available, properly equipped National Guard units to respond to natural disasters and other emergencies. Regular army troops and military reserve units are legally barred from domestic law enforcement duties. National Guard troops are not.<br />There can be no excuse for the way the Pentagon has overtaxed these units. And there is no letup in sight. The 21st century has already shown that America's need for active-duty ground forces will be considerably greater than once expected, not just for war-fighting, but also for training foreign forces, peacekeeping and other missions. It has also shown that assuring the security of America has again become an essential requirement of overall defense planning.<br />The National Guard is ideally designed to reinforce homeland security. The Reserves are meant to provide America with rapidly expandable armed forces in times of unexpected, and temporary, crisis.<br />Neither can perform these essential functions properly the way they are being used today.<br />We urge President-elect Barack Obama to continue the expansion of active-duty forces. Relieving the stress on the Guard and the Reserves - allowing them to fulfill their primary missions - is one more reason why Obama must live up to his commitment for an early, orderly drawdown of troops in Iraq. The administration and Congress must also provide the National Guard with more money to accelerate its resupply efforts.<br />No one can predict the timing or the nature of the next domestic emergency. The country cannot afford to be caught unprepared.</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="center"><strong>Investors focusing on energy, currency and rates</strong> </div><div align="justify"><br />By Jeremy Gaunt</div><div align="justify">Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />LONDON: Investors head into what for many will be the last full trading week of the year expecting more U.S. interest rate cuts, but many remain rattled by emerging dissent over how governments should help ailing economies.<br />They will also get another check on the post-credit-crunch health of the financial sector, with fourth-quarter earnings from the banking giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley .<br />The price of oil, meanwhile, is likely to be in particular focus, with oil-producing countries meeting to discuss supply cuts at a time when lower prices are one of the few areas of easing pressure on monetary authorities.<br />Investors were in no need of new stress after a year that has seen the global banking model break down, the value of stocks plummet by half, lending freeze up and market volatility soar. But the new source of worry is squabbling among the authorities about how to proceed.<br />Michala Marcussen, strategy director at Société Générale Asset Management, described the problem. "When you have politics involved," Marcussen said, "you get a lot of back-and-forth. It's not like when you watch economic data."<br />The failure of the U.S. Congress last week to agree on a bailout for the country's automakers was a shock to the system for investors who had become used to pledges from governments and central banks to do what it took to build confidence, including flooding the global economy with money.<br />There was a similar impasse in Washington over a financial bailout package earlier in the year, but that ended in a compromise. The latest fight means there will be no bailout passed by Congress for the automakers this year.<br />To that can be added a growing dispute in Europe over how far governments should go to pump up their deteriorating economies. Using unusually undiplomatic terms, German officials have been criticizing others, primarily Britain, for going into debt with rescue plans.<br />For investors, who hate uncertainty, it all suggests more volatility ahead just as some confidence was coming back to markets. State Street's latest investment flow data, for example, showed a tentative recovery in the appetite for risk.<br />One place from where help is almost certain to come, however, is the Federal Reserve, which meets Tuesday. The U.S. central bank is widely expected to reduce interest rates by as much as 75 basis points, to just 0.25 percent.<br />Since the financial crisis escalated in September 2007, the Fed has cut rates from 5.25 percent to the current 1 percent in an effort to pump money into both the banking system and the now recessionary economy.<br />There is debate among investors, however, about whether it is working, given the continued deterioration of the economy and the volatility of financial markets. One former Fed governor, Frederic Mishkin, said last week that such a debate was wrong and asked just how bad things might have gotten if the Fed had not acted as aggressively as it has.<br />But the issue is also arising - and not just in the United States - of what happens when rates are so low that they cannot be cut anymore. Quantitative easing, which essentially entails various measures for pumping money into the economy, is likely.<br />For investors, one effect of this could be on government bonds, which central banks might buy to keep yields low. But whatever the effect, investors are ending the year in a new environment.<br />"The unprecedented nature of the crisis has caught out forecasters and policy makers alike," analysts at ING wrote in a research note. "Led by the U.S., past monetary and fiscal norms are being abandoned in desperate attempts to curtail recession and deflation."<br />Investor attention will also be on the foreign exchange and energy markets this week.<br />In the currency markets, volatility jumped at the end of last week after the collapse of the U.S. auto bailout proposal, with the dollar weakening sharply after five weeks of gains against major currencies.<br />The focus will be on whether the latest weakness is a short-lived reaction or whether the dollar's recent burst of strength is now over. The soaring yen may also begin to concern the Japanese authorities.<br />The price of oil , too, will be in focus, with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting Wednesday in Oran, Algeria.<br />Crude prices have fallen close to 70 percent since peaking in mid-July as a weaker global economy has smothered demand. This has removed inflation as a worry for general investors and allowed central banks to cut rates.<br />But OPEC is expected to agree on a large cut in supply at the Oran meeting. The cartel's president has called for a more "severe" reduction than the two million barrels a day its members have already agreed to.<br />And then there are the banks. Goldman Sachs reports its results Tuesday and Morgan Stanley on Wednesday. Both are expected to announce quarterly losses, but the reports will be studied for signs of further credit-related woes or, possibly, signs of improvement.<br />Goldman has said it will cut at least 4,800 job globally, while Morgan Stanley has announced at least 6,800 layoffs.</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong>0921</strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="left"><strong>IW: Alerte Orange, a meter of snow will fall, there will be school bus tomorrow. But all we have is rain and sleet. Rain and sleet. Rain and sleet. Footprints of the dog in the snow, everywhere.</strong></div><p><br /></p><p><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037669294249938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQNeK6cmyLbSiZG6sjbBYN9EUMAOdDDAFuMT36CzyxaBNOuNIwXsv8nvM_dZI6-xKjGql-YVvqcQU3caVEMo7-DuwVStlSSWL868LO1L7l3CXM1HtzoomCpX4gty7_7W1s4jOvNu0mxrk/s320/DSC03285.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037676197642194" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5JLYHd_H25dGBJiG3ro_JjAFcW_GduwNh9S4H_s0UnNYSLA0wu5MzXcc-naBZmfEt2YkQXYctfxKr8IYwX38L_V8KkTCjqvl-G7LCxaYZFxii2qlOP8rObm3yrFMYZC35A5j-N3N5uQY/s320/DSC03286.jpg" border="0" /> </p><p> </p><p><strong>World Bank chief warns wealthy nations against harming developing world</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />MIANYANG, China: Wealthy nations must be careful not to cause more suffering to the developing world as they take bolder steps to bolster their faltering economies, the World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, said Sunday.<br />Zoellick warned that poorer countries, already faced with mounting job losses, were vulnerable to the unintended consequences of policies devised to rescue financial markets.<br />"Developed countries have guaranteed a lot of bank debt," Zoellick said in an interview while touring the part of Sichuan Province devastated by an earthquake in May. "It's actually made it hard for developing countries that had good budgetary programs to be able to go to market and issue bonds."<br />He added: "It's important for developed countries to recognize that at some point they're going to need exit strategies for these guarantees or be able to discipline them. I'm not saying that they should take that step now, but otherwise developing countries will be bearing the brunt of this."<br />The World Bank said last week that the global financial meltdown was a heavy burden on developing economies, forecasting 4.5 percent growth next year, down from 6.3 percent in 2008.<br />"This financial crisis has moved to an economic crisis, and next year it will be an unemployment crisis," Zoellick said.<br />He said the recovery could be hindered if countries turned inward in an attempt to save their economies with little regard for others. "I'm worried that the unemployment, particularly as combined with price discounting, could lead to waves of protectionism," he said.<br />While praising monetary expansion and fiscal stimulus in the United States and elsewhere, Zoellick said such policies could contain the seeds of future economic problems adding that it would require discipline to rein them in down the road.<br />Along with potentially swollen budgets, developed countries could find themselves sitting atop another liquidity roller-coaster after injecting huge amounts of cash to get their clogged financial markets flowing again.<br />Loose monetary policy after the bursting of the technology bubble earlier this decade in part explained the credit boom and bust in the United States that sparked the current financial crisis, Zoellick said.<br />"You have tremendous liquidity now, much more than in 2001, so when the velocity of money picks up, the central banks are going to have to be able to absorb some of that liquidity," he said.</p><p> </p><p>*******************</p><p> </p><p><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></p><p><strong>Fallout from Zimbabwe<br /></strong>Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />Here are the fruits of Robert Mugabe's rule of horrors: political chaos, economic collapse, desperate food shortages, violence and now a fierce cholera epidemic. Eight-hundred people have died More than 16,000 are infected, and there is no end in sight.<br />The increasingly delusional Mugabe - Zimbabwe's illegitimate president - announced on Thursday that the cholera crisis is over.<br />Tell that to the Chigudu family which lost five children, aged 20 months to 12 years, in a matter of hours. Or to the World Health Organization, which warns that the crisis now poses a regional threat.<br />Mugabe blames the West for the epidemic that is spread by water contaminated with excrement. The blame is all his. Water taps in the capital's suburbs went dry last week, so people could not wash hands or food. Hospitals are closed. Garbage is everywhere. Sludge spews from burst sewer lines.<br />The international community must provide emergency shipments of food, water purification tablets and anti-cholera drugs. The United States has allocated another $6.2 million for supplies like soap, rehydration tablets and water containers. Unfortunately, the dying will continue until Mugabe allows international health care workers to enter the country and do their jobs.<br />There will be no end to these horrors until Mugabe is gone. He stole this year's election and has blocked a unity government. South Africa and other states that insist on an African-led solution to this crisis must stop enabling Mugabe. They must renounce their recognition of Mugabe as president and press him and his cronies to cede power. The cholera epidemic, spilling into South Africa and other border states, shows there is nowhere to hide from Mugabe's legacy.</p><p> </p><p><br /><br /> </p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh15FLgsMnZ-WfwAds8MfGeebLgrPKOCqVyRZ8B2GiEsl6GQqIk_f7KKElBSlOUAcHEUOqCWXzRCoB5kxxpgMl9lDGmonjJzqR9ZUh1jsCbw2dSDPOw21C_ca7fote-mJNAP9MabkcawFA/s1600-h/DSC03287.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037673643353138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh15FLgsMnZ-WfwAds8MfGeebLgrPKOCqVyRZ8B2GiEsl6GQqIk_f7KKElBSlOUAcHEUOqCWXzRCoB5kxxpgMl9lDGmonjJzqR9ZUh1jsCbw2dSDPOw21C_ca7fote-mJNAP9MabkcawFA/s320/DSC03287.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div> </div><div><strong>OPEC leader seeks to restore cartel's clout</strong><br />By Barbara Lewis</div><div>Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />LONDON: Chakib Khelil, president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is a skilled communicator who will oversee efforts to bolster sagging prices and to restore the cartel's clout at a critical meeting Wednesday in Algeria.<br />During his year as the public face of OPEC, Khelil has sought to steer the group's 12 members as they tried to slow a record rally and then struggled to brake a record price crash.<br />With almost a decade of experience in OPEC policy and 19 years as a World Bank energy specialist, Khelil, 69, an Algerian fluent in five languages, has rarely been at a loss for words.<br />As oil slid from a record of nearly $150 a barrel to just above $40, he said he thought an ideal price would be between $70 and $90 - a price range now widely accepted in the group.<br />"Normally OPEC has no price target," Khelil said. "But people say the bottom price, the bottom cost below which we cannot step down, is between $70 and $90 a barrel."<br />Khelil said Saturday that OPEC ministers were in agreement on the need to cut output. "There is an OPEC consensus on the reduction," Khelil said in Algiers, without giving details.<br />While Khelil's approach to policy has been pragmatic, his role as a politician from Algeria has given him a degree of empathy with OPEC members that have a great need for high prices, like Venezuela and Iran.<br />The two countries have said they can live for a while on their profits. But many analysts say the countries need an oil price of nearly $100 a barrel if they are to finance big spending plans, and they have been at the forefront of calls to lower OPEC's output ceiling.<br />Although the average for benchmark U.S. crude this year is still above $100, the outlook for 2009, when many predict fuel demand will contract further, looks much weaker.<br />Given the conflicting agendas of various OPEC members, analysts said Khelil had kept his nerve.<br />"Khelil has managed the situation as well as anyone could, particularly with Iran and Venezuela as members," said John Hall, an analyst who regularly attends OPEC meetings.<br />Equally, Khelil has been undaunted by international criticism. In March, when OPEC was criticized for keeping output steady even though oil was hitting what were then all-time highs above $100, Khelil blamed the price increase on speculators and on the United States, where he previously worked and was educated.<br />"What's happening in the oil market is due to the mismanagement of the U.S. economy, which is probably affecting the rest of the world," he said.<br />At home, Algeria's own price needs are considerable. Independent analysts estimate it could require a minimum of $75 to $80 a barrel to finance its $80 billion 2009 budget without having to tap into reserves, borrow or raise taxes.<br />Khelil studied for a doctorate in petroleum engineering in Texas and worked for foreign companies, including Shell and Phillips Petroleum. He also worked at the World Bank in Washington from 1980 until he took early retirement in 1999 to return to Algeria.<br />He became energy and mines minister and an adviser to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. In those roles, he has raced to make up for Algeria's years of underinvestment in oil and natural gas, promoting a policy of openness and competitiveness in international investment.<br />Algerian governments have often had to use oil and gas revenue to meet pressing social needs, which has tended to starve the state energy giant, Sonatrach, of investment resources. But the price rally gave the country more independence and provided Khelil with the scope to embark on a huge modernization and liberalization of the energy sector.<br />"The World Bank liberalizer has become a pragmatic Algerian politician, as well as an OPEC president whose articulate way of presenting OPEC policy is admired internationally," said Jon Marks, editor of African Energy magazine. "He has had to navigate some difficult political waters, and he has done it with some aplomb."<br />William Maclean contributed reporting.</div><div> </div><div>**********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>In Niger, a war for what's beneath the desert</strong><br />By Lydia Polgreen<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />AIR MOUNTAINS, Niger: Until last year, the only trigger Amoumoun Halil had pulled was the one on his livestock vaccination gun. This spring, a battered Kalashnikov rifle rested uneasily on his shoulder. When he donned his stiff fatigues, his lopsided gait and smiling eyes stood out among his hard-faced guerrilla brethren.<br />Halil, a 40-year-old veterinary engineer, was a reluctant soldier in a rebellion that has broken out over an improbable - and as yet unrealized - bonanza of riches in one of the world's poorest countries.<br />A battle is unfolding on the stark mountains and scalloped dunes of northern Niger between a band of Tuareg nomads, who claim the riches beneath their homeland are being taken by a government that gives them little in return, and an army that calls the fighters drug traffickers and bandits.<br />It is a new front of an old war to control the vast wealth locked beneath African soil.<br />Niger's northern desert caps one of the world's largest deposits of uranium, and demand for it has surged as global warming has increased interest in nuclear power. Growing economies like China and India are scouring the globe for the crumbly ore known as yellowcake. A French mining company is building the world's largest uranium mine in northern Niger, and a Chinese state company is building another mine nearby.<br />Uranium could infuse Niger with enough cash to catapult it out of the kind of poverty that causes one in five children here to die before their fifth birthday.<br />Or it could end in a calamitous war that leaves Niger more destitute than ever. Mineral wealth has fueled conflict across Africa for decades, a series of bloody, smash-and-grab rebellions that shattered nations. The misery wrought has left many Africans to conclude that mineral wealth is a curse.<br />Here in the Sahara, the uranium boom has given new life to longstanding grievances over land and power. For years, the Tuareg have struggled against a government they largely disdained. But this new rebellion has shed the parochial complaints of an ethnic minority, claiming instead that the government is squandering the entire country's resources through corruption and waste.<br />Armed with a slick Web site and articulate spokesmen in Europe and the United States, the movement has drawn sympathy from Westerners drawn to the mysterious Tuareg and their arguments for justice.<br />It has also drawn in a wide range of fighters - not just illiterate herdsmen but college students, aid workers, even former pacifists like Halil.<br />"This uranium belongs to our people; it is on our land," Halil said. "We cannot allow ourselves to be robbed of our birthright."<br />When Halil was in high school, an old French map hung in his classroom. The verdant crescent along the southern border was labeled "useful Niger." The vast, dun-colored swath across the north that he called home was labeled "useless Niger."<br />It was a profound lesson, in politics as well as geography. The agricultural belt along the south had all the power. The herders of the north were irrelevant.<br />It had not always been so. The Tuareg have plied the barren peaks here for centuries, ruling over the caravan routes that crossed the Sahara with the riches of Africa - from salt to slaves. With their camels and swords they enriched themselves through tribute and plunder.<br />By the time Halil was born, that era was long gone. As a boy he dreamed of having a huge herd of camels, as his father had before the great droughts of the 1970s wiped him out.<br />After excelling in school, Halil went to college in Benin, but failed to get the Niger government to give him a scholarship to veterinary school abroad.<br />"My family had no connections," he said. "Unless you have a friend in government, your chances of getting a scholarship are zero."<br />Instead, he started a union of herders to try to get those notoriously individualistic people to band together for their common interests.<br />In his travels, Halil began to notice the stream of geologists from France, China, Canada and Australia scouring ever deeper into Tuareg grazing lands. Little seas of flags, used to mark potential mining areas, sprang up everywhere, he said. "I asked myself, 'What do we Tuareg get out of this?"' he said. "We just get poorer and poorer."<br />Halil's efforts were part of a wave of civic activism that has swept over Africa in the past 15 years as the continent has become more democratic. Many of these elected governments are deeply flawed, but because of a more youthful, urban population in touch with new technology, their citizens are often better informed and less willing to tolerate the corruption that has squandered so much of Africa's potential.<br />In February 2007, a group of armed Tuaregs mounted an audacious attack on a military base in the Air Mountains. A new insurgency was born. They called themselves the Niger Movement for Justice and unfurled a set of demands: that corruption be curbed and the wealth generated by each region benefit its people.<br />Far from being useless, as Halil's high school map had said, Tuareg lands produce uranium that accounts for 70 percent of the country's export earnings. But almost none of those earnings returned to those who lost access to grazing land and suffered the environmental consequences of mining, the rebels argued.<br />To fight the rebellion, the government has effectively isolated the north, devastating its economy. International human rights investigators have also documented serious misdeeds on both sides. The rebels use anti-vehicle land mines that have killed soldiers and civilians, while the army has been accused of extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions and looting of livestock. In all, hundreds of people have been killed, and thousands have been pushed from their land.<br />Despite the violence, mining and exploration continues largely unabated, but the rebels contend that corrupt officials siphon off much of that wealth. The country's prime minister was forced to step aside after being accused of embezzling $237,000, and last summer he was indicted.<br />"This wealth needs to be used to help the people, not the politicians," said Alhagy Alambo, president of the rebel movement. "Otherwise it is just plunder."<br />The government argues that Niger is a democracy, if an imperfect one, with peaceful means of redressing grievances.<br />They call the men fighting in the north bandits and traffickers who have moved drugs, untaxed cigarettes, gasoline and even human cargo across the vast Sahara for decades.<br />"Niger is a democratic country that is ruled by laws," said Ben Omar, Niger's minister of information. "If someone has a grievance, let him form a political party and bring it to the ballot."<br />The Tuareg have been fighting here for centuries, warriors who cover their faces with long, blue scarves that stain their skin an inky blue.<br />After France lost its grip on most of its Saharan colonies in 1960, the Tuareg found themselves a small minority divided among new nations created by arbitrary borders that meant little to them. Worse, droughts reduced them to penury.<br />But the parched land on which they lived was valuable. A French mining company, Areva, was scooping hundreds of tons of uranium from northern Niger every year. Unlike southern farmers, who owned their land, nomads could use pastureland but had no title to it.<br />The hardships of global warming and desertification, which eats away grazing land, further impoverished the Tuareg, forcing many to abandon herding. Yet as its fertility degraded, their land became increasingly sought after as the global price of uranium rose steadily. This paradox would prove explosive.<br />Halil sat out the last Tuareg uprising, which began in 1990 and ended with a peace agreement in 1995. Back then, he was idealistic, hoping to avoid violence. But he knew his people's history well.<br />"Tuareg are fighters," he said. "It is our nature."<br />In June 2007, an army vehicle exploded after driving over a land mine planted by the rebels. Villagers say that the army then slaughtered three elderly men; the army says no one was killed. But the story of the slaughtered elders swiftly spread among the Tuaregs.<br />For Halil, it was a sign that nonviolence was foolish.<br />"If they were going to kill old defenseless men, how could we even talk about negotiation?" he said. "Fighting was the only way to defend our communities and our way of life."<br />After months of indecision, Halil sent his pregnant wife and his 2-year-old daughter to stay with her parents. He set off for the Air Mountains.<br />Once there, Halil found a growing army. He learned how to use a weapon and march in formation, but was more useful in jobs closer to his former vocations - healer and organizer.<br />Wounded fighters sought him out under his tree in the camp. He treated infections and counseled men on splinting broken bones. Fighters started calling him the doctor.<br />"I felt that I was useful," Halil said.<br />Each new recruit must swear a three-part oath on the Koran: Never betray the movement; never attack civilians or take their property; serve all of Niger's people, not just one tribe or clan.<br />But the oath has exceptions, and stealing from outsiders is not only tolerated but encouraged. Armed men stole a new, white Toyota truck from Unicef's offices in April. The same vehicle turned up at a rebel base a few days later, its Unicef emblem scratched off. The rebels drove it to Mali to try to sell it.<br />Such slips made Halil uneasy.<br />"I was not born to be a soldier," he said.<br />The fighters spend little time actually fighting. Mostly, they drive around on patrols, take shelter under the meager shade of thorny acacia trees and prepare Tuareg tea, a potent brew poured into small glasses.<br />At such moments, Halil ached for home. He thought of his newborn son, whom he had never seen. He wondered if he made the right choice, leaving his family and taking up the way of the gun.<br />"Sometimes I have doubts," he said, stoking the embers of a campfire.</div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIeE8DndO281aAjtZmz_t-XQvJ70-BnXulaYU43ECbTNhVyUvFL-IAEL-2HXAoku-ajFJ1sitKJIm4ydasSre8WzFoVlK9iXxsEn67KgLr8DHghuSOJMLkJxnQP7ArkUMbw9zKXK-j5l4/s1600-h/DSC03288.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037483598136754" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIeE8DndO281aAjtZmz_t-XQvJ70-BnXulaYU43ECbTNhVyUvFL-IAEL-2HXAoku-ajFJ1sitKJIm4ydasSre8WzFoVlK9iXxsEn67KgLr8DHghuSOJMLkJxnQP7ArkUMbw9zKXK-j5l4/s320/DSC03288.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong></strong></div><div></div><div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>In the jungle, a commercial space coup for France</strong><br />By Simon Romero<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />KOUROU, French Guiana: Not so long ago, French Guiana was etched into the public imagination as a depraved prison colony by books with titles like "Horrors of Cayenne," "Hell Beyond the Seas" and, of course, "Papillon," Henri Charrière's classic memoir of his incarceration on Devil's Island.<br />But now this overseas sliver of France offers something altogether different - a bit of insight into the shifting fortunes of the United States in at least one corner of the evolving world economy.<br />From Kourou, where 20,000 people, many of them transplanted cosmopolitans, live sandwiched between jungle and ocean, it is easy to see how much Americans, who once dominated the commercial space industry, have been reduced to just another competitor - or, worse, a partner in joint ventures with Russians - on a global field of play.<br />The driving force behind Kourou's development is Arianespace, a French company that began as a poor cousin to NASA nearly three decades ago. Today, it has edged past Boeing and Lockheed Martin to become the leading player in the $3.2 billion commercial-satellite-launching industry; it accounts for about half of all the tonnage sent into orbit for business purposes each year.<br />That pales, of course, alongside the bigger business of military and government satellite launches, which the United States and Russia still lead. But it does include the launching of commercial satellites that transmit the data for a globalized economy, as well as for satellite broadcast, Internet and Earth-imaging tools. And in that, the Americans are no longer in charge.<br />Kourou seems a bit fantastical to be so important. With jungle on three sides and the Atlantic on the fourth, it is an equatorial one-project town. Yet its post-1960s apartment blocks are neatly tended, its gendarmerie stations staffed by men in French khakis, its food stores stocked with imported pâtés and wine. Imagine it as Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the United States carried out research to develop the atomic bomb, and provisioned by France.<br />Most of the time it seems to sleep. But about half a dozen times a year, in launches that are believed to cost $200 million apiece, rockets light up the sky.<br />"Through perseverance and some good luck and timing, we've done fine for ourselves," said Thierry Vallée, an official at France's space agency, CNES, who has a knack for understatement. He says this while standing in the Guiana Space Center's control room, under a global map of competing launch sites in places like Alcântara (Brazil), Sriharikota (India), and Xichang (China).<br />The roots of this odd achievement lie deep in the psychological jolt France got when it lost its first launch site, in Algeria, in the 1960s. Determined not merely to follow America, France was desperate to find another way to reach space independently.<br />Since the equator is the ideal latitude to launch from - the Earth's rotation is fastest there, thrusting payloads into space like a slingshot - the French looked around at their outposts that were near it and decided on this one, after rejecting French Polynesia and Djibouti.<br />As Americans reached for the moon, France and its European partners slowly built their commercial launch operations here. Then the Americans began to stumble. The Reagan administration prohibited the space shuttles from carrying most commercial payloads after the Challenger disaster in 1986. And later, NASA gave up on two flawed plans for new vehicles, the National Aerospace Plane and Lockheed Martin's X-33 unmanned space plane.<br />Boeing and Lockheed Martin, whose mainstay was U.S. military contracts, kept launching commercial satellites from California and Florida in those years. But that business declined drastically when the telecommunications and dot-com bubbles burst.<br />Meanwhile, Arianespace had tied together CNES with other European stakeholders, building a consortium that could launch here. The Europeans were mainly public entities like CNES, but because they lacked large military programs, commercial launches were the game they could play. "The Europeans had to turn to the commercial sector if they wanted to maintain their independent space capabilities," said Jeff Foust, a senior analyst with Futron, a Maryland aerospace consulting firm.<br />And they caught some breaks. With the end of the Cold War, as NASA pulled back, Russia's space program went on poverty rations and Russians became available as partners. Today, Frenchmen learn from Russians here and accept business from Mexicans, Koreans and some Americans.<br />"Welcome to the future," says Boris Dubrovin, the foreman of a crew of some 60 Russian technicians who are scrambling to build a replica of a Soviet-era launch site located in the desert steppes of Central Asia. The project will allow Arianespace to use Russia's Soyuz rockets for smaller tasks.<br />Meanwhile, the French look warily at new competitors.<br />China recently built and launched satellites for Nigeria and Venezuela. And Boeing has partnered with Russian, Ukrainian and Norwegian firms to form Sea Launch, which operates from Pacific Ocean platforms. Another American company, ILS, is controlled by Russia's Khrunichev space center and launches from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome.<br />One risk for all of these players is the current souring of the global economy. The number of launches is expected to drop next year, and it is anybody's guess what demand will be beyond that.<br />But if the pattern of the past decade can hold, satellite operators the world over will still flock to Kourou, where they will find the French Foreign Legion protecting the space center, residents sending postcards to mainland France through La Poste - and, on the offshore Îles du Salut, which include Devil's Island, futuristic tracking stations standing near old corroding prison cells where convicts like Charrière once dreamed of escape.<br />"France found a use for one of the pieces of confetti left over from its empire," said Peter Redfield, an anthropologist who studies French Guiana, "while the Americans, after the lunar missions, are still asking what to do for an encore."</div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Publicis CEO takes long view in economic downturn<br /></strong>By Eric Pfanner<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />PARIS: The morning after Barack Obama was elected the next president of the United States last month, Maurice Lévy, chief executive of Publicis Groupe, the advertising company based in Paris, sent an e-mail message to the 15,000 Publicis employees in the United States.<br />"Congratulations on such a great choice," he wrote. "Once again the American people have proved that they are right there when it comes to turning points in history - and they know how to make history."<br />In his support for Obama, Lévy had plenty of company in Europe, of course. And Lévy understands the value of friendly relationships with politicians; associates say he uses the informal French "tu," rather than the formal "vous," to address President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.<br />But openly gushing about the results of another country's election is unusual for any chief executive, let alone a discreet Frenchman whose company's commercial messages go out to Americans of all political stripes.<br />"I have always thought - politics, that is something I should not get involved in," Lévy said during an interview in his Paris office. "But I had to because this is so fantastic.<br />"It erases all the bad images, the bad pictures of the last eight years with one vote," he added. "It is a wonderful demonstration of the strengths of America, a formidable lesson for the world."<br />Like many Europeans of his generation, Lévy said, he has always admired American culture. But it is also clear that the prospect of trans-Atlantic rapprochement makes good business sense to an executive whose office overlooks the Arc de Triomphe and whose clients include McDonald's, Procter & Gamble and General Motors.<br />So forgive Lévy if he isn't pulling a long face at a time when the economic news is going from bad to worse. Since the election, forecasters have predicted that ad spending will fall in most major developed markets next year.<br />For Publicis, whose subsidiaries include the ad agencies Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett, as well as the media buying operations ZenithOptimedia and Starcom Mediavest, analysts at Morgan Stanley predict that revenue from the company's existing businesses will fall 4 percent next year.<br />The automotive industry, along with two other sectors hit hard by the downturn - health care and financial services - account for about a third of Publicis's revenue. In addition to GM, its clients include Renault, Toyota and Fiat. As GM's woes have deepened over the past year, the carmaker has been cutting its ad spending, Lévy said. Publicis expects further reductions from GM and other automakers as they streamline their product offerings, he added.<br />"Nobody should think they are not conscious of cost," Lévy said of GM. "They are very tough on us."<br />As carmakers and other advertisers look for more efficient ways to get their messages across, Lévy said, the economic crisis will hasten the shift of advertising to the Internet and away from traditional media. By 2010, he said, 15 percent of global ad spending will be online.<br />Lévy has tried to prepare Publicis for this shift by beefing up its digital capabilities. Two years ago, the company acquired Digitas, a specialist in online marketing, for $1.3 billion. Publicis has also invested substantially in emerging markets, where ad spending has been growing more rapidly than in Western Europe, Japan or North America.<br />"This has recently become a higher risk strategy," the Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a recent report on Publicis. Indeed, the notion that Internet ad spending will be less affected by the downturn, which has become something of a mantra in the industry, remains unproven. During the last downturn, Internet spending suffered the most. Emerging markets can also be volatile.<br />But Lévy said Publicis would stick with its approach. This month, the company acquired W&K Communications, an agency based in Beijing. In November, it announced the purchase of Tribal, a Brazilian agency specializing in digital advertising.<br />"We have other negotiations under way in China; we have contacts in India," Lévy added.<br />Might he be planning a bigger move? There has long been speculation in the industry about the possibility of a merger between Publicis and Interpublic Group, based in New York. Those companies are neck-and-neck for the No.3 position in the industry, after Omnicom Group and WPP Group.<br />Publicis previously made a run, unsuccessfully, at Aegis Group, a company based in London specializing in media buying and digital advertising. There has been renewed talk in the industry that Aegis might be for sale, following the recent resignation of its chief executive, Robert Lerwill.<br />But Lévy said his company was not holding discussions with Interpublic. And he said the fate of Aegis was out of his hands because the French investor Vincent Bolloré holds a nearly 30 percent stake in that company, allowing him to keep other potential suitors of Aegis at bay. Bolloré is also the board chairman of the French advertising company Havas, in which he owns a 32.9 percent stake.<br />"It is important at a time like this not to spend a lot of time on chess games," Lévy said. "We are not looking at any game-changing operations."<br />He said big, geographically diversified advertising companies like Publicis, alongside small, boutique agencies with a creative reputation, would fare better than midsize companies in the downturn.<br />"There will be casualties," he said, without naming names. "There will be consolidation. There will be companies that will not be in business when this crisis is over - advertisers, advertising agencies and media."<br />While Lévy is ebullient about the election of Obama, his admiration for the United States has its limits. In deploring what he sees as the root of the crisis - a "perversion" of capitalism that drove Wall Street to try to profit from the idea of extending home ownership to the masses - he echoed a widely held French view.<br />"Capitalism cannot be only about maximizing profit," he said.<br />But aren't advertising and marketing all about fueling capitalism - about making people want bigger houses, and things to fill them with?<br />"We don't lie to them, we don't cheat to them," he said. "We don't tell them something is a triple-A product when it is not a triple-A product."</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>In Lille, urban renewal with a boho-chic twist<br /></strong>By Seth Sherwood<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />Urban renewal these days usually means housing developments or renovated waterfronts. In the northern French city of Lille, however, it means tapered trousers and boho-chic dresses.<br />Under a creative public initiative called Maisons de Mode, Lille, France's fourth-largest metropolis, and nearby Roubaix have been recruiting young fashion designers to set up shop in two downbeat neighborhoods. The allure for the designers includes freshly constructed boutiques, dirt-cheap rents and free publicity. For Lille, which has a venerable textile tradition and lovely Flemish-style architecture, the benefit is an injection of cool and cachet, to say nothing of chic prêt-à-porter.<br />One of the new garment districts extends along the Rue du Faubourg des Postes, which cuts through an immigrant neighborhood known as Lille Sud. The first eight stores opened in a 2007 ceremony attended by Agnès b., who is a key patron of Maisons de Mode. Several more are expected by 2010.<br />The nerve center has been the Jardins de Mode (58-60 Rue du Faubourg des Postes; 33-3-20-99-91-20; www.maisonsdemode.com), which houses a collection of ateliers. A converted cinema, it hosts La Nuit des Soldes, a twice-yearly party (January and July) at which the program's designers sell their lines to the public.<br />A permanent ground-floor boutique also carries creations by others affiliated with Maisons de Mode, including kitsched-out dashikis (38, or $48) by Strangelove, a sly and playful South African arts collective, and Western-style shirts with embroidered patterns (105) by the Paris-based Espiral Man label.<br />Down the block is Petites Créations (31 Rue du Faubourg des Postes; 33-3-59-09-10-30). The boutique showcases the work of Sophie Laverdure, a former architect who makes sleek, black leather purses and small silvery pouches on slender chains (25 to 350).<br />Also nearby is a boutique that changes themes. This year's is Contemporary Africa (51 Rue du Faubourg des Postes; 33-3-59-09-69-76). Among its offerings are the Mozambican Sandra Muendane's elegantly draped dresses and tops from bamboo (70 to 120). In 2009, the space will feature designers from Eastern Europe, Russia and Turkey.<br />The second sartorial zone is a 30-minute subway ride away in Roubaix, along the Rue de l'Espérance and the Avenue Jean Lebas. This fashion scene revolves around a fashion and art museum, La Piscine (23 Rue de l'Espérance; 33-3-20-69-23-60; www.roubaix-lapiscine.com), a converted indoor municipal pool where glass cases display classic footwear by Martin Margiela and Jean-Paul Gaultier.<br />The queen of the Roubaix scene is arguably Hélène Boulanger, a graduate of the École Supérieure des Arts et Techniques de Mode. Her form-fitting, rock 'n' roll womenswear is available at her store, Sue (80 Avenue Jean Lebas; 33-3-20-02-09-79; www.sue-elen.com), as well as in boutiques in New York City and Tokyo.<br />Until this month, Boulanger was among only a handful of designers in Roubaix. But on Dec. 4, Maisons de Mode celebrated the opening of 15 more boutiques nearby. Urban renewal has never been so chic.</div><div> </div><div>**********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Le tour du chocolat</strong><br />By Amy Thomas<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />The French have elevated many things to high art: fashion, flirting, foie gras. Chocolate is no exception. With boutiques that display truffles as rapturously as diamonds, the experience of visiting a Parisian chocolatier can be sublime.<br />The problem, of course, is squeezing in as many of these indulgent visits as possible while also giving the rest of the city its due. My solution: devote one full day to chocolate boutiques, and do it in style. So, on my last visit to Paris, I took to the city's Vélib' bike system and mastered a two-wheeled circuit of eight of the chocolatiers that had the best reputations and most glowing reviews in city guidebooks and online message boards. It was exhilarating and exhausting, not to mention decadent. It was a chocoholic's dream ride.<br />The Vélib's industrial-looking road bikes that are already icons of Parisian-chic just a year and a half after the city initiated the program made the moveable feast more fun. Progressing from pralines to pavés, I spun by the Eiffel Tower, zipped across the Seine and careened through the spindly streets of St.-Germain-des-Prés alongside other bikers: Parisians in summer dresses and business suits, their front baskets toting briefcases, baguettes and sometimes even Jack Russell terriers.<br />Practically speaking, the bikes were all but essential. How else could I cover five arrondissements in as many hours, while simultaneously countering a day of debaucherous extremes?<br />The hedonism began in the center of town with the oldest master on my list, Michel Cluizel (201, rue St.-Honoré; 33-1-42-44-11-66; www.chocolatmichelcluizel-na.com), who has been making chocolate since 1948. A short distance from a Vélib' station at the intersection of Rues de l'Echelle and St-Honoré, I passed luxury stores flaunting billowy gowns and four-inch Mary Janes and stepped inside what was just as divine: a store where molten chocolate spews from a fountain and the shelves are stocked with bars containing as much as 99 percent cacao.<br />Cluizel has a single American outpost, in New York, at which I've indulged in hot cocoa made with a blend of five cocoa beans. At his Parisian shop, managed by his daughter Catherine, I discovered the macarolat (1.55 euros, or about $2 at $1.29 to the euro). A chocolate version of the macaroon, it has a dark chocolate shell filled with almond and hazelnut praline, the nuts ground coarsely to give a rich, grainy texture. It was two bites that combined creamy and crunchy, snap and subtlety. But it was just two bites; I wanted more.<br />A quick spin west landed me at the doors of Jean-Paul Hévin (231, rue St-Honoré, (33-1-55-35-35-96; www.jphevin.com). A modern blend of dark wood cabinetry, slate floors and backlit wall cubbies where cobalt-accented boxes of bonbons are displayed, the space would feel intimidating if not for the shopkeepers, who are both numerous and gracious as they juggle the crowds ogling mango coriander macaroons and Pyramide cakes. After considerable debate would it be ridiculously gluttonous to have a "choco passion," a cocoa cake with chocolate mousse, chocolate ganache and praline puff pastry, so early in the day? I settled on a caramel bûche (3.20 euros). Larger than an individual bonbon but smaller than a Hershey bar, the silky caramel enrobed in delicate dark chocolate hit the sweet spot.<br />With the choco-salty taste lingering on my tongue, I picked up a bike outside the Hôtel Costes, craning my neck to spy any A-listers were Sting and Trudie in there? Beyoncé and Jay-Z? and set out for the 16th Arrondissement.<br />Just beyond the Place de la Concorde I veered onto Avenue Gabriel. It is a curving street that winds past both the United States Embassy and Pierre Cardin's showcase for young artists, Espace, before eventually turning into a narrow café-lined passage where you have to weave around double-parked delivery trucks. Hoping to avoid throngs of wide-eyed tourists on the parallel Champs-Élysées and cars haphazardly zigging and zagging on the rotary around the Arc de Triomphe, I took the residential backstreets to Avenue Victor Hugo.<br />It was on this street that I found the most eccentric chocolatier on my list: Patrick Roger (45, avenue Victor Hugo; 33-1-45-01-66-71; www.patrickroger.com). It's not just the chocolate sculptures (a life-size farmer, for example), seasonal window displays (a family of penguins, also life-size) or snazzy aquamarine packaging he's known for: his intensely flavored bonbons are as bold as they come.<br />"I do think Patrick Roger is outstanding since he combines new, unusual flavors," said David Lebovitz, an American chocolate connoisseur, author of "The Great Book of Chocolate" and a Paris resident. But, he added, Rogers "isn't doing weird flavors just to be trendy, like others tend to do in Paris nowadays."<br />I sampled a few to confirm. The Jamaica has a rich coffee flavor from ground Arabica coffee beans; the Jacarepagua blends sharp lemon curd and fresh mint, and then there's the Phantasme, made with ... oatmeal. Each costs less than 1 euro.<br />About 90 minutes in, I had tasted creamy, salty and tart and had traversed a good stretch of the city. I was high on Paris and sugar coasting beneath Avenue Kléber's towering chestnut and plane trees toward the Place du Trocadéro in the 16th Arrondissement. Winding my way down the steep hills of the Rue Benjamin Franklin and the Boulevard Delessert, past romantic cafes and limestone edifices, alternately beige and gray depending on the light, I felt as though I was in a quaint Gallic village, not the capital city. That is until I was spit out across the river from the grandest Parisian landmark of all: the Eiffel Tower.<br />Digital cameras flashed, souvenirs were hawked and regiments of tour buses idled in one big mechanical whir. It was as if every foreigner had descended on the monument at that very moment. I didn't exhale until I entered the quietly sophisticated Seventh Arrondissement.<br />Michel Chaudun (149, rue de l'Université, 33-1-47-53-74-40) is wildly talented as an artist and chocolate sculptor (his watercolors decorate the store along with chocolate Fabergé eggs and African statues), to say nothing of his reputation for being one of the world's best chocolatiers. After 22 years of turning cacao into sublime bonbons, he's responsible for influencing many of the city's newer generation of chocolatiers.<br />His pavés are particularly worshipped. They're sugar cube-size squares of cocoa-dusted ganache that you deftly spear from the box with a toothpick and then allow to melt a little on your tongue a little before biting into the rich creaminess. Fresh and luscious, they're also hypersensitive to warm temperatures. Which meant tant pis if I tried to save any for later, they would wind up a choco-puddle.<br />Hopping on and off the Vélib's so often courted a certain amount of trouble. Parisian cynicism reared its head when a disgusted man at a station told me that 90 percent of the bikes don't work. I wouldn't say the defective bicycles were that frequent, but I learned an essential checklist: Are the tires inflated? The rims, straight? Is the front basket intact? Do the gears work? Is the chain attached? With these things checked, you're good to go, as I was after savoring the last pavé from my modest box of six (3.40 euros).<br />Cutting across the square fields in front of Les Invalides I glided by college students throwing Frisbees and old men playing pétanque. To my right, the gilded dome of Les Invalides; to my left, more gold crowning the ornate Alexandre III bridge. This was a decadent journey indeed.<br />Finally, in the Sixth Arrondissement, it seemed I could toss an M & M in any direction and hit a world-class chocolatier. There was the whimsical Jean-Charles Rochoux (16, rue d'Assas, 33-1-42-84-29-45; www.jcrochoux.fr), where gaudy chocolate sculptures of garden gnomes belie the serious artistry of his Maker's Mark truffles.<br />Christian Constant (37, rue d'Assas, 33-1-53-63-15-15), a Michelin-starred chef and award-winning chocolatier, excels at such spicy and floral notes as saffron and ylang-ylang. Pierre Marcolini (89, rue de Seine, 33-1-4407-3907; www.marcolini.be), the lone Belgian of the group, offers 75 percent dark chocolate from seven South American and African regions. Buzzing, I intended to finish the circuit in grand style.<br />The line snaking out of Pierre Hermé's slim boutique (72, rue Bonaparte, 33-1-43-54-47-77; www.pierreherme.com) told me I was doing the right thing. When I made it inside the snapping automatic doors, it was (forgive me!) like being a kid in a candy store: pristine rows of cakes adorned with fresh berries, coffee beans and dark chocolate shavings.<br />"Un Plénitude, s'il vous plait."<br />I took my treasure to a nearby park and tucked into the dome-shaped cake filled with chocolate mousse and ganache, crunchy caramel and fleur de sel. I relished the fluffy whipped richness, the bite of dark chocolate and the tang of salt. Had I died and gone to heaven? No, it was just a rapturous day in the City of Light and dark chocolate.<br />PEDALING FOR PAVÉS<br />After doubling the number bicycles since the program started last summer to 20,600, Paris' Vélib" (www.velib.paris.fr) is now the largest free bike program in France. There are 1,451 stations in the city, or one approximately every 900 feet. Each station has about 15 to 20 bikes. The bikes are simple: three speeds, an adjustable seat, a bell and basket and a headlight.<br />By purchasing a one-day or weeklong pass at the kiosk located at a station, you can hop on any bicycle and drop it at your next destination. To unlock a bike, you punch in your personal access code at the kiosk.<br />Though it's called a free bike program (Vélib' is short for vélo libre, or free bike), a day pass costs 1 euro. The first half-hour on the bike is no additional charge, the second half-hour is 1 euro, and the third half-hour is 2 euros. After that, it's 4 euros every half-hour. The shorter your trips, the lower the cost. My total cost for five hours was 12.60 euros, or about $16.15 at $1.29 to the euro.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHlBGcGI_P3eSJfoS8O8pdTOCLg4JSNBhYmAbOt_0vERHvKDlvLOfAWoEyNf105ekfU3kepQYD0OwfQUXjaIQOD-cIf9qyPOrbtp0QoxsQ1B12e4lmXCETJZ5GnjI3S4KCoBAveTBh5Rc/s1600-h/DSC03289.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037479492273986" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHlBGcGI_P3eSJfoS8O8pdTOCLg4JSNBhYmAbOt_0vERHvKDlvLOfAWoEyNf105ekfU3kepQYD0OwfQUXjaIQOD-cIf9qyPOrbtp0QoxsQ1B12e4lmXCETJZ5GnjI3S4KCoBAveTBh5Rc/s320/DSC03289.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div> </div><div><strong>As economy worsens, churches fill up in U.S</strong>.<br />By Paul Vitello<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />The sudden crush of worshipers packing the small evangelical Shelter Rock Church in Manhasset, New York - a Long Island town of yacht clubs and hedge fund managers - forced the pastor to set up an overflow room with closed-circuit TV and 100 folding chairs, which have been filled for six consecutive Sundays.<br />In Seattle, the Mars Hill Church, one of the fastest-growing evangelical churches in the country, grew to 7,000 members this fall, up 1,000 in a year. At the Life Christian Church in West Orange, New Jersey, prayer requests have doubled - almost all of them aimed at getting or keeping jobs.<br />Like evangelical churches around the United States, the three churches have enjoyed steady growth over the past decade. But since September, pastors nationwide say they have seen such a burst of new interest that they find themselves contending with powerful conflicting emotions - deep empathy and quiet excitement - as they re-encounter an old piece of religious lore:<br />Bad times are good for evangelical churches.<br />"It's a wonderful time, a great evangelistic opportunity for us," said the Reverend A.R. Bernard, founder and senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York's largest evangelical congregation, where regulars are arriving earlier to get a seat. "When people are shaken to the core, it can open doors."<br />Nationwide, congregations large and small are presenting programs of practical advice for people in fiscal straits - from a homegrown series on "Financial Peace" at a Midtown Manhattan church called the Journey, to the "Good Sense" program developed at the 20,000-member Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, and now offered at churches all over the country.<br />Many ministers have for the moment jettisoned standard sermons on marriage and the Beatitudes to preach instead about the theological meaning of the downturn.<br />The Jehovah's Witnesses, who moved much of their door-to-door evangelizing to the night shift 10 years ago because so few people were home during the day, returned to daylight witnessing this year. "People are out of work, and they are answering the door," said a spokesman, J.R. Brown.<br />Bernard plans to start 100 prayer groups next year, using a model conceived by the pastor Rick Warren, to "foster spiritual dialogue in these times" in small gatherings around the city.<br />A recent spot check of some large Roman Catholic parishes and mainline Protestant churches around the nation indicated attendance increases there, too. But they were nowhere near as striking as those reported by congregations describing themselves as evangelical, a term generally applied to churches that stress the literal authority of Scripture and the importance of personal conversion, or being "born again."<br />Part of the evangelicals' new excitement is rooted in a communal belief that the big Christian revivals of the 19th century, known as the second and third Great Awakenings, were touched off by economic panics. Historians of religion do not buy it, but the notion "has always lived in the lore of evangelism," said Tony Carnes, a sociologist who studies religion.<br />A study last year may lend some credence to the legend. In "Praying for Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Religiosity in the United States," David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics at Texas State University, looked at long-established trend lines showing the growth of evangelical congregations and the decline of mainline churches and found a more telling detail: During each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004, the rate of growth in evangelical churches jumped 50 percent. By comparison, mainline Protestant churches continued their decline during recessions, though a bit more slowly.<br />The little-noticed study began receiving attention from some preachers in September, when the stock market began its free fall. With the swelling attendance they were seeing, and a sense that worldwide calamities come along only once in an evangelist's lifetime, the study has encouraged some to think big.<br />"I found it very exciting, and I called up that fellow to tell him so," said the Reverend Don MacKintosh, a Seventh-day Adventist and religious broadcaster in California who contacted Beckworth a few weeks ago after hearing word of his paper from another preacher. "We need to leverage this moment, because every Christian revival in this country's history has come off a period of rampant greed and fear. That's what we're in today - the time of fear and greed."<br />Frank O'Neill, 54, a manager who lost his job at Morgan Stanley this year, said the "humbling experience" of unemployment made him cast about for a more personal relationship with God than he was able to find in the Catholicism of his youth. In joining the Shelter Rock Church on Long Island, he said, he found a deeper sense of "God's authority over everything - I feel him walking with me."<br />The sense of historic moment is underscored especially for evangelicals in New York who celebrated the 150th anniversary last year of the Fulton Street Prayer Revival, one of the major religious resurgences in America. Also known as the Businessmen's Revival, it started during the Panic of 1857 with a noon prayer meeting among traders and financiers in Manhattan's financial district.<br />Over the next few years, it led to tens of thousands of conversions in the United States and inspired the volunteerism movement behind the founding of the Salvation Army, said the Reverend McKenzie Pier, president of the New York City Leadership Center, an evangelical pastors' group that marked the anniversary with a three-day conference at the Hilton New York. "The conditions of the Businessmen's Revival bear great similarities to what's going on today," he said. "People are losing a lot of money."<br />But why the evangelical churches seem to thrive especially in hard times is a Rorschach test of perspective.<br />For some evangelicals, the answer is obvious. "We have the greatest product on earth," said the Reverend Steve Tomlinson, senior pastor of the Shelter Rock Church.<br />Beckworth, a macroeconomist, posited another theory: though expanding demographically since becoming the nation's largest religious group in the 1990s, evangelicals as a whole still tend to be less affluent than members of mainline churches, and therefore depend on their church communities more during tough times, for material as well as spiritual support. In good times, he said, they are more likely to work on Sundays, which may explain a slower rate of growth among evangelical churches in nonrecession years.<br />Monsignor Thomas McSweeney, who writes columns for Catholic publications and appears on MSNBC as a religion consultant, said the growth is fed by evangelicals' flexibility. In a cascading financial crisis, he said, a pastor can discard a sermon prescribed by the liturgical calendar and directly address the anxiety in the air.<br />But a recession also means fewer dollars in the collection basket.<br />"We are at the front end of a $10 million building program," said the Reverend Terry Smith, pastor of the Life Christian Church in West Orange. "Am I worried about that? Yes. But right now, I'm more worried about my congregation."</div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Wal-Mart CEO sees recession change consumer habits</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Wal-Mart Stores Inc's chief executive said on Sunday he sees changes in the habits of the chain's customers as they contend with the recession, and also said Wal-Mart had offered to help the incoming Obama administration with health care and environmental issues.<br />"The number one issue today is (consumers') concern about their job," Lee Scott said on NBC's "Meet the Press."<br />"In our pharmacy group, we have increases in prescription drugs, but not at the same rate it was," he said. "What we're seeing is an increase in self-treatment."<br />Strained consumers are also changing the food they buy at Wal-Mart, Scott said. "We're seeing an increase in food storage as people are cooking more at home," he said. They are "using leftovers more extensively," and buying more frozen food.<br />Small businesses are also changing how they buy goods, he said. Cash-strapped restaurant owners are visiting the stores more frequently to buy supplies as one day's cash flow allows them to buy supplies for the following day.<br />Scott, who will retire in early 2009, also said he sees a role for Wal-Mart in the debate around issues such as the environment and health care, which he has previously said "profoundly" affect the chain's shoppers and business.<br />Wal-Mart has "reached out" to President-elect Obama's team to work on the U.S. health care and energy issues, he said, adding that people critical of Wal-Mart's involvement in political debates were "on the wrong track."<br />"These are not times to be self-serving," he said. "We have a responsibility to participate."<br />(Reporting by Phil Wahba; Editing by Derek Caney and Leslie Adler)</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>Cohen: A church in Guantánamo<br /></strong>Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />Guantánamo, Cuba: I confess that I came here for the dateline. It beats Düsseldorf or The Hague. Like Sarajevo or Gaza City, it is one of those datelines that incline a reader onward.<br />I was in Santiago de Cuba, where the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution will be celebrated on Jan. 1. It was hot, nobody knew if the ailing Fidel would show up, or where exactly the festivities would take place. I thought, I'll drive out to Guantánamo, you never know.<br />The night before I left, a band showed up on the terrace of my Santiago hotel and played "Guantanamera," the wistful melody about the peasant girl from Guantánamo. I thought it strange that a place once associated with a love song now summons grim images of George W. Bush's war on terror.<br />Guantanamera: Once I heard it, of course, I couldn't get the chorus out my head. Would some proud, sultry-eyed woman fit the image? Purposeless journeys bring pleasant surprises. Yes, I'd go to Guantánamo for a glimpse of the U.S. naval base and whatever else I might find.<br />It's a two-hour drive from Santiago, complicated by the absence of road signs, a Cuban idiosyncrasy. I went past the town to a hillside where the bay glimmered silver and the U.S. control tower glinted far away. What a place for a bunch of Yemenis to end up.<br />On the way back to Guantánamo, I gave a ride to a woman who told me she worked in a prison in Havana for $20 a month and had come here to visit her children, whom she had entrusted to her mother after a painful divorce.<br />I asked her if she'd like to leave. "No," she said, "but I'd like to have relatives abroad sending me money!"<br />In Guantánamo, we pulled up by the main plaza. Dusk was falling. Old folk sat on benches under the palms. I set out across the square toward a whitewashed church, Santa Catalina de Ricci, whose heavy wooden doors were flung open.<br />A surprise awaited me. The church was full. A young priest in luminous green vestments was holding Mass. His words met me as I entered: "La Misa es siempre un encuentro con Dios" - "Mass is always an encounter with God."<br />I am a stranger to faith. Yet a wave of physical relief swept over me. After 10 days in Cuba, with its hymns to the heroism of Fidel, Che Guevara, the revolution and socialism, the priest seemed a merciful figure. Instead of the deification of Fidel and the utopian perfectibility of mankind, he posited human fallibility and a consoling salvation.<br />Graham Greene's masterpiece, "The Power and the Glory," came to me, with its condemned priest in his cell observing: "When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity - that was a quality God's image carried with it."<br />I was spellbound, standing in the doorway, a breeze coming in. Cuba's relations with the Catholic Church have improved in recent years, especially since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1998. Atheism has ceased to be a revolutionary tenet.<br />The priest began to tell the Parable of the Talents. How a wealthy man, parting on a journey, gave five talents to one of his servants, two to another, and one to a third. And the servant with five talents invested wisely and earned another five. And the servant with two talents did the same, also doubling his money. But the third, fearful of his master, hid the talent in the ground and earned nothing.<br />And the first two enter "into the joy of thy lord," but the third "wicked and slothful" servant is cast into "outer darkness."<br />"Where is this parable told?" the priest asked.<br />A child's hand shot up. "Saint Matthew!"<br />The child was right. But what of the parable in a land where there's nothing to invest in? Was it a "free enterprise parable," as John Howard, the former conservative prime minister of Australia once called it, a reminder that if you are given assets you must add to those assets, and that if you are entrusted with the word of God, you must make that word grow?<br />Or was it rather, a parable about the cost of standing up to authority, of being a whistle-blower like the third servant, who calls his master a "hard man, reaping where thou has not sown?" Was it about the courage to face down totalitarianism and its rich apparatchiks?<br />I wondered, but preferred mystery to answers. I'd seen America's Guantánamo prison. I'd felt the suffering of the woman in the car. I'd left New York's financial disaster, based on greed for multiplying assets, for the economic ravages of Cuba's head-in-the-ground communism.<br />Yes, pity. And if this priest had the power to turn the wafer into the flesh and blood of God, and if the people gathered here believed that and were consoled, I was ready to bow my head in silence. That, it seemed, was why I had come to Guantánamo.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Palin's church set on fire<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />ANCHORAGE, Alaska: Governor Sarah Palin's home church was badly damaged by arson, leading the governor to apologize if the fire was connected to "undeserved negative attention" from her failed campaign as the Republican vice-presidential nominee.<br />Damage to the Wasilla Bible Church was estimated at $1 million, the authorities said Saturday. No one was injured in the fire, which was set Friday night while a handful of people, including two children, were inside, according to the Central Mat-Su fire chief, James Steele.<br />He said the blaze was being investigated as an arson but did not know of any recent threats to the church. The authorities did not know whether Palin's connection to the church was relevant to the fire, Steele said.<br />"It's hard to say at this point. Everything is just speculation," he said. "We have no information on intent or motive."<br />Steele would not comment on the means used to set the fire.<br />Pastor Larry Kroon declined to say whether the church had received any recent threats.<br />"There are so many variables," he said. "I don't want to comment in that direction."<br />Palin, who was not at the church at the time of the fire, stopped by Saturday. Her spokesman, Bill McAllister, said in a statement that Palin told an assistant pastor that she was sorry if the fire was connected to the "undeserved negative attention" the church has received since she became the vice-presidential candidate on Aug. 29.<br />"Whatever the motives of the arsonist, the governor has faith in the scriptural passage that what was intended for evil will in some way be used for good," McAllister said.<br />The 1,000-member evangelical church was the subject of intense scrutiny after Palin was named John McCain's running mate. Early in Palin's campaign, the church was criticized for promoting in a Sunday bulletin a Focus on the Family "Love Won Out Conference" in Anchorage. The conference promised to "help men and women dissatisfied with living homosexually understand that same-sex attractions can be overcome."<br />The fire was set at the entrance of the church and moved inward as a small group of women were working on crafts, Steele said. The group was alerted to the blaze by a fire alarm.<br />Outside temperatures were minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 29 Celsius) as firefighters battled the blaze.<br />Steele said a multiagency task force was being assembled to investigate the fire.<br />Wasilla, the governor's hometown, is 40 miles, or 65 kilometers, north of Anchorage.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/"></a><br /><strong>U.K. bank rescue plan, a model for others, is in trouble</strong><br />By Julia Werdigier<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />LONDON: Gordon Brown's British bank rescue plan was widely praised and quickly emerged as a model for other countries, including the United States, to emulate. But the accolades may have been premature.<br />Despite the government's aggressive efforts, the plan is in trouble because the banks are resisting pressure to lend more as they seek to protect themselves in the harsh economic climate.<br />When Brown, the British prime minister, in October, presented the plan to inject capital into banks in exchange for a substantial shareholding, he promised not just to stabilize the British banking system, which threatened to crumble under its exposure to American subprime mortgages and the country's own bursting housing bubble, but also to jump-start the stalled lending market.<br />The first part worked: The troubled banks were saved and even Barclays, which declined the rescue package, found outside investors to help repair its balance sheet. Brown's popularity ratings surged and some newspapers christened him Flash Gordon.<br />But less than two months later, the plan is attracting mounting criticism from lenders, economists and opposition politicians for failing to fix the credit markets. Brown on Friday acknowledged the need for more action and said the government was working on a "second stage" of the banking rescue.<br />Michael Taylor, a senior economist at Lombard Street Research in London, said, "There is no sign yet of significant easing of credit conditions." Taylor added, "In fact some banks are tightening the credit conditions so in that sense the plan's not working."<br />Britain agreed in October to inject £50 billion, or $75 billion at current rates, in exchange for large equity stakes it would use to put pressure on the banks to ease lending to businesses and consumers. The biggest beneficiary was Royal Bank of Scotland, and the government plans to sell all of its bank investments back to shareholders once the market recovers. A separate credit line to back interbank lending, along with interest rate cuts and a fiscal stimulus package worth £20 billion, was supposed to further grease the lending market.<br />Even though interbank lending rates have started to decline slowly since October they remain relatively high as banks continue to hoard capital amid concern about rising loan defaults. Banks failed to fully pass on the recent Bank of England rate cuts to customers; the average cost of a two-year fixed-rate mortgage fell by 0.71 of a percentage point in November compared with a 1.5 point cut in the central bank rate during the same month.<br />Some analysts said the idea that a bank recapitalization would repair the lending market was flawed from the beginning. On one hand, the plan aims to force banks to reduce risks and return to profitability to quickly repay the government; on the other it is supposed to pressure them to lend more and take on more risk.<br />"Current policy objectives are conflicting and incoherent," said Michael Coogan, director general of the Council of Mortgage Lenders. "The government needs to decide on its key priority. The tug of war with lenders being pulled in every direction at once needs to end."<br />Vincent Cable, the finance spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said the multiple objectives of the recapitalization plan were "canceling themselves out." He said the top priority should be to restore lending or else "the economy is threatened to be throttled."<br />Brown hoped that the capital injection would give banks enough additional cash to remain liquid while they wrote down toxic assets and rebuilt their balance sheets so that they could lend again. But most banks, hunkering down to survive what is expected to be a long and damaging recession, remain paralyzed.<br />Alistair Darling, chancellor of the Exchequer, as recently as Wednesday attacked them for not fulfilling their part of the deal, saying that with billions of taxpayers' money invested, the general public was "looking for something in return."<br />The initial rescue plan had two inherent flaws, some analysts said.<br />For one thing, the capital injection came in tandem with a requirement that the banks set aside more capital as a cushion against further losses. The cash investment from the government made banks stronger as they faced a worsening economic climate, but it did not give them enough to revive lending, said John Hitchins, head of the British banking team at PricewaterhouseCoopers in London.<br />The second flaw was that it failed to properly assess the risks associated with toxic assets that remained on the banks' balance sheets. HBOS, the mortgage lender, said Friday that bad loans backed by assets including homes rose 75 percent in the past two months, indicating things might get worse before they got better. At a time when unemployment, home repossessions and loan defaults increase, banks are naturally reluctant to lend.<br />"When everyone is at risk of losing their job," said Matthew Sharratt, an economist in London for Bank of America, "how do you assess the risk of your lending?"<br />The Bank of England quickly reduced interest rates to make loans more affordable for borrowers. But Britain, like the United States, remains at risk of falling into a so-called liquidity trap, a situation originally described by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s in which monetary policy stops working because banks see no advantage in lending to customers.<br />Government dictates are not likely to revive lending on their own. As a result, Darling said he was considering a range of other options, including a national loan guarantee program favored by the opposition Conservative Party. Under such a plan, the government would directly underwrite commercial or even household loans. That could help overcome bank concerns over lending losses, but it would also further increase the risks for taxpayers.<br />Another option would be for the government to pool toxic assets into a separate entity, a so-called bad bank, with the hope to free up banks' balance sheets and recoup some of the investments later. That, too, could help, but again only by saddling taxpayers with the ultimate responsibility for covering the bad debts.<br />Martin Weale, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which also advises the government, said Brown's initial rescue plan had failed because it was too small.<br />"In a normal crisis about 10 percent of GDP is used to recapitalize the banks, we only put 3 percent of GDP in there," Weale said, referring to gross domestic product. "Banks are still cautious because they need more capital."<br />Tripling the size of the government's investment would increase the government's shareholding in banks, probably bringing those in the plan fully under government control.<br />Brown is still proud of his proposal, which remains the model for other countries as they struggle to revive lending. But he seems a bit flustered: In Parliament on Wednesday, he was embarrassed by a slip of the tongue in which he announced his government had "saved the world" instead of saying it had saved the British banks.<br />But it is clear that more needs to be done. Sharratt, the Bank of America economist, said: "You're just not sure what will work. So you need to try out a range of things."Barclays to bolster lending<br />Barclays said it would present a financial package to bolster lending to small and midsize businesses in Britain, Bloomberg News reported Sunday from London.<br />"Barclays will announce a package of support for small businesses, including lending commitments," on Monday, a bank spokesman, Michael O'Toole, said by telephone. He declined to give further details.<br />The announcement followed government pressure on banks to help businesses weather the short-term shocks caused by the economic slump. HSBC Holdings, which is based in London and is Europe's largest bank, this month created a $5 billion fund to increase access to credit for businesses, with $1.5 billion allocated to British customers.</div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Withdrawals bedevil hedge funds, and not just the poor performers</strong><br />By Geraldine Fabrikant<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />For Bernard Madoff, the embattled hedge fund manager, the world came to an end when his funds were unable to meet $7 billion in withdrawals at a time when he was supposedly managing $17 billion.<br />The number may sound staggering, but in fact it is typical of what has been going on at hedge funds - no matter how successful - when they offer investors the chance to withdraw their money rather that putting up a barrier, which is known as a gate. A gate blocks investors from taking out more than a fixed percentage in any redemption period.<br />As investors, endowments and funds of funds have needed to raise cash, they have turned to hedge funds that allowed them to pull money out quickly.<br />"We have become the ATM machines for people that need cash," said George Weiss, who heads a $3 billion multistrategy fund for both U.S. and foreign investors.<br />Weiss, who has been a hedge fund manager for 20 years, said that his fund was down about 7.5 percent so far this year. Even so it has had 35 percent withdrawals.<br />While investors have been redeeming actively from hedge funds, some of those that have turned in the best performance - even if it means a decline, albeit a small one - have found investors scrambling for the exits.<br />"The managers that had the most investor friendly provisions, regardless of performance, but the more flexible you were, got the most redemptions," said Kathryn Hall, whose firm, Hall Capital Partners, acts as an investment adviser for about $20 billion in assets.<br />She and others point out that the current market has presented enormous problems for investors seeking liquidity whether they are endowments, individuals or funds of funds because many funds do not permit withdrawals unless they receive the request 90 days or more before the planned withdrawal. And some funds only permit investors to take out a percentage of their holdings.<br />But there can be tension over that rule between managers and investors. "The idea is in theory is that gates protect ongoing investors from too much liquidation," said Robert Rosenkranz, the founder of Acorn Partners, a two-decades-old fund of hedge funds "In theory it is balancing the interests of the redeeming people and the ongoing investors. In some cases it protects ongoing investors."<br />But, he added, "the manager's decision is not totally disinterested because the gates do allow them to collect fees for longer periods of time."<br />Weiss and other fund managers say that investors, and particularly funds that use foreign banks to bolster their leverage, have been scrambling to exit from whatever funds they can. There are a rash of explanations, Hall said.<br />She noted that there had been discussions about withdrawals since autumn. The original focus, she was "market neutral funds." Those are funds that are theoretically not correlated to the stock market's rise or fall, like funds that go long and short equities or other instruments. In other words, that are betting on gains as well as declines.<br />But she added that those funds did not turn out to be market neutral so that they were not efficient in tumultuous markets as expected. "So investors wanted to reduce their exposure," she said.<br />In other cases, investors wanted to realign their portfolios. When a fund performs better than other funds in a portfolio, investors will often sell some of the fund that has grown to be too big a percentage of the total in an effort to rebalance. "If a fund did well and was flexible, the more withdrawals it has gotten, regardless of performance," she said.<br />Leveraged funds of funds have perhaps been under the greatest pressure for withdrawals because the funds often attempted to bolster returns by borrowing against the funds. That was fine when funds were going up in value, but as they started to plummet, the borrowers "blew through margin requirements" as one money manager put it. In order to pay off the debt investors went to the funds that were most liquid.<br />"The deleveraging has been going on for more than a year," said Charles Gradante, a co-founder of Hennessee Group which advises investors about hedge funds. "Many investors were using leverage and as the market started to drop in price, the leverage they were using went against them. They had to generate cash. Much of the cash came out of their stock portfolios, but some of it came from liquid hedge funds," he said.<br />And there was also a problem with private equity, particularly among endowments. As private equity funds called on investors to provide cash for new investments, at a time when returns from older investments were minimal, endowments and foundations too sought to raise cash. In some cases that came from hedge funds, experts say.</div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Time to check assets of bailed-out banks</strong><br />By Gretchen Morgenson<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Here in Bailout Nation, you'll be surprised to learn, some of us are more equal than others.<br />Witness the congressional back of the hand delivered Thursday to Detroit's Big Three automakers. Chrysler and General Motors, with Ford's support, were asking for $14 billion to see them through the end of the year; the Senate said no.<br />Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who leads the Senate Republicans, opposed the rescue. "None of us want to see them go down, but very few of us had anything to do with the dilemma that they have created for themselves," he said. "We simply cannot ask the American taxpayer to subsidize failure."<br />That's a new concept - not asking the taxpayer to subsidize failure. Is that not what we just did with the banks, to the tune of $700 billion, 50 times what the beleaguered carmakers asked for?<br />Moreover, in the bank rescue, taxpayers are subsidizing not only failure but also outright recklessness and greed. In spite of the fact that financial institutions drove the country into the economic ditch, and even though "very few of us had anything to do with the dilemma that they have created for themselves," the financial industry received billions, with few strings attached.<br />Complaints about bailing out high-earning autoworkers are another fascinating disconnect. The supposedly exorbitant autoworker wages that get everybody so riled up pale in comparison with the riches of Wall Street.<br />Neither were the banks required, as Detroit would have been, to get rid of their private jets or supply the Treasury with in-depth restructuring plans in exchange for bailout funds.<br />This is not to argue that handing money over to troubled carmakers is a good idea or without peril. (On Friday, the Treasury said it would move to prevent carmaker failures until Congress reconvenes in January and deals with the mess.)<br />Rather it is to remind everyone of the degree to which the banks have been blessed with a no-questions-asked bailout that will almost certainly generate tremendous taxpayer losses down the road.<br />Yes, of course, banks are different from you and me and Chrysler and GM. Because lending makes the world go round, banks need to be healthy and well-capitalized.<br />But the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, is open to banks that are both well and sickly. And nobody overseeing the program seems eager to ensure that its funds go only to those institutions that will survive and be able to pay back the taxpayer.<br />"Why is it that each of the Big Three needed a specific plan in hand to share in $14 billion while most of the banks only needed a large hat in hand to share $700 billion?" asked Brian Foley, a compensation consultant in White Plains, New York. "I don't have a sense of transparency, that there are visible accountability criteria being applied to TARP."<br />As of Dec. 5, the Treasury had allocated a total of $335 billion to TARP and disbursed $195 billion to institutions under its various parts.<br />Testifying before Congress last Wednesday, Neel Kashkari, the youthful former Goldman Sachs executive whom the Treasury has charged with overseeing "financial stability," defended the $700 billion triage package intended to get banks lending again.<br />The plan's achievements so far, according to Kashkari: "First, we did not allow the financial system to collapse. That is the most direct important information. Second, the system is fundamentally more stable than it was."<br />Maybe so. But an audit of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, released last week by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, suggests that the program's holes are many.<br />For example, the congressional auditors said, the Treasury has no way to determine if the program is achieving its goals of increased lending by banks. There also seems to be no monitoring of the banks' compliance with TARP limits on executive compensation, the agency added.<br />The Treasury should take nine actions to ensure the integrity of the TARP, according to the agency. Many relate to keeping its operations transparent, managing conflicts of interest and hiring enough staff members to ensure that the program's goals are met.<br />While these recommendations all have merit, there is one important item missing from the TARP to-do list: Hire tough-minded bank analysts to help determine which institutions are best positioned to use TARP funds in a way that will benefit their shareholders and the taxpayers at the same time.<br />Such a team could help prevent the Treasury from throwing good money after bad.<br />According to the congressional auditors, as of Nov. 21, about 48 employees were assigned to TARP. Only five are permanent staffers; the rest come from other Treasury offices, U.S. government agencies and organizations providing temporary help.<br />What is needed is a small army of TARP analysts - a lot of former bankers are out of work, by the way - to conduct a worst-case analysis of the banks' assets and capital cushion.<br />Such a burndown analysis, as it is called in private equity circles, typically involves extremely harsh loss estimates for every loan category in Year One and higher-than-average loss estimates for loans in Years Two and Three, the elimination of dividend payments, and a valuation of the bank's prospects based primarily on its deposits - not its loan portfolio.<br />The essential questions are these: What are the bank's assets really worth, how much can it earn and how much capital would the bank need to operate profitably?<br />Bankers will object, of course. They want to keep their rosy scenarios intact for as long as they can. But such a see-no-evil approach has been central to the slow-motion nature of this train wreck. Now that the government is dispensing dollars, it is time for misplaced optimism over asset values to disappear.<br />Private investors looking to put money into beleaguered banks are running precisely these types of analyses. Why shouldn't the officials who have opened the taxpayer spigot for the banks do the same?</div><div> </div><div>***********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>What happened to the Great Moderation?<br /></strong>By Emily Kaiser</div><div>Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The financial crisis has cast doubt on a widely held belief that the modern economy is less volatile, and central bankers who had been praised for orchestrating decades of stability are scrambling for new ideas.<br />For two days this week, the U.S. Federal Reserve's policy-setting committee will try to figure out what more it can do to revive the economy now that its benchmark short-term interest rate is nearing zero.<br />Another rate cut seems assured when the meeting adjourns Tuesday. The only question is whether the reduction will halve the federal funds rate to one-half a percentage point, or even lower. And of more important interest to world investors is what hints the central bank might drop about its remaining policy options.<br />The Bank of Japan's decision on rates is due Friday, and with the country's short-term borrowing costs already at 0.3 percent, it faces much the same question. Economists polled by Reuters last week saw a 40 percent chance that the central bank would return to a zero-interest policy in the next few months.<br />Japan ended a six-year period of zero interest rates in July 2006. During that time, the central bank embarked on what was then a unique policy of flooding the banking system with cash to try to restore growth.<br />As the United States adopts a similar strategy, some economists have taken to calling the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, "Bernanke-san."<br />It has been quite a drastic change.<br />In 2004, before anyone imagined that governments around the world would be spending trillions of dollars to clean up a financial disaster, top economists like Bernanke were lauding the years of stability, dubbed the Great Moderation.<br />"One of the most striking features of the economic landscape over the past 20 years or so has been a substantial decline in macroeconomic volatility," Bernanke, who was then one of the Fed's governors, said at the time. "My view is that improvements in monetary policy, though certainly not the only factor, have probably been an important source of the Great Moderation."<br />It raises the question that if monetary policy was credited with helping to keep the economy on an even keel, should it now bear some of the blame for the current turmoil?<br />Dean Maki, co-chief U.S. economist at Barclays Capital, said low interest rates and volatility might have lulled households, businesses, investors and policy makers into a false sense of security that encouraged more risk-taking and less regulation.<br />"It will be years before the final verdict is rendered on whether the Great Moderation is over or has just suffered a one-time setback," he said. "If it indeed has ended, in retrospect the low output volatility of this period may have played a part in sowing the seeds of its own demise."<br />Already, the year-old U.S. recession is longer than the past two, which lasted eight months apiece. Economists polled by Reuters expect the economy to contract in the current quarter and in the next two, which suggests at least an 18-month slump. That would be longer than the 1981-82 recession, considered one of the worst since World War II.<br />It is a similar story elsewhere. The Japanese economy is likely to contract for two straight fiscal years, and Britain faces one to two years of recession, according to Reuters poll of economists.<br />In terms of duration, those forecasts certainly would not be consistent with a Great Moderation. In terms of depth, it is too soon to say where this episode will rank, but economic data may provide some clues.<br />On Thursday, British retail sales are expected to post a 0.6 percent drop for November, after the previous month's 0.1 percent dip, which was much smaller than expected. A sharper decline could signal a more worrisome slide in consumer confidence to come and pile more pressure on the government to step up its stimulus spending.<br />So far, Washington is winning the spending race hands down, with Detroit automakers currently pressing for billions of dollars of emergency assistance.<br />But even if they manage to secure a lifeline, automakers face the gloomy prospect of persuading Americans to spend thousands of dollars on new cars at a time when their homes and retirement accounts have taken a beating and the job market is suffering.<br />It may be time to bid farewell to the Great Moderation.</div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Three European banks announce exposure to Madoff</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />MADRID: Three European banks on Sunday announced a total of about $3.8 billion (2.5 billion pounds) in exposure to an investment fund run by Bernard Madoff, the U.S. investor accused of running a $50 billion "Ponzi" scheme.<br />The largest banks of both Spain and France, Santander and BNP Paribas , and Swiss private bank Reichmuth & Co became the latest parties to detail possible losses over investments made with Madoff, who was arrested in New York on Thursday in the alleged fraud.<br />Santander put its client exposure at over $3.09 billion. BNP Paribas said it could face a potential loss of 350 million euro from exposure to Madoff-linked investments. And Swiss private bank Reichmuth & Co said it had about 385 million Swiss francs at stake, around $325 million.<br />U.S. prosecutors and regulators have accused the 70-year-old Madoff, the founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC and a former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, of masterminding a fraud through his investment advisory business, which managed at least one hedge fund.<br />A Ponzi scheme is a swindle offering unusually high returns, with early investors paid off with money from later investors.<br />Hundreds of people, investing with him through the firm's clients, entrusted Madoff with billions of dollars, industry experts have said.<br />Santander, which has to date emerged unscathed from the global financial crisis, said in a statement on Sunday that its investment fund Optimal had exposure to Madoff Securities of 2.33 billion euros, 2.01 billion of which were funds invested for institutional investors and private banking clients outside Spain.<br />The remaining 320 million euros were part of the investment portfolios of private banking clients in its home country, which are qualifying investors, the bank said in a statement.<br />"Optimal will undertake legal actions to defend the interests of the shareholders of the subfund," the bank said in a statement on Sunday evening.<br />Santander said its exposure came from an investment company managed by Optimal called Optimal Multiadvisors Ireland, which was authorised by the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority.<br />The Irish-based company had a subfund called Optimal Strategic US Equity which had used Madoff Securities to carry out its investments.<br />The custodian of Optimal Multiadvisors and Optimal Strategic is HSBC Institutional Trust Services in Ireland, which belongs to HSBC , said Santander.<br />It said the Santander group also had 17 million euros invested in Madoff-related investments through another fund.<br />In its statement, BNP Paribas said it had no investments of its own in Madoff funds but had risk exposure through its trading business and collateralized lending to funds of hedge funds.<br />Switzerland's Reichmuth wrote to clients in a letter dated December 13, posting the letter on its website over the weekend.<br />The Lucerne-based bank said Reichmuth Matterhorn, a fund of hedge funds, had investments in instruments linked to Madoff.<br />"The affected funds amount to roughly 3.5 percent of our assets under management of approximately 11 billion Swiss francs," the letter said.<br />The announcements are likely to be followed by others across Europe. On Saturday, French-language newspaper Le Temps said Geneva-based private banks and asset managers could lose more than 5 billion Swiss francs.<br />According to Spanish newspaper El Mundo, the Bank of Spain and Spain's stock exchange regulator CNMV are assessing the impact on Spanish investors of the alleged fraud.<br />The two regulators are confident the impact will be "limited," sources close to the investigations were quoted as saying.<br />Spain's second largest bank, BBVA , told Reuters on Saturday that no BBVA customers in Spain were exposed to the alleged fraud, but the bank has so far not commented on whether clients outside Spain are exposed.<br />($1=.7537 euros)<br />(Reporting by Sarah Morris in Madrid, Sudip Kar-Gupta in Paris and Lisa Jucca in Zurich; Editing by Leslie Adler)</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Details emerge of Blagojevich's talks with Obama team<br /></strong>By Helene Cooper and Jackie Calmes<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />CHICAGO: At a time of mounting pressure on Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois to resign, two associates of President-elect Barack Obama confirmed that his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had communicated with Blagojevich's office about potential candidates for Obama's Senate seat and provided a list of names.<br />The Obama associates said the interactions concerned several people who might fill the seat. Such contacts are common among party officials when a political vacancy is to be filled. Prosecutors made it plain Tuesday, the day Blagojevich was arrested on corruption charges, that their investigation in no way targeted Obama.<br />But the allegations that Blagojevich wanted, in effect, to sell the Senate seat to the highest bidder have brought intense scrutiny to all contacts the governor's office had about the vacancy.<br />The Illinois attorney general, Lisa Madigan, said Sunday that she had heard reports Blagojevich might resign as early as Monday, or possibly take a temporary leave so that he might still draw a paycheck.<br />But a Blagojevich spokesman, Lucio Guerrero, told The Associated Press on Sunday that he had "no knowledge" of any plans by the governor to resign on Monday.<br />Senator John McCain of Arizona added his voice to the long list of public figures who are calling on Blagojevich to step down. He also indicated on ABC that he thought senior Republicans should devote more attention to solving the country's economic ills and less to scoring points in the corruption scandal.<br />If the governor does not step down, he will face several challenges.<br />Madigan has asked the state supreme court to declare Blagojevich unfit to serve, in which case the lieutenant governor would succeed him - and name Obama's replacement to the Senate. And the state's general assembly will convene Monday to consider both an attempt to impeach Blagojevich and separate legislation to hold a special election to replace him.<br />Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn said on NBC that draft legislation would allow him, if Blagojevich did step down, to appoint someone to the Senate seat until a special election was held.<br />The attorney general expressed serious doubt Sunday that Blagojevich would defiantly proceed with a Senate appointment when he is under such fierce scrutiny. "Nobody in their right mind would accept an appointment to the U.S. Senate seat that this governor made," Madigan said on CBS.<br />The governor met Saturday with one of Illinois's most prominent criminal defense attorneys, Edward Genson. But Genson said he had "not yet" been retained by Blagojevich, The Chicago Tribune reported.<br />The Tribune reported that communications between Emanuel and the Illinois governor, both Democrats, had been captured on court-approved wiretaps, but Obama associates gave conflicting accounts of the interactions.<br />Obama aides have said privately that Emanuel did not engage in any deal-making with Blagojevich, whom U.S. prosecutors charged last week with conspiring to turn a profit from the appointment.<br />Emanuel has not been accused of wrongdoing by U.S. prosecutors.<br />Obama has said he never spoke with the governor about the seat. But Obama's aides have declined publicly to answer questions about what discussions they had, with several saying they were doing so at the request of the office of Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.<br />Madigan, who said her office was cooperating with U.S. prosecutors, told NBC that it "doesn't appear from what I've heard so far that there is anything improper that has occurred" regarding Emanuel.<br />For now, the Illinois governor alone has the power to fill the Senate vacancy. The criminal complaint against him alleges that he sought to benefit personally from the appointment by securing high-paying jobs for himself and his wife, or campaign contributions, in return for his selection.<br />Obama said Thursday that his aides were looking through all of their possible contacts with the governor and would release more information soon. Republicans, meanwhile, have raised questions about Obama's refusal to say more and about his past ties with the main characters in the story.<br />Emanuel's list of possible candidates included a senior adviser to Obama, Valerie Jarrett; Madigan; Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois; and Dan Hynes, the state comptroller.<br />The criminal complaint quotes Blagojevich as saying at one point that Obama's aides were not willing to give him anything more than "appreciation" in return for appointing a candidate they favored.<br />Schakowsky told The New York Times last week that she called Emanuel last month when she was exploring whether she might fill Obama's seat. She and Emanuel had served in the House together.<br />Schakowsky said Emanuel had declined to tell her whether Obama had a favorite to fill the seat. She said he seemed wary about Blagojevich.<br />One of the schemes Blagojevich is accused of involves Emanuel's House seat, for which Illinois law requires a special election.<br />According to the criminal complaint, Blagojevich talked about approaching an unnamed "president-elect adviser" to ask for help raising "10, 15 million" to start a nonprofit organization.<br />Jackie Calmes reported from Washington. Brian Knowlton and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington.</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>Rich: Two cheers for Rod Blagojevich</strong><br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />Rod Blagojevich is the perfect holiday treat for a country fighting off depression. He gift-wraps the ugliness of corruption in the mirthful garb of farce. From a safe distance outside Illinois, it's hard not to laugh at the "culture of Chicago," where even the president-elect's Senate seat is just another commodity to be bought and sold.<br />But the entertainment is escapist only up to a point. What went down in the Land of Lincoln is just the reductio ad absurdum of an American era where both entitlement and corruption have been the calling cards of power. Blagojevich's alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.<br />The Republican partisans cheering Fitzgerald's prosecution of a Democrat have forgotten his other red-letter case in this decade, his conviction of Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Libby was far bigger prey. He was part of the White House Iraq Group, the task force of propagandists that sold an entire war to America on false pretenses. Because Libby was caught lying to a grand jury and federal prosecutors as well as to the public, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. But President Bush commuted the sentence before he served a day.<br />Fitzgerald was not pleased. "It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals," he said at the time.<br />Not in the Bush era, man. Though the president had earlier vowed to fire anyone involved in leaking the classified identity of a CIA officer, Valerie Plame Wilson - the act Libby tried to cover up by committing perjury - both Libby and his collaborator in leaking, Karl Rove, remained in place.<br />Accountability wasn't remotely on Bush's mind. If anything, he was more likely to reward malfeasance and incompetence, as exemplified by his gifting of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Tenet, L. Paul Bremer and Gen. Tommy Franks, three of the most culpable stooges of the Iraq fiasco.<br />Bush had arrived in Washington vowing to inaugurate a new, post-Clinton era of "personal responsibility" in which "people are accountable for their actions." Eight years later he holds himself accountable for nothing. In his recent exit interview with Charles Gibson, he presented himself as a passive witness to disastrous events, the Forrest Gump of his own White House. He wishes "the intelligence had been different" about WMD in Iraq - as if his administration hadn't hyped and manipulated that intelligence. As for the economic meltdown, he had this to say: "I'm sorry it's happening, of course."<br />If you want to trace the bipartisan roots of the morally bankrupt culture that has now found its culmination in our financial apocalypse, a good place to start is late 2001 and 2002, just as the White House contemplated inflating Saddam's WMD. That's when we learned about another scandal with cooked books, Enron. This was a supreme embarrassment for Bush, whose political career had been bankrolled by the Enron titan Kenneth Lay, or, as Bush nicknamed him back in Texas, "Kenny Boy."<br />The chagrined president eventually convened a one-day "economic summit" photo op in August 2002 (held in Waco, Texas, lest his vacation in Crawford be disrupted). But while some perpetrators of fraud at Enron would ultimately pay a price, any lessons from its demise, including a need for safeguards, were promptly forgotten by one and all in the power centers of both federal and corporate governance.<br />Enron was an energy company that had diversified to trade in derivatives - financial instruments that were bets on everything from exchange rates to the weather. It was also brilliant in devising shell companies that kept hundreds of millions of dollars of debt off the company's bottom line and away from the prying eyes of shareholders.<br />Regulators had failed to see the iceberg in Enron's path, and so had Enron's own accountants at Arthur Andersen, a corporate giant whose parallel implosion had its own casualty list of some 80,000 jobs. Despite Bush's post-Enron call for "a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business community," the exact opposite has happened in the six years since. Warren Buffett's warning in 2003 that derivatives were "financial weapons of mass destruction" was politely ignored. Much larger companies than Enron figured out how to place even bigger and more impenetrable gambles on derivatives, all the while piling up unseen debt. They built castles of air on a far grander scale than Kenny Boy could have imagined, doing so with sheer stupidity and cavalier, greed-fueled carelessness rather than fraud.<br />The most stupendous example as measured in dollars is Citigroup, now the recipient of potentially the biggest taxpayer bailout to date.<br />The price tag could be some $300 billion - 20 times the proposed first installment of the scuttled Detroit bailout. Citigroup's toxic derivatives, often tied to subprime mortgages, metastasized without appearing on the balance sheet. Both the company's former chief executive, Charles O. Prince III, and his senior adviser, Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary, have said they didn't know the size of the worthless holdings until they'd spiraled into the tens of billions of dollars.<br />Once again, regulators slept. Once again, credit-rating agencies, typified this time by Moody's, kept giving a thumbs-up to worthless paper until it was too late. There was just so much easy money to be made, and no one wanted to be left out. As Michael Lewis concludes in his brilliant account of "the end" of Wall Street in Portfolio magazine: "Something for nothing. It never loses its charm."<br />But if all bubbles and panics are alike, this one, the worst since the Great Depression, also carried the DNA of our own time. Enron had been a Citigroup client. In a now-forgotten footnote to that scandal, Rubin was discovered to have made a phone call to a former colleague in the Treasury Department to float the idea of asking credit-rating agencies to delay downgrading Enron's debt. This inappropriate lobbying never went anywhere, but Rubin neither apologized nor learned any lessons. "I can see why that call might be questioned," he wrote in his 2003 memoir, "but I would make it again." He would say the same this year about his performance at Citigroup during its collapse.<br />The Republican side of the same tarnished coin is Phil Gramm, the former senator from Texas. Like Rubin, he helped push through banking deregulation when in government in the 1990s, then cashed in on the relaxed rules by joining the banking industry once he left Washington.<br />Gramm is at UBS, which also binged on credit-default swaps and is now receiving a $60 billion bailout from the Swiss government.<br />It's a sad snapshot of our century's establishment that Rubin has been an economic adviser to Barack Obama and Gramm to John McCain. And that both captains of finance remain unapologetic, unaccountable and still at their banks, which have each lost more than 70 percent of their shareholders' value this year and have collectively announced more than 90,000 layoffs so far.<br />The New York Times calls its chilling investigative series on the financial failures "The Reckoning," but the reckoning is largely for the rest of us - taxpayers, shareholders, the countless laid-off employees - not the corporate and political leaders who led us into the quagmire. It's a replay of the Iraq equation: The troops, the Iraqi people and American taxpayers have borne the harshest costs while Bush and company retire to their McMansions.<br />As our outgoing president passes the buck for his failures - all that bad intelligence - so do leaders in the private and public sectors who enabled the economic debacle. Gramm has put the blame for the subprime fiasco on "predatory borrowers." Rubin has blamed a "perfect storm" of economic factors, as has Sam Zell, the magnate who bought and maimed the Tribune newspapers in a highly leveraged financial stunt that led to a bankruptcy filing last week. Donald Trump has invoked a standard "act of God" clause to avoid paying a $40 million construction loan on his huge new project in Chicago.<br />After a while they all start to sound like O.J. Simpson, who, when at last held accountable for some of his behavior, told a Las Vegas judge this month, "In no way did I mean to hurt anybody." Or perhaps they are channeling Donald Rumsfeld, whose famous excuse for his failure to secure post-invasion Iraq, "Stuff happens," could be the epitaph of our age.<br />Our next president, like his predecessor, is promising "a new era of responsibility and accountability." We must hope he means it.<br />Meanwhile, we have the governor he leaves behind in Illinois to serve as our national whipping boy, the one betrayer of the public trust who could actually end up paying for his behavior. The surveillance tapes of Blagojevich are so fabulous it seems a tragedy we don't have similar audio records of the bigger fish who have wrecked the country.<br />But in these hard times we'll take what we can get.</div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/"></a><br /><strong>In Athens, the university of anarchy<br /></strong>By Rachel Donadio<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />ATHENS: Early Saturday morning inside the gates of Athens Polytechnic University, a dozen groggy young people in hooded sweatshirts slumped on folding chairs around a smoky fire. Others trickled in, holding cups of coffee. Small gypsy children scampered around with wheelbarrows, collecting empty beer bottles. One lit a cigarette.<br />But the young people and their friends were not simply recovering from a long night of drinking or studying. They were regrouping for revolution.<br />Many of the violent protests that have rocked Athens in recent days, after the police shot and killed a 15-year-old boy on Dec. 6, have taken place in and around the university, driven by a group of anarchists that has long occupied the buildings here. Garbage fires burn in its courtyard. On the streets outside, youths throwing gasoline bombs and rocks have clashed with riot police officers armed with tear gas.<br />The National Technical University of Athens, as it is officially called, is one of Greece's leading schools, training engineers, architects and scientists since 1836. It moved its main campus outside the city center in the 1980s, leaving its neoclassical downtown buildings largely to the whims of protest groups.<br />The university administration seems to view the squatters as uninvited house guests who overstayed their welcome so long ago that they have become fixtures. They hold regular demonstrations and often destroy university property.<br />But these protests have been different.<br />"In former times, a couple of years ago, there were only students protesting," said Constantinos Moutzouris, the university's rector. "This time there are all kinds of groups. This is difficult to control."<br />Conversations with those inside the university revealed a mix of students, older anarchists and immigrants protesting everything from police brutality to globalization to American imperialism.<br />Some are simply thrillseekers along for the ride.<br />Administrators say that evicting the anarchists now, especially after the protests of the past week, would entail a police operation they are unwilling to undertake for fear of instigating further violence or destruction.<br />Under an asylum law instituted after the police crushed a student rebellion at the polytechnic university against the military junta in 1973, the Greek police are not allowed on university property unless invited by administrators.<br />Yet unlike when the police killed protesters at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970, a tragic episode in a dramatic time, emotion over the Athens shooting has intensified, not faded, over time.<br />In Greece, the police are seen as both overly aggressive and disconcertingly passive. Although a police bullet killed the teenager, sparking the latest violence, the government then told the police not to use force to tamp down the protests, to avoid further mayhem. The cost of the ensuing riots, in which businesses and cars were torched, is estimated at $1.3 billion nationwide.<br />Outside the university gates Saturday morning, merchants were sweeping up the broken glass from their vandalized shops. The hulks of burned-out cars sat like carcasses in the streets.<br />Asked what the shops had to do with the death of the student, one black-clad young woman said, in perfect American English, that they represented "the corporate machine." The protesters do not have a traditional hierarchy, she said, but held "collective meetings" in the university auditorium.<br />Like rave parties, the protests are called through text-message chains or on Web sites like indymedia.org.<br />Protesters have said they will continue to demonstrate until the police charged with killing the teenager, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, are tried and jailed.<br />In an inner courtyard, someone has spray-painted "Don't Blame Us, The Rocks Ricocheted." A lawyer for the policeman who killed the teenager has said that the bullet was deformed, so that it was probably not a direct hit.<br />The Greek authorities have insisted that the violence has been driven by a radical handful, whom they refer to as "the known unknown."<br />That term is "nonsense," said Dimitris Liberopoulous, 44, a freelance book editor and anarchist sympathizer who discussed the protest movement over coffee in Exarchia, the neighborhood surrounding the university. "It's a game of semiotics," he said.<br />He said the authorities did not know who the protesters were, nor understand their frustration at class division, the poor economy, a broken education system and a corrupt government.<br />"We are thousands of people," Liberopoulous said. "We live in a parallel society with parallel values and parallel ideas."<br />That the authorities have not identified and arrested the ringleaders seems more a question of political will.<br />Greece has witnessed low-level political violence for decades. Starting in the mid-'70s, the terrorist group November 17 killed at least 23 people until the Greek authorities largely dismantled it before the 2004 Athens Olympics.<br />Last year, another group fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the U.S. Embassy here, causing damage but no injuries.<br />It is unclear whether the self-styled anarchists have ties with terrorist groups. But security experts fear that terrorist groups might see the new unrest as fertile ground for attacks.<br />They also worry that the anarchists themselves might up the ante.<br />More protests are expected this week, though Athens was largely calm Sunday.<br />"There's a proverb," Liberopoulous said. "That a civil war never ends."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzDcdJudu71dir77dku1dewPLXKEvEACpdcfe13J5k6NVlrontolxFXySYMmb_x-JUCtetpZrOor1M6lsN6ABkQvCyTUbGqZQEEQes2V8nD3ckbW_G6BKVMkxMbn2vYoczfO_awhUKe9Y/s1600-h/DSC03290.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037475729467842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzDcdJudu71dir77dku1dewPLXKEvEACpdcfe13J5k6NVlrontolxFXySYMmb_x-JUCtetpZrOor1M6lsN6ABkQvCyTUbGqZQEEQes2V8nD3ckbW_G6BKVMkxMbn2vYoczfO_awhUKe9Y/s320/DSC03290.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Hit in terror attacks, a Mumbai café bounces back<br /></strong>By Thomas Fuller<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />MUMBAI: Some day Farhang Jehani might patch up the bullet holes and cover the shrapnel pockmarks. But for now they are the Leopold Café's new decor.<br />"We are going to let it be," Jehani said over the din of his crowded restaurant, where eight people were killed in the Mumbai terrorist attacks. "It's part of history."<br />In the two weeks since the attacks, this Mumbai neighborhood of narrow streets shared by street urchins and the well-to-do has staggered back onto its feet. But at the Leopold Café, it is often standing room only.<br />The restaurant has become a sort of shrine of defiance against terrorism. That, at least, is how Jehani portrays it. "I want it to go on the same way - as if nothing has happened," he said.<br />Tourists come to buy T-shirts emblazoned with the restaurant logo (sales are now five times what they were before the attack). Passers-by stop to peer at the bullet holes in the restaurant's facade. And an eclectic clientele - some coming out of curiosity, others to show their support - sits down for a meal and freely flowing beer.<br />"I thought I'd come to have a look," said Jagdeep Kishore, a lawyer in his early 60s from New Delhi who came to Mumbai for a conference. Leopold has become a household name in India, Kishore said. "But I never imagined this place would be full of people."<br />The diversity of the clientele mirrors Mumbai itself. Tourists, especially budget travelers, have been the mainstay of the restaurant for years, starting with hippies in the 1960s. But after the attacks, the Leopold has attracted more wealthy and middle-class Mumbai natives.<br />"There are more Indians now," Amerita Kotak, 16, part of a group of high school students waiting for a table on Friday night. "People want to see what's happened."<br />The attacks, which left 163 victims and nine out of 10 gunmen dead, began a few hours after dusk Nov. 26.<br />At about 9:40 p.m., dinner at the Leopold was interrupted with a minute-long volley of gunfire and the loud bang of an exploding grenade. The gunmen never entered the restaurant, said Jagat Khadka, the Leopold's bouncer, whose left arm was grazed by a bullet. They stood outside and casually opened fire, sending waiters and customers running for the kitchen or ducking below their tables, according to interviews with the Leopold staff.<br />Six patrons and two waiters were killed. The gunmen then walked down a narrow street to the back entrance of the Taj hotel, where they then terrorized guests and hotel staff for more than two days.<br />Both waiters at the Leopold who died, Peer Pasha and Hidayat Khazi, were Indian Muslims. A note at each table, placed under the glass tabletop, advises diners that donations for family members of the "deceased staff" can be made at the cashier.<br />Jehani says he does not know the identities of the other six killed, except that three were foreigners, including one German. Jehani escaped injury because he had gone up to the restaurant's mezzanine bar to watch the end of a cricket match between England and India.<br />On the way upstairs he saw two young men standing on the sidewalk with large rucksacks, not an unusual sight in a neighborhood popular with backpackers. They looked like "decent" people, he said. "I thought they were waiting for friends." About three minutes later the men began their shooting spree.<br />The atmosphere at Leopold's on the most recent Saturday night was raucous and boozy. But amid the mainly Indian crowd were reminders of the power of the weapons that the gunmen used.<br />The bullet that grazed Khadka had punctured a solid wood door plated with a layer of stainless steel. Bullets had left holes in the restaurant's granite-paneled walls that looked like they were made with percussion drills.<br />Many buildings in Mumbai exhibit perpetual dilapidation, and Leopold Café is no exception. It is hard to know whether some of the missing tiles and broken windows here were caused by the attack or longstanding disrepair.<br />But the divot under Table 24 is unmistakable. The attackers' grenade had blasted a fist-sized hole in the granite floor and sprayed shrapnel across the adjacent counter.<br />Shrouded in revelry, the scars of the attacks do not seem to bother customers here.<br />"Nobody seems to give any impression of trepidation, absolutely not," said Pat Dunworth, an insurance assessor from Sheffield, England, who was sitting two tables down from the grenade hole. "It's no different from being in Bangkok or Los Angeles."<br />Patrons at the Leopold, which first opened as a wholesale cooking oil business in 1871, say they admire the restaurant's speed in reopening. Restaurant staff took two days to mop up the blood and bits of scalp from the floor. Zoroastrian priests in white robes came to bless the business with burning sandalwood. The first customers were served on Dec. 1, just 48 hours after the siege of the Taj hotel was over.<br />But in newspapers and on Internet blogs, some Indians say they are worried that this type of resilience is also self-defeating. After each new terrorist attack - and there have been many in India in recent years - life returns to normal and the pressure to prevent future attacks dissipates.<br />On the sidewalk outside Leopold on Friday night, Arnaz Irani, a jewelry designer, said she found the scene inside disconcerting.<br />"We were shocked that people could even be sitting in there," Irani said. "It's so upsetting to think that people were in there lying dead and now everyone is laughing and eating."<br />Of all the targets the gunmen chose in their killing spree - the train station, the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish center, the hospital and hotels were the main targets - the Leopold was among the easiest to find and gain access to. The restaurant is located on the Colaba Causeway, a main boulevard, and advertised by a large sign, sponsored by Coca-Cola, that reads, "Coke Time, Join the Friendly Circle."<br />In Mumbai, life spills out onto the streets, whether at food stalls, wet markets or along Marine Drive along the Arabian Sea, where couples stroll. The Leopold Café is the symbol of these "soft targets," in the lingo of terrorism experts, and a sign of the city's continued vulnerability.<br />Three police officers are now posted on the street outside the Leopold, but their only weapon is one tall nightstick shared among them. Khadka, the stocky bouncer who is also head of security at the restaurant, says he is not armed. During the attacks, he ran for his life down a side street. Asked what he would do if gunmen returned, he shrugged.<br />"Next time I won't run away," he said.</div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>India denies any violation of Pakistani airspace</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />NEW DELHI: India denied on Sunday its warplanes had violated Pakistani airspace.<br />"The Indian Air Force denies any such violation of airspace," Air Force spokesman, Wing Commander Mahesh Upasani told Reuters, describing Pakistani accusations as an attempt to divert "the attention of the people towards something which has not happened."<br />Pakistan said on Saturday that Indian warplanes had violated its airspace but said this was "inadvertent" and there was no cause for alarm about an escalation of tension between the nuclear-armed neighbours.<br />The report followed a rise in tensions after gunmen killed 179 people in India's financial capital Mumbai in an attack which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based Islamist militants.<br />A Pakistan Air Force spokesman said there were two violations, one in the Kashmir area and another in the sector around the city of Lahore in Pakistan's Punjab province.<br />In response to India's denial on Sunday, the Pakistani Air Force said it stood by its statement.<br />"Our stance is the same. There's no change in it," spokesman Humayun Viqas said.<br />India has been extremely careful in recent years to prevent its warplanes from straying into Pakistan's airspace.<br />Pakistan shot down two Indian planes which it said had gone into its airspace during the 1999 Kargil conflict, fought on the Line of Control dividing disputed Kashmir.<br />India said the planes were in its airspace when they were shot down.<br />Following the Mumbai attacks, India, backed by the United States, has called on Pakistan to crack down on Pakistan-based militant groups. But the government in New Delhi has resisted domestic pressure to launch retaliatory strikes of its own.<br />India and Pakistan have fought three wars and went to the brink of a fourth in 2002 following an attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 that New Delhi blamed on militants based in Pakistan.<br />(Reporting by Bappa Majumdar; Additional reporting by Kamran Haider; Writing by Simon Denyer; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Pakistan and India talk of normalizing ties after attacks</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD: Pakistan and India talked hopefully about improving relations Sunday as the nuclear-armed rivals appeared to be searching for a path away from confrontation after the Mumbai terror attacks.<br />Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, making whirlwind visits to both countries' capitals to try to calm tensions in the region, on Sunday pledged more technical support and funding to help Pakistan and India battle terrorism.<br />At a news conference with Brown, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan played down reported violations of his country's airspace by Indian aircraft a day earlier. For his part, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India said he hoped relations could be "normalized" - but not until "our neighbor stops allowing its territory to be used for acts of terrorism against India."<br />India has called on Pakistan to crack down on militant groups operating out of Pakistan, particularly Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India has blamed for the Mumbai attacks that left more than 160 people dead.<br />Pakistan has carried out raids on a charity believed to be linked to Lashkar, but also has urged India to provide further evidence.<br />Abdullah Ghaznavi, Lashkar's chief spokesman, denied involvement in the Mumbai attacks, saying his group only targets Indian forces and Indian defense installations as part of efforts to force India out of its portion of the disputed Kashmir region. "This is a jihad, and it will continue," Ghaznavi said in a call Sunday from an undisclosed location.<br />Brown urged India and Pakistan, which both possess nuclear weapons, to cooperate to peacefully resolve the crisis, which the United States fears could divert Pakistan's attention from battling Qaeda and Taliban militants along its border with Afghanistan.<br />Brown promised Pakistan new bomb-scanning technology, forensic assistance, help improving airport security and other support. He also announced a $9 million program to help fight the causes of extremism and strengthen democracy, including trying to reach out to and educate Pakistani youth to avoid radicalization.<br />Brown said he had discussed similar assistance for India with Singh earlier Sunday, including help against radicalization, airport security improvements and better information-sharing.<br />Three-quarters of the most serious terror plots investigated by the British authorities have links to Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Brown said.<br />Pakistani officials said Indian aircraft entered Pakistan's section of Kashmir and flew over the eastern city of Lahore on Saturday. Pakistani jets chased the Indian aircraft back over the border, the authorities here said.<br />Both sides are usually careful to avoid such territorial violations, and it was unclear how two separate but apparently accidental incursions could occur on the same day.<br />Zardari tried to dismiss the incidents, calling them "technical incursions" that had been blown out of proportion.<br />An Indian Air Force spokesman, Mahesh Upasani, denied Sunday that Indian aircraft has crossed into Pakistani airspace.<br />Singh said India hopes relations can be "normalized." "This is my belief that all issues can be resolved through mutual wisdom and cooperation," he said, while making clear that New Delhi's tolerance had limits. "Our good intentions should not be misconstrued as our weakness," he said.</div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Bomb blast kills 3 policemen in Afghanistan</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />KANDAHAR, Afghanistan: Three policemen were killed and 12 others were wounded on Sunday in a bomb blast in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, a local official said.<br />The escalation of violence in Afghanistan this year, the bloodiest period since the Taliban was ousted in 2001, has raised fears about the prospects of stability in the country despite an increasing number of foreign troops.<br />Five policemen and seven civilians were among the wounded when a wooden cart fixed with explosives was detonated outside the Chinese hospital in the capital of Kandahar province, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar said.<br />Earlier reports from the governor's office in Kandahar said four policeman had been killed and the explosion came from a suicide bomber.<br />Removed from power in 2001, the Taliban largely rely on suicide and roadside bomb attacks as part of their campaign to topple the Western-backed government and drive out foreign troops under the command of NATO and the U.S. military.<br />(Reporting by Ismail Sameem; Writing by Kabul newsroom)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Iran is absent for Afghanistan talks</strong><br />By Steven Erlanger<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />PARIS: Afghanistan and all its neighbors - except, notably, Iran - agreed at an informal conference here Sunday to intensify their regional relations in the interest of security and stability, pledging to work together to stabilize Afghanistan, restrict narcotics traffic and coordinate against terrorist groups.<br />Although Iran had said its foreign minister would attend the conference, then said no, then said yes and then said its ambassador to France would represent Tehran, no Iranian official showed up Sunday morning, according to the French Foreign Ministry spokesman, Eric Chevallier.<br />"It's unfortunate, but when nobody showed up this morning, everyone sat down to work," Chevallier said. "No one explained why."<br />Iran was annoyed with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France for remarks last week criticizing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's constant threats against Israel, and it may be that with elections in Iran in June, it was easier for Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to stay home.<br />Iran's failure to attend was a blow to French hopes for the conference, the first of its kind, which was meant to bring together all the countries touching on Afghanistan, including the "stans" of the former Soviet Union, China, India and Pakistan.<br />The conference also included the United Nations Special Representative for Afghanistan, Kai Eide, and senior European Union officials responsible for foreign policy and aid.<br />Germany was also invited, as a financier of great importance and a country which will be asked to do more on the ground in Afghanistan - with civilian and police trainers, if not with many more troops. All countries with troops in Afghanistan were also represented, including the United States and Britain, while Russia also attended.<br />With the American president-elect, Barack Obama, vowing a "surge" of troops and civilian advisers to try to stabilize Afghanistan, the French, who remain president of the European Union until the end of the year, wanted to present a forward-looking European initiative, French officials said.<br />And after the terrorist violence in Mumbai, and its apparent connections to Pakistan, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France thought it was another opportunity for the two countries to sit down over a shared problem.<br />"There is a consensus that there can be no peace, security and prosperity in Afghanistan without the strong involvement of its neighbors," Kouchner said after the meeting. "And there can be no peace, security and prosperity for the region without a stable Afghanistan."<br />Pakistan in particular has been charged with not doing enough to prevent cross-border operations by the Taliban, and NATO convoys and supply depots have recently been attacked in Pakistan itself. On Sunday, in Bahrain, General David Petraeus, head of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, said that the problems in Pakistan brought "new urgency" to finding alternate supply routes through the "stans" - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.<br />The Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, said at the meeting that the attack on Mumbai "was an attack on us all," a French official said.<br />The conference became more detailed on economic regional cooperation, officials reported, with the European Commission offering to host a meeting of economic experts to prepare better for a regional economic conference planned for Islamabad early next year.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>In final visit to Iraq, Bush dodges a shoe<br /></strong>By Steven Lee Myers and Alissa J. Rubin<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: President George W. Bush flew to Iraq on Sunday, his fourth and final trip to highlight the recently completed security agreement between the United States and the country that has occupied the bulk of his presidency and will to a large extent define his legacy.<br />But his appearance at a news conference here was interrupted by an Iraqi journalist who shouted in Arabic "This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog" and threw one of his shoes at the president, who ducked and narrowly avoided being struck.<br />As chaos ensued, he threw his other shoe, shouting, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq." The second shoe also narrowly missed Bush as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki stuck out a hand in front of the president's face to help shield him.<br />A scrum of security agents descended on the man, who was about 12 feet from the lectern, and wrestled him to the floor and then out of the ornate room where the news conference was taking place. The president was uninjured and brushed off the incident. "All I can report is it is a size 10," he said jokingly before continuing his news conference and noting the apologies of Iraqi journalists in the front row.<br />Shortly before 10 p.m., Bush departed the Green Zone by helicopter to Camp Victory, where he was greeted with cheers and whoops from hundreds of troops inside the enormous rotunda of the Al Faw palace. Speaking at a lectern beneath an enormous American flag that nearly reached the domed ceiling, he praised this generation of soldiers and reflected on the sacrifice of those who had died.<br />He called the surge "one of the greatest successes in the history of the United States military."<br />"Thanks to you," he told the soldiers, "the Iraq we're standing in today is dramatically freer, dramatically safer and dramatically better than the Iraq we found eight years ago."<br />Bush's arrival here during daylight hours had been one measure of progress; his first visit on Thanksgiving Day 2003 took place entirely at night.<br />As with previous visits in November 2003, June 2006 and September 2007 preparations for the visit were secretive and carried out with ruse. The White House schedule for Sunday had Bush attending the "Christmas in Washington" performance at the National Building Museum in downtown Washington. Instead, he left the White House by car on Saturday night, arriving at Andrews at 9 p.m. Air Force One remained inside its immaculate hangar until moments before taking off. A dozen journalists accompanying him were only told of the trip on Friday and allowed to tell only a superior and a spouse and only in person.<br />Air Force One arrived in Baghdad at 4 p.m. after a 10-and-a-half-hour overnight flight from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington. It was Bush's fourth visit to IraqOn arriving here, he met the two senior American officials, Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Ray Odierno, on the tarmac. He met with Iraqi leaders and was expected to meet with American troops.<br />The president and his aides have touted the security agreement as a landmark in Iraq's troubled history, one made possible by the dramatic drop in violence over the last year. They credit the large increase in American troops Bush ordered in 2007 for creating enough security to allow political progress to take root.<br />The new security agreements, which take effect on Jan. 1, replace the United Nations Security Council resolutions that authorized the presence of foreign troops in Iraq. Iraqi officials extracted significant concessions from the Bush administration over several months of hard bargaining, including a commitment to withdrawal all American forces by the end of 2011.<br />Bush's national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, said the situation in Iraq today was "a pretty optimistic place," a phrase that few would have credibly used even a year ago. He described the security agreement that will govern American military operations after the new year "a remarkable document."<br />Referring to the Iraqi parliament's contentious and lively debate leading up to a vote last month, Hadley added that the agreement was a public one: "I think the only one there is in the Arab world, and publicly debated and discussed in an elected parliament."<br />There was an unmistakeable hint of triumphalism in Hadley's remarks, as in Bush's valedictory visit, even though the president is leaving office with the war very much unfinished.<br />"If you've been through 2005 and 2006," Hadley said en route to Baghdad, when asked whether the president was "feeling pretty good" about the situation here now, "it's hard not to feel awfully good about 2008 and into 2009."<br />After arriving at the airport, Mr Bush quickly flew into Baghdad itself aboard a military helicopter, under extraordinary security. The flight passed uneventfully, swooping low over neighborhoods along the once notorious airport road. He landed at Salam Palace, boarded a civilian SUV and drove a short distance to an honor guard with Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani.<br />The president made brief remarks at the end of his meeting with Talabani and Iraq's two vice presidents, Adil Abd al-Mahdi and Tariq al-Hashimi. The three comprise Iraq's Presidency Council. The two leaders sat in arm chairs before their respective flags. Talabani spoke first, praising the president: "Thanks to him and his courageous leadership we are here now in this building."<br />Bush then spoke, calling the security agreements "a reminder of our friendship and as a way forward to help the Iraqis realize the blessings of a free society."<br />"The work hasn't been easy," he said, "but it's been necessary."</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Official history details failures of rebuilding Iraq<br /></strong>By James Glanz and T. Christian Miller<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: An unpublished, 513-page federal history of the U.S.-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.<br />"Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience," the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag - particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army - the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.<br />In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department "kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces - the number would jump 20,000 a week! 'We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000."'<br />Powell's assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer 3rd, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.<br />Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the U.S. government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.<br />The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.<br />By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in U.S. taxpayer money.<br />The history contains a catalog of new revelations that show the chaotic and often poisonous atmosphere prevailing in the reconstruction effort.<br />When the Office of Management and Budget balked at the U.S. occupation authority's abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua Bolten, then the Office of Management and Budget director and now the White House chief of staff. "To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President," wrote the lobbyist, Tom Korologos. "His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt." With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year.<br />In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a civilian official at the U.S. Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency's reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan. Whatever the quality of the agency's plan, it eventually began running what amounted to a parallel reconstruction effort in the provinces that had little relation with the rest of the U.S. effort.<br />Money for many of the local construction projects still under way is divided up by a spoils system controlled by neighborhood politicians and tribal chiefs. "Our district council chairman has become the Tony Soprano of Rasheed, in terms of controlling resources," said a U.S. Embassy official working in a dangerous Baghdad neighborhood, referring to the popular TV mob boss. "'You will use my contractor or the work will not get done."'<br />The United States could soon have reason to consult this cautionary tale of deception, waste and poor planning, as both troop levels and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan are likely to be stepped up under the new administration.<br />The incoming Obama administration's rebuilding experts are expected to focus on smaller-scale projects and emphasize political and economic reform. Still, such programs do not address one of the history's main contentions: that the reconstruction effort has failed because no single agency in the U.S. government has responsibility for the job.<br />Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the history concludes, "the government as a whole has never developed a legislatively sanctioned doctrine or framework for planning, preparing and executing contingency operations in which diplomacy, development and military action all figure."<br />"Hard Lessons" was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who regularly travels to Iraq and has a staff of engineers and auditors based here. Copies of several drafts of the history were provided to reporters at The New York Times and ProPublica by two people outside the inspector general's office who have read the draft but are not authorized to comment publicly.<br />Bowen's deputy, Ginger Cruz, declined to comment for publication on the substance of the history. But she said it would be presented Feb. 2 at the first hearing of the Commission on Wartime Contracting, which was created this year as a result of legislation sponsored by Senators Jim Webb of Virginia and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, both Democrats.<br />The manuscript is based on about 500 new interviews, as well as more than 600 audits, inspections and investigations on which Bowen's office has reported individually over the years. Laid out for the first time in a connected history, the material forms the basis for broad judgments on the entire rebuilding program.<br />In the preface, Bowen gives a searing critique of what he calls the "blinkered and disjointed prewar planning for Iraq's reconstruction" and the botched expansion of the program from a modest initiative to improve Iraqi services to a multibillion-dollar enterprise.<br />Bowen also swipes at the endless revisions and reversals of the program, which at various times gyrated from a focus on giant construction projects led by large Western contractors to modest community-based initiatives carried out by local Iraqis. While Bowen concedes that deteriorating security had a hand in spoiling the program's hopes, he suggests, as he has in the past, that the program did not need much outside help to do itself in.<br />Despite years of studying the program, Bowen writes that he still has not found a good answer to the question of why the program was even pursued as soaring violence made it untenable. "Others will have to provide that answer," Bowen writes.<br />"But beyond the security issue stands another compelling and unavoidable answer: The U.S. government was not adequately prepared to carry out the reconstruction mission it took on in mid-2003," he concludes.<br />The history cites some projects as successes. The review praises community outreach efforts by the Agency for International Development, the Treasury Department's plan to stabilize the Iraqi dinar after the invasion and a joint effort by the Departments of State and Defense to create local rebuilding teams.<br />But the portrait that emerges overall is one of a program's officials operating by the seat of their pants in the middle of a critical enterprise abroad, where the reconstruction was supposed to convince the Iraqi citizenry of U.S. good will and support the new democracy with lights that turned on and taps that flowed with clean water. Mostly, it is a portrait of a program that seemed to grow exponentially as even those involved from the inception of the effort watched in surprise.<br />On the eve of the invasion, as it began to dawn on a few U.S. officials that the price for rebuilding Iraq would be vastly greater than they had been told, the degree of miscalculation was illustrated in an encounter between Donald Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, and Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who had hastily been named the chief of what would be a short-lived civilian authority called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.<br />The history records how Garner presented Rumsfeld with several alternative rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq.<br />"What do you think that'll cost?" Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan.<br />"I think it's going to cost billions of dollars," Garner said.<br />"My friend," Rumsfeld replied, "if you think we're going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken."<br />In a way he never anticipated, Rumsfeld turned out to be correct: Before that year was out, the United States had appropriated more than $20 billion for the reconstruction, which would indeed involve projects across the entire country.<br />Rumsfeld declined comment on the report, but a spokesman, Keith Urbahn, said quotes attributed to him in the document "appear to be accurate." Powell also declined to comment.<br />The secondary effects of the invasion and its aftermath were among the most important factors that radically changed the outlook. Tables in the history show that measures of things like the production of electricity and oil; public access to potable water, mobile and landline telephone service; and the presence of Iraqi security forces all plummeted at least 70 percent, and in some cases all the way to zero, in the weeks after the invasion. Subsequent tables in the history give a fast-forward view of what happened as the avalanche of money tumbled into Iraq over the next five years. By the time a sovereign Iraqi government took over from the Americans in June 2004, none of those services - with a single exception, mobile phones - had returned to prewar levels. And by the time of the security improvements in 2007 and 2008, electricity output had, at best, a precarious 10 percent lead on its levels under Saddam Hussein; oil production was still below prewar levels; and access to potable water had increased about 30 percent, although with the nation's ruined piping system it was unclear how much actually reached people's homes uncontaminated.<br />Whether the rebuilding effort could have succeeded in a less violent setting will never be known. In April 2004, thousands of the Iraqi security forces that had been oversold by the Pentagon were overrun, abruptly mutinied or simply abandoned their posts as the insurgency broke out, sending Iraq down a violent path from which it has never completely recovered.<br />At the end of his narrative, Bowen chooses a line from "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens as the epitaph of the U.S.-led attempt to rebuild Iraq: "We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us."<br />James Glanz reported from Baghdad, and T. Christian Miller, of the nonprofit investigative Web site ProPublica, reported from Washington.</div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Mixed messages on truce from Hamas leadership<br /></strong>By Taghreed El-Khodary and Isabel Kershner<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />GAZA: At odds with a statement made by the exiled leader of Hamas in a television interview broadcast Sunday, leaders of the Islamic group in Gaza left open the possibility of renewing a tenuous truce with Israel that is due to expire at the end of the week.<br />"The truce was limited to six months and ends on Dec. 19," the Hamas political chief, Khaled Mashal, said in a television interview from Damascus with Hamas's Al-Quds satellite television.<br />"For Hamas, and I think for the majority of forces, the truce ends after Dece. 19 and will not be renewed," he said.<br />But Mahmoud Zahar, a senior Hamas leader in Gaza, said the group had not yet finalized its position. The local Hamas leadership was to meet with representatives of the other Palestinian armed groups Sunday night and only afterward formulate an official policy, Zahar said in an interview by telephone.<br />An Israeli official said the different voices show "there is no one Hamas today," and that the statement from Damascus may have been a pressure tactic to try to extract better terms from Israel for a continuation of the truce.<br />On Sunday afternoon the head of the Hamas government in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, addressed a huge crowd of supporters celebrating the 21st anniversary of the foundation of the group, which took over Gaza in 2007.<br />While Haniya criticized Israel for its continuing "aggression" and the strict embargo it has imposed on the area, he also avoided making any definitive pronouncement on the future of the truce.<br />The mixed messages from Hamas came as a senior Israeli Defense Ministry official, Amos Gilad, was in Cairo to discuss terms for extending the truce with Egyptian mediators. The original truce understandings were brokered by Egypt and went into effect on June 19. Hamas said they were valid for six months.<br />Israel has expressed readiness to extend the truce, even though it has been increasingly violated in recent weeks.<br />"Israel wants to see calm prevail in the south," Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said Sunday. "Israel has been willing, and continues to be willing, to abide by the understandings reached with the Egyptians," he said. But he added that calm was conditional on Hamas stopping the daily rocket fire from Gaza against Israeli civilian centers.<br />A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry, Shlomo Dror, also said that Israel was ready to continue with the calm, "but not like it is today."<br />Hamas has failed to stick to its commitments all along, Dror said, not least by carrying on smuggling weapons and explosives into Gaza.<br />A tense quiet largely prevailed for the first months of the truce, showing that Hamas was able to control smaller groups in Gaza, but it began to unravel on Nov. 4. Then, Israeli forces entered the Palestinian territory for the first time since June to blow up a tunnel that, according to Israel, Hamas was planning to use to capture soldiers along the border. Five Hamas militants were killed the night of the raid.<br />Since then, some 250 rockets and mortar shells have been fired from Gaza at Israel, according to the Israeli military, and at least 10 more Palestinian militants have been killed in Israeli strikes.<br />Though the recent rocket fire has not killed anyone, life in the Israeli towns and villages around Gaza has become intolerable, Dror said.<br />As a result, Israel has tightened the blockade.<br />Nevertheless, Israeli officials responded cautiously to Mashal's statement from Damascus casting doubt on the future of the truce. One said it was probably a pressure tactic; another said what counted was deeds, not words.<br />Israel, like the United States and the European Union, classifies Hamas as a terrorist organization and boycotts the group.<br />In Gaza, though, Hamas seems to have maintained a certain level of popularity. An estimated 200,000 Palestinians turned out for the anniversary rally Sunday, despite some expectations that the Israeli-imposed embargo and resulting hardship for the 1.5 million residents might keep people at home.<br />Local Hamas leaders sounded defiant and triumphant. The master of ceremonies declared from the podium that soon the green flags of Hamas would fly in the West Bank too, and introduced Haniya as "the future president of Palestine."<br />Haniya said that the fuel shortages caused by the embargo had brought the Palestinians of Gaza to the point of using "candles and wood in our stoves to cook." Calling Gaza "the land of jihad and resistance," he insisted that the crowds attending the rally proved that Hamas remained undefeated.<br />A woman attending the rally, Inshirah Abu Al-Ola, 48, from Khan Yunis, said she had "sympathy" Hamas. She was forgiving about the fuel shortages, saying "the world will not give Hamas a chance."<br />But a man who stayed away from the rally said his old dreams of a Palestinian-governed Jerusalem and the return of the Palestinian refugees had now been reduced to obtaining a canister of cooking gas.<br />Taghreed El-Khodary reported from Gaza and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.</div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Software lets Nebraska talk to Nablus</strong><br />By Jim Giles<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />It's a lovely idea: a social-networking site with automatic translation bolted on. That's Meedan, a gathering place for English and Arabic speakers who want to exchange thoughts on Middle East issues. Comments are translated automatically and instantly; Nebraska can now chat with Nablus.<br />But consider a cautionary tale. A group of Israeli journalists prepared for a visit to the Netherlands last year by sending questions via e-mail to the Dutch Foreign Ministry. After online translation from Hebrew to English, the first question reportedly read: "The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian and on relational Israel Holland."<br />That's the problem with translation Web sites: They tend to be funnier than they are useful.<br />Perhaps that is an unfair comparison. Maybe there is something especially challenging about Hebrew-to-English translation. Well, there is - but it is a problem that will also affect Meedan. Computers are taught to translate using pairs of documents that have already been translated by humans. The more pairs a computer studies, the more it learns. Much is available for some languages. English-French and English-German software thus does a reasonably good job. For language combinations where the pool of parallel texts is smaller, like English-Hebrew and English-Arabic, the challenge is greater.<br />English-to-Arabic translation has its own quirks. Arabic is a "head initial" language: verbs are often placed at the beginning of a sentence. Subject and object usually follow, although not always in that order; Arabic speakers use context and meaning to decide which is which, but for a computer it is not so easy. A literal translation from Arabic might read something like "chase dog ball." It's obvious to a human that the writer is talking about a dog chasing the ball, but a computer could just as well have the ball chase the dog.<br />Computers can also be stumped by the ambiguities in written Arabic. Take the word kataba, which means "he wrote." This is normally written as ktb, as are the words kutiba, for "it was written," and kutub, meaning books. It is usually straightforward for a reader to judge which meaning is intended, but humans do so by drawing on something computers lack - an understanding of the meaning of the text.<br />Given those hurdles, the translations on Meedan are surprisingly good. One Arabic speaker asked a question that appeared as: "Has Pakistan has [sic] become a hotbed of terrorist groups?" Not bad, considering that the original question included the word martaan, an expression that literally means "fertile ground." Context-dependent meanings are the bane of translation engines, but Meedan translated it appropriately as "hotbed."<br />Meedan's software, which was developed by International Business Machines, can dodge many problems because it has had plenty of practice. The company hired some 20 professional translators to create a collection of English-Arabic parallel documents containing more than half a million words. The Meedan software would have seen martaan translated as "hotbed" in news articles about terrorism. Since the word "terrorist" appeared in the user's question, the software could guess the context and choose the appropriate, nonliteral translation.<br />The site's translators will monitor activity, so that when the computer slips up, they can adjust the translation. So can users; each human-made change will also be noted by the IBM software and, at least in theory, the error will become less likely to occur again.<br />Will Meedan live up to its Arabic meaning of "gathering place"? It depends on how you look at it. The translations are certainly not perfect. But translations need only be good enough to satisfy those using them, said Jennifer DeCamp, a machine-translation expert at Mitre in McLean, Virginia. Meedan, she predicted, will attract users committed enough to live with a little clumsy language.<br />"Languages play a huge role in putting barriers between groups of people," says Stuart Shieber, a computational linguist at Harvard University. The question is not whether Meedan is ideal, it's whether it's better to have it than to not." But when the subject is Middle East politics, even a minor misunderstanding can tip polite debate into angry argument. As with any dispute, language matters. Terrorist or freedom fighter? Martyr or murderer?<br />Human editors and translators often wrestle with such terminology, so it is not hard to imagine a clumsy computer translation sparking an ugly - and unnecessary - dispute. Meedan's software will have to be good enough to avoid that, or users might decide they were better off living with the language barrier.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>Out of sight, out of mind?<br /></strong>By Reuel Marc Gerecht<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />PRAGUE: Few post-9/11 issues have produced more anxiety and revulsion than the CIA's use of "aggressive interrogation" and the extrajudicial rendition of terrorist suspects to countries that practice torture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to ban waterboarding and other pain-inflicting soliciting techniques, as well as rendition. He has also promised to close the Guantánamo Bay prison.<br />More broadly, liberal Democrats in Congress intend to deploy a more moral counterterrorism, where the ends - stopping the slaughter of civilians by Islamic holy warriors - no longer justify reprehensible means. Winning the hearts and minds of foreigners by remaining true to our nobler virtues is now seen as the way to defeat our enemies while preserving our essential goodness.<br />Sounds uplifting. Don't bet on it happening.<br />Obama will soon face the same awful choices that confronted George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and he could well be forced to accept a central feature of their anti-terrorist methods: extraordinary rendition. If the choice is between non-deniable aggressive questioning conducted by Americans and deniable torturous interrogations by foreigners acting on behalf of the United States, it is almost certain that as president Obama will choose the latter.<br />Of course, he and his senior officials seem to believe now that they don't have to make this choice. For them there is a better way to combat terrorism, by using physically non-coercive questioning of suspects and civilian courts or military courts-martial to try and punish jihadists.<br />But this third way, which is essentially where America was before the Clinton administration embraced rendition, is plausible only if Obama is lucky. He might be. If there is no "ticking time bomb" situation - say, where waterboarding a future Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (the 9/11 mastermind) could save thousands of civilians - then there is need neither for the CIA's exceptional methods, nor the harsh services of Jordan's General Intelligence Department.<br />And there are signs that Obama won't have to confront such a situation. Through American and allied efforts, Al Qaeda has sustained enormous damage since 9/11. Osama bin Laden's decisive battle in Iraq, where Al Qaeda intended to re-energize its holy war against the Americans among the Arabs, has turned into a military and moral disaster. Arab Muslim fundamentalists have finally started the great debate as to whether it is, in fact, unacceptable to kill believers and nonbelievers in jihad.<br />And the internal-security services of our allies in Europe are, on the whole, vastly better today than they were in 2001. Thanks to intrusive surveillance methods (many of which are outlawed in the United States), they are much more efficient in pre-empting the plots of holy warriors traversing their borders.<br />However, troubles in Pakistan may well reverse Obama's luck. He has said he intends to be hawkish about fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Central Asia. So, let us suppose that he increases the number of Special Forces raids into Pakistan, and those soldiers capture members of Al Qaeda and their computers, and learn that the group has advanced plans for striking American and European targets, but we don't know specifically where or when.<br />What would Obama do? After all, if we'd gotten our hands on a senior member of Al Qaeda before 9/11, and knew that an attack likely to kill thousands of Americans was imminent, wouldn't waterboarding, or taking advantage of the skills of our Jordanian friends, have been the sensible, moral thing to do with a holy warrior who didn't fear death but might have feared pain?<br />Obama will probably not have the option of ordering the CIA to aggressively interrogate another member of Al Qaeda - not after running a campaign that highlighted the moral failings of President Bush. To get the CIA back in the interrogation business would probably require a liberal Democratic Congress to pass laws guaranteeing case officers' immunity from criminal and civil prosecution. This seems unlikely - unless, of course, the United States is again devastated by a terrorist strike.<br />And because of Obama's plan to close Guantánamo, the Justice Department is already going to have to figure out how to move, try, punish and release its detainees. Thus the last thing in the world the Obama administration will want is to bring in more "enemy combatants" from the Central Asian battlefield.<br />Which brings us back to rendition, which, properly understood, is what Americans do when they realize that active counterterrorism against jihadists prepared to use mass-casualty weapons is an ethical, juridical and operational tar pit. It isn't an ideal solution - U.S. intelligence officers have no control of the questioning, and Washington can become beholden to foreign security services - but it's a satisfactory compromise. Just ask Samuel Berger, the national security adviser for President Bill Clinton, who no doubt worked through all the pitfalls when he first approved extrajudicial rendition.<br />In addition, the CIA is able to guard the secrecy of foreign liaison operations more effectively, especially from congressional prying, than it can its own activities. It has also certainly paid close attention to how the press tracked some of its clandestine international flights carrying terrorism suspects after 9/11, and will in the future undoubtedly make it much harder to sleuth out who is going where.<br />A dense bipartisan moral fog surrounds rendition. Former senior Clinton officials can still deny that they sent anyone away to be tortured. Few are as honest and frank as Walt Slocombe, a Clinton under secretary of defense who once remarked that the difference between Democratic and Republican rendition was that Democrats "drilled air holes in the boxes."<br />If Obama's Democrats get blown back into the ugly world that we live in, and resume rendition (and, of course, fib about it), then Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who have been vilified for besmirching America's honor, may at least take some consolation in knowing that hypocrisy is always the homage vice pays to virtue.<br />Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer, is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Dozens injured in Hong Kong from dropped acid<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />HONG KONG: Dozens of people in Hong Kong were hurt after two bottles containing an acidic liquid were dropped from a building into a busy commercial district on Saturday, said the police, which are investigating whether the act was intentional.<br />The 750 ml bottles containing an acidic and corrosive liquid exploded after hitting the ground, causing injuries and burns to 46 people, some of whom had to be treated in hospital before being released, a police spokeswoman said.<br />"After an initial investigation, we've determined two bottles containing a corrosive liquid were dropped from above," said Leona Leung at the Hong Kong Police Department.<br />"The matters is under investigation. So far nobody has been arrested," she added.<br />The liquid has been sent to the laboratory, and the police have not yet determined the contents, she added.<br />An unidentified man who witnessed the scene said people affected covered their eyes in pain, the South China Morning Post reported on Sunday. Other victims had holes in their clothings and backpacks, according to the newspaper.<br />The incident happened shortly after 5 p.m. on Saturday in a bustling shopping district of Kowloon, across the city from the main Hong Kong island, which is usually clogged with tourists and shoppers.<br />(Reporting by Rafael Nam; Editing by Bill Tarrant)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_KG4bpH2zpgOGnU6hE8kiTsYXvGHzeiCu2SI9yebKjDJ8tmKmf8RHG_ZWaTZkxfaLZkKFsu72Vny_QSHhPZOlD7i-kjMPSKGATXV_axSSkfIFyxe0vR9465BtGU91fuWZ6lidRtmlPDA/s1600-h/DSC03291.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037474849446882" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_KG4bpH2zpgOGnU6hE8kiTsYXvGHzeiCu2SI9yebKjDJ8tmKmf8RHG_ZWaTZkxfaLZkKFsu72Vny_QSHhPZOlD7i-kjMPSKGATXV_axSSkfIFyxe0vR9465BtGU91fuWZ6lidRtmlPDA/s320/DSC03291.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Obama showing glimpses of how he'll wield power</strong><br />By Jackie Calmes<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />CHICAGO: He will not formally take power for almost six weeks, but President-elect Barack Obama is already showing some glimpses of how he will wield it.<br />Despite his professed resolve to stay at arm's length from governance during the transition, the economic crisis has forced him to play a more active role - nowhere more so than in Washington's scramble to avert the collapse of the Big Three automakers with a government lifeline.<br />From here at what an aide called his "mini-White House," Obama has been pulling on the levers of power far more than any president-elect in memory, using his new stature to influence events in Congress and the real White House of President George W. Bush and yet limited in his ability - as the collapse of the auto bailout legislation in the Senate showed - to control them.<br />On Friday, after Senate Republicans' opposition had doomed a $14 billion industry loan the night before, Obama called on Bush and Congress to find an alternative. Twenty-four hours earlier, Obama had used the bully pulpit of a news conference to urge Congress to approve the loan or risk "a devastating ripple effect throughout our economy."<br />It was Obama who set the debate in motion just a week after his election, despite his reluctance to be involved directly. Amid signs that GM and Chrysler might not survive the year, he pressed Bush at a private meeting to support government help. In the next weeks, he directed his advisers to open lines of communication to Republicans. A White House aide said Obama speaks with Bush "more than any of us know."<br />In both the auto debate and parallel work on his promised two-year economic recovery plan, Obama has shown an inclination to set the broad terms for debate, and then to delegate details to advisers and Congress. For weeks, in public appearances that included "60 Minutes," he has consistently defined the goal for the auto bailout as twofold: A loan from taxpayers, but on the conditions that the companies, including Ford, remake themselves to be viable enterprises and their products to be energy efficient.<br />Yet Obama digs deeply into issues himself; he surprised one adviser in a conference call about the automakers by knowledgeably discussing "DIP financing," a complex special form of financing for distressed companies.<br />Along the way, with a skeleton team of senior advisers, Obama has shown no hesitation in stepping into disputes between the more experienced Democrats who run the House and Senate to forge the united front he will need in coming years to pass his ambitious agenda.<br />When it looked last month as if Congress might fail to act because Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader, disagreed over where the loan money should come from, Obama had Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman who will be his White House chief of staff, call Reid, Democrats familiar with the incident said.<br />"Harry, don't make this a fight between you and Nancy," Emanuel said, according to one. "Make it about what the industry is going to do in return for this money."<br />Afterward Reid and Pelosi jointly told the company chiefs to return to Detroit and come back with detailed survival plans. They did, but as this past week's second lame-duck session approached, chances for a deal with the White House remained grim. Pelosi, unlike Reid, would not agree to Bush's demand to get the emergency funds from a new environmental program intended to subsidize the industry's long-term retooling to produce energy-saving vehicles.<br />Obama himself called her in California in early December after news of the worst monthly job losses in 34 years, say people familiar with events. That weekend the speaker acquiesced to Bush, and Obama vowed on television that as president he would replenish the retooling program she wanted to protect.<br />By all accounts, Obama has good relations with Pelosi and Reid. But as president he must necessarily be less deferential, making occasional run-ins inevitable, Democrats say.<br />The hints of Obama's leadership style are, of course, limited by the self-imposed constraints reflected in his mantra that the nation has one president at a time. After he takes office, it will be clearer where Obama fits on the presidential spectrum between the wonkish and pragmatic but less disciplined style of Bill Clinton, and the crisper but less curious and more ideological decision-making of Bush.<br />Most of Obama's contacts with Congress and the White House as well as auto executives, labor leaders and bankruptcy experts have been through his senior staff.<br />Besides Emanuel and John Podesta, his transition chief, Obama's auto team includes Phil Schiliro, a longtime House aide who has gotten a jump on his job as White House legislative liaison to Congress.<br />Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who will head Obama's National Economic Council, has been Obama's touchstone on the economic aspects of the bailout. Also involved are Joshua Steiner, a former Treasury official who is a partner in a private-equity firm, and Brian Deese, a policy adviser on the Obama campaign.<br />"Do everything you can to help the process along but don't get in the way," Obama told them, according to one member of his team. "But if there is some way I can be constructive, I want you to do it. And don't talk about it."<br />After his daily workout, Obama arrives at his office in a no-frills suite in the Federal Building downtown. He snacks on peanuts while reviewing memorandums and joining the conference calls that are his main conduits for information until he and his Washington-based staff are together in the White House.<br />Obama asks lots of questions, advisers say, and typically makes quick decisions. He leaves the office each day with a notebook stuffed with policy papers and information on potential hires. Each night at home there is a final conference call, about issues coming up the following day.Housing secretary chosen<br />The widely respected housing commissioner for New York City, Shaun Donovan, has been selected by the president-elect to be the next secretary of housing, according to transition officials, Jackie Calmes reported from Washington.<br />Assuming that Donovan, 42, is confirmed by the Senate to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he would be returning to the agency where he worked in the Clinton administration as acting federal housing commissioner and, earlier, as deputy assistant secretary for multifamily housing, overseeing subsidies and properties for about two million families.<br />Donovan has experience in all facets of the affordable housing market, having worked in both the nonprofit and private sectors and in academia as a scholar of housing policy.</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Feelings running high on fate of U.S. schools<br /></strong>By Sam Dillon<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />As President-elect Barack Obama prepares to announce his choice for U.S. secretary of education, there is a question not only about the person he will choose, but also about the approach to overhauling U.S. schools that his selection will reflect.<br />Despite an 18-month campaign for president and many debates, there is still uncertainty about what Obama believes is the best way to improve education.<br />Will he side with those who want to abolish teacher tenure and otherwise curb the power of teachers' unions? Or with those who want to rewrite the main U.S. law on elementary and secondary education, the No Child Left Behind Act, and who say the best strategy is to help teachers become more qualified?<br />The debate has sometimes been nasty.<br />"People are saying things now that they may regret saying in a couple of months," said Jack Jennings, a Democrat who is president and chief executive of the Center on Education Policy in Washington. "Unfortunately, they're all friends of mine, which makes it awkward."<br />Some of the harshest criticism has been aimed at the woman Obama appointed to lead his education policy working group, the most important education post of the transition: Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University.<br />She is liked by the teachers' unions, and partly for that reason has been portrayed as an enemy of change by detractors. These have included people who have urged Obama to appoint Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, or Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, as secretary of education. Both of them have clashed with teachers' unions.<br />Editorials and opinion articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have described the debate as pitting education advocates of change against those representing the educational establishment or the status quo. But who those advocates are depends on who is talking.<br />Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, used different terms in discussing the debate.<br />He said it pitted "professionalization advocates such as Darling-Hammond," who believe policies should emphasize raising educators' morale and helping teachers improve their instruction, against "efficiency advocates like Klein and Rhee." The efficiency advocates focus on raising test scores, cracking down on poor school management and purging bad teachers, he said.<br />"It's tough love, without any love," Fuller said.<br />Darling-Hammond has become a controversial figure partly because of her longtime criticism of Teach for America, the nonprofit group that recruits college graduates to teach for two years in hard-to-staff schools. She says the group loses too many recruits at the end of their two-year commitments, just when they are learning to teach.<br />Teach for America has no official preference for or opposition to any candidate, said Kevin Huffman, a spokesman for the group.<br />But an organization called Leadership for Educational Equity, which was founded to help former members of the Teach for America corps become involved in politics, has photographs of Darling-Hammond, Obama and Klein alongside an article on its Web site that is headlined, "Education Secretary Fight Could Affect Teach for America's Mission."<br />The article notes that Darling-Hammond "has long been a vocal critic of Teach for America," and it urges the group's alumni to make their views on the candidates known.<br />Obama has given no hint of his own leanings.<br />Arne Duncan, the chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, may have an edge. He is a longtime friend of the president-elect and has closed failing schools and improved achievement without alienating the teachers' union. The superintendent of Denver Public Schools, Michael Bennet, who has enacted a plan to reward effective teachers with higher pay, has also attracted the transition team's interest.<br />Klein and Rhee, as well as Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, and several current and former governors, have also been considered, a member of the transition team said. Powell has said publicly that he is not interested.<br />One outspoken former Teach for America official is Whitney Tilson, a New York mutual fund manager. In a recent Web blog entry, Tilson said of Darling-Hammond, "She's influential, clever and (while she does her best to hide it) an enemy of genuine reform."<br />Tilson is on the board of Democrats for Education Reform, a political action committee based in New York.<br />The group sent the Obama transition team a 43-page memorandum shortly after the election with policy advice and a "wish list" of candidates for secretary that included Duncan; Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America; and Jon Schnur, who started a nonprofit group, New Leaders for New Schools, that trains principals for urban schools, said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform.<br />Williams said his group also liked Klein and Rhee. "We'd be thrilled if either one were named secretary," he said.<br />The two national teachers' unions have also been active. The National Education Association has not formally endorsed anyone but has discussed candidates with the Obama transition team, indicating some candidates who would have the union's support, said John Wilson, the executive director.<br />The American Federation of Teachers presented the Obama team with written evaluations of a string of candidates without endorsing any of them, said Randi Weingarten, the union's president.<br />"We have no candidate in the race," Weingarten said.<br />But last week she publicly praised Duncan in an interview with The Associated Press. "Arne Duncan," she said, "actually reaches out and tries to do things in a collaborative way."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyQuKsRk6QcT3DRZ4TCSnc7ahGlictebq03v8CI1G7ISixa8o3Shmq_z1S80jp3BSKya5HNLYnyRV7JDmhOmgbo1e6i0vyFwlmEsEV0RVuK6HB5NNU2lA3F19tGbaukTY0gCttf0hoC4Y/s1600-h/DSC03292.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037474436881298" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyQuKsRk6QcT3DRZ4TCSnc7ahGlictebq03v8CI1G7ISixa8o3Shmq_z1S80jp3BSKya5HNLYnyRV7JDmhOmgbo1e6i0vyFwlmEsEV0RVuK6HB5NNU2lA3F19tGbaukTY0gCttf0hoC4Y/s320/DSC03292.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Over 14,000 Santas march in Porto for world record</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />PORTO, Portugal: More than 14,000 people dressed as Santa Clauses paraded in Portugal's city of Porto on Sunday to try to set a new world record for the largest gathering of Santas and raise money for charity.<br />Despite cold weather and drizzling rain, the crowd in red-and-white hats and jackets, including scores of women and children with fake white beards, strolled through the city streets singing songs and dancing in the annual parade that started in the afternoon and continued after dark.<br />"It's not just a gathering of people at the time of the year when people normally get together, but it is also a social event to bring the warmth of Christmas to those who don't always have it," Vitor Ferreira, one of the organisers of the event, told Reuters.<br />Every Santa, or Pai Natal (Father Christmas) as he is known in Portugal, who took part in the parade donated 1 euro to buy presents for the needy children in Porto, Portugal's second-largest city, Ferreira said.<br />He said 17,400 people had signed up to take part, although bad weather prevented some from parading. Still, over 14,200 showed up in the end, which organisers claimed to be record, according to RTP national television channel.<br />According to the Guinness World Records web site (http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com), the previous world record for the largest gathering of Santas was set last year in Derry City, Northern Ireland, where a total of 12,965 people took part dressed up as Santa or Santa's helpers. (Reporting by MiguelPereira, writing by Andrei Khalip, editing by Myra MacDonald)</div><div> </div><div><strong>******************</strong></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>Bus crash kills dozens in Egypt</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />CAIRO: A bus packed with passengers traveling along a narrow road in southern Egypt plunged into an irrigation canal, killing 57 people on Sunday, officials said.<br />Ahmed Diaa, the governor of Minya, said the bus, with at least 70 passengers on board, swerved to avoid an oncoming pickup truck near a village close to the city of Minya, 214 kilometers, or 133 miles, south of Cairo.<br />Rescuers on small boats searched the canal for passengers, and volunteers pulled bodies out of the water. A crane later lifted the bus out of the canal.<br />One survivor told the Egyptian private television station Dream that a boat came to get him and a friend after the bus plunged into the water, but many people were unable to get out of the bus.<br />The accident took place early Sunday at the end of a major Muslim holiday, when inter-city roads are crowded with returning vacationers.<br />Diaa initially said 36 people were killed, but rescue efforts continued hours after the accident and he later put the death toll at 57, according to state-run television.<br />Egypt has a history of serious bus and car crashes because of speeding, careless driving and poor road conditions. At least 8,000 people were killed in accidents in 2006, the most recent statistics available.<br />The incident Sunday is one of the worst road accidents in recent months, and a prosecution team was at the scene investigating. A string of fatal accidents and fires have fueled Egyptian anger at the government because of the belief that many of the incidents are due to official negligence or poor infrastructure.</div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><a href="http://www.iht.com/"></a><div><br /><strong>650,000 remain without power in U.S. ice storm</strong><br />By Sharon Otterman<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />Warmer temperatures Sunday and Monday were expected to melt most of the ice from a severe storm last Friday that left 1.4 million customers without power in a wide swath of the Northeast. But the melting ice will present its own risks, as bent trees snap back into place, potentially taking out more power lines, utility officials said.<br />About 650,000 customers remained without power Sunday morning in upstate New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. In New Hampshire, the hardest-hit state, about 234,000 customers were still blacked out despite the efforts of more than 340 electricity crews fanned out across the state, officials said.<br />Temperatures in southern New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts were forecast to climb into the lower 40s Fahrenheit (4 to 6 degrees Celsius) on Sunday afternoon and to the mid-50s by Monday. The reprieve was expected to be brief, with snow forecast in some areas by Wednesday.<br />The rising temperatures "should be able to melt just about all of the ice," aiding utility workers, said Neal Strauss, a spokesman for the National Weather Service in Taunton, Massachusetts. "But the falling ice is going to be a safety issue for some people, and could cause some problems on the power lines."<br />New Hampshire experienced the most widespread electricity outages in its history, said Martin Murray, a spokesman for the Public Service Company of New Hampshire, the state's largest power provider. At its height on Friday evening, 322,000 customers were in the dark, dwarfing the prior record of 93,000 outages after a 1996 snowstorm.<br />Though progress in restoring power was being made, some customers may not have power until Friday or Saturday, Murray said. And as trees weighed down with ice spring back up - or "bounce back," as the power company calls it - some additional damage to power lines was expected, he said.<br />"Some roads continue to be impassable," he said. "We haven't been able to get to all the areas to assess what needs to be done yet."<br />President George W. Bush declared a state of emergency in New Hampshire and 9 of Massachusetts's 14 counties late Saturday, directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide relief assistance. Local governments and other organizations opened emergency shelters, which in some cases saw newcomers on Sunday as residents decided not to brave another night without electricity or heat.<br />The storm, which began Thursday evening, resulted from an unusual set of weather conditions. According to Strauss, a layer of cold air from Canada blew in, while above it, a rush of warm, damp air came in from the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. The result was a heavy rainstorm that froze on the way down. The weight of the ice snapped trees and power lines and destroyed transformers and other infrastructure.<br />At least four deaths appear to be related to the storm, The Associated Press reported. A Danville, New Hampshire, man died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the generator he was using after his power went out Thursday night. Carbon monoxide from a gasoline-powered generator killed a couple in their 60s at Glenville, New York, the police said Saturday. And the body of a Marlborough, Massachusetts, public works supervisor was recovered from a reservoir Saturday, a day after he went missing while checking on tree limbs downed by the ice.</div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSHwmIHiU5d59YMYcBOzI04hVXG1r2tnXWcC6Skegy-XJBr3gOTf2xWQITFkatY_OqF_TWRf-AEaF15BMfp93HnIIxrCW2sAb2qFemEIc5LOmOvrX2lS4rXAx30_Y8blkNDoi9AN1VOyM/s1600-h/DSC03294.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037213164592114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSHwmIHiU5d59YMYcBOzI04hVXG1r2tnXWcC6Skegy-XJBr3gOTf2xWQITFkatY_OqF_TWRf-AEaF15BMfp93HnIIxrCW2sAb2qFemEIc5LOmOvrX2lS4rXAx30_Y8blkNDoi9AN1VOyM/s320/DSC03294.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Richard Yates's 'Revolutionary Road': '50s bleakness in the New York 'burbs</strong><br />By Charles McGrath<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Richard Yates's 1961 novel, "Revolutionary Road," is far from the kind of property that typically becomes a big Hollywood movie, especially one starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in their first post-"Titanic" outing together. For one thing, the book is set back in the mid-20th century - an era that, until "Mad Men" came along to exhume it, was thought to have about as much entertainment potential as the Bronze Age. The story requires armies of boring fedora-wearing commuters to disembark from Grand Central every morning. The characters wear dopey clothes and drive boatlike cars, and everyone drinks and smokes too much - even pregnant women.<br />Nor does it help that "Revolutionary Road" is among the bleakest books ever written. It ends unhappily, with a gruesome death, and neither of the main characters is entirely likable to begin with. Partly autobiographical, the novel tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, who in the mid-1950s move with their two children to the 'burbs (the movie was shot on location in Darien, Connecticut, a good deal more upscale than the Wheelers' town) and from the minute they get there hold themselves apart.<br />On no particular evidence the Wheelers consider themselves full of unrealized potential. Frank (drawing on Yates's experience as a sometime copywriter for Remington Rand) works for Knox Business Machines at what he calls "the dullest job you can possibly imagine," but thinks of himself as an intellectual, an "intense, nicotine-stained Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man."<br />April, like Yates's first wife, Sheila, has theatrical aspirations, and it's she who comes up with the solution to their depressing, unfulfilled lives: they'll chuck everything and move to Paris, where she'll get a well-paying secretarial job until Frank "finds" himself. For Frank, who has meanwhile begun a grubby affair with a young woman at the office, the plan is an agreeable pipe dream, but April is deadly earnest about it, and the marriage proceeds to unravel with the inexorableness of Greek tragedy. Watching them is like rubbernecking at a car wreck.<br />"I'm pretty surprised it ever got made," Blake Bailey, Yates's biographer, said recently about the movie version, scheduled to open Dec. 26 in the United States and worldwide throughout the winter. "It has long been an ambition in Hollywood to make a movie that's the last word on postwar suburban malaise, but like any highly nuanced work of literary art, 'Revolutionary Road' is awfully hard to translate onto the screen."<br />By all accounts, that the movie did get made is owing mostly to the drive and enthusiasm of Winslet, who was taken with the script from the moment she read it. "I loved the emotional nakedness, the brutal honesty about what can sometimes happen in a marriage," she said in an interview. She began lobbying DiCaprio, she recalled, and she also worked on Sam Mendes, the director. He was an easier sell in some ways, because he happens to be her husband.<br />What none of the principals knew then is that for all its gloominess, or maybe even because of it, "Revolutionary Road" is a novel cherished by a passionate and protective coven of admirers (including, incidentally, Matthew Weiner, the creator of "Mad Men") who pass it along, the novelist Richard Ford has said, like a secret literary handshake. They cherish its honesty, its uncompromising exactness, the austere beauty of its prose.<br />But despite its many champions, the book has slipped in and out of print, never quite catching on with a wider audience, and it would probably amuse and irritate the author in equal measure to know that it has been reissued in a movie tie-in edition.<br />Though he would have hated the term, Yates was a writer's writer, or even a writer's writer's writer. He was extravagantly admired by his peers and by many critics; but popular success, which he cared about more than he let on, maddeningly eluded him. He was dogged by bad luck - "Revolutionary Road," his first novel and also his best, was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award but lost to "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy - and bad timing. At a time when postmodernism and meta-fiction were starting to become fashionable, he clung to the realist tradition of his models Fitzgerald and Flaubert.<br />Yates could also be his own worst enemy, courtly and cavalier at times but at other times bitter and self-inflated, and after the breakup of two marriages he became almost a caricature of the alcoholic, self-destructive American writer. By the end of his life he was doing little else but smoke (even when attached to an oxygen tank), cough, drink and write. He died in 1992 at 66, though he seemed much older.<br />He knew his way around Hollywood sufficiently to be skeptical about the movie prospects of "Revolutionary Road." Right after the book came out, Sam Goldwyn Jr. expressed interest. But Yates wrote later: "Cooler heads in his organization decided that the moviegoing public 'is not ready for a story of such unrelieved tragedy."'<br />Much the same thing happened in 1965 when Yates took a meeting with Albert S. Ruddy, the producer of "The Godfather," who had just bought the rights to "Revolutionary Road." Is the miserably unhappy ending of the novel a problem? Ruddy asked, according to Bailey's biography, "A Tragedy Honesty."<br />"Why, hell, let's face it, of course it's a problem. Nine out of 10 guys in This Town would cop out on a problem like that."<br />What Ruddy proposed was not a cop-out, exactly, but rather a lot of tricky camerawork - a flashback here, a match-dissolve there, a dolly-back and a pan - so the audience couldn't be entirely certain what had happened.<br />Ruddy, caught up in the "Godfather" saga, eventually sold the rights to the actor Patrick O'Neal, who was passionate about the book but not really a writer and spent the rest of his life trying to finish a workable screenplay. Marion Rosenberg, now a producer but O'Neal's agent at the time, advised his widow, Cynthia, that the way to film "Revolutionary Road" was to steer clear of Hollywood entirely. Despite being approached many times and by some big names, she said, she didn't want to let the book out of her sight until she knew it was in the proper hands, and a few years ago she sold it to BBC Films.<br />"I thought that was the way to develop the script," she said. "Under the radar, with people who understood the written word."<br />Justin Haythe, the screenwriter hired by the BBC, is 35, an American who grew up in London, and "Revolutionary Road" is just his second script. He got the job, he said recently, because he was "hugely affordable," adding, "You don't want to front-load a project like this with a lot of unnecessary expense."<br />Another thing in his favor was that he already knew the novel, having read and admired it a few years earlier. "The book is very cinematic in some ways," Haythe said, pointing to a few scenes, like a roadside quarrel between Frank and April, that practically contain their own stage directions.<br />"But it never occurred to me that it could be a viable business proposition," Haythe went on. "You've got the ending, the whole outlook of the book." Everything changed, he said, when Winslet and Mendes took an interest, and once DiCaprio came on board the movie almost immediately went into production.<br />Scott Rudin, the producer of "Revolutionary Road," has a track record of making sophisticated literary adaptations, like "The Hours" and "No Country for Old Men." He knew Yates and tried, years ago, to buy the rights to his novel. "Kate sent me the script and asked my advice," Rudin said. "I told her, 'The perfect director for this lives right in your house.' I think Sam wanted some validation from someone who wasn't his wife."<br />He added: "No one was worried about the subject matter. In a way that was the catalyst. In my experience it often works that way. The very things that to an outsider would seem daunting. Those are always the reason why people take something on. The only thing we were worried about was whether people would still buy the idea of Paris as a panacea for everything."<br />Haythe's original screenplay, which Rosenberg called one of the best first drafts she had ever seen, was a faithful and at times literal adaptation, using great chunks of Yates's own language.<br />"Sam's a very visual guy, and he kept saying, 'What does it look like?"' Haythe recalled. "I told him I imagined it as a kind of shot going up into the air, and then it starts to fall back to earth at the same speed. To think of it like that was a great way to be held to account as a writer. Sam got me to focus on this as a tragic love story, and the big challenge was to find ways to externalize all the things they don't say to each other."<br />Mendes said that in editing the film he cut some 18 scenes, or 20 minutes. "The result is less literal but more in the spirit of the book," he explained.<br />When he picked up the novel after first reading the script, Mendes recalled, it "just slayed me."<br />"The book is very particular in its insights into what people are thinking when they're saying the opposite," he said. "The subtext is made explicit, and you get this sense of an overpowering ache, of collective longing."<br />He added that a number of early viewers of the movie, including Yates's daughters, had approached him to say: You didn't mess it up. (Or words to that effect: the book's partisans tend to be more graphic.) "That's meant to be high praise," Mendes explained, "but I think it's really a sigh of relief. There are a lot of great books, but somehow this one is different. If you make a film of 'War and Peace,' people don't come up to you say, 'You better not mess it up.' I'm glad I didn't know about this at the beginning, or I think I might have just frozen."</div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAUVKpcVwqSYcsVi0b2_9m8sx756cIAXxicL9MiyQ5-Zc7ipcbPMomFIRTDLxx6Gdz5r9xWSeEsGQts8xP8iwazR7Oz5lm_3nDAlP0jUERlR2M0Bo23mfuBgpPd9PBUNvFxr1gn2YJszk/s1600-h/DSC03295.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037208747148338" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAUVKpcVwqSYcsVi0b2_9m8sx756cIAXxicL9MiyQ5-Zc7ipcbPMomFIRTDLxx6Gdz5r9xWSeEsGQts8xP8iwazR7Oz5lm_3nDAlP0jUERlR2M0Bo23mfuBgpPd9PBUNvFxr1gn2YJszk/s320/DSC03295.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Killing of migrant worker in Moscow is investigated as hate crime<br /></strong>By Michael Schwirtz<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />MOSCOW: The police in Moscow are investigating the killing of a Central Asian migrant worker, who was stabbed several times and decapitated in an apparent attack by ultranationalists.<br />The severed head of the victim, a citizen of Tajikistan, was discovered Wednesday in a trash can, wrapped in a plastic bag, the press service for the investigative wing of the Prosecutor General's Office said.<br />Investigators said the victim and another Tajik migrant worker were attacked Dec. 6 after they left work at a food warehouse south of Moscow. The newspaper Kommersant quoted unnamed police sources saying the victim was Salekh Azizov, 20, from Vidnoe, also south of Moscow. The second Tajik worker escaped but was hospitalized with injuries, the investigators said.<br />In an e-mail statement sent to two human rights organizations that monitor hate crimes in Russia, an obscure group calling itself the Militant Organization of Russian Nationalists claimed responsibility for the killing. The statement included a photograph of the victim's severed head.<br />Galina Kozhevnikova, a deputy director of the Sova Center, one of the organizations that received the statement, said it asserted that the killing was a demonstration of the group's "resolve to fight against the non-Russian occupation, and a warning to officials that the same will happen to them if they do not stop the flow of immigration."<br />Millions of migrant workers, mostly from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, live in Russia, which is dependent on their labor because of a rapidly declining population and a dwindling domestic work force. But violent attacks against ethnic minorities in Russia are common and have become more severe as more non-Slavic workers leave economically blighted regions for Russian cities in search of work, analysts said.<br />This year, 85 people have been killed and 367 have been wounded in attacks by violent nationalists, Kozhevnikova said. She said the numbers were probably far higher because many attacks go unrecorded or are reported months later.<br />A student who was attacked Dec. 5 - Stanley Robinson, an black American from Providence, Rhode Island, who was on a study-abroad program to Volgograd in southern Russia - remained in critical condition after being stabbed three times on his way back from a gym, a relative said. The police are still investigating whether the attack was a hate crime.<br />Human rights groups have criticized the police and prosecutors for appearing to sympathize with violent nationalists and for not adequately addressing racist attacks.<br />State-run television channels have largely ignored the killing of the Tajik worker, though newspapers, which are typically more independent of the government, have covered it heavily.<br />A police crackdown this year on nationalist and neo-fascist groups in Moscow reduced the number of attacks in the capital this summer, Kozhevnikova said.<br />But violence in Moscow has begun to rise again, particularly after the rape and killing of a 15-year-old ethnic Russian girl two months ago. A city maintenance worker from Uzbekistan was charged with the crime, setting off protests and revenge attacks by ultranationalist groups, who often refer to non-Slavs on Russian soil as "occupiers."<br />In the killing of the Tajik worker, the police found his head next to the Mozhaisky District administration building in western Moscow, not far from where the girl was killed.The episode is reminiscent of another beheading videotaped and disseminated on the Internet more than a year ago. In the video, a masked person decapitates a bound, dark-skinned man with what appears to be a large knife.Moments later, another man, also bound, is shot in the head. The video ends with two people in masks giving Nazi salutes in front of a red banner emblazoned with a swastika. The police have not identified the killers.</div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Russian police arrest dozens of protesters</strong><br />By Michael Schwirtz<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />MOSCOW: The Russian police detained dozens of anti-government protesters who attempted to hold an unsanctioned rally in Moscow on Sunday.<br />A huge contingent of police and riot troops in body armor prevented the planned protest in central Moscow from materializing in the latest sign that public expression of dissent against the authorities will not be tolerated under President Dmitri Medvedev any more than it was under his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, who is now prime minister.<br />As many as 100 people were detained, including Eduard Limonov, the head of the banned National Bolshevik Party, said a spokeswoman for Other Russia, a coalition of opposition groups led by Limonov and the former chess champion Garry Kasparov, among others. Meanwhile, the police said that about 10 people were detained during a similar protest in St. Petersburg, the Interfax news agency reported.<br />The planned demonstration was meant as a protest against the Kremlin's handling of the financial crisis and against plans to change the Constitution to extend presidential and parliamentary term limits, a move government critics have said could be used to extend the authority of Putin, and possibly lead to his early return to the presidency. Putin has said that Medvedev will remain president until his term ends in 2012, but has not ruled out running for a third term after that.<br />As with similar protests organized by Other Russia, the authorities denied permission for demonstrators to hold the rally Sunday, called the Dissenters' March, but organizers vowed to go ahead with the event anyway.<br />The police appeared to have foreknowledge of who would attend the protest and detained people as they arrived at the designated site, taking them to waiting buses.<br />The rally was scheduled to correspond with the establishment this weekend of a new opposition group, Solidarity, an organization modeled on the Polish anti-Communist movement of the 1980s of the same name.<br />On the opening day of Solidarity's founding congress Friday, unidentified individuals dumped a busload of dead and wounded sheep outside the meeting hall in a Moscow suburb. The sheep were wearing baseball caps and tee shirts with Solidarity written on them, according to Kasparov's Web site.</div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Inmate is cleared of sexual assault</strong><br />By James C. Mckinley Jr<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />HOUSTON: A Houston man who had served five years in prison was ordered released Friday after a genetic test proved he was not the man who sexually assaulted an 8-year-old boy in 2002.<br />District Attorney Kenneth Magidson said the authorities bungled the arrest and trial of the man, Ricardo Rachell, because neither the police nor the prosecutor ever asked for tests of biological evidence found on the victim that would have positively identified his attacker.<br />Instead, Rachell, 51, was convicted solely on the testimony of the victim and another young boy, who said he saw him and the victim together before the attack.<br />Rachell vehemently maintained his innocence from the day he was arrested, and in late November a test of the biological evidence never even mentioned, much less introduced, during the trial proved that the boys had named the wrong man.<br />On Friday morning, Judge Susan Brown of the Harris County District Court, who presided at the trial, ordered Rachell released on his own recognizance pending a hearing on whether his conviction should be thrown out.<br />It remained unclear whether the original defense lawyer, Ron Hayes, knew about the evidence. Scott Durfee, the general counsel for the Harris County district attorney, said a document turned over to the defense, known as an "offense report," mentioned the existence of bodily fluids from the attacker found on the boy and his clothes.<br />Hayes told The Houston Chronicle on Friday, however, that he had never heard about the evidence. "It was not disclosed in any offense report that I saw," he said. "If I had been aware, I would have pushed for DNA testing, without question."<br />The case is one of 540 that have been reviewed by the Harris County district attorney since 2001, when the Texas Legislature enacted a law allowing prisoners to seek to have their convictions re-examined in light of new DNA evidence.<br />At the time of Rachell's arrest, the Houston HoustonDepartment's crime laboratory was embroiled in a scandal over slipshod work and dubious results. The laboratory had a long history of making mistakes, and it was not uncommon for DNA evidence to be collected but never analyzed, an independent audit found.<br />So pervasive were the problems that the laboratory was shut down two months after Rachell's arrest.<br />The failures in the Rachell case did not stop at the laboratory.<br />Detectives gathered biological evidence from the victim and took a DNA sample from Rachell but did not ask for it to be tested. The prosecutor never raised the evidence at trial. Neither did the defense, nor the lawyer who handled Rachell's appeal.<br />The evidence did not surface until Deborah Summers, a court-appointed lawyer, petitioned Harris County to produce it under the 2001 state law, if it existed. Summers recalled that she had had little hope of success.<br />"Then I got a call out of the blue from the D.A.'s office in February 2008 saying we have this evidence and we have to send it to the lab," she said.<br />Rachell's legal nightmare began on Oct. 20, 2002, when a man enticed the 8-year-old victim to an abandoned house with an offer of money for clearing away trash. The man then raped the boy.<br />The next day, the victim's family told the police that the boy had seen Rachell in the neighborhood and identified him as his attacker. Rachell lived nearby with his mother and was known to ride a bicycle in the neighborhood.<br />Prosecutors said Magidson's office would ask for a full pardon, which would clear Rachell's name and entitle him to $300,000 in state reparations.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMfGT42kxJ_UbEdBGzA0js20TrhtiAwVLzyc1MBgokmHxr5P9FSbI2yZFG4gy3XgGdv7Yu9yYlpaf6rLr6L1fXj3ut7-ZrCkb-v2xKP1SNoV5NEa8mG2UsK9kMO4n6YUlESeSJ7jsF6t8/s1600-h/DSC03297.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037196917421490" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMfGT42kxJ_UbEdBGzA0js20TrhtiAwVLzyc1MBgokmHxr5P9FSbI2yZFG4gy3XgGdv7Yu9yYlpaf6rLr6L1fXj3ut7-ZrCkb-v2xKP1SNoV5NEa8mG2UsK9kMO4n6YUlESeSJ7jsF6t8/s320/DSC03297.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Harvard starts program for late-career professionals</strong><br />By Steve Lohr<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />Harvard kicked off a small but ambitious experiment last week that it hopes will become a new "third stage" of university education. For the student-fellows in the program, most in their 50s and early 60s, the goal is a second-act career in a new stage of life.<br />The 14 fellows have résumés brimming with achievement - including a former astronaut, a former senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, a physician-entrepreneur from Texas, a former public utility official from California, a former health minister from Venezuela and a former computer executive from Switzerland.<br />They gathered at Harvard on Thursday to begin the yearlong program intended to help them learn how to be successful social entrepreneurs or leaders of nonprofit organizations focused on social problems like poverty, health, education and the environment. Their interests include sickle cell anemia, women's education in Africa, health care quality and water conservation.<br />The opportunity, the fellows say, is to pick up new knowledge, skills and professional relationships in a new realm. To Charles Bolden Jr., one of the fellows, it has the potential to be as life-changing as his selection to join America's space program nearly three decades ago.<br />"The Harvard program feels sort of like that," said Bolden, 62, a retired major general in the U.S. Marine Corps and a veteran of four space shuttle missions.<br />The program, called the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, is a collaboration among five of the university's professional schools - business, law, government, education and public health. It is seen as a next stage for universities, beyond undergraduate and then graduate and professional schools.<br />If successful, Harvard professors say, it can serve as a model for schools at other universities, creating case studies and course material.<br />"This is about deploying a leadership force to have an impact on major social problems," said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at the Harvard Business School who heads the program. "We want to make the case to the world that experience matters."<br />Nonprofit organizations face a collective "leadership deficit" over the next decade of more than 600,000 senior managers, the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit organization that advises foundations and nonprofit groups, has estimated.<br />The Harvard program is aimed at the upper tier of that leadership gap. "This initiative is path-breaking and has enormous potential if it is done properly," said Thomas Tierney, the chairman of Bridgespan.<br />The Harvard experiment is part of a larger effort to help find productive "next" careers for a coming flood of retiring American baby boomers - more than 75 million people born from 1946 to 1964.<br />Indeed, more than five million Americans who are 44 to 70 are already engaged in a stage of work after their first careers that has a social impact, mainly in education, health care, government and other nonprofit organizations, according to a survey this year by Peter D. Hart Research Associates.<br />Such later-in-life, second acts have been called "encore careers," "postcareers" and "engaged retirement." No matter the name, the concept seems to have considerable appeal, encouraged by celebrity role models like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. Half of Americans age 50 to 70 want to find work that has a social impact after their primary career ends, according to a poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates.<br />"There is a pretty significant pool of interest, and the question is whether they will be able to act on that interest in large numbers," said Marc Freedman, chief executive of Civic Ventures, a nonprofit organization whose programs and research focus on social careers for baby boomers.<br />Civic Ventures and other groups have sponsored programs at community colleges to develop initiatives that match people's experience and skills to later-in-life careers in education, health care and social services. The Harvard program, along with the community college efforts, represents "the fitful creation of institutions and pathways for this new stage of engagement and purpose in the second half of life," Freedman said.<br />The fellows in the leadership program come to Harvard with varying degrees of certainty about their next step. But all say they hope to use the course work, tutorials and field trips to become more effective social entrepreneurs. Next November, each fellow is expected to deliver not a dissertation, but a business plan of action.<br />Hans Ulrich Märki, 62, a Swiss citizen, retired in April as the chairman of IBM operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He has traveled widely across those regions, met with heads of state and worked on applying technology to fields like education, health care and energy. As yet, he said, he has no particular project in mind, but is eager to explore the possibilities at Harvard, though he confesses to some anxiety. "I haven't sat on a school bench in 40 years."<br />Dr. Charles Denham, 52, is already a successful social entrepreneur. He has a thriving consulting firm that works with companies on health care information technology and finances his nonprofit Texas Medical Institute of Technology, a research and education organization dedicated to improving health care quality in hospitals. Denham wants to pass on what he has learned but also consult Harvard's experts to become more productive.<br />Within Harvard, there is a strong sense that developing this third stage of education must be part of the evolving mission of leading universities. "It may be a steep hill to climb to success, but this has to be part of the 21st-century educational plan," said Charles Ogletree, a professor at the Harvard Law School.<br />There is also a personal incentive for many of the faculty as well. "All of us are motivated to some degree by that fact that we're at or near this stage in our own lives," said David Gergen, 66, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government. "We want to know how to go through this and how to help others to go through this to have more of an impact."</div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFQ7feB52aOGMkyG6L4YyEbqNSQjVxeiIy6CO4O9NQ5GDdQemooYYYlfnpmWg3c6jWewoBDculIN6PPtiyw4O4Q3mqyb1TNRAKr5_ZMV1KOzLsQuXzifP9thQtSoekc2kh5jGvZsMGaI0/s1600-h/DSC03298.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037199105187650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFQ7feB52aOGMkyG6L4YyEbqNSQjVxeiIy6CO4O9NQ5GDdQemooYYYlfnpmWg3c6jWewoBDculIN6PPtiyw4O4Q3mqyb1TNRAKr5_ZMV1KOzLsQuXzifP9thQtSoekc2kh5jGvZsMGaI0/s320/DSC03298.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifq_tNNmX-rEFrZS9yzeNvcy-pWMbZaa5jZ6VNbtSMBaL7oj9EtkSheH6azonJimKQ5BAcIBFz8zMwrVrRV6navu6VumwET97_mJqV3aKKkSUZI0kFuarn4SRzpiHQ2oOtXUSVHXM12Tw/s1600-h/DSC03299.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280037190006661154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifq_tNNmX-rEFrZS9yzeNvcy-pWMbZaa5jZ6VNbtSMBaL7oj9EtkSheH6azonJimKQ5BAcIBFz8zMwrVrRV6navu6VumwET97_mJqV3aKKkSUZI0kFuarn4SRzpiHQ2oOtXUSVHXM12Tw/s320/DSC03299.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfCIf7wsG1ggTuiR5-cwFMIV6ICZZSqzAEhdDgfnPA0FeKjJvaJw9baNZJhO8rfTgQUuy81u4cedCTyz7a_A0uFrj0mOAhyphenhyphenCl9ZoYgcF-uI1QLh1aMSBICLHD5j9Ef6QNE2lgsqT9Zr9g/s1600-h/DSC03300.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036950406033618" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfCIf7wsG1ggTuiR5-cwFMIV6ICZZSqzAEhdDgfnPA0FeKjJvaJw9baNZJhO8rfTgQUuy81u4cedCTyz7a_A0uFrj0mOAhyphenhyphenCl9ZoYgcF-uI1QLh1aMSBICLHD5j9Ef6QNE2lgsqT9Zr9g/s320/DSC03300.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyeuhw-CdlnUpXFVP5LS5mDgEfpsVIXhuG2P4xndzPHDheZPWxk5mhgJsHgkVZ5N6qHnCBYEudL9HXFLnkyQGUs291ay3aOnTe1UaEj9EPjV2ofGNtw1tlg2sbuc4J27xejFZ09re8Db0/s1600-h/DSC03301.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036944943646434" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyeuhw-CdlnUpXFVP5LS5mDgEfpsVIXhuG2P4xndzPHDheZPWxk5mhgJsHgkVZ5N6qHnCBYEudL9HXFLnkyQGUs291ay3aOnTe1UaEj9EPjV2ofGNtw1tlg2sbuc4J27xejFZ09re8Db0/s320/DSC03301.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP0tk1CviPRpBwF09Qnw6xU_bX2jw_eQyt6EZwp7gwVkDXn7RwR4E8cYyMbQ3ifx51toRenJ4-Uq8eDrw2vH6llnSile3xNnfGnFa-mr5ImwDlZnYSVWvYe1IAwn15gN_oYkxN49j_DXA/s1600-h/DSC03302.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036945895256450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP0tk1CviPRpBwF09Qnw6xU_bX2jw_eQyt6EZwp7gwVkDXn7RwR4E8cYyMbQ3ifx51toRenJ4-Uq8eDrw2vH6llnSile3xNnfGnFa-mr5ImwDlZnYSVWvYe1IAwn15gN_oYkxN49j_DXA/s320/DSC03302.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB8HonY1pgXQ15qq0F4R89ZXOtl3G0z2kAtqjsUo8UAgCdLitHkIlIWgmUeTx95eyEheoyVZQ15CU9Ef1vri2F6WXxAiv6Z2xTkWhStptJbvtw-zh69Ss-fb3csqe2ssJj6K9k-mhmj4M/s1600-h/DSC03303.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036939981454562" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB8HonY1pgXQ15qq0F4R89ZXOtl3G0z2kAtqjsUo8UAgCdLitHkIlIWgmUeTx95eyEheoyVZQ15CU9Ef1vri2F6WXxAiv6Z2xTkWhStptJbvtw-zh69Ss-fb3csqe2ssJj6K9k-mhmj4M/s320/DSC03303.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAQTx9zx2LhX2G1akOlX5FQFREtp2y6tB4C5pJA2UhyphenhyphenmisycL8nU6ShQ6eQiVTqIwi346ZU7VpA1UJkAGV6M538xZiA72_-QHfaXUDUMhjP9M12bcjfQX53nbB34thE512lkc86iGKfPg/s1600-h/DSC03304.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036942915311906" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAQTx9zx2LhX2G1akOlX5FQFREtp2y6tB4C5pJA2UhyphenhyphenmisycL8nU6ShQ6eQiVTqIwi346ZU7VpA1UJkAGV6M538xZiA72_-QHfaXUDUMhjP9M12bcjfQX53nbB34thE512lkc86iGKfPg/s320/DSC03304.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg14dwbnPCDFCfRwjcO8mfXNwh_qY3WdVhsrW82igMu4ZZ4jIVXHtY4h-D00ZWIo6uJ85WLItLgA9dLEgi3Ytyp70zA1kBhZtLzb-pFR33q1nm6qCHZsWYryT3SMpjFdYMhbWLz0x8qSSA/s1600-h/DSC03305.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036699605917122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg14dwbnPCDFCfRwjcO8mfXNwh_qY3WdVhsrW82igMu4ZZ4jIVXHtY4h-D00ZWIo6uJ85WLItLgA9dLEgi3Ytyp70zA1kBhZtLzb-pFR33q1nm6qCHZsWYryT3SMpjFdYMhbWLz0x8qSSA/s320/DSC03305.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9tIV9WOYkc3CBSaDT3IXkl_n-zDXbnCcN-izpZwkxZTU_urmPONYvxF0lPJvfY56Mt2_JGZsScWUN2xx0JJyxKDDegq1-k0U2y1SJVhP863e9uDgPLR-CNwM-Rk4A946Pln4OfmteoqY/s1600-h/DSC03306.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036696797922258" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9tIV9WOYkc3CBSaDT3IXkl_n-zDXbnCcN-izpZwkxZTU_urmPONYvxF0lPJvfY56Mt2_JGZsScWUN2xx0JJyxKDDegq1-k0U2y1SJVhP863e9uDgPLR-CNwM-Rk4A946Pln4OfmteoqY/s320/DSC03306.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhToZRQReOzl4oK41cDfgNc0Q0A0GAIoafn16O4f_KxuL03sm8j_Q9iZgNvhHWtkC4bjbSiZn4MyuXJviMyc3RIQ16jXLazDsAau7drivHajT7Y7sCPeq7ZITi-RCkX6PyjW7eG676k17g/s1600-h/DSC03307.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036694744299986" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhToZRQReOzl4oK41cDfgNc0Q0A0GAIoafn16O4f_KxuL03sm8j_Q9iZgNvhHWtkC4bjbSiZn4MyuXJviMyc3RIQ16jXLazDsAau7drivHajT7Y7sCPeq7ZITi-RCkX6PyjW7eG676k17g/s320/DSC03307.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzi4mDNgSLjoivLJJGgIPwdLos9KmWYQR_TXZNa5Xwp5fHdhuJICdk3-9Dwr51q_y2vx8sfb3lunuJVItMZU8zZEpG5STm6CFi_R0QCCB6Xv8d5hfsSQRqS-fqYTMQ8nktXrfeZXZBuEc/s1600-h/DSC03309.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036692653757714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzi4mDNgSLjoivLJJGgIPwdLos9KmWYQR_TXZNa5Xwp5fHdhuJICdk3-9Dwr51q_y2vx8sfb3lunuJVItMZU8zZEpG5STm6CFi_R0QCCB6Xv8d5hfsSQRqS-fqYTMQ8nktXrfeZXZBuEc/s320/DSC03309.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn7J633v3iaj5fnJ1dmYbMZd2zT3HLwl-RrWUPg1vgaJLyT_zsUGp4WcyEcdnAP3RE0DUZhCKant2fWbcMdjVHR-LS9cDgP-Ub7J_ZVwTR-seC4YTFfATKeono_a_RzXX7t5yVPuwp6zI/s1600-h/DSC03310.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036692389934066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn7J633v3iaj5fnJ1dmYbMZd2zT3HLwl-RrWUPg1vgaJLyT_zsUGp4WcyEcdnAP3RE0DUZhCKant2fWbcMdjVHR-LS9cDgP-Ub7J_ZVwTR-seC4YTFfATKeono_a_RzXX7t5yVPuwp6zI/s320/DSC03310.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCc2Xgma882R0J4fyyLQCAZa2cq6bHLd7QVAunx3K66cOt-VUn9fxRa81oBebZxp3bqGLnvSA5hDFJOeyScgdGpaHBqCln_c_vGSlVQlcewok5hHh1dB6ccOxwbqVzERvOzzvwXhslhiQ/s1600-h/DSC03312.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036447854008722" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCc2Xgma882R0J4fyyLQCAZa2cq6bHLd7QVAunx3K66cOt-VUn9fxRa81oBebZxp3bqGLnvSA5hDFJOeyScgdGpaHBqCln_c_vGSlVQlcewok5hHh1dB6ccOxwbqVzERvOzzvwXhslhiQ/s320/DSC03312.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMAJ8oYzgkffJ04CuErY74MJvwUUl3chfmWLn_iSYES8268RzIucAsqpNaLjGME3QkiKRNFppmd6dSPAbSRlBBkEZUJMvTz5b9afi3l6Rvmdnw6CaIGazYzaW-UDkccVBqwDVWOzBMoMY/s1600-h/DSC03313.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036448449007858" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMAJ8oYzgkffJ04CuErY74MJvwUUl3chfmWLn_iSYES8268RzIucAsqpNaLjGME3QkiKRNFppmd6dSPAbSRlBBkEZUJMvTz5b9afi3l6Rvmdnw6CaIGazYzaW-UDkccVBqwDVWOzBMoMY/s320/DSC03313.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7_k3CA1aqMO7V3hXh7ZUdfRM4Mg4bcKkxmgS8RuzI-HIVCMxXYHSrkLAW5di0rA4yfbcI2UXun4I6sSMbzR6B9o-lCvuiFS9v8PTXGGpyQGaadpOsagtvD6ekRBJ6bISmqjQHsIxdYss/s1600-h/DSC03314.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036435327916418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7_k3CA1aqMO7V3hXh7ZUdfRM4Mg4bcKkxmgS8RuzI-HIVCMxXYHSrkLAW5di0rA4yfbcI2UXun4I6sSMbzR6B9o-lCvuiFS9v8PTXGGpyQGaadpOsagtvD6ekRBJ6bISmqjQHsIxdYss/s320/DSC03314.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEippysNxZ96x8PzOMAyLpE_vJpJOitGjhyphenhyphenr8L_HrnWT6tMCUT7xp29wqEBPbisA8aSALhy_6_Q1E4VZFmMIw5H-oBt_oXI2AfqyilUmdZ73vxv_lQmqACbYS8_rZEamQ8fVb1h5QYi7izc/s1600-h/DSC03315.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036432280069650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEippysNxZ96x8PzOMAyLpE_vJpJOitGjhyphenhyphenr8L_HrnWT6tMCUT7xp29wqEBPbisA8aSALhy_6_Q1E4VZFmMIw5H-oBt_oXI2AfqyilUmdZ73vxv_lQmqACbYS8_rZEamQ8fVb1h5QYi7izc/s320/DSC03315.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd84sA4ckZm2HrY9oEixZ7gvQ1jEAGuLxIvDnHEyRD78jQidnc-tliw-6u78MkNFxShvl684fXRIYBpaqSs1GKrHZroweKgteZv4bEwyay-KtHNbzV54rZI6ryGL4Xf9WxeoY6bCE6ScE/s1600-h/DSC03316.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036425066947986" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd84sA4ckZm2HrY9oEixZ7gvQ1jEAGuLxIvDnHEyRD78jQidnc-tliw-6u78MkNFxShvl684fXRIYBpaqSs1GKrHZroweKgteZv4bEwyay-KtHNbzV54rZI6ryGL4Xf9WxeoY6bCE6ScE/s320/DSC03316.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNTKutFu_Mvmk4EWUOIDSoeNNq_4LBf-7Qg-5vzMUC6qrXec-tizlg5lrtoGQbbr3RQ9CqTCg7juNewT5RlFXMVLzV8F4RtI5gPHcqFtnejmYLRvhZ2JArkxsh33JMtM6QTeEhfCYb8vM/s1600-h/DSC03317.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036203873725058" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNTKutFu_Mvmk4EWUOIDSoeNNq_4LBf-7Qg-5vzMUC6qrXec-tizlg5lrtoGQbbr3RQ9CqTCg7juNewT5RlFXMVLzV8F4RtI5gPHcqFtnejmYLRvhZ2JArkxsh33JMtM6QTeEhfCYb8vM/s320/DSC03317.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik8GFEizUSDtdc3WWDJb-Qzmu48Yf2MoB84wyVIdT_qeh85ftYov3X6YLqKzFmjs_9QUYpEAEebtW2gqkRkMwoCoSi1csG3Ckbom53iVGZjPsbO_HNN4GYX8dw2Cj46FHu51SWWsQ9py0/s1600-h/DSC03318.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036203029289394" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik8GFEizUSDtdc3WWDJb-Qzmu48Yf2MoB84wyVIdT_qeh85ftYov3X6YLqKzFmjs_9QUYpEAEebtW2gqkRkMwoCoSi1csG3Ckbom53iVGZjPsbO_HNN4GYX8dw2Cj46FHu51SWWsQ9py0/s320/DSC03318.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO0QBlDkAlKk4dYd1RKwZmygO9r5YklNpjnstOX_Qtg91rmzkBEQrBSHn48GrxA4FxnkwlSoE7cxIlVyEnhke0bkk2ljN-yc8l8A3SGaGd7HvQNOQpEGYmYmaHBJnHnVsseOgt7OvSoiU/s1600-h/DSC03319.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036200620840674" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO0QBlDkAlKk4dYd1RKwZmygO9r5YklNpjnstOX_Qtg91rmzkBEQrBSHn48GrxA4FxnkwlSoE7cxIlVyEnhke0bkk2ljN-yc8l8A3SGaGd7HvQNOQpEGYmYmaHBJnHnVsseOgt7OvSoiU/s320/DSC03319.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxXUXSr1NLkLf5QA_9M5_3NYlpB0PKLj-XssNHxMRQItghE6TfyCC7p__-CN4vqsMj1Q-vX0kdL5Sob_Hw7Ktq2vZrrkRnjCvXTEHdjzKcEygz-RwUoYXaXzZuCs6pQ-WeNj2LKHVuuSs/s1600-h/DSC03321.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280036193672803346" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxXUXSr1NLkLf5QA_9M5_3NYlpB0PKLj-XssNHxMRQItghE6TfyCC7p__-CN4vqsMj1Q-vX0kdL5Sob_Hw7Ktq2vZrrkRnjCvXTEHdjzKcEygz-RwUoYXaXzZuCs6pQ-WeNj2LKHVuuSs/s320/DSC03321.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz5rcbcNAxxp9FQCOs-M-nVPfNvfnQ7w_qZIudLn2w1q04dB3yGYecxaxfqIJOBl3ZjgJtl1xAaXcO9DUGEs22j567nxVG8S5KN2dGeAUf4Cz0Jb-PTz4_vB7aS8_TEcrTsVc78nqV7hM/s1600-h/DSC03322.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280035969715718258" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz5rcbcNAxxp9FQCOs-M-nVPfNvfnQ7w_qZIudLn2w1q04dB3yGYecxaxfqIJOBl3ZjgJtl1xAaXcO9DUGEs22j567nxVG8S5KN2dGeAUf4Cz0Jb-PTz4_vB7aS8_TEcrTsVc78nqV7hM/s320/DSC03322.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbY7YZMAXT19LXjbAYMNotG0wxqgoDJvAj-9BobHlbtUTtnxqd8XKt8Bx_crdi51rferyT34kaAuXZvPMOxyYx9N0WA2xdUfdiG1TX4seolSxVrjk1FyxyLa3x9y56KYwNB7gZo9sP5dY/s1600-h/DSC03323.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280035967275226290" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbY7YZMAXT19LXjbAYMNotG0wxqgoDJvAj-9BobHlbtUTtnxqd8XKt8Bx_crdi51rferyT34kaAuXZvPMOxyYx9N0WA2xdUfdiG1TX4seolSxVrjk1FyxyLa3x9y56KYwNB7gZo9sP5dY/s320/DSC03323.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8cD42j8hiw1516i0OGlplS248xe9Vf7C6X9XczWY-FrShsm3wVWx4goEjRE67E1Fj7EVNdfT_hj660WPWDTonChBncQluyjB0wMgj5WYo2O_UGMogvcbEMwusn-akWL9aOh_b6TexFn4/s1600-h/DSC03324.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280035965349792226" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8cD42j8hiw1516i0OGlplS248xe9Vf7C6X9XczWY-FrShsm3wVWx4goEjRE67E1Fj7EVNdfT_hj660WPWDTonChBncQluyjB0wMgj5WYo2O_UGMogvcbEMwusn-akWL9aOh_b6TexFn4/s320/DSC03324.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOm9lAyKTkfU4IS6zx0r21rdNoDi7CUz4ivX7_hB3eaGqAew3gVkhYDt-yT4-juwB7y4EjmE-GasFPZYiEgYxgyHXV_TNjmSiq0w6ZOff1E_GB96re44brB6Tgl0hlqsNVpg9Q8PIiv0k/s1600-h/DSC03327.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280035961325343426" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOm9lAyKTkfU4IS6zx0r21rdNoDi7CUz4ivX7_hB3eaGqAew3gVkhYDt-yT4-juwB7y4EjmE-GasFPZYiEgYxgyHXV_TNjmSiq0w6ZOff1E_GB96re44brB6Tgl0hlqsNVpg9Q8PIiv0k/s320/DSC03327.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYQbmRD4L_5k0cEDE9p4rMvDfmMGuZZVxGb7Ri_-atIaGYZqbE6pYNYaRlxNcRZwzG89UHEDN99xEj4u5Q2EJ8AKe9bHhmOEdCN1Rb8g7rJ9WnEmP8xpT6xfxBKNEmKFHPt0iW1iWv26s/s1600-h/DSC03329.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280035951620039890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYQbmRD4L_5k0cEDE9p4rMvDfmMGuZZVxGb7Ri_-atIaGYZqbE6pYNYaRlxNcRZwzG89UHEDN99xEj4u5Q2EJ8AKe9bHhmOEdCN1Rb8g7rJ9WnEmP8xpT6xfxBKNEmKFHPt0iW1iWv26s/s320/DSC03329.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008 </strong></div><strong><div align="center"><br /></strong>Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment</a> </div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-33735237900038209492008-12-14T11:32:00.022+01:002008-12-14T12:29:31.775+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Saturday, 13th December 2008<div align="center"><strong>Gates warns U.S. enemies not to test Obama </strong></div><strong><div align="justify"><br /></strong>Reuters<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />MANAMA: U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned the United States' enemies on Saturday against trying to take advantage of the early months of the new Washington administration to test U.S. resolve.<br />Gates also said the United States would stay deeply involved in the Middle East and the Gulf under Barack Obama's administration.<br />"I can assure you that a change in administration does not alter our fundamental interests, especially in the Middle East," he told a regional security conference in Bahrain.<br />Asked about Iran, he said the United States was not seeking to oust the country's leaders but did want to see a change in Iranian policies.<br />"Nobody is after a regime change in Iran. What we're after is a change in policies and a change in behaviour," Gates said.<br />"The president-elect and his team are under no illusions about Iran's behaviour and what Iran has been doing in the region and is doing in terms of its own weapons programs."<br />Many foreign policy experts, including vice-president elect Sen. Joe Biden, have suggested enemies of the United States will try to provoke a crisis early in Obama's term while the new administration is still finding its feet.<br />Gates, who will stay on under Obama, said extensive planning has gone into preparing for the transition.<br />"Anyone who thought that the upcoming months might present opportunities to test the new administration would be sorely mistaken," he told the Manama Dialogue conference, organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.<br />"President Obama and his national security team, myself included, will be ready to defend the interests of the United States and our friends and allies from the moment he takes office on January 20th."<br />Gates, a former CIA director, said the security of the Gulf had long been a central concern for Washington and he brought a message of continuity and commitment from Obama to U.S. allies in the region.<br />He repeated longstanding appeals for Sunni Arab states to support Iraq's U.S.-backed government with full diplomatic relations and forgiveness of Saddam Hussein-era debts.<br />Sunni Arab powers have harboured deep reservations about the Baghdad government, believing it to be sectarian and too close politically to Shi'ite-dominated Iran.<br />Gates said Sunni states should welcome a chance to forge close relations with Iraq, partly to prevent Iran from doing so.<br />"There is no doubt that Iran has been heavily engaged in trying to influence the development and direction of the Iraqi government -- and has not been a good neighbour," he said.<br />"Iraq wants to be your partner," he told his audience. "And, given the challenges in the Gulf, and the reality of Iran, you should wish to be theirs."<br />Gates restated U.S. complaints that Iran supports groups such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon and said its nuclear program was "almost assuredly" meant to lead to atomic weapons -- a charge Tehran disputes.<br />(Editing by Matthew Jones)</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong>0430</strong></div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5QMnhRosnbxM0DKknRJ2EFl3uwpZB6H1F3CQH7zD-KmRRuBWCzJR0WrCVp5Wwc_W-v3dwhj3hJoIy0KkEGeqwuaz5o8YYaK7jBQuSBQQuxqDHxIT514iz9pYJAReFZokx0-Z2hjyyr7M/s1600-h/DSC03215.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279595010529337122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5QMnhRosnbxM0DKknRJ2EFl3uwpZB6H1F3CQH7zD-KmRRuBWCzJR0WrCVp5Wwc_W-v3dwhj3hJoIy0KkEGeqwuaz5o8YYaK7jBQuSBQQuxqDHxIT514iz9pYJAReFZokx0-Z2hjyyr7M/s320/DSC03215.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNs6CoxNxfREQaOLfOD1FYdVbZJEmabX4K5Xyk3IWJOlkbOGyWRxUyr4A69w-Xr6rDoLAGxJhaM91-SdbMrHpqO4AvPv674nGLOWNftsWfZ7YQEGV0Y1qVpT_UOgIeyBDmq7qxW9uoWrY/s1600-h/DSC03218.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594839271921890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNs6CoxNxfREQaOLfOD1FYdVbZJEmabX4K5Xyk3IWJOlkbOGyWRxUyr4A69w-Xr6rDoLAGxJhaM91-SdbMrHpqO4AvPv674nGLOWNftsWfZ7YQEGV0Y1qVpT_UOgIeyBDmq7qxW9uoWrY/s320/DSC03218.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjur49b-ZYFaOgPhUQ9-ystypcePanQykTi-pDsCyXCUcVOB8r0W5NQs6pZRS8ZQ8IA7QANZgqYkr3WKMMHJe_zaeVPFatvIJehHnFRCq9IsSf4Q7ciZSOMdXEuOwzNuwVxXIoHPTg_5Ms/s1600-h/DSC03220.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594835022441842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjur49b-ZYFaOgPhUQ9-ystypcePanQykTi-pDsCyXCUcVOB8r0W5NQs6pZRS8ZQ8IA7QANZgqYkr3WKMMHJe_zaeVPFatvIJehHnFRCq9IsSf4Q7ciZSOMdXEuOwzNuwVxXIoHPTg_5Ms/s320/DSC03220.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinYFqfQKxIffbFEM-mEcHP8Tr63fuOiOkWhRQKm30D42trONhJJTFc40oNZRJNYF1io0GFJ_TyxXZJHLnHFoAEv-6Scz4b3BC7PZIie5i7wOgsnOvNpq_ZlD8MVFzwCsHohfgHB5OzBiQ/s1600-h/DSC03221.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594834640474834" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinYFqfQKxIffbFEM-mEcHP8Tr63fuOiOkWhRQKm30D42trONhJJTFc40oNZRJNYF1io0GFJ_TyxXZJHLnHFoAEv-6Scz4b3BC7PZIie5i7wOgsnOvNpq_ZlD8MVFzwCsHohfgHB5OzBiQ/s320/DSC03221.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxK_pPleiDw716dbnWs4yj6f1kq8FqFWw6XS3YWd96dDS93xmQENMGyEi6vL8IbOFX42rhrSLWaXVtSLbHgy83_OjU6xCq162ZxWEOssI8CKab0dqQlsd75Pgt9-rhHsDs7oWUdvp2JW8/s1600-h/DSC03222.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594835987183730" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxK_pPleiDw716dbnWs4yj6f1kq8FqFWw6XS3YWd96dDS93xmQENMGyEi6vL8IbOFX42rhrSLWaXVtSLbHgy83_OjU6xCq162ZxWEOssI8CKab0dqQlsd75Pgt9-rhHsDs7oWUdvp2JW8/s320/DSC03222.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjztRSifTUQs6Hj498VNZV2I_hWWW8FVda1Uy_lDCbPHN93t2tQsolin4TGJ_cyVRNJdWJh7hWTx36RstNFvb77Q7ATYBCoA5wK7mBPFX-aL9-sUioVHjLqoJiyeX1qyf-qFx0Wei2HrUw/s1600-h/DSC03223.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594827852550722" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjztRSifTUQs6Hj498VNZV2I_hWWW8FVda1Uy_lDCbPHN93t2tQsolin4TGJ_cyVRNJdWJh7hWTx36RstNFvb77Q7ATYBCoA5wK7mBPFX-aL9-sUioVHjLqoJiyeX1qyf-qFx0Wei2HrUw/s320/DSC03223.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifSA8EeKH92JO1BUXsuPkItoDuzXmAQzVzsSljkckT0jHxWWeI6OY9cL5XgkPCiXgbmAZNi_CXzg7DYanyOd0WYRDni0s28FeAefo9RoAJJI92hknV-Tj9p9MYt43SlHWv3OsGb-JXOM4/s1600-h/DSC03224.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594522871757810" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifSA8EeKH92JO1BUXsuPkItoDuzXmAQzVzsSljkckT0jHxWWeI6OY9cL5XgkPCiXgbmAZNi_CXzg7DYanyOd0WYRDni0s28FeAefo9RoAJJI92hknV-Tj9p9MYt43SlHWv3OsGb-JXOM4/s320/DSC03224.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZlQYNCSnH7Q7Cm1IR1E-mHf-GSTqYOInvZ0ArbY2Gpwsb0pVCydWsfmcuvmIV5c-tSzjRukjla6EJCNvNHNDkO5HghJkFxywqBYH20jumh8-04v7_XXMWjLHvWTJVrDzGeEIi8keuWWM/s1600-h/DSC03225.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594510706591682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZlQYNCSnH7Q7Cm1IR1E-mHf-GSTqYOInvZ0ArbY2Gpwsb0pVCydWsfmcuvmIV5c-tSzjRukjla6EJCNvNHNDkO5HghJkFxywqBYH20jumh8-04v7_XXMWjLHvWTJVrDzGeEIi8keuWWM/s320/DSC03225.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjYTnCzRWXNhQ_Th8E3TvpRDLwM6iCFe2yKJ8oISPuPjgKM03NyqfikzY0XJYioxrggBRcs1i28iPx5ANvdZWKV1pY_X-ZnMH2IIkJAYT5nLS3dHd8NQ1zOAqppw_cJqREi83yKDK0Fh8/s1600-h/DSC03229.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594509197181314" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjYTnCzRWXNhQ_Th8E3TvpRDLwM6iCFe2yKJ8oISPuPjgKM03NyqfikzY0XJYioxrggBRcs1i28iPx5ANvdZWKV1pY_X-ZnMH2IIkJAYT5nLS3dHd8NQ1zOAqppw_cJqREi83yKDK0Fh8/s320/DSC03229.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCjyUQxHSQLHdJZiYIgJOTlvYTU59kuuBVUuIs9N9DawBi1mue-WR3wxARdGqS-TvJauU-Z2bqz_qsJD4x-lJvkaqwjMpFOyDtJIenZR9l2EFDTfX-gcS7ce9Ed6D0_40ahNf8gJbLRN0/s1600-h/DSC03230.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594502437914434" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCjyUQxHSQLHdJZiYIgJOTlvYTU59kuuBVUuIs9N9DawBi1mue-WR3wxARdGqS-TvJauU-Z2bqz_qsJD4x-lJvkaqwjMpFOyDtJIenZR9l2EFDTfX-gcS7ce9Ed6D0_40ahNf8gJbLRN0/s320/DSC03230.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyhxf9US9ffeFVp5GRZ-vfEHSyNrBgbZAW0YXXIOpaC1BRSv1AwOpvtyIj0yR0rEQ8EfAIEKywRrqTm8Mycdfdlr-vZEcnbE0vI1OUPYFkInQcSNE62hRqwrSSnC6hWimn89TapdWo4rM/s1600-h/DSC03231.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594503129247842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyhxf9US9ffeFVp5GRZ-vfEHSyNrBgbZAW0YXXIOpaC1BRSv1AwOpvtyIj0yR0rEQ8EfAIEKywRrqTm8Mycdfdlr-vZEcnbE0vI1OUPYFkInQcSNE62hRqwrSSnC6hWimn89TapdWo4rM/s320/DSC03231.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Global car crisis far from over, executives say<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />By Marcel Michelson<br />Top European car makers warned of a bleak 2009 as signs grew the deep crisis in the auto sector went far beyond the U.S. industry's life-or-death struggle.<br />The heads of Renault-Nissan and Fiat said the car market would decline further next year after steep sales drops pushed the U.S. Big Three to ask for the bailout that was rejected by Congress and prompted White House action.<br />The world's largest carmaker Toyota Motor Corp was set to report a loss of about 100 billion yen (738 million pounds) for October-March, according to Japanese media on Saturday, and is expected to cut its earnings forecast again.<br />German premium car maker BMW , which also sells Mini cars and Rolls-Royce limousines, is putting up financial aid to its German dealer network for at least 100 million euros (90 million pounds), according to WirtschaftWoche weekly.<br />Daimler aims to cut costs at Mercedes-Benz by 10-15 percent in 2009, a German weekly said.<br />Pressure may also be renewed if OPEC ministers meeting on Wednesday cut output sharply, as expected. A renewed rally in petrol prices at the pump will mean further misery for the global car sector which employs 50 million people.<br />The car industry has been floored by a combination of high energy and raw material prices as well as a blow to consumer confidence from the financial crisis.<br />German weekly Automobilwoche said Europe's biggest car maker Vokswagen would discuss cost cuts on Thursday while Europe's biggest car parts firm Robert Bosch plans to cut up to 2,000 jobs to save costs in the downturn.<br />"I do not see a rapid issue to the crisis in the automobile industry," said Carlos Ghosn, chief executive at French maker Renault and its Japanese ally Nissan Motor .<br />His comments were carried by the Le Figaro and La Tribune newspapers. "We have not touched the bottom yet," he added.<br />LIQUIDITY NEEDED<br />Ghosn said the crisis was above all financial and the sector depended a lot on credit. "If the financial markets remain what they are we will all be having problems," he said.<br />French President Nicolas Sarkozy has summoned Ghosn and Christian Streiff of PSA Peugeot Citroen for a meeting on Monday after he had promised to help the sector if makers promised not to transfer any jobs abroad. Renault, PSA and car parts group Faurecia are shedding several thousands of jobs in France and elsewhere in Europe to as they cut output.<br />Ghosn said the authorities understood the seriousness of the situation and he expected concrete action in the coming weeks.<br />"The state has to provide liquidity, we have already cut our investment plans for 2009," he said. Car makers asked for 40 billion euros in European aid.<br />Ghosn said the current situation was much more serious than the crisis of 1992-1993, which took five years recovery time. Renault had a debt of 2 billion euros at end 2007 and is keeping a close eye on stocks of unsold cars, which drain cash. "If the stocks rise by 30 percent, the debt doubles," he said<br />Fiat head Sergio Marchionne, who last week predicted only six carmakers would survive in the long run from the current 50, said in La Repubblica that 2009 would be the most difficult year he had ever seen in his life.<br />Milano Finanza newspaper said Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi and Sarkozy discussed a tie-up of Fiat with Peugeot Citroen, which would give them critical mass [ID:nLD144936].<br />(Additional reporting by Ian Simpson in Milan, Hashem Kalantari in Tehran, Chisa Fujioka and Chang-Ran Kim in Tokyo and Birgit Mittwollen, Maria Sheahan and Matthias Inverardi in Berlin, editing by William Hardy)</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Thousands flee fighting in Sudan oil flashpoint</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />By Andrew Heavens<br />Thousands have fled Sudan's volatile oil town of Abyei after fresh north-south fighting has reignited tensions over the contested area, officials said on Saturday.<br />At least one person was killed after shooting broke out on Friday between police and soldiers in the first significant violence since northern and southern troops clashed in the town in May, raising fears for a north-south peace deal.<br />Both Khartoum and its semi-autonomous south claim Abyei which is close to lucrative oil fields and a key pipeline.<br />The borders of the town and its surrounding territory were left undecided in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended two decades of north-south civil war. Both sides have refused to compromise over the demarcation.<br />Scores were killed, more than 50,000 were left homeless and Abyei was burnt to the ground in the May clashes, which observers say may have started after a relatively minor confrontation at a checkpoint spiralled out of control.<br />Both sides eventually signed a roadmap agreement setting up a temporary administration, withdrawing troops and replacing them with integrated police and military units made up of both northerners and southerners.<br />Local officials said up to 10,000 Abyei residents had returned to the area to rebuild their homes before Friday's clashes.<br />But a U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said almost all the people who had moved back to the town had been forced to flee again on Friday. A night curfew was now in force for those who remained, the official added.<br />DISPLACED<br />"The population fled in all directions," Colonel James Monday from Abyei's police force told reporters.<br />"There's very few people left. The market is closed. There's no bread and no meat," he added.<br />Monday said the shooting started after a northern soldier in the joint military unit got into an argument with a trader in the town's market and police tried to intervene.<br />"The army released bullets and the police released bullets and there was a fight. Two civilians were injured in the market," he said, adding that one northern soldier was killed and four other troops injured.<br />U.N. peacekeepers managed to separate the fighters and sent delegations to northern and southern army bases outside the town, urging calm.<br />A spokesman from the northern Sudanese army declined to comment on the clashes.<br />Major General Biar Ajang, from the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army, told reporters he had heard two northern soldiers had died in the fighting.<br />He said the fighting had added to a broader build-up of tension in the region, citing recent reinforcements by northern troops in the Southern Kordofan region, north of Abyei.<br />Khartoum earlier this month said it was building up troops to counter moves from rebels in war-torn Darfur region.<br />But Ajang dismissed the explanation as "just excuses."<br />"There is the border, there are other political issues that we assume to be the reason for the mobilization of troops in this area," he said.<br />June's Abyei roadmap deal also agreed to refer the issue of Abyei's disputed borders -- which would decide whether one of Sudan's two largest oil fields is in north or south Sudan -- to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.<br />(Additional reporting by Skye Wheeler in Juba; Editing by Sami Aboudi)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuIa3JPv7OVNEeM5Q1xNtfd6zw0oNcgIM2ms8PFjojM6gA5vVRAeelP30VCo4q4oCmkDqhvZLlK5688nSdJ-81ZdMAl0LTPc72pJuh68Ybllwua45Ku3vqRqEJXiZWGYQF3lMVPUJOHMg/s1600-h/DSC03232.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594205141480002" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuIa3JPv7OVNEeM5Q1xNtfd6zw0oNcgIM2ms8PFjojM6gA5vVRAeelP30VCo4q4oCmkDqhvZLlK5688nSdJ-81ZdMAl0LTPc72pJuh68Ybllwua45Ku3vqRqEJXiZWGYQF3lMVPUJOHMg/s320/DSC03232.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>France charges three suspected ETA guerrillas</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />PARIS: A French judge has charged three suspected members of the Basque separatist group ETA, including the man believed to be its new military leader, and ordered them to be detained pending trial, an official said Saturday.<br />The three men were charged with belonging to a criminal group with links to a terrorist organisation.<br />"The three ETA militants have been charged and put in custody in line with the prosecution's request," said Isabelle Montagne, spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor.<br />They include Aitziol Iriondo, who is thought to be ETA's new military leader. He was arrested along with Eneko Zarrabeitia and Aitor Artetxe by police Monday near Bagneres-de-Bigorre in southwestern France. The town is outside the French Basque region.<br />The French Interior Ministry believes Iriondo had succeeded Txeroki, the alias for Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina, as the head of ETA's military operations.<br />Rubina was jailed in November in Paris after being arrested in Cauterets, in the Pyrenees.<br />Spanish authorities say ETA has been reduced to a relatively small number of guerrillas after a series of arrests of senior figures. But it has continued to carry out regular bombings.<br />ETA began its violent campaign for the independence of traditional Basque territories in northern Spain and southwest France in the late years of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in the 1960s, and has killed more than 800 people in four decades.<br />(Reporting by Thierry Leveque and Elizabeth Pineau; Writing by<br />Marcel Michelson; Editing by Katie Nguyen and Angus MacSwan)</div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBdbwv1eukqPSaWaIm_pDmLcnuURtEfaYS2KtIkxLimVavcuzBpLBGCuxLaa5BnMgEKbOQHXfm7VJMwLXAD3QZJJaWyk2UCSu_xuSxjn3mTn77_l2xoc_g4MxKsm23iWkgrS7eHOdtXAY/s1600-h/DSC03233.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594201052283874" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBdbwv1eukqPSaWaIm_pDmLcnuURtEfaYS2KtIkxLimVavcuzBpLBGCuxLaa5BnMgEKbOQHXfm7VJMwLXAD3QZJJaWyk2UCSu_xuSxjn3mTn77_l2xoc_g4MxKsm23iWkgrS7eHOdtXAY/s320/DSC03233.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>Pakistan walks delicate line with a radical</strong><br />By Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Salman Masood<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />LAHORE, Pakistan: On a normal Friday afternoon the line of cars and red Honda motorbikes outside the Qadssiya Mosque stretches to a gasoline station a kilometer away. Eight thousand worshipers typically come to hear Hafiz Muhammad Saeed preach at the headquarters of the organization he leads, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity that fronts for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. The two-tiered mosque can accommodate only a portion of the crowd, so the remainder spill out onto a broad concrete courtyard.<br />But this Friday the road outside was clear, and the few thousand who showed up were all able to fit inside. The day before, the Pakistani authorities had put Saeed under house arrest and closed dozens of the group's offices across the country. Many followers were unnerved.<br />"The government has created a panic," said Mohammed Nawaz, 35, one of the mosque administrators, who estimated that only one in four people came to this week's services. "Our leader has been arrested, so what happens if they come to prayers? Not a lot of people have come today. People are not certain what will happen next."<br />A few kilometers away, in Saeed's leafy neighborhood, it was a decidedly more relaxed scene. Several dozen police officers ringed the area around his home, standing casually with rifles and enforcing a house arrest that seemed more of a forced vacation.<br />Two heavily bearded workers from Jamaat-ud-Dawa arrived with food, and the police raised the barricades and allowed them through, choosing not to inspect their Suzuki truck. Saeed's relatives have been allowed to come and go freely from the home, the police said. A young boy and a girl standing on the second-floor balcony of Saeed's home looked down at the officers and smiled.<br />One local police commander, seeing journalists arrive, rushed over and proclaimed that Saeed was confined inside his home, banned from going outside now or at any other time.<br />Almost on cue, Saeed emerged moments later from the mosque across the street, clad in a green jacket and a cream-colored shalwar kameez, the long tunic and baggy pants that Pakistani men commonly wear, and ambled back to his house. "No, no, it's not Hafiz Saeed," the embarrassed commander said, though it clearly was.<br />"I'm just following instructions," he added.<br />The two scenes underscored the Pakistani government's deeply mixed reaction to Saeed and his organization following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that the Indian and U.S. governments have accused Lashkar of carrying out.<br />Under intense pressure to show some resolve against homegrown terrorism, the Pakistani government claims to have arrested the Lashkar official suspected of running the Mumbai attacks, and then on Thursday and Friday it shut down dozens of Jamaat-ud-Dawa offices and said it had detained many of the group's members.<br />But the government has also taken clear steps to soften the blow, like allowing Saeed to hold a defiant news conference before his house arrest began. Saeed maintains that neither he nor Jamaat-ud-Dawa has had connections to Lashkar for more than six years.<br />As was apparent at his home on Friday, the government is clearly reluctant to cut off Saeed and his group too abruptly, partly out of expediency but partly out of fear, too.<br />Pakistan has used Lashkar and other militant groups as surrogate security forces in Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan region claimed by both Pakistan and India, and many in the country's army are sympathetic to Lashkar and other Islamist militant groups. The country's premier spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, helped establish Lashkar in the 1980s to undermine the Indian authorities in Kashmir.<br />Lashkar and Jamaat-ud-Dawa remain popular in Punjab, the most populous Pakistani province, where the cities and villages that spread out from Lahore, the provincial capital, have been the principal recruiting ground for Lashkar and Jamaat-ud-Dawa and for the men accused of carrying out the Mumbai attacks. In these rural areas the two organizations are synonymous.<br />Moreover, Jamaat-ud-Dawa is seen by many Punjabis as a more effective relief agency than the government, bringing shelter, food, blankets and medicine to people devastated by earthquakes in Kashmir in 2005 and in Baluchistan Province in October.<br />"All the relief work will be badly affected" by the crackdown, said Mohammed Faizan Kashif, a 28-year-old Lahore banker who attended Friday's service and, like many here, sharply criticized what he described as the government's fecklessness and kowtowing to U.S. and Indian pressure. "If I try to organize a fashion show, the government will facilitate it," he said. "But if I try to highlight the Kashmir issue, the government would stop it."<br />Inside the mosque, Saeed's 38-year-old son, Mohammed Talha Saeed, took his father's place at the podium and inveighed against the government's crackdown as the result of "dictation from the United States" and pressure from "Jews and the Hindu lobby."<br />"If the government continues this type of activity, then one day the army of God will come," he lectured, urging the worshipers to remain patient.<br />Waqar Gillani contributed reporting.</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/13/asia/AS-Afghanistan.php">Brown visits British troops in Afghanistan</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/13/asia/AS-Kashmir-Elections.php">Protester killed during voting in Indian Kashmir</a><br /></div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Pakistan says Indian planes entered airspace</strong><br />By Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Salman Masood<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />LAHORE, Pakistan: Indian warplanes crossed into Pakistani airspace on Saturday over two parts of the country where the militant group accused of carrying out the Mumbai terror attacks is active, according to Pakistani officials, who said they scrambled their own air force jets to chase the Indian aircraft back across the border.<br />The incursions would appear to be an aggressive display by India, whose top officials describe neighboring Pakistan as the "epicenter of terrorism" and say Pakistan's own intelligence service has long aided Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group blamed for the attacks in Mumbai last month, which sharply raised tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals.<br />Pakistani officials trumpeted the airspace breaches in statements to the news media but said there was no cause for "alarm." They also said they had contacted Indian officials, who confirmed the breaches as accidental. But Indian outlets also reported on Sunday morning that the Indian military had denied any improper flyovers.<br />The Pakistani government sought to play down the airspace violations as "inadvertent," but it did not elaborate on how two separate breaches so far away could be unintended and coincidental.<br />According to the Pakistani account, one violation occurred over the portion of the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir that is controlled by Pakistani forces, while the other happened at least 100 miles south, near Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province and Pakistan's second-largest city. Both areas are strongholds of Lashkar and Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity group shut down last week by the Pakistani government after the United Nations labeled it a front for Lashkar.<br />The attacks in Mumbai, which began the night of Nov. 26 and ended three days later in a battle between gunmen and Indian commandos, left at least 163 people dead along with nine gunmen.</div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/13/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI-LASHKAR.php">Militant group says Kashmir fight still on</a> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>In Iraq, Gates affirms U.S. pullout goal</strong><br />By Elisabeth Bumiller<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />BALAD, Iraq: The top American commander in Iraq said Saturday that some soldiers would remain in a support role in cities beyond summer 2009, when a new security agreement calls for the removal of American combat troops from urban areas.<br />The commander, General Ray Odierno, said American troops would remain at numerous security outposts in order to help support and train Iraqi forces. "We believe that's part of our transition teams," he told reporters in Balad while accompanying Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who arrived on an unannounced trip Saturday.<br />General Odierno declined to say how many American troops might remain in Iraqi cities past the summer and said the number still remained to be negotiated with the Iraqi government under the terms of the so-called status of forces agreement. "But what I would say is we'll maintain our very close partnership with the Iraqi security forces throughout Iraq even after the summer."<br />Later on Saturday, a spokesman for General Odierno, Lieutenant Colonel James Hutton, reiterated that the soldiers staying in cities would not be combat forces but rather "enablers," who would provide services like medical care, air traffic control and helicopter support that the Iraqis cannot perform themselves. He said that all their actions would be closely coordinated with the Iraqi government, and that all tenets of the security agreement would be followed.<br />Gates met with Odierno for an hour and then was scheduled to return to Washington. Before the meeting, Gates held a question-and-answer session with American soldiers and repeated the Bush administration's pledge to the Iraqi government of a complete troop withdrawal by the end of 2011.<br />But Odierno said Saturday, as Pentagon officials have said previously, that the agreement might be renegotiated with the Iraqi government. "Three years is a very long time," he told reporters.<br />Gates came to Baghdad from Manama, Bahrain, where he warned that foreign powers should not try to "test" President-elect Barack Obama with a crisis in his first months in office. He said the new administration would be committed to security in the Gulf and criticized Iran as trying to destabilize the region.<br />"The president-elect and his team are under no illusions about Iran's behavior and what Iran has been doing in the region and apparently is doing with weapons programs," he said.<br />Gates, who was speaking at a conference on regional security, said that Obama and his advisers had done more extensive planning across the government for the transition than any other incoming administration he could remember and asserted that they would therefore be prepared from their first day in office. Gates, who is staying on as defense secretary, has worked for seven presidents; Obama will be his eighth.<br />"So anyone who thought that the upcoming months might present opportunities to 'test' the new president would be sorely mistaken," Gates said at the conference. "President Obama and his national security team, myself included, will be ready to defend the interests of the United States and our friends and allies from the moment he takes office on Jan. 20."<br />In response to questions from audience members after his formal remarks, Gates said that although the Pentagon would be sending thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan over the next months, he was ultimately worried about the size of the American presence on Afghan soil. The United States plans to add some 20,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2009.<br />"I am more mindful than most that with 120,000 troops the Soviets still lost, because they never had the support of the Afghan people," Gates said. "I think that after we complete these troop increases that we're talking about, we ought to think long and hard about how many more go in."<br />Asked about the problem of piracy of commercial ships off the coast of Somalia, Gates said he did not think the United States had enough information to launch attacks on pirate bases on land, but he said such attacks might be possible in the future. The comment appeared to put Gates at odds for now with a United Nations resolution that the United States began circulating in the Security Council on Wednesday that would increase interdiction efforts by permitting foreign forces to conduct land-based attacks.<br />Gates said there were a number of "minimally intelligent things" that ship captains could do when pirates approached, like "speed up" and "pull up the ladders." He added, "This is not rocket science."</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>U.S. draft hails steps in Mideast talks</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />By Louis Charbonneau<br />The United States handed the U.N. Security Council a draft resolution on Saturday that hails progress made in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks but calls for an "intensification" of efforts to secure a deal.<br />U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad said the 15-nation council would vote on the resolution on Tuesday at a meeting which U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov and other foreign ministers are expected to attend.<br />If approved, it will be the Security Council's first resolution on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since November 2003, when it endorsed the Middle East "road map" peace plan for eventual Palestinian statehood.<br />Khalilzad told reporters the resolution endorsed the goals of peace talks launched in November 2007 by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush in Annapolis, Maryland.<br />The Bush administration had wanted an agreement on Palestinian statehood by the end of this year but all sides now say that will not happen. Bush leaves office on January 20, when Barack Obama will become U.S. president.<br />"We believe it's very important at this time to recognise the progress that has been made," Khalilzad said.<br />It was crucial for the push for a two-state solution "to be sustained and for the council to express its support so there is no pause in the negotiations," he added.<br />Diplomats in New York say the highly unpopular Bush administration hopes this resolution will help draw attention to the good it has done for the Middle East and counter some of the criticism it has faced for its 2003 invasion of Iraq.<br />NO SPECIFICS<br />The text, expected to be revised before Tuesday's vote, mentions none of the specific complaints the Palestinians and Israelis have raised.<br />The Palestinians have said Israeli settlement building in Palestinian areas threatens to derail the peace process. U.N. diplomats said Arab delegations wanted settlements mentioned in the text but the Americans do not want to include details of specific disagreements.<br />Instead, the resolution urges both sides to "refrain from any steps that could undermine confidence or prejudice the outcome of the negotiations" and calls for "an intensification of diplomatic efforts" aimed at securing a "comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in the Middle East."<br />Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Moscow backed the text and agreed that the change of U.S. and Israeli administrations should not slow the peace process.<br />"We believe it's very important to continue the momentum," he said. "Considerable effort has been made over the last 12 months or so, and we believe that the effort has to be pinned down and it has to continue without a pause."<br />French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, speaking on behalf of the French presidency of the European Union, said the draft text was a "very good basis to get an agreement."<br />He said he was optimistic the Security Council would reach a unanimous agreement on the resolution by Tuesday.<br />Libya, a strong supporter of the Palestinians, is the only Arab state on the Security Council at the moment. It has repeatedly clashed with Washington on Palestinian issues.<br />The Palestinian delegation did not comment on the draft.<br />(Editing by John O'Callaghan)</div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>A Saudi's luxurious plight in terror's shadow</strong><br />By Landon Thomas Jr.<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />JIDDA: Yassin Kadi welcomes a visitor into the sun-drenched living room of his compound in this bustling commercial capital of Saudi Arabia. Expecting to be photographed, he has chosen to appear in Western dress - brown shirt, slacks and blue suede shoes.<br />It is an outfit that Kadi, a multimillionaire businessman with investments and charities that span the globe, rarely wears these days.<br />Once a man of the world, Kadi is confined to Saudi Arabia. His travel is limited mainly to the short drive from his home in Jidda to the office where he manages his shrunken business affairs.<br />In October 2001, right after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. Treasury designated Kadi a terrorist supporter, accusing him of funneling money to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda through a web of businesses, foundations and universities.<br />His ample worldwide assets were frozen, an order supported by the United Nations Security Council, and he has been advised by the Saudi government to not leave the country. But he is not exactly suffering; not financially, at least.<br />"I am not bankrupt," he said, as a servant brought sandwiches and coffee.<br />"I still have my life, my house and my car, but it's embarrassing. I have never been in a situation of asking other people for money."<br />As is customary in such cases, Washington has presented no direct evidence linking Kadi to terrorism. But it has made public a dense labyrinth of associations and business and personal ties that it says establishes Kadi's relationship with bin Laden and his allies.<br />Kadi, who has repeatedly claimed his innocence, is caught up in a legal limbo with no end in sight. The accusations against him are in the form of a government order. But because he has never been charged with any crime, he has not ever had the opportunity to stand before a jury or a judge to plead his case.<br />"We have not found Mr. Kadi guilty of anything," said Adam Szubin, the director of the Treasury's office of foreign assets control. "But we have found that he is a supporter of terror."<br />Washington's broad freedom to sanction those suspected of being terrorism financiers has mostly gone unchallenged since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And few have rushed to defend wealthy foreigners the way civil rights lawyers and others have sought to bring attention to the plight of the prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay.<br />But in September, in what Kadi's lawyers have called a major legal victory, the European Court of Justice overturned a lower court ruling that supported Europe's right to freeze his assets.<br />The ruling is nonbinding, however, and the Bush administration continues to maintain that Kadi is guilty. But the decision raises questions about the Treasury's ability to impose such administrative sanctions indefinitely.<br />A scion of a wealthy and well-connected businessman, Sheik Yassin, as he is widely known in Saudi Arabia, has the commanding presence of a chief executive and is quite obviously accustomed to the deference that comes to those who deploy large sums of money.<br />In interviews with government officials, Kadi has said that his net worth is as much as $65 million. His Jidda compound is spacious and well-appointed. He has servants and a chauffeur to drive his luxury cars, and he remains an active investor in world currency and stock markets.<br />(Under the terms of his asset freeze, he can continue to trade his portfolio and to collect dividends, but he cannot take money out.)<br />Kadi is mindful that his position is different from those serving time in Guantánamo Bay but insists that the paradox of his legal condition is no less unfair. "When it is classified," he said, "you can never defend yourself."<br />And, he says, his suffering has been acute in it own regard - he has struggled with bouts of depression, diabetes and the humiliation of having to ask family members for financial help.<br />The Treasury claims that it responds to new evidence presented by designees and says that it took 154 names off the list - 4,102 remain - from November 2007 to November 2008. But Kadi is unlikely to benefit from any reassessment.<br />"We stand by our designation," said Szubin, the Treasury official, "and you can quote me on that."<br />Kadi does not dispute his ties to bin Laden but maintains that he does not support him and has not spoken to him since the early 1990s.<br />They do share a common background: Now in their early 50s, they were both born to wealthy families in Jidda, studied engineering and first met in Chicago in 1981. Kadi was working for the architectural firm Skidmore Owings Merrill, and bin Laden, who then was 24 and working for the family contracting business, had come to Chicago to recruit American-trained engineers to work for the bin Laden group - his first known trip to the United States. As Kadi remembers it, he put bin Laden in touch with a group of engineers, several of whom were eventually hired.<br />They came together again in Pakistan in the late 1980s as enthusiastic backers of the Afghan rebels in their war with the Soviet Union and became large investors in Sudan in the early 1990s.<br />But Kadi says he cut ties after bin Laden began to adopt an anti-American, openly radical attitude in the mid-1990s.<br />In the absence of a full airing of the evidence against him, however, it seems unlikely that Kadi's guilt or innocence will be established. Like many wealthy Saudis, Kadi has been an enthusiastic underwriter of Islamic-hued causes, including hospitals in Peshawar, Pakistan, and in Albania, a university in Yemen and the publication of a definitive English translation of the Koran.<br />But this, he says, is nothing more than a form of blessed relief.<br />But Szubin and others say Kadi's giving is part of a disguised money trail to Al Qaeda and bin Laden.<br />Some of the evidence presented by his accusers, however, raises its own questions. For example, a Swiss prosecutor - who investigated Kadi but did not bring charges - tried to connect him to the fundamentalist Islamic philosopher Sayyid Qutb. The problem was that Qutb was put to death by the Egyptian government in 1966, when Kadi was 9 years old.<br />On the other hand, Kadi's continued refusal to renounce figures alleged to be terrorism supporters gives ready ammunition to his antagonists.<br />One of those individuals is Wael Juleidan, a prominent Saudi financier who was a close ally of bin Laden in the late 1980s. Another is Muhammad Salah, a Palestinian-American who was accused of sending money to Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. (Salah was acquitted of these charges in a federal court last year.)<br />Salah, who ran a Chicago-based Muslim charity, received about $1 million from Kadi in the early 1990s.<br />"If I wanted to send money to Hamas, I would do it directly, not via Chicago," Kadi said, in his smooth, American-accented English.<br />Such a comment, with its trace of smug self-assurance, illuminates why Kadi remains a target for so many anti-terrorism investigators.<br />He is a man who does not easily hide his disdain for the process that has trapped him in his own country or the efforts by the Bush administration to prevent another major terrorist attack.<br />But he insists that his deepest anger is reserved for bin Laden. Asked what he would say to him now, Kadi takes his time before responding.<br />"I would say, 'Wash your hands of the blood of innocent people,"' Kadi said, using the Arabic word fitna to describe the devastation bin Laden's actions have brought upon him and the Islamic world. "Islam is innocent of all this. This was a big mistake. Now, everyone is suspicious."</div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Canadian's battle role cast in doubt at Guantanamo</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />By Jane Sutton<br />A Canadian teen was buried facedown under the rubble of a bombed-out compound when someone threw the grenade that killed a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, according to a soldier's report cited at the U.S. war crimes tribunal at Guantanamo on Friday.<br />The account raised doubts about whether Canadian defendant Omar Khadr, who is charged with murdering U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, could have thrown the grenade that killed Speer during the July 2002 firefight in a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan.<br />Defence lawyers want the soldier who gave that account of the battle to testify at Khadr's January 26 trial at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.<br />They debated the witness list in court on Friday even as they hoped that U.S. President-elect Barack Obama will pull the plug on the Guantanamo tribunals before Khadr's trial begins.<br />Obama takes office on January 20 and has said he would move the Guantanamo trials into the regular civilian or military courts. He has not specifically addressed how he would handle Khadr's case or 16 others already pending in the Guantanamo tribunals, which were established by the Bush administration to try foreign captives on terrorism charges and have been widely condemned by human rights activists and foreign governments.<br />"I cannot believe that the Obama administration really wants as one of its first official acts to be the first administration in U.S. history to preside over the trial of a child on war crimes," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, Khadr's military lawyer.<br />Khadr, now a tall and bearded 22-year-old, was 15 when he was captured by U.S. forces who entered the compound after the aerial bombing ended. Speer was in the lead and was hit with a grenade but accounts of what happened next varied widely.<br />Khadr was sitting up and moving when a U.S. soldier shot him twice in the back, believing he had thrown the grenade that hit Speer, according to the shooter's report on the incident.<br />But another participant, identified in court documents only as Soldier No. 2, gave military investigators a conflicting account of what he found upon entering the compound.<br />"Mr. Khadr was so covered in rubble that soldier No. 2 inadvertently stood on top of him and thought he was standing on a trap door because the ground did not seem solid," according to a court document based on that soldier's report to military investigators.<br />"He bent down to move the brush away to see what was beneath him and discovered that he was standing on a person and that Mr. Khadr appeared to be 'acting dead.'"<br />PHOTOGRAPHS<br />Photographs taken at the scene show a pile of rubble from the collapsed roof, and then show the debris moved aside to reveal Khadr lying facedown in the dirt, Kuebler said.<br />He said the photos, which were not shown publicly, "make it abundantly clear Omar Khadr could not have thrown the hand grenade that killed 1st Sgt. Speer."<br />Defence lawyers also want to call as witnesses other U.S. soldiers who told investigators that U.S. forces were also throwing grenades at the time, suggesting Speer might have been killed by friendly fire.<br />Khadr, the Toronto-born son of an alleged al Qaeda financier, is one of two Guantanamo prisoners captured as juveniles and charged with crimes that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison. He has claimed he was abused and threatened with rape in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo.<br />Prosecutors said Khadr's age could be a mitigating factor at sentencing but that they were confident the evidence would show he knowingly carried the crimes as charged. Their evidence includes videotape of Khadr building and planting roadside explosives in Afghanistan.<br />They said they were prepared to go to trial in January.<br />"We have no control over the political circumstances one way or the other," said one of them, Navy Capt. Keith Petty.<br />Khadr is charged with murder, attempted murder, conspiring with al Qaeda, providing material support for terrorism and spying on U.S. forces who invaded Afghanistan to route al Qaeda after the September 11 attacks.<br />(Editing by Jackie Frank)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDCI2L8CoTLTfIlcChTkKWUl4lWSbu-3KStqw0_U2e72HAP1OTiO-CJlq2YR_kurvN7A8RAqzO_kkmZuHW6lrwo6WUHpr6qJ6ScaMRm9Mpjh4RfYIvv9pdy9M0GFYAGUho6n1510xQRyk/s1600-h/DSC03234.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594204039589714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDCI2L8CoTLTfIlcChTkKWUl4lWSbu-3KStqw0_U2e72HAP1OTiO-CJlq2YR_kurvN7A8RAqzO_kkmZuHW6lrwo6WUHpr6qJ6ScaMRm9Mpjh4RfYIvv9pdy9M0GFYAGUho6n1510xQRyk/s320/DSC03234.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>In Illinois, a virtual expectation of corruption</strong><br />By Kate Zernike<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />As much as politicians in Illinois have had a tradition of corruption, the people of Illinois have had a tradition of accepting it even expecting it long before Governor Rod Blagojevich was accused of trying to put a Senate seat up to the highest bidder.<br />Otto Kerner, who served as governor in the 1960s, was found to have accepted bribes of racetrack stock but only after the track owner deducted it on her taxes as a cost of doing business.<br />After Paul Powell, an Illinois secretary of state, longtime state legislator and infamous dealmaker, died in 1970, associates discovered $800,000 in undocumented cash in shoeboxes, briefcases and strongboxes in his closet, a considerable cache for a man who had never earned a salary of more than $30,000.<br />Powell had emerged unscathed from a grand jury investigation into accusations that he bought stock in a harness racing company. As he said, "It wound up with the grand jurors wanting to know from me where they could buy racetrack stock."<br />The state's unusually lax laws have allowed corruption to flourish in fact, prosecutors say, it was the threat of a new campaign finance law that takes effect in January that set Blagojevich on a last spree of pay-to-play. The tradition was established by the immigrants who settled the state in the 19th century and nurtured by a stubborn system of machine politics that other states eradicated long ago.<br />"There is this attitude among politicians, and frankly among citizens, that this is the way things are," said Kent Redfield, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Springfield. "Politics is for professionals."<br />The surprise for many Illinoisans last week was not that their governor was arrested, but that he could be brazen enough to try to sell a United States Senate seat when he was already under U.S. government investigation.<br />Now the culture of his adopted home state threatens to dog President-elect Barack Obama, whose vacated seat in the Senate Blagojevich is accused of putting up for auction, much as swampy Arkansas politics dogged the last young Democratic politician elected on a platform of change, Bill Clinton.<br />Prosecutors say Obama is not a subject of the investigation. And he has been a champion of ethics reform in the Illinois Legislature and in the Senate. But some Republicans have seized the opportunity to try to tie him to the worst side of Illinois politics.<br />As he faced questions at a press conference in Chicago last week, Obama argued that there were two Illinoises and that he came from the one not represented in the criminal complaint against Blagojevich.<br />Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, said, "It's as if we have a good angel on one shoulder and a bad angel on the other."<br />"We have produced some real leaders," Canary continued, mentioning former Senator Paul Simon, the former federal judge Abner Mikva and, of course, Abraham Lincoln. "At the same time, for historic and systemic reasons, we have real institutional corruption."<br />Certainly, other states have their problems. The Corporate Crime Reporter ranked Illinois a mere sixth on a list of the most corrupt states last year, based on the U.S. government public corruption convictions per 100,000 residents. (It was beaten by Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama and Ohio; it was slightly ahead of New Jersey and New York.)<br />Still, as Mikva, who for many years was a member of Congress, said, "There's a kind of Gresham's law that operates: the bad drives out the good."<br />If indicted, Blagojevich would be the fifth of the last eight elected Illinois governors to be charged with a crime, and if he is sent to jail, the fourth to serve time. Since 1971, said Dick Simpson, head of the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a former Chicago alderman, 1,000 Illinois public servants have been convicted of corruption, and in Chicago, 30 aldermen have gone to jail.<br />Corruption, Simpson said, goes back at least to 1869, when three Chicago commissioners gave out a contract to paint City Hall, then used whitewash instead of paint, pocketing the savings.<br />Now Illinois remains the rare place where one governor who served jail time (he used fraudulent loans to repair his yacht) writes an opinion article in a newspaper accusing the current governor of "ranking with Al Capone in establishing a disgraceful image of Illinois," as Daniel Walker did in The Chicago Tribune on Thursday.<br />"Some people say it's in the water," said Mike Lawrence, who was a spokesman for former Governor Jim Edgar (one of the unindicted ones) and executive director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University. "But Paul Simon drank the same water that Paul Powell drank, and there couldn't have been two more dramatically different politicians when it came to ethics."<br />The deep-seated corruption, Lawrence and others said, has its roots in the settlement of the state in the 19th century.<br />Irish immigrants, and later Italians and Poles, faced discrimination in getting jobs and organized themselves politically as a way to assimilate and gain strength. New immigrants would come to local bosses for housing, work and food, and public office became the marketplace for jobs, contracts, rewarding friends and punishing enemies.<br />"It isn't that the Irish are inherently corrupt," Mikva said. "It's that that's the way you got power."<br />Politicians mocked "goo-goo groups" like the "Plague of Women Voters" good government being for girls and babies. "Politics was for people who had skin in the game," Professor Redfield said.<br />After the convictions of George Ryan, whom Blagojevich replaced in the governor's office, and Dan Rostenkowski, whose seat in the House of Representatives Blagojevich once held, their allies complained that prosecutors had criminalized politics. ( Blagojevich's lawyer, too, insisted that anything he had done was "just politics.")<br />"I think for a while Illinois was sort of proud of their scoundrels," said Mikva, who appeared on Friday with the Illinois attorney general in calling upon the State Supreme Court to declare Blagojevich unfit to govern.<br />"We bragged about Hinky Dink Mike Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin," he said, referring to the bosses who ruled the First Ward in Chicago from the late 19th century until World War II with a mix of extortion, favors and ballot-box stuffing.<br />"We've gotten over that," Mikva said, "but we've never put in the defense mechanisms in terms of ethics laws and limited contributions."<br />There are no limits on political contributions in Illinois. The law that is to take effect in January bans contributions only from those with state contracts larger than $50,000, and it was passed only under pressure (including from Obama, who called his former mentor in the State Senate, Emil Jones Jr., to encourage its passage.) Unlike the federal system, corporations can give directly to politicians.<br />"There is a bottomless thirst for cash, for campaign contributions, for personal enrichment," Canary said. "There is no speed limit."<br />Professor Redfield said, "The laws reflect the culture, and the culture is shaped by the lack of laws."<br />Long after machine politics died elsewhere Prendergast in Kansas City, Tammany Hall in New York Mayor Richard Daley's machine ruled Chicago. Powell was a product of the downstate machine, Ryan of the Kankakee County machine.<br />Under Daley's son, Richard M., the current mayor, Chicago's machine has simply adapted, many say, so that the building blocks of the power structure are interest groups, corporations and unions rather than the neighborhoods.<br />In parts of downstate, the collapse of the coal industry has left the state as the biggest source of jobs, in prisons, mental institutions and universities. That has bred corruption in places like East St. Louis, where several officials and precinct workers were convicted of vote fraud in 2005.<br />"Most Illinoisans put a higher priority on getting their streets shoveled than they do on scandal-free public servants," Lawrence said.<br />Instances of revolt are rare.<br />In the late 1970s, Lawrence said, after the Legislature and the governor slipped in a pay increase in a lame-duck session, outraged voters sent envelopes full of tea bags and even human feces. Then in 1980, they voted to reduce the size of the House by a third, from 177 to 118.<br />Mikva, who with Simon fought in vain to get the Legislature to pass limits on political contributions 50 years ago, recalled going to Blagojevich to suggest that he include such limits in a reform package. But while Blagojevich agreed to establish inspectors general and a new ethics board, Mikva said, he resisted ending pay-to-play.</div><div> </div><div>***************<br /></div><div><strong>A champion of Wall St. reaps the benefits</strong><br />By Eric Lipton and Raymond Hernandez<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />"We are not going to rest until we change the rules, change the laws and make sure New York remains No. 1 for decades on into the future."<br /> Senator Charles Schumer, referring to financial regulations, Jan. 22, 2007<br />WASHINGTON As the financial crisis jolted the nation in September, Senator Charles Schumer was consumed. He traded telephone calls with bankers, then became one of the first officials to promote a Wall Street bailout. He spent hours in closed-door briefings and a weekend helping congressional leaders nail down details of the $700 billion rescue package.<br />The next day, Schumer appeared at a breakfast fund-raiser in Midtown Manhattan for Senate Democrats. Addressing Henry Kravis, the buyout billionaire, and about 20 other finance industry executives, he warned that a bailout would be a hard sell on Capitol Hill. Then he offered some reassurance: The businessmen could count on the Democrats to help steer the nation through the financial turmoil.<br />"We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals," one executive said, summarizing Schumer's remarks. "We are going to be effective, moderate advocates for sound economic policies, good responsible stewards you can trust."<br />The message clearly resonated. The next week, executives at firms represented at the breakfast sent in more than $135,000 in campaign donations.<br />Senator Schumer plays an unrivaled role in Washington as beneficiary, advocate and overseer of an industry that is his hometown's most important business.<br />An exceptional fund raiser a "jackhammer," someone who knows him says, for whom " 'no' is the first step to 'yes,' " Schumer led the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the last four years, raising a record $240 million while increasing donations from Wall Street by 50 percent. That money helped the Democrats gain power in Congress, elevated Schumer's standing in his party and increased the industry's clout in the capital.<br />But in building support, he has embraced the industry's free-market, deregulatory agenda more than almost any other Democrat in Congress, even backing some measures now blamed for contributing to the financial crisis.<br />Other lawmakers took the lead on efforts like deregulating the complicated financial instruments called derivatives, which are widely seen as catalysts to the crisis.<br />But Schumer, a member of the Banking and Finance Committees, repeatedly took other steps to protect industry players from government oversight and tougher rules, a review of his record shows. Over the years, he has also helped save financial institutions billions of dollars in higher taxes or fees.<br />He succeeded in limiting efforts to regulate credit-rating agencies, for example, sponsored legislation that cut fees paid by Wall Street firms to finance government oversight, pushed to allow banks to have lower capital reserves and called for the revision of regulations to make corporations' balance sheets more transparent.<br />"Since the financial meltdown, people have been asking, 'Where was Congress? Why didn't they see this coming? Why didn't they provide better oversight?' " said Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America. "And the answer for some, including Senator Schumer, is that they were actually too busy pursuing a deregulatory agenda. Their focus was on how we have to lighten up regulation on Wall Street."<br />In recent weeks, Schumer has worked closely with the Bush administration to try to mitigate the damage to New York's financial institutions. And as members of Congress and President-elect Barack Obama have called for new regulations to prevent future upheavals, Schumer has endorsed the need for reforms while still trying to make them palatable for Wall Street.<br />Calling himself "an almost obsessive defender of New York jobs," Schumer has often talked of the need to avoid excessive regulation of an industry that is increasingly threatened by global competition. At the same time, Schumer has cast himself as a populist who looks out for the middle class.<br />In an interview, Schumer said that until the recent market turmoil, he did not fully appreciate how much risk Wall Street had assumed and how much damage its practices could inflict on ordinary Americans. "It is a learning process, no question about it, an evolution," he said, adding that he now believed that investors and homeowners must be better protected.<br />But he defended his record. "Wall Street and Main Street are tied together," he said. "Often times, they are not in conflict. When they are in conflict, I tend to side with Main Street."<br />While Schumer has taken some pro-consumer stances, his critics fault him for tilting too far toward Wall Street in balancing his responsibilities.<br />"He is serving the parochial interest of a very small group of financial people, bankers, investment bankers, fund managers, private equity firms, rather than serving the general public," said John Bogle, the founder and former chairman of the Vanguard Group, the giant mutual fund house. "It has hurt the American investor first and the average American taxpayer."<br />Navigating the Street<br />Brash and brainy (perfect SATs and double Harvard degrees), Chuck Schumer, now 58, learned early in his career how to talk to the financiers and chief executives who would become a vital constituency for him. Though he did not grow up in that world his father owned a small exterminating business in New York he quickly showed a keen grasp of complex financial issues.<br />And, recognizing how central Wall Street is to the city's economy, he committed himself to keeping it strong.<br />"So much of what happens in this town is because we are the world financial center," Schumer said at City Hall in January 2007. "It helps support our museums, it provides the tax base for schools and health care. If we lose being the financial center, the rest goes down the drain."<br />Soon after arriving in Congress in 1981, Schumer snared a seat on the Financial Services Committee, which he viewed as the best way to help New York. While reliably liberal on many social issues, he established himself as a pragmatic Democrat willing to align with powerful business interests.<br />Schumer's political rise he moved in 1999 to the Senate, where he now has a party leadership post paralleled Wall Street's growing influence in Washington. As more Americans invested in the markets and financial institutions had a greater global reach, the industry came to rival the manufacturing sector as a driving force of the United States economy.<br />And in the 1990s, Democratic officials developed close links to a new generation of Wall Street leaders labeled "New Moneycrats" by one author who shared a free-market agenda.<br />Schumer became a magnet for campaign donations from wealthy industry executives, including Jamie Dimon, now the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase; John Mack, the chief executive at Morgan Stanley; and Charles Prince III, the former chief executive of Citigroup. And he was not at all reluctant to ask them for more.<br />Donors describe the Schumer pitch as unusually aggressive: He calls repeatedly to suggest breakfast or dinner, coffee or cocktails. He enlists intermediaries to invite prospects to events and recruits several senators to tag along. And he presses for the maximum contribution "I need you to max out," he is known to say then follows up by asking that a donor's spouse and four or five friends write checks, too.<br />"He was probably the kid that sold the most candy in grade school," said Julie Domenick, a Democratic lobbyist who has given to the senatorial campaign committee. "He is not shy."<br />Schumer, in the interview, acknowledged his full-speed-ahead approach. "Any job I do, I work hard at and I try to succeed at," he said.<br />As a result, he has collected over his career more in campaign contributions from the securities and investment industry than any of his peers in Congress, with the exception of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which analyzed U.S. government data. (By 2005, Schumer had so much cash in reserve that he shut down his fund-raising efforts.)<br />In the last two-year election cycle, he helped raise more than $120 million for the Democrats' Senate campaign committee, drawing nearly four times as much money from Wall Street as the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Donors often mention his "pro-business message" and record of addressing their concerns. John Kanas, the former chief executive of North Fork Bank, said: "He would solicit my opinion, listen to my advice and he appeared to take it into consideration."<br />Lee Pickard, a lawyer representing clients including the Bank of New York, whose employees have been significant donors to Schumer and other Senate Democrats, turned to Schumer last year to successfully beat back a regulatory initiative by the Securities and Exchange Commission. "If you get Chuck Schumer on your side, you are O.K.," he said.<br />That may help explain why some of the wealthiest financiers in New York attended the Sept. 22 breakfast hosted by Kravis at his office overlooking Central Park. A Republican with long ties to the Bush family, Kravis spent much of this year trying to help Senator John McCain, the eventual Republican nominee for president.<br />But last year, Kravis went to Capitol Hill to oppose a proposal that would have more than doubled taxes for executives at hedge funds and private equity firms like his, costing them up to $25 billion over 10 years.<br />Schumer had said publicly he would support the measure only if it also applied to executives at energy, venture capital and real estate partnerships, and he introduced alternative legislation that would do just that. His position was identical to that of lobbyists for a group paid by Kravis and other finance industry executives.<br />The Schumer bill, called a "poison pill" by the leading Republican advocate of the tax increase, went nowhere after provoking opposition from an array of industries.<br />At the breakfast meeting, Schumer, accompanied by fellow Senate Democrats Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Maria Cantwell of Washington, assessed the political landscape as debate over the bailout was beginning.<br />"On the right, you have those who view any government intervention as a threat to free markets," one executive recalled Schumer explaining. "On the left, you have people who choose to view this as a government handout to the rich. In the middle, you have everyone who knows and takes the Treasury secretary seriously and recognizes that if something is not done here, we could be staring into an abyss."<br />Within days, the businessmen sent out checks to the Senate campaign committee.<br />'Their Go-To Guy'<br />To Christopher Cox, the Republican chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the need for action was obvious in the spring of 2006.<br />His agency, which would later be criticized for a 2004 ruling that let banks pile up debt, had grown deeply concerned about lack of oversight of the nation's largest credit-rating agencies, like Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service. Linchpins of the financial system, their ratings are vital to safeguarding investors by evaluating the risks of bonds and other debt. After the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, which had repeatedly been awarded favorable ratings, the agencies had agreed to meet voluntary standards.<br />But the SEC concluded that those agreements were inadequate, so Cox urged Congress to give his agency oversight powers. "Without additional legislative authority, the SEC will not be able to regulate in a thoroughgoing way," he told the Senate banking committee at an April 2006 hearing.<br />The plan drew broad, bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. But executives at the credit-rating agencies soon began pressing Schumer and other allies in Congress to block the proposal or at least limit its reach, according to current and former employees.<br />"They knew Schumer would support them," said one former Moody's executive, who asked not to be named because he still works in the industry. "He was their go-to guy," the executive said.<br />While the New York-based agencies were not significant campaign donors to Schumer or the Senate campaign committee, their lobbyists and many of their clients were.<br />At that time, revenues for the agencies were skyrocketing. The housing market was robust, and Wall Street investment firms were paying the agencies to rate various mortgage-backed securities after first advising the firms and also collecting fees on how to package them to get high credit ratings.<br />It was an obvious conflict of interest, financial experts now say. Despite their high ratings, many of those securities, based on risky loans, would prove worthless, roiling markets and threatening financial institutions worldwide.<br />But Schumer argued that the companies voluntarily met requirements to eliminate such possible conflicts. He suggested that regulators simply encourage competition and disclosure of agencies' ratings methods. There was perhaps no need for an intrusive new law, he said in the spring of 2006. "They've implemented their codes of conduct," Schumer told Cox at a Senate hearing. "They're making good-faith efforts."<br />Schumer could not stop the legislation from passing, but he managed to get the measure amended so that it explicitly prohibited the SEC from regulating the procedures and methods the agencies use to determine ratings.<br />Richard Roberts, a former SEC commissioner, said the amendment Schumer won was troubling, adding that it could block the SEC from punishing a credit-rating agency that consistently issued unreliable ratings.<br />Sean Egan, managing director of a small Pennsylvania agency, Egan-Jones Ratings, and a proponent of the tougher regulations, was more blunt. "The bill was eviscerated," he said. "You have stripped away basic safeguards for the investors."<br />At times in Congress, Schumer has teamed up with Republicans, like former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who aggressively promoted a free-market agenda. Schumer pushed for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law, passed in November 1999, which knocked down the walls between investment banks and commercial banks and allowed financial supermarkets to flourish. The law also weakened regulatory oversight by fracturing it among different agencies.<br />In 2001, Schumer and Gramm jointly proposed legislation that would cut fees paid by Wall Street firms and others to the SEC in half, or by $14 billion, over the coming decade. Their proposal included some extra money for salaries of commission employees.<br />But with trading volumes high, Schumer argued, the government was collecting far too much money from those fees and using it to subsidize other government operations. "It is a tax, an unintended but very real tax, on all sorts of investors," he said at the time.<br />But some Democrats, pointing to the recent corporate accounting scandals, argued that the SEC budget should be doubled or tripled so it could more effectively combat fraud that could lead to a major economic collapse.<br />"We are making a tragic mistake," Representative John LaFalce, Democrat of New York, warned in arguing for a much smaller reduction in SEC fees.<br />"We give the industry what it asks for unwittingly."<br />Schumer's argument prevailed, and the fee cut passed overwhelmingly.<br />Some consumer advocates laud Schumer for his stances on consumer finance issues, including combating high interest rates on credit cards, challenging predatory lending practices and advocating legislation to allow bankruptcy courts to force banks to accept lower interest rates so that families facing foreclosure could stay in their homes.<br />"He is a strong advocate for families and homeowners to make sure they are not taken advantage of," said Eric Stein, senior vice president at the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit group that combats abusive lending practices.<br />But those efforts mostly affect commercial banks and mortgage lending operations around the country and in New York, not the securities and investment businesses in New York.<br />"He built his career in large part based on his ties to Wall Street," said Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, which advises investors on the regulatory system. "And he has given the Street what it wanted."<br />Schumer, though, has a surprising defender in Alfonse D'Amato, the onetime Republican senator he ousted.<br />"Don't take someone to task simply because a group has supported him politically and now he supports legislation that helps them," D'Amato said. "The question is, is the legislation good or bad? With Chuck, it is clear he tries to do what is best for the state and city as a whole."<br />Doling Out Criticism<br />For Schumer, Wall Street's crisis has been especially painful to watch. "It is horrible, just awful," he said in the interview. "And it affects everybody."<br />And he has already begun identifying those he faults for the devastation. Subprime lenders top the list, but he has lashed out with particular fury at the credit-rating industry, which he once defended but now says misled him and the investing public.<br />"The work at these ratings firms was severely compromised, and the companies were some of the biggest contributors to the current financial crisis," Schumer said earlier this month in response to an SEC move that same day to tighten control over the agencies. "The lesson from this is that the three major firms' stranglehold on the ratings industry must be loosened." Schumer has also blamed the Bush administration for its push to ease rules. "After eight years of deregulatory zeal by the Bush administration, an attitude of 'the market can do no wrong' has led it down a short path to economic recession," Schumer said on the Senate floor in September.<br />He has not assigned responsibility to himself or fellow Democrats, saying he had no way of knowing of the misdeeds going on on Wall Street. "I wish I was omniscient," he said. "I'm not."<br />Since the economy began to fall apart, Schumer has joined others in calling for new regulations to combat abuses. He has proposed tougher rules for credit-rating agencies, even changing the way they are paid so they are compensated by investors, not by the companies they are evaluating. He has said he is open to imposing regulations on hedge funds, which currently operate with limited government oversight.<br />And while he previously succeeded in limiting consumers' rights to sue financial institutions, he says he now favors offering that remedy in certain circumstances.<br />But he is also warning that any new rules must be carefully crafted so they don't impose excessive burdens.<br />"You need to provide safety and security to investors in order to attract them to the markets," Schumer told Wall Street executives in a speech last month. "On the other hand, you must be sure that regulation does not snuff out the entrepreneurial vigor and financial innovation that drives economic growth and makes financial institutions successful and profitable."<br />And he is seeking some regulatory concessions for some Wall Street supporters. He has proposed, for example, that the government lift a cap on how big the giant banks can get, an issue important to institutions like JPMorgan Chase. Lifting the cap would allow the biggest banks to absorb weaker ones, but it would also limit competition and increase the risks to the financial system posed by failure of one of the giants.<br />Schumer is also calling for the adoption of European-style regulations that impose far fewer rules and instead require banks to meet certain performance standards, a system institutions generally prefer but some banking experts criticize as not rigorous enough.<br />In recent weeks, Schumer has listened to Wall Street leaders for advice on what should come next. At a dinner at Morgan Stanley's headquarters the night before the presidential election, John Mack, the chief executive, and a dozen top hedge fund officials talked with Schumer about possible changes affecting their industry.<br />"People feel like he is going to be fair and reasonable," said one Morgan Stanley executive, who asked not to be identified because the session was private. "He is mindful that this is a very big part of his constituency Wall Street."</div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Questions dogged Wall Street figure even before arrest<br /></strong>By Alex Berenson and Diana B. Henriques<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />NEW YORK: For years, investors, rivals and regulators all wondered how Bernard Madoff worked his magic.<br />But on Friday, less than 24 hours after this prominent Wall Street figure was arrested for perpetrating what authorities portrayed as the biggest Ponzi scheme in financial history, questions began to be raised about whether Madoff acted alone and why his suspected con game was not uncovered sooner.<br />As investors from Palm Beach to New York to London counted their losses on Friday in what Madoff himself described as a $50 billion fraud, federal authorities took control of what remained of his firm and began to pore over its books.<br />But some investors said they had questioned Madoff's supposed investment prowess years ago, pointing to his unnaturally steady returns, his vague investment strategy and the obscure accounting firm that audited his books.<br />Despite these and other red flags, hedge fund companies kept promoting Madoff's funds to other funds and individuals, especially prominent Jewish families in New York and Florida. More recently, banks like Nomura, the Japanese firm, began soliciting investors for Madoff internationally.<br />The Securities and Exchange Commission, which investigated Madoff in 1992 but cleared him of wrongdoing, appears to have been completely surprised by the charges of fraud.<br />Now thousands, possibly tens of thousands of investors confront losses that range from serious to devastating. Some families said on Friday that they believed they had lost all their savings. A charity in Massachusetts said it had lost essentially its entire endowment and would have to close.<br />According to an affidavit sworn out by federal agents, Madoff himself said the fraud had totaled approximately $50 billion, a figure that would dwarf any previous financial fraud.<br />At first, the figure seemed impossibly large. But as the reports of losses mounted on Friday, the $50 billion figure looked increasingly plausible. One hedge fund advisory firm alone, Fairfield Greenwich Group, said on Friday that its clients had invested $7.5 billion with Madoff.<br />The collapse of Madoff's firm is yet another blow in a devastating year for Wall Street and investors. While Madoff's firm was not a hedge fund, the scope of the fraud is likely to increase pressure on hedge funds to accept greater regulation and transparency and protect their investors.<br />On Thursday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and SEC said that Madoff's firm, Bernald L. Madoff Investment Securities, ran a giant Ponzi scheme, a type of fraud in which earlier investors are paid off with money raised from later victims - until no money can be raised and the scheme collapses.<br />Most Ponzi schemes collapse relatively quickly, but there is fragmentary evidence that Madoff's alleged scam may have lasted years or even decades. A Boston whistleblower has claimed that he tried to alert the SEC to the scheme as early as 1999, and Barron's weekly newspaper raised questions about Madoff's returns and strategy in 2001, although it did not accuse him of wrongdoing.<br />Investors may have been duped because Madoff sent detailed brokerage statements to investors whose money he managed, sometimes reporting hundreds of individual stock trades per month. Investors who asked for their money back could have it returned within days. And while typical Ponzi schemes promise very high returns, Madoff's promised returns were relatively realistic - about 10 percent a year - though they were unrealistically steady.<br />Madoff was not running an actual hedge fund, but instead managing accounts for investors inside his own securities firm. The difference, though seemingly minor, is crucial. Hedge funds typically hold their portfolios at banks and brokerage firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. Outside auditors can check with those banks and brokerage firms to make sure the funds exist.<br />But because he had his own securities firm, Madoff kept custody over his clients' accounts and processed all their stock trades himself. His only check appears to have been Friehling & Horowitz, a tiny auditing firm based in New City, New York. Wealthy individuals and other money managers entrusted billions of dollars to funds that in turn invested in his firm, based on his reputation and reported returns.<br />Victims of the scam included grey-haired grandmothers in Florida, investment companies in London, and charities and universities across the United States. The Wilpon family, the main owners the New York Mets, and Yeshiva University both confirmed that they had invested with Madoff, and a Jewish charity in Massachusetts said it would lay off its five employees and close after losing nearly all of its $7 million endowment.<br />On Friday afternoon, investors and attorneys for investors with Madoff packed Judge Louis L. Stanton's federal courtroom in Manhattan, hoping for the chance to question attorneys for Madoff and the SEC. But a deputy for Stanton canceled the hearing, leaving investors with few answers. Several investors said they were planning to file lawsuits against the firm in the hope of recovering some of their money.<br />Based on the vagueness of the complaints against Madoff, his confession, as detailed in court filings, seems to have taken the FBI and SEC by surprise. Investigators have not explained when they believe the fraud began, how much money was ultimately lost and whether Madoff lost investors' money in the markets, spent it or both. It is not even clear whether Madoff actually made any of the trades he reported to investors.<br />The FBI and SEC have also not said whether they believe Madoff acted alone. According to the authorities, Madoff told FBI agents that the scheme was his alone. He worked closely with his brother, sons and other family members, many of whom have retained lawyers.<br />Also likely to face very difficult questions are the hedge funds, investment advisers and banks that raised money for Madoff. At least some big investment advisers steered clients away from putting money with Madoff, believing that his returns could not be real.<br />Robert Rosenkranz, principal of Acorn Partners, which helps wealthy clients choose money managers, said the steadiness of the returns that Madoff reported did not make sense, and the size of his auditor raised further concerns.<br />"Our due diligence, which got into both account statements of his customers, and the audited statements of Madoff Securities, which he filed with the SEC, made it seem highly likely that the account statements themselves were just pieces of paper that were generated in connection with some sort of fraudulent activity," Rosenkranz said.<br />Simon Fludgate, head of operational due diligence for Aksia, another firm that advised clients not to invest with Madoff, said the secrecy of his strategy also raised red flags. And Madoff's stock holdings, which he disclosed each quarter with the Securities and Exchange Commission, appeared to be too small to support the size of the fund he claimed. Madoff's promoters sometimes tried to explain the discrepancy claimed he sold all his shares at the end of each quarter and put his holdings in cash.<br />"There were no smoking guns, but too many things that didn't add up," Fludgate said.<br />However, the SEC had already investigated Madoff and two accountants who raised money for him in 1992, believing they might have found a Ponzi scheme. "We went into this thing just thinking it might be a huge catastrophe," an SEC official told The Wall Street Journal in December 1992.<br />Instead, Madoff turned out to have delivered the returns that the investment advisers had promised their clients. It is not clear whether the results of the 1992 investigation discouraged the SEC from examining Madoff again, even when new red flags surfaced. Lawyers at the SEC did not return calls for comment.<br />Meanwhile, Fairfield Greenwich Group, whose clients have $7.5 billion invested with Madoff, said it was "shocked and appalled by this news."<br />"We had no indication that we and many other firms and private investors were the victims of such a highly sophisticated, massive fraudulent scheme."<br />At the court hearing, an individual investor, who declined to give his name to avoid embarrassment, expressed a similar sentiment.<br />"Nobody knows where their money is and whether it is protected," the investor said. "The returns were just amazing and we trusted this guy for decades - if you wanted to take money out, you always got your check in a few days. That's why we were all so stunned."<br />Zachary Kouwe and Stephanie Strom contributed reporting.</div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>For the defrauded, little solace</strong><br />By Diana B. Henriques and Alex Berenson<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />NEW YORK: The zoning lawyer in Miami trusted him because his father had dealt profitably with him for decades. The officers of a little charity in Massachusetts respected him and relied on his advice.<br />Wealthy men like Ezra Merkin, the chairman of GMAC; Fred Wilpon, the principal owner of the New York Mets, and Norman Braman, who owned the Philadelphia Eagles, simply appreciated the steady returns he produced, regardless of market conditions.<br />But these clients of Bernard Madoff had this in common: They chose him to oversee much of their personal wealth.<br />And now, they fear, they have lost it.<br />While Madoff is facing federal criminal charges, accused by federal prosecutors of operating a vast $50 billion Ponzi scheme, many of his clients are facing an abrupt reversal of fortune that is the stuff of nightmares.<br />"There are people who were very, very well off a few days ago who are now virtually destitute," said Brad Friedman, a lawyer with the Milberg firm in Manhattan. "They have nothing left but their apartments or homes - which they are going to have to sell to get money to live on."<br />From New York to Palm Beach, business associates of Madoff spent Friday assessing the damage, the extent of which will not be known for some time. Many invested with Madoff through other funds and may not yet know that their money is at risk.<br />Emergency meetings were being held at country clubs, schools and charities to assess the potential losses on their investments and to look for options.<br />There is not much guidance available yet from regulators. On Friday, a federal judge appointed a receiver to oversee the Madoff firm's assets and customer accounts. A Web site is being set up to keep customers informed, but no one is sure yet whether any sort of safety net will catch the most vulnerable investors.<br />For Stephen Helfman, a lawyer in Miami whose father had opened an account with Madoff more than 30 years ago, the news on Thursday came as a hammer blow.<br />"The name Madoff' has overnight gone from being revered to reviled in the Helfman family," Helfman said on Friday. His grandmother, at 98, relied on her Madoff money to pay for round-the-clock care, he said, and his two children's college funds were wiped out.<br />"Thirty-six years of loyalty, through two generations, and this is what we get," he said.<br />The news was equally devastating for the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation in Salem, Mass., which works to reverse the dilution of Jewish identity through intermarriage and assimilation by sending teenagers to Israel and supporting other Jewish education efforts.<br />The foundation was forced Friday to dismiss its small staff and shut down its programs to cope with its losses in the Madoff funds, according to Deborah Coltin, its executive director.<br />"We've canceled everything as of today, everything," she said tearfully.<br />Coltin said she did not know how the little foundation came to be so exposed to the Madoff firm. Its most recent tax filings show that it had $7 million at the end of 2006, with $143,344 in stocks and the rest in what it described as "government securities."<br />It reported the sale that year of "Bernie Madoff" securities, but did not explain what those securities were.<br />Sam Englebardt, a media investor in Los Angeles, said several of his relatives had entrusted virtually all of their assets to Madoff - and he understood why.<br />"It seems like a huge overallocation, I know," Englebardt said. "But remember, they had started out small and invested over five years, fifteen years, thirty years - and every year they got a great return, and they could always take money out without ever having a problem."<br />As that track record lengthened, his relatives gradually entrusted more of their savings to Madoff, he said. "I suspect that is what has happened across the board," he added. "People came to trust him so much that, eventually, they trusted him with everything."<br />Such stories were repeated in e-mails and telephone calls throughout the day on Friday. A woman in Brooklyn whose father died just weeks ago, found that his entire estate and a substantial portion of her stepmother's money was invested with Madoff. A law school official in Massachusetts fears he has lost millions in the collapse of the Madoff operation.<br />Some wealthy victims, of course, can afford to seek redress on their own. But for them, litigation seems the only certainty.<br />Throughout the rumor-fueled hedge fund world on Friday, money managers were comparing notes and assessing losses. By all accounts, they run broad and deep - in the billions.<br />Merkin, the founder of a hedge fund called Ascot Partners, jolted his clients on Thursday with a letter announcing that "substantially all" of that fund's $1.8 billion in assets were invested with Madoff.<br />"As one of the largest investors in our fund, I have also suffered major losses from this catastrophe," Merkin said in the letter. "We have retained counsel to determine what our next steps should be."<br />Some of Merkin's investors have also "retained counsel." Harry Susman, a lawyer in the Houston office of Susman Godfrey, said he is talking with several about their legal options.<br />"These investors were never aware that all of their money was invested with Madoff," Susman said. "They are obviously shocked."<br />Sterling Equities and the Wilpon family acknowledged on Friday that it had money at risk in the Madoff scandal.<br />"We are shocked by recent events and, like all investors, will continue to monitor the situation." said Richard Auletta, a spokesman for Sterling and the Wilpons.<br />(The Mets organization issued a statement saying that the scandal will not derail its new Citi Field stadium project on Long Island or "affect the day-to-day operations and long-term plans of the Mets organization."<br />A lawyer for Norman Braman of Miami, a wealthy retired retailer and the former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles football team, confirmed that Braman, too, had money locked up and perhaps lost in the Madoff mess.<br />And Bramdean Alternatives, a London asset manager run by Nicola Horlick, saw its share price plummet nearly 36 percent on Friday after it announced that nearly 10 percent of its holdings were caught in the Madoff scandal.<br />Madoff has resigned from his positions at Yeshiva University, where he was the university treasurer and deeply involved in the business school.<br />"Our lawyers and accountants are investigating all aspects of his relationship to Yeshiva University," said Hedy Shulman, a spokeswoman for the university.<br />The most recent tax filings for the university show that its endowment fund, a separate charity, was heavily invested in hedge funds and other nontraditional alternatives at the end of its fiscal year in 2006.<br />The student newspaper, The Yeshiva Commentator, recently reported that the university's endowment's value had dropped to $1.4 billion from $1.8 billion - before the scandal broke.</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Coconuts cover Rio beach in protest on violence</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />RIO DE JANEIRO: A big black cross surrounded by 16,000 coconuts covered parts of Rio de Janeiro's famous Copacabana beach on Saturday to symbolize the homicides that have plagued the state of Rio de Janeiro in recent years.<br />"Shame" was written on a banner in four different languages, next to the coconuts laid out at sunrise. The protest lasted until after midday, when families of the victims arrived at the site.<br />Rio de Janeiro, the beach-side tourist hub, is one of Brazil's most dangerous cities and suffers from frequent confrontations between drug gangs and the police in the city's notorious slums.<br />"The coconuts represent the 16,000 people that were assassinated in the state of Rio in the past two years. If all the skulls of the people killed were put on the sand, that's what we would see," said Antonio Carlos, founder of Rio de Paz, the non-governmental organisation, which organized the protest.<br />(Reporting by Julio Villaverde, writing by Ana Nicolaci da Costa, editing by Vicki Allen)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Lawyer seen as bold enough to cheat the best of investors</strong><br />By Alison Leigh Cowan, Charles V. Bagli and William K. Rashbaum<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />Marc Dreier knew the 45th-floor conference room of Solow Realty well. He had been in it many times as a trusted lawyer for the company's founder.<br />So nothing seemed amiss when he showed up one afternoon in October and told a receptionist he had a meeting with her boss, people associated with Solow say.<br />Dreier was elegantly dressed, as always, the people said. He had three people with him. The receptionist ushered the group past her desk. They were sitting there, visible inside the glass-walled room, a few minutes later when the boss, Steven M. Cherniak, happened to walk by.<br />Cherniak would later tell people at the company how surprised he had been to see Dreier. He had not scheduled any meeting with him, and he had no idea what Dreier was up to.<br />But people there gave little thought to Dreier's odd visit until November, when the company's founder, Sheldon Solow, received a disturbing call. The caller wanted to let Solow know that Dreier had offered him the chance to buy promissory notes that had been issued by the company, people associated with the firm said.<br />They were fake notes, and shortly thereafter, lawyers for Solow Realty different lawyers were in touch with U.S. government authorities, reporting their suspicions that Dreier might be engaged in financial fraud.<br />Since that opening tip, U.S. government authorities have been tracking what they describe as a brazen swindle of some of New York's savviest investors by one of New York's most accomplished lawyers. Dreier has been charged in connection with fraud and attempted fraud in the United States and Canada, and is being held without bail in New York.<br />In court last week, prosecutors said an early count put the money missing at $380 million, most of it lost by hedge funds and other investors who had bought promissory notes that were flat-out fictions.<br />In recent days, Dreier LLP, the Park Avenue law firm that Dreier founded, has been plunged into chaos. At least $35 million in escrow money that was to have been held by the firm also seems to be missing, the authorities say, and nearly all of its 250 lawyers are now looking for work.<br />The amounts pale next to the $50 billion fraud that another high-profile New York figure, Bernard Madoff, was accused last week of orchestrating, but they have unnerved lawyers and their clients in the broader legal community.<br />As the Dreier firm's lawyers rummage through the law firm's books, which had been until recently Dreier's exclusive preserve, the lawyers are finding that bills have not been paid in months. Their health insurance is in default and the firm will not be able to make its $2.6 million payroll on Monday, lawyers there say.<br />"No one is in charge," Vincent Pitta, a lawyer at the firm, complained last week in an affidavit in support of a government request to freeze assets. "The news of Dreier's arrest has had a neutron-bomb-like effect on Dreier LLP"<br />Few have fallen as quickly as Dreier, a Yale graduate and Harvard-educated lawyer who had been a partner at some of New York's better known firms before opening up a high-profile practice of his own in 1996 that now has offices in five cities.<br />"He promised lavish salaries and lavish compensation and he was attracting the best and the brightest," said Gerald Shargel, Dreier's lawyer. Shargel said Dreier is cooperating with the receiver now running the firm.<br />The expense of running such an operation does not provide a ready explanation for thefts of such magnitude. Even the cost of sustaining Dreier's appetite for luxury does not provide an easy answer for what instilled the kind of desperation that seems to have prompted schemes involved here, schemes that prosecutors said involved Dreier pretending to be other people.<br />Dreier's lifestyle includes a waterfront home in the Hamptons, a New York triplex and a place on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, California He kept a Mercedes 500 in New York, an Aston Martin in California, and a 121-foot, blue and white Heesen motor yacht with a Jacuzzi and a crew of 10 docked in New York or St. Maarten. Associates said the boat, the Seascape, was the site of late-night parties at which Dreier, who is divorced, was often joined by an attractive young crowd.<br />The law offices themselves at 499 Park Avenue were like modern art galleries. In court papers filed this week, the comptroller for the law firm reported that $30 million to $40 million of the firm's assets had been spent on art. Among Dreier's holdings were works by Picasso and a Warhol depiction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.<br />In recent days, someone not affiliated with the firm was seen removing several pieces of artwork from the walls and carting them away, a person at the firm said. It was not clear what became of the art.<br />Friday, lawyers at the firm cannot remove even client papers without the permission of authorities who are struggling to track the apparent financial chicanery.<br />Dreier, 58, controlled the finances of his law firm to an unusual degree, according to lawyers there, because of the unusual way it was set up.<br />Dreier was the only equity partner in the firm, and deals were structured so that only he knew all the specifics and had access to all accounts, people with the firm said in court papers. Dreier persuaded lawyers that such an arrangement was best by stressing that it would allow them to concentrate on their first love, the law, while he worried about running the firm.<br />There would be no executive committee. No partners meetings. Dreier would handle all administrative chores.<br />For lawyers there now, the delegation of responsibility means that they are just now figuring out that Dreier had let their malpractice insurance lapse, exposing them to enormous risk if they are sued by Dreier's growing list of potential victims, lawyers said.<br />Dreier, who grew up on Long Island, the son of a refugee from Poland who owned movie theaters, evolved into a bon vivant who belonged to the Harmonie Club and was a staple of high-wattage charity events.<br />As a lawyer, Dreier could be aggressive, as was evident when he was reprimanded in 2004 by a bankruptcy court judge. The judge found that Dreier had, on Solow's behalf, played a role in placing false legal ads that highlighted the financial debts of a Solow Realty rival, Peter Kalikow.<br />The judge called the ads "an affront to the court" and "somewhat sleazy."<br />Two years later, though, Dreier still did some work for the Solow firm and relied on that connection to convince Wall Street veterans that he was legitimately selling promissory notes issued by the company.<br />In 2007, one investment house, Perella Weinberg Partners, bought a company that held $45 million worth of the supposed Solow paper, a spokesman for Perella said.<br />The investment firm said it had no reason to be overly suspicious about the notes because someone, ostensibly Dreier, had been paying interest on them in a timely manner. Now worthless, the notes equal roughly 4 percent of the portfolio holding them.<br />A subpoena shows the government is seeking information about an additional dozen hedge funds that may have been defrauded.<br />One investor on the list was Nick Maounis, the Connecticut trader who made headlines two years ago when a $6 billion fund he started called Amaranth blew up. He is now operating a new hedge fund known as Verition. A person close to Verition said the fund had declined to purchase the notes.<br />Making it harder to reconstruct the sale of the promissory notes is the possibility that investors sold them among themselves. Prosecutors contend that the evidence against Dreier is strong and includes tape recordings in which he admits that some of the promissory notes he was selling are fabricated.<br />Days before Dreier's arrest in New York, court documents showed, a lawyer with his firm asked Dreier to release $38 million from an escrow account for a client, only to discover that much of the money had vanished.<br />The next day, Dec. 2, Dreier flew to Canada by private jet and tried to hold a business meeting there very much like the unauthorized gathering he is said to have held in Solow's Midtown New York offices, the authorities say.<br />In the offices of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, the authorities say, he tried to pass himself off as a lawyer for the plan and close the sale of an additional $33 million in fraudulent promissory notes supposedly backed by the plan.<br />But a receptionist there caught on, the authorities said, and called the police, who arrested him.<br />Being jailed in Toronto did not curb Dreier's interest in moving money between accounts, and he feverishly worked the phones, according to court papers.<br />At this point, the law firm's comptroller refused his requests to move millions of dollars. He did agree, though, to Dreier's request to be connected to the bank that handled the law firm's accounts, an assistant United States attorney, Jonathan Streeter, said in a bail hearing on Thursday.<br />"He successfully got $10 million transferred out of an escrow account into a personal account that he controlled," Streeter said.<br />That money, like all the rest, remains unaccounted for.</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Fraud case may erode investor confidence<br /></strong>By Michael J. de la Merced<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Frauds on Wall Street aren't unheard of. But a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, one that purportedly struck at boldface names on several continents, is a bombshell by any standard.<br />The case against Bernard Madoff, the respected longtime trader accused of running one of the biggest frauds in Wall Street history, has been Topic A in the investor community. But close behind is a heated discussion of how the sordid drama will affect the already-battered community of hedge funds and other investment firms, many of which invested with Madoff.<br />Madoff's case could hardly have come at a worse time for hedge funds. The whipsawing markets and suddenly unfriendly lenders have already taken their toll on high financiers, and many have already suffered what amounts to runs on the bank by investors clamoring to withdraw their investments.<br />"It can't help but have the effect of further chipping away at the confidence that the investor community has in the hedge fund industry," said Ralph Schlosstein, the chief executive of Highview Investment Group, a money management firm and a former president of BlackRock. "But like many things that come at moments of fragility, its impact is magnified."<br />The collapse of Madoff's firm struck the vast majority of investors by surprise. Madoff, once the largest market maker on the Nasdaq stock market, was known for his modest demeanor and, perhaps more importantly, his steady and overwhelmingly positive returns. That in turn appears to have attracted scores of investors, from Palm Beach, Fla., country clubs to Manhattan social circles.<br />It is difficult to map out the swath of damage that the Madoff firm's collapse is likely to cut through the hedge fund industry, not to mention a wide range of other investors. But among its biggest investors were funds of funds, firms that invest in several hedge funds and are nominally among the most sophisticated judges of character in the industry. Because Madoff reported consistently positive returns for more than a decade - some say impossibly so - he drew vast amounts of business from them.<br />Now, the collateral damage from his scheme is likely to add to the chaos that has already been ravaging hedge funds. Spooked by losses and forced to raise cash quickly as the financial crisis ballooned, investors have sought to pull out their money from hedge funds, causing serious pain, and even some forced closures. A growing list of large, well-known firms have sought to block redemption requests in an effort to stem a mass exodus of investors who now desperately want to get into cash.<br />In a letter sent Friday, the Citadel Investment Group said it was halting redemptions at its two largest hedge funds through March 31.<br />Confidence will only weaken further with the Madoff firm scandal, intensifying pain for the industry.<br />"If you couple this with the deleveraging already, this means one thing: more redemptions," said Campbell R. Harvey, a professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.<br />The losses from the Madoff firm will also raise more questions about how well funds of funds perform due diligence, a concern already magnified by losses in the hedge fund industry.<br />"Funds of funds that invested in Madoff will get a double-whammy," said Whitney Tilson, who runs the T2 Partners hedge fund. "Not only will they have to take a loss, but they are going to have to do an awful lot of explaining for how they ever got fooled here."<br />Indeed, while many investors are asking how regulators could have missed a towering Ponzi scheme, some are beginning to question the whole process of due diligence. Several potential investors had raised questions about Madoff's claims of steady returns over the years, but regulators apparently took few steps to investigate.<br />"Where were the auditors?" asked Bill Grayson, the president of Falcon Point Capital, a hedge fund based in San Francisco. "Where was his chief compliance officer? Where was the SEC?"<br />Already under heightened scrutiny, the collapse of the Madoff firm is likely to fuel calls for greater regulation of the hedge fund industry, beyond the current optional registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission.<br />What's more, many investors in hedge funds are likely to ask tougher questions of the managers of these firms. Executives who are loath to disclose their investment strategies - instead running a "black box" model, as Madoff infamously did - will probably come under increased pressure to open the lid on their operations, at least a little bit.<br />"I suspect that many investors are going to start asking many more questions of their managers," Tilson said. "They will be much less tolerant of black box managers."<br />Still, some disagree that Madoff's arrest will lead to widespread contagion throughout the industry. Tilson argued that most investors will see the case as an unusual circumstance whose breadth and brazenness is unlikely to be duplicated. "This is not a Lehman Brothers," he said.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Singapore's star rises as Switzerland stumbles</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />By Neil Chatterjee and John O'Donnell<br />As pressure mounts on Switzerland's flagship bank UBS and the country's secrecy code comes under fire from the United States and Germany, Singapore's star as a haven for the super-rich is rising fast.<br />The sun-drenched Asian city-state, with the highest density of millionaires in the world, is seeing wealth management prosper as the U.S. and Europe grapple with the worst slump in a generation.<br />Singapore's strict bank secrecy rules seem likely to be spared an assault similar to the one that Berne is defending now, following the charging of UBS's wealth management chief for helping Americans hide money.<br />With close ties to powerful Asia, Singapore is in a stronger position to resist pressure from the U.S. than rival Switzerland or Alpine retreat Liechtenstein, which recently partially surrendered bank secrecy.<br />"It's a wealth centre," said Martyn Schilte, a manager in charge of selling million dollar supercars in Singapore. "If you look at the type of client we sell to, it's people with a net worth of $50 million-plus."<br />The city-state has its sights on attracting the world's wealthy to its palm-tree-lined coastline where some apartments come with a private yacht berth. Its plan is working.<br />As Asia's elite move billions to the country, assets under management soared by a third last year to more than $800 billion (538 billion pounds).<br />The amount may be small compared to Switzerland. Singapore had $500 billion in offshore assets under management last year, according to the Boston Consulting Group, compared to four times as much in Switzerland.<br />But it puts the region on the map for banks hoping to capitalise on a more resilient Asia as the West slows.<br />As jobs cuts cloud London and New York, banks such as Credit Suisse and Macquarie Group are hiring wealth management staff in Singapore, despite a local recession.<br />Bank of China is one of the latest to plan a wealth management arm in the Southeast Asian country, hoping to meet millionaires such as those who recently gathered to buy and sell private jets on the sidelines of a Formula One night race.<br />"Singapore has developed a lot and has all the ingredients to compete internationally," said Deepak Sharma, an executive in charge of Citigroup's global wealth management business outside the United States.<br />NO SURRENDER<br />Like tax hideout Monaco, Singapore has a hard line on bank secrecy. It has not agreed to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) standards of transparency and exchange of information.<br />Singapore, which is trying to grow financial services to wean dependence on manufacturing, is on the International Monetary Fund's list of tax havens and targeted by a proposed new U.S. anti-tax-abuse law.<br />Another country that had similarly shunned the OECD, Liechtenstein, recently agreed to a landmark deal with the U.S., paving the way for the exchange of bank account details with Washington in cases of tax evasion.<br />The agreement may pressure Switzerland into similar concessions, which could work to Singapore's advantage.<br />Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said this month such scrutiny in the West could lead to more European money flowing into the country, a hot talking point in the industry.<br />"It is interesting to notice a growth in the number of European clients booking wealth through Singapore, which unlike Switzerland does not recognise the European tax directive," said Sebastian Dovey of consultancy Scorpio Partnership.<br />But European cash comes with the risk that Singapore too could be targeted in the crackdown on tax havens. "I expect Singapore to come under pressure, too," Prime Minister Lee said.<br />The U.S. told Singapore and its banks last year to sever financial links with Myanmar's military junta, widely believed to use the city state as its main offshore banking centre.<br />"Increasingly Singapore is looking out on a limb," said Jeffrey Owens, director of the OECD's Centre for Tax Policy Administration.<br />"It's for the Singapore government to assess how the political climate is changing to protect the reputation of the Singapore brand," he said.<br />Singapore's central bank said confidentiality laws were no shield for criminal activities and that banks could disclose customer information to assist such investigations.<br />PANDORA'S BOX<br />Singapore is in a stronger position to resist the strong arm of Washington.<br />Singapore, experts in the region point out, is a U.S. military ally and one of the few Asian countries with a deepwater port that could hold a U.S. aircraft carrier.<br />Brussels too may shy away from a fight as it is unclear how many Europeans park money in Singapore. Bankers played down its significance as a destination for European money and said most comes from Asia and in particular Indonesia.<br />Singapore's central bank says over half the money managed in the city-state came from outside the Asia-Pacific, although this includes pension funds and hedge funds as well as private banking.<br />Ultimately, however, it may be politics that makes throwing down the gauntlet to Singapore difficult. To do so, said experts, would be an indirect challenge to China.<br />"If I were the Singapore government, I would not sign unless it's on equal footing with Hong Kong, the key competitor," said Roman Scott, managing director of consultancy Calamander Capital.<br />The European Union, said Scott, is not putting pressure on Hong Kong, however, because it is reluctant to confront Beijing.<br />Furthermore any agreement with Europe could pave the way for demands for the same treatment from countries such as Indonesia, Thailand or Taiwan.<br />"That is one of the reasons for the resistance as they do not want to open a Pandora's box," said Scott.<br />"They are scared what might come up. The European customers are minor -- what's more important is that you do not want to open up everything for everybody."<br />(Additional reporting by Laurence Tan and David Fogarty in Singapore and Lisa Jucca in Zurich; Editing by Megan Goldin)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Violence erupts in Athens week after killing<br /></strong>By Renee Maltezou and Silvia Aloisi</div><div>Reuters<br />Sunday, December 14, 2008<br />Small bands of Greek rioters hurling firebombs attacked an environment ministry building, shops and banks in Athens on Saturday during an eighth day of protests following the killing of a teenager by police.<br />The latest, sporadic violence by a few hundred people followed a candlelit evening vigil marking a week since 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot dead, sparking Greece's worst rioting in decades.<br />Police sources said groups of dozens of protesters armed with firebombs battled police in parts of the capital, including the leftist Exarchia neighbourhood where the teenager was killed by a police bullet on December 6.<br />"They threw stones at police in Exarchia, launched fire bombs against an environment ministry building and smashed four shops and two banks in central Athens," a police official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.<br />Throughout most of the day, Athens had appeared calmer than in the past week. Even the night-time violence was confined to pockets of the city of around four million and was on a far smaller scale than the rampage that destroyed hundreds of shops earlier in the week.<br />Families and students clad in white and holding flowers staged peaceful rallies from around noon (1000 GMT) to pay tribute to the slain teenager.<br />Several people said they were tired of violent protests, blamed on an anarchist fringe tapping into resentment over political scandals and the impact of the global slowdown.<br />But as night fell, hooded youngsters wearing gas masks could be seen roaming around Exarchia, setting garbage bins on fire, throwing rocks and smashing shop windows.<br />Riot police manning street corners responded by firing tear gas. Some restaurants closed down early for fear of attacks, although outside the neighbourhood the city was quiet.<br />"LAST STRAW"<br />Banners in the main square outside parliament, where hundreds of people converged during the day, read "The state kills" and "Down with the government of murderers" but the atmosphere was calm.<br />"The murder of Alexis was the last straw. Being a young man in Greece today is a crime ... They are stealing our dreams," said one leaflet distributed in the square on Saturday.<br />The week-long unrest, which spread to 10 cities in Greece and sparked sympathy protests in other European countries, has caused an estimated 200 million euros ($265.3 million) of damage in Athens alone. More than 400 people have been detained.<br />The people who gathered outside parliament voiced anger at the police, whom they accuse of heavy-handedness.<br />"We're here to show our grief and sorrow because no one understands us. They are killing children for no reason," said Irini, 16, a pupil at the school Grigoropoulos attended.<br />The policeman charged with killing the teenager has been jailed pending trial, along with a colleague. He says he fired warning shots after being attacked by youths in a leftist Athens neighbourhood and that one bullet ricocheted.<br />Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis has vowed to guarantee safety, rebuffing calls to resign and hold early elections.<br />"Right now, the country is dealing with a serious, big international financial crisis ... It needs responsible policies and a steady hand on the wheel," Karamanlis said on Friday.<br />(Writing by Silvia Aloisi; Editing by Michael Roddy)</div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Violence brings issues plaguing Greece to the surface<br /></strong>By Rachel Donadio and Anthee Carassava<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />ATHENS: Just four years ago, this ancient capital was remade for the Summer Olympics by a new government that surged to power promising reform. Friday, Athenians are faced with the worst unrest in decades.<br />The question on many minds, as the capital faced its seventh day of violence following the shooting death by the police of a 15-year-old boy, was simply, "What happened?" Or it was, perhaps, "What didn't happen?"<br />For most Greeks, raised in a culture with a high tolerance for protest and disarray, it was the Olympics that were the anomaly, not the violence and government inertia on display here this week.<br />"The Olympics were a utopia," said Paraskevas Golfis, who was having coffee in an upscale shopping mall that opened two weeks ago in a former Olympic venue here. "Greek reality is what we're living today."<br />That reality economic stagnation, widespread corruption, a troubled education system, rising poverty, precarious security was thrust to the fore this week as thousands of Greeks spilled onto the streets to protest against the government.<br />The demonstrations were set off by the death last Saturday night of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 15, who was killed by a police officer's bullet in the Exarchia neighborhood of central Athens. Many demonstrations turned violent, guided by a relatively small group of self-styled anarchists.<br />Although the government said it would not tolerate violence, it ordered the police not to use force to avoid further bloodshed. In the unrest, hundreds of businesses were destroyed nationwide, resulting in an estimated $1.3 billion in damage.<br />On Friday, youths smashed windows around a central square in central Athens and clashed with police officers who fired tear gas. Since last weekend, the police have made 176 arrests, the majority of them for looting, the authorities said.<br />Despite widespread criticism of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis's handling of the riots, he dismissed the idea of early elections at a news conference on Friday in Brussels. The prime minister had traveled for a European Union summit meeting as part of his strategy to diminish the riots by not straying from his normal routine. His party controls a one-seat majority in Parliament.<br />"Our government is strong," he said. "Strength isn't measured just by a parliamentary majority, which is slim, but by the resolve of a government to press ahead with its work and policies, and that's what I'm doing."<br />Karamanlis said there would be a "sober assessment" of how the authorities handled the protests. He added, "We should not confuse the actions of groups destroying public property with the right that people, students and workers have to protest."<br />That even peaceful demonstrations became so fierce spoke to the deep well of discontent in Greece Friday. Conversations with Athenians revealed great anxiety over the economy and a widespread feeling that they had been neglected and, this week, abandoned by a government they saw as corrupt.<br />"The government just shows that it's uninterested," said Paraskevas Tilipakis, manager of a shoe store at the mall. "We've lost our team spirit. That's why we're where we are today."<br />It was not supposed to be this way. In 2004, Karamanlis and his center-right New Democracy Party were elected on promises of much-needed reform after decades of Socialist governments.<br />They helped bolster national pride by pulling off the Olympics, reducing the fiscal deficit and increasing employment.<br />But problems soon arose in a culture torn between a deep need for structural reform and a profound resistance to change.<br />Karamanlis's efforts to reform the education system were met with such fierce resistance that state high schools and universities were closed for most of the 2006-07 school year. Wildcat strikes and other demonstrations followed another effort to reform Greece's generous and deficit-ridden pension system.<br />His government narrowly won re-election in 2007 and has since been plagued by multiple corruption scandals involving pension funds and land swaps. It was also criticized for its handling of the forest fires that burned out of control, killing 80 in the summer of 2007.<br />Across Southern Europe, young people are in a crisis, faced with less-than-ideal educational opportunities, few job prospects and the corrosive lack of autonomy that comes from living at home into their 30s because of high housing costs.<br />In Greece, the minimum wage is $880 a month, and one in five people live below the poverty line. Many Greeks work a second or third job to make ends meet. All this has helped bring Karamanlis's already shaky government to its weakest point yet. The leftist opposition has used this week's riots and what many say is Karamanlis's weak response to gain political ground.<br />"Greeks don't feel safe and secure," said Flora Vamvokou, 32, sitting with her housewares store colleagues at Starbucks. "They don't trust that the police will protect them."<br />She added, "The president hasn't even come out to address the Greeks and assure them and try to instill some sense of calm."<br />Then there are the economic anxieties. "This coffee cost 5 euros," said Nicole Tsoukalis, 33, pointing to her Starbucks drink. "If I make 700 euros a month, how can I afford that?"<br />The conditions were ripe for protests to continue, she said.<br />"This isn't going to end here," Tsoukalis said. "It's a revolution we're living, an uprising."<br />But in the Exarchia neighborhood surrounding Athens Polytechnic University, an anarchist stronghold, some said the situation was not so much a social uprising as a security situation that had spiraled out of control.<br />After the teenager's death last Saturday, the violent protests began. "The first night there was a reaction met with no response by the government," said Dimitris, a clerk in the Stournari bookstore near the university who only gave his first name for fear of reprisals. "That gave them further impetus, that's why the riots spread."<br />Memories of the military junta of the late '60s and '70s and the student uprisings of the '70s still loom large in the public imagination. And one small leftist party, Syriza, has been gaining ground among young people for its support of this and other demonstrations.<br />But it has also taken criticism for doing so, and few Athenians believe that better governance would come along with a return of the left to power. At the moment, Greeks do not see another hope like the Olympics.<br />"This must be the reality we like because we don't seem to be doing anything to change it," said Golfis at the mall. "This is what we like. This is who we are."<br />More protests are planned for next week.</div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Land of opportunity?</strong><br />By Floyd Norris<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />The U.S. recession provides a double whammy for the job prospects of those trying to establish themselves. There are fewer jobs to go around, and older Americans who can do so are either delaying retirement or seeking to return to the work force.<br />The accompanying charts compare the average number of jobs in September, October and November of this year for each age group to the number of jobs the same age group held a year earlier. There are now more jobs than there were a year ago for every group over 55 years of age - and fewer jobs for every group under 55.<br />Those who focus on unemployment rates could easily miss that trend, because the rates are up for nearly every age group. For men age 65 to 69, for example, the rate in November was 5.9 percent, far above the 3.4 percent rate in November 2007, the month before the United States went into recession. And yet there were nearly 100,000 more men in that age group with jobs than there were a year earlier.<br />The difference reflects the fact many more older people want jobs. The labor force - defined as those who have jobs or are looking for them - has risen rapidly among those who have reached the ages at which many traditionally retire. Now, with their retirement-plan assets down sharply in value and their homes also worth less than they had been, many people are putting off retirement or seeking to return to work.<br />The recession has had a smaller impact on women, whose employment is down by just 0.4 percent year-over-year, than on men, who have 1.7 percent fewer jobs. But it has also taken its hardest toll on racial minorities.<br />Among men age 25 to 34 - the youngest group in which virtually all have completed their education - there were 1.6 percent fewer jobs for whites, 2.1 percent fewer for Hispanics, and 6.2 percent fewer for blacks.<br />All those figures are taken from the government's household survey, which can be volatile. That is why three-month averages were used. Had the figures simply compared November to November, the changes would have been even sharper.<br />The other survey on jobs, in which employers are asked about employment, shows ways in which this recession is unlike recent downturns, in that it is hitting industries that heretofore had escaped unscathed.<br />In the past, the financial services industry has undergone upheavals, but the changes usually reflected one part of the industry gaining competitive position over another, allowing industry employment to continue to rise. But over all, jobs in the industry are down 1.8 percent over the last year, the sharpest annual contraction since World War II. Similarly, employment in retail sales is off 3 percent, the sharpest decline since World War II.<br />But health care jobs are up 2.8 percent over the last year, the same gain as in the previous year. And federal government hiring, outside the postal service, has risen at a 4.7 percent rate over the 12 months, the fastest growth of the Bush presidency.</div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594201247027714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgA42DpvcpeCtV7QJ_R-AVLCeHoNAcNPNkyoebk54ILdzDjh49L9OfdrcgoadLaZQ1Y4U6SuRa147x6Af-NAZk9N-2rKJYe0SDsvf8T9awbxn81pSUEBYgPQfB_892be39TrSEov3HbaM/s320/DSC03236.jpg" border="0" /> <div> </div><div><strong>UN report finds proxy war in eastern Congo</strong><br />By Lydia Polgreen<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />GOMA, Congo: A report to the UN Security Council by a panel of independent experts found evidence of links between senior officials of the Congolese and Rwandan governments and the armed groups fighting in eastern Congo. The findings portray a complex proxy struggle between the two nations, with each using armed forces based here to pursue political, financial and security objectives in a region ravaged by conflict.<br />The report, which was based on months of independent research in the region, gives the clearest picture yet of the underpinnings of the fighting in eastern Congo, revealing a sordid network of intertwined interests in Congo and Rwanda that have fueled the continuing chaos.<br />Tiny Rwanda and its vast neighbor to the west, Congo, have long been connected by a shared history of ethnic strife. In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Hutu militias that carried out the killing fled into Congo, then known as Zaire.<br />In 1996, Rwanda backed a rebel force led by Laurent Kabila that ultimately toppled Congo's longtime president, Mobutu Sese Seko. The initial aim had been to capture the Hutu fighters who had carried out the genocide, but the fighting devolved into a frenzy of plundering of Congo's minerals, spawning a conflict that drew in half a dozen nations and left as many as five million people dead. Most died of hunger and disease.<br />The report's findings on the current conflict are likely to strain already tense relations between the two countries, providing ammunition for each. Congolese officials have accused Rwanda of supporting a rebel group led by a renegade general from the same Tutsi ethnic group as much of the Rwandan political establishment.<br />Rwanda has accused Congo's government of colluding with an armed group led by some of the Hutu militia who carried out the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. These are the fighters who fled afterward to Congo and eventually formed the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda, or FDLR, which preys on Congolese civilians and enriches itself with the country's gold, tin and coltan, a mineral used in making the tiny processors in cellphones and other electronic equipment.<br />The independent experts found extensive evidence of high-level communication between the government of Rwanda and the Tutsi rebel group, the Congress for the Defense of the People, led by the renegade general Laurent Nkunda, based on reviews of satellite phone records.<br />Though the content of the calls is not known, the report said that they were "frequent and long enough to indicate at least extensive sharing of information."<br />In interviews, several of Nkunda's fighters described Rwandan soldiers helping the rebels inside Congo, according to the report. Rwandan soldiers also helped bring recruits, some of them children, to Congo's border to fight in Nkunda's rebellion, the report said.<br />It also investigated how Nkunda was paying for his militia, documenting hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments for taxes in territory that he controls. The report also named prominent business executives who had backed him financially.<br />Congo's military, meanwhile, has been collaborating with the Hutu militia that is led by the authors of the Rwandan genocide, according to the report. The weak and undisciplined Congolese army has frequently relied on help from these fighters in battling Nkunda's troops.<br />In exchange for ammunition, the militiamen have helped in numerous offensives, the report said, citing by name several senior Congolese military officers who had handed over materiel to the Hutu forces. According to satellite phone records, senior military and intelligence figures in Congo have spoken frequently with top Hutu militia leaders.<br />"It is obvious that Rwandan authorities and Congolese authorities are aware of support provided to rebel groups," Jason K. Stearns, the coordinator for the five-member panel that produced the report, said on Friday at a news conference at the United Nations. "They haven't done anything to bring it to an end."<br />He said the Congolese government said that it had no policy to aid the Hutu militia but that there might be support from individual military commanders. Both governments said that telephone records showing conversations between officials and rebels did not constitute support, he added.<br />Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from United Nations, New York.</div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>The Year in Ideas</strong></div><div>Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />Capital insurance<br />In 1988, the world tried to crack down on its bankers. Many nations, including the United States, adopted the Basel Capital Accord, which requires each country to ensure that its banks hold a certain amount of capital in reserve. Unfortunately, bankers have spent much of the past 20 years finding ways to evade the requirements of this agreement. Now a team of economists is proposing an alternative: capital insurance.<br />In accounting terms, capital is what's left over after you subtract a bank's liabilities from its assets. When times get tough, assets decline in value and liabilities rise, requiring banks to take steps to rebalance the equation and maintain the capital required by law. Banks do this by curtailing lending and liquidating assets - but in extreme cases, they may issue more stock, borrow from sovereign wealth funds or, in the latest instance, beg for (and receive) "capital injections" from the U.S. Treasury.<br />Is there a better way? Three economists - Anil Kashyap and Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago, and Jeremy Stein of Harvard - propose that banks be permitted to pay an insurance premium to a third party who agrees to inject capital into the bank in the event things go awry. For example, if a bank purchased a billion dollars' worth of capital insurance from a sovereign wealth fund, the fund would deposit a billion dollars' worth of a safe asset (Treasury bonds, for example) into an escrow account. If the bank ran into trouble, the billion dollars would flow out of the escrow account and into the bank's coffers. If not, the money would revert back to the sovereign wealth fund when the policy expires.<br />Stein and his colleagues say capital insurance could avoid the kind of regulatory arms race that leads to more regulation and more evasion - and the prospect of more crises.<br />- Stephen Mihm<br />Wine from China<br />In May, Berry Brothers & Rudd, England's oldest independent wine merchant, dropped an oenological bombshell. In its "Future of Wine Report," it predicted that in 50 years, China would be the world's leading wine producer. What's more, because of the country's favorable soil, low labor costs and soaring domestic demand for wine, the authors concluded that China had "all the essential ingredients to make fine wine to rival the best of Bordeaux."<br />Don't laugh just yet. China is already the world's sixth-largest producer, with about 400 wineries. And it has been making grape-based wine for at least 2,000 years. True, most Chinese wine today is unremarkable, even undrinkable to Western palates. And reports abound of counterfeiting and labeling imported wine as Chinese. But many among China's 1.3 billion citizens are developing a taste for wine, which experts say will drive better wine making. Producers are taking steps to raise quality, too, bringing in wine consultants from Australia, France and other regions. "None of us were drinking wines from Chile or Argentina 50 years ago," noted Bartholomew Broadbent, an importer and co-owner of Dragon's Hollow, a winery in Ningxia-Hui, an autonomous in northwestern China. "Why not China?"<br />Grace Vineyards, a winery complete with a French-style château in Shanxi Province, points to the country's potential. A bottle of Grace Chairman's Reserve, a Bordeaux-style blend, sells for $60 or more.<br />- Amy Cortese<br />'Locavestors'<br />Perhaps you've heard of locavores: people who eat only foods that have been produced within a tight radius of where they are consumed. Now some people - call them locavestors - are investing in much the same way. The idea is that by putting money into local businesses - rather than, say, a faceless conglomerate - investors can earn a profit while supporting their communities. To help match mostly local investors with capital-hungry local businesses, regional stock exchanges are starting to spring up around the globe.<br />Consider InvestBX, which was formed to serve businesses looking to raise relatively small sums in the West Midlands region of England. In February, InvestBX's first listed company, Teamworks Karting, which runs an indoor go-kart center in Birmingham, raised more than $735,000 to open a track in nearby Reading. In November, Key Technologies, a technology company with 232 employees and annual sales of about $26 million, floated shares worth nearly $3 million. To list on InvestBX, a company must be based in Britain and have a significant part of its operations in the West Midlands. Companies can raise about $3 million from "local and U.K.-wide investors," according to the exchange.<br />Local exchanges address a financing gap for smaller companies, which may not be able to attract venture capital and for whom the major exchanges may be out of reach. "Small businesses need funding options more than ever in today's recessionary climate," said Trexler Proffitt, a professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who recently completed a feasibility study for a seven-county Lancaster exchange. (His conclusion: affirmative.)<br />In a way, we are coming full circle. Until the 1950s, when they began to consolidate, there were thriving regional exchanges all across the United States. "Globalization has been advantageous, but we're starting to see the sacrifices we've made," Proffitt said. "People are interested in figuring out how to connect to their local communities again."<br />- Amy Cortese<br />The Mahlangu hand-washer<br />Irene van Peer is a Dutch designer who, with a group of colleagues, has devised a clever method for turning empty plastic beverage bottles into hand-washing devices that can help prevent the spread of disease in Africa.<br />Van Peer realized the need for such a device while working on sanitation projects in South African townships; many of the township residents have difficulty washing their hands because they lack easy access to water. Van Peer and her colleagues began by having conversations about the idea with people, mostly women, in the townships. "For me it was important to listen to their problems and to come back with a solution they could make themselves," she said.<br />Eventually, van Peer and her colleagues hit upon an ingenious design. It involves converting the cap of an empty bottle into a homemade tap. The cap is pierced and then a long, skinny cone made from a readily available material like cork is inserted. One end of a length of wire is pushed through the cone, and the other is wound around a weight, like a stone, to nestle in the palm of the hand. The bottle is held above the hand facing downward, and when the weight is pushed up, the water is released and trickles down the wire toward the weight. Used carefully, a one-liter bottle can perform up to 60 hand-washes.<br />After showing people in the townships how to use it, van Peer also left instructions to be passed on from person to person. She named it the Mahlangu after Johanna Mahlangu, a woman who told her she planned to make the hand-washers for her day care center for disabled children.<br />- Alice Rawsthorn<br />Carbon penance<br />We all contribute to climate change, but none of us can individually be blamed for it. So we walk around with a free-floating sense of guilt that is unlikely to be lifted by the purchase of wind-power credits or halogen bulbs. Annina Rüst, a Swiss-born artist-inventor, wanted to help relieve these anxieties by giving people a tangible reminder of their own energy use, as well as an outlet for the feelings of complicity, shame and powerlessness that surround the question of global warming.<br />So she built a translucent leg band that keeps track of your electricity consumption. When it detects, via a special power monitor, that electric current levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the wireless device slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns into the flesh of your leg. "It's therapy for environmental guilt," said Rüst, who modeled her "personal techno-garter" on the spiked bands worn as a means of self-mortification by a monk in Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code." (Brown derived the idea from the bands worn by some celibate members of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei.)<br />Rüst built her prototype while working at the Computing Culture group of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also designed the band to punish wearers if they didn't spend enough time talking to their carbon-fixing house plants. But first Rüst may have to address a more mundane matter. When the spikes dug in, Rüst said, she noticed that the device "doesn't hurt that much."<br />- Jascha Hoffman<br /></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9l-37Jo_ZFQtW0MPIH3Id8DOIK7CvQxuIVON0bYLDjJFbOAiNLO0BZeIS5gGLxDKBvE6aKBoDnp1rMEiPnVuuhIaAZUms6lFPyiHVyDR_dbWvRynVt10OYe2a5Gy0uxPEuvDeB972c5E/s1600-h/DSC03238.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279594200697221586" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9l-37Jo_ZFQtW0MPIH3Id8DOIK7CvQxuIVON0bYLDjJFbOAiNLO0BZeIS5gGLxDKBvE6aKBoDnp1rMEiPnVuuhIaAZUms6lFPyiHVyDR_dbWvRynVt10OYe2a5Gy0uxPEuvDeB972c5E/s320/DSC03238.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>Russian military retakes Georgia border village</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />By Margarita Antidze and Matt Robinson<br />Russian troops reoccupied a Georgian village near breakaway South Ossetia on Saturday, forcing back Georgian police and drawing criticism from European Union cease-fire monitors.<br />An EU mission monitoring the fragile cease-fire since Georgia's five-day war with Russia in August called on the Russian forces to immediately withdraw.<br />The mission said their presence in Perevi, a mountain village on a road into South Ossetia from the west, was "incompatible" with the EU-brokered cease-fire. Georgia said there were at least 500 Russian soldiers present.<br />Russian forces pulled back in October from a buffer zone adjacent to South Ossetia having repelled a Georgian military assault on the rebel territory in August. But it kept soldiers in Perevi, angering Tbilisi.<br />The troops pulled out of the village of 1,100 people on Friday. Georgian police moved in behind them, but the Russians were back by nightfall. Television pictures showed soldiers unloading sandbags from a truck and building up a checkpoint.<br />The EU monitors said they had verified that "Russian troops have reoccupied the Perevi checkpoint, near the administrative boundary line of South Ossetia, and even deployed a considerable number of troops in and around the village of Perevi."<br />They said in a statement that Russian troops had prevented European ambassadors from visiting the area.<br />"EUMM (European Union Monitoring Mission) calls on the Russian government to withdraw its units from the Perevi checkpoint and the Perevi village without delay," it said.<br />South Ossetia, recognised by Russia after the war as an independent state with Russian military protection, accused Georgia of violating the cease-fire by deploying special forces to the boundary.<br />"About 60 special forces soldiers were deployed to the village of Perevi directly on the border with South Ossetia," Interfax news agency quoted a South Ossetian defence ministry official as saying. "EU monitors are turning a blind eye."<br />Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said Russian troops had "put on a show" with helicopters, armoured vehicles and paratroopers. Georgian police withdrew. "The Russians kicked the police out of Perevi this morning," he said.<br />South Ossetia claims the village as its own. But the EU monitors say it clearly lies outside the region's boundary.<br />The monitors claimed credit on Friday for the Russian withdrawal, saying it followed EU discussions with the Russian foreign ministry and military.<br />South Ossetia and a second breakaway Georgian region, Abkhazia, threw off Tbilisi's rule in wars in the early 1990s.<br />Russia said it intervened in Georgia to save civilians from a Georgian military bid to retake South Ossetia after months of skirmishes and Georgian allegations of Russian provocation. The West condemned Moscow's response as disproportionate.<br />(Editing by Matthew Jones)</div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHUN0otswr9Y7sKfVn2jPEy7JBg6jjPNURYSB6I3DSwizjYW37NDeYqiL-UNMkoARM1WldG-2OnTxN5iaG-AxL3g0l52F65hJvZq2dIv_SaDL4yLwf2I7STIwSZihPDrW8n0IRK5ywcpA/s1600-h/DSC03239.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593900097293186" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHUN0otswr9Y7sKfVn2jPEy7JBg6jjPNURYSB6I3DSwizjYW37NDeYqiL-UNMkoARM1WldG-2OnTxN5iaG-AxL3g0l52F65hJvZq2dIv_SaDL4yLwf2I7STIwSZihPDrW8n0IRK5ywcpA/s320/DSC03239.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/13/asia/OUKWD-UK-AUSTRALIA-ITALY-ROWING.php">Italian quits just short of rowing the Pacific solo</a> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifLA7E4zMJt7BhYsNnc2geUHePlMf8z-sSy3dR0cwvLhWpyDGypiryJ2LP5iN5_Tximi9TNR2qeq-Ms8yjw35wW_AmUTJC68NywHt_0KZFEz0nGga1RBqcXBrTiBLq3MNW72ndIFw1vGs/s1600-h/DSC03240.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593894535990114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifLA7E4zMJt7BhYsNnc2geUHePlMf8z-sSy3dR0cwvLhWpyDGypiryJ2LP5iN5_Tximi9TNR2qeq-Ms8yjw35wW_AmUTJC68NywHt_0KZFEz0nGga1RBqcXBrTiBLq3MNW72ndIFw1vGs/s320/DSC03240.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgClmQJSqMsF7BvREoOCHCc_1NvCjh6DKnfli7K6Ut_E96-wS6_MOD4zHLmjlWPNhNa3dcYdE_BpvFU4slE8POX3w75j_00pILR6IzZGqVQhMGbOCuWYokJ_P34DQIXIEXU4GxXwkECrk/s1600-h/DSC03241.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593889915265650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgClmQJSqMsF7BvREoOCHCc_1NvCjh6DKnfli7K6Ut_E96-wS6_MOD4zHLmjlWPNhNa3dcYdE_BpvFU4slE8POX3w75j_00pILR6IzZGqVQhMGbOCuWYokJ_P34DQIXIEXU4GxXwkECrk/s320/DSC03241.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLXoT_acmrohRBp9a9yBgSP8MqdbdheMhHIkM_rjTWKZcHoEfrbpWa-bX7N5cPKn2GVH4gLpT0UggqGuKkU-M1_8IpyuDulUIJ91fMzvPcN1VmFDS6UJkiuim1LVDJgY3AiSOUqWkTDXQ/s1600-h/DSC03242.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593891119076818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLXoT_acmrohRBp9a9yBgSP8MqdbdheMhHIkM_rjTWKZcHoEfrbpWa-bX7N5cPKn2GVH4gLpT0UggqGuKkU-M1_8IpyuDulUIJ91fMzvPcN1VmFDS6UJkiuim1LVDJgY3AiSOUqWkTDXQ/s320/DSC03242.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmqN2evnQnAMd9C-QDn3n6Moe9x2ETcVZUdWhol5Nx7ZrTe3XYqeFzD85HN2IoqBdlPha0H0OhKD0WV0LN8TbM_PdmOIyYxYTHin4gSeh_mwptmKLm6RJc-AUf4dPfdYXcsuve_y6B1d4/s1600-h/DSC03243.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593885724169650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmqN2evnQnAMd9C-QDn3n6Moe9x2ETcVZUdWhol5Nx7ZrTe3XYqeFzD85HN2IoqBdlPha0H0OhKD0WV0LN8TbM_PdmOIyYxYTHin4gSeh_mwptmKLm6RJc-AUf4dPfdYXcsuve_y6B1d4/s320/DSC03243.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>Zimbabwe seen eyeing fresh polls<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Saturday, December 13, 2008<br />HARARE: Zimbabwe might be forced to hold early elections if a constitutional bill creating a power-sharing government with the opposition fails in parliament, state media reported on Saturday.<br />President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since independence in 1980 to the opposition MDC, whose leader Morgan Tsvangirai beat the veteran leader in a March presidential poll but fell short of the necessary votes to avoid a run-off.<br />Mugabe won the second round after Tsvangirai pulled out, citing violence, but the vote was widely condemned. The 84-year-old leader is under Western pressure to step down following a cholera outbreak that has killed hundreds.<br />A power-sharing pact signed by Mugabe and Tsvangirai on September 15 has so far failed to materialise due to a dispute over key ministries and constitutional changes creating the prime minister's post for Tsvangirai has yet to be passed.<br />Zimbabwe's Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told the state-run Herald newspaper the constitutional bill would be published on Saturday and brought to parliament after 30 days of scrutiny by the public.<br />"If no support is forthcoming, it means that (the constitutional) amendment number 19 bill will be a dead matter," Chinamasa said.<br />"In the event that the collaboration that we envisage (to pass the bill) is not forthcoming, then that will necessitate fresh harmonised elections at some point in time."<br />Chinamasa said the constitutional amendment would need the support of the opposition as no single party had the two-thirds parliamentary majority required to pass the bill.<br />Tsvangirai's MDC controls 100 seats in the 210-member lower house of parliament, while ZANU-PF won 99 seats. The balance is held by a smaller faction of the MDC, led by Arthur Mutambara.<br />All the parties approved a constitutional draft during talks last month in South Africa.<br />Tsvangirai has refused to join the unity government, saying Mugabe and ZANU-PF wanted to make the MDC a junior partner in the government.<br />Analysts say the power-sharing agreement presents the best hope for reversing Zimbabwe's economic ruin, shown by the highest inflation rate in the world, above 231 million percent, and acute food and foreign currency shortages.<br />Zimbabwe is also battling a cholera epidemic that has killed nearly 800 people and infected over 16,700.<br />(Reporting by Nelson Banya; Editing by Sami Aboudi)</div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBIjj3OmItBVKMVqtA1DBXtfetyIauyc91G3cS-Gmm3Osg9bRXRzYJy0eBvTknmVypp8E0qufmTvOYDP6a0syExscDQ_PJuZQF7WYA1FFheB4wh89gFRv_117E3MVIIZSW3gabJNu33AI/s1600-h/DSC03247.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593503608553954" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBIjj3OmItBVKMVqtA1DBXtfetyIauyc91G3cS-Gmm3Osg9bRXRzYJy0eBvTknmVypp8E0qufmTvOYDP6a0syExscDQ_PJuZQF7WYA1FFheB4wh89gFRv_117E3MVIIZSW3gabJNu33AI/s320/DSC03247.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF0m1haBy5S630qREsuPPE_uwHw7JmA21rQaWRlb5TVlpr9oCLHvhTd0sBrRvYrIVdqR2MjapbN6t7vr0m-8VG9KIR5K8_2jTLSZ3i8Y6lPKEdNqiwXpOAt4BIr1mRFwuqOcMth2A-ke4/s1600-h/DSC03249.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593499770712050" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF0m1haBy5S630qREsuPPE_uwHw7JmA21rQaWRlb5TVlpr9oCLHvhTd0sBrRvYrIVdqR2MjapbN6t7vr0m-8VG9KIR5K8_2jTLSZ3i8Y6lPKEdNqiwXpOAt4BIr1mRFwuqOcMth2A-ke4/s320/DSC03249.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuz9Q8Vsv0jOp4QlOpDv1gY66FtHpUdYjL24YsMWsCgcsfsrT_tGgNhLr31RnVo8IEtjE1Wl4JMmqR7sPdMtsIZ7O-GpzPrqxu8fSeS1ZHR84b4bU3_kLXfqAY912oqguSA4ZfeaSY3H8/s1600-h/DSC03250.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593498310394258" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuz9Q8Vsv0jOp4QlOpDv1gY66FtHpUdYjL24YsMWsCgcsfsrT_tGgNhLr31RnVo8IEtjE1Wl4JMmqR7sPdMtsIZ7O-GpzPrqxu8fSeS1ZHR84b4bU3_kLXfqAY912oqguSA4ZfeaSY3H8/s320/DSC03250.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt53Az7SpbXfZPcyG32zrkQ_4jQr-3AHQ16QCWHcuczU8t8AmD3HByRluXhmILs1GVJ6xhqbIwdg2FGWHNTaqmRfEkL60Y21JU1D_JihQkRSUnv3eBR7Z2RKjy87W09dF2sPekqkLkT74/s1600-h/DSC03252.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593496176084210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 274px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt53Az7SpbXfZPcyG32zrkQ_4jQr-3AHQ16QCWHcuczU8t8AmD3HByRluXhmILs1GVJ6xhqbIwdg2FGWHNTaqmRfEkL60Y21JU1D_JihQkRSUnv3eBR7Z2RKjy87W09dF2sPekqkLkT74/s320/DSC03252.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQAPhlX_RckD5C33lJAMyT4RnzTBy_xlaVIIdRlOGZi7jd-B0TX3fTR5t9euyG63SLeLGw9ExsKfxlNhL9ELYdNB1Du26_k5y42wp4QCVnToDDheTjKUK9yr-MTmER3deAGt3jNxfMNfI/s1600-h/DSC03253.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593494319274690" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 206px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQAPhlX_RckD5C33lJAMyT4RnzTBy_xlaVIIdRlOGZi7jd-B0TX3fTR5t9euyG63SLeLGw9ExsKfxlNhL9ELYdNB1Du26_k5y42wp4QCVnToDDheTjKUK9yr-MTmER3deAGt3jNxfMNfI/s320/DSC03253.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg48lAA47xth9a9bqzAsNJE4QqEeHh-txcxhFv-Y_Rk13rlm8xTrSRTDXxx0pp73xJ7cDO4azmwGntQtSka_7JYQtVQwwW4Kgci8Dr1F9EyoiCD9KdLtVgs1DjK64iyh6RwsMZSGckIfHA/s1600-h/DSC03257.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593208062823826" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg48lAA47xth9a9bqzAsNJE4QqEeHh-txcxhFv-Y_Rk13rlm8xTrSRTDXxx0pp73xJ7cDO4azmwGntQtSka_7JYQtVQwwW4Kgci8Dr1F9EyoiCD9KdLtVgs1DjK64iyh6RwsMZSGckIfHA/s320/DSC03257.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6SVpcIqwFwi9wXZNqb7jHi5Gi1YPoJMxipmdv5hilox3MHya3dID9o6WzDOs71HGu3N6gxYh12Q3XYKDJuSdNC6bQc0ulvM3lC2hnYDMgTMw9IEYfOipYjZji2JrECBZrB7l8llzYo6U/s1600-h/DSC03258.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593205379738130" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6SVpcIqwFwi9wXZNqb7jHi5Gi1YPoJMxipmdv5hilox3MHya3dID9o6WzDOs71HGu3N6gxYh12Q3XYKDJuSdNC6bQc0ulvM3lC2hnYDMgTMw9IEYfOipYjZji2JrECBZrB7l8llzYo6U/s320/DSC03258.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhei61f-BQWZVU3fxz9ULhmts04LSlO6D8yem2ZDimRYASrzd2ymuJhj-sXoW_8RPTr6zIv_2NjtRlYJHTmIYSPBavzPLxO1Btb4AlkOQdixycfdEu_kVUYrxMakZaXUO9XkW3M80Sk07A/s1600-h/DSC03259.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593208059788738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 300px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhei61f-BQWZVU3fxz9ULhmts04LSlO6D8yem2ZDimRYASrzd2ymuJhj-sXoW_8RPTr6zIv_2NjtRlYJHTmIYSPBavzPLxO1Btb4AlkOQdixycfdEu_kVUYrxMakZaXUO9XkW3M80Sk07A/s320/DSC03259.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiVQKmvBMDaiGeBUP7Qir51DHDIardrbKhhiEHz7EoC0G7iCralq0GBriHErGgb_Jmn_7FODRX8ohBxKSyNWF-oOyrF8vELMP58E5is1U5-YjmsiU64x6CY0aYqkH9bwNohtCdD58pZTM/s1600-h/DSC03260.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593200557660114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiVQKmvBMDaiGeBUP7Qir51DHDIardrbKhhiEHz7EoC0G7iCralq0GBriHErGgb_Jmn_7FODRX8ohBxKSyNWF-oOyrF8vELMP58E5is1U5-YjmsiU64x6CY0aYqkH9bwNohtCdD58pZTM/s320/DSC03260.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxinFdr4AMjU7mInxxgEDPSvGxSMB0Y2P2GnmNzUMz-Clxhg5n-RbbcASnQefUP2maKKFnL1JjI7A_oEUD2T4QLu49kNHC9JNJREGlOe5x_8uDegg4YSfOJ-JcVOA96Gj1sH4_1leaH-Q/s1600-h/DSC03261.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279593197316616466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxinFdr4AMjU7mInxxgEDPSvGxSMB0Y2P2GnmNzUMz-Clxhg5n-RbbcASnQefUP2maKKFnL1JjI7A_oEUD2T4QLu49kNHC9JNJREGlOe5x_8uDegg4YSfOJ-JcVOA96Gj1sH4_1leaH-Q/s320/DSC03261.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4AzmfcahA6Selm8GxKAsKQzF3RhKdL98R-w_eDNXD7aBtadfrxm-UMMdiNcOvJmfESACqWAN2N_tJw-rbIZLz7hm3jWdoYtyf-w-6ZCYDGmUnSY22_PS8_9GzcbqWpFKAouklc8UnRWo/s1600-h/DSC03262.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592936429325218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4AzmfcahA6Selm8GxKAsKQzF3RhKdL98R-w_eDNXD7aBtadfrxm-UMMdiNcOvJmfESACqWAN2N_tJw-rbIZLz7hm3jWdoYtyf-w-6ZCYDGmUnSY22_PS8_9GzcbqWpFKAouklc8UnRWo/s320/DSC03262.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFnrIqCoeutFDMn2a8ydKnPC1mD3dSLWeDIrlOSLbhsg_m3jMOE81tDcj_i9hFIHgt_2Zm-Fe5SPPngZhHQbn7JLgfjpzIdCZQZSsP-GnvfDZy0ONNr0-HRaGOzXw79SQvl2nee2mnFq0/s1600-h/DSC03264.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592934854813554" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFnrIqCoeutFDMn2a8ydKnPC1mD3dSLWeDIrlOSLbhsg_m3jMOE81tDcj_i9hFIHgt_2Zm-Fe5SPPngZhHQbn7JLgfjpzIdCZQZSsP-GnvfDZy0ONNr0-HRaGOzXw79SQvl2nee2mnFq0/s320/DSC03264.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2ZLbFJe_V-sNRerYxRWayqMOFlDvnNFmlWNcDcqE9kayVcZUUvejzIXVrfcAfWuWdbK5wdRbLlQfDwINxj1LihHScp9nL_OZp-4rzl7qebhZJQGTlJ8qiSxKJia7RTs_oNCaKymoNtrQ/s1600-h/DSC03265.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592930795006642" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2ZLbFJe_V-sNRerYxRWayqMOFlDvnNFmlWNcDcqE9kayVcZUUvejzIXVrfcAfWuWdbK5wdRbLlQfDwINxj1LihHScp9nL_OZp-4rzl7qebhZJQGTlJ8qiSxKJia7RTs_oNCaKymoNtrQ/s320/DSC03265.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyjm2JxLaRpX1toULxMLAmXJZSpdrUXguH9vl4mQ-9FwjYFnshcP__E1j5kSKksHqKNZZrrkrTQyZiJOUG8Vnd85vzeF9qoGVtWy46zXjsvC3WyVuz61rir1x4cBCFUmdPvQR2vBnzwLU/s1600-h/DSC03267.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592927742687090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyjm2JxLaRpX1toULxMLAmXJZSpdrUXguH9vl4mQ-9FwjYFnshcP__E1j5kSKksHqKNZZrrkrTQyZiJOUG8Vnd85vzeF9qoGVtWy46zXjsvC3WyVuz61rir1x4cBCFUmdPvQR2vBnzwLU/s320/DSC03267.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2fj73gBrCASirE6R8arFSdWBd58tCfYVY8n7w2BDpGuejHMHsEuEnT9HfweyPMf1PLilbi74S01xk2M-LlmUuiiV7YciO6kg6gtIgRtv6eQ1Dr6ZQY-PqC4FC2e36YgT2M4boZJrq3iU/s1600-h/DSC03269.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592924054186802" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 318px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2fj73gBrCASirE6R8arFSdWBd58tCfYVY8n7w2BDpGuejHMHsEuEnT9HfweyPMf1PLilbi74S01xk2M-LlmUuiiV7YciO6kg6gtIgRtv6eQ1Dr6ZQY-PqC4FC2e36YgT2M4boZJrq3iU/s320/DSC03269.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8ICSaCefCTx6SDbqsNk0zKwWWFYE0Tn2XxMYDeOi6gI_YdKKHpJs96VX4sB84nakxhx8DEB4Cq4D4L2eReVHa5FgKl9J_ID-rAXbWG2NPlumSWGFRs5iW1XZsRMLBQ6dyA8H4FBqLnwI/s1600-h/DSC03270.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592667435025154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 270px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8ICSaCefCTx6SDbqsNk0zKwWWFYE0Tn2XxMYDeOi6gI_YdKKHpJs96VX4sB84nakxhx8DEB4Cq4D4L2eReVHa5FgKl9J_ID-rAXbWG2NPlumSWGFRs5iW1XZsRMLBQ6dyA8H4FBqLnwI/s320/DSC03270.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQp7x_D3OgUVUMBWXwvsr-_JXYhkJeE5iIqKV9WXbsZTJ35F8y2xLlB3ExYwDV19xOA1jafVqs118WbHNBYTL1B8tzdtAYqDnfB2NtpReaAVfJWFG-_GwcV6x8jmsAj7KakhieOYlIZnc/s1600-h/DSC03271.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592656097339986" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQp7x_D3OgUVUMBWXwvsr-_JXYhkJeE5iIqKV9WXbsZTJ35F8y2xLlB3ExYwDV19xOA1jafVqs118WbHNBYTL1B8tzdtAYqDnfB2NtpReaAVfJWFG-_GwcV6x8jmsAj7KakhieOYlIZnc/s320/DSC03271.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKSBzRd05g2Cff0Qtm95Jdjq-HDPg9si-niWTP7PPi0b7Gz4g8VyzVKxk4fJbxVJ6Dm47lNgnpcbd3BMAgtmBYSXE9N2xQtm-XGNqMihRXtyl_sGiGKz6Yv-DqAgl8Cft7AZEp7Ewp9XE/s1600-h/DSC03272.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592654764631138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKSBzRd05g2Cff0Qtm95Jdjq-HDPg9si-niWTP7PPi0b7Gz4g8VyzVKxk4fJbxVJ6Dm47lNgnpcbd3BMAgtmBYSXE9N2xQtm-XGNqMihRXtyl_sGiGKz6Yv-DqAgl8Cft7AZEp7Ewp9XE/s320/DSC03272.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYBVkjrxRnFQMqQVi8lDVUO2vx3bb5lUzGmgS4X5d1XWVhpQEfB88NhSD8xXuVXTl1iSngLHazf1Faj_4F0Y7Lh49rlLQmXKAa7fDFhjyvSvod3VMVYwpabWIBAEcEH4Dyxxow8kAy1I4/s1600-h/DSC03273.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592653579038546" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYBVkjrxRnFQMqQVi8lDVUO2vx3bb5lUzGmgS4X5d1XWVhpQEfB88NhSD8xXuVXTl1iSngLHazf1Faj_4F0Y7Lh49rlLQmXKAa7fDFhjyvSvod3VMVYwpabWIBAEcEH4Dyxxow8kAy1I4/s320/DSC03273.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCmPNeCNIEUfe7uMpbmmp0xPvQb4Lb1_tIpT2acR8nDYOmiK7Anjiw0MfwCIFMbikncQh2b7ZNEc_Fb21C0Z9s-MpYaV2am9ZWcpkx7RpT0n67KxJwZZcwduHWhJotn2-0gF1BWmXDdYM/s1600-h/DSC03276.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592646054292674" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCmPNeCNIEUfe7uMpbmmp0xPvQb4Lb1_tIpT2acR8nDYOmiK7Anjiw0MfwCIFMbikncQh2b7ZNEc_Fb21C0Z9s-MpYaV2am9ZWcpkx7RpT0n67KxJwZZcwduHWhJotn2-0gF1BWmXDdYM/s320/DSC03276.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqAzcXXQXmiTPdz2hIWSeY8y53ltTgv9hyCWjtAHGpuexpx32g1sFLOHeQrbSK33RgNHbwLD3KOQrXyVlsFQyS9wNePFAhjyJLKfkMn5ntjlfoN-VPs4M5d4cQcgLE2O8wtB0lAatLouc/s1600-h/DSC03277.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592335616786466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqAzcXXQXmiTPdz2hIWSeY8y53ltTgv9hyCWjtAHGpuexpx32g1sFLOHeQrbSK33RgNHbwLD3KOQrXyVlsFQyS9wNePFAhjyJLKfkMn5ntjlfoN-VPs4M5d4cQcgLE2O8wtB0lAatLouc/s320/DSC03277.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCz0HVJUbHCfYMx8bHWcRmdos-CFaJrCFjZwp7AgNkgegR07Nmy3v57W98mKRzHLyRIgRdzoJJKthR2gC2c2g678aqEDQaHw4gsGa-v5FIkSj7n3fYBOhAvTKi8ueRCxe9j_-VPK5ZDpc/s1600-h/DSC03278.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592333844314562" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCz0HVJUbHCfYMx8bHWcRmdos-CFaJrCFjZwp7AgNkgegR07Nmy3v57W98mKRzHLyRIgRdzoJJKthR2gC2c2g678aqEDQaHw4gsGa-v5FIkSj7n3fYBOhAvTKi8ueRCxe9j_-VPK5ZDpc/s320/DSC03278.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdgdj8R0VKUpqZrorJ1Dr1cmYrMhCiVWtr2unpumNuTjvL2WapJteNsq8pwKdKdoPYC3P_NSnKaRlFgaYB4X7BUPd5ZaH75iEf4LxJoikBNVLs3-l-2-OtMetiCxVLDvAx_j6LD9ReERE/s1600-h/DSC03279.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592325871236354" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdgdj8R0VKUpqZrorJ1Dr1cmYrMhCiVWtr2unpumNuTjvL2WapJteNsq8pwKdKdoPYC3P_NSnKaRlFgaYB4X7BUPd5ZaH75iEf4LxJoikBNVLs3-l-2-OtMetiCxVLDvAx_j6LD9ReERE/s320/DSC03279.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFiN6xBqlZ7AwFXHxYXgGbbepKCybyX9owrV0KeaRAw3dGqMJGAsq4oonUkAHJN_XS2yAnmepfj-3R8aYOdMPFHl9D6ph2dgPLmYzIwOrUHqDNm8u796tqW4s_y1fCVYl29WGM7JJfmOU/s1600-h/DSC03283.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592324901419506" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFiN6xBqlZ7AwFXHxYXgGbbepKCybyX9owrV0KeaRAw3dGqMJGAsq4oonUkAHJN_XS2yAnmepfj-3R8aYOdMPFHl9D6ph2dgPLmYzIwOrUHqDNm8u796tqW4s_y1fCVYl29WGM7JJfmOU/s320/DSC03283.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnEP9HEPMNV38M8rsMULL4tXMw-Fkwsfm5eciz-JrL-JkdU_BjKKTYvriPXDIUciQKC7hHO6LSRr3WFLf5EyIZTTkVF-j3frlspNTkd5UxflomyyfcQDmNT_XTZMrFXTeeIv9q2lwhqi0/s1600-h/DSC03284.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279592322785380658" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnEP9HEPMNV38M8rsMULL4tXMw-Fkwsfm5eciz-JrL-JkdU_BjKKTYvriPXDIUciQKC7hHO6LSRr3WFLf5EyIZTTkVF-j3frlspNTkd5UxflomyyfcQDmNT_XTZMrFXTeeIv9q2lwhqi0/s320/DSC03284.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong> </div><div align="center"><br />Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/"><strong>Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </strong></a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-2244213319647435482008-12-13T05:22:00.016+01:002008-12-13T07:38:36.358+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Friday, 12th December 2008<div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong>0431</strong></div><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg__nXoF6oDcgxJ9920q1By9WxN_PT2RJPug-RKC2WjI4Z8FXeBfzlWMaE1PbU6S3EE4YUnGMqvRPmo9NciW_f0FDJieIWCS1Xmdsu8hVk4R3N_NYtOZCtsJ7eyb8RrwJ8n9UJon7UgpfE/s1600-h/DSC03147.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279130208924216514" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg__nXoF6oDcgxJ9920q1By9WxN_PT2RJPug-RKC2WjI4Z8FXeBfzlWMaE1PbU6S3EE4YUnGMqvRPmo9NciW_f0FDJieIWCS1Xmdsu8hVk4R3N_NYtOZCtsJ7eyb8RrwJ8n9UJon7UgpfE/s320/DSC03147.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU8bpEp5EqxNRuw-UVtCZ2PCgP51x2wmMqPv9vcK9EIZZpsOtcpwK8VrMlrqT25b6K64GyD0on0jhpG57jisEmXNhppAUsvboLSJIcWz9JDou6YHWAi7ucuiqS_I3QJeny4RyIWwr2fhg/s1600-h/DSC03150.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279130203122882226" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU8bpEp5EqxNRuw-UVtCZ2PCgP51x2wmMqPv9vcK9EIZZpsOtcpwK8VrMlrqT25b6K64GyD0on0jhpG57jisEmXNhppAUsvboLSJIcWz9JDou6YHWAi7ucuiqS_I3QJeny4RyIWwr2fhg/s320/DSC03150.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>IW: No camera I own can capture the light on snow of a full moon in a clear night sky. The hightlight of my day. </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Otherwise I am a largely bed-bound, impatient, cranky, cooped up person who knows the snow's on this weekend at the station 40 minutes drive from our house and that I won't be taking M. and starting B. I am in poor humour.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>I await the other highlight of my day: the rising shadow of the sinking sun as it squeezes the pink light off the mountain top. I watch the shadow rise, then the snow lit crest is gone and within a few minutes it is dark.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCp9AafCdxDPfLahd7SB2YSPk5BLXZFrXOvQk4SwL0cGJf28nPX_gv7ztOMtpuOEmmfRDzPkd990_5g36c-D4lRCP9hoQsCa3A_BTsGE65WCMNdBEqe8JGyK68Xw-eBK5c3gSjieP-P38/s1600-h/DSC03153.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279130203176657826" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCp9AafCdxDPfLahd7SB2YSPk5BLXZFrXOvQk4SwL0cGJf28nPX_gv7ztOMtpuOEmmfRDzPkd990_5g36c-D4lRCP9hoQsCa3A_BTsGE65WCMNdBEqe8JGyK68Xw-eBK5c3gSjieP-P38/s320/DSC03153.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikL6_Dl5ug01y7-P90pZVO8a5_ZzwZhXml5riU46k6V9wpXncRDAvkrUhwn7bCr-QG0BL8S3L4y-ADnEsoUnTelTNB-nkbydPIqLJmjcvbNyp24IU-6IeogHPEvgL3mruWCDGfL3XW4ZQ/s1600-h/DSC03155.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279130201116021906" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikL6_Dl5ug01y7-P90pZVO8a5_ZzwZhXml5riU46k6V9wpXncRDAvkrUhwn7bCr-QG0BL8S3L4y-ADnEsoUnTelTNB-nkbydPIqLJmjcvbNyp24IU-6IeogHPEvgL3mruWCDGfL3XW4ZQ/s320/DSC03155.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><strong>WTO won't seek Doha breakthrough this year</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />GENEVA: The World Trade Organization dropped plans on Friday to seek a breakthrough for a new trade deal this year, risking an increase in protectionism as the world economy suffers its worst crisis in a generation.<br />The WTO's director-general, Pascal Lamy, told members that he had decided against calling trade ministers to Geneva this month to push for a deal in the WTO's seven-year-old Doha round, because they were not showing enough political will to narrow differences.<br />The decision means ministers were unable to meet a call by leaders of the Group of 20 rich and emerging nations last month to reach an outline Doha deal by the end of this year to help counter the financial crisis by warding off protectionism.<br />It also promises an uncertain period for international trade, the lifeblood of the global economy, as the world navigates the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.<br />Lamy clearly decided that the prospects of a successful meeting were not high enough to invite ministers now. That formally leaves the Doha round still in progress, but economists say it will be much harder to reach a deal next year when the world economy will already be in a much worse state than today.<br />But Lamy left political leaders, like Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, who has pushed hard for a deal, the opportunity to save the talks over the weekend.<br />"Leaders have expressed a desire but this has not translated into enough will at this stage," Lamy told a meeting of key WTO ambassadors.<br />"Unless this dramatically changes in the next 48 hours this is the reality from Geneva," he was quoted as saying at the meeting by a participant, who was not authorized to speak publicly.<br />The next steps for negotiations will be discussed at a meeting of the WTO's general council on Dec. 18 to 19.<br />The U.S. ambassador to the WTO, Peter Allgeier, said a ministerial meeting was unlikely now to take place while George W. Bush is U.S. president, and the next moves were likely after President-elect Barack Obama takes office on Jan. 20.<br />"We're very disappointed but we also agree that that is a prudent conclusion to draw given the gaps that still exist in some crucial issues," Allgeier told reporters.<br />Lamy had previously indicated that a meeting could be held this weekend. But on Monday, after meeting key WTO ambassadors to discuss revised negotiating texts on agriculture and industrial goods issued on Saturday, he decided that further consultations were needed on three sensitive issues.<br />These were proposals to create duty-free zones in some industrial sectors such as chemicals, a proposal to safeguard farmers in poor countries from surges in imports, and cotton subsidies - all of which touch on key U.S. interests.<br />Brazil's foreign minister Celso Amorim told reporters that the United States was making excessive demands, when, as the source of the financial crisis that Doha deal would help solve, it should be showing the most flexibility. But Allgeier denied the United States had refused to budge.<br />Lamy told ambassadors that major trade players were not willing to spend the political capital to narrow differences over the sector deals and farm safeguard issues.<br />"It has been a tough week, trying and trying again, which is, I believe, my responsibility," Lamy told WTO members. "But at the end of the day the responsibility to compromise lies with you."<br />Lamy spent the last three days in one-on-one conversations and conference calls with ministers and top officials from the United States, China, India, Brazil and other trade powers to try and narrow the gap on those issues, trade officials said.<br />Estimates of the value of a Doha agreement vary widely. Some advocacy groups say it would damage the interest of developing countries, although poor nations have been among the loudest calling for a deal.<br />A study last month by the International Food Policy Research Institute said more than $1 trillion in world trade could be at risk if Doha was not concluded soon - $336 billion in increased trade from lower tariffs and subsidies in a deal, and $728 billion in lost sales as countries hike tariffs to ceilings allowed under previous deals.</div><div></div><div>***********************</div><div></div><div><strong>Cambodia confirms new human case of bird flu<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: Cambodia's Health Ministry confirmed on Friday the country's eighth human case of virulent bird flu since 2005.<br />The ministry said in a statement with the U.N.'s World Health Organization that a 19-year-old man from Kandal province, southeast of the capital Phnom Penh, was confirmed to have the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus in laboratory tests Thursday.<br />The case, the first this year in Cambodia, comes a day after a senior World Health Organization official warned that Asian nations must remain vigilant against the disease.<br />The World Health Organization says there have been 246 confirmed fatal cases of the disease in humans worldwide since 2003.<br />The man is being treated at Calmette Hospital in the capital. Cambodian health and agriculture ministry officials have been sent to the victim's village to ensure that there is no further spread of the disease.<br />Ly Sovann, a health ministry expert on bird flu, said the victim became sick after touching a dead chicken that had been raised at his home.<br />"The boy is being treated at hospital now but his health is getting better day by day," Ly Sovann said. "If nothing changes with his health, he will be released from hospital soon."<br />The seven previous Cambodian victims of the disease had died.<br />On Thursday, the World Health Organization's regional chief urged Asian governments not to let down their guard against bird flu, saying a new outbreak among poultry in Hong Kong showed the disease still poses a threat.<br />"This is an indication that we have to remain vigilant," Shigeru Omi said in Malaysia. "Constant vigilance is the key."<br />Omi said the outbreak in Hong Kong was "not unexpected because the virus is still circulating in the world, and certainly in this part of the world."<br />Twenty countries had outbreaks of the disease during the first nine months of 2008, down from 25 during the same period last year, U.N. officials have said.<br />Some officials worry that the public has largely lost interest because the virus has so far not mutated into a much-feared form that could spread easily among people. It remains hard for people to catch, with most human cases linked to contact with infected birds.</div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2RBbmXqVUt_LmR_RwH22jjEGCx_OpOFTvjUGe-Kzc1H9qOJD9XlnyPFt_gQHzZhhvb8CUuTC_3hWK8nTDtfkiDPoYHHKR4UCZqb0ihsf1qC-tvA6l9v1lATfa6pDGgRcOc-w0fC4nWgo/s1600-h/DSC03156.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129964945538466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2RBbmXqVUt_LmR_RwH22jjEGCx_OpOFTvjUGe-Kzc1H9qOJD9XlnyPFt_gQHzZhhvb8CUuTC_3hWK8nTDtfkiDPoYHHKR4UCZqb0ihsf1qC-tvA6l9v1lATfa6pDGgRcOc-w0fC4nWgo/s320/DSC03156.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>EU leaders drastically weaken their emission ambition<br /></strong>By James Kanter and Stephen Castle<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: European leaders agreed on Friday to binding measures to curb global warming but pushed back deadlines and granted significant concessions to smokestack industries that said they were struggling in a hard economic climate.<br />At the close of a two-day summit meeting, the leaders also endorsed a €200 billion, or $267 billion economic stimulus package of mostly national measures, which are devised to avert the worst effects of recession.<br />But most of the focus was on the climate deal amid fears that the dire economic straits would result in a watering down of the package. In the end, the leaders stuck to their ambitious targets of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2020, and insisted the goal would not be jeopardized by the breaks, granted mainly for East European countries and heavy manufacturers.<br />They also challenged the United States, after Barack Obama becomes president, to match their ambition.<br />"This is historic," said the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who added that no other continent had agreed to be bound by such strict rules. He called on Obama to "join Europe and with us to lead in this global effort."<br />José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, echoed Obama's campaign slogan with his message, telling the EU's global partners: "Yes you can."<br />But analysts and representatives from the renewable energy industry criticized the concessions made to East European countries fearing sky-high energy bills and to industries facing stiff foreign competition that will continue to receive some of their pollution permits for free, rather than having to pay for them. Critics say that will only allow industries to put off making fundamental improvements in their operations to reduce emissions.<br />"EU governments to some extent have removed the incentive to invest in less carbon-intensive processes," said Mark Lewis, the global head of carbon research at Deutsche Bank in Paris. "We could have gone further and done so a good deal faster without this political compromise."<br />Under the original plan, electric utilities, which now get most of their pollution permits for free, would have had to start paying for them starting in 2013. Instead, utilities in East European countries like Poland and Hungary would not need to buy all of their required permits until 2020.<br />In another concession, heavy industry sectors like steel and chemicals would receive free emissions permits if they can show their costs are increasing and that they are significantly exposed to international competition.<br />Manufacturers not exposed to international competition will have to pay for their permits beginning in 2013, starting with 20 percent and gradually increasing. But rather than paying for all of their permits by 2020, as under the commission's original plan, they would pay for only 70 percent by then.<br />Christian Kjaer, the chief executive of the European Wind Energy Association, warned that Europe was "losing credibility and leadership in the fight against climate change."<br />Even so, EU governments kept in place an earlier goal of capping emissions in Europe at a level significantly lower than the current level. That was "a genuine achievement in the current very difficult economic circumstances," said Lewis of Deutsche Bank.<br />During tense negotiations in Brussels, Sarkozy first won over Germany with concessions to its industry and then, gradually, managed to reach a deal with Eastern European nations.<br />"At the end of the negotiation," said Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, Poland's Europe minister, "Hungary and Poland were the last actors on the stage," underlining their tough negotiating stance, he said.<br />Warsaw would gain €15 billion in the form of free emissions permits to help poorer nations, he added.<br />Dowgielewicz said that the package "would not have been workable" without that concession.<br />"It would have blown up after introduction in countries like Poland because of the economic and social effect."<br />Sarkozy also argued that without assistance, Polish energy prices would rise two or threefold, because of the country's heavy reliance on dirty coal.<br />Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, greeted cameras with a V for victory sign as he left the summit meeting.<br />But analysts said large windfall profits would continue for some electricity generators in Eastern Europe.<br />Under the accord, power companies in countries that are comparatively poor and that use significant amounts of coal still will be able to receive 70 percent of their permits for free from 2013, although that amount would gradually decline to zero by 2020. The formula devised by the EU would include Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Malta, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.<br />Stig Schjolset, a senior analyst at Point Carbon, said power companies in these countries stood to make billions of euros in windfall profits in the same way that West European companies, like RWE of Germany, have been able to in recent years.<br />West European power companies would have to buy all of their permits beginning in 2013, and that meant "their fat margins should disappear," Schjoset said. But Germany - worried about Polish electricity companies gaining a competitive edge from continued access to free permits - also won important benefits for its powerful, coal-fired electricity sector.<br />In a measure aimed at placating Germany in particular, governments will be entitled to use money earned from selling permits to help companies like RWE build highly efficient power stations that could connect to equipment to capture and store carbon dioxide underground or under the sea.<br />Even so, RWE reacted furiously to the decision to make power companies buy their permits, saying that risked a power shortfall in coming years.<br />Johannes Lambertz, the chief executive of RWE Power, said "the EU has failed to create a level-playing field and has greatly weakened Germany as a center of energy production." He said "the EU has seriously curtailed its prospects" of secure energy supplies and said that would mean more reliance on imported gas.<br />Despite the breakthrough on the so-called climate package, the precarious economic situation still overshadowed the summit meeting on Friday.<br />Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, endorsed proposals for a €200 billion stimulus package for the European economy, and kept open the possibility of announcing extra measures above the €32 billion worth of proposals already announced.<br />Germany had gone into the summit with a more strident position than that traditionally taken by a country renowned for its commitment to European integration. But Merkel, who has been nicknamed "Madam Non" by the French media over her reluctance to sanction greater spending, said that on Friday she had turned out to be "Madam Yes."<br />Sarkozy said that backing for a commission proposal to spend €5 billion of EU money on infrastructure projects, including installation of broadband networks, was conditional on specific plans being proposed and approved. Sarkozy said that finance ministers would reach a decision next March on reductions of sales taxes and that he had received an assurance from Merkel that her finance minister's approach would be "constructive."<br />Merkel declined to give any such commitment at her press conference.<br />Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, said that the debate over the need for a fiscal stimulus had been ended by the summit's endorsement of the European package.</div><div></div><div>****************</div><div></div><div><strong>U.N. climate talks agree fund to help poor states</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By Megan Rowling and Gerard Wynn<br />U.N. climate talks agreed on Friday to launch a fund to help poor nations cope with the impacts of climate change, such as droughts, mudslides and rising seas.<br />Under the existing mechanisms, the fund could be worth $300 million (200.7 million pounds) a year by 2012. The United Nations says tens of billions of dollars a year are likely to be needed by 2030 to cope with the impacts of climate change in developing nations.<br />"Everyone has now agreed," Richard Muyungi, board chairman of the Adaptation Fund, told Reuters during the December 1-12 talks by 189 nations that have been overshadowed by fears about the impact of recession on plans to fight global warming.<br />The decision would have to be formally endorsed by all nations at a meeting later on Friday night.<br />The U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said the Polish talks had already achieved main goals of agreeing a plan of work towards Copenhagen, where a new climate treaty is due to be agreed at the end of 2009, and helped narrow options in a 100-page document summing up thousands of pages of ideas.<br />But the talks remained split on whether to raise more cash from other sources to help fund projects such as storm-warning systems, sea defences or drought-resistant crops.<br />Poor nations such as the Pacific island state of Tuvalu had previously accused rich nations of putting up too much red tape and barring direct access to the fund, saying it is a "survival fund" to cope with rising seas that could wipe them off the map.<br />But the EU said making cash too accessible could set a bad precedent in an economic downturn as the world seeks to work out a new global climate treaty by the end of 2009.<br />"We also want to be secure about the credibility of the use of the money and the credibility of the projects," German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said.<br />Gabriel and other EU ministers at the Poznan talks expressed relief after EU leaders in Brussels agreed a historic pact to cut greenhouse gases by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 -- after making concessions to east European states.<br />LEVY ON EMISSIONS PROJECTS<br />Under the current Adaptation Fund, cash will be raised by a 2 percent levy on a U.N. system of emissions cutting projects in developing nations -- raising roughly 60 million euros ($79.6 million) for the fund so far.<br />Climate negotiators also agreed measures to speed up approval of those projects, such as cutting greenhouse gases from factories in China or by building windmills in Morrocco.<br />Under rules of the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, rich countries can lay off their greenhouse gas emissions and meet their climate targets by funding cuts in developing nations.<br />The delegates delayed a decision on whether to allow coal plants to use the scheme to earn offsets from burying carbon dioxide underground, a little-tested technology called carbon capture and storage.<br />Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore won the biggest applause of the conference with a speech predicting a far more active U.S. climate policy under President-elect Barack Obama after President George W. Bush leaves office next month.<br />He also said a new U.N. climate deal could be agreed, as planned, at a meeting in Copenhagen in late 2009 despite the recession.<br />"To those who are fearful that it is too difficult to conclude this process with a new treaty by the deadline that has been set ... I say it can be done, it must be done," he said.<br />(Editing by Michael Roddy)</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Italy plagued by torrential rains<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />ROME: Rome residents were on alert Friday for possible overflowing of the Tiber river as heavy rain battering much of the country caused three more deaths, officials said.<br />Rescuers recovered the body of a man in southern Italy who was swept away in the heavy rains, while an elderly man died after his car was hit by a tree and another was killed in a car crash in a rainstorm, police in the southern city of Reggio Calabria said.<br />Downpours disrupted transport from Milan in the north to Palermo, Sicily, in the south. Trains were delayed and many streets were flooded or blocked by fallen trees. Water again covered Venice's lowest areas, including the landmark St. Mark's Square, while Alpine rescuers recovered a group of boy scouts who had been trapped on Mount Etna.<br />In Rome, the Civil Protection Department said the Tiber might burst its banks in some neighborhoods on Friday. The department said the river had risen by about 16 feet, or 5 meters, in the past two days.<br />Officials evacuated gypsy camps on the river's banks, and three boats broke loose from their moorings. The smaller Aniene river, which flows into the Tiber, has already overflowed, forcing officials to close down some streets.<br />On Thursday, more rain fell in Rome than the average for the entire month of December, city officials said.<br />"It's as if there has been an earthquake," Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno told daily La Repubblica.<br />In Rome and Venice, two of the hardest-hit cities, union officials called off local transport strikes.<br />Alemanno was among the local officials to ask for a state of emergency for their battered cities. Italy has been hit by days of bad weather, and entire neighborhoods have been flooded or covered in mud.<br />On Thursday, a woman was killed after her car was submerged in an underpass in Rome. </div><div></div><div>*************************</div><div></div><div><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></div><div><strong>The oceans' shifting balance</strong><br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />Most of us understand that what we give off in the form of exhaust - from cars and manufacturing and energy production and burning forests - makes its way into the atmosphere, and is responsible for changes in the global climate. What is less familiar is the fact that the oceans are absorbing as much as a third of the carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere.<br />The effects are already being felt. That added carbon dioxide is slowly making the oceans less alkaline and more acidic, altering the chemical balance on which much of oceanic life depends. Carbon dioxide reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid, a process that consumes carbonate ions. Those ions are necessary for the chemical reaction used to form calcium carbonate, the structural element in corals and the shells of many marine animals.<br />As the oceans acidify, shells will simply dissolve. The growth of coral reefs will slow, and their structural integrity would be weakened, making them more vulnerable to storms and erosion. That would be a catastrophic loss. The list of potential long-term effects to oceanic life is only beginning to be explored.<br />Scientists have understood ocean acidification for a long time. But what they are learning now is how quickly it is increasing, in step with increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. New studies show that if carbon dioxide emissions continue at current rates, shells and corals could begin to dissolve - especially in the southern oceans - within 30 years. Observations from many places, including the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, suggest that ocean acidification is proceeding much faster than anyone had thought.<br />Combating a change as fundamental as this requires a fundamental change in awareness and behavior. What is needed is a mental stencil of the kind you find near storm drains in Los Angeles that say: "This Drains to Ocean." A third of whatever we emit in the way of carbon dioxide ultimately drains to the ocean, which is all the more reason to curb emissions quickly.</div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div><strong>With loan, a chance to clean up polluted Indonesian river</strong><br />By Peter Gelling<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />BEKASI, Indonesia: During the height of the dry season here, a once raging river and the canal that leads it to Jakarta, supplying the city with 80 percent of its water, carry a thick layer of sludge, a flotilla of solid waste that former fishermen now use to forage for potentially valuable trash in their wooden boats.<br />Some environmentalists call the Citarum the most polluted river in the world.<br />"There is no scale really to determine which is the worst," said Christopher Morris, a water resources engineer with the Asian Development Bank. "But it is very nasty. To say you can't swim in it, I mean, you know when you are a few kilometers from it."<br />The Citarum is a mighty river. Its basin stretches 13,000 square kilometers, or 5,000 square miles, across West Java, supporting a population of more than 28 million people and more than 20 percent of the country's industrial output.<br />Three hydroelectric dams produce 1,400 megawatts, and the river irrigates 400,000 hectares, or one million acres, of farms that supply 5 percent of the country's rice.<br />But rapid, and unregulated, industrialization and urbanization over the last 20 years have reduced the river to a national embarrassment.<br />More than 2,000 factories are now situated along its banks, everything from steel to oil to garments is produced using the river as both a source of water and a dumping ground for waste. The hundreds of smokestacks here in Bekasi, an industrial suburb of Jakarta, could be mistaken for a forest consumed by fire.<br />The 70-kilometer, or 43-mile, canal passes through Bekasi on its way to Jakarta, and along its banks another industry has formed - prostitution. Young women sit outside small houses, or cafés, offering sex to the thousands of nearby factory workers.<br />Along this stretch lives a woman in her 40s who runs a small restaurant.<br />The restaurant sits atop a high slope, at the bottom of which meanders the river. In the distance, the fog of industry swirls.<br />"I know the color of the river is not right," Sutri says, adding that she washes the restaurant's dishes in the river, along with her clothes and occasionally her family. "But I don't know anything about dangerous chemicals. Anyway, there is nowhere else for me to get water."<br />She will be one of the first to benefit from a $500 million loan from the Asian Development Bank that aims to jump-start a government program to clean up the entire Citarum River and the West Tarum Canal that connects it to Jakarta. In all, the Indonesian government expects the cleanup to cost $3.5 billion and take 15 years.<br />The loan from the Asian Development Bank, approved last week, will be delivered in several phases over those 15 years, with the first $50 million to go toward revitalizing the all-important canal, securing Jakarta's main source of water. The entire loan package will fund a myriad of sanitation and environmental projects as well as the building of waste treatment plants.<br />"We are taking a long-term approach while recognizing there are some things we can fix quickly," Morris said. "But changing the behavior of the community takes a lot of careful planning and preparation."<br />The plan, however, has critics. A coalition of community advocacy groups, collectively called the People's Alliance for Citarum, have raised concerns over the amount of debt the country is taking on for a cleanup plan that, they say, has few safeguards from corruption. Indonesia is widely considered to be one of the world's more corrupt countries.<br />Also, more than 800 people, mostly banana growers, who live along the canal might have to relocate. The alliance says there is no clear plan for their relocation or to reimburse them for the loss of their livelihood.<br />"We are worried that the money could be lost through corruption," said Nugraha, 30, who has been working to clean up the Bekasi environment since he graduated high school. "And we are worried the farmers will be left out. The focus seems to be on the people of Jakarta, not the local people here."<br />Nugraha's comment touches on another potentially difficult issue down the line: management of the Citarum River Basin, which spans several provinces. Questions remain about the allocation of clean water across the provinces.<br />The solution proposed by the Asian Development Bank is a "water council," half of which would represent government agencies and the other half civil society. What authority the council would have remains to be seen, as different levels of government disagree. Of particular concern to the alliance is how this water council might be manipulated, creating yet another avenue for corrupt practices.<br />The bank will, for the first time in Indonesia, introduce a multitranche financing system to address this very problem, Morris said, disbursing portions of the loan over time as needed.<br />"The point is to make the money available to the government in an efficient way, so they aren't sitting with a loan and paying charges on it until they actually need to use it," he said. "But it also allows us to put in some safeguards and implement our anti-corruption policies and other policies the Asian Development Bank promotes."</div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div><strong>Vatican issues instruction on bioethics<br /></strong>By Laurie Goodstein and Elisabetta Povoledo<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />The Vatican on Friday issued the most authoritative and sweeping document on bioethical issues in more than 20 years, taking into account recent developments in biomedical technology and reinforcing the Roman Catholic church's opposition to in vitro fertilization, human cloning, genetic testing on embryos before implantation and embryonic stem cell research.<br />The Vatican document says that these techniques violate the principles that every human life - even an embryo - is sacred and that children should be conceived only through intercourse by a married couple.<br />The 32-page instruction, titled "Dignitas Personae," or "The Dignity of the Person," was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog, and carries the approval and the authority of Pope Benedict XVI. It was developed to provide moral responses to bioethical questions that have been raised in the 21 years since the congregation last issued instructions.<br />The document also bans the morning-after pill; intrauterine devices and the pill known as RU486, saying these can result in what amounts to abortions. The church also said it objects to freezing embryos because they are exposed to damage and manipulation and it raised the issue of what to do with frozen embryos that are not implanted.<br />"There is no morally licit way to get out of the blind alley created by the thousands of frozen embryos already in existence," Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, president emeritus of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said at a news conference Friday in Rome.<br />The Vatican's intended audience for the document includes individual Roman Catholics as well as doctors, scientists, medical researchers and legislators who might consider regulating new developments in biomedical technology.<br />In the United States, President-elect Barack Obama has said that he will end the restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that were instituted by President George W. Bush.<br />The Vatican document reiterates that the church is opposed to research on stem cells derived from embryos. But it does not oppose research on stem cells derived from adults, blood from umbilical cords or from fetuses "who have died of natural causes."<br />One new development addressed in the document is the attempt by researchers to create alternative techniques of producing stem cells for medical treatments without involving human embryos, said Reverend Thomas Berg, executive director of The Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person, a Catholic ethics research group in New York state.<br />Berg said that one particularly promising technique, called altered nuclear transfer, would "allow us to get past this cultural divide on stem cell research." He said he was pleased to see that the Vatican document did not prohibit such techniques, although it cautions that there must be absolute assurance that human embryos are not destroyed in the process.<br />"The document is neither accepting or rejecting, simply raising a caution," Berg said, adding that he finds it a "very positive, very forward-looking" position.<br />Some were also hoping that the Vatican would clarify its position on whether couples could "adopt" surplus embryos that have been frozen and abandoned by couples undergoing in vitro fertilization. Such "prenatal adoption," although rare, has been taken up as a cause among some Catholics and evangelical Christians.<br />But the Vatican did not issue a clear or definitive ruling in this document, saying that while "prenatal adoption" is "praiseworthy," it presents ethical problems similar to certain types of in vitro fertilization and, in particular, surrogate motherhood, which the church prohibits.<br />"I see the church recognizing that there are strong opinions on both sides, and they have not wanted to make a pronouncement," Berg said.<br />Experts responded Friday by saying that there was little new in this document but that it might still come as a surprise to many Catholics who are unaware that the church bans most in vitro fertilization methods.<br />Kathleen Raviele, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Georgia who is president of the Catholic Medical Association, the largest group of Catholic physicians in the United States, said that she tells her patients: "God creates through an act of love, and that's not what's happening in the laboratory. It's the technician who's creating. What in vitro does is it separates the creation of a child from the marital act."<br />Jon O'Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, a group based in Washington that contradicts church teaching on abortion and sexuality, issued a statement on Friday saying, "It remains difficult to reconcile the Vatican's self-avowed pro-life approach with the rejection of in-vitro fertilization and embryo freezing, not to mention the condemnation of the potential of stem-cell research."<br />Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said at the news conference Friday that because the document excludes a number of biomedical technologies as unethical, "it will likely be accused of containing too many bans."<br />Nonetheless, the Church "feels the duty to give voice to those who have no voice," he said, referring to the unborn.<br />Laurie Goodstein reported from New York and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.</div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div><strong>Amish study sheds light on heart disease</strong><br />By Gina Kolata<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />For the sake of heart disease research, 809 members of the Old Order Amish community agreed to go to a clinic in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, near their homes, and drink a rich milkshake that was made mostly of heavy cream. Over the next six hours, a group of investigators took samples of their blood, determining how much fat was churning through their bloodstreams.<br />Most of the study participants responded as expected - their levels of triglycerides, a common form of fat in the blood, rose steadily for three to four hours and then declined. But about 5 percent had an extraordinary reaction: Their triglyceride levels started out low and hardly budged.<br />It turns out, the researchers report in the Friday issue of the journal Science, that those individuals who barely responded have a mutation that disables one of their two copies of a gene called apoC-III. The gene codes for a protein, APOC3, that normally slows the breakdown of triglycerides.<br />With the mutated gene, people break down triglycerides unusually quickly. And, the investigators find, they also have low levels of LDL cholesterol, which at high levels increases heart disease risk. They have high levels of HDL cholesterol, which is associated with a decreased risk of heart disease. And they appear to have arteries relatively clear of plaque.<br />To find the gene mutation, the researchers, led by Toni Pollin, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, scanned the entire genomes of their study subjects, looking for genetic regions that were linked to levels of blood triglycerides.<br />That led them to a region containing the apoC-III gene. When they sequenced it, they found the mutation that destroyed its function.<br />Dr. Alan Shuldiner, head of the division of endocrinology, diabetes and nutrition at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and the senior author of the paper, said the Amish were ideal for the study because they were an isolated population that had been in the United States for 14 generations and whose members shared many genes.<br />In this case, Pollin said, she and her colleagues traced the apoC-III mutation to a member of the Amish community who was born in the 18th century.<br />The gene is also regulated by insulin, noted Dr. Daniel Rader, a heart disease researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, and people with diabetes have high levels of APOC3, high levels of triglycerides and an increased risk of heart disease.<br />The discovery of the gene mutation, researchers say, helps bolster the case that triglycerides are related to risk of heart disease and that APOC3 is an important contributor. But clinical applications may be years away.<br />Dr. Ira Goldberg, chief of the division of preventive medicine and nutrition at Columbia University, said the triglyceride case had mostly rested on studies showing an association between high triglyceride levels and an increased incidence of heart disease. But that, Goldberg added, is not cause and effect. The new study provides more direct evidence.<br />"Here we have a group of people with a genetic mutation that lowers triglycerides," Goldberg said. "They seem to have less cardiovascular disease."<br />As for apoC-III, the study clarifies its role, said Dr. Alan Tall, head of the molecular medicine division at Columbia. "It was known from animal studies that apoC-III might have a role like this," Tall said. "But the human information is really novel. We suspected it might be the case but this nails it down."<br />Rader agreed. "This is among the strongest human evidence we have that APOC3 is quote, unquote, bad," he said. "If you had a drug to turn off the gene to prevent as much APOC3 being made, this study suggests that that would be beneficial to do."<br />But he added that there were no such drugs on the immediate horizon.</div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div><strong>Global immunization rates may be exaggerated<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By Julie Steenhuysen<br />Global childhood immunizations are growing at only about half the rate reported to global health agencies as countries receiving aid exaggerate coverage to meet performance goals, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.<br />They analyzed independent surveys and found gaps between actual rates of childhood immunization and estimates reported to the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children's Fund.<br />"An incentive to over-report progress, either intentionally or unintentionally, will always exist with performance-based payments," said a statement from Dr. Christopher Murray of the University of Washington in Seattle, whose study appears in the journal Lancet.<br />Murray and colleagues studied the number of children receiving the three-dose diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DPT3) vaccines in countries receiving aid money from the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunizations, or GAVI, a Geneva-based body working to improve access to vaccines.<br />They looked at 193 countries between 1996 and 2006 and found that since 1999, when GAVI was launched, officially reported estimates show a 9 percent jump in DPT3 vaccination coverage, while independent surveys showed only a 4.9 percent increase in global coverage.<br />They also found that the GAVI immunization services support program that pays countries $20 dollars (13 pounds) for each additional child immunized leads to over reporting in two-thirds of the countries studied.<br />They said the gap between country-reported and independently reported data was especially wide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Niger and Pakistan.<br />"We don't know exactly why there is such a striking gap between the survey data and the country-reported data when it comes to over-reporting -- or in some cases under-reporting -- the number of additional immunizations," Stephen Lim, who worked on the study, said in a statement.<br />"What we do know is that there is a clear correlation between when those gaps start to widen and when GAVI started funding these countries."<br />The researchers called for independent measurement of immunization levels, which they said should be a condition of funding.<br />But Dr. David Bishai of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, who wrote a commentary in the journal, said the findings were suggestive but not quite conclusive.<br />"I really want to caution readers to slow down and hold off in reaching the conclusion that, 'Aha! We caught them over-reporting,'" Bishai said in a telephone interview.<br />In his commentary, Bishai said the findings were tentative and voiced concern they may spark an "inquisition that diverts country vaccine staff away from the important job of immunizing children."<br />(Editing by Will Dunham and Bill Trott)</div><div></div><div></div><div>************</div><div></div><div><strong>China chooses new site for quake-levelled town</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />BEIJING: China has chosen a new site to rebuild the town of Beichuan, where the massive May 12 earthquake killed two-thirds of the population and which the government has decided to leave in ruins as a memorial.<br />It was one of the places worst hit by the 7.9 magnitude tremor, which fewer than 4,400 of its 13,000 inhabitants survived. Around 70 percent of the town's buildings were toppled.<br />The survivors' misery in subsequent weeks was compounded by fear of an inland tsunami if unstable mud dams created by landslides and storing huge reservoirs of water were to burst.<br />The new Beichuan will be around 35 km (20 miles) away on the flatter land of Anchang township, with building work on the first phase due to start after the Chinese New Year in February, the official Xinhua news agency said.<br />New housing, government offices and public facilities like schools and hospitals is expected to cost around 20 billion yuan (1.93 billion pounds).<br />The local government of a Sichuan, most famous for its pandas and fiery cuisine, also hopes to set up an "experimental tourist zone" tracking the quake fault line through Wenchuan county.<br />It would encompass ruins, a memorial in Yingxiu, a museum in Beichuan and a lake created during the tremors at Tangjiashan, to showcase the devastation and the courage of survivors.<br />(Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison; Editing by Nick Macfie)</div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-NH2jZNmS81n48kQlsszs8Vb8rvoeif_E0dj9tYH3_WGJRpvhOymPxgUVX5e2ihjsfPIf8MJpHKpsuz2TtVngo7BeA9vLWxjlMG6PCPm9-aBFppCkG0-w-7n4d5CZdYD1xatb4zrlwhk/s1600-h/DSC03157.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129961886710898" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-NH2jZNmS81n48kQlsszs8Vb8rvoeif_E0dj9tYH3_WGJRpvhOymPxgUVX5e2ihjsfPIf8MJpHKpsuz2TtVngo7BeA9vLWxjlMG6PCPm9-aBFppCkG0-w-7n4d5CZdYD1xatb4zrlwhk/s320/DSC03157.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong>Oil sinks with failed auto bailout</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />LONDON: Oil fell to $45 a barrel on Friday after the collapse of a $14 billion rescue for U.S. automakers caused heavy losses across global financial markets.<br />The plight of the big U.S. auto firms, including General Motors and Chrysler, illustrates the severity of the global economic downturn that has hit demand for oil.<br />Crude has shed two-thirds of its value over the past five months, down about $100 from a record of $147.27 in July. It rebounded 10 percent Thursday in anticipation of a big supply cut from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.<br />U.S. crude oil for January delivery was down $2.98 at $45 a barrel by midmorning.<br />The president of OPEC, Chakib Khelil, has called for more "severe" supply cuts when the cartel gathers for its next meeting on Wednesday in Algeria.<br />President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia also weighed in, saying his country was ready to work with OPEC on possible oil output cuts.<br />Oil hit $40.50 a barrel on Dec. 5, its lowest in four years. <strong>Goldman Sachs, which had once predicted $200 per barrel oil, virtually halved its 2009 price forecast for U.S. crude to $45 and said the price could fall to $30 in the short term.<br /></strong>"The collapse in world oil demand in the fourth quarter of 2008, as the global credit crunch intensified, now threatens to push oil prices below $40 a barrel in the near term," Goldman Sachs said in a research note.<br />Arjun Murti, a Goldman analyst, predicted that prices would hit a trough in the first quarter of 2009.<br />Nippon Oil of Japan said on Friday that it expected OPEC to agree to cut 1.5 million to 2 million barrels a day at its meeting.<br />"Chances for a 2.5 million bpd cut are possible, but that would put increased criticism on OPEC amid the economic slowdown, so I think the likely cuts are up to 2 million bpd," Kazuyoshi Takayama, general manager for Nippon Oil, said.</div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Book Review: 'Sun In a Bottle'<br /></strong>By Ann Finkbeiner<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />Sun In a Bottle The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking. By Charles Seife. Illustrated. 294 pages. Viking. $25.95.<br />Science has a cure for wishful thinking. It goes like this: You have an elegant idea, you do the experiment, it seems to work. Colleagues and competitors repeat or refine your experiment, and now it doesn't work. You really want it to work so you do it again, differently, and then so do they, and it still doesn't work. After enough of this, and sometimes years of it, you admit it doesn't work and everybody quits.<br />But sometimes wishful thinking is incurable: the poster child is nuclear fusion, the subject of Charles Seife's substantive and lively new book, "Sun in a Bottle." Fusion - the process by which hydrogen bombs explode and stars shine - could potentially mine cheap, limitless energy from atomic nuclei, but after decades of experiments and numberless careers, it still doesn't work and still nobody quits. "There's something about fusion that is a little different," Seife writes, "that makes generation after generation of scientists deceive themselves."<br />Fusion occurs only in charged gases at extraordinary temperatures and pressures that happen in bombs only for fractional seconds and that only stars can maintain. Every time scientists try to confine a charged gas, and heat and compress it until its nuclei fuse, the gas squirts out of its confinement, cools off and generally declines to light our light bulbs.<br />Still, as Seife shows, fusion's grand promise has led to some dubious experiments. In 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons claimed to have achieved fusion at low temperatures (so-called cold fusion), effectively bottling a star on a table top. But no one else could repeat their results, and when the researchers wouldn't back off their claims, they were effectively excommunicated. In 2002, another team of scientists claimed that sound waves in liquid could create hot little bubbles that imploded and caused fusion. But this effort - recounted vividly by Seife, who originally covered it for Science magazine, which published the controversial paper - couldn't be repeated either and likewise ended in disgrace.<br />These experiments make good stories, but they occurred on fusion science's margins - something Seife doesn't make clear enough. Most fusion experiments are reputable and repeatable: they're real science. They're done by large international collaborations building machines that have been in the process of improvement since 1951 and have grown to more than 50 feet across, or by well-financed national teams using lasers powerful enough to be classified. But the state of the art is still what it has always been: fusion can't be sustained, and the energy released is less than the energy required to produce it in the first place. The decades-old mantra - "fusion is only 20 (or 30, or 50) years away" ' remains wishful thinking at its best.<br />Seife writes with effortless clarity, taking readers through the complex physics and engineering. That means the reader can not only understand but, even better, evaluate Seife's message: fusion scientists should just cut bait.By analogy to your closet, if you haven't worn it, throw it out. If you've been trying it for the last half-century and it hasn't worked, then enough already.</div><div></div><div>**********************</div><div></div><div><strong>Book Review: 'The Lost Art of Walking'<br /></strong>By D.T. Max<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />The Lost Art of Walking The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism. By Geoff Nicholson. 276 pages. Riverhead Books. $24.95.<br />If golf is a good walk spoiled, then walking is a great game made dull. How sluggish locomotion is, compared with the speed at which the mind absorbs new images and information. The brain strains at the body's tether, seethes for new scenery, new stimulation, bridles at the slow feet below. Look at that tree with such lovely orange leaves, how pretty it is. . . . A minute later: the same tree, the same leaves, still good looking. Walking is adding with an abacus, it's space travel on a donkey.<br />All the same, many people do it, and clearly Geoff Nicholson, the British author of "The Lost Art of Walking," is among them. "I've strolled and wandered, pottered and tottered, dawdled and shuffled, mooched and sauntered and meandered," he brags at the beginning of this pleasant tour of the literature and lore of ambulation. "I've certainly ambled and I could be said to have rambled. . . . I've also shambled, but I don't think I've ever gamboled."<br />It turns out that the highly prolific Nicholson also composes novels on his feet. It's how he keeps his productivity up. He solves plot twists and problems of characterization as he walks. One supposes that at some point, strolling along in the Hollywood Hills, the neighborhood in Los Angeles where he lives part of the year, Nicholson, with more than a dozen books to his credit, asked himself how he had overlooked writing about something so central to his life. Could he do it? Did he have the qualifications? "The overriding one was that I liked walking: I liked it a lot," he answered himself, feet pounding the canyon asphalt, and set to work<br />A disclaimer: I can't walk, at least not easily. I have a condition that makes it painful to do so. Nicholson writes of the pleasurable self-annihilation to be found in a purposeful stride, and another noted writer, the British novelist Iain Sinclair, tells him that "as well as hoovering up information," walking is "a way of actually shifting a state of consciousness, and you get into things you didn't know about, or you begin to find out about, and that's the interesting part." But I think only of hyperextended knees, strained lower backs and concussed heels. In fact, the part of "The Lost Art of Walking" with which I most easily identify is the book's opening, when Nicholson takes a spill on an ordinary hill and breaks his arm in three places. My heart felt not joy, to be sure, but at least the same soft oomph one experiences when Icarus falls into the sea. We were designed to move on all fours, at best knuckle-walk.<br />Nicholson's wipeout put him on the sidelines at an inopportune moment for this book. That may be why in "The Lost Art of Walking" he is not often on the road. This is not a travel book so much as an omnium-gatherum for those who like to ride what was once called "the marrow bone coach." It is perfect for the armchair walker. Nicholson's stance is that of the ordinary man on the street, fortified by his commonsense Englishness.<br />For instance, the Continent has recently given us the science of psychogeography, which its founder, Guy Debord, described as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." "This is fine as far as it goes," Nicholson notes, "but it doesn't go very far." Nor is Nicholson crazy about the neoromantic effusions that are common among New Agers when they walk. "Personally I blame Thoreau for a lot of this," he writes. For his part, Nicholson is just as happy in a parking lot as at Big Sur. A walk is a walk. It is "something but not much, certainly not a means of salvation." It can be made even better by a drink or two, as Nicholson shows when he wanders around Manhattan, trying, in a doff of the hat to psychogeography, to figure out whether certain streets in the Village outline a martini glass.<br />The loping pace of this book, comparable to the act of walking itself, invites time for trivia, and there is a lot in these pages. Nicholson's previous books, among them "Sex Collectors," reveal a taste for offbeat information, and the nuggets collected here must have taken him some work to unearth. According to Nicholson: Wordsworth walked more than 180,000 miles in his life; Norwegians have more than 50 words for walking; roughly 40 percent of pedestrians killed in car accidents are drunk. Private security guards keep what is called the Hollywood Entertainment District Public Urination Map to record instances of this unlawful act. Erik Satie liked to write his music while walking. "Before I compose a piece," he once said, "I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself." World War I hurt his productivity, because he could not write down his ideas under the blacked-out streetlamps of Paris. Mrs. Dalloway could have covered the distance in the famous walk in the eponymous novel in the time frame the book allows only by taking a taxi. There was a man who twice walked naked across England, from one corner to the other. In 1974, Werner Herzog walked from Munich to Paris because he believed it would cure the film historian Lotte Eisner, who was gravely ill. After his arrival she lived another nine years.<br />Walking turns out to have had a heyday, at least as a competitive sport. That heyday came in the 19th century, when for the first time it was no longer something nearly everyone had to do. The sport was called pedestrianism, which was not then, Nicholson says, a synonym for the act of walking as it is now. Pedestrians walked on bets, they walked to set records, they walked for love. On a bet, the great pedestrian Capt. Robert Barclay Allardice walked a mile in each of a thousand successive hours, which means, as Nicholson points out, that he never got to rest for more than an hour and a half at a stretch for more than 40 days.<br />One of Nicholson's favorite walkers, though, trod his path more recently. The explorer Sebastian Snow walked the 8,700 miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Panama Canal in 19 months in the early 1970s. Snow, who died in 2001, was "droll, debonair, tough as granite and an eccentric by any conventional standard," Nicholson writes. Asked how he did it, the Old Etonian commented: "By some transcendental process, I seemed to take on the characteristics of a Shire (horse), my head lowered, resolute, I just plunked one foot in front of t'other, mentally munching nothingness." Which is why I'd rather ride a bike or grab a cab.</div><div></div><div>*********************</div><div></div><div><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></div><div><strong>The Big Three bailout plan: Flawed, but unavoidable<br /></strong>Friday, December 12, 2008<br />Senate Republicans determined to block the $14 billion rescue package for Chrysler and General Motors have trotted out predictable rhetoric about the dangers of Big Government. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, warned Thursday that "a government big enough to give us everything we want is a government big enough to take everything we have."<br />As the American economy sinks into the deepest recession in a generation - caused in large part by this sort of anti-government and anti-regulatory dogma - it would be folly to allow the ideologues to undermine efforts to pull the country out.<br />Let's be clear. The rescue plan passed by the House this week won't fix the ailing automakers that are hemorrhaging cash as sales plummet. But allowing one or more of these companies to collapse into bankruptcy proceedings could potentially cause the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs and even greater economic havoc.<br />Furthermore, if the Detroit carmakers are going to survive, they will have to completely overhaul the way they do business - and start building cars that people will buy. For that, they are going to need new leadership, a rational assessment of their long record of failure and, yes, a much larger infusion of government cash.<br />The short-term bailout not only buys time, it uses the time to build a restructuring plan. The incoming Obama administration can then decide whether to invest billions more to rebuild the industry. Nobody - including the carmakers - fully understands the depth of Detroit's problems or how much money it will take to dig them out.<br />Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody'sEconomy.com, told Congress last week that rescuing the companies would cost taxpayers $75 billion to $125 billion over the next two years. And that's probably optimistic. As sales fall, the more taxpayer money the automakers will need to survive, and the more doubts will arise about whether it makes sense to support failing car companies that can't sell cars.<br />Before it makes any decisions, the next administration will need a lot more information. The current plan calls for a government car czar who would have full access to the automakers' finances. By the end of the year, the czar would establish benchmarks to evaluate the carmakers' progress in restructuring.<br />The official would bring the companies together with creditors, workers, dealers and suppliers to hammer out a plan to restore their long-term viability. The various stakeholders would be given until March 31 to reach such a deal. And the czar could use the threat of forcing them into bankruptcy proceedings to encourage all parties to reach an acceptable agreement.<br />The bill has big weaknesses. Most importantly, it fails to demand that top executives of any car company receiving taxpayer money step down. These companies need new managers who are not wedded to Detroit's failed strategies. And the bill doesn't set any conditions to ensure automakers invest in fuel-efficient vehicles. Any long-term plan must make sure the automakers don't simply keep making gas-guzzling trucks and sport-utility vehicles, whose popularity - unfortunately - has recovered as gas prices have declined.<br />We were distressed by the effort by Senate Republicans to scuttle the deal. Despite all the flaws of the temporary fix, we don't see a long-term solution without it.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE1wDFyH7ieWZ7ApgD41dRPO71ki2FRfcITxRjFbsW-rRc4hPtqt9cgOPwfn6iltM4qBxqFpe96JOx03i__V_U1ObVpPT1H4-D2skM32jbmyfo5DmWHzEdBPTj7qewGyjSQV8-2llJGB8/s1600-h/DSC03158.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129958476088306" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE1wDFyH7ieWZ7ApgD41dRPO71ki2FRfcITxRjFbsW-rRc4hPtqt9cgOPwfn6iltM4qBxqFpe96JOx03i__V_U1ObVpPT1H4-D2skM32jbmyfo5DmWHzEdBPTj7qewGyjSQV8-2llJGB8/s320/DSC03158.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>Pink Panthers' global trail glitters with jewels<br /></strong>By Doreen Carvajal<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />PARIS: Their timing was as impeccable as a tourbillon watch, a luxury timepiece whose name means whirlwind.<br />And after the diamond thieves disguised in women's wigs and flowing foulards had vanished, police detectives on several continents pondered a trail of more than €100 million in jewelry heists over the last four years and wondered whether the so-called Pink Panthers had struck again.<br />The whirlwind started near closing time, a favorite moment for diamond thieves to strike. As the second hand ticked, four men - three dressed as women with long blonde tresses, sunglasses and winter scarves - stood in front of an intercom and demurely requested to enter the deluxe Harry Winston jewelry store on Avenue Montaigne. It was a chilly evening within the golden triangle of boutiques that includes Dior, Chanel and Gucci, the ornate facades and trees resplendent with Christmas lights.<br />Buzzed in, the men rolled a small valise on wheels into the hushed inner refuge. Then they pulled out a hand grenade and a .357 Magnum. As Parisians strolled unawares past the store's wrought-iron gates, the robbers smashed display cases and barked out orders - and the names of some of the Harry Winston employees. They spoke French with strong Slavic accents.<br />There was no time for officers from a nearby police station in the luxury district to rush over. In less than 15 minutes, the jewel thieves were gone, roaring away in a waiting car through the 5:30 p.m. twilight with sacks of emeralds, rubies, and chunky diamonds the size of tiny birds' eggs - the lot valued at more than €80 million.<br />The robbers may not have been suave celluloid jewel thieves with the charm of David Niven - aka Sir Charles Litton, the debonair phantom bandit of the original Pink Panther film - but their meticulous planning, swift execution and creative style quickly raised suspicions that the Harry Winston heist was the handiwork of a loose global network of battle-hardened former soldiers and their relatives from the former Yugoslavia.<br />Investigators, marveling at the gang's ingenuity, have dubbed this unlikely network the Pink Panthers. The parallels between film and reality are perhaps best summed up in the fractured accent and words of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau himself, from the original 1963 movie: "In a strange way," he said of his nemesis, the phantom bandit, "I admire him, for he has a unique flair for the dramatic."<br />The Pink Panthers - many of whose grim Interpol wanted posters show they come from the town of Nis in southern Serbia - have been roving the world's luxury capitals since at least 2003 on reconnaissance missions for hard diamonds that can be, in the parlance of luxury security specialists, "soft targets."<br />Defense lawyers for some thieves who have been arrested insist that membership in the Pink Panthers is an invention of drama-loving law enforcement authorities. But investigators say that there are about 200 members in the group, linked by village and blood, and that the Pink Panthers have scooped up jewels worth more than $130 million in bold robberies in Dubai, Switzerland, Japan, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Monaco.<br />The group's members live all over Europe, with some working in mundane jobs as hospital cleaners, waiting to be summoned for the next discount flight to a foreign capital, investigators said. And the group's leadership is loose and unstructured.<br />When cornered they fight hard; one Pink Panther fugitive escaped from a French prison in 2005 by sliding down a ladder while his friends raked a watchtower with machine-gun fire.<br />In Paris, investigators are weighing all the possibilities - including the return, literally, of the Pink Panthers.<br />"Of course there is a hypothesis that it is the Pink Panthers, but we cannot at this stage say absolutely that it is them," said Isabelle Montagne, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor's office. It was the second major robbery at the same store in the last year. "We're open to all theories," she said.<br />The risk adjusters and syndicates associated with Lloyds of London - the Harry Winston insurer that also has a representative playing a supporting character in the original Pink Panther movie - harbor the same suspicions. They have placed strategic classified advertisements all over the world, including in the former Yugoslavia, to publicize a $1 million reward for information that might lead to the recovery of the Harry Winston sparklers.<br />The nature of their suspicions is underlined by the fact that in France they have placed a classified notice in a local daily, Le Parisien, instead of one of the country's grand newspapers like Le Monde. The newspaper reaches the working-class outskirts, the banlieue of Paris where the adjusters suspect that many of the professional thieves may live or have family.<br />France is already home - if a cold jail cell can be called home - for two Serbians considered by prosecutors to be former Pink Panther members, who have been blamed for robberies that reaped more than €7.5 million in jewelry from swank French boutiques in the Riviera towns of St. Tropez and Cannes and the Atlantic resort of Biarritz.<br />Just a day before the Harry Winston robbery, these two men - Boban Stojkovic and Goran Drazic - were sentenced respectively to sentences of 6 and 10 years in prison. Dragan Mikic, the man identified as the group's ringleader who was sprung from prison in a machine-gun attack, was sentenced in absentia to 15 years.<br />"Almost all of them are intelligent," remarked the prosecuting lawyer, Gilbert Lafaye, at their sentencing. "But with this intelligence, why do they follow the path to easy money?"<br />The fact that cool cleverness, boldness and speed are the hallmarks of the group's robberies has led investigators to speculate that the Pink Panthers are casting for ideas from movie thieves - right down to storing a signature €500,000 blue diamond in a jar of face cream, a ruse used in "The Return of the Pink Panther."<br />In comparison with other robberies blamed on the gang, the Harry Winston job, despite the violence - some of the workers were struck in the head - was almost subtle.<br />In the Gulf emirate of Dubai, masked members of the gang were alleged last year to have rammed two luxury Audi cars into the window of a Graff jewelry boutique in a gleaming Wafi City shopping mall. They scooped up $3.4 million of diamonds and then bolted away in the same cars - in a daylight heist that has become a YouTube classic with more than 200,000 hits. Later, they burned the cars to erase their traces.<br />It took well-dressed Pink Panthers less than three minutes to attack the Graff store in Tokyo's Ginza jewelry district in 2004 and stuff a sack with rare yellow diamonds and other loot, the brazen proceedings captured on video.<br />The haul: a 125-carat necklace of 116 diamonds known as the Comtesse de Vendôme, worth an estimated $31.5 million, which has never been recovered. Some suspects were later arrested and ultimately tried in Serbia under an agreement with Japan, but as with other cases attributed to the group, the thieves insisted that they didn't know where the jewels were.<br />In London, thieves believed to be Pink Panthers last year stepped out of a chauffeur-driven Bentley Continental and struck a jewelry store in Mayfair.<br />Sometime they match their brutality with cleverness. In Biarritz, for example, they coated a bench with fresh paint to deter pedestrians from resting near a jewelry store that was a soft target.<br />"The modus was always the same," said Olivier Jude, the commander of the police department in the tiny principality of Monaco. "Very fast, very well-organized with a plurality of perpetrators, and violent, too. The criminals used to break the shop windows most of the time with hammers."<br />There are more than 400 closed-circuit cameras in Monte Carlo's Casino Square, a playground for the wealthy, with designer shops including Cartier, Hermes and Louis Vuitton. But in the summer of 2007, jewelry thieves struck the Ciribelli shop, prompting the Monaco police force to request an international conference of investigators.<br />The conference was held a month later at Interpol headquarters in Lyon. Interpol now presides over what it calls Project Pink Panthers to share and coordinate information about the gang.<br />As part of that effort, Interpol started circulating the names and pictures of Pink Panthers on its so-called "red" list of fugitive criminals. One of them was Dusko Poznan, 30, whose picture shows a mournful man with dark hair and circles under his eyes, dressed in a sweater and tailored shirt.<br />Poznan, fluent in Russian and English and a native of Bihac, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was a suspect in the Dubai robbery and in a theft in Liechtenstein. In October, Poznan drove to Monaco with another man in a rented Audi A3 and headed directly for Casino Square, the authorities said. There he was crossing the road on foot when he was hit by another car.<br />Initially he resisted medical treatment, according to police officers who arrived on the scene. Once he arrived at Princess Grace Hospital, an officer made the connection to the red list photo.<br />Both Poznan and his companion had forged passports, but insisted they were simply holiday tourists, Jude said, noting dryly that the surveillance cameras later showed that "they were exactly in the area of jewelry shops and they weren't doing their Christmas shopping."<br />Yet for all their daring, the thieves have been tripped up at times by smallest of details.<br />In Dubai, investigators retrieved DNA evidence from the fire-scorched Audi rental cars and found a mobile telephone number on the rental agreement.<br />That set them on the trail of Bojana Mitic, 27, a native of Nis. Her cellphone led investigators to six other suspects.<br />When caught, some of them have denied everything - including what appear to be their images in jewelry-store robbery photographs - while others, like Boban Stojkovic, have spoken in detail to investigators.<br />"I don't demand your pity," Stojkovic said as he was sentenced the day before the Harry Winston robbery in Paris. "Because I know that I have to pay for these crimes. But just leave me an open door to remake my life."<br />Stojkovic's attorney, Emmanuel Auvergen-Rey, said Stojkovic was an ex-soldier from the former Yugoslavia whose role it was to be the enforcer. But, he said, he had the manner of what can only be described as a gentleman bandit.<br />"He committed robberies with a minimum of violence," said Auvergne-Rey, who insisted that Stojkovic was not part of the Pink Panthers, which he claimed was an invention of the police. "I find him extremely sweet, extremely polite and nice."<br />If he was so clever, then why did he become a bandit? "Permit me to say something," Auvergne-Rey said, pausing, "It's not necessary to be an idiot to act like a fool."<br />Although he was arrested before the Paris job, Stojkovic described aspects of his gang's modus operandi that should help investigators. He revealed that his group would minutely observe a target for up to 10 days before striking.<br />Such painstaking surveillance may well have led to the decision to wear wigs at Harry Winston: women, even fake ones, glimpsed through a security camera might appear less threatening to weary workers. It could also reveal how the robbers knew some of the workers' names - other members of the team may have visited enough times to pick up identities, the authorities said.<br />Tom O'Neill, the president of Harry Winston who was in Paris on Thursday, said that "we are working on reopening the salon as soon as possible and we are appreciative of the work of authorities and our insurance carrier in this very unfortunate matter."<br />The authorities who are investigating the Dec. 4 heist will also be reviewing the robbery at the same Avenue Montaigne store just a year ago, a crime that someone now feels absurdly small - just €10 million worth of jewels.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>Taking another pass at Easter Island's story<br /></strong>By John Vinocur<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />PARIS: Down at the end of a dead-end street here, there's an exhibition hall where a famous and politically correct notion about one of the world's real mysteries is getting a rough ride.<br />In an era of lowered expectations, the exposition about Easter Island is worth a look.<br />It comes for free, certainly the right price these days, and in a low-toned, less than riveting way goes after what it says is a myth about man's irrepressible self-destructiveness - a parable forced on what's rather gently suggested is an overdrawn link between the island's extraordinary statues and its civilization's downfall.<br />Since Paris at recession's precipice is not offering enormous new extravagance - give or take a magazine ad pitching limited edition men's perfume in 100 milliliter snail-shaped bottles at €800, or $1,070, a throw - you could do worse than wandering at no cost into a slice of controversy.<br />The exhibition hall belongs to the foundation of Électricité de France, the country's former electricity monopoly.<br />For decades, EDF has played so big and rich and rough in the business world that the foundation's shows inevitably seem intent on lacquering it as a caring environmentalist. Currently butting heads with Warren Buffett in a megabuck takeover deal involving U.S. atomic energy suppliers, EDF rarely turns away from the tender touch of its corporate PR airbrushers.<br />A couple of years ago, EDF ordered up a television commercial set on Easter Island. Against a background of its powerful moai, or statues, EDF was cast as a protector of renewable energy while the island's ancestors were turned into miscreants of historical proportion who used up their woodland (and virtually destroyed themselves) by making wooden sleds for transporting the increasingly enormous statues from the quarries where they were sculpted.<br />Oh, those passionately creative but unthinking primitives!<br />Recalling that the commercial had been called an outrage, or at least a misrepresentation, and that Chile had made its displeasure known, I took a look at the show, which runs until March 1 (Espace Fondation EDF, 6 rue Récamier, Paris 75007).<br />You go in, and there's a plastic replica, covered in kind of grayish stucco, of one of the island's stone heads. You find out that there were about 800 of them, weighing up to 270 tons. They were created on an island, roughly the size of Paris and some of its suburbs, that at a distance in the Pacific of about 3,500 kilometers, or 2,200 miles, from the coast of Chile, is the most isolated inhabited place in the world.<br />Head upstairs and there are small wooden sculptures, like snippets from the island's crashing symphony, that echo the intensity and fierce grace of the moai. Alongside them, long, slightly curved staffs, called ua, are topped with double-faced heads that glare with the giant sculptures' stern mouths.<br />On another floor, a movie from 1934, made by visitors from the Belgian and French navies, looks at Easter Island through colonialists' eyes, offers a pith-helmet version of its pathos, and pictures, with a kind of repugnant nonchalance, an attempt to drag one of the statues onto the expedition's ship. The object sinks, then gets hauled up for transport to Europe, but minus its distinctive nose.<br />My urge was to applaud the Polynesian gods' spite.<br />The exhibition's interest and controversy comes in a display about the disappearance of the island's foliage that left the place with a little more than 100 people in the 1800s after once, centuries earlier, having as many as 20,000.<br />Since the mid-1990s and an article written by the American academic Jared Diamond, the idea has been popularized - as in the EDF commercial - that men determined to make bigger statues led to deforestation and the implosion of the island's unique civilization.<br />Diamond called it "an escalating spiral of one-upmanship as rival clans tried to surpass one another with shows of wealth and power."<br />He imagines concerned islanders' warnings "being overridden by vested interests of carvers, burocrats and chiefs," and insists, "Easter Island is the Earth writ small."<br />The exhibit says, hey, wait a minute. Its version brakes what had become a comfortable message of political correctness.<br />The curators, Michel and Catherine Orliac of France's National Center for Scientific Research, explain (although not in English) that an examination by Ms. Orliac of 12,000 charcoal remains demonstrated the disappearance of trees, shrubs and undergrowth to be a brutal process. They link its cause to a fall in ocean temperatures and salinity, caused by a natural phenomenon like El Niño in the years 1600 to 1640.<br />Before the middle of the 17th century, the exhibit's documentation says, the island had 23 species of trees and shrubs; afterward only six remained. For Michel Orliac, to whom I spoke, it would be hard to conceive of the island's accomplished Polynesian sailors disregarding their need for wood to make boats in favor of sleds for moving the statues.<br />"If it were just the big trees that disappeared, you could accuse man," he said. "But it was all the little species, too."<br />The exhibit's verdict: "Only a natural phenomenon of great dimensions is capable of producing such a catastrophe. It was probably a drought."<br />This comes as a relief to me, and probably fits what seems to be EDF's idea that a little penance might be due Easter Island's people and their ancestors.<br />My issue was having heard on the radio in a more confident, credulous time that the whole problem was caused by extraterrestrials who came, built the moai and then rocketed off, leaving things a mess.<br />Way back then, I reported this with a wow! to my grandmother. Scanning the living room, she told me to listen to more intelligent programs and make sure I picked up the potato chip crumbs from the carpet.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJvLbgRMeawgRXLYsUC_XPsqVw7PMXL4O27KV1OLhnYos42p4967QIDFRUlV4o2JEG_6baoKoz7L3seDkL3JFkd2gDYP7UQGStSX49th8R0s95ICYJ8T2GVqK7rd9ifeHoidqCOcgflMc/s1600-h/DSC03159.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129954409251506" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJvLbgRMeawgRXLYsUC_XPsqVw7PMXL4O27KV1OLhnYos42p4967QIDFRUlV4o2JEG_6baoKoz7L3seDkL3JFkd2gDYP7UQGStSX49th8R0s95ICYJ8T2GVqK7rd9ifeHoidqCOcgflMc/s320/DSC03159.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>Africa: Another anti-terrorism front</strong><br />By Eric Schmitt<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />KATI, Mali: Thousands of miles from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, another side of America's fight against terrorism is unfolding in this remote corner of West Africa. Green Berets are training African armies to guard their borders and patrol vast desolate expanses against infiltration by Al Qaeda's militants so the United States does not have to.<br />A recent exercise by the United States military here is part of a wide-ranging plan since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to take counterterrorism training and assistance to places outside the Middle East, including the Philippines and Indonesia. The five-year, $500 million partnership between the State and Defense Departments, aimed at Africa, also includes Algeria, Chad, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia, and, possibly soon, Libya.<br />American efforts to fight terrorism in the region also include nonmilitary programs, like instruction for teachers and job training for young Muslim men who could be singled out by militant recruiting campaigns.<br />One goal of the program is to act quickly in these countries before terrorism becomes as entrenched as it is in Somalia, an East African nation where there is a heightened militant threat. And unlike Somalia, Mali is willing and able to permit dozens of American and European military trainers to conduct exercises here, and its leaders are plainly worried about militants who have taken refuge in its vast Saharan north.<br />"Mali does not have the means to control its borders without the cooperation of the United States," Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, a former prime minister of Mali, said in an interview.<br />Mali, a landlocked former French colony nearly twice the size of Texas, has one of the more stable, but still fragile, democracies in West Africa. But it borders Algeria, whose well-equipped military has chased Qaeda militants into northern Mali, where they have adopted a nomadic lifestyle, making them even more difficult to track.<br />With only 10,000 military and other security forces, and just two working helicopters and a few airplanes, Mali acknowledges how daunting a task it is to try to drive out the militants from their territory.<br />The biggest potential threat comes from as many as 200 fighters from an offshoot of Al Qaeda called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which uses the northern Malian desert as a staging area and support base, American and Malian officials say.<br />About three months ago, the Qaeda affiliate threatened to attack American forces that operated north of Timbuktu in Mali's desert, three Defense Department officials said. One military official said this warning contributed to a decision to shift part of the recent training exercise out of that area.<br />The government in neighboring Mauritania said 12 of its troops were killed in a militant attack there in September. By some accounts, the soldiers were beheaded and their bodies were booby-trapped with explosives.<br />Two Defense Department officials expressed fear that a main leader of the Qaeda affiliate in Mali, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, is under growing pressure to carry out a large-scale attack, possibly in Algeria or Mauritania, to establish his leadership credentials within the organization.<br />Members of the Qaeda affiliate have not attacked Malian forces, and American and Malian officials privately acknowledge that military officials here have adopted a live-and-let-live approach to the Qaeda threat, focusing instead on rebellious Tuareg tribesmen, who also live in the sparsely populated north.<br />To finance their operations, the militants exact tolls from smugglers whose routes traverse the Qaeda sanctuary, and collect ransoms for kidnapping victims. Last month two Austrians were released after a ransom of more than $2 million was reportedly paid. They had been held in northern Mali after being seized in southern Tunisia in February.<br />For those reasons, American officials still eye the largely ungoverned spaces of Mali's northern desert with concern.<br />This year, the United States Agency for International Development is spending about $9 million on counterterrorism programs here. Some of the money will expand an existing job training program for women to provide young Malian men in the north with the basic skills to set up businesses like tiny flour mills or cattle enterprises.<br />The agency is also building 12 FM radio stations in the north to link far-flung villages to an early-warning network that sends bulletins on bandits and other threats. Financing from the Pentagon will produce radio soap operas in four national languages that will promote peace and tolerance.<br />"Young men in the north are looking for jobs or something to do with their lives," said Alexander Newton, the development agency's mission director in Mali. "These are the same people who could be susceptible to other messages of economic security."<br />Concern about Mali's vulnerability also brought a dozen Army Green Berets from the 10th Special Forces Group in Germany, and several more Dutch and German military instructors, to Mali for the two-week training exercise that ended last month.<br />The mock skirmish lasted just a few minutes. The Malians, shouting to one another and firing at their attackers, retreated from the ambush rather than try to fight through it.<br />"We're still learning," said Captain Yossouf Traore, a 28-year-old commander, speaking in English he learned in Texas and at Fort Benning, Georgia, as a visiting officer. "We're getting a lot of experience in leadership skills and making decisions on the spot."<br />Still, some worrisome indicators are giving some Malian government and religious leaders, as well as American officials, pause about the country's ability to deal with security risks.<br />Mali is the world's fifth-poorest country and, by some measures, getting poorer, according to United Nations and State Department statistics. One of every five Malian children dies before the age of 5. The average Malian does not live to celebrate a 50th birthday. The country's population, now at 12 million people, is doubling nearly every two decades. Literacy rates hover around 30 percent and are much lower in rural areas.<br />There are also small signs that radical clerics are beginning to make inroads into the traditionally tolerant form of Islam practiced here for centuries by Sunni Muslims. The number of Malian women wearing all-enveloping burqas is still small, but the increase is noticeable from just a few years ago, religious leaders say.<br />New mosques are springing up, financed by conservative religious organizations in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iran, and scholarships offered to young Malian men to study in those countries are also on the rise, Malian officials say.<br />American and African diplomats here said Mali was one of the few countries in the region that had good relations with most of its neighbors, making it a likely catalyst for the broader regional security cooperation the United States is trying to foster. American commanders expressed confidence that by training together, the African forces might work together against transnational threats like Al Qaeda.<br />"If we don't help these countries work together, it becomes a much more difficult problem," said Lieutenant Colonel Jay Connors, the senior American Special Forces officer on the ground here during the exercise.<br />American officials say their strategy is to contain the Qaeda threat and train the African armies, a process that will take years. The nonmilitary counterterrorism programs are just starting, and it is too early to gauge results.<br />"This is a long-term effort," said Connors, 45, an Africa specialist from Burlington, Vermont, who speaks French and Portuguese. "This is crawl, walk, run, and right now, we're still in the crawl phase."</div><div></div><div>************************</div><div></div><div><strong>Somalia backs U.S. plan to hunt pirates</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By Abdi Sheikh<br />Somalia's government has welcomed a call by the United States for countries to have U.N. authority to hunt down Somali pirates on land as well as pursue them off the coast of the Horn of Africa nation.<br />A surge in piracy this year in the busy Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean off Somalia has driven up insurance costs, brought the gangs tens of millions of dollars in ransoms, and prompted foreign navies to rush to the area to protect shipping.<br />Diplomats at the United Nations said the U.S. delegation there had circulated a draft resolution on piracy for the Security Council to vote on next week.<br />A draft text seen by Reuters says countries with permission from Somalia's government "may take all necessary measures ashore in Somalia, including in its airspace" to capture those using Somali territory for piracy.<br />"The government cordially welcomes the United Nations to fight pirates inland and (on) the Indian Ocean," said Hussein Mohamed Mohamud, spokesman for Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf.<br />"We're also willing to give them a hand in case they need our assistance," Mohamud told Reuters in the capital Mogadishu.<br />Somalia has seen continuous conflict since 1991 and its weak Western-backed government is still fighting Islamist insurgents. The chaos has helped fuel the explosion in piracy: there have been nearly 100 attacks in Somali waters this year, despite the presence of several foreign warships. The gunmen are holding about a dozen ships and nearly 300 crew.<br />Among the captured vessels are a Saudi supertanker loaded with $100 million (67 million pounds) of crude oil, the Sirius Star, and a Ukrainian cargo ship carrying some 30 Soviet-era tanks, the MV Faina.<br />Many of the pirates are based in Somalia's semi-autonomous northern region of Puntland. An official there said he was sceptical whether the international community would take action.<br />"We are not happy because the United Nations never implements what they endorse," Abdulqadir Muse Yusuf, Puntland's assistant fisheries minister, told Reuters in Bosasso.<br />"We urge them to fight the pirates on land and in our waters. We would also like them to empower our security forces so that we can participate in the global war on piracy too."<br />There are already several international naval operations off Somalia, including a NATO anti-piracy mission. The European Union agreed on Monday to launch anti-piracy naval operations in the area, involving warships and aircraft.<br />The U.N. special envoy to Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, told an international meeting on piracy in Kenya on Thursday that the pirates were "threatening the very freedom and safety of maritime trade routes, affecting not only Somalia and the region, but also a large percentage of world trade."<br />(Additional reporting by Duncan Miriri in Nairobi; Writing by Daniel Wallis; editing by Mark Trevelyan)</div><div></div><div></div><div>***********************</div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>India's circumscribed options<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />NEW DELHI: Even as Indian officials lambasted Pakistan as the "epicenter" of terrorism and dismissed its crackdown on extremist groups as inadequate in the wake of the attacks last month in Mumbai, they all but ruled out the prospect of a military confrontation.<br />Rather, Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee told members of Parliament on Thursday that it would take time for India to turn off the tap of support for militant groups operating across the border and that war was "no solution."<br />"We shall have to patiently confront it," he said. "We have no intention to be provoked."<br />His words signaled India's delicate and somewhat circumscribed options. If it were to carry out even limited military strikes against Pakistan, it would be likely to lose the support of its allies, namely the United States, which fears that Pakistan would then divert troops from its western border with Afghanistan to its eastern one with India.<br />Second, India confronts a weak civilian government in Pakistan, which, as Indian officials have long acknowledged privately, has little muscle to counter the powerful military and spy agency.<br />India's options range from suspending peace talks to what military analysts call limited punitive strikes on terrorist training camps.<br />Mukherjee said Thursday that he had no "quarrel" with the Pakistani administration of President Asif Ali Zardari but pressed him to do more to dismantle support for militants. Initially after the Mumbai attacks, Zardari had described the suspects as "nonstate actors" over whom the Pakistani government had no control. On Thursday, that statement met with a stinging retort from Mukherjee.<br />"Are they nonstate actors coming from heaven, or are they coming from a different planet?" Mukherjee asked. "Nonstate actors are operating from a particular country. What we are most respectfully submitting, suggesting to the government of Pakistan: Please act. Mere expression of intention is not adequate."<br />India's coalition government, led by the Congress Party, is keenly aware of public outrage over the administration's failure to heed intelligence warnings or stop the attackers more quickly. On Thursday, it unveiled an overhaul of the national security system. The government said it would set up a national investigative agency to coordinate with various state and local law enforcement agencies, increase coastal security and modernize the police forces.<br />"Given the nature of the threat, we can't go back to business as usual," Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said in a speech to Parliament. He said it would require "hard decisions to prepare the country and people to face the challenge of terrorism."<br />The gunmen who carried out the three-day siege of Mumbai, India's financial capital, killed 163 people. Nine of the gunmen were killed and a 10th was arrested. The Mumbai police said all of the attackers were Pakistani citizens who had traveled across the Arabian Sea to Mumbai, formerly Bombay. They are believed to have belonged to a Pakistan-based group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is officially banned in Pakistan.<br />This past week, in response to appeals by India and the United States, the UN Security Council declared that a charity called Jamaat-ud-Dawa was a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba and subject to United Nations sanctions, including the freezing of its assets and a travel ban on four of its leaders. Those leaders include Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the head of the charity, and Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who India said had planned the Mumbai attacks and whose arrest the Pakistani government announced last Sunday.<br />Indian officials dismissed the arrests as inadequate. They pointed out that Pakistan had placed many of the same men under house arrest after the attacks on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, which India said was the work of Pakistan-based groups, but quietly released them later.<br />"We have noted the reported steps taken by Pakistan, but clearly much more needs to be done," the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, told Parliament on Thursday evening. He called for the dismantling of "the infrastructure of terrorism" across the border and then issued a warning to India's allies abroad. "The political will of the international community," he said, "must be translated into concrete and sustained action on the ground."<br />India's wait-and-watch approach seems to be primarily directed at the United States, political analysts here say, and particularly at President-elect Barack Obama, who India hopes will exert a stronger hand against Pakistan. "India will have to wait until the logic of this is going to work out and the United States will have to act," said K. Subrahmanyam, a strategic affairs analyst in New Delhi. "What we are waiting for is when Obama takes over, there will be a showdown between Pakistan and the United States, unless Pakistan is prepared to mend its ways."<br />The United States has sought to temper India's reaction and has pushed Pakistan to do more. The deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, was in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, on Thursday, a week after visits by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.<br />"There is a lot of pressure to do something meaningful and see Pakistan take long-term irreversible steps, but the Indian government has up to this point been very cautious," said Xenia Dormandy, a former Bush administration official who runs the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.<br />If Pakistan does not go further, she added, India would be likely to act with a heavier hand. "Whether it is as forward leaning as bombing camps in Jammu and Kashmir, I don't know," she said. "I think you will see India take some stronger steps in the next two, three weeks."<br />Adding to the difficulty of dealing with Pakistan, Indian and foreign analysts point out, is that the civilian government itself confronts a powerful army and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the spy agency. Indeed, immediately after the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan's civilian administration announced that it would send its spy chief to India; within hours, that offer was withdrawn.<br />"Who do you deal with, who do you talk to?" a Western diplomat in India said. "If you get the government to do something about it and if the real organization is the ISI - and I say if - then any action by the government is going to be of limited use, really. It is a problem. It is one everybody is thinking about." </div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Pakistan presses India to share evidence in Mumbai attacks</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD: Pakistan pressed India on Friday to share evidence from the Mumbai attacks, warning that any effort to prosecute key suspects rounded up in Pakistan would be hamstrung without it.<br />India says that Pakistan must dismantle Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group blamed for the attack last month that left at least 163 dead, along with the nine men believed to have been gunmen, and sharply raised tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals.<br />Pakistan, under pressure from the United States to avoid a crisis that would divert Islamabad from battling the Taliban and Al Qaeda on its Afghan frontier, has arrested two men accused of masterminding the assault. On Thursday, it clamped down on an Islamic charity after the United Nations branded it a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the powerful Pakistani guerrilla group blamed for the Mumbai attacks.<br />Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said Friday that Pakistan firmly believed that its territory should not be used to commit any act of terrorism. "However, our own investigations cannot proceed beyond a certain point without provision of credible information and evidence pertaining to Mumbai attacks," Qureshi said in a televised statement.<br />The Indian authorities have made public what they said were the names and Pakistani hometowns of the 10 gunmen who assaulted the Indian commercial capital over three days. Indian investigators, having interrogated the lone gunman captured alive, allege that the gunmen were trained in camps in Pakistan.<br />Pakistan complains that its own investigation has had to rely on Indian news reports because of the lack of information coming from the authorities. Bun Dawn, a respected Pakistani newspaper, reported Friday that its correspondents had tracked down the family of the surviving gunman.<br />The English-language daily quoted Amir Kasab as saying he was the father of Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, the 21-year-old suspect now held in India. Interviewed in his village of Faridkot, Amir Kasab said his son had disappeared around four years ago.<br />"I was in denial for the first couple of days, saying to myself it could not have been my son," the newspaper quoted him as saying. "Now I have accepted it."<br />The United States says Lashkar-e-Taiba, which grew out of the 1980s resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, has developed ties to Al Qaeda. India accuses it of involvement in a string of terrorist attacks on its territory and alleges that Pakistani intelligence continues to back it - a charge vehemently denied in Islamabad.<br />However, the group's main focus has been fighting Indian troops in Kashmir, the Himalayan region divided between Pakistan and India since independence from Britain in 1947 and the source of two of their three wars.<br />The Islamic charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa says it cut its ties with Lashkar-e-Taiba when the group was banned in 2002. But the United Nations said Wednesday that Jamaat-ud-Dawa was no more than a front. The next day, the Pakistani authorities put the charity's leader, the Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, under house arrest, sealed the charity's offices around the country and ordered banks to freeze its assets.<br />The clampdown continued Friday, with the police and charity officials reporting that dozens of its offices were closed in northwest and southern Pakistan. Attique Chohan, a Jamaat-ud-Dawa spokesman in North-West Frontier Province, said that scores of activists had been arrested.<br />The United States is pressing Pakistan and India to cooperate in the investigation and to resume a peace process that had lowered tensions without resolving the core dispute over Kashmir. Analysts say Washington wants to defuse tensions as quickly as possible so Pakistan does not find an excuse to pull its troops from its western borders and slacken its military campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.<br />The U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte met with Pakistani political leaders and the army chief before going to New Delhi on Friday. There, he met External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan and urged more international cooperation into the investigation.<br />"We're cooperating in this effort, obviously the government of India is in the lead, but all of our diplomatic partners have a responsibility to contribute to this effort," Negroponte said in a statement in New Delhi.<br />Analysts warn that the shaky civilian government in Pakistan could face a backlash if it moves strongly against Jamaat-ud-Dawa under pressure from India and the United States and without making public the evidence against it.<br />In the first sign of public dissent, about 500 people marched Friday to a UN office in the Pakistani portion of Kashmir, chanting slogans against the United Nations and India, including, "India your death came, Lashkar came, Lashkar came!"<br />Also Friday, a police team arrived in northern India to seek a warrant to bring two men suspected of being Lashkar-e-Taiba militants to Mumbai for questioning. Faheem Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed, both Indians, have been in jail in the city of Rampur since being detained in February after an attack on a police station there.</div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Pakistan cracks down on Islamic charity<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By Abu Arqam Naqash<br />Pakistan shut offices and arrested scores of activists of an Islamic charity, officials said on Friday, as international pressure mounted for firm action against militants blamed for the Mumbai attacks.<br />The overnight raids came after Pakistan said it would abide by a U.N. decision placing Hafiz Saeed, founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, on its terrorism sanctions list of people and organisations linked to al Qaeda and the Taliban.<br />India and the United States have been urging Pakistani action after the Mumbai attack by gunmen that killed 179 people last month.<br />U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte met with Pakistani political leaders and the army chief before going to New Delhi on Friday.<br />There, he met External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and National Security Adviser M. K. Narayanan and urged more international cooperation into the investigation.<br />"We're cooperating in this effort, obviously the government of India is in the lead, but all of our diplomatic partners have a responsibility to contribute to this effort," Negroponte said in a statement in New Delhi.<br />Pakistan said it was investigating links with the Mumbai attack, but that India has not provided any evidence.<br />"Our own investigations cannot proceed beyond a certain point without provision of credible information and evidence pertaining to the Mumbai attacks," Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said in a televised statement early on Friday.<br />Washington has kept up diplomatic pressure to keep Pakistani-Indian relations from worsening and Islamabad focussed on the war on terrorism. Pakistan has responded by rounding up some of the 40 people India has demanded be extradited.<br />MILITANT SWEEP<br />Saeed, who founded Lashkar in 1990 and officially left the jihadi group in 2001 just days before Pakistan banned it, has been put under house arrest, according to one of his spokesmen.<br />Three associates were also added to the U.N. list and will be subject to sanctions freezing assets and restricting travel, but a Pakistani TV news channel reported one of them was dead and another had been in a Saudi jail for the past three years.<br />An intelligence official told Reuters that Maulana Masood Azhar, head of the Jaish-e-Mohammad group blamed with Lashkar for a 2001 attack on India's parliament, was also detained.<br />One close aide of Azhar's told Reuters: "I think they could have detained him to relieve pressure, but I don't know the exact whereabouts of the Maulana."<br />In the Pakistani Kashmir capital Muzaffarabad, police raided an office, two schools and a religious seminary run by Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a charity regarded as a Lashkar front. The U.N. has put the JuD on its terrorist list too.<br />Hundreds of supporters and people who recalled JuD's work during an earthquake in Kashmir in 2005 protested the raids.<br />"Pakistan should revisit its policy of bowing before international pressure immediately, without regard for the pros and cons of its actions," Maulana Abdul Aziz Alvi, JuD's head in Pakistani Kashmir, told Reuters from house arrest.<br />Police raided JuD offices elsewhere in Pakistani Kashmir, as well as in several cities including Multan, Bahawalpur, Rahim Yar Khan, Lahore, Karachi and Quetta. A Jamaat spokesman said 100 workers were arrested in North West Frontier Province alone.<br />The charity's headquarters at a sprawling complex in the eastern town of Muridke appeared deserted. Officials said the office, schools and hospitals it ran there had shut on December 4.<br />A spokesman for Pakistan's central bank said late on Thursday that directives had been issued to banks to freeze JuD accounts and assets of the four men added to the U.N. sanctions list.<br />Television reports said the JuD would be banned though no official announcement has yet been made.<br />Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Richard Boucher, after meeting Chinese officials in Beijing, said Pakistan's moves were "good steps."<br />"But you also have to find out who else was trained and what else might they have planned, and so I think we want to keep working with Pakistan and make sure that other threats, other dangers, other terrorists, can be stopped," he told reporters.<br />A Pakistani crackdown on Jaish and Lashkar after the 2001 attack on India's parliament was regarded as a sham, and India will be looking for more concrete and lasting steps this time.<br />(Additional reporting by Asim Tanveer in Multan, Gul Yousafzai in Quetta, Imtiaz Shah in Karachi, Krittivas Mukherjee in New Delhi and Chris Buckley in Beijing; Writing by Augustine Anthony; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)</div><div></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Spain to remove limit on troops abroad<br /></strong>By Victoria Burnett<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />MADRID: The Spanish government plans to lift a cap on the number of troops it can station overseas, signaling a willingness to extend its military presence abroad and eliminating a barrier to sending more soldiers to Afghanistan.<br />Defense Minister Carme Chacón told lawmakers this past week that she intended to remove the limit of 3,000 when the measure came up for review on Dec. 31 and would seek approval from the cabinet in the next few weeks.<br />Spain is pushing against the ceiling of 3,000 overseas troops, with deployments in Lebanon, Bosnia, Kosovo and Chad as well as Afghanistan. It has, so far, resisted calls from NATO allies to increase its Afghan force of nearly 800.<br />A Defense Ministry spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity under government rules, said the decision to remove the limit was not linked to a plan to increase Afghan troop levels.<br />However, defense analysts and diplomats from NATO member-states in Madrid said the move would pave the way for Spain to heed a fresh request for troops after President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January. The Spanish contribution to NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan is a third, or less, the size of that of Italy, France or Germany.<br />The government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero wants to play a bigger role in resolving international conflicts after years of relative pacifism, analysts said.<br />"The government is redefining the defense policy of Zapatero's first term," said Rafael Calduch, professor of international relations at the Complutense University in Madrid. "There is a shift from idealism to realism."<br />Zapatero introduced the ceiling on overseas troop levels after he was elected in 2004. That year he also withdrew the Spanish forces sent to Iraq by his predecessor José María Aznar, chilling relations with the administration of President George W. Bush.<br />Chacón said the ceiling on overseas troops was obsolete because of a 2005 law that requires approval from Parliament for all foreign deployments. Spain now has the capability to station as many as 7,700 troops outside Spain, she said.<br />"Spain's international obligations keep growing, as does the credibility of our commitment among international bodies," she told the parliamentary defense committee on Wednesday, according to a transcript of the meeting. "From 2009, the number of Spanish troops abroad will be determined by the legitimacy of the mission, the wish of the Spanish people and the capacity of our Armed Forces."<br />Chacón indicated that, irrespective of troop limits, Spain would only be willing to send more soldiers to Afghanistan if the military and political strategy there were revised. She said any decision about the future of NATO forces in Afghanistan had to involve "a thorough debate about how to refocus our strategy in this country and adjust it to the changing situation."<br />Nicolás Sartorius, executive vice-president of the Alternatives Foundation, a progressive research organization in Madrid, said the Spanish public would also want to see a shift in approach in Afghanistan. "Spain cannot send more troops to Afghanistan just because the U.S. President asks for them - the Spanish public would not understand that," he said. "There has to be a new strategy."<br />A total of 87 Spanish soldiers have died during deployments to Afghanistan. Most of the deaths were caused by two air accidents.<br />The immediate impact of lifting the troop limit would be felt in the spring, when Spain intends to send nearly 200 military personnel to help fight pirates off the coast of Somalia, analysts said.</div><div></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Japan leader wins extension of navy's Afghan mission</strong><br />By Martin Fackler<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />TOKYO: Japan's governing party pushed through a law on Friday to extend a refueling mission by its navy in the Indian Ocean, allowing Tokyo to keep its small but symbolic presence in the U.S.-led military action in Afghanistan.<br />Prime Minister Taro Aso's Liberal Democratic Party used its majority in Parliament's more powerful lower house to override an earlier rejection of the bill by the opposition-controlled upper house. It was the second time this year that the governing party rammed through an extension of the refueling operation, a strong-arm tactic that risks alienating Japan's pacifist public.<br />Aso had sought quick passage so he could turn his attention to the global financial crisis, amid rising calls at home and abroad for Tokyo to take more action to stimulate its recession-bound economy. Hours after the refueling extension passed, he appeared on national television to announce billions of dollars in new spending and loans to create jobs and help cash-strapped companies.<br />Aso is struggling to overcome growing doubts about his leadership, which have driven his public approval rating down near 20 percent as his party faces crucial national elections later this year.<br />The refueling law passed Friday allows a Japanese Navy tanker and escorting destroyer to continue operating for another year in waters off Pakistan, where they provide fuel and water for American and other warships supporting operations in Afghanistan. While the mission has limited military value, it carries political significance as a test of Japan's alliance with its biggest ally, the United States.<br />"Anti-terror patrols have suppressed and deterred terrorist activities in the Indian Ocean," Aso said in a statement. "It is extremely significant for Japan to continue its refueling mission as a member of international society."<br />J. Thomas Schieffer, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, immediately issued a statement welcoming the mission's extension.<br />Any use of its military overseas is a touchy issue in Japan, whose post-World War II Constitution renounces its right to wage war. Because of such sensibilities, the law authorizing the refueling operation must be extended every year, setting the stage for an annual political fight with the opposition.<br />The country's largest opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, has seized on the refueling issue to attack the unpopular Liberal Democrats, whom they accuse of slavishly following the United States.<br />Aso and his predecessors called the refueling mission important for keeping open the sea lanes through which the bulk of Japan's oil must pass. Extending the mission had taken additional urgency in light of President-elect Barack Obama's shift of America's military and diplomatic priorities to Afghanistan from Iraq.<br />The refueling mission began in 2001, when the U.S.-led coalition began its war in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.<br />The Japanese refueling effort was briefly halted late last year when the opposition won control of the upper house of Parliament. It then resumed in January with new restrictions limiting refueling to ships directly involved in the Afghanistan operation.<br />Last month, Japan announced that it would pull its military out of Iraq, ending its airlift operation there by the end of the year.</div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>U.S. tries to reassure Karzai with visit to warship<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />MANAMA: Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited a U.S. aircraft carrier this week as the U.S. military tried to reassure him about air strikes he has bitterly denounced for causing civilian casualties.<br />Karzai paid a visit Thursday to the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which launches bombing missions on insurgent targets in Afghanistan from the Indian Ocean, the U.S. Navy said.<br />In one of a string of recent strongly worded complaints about international military operations, Karzai said last month he would bring down U.S. warplanes bombing villages if he could, before they dropped bombs on Afghan villages.<br />Afghanistan has suffered its worst violence this year since U.S.-led and Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban Islamist government in 2001, with at least 4,000 people killed, around a third of them civilians.<br />Afghan officials have blamed NATO and U.S. forces for scores of civilian deaths. Western forces say they go to great lengths to avoid such casualties and have blamed the Taliban and other insurgents for hiding among innocent people.<br />"President Karzai was able to see first hand the professionalism demonstrated by our personnel and gain a better understanding of how we do operations," U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Bill Gortney said in a statement released Friday.<br />Gortney, head of the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, who accompanied Karzai on the visit, said the Afghan leader had not raised his concerns about the air strikes.<br />"He was there ... fact-finding and quite frankly was very grateful for our support," Gortney told reporters travelling with visiting U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates at his headquarters in Bahrain.<br />(Reporting by Frederik Richter and Andrew Gray; Editing by Louise Ireland)</div><div></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>"Che": Perpetuating the myth of Guevara as a macho Marxist superman</strong><br />Reviewed by A.O. Scott<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />Che Directed by Steven Soderbergh<br />Nearly four and a half hours long, spanning more than a decade and reconstructing a pair of brutal insurgencies, "Che" surely deserves the overworked, frequently misapplied name of epic. Steven Soderbergh's new film, a two-part portrait of the Argentine doctor-turned-international revolutionary Ernesto Guevara (it opened in limited U.S. release as one film on Friday and will open as two films worldwide early next year), plants itself squarely in an old tradition of martial poetry: it sings of arms and the man.<br />But in chronicling the deeds of their hero - and the heroism of Ernesto Guevara is not something "Che" has any interest in questioning - Soderbergh and the screenwriter, Peter Buchman, restrict themselves to a narrow register of themes and effects. This is a very long song composed in about three notes. Its motifs are facial hair, tobacco smoke and earnest militant bombast. (The excellent score, less austere in its moods and effects, is by Alberto Iglesias.)<br />The first half, detailing the grinding campaign of Fidel Castro's guerrilla army against the government of Fulgencio Batista, which culminated in Batista's ouster in 1959, is intercut with scenes of a visit to New York that Guevara made in 1964 to address the UN General Assembly. Those bits, shot in a gorgeously grainy mock-antique black-and-white, offer a bit of visual relief from the long slog through the Cuban countryside, as well as providing an occasion for defiant revolutionary apologetics.<br />The New York passages also establish Guevara's status as a demon in the eyes of the U.S. government and a celebrity and fetish object for, as far as the movie is concerned, just about everyone else.<br />Journalists interview him in purring, fawning tones. An unctuous fan in round spectacles asks for an autograph. Cocktail party guests in an elegant Manhattan apartment crowd around him. But Che, media star and darling of the international left-leaning intelligentsia, regards the fuss with detachment, preferring to sit and smoke with the common folk in kitchens and back rooms.<br />"Che," in effect, represents the position of a person at that cocktail party who feels superior to the others because, unlike those liberal phonies, he really understands, in the depths of his soul, the Cuban revolution and the agonies of the third world. More dogmatic than thou (and certainly than Walter Salles's 2004 "Motorcycle Diaries," a vivid and sympathetic picture of the young Ernesto Guevara), "Che" not only participates in the worship of its subject but also spares no effort to insulate him from skepticism.<br />Benicio Del Toro's performance is technically flawless: you can be sure when he crooks his arm to look at his watch, or squints at a comrade through a plume of pipe smoke, or peels an orange, that you are seeing the thing done exactly as Che would have done it. He also infuses the character with the full and considerable measure of his own charisma.<br />But the charisma is the whole of the performance. Jean-Paul Sartre once called Guevara "the most complete human being of our time," a description that in a way means the opposite of what it seems to. Che represented, to Sartre and others, and perhaps to himself, a new kind of person, a creature of pure revolutionary integrity free of the usual trappings of bourgeois subjectivity. Those trappings, of course, are part of what make characters in movies interesting. In honoring the myth of Che as a kind of macho Marxist superman in whom thought and feeling, action and theory, passion and discipline are united, Soderbergh and Del Toro (a producer of the picture as well as its star) remove him from the realm of ordinary human sympathy.<br />He has friendships (with Fidel, wittily impersonated by Demián Bichir, and with Camillo Cienfuegos, played with great verve by Santiago Cabrera) and relations with women (Catalina Sandino Moreno and Franka Potente). He faces hard choices as a strategist and a field commander and is subject to crippling asthma attacks. But his inner life is off limits, except insofar as his thoughts and emotions might illuminate the exemplary character of his deeds.<br />"Che," in other words, is epic hagiography. Its second half, recreating Guevara's failed attempt to reproduce the Cuban revolution in Bolivia, might be called "The Passion of the Che," in honor of the fanatical fidelity with which it walks its sanctified hero through the stations of his martyrdom. (Guevara was executed in 1967 by the Bolivian military after his insurgency had been crushed.) But the film is also, in a very precise and unusual sense, an action movie. I don't just mean that it is heavy on battles and gunfights, but rather that action - what people do, as opposed to why they do it - is its primary, indeed obsessive concern.<br />The narrowness I mentioned earlier comes from the decision to treat complicated and consequential political events - the Cuban revolution, for starters, and nearly everything that followed, by implication - in purely tactical terms. The precision with which Soderbergh charts the progress of Castro's army across the Cuban countryside - and the even greater meticulousness in his depiction of the unraveling Bolivian campaign - has something in common with the exertions of Civil War re-enactors or online gamers.<br />It's not that Soderbergh is a military history nerd; he's more of a process geek, fascinated by logistics and the intricacies of how stuff gets done. He indulged this tendency in the "Ocean's 11" franchise, and while "Che" is hardly the same type of commercial entertainment, its military operations are, like the capers in the "Ocean's" pictures, at once formal challenges and allegorical stand-ins for the act of filmmaking itself.<br />"Che," shot on locations in Latin America with a small crew and a new kind of lightweight digital camera, both studies and mirrors Guevara's two wars. With diagrammatic rigor, it lays out how one revolution succeeds - by cultivating popular support, by marshaling a disciplined and growing contingent of troops - and how another fails.<br />It communicates a sense of difficulty and frustration, and also the kind of elation that comes from being absorbed in a heroic communal task.<br />This self-absorption - the extent to which "Che" is a movie about itself - saves it from becoming too dull and allows you, at least temporarily, to overlook its naïve and fuzzy politics. But the film's formal sophistication is ultimately an evasion of the moral reckoning that Ernesto Guevara, more than 40 years and several million T-shirts after his death, surely deserves. Soderbergh once again offers a master class in filmmaking. As history, though, "Che" is finally not epic but romance. It takes great care to be true to the factual record, but it is, nonetheless, a fairy tale.</div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Silver Stars awarded to 10 soldiers for Afghan battle<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />FORT BRAGG, N.C.: Capt. Kyle Walton remembers pressing himself into the jagged stones that covered the cliff in northeast Afghanistan.<br />Machine gun rounds and sniper fire ricocheted off the rocks. Two rounds slammed into his helmet, smashing his head into the ground. Nearby, three of his U.S. Army Special Forces comrades were gravely wounded. One grenade or a well-aimed bullet, Walton thought, could etch April 6, 2008 on his gravestone.<br />Walton and his team from the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group had been sent to kill or capture terrorists from a rugged valley that had never been penetrated by U.S. forces — or, they had been told, the Soviets before them.<br />He peered over the side of the cliff to the dry river bed 60 feet below and considered his options. Could he roll the wounded men off and then jump to safety? Would they survive the fall?<br />By the end of the six-hour battle deep within the Shok Valley, Walton would bear witness to heroics that on Friday would earn his team 10 Silver Stars, the most for a single battle in Afghanistan.<br />Walton, a Special Forces team leader, and his men described the battle in an interview with The Associated Press last week. Most seem unimpressed they've earned the Army's third-highest award for combat valor.<br />"This is the story about Americans fighting side-by-side with their Afghan counterparts refusing to quit," said Walton, of Carmel, Ind. "What awards come in the aftermath are not important to me."<br />The mission that sent three Special Forces teams and a company from the 201st Afghan Commando Battalion to the Shok Valley seemed imperiled from the outset.<br />Six massive CH-47 Chinook helicopters had deposited the men earlier that morning, banking through thick clouds as they entered the valley. The approaching U.S. soldiers watched enemy fighters racing to positions dug into the canyon walls and to sniper holes carved into stone houses perched at the top of the cliff.<br />Considered a sanctuary of the Hezeb Islami al Gulbadin terrorist group, the valley is far from any major American base.<br />It was impossible for the helicopters to land on the jagged rocks at the bottom of the valley. The Special Forces soldiers and commandos, each carrying more than 60 pounds of gear, dropped from 10 feet above the ground, landing among boulders or in a near-frozen stream.<br />With several Afghan commandos, Staff Sgt. John Walding and Staff Sgt. David Sanders led the way on a narrow path that zig-zagged up the cliff face to a nearby village where the terrorists were hiding.<br />Walton followed with two other soldiers and a 23-year-old Afghan interpreter who went by the name C.K., an orphan who dreamed of going to the United States.<br />Walding and Sanders were on the outskirts of the village when Staff Sgt. Luis Morales saw a group of armed men run along a nearby ridge. He fired. The surrounding mountains and buildings erupted in an ambush: The soldiers estimate that more than 200 fighters opened up with rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and AK-47s.<br />C.K. crumbled to the ground.<br />Walton and Spc. Michael Carter dove into a small cave. Staff Sgt. Dillon Behr couldn't fit so the Rock Island, Ill., native dropped to one knee and started firing. An F-15 made a strafing run to push back the fighters, but it wasn't enough.<br />Sanders radioed for close air support — an order that Walton had to verify because the enemy was so near that the same bombs could kill the Americans.<br />The nearest house exploded; the firing didn't stop.<br />"Hit it again," Sanders said.<br />For the rest of the battle, F-15 fighters and Apache helicopters attacked.<br />Behr was hit next — a sniper's round passing through his leg. Morales knelt on Behr's hip to stop the bleeding and kept firing until he, too, was hit in the leg and ankle.<br />Walton and Carter, a combat cameraman from Smithville, Texas, dragged the two wounded men to the cave. Gunfire had destroyed Carter's camera so Walton put him to work treating Morales who, in turn, kept treating Behr.<br />Staff Sgt. Ronald J. Shurer, a medic from Pullman, Wash., fought his way up the cliff to help.<br />"Heard some guys got hit up here," he said as he reached the cave, pulling bandages and gear from his aid bag.<br />Walton told Walding and Sanders to abandon the assault and meet on the cliff. The Americans and Afghan commandos pulled back as the Air Force continued to pound the village.<br />Walding made it to the cliff when a bullet shattered his leg. He watched his foot and lower leg flop on the ground as Walton dragged him to the cliff edge. With every heartbeat, a stream of blood shot out of Walding's wound. Rolling on his back, the Groesbeck, Texas, native, asked for a tourniquet and cranked down until the bleeding stopped.<br />The soldiers were trapped against the cliff. Walton was sure his men would be overrun. The narrow path was too exposed. He sent Sanders to find another way down. Sometimes free-climbing the rock face, the Huntsville, Ala., native found a steep path and made his way back up. Could the wounded make it out alive? Walton asked.<br />"Yes, they'll survive," Sanders said.<br />Down below, Staff Sgt. Seth E. Howard took his sniper rifle and started climbing with Staff Sgt. Matthew Williams.<br />At the top, Howard used C.K.'s lifeless body for cover and started to shoot. He fired repeatedly, killing as many as 20 of their attackers, his comrades say. The enemy gunfire slowed. The Air Force bombing continued, providing cover.<br />Morales was first down the cliff, clutching branches and rocks as he slid. Sanders, Carter and Williams went up to get Behr, then back up to rescue Walding. As Walton climbed down, a 2,000-pound bomb hit a nearby house. Another strike nearly blew Howard off the cliff.<br />Helicopters swooped in to pick up the 15 wounded American and Afghan soldiers, as well as the rest of the teams. Bullets pinged off the helicopters. One hit a pilot.<br />All the Americans survived.<br />Months later, Walding wants back on the team even though he lost a leg. Morales walks with a cane.<br />The raid, the soldiers say, proved there will be no safe haven in Afghanistan for terrorists. As for the medals, the soldiers see them as emblems of teamwork and brotherhood. Not valor.<br />"When you go to help your buddy, you're not thinking, 'I am going to get a Silver Star for this,'" Walding said. "If you were there, there would not be a second guess on why."</div><div></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Iraqis in north mourn suicide bombing deaths</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By Mustafa Mahmoud<br />Mourners poured into mosques in Iraq's northern city of Kirkuk on Friday, vowing not to let the worst bomb attack in months turn ethnic tensions into bloodshed.<br />Fifty people were killed and some 100 wounded in the suicide bombing on Thursday of a restaurant north of the city that is disputed by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen. It has been an oasis of relative calm during Iraq's wave of sectarian violence.<br />"What is their sin?" said Miaad Ridha Mohammed, 45, a Kurd, breaking into tears before the funeral in a Sunni mosque for his brother, his brother's wife and two of their three children, all killed in Thursday's blast near Kirkuk.<br />Only his brother's two-year-old daughter Mina survived the bomb in a popular eatery north of Kirkuk, the bloodiest attack in Iraq since a Baghdad truck bomb killed 63 people in June.<br />The explosion reminded Iraqis of the fragility of a recent, decline in the sectarian slaughter prompted by the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.<br />The security gains will be tested when Iraq holds provincial elections in January and a general election later next year, and when U.S. troops start to pull out of cities in the first half of 2009, ahead of a full withdrawal by the end of 2011.<br />While the wholesale sectarian killings of two years ago have faded, suicide and car bomb attacks are common.<br />Suicide bombings are a trademark of Sunni Islamist al Qaeda, but no group claimed responsibility for the attack on the restaurant, where Kurd and Arab officials were dining after holding talks to discuss tensions between their communities.<br />The ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk has been generally one of the less violent places in Iraq.<br />DISPUTES<br />But it is disputed by ethnic Kurds, who claim it as their ancient capital and want it to become part of semi-autonomous Kurdistan, and Arabs and Turkmen, who want the city to remain under central government authority. Under the city lie rich, largely untapped, reserves of oil.<br />"This attack is an attempt by the terrorists to derail the peace in this united city," said Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, vowing to give the city authorities all the help they needed to cope with the incident.<br />Residents of Kirkuk said they would not allow the bombing to tip the city into the inter-community violence that swept through the rest of Iraq for years after the U.S. invasion.<br />"It is terror in general that doesn't differentiate between kids, and young men and old men," said Mohammed, an employee of the state-run North Oil Company. "This explosion has nothing to do with Arabs, Kurds or Turkmen. It targets innocent civilians. They want to kill Iraqis' joy."<br />Mohammed said the shock of losing almost his entire family in the bomb blast was so great that he lost consciousness when he arrived at a local hospital and was told the news.<br />His brother had taken his family out to lunch after going to a fairground during the Muslim Eid al-Adha religious holiday.<br />Imad Ahmed, 30, an editor at a TV station in Kirkuk, said that one colleague, presenter Kanaan Guzal, a Turkmen, had been killed in the blast along with his three children and brother.<br />"I can't describe that moment when I found out that all five members of one family were killed," he said. "I just want to ask those who did this: 'What victory do you gain by killing children, women, young men and old men?'."<br />(Writing by Khalid al-Ansary; Editing by Michael Christie and Elizabeth Piper)</div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Thousands celebrate in Baghdad as violence falls<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By Mohammed Abbas<br />Iraqis have visited Baghdad's parks and shrines in their thousands in the past few days during a major Muslim festival, the highest turnout for years as violence falls in the Iraqi capital, security officials said.<br />For much of last year the city was still mired in sectarian bloodshed, unleashed shortly after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Mutilated and tortured bodies were dumped on the streets almost daily.<br />Now Iraqis screamed and shouted from Zawraa park's "Space Gun" ride, which spins people full circle and holds them upside down in the air, handbags and glasses tumbling 30-feet (9 metres) onto the floor below with each revolution.<br />"We are proud of ... achievements that led millions of people to visit shrines, mosques, parks and fairs in a way Baghdad and other Iraqi provinces haven't seen before," Baghdad security spokesman Major-General Qassim Moussawi told reporters.<br />He was speaking in the park, where thousands of Iraqis were celebrating at the end of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, a four-day event that ends Friday for Shi'ites and ended on Thursday for Sunnis. Moussawi could barely be heard over processions of boys banging drums and tambourines and singing.<br />Moussawi said there had been no security violations in the city for six days.<br />The relatively quiet Eid in Iraq was still marred by a suicide blast near the northern city of Kirkuk that killed 50 people in a busy restaurant Thursday.<br />For many Iraqis out at Baghdad's parks, it had been the first Eid al-Adha they could remember in the capital since Saddam Hussein fell that had not been overshadowed by violence.<br />"It's been a huge change. People were slaughtering each other last year. This is the first Eid we've felt this secure. Before it was all murders and bombings," said Saad Hussein, sat in Abu Nawas park on the banks of the Tigris.<br />TIGHT JEANS<br />Young men who might have grown a beard when Islamist militias and insurgents controlled chunks of Baghdad now roamed the parks in packs, clean shaven with slicked back hair and tight jeans, eying young women passing by.<br />Many women wore figure-hugging outfits, heavy make up and openly displayed flashy jewellery.<br />"These three days have been good, no bombs at all, not like the last Eid when there was a bomb on the first day. But we're still afraid when we go out," said park goer Shaymaa Irzouqi.<br />Like many others in Abu Nawas park and Zawraa park, Irzouqi's assessment of security in Baghdad was qualified. There had been several bomb attacks in the weeks leading up to Eid.<br />For some, the high turnout at Baghdad's parks and shrines was only partly due to better security.<br />"We're used to it. There's an explosion and then we quickly carry on as normal," said Hussein Mohammed, walking with his friend Ali Mohammed near a carousel in Zawraa park. He and his friend had run from the park under gunfire at Eid last year.<br />"Security is better than it was. But you can't really say anything for certain. There could be an explosion any time," Mohammed said.<br />Security in and around the park was heavy, and military helicopters buzzed overhead at Abu Nawas and Zawraa.<br />Others said that while security was good now, they feared for the future. Provincial and parliamentary elections and a referendum are due to be held next year, events that could spark an upsurge in violence.<br />Thousands of mainly Sunni prisoners, many detained on suspicion of being insurgents, have been released in recent months under an amnesty law.<br />"Young men are coming out of prison. There are no jobs, no hope. It's very easy for them to get caught up in terrorism," said Abu Nawas park drinks vendor Mohammed Abdullah.<br />(Additional reporting by Khalid al-Ansary, Editing by Michael Christie)</div><div></div><div></div><div>********************</div><div></div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>A gift from the king<br /></strong>By Tim Sebastian<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />AMMAN: An odd thing happened the other day in the Arab world.<br />Amid all the recent backsliding on free speech and the general disinterest in democracy among Middle Eastern governments, one head of state drew a thin and highly significant line in the sand.<br />Typically, the other Arab states chose to ignore it, local journalists didn't believe it and the international press had its mind on other things. But in a region where good news has become a long-forgotten curiosity, it would be unwise to let it pass unnoticed.<br />The man at the center of this event was King Abdullah of Jordan, who last month gathered together the chief editors of Jordan's main newspapers and told them that from now on there would be big changes in the country's media environment. Specifically, no more jailing of reporters for writing the wrong thing and a new mechanism would be created to protect the rights of journalists, including their access to information.<br />"Detention of journalists is prohibited," he said. "I do not see a reason for detaining a journalist because he/she wrote something or for expressing a view."<br />Perhaps, after nearly five years broadcasting debates from the confines of the Middle East, I'm easily pleased. But over that period, no other Arab leader has come close to making a similar, public commitment and all the recent changes affecting the Arab media have led inexorably backward.<br />I am deluged by stories from editors in the region, who regularly have the guts censored out of their political articles, and who have seen a steep rise in the number of warning calls from their political masters, telling them what they can or cannot print.<br />In addition, all but two Arab states signed up last February to an Arab League initiative that pledged to restrict still further the rights of the myriad satellite stations in a vain effort to shore up that rarest of regional commodities - Arab unity. So against this background, King Abdullah's declaration marks a sharp departure from the current trend.<br />And yet it's hardly surprising that local journalists were unimpressed. The government still has plenty of legal instruments it can use against them. More than 20 laws continue to govern media conduct in Jordan, including the Penal Code, and there is no guarantee against "creative" prosecutions in the future under the pretext of other crimes or misdemeanors. No single statement from the royal palace can airbrush away years of harassment and interference.<br />Besides, the king's statement comes in the same year that his country has been downgraded by the Paris-based organization "Reporters without Borders" in its 2008 Worldwide Press Freedom Index. Jordan now stands at 128th position out of 173 countries - six places lower than last year.<br />Even a government report by the grandly titled Higher Media Council last year admitted serious problems with the country's journalism. The majority of reporters faced difficulties getting information, it said - or worse, were completely denied access to data.<br />So was the king serious about pushing through improvements?<br />One senior diplomat in Amman was heard to wonder whether his majesty's wishful thinking had got the better of him. A government minister even hinted that some "authorities" might take no notice of his strictures. There were suggestions that the engine room often took time to react to orders from the bridge.<br />Whatever the case, it would be a mistake to do what the opponents of free speech would like the world to do: Forget about the whole thing.<br />Jordan's king needs to be reminded that the world will not ignore his fine words. He should also be persuaded to repeat them and expand their scope in the months to come.<br />Plenty of leaders in the region have talked about reform - although considerably fewer these days than three years ago - but King Abdullah, now facing serious economic problems, is more receptive than most to external encouragement. Sweeping away repressive practices on the treatment of journalists would go a long way to improving his country's image, especially amid new accusations by Human Rights Watch of torture in Jordanian jails.<br />One other event also passed unnoticed in Amman over the last few weeks: the first regional conference for Arab investigative journalists.<br />Like me, you may be amazed that, given the many and varied disincentives, such an organization can still exist in the Middle East. But it is a tribute to a small number of brave and single-minded reporters, who labor across the region under the constant threat of arrest or arbitrary detention.<br />All they have to protect them are their questions - and in many cases, that isn't enough.<br />Last month, they got a small gift from the king of Jordan in the shape of a declaration of support. They need to unwrap it, display it and ask for more. If nobody takes it seriously - either at home or abroad - there is a strong chance this gift could be taken back.<br />Tim Sebastian is the chairman of The Doha Debates.</div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>6 terror suspects charged in Belgium<br /></strong>By Steven Erlanger<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />PARIS: The authorities in Belgium charged six suspected extremists Friday with membership in a terrorist group, a spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office said in Brussels.<br />They were among 14 people arrested in raids early Thursday, including a woman who writes jihadist screeds on the Internet and three men the Belgian authorities said had just returned from training camps along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. One had "said goodbye to his loved ones," according to the Belgian federal prosecutor, Johan Delmulle, leading to fears of an imminent suicide attack around the time that European Union leaders were meeting in Brussels.<br />Lieve Pellens, spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office, said by telephone that the six suspects charged Friday included the woman, Malika El Aroud. She said the eight others had been released because a judge had determined that there was not enough evidence to press charges.<br />The six suspects are all Belgian nationals and most are of Moroccan origin, Pellens said. She said they should be arraigned within five days. Under rules to preserve the secrecy of the investigation, Pellens could not give out more detailed information on the charges.<br />Though the possible target was not clear, the arrests Thursday came on a day when European leaders began a two-day summit meeting in Brussels.<br />"We don't know where the suicide attack was to take place," Delmulle said in Brussels. "It could have been an operation in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but it can't be ruled out that Belgium or Europe could have been the target."<br />An investigation into the suspects had been under way for a year.<br />But given the EU meeting, Delmulle said, the authorities felt they had "no choice but to take action" or to sharply raise security around the meeting.<br />The police carried out 16 raids in Brussels and one in Liège. Those arrested included El Aroud, 49, who accompanied her husband to Afghanistan in 2001, where he trained in a camp run by Al Qaeda and then, days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, helped kill the anti-Taliban resistance leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud. El Aroud, whose husband was eventually killed, writes online as Oum Obeyda.<br />Basil Katz contributed reporting.</div><div></div><div></div><div>*************************</div><div></div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/12/europe/russia.php">Russia's lower house votes to end jury trials for terrorism and treason</a></div><div></div><div>*************************</div><div></div><div><strong>Iran cleric says Obama adopting old U.S. tactics</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />TEHRAN: A senior Iranian cleric described President-elect Barack Obama on Friday as a novice who was adopting old U.S. tactics of "deception and fraud," underscoring Iran's scepticism about prospects for change in U.S. policy.<br />Some Iranian officials have said Iran would "wait and see" before judging how Obama would act in office, but the president- elect's call for Iran to stop part of its disputed nuclear work has drawn an uncompromising line from Iran.<br />Tehran says it will not suspend uranium enrichment, which Washington says has military aims, insisting it wants technology to make fuel for power plants not material for warheads. It says nuclear weapons have no role in Iran's defence doctrine.<br />"He (Obama) recently opined that the development of nuclear arms in Iran would be unacceptable, and also that Iran's support for 'terrorist organisations', such as Hezbollah (in Lebanon), is unacceptable," conservative cleric Ahmad Khatami said.<br />"I want to say that these statements are made by a raw person, an upstart (in politics), who has just reached power and is travelling the world of thoughts and imagination. The policy of deception and fraud has been an instrument that has defamed all American presidents," he said.<br />Khatami, a member of Iran's powerful oversight body, the Assembly of Experts, was speaking to worshippers in Friday prayers broadcast on state radio.<br />The cleric also said Obama was following the past "carrot and stick" policy, a reference to an offer by world powers of trade, nuclear and other incentives in return for halting its nuclear work. But they warn of more sanctions if Tehran refuses.<br />Obama, who takes office on January 20, said on Sunday he was ready to talk to Iran directly to give the Islamic Republic the "clear choice" to accept incentives or face tougher sanctions.<br />In his sermon, Khatami also criticised the heads of some Islamic countries and "particularly those of the Arab states" for not doing enough to stop Palestinian suffering in Gaza.<br />Hundreds of Iranians demonstrated in Tehran on Friday to call for an end to Israel's blockade of Gaza, Iranian media showed.<br />"Behind the crime scene against Muslims, the hands of some Islamic states can be seen," Khatami said. He singled out Egypt, which borders Gaza, in his sermon.<br />Egypt and Iran do not have full diplomatic ties. Cairo complained to the head of the Iranian mission in Egypt this week after Iranians protested outside Egypt's interests section in Tehran. An Egyptian diplomat said demonstrators threw a petrol bomb at the mission's fence and chanted anti-Egypt slogans.<br />(Reporting by Hashem Kalantari, writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Richard Balmforth)</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSZVZ-yPWBrjr-UDqUvaG76aGcz_q-TrR6B-gO6Ywwije7gczLbGpHfaoIBayKp5QrbdXT1edrhMc5GrXfNkwz1F_sWvPghoqkdnSHNu0P40JK-SnNjOKn7t9P0y0iAB6mHjxmOVdFob8/s1600-h/DSC03160.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129680705313106" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSZVZ-yPWBrjr-UDqUvaG76aGcz_q-TrR6B-gO6Ywwije7gczLbGpHfaoIBayKp5QrbdXT1edrhMc5GrXfNkwz1F_sWvPghoqkdnSHNu0P40JK-SnNjOKn7t9P0y0iAB6mHjxmOVdFob8/s320/DSC03160.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div></div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/12/business/yen.php">Japan hopes to revive economy with more stimulus</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/12/business/auto.php">White House plans to use bank bailout funds to aid automakers</a> </div><div></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Wall Street legend arrested on fraud charges<br /></strong>By Diana B. Henriques and Zachery Kouwe<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />NEW YORK: On Wall Street, his name is legendary. With money he had made as a lifeguard on the urban beaches of Long Island, he built a trading powerhouse that had prospered for more than four decades. At the age of 70, he had become an influential spokesman for the traders who are the hidden gears of the marketplace.<br />But on Thursday morning, this consummate trader, Bernard Madoff, was arrested at his New York home by U.S. government agents who accused him of running a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme, perhaps the largest in Wall Street's history. Regulators have not yet been able to verify the scale of the fraud. But the criminal complaint filed against him Thursday in U.S. District Court reports that Madoff himself estimated the losses at $50 billion.<br />"We are alleging a massive fraud, both in terms of scope and duration," said Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the enforcement division at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "We are moving quickly and decisively to stop the fraud and protect remaining assets for investors."<br />Andrew Calamari, an associate director for enforcement in the SEC's regional office in New York, said the case involved "a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions."<br />According to his lawyers, Madoff was released on a $10 million bond. "Bernie Madoff is a longstanding leader in the financial services industry," said Daniel Horwitz, one of his lawyers. "He will fight to get through this unfortunate set of events."<br />Madoff's brother and business colleague, Peter Madoff, also declined to comment on the case or discuss its implications for the firm, which at one point was the largest market maker on the Nasdaq market, regularly operating as both a buyer and seller in the marketplace. The firm employed hundreds of traders.<br />There was some worry on Wall Street that Madoff's fall would shake more foundations than his own.<br />According to the most recent government filings, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the firm he founded in 1960, operated more than two dozen funds overseeing $17 billion. These funds have been widely marketed to wealthy individuals, hedge funds and other institutional investors for more than a decade. An SEC filing in the case said the firm reported having 11 to 23 clients at the beginning of this year.<br />As news about Madoff's arrest spread on Friday, dozens of customers called the company, the media and their lawyers seeking information about their accounts, which for many represented essentially all their net worth.<br />"The scale of this is unprecedented," said Brad Friedman, a lawyer who has been retained by dozens of older customers whose money had been entrusted to Madoff for decades. "These are people who were living very, very well who are now destitute, whose only remaining asset is their home or their apartment."<br />About a dozen angry investors gathered on Friday in the lobby of the Lipstick Building in midtown Manhattan, where the market-making firm and advisory fund are both headquartered, demanding to know the fate of their money, Reuters said.<br />The two most prominent hedge funds that invested with Madoff were the $7.3 billion Fairfield Sentry, run by Fairfield Greenwich Group, and the $2.8 billion Kingate Global Fund. Fairfield called Madoff's arrest "a shocking development," according to a statement on its Web site, and said it's taking steps "to protect our investors and our firm."<br />European investors in Madoff's firm include the British fund manager Nicola Horlick's Bramdean Alternatives and UniCredit's Pioneer Alternative Investments, according to Bloomberg News and Reuters, who cited unnamed people. Benedict Hentsch, a Swiss private bank, said it had 56 million Swiss francs, or $47 million, of exposure to Madoff's investment advisory business.<br />At the request of the SEC, a District Court judge appointed a receiver to secure the Madoff firm's overseas accounts and warned the firm not to move any assets until he had ruled on whether to freeze the assets.<br />Regulators said they hoped to have a clearer picture of the losses potentially facing investors. "We have 16 examiners on site all day and through the night poring over the records," said Calamari, of the SEC.<br />The Madoff funds attracted investors with the promise of high returns with low fees. The Fairfield Sentry fund reported $7.3 billion in assets in October and said it had paid more than 11 percent interest a year through its 15-year track record.<br />Competing hedge fund managers have wondered privately for years how Madoff generated such high returns, in bull markets and bear, given the generally low-yielding investment strategies he described to his clients.<br />"The numbers were too good to be true, for too long," said Girish Reddy, a managing director at Prisma Partners, an investment firm that invests in hedge funds. "And the supporting infrastructure was weak."<br />Reddy said his firm had looked at the Madoff funds and decided against investing in them because their performance was too consistently positive, even in times when the market was extremely volatile.<br />But the essential drama is a personal one - one laid out in the dry language of a criminal complaint by Lev Dassin, the acting chief U.S. prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, which includes Wall Street, and in a regulatory lawsuit filed by the SEC.<br />According to those documents, the first alarm bells rang at the firm Tuesday, when Madoff told a senior executive he wanted to pay his employees their annual bonuses in December, two months early.<br />Just days earlier, he had told another senior executive he was struggling to raise cash to cover about $7 billion in requested withdrawals from his clients, and he had appeared "to have been under great stress in the prior weeks," according to the SEC complaint. So on Wednesday, the senior executive visited Madoff's office, maintained on a separate floor with records kept under lock and key, and asked for an explanation.<br />Instead, Madoff invited the two executives to his New York apartment that evening. When they joined him there, he told them that his money-management business was "all just one big lie" and "basically, a giant Ponzi scheme."<br />The senior employees understood him to be saying that he had for years been paying returns to certain investors out of the cash received from other investors.<br />In that conversation, according to the criminal complaint, Madoff "stated that he was 'finished,' that he had 'absolutely nothing."'<br />By this account, Madoff told the executives he intended to surrender to the authorities in about a week but first wanted to distribute about $200 million to $300 million to "certain selected employees, family and friends."<br />On Thursday morning, however, he was arrested on a single count of securities fraud, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $5 million.<br />According to the SEC, Madoff confessed to an FBI agent that there was "no innocent explanation" for his behavior and said he expected to go to prison.<br />He had lost money on his trades, he told the agent, and had "paid investors with money that wasn't there."</div><div></div><div></div><div>*************************</div><div></div><div><strong>Madoff's alleged fraud hits other investors</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By Jon Stempel and Christian Plumb<br />Investors scrambled to assess potential losses from an alleged $50 billion (33.4 billion pound) fraud by Bernard Madoff, a day after the arrest of the prominent Wall Street trader.<br />Prosecutors and regulators accused the 70-year-old former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market of masterminding a Ponzi scheme of epic proportions through his investment advisory business, which managed at least one hedge fund. Hundreds of people, investing with him through the firm's clients, entrusted Madoff with billions of dollars, industry experts said.<br />"Madoff's investors included captains of industry, corporations -- some of which are publicly traded -- that used Madoff almost as a high-yielding cash management account, endowments, universities, foundations and, importantly, many high-profile funds of funds," said Douglas Kass, who heads hedge fund Seabreeze Partners Management.<br />"It appears that at least $15 billion of wealth, much of which was concentrated in Southern Florida and New York City, has gone to 'money heaven,'" he said.<br />A Ponzi scheme is an illegal investment vehicle that pays off old investors with money from new ones, and is dependent on a constant stream of new investment. Because the invested capital is not earning a sufficient return on its own, such schemes eventually collapse under their own weight.<br />Federal agents arrested Madoff at his apartment on Thursday after prosecutors said he told senior employees that his money management operations were "all just one big lie" and "basically, a giant Ponzi scheme."<br />Madoff is the founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, a market-making firm he launched in 1960. His separate investment advisory business had $17.1 billion of assets under management.<br />'BUSINESS AS USUAL?'<br />About a dozen angry investors gathered on Friday in the lobby of the Lipstick Building in midtown Manhattan, where the market-making firm and advisory business are headquartered, demanding to know the fate of their money.<br />One woman said that when she called the firm's offices on Thursday she was told it was "business as usual."<br />Another investor groused, "Business as usual? Of course it's business as usual. We're getting screwed left and right."<br />Police later evicted the small group from the building.<br />Individual investors were feeling the squeeze elsewhere.<br />"I expect to get back zero," said Susan Leavitt in Tampa Bay, Florida, who invested through Madoff. "When he tells the Feds, he has $200 million to $300 million left out of billions, what can you expect."<br />The two most prominent hedge funds that invested with Madoff were the $7.3 billion Fairfield Sentry, run by Walter Noel's Fairfield Greenwich Group, and the $2.8 billion Kingate Global Fund, run by Kingate Management.<br />Fairfield Sentry and Kingate Global were among a small group of hedge funds to report positive returns for 2008; the average hedge fund was down 18 percent, according to data from Hedge Fund Research.<br />"People who came to us for portfolio construction were often already invested with Bernie Madoff, he had hundreds of clients," said Charles Gradante, who invests in hedge funds as a principal at Hennessee Group. "Now his whole legacy is destroyed. He was God to people."<br />Prior to Madoff's arrest, investors had wondered how he was able to generate annual returns in the low double digits in a variety of market environments. Many questioned how U.S. regulators were able to ignore numerous red flags with regards to Madoff's operations.<br />"Many of us questioned how that strategy could generate those kinds of returns so consistently," said Jon Najarian, an options trader who knows Madoff and is a co-founder of optionmonster.com.<br />In May 2001, Barron's reported that option strategists for major investment banks said they could not understand how Madoff managed to generate the returns that he did.<br />"We weren't comfortable with Madoff," said Brad Alford, president at investment adviser Alpha Capital in Atlanta. "We didn't understand how his strategy could generate the kind of returns it did. We will walk away from things like that."<br />MORE TO COME?<br />U.S. stocks tumbled in early trading on Friday, with some investors citing the Madoff case as well as the failure of talks in Congress on a rescue for the U.S. auto industry. The market later rebounded, with the Dow Jones industrial average rising 64.59 points, or 0.75 percent, to end unofficially at 8,629.68.<br />Investors overseas were reeling from the alleged fraud.<br />Benedict Hentsch, a Swiss private bank, said it had 56 million Swiss francs ($47 million) of exposure to Madoff's investment advisory business. UniCredit SpA's fund management unit, Pioneer Investments, has exposure through its Primeo Select hedge fund, two people familiar with the matter said.<br />Bramdean Alternatives said almost 10 percent of its holdings were exposed to Madoff, sending shares in the UK asset manager crashing.<br />CNBC Television reported that Sterling Equities, which owns the New York Mets baseball team, had accounts managed by Madoff.<br />'UNFORTUNATE SET OF EVENTS'<br />Madoff said "there is no innocent explanation" for his activities, and that he "paid investors with money that wasn't there," according to the federal complaint.<br />Prosecutors also accused Madoff of wanting to distribute as much as $300 million to employees, family members and friends before turning himself in.<br />Charged with one count of securities fraud, he faces up to 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed separate civil charges.<br />A hearing had been scheduled for Friday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on the SEC's request to grant powers to the court-appointed receiver to oversee the entire firm, as well as on the commission's request for a firmwide asset freeze.<br />But the hearing was cancelled after the matter was resolved, said a deputy for U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton. No other details were immediately available. The receiver, lawyer Lee Richards, had been appointed by the judge on Thursday to oversee assets and accounts of the firm held abroad.<br />Madoff's lawyer, Dan Horwitz, said on Thursday, "We will fight to get through this unfortunate set of events." His client was released on $10 million bond.<br />Madoff is a member of Nasdaq OMX Group nominating committee. His firm has said it is a market-maker for about 350 Nasdaq stocks.<br />He is also chairman of London-based Madoff Securities International, whose chief executive, Stephen Raven, said the firm was "not in any way part of" the New York-based market-maker.<br />All equity trades involving the market-making firm will be processed as usual, the Depository Trust Clearing Corp told Reuters on Friday.<br />(Reporting by Jennifer Ablan, Edith Honan, Aarthi Sivaraman and Leah Schnurr and Dan Wilchins in New York; Svea Herbst-Bayliss in Boston, Steve Slater in London and Lisa Jucca in Zurich; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe, John Wallace, Toni Reinhold)</div><div></div><div>************************</div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Mugabe insists his statement on cholera was misunderstood<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />HARARE, Zimbabwe: President Robert Mugabe claims that the cholera crisis that has killed nearly 800 people in Zimbabwe is contained, and his spokesman said his much criticized remark that there was no cholera was misunderstood, state media reported Friday.<br />Mugabe's comments Thursday drew strong criticism from the United States and Britain. The U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe said it showed "how out of touch he is with the reality."<br />The Herald newspaper quoted Mugabe's spokesman, George Charamba, on Friday as saying that Mugabe had been being sarcastic and had wanted to make the point that the crisis was contained.<br />The World Health Organization, though, said Friday that the death toll from the waterborne disease had risen to 792 and that the number of cases had increased to 16,700.<br />"I don't think that the cholera outbreak is under control," a WHO spokeswoman, Fadela Chaib, said.<br />Cholera has spread rapidly in Zimbabwe because of the crumbling health care system and lack of clean water. The country's health care system was among the best in Africa before the economic meltdown.<br />Now most hospitals have been forced to close because they can no longer afford drugs, equipment or wages for their staff, and some of the sick seeking treatment are being transported by wheelbarrow. Officials are also unable to afford spare parts and chemicals for water systems.<br />Zimbabwe's decline began in 2000, when Mugabe began an often violent campaign to seize white-owned farms and give them to blacks; most of the land ended up in the hands of his cronies, and production has dropped. Now, Zimbabweans scrounge for corn kernels spilled from trucks carrying the harvest to market in a nation that once exported food.<br />On Friday, the opposition accused Mugabe of being disingenuous for his "careless and reckless" remarks about the cholera crisis.<br />"The epidemic is still with us and is spreading fast," Henry Madzorera, health spokesman for the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change, said in a statement.<br />Aid agencies have warned that the outbreak could worsen with the onset of the rainy season and that the disease has spread to Zimbabwe's neighbors.<br />The South African authorities have declared the border region with Zimbabwe a disaster area. About 664 people have been treated for the disease and at least 8 people have died in South Africa.<br />Mugabe has been in power since independence from Britain in 1980 and refused to leave office after disputed elections in March. President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France have called for Mugabe, 84, to step down. </div><div></div><div>*********************</div><div></div><div><strong>Shell's pension underfunded<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By Tom Bergin and Cecilia Valente<br />Royal Dutch Shell's Dutch pension fund has fallen into deficit as share market turmoil knocked 40 percent off the fund's value, forcing the oil major and employees to increase contributions.<br />The fund said in a letter sent to its members this week that its funding ratio -- a measure of how well a pension scheme can meet its liabilities -- was 85 percent at the end of November, down from 180 percent at the end of 2007.<br />A spokeswoman for Shell confirmed the letter had been sent but could not say how much the new arrangements would cost Shell. She said Shell's UK defined benefits fund was fully funded.<br />A Dutch pension fund manager estimated the company would need around 2 billion euros (1.78 billion pounds) to bring the funding ratio to 100 percent or 2.5 billion euros to hit the 105 percent level Dutch law requires such funds to maintain over time.<br />The drop in ratio is a result of the fund's focus on equities and the fund said it would now decrease its share investments and shift into government bonds to reduce risk, the letter, seen by Reuters, said.<br />A full copy of the letter is published on activist website royaldutchshellplc.com.<br />The scheme's annual accounts show that at the end of 2007 the fund had assets at 19.2 billion euros, and liabilities of 10.6 billion euros.<br />At the time, equities investments accounted for 12.2 billion euros and bonds for 5.5 billion euros.<br />An agreement between Shell and the fund requires Shell to provide additional funding up to a funding ratio of 105 percent, if the funding ratio regularly is below 105 percent over a six-month period, the letter said.<br />Under Dutch law, a pension scheme whose funding ratio is under 105 percent has three years to fill the deficit. The scheme must notify the regulator and submit a recovery plan.<br />Shell's pension fund has commissioned a report to establish if its long-term strategy needs changing and will submit a recovery plan to the Dutch Central Bank, which is also the country's pension regulator, next year.<br />The fund's 70 percent equity focus is in the upper end of the range Dutch and UK defined benefit schemes usually operate within while similar funds in Germany, France or Italy typically have a clear bond focus.<br />The Dutch central bank responded to the current market downturn last month by allowing underfunded pension schemes to postpone recovery plan submission until April next year.<br />(Reporting by Tom Bergin and Cecilia Valente; Editing by Hans Peters and Rupert Winchester)</div><div></div><div></div><div>*********************</div><div></div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/12/business/13econ.php">U.S. retail spending hit a weak spot in November</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/12/business/jobs.php">Bank of America to cut as many as 35,000 jobs over 3 years as part of Merrill merger</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/12/technology/alcatel.php">Alcatel-Lucent to trim costs and jobs as part of strategic reorganization</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/12/business/baidu.php">Baidu cuts revenue forecast as slowdown hits Internet ad spending</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/12/business/OUKBS-UK-AIRLINES-CONSOLIDATION.php">U.S. airline merger talks could resume in '09</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/12/business/13industry.php">GM to idle most plants for about a month</a> </div><div></div><div>**********************</div><div></div><div><strong>For private banker, prudent is in<br /></strong>By Karina Robinson<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />LONDON: If you are going to be a banker these days, better to be in private banking. Wealth management, with its conservative investment strategy and sustainable revenue, has become much more appealing in a financial crisis in which the formerly high-earning commercial end of the business has fallen out of favor.<br />In this charmed circle, Chris Meares would seem to be leading an especially charmed life. As chief executive of HSBC Private Bank, he presides over a division with assets of $499.3 billion under management - larger than the gross domestic product of Sweden - and profit before tax of $822 million in the first six months of the year, or 8 percent of the total for its parent company, HSBC Group.<br />HSBC, for its part, is weathering the current storm better than many global banks, despite its well-heralded exposure to the U.S. subprime market. At a time when banks' capital is being sapped by bad loans, HSBC's core Tier 1 capital, a measure of safety, stands at a healthy 8.9 percent. A comparable U.K.-based competitor, Standard Chartered, will have core Tier 1 of 7.4 percent even after a recent rights issue.<br />The perception of safety has led to a solid inflow of funds to HSBC Private Bank even since the credit crisis hit. Of the $24 billion net inflows this year, 42 percent came in the third quarter.<br />"Clearly the market has now settled down," Meares, 51, said in a recent interview at HSBC's headquarters in the Canary Wharf district. "We hope people still appreciate we have come through without government assistance," he added. Other banks, like HSBC Private Bank's key competitor UBS, have requested and received aid from the government.<br />HBSC's private client profile - wealth creators and entrepreneurs, rather than old money - means that many have come through referrals from the commercial bank. In 2007, nearly $6 billion, or 20 percent of net new inflows, came from referrals.<br />Client profile is one reason that HSBC Private Bank sponsors Design Miami, a fair that takes place in early December at the same time as the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair. Contemporary art is suffering the same volatility as commercial banking, but Meares noted that design was as appropriate in difficult economic times as in boom times.<br />His ambitions for the private bank unit to lift its contribution to group profit to 10 percent will both benefit and suffer from the current difficult times. On the one hand, plummeting financial markets cut total assets under management and make clients cautious; on the other, acquisition opportunities are greater.<br />Meares insisted that organic growth should continue to serve the bank well, but the 20 percent compound annual growth rate of the last five years may be difficult to sustain. The bank is "keeping a close eye" on possible acquisitions, he said, but with price/earnings ratios at a lofty 20 for recent deals, he is waiting for prices to fall.<br />The current rise in inflows, moreover, does not directly translate into a large profit margin. Many clients are sticking to cash, which provides smaller profits for the bank than if they were investing in financial instruments like stock market and private equity funds.<br />Caution may be newly fashionable in most banking circles, but in private banking it has long been a calling card.<br />"Clients and depositors appreciate the low-risk nature and stable, predictable earnings streams associated with the private banking business," said Guido Versondert, a vice president at Moody's Investors Service. "HSBC Private Bank contributes increasingly to HSBC group's profits but hardly requires precious capital so that risk-adjusted returns are very attractive."<br />A criticism often leveled at private banks with investment banking arms, which include Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, is that they push inappropriate products with too much risk in them onto clients.<br />Meares acknowledged that despite regulatory pressure, "some banks are more aggressive in using their own products, which enhances the margin." But, he noted, HSBC offers products from other banks and providers as well as HSBC. He added that the bank would very likely use HSBC asset management for emerging markets, a known expertise, but unlikely for an investment in the U.S. stock market.</div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Mexicans seek solace at shrine to face economy<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By Robert Campbell<br />Crowds thronged Mexico's holiest Catholic shrine on Friday in one of the world's biggest regular pilgrimages, with many of the faithful seeking spiritual support as the economy slips towards recession.<br />Streams of people from across Mexico and as far away as the United States, worshiped in front of a centuries-old cloak emblazoned with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is said to have appeared to a 16th-century Indian peasant in December 1531.<br />Many walked for days carrying images of the dark-skinned virgin on their backs to pray at the giant basilica in Mexico City for health, forgiveness of their sins and, as Mexico's economy slows, help to find jobs and money.<br />"I am hoping the virgin will help my husband find a job," said Margarita Lopez as she led her two small children through the crowd towards the giant basilica. "He's in the United States and has been out of work for two months."<br />Prospects for Mexico's economy have dimmed sharply with the deepening recession in the United States. The country sends about 80 percent of its exports to its neighbour to the north and money sent home by millions of migrant workers there provides a critical cash lifeline for many impoverished Mexican families.<br />Economists who were optimistic that Mexico could skirt a recession now fret that a deep downturn may be difficult to avoid.<br />A river of mostly poor people poured into the shrine from the early morning. Some crawled the trash-strewn final stretch on their knees past troupes of twirling dancers decked out in Aztec garb.<br />Church and municipal leaders expect several million people to make the pilgrimage in the days up to and including Friday and claim the basilica is the second most visited Catholic church in the world after St Peter's in Rome.<br />VENDORS GRUMBLED<br />More than 2 million Muslims attended the Haj in Mecca this year, a lower number than usual after the Saudi Arabian government cracked down on pilgrims attending the event without permits.<br />Despite the huge crowds in Mexico City, vendors grumbled that business was slow.<br />"They're all looking but no one is buying," said Ramon Martinez, who runs a stall selling religious pictures, disposable cameras and snacks.<br />"By this time last year I had sold a lot more," he said before rushing up to an old school bus festooned with flowers and pictures of the virgin and the pope to show his wares to newly arrived pilgrims.<br />The pilgrimage to the basilica has been an annual event since the late 17th century. The Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have appeared to a peasant named Juan Diego in 1531 on a hilltop which had once been a shrine to an ancient Aztec goddess.<br />After Juan Diego told a bishop of his vision, the virgin's image later appeared on his cloak, according to legend. The event was key in converting Mexico to Catholicism.<br />The humble woodcutter was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002 in an effort by the Vatican to reach out to Latin American believers.<br />(Additional reporting by Alistair Bell, editing by Vicki Allen)</div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div><strong>Joblessness grows in New York<br /></strong>By Patrick Mcgeehan<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />Well-paid professionals like lawyers, accountants and architects are joining the rapidly expanding unemployment rolls in New York City, as the effects of the financial crisis have spread beyond Wall Street not only to other white-collar industries but also to the construction and retail trades, a new report shows.<br />The number of white-collar workers outside the financial industry receiving unemployment checks was up by more than 40 percent in October from the same month last year, and the number of college graduates collecting benefits was up by 50 percent, according to the report by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group.<br />"Unemployment is starting to shoot up in New York City, and it's affecting a spectrum of workers, both professionals and blue-collar," said James Parrott, the institute's chief economist and author of the report. "It's hitting young workers and older workers, and it's poised to rise dramatically in the weeks and months ahead."<br />The report comes amid continued bad news in the financial industry. On Thursday, Bank of America said it planned to cut 30,000 to 35,000 positions over the next three years as it digests its acquisition of Merrill Lynch .<br />The report, based on state and federal unemployment statistics, provides hard data confirming a trend that was until now best understood anecdotally. It also showed that New York entered the recession much later than the rest of the country, largely because hiring by law and accounting firms, media companies and tourism-related industries remained strong through the first half of the year.<br />As recently as July, the number of new claims for unemployment benefits in the city was only about 10 percent higher than it had been a year earlier. But since employment peaked in August, the city has lost about 10,000 jobs. And in the 12 weeks between late August and late November, first-time unemployment claims increased by more than 40 percent over the same period the year before, the sharpest year-over-year increase since February 2002.<br />Parrott said that the figures understate the severity of unemployment because many laid-off workers have not started collecting checks and many others do not qualify for benefits. In October, fewer than one-third of the 225,000 unemployed residents of New York City were collecting benefits, he said.<br />That portends an upsurge in the city's unemployment rate for months to come, Parrott said. Most forecasts project that the city will lose more than 150,000 jobs during this recession. The Fiscal Policy Institute report estimates that job losses will average about 10,000 a month from November 2008 through the end of 2009.<br />The city's unemployment rate was 5.7 percent in October, up from 5.2 percent in October 2007. The national unemployment rate was 6.5 percent, up from 4.8 percent the year before.<br />The growth in New York's ranks of the well-educated unemployed seems to parallel a national trend, said Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Since March 2007, the number of college graduates who are unemployed has risen at a faster rate, 75 percent, than has the number of all unemployed Americans who are 25 and older, 62 percent, Mishel said.<br />"This is very strong evidence that this recession is very hard on college grads, more than usual," Mishel said.<br />Mishel's organization works with Parrott's to promote the concerns of organized labor and low-wage workers.<br />Kenly Lambie, an architect who lives in Brooklyn, joined the ranks of the unemployed this summer after she was laid off by a firm where she had worked for a year. The dismissal caught her by surprise, but she said other firms have also cut back as construction loans have dried up.<br />"It's really grim, and almost everyone I know who was at my level is unemployed," Lambie, 29, said. She said she hopes to land at another firm in the city, but added, "If a really interesting opportunity came along in, say, Argentina, I'd jump on it."<br />In the meantime, Lambie is trying to get by on a weekly unemployment check of $405, which she said is "definitely not enough."<br />A separate report released on Thursday by the city comptroller's office echoed the central findings of Parrott's study, doubling the city's projection of the number of people who will lose their jobs by August 2010, to 170,000.<br />The comptroller's report also estimated that total Wall Street bonuses this year will be less than half what was paid last year, making it the smallest amount since 2002. Largely as a result, city tax revenue will fall by 4.3 percent in the next half year, the comptroller concluded.<br />The layoffs in New York are following a traditional recessionary pattern by radiating out from the big financial companies to other professional services and to lower-paying businesses like retailing, according to the report, which uses the latest data available from the state's Labor Department.<br />In October, 6,428 people who had worked in professional, technical and scientific services were receiving unemployment benefits, up 42 percent from October 2007. That total — which includes the fields of law, accounting, consulting and engineering — exceeded the 5,935 people from the finance and insurance industries who were receiving benefits, the report showed.<br />The number of blue-collar beneficiaries was up 50 percent, driven mainly by a jump in laid-off construction workers.<br />Among those collecting benefits in the city, the smallest increases have come in management and from the fields of health care and social services and arts, entertainment and recreation, the report found. Health care and businesses that benefit from tourism have helped to bolster the city's economy as the financial crisis has worsened.<br />But with the dollar strengthening against other currencies and foreign economies faltering, tourism has already begun to decline, threatening employment in that sector.<br />Not every unemployed person has a tale of woe. Lynne Figman, a real estate lawyer, said that she was given only about five minutes to clean out her desk at Phillips Nizer when she was laid off on Nov. 5. Her boss said he was letting her go because the firm expected its real estate practice to plummet next year, she said.<br />But Figman, who is receiving unemployment benefits now, has already begun setting up her own practice from her Upper West Side apartment and expects to have a healthy list of small businesses and homeowners as clients. On Sunday, she turns 50.<br />"I'm still going through with the plan to party," Figman said. "My parents insist."</div><div></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div><strong>Shop says get out of UBS, get into a new suit</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />ZURICH: Shareholders of troubled Swiss bank UBS have been offered a new way to get out of their investment at a premium: buy a suit.<br />A Zurich boutique is accepting UBS shares as payment at a 40 percent premium over the stock's closing price on Friday.<br />"We take your UBS shares at 21 Swiss francs (11.94 pounds) for your purchase," says the poster in window of boutique Premier in Zurich's downtown, only a few blocks from UBS' main building.<br />"On the day that the UBS shares fell to their lowest level, I had the idea that the shares were not so worthless and that we now needed to have confidence in them," Marcel Gayer, the shop's owner, told Reuters.<br />UBS shares have lost over two thirds of their value this year as the bank has been forced to make some $49 billion in writedowns, more than any other bank in Europe.<br />The stock hit an all-time low on November 20, falling to below 11 francs. Shares closed at 14.41 francs on Friday.<br />So far, nobody had paid with UBS shares but the poster has been a marketing success, said Gayer, adding that he did not own UBS shares. "Hundreds of people have seen the poster, stopped and smiled. It has been the trigger for conversations."<br />Gayer, who sells brands from Armani to Zegna, said he was feeling the pinch from the crisis: "We feel that people are spending less."<br />His offer is valid until the end of the year, he said. Should someone pay with UBS shares, he would keep them: "I would keep them and hope that I would make a profit."<br />(Reporting by Katie Reid and Rupert Pretterklieber; editing by Elizabeth Piper)</div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Even in recession, spend they must: Luxury shoppers anonymous<br /></strong>By Ruth La Ferla<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />ONLY a year ago, Maggie Buckley might have indulged a craving for, say, satin opera gloves or python sandals with a quick trip to Saks or Bergdorf Goodman. But now, in these recessionary times, she tends to avoid such public sorties.<br />"Shopping is almost embarrassing, and a little vulgar right now," said Buckley, an editor at Allure magazine. Loath to be seen loading freezer-size parcels into the back of a waiting cab, she finds herself shopping at under-the-radar soirees in the homes of her friends.<br />Buckley is one in a coterie of shoppers turning their backs on conspicuous consumption but trawling for treasures nonetheless at invitation-only shopping events springing up in hotel suites, at private showrooms or in the well-appointed parlors of their peers. Feeling the pangs of conscience, they are shopping on the down-low, finding deals in places that are the retail equivalent of a safari on a private game reserve.<br />"People don't want to be as public about shopping for luxury goods as they were in the past," said Robert Burke, a luxury retail consultant in New York. "It's a feel-good way to buy, and this is a time for feel-good things."<br />Such covert shopping has long been enjoyed by the upper crust, people who could pay six figures for diamond-and-sapphire brooch or sable wrap — and the privilege of exclusivity. But in the current climate, stealth consumption has gained a more potent appeal, taking place at gatherings with an insiders' feel.<br />"We're like a little secret that people want to share, but not with just anybody," said Eve Goldberg, an owner of William Goldberg, a diamond dealer in New York. Goldberg's company recently opened a salon that caters to clients who prefer to shop discreetly.<br />"People are saying: 'It's that time of year; I want to buy something, but I feel a little weird,' " Goldberg said. "Often they tell me, 'I don't want to be out there making an announcement with a big bag that says Harry Winston.' "<br />Private dealers, many of them dilettantes who acquire their wares from designer friends, at trade shows and from dealers and artisans in exotic locales, are the bane of recession-battered high-end merchants. Established retailers are hard pressed to compete with such luxury pop-up shops while maintaining inventories and absorbing the high costs of operating their businesses.<br />But under-the-radar parties offer the well heeled, and the well connected, a chance to snap up temptations without an inner censor chiding them for their spendthrift ways.<br />"There is certainly a stigma to spending openly in this economy," said Eric Spangenberg, a consumer psychologist and the dean of the business school at Washington State University. "These people don't want to appear flippant by disregarding the woes of the economy," he said, "but they still want to get their shop on, and they're going to find a way."<br />Those who cannot wean themselves off the shopping habit flock to events that are, in Spangenberg's phrase, "the high-end equivalent of a Tupperware party." There they trade gossip and air kisses — and spring for crewelwork pashminas or pavé diamond pet collars.<br />Sure, they are shopping. "But they are also enjoying the camaraderie and a social experience," said Joan Horton, an event planner and decorator who offered a selection of shrugs she bought during buying trips abroad. Last week she displayed those items, sold under the Shrug Shop label, at a lavish three-day shopathon in the apartment of a friend.<br />The gathering, the brainchild of a clutch of freelance stylists, designers and merchants, offered handmade Balinese lace blouses, ikat patterned tablecloths, Indian shawls, snakeskin bags and Bakelite bangles.<br />"We were looking for a retail outlet," said Amy Eller, an organizer of the event. But then the Dow went into free fall, putting a crimp in their plans. "We decided we would just become a floating marketplace," she said.<br />That marketplace took the form of a haute bohemian souk on Park Avenue, stocked with items priced from $25 to $700, shown off against a backdrop of crimson walls, 19th-century lithographs and faux leopard carpeting worthy of Elsie de Wolfe. Ten percent of the proceeds from the event, which drew about 300 guests and took in an estimated $60,000, went to VetDogs, which provides service dogs for disabled veterans.<br />"People like the private atmosphere," Eller said. "And they also felt they were giving back a little while they shopped."<br />SIMILAR opportunities for altruism may have eased the consciences of the 250 guests at the International Fashion party, a by-invitation event held last week at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco to benefit Rebekah Children's Services, which aids children with emotional and behavioral problems. But the party, which attracted the social figures Vanessa Getty, Sloan Barnett and the wives of several Silicon Valley executives, was also a magnet for trophy hunters. Filigreed chokers and diamond-studded earrings with an ornate Asian cast were offered alongside hair and eyelash extensions and a rack of furs supplied by Saks Fifth Avenue, which saw an opportunity to reach affluent clients. Prices ranged from $100 to $10,000 — or, furs apart, about 10 percent above the wholesale cost.<br />"We don't need to mark up items so much as a store might," said Dorothy Toressi, an organizer of the benefit. "We don't need to hold inventories or pay salaries or other costs of overhead."<br />After checking in at the door and filing by a phalanx of security guards, guests sipped Champagne, fingered baubles arranged on muslin-draped tables and tested the heft of new handbags, happy all the while to be mingling with their own.<br />"These parties can be social networking opportunities," said Susanna Stratton-Norris, a London-based knitwear designer who offered her opulent cashmeres for sale last month in a suite at the Regency Hotel in New York. She pulled her guest list together from a roster of clients she had cultivated in an earlier career as a decorator.<br />"These people felt as if they belonged to a club," Stratton-Norris said, one that caters to their tastes "and where they could meet like-minded people." Socially at ease, they were free to indulge an acquisitive streak, "not embarrassed to purchase in multiples or to tell me, 'I'll have one of these in every color.' "<br />Other covert shoppers conduct their operations on the Web.<br />"It seems counterintuitive, but the big ticket items are flying out," said Ricky Serbin of Ricky's Exceptional Treasures, a luxury resale store on eBay. Serbin said that in one week in November, he sold three Oscar de la Renta gowns, each for about $3,000. In flusher times they might have languished while shoppers indulged a yen for finery at luxury boutiques and upscale department stores.<br />What's changed? "People like the anonymity of the Web," Serbin suggested. "No one can see you coming out of Neiman Marcus moving a ball gown."<br />Tatiana Sorokko, who recently bought a Ralph Rucci ensemble from Serbin, supported that theory. "In this economy, the people I know are making adjustments. Their transactions tend to be between themselves and the seller," said Sorokko, a former model and the owner with her husband, Serge, of a gallery in San Francisco.<br />Stealth shopping provides the satisfaction of "buying something special from a person who you trust," she said. "But you haven't gone public. No one will talk."</div><div></div><div>********************</div><div></div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>David Brooks: Your envoy's report<br /></strong>Friday, December 12, 2008<br />Your Excellency,<br />Your humble ambassador requests the honor of your time so that he may apprise you of the mood and conditions in Washington. Seeking nothing for himself, but only seeking to serve your most Serene Majesty, your ambassador has been working tirelessly to understand the spirit of the U.S. capital.<br />Your ambassador discerns three emotions. At the most obvious level, the capital is enjoying a season of rebirth. Sixty-seven percent to 75 percent of Americans have positive feelings toward Barack Obama and his transition. Perhaps up to 4 million people will attend the inauguration, possibly filling the entire space between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial.<br />Washingtonians do not speak of this as a political transition. They speak of the inaugural as a cultural, psychological and historic event. It seems to have become, in their minds, like an ancient tribal rite - the purging of sin, the elevation of the pure, the moral regeneration of the nation's soul. It would not surprise your ambassador if the Americans were to throw a sacrificial goat into a volcano as part of the primal offerings.<br />Second, there is a feeling of audacity sweeping the ruling circles. America's rulers have widened their eyes, enlarged their perspectives.<br />For example, zeros have lost their meanings. The amount of consideration once devoted to a proposal costing $3 billion is now devoted to a proposal costing $300 billion. Americans have entered the age of budgetary infinity.<br />Once a $100 billion stimulus package was large, but now the stimulus proposals have passed through $300 billion to $500 billion on their way to infinity. Some Americans believe the automakers should be bailed out even without the reforms proposed by Senator Bob Corker. But without those reforms, which were shot down in the Senate on Thursday night, the bailouts would go on and on into infinity.<br />Once, Americans considered health care and energy reform to be gigantic undertakings. Now President-elect Obama describes these initiatives as mere subplots in his economic rescue effort. Analysts casually tick off the elements of the Obama plan: Enact the largest infrastructure project in 50 years, initiate the broadest tax cut in history, reorganize 14 percent of the U.S. economy, replace the carbon-based economy with a renewable-energy economy, restructure the auto industry.<br />Democrats also talk about passing a stimulus plan on Day One. That is, they seek to pass a piece of legislation perhaps equal to half the federal budget without a single hearing or a second of floor debate. Your humble ambassador has not seen the Americans in such a fit of transformational zeal since the run-up to the Iraq war.<br />Something has been revealed about the psychology of the nation's capital. When investors in New York become gripped by fear, they pull inward. When Washingtonians are gripped by fear, they rush outward, with bigger and more daring plans. The risk tolerance in the financial world has shrunk to zero, but the risk tolerance in the political world has risen to infinity.<br />Once America was a decentralized country, but now all roads lead to Washington. Mighty CEO's abase themselves before junior House members. Governors and mayors come groveling. The status of the lowliest bureaucrat has risen delightfully, and there is a feeling of overflowing abundance amid the national scarcity as Washington spends the trillions it doesn't have. Such is the local boom that your humble ambassador can drive from his residence, and in a few minutes he can count 10 McMansions under construction.<br />And this leads, sad to say, to the third layer of emotion: anxiety.<br />Many of those swept up in the excitement of this moment also have the nagging sensation that perhaps the laws of gravity, economics and history have not been repealed. Perhaps Obama's talents, while great, are not as great as his self-confidence. Perhaps the New Deal paradigm everybody is applying doesn't actually fit the circumstances. Certainly something big needs to be done, but perhaps in the doing, some unholiness is being unwittingly and rashly created.<br />Why is it, some ask, that America is so slavishly following the same failed route earlier taken by the Japanese - from bank capitalization, to industrial bailouts to infrastructure spending? Why is it that the pork-meisters in Congress are already distorting the best-laid stimulus plans? Why are there so few saying "no" to any budget request? Why do so many of the plans being offered rely upon a Magic Technocrat - an all-knowing Car Czar who can reorganize Detroit, an all-seeing team of Olympians who decide which medicines doctors will be allowed to prescribe?<br />The wisest Americans are throwing piles of money around, while looking nervously for signs of fiscal ruin. Your humble ambassador will remain your eyes and ears, and will scoop up any stray billions he finds lying around.</div><div></div><div>*********************</div><div></div><div><strong>Youths throw firebombs in Athens in 7th day of violence<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />ATHENS: Youths hurled rocks and firebombs Friday, as the seventh straight day of riots triggered by the police killing of a teenager tapped into anger at the government's fiscal policies. Officers responded to the new violence with stun grenades and tear gas.<br />Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, however, rebuffed calls to resign and hold early elections, insisting that a steady hand was needed in times of financial crisis.<br />Terrified workers in banks on the central Syntagma Square in Athens watched in fear as protesters shattered windows replaced just days ago after being damaged in the worst riots Greece has experienced in decades.<br />Protesters also smashed their way into the main branch of the National Bank of Greece, sending employees fleeing in panic. A protester walked up to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside Parliament and threw a black-and-red anarchist flag at it.<br />The riots broke out within hours of the police shooting death of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos last Saturday and have since expanded to encompass general anger about economic hardship. Hundreds of stores and dozens of cars have been destroyed or damaged across the country.<br />"What started as an outburst of rage over Alexandros's killing is now becoming a more organized form of protest," said Petros Constantinou of the Socialist Workers Party.<br />The violence has hammered Karamanlis's increasingly conservative government, which already faced vociferous opposition to economic and social reforms.<br />Karamanlis, whose party has only a single-seat majority in Parliament, explicitly rejected mounting calls for him to resign, saying Friday that Greece needed to focus instead on the global financial crisis.<br />"That is my concern and the concern and the priority of the government, and not scenarios about elections and successions," Karamanlis said in Brussels, where he was attending a meeting of European Union leaders on climate change.<br />Protesters, occupying high schools and universities, are demanding a reversal of public spending cuts, the resignation of the country's interior minister and the release from custody of arrested riot suspects.<br />About 100 people have been arrested during the riots and 70 injured.<br />Protesters also briefly occupied a private Athens radio station Friday and read a statement on the air. A municipal building in the northwestern city of Ioannina was occupied.<br />The two police officers involved in the shooting have been jailed pending trial, one on manslaughter charges and the other as an accomplice. They contend that they were attacked by a group of youths and that one officer had fired warning shots, but witnesses have disputed the claim.<br />The officers' defense lawyer, Alexis Cougias, said ballistics testing of the bullet that killed Grigoropoulos showed it had ricocheted. The ballistics report has not been made public.<br />The Greek police will review their firearms policy, Panayiotis Chinofotis, the deputy minister for public order, said Friday.<br />The unrest has also spilled over into other European cities, raising concerns that the clashes could be a trigger for opponents of globalization, disaffected youth and others outraged by the Continent's economic turmoil and soaring unemployment.</div><div></div><div>*********************</div><div></div><div><strong>EU aims to up military goals amid Congo inaction</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By David Brunnstrom<br />European Union leaders were set on Friday to adopt goals on expanding military capabilities to respond to crises, even after failing to meet a U.N. plea for an emergency force for Congo.<br />A draft statement from a Brussels summit repeated a goal of being able to deploy a force of 60,000 to a major crisis within 60 days. The bloc should also be able to plan and conduct more than 20 missions simultaneously, including stabilisation and reconstruction and rapid response operations, it said.<br />However, the timeframe for the 60,000-strong force first mooted in 1999, which has slipped from 2003 to 2010, is now stated vaguely as "in the years ahead."<br />The EU is hopes to become a global player in the foreign and security sphere, but the aim has been hobbled by an inability to present a united political response, and shortfalls in equipment and interoperability that the draft says must be corrected.<br />On Thursday, EU foreign ministers were unable to agree on a response to a request by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for a "bridging force" to help a 17,000-strong U.N. mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo known by the French acronym MONUC.<br />EU diplomats said those who want the force were dealt a blow when EU Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Louis Michel told the meeting that an EU force was not needed.<br />Karel De Gucht, foreign minister of Belgium, the former colonial power in Congo and an advocate of EU intervention, told reporters: "Everybody agrees there is a serious problem but political will and means have not been deployed to try to find a solution."<br />"MORAL RESPONSIBILITY"<br />"Its about moral responsibility, it bothers me that the biggest economic power in the world does not succeed in alleviating human suffering, it bothers me fundamentally as a human being."<br />He said he disagreed with Michel -- also Belgian -- that the problem could be resolved through political dialogue.<br />"I don't share this view because it means putting all your hopes in the protagonists ... it's the wrong assessment."<br />He and others ministers questioned why the deployment should be a problem when the European Union had fast response battle groups on standby -- one led by Britain, the other by Germany.<br />"What I find strange is that a couple of these battle groups only exist on paper and not in reality," de Gucht said. "The UK says 'we don't have troops', but they are leading the battle group, so who is leading these battle groups then?"<br />On Thursday, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said the Congo issue was a test of the battle group concept.<br />"If it is worth anything it could be used; if it can't be used we have to question the concept of it," he said.<br />Britain has repeated its position favouring strengthening the existing U.N. force in Congo rather than a separate one.<br />"A single chain of command is always important," Foreign Secretary David Miliband told Reuters on Thursday. "EU members can contribute to MONUC and that's the first port of call."<br />(Additional reporting by Ingrid Melander and Yvonne Bell; editing by Elizabeth Piper)</div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTimpxa3Nd7y2qJ83rVS7EagUrZH_FizrMTJmVmr84y1RIgJlAjRaxdcNjw_xza2EyfmtQRm3Z1O0yteJzVKUxUVengqbeezW91CnqGMLXldR4Xw2bcBpsJ6mXmf_BgLSar-mVGX7pKeg/s1600-h/DSC03161.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129670428559506" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTimpxa3Nd7y2qJ83rVS7EagUrZH_FizrMTJmVmr84y1RIgJlAjRaxdcNjw_xza2EyfmtQRm3Z1O0yteJzVKUxUVengqbeezW91CnqGMLXldR4Xw2bcBpsJ6mXmf_BgLSar-mVGX7pKeg/s320/DSC03161.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>Thank you for oversharing</strong><br />By Alex BeamThe Boston Globe<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />Last month, the writer Lauren Slater published a column in The New York Times about her lack of interest in making love with her husband. Lauren, whom I know a little, is a veteran revealer, so the notion that she would share the intimacies of the marriage bed with millions of readers was nothing new. Over the years, she has written about her struggles with cancer, depression and suicidal thoughts.<br />This piece seemed ever more cringe-inducing because it involved her husband of 10 years (eager for "hot sex") and her children, who someday may read about Mommy's first orgasm, her torrid affair with a man not her fiance, and the onset of her personal Big Chill: Sex "interests me these days about as much as playing checkers," she wrote.<br />"I often feel very disconnected from the pieces after they are published," Lauren e-mailed. "My goal is certainly not to attract attention. That what I feel is controversial surprises me as it is not my intention." Yet after reading her column, I wondered: Did we really need to know?<br />Oversharing, of course, is the default setting in modern American letters. Elizabeth Wurtzel's wild tales of sex and personal degradation in her 1994 "Prozac Nation" demonstrated the wild alchemy that translates self-abasement into best-selling books. (Slater probed this same territory in her somewhat more subdued 1998 memoir, "Prozac Diary.") A friend directed me to Michael Ryan's icky 1995 memoir, "Secret Life," detailing his serial seductions of students while teaching at Princeton.<br />The second exhibit in today's Too Much Information museum would be the just-published authorized biography of novelist V.S. Naipaul. Social niceties have never meant much to the Trinidadian-born 2001 Nobel laureate, but Patrick French's biography, "The World Is What It Is," paints its subject in the darkest tones imaginable.<br />Naipaul gave French access to family diaries and correspondence that revealed the writer's systematic psychological torture of his first wife, Pat, as well as accounts of him beating his longtime mistress, Margaret Gooding, black and blue.<br />"Even more shocking than certain details of Mr. Naipaul's life is his willingness to share them," Martin Rubin wrote in The Wall Street Journal. "Mr. Naipaul seems to be lashing himself into an orgy of public remorse."<br />I asked French what prompted Naipaul to unleash himself with such fury on his deceased wife and his still-living mistress? "To him the material might not seem so horrific, because he has those experiences sitting in his mind, and they've been there for a long time," the biographer said. "He tends to detach himself from the consequences of his own actions."<br />Also in the bookstores is the reigning Queen of Oversharing, Susan Cheever, who has just published "Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction." This follows an earlier work about her addiction to alcohol, and a memoir in which she disclosed the homosexuality of her father, the writer John Cheever. When her mother voiced reservations about the disclosure, Susan informed a Boston Globe interviewer: "My mother is no one."<br />In "Desire," Cheever "wants you to know that she has had sex - a lot of sex - with all sorts of men," Chelsea Cain wrote in a not very flattering New York Times review. "She has committed adultery. She has been up to hanky-panky in hotel rooms. She has made eyes at lawyers and book salesmen and the guys from the moving company."<br />TMI, as the youthful txters say? Too Much Information? "Some people think I overshare, some people think I undershare," Cheever told me. "For a long time I wrote to bear witness, now I have the motivation of a teacher. Memoirs have been a democratizing force in literature: The voices that didn't get heard were the voices of addiction, of alcoholism, of eating disorders. If artists worried about what people thought, there wouldn't be any art."<br />When I mentioned Cain's cheerily dismissive book review, Cheever countered: "People never review my books, they just end up reviewing me." But isn't that because ... Oh, never mind.</div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div>Book Review: 'Martial's Epigrams'<br />By Steve Coates<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />Martial's Epigrams A Selection. Translated and with an introduction by Garry Wills. 205 pages. Viking. $24.95; £18.99.<br />You have to admire a scholar who can produce a small library of erudite, elegant and accessible books on American history, the New Testament and his own powerful brand of Roman Catholicism, winning a Pulitzer Prize along the way. And you have to be impressed by a plucky Spanish provincial, in the dangerous days of Nero and Domitian, who could manage to earn a handsome living writing dirty poems for the urban sophisticates of ancient Rome. But can you condone what they get up to under a single set of covers? "Martial's Epigrams," Garry Wills's enthusiastic verse translations of Marcus Valerius Martialis, Rome's most anatomically explicit poet, offers a chance to find out.<br />The pairing is not as counterintuitive as one might imagine. Wills, who has a Ph.D. in classics and who once taught ancient Greek at Johns Hopkins, has long kept a foot in the ancient world. His Pulitzer winner, "Lincoln at Gettysburg," brilliantly analyzed Lincoln's greatest speech in terms of the conventions of ancient Greek funeral orations, and he has also translated the Latin of St. Augustine's "Confessions."<br />Martial, though, was no saint. Arriving in Rome around A.D. 64, he spent much of the next four decades composing short topical verse about life in the big city, an urban panorama as broad, as varied and as full of depraved humanity as any to have survived from classical times. In conventional but nimble Latin meters, he wrote gory epigrams about the Colosseum, sycophantic ones to flatter the ruler of the day, tender ones about such topics as a slave girl's early death and, above all, comic ones aimed squarely at Roman society's foibles. Preoccupations including combovers, stingy hosts, medical quacks, the poetry racket, the futility of cosmetics, consumptive heiresses and one-eyed women lend his books the ambience of a front-row seat at the Roman carnival.<br />Modern readers, however, are drawn to Martial mostly for his scorpion-tailed epigrams of sexual invective, written, limerick- and graffiti-like, as raunchy entertainment. Even by today's standards, many are grotesquely obscene; Martial takes us down some of Rome's sleaziest streets ("I write, I must confess, for dirtier readers, / My verse does not attract the nation's leaders").<br />If Martial's poems weren't saintly, though, they were all in good fun ("My poetry is filthy - but not I," he insisted). His targets were types, not real people, and many of his outrageous sketches, it has been rightly said, "come no closer to plausible reality than a Victorian Punch cartoon." In this spirit, Martial riffs endlessly on prostitution, marital infidelity, oral sex, pederasty, exhibitionism, unapproved modes of homosexuality, and incest ("Of course we know he'll never wed. / What? Put his sister out of bed?"). Roman sexual humor, it seems, when not simply gross-out comic description of intimate body parts - Martial wrote a notorious poem involving a loquacious vagina - hinged largely on the question of who might be on the passive end of any copulatory squirming ("I thought 'twas you that played the man / But find receive is all you can").<br />In the case of lines far more lubriciously explicit than these, Wills embraces the Roman poet's copious Latin obscenities in tumescent Anglo-Saxon translations, and in this sense certainly conveys the authentic Martial. He suggests that his happy-go-lucky rhyming verse and dogged meters work toward the same end, preserving some of the strict formality of Martial's elegiacs and hendecasyllables. But in fact, Wills's commitment to rhyme, not a significant concern for Latin poets, forces his syntactical hand and allows much of the real Martial to fall between the cracks. One neat example is a two-line poem that Wills translates: "Her teeth look whiter than they ought. / Of course they should - the teeth were bought." A prose version reveals that Martial was able to insult not one woman but two in the same space: "Thais's teeth are black, Laecania's snow-white. The reason? The latter has ones she bought, the former her own."<br />Most of Wills's translations, denuded of Martial's enlivening proper names, are impressionistic in this same way, and readers wanting to get closer to the Latin text would be much better off picking up a volume or two of the well-annotated Loeb Classical Library prose edition by the great Latinist, textual critic and translator D. R. Shackleton Bailey, who died in 2005.<br />Educated Romans often translated Greek poetry, or even tried their hands at epigrams, as a cultured way of amusing themselves. From Wills's affectionately rambunctious dedication to the same Shackleton Bailey ("Martialissimo" - essentially, "Martial to the max") to the acknowledgments' revelation that most of these poems were translated at the Grand Hotel de la Minerve in Rome and the Grand Hotel Continental in Siena, this collection bespeaks a great scholar at play. Recreational classicists should feel flattered that he wants them to watch.</div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Book Review: 'The Jewel Of Medina'</strong><br />By Lorraine Adams<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />The Jewel Of Medina By Sherry Jones. 358 pages. Beaufort Books, $24.95.<br />For some devout Muslims, perhaps the most objectionable chapter in Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" concerned a brothel where prostitutes used the names of Muhammad's 11 wives. For certain pious Christians, the most offensive aspect of Martin Scorsese's "Last Temptation of Christ" was the dream sequence of Christ's marrying Mary Magdalene and then becoming involved with two other women. Both 1988 works ignited violence. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued the fatwa that forced Rushdie into hiding and led to deadly riots, bombings of British bookstores and the fatal stabbing of the book's Japanese translator. The most dramatic incident associated with Scorsese's film occurred when a Paris theater where it was playing was gutted, apparently by an arson attack, sending 13 people to the hospital.<br />Now, 20 years later, Sherry Jones, a Montana and Idaho correspondent for the Bureau of National Affairs, a specialty news service covering legislative and regulatory issues, has written a novel from the point of view of Muhammad's third and youngest wife, A'isha. Most accounts agree that she was 6 at their engagement, 9 at their wedding and 14 when publicly accused of adultery. The novel's story line coincides with a pivotal time in Islamic history - the 10 years beginning with Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina in A.D. 622 and ending with his death at age 62. His actions during that period have also been seized upon by Western commentators and poets as proof of Muhammad's unmanageable sexual appetite and self-serving declaration of divine revelation. Among the most contested criticisms of Muhammad are his taking of many more than the four wives he decreed as the limit for other men and his edict, supposedly inspired by Allah, requiring his wives to be placed behind a curtain, the basis for the veiling of Muslim women. Both matters are fictionalized in Jones's novel, which was scheduled to be published by the Random House imprint Ballantine until controversy intervened.<br />The most authoritative contemporary English-language account of A'isha - "Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A'isha Bint Abi Bakr" ' is not listed as one of Jones's sources. But its author, Denise Spellberg, played a role in Random House's decision to abandon the book. According to a Wall Street Journal op-ed essay last August, "You Still Can't Write About Muhammad," Spellberg received an advance copy, usually sent to solicit a blurb, and responded instead with a warning that Jones's novel could incite violence from Muslim extremists. An associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas, Austin, Spellberg also emphasized that she supported freedom of expression. "I walked through a metal detector to see 'Last Temptation of Christ,' " she told the essay's author, Asra Q. Nomani. "I don't have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can't play with a sacred history and turn it into soft-core pornography."<br />Rushdie defended Jones's novel (although it's not clear he read it), declaring "this is censorship by fear and it sets a very bad precedent indeed." The following month, the small New York press Beaufort Books (which also published O. J. Simpson's "If I Did It" after another publisher scotched the project) bought the novel. A few weeks later, somebody pushed a firebomb through the mail slot at the home office of Jones's London publisher.<br />In a Q. and A. included in "The Jewel of Medina," Jones explains that she first became interested in A'isha in 2002 after the American invasion of Afghanistan. "I discovered that the Prophet Muhammad had multiple wives and concubines. Being unable to find very much information about any of them made me want to tell their stories to the world." Most Muslims would be surprised to hear that these women's stories were little known - they've been an object of scholarly debate and political maneuvering since the seventh century. They're also firmly entrenched in contemporary Muslim popular culture.<br />A'isha in particular is, as Spellberg has pointed out, at the center of key disagreements between the Shia and Sunni sects. Her father, Abu Bakr, was the first caliph. Shiites consider him a usurper and place Ali - whom A'isha led armed forces against in the first Muslim civil war - as the true heir of Muhammad. For Sunnis, A'isha is an exemplary woman, in part because of a Koranic revelation exonerating her from the charge of adultery.<br />One of Rushdie's characters in "Satanic Verses" makes much of her, suggesting that Muhammad's forgiveness of A'isha arose from personal preference, not divine inspiration. Jones doesn't go that far: regarding A'isha's exoneration, she follows Sunni tradition. Yet, like Rushdie, Jones looks through A'isha's eyes to question Muhammad's revelation concerning the curtain and his motives for his many marriages. Jones's novel stops short of the blasphemy "The Satanic Verses" was accused of: her A'isha accepts the curtain revelation as divine even though she passionately dislikes it. And she jealously believes that Muhammad's multiple marriages are motivated at least partly by desire ' not, as he tells her, to make strategic alliances.<br />Jones's novel accurately conveys A'isha's overall jealousy and her outspokenness, Muhammad's exasperated monthlong retreat from his squabbling harem, his marked preference for A'isha and his death in her arms. Jones alters early Islamic versions of A'isha's life - the first of which was written 150 years after Muhammad's death - in relatively few aspects. She transforms A'isha into a sword fighter. She makes her a precocious military strategist. She depicts her kissing a man she was briefly engaged to prior to Muhammad, her accused partner in the adultery episode. The record doesn't mention kissing, and the man was not engaged to A'isha. Jones also inserts a Turkish custom ' the choosing of a harem's premier wife, or hatun' unknown in seventh-century Arabia.<br />Spellberg's characterization of "The Jewel of Medina" as soft porn doesn't hold up, since the language describing A'isha and Muhammad's conjugal relations is always euphemistic and most often juvenile. The novel is, in fact, an example of that subspecies of genre fiction, "historical romance." Yet even judged by that standard, Jones's prose is lamentable. Here's A'isha as a girl, peeping at a couple in the throes of passion: "I stared at his behind, as big as my goat's-bladder ball and covered with hair." The Prophet isn't spared either: "Desire? Muhammad was having so many of them at that moment, they clashed like lightning bolts on his face."<br />An inexperienced, untalented author has naïvely stepped into an intense and deeply sensitive intellectual argument. She has conducted enough research to reimagine the accepted versions of Muhammad's marriage to A'isha, thus offending the religious audience, but not nearly enough to enlighten the ordinary Western reader. Should free-speech advocates champion "The Jewel of Medina"? In the American context, the answer is unclear. The Constitution protects pornography and neo-Nazi T-shirts, but great writers don't generally applaud them. If Jones's work doesn't reach those repugnant extremes, neither does it qualify as art. It is telling that PEN, the international association of writers that works to advance literature and defend free expression, has remained silent on the subject of this novel. Their stance seems just about right.<br /><br /></div><div></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>The simple life: Finding peace in upstate New York</strong><br />By Shivani Vora<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />It began at 4:30 on a Saturday morning.<br />The three dozen participants started out with two half-hour Buddhist meditation sessions before dawn. They then spent the next two hours doing what's called work practice, which consisted of scrubbing toilets and raking leaves, all in silence. An afternoon of instruction on the essentials of Buddhism led to more meditation, cleaning the dinner dishes, and sleeping in dorm-style accommodations. Sunday was an abbreviated version of the day before.<br />Perhaps what was the most unusual aspect of this austere weekend at Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York, was that many of the attendees were not adherents of Eastern religious practices, but were part of an increasing number of nonbelievers who are seeking stress-free, spiritual and often inexpensive weekend breaks at local ashrams (isolated communities formed around a guru who follows Hindu philosophy) and Buddhist monasteries (residences for monks).<br />Philipp Malkmus, a 30-year-old consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, said the rigorous agenda at Zen Mountain Monastery over the Halloween weekend actually left him refreshed. "It wasn't fun in the traditional sense, but it was the opposite of my life in New York City and a return to a very uncomplicated way of living," he said. "It gave me the rest and relaxation I was looking for."<br />Zen Mountain is just one example of an ashram or monastery in upstate New York that promises to recharge the mind and spirit of its guests with a combination of simplicity and meditation, served up on a tight schedule. At least half a dozen of these spiritual retreats are tucked away among the Catskill Mountains.<br />Most have been around for several decades, but until recently their visitors were mainly practicing Buddhists, serious yoga students or devotees of an ashram's guru. Today, these spots are attracting clientele from the surrounding metropolitan areas who've had limited interaction with Eastern religions, yoga or a spiritual guru. Like Malkmus, who spent several months before his trip clocking 60-hour workweeks, more nonbelievers are coming to experience the rigors of an ashram or monastery as a way to escape.<br />At Vivekananda Retreat, Ridgely, an ashram in Stone Ridge founded in 1997 on the principles of Swami Vivekananda, for example, Pravrajika Gitaprana, the minister in residence, estimated that half of the roughly 100 guests the ashram sees every year aren't followers of the swami. Five years ago, she said, almost all were.<br />Jennifer Schmid, the marketing director for Ananda Ashram in Monroe, said that many of the guests in the past few years had no knowledge of the ashram's guru, Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati, before visiting. "It used to be that most of the people coming to stay here had read our guru's writings or had studied with him," she said. "Today, people are realizing that we're a place they come to for refuge. They don't necessarily know anything about our guru or know that we even have a guru."<br />Malkmus had no prior knowledge of Buddhism or meditation before his stay at Zen Mountain. He discovered the monastery when he was searching the Internet for a weekend getaway in the Catskills. He chose to stay there, he said, because it represented the antithesis of his life of technology overdrive and constant action. "I've done lots of local trips to places like Fire Island and the Jersey Shore," he said. "The scenery changes, but the vibe doesn't. This has a back-to-the-basics approach that's unlike anything I've ever done."<br />It's the spartan living style and firm scheduling at these retreats that make them increasingly popular as an alternative vacation option. Harried urbanites can spend whole days without making a decision or facing a crisis, without trying to find a cab in the rain or worrying about a client. The activities are predetermined and tightly scheduled: meditation, chanting religious verses, doing chores around the property and silent self-contemplation.<br />The retreats' accessibility to several metropolitan areas and their affordability also enhance their appeal at a time when the economy is weak.<br />Schmid said that Ananda Ashram has been booked to its capacity of 50 guests nearly weekend, even in the winter, for the past two years. It is a marked change from when the ashram was not even half full during colder months. And the Introduction to Zen program that Malkmus participated in at Zen Mountain currently attracts 35 to 40 guests most weekends, up 25 percent from 10 years ago, said Ryushin Osho, a resident monk.<br />It's generally stress — whether personal or job related — that drives guests to choose one of these spiritual getaways, according to surveyed clientele and the staff at ashrams and monasteries. Melissa Poller spent a weekend at the Dai Bosatsu Zendo monastery in Livingston Manor last May in an effort to ease her incessant worrying about her job in technology services. Its routine is similar to Zen Mountain's, but with communication limited to only essential talking during much of the retreat, since activities such as eating and chores are viewed as a form of meditation. Poller said it was mentally and physically challenging to sit still and not talk for such long periods but that she felt free from stress for the first time in several months. "You push yourself to a limit," said Poller, a 30-year-old Brooklyn resident, "but the experience gave me a lot of clarity and peace and helped me cope with my constant anxiety."<br />Stays at monasteries such as Dai Bosatsu tend to be stricter than those at ashrams. At Sivananda Ashram Yoga Ranch, a picturesque 77-acre spot surrounded by woods in Woodbourne, for example, days begin at 6 a.m. with meditation and chanting, a two-hour yoga class and an hour of chores around the property. In the afternoons, ashram residents or outside speakers usually present workshops on topics such as "The Essentials of Yoga" and conduct question-and-answer sessions on meditation. But guests also have free time each day to go on staff-guided nature walks or relax in a 12-person wood-burning Russian sauna.<br />Grace Lee, a 32-year-old from New York City working in pharmaceutical research, stayed at Sivananda in October when a breakup with her long-term boyfriend, on top of an already stressful three-hour commute to and from work every day, began to affect her mental and physical health. "I was tense and fatigued all the time," she said, "and the massages I was getting at fancy spas were doing nothing for the knots in my neck."<br />Lee remembered the handful of yoga classes she had taken at various gyms as being relaxing and thought a few days of intense practice might be her ticket to unwinding. She came across Sivananda while researching yoga vacations, and though she's an avid globetrotter who has visited 32 countries, she said that the ashram's proximity to home was a deciding factor. "It's stressful to go to the airport and worry about lost luggage and the other negatives of flying," she said. "This is close to home, but it feels so far away and gives you the feeling that you've really disconnected from everything."<br />The days are lush with spiritual offerings, but the accommodations at Sivananda and other such sites are in line with the most barebones European youth hostel. At Ananda Ashram, for instance, housing is either dorm-style, single-sex quarters that sleep four to six or semi-private rooms with two single beds. Bathrooms are shared.<br />What they lack in deluxe lodgings, however, ashrams and monasteries more than make up in meals, which can rival those at an upscale spa. They're almost always buffet style vegetarian affairs and incorporate locally grown produce and organic products. On a recent Wednesday afternoon at Ananda's high school-like dining hall, lunch featured six varieties of breads, including spelt and sprouted, roasted herbed potatoes, a vegan tomato bisque, orzo salad, pineapple-and-vegetable stir-fry, lemon bars, and apples and pears from a nearby farm. Nearly everything is made from scratch, including the ketchup, salad dressings and even tempeh.<br />Stays at ashrams and monasteries are all-inclusive and usually include accommodations, activities and three meals a day. Prices are as low as $60 a night for dorm-style rooms. Poller said the $200 cost for her weekend trip to Dai Bosatsu made the decision to go that much easier. "In the current economy, I worry about money," she said. "I'm trying to find ways to go away without spending so much money, and this is really inexpensive."<br />Although they're in vacation settings, the residents emphasize, these are not hotels for travelers looking for a cheap place to stay for a few nights. Pravrajika Gitaprana said anyone making a reservation at Vivekananda Retreat was told that participation in the meditation sessions and classes was encouraged. And Jokei Kyodo, a resident at Dai Bosatsu, said the monastery is not a resort for guests looking to put their feet up. "I had a lady who called me recently and said she had a few extra vacation days she needed to use up," she said. "We want people to come here and make a commitment to our Zen practice, which isn't exactly comfortable."<br />And while all the monasteries and ashrams surveyed said they weren't attempting to convert guests to any particular religion or guru and only wanted to provide spiritual solace, many guests find the getaways alluring enough to make a second trip. Ian Reclusado, a 28-year-old project manager in account sales from New York, stayed at Zen Monastery over a weekend in October and intends to go back for an intense weeklong session that involves 10 hours of meditation a day, and both Poller and Lee found their visits to Dai Bosatsu and Sivananda so beneficial that they've already returned for more stays.<br />Still, some say one visit is sufficient to give them what they were searching for. "It's not like I'm a die-hard Buddhist after this," said Malkmus of his weekend at Zen Mountain. "I wanted to get away from the permanent noise in New York City and get a break, and that's exactly what I got."<br />THE DELIGHTS OF SILENCE<br />Ananda Ashram, Monroe (845-782-5575; www.anandaashram.org). Late risers will appreciate the 8 a.m. start time to most days. The ashram holds several kinds of yoga classes, including hatha, anusara and vinyasa, and has a theater that shows dance performances and plays.<br />Blue Cliff Monastery, Pine Bush (845-733-4959; www.bluecliffmonastery.org). This Vietnamese Buddhist monastery opened in June 2007 in an old conference center. Meals are vegan, and students and those 65 and older get a discount on overnight stays.<br />Dai Bosatsu Zendo, Livingston Manor (845-439-4566; www.daibosatsu.org). Open to guests from March through June and September through November, for monthly Introduction to Zen retreats. Everyone must adhere to the 4:30 a.m. wake-up calls, work practice and silence.<br />Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, Woodstock (845-679-5906; www.kagyu.org). Days at this Woodstock monastery begin at 5 a.m. with chanting and meditation followed on weekends by Buddhist teachings. Afternoons repeat the morning schedule.<br />Sivananda Ashram Yoga Ranch, Woodbourne (845-436-6492; www.sivananda.org). Founded in 1976 on the principles of hatha yoga, the ashram offers four hours of yoga a day in this style. It also has special programs, such as juice fasting and family weeks.<br />Vivekananda Retreat, Ridgely, Stone Ridge (845-687-4574; www.ridgely.org). It has twice daily meditation sessions and often offers classes on yoga sutras or Vedantic scriptures but builds in four hours of unstructured time a day.<br />Zen Mountain Monastery, Mount Tremper (845-688-2228; www.mro.org). In addition to retreats, guests can visit this 230-acre property on most Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings for an introduction to meditation and Buddhism. </div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>Scare tactics don't work<br /></strong>By Martin Lindstrom<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />Ten years ago, in settling the largest civil lawsuit in American history, Big Tobacco agreed to pay the 50 states $246 billion, which they've used in part to finance efforts to prevent smoking. The percentage of American adults who smoke has fallen since then to just over 20 percent from nearly 30 percent, but smoking is still the No. 1 preventable cause of death in the United States, and smoking-related health care costs more than $167 billion a year.<br />To reduce this cost, the incoming Obama administration should abandon one antismoking strategy that isn't working.<br />A key component of the Food and Drug Administration's approach to smoking prevention is to warn about health dangers: Smoking causes fatal lung cancer; smoking causes emphysema; smoking while pregnant causes birth defects.<br />Compared with warnings issued by other nations, these statements are low-key. From Canada to Thailand, Australia to Brazil, warnings on cigarette packs include vivid images of lung tumors, limbs turned gangrenous by peripheral vascular disease and open sores and deteriorating teeth caused by mouth and throat cancers. In October, Britain became the first European country to require similar gruesome images on packaging.<br />But such warnings don't work. Worldwide, people continue to inhale 5.7 trillion cigarettes annually - a figure that doesn't even take into account duty-free or black-market cigarettes. According to World Bank projections, the number of smokers is expected to reach 1.6 billion by 2025, from the current 1.3 billion.<br />A brain-imaging experiment I conducted in 2006 explains why antismoking scare tactics have been so futile. I examined people's brain activity as they reacted to cigarette warning labels by using functional magnetic resonance imaging, a scanning technique that can show how much oxygen and glucose a particular area of the brain uses while it works, allowing us to observe which specific regions are active at any given time.<br />We tested 32 people (from Britain, China, Germany, Japan and the United States), some of whom were social smokers and some of whom were two-pack-a-day addicts. Most of these subjects reported that cigarette warning labels reduced their craving for a cigarette, but their brains told us a different story.<br />Each subject lay in the scanner for about an hour while we projected on a small screen a series of cigarette package labels from various countries - including statements like "smoking kills" and "smoking causes fatal lung cancers." We found that the warnings prompted no blood flow to the amygdala, the part of the brain that registers alarm, or to the part of the cortex that would be involved in any effort to register disapproval.<br />To the contrary, the warning labels backfired: They stimulated the nucleus accumbens, sometimes called the "craving spot," which lights up on f.M.R.I. whenever a person craves something, whether it's alcohol, drugs, tobacco or gambling.<br />Further investigation is needed, but our study has already revealed an unintended consequence of antismoking health warnings. They appear to work mainly as a marketing tool to keep smokers smoking.<br />Barack Obama has said he's been using nicotine gum to fight his own cigarette habit. His new administration can help other smokers quit, too, by eliminating the government scare tactics that only increase people's craving.<br />Martin Lindstrom is the author of "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy."</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvNBD9UEmkJKbYRFDcpnUTqjfiEDxM5g0pkVdHqeHLOziGIbkN_qNRkTDEOA_qQpeFyoQ8v9zaNimnC6ypC9SBvAfgO2_ZAHqfd4DCRrKaesNmcp4fU4tZvvTKbM4jQ01UNBGpkGsfwm0/s1600-h/DSC03162.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129669502284338" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvNBD9UEmkJKbYRFDcpnUTqjfiEDxM5g0pkVdHqeHLOziGIbkN_qNRkTDEOA_qQpeFyoQ8v9zaNimnC6ypC9SBvAfgO2_ZAHqfd4DCRrKaesNmcp4fU4tZvvTKbM4jQ01UNBGpkGsfwm0/s320/DSC03162.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong>Russian police investigate grisly murder of migrant worker<br /></strong>By Michael Schwirtz<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />MOSCOW: The police in Moscow are investigating the ghastly murder of a Central Asian migrant worker, who was stabbed several times and decapitated in an apparent attack by ultranationalists.<br />The severed head of the victim, a citizen of Tajikistan, was discovered in a dumpster on Wednesday wrapped in a plastic bag, the press service for the investigative wing of the Prosecutor General's Office said.<br />Investigators say the victim and another Tajik migrant worker were attacked last Saturday after they left work at a food warehouse just south of Moscow. The newspaper Kommersant cited unidentified police sources, who said the murder victim was Salekh Azizov, 20, from the city of Vidnoe, also south of Moscow. The second Tajik worker was able to escape, but was hospitalized with injuries, according to the investigators.<br />An obscure group calling itself the Militant Organization of Russian Nationalists announced it was responsible for the killing in an email sent to two human rights organizations that monitor hate crimes in Russia. The email also included a photo of the victim's decapitated head.<br />The authors of the email said the killing was "a demonstration of their resolve to fight against the non-Russian occupation, and a warning to officials that the same will happen to them if they do not stop the flow of immigration," said Galina Kozhevnikova a deputy director at the Sova Center, one of the rights organizations that received the email.<br />Millions of migrant workers, mostly from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, reside in Russia, which is dependent on their labor because of the country's rapidly declining population and dwindling domestic workforce.<br />But violent attacks against ethnic minorities in Russia are common and have been growing in severity as increasing numbers of non-Slavic migrant workers leave economically blighted regions for large Russian cities in search of work, analysts said.<br />In 2008, 85 people have been reported killed and 367 injured in attacks by violent nationalists, said Kozhevnikova, though she said that the numbers were likely far higher since many attacks go unrecorded or are reported months after they occur. Most of the victims tend to be dark-skinned men from Central Asia or the Caucasus region, though tourists and foreign students have also been attacked.<br />Stanley Robinson, a young African-American student from Rhode Island, on a study abroad program to Volgograd in southern Russia, remains in critical condition after he was stabbed three times last week on his way from the gym, a relative of Robinson said.<br />Human rights groups have frequently criticized Russian officials for appearing to sympathize with violent nationalists and for failing to adequately address the problems of racist attacks in the country.<br />State-run Russian television channels have largely ignored the murder of the Tajik worker, though newspapers, which are typically more independent from government meddling, have covered it heavily.<br />A police crackdown on nationalist and neo-fascist groups in Moscow earlier this year resulted in the attacks in the capital abating somewhat over the summer, Kozhevnikova said.<br />Yet violence in Moscow has begun to climb again in recent months, particularly following the rape and murder two months ago of a 15-year-old ethnic Russian girl. A city maintenance worker from Uzbekistan was charged with the crime, sparking protests and revenge attacks by ultranationalist groups, who often refer to non-Slavs on Russian soil as "occupiers."<br />Police found the head of the slain Tajik worker next to the Mozhaisky District administration building in western Moscow, not far from where the girl was murdered.<br />The incident is reminiscent of another grisly beheading videotaped and disseminated on the Internet over a year ago. In the video, a masked individual decapitates a bound, dark-skinned man with what appears to be a large knife. Moments later, another man, also bound, is shot point-blank in the head. The video ends with two people in masks giving Nazi solutes in front of a red banner emblazoned with a swastika.<br />Police have still not identified the killers. </div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div><strong>Swiss scrap passport checks at land border</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />ZURICH: Most travellers entering Switzerland by land will no longer need to show passports from Friday after the Alpine nation opened its borders to all neighbouring European Union countries.<br />Switzerland, which borders France, Germany, Italy and Austria, is the 25th country to scrap routine passport controls as part of the Schengen club of European states.<br />But authorities said that because non-EU member Switzerland remains outside the bloc's customs zone, border guards will continue to make spot customs checks in which some travellers could be required to present ID.<br />The European Commission says about 900,000 EU citizens live and work in Switzerland and many more cross its borders on a regular basis, often commuting to work in cities like Geneva and Basel from parts of France or Germany where housing is cheaper.<br />Swiss authorities will share information with other Schengen countries on crime and on asylum applications under the Schengen-related Dublin agreement. Travellers to Switzerland with passports from outside the Schengen area will require a visa enabling entry to all 25 Schengen member countries.<br />Swiss voters voted in favour of joining up to the Schengen and Dublin accords in 2005, but have rejected membership of the European Economic Area, which could have paved the way for eventual EU membership.<br />(Reporting by Jason Rhodes, editing by Mark Trevelyan)</div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>An American's lament: 'I was deported, too'</strong><br />By Marc Lacey<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />TIJUANA: The two men could barely communicate. One was a Mexican laborer, the other an American wanderer, neither with any pesos in his pockets. But they bonded, having just gone through similar ordeals.<br />"The migra got me," lamented the downcast Mexican, using slang for the United States Border Patrol.<br />"I know what you mean," said the American, sitting on a bench near Tijuana's seedy Avenida Revolución, strumming his guitar in the hopes someone might toss him some change. "I was deported, too."<br />The United States government formally deported or otherwise returned more than a million foreigners — most of them Mexicans — according to immigration data. That figure has risen steadily over the years. But much to the surprise of many Americans, there is a trickle of deportees that flows north from Mexico to the United States as well.<br />Between January and September, the National Migration Institute, Mexico's immigration service, deported 350 Americans, some of them lawbreakers who had finished prison sentences in the country, but others merely travelers who were found to be without proper paperwork.<br />One of them was the scruffy wanderer in his early 40s who goes by the name Crash, eschews regular employment and racks up stories of his adventures.<br />"I didn't know you could be deported from Mexico," he said, requesting that his full name not be used to avoid running further afoul of the law. "I didn't know it was possible. Now I know."<br />He said he had been riding in the back of a pickup truck from Huatulco, a popular vacation spot in the southern state of Oaxaca, to the resort city of Acapulco several weeks ago when the vehicle approached a checkpoint. The authorities asked Crash for his passport. He did not have one.<br />He said he was taken away and later found himself in a police lineup. He said he had been told that a woman had been robbed in Acapulco by a blond man with a goatee. Looking at the other men in the lineup, Crash said they could have been his brothers, all of them blond and with goatees.<br />He was not chosen as the robber but said he was sent to jail nonetheless, which was not an altogether unpleasant experience for Crash. "The cell was better than some of the 300-peso hotel rooms I've stayed in," he said. "The only thing was that it had bars."<br />He said he spent about a week there while the American Consulate prepared travel documents for him. When informed that he was going to be deported to the United States, he said he initially could not believe it. "I thought to myself, 'You've got to be kidding. This is a joke. You're deporting me from Mexico?' "Crash said. "I told one of the guys, 'This gives you great satisfaction, doesn't it?' He said, 'You've been doing it to our people for years.' "<br />As it turns out, Americans make up a tiny portion of Mexico's deportees, who are usually Central Americans crossing Mexico's southern border with Belize and Guatemala. The 350 Americans sent home in the first nine months of this year represented just over 1 percent of the 28,778 deportations carried out by Mexican authorities. In contrast, Mexicans represent nearly two-thirds of America's deportees.<br />But the experience is remarkably similar, say some of those who have undergone it.<br />Crash was put on a plane from Acapulco to Tijuana and then carried to the actual border in a government van. Led to a crossing, he was told that if he returned within the next year he could face hard time.<br />Not one to be told what to do, Crash stayed in the United States about 15 minutes, he said. He then walked back across into Tijuana and, as is the case with most Americans, no official asked him for identification to get in.<br />His adventures did not slow up. As he roamed the streets of Tijuana, he said a man approached and offered him a more lucrative job.<br />Now, Crash, a California native who has worked in the past as a cook, nanny, farm worker and ship builder, among other jobs, is no materialist.<br />"As long as I have a pack of cigarettes in my pocket, tacos in my stomach and a beer in my hand, I have no needs in the world," he said.<br />But at that particular moment, he said he had nothing and readily accepted the nebulous money-making offer. The stranger took him to a house near the border and supplied Crash with all the beer and marijuana he desired. The only catch was that he also locked Crash up in the house for several days.<br />Then, another man came along and told Crash that he would be driving a truck across the border to the United States. Led to the vehicle, he said he saw several Mexicans hiding under a blanket in the back. They were obvious, Crash said, but he still hopped in the vehicle and headed to a border crossing.<br />American authorities easily spotted the illegal immigrants. He said they took him into a station along the border, put his personal information into a computer and then released him with the promise that any more smuggling would lead to jail time.<br />Again, Crash crossed the border back to Mexico, where he considers life cheaper and more carefree. He is now on crutches, having fallen and injured his ankle. He is staying with a stranger he met through couchsurfing.com, a site that promotes cheap traveling.<br />One of the songs he sings these days to earn some change is "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)," in which Woody Guthrie laments the plight of a group of Mexican farm workers who died in a plane crash while being deported in 1948.<br />"Now I can sing it with a lot more emotion," Crash said.</div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2ZA3lSNJKk-0D_3SyNi4hm_DSDjFz-wykFgwto83vaaCMB6tt9flejxRd6FOLdclRwCmR22AGAWsgu7jsr2vZFBjagOeqRH9ugoprQ5ouEcj764Psn2Dr_GoOJH-2NWp1i8UhIG4hAM4/s1600-h/DSC03164.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129657804376546" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2ZA3lSNJKk-0D_3SyNi4hm_DSDjFz-wykFgwto83vaaCMB6tt9flejxRd6FOLdclRwCmR22AGAWsgu7jsr2vZFBjagOeqRH9ugoprQ5ouEcj764Psn2Dr_GoOJH-2NWp1i8UhIG4hAM4/s320/DSC03164.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/12/europe/EU-Estonia-Cellular-Voting.php">Estonia to vote by mobile phone in 2011</a> </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivB_pfpGu1iwad82EFx7KApxmyb2EogZI1I4BLttPjfNBHHsIPIeGdyf1F14UbwReN4MrNTPJVU9Za3PcaEZMaLbwPNXzTGtwDoGEQkEnMa0MpZZQvbQHL9gDQGlTwOFSZigRjz5KtHAo/s1600-h/DSC03166.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129659849627650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivB_pfpGu1iwad82EFx7KApxmyb2EogZI1I4BLttPjfNBHHsIPIeGdyf1F14UbwReN4MrNTPJVU9Za3PcaEZMaLbwPNXzTGtwDoGEQkEnMa0MpZZQvbQHL9gDQGlTwOFSZigRjz5KtHAo/s320/DSC03166.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong>Serb police search town in hunt for Mladic</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By Adam Tanner<br />Police were searching a town outside Belgrade Friday as part of efforts to find former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, the Serbian war crimes prosecutor said.<br />The prosecutor said in a statement the search was taking place in Arandjelovac, a small town known for its marble and its mineral water 60 km (37 miles) from the capital Belgrade.<br />"As part of a plan to locate, arrest and transfer Hague indictees, and at the order of the War Crimes Prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic, police units are searching some objects in the territory of Arandjelovac municipality," the statement said.<br />An official who did not want to be named said the search was aimed at finding the people who were financing Mladic's long run from the law.<br />The most prominent Balkan war crimes suspect still at large, Mladic is the chief obstacle blocking Serbia from closer relations with the European Union.<br />The search comes as EU leaders meet in Brussels and a day after Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said Serbia has yet to show full cooperation with the U.N. war crimes tribunal.<br />Serbia has set its sights on joining the EU, but the Netherlands has blocked further improvement of relations with the EU pending the capture of Mladic.<br />Mladic was indicted in 1995 on genocide charges for the siege of Sarajevo and for orchestrating the Srebrenica massacre. Also at large is Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic, who is wanted for crimes against humanity.<br />Authorities have conducted frequent previous raids seeking clues leading to Mladic, including on December 4, when they searched a Mladic family apartment in Belgrade.<br />(Additional reporting by Gordana Filipovic and Branko Filipovic in Belgrade and Huw Jones in Brussels; Editing by Diana Abdallah)</div><div></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Museum to Chile's Pinochet sickens victims</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />SANTIAGO: Family and friends of former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet quietly inaugurated a museum in his memory on Friday, replete with uniforms and medals he wore, to the horror of victims of his rule.<br />Among items displayed at the new Pinochet Foundation museum in an upscale quarter of the capital, Santiago, are the last uniform he used as commander in chief of the Chilean Army along with dozens of his medals.<br />"I am happy because this is a way of doing some justice to what he represented and what he did," said Lucia Hiriart, his widow, flanked by family and some former ministers and retired military. The event was low-key.<br />Pinochet led a bloody coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973, ushering in 17 years of dictatorship in which 3,000 people died or disappeared and around 28,000 were tortured.<br />Victims of his rule, some of whom complain the wheels of justice turn too slowly in Chile, were disgusted.<br />"Any monument to a dictator is shameful to the memory of all those who fell in the fight against the dictatorship," said Tito Tricot, an academic who was tortured and had his spine broken during Pinochet's rule.<br />"It is a reflection of what is going on in this country, of a negotiated, agreed transition, in which justice has not been done," he added. "It is offensive to me. Shameful."<br />Pinochet died of heart failure on December 10, 2006, at the age of 91, without having faced a full trial for human rights abuses committed during his rule.<br />(Reporting by Esteban Medel, Pav Jordan. Editing by Simon Gardner)</div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzuuAa-2pKqoir6DC-dDe0EUQHl85fGcZ0UUuYEfNxx-PurqThyeAcL7wb_aRYnmCqL-Bed3C7eLbiADGj3GRldNMS_AdBIRhcO1qHB2N6oP7oz73Ia1dD4j-P1NNoizs8qswACmK33bI/s1600-h/DSC03167.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129381380652018" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzuuAa-2pKqoir6DC-dDe0EUQHl85fGcZ0UUuYEfNxx-PurqThyeAcL7wb_aRYnmCqL-Bed3C7eLbiADGj3GRldNMS_AdBIRhcO1qHB2N6oP7oz73Ia1dD4j-P1NNoizs8qswACmK33bI/s320/DSC03167.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong> </strong></div><div><strong>Nepal school bus crash kills 22</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />KATHMANDU: A school bus crashed in southwest Nepal, killing at least 22 people, most of them children returning from a picnic, police said Friday.<br />The bus skidded off a bridge on a highway and plunged 30 metres (100 feet) in Nawalparasi district, about 150 km (93 miles) southwest of Kathmandu late Thursday.<br />"At least 52 others were injured and are undergoing treatment at a medical college and nearby hospitals," Chet Bahadur Khatri, an officer at the Nawalparasi police control room said.<br />The cause of the accident was not known.<br />Accidents are common in mostly mountainous Nepal where roads are poorly maintained.<br />(Reporting by Gopal Sharma; Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Sanjeev Miglani)</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWxT0znYzuV6nSpy6gcVJ85irqafsJZBQfXRkDZStZNkVtlNKwuyg1pazVfOegb_eZh9LkU9cZdoiVd4hNiPcYlkZFjLhmYFglhlnQqeqZGHdkkGczbFnkqgG2pJHTFbiSjmEZbZQ5kH0/s1600-h/DSC03168.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129381989684146" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWxT0znYzuV6nSpy6gcVJ85irqafsJZBQfXRkDZStZNkVtlNKwuyg1pazVfOegb_eZh9LkU9cZdoiVd4hNiPcYlkZFjLhmYFglhlnQqeqZGHdkkGczbFnkqgG2pJHTFbiSjmEZbZQ5kH0/s320/DSC03168.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIArYveFgGUzd1JwG50W490dhwi4sd66ksrIF2bX7H6vZb1wB3d3wVoeg6a9O7wjiAee63Z8BHugITHQHxkqgaJBlk3m15sTsG6p4QkH6z6K8d_2ZE8cFLZyqpyRsDvu_RsYEutiIoeds/s1600-h/DSC03169.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129376150240914" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIArYveFgGUzd1JwG50W490dhwi4sd66ksrIF2bX7H6vZb1wB3d3wVoeg6a9O7wjiAee63Z8BHugITHQHxkqgaJBlk3m15sTsG6p4QkH6z6K8d_2ZE8cFLZyqpyRsDvu_RsYEutiIoeds/s320/DSC03169.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhPuFTDDWMWAjDTWq5DACWL_iEcJZnmns7LsqvicoQpjnR57Ne52yo9Lui1WqoS2TWe9hOwy8wVuoN-N-bgwu_mwdbgtu7LQnnzMETvqbWgOxhvYZqAjL1gbjyklF-CX7-vDGUT6xYS1E/s1600-h/DSC03170.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129373462051202" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhPuFTDDWMWAjDTWq5DACWL_iEcJZnmns7LsqvicoQpjnR57Ne52yo9Lui1WqoS2TWe9hOwy8wVuoN-N-bgwu_mwdbgtu7LQnnzMETvqbWgOxhvYZqAjL1gbjyklF-CX7-vDGUT6xYS1E/s320/DSC03170.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhQHACT4bH3VIvQ_Pu253dD9XDN6tO18sOSsICwEhhndEfLcsnTwF91e03QUxhVcGy8l38Herl5kEIDM-7kq-9YEiBxsPAzYssN0e9gcQqPcFRCX4YRKlBC8vj7TxCyZnJ0aAnXrjBnK4/s1600-h/DSC03171.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129372318640466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhQHACT4bH3VIvQ_Pu253dD9XDN6tO18sOSsICwEhhndEfLcsnTwF91e03QUxhVcGy8l38Herl5kEIDM-7kq-9YEiBxsPAzYssN0e9gcQqPcFRCX4YRKlBC8vj7TxCyZnJ0aAnXrjBnK4/s320/DSC03171.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUC6FebOVt2Z1SpTXPwQKZWs6Po9GyPDQSYEZZT7NoHXYktpL-zbg9Y0Y14NVasH_oTXJtAHW1k0IrQ8jT9bE4hIwMd62RBBrcqxrsW0rE8n6OyVEEEcsJWuB5DUSzVI-2LsYH9-QeP-Q/s1600-h/DSC03172.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129112615568162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUC6FebOVt2Z1SpTXPwQKZWs6Po9GyPDQSYEZZT7NoHXYktpL-zbg9Y0Y14NVasH_oTXJtAHW1k0IrQ8jT9bE4hIwMd62RBBrcqxrsW0rE8n6OyVEEEcsJWuB5DUSzVI-2LsYH9-QeP-Q/s320/DSC03172.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOsr_82LO9qmPTnC87NEkjlUOBctZwcMy4TakT2XuLqKVyL_CsPkOeGy3YgS6mlUDAw7iJsRlcoRIE_-rZTcOuDFlyJa0juyjFcgRAsO5qCQPM9lqpLdWhT5wT9NeL2UbqHDQHeUppXyg/s1600-h/DSC03173.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129115720913074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOsr_82LO9qmPTnC87NEkjlUOBctZwcMy4TakT2XuLqKVyL_CsPkOeGy3YgS6mlUDAw7iJsRlcoRIE_-rZTcOuDFlyJa0juyjFcgRAsO5qCQPM9lqpLdWhT5wT9NeL2UbqHDQHeUppXyg/s320/DSC03173.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn0xDMGohVJ9kPqiomJLZcF6Hd1OnxuCtKT-arvMHq1DVFWAI_FVsjOXzojbvsR_Y8AAzI-M_l-Jjit6SwleLbBorFuVPjzTDeGbE7gpF44gnZXWTsSUzzS1BUPLY1Hz0x-wzSriblB2k/s1600-h/DSC03175.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129110830988978" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 206px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn0xDMGohVJ9kPqiomJLZcF6Hd1OnxuCtKT-arvMHq1DVFWAI_FVsjOXzojbvsR_Y8AAzI-M_l-Jjit6SwleLbBorFuVPjzTDeGbE7gpF44gnZXWTsSUzzS1BUPLY1Hz0x-wzSriblB2k/s320/DSC03175.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTTgsGQD0hu8pUC6fPStumSx1j3fPZYfb9JwmIYgvbTFr4i4Y4-nQ_WQlCniopc8lPkXriFNVPdylz9W1r_EkHhPN-C_Hx6TSieGrLWbxHbZLFBtGdVqHXOW6LMfPQzRT4dY3kNRvGYrM/s1600-h/DSC03176.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129109996631890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTTgsGQD0hu8pUC6fPStumSx1j3fPZYfb9JwmIYgvbTFr4i4Y4-nQ_WQlCniopc8lPkXriFNVPdylz9W1r_EkHhPN-C_Hx6TSieGrLWbxHbZLFBtGdVqHXOW6LMfPQzRT4dY3kNRvGYrM/s320/DSC03176.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7LHu9EhGwOEEzfU5eyybfpg5fb0HxkaZCoNn1vclmWHPhv52rnsvxzuHv-iesy-BVDP4g6yd-KxSnX4oW1xbdkj72StJQf99XM21tj3tLPvOa5Q5GAAl4LJHm1o1kjDvNzFNUs0TCDiQ/s1600-h/DSC03181.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279129109557627186" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7LHu9EhGwOEEzfU5eyybfpg5fb0HxkaZCoNn1vclmWHPhv52rnsvxzuHv-iesy-BVDP4g6yd-KxSnX4oW1xbdkj72StJQf99XM21tj3tLPvOa5Q5GAAl4LJHm1o1kjDvNzFNUs0TCDiQ/s320/DSC03181.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVGZNyWMnmc6xqfC5XTcK_msU2qIDs19pi9bqUdcqXNCgvTlEqtMTT8FF9ZJg4XeRvMFY5odulo6q1VWc8E0-ZAj0G0cVwoyR9Be4vF0mYKLCIFh144b3u4Xm24csJ7tYUEpQFJiFsCmQ/s1600-h/DSC03182.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128817219135170" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVGZNyWMnmc6xqfC5XTcK_msU2qIDs19pi9bqUdcqXNCgvTlEqtMTT8FF9ZJg4XeRvMFY5odulo6q1VWc8E0-ZAj0G0cVwoyR9Be4vF0mYKLCIFh144b3u4Xm24csJ7tYUEpQFJiFsCmQ/s320/DSC03182.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiejaGXCwGWcpLaqjRUoNBKjDLr8W-N9LIKddVXti-Hsyi5o2NeonkmCdrmyNhB99cjY10rsXBuibSMiY_vVpcNLrgwxzmCd4NwS8LM9iAEj7NPCq1zz69Vk-W8qA4ryt6YvKlw1qZgV-g/s1600-h/DSC03183.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128818206446114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiejaGXCwGWcpLaqjRUoNBKjDLr8W-N9LIKddVXti-Hsyi5o2NeonkmCdrmyNhB99cjY10rsXBuibSMiY_vVpcNLrgwxzmCd4NwS8LM9iAEj7NPCq1zz69Vk-W8qA4ryt6YvKlw1qZgV-g/s320/DSC03183.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm7AkjF3jdGhuhwGO0VuGMlAKZVjULbk9XBY0Z4Ymx4PQ14i55fTnkC7uQg6bg3sw9z_nea2AGxRomqwGQ4PzP5LUG8MViv_6gJdDYPjHTkw0aIOTofK8oE23_-fRLyvePOEFLJEHi7X0/s1600-h/DSC03184.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128807269975202" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm7AkjF3jdGhuhwGO0VuGMlAKZVjULbk9XBY0Z4Ymx4PQ14i55fTnkC7uQg6bg3sw9z_nea2AGxRomqwGQ4PzP5LUG8MViv_6gJdDYPjHTkw0aIOTofK8oE23_-fRLyvePOEFLJEHi7X0/s320/DSC03184.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkthCPS1DWlfTk7hMSao9RqpIMd77qgQguG9_7lmyh9ChICgttsM9zprCVnNjNgCR3NaMWNVq84wh6NPiD3LRdxdUVxkg4SqinUrGMias1EE3lpm25esoMcCk5x8z6MfGQHhCeNvsBDSY/s1600-h/DSC03185.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128805911603138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkthCPS1DWlfTk7hMSao9RqpIMd77qgQguG9_7lmyh9ChICgttsM9zprCVnNjNgCR3NaMWNVq84wh6NPiD3LRdxdUVxkg4SqinUrGMias1EE3lpm25esoMcCk5x8z6MfGQHhCeNvsBDSY/s320/DSC03185.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiganJvr3d9ngS4VkXhCljzvUYdSTphgeu8M2Jc-oZaUBP2lZhyZoevH54K1lxXDV-0W2N810rzfmcZ8crbw76QGM53kOutolU_hj4RELrfAgJT31um_3RbxkiDjXtgmjqPdMvXSnY5PFA/s1600-h/DSC03186.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128804458232018" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiganJvr3d9ngS4VkXhCljzvUYdSTphgeu8M2Jc-oZaUBP2lZhyZoevH54K1lxXDV-0W2N810rzfmcZ8crbw76QGM53kOutolU_hj4RELrfAgJT31um_3RbxkiDjXtgmjqPdMvXSnY5PFA/s320/DSC03186.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9B2aUyKXXWr1fnwY6Dw4AkJYi3o3e9yhMG5HxWeHYzfKfygWEHaqdkLiyRxCsZ3bAxi9HQp1EVTY93llQ881IGvusvn3j-zy7QZYfcN5LGK18Niq1LUcOj0X1zOukncX0b38ABI7WoAs/s1600-h/DSC03187.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128579855370498" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9B2aUyKXXWr1fnwY6Dw4AkJYi3o3e9yhMG5HxWeHYzfKfygWEHaqdkLiyRxCsZ3bAxi9HQp1EVTY93llQ881IGvusvn3j-zy7QZYfcN5LGK18Niq1LUcOj0X1zOukncX0b38ABI7WoAs/s320/DSC03187.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_r_QhdfIvwKGxOBWVmbyOgO8zdf0lq_0_Yubn7MBP4hMIdaPFGdw6zuOT0GObL1Yacff6L85bEjn0S7ofiLEkMOK8dvm2OUK-GKHBTnZD5O3wFPAZDszIqwzHfadecdBXiPGznNvF1sg/s1600-h/DSC03188.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128446406008562" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_r_QhdfIvwKGxOBWVmbyOgO8zdf0lq_0_Yubn7MBP4hMIdaPFGdw6zuOT0GObL1Yacff6L85bEjn0S7ofiLEkMOK8dvm2OUK-GKHBTnZD5O3wFPAZDszIqwzHfadecdBXiPGznNvF1sg/s320/DSC03188.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1JZXq6Cbu7axmBSehugZs0MdPr4Go9Kguk1TymjaxwhxC4zLBSEBj9qnjcSLeA7ibQl2jvBZk0Tg_Plteh_q8N5zAeQfF5XXUrP3DkxB4RKx-9y9HFIg4rN6puesFDbi9KRKOc5HM2_Y/s1600-h/DSC03189.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128442659908114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1JZXq6Cbu7axmBSehugZs0MdPr4Go9Kguk1TymjaxwhxC4zLBSEBj9qnjcSLeA7ibQl2jvBZk0Tg_Plteh_q8N5zAeQfF5XXUrP3DkxB4RKx-9y9HFIg4rN6puesFDbi9KRKOc5HM2_Y/s320/DSC03189.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhswaVH3OOtp9O0cP4zXwWAyTibBYPlfimm55vi6vOqXp5y6Zqgswvu8JfrqUIE90CxfVYcu1rj9WEsNCkaSAD8iePvcPVRj4MixFvt8rrC4V4m2YIVa8G7o93stMcU076XPsA7u8re54Q/s1600-h/DSC03190.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128442511314514" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhswaVH3OOtp9O0cP4zXwWAyTibBYPlfimm55vi6vOqXp5y6Zqgswvu8JfrqUIE90CxfVYcu1rj9WEsNCkaSAD8iePvcPVRj4MixFvt8rrC4V4m2YIVa8G7o93stMcU076XPsA7u8re54Q/s320/DSC03190.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQN9-My2JDqCHSDxeIJys_G9zt66HKK5yOkPxsp_YF9SOl5B2h2ipCU-kpQwwc_5Nla38Fl3K_B_-2LWGyh50GQSS68XZMwOlP0L63NXj3B_ggr6BdjboixEKbfAy4uzB5nOTG9O3S8jE/s1600-h/DSC03195.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128437889004946" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQN9-My2JDqCHSDxeIJys_G9zt66HKK5yOkPxsp_YF9SOl5B2h2ipCU-kpQwwc_5Nla38Fl3K_B_-2LWGyh50GQSS68XZMwOlP0L63NXj3B_ggr6BdjboixEKbfAy4uzB5nOTG9O3S8jE/s320/DSC03195.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm_8B5WDWP0SLExg2MAcz3Idv7DjexIKHTryniM1XbR9lFBddDqxi3BkO-vLIrHhMil-xuUSQx_7xzdvEDlEgD3p-_WYG3pagnMlEJUYgH-2XxfRpLvnPtUukBA9ZW5OnaD_KymDMacyY/s1600-h/DSC03196.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128435580680546" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm_8B5WDWP0SLExg2MAcz3Idv7DjexIKHTryniM1XbR9lFBddDqxi3BkO-vLIrHhMil-xuUSQx_7xzdvEDlEgD3p-_WYG3pagnMlEJUYgH-2XxfRpLvnPtUukBA9ZW5OnaD_KymDMacyY/s320/DSC03196.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdjIyM8wWJ0LDHAy9xchYqJiAjklNnKv0K5H9gPLHcpi2NBE4hdnPHq2vaZgP6KH7V7aZaKMdkihzVaKOkFAxYiFQNE1ErEj3qKhcEkyQ1YtKKScsk4p1tMJBnuiAjEEkCSQtuDkGcgf0/s1600-h/DSC03197.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128184709420066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdjIyM8wWJ0LDHAy9xchYqJiAjklNnKv0K5H9gPLHcpi2NBE4hdnPHq2vaZgP6KH7V7aZaKMdkihzVaKOkFAxYiFQNE1ErEj3qKhcEkyQ1YtKKScsk4p1tMJBnuiAjEEkCSQtuDkGcgf0/s320/DSC03197.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWkTFvlmj36KaeD34gZLSNimFbQ87D4lOSbVp_PmqoaRTCBXL9gUuFA74bF-VtsceM-AMXpMOwG3ZSAMPq7w0Fkn1F74jhtTPUPXOizUX91ywuHa6luyv3Jk86Ppvh3xb4yOrW7lgfEe8/s1600-h/DSC03198.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128183037465506" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWkTFvlmj36KaeD34gZLSNimFbQ87D4lOSbVp_PmqoaRTCBXL9gUuFA74bF-VtsceM-AMXpMOwG3ZSAMPq7w0Fkn1F74jhtTPUPXOizUX91ywuHa6luyv3Jk86Ppvh3xb4yOrW7lgfEe8/s320/DSC03198.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIu7jMCi5UWe_ZpgEp1q0hBb0EL4GeL8K3OXGdEGkzrub49tFrzLUHJ-FzdTQ8NQzA4luA7eVYL2wucjarILfgKzXU08QJFMj3DbbUqXEt2jen3eliJ7_mAJzSAeleNksUnL9B_bgcbKw/s1600-h/DSC03199.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128176397455010" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIu7jMCi5UWe_ZpgEp1q0hBb0EL4GeL8K3OXGdEGkzrub49tFrzLUHJ-FzdTQ8NQzA4luA7eVYL2wucjarILfgKzXU08QJFMj3DbbUqXEt2jen3eliJ7_mAJzSAeleNksUnL9B_bgcbKw/s320/DSC03199.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihZrCHZygYzIt3n41JFdmOLb5unjL1n6yzgtH733jb6FrT_QnpGmqQKNSpVT_FEuSYe8rRtTCCePMYwLBIDrteR8h6ztuF2ReIAgleMP4Y5ded_YwlYFaIcy1MyfTzazF8ddCR1xf8l4I/s1600-h/DSC03200.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128176013634130" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihZrCHZygYzIt3n41JFdmOLb5unjL1n6yzgtH733jb6FrT_QnpGmqQKNSpVT_FEuSYe8rRtTCCePMYwLBIDrteR8h6ztuF2ReIAgleMP4Y5ded_YwlYFaIcy1MyfTzazF8ddCR1xf8l4I/s320/DSC03200.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJdCvTqpIwypuP_XYZ6-9Mx_izOu80SLfw7AVvhxtrtHfN3GiNT-q0LXKEKNJ9VwgTSJVEX9H4octiI2tRlo-i-4b9cYgYAKeS2JQi8KAXSvZqwBawRG680WoIM2Ms1w_sXvwPNb0IKPs/s1600-h/DSC03201.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279128172651400114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJdCvTqpIwypuP_XYZ6-9Mx_izOu80SLfw7AVvhxtrtHfN3GiNT-q0LXKEKNJ9VwgTSJVEX9H4octiI2tRlo-i-4b9cYgYAKeS2JQi8KAXSvZqwBawRG680WoIM2Ms1w_sXvwPNb0IKPs/s320/DSC03201.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMFeH6NDww1P6aDt0MDa1ZGegWsmQ3QcEIk9pQtzLrVjWD0-cymANp9BHgsbpO5-ZPXJKh6TslifkELVv5cnIQfGbOUYoDQPyoQphvopTwbqoEa6I0MUVCvnBTJw4OJBgE5nQ7T-0qWf8/s1600-h/DSC03202.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279127837940982130" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMFeH6NDww1P6aDt0MDa1ZGegWsmQ3QcEIk9pQtzLrVjWD0-cymANp9BHgsbpO5-ZPXJKh6TslifkELVv5cnIQfGbOUYoDQPyoQphvopTwbqoEa6I0MUVCvnBTJw4OJBgE5nQ7T-0qWf8/s320/DSC03202.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihfT1_YdTGfoG6GvO_CHZeo1OOI2kcMqbYixum2EQHUmk1VQVFNQcJQsXO4a8q_qTVv4mUn5wVP6i6ZOPPqdd6ytcHSJhiRstkEZa-S_yGVdgOGow8V7FtTe5SoRin_dg6U2FnmGG1l0c/s1600-h/DSC03203.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279127839113033890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihfT1_YdTGfoG6GvO_CHZeo1OOI2kcMqbYixum2EQHUmk1VQVFNQcJQsXO4a8q_qTVv4mUn5wVP6i6ZOPPqdd6ytcHSJhiRstkEZa-S_yGVdgOGow8V7FtTe5SoRin_dg6U2FnmGG1l0c/s320/DSC03203.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBJjU13NWhH9XHDz6d1hYtynfMPE7dmdv28WGecoZiHGFj4pk_zcMoTDS90fR2v3xE4M49qxsy1gtCReug3aaSErb7BwiEFAjOYc8vnkA9VC2AZxkSrz4iqk-fXmGNWxbN_AunwHZgtgg/s1600-h/DSC03211.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279127834227667698" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBJjU13NWhH9XHDz6d1hYtynfMPE7dmdv28WGecoZiHGFj4pk_zcMoTDS90fR2v3xE4M49qxsy1gtCReug3aaSErb7BwiEFAjOYc8vnkA9VC2AZxkSrz4iqk-fXmGNWxbN_AunwHZgtgg/s320/DSC03211.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLbadTCAamhBbD0itrPNS_j_pA2BmzfEskIEvmZtpN1F1eA-VGdMb2724M6nJtluTtnhUihCc-jInVkfQlwax-ErZt_BNyDTki2sNNc-n8MyBQtaVlkgOd6pB1ixg5aSm_BvON74CSj6M/s1600-h/DSC03213.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279127831373497842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLbadTCAamhBbD0itrPNS_j_pA2BmzfEskIEvmZtpN1F1eA-VGdMb2724M6nJtluTtnhUihCc-jInVkfQlwax-ErZt_BNyDTki2sNNc-n8MyBQtaVlkgOd6pB1ixg5aSm_BvON74CSj6M/s320/DSC03213.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3DAelnb3RNtm0K0HR0Cvizrdvjz8meOIkvTE1xexS8ot47zyPL2uc26ciKrYAqfvXSKsIj3oKdRs5KPD8wjXUd_AT4IX6QAPhbE6TAoKwPapXKs8Tvj8wIF8vE1JAtu0QDEx9huCDn88/s1600-h/DSC03214.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279127831384884162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3DAelnb3RNtm0K0HR0Cvizrdvjz8meOIkvTE1xexS8ot47zyPL2uc26ciKrYAqfvXSKsIj3oKdRs5KPD8wjXUd_AT4IX6QAPhbE6TAoKwPapXKs8Tvj8wIF8vE1JAtu0QDEx9huCDn88/s320/DSC03214.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Jury rebuffs U.K. police in mistaken killing of Brazilian</strong><br />By John F. Burns<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />LONDON: A three-month inquest ended Friday with the jury effectively rejecting police claims that a 27-year-old Brazilian electrician was lawfully shot after he was mistakenly identified as a suspect in a failed plot to bomb the London Underground in July 2005.<br />With a vote of 8 to 2, the jury returned an open verdict in the case concerning Jean Charles de Menezes, essentially condemning the actions of two Scotland Yard firearms officers who shot the Brazilian seven times in the head after mistaking him for a terrorist.<br />An open verdict, in the British legal system, generally means an inquest jury has concluded that the evidence did not justify any firm conclusion about the responsibility for a death. Although open verdicts are supposed to carry no implication of censure, legal experts said the de Menezes verdict, by failing to exculpate Scotland Yard, effectively left the implication that the police may have acted unlawfully, opening the way for further legal action by the family of de Menezes.<br />The findings by the jury, announced after testimony from more than 100 witnesses, was expected to fuel a bitter controversy over the killing that has rocked Scotland Yard and contributed to the recent firing of Ian Blair, Britain's top police officer.<br />A statement after the verdict by de Menezes's family condemned the court proceedings as a "whitewash," and vowed to pursue legal action against the police in Britain's high court.<br />No British police officer has been prosecuted in about 50 years for unlawful killing in the pursuit of his duty, a course the de Menezes family has urged in the case concerning their son. But the profound impact the shooting has had on Scotland Yard was reflected in the statement made immediately after the verdict by Paul Stephenson, acting commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, which is informally known as Scotland Yard.<br />Stephenson took over Blair's responsibilities last month and, eager to be appointed to the position permanently, appeared eager to strike a contrite tone. Few recent cases involving the British police have stirred as much controversy as the de Menezes killing, which civil liberties groups have described as a shocking case of police incompetence followed by an effort at the highest levels of Scotland Yard to cover up the truth.<br />"Jean Charles Menezes was an innocent man, and we must, and do accept full responsibility for his death," Stephenson said Friday. "In the face of the enormous challenges faced by officers on that day," he said, "we made a most terrible mistake. I am sorry."<br />He said that Scotland Yard would learn from the mistakes it had made "so as to minimize the chance of this ever happening again."<br />The shooting of the Brazilian occurred on July 22, 2005, the day after four men, all later arrested and sentenced to life in prison, had sought unsuccessfully to replicate the bombings two weeks earlier that killed 52 people and injured more than 700 on London's public transport network. The homemade bombs used in the second plot failed to detonate, setting off a manhunt that led to the shooting of de Menezes.<br />The verdict Friday was set to foment new outrage from the de Menezes family and their supporters after the coroner at the inquest, Sir Michael Wright, a former high court judge, ruled last week that the jurors could not return a finding of unlawful killing by the police. That ruling was based on the coroner's conclusion that the inquest evidence did not support a verdict that unambiguously condemned the police for the killing.<br />The de Menezes family has already requested a high court appeal seeking to overturn the coroner's ruling, which left the jury with two possible verdicts - that the killing was lawful, as Scotland Yard has always contended, or the open verdict, which they underscored with a series of damning conclusions about the circumstances of the shooting.<br />In effect, the jurors' conclusions, in answer to a series of detailed questions put to them by the coroner, showed that they rejected as untrue essential parts of the police testimony. Crucially, the jurors said they had concluded that the two officers who shot de Menezes did not shout "armed police" as they stormed the stationary Underground carriage in which de Menezes was sitting. A total of 17 civilian passengers who were aboard the train testified that they heard no such warning before the officers opened fire.<br />The account of the two armed police officers, identified in court only by their code names, Charlie 2 and Charlie 12, was that their warning was ignored by de Menezes, who they said had stood up and walked toward them with his arms and hands in a position "consistent with someone who may be about to detonate a bomb hidden on their person or in a belt." They said his actions left them with no option, consistent with police procedures, but to shoot de Menezes in the head.<br />The jurors said they had concluded that the Brazilian did stand up, but that he had not moved towards the firearms officers, a finding that tallied with the testimony of other passengers. Outside the court, the jurors' findings were cited by members of the de Menezes family and their supporters as evidence of an attempted police cover-up.<br />Other factors that the jurors said contributed to the killing included the failure to provide police pursuit teams with better photographs of the suspect, Hussain Osman, one of those now serving a life sentence. The police had been provided with an indistinct gym-card photo and another from closed-circuit cameras in the Underground system, instead of high-quality photos available from government immigration files.<br />The gym card led the police to an apartment block in Tulse Hill, south London, where surveillance officers spotted de Menezes as he left for work the morning after the plot. They then followed him as he boarded two buses before entering the station at Stockwell. The suspect's erratic route, which was caused by the temporary closure of a station that he reached aboard the first bus, was cited by the police as part of the "suspicious" behavior that led them to mistake him for Osman.<br />But the jurors said the fatal shooting could have been prevented had the surveillance officers prevented de Menezes from boarding the buses or entering the Stockwell station. That decision was made by Cressida Dick, one of Britain's most senior female police officers.<br />Testimony during the inquest showed that Dick wavered at critical moments during the pursuit operation. She finally decided that there should be no attempt to halt de Menezes before armed police officers caught up with him, which they finally did after he boarded the train.</div><div></div><div>********************</div><div></div><div><strong>London risks losing financial centre lead<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />LONDON: London faces losing its crown as the world's top financial centre unless authorities take measures including reviewing some laws and improving the city's infrastructure, senior financial executives said on Friday.<br />"London faces a real and serious threat from competitor cities that have developed aggressive strategies to steal business away from the capital," they said in a statement on Friday, accompanying a report commissioned by London's mayor.<br />Dublin and Luxembourg, for example, have together attracted more than 420 billion pounds of investment funds away from London in the last year thanks to their favourable tax and regulatory regimes, according to the report.<br />The survey also identified Dubai and Singapore as fast-rising contenders to London's throne.<br />The Global Financial Centres Index published by the City of London Corporation in September showed London had retained its top spot, followed by New York and then Singapore.<br />"I will not stop until I lobby whoever it takes to remove the obstacles that are putting London's global reputation at risk from the new kids on the block chomping at our heels," said Mayor of London Boris Johnson.<br />Among other problems, the survey found the British capital suffered from too much UK and European Union regulation and a lack of proficient science graduates.<br />It said the government must urgently review administration laws governing London-based subsidiaries of overseas companies and attacked unpredictable tax policies. The executives also support a move to more intense supervision by the financial regulator.<br />More than 80 senior executives from the financial industry took part in the survey between June and November, led by a panel which included Barclays Chief Executive John Varley, 3i Group head Philip Yea and the co-head of GLG Partners, Manny Roman.<br />(Reporting by Olesya Dmitracova; Editing by David Holmes)</div><div></div><div>***********************</div><div></div><div><strong>"Woolies" sale brings out bargain-hunters</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />By Paul Adrian Raymond<br />Sentimental shoppers flocked to Woolworths stores across London on Friday, hunting for bargains on the second day of the troubled retailer's closing down sale.<br />The discount DVDs-to-sweets chain went into administration last month after almost a century in business, during which it became a household name for generations of Britons.<br />"It's going to be a great loss," said Leonard Kettle, a 77-year-old from the south London suburb of Camberwell.<br />"People of my age were brought up with it. You could go in there and buy something for sixpence when I was a child. I'll miss it when it's gone."<br />The disappearance of the familiar red Woolworths sign from British town centres will mark the end of 99 years of trading, while also likely leading to the loss of 25,000 jobs in 815 stores across the country.<br />"It's a shame, really, because it's history, isn't it?" said an 83-year-old great-grandmother from south London.<br />"We've known it all our lives. I've got two little porcelain animals at home that my daughter bought me from Woolworths when she was a baby, and she's 58 now."<br />Not everyone was as nostalgic, however.<br />While some bemoaned the demise of the high street shop, many just came in search of Christmas discounts. By mid-morning there were long queues at branches throughout the capital.<br />"Yesterday I was in the Clapham branch of Woolworths, and the whole place was heaving," said Aaron Deary, an in-store salesman of beauty products.<br />"A lot of people were saying, 'it's really sad that it's closing,' and were going to buy something for old time's sake. But I think they were vastly outnumbered by the people smelling a bargain."<br />Britain's first Woolworths store opened in Liverpool in 1909 as an offshoot of American F.W. Woolworth's retail empire.<br />Its mixture of low-cost household items and confectionery was an immediate success and branches soon opened in high streets around the country.<br />While "Woolies" sells more sweets than any other British retailer, competition from supermarkets, online retailers and specialist groups steadily became too much for the chain after it floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2001.<br />The credit crisis, which has hit businesses from banks to retailers over the past year, also made trading conditions for the company difficult, eventually forcing the board to call in the administrators and look for buyers.<br />While some have expressed interest, no one looks likely to buy the struggling brand. Administrators Deloitte have said they will keep selling stock, but may have to starting closing stores before the end of the month.<br />(Editing by Luke Baker)</div><div></div><div>**********************</div><div></div><div><strong>Barclay twins shut Sark businesses after election loss</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />LONDON: After 450 years of rule by feudalism, residents on the tiny Channel island of Sark knew their first democratic election would bring changes — but no one expected that 100 people would be immediately tossed out of work.<br />Two wealthy brothers abruptly closed their businesses on the island after their candidates for its first elected parliament were largely rejected by voters — job losses that hit Sark's 600 residents hard.<br />Sir David Barclay had warned that he and his twin brother, Sir Frederick Barclay, would be tempted to walk away from their investment in Sark, a 1,350-acre (545-hectare) island 25 miles (40 kilometers) off the French coast, after their opponents prospered in Wednesday's election.<br />Candidates backed by the brothers had proposed sweeping development of the island to create the first paved roads and to allow cars and helicopters for the first time. Their opponents advocated retaining the island's sleepy charms, and making only gradual reforms.<br />"They've taken their ball and taken it to another playing field," Paul Armorgie, who won a seat in the new legislature, told BBC radio. "(The Barclays) wanted democracy at their own pace, rather than at the pace of the island."<br />The Barclays, whose assets include London's Ritz Hotel and Britain's Telegraph newspapers, have agitated for change since establishing a castle home on Brecqhou, an 87-acre islet just 80 yards (meters) west of Sark, in 1993. They already have won a change in the law of primogeniture — inheritance to the first-born son — to allow land to pass to a female heir or a younger child.<br />Most of their 140 employees at two hotels, a cafe, shops and other ventures were laid off Thursday, but Gordon Dawes, a lawyer for the Barclays, said Friday he expected the businesses to reopen in the spring.<br />"The difference is that there will be no new investment, which had been running at 5 million pounds ($7.5 million) per annum," he said.<br />Sark's hereditary owner, 80-year-old Michael Beaumont, didn't seem worried by the layoffs. "We've managed for 400 years," Beaumont said in a telephone interview. "Life goes on."<br />But some who lost their jobs were not so confident.<br />Amandine Boquet, a 23-year-old from France who had been working in Web site design and marketing for the Barclays, said she and her boyfriend were both fired Friday.<br />"We are in a bad situation," she said. "It's the winter, and there aren't any jobs here, and with the economy the way it is we don't know if we can find a job anywhere."<br />Boquet said many of her friends, including some parents with toddlers, found themselves suddenly out of a job in the election aftermath.<br />The first elected parliament marked a significant break with the island's feudal system. The legislature, known as the Chief Pleas, had been controlled by leaseholders on the 40 tenements — the parcels of land granted to the original settlers in the 16th century.<br />Only two of the nine candidates backed by the brothers won seats in the legislature. Nine of the 12 candidates they had denounced as "dangerous to Sark's future" were elected.<br />Dawes said the final straw was the defeat of Kevin Delaney, manager of the Barclays' estate, who finished 36th in a field of 56.<br />Two of the Barclays' investments, the Aval du Creux Hotel and the Dixcart Bay Hotel — two of the island's five hotels — were closed on Friday, along with a cafe.<br />"I don't see it as a problem," said Beaumont, the seigneur or chief executive of the island. "It will take us back to a year and half before the Barclays came, and we were managing perfectly well then."<br />Beaumont is the latest in a line of hereditary owners of Sark dating back to Helier de Carteret, who was granted a fief by Queen Elizabeth I in 1565.<br />The seigneur of Sark each year pays one-20th of a knight's fee — now about 1.72 pounds ($2.55) — to Queen Elizabeth II, and has the sole right to keep pigeons and unspayed female dogs on the island.<br />___<br />Associated Press Writer Gregory Katz in London contributed to this report.<br />___<br />On the Net:<br />Sark, <a href="http://www.sark.info/">http://www.sark.info/</a><br />Sark News, <a href="http://www.sarknews.com/">http://www.sarknews.com/</a></div><div><br /><br /></div><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong> </div><div align="center"><br />Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-48030178540113862192008-12-12T05:05:00.004+01:002008-12-12T09:10:07.846+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Thursday, 11th December 2008<div align="center"><strong>Nuclear deal with North Korea eludes Bush's grasp </strong></div><strong><div align="justify"><br /></strong>By Steven Lee Myers<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush's last effort to seal an agreement to dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons program during his presidency collapsed Thursday, leaving the confrontation with one of the world's most isolated and intractable nations to Barack Obama's administration.<br />Four days of negotiations in Beijing ended in impasse after North Korea refused to agree to a system of verifying its promise to end all nuclear activity. Among other things, the North Koreans have objected to soil and air samples being taken near nuclear facilities and being taken overseas for testing.<br />The negotiations over North Korea's nuclear weapons - a major diplomatic achievement of Bush's second term - have often progressed erratically, punctuated by brinkmanship and breakdowns, only to resume again.<br />North Korea could still return to the bargaining table, officials said, but it is now almost certain not to do so until after Bush steps down in less than six weeks, depriving him of a late diplomatic breakthrough in the sunset of his presidency.<br />"What's unfortunate is that the North Koreans had an opportunity here," the White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said Thursday. "There was an open door, and all they had to do was walk through it."<br />Even as the administration pushed to seal an agreement, it appeared North Korea wanted to stall, perhaps to seek different terms from Obama's administration.<br />As a candidate and president-elect, Obama's team has pledged to take aggressive steps to halt nuclear proliferation by North Korea, as well as Iran, criticizing the president's handling of the confrontation as "ad hoc" and unnecessarily belligerent.<br />But while Obama has indicated he would be open to talks with Iran's leaders, which Bush has ruled out, he has not proposed a radically different approach to North Korea than the one Bush has pursued for the last two years.<br />In a debate against Senator John McCain in September, he criticized Bush's initial hostility toward North Korea, saying it resulted in that country's decision to abandon the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and test a nuclear weapon in 2006, but he also acknowledged the diplomatic effort that has since followed.<br />"When we re-engaged - because, again, the Bush administration reversed course on this - then we have at least made some progress, although right now, because of the problems in North Korea, we are seeing it on shaky ground," Obama said at the time.<br />Only two months ago, the administration officially removed North Korea from a list of state sponsors of terrorism in an attempt to salvage the agreement, which has been fragile from the moment since it was first reach in February 2007.<br />The State Department's spokesman, Sean McCormack, said that the administration would not reverse that decision since it had been made "based on the law and the facts."<br />"That's an irreducible condition," he said on Thursday. "You can't get around that. They met the criteria."<br />At the same time, however, an administration official made it clear that North Korea could not expect additional reciprocal steps or incentives without accepting a rigid and intrusive system of verification.<br />"They're not going to get any more from us unless they're willing to take action," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic exchanges.<br />At the White House, Perino suggested that the United States would now reconsider some of the assistance it has provided under the carefully calibrated agreements that have been negotiated over nearly two years of talks. The aid includes fuel oil that the United States, along with China, Russia, South Korea and Japan, had offered in exchange for North Korea's steps toward dismantlement, but Perino emphasized that no decisions had been made yet.<br />North Korea's posture in recent talks has prompted some officials to question whether its reclusive leader, Kim Jong Il, was fully in charge following a stroke in August. A French doctor who treated him, François-Xavier Roux, confirmed in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro that he had a stroke but that his condition had since improved.<br />Roux, a neurosurgeon based in Paris, told the newspaper that Kim had undergone treatment, but not an operation; he last treated him in late October, he told the newspaper.<br />North Korea's government has said nothing about its leader's health except to say that foreign reports of his illness were a conspiracy to undermine the country. North Korea's state media has recently showed pictures of the leader in public events, like a soccer match, appearing healthy.<br />"The photos that have just been published seem recent and authentic to me," Roux said.<br />"I have the impression that he is in charge in North Korea."<br />He declined to detail Kim's health, citing medical confidentiality and state secrecy. According to Figaro, two French doctors, an anesthetist and a surgeon, went to Pyongyang in 1991 and implanted a pacemaker in Kim.<br />Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Paris.</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center"><strong>14 arrested in Belgium for links to terrorism</strong> </div><div align="justify"><br />By Steven Erlanger<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />The Belgian police arrested 14 people suspected of terrorist links in raids Thursday, including one man thought to have been planning a suicide attack who had "said goodbye to his loved ones," said the federal prosecutor in Brussels, Johan Delmulle.<br />Although the possible target was not clear, the arrests came on a day when European Union leaders began a two-day summit meeting in Brussels.<br />"We don't know where the suicide attack was to take place," Delmulle said. "It could have been an operation in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but it can't be ruled out that Belgium or Europe could have been the target."<br />Given the summit meeting, which marks the effective end of the French presidency of the European Union, Delmulle said the Belgian authorities felt they had "no choice but to take action today."<br />Lieve Pellens, a spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office, said in an interview by telephone that those arrested included Malika el-Aroud, 49, who calls herself a female warrior for Al Qaeda and writes jihadist screeds on the Internet under the name Oum Obeyda.<br />Aroud's husband, Moez Garsalloui, was also believed to have been arrested, said Claude Moniquet, chairman of the European Strategic Intelligence & Security Center, a research organization in Brussels.<br />Garsalloui was released in July 2007 after serving three weeks for promoting violence and then disappeared.<br />Belgian officials said he fled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Moniquet said that Garsalloui was one of the three people arrested whom prosecutors said had recently returned from training camps along the Pakistani-Afghan border.<br />A fourth suspect was tracked to South Asia but has not yet returned, the officials said.<br />Pellens said in the interview that she believed the cases against the 14 arrested were strong, based on a year of investigation, surveillance and wiretapping carried out by a team of 80 police officers.<br />She described Aroud, who has been arrested before and released, as "a very important and serious lady," and said the prosecutor "will try to prove in court that she's important, a leader, who takes decisions and raises money."<br />The case, Pellens said, is about terrorism but also about "grand theft and robbery as a way to raise money for the group." She said that "the investigation was complex and intense, and there were times when all the wiretapping chambers were occupied with anti-terrorism guys working this case."<br />The police carried out 16 raids in Brussels and one in the eastern city of Liège.<br />The timing of the arrests was forced by the summit meeting, the prosecutor's office said, and came after threats against Belgium contained in a video sent to Belgian and Dutch television networks at the end of November.<br />Faced with raising the threat level and disrupting the summit meeting or making the arrests a little early, Pellens said, the decision was made to make the arrests.<br />A statement from the prosecutor's office said that several of those arrested were suspected of ties to Al Qaeda, and that there are "direct contacts between the group around the suspect 'M.G."' - the initials of Garsalloui - "and important people of the organization Al Qaeda."<br />The suicide farewell of one of the suspects was captured through wiretaps, Pellens said, who added that the suspect had changed considerably after his return from Afghanistan.<br />"He became the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the group," she said.<br />A year ago, the Belgians arrested about a dozen people when the United States provided them with information that an attack in Brussels was imminent, Pellens said. Moniquet said that the pressure from Washington was so strong that the arrests were made before strong cases could be made against the suspects, and all were released the next day. The target was believed to have been an American installation.<br />To justify the arrests a year ago, the Belgian authorities tied them to an effort to break Nizar Trabelsi out of jail, even though evidence for such a plot was at least six months old at the time, Belgian officials said Thursday.<br />Trabelsi, a former soccer player and member of Al Qaeda, has been jailed in Belgium since 2001 for his alleged involvement in a plot to blow up a NATO installation in Belgium. He was also alleged to be involved in a Qaeda plot to blow up the American Embassy in Paris, the prosecutor's office said.<br />He was sentenced in June 2004 to 10 years in prison at a trial where he pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden, whom he had met in Afghanistan. Washington has filed an extradition request for Trabelsi, who has appealed against the extradition.<br />Those arrested Thursday had ties to Trabelsi and his wife, Belgian officials say.<br />Moniquet, noting that some of those arrested were returning from Afghanistan, said he is assuming that their target "was in Europe, maybe in Belgium or France."<br />Basil Katz contributed reporting.</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong>0507</strong></div><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXFERJC6D9msW9M6gg3SYZP6uVpZEGz46iP_j-85c-Bs1Dp_Zh74j31G8WoJbSVsw58O9-3yQryTSmqV9Wt6C9O4xMkPWlF3DBtbzRkja3y8BKIjtx5Gr6hwEPoLOEq_1CRAEzb0j-Nxo/s1600-h/DSC02971.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278760024272978114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXFERJC6D9msW9M6gg3SYZP6uVpZEGz46iP_j-85c-Bs1Dp_Zh74j31G8WoJbSVsw58O9-3yQryTSmqV9Wt6C9O4xMkPWlF3DBtbzRkja3y8BKIjtx5Gr6hwEPoLOEq_1CRAEzb0j-Nxo/s320/DSC02971.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqHCF8IsquhpG2zGtpWsMz-utX_Aj-lWk9SW22eQLWDrAL3n-NhLQ6dsy1dtDDs2oW0G9UvpKa853wiASEe788qOud1m8RtXcgmKomCJzYt8WnH0UZKBncxXK3g2r3yqvM4mWlDeXfKvg/s1600-h/DSC02972.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278760016827495970" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqHCF8IsquhpG2zGtpWsMz-utX_Aj-lWk9SW22eQLWDrAL3n-NhLQ6dsy1dtDDs2oW0G9UvpKa853wiASEe788qOud1m8RtXcgmKomCJzYt8WnH0UZKBncxXK3g2r3yqvM4mWlDeXfKvg/s320/DSC02972.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPO19XWmJc8bAVVo-xrJ_hJkAPNpMZ7quz-FQ8Gj24HCPUDHrHaCmIL_AzHxVXuxeb7xfgFF43Mim4ZXFMCr7hheQer4fgXttzPVktJG0f6GTH5OJRc3y9Z4X9ljg0LYlRC1Nq6T61Llc/s1600-h/DSC02973.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278760015106973186" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPO19XWmJc8bAVVo-xrJ_hJkAPNpMZ7quz-FQ8Gj24HCPUDHrHaCmIL_AzHxVXuxeb7xfgFF43Mim4ZXFMCr7hheQer4fgXttzPVktJG0f6GTH5OJRc3y9Z4X9ljg0LYlRC1Nq6T61Llc/s320/DSC02973.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3emA0RtJPuZPWedprCbX5MtwYLAs1wexweNDm0fEb9UY22Z5tr9z8GtfPfR_d2fCgheG1RhChvWOBO2zSVbIljasI6Lw6j-wPUOx_M_cHRMHAlKX4ZEYyiaunOmNKMKqJe8sPzIp-wMk/s1600-h/DSC02974.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278760014689901122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3emA0RtJPuZPWedprCbX5MtwYLAs1wexweNDm0fEb9UY22Z5tr9z8GtfPfR_d2fCgheG1RhChvWOBO2zSVbIljasI6Lw6j-wPUOx_M_cHRMHAlKX4ZEYyiaunOmNKMKqJe8sPzIp-wMk/s320/DSC02974.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>Nicholas D. Kristof: Obama's 'secretary of food'?</strong><br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />As Barack Obama ponders whom to pick as agriculture secretary, he should reframe the question. What he needs is actually a bold reformer in a position renamed "secretary of food."<br />A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.<br />Renaming the department would signal that Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhealthy - all while costing taxpayers billions of dollars.<br />"We're subsidizing the least healthy calories in the supermarket - high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oil, and we're doing very little for farmers trying to grow real food," notes Michael Pollan, author of such books as "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food."<br />The Agriculture Department - and the agriculture committees in Congress - have traditionally been handed over to industrial farming interests by Democrats and Republicans alike. The farm lobby uses that perch to inflict unhealthy food on American children in school lunch programs, exacerbating America's national crisis with diabetes and obesity.<br />But let's be clear. The problem isn't farmers. It's the farm lobby - hijacked by industrial operators - and a bipartisan tradition of kowtowing to it.<br />I grew up on a farm in Yamhill, Oregon, where my family grew cherries and timber and raised sheep and, at times, small numbers of cattle, hogs and geese. One of my regrets is that my kids don't have the chance to grow up on a farm as well.<br />Yet the Agriculture Department doesn't support rural towns like Yamhill; it bolsters industrial operations that have lobbying clout. The result is that family farms have to sell out to larger operators, undermining small towns.<br />One measure of the absurdity of the system: Every year the American taxpayer sends me a check for $588 in exchange for me not growing crops on timberland I own in Oregon (I forward the money to a charity). That's right. The Agriculture Department pays a New York journalist not to grow crops in a forest in Oregon.<br />Modern confinement operations are less like farms than like meat assembly lines. They are dazzlingly efficient in some ways, but they use vast amounts of grain, as well as low-level antibiotics to reduce infections - and the result is a public health threat from antibiotic-resistant infections.<br />An industrial farm with 5,000 hogs produces as much waste as a town with 20,000 people. But while the town is required to have a sewage system, the industrial farm isn't.<br />"They look profitable because we're paying for their wastes," notes Robert P. Martin, executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. "And then there's the cost of antibiotic resistance to the economy as a whole."<br />One study suggests that these large operations receive, in effect, a $24 subsidy for each hog raised. We face an obesity crisis and a budget crisis, and we subsidize bacon?<br />The need for change is increasingly obvious, for health, climate and even humanitarian reasons. California voters last month passed a landmark referendum (over the farm lobby's furious protests) that will require factory farms to give minimum amounts of space to poultry and livestock. Society is becoming concerned not only with little boys who abuse cats but also with tycoons whose business model is abusing farm animals.<br />An online petition at www.fooddemocracynow.org calls for a reformist pick for agriculture secretary - and names six terrific candidates, such as Chuck Hassebrook, a reformer in Nebraska. On several occasions in the campaign, Obama made comments showing a deep understanding of food issues, but the names people in the food industry say are under consideration for agriculture secretary represent the problem more than the solution.<br />Change we can believe in?<br />The most powerful signal Obama could send would be to name a reformer to a renamed position. A former secretary of agriculture, John Block, said publicly the other day that the agency should be renamed "the Department of Food, Agriculture and Forestry."<br />And another, Ann Veneman, told me that she believes it should be renamed, "Department of Food and Agriculture." I'd prefer to see simply "Department of Food," giving primacy to America's 300 million eaters.<br />As Pollan told me: "Even if you don't think agriculture is a high priority, given all the other problems we face, we're not going to make progress on the issues Obama campaigned on - health care, climate change and energy independence - unless we reform agriculture."<br />Your move, Mr. President-elect. I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground and join me on Facebook. You can also watch my Youtube videos and follow me on Twitter.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>China may compensate milk victims</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />BEIJING: China is considering compensation for victims sickened or killed by toxic infant milk formula, a government spokesman said, following months of contention over stricken families with unmet demands for redress.<br />But a lawyer pressing for open redress denounced the plan.<br />Chinese authorities recently said six children died and 290,000 children suffered "urinary system abnormalities," apparently after consuming Sanlu-brand milk powder and a "handful of other milk powder brands with problems."<br />A spokesman for the Ministry of Health, Mao Qun'an, said the "relevant departments are now assessing a compensation plan for the Sanlu infant milk powder incident," according to the Ministry website ( http://www.moh.gov.cn ) on Wednesday.<br />Mao told a news conference that the Ministry was compiling information about the victims who may receive compensation, according to the website.<br />The Sanlu dairy group, partly owned by New Zealand's Fonterra group, sold milk powder contaminated with an industrial chemical, melamine, that caused kidney stones and other agonising complications in infants. Melamine can be used to cheat quality checks, by producing false readings for protein levels.<br />But a Beijing lawyer seeking compensation for stricken children said the government plan would not satisfy families' thirst for open accountability.<br />"This plan is being developed behind closed doors. The victims and their lawyers should be involved in setting the rules for compensation," said Li Fangping, the lawyer.<br />"The traditional bureaucratic dominance of these issues hasn't changed...So I have big doubts about this plan."<br />Li said that when he and other volunteer lawyers went to a court in Sanlu's home city, Shijiazhuang, this week seeking to sue the company, a court official said their legal papers would not be processed.<br />"Clearly, the government does not want these problems aired in the courts, open to the public," Li said.<br />Chinese media first reported in September that babies had fallen ill from the formula. But officials have since acknowledged that the Sanlu Group, the main source of the tainted milk, and officials hid the problem for many months.<br />Families of children killed and sickened have turned to volunteer lawyers, threatening to sue Sanlu and perhaps others. But their efforts have been stymied by authorities, apparently worried that court cases could inflame public anger over the scandal.<br />The scandal has also prompted bans and extra checks on Chinese milk and food products in dozens of export markets, and melamine has been found in a range of products, from candy to eggs.<br />(Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Ken Wills and Valerie Lee)</div><div><br /><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid_K2s6b5yFyit-F9q81wgCccZmz0PlPuviRP5gRSJez_I7CxaEI4RYQgczHHJ5KaGfqAfHH38CqIgvOv1p9VPCgt5_QY9J9xW_4_Qv-vdUIbIQQ6uzBOAkJjcyUESLoOUo7TYdbtNKxw/s1600-h/DSC02975.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278760012701515634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid_K2s6b5yFyit-F9q81wgCccZmz0PlPuviRP5gRSJez_I7CxaEI4RYQgczHHJ5KaGfqAfHH38CqIgvOv1p9VPCgt5_QY9J9xW_4_Qv-vdUIbIQQ6uzBOAkJjcyUESLoOUo7TYdbtNKxw/s320/DSC02975.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>Carbon dioxide detected on distant planet<br /></strong>By Kenneth Chang<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />Astronomers testing techniques to search for extraterrestrial life have detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet 63 light-years away.<br />This carbon dioxide, though, is certainly not coming from plants or automobiles. The planet, HD 189733b, is far too big (about the mass of the Jupiter) and too hot (1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, or 925 degrees Celsius) for any possibility of life.<br />"It's really a proof of concept of using CO2 as a biomarker," said Mark Swain, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who led the team that made the discovery.<br />The findings will appear in Astrophysical Journal Letters.<br />This year, astronomers, including Swain's group, reported finding water vapor and methane swirling around HD 189733b. And in the Thursday issue of the journal Nature, a different group of astronomers, led by Carl Grillmair of the California Institute of Technology, report that they, too, have detected water around the same planet, using a technique more precise than that used in earlier research.<br />As seen from Earth, HD 189733b passes directly in front of and behind its parent star as it orbits.<br />Taking advantage of those eclipses, Swain's group used the Hubble Space Telescope to compare the near-infrared light from the star alone (when the planet was hidden behind it) with the combined light from both.<br />The difference between the two spectrums revealed the light emitted from the planet, and the mix of colors in the planet's light contained the telltale signs of carbon dioxide at concentrations ranging from one part per million to one part per 10 million, compared with Earth at about 385 parts per million.<br />Even that much carbon dioxide was a bit of a surprise, because the simplest chemistry equations predicted that carbon would prefer to form carbon monoxide or methane molecules.<br />One possibility is that the intense ultraviolet radiation from the star, just 3 million miles, or 4.8 million kilometers, away, is spurring chemical reactions to produce the observed carbon dioxide.<br />"The theorists will have no problem explaining it," said L. Drake Deming, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and a member of Swain's team.<br />Meanwhile, the detection of water by Grillmair's team, using a similar technique but with longer-wavelength infrared emissions detected by the Spitzer Space Telescope, confirms what had been expected: hydrogen and oxygen are two of the most common elements in the universe, and they readily combine into water.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Obama delegation missing at climate talks<br /></strong>By Elisabeth Rosenthal<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />POZNAN, Poland: As ministers from 189 countries gather here to hammer out a new climate change treaty, progress is sorely hampered by the absence of one delegation: the team that will forge Barack Obama's climate policy.<br />The U.S. president-elect has called climate change "a matter of urgency," but his administration-in-waiting has not sent representatives to Poznan, where the United States is represented by the Bush administration. That has left this critical meeting in a bit of limbo, with many delegates saying they were waiting to size up the next administration's environmental commitment before making bold moves of their own.<br />"It has affected the meeting in a fairly significant way," said Gus Silva-Chávez, a policy expert at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, who has been observing the closed negotiations. "A lot of people think: 'This is not the time to put our cards on the table. Let's wait for the new administration. Why agree to anything now?"'<br />This problem is exaggerated by the fact that the European Union is struggling to finalize its own climate package - hampered by the global economic downturn - and so its delegates have been unusually quiet. In practice, that has meant little progress on anything except the basic decisions needed to keep the dream of a climate treaty alive.<br />"We have a sense of urgency, but you don't see any strong decisions" being made here, said Elenita Dano, a member of the delegation from the Philippines. "Political developments in the U.S. and the EU are holding us hostage, and we have no choice but to wait."<br />The negotiations are meant to culminate in a treaty in Copenhagen in December 2009, which will take effect in 2013 and replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol.<br />So far, Obama has outlined broad policies but provided few specifics or a timetable for carrying them out. His team is hashing out various options.<br />His administration could propose a climate bill designed to pass quickly through the U.S. Congress with concrete short-term goals like improving energy efficiency and creating "green" jobs, or it could hold off a bit to craft a more comprehensive policy proposal with long-term emissions reductions charting a course decades into the future.<br />"The fear is this could become a Clinton health plan, trying to do too much too soon, and ending up with nothing," said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House staff member now with the National Commission on Energy Policy.<br />Even at the highest levels, officials in Poznan are awaiting results: "Another climate treaty without the U.S. doesn't make a lot of sense," said Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the sponsor of the meeting.<br />Still, the conference has achieved some important goals.<br />The delegates have agreed on a method for essentially paying countries and communities to preserve forests, through a system of carbon credits. Twenty percent of man-made emissions are attributed to deforestation.<br />The delegates also are nearing agreement on a fund, conceptualized a year ago, to help developing countries adapt to climate change.<br />Talk of a climate-change upheaval was muted, since the meeting in Poznan was meant to be a midpoint in talks that would lead to a new treaty next year.<br />"Expectations for this meeting were pretty low, but we're on track for a work plan covering the next year," said Angela Anderson, director of the International Global Warming Campaign of the Pew Environment Group. "If the pace picks up we could get an agreement by Copenhagen."<br />Delegates have been hammering out proposals for the past 10 days. On Thursday, various ministers arrive for two days of meetings to approve them.<br />Still, there were disturbing rumblings that industrialized nations were seeking to scale back emissions-reduction targets recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which suggested that rich countries should cut emissions 25 percent to 40 percent by 2020 to avert disastrous warming. Countries like Italy have suggested that they might have a hard time meeting previous emissions-reduction goals in the current economic malaise.<br />In addition, a group of developing countries called the G-77 complained that their proposals for help fell on deaf ears. "We got no support from developed countries, whether in technology transfer or finances," said Tasneem Essop, of the WWF South Africa.<br />Such hopes and frustrations underscore the pressure the new U.S. administration is likely to feel. Jake Schmidt of the National Resources Defense Council said, "Clearly one of the major stumbling blocks has been a lack of leadership at the U.S. level, and that's about to change."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>U.S. shift on climate lifts mood at conference in Poznan</strong><br />By Elisabeth Rosenthal<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />POZNAN, Poland: Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts arrived at the United Nations conference here Thursday reassuring delegates from around the world that the United States would take strong measures to combat climate change.<br />"President Obama will be like night and day compared to President Bush," he said at a news conference, adding that "Congress and the president-elect are committed to movement on mandatory goals as rapidly as possible."<br />Although the incoming Obama administration has no official representatives at the meeting, where officials are forging a new climate change treaty, the massive glass conference center is crawling with American lawmakers, or at least their staffers, a sign of a transitional and potentially transformative moment in U.S. climate politics.<br />Over the past two weeks, staff members from more than 50 congressional offices - representing powerful figures like the House speaker, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California; Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee; and Representative Henry Waxman of California, the incoming chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce - have made appearances. The staffers have been so numerous that the delegation representing the Bush administration had to put a sign on its office door: "Executive Branch Personnel Only."<br />Despite elation at the new U.S. presence, there has been widespread concern among delegates that developed nations would be less willing to make the financial investments in climate change in a time of global recession. In opening the two-day meeting of environment ministers Thursday morning, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, said there should be "no backsliding on our commitments."<br />In a roundtable that afternoon, dozens of environment ministers pledged to hold to previous plans for emissions reductions. Stavros Dimas, the European Union's environment commissioner, said, "We are determined, despite economic surprises, to deal with climate change."<br />He emphasized that the deadlock among EU members negotiating their new climate package was about "modalities, not objectives." The EU has committed to reducing emissions 20 percent by 2020, and Dimas said it would go as high as 30 percent if other industrialized nations made similar promises.<br />Still, other ministers made it clear that the economic turmoil had made the challenge more difficult.<br />"If we can bring our finance ministers back on board, we will be successful in Copenhagen," said Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's environment minister, who reiterated Berlin's goal of cutting emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020.<br />The negotiations in Poland are meant to culminate in a treaty in Copenhagen in December 2009 to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol.<br />But there were some bright spots at the conference. Mexico took the lead among developing nations, committing to reductions and caps on greenhouse-gas emissions - though developing countries are not required to do so under the Kyoto Protocol. Brazil announced that it would cut deforestation 70 percent in the next decade.<br />But Xie Zhenhua, the representative from China, the world's largest emitter, reiterated his country's position that as a developing nation it should not have such numerical commitments, but instead would "take positive and effective mitigation and adaptation measures."<br />Also, members of some developing countries said that promises by industrialized nations to help them cope with climate change seemed to be on hold. The fate of a fund to help poor countries adapt to climate change was still unclear Thursday night.<br />"We are really disappointed with the progress we are seeing in Poznan," said Amjad Abdulla, a delegate from the Maldives, a chain of low-lying islands that is threatened by rising sea levels. "We are drowning, and there is this huge gap in commitment."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Obama picks Daschle to spearhead health-care reform<br /></strong>By Brian Knowton, Robert Pear,John M. Broder<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday named a key political ally with deep roots in Congress to take the lead in his expansive plans to remake the American health-care system.<br />At a news conference in Chicago, Obama named Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, to serve not only as Health and Human Services secretary but to oversee a new White House Office of Health Reform. That combined portfolio, Obama said, would make Daschle not just a cabinet-level advocate of a health-care overhaul but a lead architect.<br />"It's hard to overstate the urgency of this work," Obama said, as he moved a step nearer to filling out his cabinet.<br />With health-care premiums having nearly doubled since 2000 and 45 million Americans lacking health insurance, he said, the question was not how the country could afford to undertake sweeping change amid economic crisis but "how can we afford not to."<br />"Small businesses across America are laying off or shutting their doors for good because of rising health care costs," Obama said. "Some of the largest corporations in America, including major American car makers are struggling to compete with foreign companies unburdened by these costs."<br />The president-elect has also selected his top energy and environmental advisers, aides said earlier. The appointees will include a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Steven Chu, and the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Carol Browner. Their selection drew praise from environmental activists as a sign of Obama's seriousness on climate change.<br />In addition, Obama spent time Thursday with two former secretaries of state, James Baker and Warren Christopher, delving into the question of the limits of executive power, and who can send the country into war.<br />With a kind of moral passion for universal health coverage, Daschle he will probably have little trouble crystallizing public support for that goal. But while Democrats, with an expanded majority in Congress, are hopeful of realizing their dream of affordable health care for all, the task will be far from easy. Daschle predicted in a recent book that the health-care industry would wage "all-out war to defeat reform."<br />Two of his ideas could reignite the kind of ideological warfare that sidetracked past health-care proposals.<br />Daschle wants to establish a Federal Health Board, an independent entity like the Federal Reserve. The board would make coverage decisions for federal health programs and, he said, "reduce or deny payment for new drugs and procedures that aren't as effective as current ones."<br />But critics say the board would be picking winners and losers among makers of drugs and medical devices, rankling many of them. Daschle himself writes that "doctors and patients might resent any encroachment on their ability to choose certain treatments."<br />Private insurers already follow many of the coverage decisions made by Medicare, the government health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. Daschle said Congress could go further and link tax breaks for private insurance to compliance with the board's recommendations.<br />Another volatile question is whether the government should offer its own health insurance plan to people without job-based insurance.<br />In the presidential campaign, Obama said he wanted to create a nationwide marketplace, a "health insurance exchange," where people could compare and buy insurance policies, creating downward pressure on costs. Daschle has offered a similar proposal.<br />But Republicans said a government plan would have unfair advantages and could drive private insurers from the market.<br />Daschle, 61, served 26 years in Congress, including 10 as Senate Democratic leader. He was an early and influential supporter of Obama.<br />But while he is well-versed in the intricacies of health policy and Senate procedure, the results of his health care work in Congress were mixed.<br />Republicans, deflecting demands for radical change, often boast that the United States has the world's finest health care system. Daschle wants to deflate those claims.<br />"We have the most expensive health care system in the world, but are not the healthiest nation in the world," Daschle said Thursday. "Our growing costs are unsustainable, and the plight of the uninsured is unconscionable."<br />Obama is expected to name his environmental team next week.<br />Aides said he would name Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as energy secretary, Nancy Sutley, deputy mayor of Los Angeles for energy and environment, as head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and apparently also Browner, the EPA administrator under President Bill Clinton, as the top White House official on climate and energy policy. Lisa Jackson, the New Jersey environmental commissioner, would be named to head the EPA.<br />They would be backed by strong allies in Congress who are interested in developing climate-change legislation.<br />But opposing their efforts will be many Republicans and some Democrats, as well as manufacturers, utilities, oil companies and coal producers who will bear the brunt of the costs of any steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the main culprit in global warming.<br />Chu shared a Nobel Prize in physics in 1997 for work on supercooled atoms. But at the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, he has sponsored research into biofuels and solar energy, has pushed hard for practical solutions, and has strongly advocated controlling greenhouse gas emissions.<br />Obama met Thursday with Baker and Christopher, the two former secretaries of state, to discuss the proposal from a commission they led to revamp the legal process for launching military action. They favor requiring more consultation between a president and Congress.<br />The proposal would scrap the War Powers Act of 1973, a measure passed in the hangover from Vietnam to give Congress more say in committing troops to the battlefield but largely ignored ever since by presidents. In its place, the commission proposes a law requiring a president to consult lawmakers before any significant military action and Congress to vote up or down within 30 days.<br />Peter Baker and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>China "cancer village" pays ultimate price for growth<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />By Emma Graham-Harrison and Vivi Lin<br />Once an isolated haven, the Chinese village of Liukuaizhuang is now a tainted hell, surrounded by scores of low-tech factories that are poisoning its water and air, and the health of many villagers.<br />One in fifty people there and in a neighbouring hamlet have been diagnosed with cancer over the last decade, local residents say, well over ten times the national rate given in a health ministry survey earlier this year.<br />Many fear they are paying for the country's breathtaking economic expansion with their lives, as surrounding plants making rubber, chemicals and paints pour out health-damaging waste.<br />"They asked in the hospital whether my family had a history of cancer. I said: 'No, in the last three generations no one had it'," one villager told Reuters, pulling out his x-rays and doctor's diagnosis that he had lung cancer. "It must have a lot to do with the pollution here."<br />Three decades of reforms and opening up since 1978 have transformed China from a rigidly ideological backwater into the world's fourth largest economy, lifting millions out of poverty, but not without a price.<br />Nationwide there are dozens of places like Liukuaizhuang, where factories have blackened streams, poisoned farmland and choked the air.<br />Just 120 kilometres south of Beijing, Liukuaizhuang was a quiet village before the dramatic economic boom was kicked off by a series of low-key Communist reforms on Dec 18, 1978.<br />Twenty years later almost 100 chemical plants were scattered across what used to be farmland and thirty years on someone in almost every family is dead or dying of cancer -- the youngest just seven years old -- according to a local activist.<br />Officials agree that the area, dubbed a "cancer village" in domestic media, had a huge pollution problem, although they insist cancer rates are below the national average and all the worst-offending factories are now shuttered.<br />"The factories were not far from homes and to a certain degree influenced the normal life of the villagers," said the Communist Party spokesman for the county, Huo Junwei.<br />"(But) we think figures provided by individuals exaggerate pollution problems in our area," he said. "For several years we have been looking into whether there is a link between cancer and chemical production and have not yet got a scientific answer."<br />QUESTIONS AND SILENCE<br />In recent years, national leaders worried about the mixed legacy of chasing economic expansion at almost any cost have stepped up calls for a more equitable society and cleaner industry nationwide.<br />But the pollution around Liukuaizhuang was so rampant that a crackdown driven partly by health concerns began in 2003, long before greener growth became a ubiquitous government mantra.<br />And activists say waste water and toxic gasses are certainly causing some illness there, even if an apparent link with cancer has not been proved.<br />"Pollutants including heavy metals like mercury and lead have already got into the food chain and all these chemicals will affect the normal function of cells," said Gao Zhong, an environmental economist with a non-governmental organisation that works to clean the country's polluted water.<br />Wong Tze-wai, an environmental health expert at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, said it would be premature to assume a link, but authorities should look into whether the number of cancer cases in the village was abnormally high, and if so, why.<br />"It's important to investigate. We know that many industrial chemicals are carcinogenic and it is not unlikely that they can get into the eco-system," he told Reuters.<br />The village's richer inhabitants have backed that view by moving away, locals say, leaving behind the old, poor and ill. Some cannot afford even the most basic health precautions.<br />"We don't have enough money to clean the water we drink. We put it all in a basin and let the pollutants sink," said the daughter-in-law of one lung cancer sufferer.<br />All are reluctant to discuss the illness as they say health benefits were cut to victims who spoke out in the past, as well as one activist, Wang Dehua, who was jailed for several years.<br />"A lot of journalists came and went, but it did not change the situation at all," said one middle-aged liver cancer patient whose husband was also diagnosed with cancer recently. Like all the other interviewees she refused to be named.<br />CLEAN REVOLUTION?<br />Some hope may ironically come from the global economic crisis, which is threatening so many Chinese jobs, as the world slowdown has dented demand for the products churned out from the country's factories and so cut their waste.<br />The villagers say some of Liukuaizhuang's bare bones factories, where paint is mixed in open drums in fume-filled warehouses guarded by vicious dogs, have already gone bust.<br />The crisis has also spurred Beijing to line up a multi-billion dollar stimulus package. Activist Gao hopes some of the cash will be spent on cleaner technology.<br />"Now we are facing financial turmoil. There is a good way to stimulate domestic demand and also keep society stable, which is to improve the environment to invest more into this so ... the country will be able to develop with quality," he said.<br />However there is also a risk that Beijing's leaders, facing rising unemployment and the social problems caused by a slowing economy, will relinquish environmental goals and ease pressure on the heavy industries that have created so much of both the country's growth and its pollution.<br />Many in the "cancer village" fear the clean up is too late for them but they cling to hope that it will save their children and grandchildren from terminal illnesses.<br />"Of course I am worried, but what is the use of being worried?" said a lung cancer patient.<br />"We have to save our concern for the next generation."<br />(Additional reporting by Tan Ee Lyn in Hong Kong)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><br /><br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278759599964157010" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_B6y7QSfWwLRra-zc2RH6K28KH5CF5LHpilVdnF0mncCMCeMpEQEGcicqSOsjR0yH3ryH_UTV0IxN0SkDHX5fP4Pv13irlfdWsi6VuXdNZ1w9W3H405l61yyr2-XDSu4oci0bgCbpKUM/s320/DSC02978.jpg" border="0" /> <div></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Oil companies carved up the mundane market for paraffin in style</strong><br />By Doreen Carvajal and Stephen Castle<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />PARIS: Surrounded by a moat and four watch towers, the ancient Château d'Ermenonville is not the kind of place anyone would associate with a product as mundane as paraffin.<br />But the château, a discreet luxury hotel about a 40-minute drive northeast of Paris, and a circuit of others around Europe served for more than a dozen years as bases for executives from some of the biggest names in oil - Exxon Mobil; Royal Dutch Shell; Sasol, of South Africa; and Repsol YPF, of Spain - to fix prices of paraffin, the overlooked wax byproduct of crude oil, that is used in candles, paper cups, lip balm and chewing gum.<br />The scheme drove up prices to consumers in a plot that probably touched most every household, according to the European commissioner for competition, Neelie Kroes, whose office punished nine oil companies with more than half a billion euros in penalties.<br />In leveling the fines in October, Kroes released a two-page statement and no supporting documentation, but the International Herald Tribune has reviewed dozens of pages of confidential legal documents that offer an unusual look, filled with drab details worked out in luxurious settings, at the inner workings of a price-fixing cartel.<br />Most cartels operate in secrecy, destroying documents, encrypting e-mail messages or using prepaid phone cards to erase communication traces. But the paraffin cartel was rare in that some members - notably Tibor Toth, a manager with the Hungarian oil company MOL - kept minutes, and attendance lists.<br />Cartel members e-mailed invitations and sought RSVPs. They booked each other's rooms and played host to open bars. Documents found when investigators first raided the companies in April 2005 included handwritten notes on stationery from hotels on the cartel's itinerary: the five-star Kempinski in Budapest or Château de Montvillargenne in the bucolic horse country of Chantilly, France.<br />"Next price increase May/June 2000," a Shell executive scribbled in a note after a meeting in Paris.<br />Toth, writing in Hungarian, recorded new prices in West German marks, or Deutsche marks. "Raise in January unless first-quarter quantities are reduced, otherwise raise in season, DM 120."<br />The behavior of this group and its undoing pose significant concerns.<br />The relaxed clubiness of the paraffin conspirators stokes worries about the hold that price-fixing cartels have on European commerce.<br />With Kroes cracking down on cartels involving elevators, cement, automotive glass and drugs, total annual fines in the past five years have more than tripled, reaching €2.27 billion, or $3 billion, this year. The money goes into the EU general budget.<br />Questions also arose about whether the tactics employed by Kroes were the fairest or most effective for ending collusion.<br />In the paraffin case, as in others, some of the biggest offenders walked off with no, or relatively small, fines because they were first in the door with information implicating less-involved conspirators. And, unlike in the United States, in European Union cases, price fixers do not face the prospect of jail time.<br />Over all, the number of international cartels has been rising nearly every year since the 1980s, according to John Connor, a Purdue University economist whose studies show that global cartels are bigger and more plentiful in Europe. European cartels are also more likely to include repeat offenders.The paraffin cartel meets,drinks and divides markets<br />The paraffin cartel involved at least 35 sales or product managers, and in internal memos they used nicknames for themselves and their get-togethers: the Blue Saloon, after a favorite bar in Hamburg; the Appetizer Meetings; even, for one participant, the Paraffin Mafia.<br />At meetings, they fixed prices and carved up markets for their distinct product lines, speaking of extruder, coating wax, liquid slabs, tea-light candles and grave lights used for tombstones. Their nine companies controlled 75 percent of the European market, and the other 25 percent often fell in with the pricing structure constructed.<br />Most cartels last five years, according to studies, then sputter out amid recriminations over cheating. European regulators suspect this one may date as far back as the 1970s, based on files plucked from some companies involved. Investigators said that they believed they had firm enough evidence to form a case starting with a Sept. 3, 1992, meeting of five participants at an unknown location, according to the European Commission's confidential 200-page report laying out the evidence.<br />In the months that followed, a ritual developed, according to the documents: Sasol - the market leader, based in South Africa and with an office in Hamburg - played ringleader and club booster. A product manager, Michael Matthäi, issued invitations by telephone, fax and e-mail. Usually it was for a half-day meeting, with dinner the night before along with a cocktail hour, often with Holger Schröder, sales manager for Shell Deutschland, playing host.<br />At Sasol, where the club was known as "Blauer Salon," or Blue Saloon, after the Hamburg bar, participants would report back on the gatherings to other executives who kept notes. If executives from other companies could not make meetings, Sasol executives would fill them in, according to the commission's legal documents.<br />They describe half-day meetings divided into technical discussions about such issues as safety and then to a roundtable debate, with each executive weighing in on prices. Sometimes discussions detoured to the hotel bar.<br />There was a "general understanding between the attending wax manufacturers to respect each other's main customers in their respective home markets," according to a file submitted by Shell to regulators.<br />The companies "tried to protect their home markets by creating an atmosphere of mutual trust and good will among themselves," according to a file obtained from Sasol by commission investigators.<br />The documents show that they shared information about customers, production capacities, sales volumes and even plant maintenance. They talked prices, agreeing on absolute numbers. "Cancel prices of special customers (= those that do not buy, or that buy significantly below last year/budget)," said a Sasol debriefing note. "Goal: to set a landmark!"<br />Toth, the MOL executive held a more junior position than other sales managers in the cartel, but according to legal documents he was sent to meetings because he spoke English and German. His notes, written in Hungarian, included careful tables and documents with titles like "Candle Industry - Price situation," listing prices for a variety of waxes and the notice of a new price structure.<br />Memos outlining the agreements contained insider references to some of the biggest paraffin customers - the candle makers Iberceras, of Spain, and Bolsius, of the Netherlands - marked with prices by their names.<br />Shell and Sasol also agreed, for instance, to shy away from each other's top customers, according to memos each submitted to investigators.<br />The cartel members also anointed the company to kick off the new prices - usually the market leader Sasol.<br />For appearance's sake, however, other unidentified companies were enlisted. Customers might not even have noticed because there was never a uniform price increase, just agreement on what specific companies would charge.<br />The legal documents indicated that they also talked about cheating and a Sasol emissary debated whether to head to Budapest to persuade MOL to drop plans to undercut West European prices.<br />After the meetings, a flurry of letters was exchanged - some 150 in total. They stipulated relevant prices; if customers balked, cartel members coordinated negotiating strategies by phone.<br />Some candle makers had their suspicions. During the 1990s, when the cartel was in full swing, the biggest candle manufacturer in Europe, Bolsius, started looking for better prices in Asia, and decided to build a multimillion-euro, 30,000-ton storage depot in Rotterdam for imports, said Vincent Kristen, the company's managing director.<br />But that failed because the company started to detect a curious pattern. "Soon we found we were getting more or less European prices from suppliers in the rest of the world," Kristen said. He declined to say how much he thought the wax cartel damaged the candle industry, but, he said, "the moment raw materials go up in price, the consumer has to pay more." Experts usually put the figure for a cartel-rigged product at 10 percent above market-driven prices.The party ends and membersof the cartel race to confess<br />For what would be its last supper, the cartel gathered in late February 2005 in the brightly colored four-star Hotel Madison Residenz in Hamburg. Wax prices were debated, but in its last moments, the cartel was showing strains: it could not reach a deal. Still, the members planned another meeting in May.<br />Three weeks later, the cartel was shattered. Shell, facing €270 million in fines for its participation in other cartels involving synthetic rubber and bitumen, a thick form of petroleum, revealed the paraffin combine to the EU authorities on March 17, 2005.<br />By that time, the company ranked among a group of corporate "cartel recidivists" with a record of 14 convictions for repeat cartel activity, according to a study by agricultural researchers at Purdue University.<br />Under EU regulations, Shell, though, won complete forgiveness of what would have been a €96 million fine calculated by the commission. Other companies - some far less implicated - faced fines eventually totaling €676 million.<br />The totals grew with the investigation, which built on a series of raids in the weeks after Shell talked. Perhaps the richest trove came from MOL headquarters in Hungary, where investigators discovered Toth's files.<br />When European regulators raided the MOL offices they uncovered Toth's files with a series of notes on hotel stationary that were arranged in chronological order dating back to 1989.<br />The race to the confessional did not stop with Shell. Under EU rules, other companies can turn up with evidence and mea culpas to win more limited reductions in their fines. And they did.<br />Sasol, which the commission identified as the ringleader, pressed for leniency the day after the raids concluded on April 29 and ended up with a 50 percent reduction, lowering its fine to €318 million. More limited discounts were meted out - 25 percent, reducing the fine for Repsol to €20 million, and 7 percent for Exxon Mobil, for a €83.5 million penalty.<br />Two companies, Total, of France, and Eni, of Italy - both with a record of other cartel activities - received heavy fines, though their participation did not equal that of Shell. Eni attended only one meeting in the first nine years covered in the investigators' complaint.The companies apologize, but shareholders are riled<br />Since the trustbusters issued the fines, chastened top executives have apologized, with several saying they unwittingly inherited cartel membership from smaller companies they acquired or that their product managers had acted without company knowledge.<br />Nikolaas Baeckelmans, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said his company "deeply regrets our involvement, although limited, in the infringement." He said participation was confined to four Mobil employees who became involved before the Exxon merger with Mobil in 1999 and a single Mobil employee held over in Germany after the merger, who retired in 2003.<br />Rainer Winzenried, a spokesman for Shell in The Hague, said that it took time to integrate DEA, a German business it purchased in 2002, and which already was a cartel member. Winzenried said that Shell went to the authorities when it became aware of the scheme three years later. "As soon as the new Shell manager discovered that a cartel had been in operation, he reported this anti-competitive behavior and we alerted the European Commission," he said.<br />Sasol's top executives blamed rogue employees for conspiring in secret. "Unfortunately, no internal control or compliance process can provide absolute assurance against illegal conduct of delinquent employees," said Nereus Joubert, the company secretary at Sasol. "We view such activities as clearly reprehensible and regret that we have not detected these activities earlier."<br />But questions about how aggressive the companies really were in stamping out bad behavior are being raised by shareholders who watched stock fall with the announcements of fines.<br />The commission argued that senior managers should have investigated the real purpose of the meetings because attendees were not at any official oil industry function, but they still submitted business travel claims to their companies.<br />A 2003 memo was sent by an unidentified employee to Exxon Mobil's legal department to discuss the meetings. But, the commission said, Exxon Mobil took the matter no further. The company declined to comment on this information, which was contained in commission documents.<br />At an angry Sasol shareholders' meeting this month, critics like Peter Lord complained that the European investigation got less than seven lines in its 274-page annual report, according to South African press reports. It referred simply to violations before "Sasol became a shareholder in the European business in 1995." The information failed to note that the cartel violations continued under full ownership through 2005.<br />Theo Botha, a shareholder advocate in South Africa, also pressed Sasol's chief executive, Pat Davies, about why the company failed to detect the cartel. "The bottom line," Botha said later during an interview, "is that directors need to accept responsibility even though the people have left. Yes they're sorry, but then it's business as usual."<br />But Davies insisted, "We did do due diligence," adding that "it's very difficult to pick up where there's no paper trail and people don't volunteer the information."<br />Yet Sasol submitted dozens of documents to obtain leniency from the commission, including memos known as the Blue Saloon debriefing notes.<br />Until recently, a number of the cartel members continued to keep employees who participated in the meetings on their payrolls. But when asked about their status, some companies insisted they had resigned months or even years ago. A spokesman for MOL, the Hungarian oil company, initially said that the memo writer, Toth, left the company two years ago, later conceding that this was incorrect and stating that he left in the last couple of months. A colleague of Toth's in Hungary said he was working there until October. </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>IEA sees oil demand rising in 2009 after weak 2008<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />LONDON: World oil demand growth will return in 2009 after shrinking this year for the first time since 1983 due to the global economic slowdown, the International Energy Agency said on Thursday.<br />The IEA's view is in stark contrast to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which on Tuesday said demand was expected to shrink by 450,000 barrels per day in 2009 following a predicted 50,000 barrel a day decline in 2008.<br />In its monthly report, the Paris-basd IEA cut its 2008 oil demand estimate by 350,000 barrels a day to 85.8 million barrels a day, a 200,000 barrel a day year-on-year fall.<br />The IEA, an adviser to 28 industrialized countries, sees demand rebounding to 86.3 million barrels a day in 2009, based on the International Monetary Fund's assumption the global economy will gradually recover in the second half of next year.<br />"Our working scenario rests on assumed resilience outside of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development regions, albeit with slower growth than in the past five years," the IEA said.<br />"This month's report saw scant amendment to recent non-OECD demand data, and therefore we resist the temptation to jettison growth for 2009, despite weaker economic indicators in some cases."<br />David Fyfe, head of the IEA's Oil Industry and Markets Division said the agency's forecast still demonstrated global economic weakness in 2009.<br />"It's marginally higher growth from a lower base," Fyfe said. "Less than half a million barrels per day of demand growth still indicates a weak market in 2009."<br />The IEA said non-OECD demand could be revised lower if more pessimistic economic forecasts were borne out.<br />"Structurally, the West is going to take a lot longer to recover than emerging markets which we see starting to pick-up towards the end of this year, which should support demand," Helen Henton, head of commodities at Standard Chartered Bank, said. "With prices now at much lower levels we could see demand start to recover. The situation might be stabilizing."<br />As demand has fallen during the economic slowdown, oil inventories in OECD countries have risen sharply.<br />Stocks at the end of October stood at 56.8 days of demand, well above the five-year average, the IEA said.<br />It said there would hence probably be lower demand for crude oil from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in 2009.<br />"Our own supply and demand balances suggest a lower 'call on OPEC' in 2009 at 30.7 million bpd, versus 31.5 million bpd in 2008," the IEA said.<br />It also lowered its forecasts for supply from outside OPEC in 2009, leading to a 200,000 barrels a day increase in the amount it said OPEC needed to pump to balance the market.<br />OPEC is expected to cut output by at least one million barrels a day when it meets in Algeria on Wednesday, as the producer group tries to shore up prices which have dropped to about $45 a barrel, more than $100 below an all-time high above $147 hit in July.<br />OPEC, source of two in every five barrels of oil, has already cut member output quotas by two million barrels a day since September.<br />Oil prices were higher after the IEA report was released. U.S. crude was up $1.41 at $44.93 a barrel in pre-market trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Oil rises 10 percent after OPEC calls for "severe" cut<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />By Rebekah Kebede<br />Oil surged more than 10 percent on Thursday, settling at nearly $48 a barrel after the OPEC president called for more "severe" production cuts and the dollar fell to a seven-week low versus the euro.<br />News that Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev said the country was ready to work with OPEC on possible oil output cuts lent additional support to the market.<br />"We are starting to see the real engine for lifting oil prices, cuts in OPEC production, and it seems likely they will cut production at their meeting next week," said Tim Evans, energy analyst for Citi Futures Perspective.<br />"Also in the background is Russia rumbling about possible coordination with OPEC and that is bullish if carried out," he added.<br />U.S. crude settled at $47.98 a barrel, up $4.46, or 10.25 percent, continuing a rebound from near four-year lows hit last week. It was the biggest single-day percentage gain since November 4, when prices ended up 10.36 percent.<br />European benchmark Brent crude settled at $47.39, up $4.99.<br />Oil prices are down almost $100 from a record peak of $147.27 scaled last summer as a global financial crisis hits consumer demand for fuel.<br />OPEC should agree on a more "severe" reduction in output at the meeting next week in Algeria, OPEC President Chakib Khelil said in remarks published on Thursday, which made no mention of a figure.<br />Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said the world's largest exporter pumped 8.49 million barrels per day of oil in November, less than estimated by analysts and in line with its OPEC target.<br />That would put the kingdom's output at 560,000 bpd less than the IEA's estimate of Saudi November production, published earlier on Thursday, of 9.05 million bpd.<br />Industry sources told Reuters on Wednesday they expected January shipments to be below Saudi's existing OPEC target, implying it expects OPEC to agree a further supply cut when the producer group meets in Algeria on December 17.<br />OPEC member Ecuador also said it wants to slash oil output at the Algeria meeting to stabilise the market.<br />Russia, which will attend the Algerian meeting as an observer amid calls from some members for Moscow to join in output curbs, said Wednesday it will present its own proposal at the talks.<br />The U.S. dollar weakened after data on weekly U.S. jobless claims came in worse than expected [ID:nN11392744]. A weak dollar can boost investor demand for oil and other dollar-denominated commodities.<br />RETURN OF DEMAND<br />A prediction from the International Energy Agency that world oil demand growth would rebound in 2009 after shrinking this year for the first time since 1983 was also supportive. The IEA also cut forecasts for supply outside OPEC next year.<br />The IEA's view that demand will grow in 2009 contrasts with that of the U.S. government's Energy Information Administration, which this week forecast consumption would fall by 450,000 barrels per day (bpd) next year.<br />The Paris-based IEA also lowered forecasts for supply from outside OPEC in 2009, leading to a 200,000 bpd increase in the amount it said OPEC needs to pump to balance the market.<br />(Additional reporting by Alex Lawler in London, Anna Mudeva in Poznan and Jennifer Tan in Singapore; Editing by Christian Wiessner)</div><div><br /><br /> </div><div> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBjmDmKdHcnzKSmz3VNdXS2AUchTdOsJrO7vs2OBTg04ErccIrh7GW-Yfm6kcm5v58N3Zs8sRZ5RDqz62AyBC2xvBfMI5C5nME1VWZalc5LTWLaHq4-a0gkNrgBlvC64wAO2YfM0nzakU/s1600-h/DSC02977.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278759605786031634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBjmDmKdHcnzKSmz3VNdXS2AUchTdOsJrO7vs2OBTg04ErccIrh7GW-Yfm6kcm5v58N3Zs8sRZ5RDqz62AyBC2xvBfMI5C5nME1VWZalc5LTWLaHq4-a0gkNrgBlvC64wAO2YfM0nzakU/s320/DSC02977.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>Société Générale and Barclays cleared in French money-laundering case<br /></strong>Bloomberg News<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />PARIS: Société Générale and Barclays were cleared of money-laundering charges by a French court on Thursday, while a French regional bank and a Pakistani bank were fined after being found guilty on some charges.<br />Barclays, based in London, Société Générale, based in Paris, and the French lender's chairman, Daniel Bouton, were not part of a ring that funneled the equivalent of 82 million, or $109 million at current exchange rates, into Israel in the late 1990s, Judge Olivier Leurent said as he read a summary of the decision.<br />Leurent did find National Bank of Pakistan, based in Karachi, guilty on some charges, imposing a fine of 200,000. Two of the bank's executives were cleared of all charges, while two others were found guilty on some charges, fined 20,000 each and given two-year suspended sentences. Société Marseillaise de Crédit, in southern France, was fined 100,000. Groupe Banque Populaire bought the regional bank from HSBC Holdings in July 2008.<br />The lenders were among four banks and about 150 companies and individuals tried for money laundering in the so-called Sentier Affair, named after the Paris garment district.<br />Société Générale declined to comment on the decision. The decision fell outside of Pakistani business hours and bank spokesmen could not be reached for immediate comment. Banque Populaire did not immediately return a message left by telephone.<br />The National Bank of Pakistan "terminated four employees involved," its president, Syed Ali Raza, said in February. "We then strengthened all our internal controls and plugged all the holes."<br />The case against the lenders revolved around their role as correspondent banks for Israeli financial institutions. Executives in charge of the banks' compliance monitoring, check processing and international banking services were also named in the court's files.<br />Correspondent banking allows fund transfers and currency exchanges for banks that do not have offices in large financial centers. It also provides an entry point to the global financial system from countries that permit unlimited cash transactions and anonymous accounts.<br />In 2002, 88 people, mostly merchants from the Sentier neighborhood were convicted for defrauding banks and insurance companies by reaping 82 million in loans using fake invoices. They received fines and as long as seven years in prison.<br />Société Générale was one of the banks that filed complaints against the Sentier shop owners in 1997. "At that time, there were no legal or regulatory obligations" to verify checks to prevent fraud, the bank said before the trial. It installed new controls in 2002.<br />During the first investigation, magistrates found checks issued by French banks cashed by or transferred to third parties in Israel. This trial focused on claims that the banks did not make the necessary verifications before processing the payments.<br /><br /><br /></div><div><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIoocXLCeAZjICHtl7ouI0aZnP9za6wxfmHTUa0qEaqLzlTYf2ZrvchZzvPGbtKFNoAaJvq4PGiTQllMTfc7VPorz6NWiLcvw6ob-Bal4PVEHup6pV-8CaA8Dm9Ykst7DIFMjdKqc93JE/s1600-h/DSC02979.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278759590385817346" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIoocXLCeAZjICHtl7ouI0aZnP9za6wxfmHTUa0qEaqLzlTYf2ZrvchZzvPGbtKFNoAaJvq4PGiTQllMTfc7VPorz6NWiLcvw6ob-Bal4PVEHup6pV-8CaA8Dm9Ykst7DIFMjdKqc93JE/s320/DSC02979.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>India calls on Pakistan to do more on terror<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta, Robert F. Worth and Mark McDonald<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />NEW DELHI: Calling Pakistan the epicenter of terror attacks against India, Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee called Thursday for the government in Islamabad to do more than detain leaders of extremist groups, even as he hinted that India did not "intend to be provoked" into a military conflict.<br />Mukherjee, speaking to Parliament in its first session since the three-day siege of Mumbai last month, reiterated India's demand for about 40 fugitives and terrorism suspects whom it says are taking shelter in Pakistan. His comments seemed intended to avoid directly criticizing the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, with whose democratically elected government he said he had "no quarrel."<br />At the same time, he pressed the Zardari administration to close down the "infrastructure" that enables terrorist strikes against India.<br />Shortly after the Mumbai attacks, Zardari had described the terrorism suspects as "nonstate actors" over whom the Pakistani government had no control. On Thursday, that statement met with a stinging retort from Mukherjee.<br />"Are they nonstate actors coming from heaven, or they are coming from a different planet?" Mukherjee asked. "Nonstate actors are operating from a particular country. What we are most respectfully submitting, suggesting to the government of Pakistan: Please act. Mere expression of intention is not adequate."<br />It was India's first reaction to Pakistan's crackdown on camps and leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based group accused in the Mumbai attacks that left victims 163 dead, along with nine men believed to have been the attackers. Officials in Islamabad announced the arrests earlier this week.<br />On Thursday, Pakistan ordered the closure of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a charity in Pakistan, a day after the UN Security Council declared it was a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba and subject to UN sanctions, including the freezing of its assets and a travel ban on four of its leaders, including Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who was arrested Sunday by Pakistan.<br />Mukherjee on Thursday also delivered a message to allies and rivals abroad: India would not be dragged into discussions about disputed Kashmir Province, which the minister described as a domestic problem for its government to negotiate. "This is not an India-Pakistan issue. This is not an issue related to Jammu and Kashmir," he said. "This is a part of global terrorism."<br />India's home minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, in announcing on Thursday an overhaul of the nation's intelligence network, said "the finger of suspicion" points at "our neighbor," clearly meaning Pakistan. Chidambaram took over as home minister after his predecessor, Shivraj Patil, resigned in shame after the attacks.<br />The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party also pledged Thursday to stand by the government.<br />"We should not be fooled by this kind of operation," Lal Krishna Advani, the opposition leader, said of Pakistan's response so far.<br />Chidambaram, the country's principal law enforcement official, had previously acknowledged lapses in the security forces' preparedness for the attacks. He revealed an intelligence overhaul in a speech to Parliament in New Delhi - something the prime minister pledged his administration would do in the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks.<br />The Indian security forces' slow response to the attack "exposed their lack of intelligence and lax approach to law and order," said Farhana Ali, a South Asia terrorism expert and former analyst for RAND, a group offering research on policy and security issues.<br />The restructuring announced will bolster the coast guard and maritime forces, strengthen intelligence agencies with new personnel, establish a national investigative center and set up training courses for anti-terrorism officers, police units and commando squads.<br />The attacks began on the night of Nov. 26 and ended more than 60 hours later when the last gunmen were killed in a shootout with elite Indian commandos. The assault was apparently staged, the Indian police have said, by a squad of 10 gunmen who used boats to approach Mumbai.<br />Nine attackers were killed and one was captured.<br />Since the attacks, there has been an outpouring of anger across India. Last week, tens of thousands of citizens stormed the Gateway of India, a famed waterfront monument near the Taj Mahal hotel, venting anger at their elected leaders. There were similar protests in New Delhi and the southern technology hubs of Bangalore and Hyderabad. All were organized spontaneously, with word spread through text messages and Facebook pages.<br />Indian citizens and police officials alike have expressed concern about follow-on attacks by terrorists who might have escaped during the mayhem of the assault.<br />"That's the million-dollar question: Will there be more attacks? I think it's just a matter of time," said Ali, the terrorism expert.<br />The Indian police had said they foiled an attempt to destroy landmarks and wreak havoc in Mumbai early this year, breaking up a cell of Pakistani and Indian men.<br />The foiled plot also involved Lashkar-e-Taiba, which suggested that the militant group conceived its plan long in advance and has deeper contacts with radical Indian Muslims than investigators have been willing to concede.<br />It also pointed up another significant security lapse by Indian intelligence and police forces, who months ago had glimpses of a blueprint for the Mumbai attacks and even a strong indication of the intended targets.<br />Somini Sengupta reported from New Delhi, Robert F. Worth from Mumbai and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Pakistan moves against charity linked to militants<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD: Pakistan ordered the closure Thursday of Jemaat-u-Dawa, a charity linked to a militant group suspected in the Mumbai attacks, a day after the outfit was declared a front for terrorists by the United Nations, officials said.<br />The Pakistani police said Thursday that Hafiz Saeed, the leader of the charity, was under house arrest.<br />The move against Jemaat-u-Dawa came as Pakistan was under intense pressure by India and the United States to crack down on anyone on its soil who was connected to the attacks.<br />"The Interior Ministry has issued instructions to all four provincial authorities to close down all Jemaat-u-Dawa's offices and keep an eye on their activities," said a senior ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.<br />It was not clear whether the order represented a formal ban on the group, nor whether its activists would be arrested.<br />Earlier Thursday, the authorities in the country's largest city, Karachi, said they had closed nine premises associated with the group, apparently carrying out the order from the central government.<br />An Associated Press reporter outside one Jemaat office in the city said it was locked up and deserted.<br />It was unclear what was happening at the group's large headquarters close to the eastern city of Lahore.<br />Pakistan has arrested at least 20 people, including two people it said were extremists alleged by India to be key players in the Mumbai attacks, but India has made it clear it wants to see more action.<br />The Security Council on Wednesday declared Jemaat-u-Dawa a front for a terrorist group subject to UN sanctions, including an asset freeze, travel ban and arms embargo.<br />U.S. officials said the group, which has offices, schools and medical clinics around the country, is a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a banned militant group accused by India of carrying out and planning the Mumbai assaults.<br />The United Nations also put three other Pakistanis associated with Lashkar on a terrorist list, which sanctions a freeze on their assets and a ban on travel.<br />In a statement Thursday, Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani said Pakistan had "taken note of the designation" and "would fulfill its international obligations." He did not elaborate.<br />Earlier, Saeed, Jemaat's hard-line Islamist leader, denied that the charity was involved in terrorism and denounced the United Nations. He said the group would petition the United Nations as well as national and international courts to overturn the decision.<br />"If India or the U.S. has any proof against Jemaat-u-Dawa, we are ready to stand in any court. We do not beg, we demand justice," Saeed said at a news conference. "We will not accept any decision taken under Indian pressure. This decision was taken to defame Pakistan."<br />Pakistan has promised to pursue those responsible for the Mumbai attacks. But it complains that India has not shared evidence from its investigation, underlining the mistrust hampering U.S. efforts to avert a deeper crisis between the two countries.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Pakistan detains one of India's most-wanted</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />By Krittivas Mukherjee and C. Bryson Hull<br />Pakistan put the founder of a militant group blamed for the Mumbai attacks under house arrest Thursday, responding to intense pressure to wipe out what India called "the epicentre of terrorism."<br />The detention of Hafiz Saeed, the founder of the outlawed Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group who now runs the Jamaat-ud-Dawa charity seen as its front, came after the United Nations placed him on its terrorism sanctions list.<br />"Police have encircled the house of Hafiz Saeed in Lahore and told him he cannot go out of the home. They have told him detention orders will be formally served to him shortly," Saeed's spokesman Abdullah Montazir said.<br />India blames LeT for the Mumbai attacks which killed 179 people last month and also for earlier ones, including a 2001 assault on parliament that nearly thrust the nuclear-armed south Asian rivals into their fourth war since independence from Britain in 1947.<br />A spokesman for Pakistan's central bank said directives had been issued to banks to freeze the accounts of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Saeed and three associates included in the U.N. sanctions, which also impose a travel ban on the blacklisted individuals.<br />Police in Karachi and Hyderabad sealed the offices of Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Television reports said the charity would be banned though no official announcement had yet been made as yet.<br />But Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, speaking to parliament before the lower house passed a largely symbolic resolution condemning the attacks and pledging to find those responsible, said Pakistan's efforts had not been enough.<br />"We have to galvanise the international community into dealing sternly and effectively with the epicentre of terrorism, which is located in Pakistan. The infrastructure of terrorism has to be dismantled permanently," he said in comments that preceded Saeed's house arrest.<br />"WAR NO SOLUTION"<br />Singh said he had told world leaders that India "could not be satisfied with mere assurances."<br />"We have noted the reported steps that have been taken by Pakistan. But clearly much more needs to be done and the actions should be pursued to their logical conclusion," he said,<br />He also reiterated that "all means and measures" needed to wipe out militants would be used.<br />India has been angry at what it sees as the Pakistani government's tolerance of militants, and Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee earlier Thursday said India had given Pakistan a list of 40 people it wants handed over.<br />Asked by an angry lawmaker why India was not attacking Pakistan after so much proof of its complicity in fomenting trouble in India, Mukherjee replied: "That is no solution."<br />Indian officials had previously demanded that Pakistan hand over 20 suspected militants and others it wants for past attacks.<br />Keeping up the pressure on Pakistan, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte arrived in Islamabad Thursday to follow up visits by his boss, Condoleezza Rice, to India and Pakistan last week.<br />Washington has engaged in intensive diplomacy to stop tensions from mounting between Pakistan and India, and to keep Islamabad focussed on fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda.<br />Global pressure has seen Pakistan raid several Islamist militant training camps and detain or arrest some of the militant leaders India wants extradited.<br />Pakistani security forces have arrested around 20 militants in raids, an intelligence official told Reuters Thursday.<br />Analysts say Pakistani intelligence has ties to some of those India wants, and that its civilian government risks political fallout if it acts against them.<br />Saeed led the LeT militant group until December 2001, when he quit a few days before Pakistan complied with a U.S. move to put the group on a list of individuals and organizations with links to al Qaeda and the Taliban.<br />Saeed, one of the most wanted men in India, has since headed Jamaat-ud-Dawa.<br />(Reporting by New Delhi and Islamabad bureaux; Writing by Bryson Hull; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Suspected U.S. drone strike in Pakistan kills 7<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />PESHAWAR, Pakistan: A missile strike, suspected to be from a pilotless U.S. drone, killed seven militants on Thursday in Pakistan's South Waziristan region, seen as an al Qaeda sanctuary, two intelligence officials said.<br />One of the officials said there may be foreigners among the dead but that he did not know their nationalities.<br />"The missile hit a house adjacent to a madrasa (Islamic seminary). Seven people are killed," he said.<br />"Most of those killed are Punjabis," the official added, employing a term used for militants from Pakistan's central province of Punjab.<br />It was the second suspected strike by U.S. drone aircraft this month, after three people were killed in a similar attack in neighbouring North Waziristan.<br />There have been over 20 strikes in the last three months in the tribal regions and nearby areas. They reflect U.S. impatience over support provided by militants from Pakistan for the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, and fears that al Qaeda fighters in northwest Pakistan could plan attacks in the West.<br />Rashid Rauf, a British militant with al Qaeda links, was killed in a similar strike in Mir Ali last month, together with an Egyptian, intelligence officials say.<br />The latest strikes came amid growing tension between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India over deadly attacks on Mumbai last month.<br />India has blamed militants based in Pakistan for the attacks on two luxury hotels, a railway station and a Jewish centre in its financial capital that killed at least 179 people.<br />Pakistan has condemned the attacks, promised full cooperation in investigations and launched a crackdown on an Islamist charity regarded as a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group suspected of being behind the operation.<br />(Writing by Zeeshan Haider, editing by Mark Trevelyan)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Aircraft carrier contract delayed up to two years<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />By Tim Castle<br />Britain said on Thursday it was delaying a 4 billion pound contract for two Royal Navy aircraft carriers by up to two years to help it meet rising equipment bills and the cost of fighting on two fronts.<br />The ships had been due to enter service in 2014 and 2016 under a contract awarded in July to BVT Surface Fleet shipbuilding, a joint venture between British defence companies VT Group and BAE Systems.<br />The joint venture said it did not expect the delay to lead to any cuts in its 7,000 staff.<br />The Ministry of Defence said it was also dropping U.S. defence firm General Dynamics as a provisional preferred bidder for a new armoured vehicle after failing to reach acceptable commercial terms.<br />In addition the defence ministry said it remained committed to a 1 billion pound Future Lynx helicopter contract with AgustaWestland, a subsidiary of Italy's Finmeccanica, but would cut its order of the aircraft to 62 from 70.<br />The aircraft carrier project at its peak is expected to create or sustain 10,000 jobs, with construction taking place at Govan and Rosyth in Scotland, Barrow-in-Furness in northwest England and Portsmouth on the southern English coast.<br />The decision to delay the carriers came after a review of equipment projects to meet an estimated 2 billion pound overspend in this year's defence budget.<br />British military spending is under strain from the cost of operating on two fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan, while government tax revenues are seen diving in the economic downturn.<br />"The aims of the examination were to adapt to the rising cost of high-end defence equipment and to provide more support for current operations," Defence Secretary John Hutton said in a statement.<br />The carriers are each due to carry up to 36 Lockheed Martin fighter jets but industry reports say these will not be ready till 2017.<br />"We have concluded that there is scope for bringing more closely into line the introduction of the Joint Combat Aircraft and the Aircraft Carrier," Hutton said.<br />"This is likely to mean delaying the in-service date of the new carriers by 1-2 years. Construction is already under way and will continue."<br />The defence ministry said it would also spend an extra 70 million pounds to put new engines in 12 Lynx Mark Nine helicopters to give additional support to British troops in Afghanistan from next year.<br />(Additional reporting by Sumeet Desai and Philip Waller)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Amid deadly carnage, Iraq attack may offer challenge</strong><br />By Timothy Williams<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: A man detonated a suicide vest inside a crowded restaurant in the northern city of Kirkuk on Thursday, killing at least 48 people and wounding 96 others during a meeting of local tribal leaders who were discussing solutions to end the violence that has plagued the city.<br />The attack, which came at the end of the religious holiday of Id al-Adha, is the worst act of violence in Iraq since June, in what has been a relatively peaceful period in the country.<br />The casualty figures may continue to rise beyond 48 because at least 25 of the wounded were taken to local hospitals in critical condition, said Colonel Yadger Abdullah, a law enforcement official.<br />The vast restaurant, adjacent to a highway that connects Kirkuk to Irbil, another large urban center in northern Iraq, may have been filled with as many as 3,000 diners at the time of the explosion, officials said.<br />The bomber entered the restaurant and stopped in a hallway between three large dining halls before detonating his vest, Abdullah said.<br />"All of a sudden we heard a very loud explosion," said Shirzad Mowfak Zangana, a supervisor at the restaurant. "Two of the walls collapsed and then the next thing I remember is that I felt blood covering my face. People were screaming. Children were crying. Smoke filled all three dining rooms."<br />The bombing appeared to be a direct challenge to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as the United States prepares to draw down its troops and questions remain about whether Iraqi security forces will be able control violence in the country.<br />Provincial elections are scheduled in Iraq for Jan. 31, though the vote has been delayed in Kirkuk out of fear that elections might exacerbate ethnic tensions.<br />The restaurant, about 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, north of Kirkuk, is in the heart of an oil area contested by Kurds and Arabs, and where Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has been active.<br />Major General Turhan Yusef, chief of the Kirkuk police, said investigators had not yet determined who was responsible for the attack.<br />"We have received some intelligence and are analyzing the information," he said.<br />But the bombing bore the hallmarks of previous suicide bombings carried out by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and appeared calculated to aggravate the sharp divisions between Arabs and Kurds, who are competing for control of Kirkuk and surrounding areas.<br />While sectarian tensions have quieted in much of the country, an ethnic fault line remains between Sunni Arabs and Kurds.<br />The area where the bombing occurred is one of the most heterogeneous in Iraq, with populations of Arabs, Kurds, and Turkmen.<br />The attack also seemed to send the message that despite claims by the American military and the Iraqi government that they have vanquished Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the extremists are still present and capable of doing enormous damage.<br />"The real objective is to sow division between the various communities and inflame passions among the extremists among them - of whom there are plenty in all the communities - and set them up against one another," said Joost Hiltermann, the director of the Istanbul office of the International Crisis Group and an expert on Kurdish politics.<br />"If it happened in a Kurdish restaurant, where there were Arabs eating, the Kurds will blame the Arabs and the Arabs will blame the Kurds for not protecting them," he said.<br />The attack tapped into the political tensions over the unresolved question of who should govern Kirkuk - Arabs, Kurds or Turkmen - and whether the city and surrounding areas should become part of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan.<br />In 2006, a bombing in Samarra destroyed part of a shrine that is holy to Shiites, though the area is predominantly Sunni Arab.<br />That set off a whirlwind of sectarian attacks and counter attacks that did not abate for nearly two years.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Panel on Iraqi detainees meets<br /></strong>By Campbell Robertson<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: A committee formed to oversee the transfer of detainees from American to Iraqi custody has met for the first time, the United States military said in a statement. Under the terms of the recently ratified security agreement, American forces must begin releasing detainees or transferring them to Iraqi custody on Jan. 1.<br />Attendees at the meeting, on Wednesday, included Barhim Saleh, Iraq's deputy prime minister, and General Raymond Odierno, commander of coalition forces in Iraq. American military officials said they would provide the Iraqi government with files on 15,000 detainees on the first day of each month. The Iraqis would then decide on a case by case basis to release them or have them transferred into Iraqi prisons.<br />Coalition forces are currently holding around 15,800 detainees, the military said, down from a high of roughly 26,000 a little more than a year ago.<br />In another development that underscored the still fragile security situation in some areas, the head of the provincial council in Diyala said Thursday that his province was far from ready for provincial elections scheduled for the end of January, and asked that they be postponed six months. He said that Sunni insurgent forces still dominated around a third of the province.<br />In Washington, at a speech at the Center for Strategic for International Studies on Wednesday, Ali al-Dabbagh, the Iraqi government spokesman, said Iraq welcomed the more diplomatic approach to Iran suggested by President-elect Barack Obama.<br />"If there is anything that happens or any conflict with Iran, Iraq will be the first loser," Dabbagh said. "That is why we are urging the new administration to have a proper dialogue with Iran." </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Report blames Rumsfeld for detainee abuses</strong><br />By Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti<br />Friday, December 12, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: A report released Thursday by leaders of the Senate Armed Services committee said that top Bush administration officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, bear major responsibility for the abuses committed by American troops in interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other military detention centers.<br />The report was issued jointly by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the panel, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican. The report represents the most thorough review by Congress to date of the origins of the abuse of prisoners in American military custody, and it explicitly rejects the Bush administration's contention that tough interrogation methods have helped keep the country and its troops safe.<br />The report also rejected previous claims by Rumsfeld and others that Defense Department policies played no role in the the harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and in other incidents of abuse.<br />The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the report says, "was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own" but grew out of interrogation policies approved by Rumsfeld and other top officials "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees."<br />By the time of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Rumsfeld had formally withdrawn approval for use of the harshest techniques, which he authorized in December 2002 and then ruled out a month later. But the report said that those methods, including the use of stress positions and forced nudity, continued to spread through the military detention system. It added that their use "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."<br />Most of the report, the product of an 18-month inquiry and interviews of more than 70 people by committee staff, remains classified. But the 29-page summary offers the clearest timeline to date linking the acts of Pentagon officials, including William Haynes II, the former Defense Department general counsel, to abusive treatment in the field.<br />Committee staff members said the report was approved by a voice vote without dissent, but only 17 of the committee's 25 members were present for the vote. McCain, who was tortured while being held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, has been an outspoken opponent of harsh interrogation tactics, but some other Republicans have defended such methods as legal and necessary.<br />Most of the facts in the report summary have been previously made public, notably at hearings the Senate committee held in June and September. But the report documents how the military training program called Surveillance, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, became a major source for interrogation methods as the Bush administration looked for tougher methods after the 2001 terrorist attacks.<br />The SERE training was based on methods used by "a ruthless, lawless enemy," Levin said in a statement. "The techniques were never intended to be used against detainees in U.S. custody," he said.<br />McCain called the adoption of SERE methods "inexcusable."<br />"These policies are wrong and must never be repeated," said McCain, who led the successful fight in Congress in 2005 to prohibit military interrogators from using coercive methods.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Book review: 'Unintended Consequences'</strong><br />Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />Unintended Consequences How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies By Peter W. Galbraith 203 pages. Simon & Schuster. $23.<br />In his compelling new book the scholar and former diplomat Peter W.Galbraith not only reminds us that the Iraq war has been a costly, bungled operation, but he also argues that the war has had the opposite effect of virtually everything that President Bush and his administration promised the American public it would have:<br />- A war intended to eliminate (what were later found to be non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq "ended up with Iran and North Korea much closer to having deployable nuclear weapons."<br />- A war intended to help combat terrorism has led to the recruitment of more terrorists and the spread of Al Qaeda to Iraq.<br />- A war intended to create a bulwark against the ayatollahs in Tehran turned into a "strategic gift to Iran" and the empowerment in Iraq of pro-Iranian Shiite theocrats.<br />- A war intended to make Israel more secure has made that country more vulnerable to threats from Syria, Iran and Hezbollah.<br />- A war intended to showcase U.S. power has ended up underscoring "the deficiencies of U.S. intelligence, the incompetence of American administration and the limitations on the American military."<br />- A war meant to boost U.S. global leadership "has driven U.S. prestige to an all-time low" over the last five years and alienated important allies like Turkey.<br />Galbraith makes a persuasive case for these arguments, using his firsthand observations on the ground in Iraq (as a staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later as a consultant for ABC News) and his extensive knowledge of the region to explicate the consequences that the American invasion has had on political and ethnic struggles within Iraq and on larger strategic alignments in the Middle East and wider world.<br />Certainly many readers will not agree with all his theories. He perversely contends, for instance, that the Iraqi exile and neoconservative favorite Ahmad Chalabi might have done "a respectable job running Iraq," since he was capable enough to help persuade the United States to get rid of his nemesis, Saddam Hussein, "when Iraq posed no threat to the United States." But, all in all, "Unintended Consequences" offers a lucid, pointed and often powerful deconstruction of the Bush administration's blunders in prosecuting the war.<br />As Galbraith sees it, critics of the war are wrong to focus on matters like the dismissal of the Iraqi army or the draconian de-Baathification decree, issued by L. Paul Bremer III, because such missteps, important as they are, obscure "the larger failure that was the product of incompetence, partisanship and an obsession with ideology over pragmatism."<br />The root of the problem, he says, was "the absence of presidential decision making": "The self-styled decider never decided the most critical questions about the future of Iraq" - like how to provide security in Baghdad when U.S. forces took it over or how a post-Hussein Iraq would be governed - "and worse, never knew there were critical matters that needed deciding."<br />Two things, Galbraith contends, "ensured defeat in the days that followed the U.S. takeover of Iraq" - namely the American failure to stop the looting of Baghdad, which "continued unchecked for at least six weeks" and "the decision, made three weeks after U.S. troops were already in Baghdad, to substitute an occupation government for an Iraqi government, and then to put together the occupation government in a slapdash manner with an unqualified American administrator at its head and a staff filled with unqualified Republican Party loyalists."<br />When it comes to assessing Iraq's future, Galbraith is deeply pessimistic, discounting what others have seen as more hopeful signs. He argues that Bush "has already surrendered Iraq to Iran and to the same undemocratic forces that we invaded Iraq to remove": "Iran's allies dominate Iraq's central government. Iraq is divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states and there are civil wars being fought between Sunnis and Shiites in the Arab parts. The United States has no chance of achieving what President Bush has defined as victory: a self-sustaining, democratic and unified Iraq."<br />And what of the surge? As Galbraith sees it, the surge and the Sunni Awakening have helped defeat Al Qaeda in Anbar, Salahadin and west Baghdad but have also undermined Iraq's unity by establishing a Sunni militia; and the Awakening, which is composed of Baathists, many of whom were part of the anti-American insurgency, could easily turn against the United States again or against the Iraqi government, particularly if America stops providing funds to it.<br />The "pretense that the surge is a success and that therefore the United States is winning the Iraq War," Galbraith contends, "is the opening salvo in a coming blame game as to who lost Iraq." He suggests that the surge has enabled Bush to "run out the clock on his term in office so as to avoid having to admit defeat" and that running out the clock serves the interests of the Republican Party, setting up a GOP story line for 2009: "When George W. Bush left office, America was winning the Iraq War. His successor - abetted by the Democratic Congress and the faithless American people - squandered the victory and is responsible for the consequences."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Ethiopia says AU peacekeepers want to quit Somalia</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />By Tsegaye Tadesse<br />African Union peacekeepers in Somalia have asked Ethiopian troops planning to leave the country at the end of the year to help them quit Mogadishu too, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said Thursday.<br />There are 3,200 soldiers from Uganda and Burundi guarding strategic sites in the capital, which has been the focus of a two-year Iraq-style insurgency by Islamist rebels battling the Horn of Africa nation's Western-backed interim government.<br />The withdrawal of the foreign forces could leave the door open for an insurgent assault.<br />Ethiopian troops have been supporting the administration, but Meles has become increasingly frustrated by feuding among its leaders, the financial cost of the operation and the absence of any serious, international effort to pacify Somalia.<br />Addis Ababa says it will withdraw its forces at the end of December, and Meles said the AU soldiers wanted to leave too.<br />"The African Union, Uganda and Burundi have all asked us to stay behind and provide protection for the safe passage of their troops," Meles told parliament.<br />"The AU troops in Somalia are our comrades in arms, we have responsibility to provide safe passage during their withdrawal."<br />Ethiopia's decision to pull out was final, he said, and he blamed the international community for failing to fund the AU mission, AMISOM, to its planned strength of 8,000 troops.<br />An Ethiopian withdrawal could create a power vacuum and leave Mogadishu open to a takeover by the Islamists, who now control most of the south and central regions and are camped on the outskirts of the city.<br />SHARIF CONDEMNS FIGHTING<br />The ill-equipped AU troops might be ill-placed to stop that, even if it were in their mandate. Ugandan and Burundian military spokesmen were not immediately available to comment.<br />Some residents were cheered Wednesday when moderate Islamist leader Sheikh Sharif Ahmed returned to Mogadishu for the first time in two years. His opposition faction is in U.N.-led talks with President Abdullahi Yusuf's government.<br />But the rebels remain deeply divided, and witnesses said clashes between other Islamist gunmen and pro-government forces killed at least 10 people in the city early Thursday.<br />"We attacked five government bases and even neared the presidential palace this morning," Sheikh Abdirahman Isse Adow, spokesman for the Islamic Courts, told Reuters.<br />He said his fighters had killed many Ethiopian soldiers, but there was no independent verification of that.<br />Experts say Sharif has little influence over Islamist hardliners including the al Shabaab group, which the United States accuses of having links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.<br />At a news conference, Sharif condemned the bloodshed and urged the opposition to unite.<br />"All Islamists must stop fighting and resolve their differences at the negotiation table," he reporters.<br />"We are very disappointed with those who claim jihad and attack Ethiopian troops who have already agreed to pull out."<br />A local rights group said Wednesday fighting had killed 16,210 civilians since the start of last year, when allied Somali-Ethiopian forces drove the Islamists from the capital.<br />About 1 million people have been uprooted, and 3.2 million -- more than a third of the population -- need emergency aid. The chaos has also helped fuel an explosion of piracy offshore.<br />(Additional reporting by Abdi Sheikh and Abdi Guled in Mogadishu; Writing by Daniel Wallis)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>U.S. proposes allowing attacks on pirates on land<br /></strong>By Neil MacFarquhar<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />UNITED NATIONS, New York: In an effort to curb piracy off Somalia's coast, the United States began circulating a UN Security Council resolution that would significantly beef up interdiction efforts by permitting foreign forces to attack pirate bases on land.<br />Until now all military action has been focused on naval measures. The proposal on Wednesday to carry the fight ashore is an escalation opposed by some countries skittish about sovereignty issues.<br />The U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, is expected at the UN Security Council early next week to engage other foreign ministers from member states on piracy, among other matters.<br />The U.S. envoy, Alejandro Wolff, said that given the threat the pirates pose to international navigation and to the government of Somalia, "We will leave no stone unturned in dealing with this issue." Any military action on land would be undertaken with the agreement of the Somalian government, he said.<br />The Somalian ambassador to the United Nations could not be reached for comment, but the beleaguered government has generally supported any action against the pirates.<br />Diplomats who have seen the U.S. draft said that it spoke of taking "all necessary measures ashore in Somalia," including air attacks, to prevent piracy. It also calls for the creation of a central clearing house in the region for information about the pirates and discourages the payment of ransom for captured ships.<br />Opposition came on two grounds. Some diplomats said the Security Council had not done enough to bring stability to Somalia, which they called the root cause of the problem.<br />U. Joy Ogwe, the Nigerian ambassador, said that while African states supported measures to fight piracy, "It is because we are not engaged on the ground that we see so much threat on the seas."<br />In addition, some opponents said that enough concessions had already been made in allowing foreign powers to encroach on Somalia's territorial waters.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>U.S. aims for more troops in Afghanistan</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />By Andrew Gray<br />Defence Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped a U.S. troop increase for Afghanistan would be mostly done by late spring, as his commander warned Afghan forces were three or four years from leading the fight.<br />Gates, visiting a dusty NATO base near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, criticised the United Nations and the European Union for not doing more to help stabilise the country.<br />There are some 65,000 international troops in Afghanistan, including more than 30,000 from the United States, struggling to combat worsening insurgent violence which has sparked alarm in Washington and other Western capitals.<br />U.S. Army Gen. David McKiernan, commander of NATO forces and most U.S. troops in Afghanistan, has requested four more combat brigades and support units -- a total of more than 20,000 troops.<br />One of those brigades is scheduled to deploy in January.<br />"Beyond January, we are hopeful that we will be able to send an additional two brigade combat teams by late spring," Gates, who will stay in his post after Barack Obama becomes U.S. president next month, told reporters at the NATO base.<br />Most of the extra troops are expected to go to southern Afghanistan, the scene of the fiercest insurgent violence.<br />Washington's ability to send more forces to Afghanistan depends largely on being able to pull some of its 150,000 troops out of Iraq, where security has improved dramatically but commanders caution the situation remains fragile.<br />Obama has pledged to make Afghanistan one of his top priorities and to send more troops there.<br />Seven years after U.S.-led forces ended Taliban rule in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, both Gates and McKiernan said a sustained commitment to Afghanistan by Washington and its allies was still needed for years to come.<br />"It's going to take us another three or four years to develop the army and continue to work on reforming and developing the police to have less reliance on international forces," McKiernan told reporters travelling with Gates.<br />Both Gates and McKiernan declined to say whether that meant 50,000 U.S. troops -- the likely total after the planned buildup is complete -- would need to stay in Afghanistan that long.<br />"DISPROPORTIONATE BURDEN"<br />At a town hall-style meeting with U.S. troops in a large tent on the base, Gates renewed criticism of other NATO nations for not providing more troops and other resources to Afghanistan.<br />He said that, without the United States, the alliance had some 2.5 million men and women under arms, yet had only about 30,000 of them in Afghanistan, which NATO leaders have declared their top operational priority.<br />"I think it's a real concern that the United States is having to bear a disproportionate part of the burden," he said.<br />Gates said other NATO nations should be able to supply many badly needed trainers for the Afghan police but he described as "trivial" the number provided by the European Union, which accounts for a large proportion of NATO members.<br />He also said international aid projects in Afghanistan remained poorly coordinated and the United Nations had not given its top official in the country, a former Norwegian foreign minister, enough support to tackle the problem.<br />"Unfortunately, in my opinion, the United Nations has not provided ambassador Kai Eide with the resources -- both people and money -- that he needs to do the job," he said.<br />Asked at the meeting how long the broader war with Islamist militants would last, Gates noted that America's last ideological struggle -- the Cold War -- went on for 45 years.<br />"How long this will go on is an unknown but I think it will be protracted," said Gates, who was a Soviet analyst at the CIA during the Cold War and later became head of the spy agency.<br />(Editing by Andrew Roche)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Israeli party tips right as its leader woos centrists</strong><br />By Ethan Bronner<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />JERUSALEM: Primary election results in Israel for the opposition Likud Party this week have put its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, in a bind: His list of parliamentary candidates is notably more hawkish than he is, making it harder for him to campaign on the promise to form a centrist coalition if elected.<br />Major victors in the primaries held Monday and Tuesday either reject territorial compromise with the Palestinians or are so skeptical of Palestinian intentions and capacities that they dismiss negotiations with them as a waste of time. Netanyahu has been assuring Arab, European and American officials that if, as voter surveys suggest, he is elected prime minister in February he will continue talks with the Palestinians and govern with a broad coalition.<br />"We see a list which might make it difficult for Netanyahu to govern as he had planned," said Zalman Shoval, his longtime foreign affairs adviser and a former ambassador to Washington, who did not win a secure place in the primaries. "The general public is not represented by the composition of the Likud list."<br />Analysis in the news media has been much harsher.<br />In a column called "Return of the Swamp," Nahum Barnea wrote Wednesday in Yediot Aharonot, a centrist newspaper, that Netanyahu was now "a hostage in the hands of the extreme right wing." In Maariv, a center-right daily newspaper, Shalom Yerushalmi, an analyst, called the damage to Netanyahu great.<br />The Jerusalem Post, a daily that leans right of center, said in an editorial: "Netanyahu urgently needs to tell his Knesset candidates, the voting public and Israel's allies abroad what his party now stands for. Otherwise others, to his detriment, will be only too ready to define it for him."<br />The hope among officials in Kadima, the centrist party leading the government and seeking to remain in power, is that wavering voters will move toward them from Likud as a result of the primaries.<br />But the first postprimary polls, conducted Tuesday evening and published in the newspapers Haaretz and Yediot Aharonot, showed no such effect. Of the 120 seats in Parliament, the Haaretz survey found, 36 would go to Likud, 27 to Kadima and 12 to Labor, with the rest to smaller parties; Yediot found the distribution to be 31 to Likud, 24 to Kadima and 11 to Labor. These were largely unchanged from last month.<br />Analysts are divided on whether or not the nature of the Likud list has sunk in and on whether voters are more focused on the economy, education and crime than on Middle East peace and would still prefer Likud.<br />"I think the divide between doves and hawks is less relevant because most Israelis don't see peace around the corner," said Ron Dermer, a close campaign aide to Netanyahu. "We are saying: 'Let's not get caught up in an all-or-nothing approach. Let's make steady progress on the ground with the Palestinians and on the domestic agenda.' "<br />Netanyahu has spoken of promoting an "economic peace" with the Palestinians, bolstering their prosperity and domestic institutions while slowly continuing political negotiations on a two-state solution based on yielding territory. Palestinian officials have expressed despair at such an approach.<br />For the Palestinians, as well as for outsiders who follow Israeli politics, it may be hard to think of Netanyahu as anything but a hawkish conservative when compared with Ehud Barak, leader of the Labor Party, and Tzipi Livni, the Kadima chief, who both say they will charge ahead on a peace deal. Netanyahu has repeatedly said he will not divide Jerusalem, a Palestinian demand for peace, or go beyond certain red lines regarding Israel's territorial security.<br />But Netanyahu and his aides have gone out of their way to note that when he was prime minister in the late 1990s he signed an agreement with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Hebron, the West Bank city. They say he hopes to draw Labor into his government to defang the left. Netanyahu brought several moderates into Likud in recent weeks as part of that effort.<br />Since previous hawks became more dovish once they were in power, some Israelis argue, the same will happen to whoever wins in February. They point to the change of heart that occurred in former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the departing prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and say Netanyahu will go down the same path.<br />But the selection this week of a number of Likud candidates seems likely to complicate that analysis. Attention has been focused on the election of Moshe Feiglin to the secure 20th spot on the Likud list as well as a number of others whom Feiglin's supporters helped choose, voting in a bloc.<br />Feiglin is among the most unyielding of West Bank settlers. He has advocated Israeli withdrawal from the United Nations and the cutoff of water and electricity to the Palestinian areas. He says that there is no Palestinian people and that there will never be a Palestinian state, and that Israel will hold onto everything it has now. In a television interview on Wednesday, he advocated annexing the West Bank and paying Palestinians to leave.<br />Netanyahu campaigned against Feiglin before the primaries, and his aides say that because of various rules governing the primaries, Feiglin's slot may move down before the February elections.<br />Still, analysts note, numerous others who are expected to be elected from the Likud Party, while not as hard-line as Feiglin, would make negotiations with the Palestinians hard to carry out and territorial compromise even harder.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Obama may offer Israel "nuclear umbrella"</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />JERUSALEM: U.S. President-elect Barack Obama plans to offer Israel a strategic pact designed to fend off any nuclear attack on the Jewish state by Iran, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday.<br />Quoting an unnamed American source close to Obama's administration, the Haaretz daily said Washington would pledge under the proposed "nuclear umbrella" to respond to any Iranian nuclear strike against Israel with a U.S. retaliation in kind.<br />Iran denies its nuclear programme has military designs. But virulent anti-Israel rhetoric from Tehran has spread fears that the Israelis, who are believed to have the Middle East's only atomic arsenal, could attack their arch-foe pre-emptively.<br />The latitude for unilateral Israeli action might be limited by a U.S. nuclear umbrella. Similar Cold War treaties -- NATO in Europe, the nuclear umbrella over Japan -- defended U.S. allies while obliging them to get Washington's nod for military moves.<br />Asked about the Haaretz report, an official in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government said only: "We do not engage in speculation whose source is unclear."<br />An aide to rightist opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads a race to replace Olmert in a February 10 election and who has said he believes Obama is serious about preventing Iran from attaining nuclear weapons, declined to comment on the report.<br />Speculation on the possibility of a U.S.-Israeli strategic pact was stirred two years ago, when President George W. Bush said in an interview with Reuters that his country would "rise to Israel's defence" in the face of Iranian threats.<br />Obama succeeds Bush in January. A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv said he could make no statement "on what a future administration's policy might or might not be."<br />Israel was founded partly as a haven for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, on the promise that Jews would now look to their own defence. Formally submitting to foreign protection could spell a major credibility crisis for the Israeli government.<br />(Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Charles Dick)</div><div><br /> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZeONDBX5cCFRGQhDecE8JgM25JN14nrubQ-zBGPGJlllmwlI6RLZhy7plkI8UstEE1fUOaWz4ZXd5pVZJkZ1kK2kaBaLdHBI_WvC3bAGJQiRwfmZ5GGm5lRQCI8CHgw5VOBf5AleYh1o/s1600-h/DSC02980.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278759586097309458" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZeONDBX5cCFRGQhDecE8JgM25JN14nrubQ-zBGPGJlllmwlI6RLZhy7plkI8UstEE1fUOaWz4ZXd5pVZJkZ1kK2kaBaLdHBI_WvC3bAGJQiRwfmZ5GGm5lRQCI8CHgw5VOBf5AleYh1o/s320/DSC02980.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>In Greece, a crisis decades in the making</strong><br />By Rachel Donadio and Anthee Carassava<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />ATHENS: Just four years ago, this ancient capital was remade for the summer Olympics by a new government that surged to power promising reform. Today, Athenians are faced with the worst unrest in decades.<br />As the capital slowly returned to its workday bustle on Thursday after days of violent protests following the shooting death by the police of a 15-year-old boy, the question on many minds was simply: What happened?<br />Or perhaps: What didn't happen?<br />For most Greeks, raised in a culture with a high tolerance for protest and disarray, it appeared that the Olympics were the anomaly, not the violence and government inertia on display here this week.<br />"The Olympics were a utopia," said Paraskievas Golfis, who was having coffee with his family in an upscale shopping mall that opened two weeks ago in a former Olympics venue here. "Greek reality is what we're living today."<br />A range of issues - economic stagnation, widespread corruption, a troubled education system, rising poverty, precarious security - were thrust to the fore this week as thousands of Greeks spilled onto the streets to protest against the government.<br />But were the riots a security situation handled badly or a social uprising waiting to happen?<br />Many demonstrations turned violent, guided by a relatively small group of self-styled anarchists. Although the government said it would not tolerate violence, it ordered the police not to use force to avoid further bloodshed. In the melee, hundreds of businesses were destroyed around the country, resulting in an estimated $1.3 billion in damage.<br />That even the peaceful demonstrations became so fierce speaks to the deep well of discontent in Greece today. Conversations with Athenians revealed a widespread feeling that they have been neglected - and this week abandoned - by a government they see as corrupt.<br />"The government just shows that it's disinterested," said Paraskievas Tilipakis, the manager of a shoe store in the mall. "We've lost our team spirit. That's why we're where we are today."<br />It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 2004, Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis and his center-right New Democracy party soared to power promising to push the country into the future after decades of Socialist rule.<br />It pulled off the Olympics, reduced the national debt and boosted employment, but troubles remained. In 2006, the government revised the country's gross domestic product up 25 percent after taking into account the underground economy.<br />Since narrowly winning re-election in 2007, Karamanlis's government has been beset by corruption scandals and criticized for its handling of forest fires that burned out of control and killed 80 in the summer of 2007.<br />If people were angry with the government before the protests this week - and angry at what they see as police brutality in the teenager's death - they are equally angry at the government's response.<br />"Greeks don't feel safe and secure. They don't trust that the police will protect them," said Flora Vamvokou, 32, who was sitting at a Starbucks in the mall with two colleagues from the housewares store where they work. "The president hasn't even come out to address the Greeks and assure them and try to instill some sense of calm."<br />Her colleague Nicole Tsoukalis added, "This isn't going to end here." Salaries remain fixed at around €700 a month, she said, and the cost of living is rising. All this adds fuel to the fire. "It's a revolution we're living," she said, "an uprising."<br />But in the Exarchia neighborhood surrounding the Polytechnic University, an anarchist stronghold, some said the situation was not so much a revolution as a security situation that had spiraled out of control.<br />After the boy's death on Saturday, the violent protests began.<br />"The first night there was a reaction met with no response by the government," said Dimitris, a clerk in the Stournari bookstore near the university who declined to give his last name for fear of reprisals. "That gave them further impetus - that's why the riots spread."<br />On a street of charred shops and burned-out cars, he said that anarchists had spared the shop this time but had routinely given it trouble. Still, he would not consider calling the police.<br />"If you call the police, they say, 'We won't come to Exarchia,"' Dimitris said.<br />Hundreds of self-styled anarchists have long occupied the Polytechnic University. But since the 1970s, when the police opened fire on students at the school, the police are banned from college campuses unless asked to do so by administrators. They have so far been reluctant, for fear the anarchists will burn the universities down, said Christos Kittas, the rector of Athens University.<br />Stathis Kalyvas, a political science professor at Yale University and the director of its Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence, said: "Greek society has changed enormously since the mid-'70s. At the time, it was poor, isolated and politically and socially repressed. It is now a wealthy, liberal European society."<br />Yet the student uprisings in the 1970s still loom large in the public imagination, and the Greek press continues to foster a climate of hostility toward the police.<br />While violence may not be welcome, the anarchists meet with some popular support.<br />"The bottom line, in my opinion, is that their hold on Greece can only be explained by the culture of tolerance toward them," Kalyvas said.<br />Although there were no large demonstrations on Thursday, small groups of militant youths targeted police stations around Athens.<br />"Things are a scale or two lower today," Panayotis Stathis, the National Police spokesman, said Thursday. "There is a gradual de-escalation, and that's how things will be going."<br />Yet students have announced more protests for Friday and Monday.<br />Asked whether they think the crisis will force change, Athenians inevitably say no.<br />"This is the reality we like because it doesn't seem like we're not doing anything to change it," said Golfis, at the mall. "This is what we like. This is who we are."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>A model home plate<br /></strong>By Doug Glanville<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />I'm Doug Glanville and my wife approved this message.<br />Being a major league baseball player has its perks, one of which is the wide-open access you can have to celebrities in all industries. I've met Mia Hamm, I've met "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, I've met Josh Grobin, I've met Michael Jordan. If you added up all the stars I have encountered, the sum of their 15 or more minutes of fame could make a heckuva grandfather clock.<br />O.K., you got me: Meeting a supermodel probably deserves special consideration. Although I met Tyra Banks in the most random way imaginable.<br />It all started with Wade Boggs. The Hall of Fame third baseman had an amazing career, mostly with the Boston Red Sox. He was a left-handed hitter who used to slap balls off the Green Monster like he was playing tennis with himself. Eventually he found himself approaching his 3,000th hit.<br />Let me give you an idea of how remarkable that number is: I ended up with 1,100 hits, and I was an everyday player for most of my nine major league seasons. One year I even had 204 hits in 150 games. Take what I did and multiply it by three. That is a lot of hits.<br />So, as only the best drama writers could script it, Wade Boggs stepped up to the plate as a member of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and got his 3,000th hit by homering into the right field stands. He galloped around the bases and when he reached home plate, he kissed it.<br />Now, I know the level of nastiness a home plate can attain. It is a smorgasbord of dirt, white chalk, spit and tobacco - and that's on a good day. So when columnist Jayson Stark of The Philadelphia Inquirer asked my opinion of Boggs's act of passion, I told him, "The only way I would kiss that filthy thing is if Tyra Banks's picture was on it." (Although even when I said it, I would have hesitated to pucker up.)<br />Well, somehow, that quote made it to The Los Angeles Times, and apparently Banks read it. All I know is that shortly after the season ended, I received a package with an authentic major league home plate inside ... and her picture airbrushed on it. An inscription read, "You don't have to wait 'til you hit 3,000, you can kiss home plate now!" Her birthday was coming up (it was just last week, in fact), and the plate was accompanied by an invitation to a party hosted by GQ magazine in New York.<br />I thought, "Not a bad way to spend an evening during the off-season."<br />Still, I didn't believe it. I wouldn't have put it past a teammate playing a practical joke, or even some person three degrees of separation from her entourage wanting to score points with her. But my agent's office was able to confirm that it was not a hoax, and that she had asked her people to find little ol' me.<br />Now I had to figure out what in the world she might want for her birthday.<br />I did a little research and found out that her favorite color was green. I was playing for the Phillies at the time, and we were known to have green hats for the St. Patrick's Day game during spring training. Seemed like the perfect gift.<br />So I rounded up my best friends from college and brought my own mini-entourage to her party. We were escorted to her V.I.P. room and there she was, greeting us with open arms. I believe one of my friends still hasn't washed the side of his face she kissed.<br />It was a star-studded night. From what I recall, the party also honored her as GQ's first African-American cover girl. Great D.J., too.<br />Meanwhile, I had broken out my A game: Inside her birthday bag, I made sure to include every possible way a human being could find me if she wanted to. I probably would have implanted a G.P.S. chip in my head and given her the tracking device if I had thought of it.<br />A couple of months later, on a quiet day at Phillies training camp, I was working out and decided to take a break and check my e-mail. There was one I didn't recognize, and not till I got to the signature line did it appear that it was, apparently, from Tyra. A little skeptically, I wrote back.<br />To my surprise, she replied. And over time, we e-mailed. She turned out to be an insightful and fun e-pal. She even sent me a handwritten thank-you note for the green hat.<br />I continue to watch the meteoric rise of her career, and I root for her. She seems to be capturing the hearts of America by her openness and her palpable connection to people, a couple of traits I noticed in the short time I interacted with her. And when I think about some of the more memorable events in my career, I will always think of that home plate with her picture on it and smile.<br />Still, despite my remark that started all this, I will never in a million years kiss that thing.<br />Doug Glanville played professional baseball from 1996 to 2004.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Japan learns from history: Focus on the future<br /></strong>By Martin Fackler<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />SAKAI, Japan: Despite the rapidly slowing economy in Japan, an army of cranes still moves busily above the archipelago of factories that Sharp is building in this gritty port.<br />The $10 billion complex, row upon row of hangar-size buildings, will produce up to 13 million liquid crystal display televisions a year by 2010.<br />If consumer demand does not rebound by then, industry analysts say, the project could end up being the world's most expensive industrial art installation. But the Japanese television maker calls it something else: one of the keys to its survival, particularly in hard times.<br />"We need to take a longer-term view," said Nobuyuki Sugano, an executive at Sharp. "If other companies slow down spending, we can stay ahead."<br />Across the globe, companies are battening down the hatches - reducing spending, laying off workers and pulling back on apparent luxuries, like research and development and expansion. In the United States, many people seem to support letting the American automobile industry collapse under the weight of its own lethargy.<br />Of course, Japanese companies are also cutting back: Sony announced Tuesday that it would eliminate 8,000 jobs. And Sharp said Friday that it would close two LCD output lines making small and mid-sized panels in Japan, shedding 380 temporary workers. But, armed with the lessons of their past, many Japanese companies are cutting back less than their competition, investing instead for the day the downturn ends, however long that takes to happen.<br />"Unless our sales dry up completely, we have to continue investing," said Kumiko Makino, a spokeswoman for Sanyo Electric, which has refused to cut investment in new battery and solar panel factories. "If we stop, our rivals and competitors will quickly catch up."<br />That urgency stems from the bitter lessons of the stagnant 1990s.<br />Strapped for cash, Japanese companies cut back on new factories and development, only to lose ground to hungry Taiwanese and Korean competitors.<br />While it is too early for numbers to be available, many economists and industry analysts say that Japanese companies have so far maintained higher levels of investments in production, research and development than companies in other countries.<br />Instead of mass layoffs or cuts in facilities, companies in Japan are cutting part-time staff. (Layoffs of full-time workers remain taboo.) They are also delaying or canceling fewer new factories than elsewhere.<br />One reason is that Japanese companies have war chests of cash built up during Japan's recovery earlier this decade. Another is that unlike in the United States, shareholders lack the power to demand that cash be paid out as dividends.<br />Indeed, if the powerful Japanese manufacturing sector has a secret to its success, it may be this willingness to reinvest a lion's share of profits back into new plants and research.<br />Japan's drive to build bigger, more advanced factories fueled an industrial construction boom that propelled the economic recovery earlier this decade. It also equipped the country with the most advanced factory production lines to try to defend its technological lead over the rest of Asia.<br />Japanese innovation also helped keep American stores and showrooms stocked with ever less expensive and more sophisticated gadgets and vehicles.<br />"Japan sees its future as more dependent on capex than Americans or Europeans do," said Robert Feldman, an economist at Morgan Stanley in Japan, using the industry jargon for "capital expenditure," investment in new factories and equipment.<br />Innovation grew from necessity, too. Feldman noted that with Japan's shrinking population, companies are more likely to try to fill the gaps by investing more heavily in labor-saving machinery, such as robots.<br />To be sure, the global slowdown has hammered Japan's corporate profits and sent its $5 trillion economy, the world's largest after the United States, into recession. And economists say harder times lie ahead, with the crucial holiday shopping season in the United States looking to be one of the weakest in memory.<br />That has led to spending cuts. Toyota, which earlier this month predicted its first annual earnings decline in nine years, has said that it will cut capital spending 5.4 percent this year. Blue chip companies including Fujitsu and Canon have also announced cuts in capital expenditure.<br />Meanwhile, Sony, which announced job cuts, and that it was slashing a third of its electronics investment, has become the General Motors of Japan. Sony, the creator of the Walkman and PlayStation, lost its reputation as an innovator to competitors like Apple and Nintendo. At the same time, it is being challenged on price by rivals from China and South Korea that make less expensive goods.<br />Over all, revised government figures released Tuesday reported that corporate spending on factories and other facilities fell 2 percent in the three months ending September from the previous quarter, for its third straight quarterly decline. The declines were a major factor in Japan's sliding into recession.<br />Tetsufumi Yamakawa, the chief Japan economist at Goldman Sachs, estimates that such investment will shrink 1.8 percent this year and 2.1 percent in 2009 before growing slowly.<br />"The pace of the slowdown in capex has been much sharper than we expected," Yamakawa said.<br />Still, Yamakawa and other economists say they expect corporate Japan to keep outspending the United States on new factories, even during the current downturn.<br />Last year, Japan spent 16 percent of its gross domestic product on new factories and production, Yamakawa said. While that is down from the high-growth 1980s, when Japan spent closer to 25 percent, the figure is still high when compared with 11 percent by the United States, he said.<br />But Japan also knows all too well the dangers of overcapacity. A key cause of the deflation, chronic price declines, that racked Japan's economy in the 1990s was an oversupply of production capacity, which forced companies to keep cutting prices. Also, electronics industry analysts warn that if global consumption keeps falling, even Japanese companies will eventually run out of cash.<br />"They can't keep this level of spending up forever," said Koya Tabata, an electronics analyst in Tokyo for Credit Suisse. But Tabata said that for now, corporate Japan outspent Asian rivals like Taiwan and South Korea.<br />Nowhere is that still formidable appetite for factory investment more apparent than along the shores of Osaka Bay, in western Japan. This former rustbelt region has seen a boom in construction of large new electronics and television plants, earning it the nickname Panel Bay.<br />Panasonic is building what it calls the world's largest plasma TV factory in Amagasaki, a $2.9 billion plant that will produce 12 million TVs a year when finished next year. Sanyo is also expanding two plants for lithium-ion batteries, the type used in laptops and cellphones.<br />Nor has the army of construction cranes missed a beat at the largest of the Panel Bay projects, Sharp's complex on the site of an abandoned steel furnace. Despite reducing its capital budget this year by 10 percent to $3.2 billion, Sharp says it is not slowing construction, which will also make solar panels.<br />When opened, the complex is expected to employ 10,000 people and add $11 billion a year in new economic activity. But there are growing fears in the city of Sakai itself that the complex could go the way of the steel furnace that preceded it.<br />"Sharp tells us not to worry, so we remain hopeful," said Takayuki Kanemoto, manager of the Sakai city hall's investment promotion division. "But we can't even tell anymore what will happen next week, much less in two years."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/11/business/bank.php">Sumitomo Mitsui to raise $5.8 billion</a> </div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div><strong>Senate Republicans doom auto bailout<br /></strong>By David M. Herszenhorn and David E. Sanger<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Amid stiff resistance in Senate, prospects fade for U.S. auto bailout<br />The prospects of a $14 billion government rescue of the U.S. auto industry seemed to vaporize Thursday as the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, spoke out forcefully against the bill, effectively dooming its chances despite the urgings of the White House.<br />McConnell, in a speech on the Senate floor, said that he and other Republicans had drawn a clear distinction between the Treasury Department's $700 billion economic stabilization plan, which they helped pass in October, and the proposal to aid U.S. automakers, which he said raised questions about which industries or individuals deserved help.<br />"A lot of struggling Americans are wondering where their bailout is," McConnell said.<br />Although McConnell voiced support for an alternative plan that was developed by Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, it seemed unlikely that there was any possibility of compromise at this late point in the year.<br />The House of Representatives on Wednesday night approved a plan, negotiated by congressional Democrats and the White House, to grant $14 billion in emergency short-term loans to General Motors and Chrysler and to require the companies to submit to broad government oversight directed by a so-called car czar who would be appointed by President George W. Bush.<br />Democrats have indicated that the vote on the auto rescue plan was almost certainly the last major action by the House in this Congress, and they have suggested that if Senate Republicans balk, the Bush administration may have no choice but to find alternative ways to prevent GM and Chrysler from financial collapse.<br />The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, challenged Republican senators earlier Thursday to propose an alternative to the measure approved by the House and to allow swift votes on the competing plans. McConnell answered that challenge a short while later, saying that the Republicans would oppose the White House plan.<br />The House had approved the taxpayer-financed auto rescue by a vote of 237 to 170 mostly along party lines. Voting in favor were 205 Democrats joined by 32 Republicans mainly from states heavily dependent on the auto industry; 150 Republicans and 20 Democrats voted against it.<br />But the more crucial test comes in the Senate. Some Republican senators have called for the automakers to enter bankruptcy, while others said there should be steeper concessions by labor unions and creditors.<br />For procedural reasons the measure needs 60 votes to advance in the Senate where Democrats currently hold a 50 to 49 majority, including two independents. There is one vacancy because of the resignation of President-elect Barack Obama.<br />Because of the procedural hurdles, Reid could not force a vote Thursday on the auto measures. If the Republicans refuse to allow immediate votes, Reid has laid the groundwork for a vote Friday morning that would end the discussion if Republicans refused to support the bill.<br />The White House on Thursday renewed its efforts to promote a rescue plan. "We believe that the economy is in such a weakened state right now that adding another possible loss of one million jobs is just something our economy cannot sustain at the moment," Dana Perino, chief spokeswoman for President Bush, said.<br />Obama sounded a similar theme.<br />"I understand people's anger and frustration at the situation our auto companies find themselves in today," Obama said during a news conference in Chicago. "I raised concerns about the health of our auto industry a year and a half ago, when I spoke to industry leaders in Detroit. I urged them to act quickly to adopt new technologies and a new business approach that would help them stay competitive in these changing times. And while they've failed to move quickly enough toward these goals, at this moment of great challenge for our economy, we cannot simply stand by and watch this industry collapse. Doing so would lead to a devastating ripple effect throughout our economy."<br />General Motors and Chrysler have said they cannot survive much longer without the federal aid, while Ford Motor, which is in better shape than its competitors, has said it will not seek the emergency loans.<br />As an amendment to the auto rescue plan, the House approved a measure that would require banks receiving assistance from the Treasury's $700 billion economic stabilization program to detail new lending activity each quarter.<br />Bill Vlasic contributed reporting.Sweden to help carmakers<br />Sweden said Thursday that it would provide credit guarantees and emergency loans to its ailing automobile industry but that it had no plans to buy stakes in Volvo or Saab, Reuters reported from Stockholm.<br />The center-right government said that it would provide up to 20 billion kronor, or $2.5 billion, in collateral-backed credit guarantees, directed toward the manufacture of more environmentally friendly vehicles, as well as rescue loans of up to 5 billion kronor.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Germany stands behind joint EU stimulus plan, Merkel says<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: Germany said on Thursday that it was fully behind an EU-wide stimulus package aimed at pulling the bloc out of recession but insisted it would not follow others in "tossing around billions" to ease the crisis.<br />The EU summit in Brussels will be dealing with deepening economic problems and also aims to put the EU in the lead of the global fight against climate change. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France urged leaders to set aside differences and agree on a package of moves to cut the bloc's emissions by a fifth by 2020 from 1990 levels.<br />The 27-nation bloc wants to agree on a €200-billion, or $260-billion, stimulus package to avert a deepening recession, but Germany -- the largest economy in Europe -- has doggedly resisted calls on it to contribute much more than planned.<br />"We support the view" of the European Commission "that we need to provide 1.5 percent of GDP for the stimulus package to strengthen the economy," Merkel told reporters as she arrived for the two days of talks.<br />"Germany is aware of its responsibility as Europe's biggest economy and Germany will also look at what we may have to do," she said, repeating earlier suggestions it might top up a first national package worth €32 billion.<br />But Berlin remains at odds with others like Britain on how to rescue a European economy heading sharply into recession after the worst credit crunch in 80 years, insisting it will not follow them with hefty cuts to value added tax that would damage its budget.<br />In an interview with Newsweek magazine, the German finance minister Peer Steinbrück singled out Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain for abandoning fiscal prudence and switching to policies that he said would saddle a generation with debt.<br />"The speed at which proposals are put together under pressure that don't even pass an economic test is breathtaking and depressing," Steinbrück said in the interview, published on the magazine's Web site on Wednesday.<br />Britain is to pump £20 billion into the economy to 2010 with tax cuts and £3 billion of capital spending. Germany has cited plans worth €31 billion over two years but with a budget impact of just €10.9 billion to 2012.<br />EU leaders aim to agree how to reach targets of slashing carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and winning 20 percent of the bloc's energy from renewable sources such as wind and solar power by that date ahead of global talks next year on a successor to the Kyoto agreement from 2012.<br />The talks take on a particular importance, coming just over a month before Barack Obama takes over in the White House - a change in leadership many European leaders hope will produce closer cooperation on issues such as climate change. "Europe has no choice other than to reach agreement," said Sarkozy, who wants an accord on the climate package to crown his six months in the chair of the rotating EU presidency.<br />A French-backed proposal for a deal sought to ease the shock for heavy polluters by protecting steel, cement, chemicals, paper and other industries from the cost of buying permits to emit carbon dioxide from the EU's flagship emissions trading scheme.<br />If that allays the concerns of countries such as Germany and Italy, negotiations will switch to bargaining with eastern European states over how much money they need to accept a proposal that will punish their coal-dependent power sectors.<br />Poland's demand for coal plants to get 70 percent of their emissions permits free in 2013, paying for them fully by 2020, had been accepted in the draft, seen by Reuters.<br />Meanwhile, EU officials were upbeat on chances of persuading Ireland to hold a new referendum next year on the Lisbon Treaty of EU reforms which Irish voters rejected in June over concerns about a loss of sovereignty and Irish influence in Brussels.<br />In the most explicit acknowledgement yet by Dublin that it could hold a new referendum, Foreign Minister Micheál Martin said such a vote could take place if Ireland won assurances on keeping a permanent seat on the European Commission and that its military neutrality would not be undermined.<br />Martin said a draft accord circulated by France addressed Irish demands for a guarantee of one seat on the European Commission and that its traditional military neutrality would not be undermined.<br />"Work remains to be completed with our European partners over the coming months and any second referendum is conditional on satisfactory conclusion of that work," he said in the clearest reference yet by Dublin to a possible re-vote.<br />The draft document, obtained by Reuters, includes additional assurances on taxation policy, workers' rights and other issues which contributed to Irish voters' rejection of the treaty, and commits Ireland to ratifying the treaty by end-2009.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/11/business/boeing.php">Boeing delays Dreamliner deliveries again</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/11/business/12bank.php">Bank of America plans 35,000 job cuts over 3 years</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/11/business/usecon.php">U.S. trade deficit widened in October</a> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Will bankers be prosecuted?</strong><br />By Floyd Norris<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />NEW YORK: The Wall Street backlash is under way. If it grows strong enough, it could end with some bankers facing criminal trials.<br />As with most searches for scapegoats, the process will not be entirely fair. But efforts by the big banks to point the finger of blame elsewhere - to Fannie Mae for guaranteeing bad loans, or to the accountants for requiring the banks to admit they owned assets that were not worth much anymore - seem to be failing at the same time public anger is growing.<br />One precipitating event is the failure of the huge bank bailouts to do anything for the economy. "Lenders who receive public funds should use those funds to lend," said Christopher Dodd, the chairman of the Senate banking committee. He complained that banks were "hoarding capital" and buying other banks, rather than lending it to people who need credit.<br />The administration of President George W. Bush had good reason not to impose strong restrictions on the recipients of bailout money; it had to find a way to recapitalize the banking system without putting a stigma on those who took the money. Strict requirements on how the money could be used would have scared away too many healthy institutions.<br />But the bankers should have known that there was a risk of backlash. Few Americans ever dreamed of making what most investment bankers took for granted. In a year of losses, why should there be any bonuses at all for executives? Talk of the need to keep valued executives does not play well when those are the same executives who got the banks into this mess.<br />A functioning banking system is necessary for a modern economy to grow, but it is not sufficient. The bank bailout was not designed to rescue the economy, but that fact was not exactly emphasized by advocates.<br />Washington took longer than it should have to realize the depth of the economic troubles, treating this as a U.S. credit crisis rather than the worldwide recession it was fast becoming. The bailout was the only action in town, and people not unreasonably assumed it was supposed to make life on Main Street better. It hasn't, and that has roused resentments.<br />If public pressure rises to prosecute one or more bankers, there is the not-unimportant question of what charges could be proven. The bosses at Tyco stole from the company, and those at Enron put out false financial statements that violated accounting rules. WorldCom lied about the nature of its spending, and thus turned losses into profits.<br />In this mess, on the other hand, there is every indication that many top bankers did not understand the risks they were taking, and were stunned when the losses materialized. That may have been stupid - another reason to think bonuses are inappropriate - but stupidity is not a crime. As a U.S. District Court judge wrote this month in considering claims against the officers and directors of the mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, "the federal securities laws do not create liability for poor business judgment or failed operations."<br />But that same opinion, by Mariana Pfaelzer, a judge in Los Angeles, offers a road map for any prosecutor who wants to make such a case, even if there is no proof that company executives knew their financial statements understated the losses and risks they were facing.<br />The Countrywide complaint, she wrote, presents "the extraordinary case where a company's essential operations are so at odds with the company's public statements that many statements that would not be actionable in the vast majority of cases" can form the basis of a complaint.<br />"For example," she wrote, "descriptions such as 'high quality' are generally not actionable; they are vague and subjective puffery not capable of being material as a matter of law."<br />But in this case, she said, the complaint claims "Countrywide's practices so departed from its public statements that even 'high quality' became materially false and misleading; and that to apply the puffery rule to such allegations would deny that 'high quality' has any meaning."<br />It should be noted that the judge's opinion did not find Countrywide had violated securities laws. She just kept alive a suit claiming that the company's executives acted illegally when they falsely claimed to be following tough underwriting standards in making mortgage loans.<br />She was not making new law. Responding to the last banking crisis in this country, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a bank's puffery defense that had been accepted by a lower court judge.<br />"If a defendant represents that its lending practices are 'conservative' and that its collateralization is 'adequate,' the securities laws are clearly implicated if it nevertheless intentionally or recklessly omits certain facts contradicting these representations," the court wrote. "By addressing the quality of a particular management practice, a defendant declares the subject of its representation to be material to the reasonable shareholder, and thus is bound to speak truthfully."<br />That opinion was written about what a bank said in 1990, shortly before its loan losses went through the roof and its stock price went through the floor. But it has a 2008 ring to it. "From a risk management perspective," said a senior Lehman Brothers executive, a few months before the firm collapsed, "we continued to operate in our disciplined manner we're known for."<br />All these cases were civil cases brought by private parties. So far it is not clear that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission would bring a civil case on such routine-sounding puffery as claiming that lending practices are conservative and disciplined, let alone that the Justice Department would file a criminal case with no more evidence of misconduct than that.<br />But if the anger against Wall Street grows large enough, that could change. The executives may not have understood how badly they were hurting their banks, but perhaps it can be proved they knew, or should have known, that claims of disciplined and conservative lending practices were woefully wrong.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/11/business/iea.php">Oil demand expected to drop this year, but gain in 2009</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/11bair.php">Fighting foreclosures, FDIC chief draws fire</a> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>A crucial lack of trade financing</strong><br />By James SaftReuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />LONDON: Trade financing, a basic lubricant for the global economy, is becoming much more expensive and tougher to get, accelerating an already harrowing downturn.<br />Banks are reluctant to allocate scarce capital to trade financing, which finances cross-border buying and selling, and are very wary about being caught short by defaults by other banks that write letters of credit or by the importers and exporters themselves.<br />While not the prime cause of the slowdown in global trade, tough conditions for the obscure but crucial corner of finance that fuels the dispatch and delivery of goods and commodities are sand in the wheels.<br />The stunningly bad trade figures from China underline the problem. China had been expected to show double-digit growth in trade last month compared with November 2007, but the data showed exports falling 2.2 percent from a year earlier and imports sliding 17.9 percent.<br />"Global demand for Chinese products is vanishing," said Gene Ma, an economist at China Economic Monitor in Beijing. "Secondly, the credit freeze in importing countries has made it hard for Chinese exporters to sell abroad. I heard some Chinese exporters had to cancel shipments as they were worried about getting paid by their buyers."<br />Chinese banks have been very nervous about accepting letters of credit from abroad, making it tougher for imports to China to get the needed financing. China and the United States pledged $20 billion to promote trade with developing countries last week, but that is a tiny balm for a huge market.<br />The rule of thumb is that 90 percent of global trade requires financing. Karl Alomar, chief executive of China Export Finance, estimates that letters of credit, which had accounted for about 70 percent of Chinese trade financing in 2007, might now only have 30 percent to 40 percent of the market, in part because of concerns about international banks.<br />Many deals that would otherwise go through will inevitably be scrapped, while many more will be less profitable. The World Trade Organization's director general, Pascal Lamy, said in November that some transactions that had charged 80 basis points over bank benchmark rates a few months ago were now charging 500 basis points.<br />It may well take concerted international action by central banks and governments to bring trade financing back to life. But there are many other calls on governments for capital and guarantees and it could prove politically easier to prioritize "purely domestic" issues, like the U.S. bailout proposal for automakers, over trade.<br />For the weakest importers, like the British retailer Woolworths, denial of trade financing could hasten a death spiral.<br />"Woolworths is one of the better examples of that," said Sandy Chen, a banking analyst at Panmure Gordon. "Because they couldn't get the credit insurance to effectively fund their pre-Christmas inventory stocking, they couldn't put orders in to shippers in the Far East. Because shippers couldn't get the assurances on whether or not Woollies could pay, they wouldn't ship."<br />Woolworths had to put its retailing and distribution business under creditor protection.<br />Even putting such buyer-shipper risks aside, trade financing is vulnerable in the current situation. Banks and, crucially, many nonbank finance companies are having difficulties raising funds and are being required to pay more for them. They are also under considerable pressure to channel their resources into areas that either have a big payoff or, like mortgage lending, win points with their government regulators and shareholders.<br />Trade financing, though vital, doesn't check off many of those boxes. It is also fairly easy to pull back from without enormous immediate repercussions for the banks, as it involves short-term transactions.<br />Difficulties with trade financing have also contributed to a 94 percent decline in the price of storage space for dry commodities on large ships.<br />The Baltic Exchange's chief sea freight index, which tracks fees for shipping resources like coal and iron, is close to a 21-year low.<br />The chilling thing about the trade financing situation is not its impact in isolation but the way it illustrates how easy it is to send a very highly integrated global economy into reverse.<br />"If there are significant increases in perceived counterparty default risks leading to a shutdown of one part of the supply chain, it rapidly moves on to the rest of the chain," Chen said. "It's a cycle that feeds on itself."<br /> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSVGzUl85e2Duezl0ca8vN8VPHJipgzY7Hn6NXX-CB9z0J7Wz_ZVl1meFnjYREbQ0Yvx3yxpIu0xAxMgGUZi_J4NEOuejDBFNMTmqxH1p3EyNU_aYOIh32mYld1C_yaaXZVY6haP06VT0/s1600-h/DSC02983.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278759581296379234" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSVGzUl85e2Duezl0ca8vN8VPHJipgzY7Hn6NXX-CB9z0J7Wz_ZVl1meFnjYREbQ0Yvx3yxpIu0xAxMgGUZi_J4NEOuejDBFNMTmqxH1p3EyNU_aYOIh32mYld1C_yaaXZVY6haP06VT0/s320/DSC02983.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>A new ordeal bleeds Zimbabwe<br /></strong>By Celia W. Dugger<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />HARARE, Zimbabwe: Cholera swept through the five youngest children in the Chigudu family with cruel and bewildering haste. On a recent Saturday, they chased one another through hardscrabble streets that flow with raw sewage, and chattered happily as they bedded down for the night.<br />The onslaught of diarrhea and vomiting began around midnight. Relatives frantically prepared solutions of water, sugar and salt for the youngsters, aged 20 months to 12 years, to drink. But by morning, they were limp and hollow-eyed. The disease was draining their bodies of fluid.<br />"Then they started to die," said their brother Lovegot, 18. "Prisca was first, second Sammy, then Shantel, Clopas and Aisha, the littlest one, last."<br />A ferocious cholera epidemic, spread by water contaminated with human excrement, has stricken more than 16,000 people across Zimbabwe since August and killed more than 780. Health experts are warning that the number of cases could surpass 60,000, and that half the country's population of 12 million is at risk.<br />The outbreak is yet more evidence that the most fundamental public services in Zimbabwe - from water and sanitation to public schools and hospitals - are shutting down, much like the organs of a severely dehydrated cholera victim.<br />Zimbabwe's once-promising economy, disastrously mismanaged by President Robert Mugabe's government, has been spiraling downward for almost a decade, but residents here say the free fall has gained frightening velocity in recent weeks. Most Zimbabwean schools, which were once the pride of Africa, producing a highly literate population, have virtually ceased to function as teachers, whose salaries no longer even cover the cost of the bus fare to work, quit showing up.<br />With millions enduring severe and worsening hunger, and cholera spilling into neighboring countries, there are rising international calls for Mugabe to go after 28 years in power. But he only seems to be digging in, and even declared Thursday that the cholera epidemic had ended, just a day after the World Health Organization warned that the outbreak was grave enough to pose "serious regional implications."<br />Water cutoffs are common and prolonged here, but last week the taps went dry in virtually all of the capital's densely packed suburbs, where people most needed clean drinking water to wash their hands and food, essential steps to containing cholera. On rutted streets crowded with out-of-school children and jobless adults, piles of uncollected garbage mounted and brown sludge burbled from burst sewer lines.<br />The capital's two largest hospitals, sprawling facilities that once would have provided sophisticated care in just such a crisis, had largely shut down weeks earlier after doctors and nurses, their salaries rendered virtually worthless by the nation's crippling hyperinflation, simply quit coming to work.<br />Inflation officially hit 231 million percent in July, but John Robertson, an independent economist in Zimbabwe, estimates that it has now surged to an astounding 8 quintillion percent - that is an 8 followed by 18 zeros.<br />The situation has deteriorated to such a degree that soldiers - Mugabe's enduring muscle - rioted last week on the streets of the capital, breaking windows and looting stores, after waiting days in bank lines without being able to withdraw their meager salaries from cash-short tellers. A midlevel officer who participated in the mayhem, but declined to be identified for fear of prosecution, said troops were enraged that they could no longer afford to buy food or send their children to school.<br />"As we talk, children of chefs are in private schools learning while ours are playing in dusty roads," he said bitterly, using the local term for the people in power.<br />Rumors about this extraordinary unrest in the army's ranks have circulated feverishly, with some speculating that the rioting was staged to justify imposing a state of emergency. Others hoped that it finally signaled the beginning of the end for Mugabe.<br />Still, the Mugabe regime's ability to clamp down on dissent seems intact. The police quelled the riot. Sixteen soldiers now face courts-martial. Beyond that, some 20 opposition party activists and human rights workers have recently disappeared. Last week, armed men abducted a well-known human rights activist, Jestina Mukoko, at dawn while she was barefoot, still in her nightgown and bereft of her eyeglasses, and as her teenaged son looked on helplessly.<br />Analysts have long predicted that Mugabe's hold on power - which he has refused to loosen even since September, when he signed a power-sharing deal with his nemesis, the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai - would be broken only when the economy completely imploded and daily life became intolerable.<br />But as the endgame of the octogenarian Mugabe's rule plays out, the human tragedies mount.<br />In a country that already lays claim to the terrible distinction of having the second-highest proportion of orphans in the world - one in four children have lost one or both parents - the closure of schools and hospitals is hitting these most vulnerable children mercilessly.<br />Aisha Makombo, 15, has been raising her 11-year-old sister, Khadija, since their mother died of AIDS last year. An expressive girl with a soft, round face, Aisha is HIV-negative, but she has been struggling to get drug treatment for Khadija, who is now sick with AIDS.<br />She took her little sister - so stunted that she appears half her actual age - to Parirenyatwa Hospital, the largest referral hospital in the country, last year, but crucial test results needed to qualify Khadija for life-saving medications were inexplicably misplaced. On a later visit, Aisha was told the machine that performs the tests was broken. Now the hospital is virtually closed. Aisha said she was referred to private doctors who demand payment in South African rand or American dollars, but the girls have no money.<br />Aisha's eyes filled with tears as she explained that she had been able to obtain only cotrimoxazole, an antibiotic used to treat opportunistic infections, for her little sister.<br />Aisha used to escape the sadness of her life by going to school, but two months ago the teachers at her high school stopped showing up.<br />"She didn't bid us farewell. She just left," Aisha said of her math teacher, the one she misses most of all. "At first, we thought she would come back, but then we gave up hope."<br />Aisha now scrambles to barter her labor for food, while her little sister, too weak to work, attends a small school run by a nonprofit group. Last week, Aisha started a four-day job, bent over in a field, readying it for planting. In exchange, she was to get two pounds of flour and a bottle of cooking oil, as well as a shirt and blouse for Khadija.<br />The girls pray together each night before they sleep in the tiny, grubby, windowless room they share. The small house belongs to their grandfather, but he admits that it is Aisha who provides the food for him and her 45-year-old uncle, who sometimes steals the cornmeal she earns, as well as the girls' clothes to sell secondhand.<br />Yet the girls say they cling to their dreams. Aisha's is to be a doctor, Khadija's a bank teller, each hungering for what the sisters do not have - health and money for medicine and food.<br />Zimbabwe has one of the world's highest rates of HIV infection, and now a raging cholera crisis. But with the economic collapse decimating revenues needed to run the country's collapsing public health systems, mortality rates among cholera victims here are five times higher than in other countries, public health experts said.<br />Mugabe's government - in its pursuit of power and money - has also contributed to both catastrophes, analysts say.<br />Earlier this year, the government jeopardized $188 million in aid from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by taking $7.3 million the organization had donated and spending it on other, unrelated expenses. Only at the eleventh hour, under threat that the money would be withheld, did the government reimburse the Global Fund for the missing money.<br />And two years ago, the government took control of the Harare water and sewer systems from the opposition-controlled city council, depriving the local government of a crucial source of revenue to keep services functioning.<br />"The real motive was to dilute the influence of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and cripple them financially," said Justice Mavezenge, an officer with the Combined Harare Residents Association, a civic group.<br />Last week, even Mugabe's mouthpiece, the Herald newspaper, castigated the state-run water authority for running out of chemicals to purify the Harare water supply - chemicals it said could have been trucked in from South Africa in less than 24 hours.<br />The United Nations Children's Fund and international donors have stepped into the void. They have begun trucking 50 tankers of fresh water into the most densely settled suburbs and will be providing water-treatment chemicals for the city over the next four months, said the Unicef acting country director, Roeland Monasch.<br />But some aid officials fear the epidemic will be impossible to contain because of the failing water and sanitation systems in places like Budiriro, the Harare suburb where the Chigudu children died and where half the cases in the epidemic have occurred.<br />"We're not going to be able to control it," said one aid agency adviser, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution. "The likely scenario is that people who get sick in places like Budiriro will go home for the festive season and you'll get flash points all over the rural areas."<br />Cholera stole the five Chigudu children in just two days, on Nov. 17 and 18, and the grandmother and aunt who helped care for them died days later. Their father, who returned home just hours after the last of his children died, got his first inkling of unspeakable calamity when his youngest ones were not there to clamber all over him as he walked in the door.<br />"I will never get my children back," he said.<br />The death toll mounts each day. Chipo and Tecla Murape rushed their orphaned 5-year old niece, Moisha, to the clinic in Chitungwiza, a city just south of Harare, last week. Nurses told the family the veins in the girl's arms had collapsed because she had lost so much fluid. No doctor ever saw her, her relatives said, and the nurses never hit a vein. Moisha, a shy, but friendly girl, instead drank rehydration fluids.<br />Throughout the day, she complained of a terrible thirst and a painful stomachache. On the advice of clinic workers, her aunts did not even hold her hand as she lay dying, for fear of infection. After night fell, the nurses said there was nothing more they could do and suggested that Moisha's relatives take her to the city's hospital, some four kilometers, or two and a half miles, away.<br />But there was no ambulance. Tecla Murape, 42, swaddled Moisha to her back and set off hurriedly for the hour-long walk, her heart pounding with worry. Under a dark, moonless sky, she took a shortcut through a maize field, leaping across yet another putrid sewage spill. By the time they arrived, Murape's clothes were soaked with Moisha's watery diarrhea. Hours later, Moisha passed away.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Daring young women are on the curl of a new era</strong><br />By Matt Higgins<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />HALEIWA, Hawaii: In July, Christy Manuel arrived at the United States Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, California, fed a parking meter for 20 minutes of time and walked to the shore where her daughter Malia, 14, was competing in a quarterfinal heat.<br />"I didn't expect to be there all day," Christy said.<br />But then Malia Manuel upset the former world champion Sofia Mulanovich, 25, to advance, sending her mother back to the meter.<br />"The guy was giving me a ticket," she said. "I go, 'Whoa, we're still here.' "<br />Malia, now 15, of Kauai, Hawaii, won two more heats that day to become the youngest champion since the Open began in 1959. Coco Ho, 17, was second.<br />Those two teenagers belong to a new generation of women who are shaking up the professional surfing establishment. Most are still in high school and remain a few years from competing full-time for prize money. But with a combination of powerful moves and progressive aerials, they have signaled a new era of performance in the sport.<br />"It's definitely a changing of the guard in women's surfing," said Wayne Bartholomew, president of the Association of Surfing Professionals, the sanctioning body that runs the men's and women's professional tours.<br />In November, Carissa Moore, 16, won the Reef Hawaiian Pro at Haleiwa, on Oahu, by defeating the seven-time world champion Layne Beachley in the final matchup.<br />"We're seeing the likes of Carissa Moore blow minds with her tailslides and the like," said Beachley, 36, who will retire from full-time competition after the Billabong Pro Maui, which began Wednesday.<br />"I've never landed an aerial in my life," Beachley said. "So I feel like I'm retiring at just the right time."<br />Moore, of Honolulu, and her generation have looked to the men's ranks for inspiration. "We're maybe experimenting with our surfing a little bit, trying different things and really looking at what the guys are doing," she said.<br />Manuel said she regularly surfed with boys back at her home break on Kauai. "It's made me stronger, for sure, because I just grew up surfing with all my bros," she said.<br />The new generation came of age at a time when women's surfing has gained in popularity.<br />"When I started, it wasn't really acceptable to be a woman in the water," Beachley said. "Whereas now it's actually encouraged, accepted and respected."<br />That is true not only in Hawaii, but worldwide. The next generation includes Courtney Conlogue, 17, of Santa Ana, California; and the Australians Sally Fitzgibbons, 17, and Stephanie Gilmore, 20, who clinched her second consecutive women's world title last week at the Roxy Pro.<br />"What's happening in women's surfing is pretty much the most exciting thing in surfing right now," Bartholomew said. "There's going to be unbelievable rivalries developing through the years. The actual performance levels are just going through the roof."<br />In competition, the contrast between the new school and the veterans can be striking.<br />"I guess what's different is in a heat we're trying to combine power and flow and speed and all these different things," Moore said. "And also at the same time add a little flair and a couple different tricks and stuff."<br />Some note differences in attitudes, too. During the final of the Reef Hawaiian Pro last month, Ho dropped in on a wave Beachley was surfing, cut her off and launched an aerial.<br />Ho was cleared of any wrongdoing by the judges. But the move rankled Beachley, who believed it deprived her of a potential winning wave and demonstrated a lack of respect.<br />"I think it's great that they're taking it to world champs and challenging us," Beachley, a native of Australia, said. "But I just think it's a level of immaturity and insecurity if you have to resort to tactics like that."<br />Moore defended Ho and her fellow teenagers, saying: "I actually read a lot of different comments that said it seems like this generation is aggressive. They are doing things that aren't cool. I was like, wow. I think most of it is just what you do. It's part of being a competitor."<br />Moore said of Beachley: "We all have a lot of respect for her. And she's a legend. But when you're in a heat, you have your competitive hunger."<br />Rather than being shunted aside, Beachley said, she believes that now is the time for her to relinquish her role as a caretaker for women's surfing and make way for the youngsters.<br />She will continue to compete in select events and run her signature surfing event, the Beachley Classic, held on Manly Beach in Sydney, Australia, each October, which offers the richest prize purse on the women's professional tour.<br />"The talent of these young girls, and also the tenacity and the hunger, gives me the confidence to leave it in their hands," Beachley said.<br />For now, Moore appears uncomfortable speaking on behalf of her sport.<br />"I don't know if I'll ever be that," she said about becoming an ambassador for women's surfing. "It would definitely be an honor."<br />Still, she has proved to be a leader in other ways. She left her sponsor, the surf apparel maker Roxy, to sign deals with Nike 6.0 and Red Bull in November. A representative from Nike declined to discuss the value of the contract. But a professional women's surfer being coveted by mainstream sponsors has symbolic meaning for the sport.<br />Despite her new deals, Moore is still a few years away from becoming a full-fledged professional. A junior at the private Punahou School in Honolulu, she plans to complete her high school education first.<br />"The school part is really, really important," she said. "It mostly keeps me grounded and you always have something to lean back on in the future."<br />And there are lessons with applications to surfing, too.<br />"In science we're learning about evolution," she said. "Surfing is survival of the fittest. We've got to adapt, evolve, just stay in the top."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*************************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Executions in Congo underscore failure of UN peacekeeping force<br /></strong>By Lydia Polgreen<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />KIWANJA, Congo: At last the bullets had stopped, and François Kambere Siviri made a dash for the door. After hiding all night from firefights between rebels and a government-allied militia over this small but strategic town, he was desperate to get to a nearby latrine.<br />"Pow, pow, pow," said his widowed mother, Ludia Kavira Nzuva, recounting how the rebels killed her 25-year-old son just outside her front door. As they abandoned his bloodied corpse, she said, one turned to her and declared, "Voilà, here is your gift."<br />In little more than 24 hours, at least 150 people would be dead, most of them young men, summarily executed by the rebels last month as they tightened their grip over parts of eastern Congo, according to witnesses and human-rights investigators.<br />And yet, as the killings took place, a contingent of about 100 United Nations peacekeepers was just a few minutes away, struggling to understand what was happening outside the gates of its base. The peacekeepers were short of equipment and men, UN officials said, and they were focusing on evacuating frightened aid workers and searching for a foreign journalist who had been kidnapped. Already overwhelmed, officials said, they had no intelligence capabilities or even an interpreter.<br />The peacekeepers said they had no idea that the killings were taking place until it was all over.<br />The executions in Kiwanja are a study in the unfettered cruelty meted out by the armed groups fighting for power and resources in eastern Congo. But the events are also a textbook example of the continuing failure of the world's largest international peacekeeping force, which has a mandate to protect the Congolese people from brutality.<br />In this instance, the failure came from a mix of poor communication and staffing, inadequate equipment, intelligence breakdowns and spectacularly bad luck, said Lieutenant Colonel H.S. Brar, the commander of the Indian peacekeepers based in Kiwanja.<br />But the killings and the stumbling response to the rebel advance were symptomatic of problems that have plagued the UN peacekeeping force in Congo for years, said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, who investigated the slayings this month. The rebel onslaught was even led by a commander who is wanted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court, she said.<br />"Kiwanja was a disaster for everyone," Van Woudenberg said. "The people were betrayed not just by rebels who committed terrible war crimes against them but by the international community that failed to protect them."<br />In the past year alone, hundreds of thousands of people in Congo have been forced to flee their homes as the rebels, led by a renegade army general, have waged a fierce insurgency against the government and its allied militias.<br />In an interview, the rebel general, Laurent Nkunda, denied that his troops had executed civilians here, accusing militias allied with the government of trying to make his rebel movement look bad.<br />"We cannot kill the population," he said. "It is not in our behavior to kill and to rape."<br />But extensive interviews with victims, aid workers and human-rights investigators showed that Nkunda's men carried out a door-to-door military operation over two days in which young men and others were executed.<br />The trouble began Oct. 28, when Congolese Army troops fled the town, fearful of the advance of Nkunda's troops.<br />The soldiers, who had already been routed by Nkunda's men farther south, looted and raped as they ran, taking everything of value and even forcing some residents to help them carry the spoils, according to witnesses and investigators. Fearful residents had to choose between two bad options: follow the rampaging army or wait to see what the rebels might bring.<br />With the soldiers long gone, Nkunda's troops took the towns of Kiwanja and Rutshuru without firing a shot. Immediately, they ordered the remaining residents to torch sprawling camps that held about 30,000 people displaced by earlier fighting, proclaiming that it was now safe for the camp dwellers to return to their villages, witnesses said.<br />"They said there was security, so everyone should go home," said François Hazumutima, a retired teacher who had been living in a nearby camp. "But none of us felt safe."<br />A week later, on Nov. 4, a group of militia fighters known as the Mai Mai carried out a surprise attack on Kiwanja. But the rebels soon routed the Mai Mai - and ordered all residents to leave.<br />The soldiers then went house to house, saying they were searching for militia fighters who stayed behind to fight. But many residents who stayed were scared their houses would be looted or were too old or infirm to flee, according to witnesses. Others simply had not gotten the message to leave.<br />The rebels came to the door of a 25-year-old trader, banging and threatening to shoot their way in.<br />"There were gunshots everywhere," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. "They asked for money. I gave them $200."<br />He then watched in impotent horror as the rebels went to his 22-year-old brother's house next door. The man, a student, had no money to offer them. The soldiers ordered him to lie on the ground. They stabbed him in the neck with their bayonets and shot him in the head.<br />"They said, 'If you don't have money, you are Mai Mai,"' he said. "Everyone who was young was destined to die."<br />Muwavita Mukangusi said she was out in the fields farming with her husband when the shooting started. Their three young daughters were at home, so Mukangusi ran back. Her husband hid in the fields, returning only at nightfall. The next morning, the rebels came.<br />"They took my husband," she said, her eyes rimmed in red. "Because I had $50 in the house, I took $25 to them. But it was not enough. I added $25. It was still not enough. They accused him of being Mai Mai."<br />The rebels beat him, she said, then forced him to the ground and shot him in the back of the head.<br />According to witnesses and clips of video shot at the time, Jean Bosco Ntaganda, Nkunda's chief of staff, commanded the troops that carried out the killings. Ntaganda, whose nom de guerre is the Terminator, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed while he was commanding a different armed group earlier in the war.<br />Meanwhile, confusion reigned at the nearby peacekeepers' base. The company of soldiers sits in a spot that is decidedly not strategic, nestled in a valley that is highly vulnerable to incoming fire and has a poor vantage point from which to keep tabs on the surrounding area.<br />The company's only translator left the base Oct. 26 and was not replaced until more than two weeks later. But even in normal times, communications are limited. To make logistical arrangements, the peacekeepers depend largely on civilian staff members who work normal business hours and have weekends off. Unable to speak to most of the population and with almost no intelligence capabilities, Brar groped his way through a fog of rumor, speculation and misinformation.<br />"During this whole time, there was an informational vacuum," Brar said.<br />With just one company of soldiers and three armored vehicles, the colonel's peacekeepers were overmatched, he said. Patrols had to be aborted because rebels and militia fighters opened fire with heavy weapons that could pierce the vehicles' cladding. The peacekeepers said they could not tell the difference between the different armed groups and were fearful of firing on civilians.<br />The colonel said he was juggling orders from headquarters in the eastern Congolese city of Goma to rescue stranded aid workers and search for a kidnapped foreign journalist. Sending out too many patrols would leave no one to protect the thousands of civilians gathered around the base, trapped in the vulnerable valley.<br />Making matters worse, the peacekeepers' armored vehicles are largely unable to handle the muddy terrain of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the violence. It was not until the fighting was over that the full horror of the killings was discovered in houses stuffed with dead bodies.<br />"We launched patrols in areas we thought there would be clashes," he explained. "But we could not be everywhere at once."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></div><div><strong>Darfur: Another year passes and the world is still waiting</strong><br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />In January, President Bush said this about Darfur: "My administration called this genocide. Once you label it genocide, you obviously have to do something about it."<br />Yet, last week - nearly one year later - this is what the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told the United Nations Security Council about Darfur: "Genocide continues. Rapes in and around the camps continue. Humanitarian assistance is still hindered. More than 5,000 displaced persons die each month." How can this still be?<br />The world has long declared its revulsion at the atrocities committed by Sudan's government and its proxy militias in Darfur and done almost nothing to stop it. It took years of political wrangling to get the Security Council to approve a strengthened peacekeeping force with deployment set for Jan. 1. More than 11 months later, the Security Council has managed to send only 10,000 of the promised 26,000 peacekeepers. Large-scale military attacks against populated areas continue.<br />Much of the fault lies with Sudan's cynically obstructionist president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. But Russia and especially China - which has major oil interests in Sudan - have shamefully enabled him. So have African leaders. The United States and its allies also bear responsibility for temporizing, most recently over how to transport troops and equipment to the conflict zone.<br />Bush said Wednesday that the United States was prepared to provide an airlift. So why has this taken so long?<br />Now, the war crimes charges Moreno-Ocampo has brought against the Sudanese leader for his role in masterminding Darfur's horrors (burning of villages, bombing of schools and systematic rape of woman) may - may - be changing the calculus in Khartoum.<br />Bashir recently agreed to peace talks mediated by Qatar and pledged to punish anyone guilty of crimes in Darfur. Until proved otherwise, the world must assume that all of this is theater designed to fool the Security Council into delaying his reckoning at the Hague.<br />The African Union and the Arab League, seeking to protect one of their own, are pressing the Security Council to delay a formal indictment and arrest warrant, saying it would hurt chances for a negotiated peace. The Bush administration has threatened to block such a move and we hope it stands firm. President-elect Barack Obama and his advisers have called for strong action to end the Darfur genocide. We hope the next administration moves quickly.<br />But have no doubt: Fixing Darfur, which is increasingly engulfed in inter-rebel warfare, gets harder by the day. The indictment, expected in February, is undeniably deserved. UN officials say that up to 300,000 people have been killed in the Darfur conflict and that 2.7 million have been driven from their homes.<br />Still it might be worth delaying if Bashir called off his murderous militias, stopped obstructing deployment of a strengthened peacekeeping force and began serious peace talks. The world is waiting.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Even high-end fashion houses resorting to discounts</strong><br />By Astrid Wendlandtand Marie-Louise GumuchianReuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />PARIS: In fashion, cut is vital, but Marie Dupuis has found that it can also apply to price. Thanks to a little bargaining, she recently bought a Jean-Paul Gaultier dress at a 40 percent discount for New Year's Eve.<br />Dupuis, 32-year-old Parisian, expressed surprise at paying 310, or about $400.<br />"I have never seen that," she said. "It must be because of the crisis everybody is talking about."<br />The high-fashion bargain is usually reserved for the superrich or celebrities who obtain designer clothing free from fashion houses seeking the publicity. But in the current economic downturn, less-expensive luxury items are becoming attainable to more ordinary, though still relatively well-off, shoppers.<br />With margins at mainstream retailers under pressure as they fight for a share of smaller customer budgets, the couture house created by Jean-Paul Gaultier is among the high-end brands that are jumping on the promotional bandwagon.<br />From Paris to Milan and New York to London, a strong increase in promotional sales in recent weeks has come to include luxury brands. In retail generally, the year-end holiday season can account for about 40 percent of annual sales, so the stakes are high.<br />But the high-end sales offerings are subtle. Instead of advertising discounts in shop windows - which can damage the brand by undermining the notion that quality comes at a price - they lure buyers with discreet "private sales," some of them earlier this year than last.<br />For example, Sonia Rykiel, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Jimmy Choo, Prada, Armani, Gucci, Tod's, Dolce & Gabbana, Alexander McQueen, Gianfranco Ferré and Alberta Ferretti have been offering discounts or holding private sales, but not at every store or in every country.<br />Tolerated by European regulators outside the traditional January and July discount seasons, private sales are usually exclusively reserved for loyal customers who receive an invitation by mail. The discounts typically apply to small selection of items.<br />This year, Reuters reporters found that one could buy a wide range of discounted products without an invitation at Jean-Paul Gaultier and Jimmy Choo in Paris and Prada in Milan.<br />"Some may say they don't hold them, but they do," said an assistant at a top designer boutique in Milan. "They just don't want everyone to know about them."<br />A spokeswoman for Jean-Paul Gaultier said: "We do not have any comment to make about private sales. It's down to individual shops to decide them."<br />Other representatives for brands including Gucci and Armani declined comment. A spokesman for Prada said private sales were usual held at this time of year but declined to provide further details.<br />A spokeswoman for Gucci Group, which also includes Bottega Veneta and Yves Saint Laurent, said, "Our policy is that we do not give information about our commercial activities."<br />Altagamma, the Italian fashion industry association, said that it had noted an increase in the number of private sales this year because of the financial crisis but that they were a longstanding tradition for many fashion houses.<br />On Old Bond Street in London, Avenue Montaigne in Paris and in the Quadrilatero d'Oro in Milan, not many customers could be seen at the end of November and early December.<br />"I am more careful this year with my money," said Jean-Michel Fouquet, 55, a French aerospace executive buying a 290 Hermès leather bracelet as a gift in Paris. "We are all worried about the economy and our job."<br />In this downturn, when bonuses are expected to disappear for many highly paid executives, and fortunes are shrinking among the superwealthy from Russia to India, luxury customers' behavior has changed.<br />The ostentatious, ephemeral or frivolous has been replaced by an urge for quality and strong brands, according to industry specialists.<br />As the collapse of financial markets has narrowed investment options, this is not all about consumption. Demand persists for custom-made goods, from tailored suits to specially commissioned fine jewels.<br />"There is a drive towards timeless, very high-end brands," said Pierre Mallevays, a partner at Savigny Partners, an investment banking boutique in London. "If you buy a Louis Vuitton bag, you know that it will not lose much value. But if you buy weaker brand, you are not so sure."<br />Louis Vuitton and Hermès said they never conducted private sales, and business looked brisk on recent visits to their shops.<br />Analysts predict that luxury-goods revenue will drop in 2009 for the first time in over a decade at constant exchange rates. Consultants at Bain say global luxury sales could drop as much as 7 percent in next year, while analysts at Bernstein are projecting a decline of 5 percent.<br />"Channel checks and industry interviews highlight an increasingly promotional environment," Bernstein said in a note, "a clear sign of soft consumer demand."<br />Analysts said independent shops were being more severely squeezed by the spending contraction than department stores. The French haute couture house of Jean-Louis Scherrer, for example, extended a 60 percent promotional sale this month on evening dresses that it started in mid-November. The fashion house even advertised the fact in the window of its shop off the Champs-Élysées.<br />"This is the first time I've seen such a sale," a clerk said.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>A palace fit for nonroyalty</strong><br />By Jean Rafferty<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />MARRAKESH, Morocco: 'Everything has been done to make an art de vivre.'<br />The renaissance of the Palais Layadi - from ruin to regal palace in 18 months - is a 21st-century tale of "A Thousand and One Nights."<br />The palatial compound, which measures 4,000 square meters, or 43,055 square feet, was built between the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Caïd Layadi, a Berber tribal lord.<br />Now, a French decorator, Jean-Louis Raynaud, and his American design partner, Kenyon Kramer, veterans of their own Marrakesh renovation, are behind the continuing transformation, said to be the largest private restoration inside the walled medina.<br />The complex includes eight structures, some of which reflect the property's colorful history. There are two riyads, the Moroccan term for townhouses constructed around a courtyard garden. The first, the Palais Layadi, was built for the caïd's family and now is the main reception area. The second, Dar Kabira, was built for the caïd's concubines and now houses the guest wing.<br />A stynia, which means "pearl" in Arabic, was the pavilion of the caïd's official wife. It now contains one of the compound's two master suites.<br />There also is Dar Turquia, a two-floor courthouse - Layadi had his own tribunal and prison - that a later owner turned into a Turkish folly and now is the second master suite.<br />Other small houses and several outbuildings contain a large kitchen, laundry, wine cellar, hammam and staff quarters. A gym, spa and movie theater are still to come.<br />From the imposing carved cedar entry door through rooms of mystery and magic, where walls gleam with a kaleidoscope of colorful zillijes, or handmade Moroccan tiles, the unusual architecture has been preserved and interiors have been reinvented in a mix of tradition and Western savoir-vivre.<br />Now there is a new family in residence.<br />The designers, who are based in Aix-en-Provence, France, count clients like Janet de Botton, the London art collector; Anne Cox Chambers, the former U.S. ambassador to Belgium; and the film director Ridley Scott. In 2001 they arranged a Moroccan tour for another client, the Swiss banker Urs Schwarzenbach and his Australian wife, Francesca, for whom they had done a house in Provence.<br />The tour was cut short by the attacks of Sept. 11 but they returned the next year and Schwarzenbach was intrigued by the designers' own restored riyad.<br />"Two or three hours from London or Zurich, you live in a different world. Marrakesh has a history, a culture, real people living there. It's not artificial," is how Schwarzenbach described the city's attraction in a telephone interview. "I fell in love with their place. I told them, If you ever find another like that - it might also be a little bit bigger - let me know."<br />It took two years for the designers to find the palace, which was put up for sale in five lots. When they presented it to him, the Zurich financier said he immediately saw its "serious potential."<br />"I have a passion for building," he admitted. "For the last 30 years, I have been doing up houses from Australia to Scotland." (Among them are the recent 310 million, or $400 million, renovation of the Dolder Grand Hotel in Zurich, with new wings by Norman Foster; several farms in Australia; an estate in Scotland; a manor in Oxfordshire; and an entire village, called Hambleden, also in England.)<br />Schwarzenbach asked the French-speaking designers to negotiate the purchase, which turned out to be long, laborious and frustrating. "It's like a labyrinth: turn right, turn left, stop and make a detour" is how Kramer put it.<br />"One palace had 74 heirs and each one had to decide to sign the sale contract," Raynaud explained. "Several had moved to France and Germany so lawyers had to find them, bring them back to sign the papers."<br />Another surprise was finding out that the caïd's last concubine, now 90, had been granted lifetime occupancy in his will. "We were sensitive to letting her stay, but then thought of offering her the choice of another house in the medina or an apartment, things she could leave her own heirs," Kramer said. "She loved the idea and opted for a modern apartment with contemporary kitchen, washing machine and dryer. We were delighted to live in the 19th century, but she bolted right into the 21st century."<br />The designers initially were occupied with basics, including the installation of a sewer system and a back-up electrical generator. They also turned a former kitchen into a mosque for the workers' daily prayers; eventually it will be used by the staff.<br />The location, near the route de Fez at the northern edge of the medina, allowed them to remove debris by truck. But a bulldozer could not be brought into the walled-in courtyard, so the pool had to be dug out by hand and the earth brought out in wheelbarrows.<br />Exterior walls were redone and the 4,000 square meters of interconnecting wooden roofs were tiled and, finally, caulked and waxed. Rooms also were reconfigured to make the two master suites and eight guest suites, each with one or two bathrooms.<br />The designers also created a dramatic perspective by copying the nearly five-meter, or 16-foot, entrance arch on the far side of the palace reception room, opening up a view of the marble courtyard and garden beyond.<br />"Arabic culture is about circling around in serpentine corridors. Things are hidden and discovered," Kramer explained. "We decided quite early to cut through from the entrance to make a central axis. Westerners like a panorama, to see the whole picture."<br />Off the salons on both sides of the garden, shaded galleries provide seating and outdoor dining areas. On the far side, another monumental arch was cut through from the grand salon into the new library where glassed-in bookcases will house 10,000 volumes on Moroccan lore and history.<br />One of the most beautiful rooms is the stynia's master suite, where a shaft of light falls from a dome 20 meters overhead and, in the shadows, two gilded gazelles from Myanmar crouch by the fireplace.<br />At sunset, the place to be is on the stynia's highest roof terrace. From here, a visitor can see the Atlas Mountains turning rose pink in the west and the glowing Koutoubia minaret - which, in Marrakesh, is what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.<br />"You need time, knowledge and, most of all, the patience that Jean-Louis and Kenyon have to cope with the inshallah attitude, 'If God willing, tomorrow perhaps,"' Schwarzenbach said. "A German or Swiss architect couldn't have done what they did."<br />Neither the designers nor the owner would be drawn out on the cost of the property, but Schwarzenbach noted that the average worker's monthly salary was 200, or $253, so the renovation's cost was "about one-tenth of what it would cost in Europe."<br />"A grand riyad like that is very rare," said Alban Pamart of Atlas Immobilier in Marrakesh. "The minimum price for such a prestigious property, even needing renovation, would be 1,000 a square meter and renovation, not including furniture or art, would run between 600 to 1,000 per square meter."<br />Those estimates would put the project cost at 8 million.<br />"Most of the large properties are new and, in the Palmerie, where one 4,000-square-meter estate is going for 30 million," noted Alex Peto, the Marrakesh property expert for the British real estate company Aylesford. The most comparable thing on his books now is a small renovated hotel in the medina, the 1,200-square-meter Palais Sebban. The 19th-century structure has six suites and nine rooms and is listed at 3,360,000.<br />"Beauty cannot be measured," Raynaud said. "Nothing has been done to be luxurious; everything has been done to make an art de vivre. I told Mr. Schwarzenbach, 'This will not be your most sumptuous house but it will be a house to make you dream."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Mugabe claims Zimbabwe cholera outbreak stopped</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />By MacDonald Dzirutwe<br />Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe announced on Thursday his government had stopped a cholera outbreak that has killed nearly 800 people, but the United Nations said the death toll was rising.<br />The United States, which has called on Mugabe to step down, said the outbreak was worsening and South African officials declared a stretch of the border with Zimbabwe a disaster zone because of Zimbabweans fleeing in search of treatment.<br />"I am happy we are being assisted by others and we have arrested cholera," Mugabe said in a speech in which he also attacked what he described as Western plans to invade Zimbabwe and topple his government.<br />"Now that there is no cholera there is no case for war."<br />The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the toll from the water-borne disease, normally easy to prevent and treat, had risen to 783 and that 16,403 were believed to be infected.<br />Asked about Mugabe's remarks, OCHA spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs in Geneva said: "The figures speak for themselves. We hope that the joint efforts of the United Nations and government will contribute to halting the epidemic."<br />U.S. government aid agency USAID said the outbreak had not stopped and announced it was sending $6.2 million (4.1 million pounds) more in aid.<br />"This is a cholera outbreak that is ongoing and urgent. This is clearly a humanitarian crisis," USAID administrator Henrietta Fore told a news conference in Washington.<br />The collapse of Zimbabwe's economy and health care system has left victims to fend for themselves and driven hundreds to try to escape to South Africa to seek treatment there.<br />DISASTER AREA<br />"The whole of the Vhembe district has been declared a disaster," said Mogale Nchabeleng, a spokesman for South Africa's Limpopo provincial government. The government took the decision after an emergency meeting earlier this week.<br />The outbreak, coupled with an economic meltdown, has prompted calls for international humanitarian assistance as well as calls for Mugabe's resignation from Western leaders and some within Africa.<br />Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai reached a power-sharing deal brokered by regional mediator Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's former president, in September. But they are deadlocked over how to implement it.<br />The MDC said on Thursday that the cholera outbreak showed Mugabe's government could no longer rule the country and accused the ruling ZANU-PF party of orchestrating a campaign of abductions of MDC leaders and activists.<br />"We remain on the side of the people while ZANU-PF remains on the side of terror. We remain on the side of the downtrodden while ZANU-PF is firmly etched in the dark corner of an avaricious, parasitic elite," the MDC said in a statement.<br />The French foreign ministry said Zimbabwe had denied visas to a French team of specialists standing by to help stem the cholera outbreak.<br />"Contrary to what Mr Mugabe says, the cholera epidemic is not under control... France strongly regrets this decision and calls on Zimbabwe's authorities to allow aid to reach the population," ministry spokesman Frederic Desagneaux said.<br />The United Nations has warned that cholera could infect 60,000 if not treated properly.<br />(Additional reporting by Paul Simao in Johannesburg, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Brian Rohan in Paris; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)'</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Obama to hear panel on changes to war powers act<br /></strong>By Peter Baker<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: It's not as if President-elect Barack Obama doesn't have enough on his plate with a financial meltdown and a home-state scandal. But now he is delving into the thorny question of who can send the country into war.<br />In between interviewing cabinet nominees and announcing health care plans, Obama plans to meet Thursday with the leaders of a commission that has proposed revamping the legal process for launching military action, to require more consultation between a president and Congress.<br />The proposal would scrap the problematic War Powers Act of 1973, a measure passed in the hangover from Vietnam to give Congress more say in committing troops to the battlefield but largely honored in the breach ever since by presidents who deemed it unconstitutional. In its place, the commission proposes a law requiring a president to consult lawmakers before any "significant military action" and calling on Congress to vote up or down within 30 days.<br />The commission, composed of luminaries from both parties, unveiled its plan in July, but it was largely overlooked in the heat of the presidential campaign. Although Obama has not endorsed the proposal, he could be breathing life into it by meeting with the commission's chairmen and giving them a high-profile platform to make their case.<br />Sitting down with Obama in Chicago will be two former secretaries of state, James Baker III, a Republican, and Warren Christopher, a Democrat. (Baker and Christopher actually once waged political war against each other, leading the legal teams for George W. Bush and Al Gore during the recount following the 2000 election.)<br />Other members of the commission, assembled by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, include former Senator Slade Gorton, a Republican from Washington, former Representative Lee Hamilton, a Democrat from Indiana, Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser and Abner Mikva, a former White House counsel.<br />Obama's office said only that "the meeting is being held at the request of the commission members," so it is possible that the president-elect is merely being polite to some of the country's most respected elder statesmen. Mikva, who was also a congressman and federal judge from Chicago, has been a mentor to Obama.<br />But some key people on the Obama team have shown interest in the matter. John Podesta, the co-chairman of Obama's transition team, testified before the commission. And Vice President-elect Joseph Biden Jr., a longtime senator, in the past has proposed revisiting the War Powers Act.<br />If Obama were to act on the report, he would be taking on an issue that has bedeviled the nation's leaders for generations. The Constitution divides war powers between the executive and legislative branches. Article I gives Congress the authority to "declare war" and finance military operations while Article II makes the president the "commander in chief." As a practical matter, though, the balance has tilted increasingly toward presidents, particularly in the last half century as the world has grown more complicated, dangerous and national security threats more fast moving.<br />Harry Truman sent United States forces to Korea in the 1950s, and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson sent them to Vietnam in the early 1960s without a congressional declaration of war. Congress in recent decades has voted to authorize military operations without declaring war in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 and the resolutions endorsing action against Iraq in 1991 and 2002. But Ronald Reagan, the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton launched military operations in Grenada, Panama and Kosovo without congressional votes.<br />The War Powers Act, in theory, requires presidents to submit reports on military action, triggering a clock that would force the end of hostilities within 60 or 90 days unless Congress authorizes further use of force. The law, passed over Richard Nixon's veto, has essentially been disregarded by presidents ever since. They typically send reports to Congress "consistent with" the act but not "pursuant to" it, meaning they never start the clock, and Congress has not really sought to enforce the act when it has been ignored.<br />Many legal scholars consider the act unconstitutional, in particular because it purports to let the legislature overrule the executive's decision through the absence of action rather than an affirmative vote. That is one thing the commission led by Baker and Christopher are trying to fix with their plan, which requires Congress to vote one way or the other within 30 days of the commencement of military action.<br />"It's not effective, at best," Baker said of the existing War Powers Act during a news conference unveiling the commission report in July. "It's unconstitutional, at worst. It's a bad law that ought to be replaced with a good law, something that would work."<br />The commission's proposed War Powers Consultation Act of 2009, which it urged Congress to pass in the first 100 days of the next president's administration, still gives enormous latitude to a president, who would not need consent to go to war, and makes it difficult for a Congress to stop him:<br />A president would have to consult with Congress before any "significant military action" expected to last more than a week or within three days of the start of action in circumstances where secrecy is paramount. This would not include short-term missions such as protection of United States embassies, reprisals against terrorist attacks or covert operations.<br />Within 30 days, Congress would vote on a measure approving the military action. If the resolution to approve fails in either house, any member could then introduce a measure to disapprove, which would be voted on within five days. If passed by both houses, it could still be vetoed by the president, so as a practical matter, Congress could stop a president's war only with a two-thirds vote in both houses overriding the veto.<br />Perhaps the more meaningful innovation would be the creation of a Joint Congressional Consultation Committee, composed of the majority and minority leaders of both the Senate and House, as well as the chairmen and ranking members of key committees. This panel would be provided the same intelligence shown the president and have a standing bipartisan staff.<br />"From the standpoint of Congress, the statute gives Congress a seat at the table in deciding whether or not to go to war," Christopher said in July. He added: "This new statute could give us a new day of consultation between the president and the Congress." </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFXasdQhXu5le6iuXrcsfQGF12PhXIY7nGz15VsVqNrci3byJ2cem5TouheFT2VeMblcWJ42pvtu-hQCkMEq5cdb2lTfuGznAr7l8k7V7V8C-kmlrkh43H6u5pRkuSekFbCqMhnd4QH_w/s1600-h/DSC02987.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278759119683657298" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFXasdQhXu5le6iuXrcsfQGF12PhXIY7nGz15VsVqNrci3byJ2cem5TouheFT2VeMblcWJ42pvtu-hQCkMEq5cdb2lTfuGznAr7l8k7V7V8C-kmlrkh43H6u5pRkuSekFbCqMhnd4QH_w/s320/DSC02987.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>No contact with Blagojevich about Senate seat, Obama says</strong><br />By Jack Healy<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />President-elect Barack Obama said Thursday that he had never spoken to the governor of Illinois about Obama's replacement in the U.S. Senate, and that no one on his staff had been involved in any deal-making regarding Obama's successor.<br />"That would be a violation of everything that this campaign has been about," Obama said at a news conference in Chicago that was called to announce an appointment to his cabinet.<br />In his first extended comments on the unfolding scandal, Obama said he was "appalled and disappointed" by the details of a complaint filed by federal prosecutors, who have accused Governor Rod Blagojevich of trying to profit from his power to choose Obama's successor. He also restated his call for Blagojevich to resign.<br />"I think the public trust has been violated," Obama said. "I hope that the governor comes to the conclusion that he can no longer effectively serve and that he does resign."<br />Obama said he was compiling information on any possible contacts between his transition team and members of Blagojevich's staff.<br />"I want to gather all the facts about any staff contact that may have taken place," he said. "We'll have those in the next few days and we'll present them."<br />He did not specifically lay out what cooperation prosecutors had asked for from members of his team or how they were responding.<br />Obama added, "Our office had no involvement in any deal-making around my Senate seat - that, I'm absolutely certain of."<br />Blagojevich was arrested Tuesday on charges that included trying to cash in on his power to name Obama's successor in the U.S. Senate. According to transcripts of taped conversations provided by prosecutors, Blagojevich wanted to parlay his appointment power to secure an ambassadorship, a cabinet position, a high-paying nonprofit job for himself or a lucrative spot on a corporate board for his wife.<br />The governor's lawyer denied the charges, and Blagojevich returned to work Wednesday to address the state's $2 billion budget gap, a spokeswoman said.<br />It remained unclear Thursday how the drama would play out. Obama on Wednesday added his voice to the many Illinois politicians who have called on Blagojevich to step down. The State Assembly will convene next week amid calls for legislation to allow a special election to fill the Senate seat that Obama vacated, taking that matter out of Blagojevich's hands. And the state's attorney general said she might refer the issue to the Illinois Supreme Court.<br />The governor's alleged actions shocked even some in a state considered one of the country's most corrupt. The former Illinois governor Dan Walker, who served 18 months in federal prison on bank fraud charges unrelated to his public duties, denounced Blagojevich's actions as "despicable."<br />Prosecutors have gone out of their way to say that Obama was not implicated in the investigation. Indeed, Blagojevich is quoted as angrily cursing Obama and his staff in the criminal complaint, saying, "They're not willing to give me anything except appreciation," according to prosecutors.<br />Still, for the past three days, Obama and his transition team have been forced to distance themselves from a hometown political scandal, one that has shifted public focus away from the president-elect's cabinet appointments and plans for the new administration.<br />On Tuesday, Obama had made a brief appearance to discuss climate change with former Vice President Al Gore, but instead faced a barrage of questions about his ties to Blagojevich.<br />Obama said he was "saddened and sobered" by the accusations, and told reporters that he had not been in contact with the governor or Blagojevich's staff.<br />But those comments contradicted an earlier statement by David Axelrod, a senior adviser, who told Fox News on Nov. 23 that Obama had spoken to Blagojevich about the Senate seat, and that "there are a whole range of names, many of which have surfaced."<br />Late Tuesday, Axelrod issued a statement saying he had misspoken in his comments to Fox News, and said that Obama indeed had no contact with Blagojevich in the conversations over a replacement.<br />In the news conference Thursday, Obama was asked how Blagojevich had gotten the impression - as reflected in comments he allegedly made - that neither Obama nor his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, a possible pick for the Senate seat, was "willing to play ball and why he said those unrepeatable things about you."<br />Obama said he could not speculate what was going on in the governor's mind.<br />He added: "Let me say that this Senate seat does not belong to any politician to trade. It belongs to the people of Illinois. They deserve the best possible representation. They also deserve to know that any vacancy will be filled in an appropriate way so that whoever is sent to Washington is going to be fighting for the people of Illinois. I hope and expect that the leaders of the legislature will take these steps to ensure that this is so."<br />The president-elect said that he believed that there are two different views of politics. One involves sacrifice and public service, the other is that politics is a business - "you're wheeling and dealing and 'what's in it for me?"'<br />He added that his own campaign had been about changing that view of politics.<br />"You can get elected by playing it straight," he said. "You can get elected by doing the right thing."<br />Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div><strong>Scandal is a slap for Chicagoans after Obama euphoria</strong><br />By Dirk Johnson<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />CHICAGO: For Jeff Makowski, a 47-year-old house painter, it had been fun lately to boast to out-of-town friends about Chicago as the home of President-elect Barack Obama.<br />Now the phone calls are coming the other way, and they are often sarcastic.<br />"We're a national laughingstock," said Makowski, who was drinking a beer with a work pal on Wednesday afternoon after finishing work on a North Side condominium. "They call up and say, 'What's going on in Illinois? How can you elect these people?"'<br />Last month, Chicago erected huge banners along Michigan Avenue bearing the image of its hometown hero, Obama, and "our city just beamed," as Peggy Smith, a 53-year-old nurse, put it.<br />To Makowski and others, the election of Obama had shown the world that Chicago had produced a brilliant politician, a president with the historic purpose of Lincoln - a home-state fellow, of course - and the style of a Kennedy.<br />But it was a short-lived burst of civic pride that sparkled on Election Night like never before. The arrest on Tuesday of Governor Rod Blagojevich has resurrected the corrupt image of politics in this city and state. The state's previous governor, George Ryan, is in prison on corruption charges, only the latest of a string of Illinois executives to go to jail in the last century.<br />"In Chicago, we had just gotten past the old stereotypes," Makowski said. "But now we're back to the jokes. You go anywhere and you hear that 'Oh, you guys are from Chicago' business. And then they just laugh at you."<br />His pal, Dan Frohling, 42, took a swig of his beer and shook his head. "It's a blemish for us," he said. "It's depressing."<br />For Bruce Hansfurther, a 51-year-old lawyer, it is difficult to be surprised anymore.<br />"In my lifetime, I've had nine governors - three went to prison and another one might be on his way," he said. "My 22-year-old son reminded the family yesterday that he was the only one of us who didn't vote for Blagojevich. He wrote in his grandmother's name."<br />Even the young in Illinois grow skeptical. Jimmy Ray, 22, said he thought it was probably good for Chicago to endure some bad news about political corruption, especially given the wild sense of euphoria here about Obama's election.<br />"He's being expected to ride in on a white horse, end hunger, stop war and deforestation, and maybe cure cancer along the way," said Ray, himself an enthusiastic Obama supporter, as he stood near a giant likeness of American Gothic, a symbol of down-to-earth sensibilities. "The expectations are so ludicrously high. It sets him up for failure. So this Blagojevich thing is maybe good for us, a cold slap in the face. It's a dose of realism for us."<br />Patricia Sams, a 55-year-old medical assistant, stood at the edge of Grant Park, where Obama electrified the city and the world with his Election Night speech, and pined for the good old days of six weeks ago.<br />"We were all so elated," Sams said. "Black people and white people and Asian people all hugging, just like it should be."<br />The latest news, she said, "is obviously embarrassing" for the state. But she cautioned against judging the governor before all the facts come in, and she said he should not be assumed to be guilty "just because he's from Illinois."<br />Chicagoans say it suddenly feels like a long time since the elation of Election Night on Nov. 4, an unseasonably balmy evening. The streets are now filled with slush again, and the infamous gale known here as "The Hawk," blows off Lake Michigan.<br />Kathy Burns, a tourist who came here with her husband, Andrew, to celebrate their sixth wedding anniversary, said she could sense the sagging spirits among Chicagoans.<br />"I'm from Louisiana," Burns said of a state that has known more than its share of political corruption, "so I can relate."<br />As a measure of the pride in this city's connection to Obama, The Chicago Sun-Times printed extras of its Nov. 5 issue, the one whose front page declared, "Mr. President." Oprah Winfrey, who broadcasts from here, waved a copy on her television show. In contrast, the front page of Wednesday's Sun-Times carried the word "Shame."<br />Despite the disappointment about the corruption case involving Blagojevich, virtually all of the more than a dozen Chicagoans interviewed said it would not dampen the spirit of the Obama victory. One woman could be heard explaining to a visitor, with evident pride, "This is Presidential City, dude."<br />Smith, the nurse, said she was a "glass-is-half-full girl," determined that politics would improve, even in Illinois. Besides that, she said, she hoped it was going to be helpful to have a local man as president.<br />Then she spoke like an Illinois voter.<br />"Let's hope he doesn't forget about Illinois when he's in the White House," she said. "Think of all the perks."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>COLUMNIST Gail Collins: The good news from Illinois<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />These are troubled times when people yearn for diversion. We like stories about a simple crisis in which somebody does something incredibly stupid that will not cost 100,000 people their jobs. Yet Hollywood starlets and pop singers have been unhelpfully quiet. Then suddenly, there was Rod Blagojevich, seeking bids for Barack Obama's Senate seat with all the subtlety of a tobacco auctioneer.<br />That's the ticket! Now, if only we could indict the economy ...<br />Feel free to indulge in a little schadenfreude at the expense of the governor of Illinois. Sure, the last couple of months have been tough. But at least you didn't have to spend your birthday listening to the nation debate whether you were the most corrupt elected official in living memory or simply out of your mind.<br />Some people might wonder why Blagojevich chose to say potentially incriminating things like "I want to make money" over the telephone at a time when he knew he was the subject of multiple federal investigations. Perhaps his legal problems sent him off into his own little world. There he was, sitting around the house in his blue jogging suit, dipping into delusions of grandeur in which the empty Senate seat becomes a magic key to a Cabinet post, a big-money job for the missus, the presidency in 2016.<br />Lord knows we've all been tempted to retreat into fantasyland when things get rough. Really, the only thing saving us from succumbing was the lack of a Senate seat to sell.<br />Those of us who do not live in Illinois had generally not given much thought to Rod Blagojevich until this week. We had never wondered how a person with a 13 percent approval rating ever managed to get elected in the first place, though now I am personally leaning toward the theory that it was the hair. Blagojevich tossed his thick brown mane and the voters told each other: "Yes, he sounds a little dumb. But truly, this is the hair of a reformer."<br />Illinois is not the only place going through empty-Senate-seat turmoil. In New York, the departure of Hillary Clinton for the cabinet has set off an unseemly scramble, the like of which you usually see only when someone drops a pound of hamburger in the middle of a pit bull convention.<br />Still, as far as we know, nobody has actually tried to trade anything other than political advantage, the hope of future campaign contributions and the gratitude of one or more special interest groups. You know, the normal stuff. On behalf of my state, I would like to thank the governor of Illinois for making us feel as if this is a good record.<br />The Senate seat sellathon is actually not the most damaging thing Blagojevich is accused of trying to do. There are, after all, 100 senators, and we know from several centuries of experience that the nation can survive quite nicely even if a sizable minority are brain-dead bank robbers.<br />Worse, he's upped the already hearty level of cynicism in Illinois voters. He ran for governor as an antidote to the culture that had sent an average of one Illinois chief executive to the clink every 10 years. ("Our state has been adrift. Corruption has replaced leadership," Rod and his hair said in early campaign commercials.) Now look at him. It's the sort of experience that sets the public wondering if there's a way to get reform while avoiding reformers.<br />In New York, of course, we elected a reform governor two years ago, and he was driven from office by some unpleasantness involving the Emperor's Club VIP escort service. Now, post-Rod, all that seems kind of petty - especially since, as far as we know, Eliot Spitzer even used his own money.<br />That's something else we have to hold against Blagojevich. He's definitely driven the bar of acceptable political behavior below sea level.<br />Look at Delaware, where the election left yet another Senate seat vacant and Governor Ruth Ann Minner quickly announced that she'd be appointing Joe Biden's longtime aide, Edward Kaufman, to the job. Given the fact that Biden wants his seat to eventually go to his son, Beau, who is currently serving in Iraq with the Army National Guard, some observers found it a tad convenient that Minner happened to choose a person no one has ever heard of who is intensely loyal to the Biden family and has already promised not to run in the next election.<br />But now Delaware is looking like the gold standard. It was only political expediency! The state Legislature isn't going to have to set up an emergency election so the governor won't have time to barter the seat away. And everybody in Washington knows the aides do all the real work anyway so nobody will even notice Biden is gone. Good work, Governor Minner!<br />One thing is clear. We cannot have any more vacant Senate seats hanging around, creating temptation. Next time we have a presidential election, let's try to limit the candidates to governors, retired generals and failed movie stars. Much safer.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>In Illinois, a first lady who speaks louder in private<br /></strong>By Pam Belluck<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />In the six years since she became first lady of Illinois, Patricia Blagojevich, now 43, has not played a highly public role in her husband's administration.<br />"She has kept a very low profile as first lady," said Paul Green, a political science professor at Roosevelt University. "She literally could walk down Michigan Avenue and if she didn't have security, 9 out of 10 people would not know who she was."<br />So the extent of her involvement in the brash telephone conversations that resulted in charges of corruption against her husband, Governor Rod Blagojevich, on Tuesday came as a surprise to many.<br />In the 76-page federal complaint, Blagojevich appears to be an influential and demanding partner to her husband's schemes to trade the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama for money-making or politically aggrandizing opportunities.<br />The complaint also shows her participating in a phone call in which the governor discusses trading his influence over the Senate seat appointment to earn money and find his wife seats on paid corporate boards.<br />And, in a blast of vulgar language, Patricia Blagojevich eggs on her husband when he reportedly threatens to prevent the Tribune Company from selling the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field unless The Chicago Tribune fired editorial writers who had called for the governor's impeachment. She is quoted in the complaint as saying that the state should "hold up that [expletive] Cubs [expletive] ... [expletive] them."<br />Federal officials have declined to discuss the role of Patricia Blagojevich in the case. She has not been charged in the case. But officials have suggested that she and others involved in the taped phone calls would be looked at as part of the continuing investigation.<br />Blagojevich has a deep-rooted political pedigree as the daughter of Richard Mell, the longtime Chicago alderman and a leader in Cook County Democratic politics, who is considered to have been instrumental in getting her husband in politics.<br />"Rod's marriage to her is really what begins his political career," said John Pelissero, a political science professor at Loyola University. "It was really through connections with his father-in-law's influence that he got elected."<br />The Web site for the governor's office says that in addition to raising the couple's two daughters, Patricia Blagojevich occupies herself with typical first lady issues: raising awareness on children's health, food allergies and literacy, and starting the State Beautification Initiative, which planted native wildflowers along state roads.<br />But in recent years, Blagojevich, who has a bachelor's degree in economics and a real estate broker's license, has attracted attention through the dealings of her home-based real estate company. Her clients have included people who were awarded state contracts or made political contributions to the governor.<br />The Chicago Tribune, in an analysis, reported that her firm, River Realty, had earned more than $700,000 in commissions since her husband began raising money in 2000 for his first run for governor. The Tribune reported that more than three-quarters of those commissions came from "clients with connections," not including commissions she earned from Antoin Rezko, a developer and fund-raiser for the Blagojevich campaign, who was convicted of fraud and bribery this summer.<br />According to news reports over the last year, U.S. law enforcement officials have been investigating her real estate dealings. Officials in the federal prosecutor's office would not comment Tuesday on whether the governor was under investigation for the real estate dealings or anything else.<br />In September, she became development director for the Chicago Christian Industrial League, which helps poor and homeless families. A spokeswoman, Jenny Brandhorst, said Patricia Blagojevich has "a good knowledge of, obviously, Chicago and the development community. She's done a great job since she's been here."<br />Chicago newspapers have reported that tax records show that in 2007, the Blagojevich family's income dropped 17 percent, to $214,580 in combined wages. (He earns $177,412 as governor.) In the transcript of the charges against the governor, finding avenues for his family to get more money is a constant theme.<br />If Ron Blagojevich owes some electoral success to his father-in-law, their relationship frayed over the governor's 2005 decision to close a landfill owned by a cousin of Mell's wife, saying that it had environmental problems. Mell accused the governor of carrying out a vendetta against him and his relatives. Blagojevich said he had the male "virility" to stick with his decision.<br />Patricia Blagojevich's sister, Deborah Mell, a gay rights activist, was elected a state representative in Illinois last month. She first indicated that she would run for Representative Rahm Emanuel's congressional seat when he becomes Obama's chief of staff, but decided against it.<br />Mell's spokeswoman, Leah Cunningham Pouw, said her own impression of Patricia Blagojevich was that "she is extremely dedicated to her kids," adding: "I've seen her laughing and playing with them. She's funny; she's light. When you go in their house, there's pictures of their drawings posted on the stairwell."<br />Asked if she was surprised by the words attributed to Patricia Blagojevich in the transcript, Pouw said, "Well, Rich Mell is sort of known for his colorful language."<br />Patricia Blagojevich told Chicago Parent magazine last month that she did not want her daughters, Amy, 12, and Annie, 5, to go into politics.<br />"It's a rough-and-tumble life. Politics in Chicago is like a blood sport," she said, adding that in her husband's case, "I'm looking forward to the day he's not in politics."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Union linked to Illinois corruption scandal</strong><br />By Steven Greenhouse<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />The Service Employees International Union has long boasted that it is on the cutting edge of the labor movement. But it found itself badly embarrassed this week when it was linked by name to Governor Rod Blagojevich's maneuvering to secure some financial gain from picking the next Senator from Illinois.<br />The federal criminal complaint filed against Blagojevich said his chief of staff, John Harris, had suggested to a service employees' official that the union should help make the governor the head of Change to Win, the federation of seven unions that broke away form the AFL-CIO. The complaint said Blagojevich was seeking a position that paid $250,000 to $300,000 a year.<br />In exchange, the complaint strongly suggested, the service employees union and Change to Win would help persuade Blagojevich to name Valerie Jarrett, President-elect Barack Obama's first choice, as the state's new senator. And the union would get help from the Obama administration, presumably for its legislative agenda.<br />Several union officials in Chicago and Washington said that service employees official approached by Harris was Tom Balanoff, the president of the union's giant janitors' local in Chicago and head of the union's Illinois state council. Balanoff, one of the union officials closest to Obama, is widely seen as an aggressive, successful labor leader, who has helped unionize thousands of janitors not just in the Chicago area but also in Texas.<br />Reached by telephone on Tuesday, Balanoff said, "I can't comment on anything right now."<br />The Illinois branch of the service employees issued a statement on Wednesday night saying, "We have no reason to believe that SEIU or any SEIU official was involved in any misconduct." It added that the union and Balanoff "are fully cooperating with the federal investigation."<br />Greg Denier, Change to Win's spokesman, said the federation "had no involvement, no discussion, no contact" with Blagojevich or his staff. "The idea of a position at Change to Win was totally an invention of the governor, and his stance has no basis in reality," Denier said.<br />Denier noted that the presidency of Change to Win was an unsalaried position. The federation's president, Anna Burger, is the service employees' secretary treasurer and receives only her SEIU salary.<br />Service employee officials said that the criminal complaint does not allege that the unidentified "SEIU official" did anything wrong. All he did, they said, was listen to Blagojevich and his chief of staff and ferry some messages for them.<br />A senior service employees official, who insisted on anonymity because prosecutors have asked union officials not to talk, said his union was one of many that backed Blagojevich and has received favors from him. But he said that it was understandable that Blagojevich would ask the service employees for favor because it was so powerful and was seen as one of the unions closest to Obama.<br />Patrick Gaspard, the former political director of the service employees' huge New York health-care affiliate, 1199, was political director of Obama's campaign.<br />If Blagojevich was going to approach a union to help land a cushy job after leaving the Illinois governorship, it probably made sense for him to approach the service employees, the nation's fastest growing union.<br />With more than 1.8 million members nationwide, it is the largest union in Illinois, was an early and generous backer of his gubernatorial ambitions and received some important favors from him. In 2005, the governor issued an executive order that enabled the service employees to unionize 49,000 in-home child care providers who were paid through state and U.S. government funds.<br />Afterward, the service employees negotiated a 39-month contract that raised the child-care providers daily rates by 35 percent on average and provided them with health coverage.<br />With Blagojevich evidently hoping to trade favors with President-elect Obama, the service employees seemed like a sensible intermediary because it was widely seen as doing more to elect Obama than any other union. The service employees' political action committee spent at least $26 million on Obama's behalf in this year's presidential campaign, making it by far the largest single PAC donor in the campaign.<br />The service employees union was by far the top overall donor to Blagojevich's 2006 re-election campaign, with records showing it donated more than $900,000, or about 5 percent of his total campaign funds.<br />Michelle Ringuette, a service employees' spokeswoman, said the political contributions were unusual.<br />"Many unions make donations to political candidates," she said, "in the interest of making sure we have elected officials who represent the interest of working families, men and women who get up and go to work every day."<br />The service employees' president, Andy Stern, is often seen as the nation's most powerful union official, serving as both a dynamo and lightning rod for the labor movement. He led the schism from the AFL-CIO, and now he is seeking to lead an effort to persuade Obama to enact two major pieces of legislation in his first 100 days: universal health coverage and the Employee Free choice Act, a law that would make it far easier for workers to unionize.<br />Stern was embarrassed early this year when Tyrone Freeman, an official he appointed to run a large, home-care workers' local in Los Angeles, was suspended and later banned for misappropriating hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds. Freeman was found to have improperly directed union funds to his wedding, his wife's company, even to membership in a private cigar club.<br />Stern has named a panel of experts to develop a tougher ethical code for the union. </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Illinois furor tests Obama team</strong><br />By Peter Baker and Jeff Zeleny<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: When Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, began exploring whether she might fill Barack Obama's seat in the U.S. Senate, she called Rahm Emanuel. They served in the House together and, more important, he had just become chief of staff to the newly elected president.<br />But Emanuel was uncharacteristically circumspect. If Obama had a favorite, Emanuel was not saying. And to Schakowsky, he seemed wary about Governor Rod Blagojevich, who would be making the appointment.<br />"Rahm always has good intelligence," Schakowsky recalled. "In this case, he really didn't. It was not clear to him what the governor was going to do, or at least he didn't share it with me."<br />For the Obama team in the days after his election to the presidency, the question of who would succeed him in the Senate was a sensitive one. With a new administration to build and a financial crisis worsening by the day, Obama and his advisers had bigger issues on their plate. Moreover, they wanted to keep their distance from Blagojevich, who was already known to be under federal investigation into possible corruption. But many still assumed that Obama's voice would be critical if he chose to weigh in.<br />Exactly what role he or his team played will be a focus of intense scrutiny in the weeks to come after the arrest of Blagojevich on accusations that he was plotting to trade or sell the Senate appointment. In that sense, the furor could be the first test of the Obama team's ability to manage a burgeoning scandal in an era when intense media scrutiny and partisan attack machinery can escalate almost any incident into a serious political problem.<br />Obama said Tuesday that he never spoke with the governor about the seat, and prosecutors said neither Obama nor his advisers had been implicated. At the same time, Obama's team has declined for two days to answer questions about what discussions they had about the seat and whether intermediaries had any contacts with Blagojevich's advisers.<br />Republicans have already raised questions about Obama's refusal to say more and about his past ties with the main characters. Even if Obama remains untouched by the investigation, it shines a light on the corrupt political environment of the state he emerged from and takes attention away from the agenda of change he would rather emphasize.<br />"This is a huge distraction at the worst possible moment," said Lanny Davis, a former White House special counsel who did damage control for President Bill Clinton. "You definitely want to get out in front of this to put it to bed. The only way to do that is to defy the conventional wisdom and the lawyers in the room and the more conservative political advisers in the room who will say, 'Why should we say anything?"'<br />Not everyone agrees with that approach. Chris Lehane, another veteran of the Clinton scandal defense teams, said the worst thing would be to put out information that later proves questionable. "It's like the whirlwind," he said. "You get pulled into the vortex more and more, and that's why he has to be enormously disciplined in terms of sticking to your basic points and not putting out information that creates more trouble for you."<br />That became clear Tuesday after Obama said flatly that he had not talked with Blagojevich about the Senate seat. Within minutes, reporters and Republicans were circulating a two-week-old quote from one of his senior advisers, David Axelrod, saying Obama had spoken with the governor about the seat. Only hours later did Obama's office release a statement in Axelrod's name saying he had misspoken.<br />Obama stayed out of sight Wednesday, calling for Blagojevich's resignation through an aide and only after other Democrats had already done so. Aides were told by transition lawyers not to comment. But Obama planned to hold a news conference Thursday on health care during which he presumably would be asked about the investigation.<br />By the account of several Democrats close to him, Obama did not try to insert himself into the selection of his successor, at least partly because of his own strained relationship with Blagojevich and partly because he had long since grown restless with the Senate. He discussed it with some allies, like fellow Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, but not with some others involved.<br />Schakowsky said she had never talked with Obama about the seat.<br />Likewise, the president-elect never brought it up with another potential candidate, Tammy Duckworth, the director of veterans' affairs in Illinois, when the two participated in a Veterans Day ceremony, an aide to Duckworth said.<br />Neither Obama nor Durbin was invited by Blagojevich to offer advice, the Democrats said. "We all have varying levels of cooperation with the governor. Mine was extremely limited," Durbin said in an interview. "I believe President-elect Obama could say the same." He added: "I knew there was a process in place in the governor's office, but I had no idea what it involved."<br />Emanuel was among the few people in Obama's circle who occasionally spoke to Blagojevich. He declined to answer questions Wednesday, waving off a reporter who approached him as he walked across Capitol Hill.<br />A Democrat familiar with Illinois politics and the Obama transition, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there probably were telephone calls between the Blagojevich and Obama camps about the Senate seat. It was not clear whether any calls were recorded by federal agents, who had tapped the governor's telephones.<br />Blagojevich was largely keeping his own counsel on the selection process, several Democrats said. One aide close to Obama and Durbin said it seemed Blagojevich was "on an iceberg," far removed from most party leaders. The governor did not return telephone calls from Durbin for nearly two weeks, Democrats said. Schakowsky said he took days to answer her messages, too. When he did call back, he spoke with her for just 10 minutes as she made her case for the seat.<br />"I see in retrospect," Schakowsky said, "I probably wasn't in contention - he didn't ask me for anything."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Venezuela indicts opposition leader on corruption<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />CARACAS: Venezuela indicted opposition leader Manuel Rosales on corruption charges on Thursday, possibly weakening adversaries of leftist President Hugo Chavez as he seeks to deepen his self-styled revolution.<br />The indictment, which had been expected, came after the government this year blocked several opposition politicians from running for office, sparking criticism that Chavez was using the state to silence his political enemies.<br />The indictment opens the possibility that Rosales, who says the charges are trumped up, could be unable to run for president in the 2012 election. Chavez is opening a campaign for a constitutional amendment allowing him to stay in office after his current term ends.<br />"Today we've come to confront this political lynching that they are trying to do, a terrorist trial, a political trial," said Rosales, a former presidential candidate who last month was elected mayor of Maracaibo, Venezuela's second-biggest city.<br />"The only thing missing is for them to investigate me for the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy," Rosales told a news conference.<br />The state prosecutor's office said the charges of "illicit enrichment," punishable by three to 10 years in prison, were based on a government investigation of Rosales' assets in which he was unable to explain the origin of certain funds.<br />Communications Minister Jesse Chacon said this week the charges against Rosales had nothing to do with politics.<br />A ruling against Rosales could slow the opposition after it gained ground in last month's elections for governors and mayors by winning several populous states and the capital, Caracas -- although Chavez allies won in most of the OPEC nation.<br />Chavez is seeking a referendum for early next year on changing the constitution to lift a two-term limit on presidential re-election, a proposal voters shot down last year in a broader constitutional reform referendum.<br />(Reporting by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Peter Cooney)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1st6aFObXUwBclvUCotI1EekSgD-iMe_kqNeSNbTN5v1boBHkEgo_lsx46hfxa99UY6S6R5vp0w0UADZzsuTfOaAS6z5zAPx60xfYZqRg_tKjMLcj3rPcIsLOYyVcU8nmoKbzfJUyqMM/s1600-h/DSC02988.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278759116368482866" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1st6aFObXUwBclvUCotI1EekSgD-iMe_kqNeSNbTN5v1boBHkEgo_lsx46hfxa99UY6S6R5vp0w0UADZzsuTfOaAS6z5zAPx60xfYZqRg_tKjMLcj3rPcIsLOYyVcU8nmoKbzfJUyqMM/s320/DSC02988.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Executions in U.S. fall to a 14-year low<br /></strong>By Solomon Moore<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />LOS ANGELES: The use of capital punishment in the United States dropped this year, as state and federal courts executed 37 inmates, a 14-year low, according to a new report. Courts sentenced 111 people to death in 2008, the lowest number of new condemnations in three decades.<br />In 2007, 42 people were executed and 115 were sentenced to death.<br />The data were compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center, a research and anti-death-penalty advocacy group.<br />The lull in executions defied predictions that more prisoners would be put to death after a Supreme Court ruling in April upheld the use of lethal injection and ended an eight-month moratorium. Since that decision, Baze v. Rees, states have granted stays in 25 capital cases as courts worked through issues including the mental illness of defendants, ineffective representation and revelations of potentially exculpatory evidence.<br />Four death row inmates were exonerated in 2009, raising the total number of exonerations to 130 since 1976.<br />Richard Deiter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said that the decline in executions proved that capital punishment was becoming less popular.<br />"Revelations of mistakes, cases reversed by DNA testing, all of these things have put a dent in the whole system and caused hesitation," Deiter said.<br />"I don't think what is happening is a moral opposition to the death penalty yet, but there is a greater scrutiny applied to the death penalty that wasn't there before."<br />Deiter also said that the economic crisis and budget constraints were dissuading prosecutors from seeking capital trials, which usually cost millions of dollars and take decades to complete.<br />Death row inmates are also extraordinarily costly.<br />In June, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice reported that the death penalty system cost $138 million a year.<br />California has the nation's largest death row, but has not executed anyone since 2006.<br />Joshua Marquis, the district attorney of Clatsop County in Oregon and a death penalty supporter, said that prosecutors factored in the high cost of capital cases before deciding whether to proceed.<br />"Prosecutors are the gatekeepers and jurors are becoming more discriminating about when to seek and apply capital punishment," Marquis said.<br />Executions declined even in Texas, which led the nation with 26 inmates put to death in 2008. Overall, most of the nation's executions occurred in Southern states.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Jury deadlock in Georgia death penalty case<br /></strong>By Robbie Brown<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />ATLANTA: A state jury announced Thursday that it could not reach a unanimous decision on whether Brian Nichols deserves the death penalty for committing a spree of murders, assaults and hijackings in 2005 that terrified Atlanta.<br />The jurors, deadlocked after 20 hours of deliberation, told Superior Court Judge James Bodiford that they were split 9-3, but did not say if the majority favored death or life in prison. The defense called for a mistrial, but the judge ordered jurors to continue deliberating until 1:30 p.m. while he met with the lawyers.<br />The jury convicted Nichols on Nov. 7 of murdering four people, stealing five cars, kidnapping a woman and evading police in a chase across Atlanta.<br />He was on trial for rape on March 11, 2005, when he stole the gun of a sheriff's deputy, shot a judge, a court reporter and a deputy at the Fulton County Courthouse, then killed a customs official during his escape. The spree, known here as the Courthouse Shootings, has transfixed Atlanta for three years and cost the county more than $3 million in legal fees.<br />Jurors have three sentencing options: the death penalty, life in prison with parole, or life without parole. Under state law, their decision must be unanimous in order for Nichols to receive the death penalty. If the jury remains hung, the judge will determine the sentence, although he may not select the death penalty. </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA9bpb7ih-i_dWSIHF7wxl2bR-pFnCl54Ju_b8V1sfjjlnTHLhgyda5M6wK9aeSmI8GbzGqVhmNX65_i9_q5R9Shoge_vyY6E3nZDpx0XTJGpSMkkmFtDwP00pCMiy-1NuZTBQAvCYXBc/s1600-h/DSC02991.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278759112286126770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA9bpb7ih-i_dWSIHF7wxl2bR-pFnCl54Ju_b8V1sfjjlnTHLhgyda5M6wK9aeSmI8GbzGqVhmNX65_i9_q5R9Shoge_vyY6E3nZDpx0XTJGpSMkkmFtDwP00pCMiy-1NuZTBQAvCYXBc/s320/DSC02991.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmIrcgAXCgzPvQSICFUYRwsLB_HHbRkkDgN64Tnnrl-LBSDgNgfroawx1l-KBUKz8BBkSm7zrvzrnmnfl22_nJfv_CKZ1IrgU_7wRyDUFYjWDMJ2pAsMwb1O2dCRHtiqM_zlgaAndXcG0/s1600-h/DSC02994.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278759102219282290" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmIrcgAXCgzPvQSICFUYRwsLB_HHbRkkDgN64Tnnrl-LBSDgNgfroawx1l-KBUKz8BBkSm7zrvzrnmnfl22_nJfv_CKZ1IrgU_7wRyDUFYjWDMJ2pAsMwb1O2dCRHtiqM_zlgaAndXcG0/s320/DSC02994.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOOioMNtuGGEsy11p8CmxgMqShMzRd-dBT4m0y0ZYRyi3vT1wNH4-bu8OOOud9zLVsdoT1R6yxSlvyXZzMcseTXkqqw6Zyu3CYWzqy42fJ-omg-QlZNtOfT2ekqbi8spnh7_jvjcSbE_Y/s1600-h/DSC02996.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278759096041210594" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOOioMNtuGGEsy11p8CmxgMqShMzRd-dBT4m0y0ZYRyi3vT1wNH4-bu8OOOud9zLVsdoT1R6yxSlvyXZzMcseTXkqqw6Zyu3CYWzqy42fJ-omg-QlZNtOfT2ekqbi8spnh7_jvjcSbE_Y/s320/DSC02996.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFhOxXoOOVONDPLPMoWOCatAZWpP-iufxoNZ0g_SUg5-TADjcpsp-jJncWzdeYlMhrXHbHQVrL20gtNnAD5YlnRA2pBWLcxENbY7rcbWZendJ7OKMZ4cYf2u7fROgZRrcSkoAmkrK2WY0/s1600-h/DSC02998.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278758647508990194" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFhOxXoOOVONDPLPMoWOCatAZWpP-iufxoNZ0g_SUg5-TADjcpsp-jJncWzdeYlMhrXHbHQVrL20gtNnAD5YlnRA2pBWLcxENbY7rcbWZendJ7OKMZ4cYf2u7fROgZRrcSkoAmkrK2WY0/s320/DSC02998.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglvzKnTugSPz5JzCEvArIG54FVIc7O2B2wEbW55ZySNsoAzT9ZAhuw9-AQdUCA1YH6k-W0ls8_QlJgp6UGPHHq9DhX3lbMZIxfZTuOwSBf_Y1lxpWX4QOEdh0FhkXIuvWfkRQrqWdhfqc/s1600-h/DSC02999.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278758644387697970" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglvzKnTugSPz5JzCEvArIG54FVIc7O2B2wEbW55ZySNsoAzT9ZAhuw9-AQdUCA1YH6k-W0ls8_QlJgp6UGPHHq9DhX3lbMZIxfZTuOwSBf_Y1lxpWX4QOEdh0FhkXIuvWfkRQrqWdhfqc/s320/DSC02999.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJBUCZxEA6rW-3vQ4mFDUINFGggSP2qLUYTUuTca3PA5SoaXBw8VK7dgq76oqxeh_iPIWLjnY0Iglnf4NLwD2lgEyP4KMe2mAySshQf-ib-vgCUlZTa2d-l3aot2OHScu6tJKQpvs58Ws/s1600-h/DSC03000.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278758644385868402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJBUCZxEA6rW-3vQ4mFDUINFGggSP2qLUYTUuTca3PA5SoaXBw8VK7dgq76oqxeh_iPIWLjnY0Iglnf4NLwD2lgEyP4KMe2mAySshQf-ib-vgCUlZTa2d-l3aot2OHScu6tJKQpvs58Ws/s320/DSC03000.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB9wZ6_MwxKtGOgnod86Fh1kMXPacMEn9ICn_DD9SjV0P392fyLRR5Gs_ZcAU6E5lmCJmllZbjRVAwxFZEnOD2b1McKRBJLvp3QnkY64mxwyxGChdBG0LqwEVV5MQeVMQw-Oj8hHPhTuM/s1600-h/DSC03002.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278758644883319890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB9wZ6_MwxKtGOgnod86Fh1kMXPacMEn9ICn_DD9SjV0P392fyLRR5Gs_ZcAU6E5lmCJmllZbjRVAwxFZEnOD2b1McKRBJLvp3QnkY64mxwyxGChdBG0LqwEVV5MQeVMQw-Oj8hHPhTuM/s320/DSC03002.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiExsJB4aZL3tLgTGaaCadZQs4zIz4a_6qJePLIpn0KBr_UciwzY8AFtEp1ia7CZ-k9O9aIlocUGx431V3reA81MkK2G8nt0eIddMFnVITXTB3PtF_UH0cTqqnICQoJzsO6qvhmlVG2qZQ/s1600-h/DSC03003.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278758639594763298" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiExsJB4aZL3tLgTGaaCadZQs4zIz4a_6qJePLIpn0KBr_UciwzY8AFtEp1ia7CZ-k9O9aIlocUGx431V3reA81MkK2G8nt0eIddMFnVITXTB3PtF_UH0cTqqnICQoJzsO6qvhmlVG2qZQ/s320/DSC03003.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh51zuMePd-tM45LSQgBi2sG-seyfmP9a06B6S__mXzaAai473k98sMVMeRe9fXli2dk_e6xzKku3g5NeTzorNX25kiNAXe1soBlUGGTA-LCkHoVhNFq7vID344M_PLqRT7pucKH5Y0oFg/s1600-h/DSC03005.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278758293237485186" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh51zuMePd-tM45LSQgBi2sG-seyfmP9a06B6S__mXzaAai473k98sMVMeRe9fXli2dk_e6xzKku3g5NeTzorNX25kiNAXe1soBlUGGTA-LCkHoVhNFq7vID344M_PLqRT7pucKH5Y0oFg/s320/DSC03005.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEbCDLo3klEMUVW81sXT3GVibvYviEyDmubyg82iCelr-oUY1pzvcZOunwjXs6aUOh_MGOpqeFKJbsn09b62t9yCqlNIqZt9xP4yxz44-qQttJDsVpOy7hmw8MLKw2nIUd9isZwG6-lgA/s1600-h/DSC03010.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278758290849413810" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEbCDLo3klEMUVW81sXT3GVibvYviEyDmubyg82iCelr-oUY1pzvcZOunwjXs6aUOh_MGOpqeFKJbsn09b62t9yCqlNIqZt9xP4yxz44-qQttJDsVpOy7hmw8MLKw2nIUd9isZwG6-lgA/s320/DSC03010.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvmXw4gmxiYhWz9g0sHjPmSFtd4MN3E9OecpJma_Dp5bXtOaq31qTMJb64wK9vmej9GF2UvCvZIrcVDl3eDL9sQl_0QGe8iDVfOsMaNmAMMpkK-Li40WPcqu4agir5FjGFLInk8J1xZWo/s1600-h/DSC03011.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278758292153833810" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvmXw4gmxiYhWz9g0sHjPmSFtd4MN3E9OecpJma_Dp5bXtOaq31qTMJb64wK9vmej9GF2UvCvZIrcVDl3eDL9sQl_0QGe8iDVfOsMaNmAMMpkK-Li40WPcqu4agir5FjGFLInk8J1xZWo/s320/DSC03011.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7n0JIJuUbibzVVrKwAqfbwVKAVEe03LqojuSIzEGtznVHtKtlDICFNoC8i8OofBeonqmb6fbqJNvQvQ9Wvti6M3Gsg4A0Q8N0U8_eOL98AUZ2P6W5k2mV00yJ7bQk8Laz9cwh4nSQPG0/s1600-h/DSC03013.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278758280671741730" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7n0JIJuUbibzVVrKwAqfbwVKAVEe03LqojuSIzEGtznVHtKtlDICFNoC8i8OofBeonqmb6fbqJNvQvQ9Wvti6M3Gsg4A0Q8N0U8_eOL98AUZ2P6W5k2mV00yJ7bQk8Laz9cwh4nSQPG0/s320/DSC03013.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjCbLg_5n2v8sE5oVHaWd7lglZpdOWqM7ICkFwFAh04LDbF2e7-KsKUKUl008KdjEArNoXbj6kGn1tWvVMyghL1XAIS1JA7Hn4MxKL8UJZjcaDydRotevQA0pKcwdcAF__-GR_gN-2koY/s1600-h/DSC03015.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278758278682649138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjCbLg_5n2v8sE5oVHaWd7lglZpdOWqM7ICkFwFAh04LDbF2e7-KsKUKUl008KdjEArNoXbj6kGn1tWvVMyghL1XAIS1JA7Hn4MxKL8UJZjcaDydRotevQA0pKcwdcAF__-GR_gN-2koY/s320/DSC03015.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-l-gB00tog0kwpCEKfJaBf84DUDVGCTvA_ZAvWMPuI65DDiy_L9xL9h8qqSjumyJA_NAaqII60N_XSsjPpTubEswDBXZo3gOM2t4juA88v7hwSjd6JDM9jBPK6-hYvOnZS4ek1ZBH7kw/s1600-h/DSC03016.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278757918832666306" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-l-gB00tog0kwpCEKfJaBf84DUDVGCTvA_ZAvWMPuI65DDiy_L9xL9h8qqSjumyJA_NAaqII60N_XSsjPpTubEswDBXZo3gOM2t4juA88v7hwSjd6JDM9jBPK6-hYvOnZS4ek1ZBH7kw/s320/DSC03016.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Ws6FW3S4vt92ciflZzV45AgpiVmNmEUISeP3cmvC2oI9esdsnl_coDEvdlXce3p6DxYhbNBs_51XTIcz2zn1Omyzp8ATRpBmkIP2bImBztti2LGxZYEpBos6aIrWbALLfJQezh83WCw/s1600-h/DSC03018.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278757917084395938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Ws6FW3S4vt92ciflZzV45AgpiVmNmEUISeP3cmvC2oI9esdsnl_coDEvdlXce3p6DxYhbNBs_51XTIcz2zn1Omyzp8ATRpBmkIP2bImBztti2LGxZYEpBos6aIrWbALLfJQezh83WCw/s320/DSC03018.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhODjXxC3resJHKxljsVh18Rk7Om0M3XHm2-7qKa4dGY18HMvfw_tvYmYs0N1lVmQuhRTxfBSaucgrxcMv9V8eNUgEFPHVY5EetXaV9_n36td-WfhiyZQuPcAHEB7kQUW9yN1fLiPOKqKw/s1600-h/DSC03021.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278757912427611330" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhODjXxC3resJHKxljsVh18Rk7Om0M3XHm2-7qKa4dGY18HMvfw_tvYmYs0N1lVmQuhRTxfBSaucgrxcMv9V8eNUgEFPHVY5EetXaV9_n36td-WfhiyZQuPcAHEB7kQUW9yN1fLiPOKqKw/s320/DSC03021.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>Digital renegades, or captives?<br /></strong>By Evgeny Morozov<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />Over the last few months, the so-called digital natives - teenagers who have grown up surrounded by digital technology - have been lauded as a new force that could redefine politics. A flurry of books with titles like "Born Digital," "Grown Up Digital" and "iBrain" point to the emergence of a new type of wired young citizens. A recent three-year study by the MacArthur foundation found that the Internet helps young people to become "competent citizens in the digital age." The success of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, much of it fought over the Internet, has made many of us rethink the role that the Internet could play in the lives of modern teenagers.<br />However, as history shows, what works in America doesn't always work elsewhere. Few studies have examined the tribe of "digital natives" born outside the well-off and democratic societies of North America and Western Europe.<br />Are they the "digital renegades," ready to leverage the power of social networking and text messaging to topple their undemocratic governments? Or are they "digital captives," whose political and social dissent has been significantly neutered by the Internet, turning them into happy consumers of Hollywood's digital marginalia?<br />That latter proposition seems counterintuitive; many recent examples point to the opposite trend. The democratic forces in Ukraine used the Internet to mobilize young people and get them into the streets during the Orange Revolution. Facebook has been used in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to fuel a series of protests. The recent post-election violence in Armenia and Kenya was well-documented on local blogs, while Chinese bloggers continue testing the patience of their state with numerous protest activities - coordinated over the Internet.<br />What should we make of such examples? The fact that existing political activists embraced the Internet as a tool of mobilization is fairly noncontroversial. What's less obvious is how many digital natives the Internet has turned into digital renegades - and how many into digital captives. It's precisely this balance that will determine what the political landscape of Russia, China or Iran will look like in 10 years.<br />The early enthusiasm for the Internet as a tool of political change has been pegged to its promise to transform the international order: As the benefits of unrestricted access to information and easy group mobilization were to propagate around the globe, even the most heinous dictatorships were expected to founder. The Internet promised a global triumph of liberal democracy, responsible governance and radical transparency. The digital natives were expected to be in the avant guard of this movement; Facebook was supposed to make the Little Red Book irrelevant.<br />To the dismay of most policymakers and technology enthusiasts, this has not happened: The Berlin Wall may have fallen, but the Chinese Firewall has been erected in its place. What if the original premise was wrong and the Internet is not a great force for democratic change but rather the clay that keeps authoritarian regimes together?<br />Whatever the answer to this complex question, it would be wrong to project the American experience to the rest of the world, where the Internet plays a radically different role, particularly in societies with long-established histories of social and sexual taboos.<br />Consider a 2007 survey of Chinese youth, which found that 80 percent of respondents believe that "digital technology is an essential part of how I live," compared with 68 percent of American respondents; 32 percent of the Chinese said that the Internet broadens their sex life, compared with 11 percent of the Americans.<br />We have to be aware of the fact that the Internet has given the youth living in controlled societies infinite venues for digital entertainment - without any religious or social censorship - that may not necessarily be enhancing their digital sense of citizenship and civic engagement. Risking the comfort of their bedrooms - with their hard-drives full of digital goodies - for the gloom of a prison cell does not appeal to many of them. The governments are all too happy to promote this new cult of "cyber-hedonism." Whatever keeps these troubled youths from the streets is inherently a good thing. Digital captives are, after all, cheaper to sustain than the real ones.<br />How does dissent and activism fit in all of this? Is the Tiananmen Square even possible in the age of Twitter, YouTube, and MySpace? As useful as it is, the discussion about digital natives as "citizens by default" is not always helping us to find answers to these questions. That Obama's online campaign has managed to make so many young people engaged in the political process in America doesn't mean much in the international context: In the absence of the local Obama in Russia, China or Iran, young people would continue worshiping Jerry Seinfeld and Paris Hilton (or their local alternatives), leaving the local democratic forces to themselves.<br />Evgeny Morozov, a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York, is writing a book about the role of the Internet in controlled societies.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>OPINION </strong></div><div><strong>Innovating through openness</strong><br />By Nelson Mattos<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />ZURICH: One of the greatest stories of technological innovation in recent centuries happened with little fanfare or notice. In 1811 - a decade after James Watt's patent expired and his monopoly of the steam-engine market ended - a group of miners got together to produce a monthly journal, the Lean's Engine Reporter, which included performance reports and specifications of the steam engines being used in the tin and copper mines of Cornwall, England. The aim of the journal was to promote the identification and spread of good techniques, and likewise fuel competition and new innovation in steam engines - then the lifeblood of English mining.<br />Lean's Engine Reporter and the technological advances it fueled taught us a lesson that we're still learning today: Open innovation is better than closed. Open technology - open in the sense that the technology or knowledge is available to the general public for use - encourages new ideas, competition, efficiency and innovation. It can be messy, but it's inclusiveness means that the barriers of entry are low, cost savings occur across the board, and that the best ideas and practices will rise to the top, allowing companies to grow, become profitable and benefit society as a whole.<br />This lesson is particularly important in Europe. Even though the Web was created here, America has led the first generation of Internet innovation, creating not just Google, but other pacesetters such as Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon and eBay. If Europe is to become the home of the next generation of Web giants, it must keep the Internet open. This requires charting a course that favors open over closed proprietary software standards, ensuring sufficient safeguards on consumer's rights to access the Internet, and allowing innovators to leverage copyrighted material by adapting them to create new products.<br />The Web has thrived because it has been built on a model of openness. Think of your early Internet experiences. You probably used an online service provider that had different games or chat rooms or articles on its portal. Occasionally there would be a link taking you outside the portal and into an untamed World Wide Web with its chaotic jumble of content.<br />As disorganized as the Web was, the standards on which it was built were available to all, and were in fact developed by the Web community. No authority dictated what should or shouldn't appear there. Some of what ended up on the Web was likely of little value, but users were able to make their own choices as to where to browse and what to view.<br />Out of the jumble grew demand for better content. Better content brought more people to the Web, which created more demand for innovation. Eventually, people demanded direct access to this open Web.<br />Today, that openness extends beyond simply a question of direct access to Web content. In the simplest terms, today's open Web is a ubiquitous network where everyone can share information, integrate and innovate unfettered, and then make their work accessible through powerful Web clients like open source Web browsers.<br />This isn't a bizarre, niche community building tools that the average person has never seen. On the contrary: It's the software engineers who build your Facebook applications or your chat service. It's open source browsers like Mozilla's Firefox or Google Chrome.<br />Why is this openness so important? It's not simply a question of philosophy - of believing that transparency and information sharing is right.<br />First, openness speeds innovation. In an open Web, there are no deals to sign or payments to be made. An open platform lowers the barrier to entry for users, Web site owners, and application developers. In an open Web, there can be another Google, or another Facebook, started from someone's garage with very little capital.<br />Second, it reduces inefficiency. In the past, developers have wasted time and resources to write Web code to cover basic functions common to most Web sites - like a registration page. Nowadays, thanks to open code-sharing initiatives, developers don't need to waste time reinventing the wheel. They can pull tried and true code and pop it into their program. Moreover, as more and more sharing of code occurs, weaker solutions are weeded out in favor of more robust models.<br />Third, it makes economic sense. Although it may sound counterintuitive to give something away for free, the resulting popularity and innovation ends up paying off. Consider social networks. Facebook started out with some good, useful applications, but once it opened up its platform to outside developers, the number of applications skyrocketed into the tens of thousands. Today there are more than 140 new applications added each day.<br />Facebook benefited from a better product by letting others do their building; those developers benefited by never having to build or pay for a platform on which to build.<br />But we can take it even further - rather than opening up just one particular platform, we could have openness across social networks. That's the idea behind OpenSocial, which was started by Google and is now run by the OpenSocial Foundation. It is an open platform that allows developers to build Web applications that can be shared across social networking sites, from Orkut to Facebook to Bebo.<br />The final argument in favor of openness is that it promotes greater user choice. Just as the steam engine centuries ago saw a spurt of innovation as a greater number of innovators competed in the market, so will the Web thrive as users are given multiple options, free to pick and move between the best applications and software rather than be locked into one choice.<br />At Google we believe in openness because it's at the heart of the Web's success. Openness isn't just good for Google. It's good for the developer in Moscow who reaches thousands through his applications; for the small business owner in Seville, who uses an open mapping application to show his customers how to find him; and for the person in Lille or Ljubljana who discovers she has more information at her fingertips than ever before.<br />Nelson Mattos is Google's vice president for engineering for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.</div><div>*****************</div><div>Why Athens is burning<br />By Stathis N. Kalyvas<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />Athens, along with several other Greek cities, has been burning for the several days. The rioting was triggered by the death of a teenager killed by the police on Saturday night. How to make sense of a reaction that appears to be so massively disproportionate?<br />Several observers have pointed to the usual suspects: maladministration and corruption; the collapse of confidence in the government; political scandals; a growing gap between the rich and the poor.<br />These arguments are wanting: Greece is hardly exceptional in terms of its problems, yet rioting and destruction on such scale are unusual in Europe.<br />In fact, these riots are a symptom of a deep cultural problem rather than a social one. The rioting youths are not disadvantaged, poor, or even immigrant (as in France). They are, for the most part, regular teenagers, children of the middle class; in fact, the teenager killed by the police lived in one of Athens's most exclusive suburbs. Why are they, then, reacting in such a way?<br />After Greece's transition to democracy in the mid-1970s, a public discourse of resistance against authority emerged and became dominant. Civil disobedience, including violent demonstrations and the destruction of public property, is almost always justified, if not glorified; the police can only be wrong: If they act too harshly they are brutal; if not, incompetent. This discourse has proven to be extremely resistant to time and momentous world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, and is promoted in the media. On the one hand, several journalists came of age in the mid 1970s and are openly sympathetic to it. On the other, political entrepreneurs see it as a resource that can be used handily for political or even economic advantage.<br />As a consequence, all governments since the 1970s have stood by while an anarchist subculture grew, complete with its exclusive urban enclave (the neighborhood of Exarcheia in downtown Athens which is a no man's land for the police). In regular intervals and on a variety of occasions (e.g. Bill Clinton's visit to Greece, various educational reforms, etc.), anarchists engage in violent demonstrations and widespread destruction. These are led by a hard core of 500 to 1,000 individuals which has grown in strength since the late 1990s and fantasizes that it is enacting some sort of 19th century social revolution against the bourgeois. Depending on the popularity of the issue they are joined, by hundreds or thousands of others of lesser commitment and varying motivations, from ideology to simple looting, who are nevertheless socialized into this culture.<br />Undergirding these actions is a more or less complete absence of sanctions - few people get arrested and almost no one gets sentenced. Participation in these riots is seen as a fun and low-risk activity, almost a rite of passage. This attitude of toleration covers a variety of other acts, such as the widespread use of graffiti, which has totally defaced Athens in the past few years.<br />The police lack a consistent policy. They are regularly harassed by groups of youths - a recurrent activity that is perceived as more or less normal; badly trained and inefficiently led, they are prone to outbursts of brutality. The cycle is vicious.<br />Greece's political, cultural, and intellectual leadership has been unwilling to act against this anarchist subculture. In fact, some have fully, and sometimes openly, justified, abetted, and in some instances endorsed it - especially small parties of the left, as well as mainstream left-of-center newspapers.<br />Clearly, these riots are undermining an already weak government. The opposition Socialist Party is already calling for its resignation. However, this problem won't fade away with the present government. Opportunities for riots will always present themselves. Addressing this problem requires nothing less than a deep cultural shift at the top.<br />Stathis N. Kalyvas, a professor of political science at Yale, is the author of "The Logic of Violence in Civil War."</div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOBECOoGGJJCSrCATusPPAn5h-tpGFvUt7xKbVtXbE6h4hfMDId8DnktIoD2FRusJe1iWSbTA7VJJaATy6-qlc5ECP8Q4syL_UUTif0wGylYvy8UmzvBH9j_G6aaPdWawB788ohxDKjPg/s1600-h/DSC03023.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278757910216585330" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOBECOoGGJJCSrCATusPPAn5h-tpGFvUt7xKbVtXbE6h4hfMDId8DnktIoD2FRusJe1iWSbTA7VJJaATy6-qlc5ECP8Q4syL_UUTif0wGylYvy8UmzvBH9j_G6aaPdWawB788ohxDKjPg/s320/DSC03023.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPrnU1p3utPSvhac9aJBzTYiHFFjE5qtumhwwXRDbBk7Xrch6bNgfNV3afPooOUiGAnfEPg2o1tlObFCcyYg-n79J_IjBCnaZJeEL-sglqzj3Ff7RDJB4y1QUQ_D0oBvCSTxThXmHUQpw/s1600-h/DSC03025.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278757907041839426" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPrnU1p3utPSvhac9aJBzTYiHFFjE5qtumhwwXRDbBk7Xrch6bNgfNV3afPooOUiGAnfEPg2o1tlObFCcyYg-n79J_IjBCnaZJeEL-sglqzj3Ff7RDJB4y1QUQ_D0oBvCSTxThXmHUQpw/s320/DSC03025.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy1eg1yAB0OMTKI2OCnJ8OxbBk3bg7mJYhlvQUUWRssWGZXl8UvLZnt4rBrE-skEBiND8kgRplXAuLv3sv0MtEs2TwvIdfjdsne-ML-81L2BrFYY7-il0Cg3_IWPKShKkMUHW5e3AwW1o/s1600-h/DSC03026.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278757449899279410" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy1eg1yAB0OMTKI2OCnJ8OxbBk3bg7mJYhlvQUUWRssWGZXl8UvLZnt4rBrE-skEBiND8kgRplXAuLv3sv0MtEs2TwvIdfjdsne-ML-81L2BrFYY7-il0Cg3_IWPKShKkMUHW5e3AwW1o/s320/DSC03026.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUHAKfwdkn9-0i5rZ5FB0nD1gksSWVKQqgFZJtw9HoSnrUZ5Fo-YtZ7tVcxr4X1fSypbo_Djk59V_8r74512-L5pzRqfhMd7SFr0QjcnvhStRg7dlerH6vdV6KRm6QEewYAkjr7rzEnbo/s1600-h/DSC03028.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278757446907252466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUHAKfwdkn9-0i5rZ5FB0nD1gksSWVKQqgFZJtw9HoSnrUZ5Fo-YtZ7tVcxr4X1fSypbo_Djk59V_8r74512-L5pzRqfhMd7SFr0QjcnvhStRg7dlerH6vdV6KRm6QEewYAkjr7rzEnbo/s320/DSC03028.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlOFtjbbwK7DYHGc91GlrEyzBqybBJKR25I0NZt31ZHClDUctmgga8ZYgVya2RjBt2llXTdMhTpAXyx1RgR5_5dmn0Qma3pBW4eTkp1OtpHj27A5Bn8unVt7P0w91SZK1y1GShhHHxVGg/s1600-h/DSC03029.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278757449486804338" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlOFtjbbwK7DYHGc91GlrEyzBqybBJKR25I0NZt31ZHClDUctmgga8ZYgVya2RjBt2llXTdMhTpAXyx1RgR5_5dmn0Qma3pBW4eTkp1OtpHj27A5Bn8unVt7P0w91SZK1y1GShhHHxVGg/s320/DSC03029.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx3xkTXcyWp34_hBG-zSqboxa1tcM3uoaH-orkLzf7KsSxnD4lWkzGPwgvIz7DjfdgjrW70mvuc_6FNj2QzdWWQ0HYrzR0B2KMU39infIbSQk42ZCeeN755ZPcNNPcfv_ZJHfLDeH3Fbo/s1600-h/DSC03030.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278757443367343186" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx3xkTXcyWp34_hBG-zSqboxa1tcM3uoaH-orkLzf7KsSxnD4lWkzGPwgvIz7DjfdgjrW70mvuc_6FNj2QzdWWQ0HYrzR0B2KMU39infIbSQk42ZCeeN755ZPcNNPcfv_ZJHfLDeH3Fbo/s320/DSC03030.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieqj2AMA3eTY3JIMx8Ho9m12WgnQpQIZxrQft7JRWuP5WHEymuv_dGn_swZWdJw9Cmne565fjn-oVmo_-JC8knd4OmqyKMDrZfU9gH322HbRgcLmBpGHGaX4Urkmg0OVTl-CNHxUs4ZkE/s1600-h/DSC03031.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278757441586731362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieqj2AMA3eTY3JIMx8Ho9m12WgnQpQIZxrQft7JRWuP5WHEymuv_dGn_swZWdJw9Cmne565fjn-oVmo_-JC8knd4OmqyKMDrZfU9gH322HbRgcLmBpGHGaX4Urkmg0OVTl-CNHxUs4ZkE/s320/DSC03031.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYaoQV9FHG7WH1rSRpW_PgWDdrzGsfcUKzTWD3AB1JXQsPkH3nzEIvbPGfta-pVAxt1Ym74n1XbN_Oql7g-60Z3_7bNRvbp6lpGgWzakI2h-oKdrMK9QYRvTl4EQ8QYxrUG_LC_yKBznU/s1600-h/DSC03032.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278756979273002706" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYaoQV9FHG7WH1rSRpW_PgWDdrzGsfcUKzTWD3AB1JXQsPkH3nzEIvbPGfta-pVAxt1Ym74n1XbN_Oql7g-60Z3_7bNRvbp6lpGgWzakI2h-oKdrMK9QYRvTl4EQ8QYxrUG_LC_yKBznU/s320/DSC03032.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIUpSTXvopx0B4B6CmCqKCRXNFpcjpRygVCOA5mZHkJPfTWZgm88H6lLsSAc405UsOKNl89c0DX8TTUVNHwjP2cQ2m4liHqvR-TVpjfxl80IKsSVToY2gtMvfdh37cnW3BYzBRjSvN_ZI/s1600-h/DSC03033.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278756973700728946" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIUpSTXvopx0B4B6CmCqKCRXNFpcjpRygVCOA5mZHkJPfTWZgm88H6lLsSAc405UsOKNl89c0DX8TTUVNHwjP2cQ2m4liHqvR-TVpjfxl80IKsSVToY2gtMvfdh37cnW3BYzBRjSvN_ZI/s320/DSC03033.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-sYxYIJ6DAhA0CU-mnj_ujf4ZSrN58hPU-wOo5lUzVBBoG8c3qoSZdKXqIlhA2NMpTEGxGy_e-jIXsE9To3LiHWMLwpoFNeRP9FNWY-gxQfHlgq2HJ940eGFNKr7SEjgBiclExZ_ELZ4/s1600-h/DSC03034.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278756973729161362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-sYxYIJ6DAhA0CU-mnj_ujf4ZSrN58hPU-wOo5lUzVBBoG8c3qoSZdKXqIlhA2NMpTEGxGy_e-jIXsE9To3LiHWMLwpoFNeRP9FNWY-gxQfHlgq2HJ940eGFNKr7SEjgBiclExZ_ELZ4/s320/DSC03034.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA_gMNBI9MU9LCrDPxR6YZpaAJ7IlbiWR4Gh5K1tVviS9655vQksRQej2BlxtcqX3tae6xYO1XQRkN1G4Fp_G_eEypzdrXd4AYyP1-4NItVWlFzHqxLBN8S4I3hHW0Tv3nlVS7BmcXSZs/s1600-h/DSC03035.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278756968103781794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA_gMNBI9MU9LCrDPxR6YZpaAJ7IlbiWR4Gh5K1tVviS9655vQksRQej2BlxtcqX3tae6xYO1XQRkN1G4Fp_G_eEypzdrXd4AYyP1-4NItVWlFzHqxLBN8S4I3hHW0Tv3nlVS7BmcXSZs/s320/DSC03035.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTIHZlU80iX_Uver4Xee8Y2DCYZ7zgqmqB2tVwk0X0XmGI1WdVFfYOtX9SEsSkHpt1_3p9pPvOh_2HYIOLIPtpBVRUsTIDpK_LM2K6U3NBao3lXF9NiYwo6EFwEMnyXDPSTZjsHzTc4r0/s1600-h/DSC03037.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278756562598863090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTIHZlU80iX_Uver4Xee8Y2DCYZ7zgqmqB2tVwk0X0XmGI1WdVFfYOtX9SEsSkHpt1_3p9pPvOh_2HYIOLIPtpBVRUsTIDpK_LM2K6U3NBao3lXF9NiYwo6EFwEMnyXDPSTZjsHzTc4r0/s320/DSC03037.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh-s2SimzvpPscJLaEggtNXtu-cdjNufMg12qMMvinuZD-nbv4I-h0aNXVLJrXEHGQfPjFgTpWgGb_54ENOQ4EE5jpfKQjZkBOd9Y0nG6U9G7lKaSzyPynQss9JW7C1rfLMhHXQ6HPwhU/s1600-h/DSC03038.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278756564330275554" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh-s2SimzvpPscJLaEggtNXtu-cdjNufMg12qMMvinuZD-nbv4I-h0aNXVLJrXEHGQfPjFgTpWgGb_54ENOQ4EE5jpfKQjZkBOd9Y0nG6U9G7lKaSzyPynQss9JW7C1rfLMhHXQ6HPwhU/s320/DSC03038.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgChBpYVMXshBNUTBt_EfGPe36DoqAv-Dt4ka-oGE6lmV-99rPnSa0APdBoNlsV5B-V7F8nmnGAYOCQAWpTl5fK40KjyOEt420OPtJ0hu3je8lsT3RyS8764CWQiOW2jNHAWVKfApSq2WA/s1600-h/DSC03040.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278756273979874898" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgChBpYVMXshBNUTBt_EfGPe36DoqAv-Dt4ka-oGE6lmV-99rPnSa0APdBoNlsV5B-V7F8nmnGAYOCQAWpTl5fK40KjyOEt420OPtJ0hu3je8lsT3RyS8764CWQiOW2jNHAWVKfApSq2WA/s320/DSC03040.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwVox5v8s0TcWavHI6v_SQqSp6cc4W2igRpsIru-s8aApYjSlw9V_hPEVFnm20GFY21zVf4-44A6E-Hce31wtsgPbNZeT6I1k-KpCjs8lS7d9ll067UXmQBss3p37pkvjILhLaI_WAxhA/s1600-h/DSC03041.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278756272852952322" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwVox5v8s0TcWavHI6v_SQqSp6cc4W2igRpsIru-s8aApYjSlw9V_hPEVFnm20GFY21zVf4-44A6E-Hce31wtsgPbNZeT6I1k-KpCjs8lS7d9ll067UXmQBss3p37pkvjILhLaI_WAxhA/s320/DSC03041.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJBPabp9EuufaGpo2wdKm5SQF2rjpinXUBmwqZzm_dZqYUIzcNszurwgZr6uF1Nha0E9468uwHPDmKSs58nWgOc8_ZXc69j39Vjyhjv4kd-7QWuwbQ1vs1RB5sodAl7z_ejBgaZMm3I_o/s1600-h/DSC03042.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278756269346195154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJBPabp9EuufaGpo2wdKm5SQF2rjpinXUBmwqZzm_dZqYUIzcNszurwgZr6uF1Nha0E9468uwHPDmKSs58nWgOc8_ZXc69j39Vjyhjv4kd-7QWuwbQ1vs1RB5sodAl7z_ejBgaZMm3I_o/s320/DSC03042.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVNQcK_Nyn3yOPy1b_DmN3BiHh9HYE0n4MJDbwHRZhbcUfLDjnMmuIhBAkCNgxvMDgTn6_wU6d9orK2XSq6hpXhX-SiB92HgOzTCyuVb52So7T9xbUs6yKdDKWFVNuEX2zeh_DkRDcF5U/s1600-h/DSC03043.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278756262879971410" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVNQcK_Nyn3yOPy1b_DmN3BiHh9HYE0n4MJDbwHRZhbcUfLDjnMmuIhBAkCNgxvMDgTn6_wU6d9orK2XSq6hpXhX-SiB92HgOzTCyuVb52So7T9xbUs6yKdDKWFVNuEX2zeh_DkRDcF5U/s320/DSC03043.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgejJ7_lK8cdyZb0Ouc2hYZ8yEBamduzEITko6CR3M9Tc7Xg_fIPHjE4tydkzX9yrVsbXIpvamSRqeO6CYFzDpYAEpU6ZawZnSk5CI5AJOAW7uT82pKxj_SX3zGtJ2oqICkavmcdDSCD4Q/s1600-h/DSC03044.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278756257782818210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgejJ7_lK8cdyZb0Ouc2hYZ8yEBamduzEITko6CR3M9Tc7Xg_fIPHjE4tydkzX9yrVsbXIpvamSRqeO6CYFzDpYAEpU6ZawZnSk5CI5AJOAW7uT82pKxj_SX3zGtJ2oqICkavmcdDSCD4Q/s320/DSC03044.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoEkly6MVe9QrlCuwtMAhMoJ0FkhyphenhyphenWsaNTjcKZREmKGxjaqj-YleQDOzUZC8smffZn4emS_nraR0juvhayTrCTWc9Ut2GGjQMG7Iv0ocZ1kxDkRk2WDy_yhAAw8CC4h-ij9ndejy2fdK0/s1600-h/DSC03045.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755885545735922" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoEkly6MVe9QrlCuwtMAhMoJ0FkhyphenhyphenWsaNTjcKZREmKGxjaqj-YleQDOzUZC8smffZn4emS_nraR0juvhayTrCTWc9Ut2GGjQMG7Iv0ocZ1kxDkRk2WDy_yhAAw8CC4h-ij9ndejy2fdK0/s320/DSC03045.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtiRoF1Jz47h9xmEG0MJSe5P3gb1YZn2rFlpqmXJq4P_HPKYPlP3RK-Ak28MoEXk3rCdHoC1WygaNMqrU2ygulUTp1ze-B-1goYvUQOIoF-s9PTgbEHfaXAoVpTtgSTHW5ARpiOh7TRfg/s1600-h/DSC03046.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755879175009378" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtiRoF1Jz47h9xmEG0MJSe5P3gb1YZn2rFlpqmXJq4P_HPKYPlP3RK-Ak28MoEXk3rCdHoC1WygaNMqrU2ygulUTp1ze-B-1goYvUQOIoF-s9PTgbEHfaXAoVpTtgSTHW5ARpiOh7TRfg/s320/DSC03046.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSeIM8zghMBHP3EA71UDHLkWK6k9G-2R3B0vBRvdMYZiDRLhPMfFSmK7feROjFwogz7gbj_Ii1e1Zfv0LJ5axzTUgnurWCFlnLD3c0-Ysp3DSN3NKy__-l-EjCwVnuMb1xi1glfAmpYu8/s1600-h/DSC03047.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755880808428354" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSeIM8zghMBHP3EA71UDHLkWK6k9G-2R3B0vBRvdMYZiDRLhPMfFSmK7feROjFwogz7gbj_Ii1e1Zfv0LJ5axzTUgnurWCFlnLD3c0-Ysp3DSN3NKy__-l-EjCwVnuMb1xi1glfAmpYu8/s320/DSC03047.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHRZf5yUUusQwSexKuQQmCm6nZJxsmGRUrhGS1gWjqRbIz-e0ihguvqUToueb8C4Ue7mmhnnBeuweYcJwcY9aZGenrM8JZ4hfyFk7EVMDjBbnfJgI-ZBH4kHmrJpPYnUl1Z8417jKnpN4/s1600-h/DSC03049.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755877640781970" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHRZf5yUUusQwSexKuQQmCm6nZJxsmGRUrhGS1gWjqRbIz-e0ihguvqUToueb8C4Ue7mmhnnBeuweYcJwcY9aZGenrM8JZ4hfyFk7EVMDjBbnfJgI-ZBH4kHmrJpPYnUl1Z8417jKnpN4/s320/DSC03049.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRelMXROO4mwNYFanARekB9Gl8OwoKUHB5I3ZY0YsQk5_51QYeJ0J6ZVi5Sl9ICUYv99psA0Y6Ir8hWuDLAP0-4-bq2i-OtCQ9x2p7TzRmC3uGELxkhKgOZ1NCuDJ6k0zdpBhjVJRaAw8/s1600-h/DSC03050.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755867067601922" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRelMXROO4mwNYFanARekB9Gl8OwoKUHB5I3ZY0YsQk5_51QYeJ0J6ZVi5Sl9ICUYv99psA0Y6Ir8hWuDLAP0-4-bq2i-OtCQ9x2p7TzRmC3uGELxkhKgOZ1NCuDJ6k0zdpBhjVJRaAw8/s320/DSC03050.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk_Zozb818L2-gDjfRx-Kxhj5l9IUwuMI4ccmEYb3qudK8OGsBK3lnuK5TN1Y61wCE4cCShYZRAxK6xO0mBOUX2Ty5ayIocjnVlRAG32mY87atAWUr5xzFNpao5AzLSDlPldfQlv_OHYU/s1600-h/DSC03052.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755549966703202" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk_Zozb818L2-gDjfRx-Kxhj5l9IUwuMI4ccmEYb3qudK8OGsBK3lnuK5TN1Y61wCE4cCShYZRAxK6xO0mBOUX2Ty5ayIocjnVlRAG32mY87atAWUr5xzFNpao5AzLSDlPldfQlv_OHYU/s320/DSC03052.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghUXC9WY_x_8L24WpGxbrNVN3164OsbP2MDfTXUv7cr2uDwpzglJNxMSA317O04NIEW07Q-gS0meR3O0Oq46Dd7rW3_1kwNpnOXQl26zXNuSI67vAuQIbaRz_sCKezXk_7qg6eOn1Eub4/s1600-h/DSC03053.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755541014704466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghUXC9WY_x_8L24WpGxbrNVN3164OsbP2MDfTXUv7cr2uDwpzglJNxMSA317O04NIEW07Q-gS0meR3O0Oq46Dd7rW3_1kwNpnOXQl26zXNuSI67vAuQIbaRz_sCKezXk_7qg6eOn1Eub4/s320/DSC03053.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim2Ji3Lt3gGz3oeBgcF9bJJZRbHftcag67OF2Vmc9YFxGeZSh0_A8IzF2KNjSH_wRsT5DBLp2FtuBwR81WFJYGJUGcqY0JyBBRLeplQO75_uXmaUz17E96XT3vNRagSnt-jXZ8XtTch9M/s1600-h/DSC03054.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755541376028914" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim2Ji3Lt3gGz3oeBgcF9bJJZRbHftcag67OF2Vmc9YFxGeZSh0_A8IzF2KNjSH_wRsT5DBLp2FtuBwR81WFJYGJUGcqY0JyBBRLeplQO75_uXmaUz17E96XT3vNRagSnt-jXZ8XtTch9M/s320/DSC03054.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhux4d_v6ZqgeGIH2oA1GTegH5kuDerrzHznt9LQt0wmJMRg3WteaMf0iy7OMLJoiqhqbm-CA9qN2Axq9scJlpXDfctuhDSbKPfIsBkbYkj5wgfO7DUBK9VjRdetHWBJiBcRe4Db202N7E/s1600-h/DSC03055.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755535489331570" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhux4d_v6ZqgeGIH2oA1GTegH5kuDerrzHznt9LQt0wmJMRg3WteaMf0iy7OMLJoiqhqbm-CA9qN2Axq9scJlpXDfctuhDSbKPfIsBkbYkj5wgfO7DUBK9VjRdetHWBJiBcRe4Db202N7E/s320/DSC03055.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh90NIAbKbev1OpQMScacG0CpORKT6T1tUaSPLB0HPEru47wDbrzD1q20s_MfEAvrfFZBCP6caP5ZjSTd6sLuOkYnNaXvuFX1v-s1RflIPPpSvOGIPeMvSPLrWsX4iXVQa_TBf0EfvnEL8/s1600-h/DSC03056.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755532142484770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh90NIAbKbev1OpQMScacG0CpORKT6T1tUaSPLB0HPEru47wDbrzD1q20s_MfEAvrfFZBCP6caP5ZjSTd6sLuOkYnNaXvuFX1v-s1RflIPPpSvOGIPeMvSPLrWsX4iXVQa_TBf0EfvnEL8/s320/DSC03056.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju1p2-i1qxLKSKrwPP05noLG56jy2t7p6MgLTJlZ_TU8e-RRuUnK_ZYjd-csnddXLFd5OtvelG8L2UD6q6OHslK3a2xKvu2-GOtOPnse0AQRufDqr_eclfhq3gDuaZAitWxEG5JC_fo-o/s1600-h/DSC03057.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755183328980770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju1p2-i1qxLKSKrwPP05noLG56jy2t7p6MgLTJlZ_TU8e-RRuUnK_ZYjd-csnddXLFd5OtvelG8L2UD6q6OHslK3a2xKvu2-GOtOPnse0AQRufDqr_eclfhq3gDuaZAitWxEG5JC_fo-o/s320/DSC03057.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9QSPr4J-br3O0g8n02LoWNcw2VN7JG3PVVjCiitaNwYVrL5fxo3lCy5MO4m9o-sxyWFBKunBcbbsobWb9WxxMCdQPEE5CBBfZHy2L3P_1-4ZRT8-r6ZtCPEBhcaFL0JYq6bdrWp9aE0c/s1600-h/DSC03058.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755184767706082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9QSPr4J-br3O0g8n02LoWNcw2VN7JG3PVVjCiitaNwYVrL5fxo3lCy5MO4m9o-sxyWFBKunBcbbsobWb9WxxMCdQPEE5CBBfZHy2L3P_1-4ZRT8-r6ZtCPEBhcaFL0JYq6bdrWp9aE0c/s320/DSC03058.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfRRiPQDLnH5ZT9tQ0VHfnUTb1rgrITMcX4pV4cWCqAAVOVhVgGGAsNm1SiAOKYm0LVWZgBxDAajjdS6kTHXv53zJAANqtJp62IMlUZRgWVtS_nBpiRCiDYjD9_utn289BJkyhQinCbXY/s1600-h/DSC03059.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755182205390482" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfRRiPQDLnH5ZT9tQ0VHfnUTb1rgrITMcX4pV4cWCqAAVOVhVgGGAsNm1SiAOKYm0LVWZgBxDAajjdS6kTHXv53zJAANqtJp62IMlUZRgWVtS_nBpiRCiDYjD9_utn289BJkyhQinCbXY/s320/DSC03059.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGBHLyZyYtpZqwZl3xD80TyWrg6-JwTMAuFS1o-a3Ss_XaT98pcUuLGDxA8D0kHXVEkU75HrGK06CkOBANVOLFto2GO3xMZu-106YhVzSzNBeH3zaPQyiBZ83Q7X_BU48O4yLy4_kNbm0/s1600-h/DSC03060.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755179291337298" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGBHLyZyYtpZqwZl3xD80TyWrg6-JwTMAuFS1o-a3Ss_XaT98pcUuLGDxA8D0kHXVEkU75HrGK06CkOBANVOLFto2GO3xMZu-106YhVzSzNBeH3zaPQyiBZ83Q7X_BU48O4yLy4_kNbm0/s320/DSC03060.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhujxg6cUg19XpGmwShqiPZMnM11-9mME3sTmfyj_rqnuIl2uAMAplnEY2aDf0oExDWKUK87lGbml48RnleiZCtaZoJbreRxDKlUrNPtO0AmjyvToI-Wwz1oiw_m1wEaoAyJwHMIq82520/s1600-h/DSC03061.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278755176086539282" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhujxg6cUg19XpGmwShqiPZMnM11-9mME3sTmfyj_rqnuIl2uAMAplnEY2aDf0oExDWKUK87lGbml48RnleiZCtaZoJbreRxDKlUrNPtO0AmjyvToI-Wwz1oiw_m1wEaoAyJwHMIq82520/s320/DSC03061.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzCEbUAV9C2YLFIUNe6k_VIZ1V25V8qLwW9L7ZMqspiuKCKTo6dWoolTQXPuFXbT2K9OGG-SvgDcB0zXYaUxwrNydlleFG_ZaWO8l9VeJ6iVqUliGh0OXDs9p7JNJIkYHv57CxzdNGUwI/s1600-h/DSC03062.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278754045890648802" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzCEbUAV9C2YLFIUNe6k_VIZ1V25V8qLwW9L7ZMqspiuKCKTo6dWoolTQXPuFXbT2K9OGG-SvgDcB0zXYaUxwrNydlleFG_ZaWO8l9VeJ6iVqUliGh0OXDs9p7JNJIkYHv57CxzdNGUwI/s320/DSC03062.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh96-dvNoPCY5LgMJItSX3hM4IFY4Lgqwvgv7WPdMX-mn8zVm4UTTybdr-iKo8yFKv5AE5vijuNtJjy3bDyQXjD7wDZRBYPjf4KmaTH3GVC1SbhQJhu4pl65_VKgt_VIDb7vb4-aS9WzDw/s1600-h/DSC03063.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278754047070436370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh96-dvNoPCY5LgMJItSX3hM4IFY4Lgqwvgv7WPdMX-mn8zVm4UTTybdr-iKo8yFKv5AE5vijuNtJjy3bDyQXjD7wDZRBYPjf4KmaTH3GVC1SbhQJhu4pl65_VKgt_VIDb7vb4-aS9WzDw/s320/DSC03063.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfCOXyZXyV4h4ZJa-QacJ2Tp1UUtEeYQh9SIuPxV5HpVzYrGu1w08WB341_PP4GHB4uFpVhdqPVu6tjWHEZ5SoEGNWX2ZCmFCsLHSc_4jwhnsgloKwsEUGZBZkVOsVK-dM4dL694dSGmM/s1600-h/DSC03064.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278754043870928898" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfCOXyZXyV4h4ZJa-QacJ2Tp1UUtEeYQh9SIuPxV5HpVzYrGu1w08WB341_PP4GHB4uFpVhdqPVu6tjWHEZ5SoEGNWX2ZCmFCsLHSc_4jwhnsgloKwsEUGZBZkVOsVK-dM4dL694dSGmM/s320/DSC03064.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE8P21E2LPMnj2K4jvTdDSkwpMl1oYlaRiHRBsUq-PF0REwGFCLjJwpWDOYirQ2wjLtFH2c7h6OQJDCf5xkSvmvaCRpWlDw-1nVs38inhOdci2qRWV7DKN2Dy8_E_NT4yoFyS8VuFxFA4/s1600-h/DSC03066.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278754041030110738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE8P21E2LPMnj2K4jvTdDSkwpMl1oYlaRiHRBsUq-PF0REwGFCLjJwpWDOYirQ2wjLtFH2c7h6OQJDCf5xkSvmvaCRpWlDw-1nVs38inhOdci2qRWV7DKN2Dy8_E_NT4yoFyS8VuFxFA4/s320/DSC03066.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRrrUsXmpWBT9PmTAFO_PPKt2NpYTpPlhJFtxjlRpNsZNlP3pkl79bCKjRsFJI2meH4tmKi-UTM7z6QWTLMZGTrmotcjbtkgHbeOWolTSfOGh4bndDnsYm8WrQ-56AQ1pQAZT_Oj2Qgwc/s1600-h/DSC03067.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278754040602831282" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRrrUsXmpWBT9PmTAFO_PPKt2NpYTpPlhJFtxjlRpNsZNlP3pkl79bCKjRsFJI2meH4tmKi-UTM7z6QWTLMZGTrmotcjbtkgHbeOWolTSfOGh4bndDnsYm8WrQ-56AQ1pQAZT_Oj2Qgwc/s320/DSC03067.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqFUYgnuhkcPw1DRIzgUYihVMJbzcedRf4LDfmGAC_MD8M8Jv-HpFwF4x7Ak9Q6hAVCj3bwmIXyZ4DlG6n88cLgYsU07t73ghf8J72z0I2zepnAj6T2NaA7BfWnw9K-DBbYCNwO6Wooc0/s1600-h/DSC03068.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753772132939746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqFUYgnuhkcPw1DRIzgUYihVMJbzcedRf4LDfmGAC_MD8M8Jv-HpFwF4x7Ak9Q6hAVCj3bwmIXyZ4DlG6n88cLgYsU07t73ghf8J72z0I2zepnAj6T2NaA7BfWnw9K-DBbYCNwO6Wooc0/s320/DSC03068.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjinKfc5yT-HwDLE8huMls1K0E9w-cNyhnFhYOhJsD5Y6L0Z1lC2zvytcHMlKtnf0lYF5_IEE34_zCNzUW1f8njl79tEFEmqet3GO3UQUPxQ23tKQvFo5qG64X_ZwZIfkk-IM7WfYQUx0/s1600-h/DSC03069.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753768688295314" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjinKfc5yT-HwDLE8huMls1K0E9w-cNyhnFhYOhJsD5Y6L0Z1lC2zvytcHMlKtnf0lYF5_IEE34_zCNzUW1f8njl79tEFEmqet3GO3UQUPxQ23tKQvFo5qG64X_ZwZIfkk-IM7WfYQUx0/s320/DSC03069.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYNLiHsYwiVGorP-c3iAzB8UNttpo94osTlwScf5TJYWw5wJvFIKFLLg7Nw8UNEHTPzJTSspItjivYsDQOshVDla9CKYBUzcrz_IbZLETCsD-l9gj8Rv1WL0_Tdh0KnOO0ahUJexVsOk8/s1600-h/DSC03071.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753766063019154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYNLiHsYwiVGorP-c3iAzB8UNttpo94osTlwScf5TJYWw5wJvFIKFLLg7Nw8UNEHTPzJTSspItjivYsDQOshVDla9CKYBUzcrz_IbZLETCsD-l9gj8Rv1WL0_Tdh0KnOO0ahUJexVsOk8/s320/DSC03071.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoqjULo6wOwxVnuQU5ZkG1H0QsFLx0f9H0SBEEPMi9D-JuUY472jrFCgJ_WfkPCNsYShtLX_Y-Sml8nhXiD0VOqNEix_HPxz-X_t93I30NPgTOp-E-UWmXFvUPLCsEVwOW6OHHpZCNcsA/s1600-h/DSC03074.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753764517892034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoqjULo6wOwxVnuQU5ZkG1H0QsFLx0f9H0SBEEPMi9D-JuUY472jrFCgJ_WfkPCNsYShtLX_Y-Sml8nhXiD0VOqNEix_HPxz-X_t93I30NPgTOp-E-UWmXFvUPLCsEVwOW6OHHpZCNcsA/s320/DSC03074.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLmoV-kH-W0Q-5QpC5cIXe6MMUR0CjPePYt0n4Xlytd1hyphenhyphenibRZ7ADvjjqWvneca5coJeOIi74g2Ej2GPRsFJ3VfTjwGrOn8Y61-bAD62jqkkXwj0-GwqhJZ_vS8N40QemWrohOPS2oI1Q/s1600-h/DSC03075.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753759333581842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLmoV-kH-W0Q-5QpC5cIXe6MMUR0CjPePYt0n4Xlytd1hyphenhyphenibRZ7ADvjjqWvneca5coJeOIi74g2Ej2GPRsFJ3VfTjwGrOn8Y61-bAD62jqkkXwj0-GwqhJZ_vS8N40QemWrohOPS2oI1Q/s320/DSC03075.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKndm-YmdHfxcqwgu-z4q-BlShSDqhMV7kVY-HQzY3zZ1rYqLVAXuqcA0E3Rhhn5Q6CjGFqBAH_jYPHGSkVKpND1OKtBKD4twktZpPN6yObuLybfBzqgS1SsXnEvlunXSD8Mliesmggng/s1600-h/DSC03076.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753489146396450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKndm-YmdHfxcqwgu-z4q-BlShSDqhMV7kVY-HQzY3zZ1rYqLVAXuqcA0E3Rhhn5Q6CjGFqBAH_jYPHGSkVKpND1OKtBKD4twktZpPN6yObuLybfBzqgS1SsXnEvlunXSD8Mliesmggng/s320/DSC03076.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9SRrFA1CTOcYup_Jc5HagHRYKlEp3aNVPCY_tExRDnjsKZ83WXkSPnrd3ISlZu90Aic4UpcWpvZ88S21wYG-1D2ALtZRfII92tQkcOJT2wuVCiB_OqAOeJBdhaLOA55C1ZQqRs8HkdfA/s1600-h/DSC03077.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753482734665778" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9SRrFA1CTOcYup_Jc5HagHRYKlEp3aNVPCY_tExRDnjsKZ83WXkSPnrd3ISlZu90Aic4UpcWpvZ88S21wYG-1D2ALtZRfII92tQkcOJT2wuVCiB_OqAOeJBdhaLOA55C1ZQqRs8HkdfA/s320/DSC03077.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtXmZnz-GkIVkTJFyiNMq7R7ncLcSTOubINnrg631nFUPcSqc4KdjSTi6Qz7pH3mTB2gDmSUN6nSGsp8Ub55BV9ZBg8AZyrdLX9EajFOn6yursFKXXodZhJo3UYxfetBcmbVamjyYCKKE/s1600-h/DSC03078.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753483207825378" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtXmZnz-GkIVkTJFyiNMq7R7ncLcSTOubINnrg631nFUPcSqc4KdjSTi6Qz7pH3mTB2gDmSUN6nSGsp8Ub55BV9ZBg8AZyrdLX9EajFOn6yursFKXXodZhJo3UYxfetBcmbVamjyYCKKE/s320/DSC03078.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQVzMle9gZHe-usMaGwSpsZ9EWyUcdh-1y_eJCTU31m7ABLKqEUVpOQTuQxLHyqeVhRJgWnLg15W889YIhplozLx7jG_Cf4GAB-iVXgy_mRGmnsor-wV1gCk8oN1gZfsd0ikvi0Pw4_uA/s1600-h/DSC03079.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753479893953202" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQVzMle9gZHe-usMaGwSpsZ9EWyUcdh-1y_eJCTU31m7ABLKqEUVpOQTuQxLHyqeVhRJgWnLg15W889YIhplozLx7jG_Cf4GAB-iVXgy_mRGmnsor-wV1gCk8oN1gZfsd0ikvi0Pw4_uA/s320/DSC03079.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP5Hvr47WOP7yzI9E85nHQKmfk0YwjBGkoULREi_D-xH8H7937L0AruGZuy24fU6BFmtIeBITgb9OL5wVkshYQsKzPOjCiRPFXFbB-u63ABEYIwxghz96ZSnU_rAwRFsjUPID4vSNPmPY/s1600-h/DSC03081.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753473703606450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP5Hvr47WOP7yzI9E85nHQKmfk0YwjBGkoULREi_D-xH8H7937L0AruGZuy24fU6BFmtIeBITgb9OL5wVkshYQsKzPOjCiRPFXFbB-u63ABEYIwxghz96ZSnU_rAwRFsjUPID4vSNPmPY/s320/DSC03081.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrrgTpY857Ii8rds9kkAv0yBdMJlf0Z2N0XlMFKlkPnwoUkwobTlcfai9wgRupRxWPbirwQi_MDJea36QbyTn0x2Y_-EPawHRplSZ0cWC_5ITvLi1I582l-bELHcSLHRV8T5hW6PdZnow/s1600-h/DSC03082.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753216060952594" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrrgTpY857Ii8rds9kkAv0yBdMJlf0Z2N0XlMFKlkPnwoUkwobTlcfai9wgRupRxWPbirwQi_MDJea36QbyTn0x2Y_-EPawHRplSZ0cWC_5ITvLi1I582l-bELHcSLHRV8T5hW6PdZnow/s320/DSC03082.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigkTGRR84MGA6XT6Uo1CoPlVpkp43IrF4CUNq_2NeC0Zp6jOBTbzfta5F9uqgOT4A99UYVZz-CzQu_g-eu3AfuYeqFJ6jCMJd2DR0gAERCgdZjGAxzjMF5Bqc65xXSeYR_NEoKXwuKAew/s1600-h/DSC03083.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753209293654450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigkTGRR84MGA6XT6Uo1CoPlVpkp43IrF4CUNq_2NeC0Zp6jOBTbzfta5F9uqgOT4A99UYVZz-CzQu_g-eu3AfuYeqFJ6jCMJd2DR0gAERCgdZjGAxzjMF5Bqc65xXSeYR_NEoKXwuKAew/s320/DSC03083.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc3a2Qm8PMD0N_c93yo2A2E0H71ZsIAas1FmTEiSgNFVYYHMjzKMQ0dzJXRuuvj2QlbD6t9ujYZ_ZtAAHu6-Vq_QwvZJrEgUnxn48MCb3Xss0VwUTSq-p6VwVFsF03gnu_ag4N_wGJKGI/s1600-h/DSC03084.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753206811594066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc3a2Qm8PMD0N_c93yo2A2E0H71ZsIAas1FmTEiSgNFVYYHMjzKMQ0dzJXRuuvj2QlbD6t9ujYZ_ZtAAHu6-Vq_QwvZJrEgUnxn48MCb3Xss0VwUTSq-p6VwVFsF03gnu_ag4N_wGJKGI/s320/DSC03084.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1NDnRVpFmlFXJX315KGVmtcZed5N9mtc7Fgk_42Q0LGPga8SJ-uL2UNrpty7aWV0txSsDzmROV1kHEAKk6sQPGC5o3zOi3R0weiztgiAcAjDS7RtnL6-q7jBUCoQ8-XDDnAhbsiBf-Bw/s1600-h/DSC03085.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753204567906546" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1NDnRVpFmlFXJX315KGVmtcZed5N9mtc7Fgk_42Q0LGPga8SJ-uL2UNrpty7aWV0txSsDzmROV1kHEAKk6sQPGC5o3zOi3R0weiztgiAcAjDS7RtnL6-q7jBUCoQ8-XDDnAhbsiBf-Bw/s320/DSC03085.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnL6N2u5LPX7U8Ks4MPkB7lExGwSWaIqWQdENjBLTOCRKkwETNN9wiHbxy8ERQd9u2Zzrgzr8V9l21yDbVKjN9iMAQMvEUh4BXL37Tqkg5LjBna_RnNt-NRI2ZmgChKjBBhwF3eflRsz4/s1600-h/DSC03086.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278753206918919474" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnL6N2u5LPX7U8Ks4MPkB7lExGwSWaIqWQdENjBLTOCRKkwETNN9wiHbxy8ERQd9u2Zzrgzr8V9l21yDbVKjN9iMAQMvEUh4BXL37Tqkg5LjBna_RnNt-NRI2ZmgChKjBBhwF3eflRsz4/s320/DSC03086.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>IW: This is E., just before he and I share my bed for a siesta.</strong><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic2Kgm7v-T2Hqm7ku09qyjwv2U4OdghW-oSyvXe1KVFdpAFVFU7_BvTQhAVy9FvZy9gZpLLZClh08I-i1LF1zW-FDsOXfNA_W9KB7uj3RoQHVb-l3xGanX0qpEVowhDtCzQcbX0noCTK8/s1600-h/DSC03087.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752963501588738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic2Kgm7v-T2Hqm7ku09qyjwv2U4OdghW-oSyvXe1KVFdpAFVFU7_BvTQhAVy9FvZy9gZpLLZClh08I-i1LF1zW-FDsOXfNA_W9KB7uj3RoQHVb-l3xGanX0qpEVowhDtCzQcbX0noCTK8/s320/DSC03087.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>IW: This is B., taking M. and B. to A.'s as she is taking them down to school after lunch. These are the last words the limpet heard from his mother: 'I'm just off to A's."<br /></strong><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2nJ9n1vZUKCzjg0rd-Th9QZRtzNpj8y8ZnDaLxX8FpAjvOrF9etfb9FEaFX14DufDVi3MuEwNqTgexSSl4QoAebdl0kqk5ui2HnDLcj3bbXjEDMS3GnXODR4K7xlqqmhzoh3OJAMeCNM/s1600-h/DSC03089.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752958889435218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2nJ9n1vZUKCzjg0rd-Th9QZRtzNpj8y8ZnDaLxX8FpAjvOrF9etfb9FEaFX14DufDVi3MuEwNqTgexSSl4QoAebdl0kqk5ui2HnDLcj3bbXjEDMS3GnXODR4K7xlqqmhzoh3OJAMeCNM/s320/DSC03089.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>IW: This is E. 1.5 hours later. During this time, as I slept and B. worked in the study, with the baby monitor on, E. got up, put on some shoes, and in zero degree temperatures, left the house so silently neither dog, mother, nor father heard him. He walked at least 1.5km down the lane, then onto the main road heading up to the bourg and A.'s driveway. Faced with its steepness and uncleared snow, he sat down in the middle of the road in the snow.</strong></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>Here he was found by a passing villager who knew us but not we him, and he presented the limptet to his mother in the study where she was working, while the limpets father slept. </strong></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>All's well that ends well.<br /></strong><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZJpN4w9I7ygxKjYbeWJjk18mYldqbzFJ0TEs9YMeMjv3rxWO38rYj9Wd8bpGSebL9A26B7ZrJz-AGu0Lv85725Pu3lk5lTqJ61kDxmJf1caN2FJXSGpqNdMVsJ6O4NKTnYiHGOxIxJW8/s1600-h/DSC03092.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752956098265330" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZJpN4w9I7ygxKjYbeWJjk18mYldqbzFJ0TEs9YMeMjv3rxWO38rYj9Wd8bpGSebL9A26B7ZrJz-AGu0Lv85725Pu3lk5lTqJ61kDxmJf1caN2FJXSGpqNdMVsJ6O4NKTnYiHGOxIxJW8/s320/DSC03092.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe0cXlQvl6Ww6yFniuhxkgLmXH8RcTMr1JjHSVWt-Ah9kS6XNIzuU-2l14-V5-GCDQzFf3dXCWt3ZIrDCDY9g_5MaYIDqI2TqOwsqJv-vp7yEJncrbdQYbjl7-vx1d4tro3vNgg757gNM/s1600-h/DSC03093.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752957044740530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe0cXlQvl6Ww6yFniuhxkgLmXH8RcTMr1JjHSVWt-Ah9kS6XNIzuU-2l14-V5-GCDQzFf3dXCWt3ZIrDCDY9g_5MaYIDqI2TqOwsqJv-vp7yEJncrbdQYbjl7-vx1d4tro3vNgg757gNM/s320/DSC03093.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBz0tJrHOR9l1OyTHoo6BlE_yBd3lgR98dP-dDt04zMhf4mPfmuAKNeKrHZ3lZktSmoy0r3VrW6NsOcuLzWj3XDJDoF9HOO9qPodnJ7hlDFSNkCzy7pC-NJ3hcKZuWu7NXmTy4FqN7IYc/s1600-h/DSC03094.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752950738584210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBz0tJrHOR9l1OyTHoo6BlE_yBd3lgR98dP-dDt04zMhf4mPfmuAKNeKrHZ3lZktSmoy0r3VrW6NsOcuLzWj3XDJDoF9HOO9qPodnJ7hlDFSNkCzy7pC-NJ3hcKZuWu7NXmTy4FqN7IYc/s320/DSC03094.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDnSl0Oi3YHEcJ_wTV3PTYHJW0b266k-eZgYvU9aBzKu_a50jr4UMjq4VEdL72zCXhyphenhyphenbmoYrAzXEOTaLrrGyFymrDM0d_YmIbeSA3j1CqmTIKZ4DnThSzb2rWohuFaOqMejNCGbOcztgI/s1600-h/DSC03095.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752577822460418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDnSl0Oi3YHEcJ_wTV3PTYHJW0b266k-eZgYvU9aBzKu_a50jr4UMjq4VEdL72zCXhyphenhyphenbmoYrAzXEOTaLrrGyFymrDM0d_YmIbeSA3j1CqmTIKZ4DnThSzb2rWohuFaOqMejNCGbOcztgI/s320/DSC03095.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizgmhrL-mkaqBP1Y4Ia0PrKs4W4gKVjRPmq9lyJJlMW9Kvvvu4sJkqz-0oxIKytJhGtH48Xdsmrhnz_QIVuHKm6YVAXLjAOknZWv0qnRVCNhHXEkZLulC1w6mp2No2T0cWN9Gy2X5IjXk/s1600-h/DSC03096.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752573366521746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizgmhrL-mkaqBP1Y4Ia0PrKs4W4gKVjRPmq9lyJJlMW9Kvvvu4sJkqz-0oxIKytJhGtH48Xdsmrhnz_QIVuHKm6YVAXLjAOknZWv0qnRVCNhHXEkZLulC1w6mp2No2T0cWN9Gy2X5IjXk/s320/DSC03096.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsn7qPEq-wHaHmsalLWEiN3GjXgmGI-YyuGF6l9NstojgK2J_ii6uklrMvn5xc565Z0qE4CGY5-phdRVMooF2w5b4Pxvp-T4y-hybRwV2PkcjltXljVU-BInzeYq28kRwcBilk1y1TZoA/s1600-h/DSC03097.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752571568011122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsn7qPEq-wHaHmsalLWEiN3GjXgmGI-YyuGF6l9NstojgK2J_ii6uklrMvn5xc565Z0qE4CGY5-phdRVMooF2w5b4Pxvp-T4y-hybRwV2PkcjltXljVU-BInzeYq28kRwcBilk1y1TZoA/s320/DSC03097.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTq9KT_VANYnru6hcb5AYwvJDkytydAVUkL9EpxNYCwJX18neiOThREgi9u5Zdo3JWr_kDjUqmzCDoHDEce4Zl6iqcrAm-1ACFAK_52YeeQ94DHm5ozoK9xorlQyCCltxD3PaK9Mh9YK4/s1600-h/DSC03098.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752566132320194" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTq9KT_VANYnru6hcb5AYwvJDkytydAVUkL9EpxNYCwJX18neiOThREgi9u5Zdo3JWr_kDjUqmzCDoHDEce4Zl6iqcrAm-1ACFAK_52YeeQ94DHm5ozoK9xorlQyCCltxD3PaK9Mh9YK4/s320/DSC03098.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJLYypS-rTcMLfD0GoR-K_9JRwfJp7MEOwHPfFTDnsZD4u4zaHN9JSM4pw_TFx_fQnYlVfZHd0rsYWA6R4pPYiQpvTR0dxn4efnfTfGR3m6VGwtYqmXwUfAMN4mNdctZC6f2kTO-eSscU/s1600-h/DSC03099.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752562127356018" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJLYypS-rTcMLfD0GoR-K_9JRwfJp7MEOwHPfFTDnsZD4u4zaHN9JSM4pw_TFx_fQnYlVfZHd0rsYWA6R4pPYiQpvTR0dxn4efnfTfGR3m6VGwtYqmXwUfAMN4mNdctZC6f2kTO-eSscU/s320/DSC03099.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRNupagy2gxkBQkHNmpjcWyFG0E7nH4YrpPiRDw32bGfnWLhcjrrvDXCiJcZjQg5AENNQqIcdQyeP7Ln0qXotdooD8YKyyoikXOOOrofDzg2zLxkvKM-APtlcF2lIxYu7SXxtTtykS4IU/s1600-h/DSC03100.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752248344519778" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRNupagy2gxkBQkHNmpjcWyFG0E7nH4YrpPiRDw32bGfnWLhcjrrvDXCiJcZjQg5AENNQqIcdQyeP7Ln0qXotdooD8YKyyoikXOOOrofDzg2zLxkvKM-APtlcF2lIxYu7SXxtTtykS4IU/s320/DSC03100.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaXxcZ3FYsTJHQcItBZbIyDOPllzs7CgyzE8y2PXmC3UMxA5g508fYA2LHDoquIMjMJBneQvSZOhgjHyRw0fIFzRDdDqyCbyOjKJNn2tqa45chpImwBb1BYRU7uaemUhYdklVismEDAIE/s1600-h/DSC03101.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752245127368402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaXxcZ3FYsTJHQcItBZbIyDOPllzs7CgyzE8y2PXmC3UMxA5g508fYA2LHDoquIMjMJBneQvSZOhgjHyRw0fIFzRDdDqyCbyOjKJNn2tqa45chpImwBb1BYRU7uaemUhYdklVismEDAIE/s320/DSC03101.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGMIDj0Z4xhoCnrT1fjkuB9AFTDRTb1fEILNDnwJiBiVWq9J8VRK7hHrKdvbTsHWheTdpIc3RGIjqTEgCNNlGpcgrfs3bPyMwGmDkqXSWQu0hlJGuBw7DXsY2dRXddPi70DKo3Ai0aV5A/s1600-h/DSC03102.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752237282174514" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGMIDj0Z4xhoCnrT1fjkuB9AFTDRTb1fEILNDnwJiBiVWq9J8VRK7hHrKdvbTsHWheTdpIc3RGIjqTEgCNNlGpcgrfs3bPyMwGmDkqXSWQu0hlJGuBw7DXsY2dRXddPi70DKo3Ai0aV5A/s320/DSC03102.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV5BrNlBOgBX9IY9z5SoYbuow2ctBOEkOH7U-eJHxtKmMNjNKBQMeqItJ_W2aMCe1vzK8oHXtjGAitmCgcgOHQgePeR5BQicIMZNo6mTi2DCK_2d6JTKQmcKnsBoeBIjoSlMDKauddgsQ/s1600-h/DSC03103.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752236793612946" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV5BrNlBOgBX9IY9z5SoYbuow2ctBOEkOH7U-eJHxtKmMNjNKBQMeqItJ_W2aMCe1vzK8oHXtjGAitmCgcgOHQgePeR5BQicIMZNo6mTi2DCK_2d6JTKQmcKnsBoeBIjoSlMDKauddgsQ/s320/DSC03103.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvIrRM6alpYT7BmpLo8WCnMQrrmnZWch3BmkFt3ecSVtgL5HScir2fyfqITRhR6s8qDE_uNjumZtlTsPiSeuyR69WhbMiOCtn9wOo_JrEOyEm-ev-YHLFGOchlitXYtjQDb3o2SFekR0Q/s1600-h/DSC03104.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278752228112281650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvIrRM6alpYT7BmpLo8WCnMQrrmnZWch3BmkFt3ecSVtgL5HScir2fyfqITRhR6s8qDE_uNjumZtlTsPiSeuyR69WhbMiOCtn9wOo_JrEOyEm-ev-YHLFGOchlitXYtjQDb3o2SFekR0Q/s320/DSC03104.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU6hX91bvNK4ugt2RKVOwMN8YJrTl7FRcdWkuuTU2-7A2e62wBbs7VaerKiA6WOttq13UdI5g5e345i_CqJZ3A_9gDbVLBIKgxpQHt4l7DXUza6UTM4hJ20QrRn85N6ol7XL9ZI7LhiZg/s1600-h/DSC03105.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751975846015010" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU6hX91bvNK4ugt2RKVOwMN8YJrTl7FRcdWkuuTU2-7A2e62wBbs7VaerKiA6WOttq13UdI5g5e345i_CqJZ3A_9gDbVLBIKgxpQHt4l7DXUza6UTM4hJ20QrRn85N6ol7XL9ZI7LhiZg/s320/DSC03105.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigvbabdF-MIbGaz94eTYaDwM1EIgdcdlyjl_0wR4O3yeSBJhPKRAG0ab94UeF7m2xQeJx1ls4EmoC6fT6ANzXdoWtElAM8g0hm24dy3-eJSr12UOdSS5E38egaMulOQpaUeK4XL478pAQ/s1600-h/DSC03106.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751972777654210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigvbabdF-MIbGaz94eTYaDwM1EIgdcdlyjl_0wR4O3yeSBJhPKRAG0ab94UeF7m2xQeJx1ls4EmoC6fT6ANzXdoWtElAM8g0hm24dy3-eJSr12UOdSS5E38egaMulOQpaUeK4XL478pAQ/s320/DSC03106.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdhX8s7bqiQlayXTJRr4gltWXIf1O5JRcJtSXaE4Vp6I_EYbN9UFA-4pFXJ6swSNnW-MSDod4CaH8SurCcSJaV8iPXyQAr2ItnR2re9Wa-pf-gR0QIw5HrjtSkdT4zR0DPg2e5qD6az0Y/s1600-h/DSC03107.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751966948833074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdhX8s7bqiQlayXTJRr4gltWXIf1O5JRcJtSXaE4Vp6I_EYbN9UFA-4pFXJ6swSNnW-MSDod4CaH8SurCcSJaV8iPXyQAr2ItnR2re9Wa-pf-gR0QIw5HrjtSkdT4zR0DPg2e5qD6az0Y/s320/DSC03107.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgQKrop5-44d8MSeMLsdjfUczN4RxRdTmgw9XDB8w8gR-XCnxK-xQjwxh9qnJpchrYsFi77dvHqrzKWARnnNr2nyGzCq7WwlUrnIf0_uzdrlQk2aULa9OzxxUlQWfWuTpfmk7ISjuIUGg/s1600-h/DSC03108.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751960768967218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgQKrop5-44d8MSeMLsdjfUczN4RxRdTmgw9XDB8w8gR-XCnxK-xQjwxh9qnJpchrYsFi77dvHqrzKWARnnNr2nyGzCq7WwlUrnIf0_uzdrlQk2aULa9OzxxUlQWfWuTpfmk7ISjuIUGg/s320/DSC03108.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV-ek2b-RAc5EMZX1PntfwMPZwd_LKhOzMp8rkX2u8kBa3_UzHuq9X8K_0V84FHH-nmLhaB0Jfe9uLVmMp-Ommtf4OrobiE1fzlbs3gS3yrSioN5vX_hZr8S4ofPf1EFv55TdVi5kPSmE/s1600-h/DSC03109.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751958456444514" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV-ek2b-RAc5EMZX1PntfwMPZwd_LKhOzMp8rkX2u8kBa3_UzHuq9X8K_0V84FHH-nmLhaB0Jfe9uLVmMp-Ommtf4OrobiE1fzlbs3gS3yrSioN5vX_hZr8S4ofPf1EFv55TdVi5kPSmE/s320/DSC03109.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WbdLXMMVWfiK-XoEhuykcyuIUiBoViCedOY_fgBnOVyGEe34KTDkT0T6-gFg7gYiPfvTrpZhRmnEg3Qr_aAhbrhcDnMMRZbsslj1njPIa-DQQkYe9Y0cVgPWUtzmZsp1KN0wMfCTbxg/s1600-h/DSC03109.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751728030580242" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WbdLXMMVWfiK-XoEhuykcyuIUiBoViCedOY_fgBnOVyGEe34KTDkT0T6-gFg7gYiPfvTrpZhRmnEg3Qr_aAhbrhcDnMMRZbsslj1njPIa-DQQkYe9Y0cVgPWUtzmZsp1KN0wMfCTbxg/s320/DSC03109.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrtI3CcGSpaA-CpNCsbWLbH9V0Rx6qtRxHw1PZcuL-aRo8NQf5mHUeX3BejxYM9i4aqa6_NBTtGD1hy1QdTMYTFA0XJ67Zh5-lfRR8w-RJUz1gn70Pqg21h_yKw0xFs67pXVFe8KiY1_E/s1600-h/DSC03110.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751724111687682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrtI3CcGSpaA-CpNCsbWLbH9V0Rx6qtRxHw1PZcuL-aRo8NQf5mHUeX3BejxYM9i4aqa6_NBTtGD1hy1QdTMYTFA0XJ67Zh5-lfRR8w-RJUz1gn70Pqg21h_yKw0xFs67pXVFe8KiY1_E/s320/DSC03110.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZrqI4HNEsxARUoddQG2txvMD0aiEM-ItUCCiuBCpcxGw7cDY9yq5WphGw90TIpzInelx3JTUvyJLmb2JK1i7nN3HINjYO9Fb0nM-mHuw3Gm1fnU8ThOkzIS7My_WNP6_RYi9sRjGLyU8/s1600-h/DSC03111.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751724319170610" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZrqI4HNEsxARUoddQG2txvMD0aiEM-ItUCCiuBCpcxGw7cDY9yq5WphGw90TIpzInelx3JTUvyJLmb2JK1i7nN3HINjYO9Fb0nM-mHuw3Gm1fnU8ThOkzIS7My_WNP6_RYi9sRjGLyU8/s320/DSC03111.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBgVAM4SO5AuSvoTW1it78bGCN-bJzYguC8Cz82cWlSfeyu24l8MtxXu8jkETr-uhwL0F8Z4YXqcC2Heos_k7KpeCaeTem7FI54qtieOAvvLg5H8zjBTtVIcrrT5f9lFPtvFliiSvLw_U/s1600-h/DSC03112.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751718380771042" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBgVAM4SO5AuSvoTW1it78bGCN-bJzYguC8Cz82cWlSfeyu24l8MtxXu8jkETr-uhwL0F8Z4YXqcC2Heos_k7KpeCaeTem7FI54qtieOAvvLg5H8zjBTtVIcrrT5f9lFPtvFliiSvLw_U/s320/DSC03112.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd7wXQUHmHwVJbDQuLGaajH6_A0Bnv1oq2psQkjrLvv9-KCWVTYD3ioGr1zFVQdsJJvrkqBM4Q2bjFH32jGtUtdbEoWWWZhW5Zl_to-aiPoitTUZLwaG5iHemC5YCVYUGQcOMw-AL5rU4/s1600-h/DSC03113.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751705715029858" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd7wXQUHmHwVJbDQuLGaajH6_A0Bnv1oq2psQkjrLvv9-KCWVTYD3ioGr1zFVQdsJJvrkqBM4Q2bjFH32jGtUtdbEoWWWZhW5Zl_to-aiPoitTUZLwaG5iHemC5YCVYUGQcOMw-AL5rU4/s320/DSC03113.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6E1-eQke22seJQxsftnXSzf43U7rO1GxEHWCuvafZ2a6Vk3Kq_qoQxuVpfnZYa0xRAqGVjBs9wEh9pjGwSKuTtRiS0pH5AZBbgxD1RYnmnQQkcGYpStcMF83BWl65iipyUDWtX2Ljg4s/s1600-h/DSC03114.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751401526213650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6E1-eQke22seJQxsftnXSzf43U7rO1GxEHWCuvafZ2a6Vk3Kq_qoQxuVpfnZYa0xRAqGVjBs9wEh9pjGwSKuTtRiS0pH5AZBbgxD1RYnmnQQkcGYpStcMF83BWl65iipyUDWtX2Ljg4s/s320/DSC03114.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4rC7_GWAN0skQrv8FuWELlcSPIIuaV4wqH45C4F0bn4kpGuSGX5LmhBIwFTZdzmI8ZFqpDaDVC08OAkHUu_ATrlNVibQ1TXCKBXNhfNl5LbPWL9wlBQI6SUsxo6IDCeao8Qlqj-ZM7jY/s1600-h/DSC03118.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751395763271810" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4rC7_GWAN0skQrv8FuWELlcSPIIuaV4wqH45C4F0bn4kpGuSGX5LmhBIwFTZdzmI8ZFqpDaDVC08OAkHUu_ATrlNVibQ1TXCKBXNhfNl5LbPWL9wlBQI6SUsxo6IDCeao8Qlqj-ZM7jY/s320/DSC03118.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOyqtigz5n8HJBn7fnXCJGZK2UlzTeWGpSUgibBjrc8RVfVY3ZbTLvRSH8_nvsuB-OQqd07ExNWvjnTXDCPhO63EvkREvgBVr_9SOHU2KUJkwva1lbvH1Uuppuqbao2mMZlEmfdVHL4DM/s1600-h/DSC03119.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751389092519458" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOyqtigz5n8HJBn7fnXCJGZK2UlzTeWGpSUgibBjrc8RVfVY3ZbTLvRSH8_nvsuB-OQqd07ExNWvjnTXDCPhO63EvkREvgBVr_9SOHU2KUJkwva1lbvH1Uuppuqbao2mMZlEmfdVHL4DM/s320/DSC03119.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWkSQ9r784dnornmxNtMpf_P5kBAffSjMdNMnuBBrGC1Oua6beZgDHbFKvUuxMVKTx-Ack6xemAdu57eCQd1h19g7Cy9sLgDWlQnkd5vpHlmOCRWSCNoZslWuV7_ym5d1SzzhS-ymHLOs/s1600-h/DSC03120.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751390405806770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWkSQ9r784dnornmxNtMpf_P5kBAffSjMdNMnuBBrGC1Oua6beZgDHbFKvUuxMVKTx-Ack6xemAdu57eCQd1h19g7Cy9sLgDWlQnkd5vpHlmOCRWSCNoZslWuV7_ym5d1SzzhS-ymHLOs/s320/DSC03120.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitXRqYqcKuAWOhPVzsT9oWRUIVvXZAuxV4_Wg2yZtVTYAJy2mMKjEQBuPBXMIrCL5dald_YcrUJ5a4PAxfPyciazRVqv_pl10MOScmq_4qRrjPpEYhbTY_1eTaG-MuN0HB1J3DdkaxED8/s1600-h/DSC03121.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751386297422386" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitXRqYqcKuAWOhPVzsT9oWRUIVvXZAuxV4_Wg2yZtVTYAJy2mMKjEQBuPBXMIrCL5dald_YcrUJ5a4PAxfPyciazRVqv_pl10MOScmq_4qRrjPpEYhbTY_1eTaG-MuN0HB1J3DdkaxED8/s320/DSC03121.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6QvTMx4jeY1R0b9fpuc36zLOMmsjYNuryk_9vhsxLS_3yXmCR1TznvSQMJCC5QPWZW3yv4LxtIo2iutnPnjTjU4p0SwaEAVhHnEyaFtrP7G0f5o8_IqnqpkCcDM6r-ryBs8jBhFCriR4/s1600-h/DSC03122.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751169074678562" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6QvTMx4jeY1R0b9fpuc36zLOMmsjYNuryk_9vhsxLS_3yXmCR1TznvSQMJCC5QPWZW3yv4LxtIo2iutnPnjTjU4p0SwaEAVhHnEyaFtrP7G0f5o8_IqnqpkCcDM6r-ryBs8jBhFCriR4/s320/DSC03122.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrZNTWE9wxUbtI2fTD3bmQrqRHZjEVBTS_sNN6V9CbpONeYYNgza6FIdiLoJEH5xS_uERC_73mjmYKfw2qsbS_zijHtL8_FAaF1yWauQp-rSmdKmFcnowPuRL9w7dp9yzhedbVgUju3xY/s1600-h/DSC03123.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751161594778370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrZNTWE9wxUbtI2fTD3bmQrqRHZjEVBTS_sNN6V9CbpONeYYNgza6FIdiLoJEH5xS_uERC_73mjmYKfw2qsbS_zijHtL8_FAaF1yWauQp-rSmdKmFcnowPuRL9w7dp9yzhedbVgUju3xY/s320/DSC03123.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh73ZSn7_7bWa85030t_rFlLm6a4GZmye4LP_VSspvuv66byfOVxe7TaWqmeHrNrLz3H-S2wA1J62x2bXs63YwHcr98bN3LgQ1y7NRioHkIWMwLK8Rl0fQFI3VF12sX5fUAHN3Q5guuAYc/s1600-h/DSC03125.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751158032966338" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh73ZSn7_7bWa85030t_rFlLm6a4GZmye4LP_VSspvuv66byfOVxe7TaWqmeHrNrLz3H-S2wA1J62x2bXs63YwHcr98bN3LgQ1y7NRioHkIWMwLK8Rl0fQFI3VF12sX5fUAHN3Q5guuAYc/s320/DSC03125.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy_tzSHi_JpUNl-maZB83M-kS9Imu11-zruU05Hnsxf9Z3vjSyl__FR2TBBpzVw6rc0WZ9TPXf_Cct5GDxlONXPmYZUi7UA6FSy1ytt0U_QAWFUtgUWju_w1tDlf5ZGln921Xvl-kGkPs/s1600-h/DSC03126.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751152101287634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy_tzSHi_JpUNl-maZB83M-kS9Imu11-zruU05Hnsxf9Z3vjSyl__FR2TBBpzVw6rc0WZ9TPXf_Cct5GDxlONXPmYZUi7UA6FSy1ytt0U_QAWFUtgUWju_w1tDlf5ZGln921Xvl-kGkPs/s320/DSC03126.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhNFMxUrb8S-k26NlpxHt4HDNkG5J2petEVUaUKADF-2u_hmaO4HflTDFRm_WuVmsmkjAt9cHjsUoYC7pXP_rfG6d0uGIQV_DF5OtyN3-rcnn4xSZP5xMrmIapqdxc27vXNmLoPl-19M4/s1600-h/DSC03127.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278751153672898226" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhNFMxUrb8S-k26NlpxHt4HDNkG5J2petEVUaUKADF-2u_hmaO4HflTDFRm_WuVmsmkjAt9cHjsUoYC7pXP_rfG6d0uGIQV_DF5OtyN3-rcnn4xSZP5xMrmIapqdxc27vXNmLoPl-19M4/s320/DSC03127.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio94M9qrlTMUM6hbs3slgTpHkokywkcj7LXwxUBcovJq3MDhLA5vdQDHSKPicmilUFtoOQ2sQU9qNYLwKjF8FIBbWXnGayOlbpEZClRy651gtPN1AP8NHrr8WJC1OBD_RjCJRN9JE9CUA/s1600-h/DSC03128.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750937128288210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio94M9qrlTMUM6hbs3slgTpHkokywkcj7LXwxUBcovJq3MDhLA5vdQDHSKPicmilUFtoOQ2sQU9qNYLwKjF8FIBbWXnGayOlbpEZClRy651gtPN1AP8NHrr8WJC1OBD_RjCJRN9JE9CUA/s320/DSC03128.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjO-o6jWpZEAfiCmrsWbzN843_HobfOgBE8I8UQ9bHSYyJwubK_m3Ux4Fynp2ufWvU9h_GV6H07gUTWTM8xeQBibpVLSNtyvDeMZFRiRs2LGvAzacdHKO5tYMddp7v0I_sQv8sb6CYCl4/s1600-h/DSC03129.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750932607647922" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjO-o6jWpZEAfiCmrsWbzN843_HobfOgBE8I8UQ9bHSYyJwubK_m3Ux4Fynp2ufWvU9h_GV6H07gUTWTM8xeQBibpVLSNtyvDeMZFRiRs2LGvAzacdHKO5tYMddp7v0I_sQv8sb6CYCl4/s320/DSC03129.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDucg_4HHTYN_YtIjP60V_W9talYscm0Jwzs9I00FqHJpuF3rjC33Fyd5eUyRgq0pONFMUldqrvMggkuGrojVjFLTZP7nTmHNzQM-2AGJ5woOMnl2UmfvSGMsHd5GaEz0OElEhcYkRExg/s1600-h/DSC03130.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750928706680018" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDucg_4HHTYN_YtIjP60V_W9talYscm0Jwzs9I00FqHJpuF3rjC33Fyd5eUyRgq0pONFMUldqrvMggkuGrojVjFLTZP7nTmHNzQM-2AGJ5woOMnl2UmfvSGMsHd5GaEz0OElEhcYkRExg/s320/DSC03130.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCIEuMLcF0S6ZrcTIS0gso8eFVK6Ws2owoD2ojZSbFa9wtawztszaNGFdxZ7YJSRWa_xXBPHC3UMQUCG3q0Tbg3WOyuSQ_aetNiiZJE4FwcbEEydFY8-IZ8u0GVj8O8WYw5WUs_sBvLOI/s1600-h/DSC03131.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750767597571394" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCIEuMLcF0S6ZrcTIS0gso8eFVK6Ws2owoD2ojZSbFa9wtawztszaNGFdxZ7YJSRWa_xXBPHC3UMQUCG3q0Tbg3WOyuSQ_aetNiiZJE4FwcbEEydFY8-IZ8u0GVj8O8WYw5WUs_sBvLOI/s320/DSC03131.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Gc_p9tGu0aPFSW0K6E1CQ8SiQl-50arM9srq8nyvMk5hx7Zqps7veQeYimeDVHB1YzoIC8LHU_N_R8PE7M-9vQdzawk1EabkPFy1k-HAyvu55Hd90DKmA6zI204Y2JXvcJz-DpinqEg/s1600-h/DSC03132.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750763467816658" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Gc_p9tGu0aPFSW0K6E1CQ8SiQl-50arM9srq8nyvMk5hx7Zqps7veQeYimeDVHB1YzoIC8LHU_N_R8PE7M-9vQdzawk1EabkPFy1k-HAyvu55Hd90DKmA6zI204Y2JXvcJz-DpinqEg/s320/DSC03132.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_G5EHYFldPOwjsaLA3iur_ZmENAGTWl0Po5JnOgssTl-8FmjHjhB8kQZD90ux7hPKntSzNbtDddyO6U3j0vD4Z_rFJZyKWYdtAQLHWlDdDwRN0VM6VDBvI1bPnnC7ztpam55i0aYzt-k/s1600-h/DSC03133.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750755543248562" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_G5EHYFldPOwjsaLA3iur_ZmENAGTWl0Po5JnOgssTl-8FmjHjhB8kQZD90ux7hPKntSzNbtDddyO6U3j0vD4Z_rFJZyKWYdtAQLHWlDdDwRN0VM6VDBvI1bPnnC7ztpam55i0aYzt-k/s320/DSC03133.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7tF0lAZGKqj5IwkFoaRQFLc0Ay8XGOC-_0xqQTCwBX8SOlLVf4LMHYdwBbMFAxxy7DcNAn3Tm2kA6R-F6_-l17vnA-1gEO8aqyaO0i2omyGUyz3Czmv3aAgbyKD-Y1HHk_LegCLU2g90/s1600-h/DSC03134.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750752637321730" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7tF0lAZGKqj5IwkFoaRQFLc0Ay8XGOC-_0xqQTCwBX8SOlLVf4LMHYdwBbMFAxxy7DcNAn3Tm2kA6R-F6_-l17vnA-1gEO8aqyaO0i2omyGUyz3Czmv3aAgbyKD-Y1HHk_LegCLU2g90/s320/DSC03134.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCU6tCe91EOb785gEASxrb4YSLh3dR2oJATp2OcfF4M5DxqUa_GFdpe9alFm9FTBmolzSbMCCTtzuRVf20Lm7tCJrUc1WaimyRY6CrFRqcMa_n2212eiw_Od_o33EjMOIvYRO-kOEishU/s1600-h/DSC03135.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750752300873586" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCU6tCe91EOb785gEASxrb4YSLh3dR2oJATp2OcfF4M5DxqUa_GFdpe9alFm9FTBmolzSbMCCTtzuRVf20Lm7tCJrUc1WaimyRY6CrFRqcMa_n2212eiw_Od_o33EjMOIvYRO-kOEishU/s320/DSC03135.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp1bAv6fQ-2_AJPsmwH5N8rKvyLLbZ17G9GC6tnxKkU2Lh4l1fHuR4U0-kQ8IGGlT-IiTf4RilyP_95IbAsFaxsKcfatI35GpgC39ybXPnQOoAuud8H9O7AqCtWOb-17AYjOYHhQPMt30/s1600-h/DSC03136.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750529152593570" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp1bAv6fQ-2_AJPsmwH5N8rKvyLLbZ17G9GC6tnxKkU2Lh4l1fHuR4U0-kQ8IGGlT-IiTf4RilyP_95IbAsFaxsKcfatI35GpgC39ybXPnQOoAuud8H9O7AqCtWOb-17AYjOYHhQPMt30/s320/DSC03136.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2iBKSnN9fVQ7refPMALd8rSAT4FGyUQeqzOqflSlWoBu57h789OulYp82UM5-00TmQMJ0LcPsm_Bxu0DPSos7oQwbKBdkSuJLFh_EP4Bi0Wuspdch5TfbtuLNJ6AohrPBwO0EnauWvno/s1600-h/DSC03137.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750523321172050" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2iBKSnN9fVQ7refPMALd8rSAT4FGyUQeqzOqflSlWoBu57h789OulYp82UM5-00TmQMJ0LcPsm_Bxu0DPSos7oQwbKBdkSuJLFh_EP4Bi0Wuspdch5TfbtuLNJ6AohrPBwO0EnauWvno/s320/DSC03137.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3RS7WTm-WW7_keK-L5l0qQ7uA0sT6Z7qSBfXRbxT8HpegHs0N-6lxSfndUcp3TqTHSO3XswfOF6yiZTkGQrzgyCzn01fH21w3nmR1JLG0QbmHcRYa3rh4nM6a8QzCVqMs8Hy85GOay0I/s1600-h/DSC03139.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750520256277442" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3RS7WTm-WW7_keK-L5l0qQ7uA0sT6Z7qSBfXRbxT8HpegHs0N-6lxSfndUcp3TqTHSO3XswfOF6yiZTkGQrzgyCzn01fH21w3nmR1JLG0QbmHcRYa3rh4nM6a8QzCVqMs8Hy85GOay0I/s320/DSC03139.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif4HMMWjsVzE8BTEwOVIbamAnXQriEjORT0HjoDrT76Qc8qlyVLdjSUky1SKKvGxwEL8ctvvsoRENiogDTRIsfYyxvJZ7bakj6QVlslbpDee8Ed8FwMHWrSc0LUjppJkqayNNv11EyYaY/s1600-h/DSC03144.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750522883405634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif4HMMWjsVzE8BTEwOVIbamAnXQriEjORT0HjoDrT76Qc8qlyVLdjSUky1SKKvGxwEL8ctvvsoRENiogDTRIsfYyxvJZ7bakj6QVlslbpDee8Ed8FwMHWrSc0LUjppJkqayNNv11EyYaY/s320/DSC03144.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6cv0uIpGjoUEG9Oz5_guPX7xtYR0Ow4_7EijXZZrUfvIL9GQ64tQHckFMnNHmvE-BRpB6Bd0i2o3U3Gnlxl_xWHg1iB7RXG0WIMIduVAkgGzwZA3KnHMBiRdgKKVolI_NK_W0VNeSixE/s1600-h/DSC03145.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278750514703798034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6cv0uIpGjoUEG9Oz5_guPX7xtYR0Ow4_7EijXZZrUfvIL9GQ64tQHckFMnNHmvE-BRpB6Bd0i2o3U3Gnlxl_xWHg1iB7RXG0WIMIduVAkgGzwZA3KnHMBiRdgKKVolI_NK_W0VNeSixE/s320/DSC03145.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>Tesco to launch half-price Christmas sale<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />LONDON: Tesco unveiled a half-price sale on about 1,000 products on Thursday, seeking to lure shoppers amid signs they are holding out for bigger post-Christmas bargains.<br />The supermarket group said that from Friday it would be halving prices on products from bikes to beef and perfume to Christmas puddings, with a focus on gifts and essentials for the festive season.<br />"Customers are telling us that they are delaying their main Christmas purchases as they wait for bargains," Commercial Director Richard Brasher said in a statement.<br />"Our Half Price Sale reassures customers that we're not making them wait."<br />Tesco said a survey conducted by ICM showed that shoppers were delaying spending, with 73 percent of participants saying they had bought at least one Christmas gift, down from 78 percent the same time a year ago.<br />Retailers, including clothing and foods group Marks & Spencer and department stores chain Debenhams, have launched big discounts and promotions in the run-up to Christmas in a bid to revive flagging consumer spending.<br />But research from credit information provider Experian shows that shopper numbers have remained below levels at the same time last year.<br />(Reporting by Mark Potter; Editing by Mike Nesbit)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Book review: 'The Northern Clemency'</strong><br />By Sophie Gee<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />The Northern Clemency<br />By Philip Hensher<br />597 pages. Knopf. $26.95.<br />'The Northern Clemency" is a 600-page multigenerational epic set in the northern English city of Sheffield, famous for steel, coal mines and the retrenched male strippers immortalized in "The Full Monty." Written by a distinguished creative writing professor, blurbed by Philip Pullman, a finalist for the 2008 Booker Prize and recently named Amazon's Best Book of 2008, this door-stop volume aims to be a Major British Novel, revisiting the dawn of Thatcher's Britain in the 1970s, the volatile confidence and despair of the '80s and the awakening of Tony Blair's new Britain in the '90s.<br />Philip Hensher describes a Britain that doesn't get much coverage abroad - it's neither the well-groomed London of Richard Curtis movies nor the grungily council-housed and incomprehensibly accented Britain of Irvine Welsh novels and Mike Leigh films. Hensher's England is forged in sonorous M.F.A.- inflected cadences ("the city had been made by fire out of water") and tempered with local color ("By the time Tim was 7, she had taken to getting into the car, going to Broomhill and filling the morning with the day's small shopping - the fishmonger or the pork butcher, the little supermarket, the greengrocer - maybe the bank, and definitely the little tea-shop for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.")<br />The novel follows the lives of two not quite upper-middle-class families living opposite each other on a street overlooking the Yorkshire moors. It starts when the Sellers family moves up from London - Alice and Bernie, who still "went to bed together" every night, and their two odd and unlikable children, Sandra and Francis. Across the road are the Glovers - Katherine, Malcolm and their brood: oversexed but appealing Daniel, dreamy Jane and weird Tim. On the day the Sellerses arrive, Malcolm Glover disappears, suspecting his wife of having an affair with Nick, a handsome but feckless fellow lately arrived from London to open a high-end flower shop. Katherine, filled with rage and despair, violates all the rules of English domestic furtiveness and erupts from her front door gripping Tim's pet snake, whose head she proceeds to mash into the footpath with the heel of her shoe.<br />The ensuing action, unfolding across 20 years and shifting between Sheffield and London (with detours to Australia), sucks in massive drafts of people and places. Births, deaths and marriages are in ample supply, not to mention a Dickensian cast of minor characters, all dutifully detailed. Details are, in fact, what keep one end of this tome such a long way from the other.<br />Hensher performs a comprehensive survey of English domestic interiors, from stately homes to council flats: Chatsworth ("the encrusted palace, the dense magic of its gardens and beyond, a landing-strip of water with a single fierce jet, 40 feet high"); a hideous pile purchased impulsively by a rich drug dealer; middle-class interiors so detailed we see the insides of the fridge; depressing lower-middle-class sitting rooms; the sparse interior of a shared house in Clapham; and, finally, the cozy insides of a yuppie couple's first terrace house.<br />Hensher's take on Englishness is that the national obsession with domestic correctness is underscored by the desire for violence and destruction. The pulverized snake at the beginning and a drowned, mangled body at the end bookend numerous other such episodes, including an over-determined sequence in which the drug dealer's posh, slutty daughter pushes old stone sculptures off the parapet of her dad's new house.<br />The striking thing about "The Northern Clemency" is that it doesn't do anything new. It resembles a Victorian drama, "Middlemarch" or "Barchester Towers," but there's plenty of Modernism too, Woolf and Forster and even a Waugh-indebted cruelty. A touch of Alan Hollinghurst, notes of Ian McEwan - Hensher's edifice is built solidly from the bricks and mortar of English social realism. No wonder that a central expressive device of the novel is the mushroom vol-au-vent("flaking, soft and clothy") - thrilling in the '70s, scorned and despised in the '80s, finally rehabilitated in the '90s.<br />Hensher is obviously thoroughly versed in literary history, but he's writing at a moment when a lot of authors choose to keep their influences well-disguised. Hensher's mammoth literary homage raises questions about whether homage is the power play it once was. His use of certain structural echoes is impressive, but if the readers don't get the references, how much sense do they make? Deciding to write like Dickens or Eliot rather than Christopher Paolini or Stephenie Meyer is no longer a no-brainer - because, unlike the times when Hensher's realist predecessors were writing, these days, highly literary books are seldom big sellers.<br />Hensher's novel is tremendously adroit, reminding us of what it's like to sink luxuriously into the great novels of an earlier era: all-inclusive, interconnected, lavishly detailed, ample. And yet, for the same reasons, it's tremendously dull. Despite all the twists and turns (each beautifully set up and delivered), there are no surprises; this is a book that seems to have been written too many times already. Is it possible that literary prizes are a bit like the Fed's bailout package, subsidizing a prose style invented to describe a world that stopped existing nearly a century ago?<br />Sophie Gee, an assistant professor of English at Princeton, is the author of the novel "The Scandal of the Season."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Broadcast challenges British ban on assisted suicide</strong><br />By Sarah Lyall<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />LONDON: Almost completely incapacitated by motor neuron disease, Craig Ewert, 59, looked at an interviewer and laid out his options, as he saw them.<br />"If I go through with it, I have death," Ewert said. "If I don't go through with it, my choice is essentially to suffer and to inflict suffering on my family, and then die."<br />He chose the quick way. On Wednesday night, Britons could watch Ewert's death on television, in a film showing how he traveled to a clinic in Zurich in 2006 and took a fatal dose of barbiturates. Broadcast on Sky Television, the film - "Right to Die?" - is said to be the first shown on British television of the moment of death in an assisted suicide case.<br />It has thrown a new bomb into an already contentious debate. It is illegal in Britain to "aid, abet, counsel or procure" suicide. But while the law is clear, its application is murky. Ewert's wife, Mary, was not prosecuted, despite the fact that she broke the law by, among other things, helping him travel to the clinic.<br />By coincidence, Britain's director of public prosecutions announced Tuesday that he would not file charges against a couple from Worcester who, in September, took their paralyzed 23-year-old son to the same Swiss clinic, Dignitas, so that he could kill himself.<br />Nor, said the prosecutor, Keir Starmer, would he prosecute a family friend who helped organize the trip.<br />In a statement, Starmer acknowledged that while there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the parents, Mark and Julie James, it would not be "in the public interest" to do so.<br />Their son, Daniel, was an avid rugby player who was studying construction engineering. He became paralyzed from the chest down after being injured while practicing with his team in 2007. He had tried to kill himself three times.<br />He then convinced a succession of doctors that he wanted nothing more than to die and that he could not do it on his own. "Not a day has gone by without hoping it will be my last," he wrote to Dignitas.<br />His parents begged him to reconsider, until the end. But when he would not change his mind, they said afterward, they resolved to support him.<br />About 100 Britons have committed suicide at Dignitas in the last decade, said Jo Cartwright, a spokeswoman for Dignity in Dying, a lobbying group. Those cases have often provoked police investigations in Britain but have never ended in prosecutions, she said.<br />Meanwhile, the authorities periodically prosecute people who have assisted in suicides in Britain. They are rarely sent to jail, Cartwright said, but face many months of distress while waiting to stand trial.<br />"The law isn't working," she said. "People are being forced to go abroad to die because they have no other options."<br />Only a handful of places, including Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington, allow assisted suicide, and only according to stringent criteria.<br />Britain's law against it is now being tested by Debbie Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis and who is seeking assurances that if her husband travels to Dignitas to help her kill herself, he will not be prosecuted on his return. She lost the case this year but has appealed the ruling.<br />Parliament has been reluctant to debate the issue. But Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday that he opposed legislation that would allow assisted suicide.<br />"I believe it's necessary to ensure that there's never a case in the country where a sick or elderly person feels under pressure to agree to an assisted death, or somehow feels it's the expected thing to do," he said.<br />Mary Ewert, Ewert's wife, said this week that she was not sorry that her husband's suicide had been broadcast.<br />"For Craig, my husband, allowing the cameras to film his last moments in Zurich was about facing the end honestly," she wrote in The Independent, a British newspaper. "He was keen to have it shown because when death is hidden and private, people don't face their fears about it."<br />In the film, Ewert comes across both as severely disabled and absolutely determined that he is doing the right thing. His final moments are almost unbearably poignant.<br />Lying on a bed at the Dignitas center, he signs a consent form with the help of his wife. In his labored voice, he says, "I love you, sweetheart, so much."<br />She responds, "Have a safe journey, and see you sometime."<br />Using his teeth, Ewert presses the button that will turn off his ventilator. He drinks a fatal mixture of barbiturates. And then, as a piece of music he has selected - Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - plays in his room and his wife gently rubs his feet, his life begins to ebb away.</div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong></div><div align="center"><strong><br /></strong>Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France </div><div align="center"><br />Blogs about France<br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/"><strong>Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment</strong> </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-20914655619667445432008-12-11T05:58:00.024+01:002008-12-11T08:19:14.471+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Wednesday, 10th November 2008<div align="center"><strong>A U.S.-Iranian conversation</strong> </div><div align="justify"><br />COLUMNIST: Roger Cohen<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />THE HAGUE: The United States and Iran are talking to each other about the elimination of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction. That is a good thing. On the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, it shows there is nothing in the DNA of the two nations that precludes dialogue.<br />The discussions - often bruising but never to the point of a breakup - are proceeding within the framework of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. That's an unwieldy name for something the world should cheer.<br />The OPCW brings together 185 nations working in near total obscurity toward an April 29, 2012, deadline for the final elimination of the scourge that has brought death and agony from the fields of Flanders in World War I to the Tokyo subway in 1995.<br />Countries representing 98 percent of the global population have adhered to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which came into force 11 years ago. More than 40 percent of the world's 71,000 metric tons of declared chemical agents, most of them in the United States and Russia, have been destroyed.<br />States including Albania and South Korea have already completed the destruction of their chemical weapons stockpiles. At American, Russian, Indian and other sites, work proceeds to ensure the likes of mustard gas, sarin gas and the lethal VX nerve agent are not only eliminated, but never again produced or used.<br />"We work by consensus, and Iran and the United States are very much key figures in that," Rogelio Pfirter, the Argentine director-general of the organization told me. "Through engagement, and despite robust exchanges, we are able to move forward on a central disarmament and nonproliferation issue."<br />The other day, at the OPCW's annual conference, I sat with Eric Javits, the widely respected U.S. ambassador, while Seyed Mohammad Ali Hosseini, an Iranian deputy foreign minister, spoke.<br />Referring to Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, in attacks that left more than 100,000 Iranian casualties, Hosseini said: "As the last victim of chemical weapons, the Islamic Republic of Iran strongly believes that promoting international peace and security is subject to the realization of a world free from the threat and existence of weapons of mass destruction."<br />Not so much as an eyebrow was raised by Javits, although Iranian centrifuges are widely believed to be spinning in the pursuit of fissionable material for a nuclear weapon.<br />Nor did the ambassador's composure show cracks when Hosseini referred to the "chemical and nuclear weapons" of the "Zionist regime" as the "most dangerous threat to regional and international peace."<br />Afterward, Javits described his approach to me. "I'm here to get everyone to feel like a partner," he said. Including the Iranians? "I am friendly with them, although negotiations are tough. They are committed to this organization because of what happened under Saddam."<br />And what of Iran's Israel bashing? "Look, we've gotten results here through patient diplomacy. I don't bring up things outside the purview of this organization. An enormous lesson here is that other nations want to feel they're treated by the big guys on an equal basis. This is an example of effective multilateralism. We've neglected how to put the multilateral tool to successful use."<br />Earlier this year, at the organization's second review conference, Javits played a decisive role in preventing a collapse. Tensions boiled over Iran's contention that the United States was trying to turn the OPCW into an antiterrorist organization focused more on chemical industry inspections aimed at ensuring nonproliferation than on destruction of existing weapons. At the 11th hour, a formula balancing the two objectives was found.<br />"Javits is a patient listener and this is very much appreciated," Ali Reza Hajizadeh, a counselor at the Iranian embassy, told me.<br />There are lessons here. The first is that listening is more productive than lecturing. Sure, chemical weapons are a far easier field for diplomacy than nuclear weapons because of their now limited military usefulness. But dialogue has reduced tensions and it can in the nuclear field, too.<br />The second is that dialogue will be very tough. Iran's focus on Israel's unacknowledged nuclear weapons may cause discomfort in Washington, where the subject tends to be taboo, but it's impossible to understand the psychology of the Iranians without taking the Israeli bomb into account.<br />Hearing their views directly is salutary. Obama's proposal to push for an Iranian dialogue is his single most important diplomatic proposal.<br />The Middle East has been the one area where the OPCW has had limited success precisely because of mistrust over weapons of mass destruction. Israel, Egypt and Syria have not joined the treaty.<br />"Israel says nothing is solved until everything is solved," Pfirter told me. "Egypt and Syria say they cannot join until the Middle East is free of weapons of mass destruction. But logic suggests that moving ahead with eliminating chemical weapons might advance peace overall and certainly benefit the people of the Middle East."<br />Pfirter is right. To make progress on these issues, they need to be aired. As Javits put it to me, "Consensus sometimes means equal disappointment, but it's no less valuable for that."<br />Readers are invited to comment at my blog: <a href="http://www.iht.com/passages">www.iht.com/passages</a></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center"><strong>Was the CIA wrong (again)?</strong> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">OPINION<br />By Edward Jay Epstein<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />A year has passed since the release of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. In a stunning departure from all the previous estimates dating back to 1997 under Presidents Clinton and Bush, it declared: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."<br />It also judged, with modest confidence, that Iran had not resumed its quest for nuclear weapons. If correct, this new assessment meant that previous ones, such as the 2004 NIE that also judged with "high confidence" that Iran was expanding its nuclear weapons capabilities under the cover of a civilian energy program, were based on flawed intelligence.<br />But was this astonishing reversal correct?<br />The 2007 intelligence estimate proceeded from both a reorganization of the so-called intelligence community and a re-evaluation of information the CIA had gotten on a clandestine nuclear weapon design program code-named by Iran "Project 1-11." Even though Project 1-11 had been in operation since 1997, the CIA did not get wind of it until 2004, when it obtained a stolen Iranian laptop that had been smuggled into Turkey. The computer's hard drive contained thousands of pages of documents describing efforts to design a warhead that would fit in the nose cone of the Iranian Shahab 3 missile and detonate at an altitude of 600 meters (which is too high for any explosion but a nuclear one to be effective).<br />From the warhead's specifications, which included the kind of high-tension electric bridge wire used in implosion-type nuclear weapons, the CIA deduced that the payload was a nuclear bomb similar to Pakistan's early bomb. Its conclusion that Iran was going nuclear was repeated in all the NIEs through 2006.<br />By 2007, however, the CIA and reorganized intelligence community re-examined the issue and doubts began to emerge. It turned out that shortly after the stolen laptop compromised Project 1-11, satellite photographs showed that buildings involved in it had been bulldozed, and conversations intercepted by the U.S. indicated that the project was being dismantled. Then a high-level defector from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, General Ali-Reza Asgari, confirmed in his CIA debriefings that Project 1-11 had been terminated in 2003.<br />After a long review, and "scrubbing" the evidence for signs of deception, the CIA reached its new conclusion that Iran's 1-10 project really had ended by 2004. In the world of clandestine activities, it is hardly unexpected that a super-secret operation such as Project 1-11, once it was compromised, would be officially closed down, and the evidence seems convincing that it was shuttered.<br />The issue is why. One explanation is that Iran had abandoned its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Another is that Iran no longer needed Project 1-11 because Iran had solved the tricky problem of triggering a nuclear warhead through other means.<br />Three pieces of the puzzle uncovered by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency cast a surprising light on how Iran has advanced its capabilities independently of Project 11-1. First, there is the digital blueprint circulated by the network of A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. IAEA investigators decoding and analyzing the massive computer files of this network found that it had clandestinely provided clients with a detailed design of a nuclear warhead of the version used by first China then Pakistan.<br />Since the IAEA knew that Iran had been dealing with the Khan network since at least 2003, and features of that digital blueprint matched those described in the Project 11-1 documents, it was suspected that Iran acquired the digital blueprint, along with other components, from the Khan network. If so, it shortened the task of Project 1-11.<br />Then, in late 2007, IAEA investigators uncovered a detailed Iranian narrative, written in Farsi, that described how a Russian scientist helped the Iranians conduct experiments to help Iranian scientists solve a complex design problem: Configuring high-tension electric bridge wire to detonate at different points less than a fraction of a nanosecond apart. In an implosion-type bomb, this is crucial for properly compressing the nuclear core. As Olli Heinonen, the IAEA's chief inspector explained at a closed-door briefing in February 2008, these Russian-led experiments were "not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon."<br />Finally, there is the Polonium 210 experiments that Iran conducted prior to 2004. Since Polonium 210 is used to initiate the chain reaction in early-generation nuclear bombs (and used in the Pakistan design), IAEA inspectors attempted up until 2008 to get access to the facility, or "box," in which the Polonium 210 was extracted from radioactive Bismuth.<br />Iran insisted that the Polonium 210 was only to be used for a civilian purpose - powering batteries on an Iranian spacecraft - and turned down these requests.<br />Iran had no known space program, but even if the extraction process was for civilian purposes, Iran's success with it meant that it could also produce Polonium 210 to trigger a nuclear bomb of the design furnished by the Khan network. So, even without further work by Project 1-11, it may have acquired all essential design elements for a nuclear weapon.<br />Design of course is only part of the equation. The other crucial part is obtaining a fissile fuel for the nuclear explosion, such as highly-enriched uranium.<br />In 1974, Pakistan, with the assistance of A.Q. Khan, had pioneered the path to nuclear proliferation by using centrifuges to enrich gasified uranium into weapon-grade uranium. In this process, the uranium cascades from one rapidly-spinning centrifuge to the next, each gradually increasing the proportion of the fissile isotope Uranium 235, until it becomes first low-enriched uranium for power plants, then, if continued, high-enriched uranium, for weapons. Iran built a similar facility in the massive underground caves at Natanz, able to house up to 50,000 centrifuges, which became operational in 2002.<br />Iran claimed this facility was intended for the production of low-enriched uranium for the Russian-built nuclear reactor at Bushehr to generate electric power (a facility Russia had agreed to fully supply as long as it operated). But the plant also could be used to produce weapons-grade uranium.<br />According to the IAEA, which monitors Natanz, by 2008 Iran had 3,800 centrifuges in operation and is adding another 3,000. It has also upgraded many of the older centrifuges, giving it about quadruple the capacity it had in 2003. To date, it has produced and stockpiled 1,380 pounds of low-enriched uranium, which is enough, if further enriched to weapons grade, to build a nuclear bomb.<br />The 2007 NIE deftly ducked this escalation with a footnote stating it was excluding from its assessment "Iran's declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment," which meant Natanz. However, in light of all the developments in the past year, America's new president will have to confront the reality that Iran now has the capability to change the balance of power in the Gulf, if it so elects to do so, by building a nuclear weapon.<br />Edward Jay Epstein is an investigative writer and the author of 13 books, including "Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and CIA." He is currently writing a book on the 9/11 Commission.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center"><strong>Still no explanation of cause for Eurotunnel inferno three months ago</strong> </div><div align="justify"><br />By Caroline Brothers<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />CALAIS, France: Behind sealed metal doors in a tunnel far under the sea floor, tiny pellets of concrete were flying through the air Wednesday as workers blasted the walls with wet cement.<br />Amid constant noise and in temperatures cooled by the blast of artificial wind, 85 engineers are working in round-the-clock shifts to repair the walls in record times.<br />Three months since the tunnel, which links Britain to France, was consumed in an undersea inferno, there are theories but still no explanations of the cause. Thousands of travelers were stranded and delayed on both sides of the English Channel after the blaze on Sept. 11, with traffic still disrupted along one of Europe's most vital transport routes.<br />While awaiting the conclusions of several parallel investigations - a police inquiry took more than a year to deliver its initial report after a fire in the tunnel 12 years ago - officials at Eurotunnel, the tunnel operator, are already drawing conclusions about how matters could be handled differently next time.<br />All 32 passengers and crew escaped heat of 1,000 degrees Centigrade, or 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit, in the September blaze, but 21 of the freight train's 27 carriages were destroyed, along with 650 meters, or 2,100 feet, of tunnel. Traffic is not likely to return to normal before February, when the tunnel should reopen after repairs costing €60 million, or $88 million.<br />"We are not sure of the starting point, but the hypothesis is that the fire broke out 40 kilometers after entering the tunnel inside a cargo truck or in the cargo itself," Jacques Gounon, Eurotunnel's chief executive, said Wednesday during the first public visit to the tunnel since the disaster took place.<br />Eurotunnel said it also planned to enhance its training for staff to better handle panicking passengers, and to translate the safety instructions on board the train into nine foreign languages, rather than just English and French now.<br />"If you don't have good communications, panic sets in very quickly," Gounon said Wednesday. Truck drivers traveling in the cabin car smashed its windows with hammers, letting in smoke and fumes, rather than waiting a few seconds for the doors to open automatically once a special ventilation system had cleared the air outside .<br />"We have to manage the stress of the evacuees," Gounon said.<br />Also under consideration are methods to detect changes in temperature on board the moving train, and to find a fire-extinguishing system that would facilitate the firemen's work.<br />"My challenge is to try to prevent trucks from burning," Gounon added in an interview Wednesday amid scaffolding and forklift trucks parked on a road built over the tracks inside the tunnel. "We will strengthen measures at the entrance of the tunnel and facilitate the firemen's job of putting out the fire in the tunnel."<br />Eurotunnel defends its safety record on the world's longest undersea tunnel - it extends for 50 kilometers, or 31 miles. A total of 38 kilometers are under water.<br />"What is certain is when you have 14 million trucks passing through since the opening of the tunnel, one truck burning is unfortunately part of the statistics," Gounon said.<br />Eurotunnel also plans to re-examine the special ventilation system that blasts fresh air down the tunnel to clear away smoke and fumes. While it worked well this time to preserve human life, it oxygenated the flames that burned for 16 hours before firefighters could put them out.<br />But the company is not considering encasing the carriages in which the freight trucks travel to seal them off from any fire on logistical grounds, due to the width of the tunnel. And since it is one of the few tunnels in the world to have a parallel escape tunnel, it does not plan to revise its policy of not driving through to the other side if a fire is detected on board.<br />Though the damage is 50 percent more extensive than occurred after the criminally set fire in 1996, Gounon said that with better organization and machinery, the work should take about half the time.<br />In the first public visit to the site since the disaster, reporters could see parts of the ceiling still blackened after the fire raged through, turning walls of concrete to powder and destroying its metal supports. Paradoxically, workers sifting through the debris of the train that had been carrying machine parts, rolls of plastic and other goods found that a truckload of After-8 chocolates did not vaporize, but simply melted in the phenomenal heat.<br />Where once the rails stretched unhindered to England, workers have turned the tracks into an undersea road in order to bring in forklift trucks and concrete-blasting machinery, and lined it with three levels of scaffolding reaching right to the ceiling. A double metal door custom-built for the purpose seals off the tracks at the end of the work site so the engineers can work unhindered by the rush of wind from trains crossing over into the south tunnel.<br />And in the escape tunnel behind Cross Passage number 4898, where 32 people panicked but fled to safety when their freight train was consumed in an underwater fireball, workers have established a refectory area and work-site computer offices.<br />"It reminded me of 1996 - it was the same smell, the same heat, and exactly the same damage," said Frédéric Dudragne, 37, an engineer and the foreman on the work site, who worked on the same tunnel after the fire in 1996.<br />His colleague Faty Bansalem, 26, a civil engineer in charge of logistics, tools and materials, said the site looked like "the scene from a horror movie" when she walked into the blackened infrastructure for the first time.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center"><strong>North Korea nuclear talks hit impasse</strong> </div><div align="justify"><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />By Chris Buckley<br />Talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions failed to break an impasse over rules for probing its atomic activities, negotiators said on Wednesday, offering dim prospects of a breakthrough.<br />Having coaxed North Korea to partly disable its Yongbyon nuclear complex this year in a disarmament-for-aid deal, envoys from five states have been asking the reclusive fortress state to accept a protocol for checking its nuclear declaration.<br />Agreement on verification would be a welcome diplomatic trophy for outgoing U.S. President George W. Bush before he gives way to President-elect Barack Obama in January.<br />But the chief U.S. negotiator, Christopher Hill, said there was no sign of agreement with Pyongyang after the third day of the latest negotiations. And he offered little prospect of a breakthrough in the talks, which could extend another day.<br />"It's not trending in the right direction," Hill said after what he said was a tough day of fruitless haggling over verification. "It's been a very difficult day, indeed a very difficult week ... We have not achieved our goal."<br />Hill said he had not heard from host country China whether the envoys would gather again on Thursday. Japan's negotiator, Akitaka Saiki, was quoted by Kyodo news agency as saying they would. But he too sounded downcast.<br />"We have not resolved (differences) in views over nuclear verification," he said, according to Kyodo.<br />The six-party talks, begun in 2003, bring together North and South Korea, host China, the United States, Japan and Russia. They took on fresh urgency after Pyongyang held its first nuclear test explosion in October 2006, but have made fitful progress in curtailing its atomic ambitions.<br />"North Korea is putting its own conditions on verification, because it hasn't made the fundamental choice to abandon nuclear weapons," said Zhang Liangui, a Chinese expert on the North at the Central Party School, a leading thinktank in Beijing.<br />"Until that changes, North Korea will always find reasons to stonewall."<br />NORTH KOREA IN NO RUSH<br />In the latest talks, North Korea has refused proposals to allow inspectors to take nuclear samples to test its declaration, said South Korea's envoy Kim Sook, Kyodo news agency reported.<br />Many analysts believe North Korea is in no hurry to make concessions, waiting to test Obama's intentions. A South Korean expert on North Korea said Pyongyang was unlikely to make real concessions on verification any time soon.<br />"North Korea will never allow sampling in the second-phase process because it is a bargaining chip it wants to hold on to until the last moment of the talks," said Koh Yu-hwan of Dongguk University.<br />In a sign of North Korea's combativeness, its official KCNA news agency on Wednesday trumpeted a U.S. military report that called it a nuclear arms state.<br />Regional powers refuse to officially designate the North as a nuclear power, and South Korea's foreign minister has said the U.S. report was mistaken and will be corrected. But Pyongyang has longed for the prestige that goes with such a designation.<br />Complicating the talks are sour relations between North and South Korea and a feud between Pyongyang and Tokyo over the kidnapping of Japanese nationals decades ago. The North has said it will not recognise Japan's role in the talks.<br />There is also mystery over the Communist state's leader, Kim Jong-il. U.S. and South Korean officials have said Kim suffered a stroke in August, raising questions about who was making decisions over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.<br />If Kim is "seriously ill and is practically out of power, then the hard-line military would try to slow down the negotiation process and ask for even more," said Koh, the Dongguk University professor.<br />(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in BEIJING, Yoko Nishikawa in TOKYO and Kim Junghyn in SEOUL; Editing by Nick Macfie and Jerry Norton)</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><br /><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>0751</strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMfJ9HFjDv1s2DvLW4K8xSRfAPxSGA6HEI6wq0G5Kzj0T-10GobLdZf0PXeJbpm8m24pdI9_newv6lWNPO7qkgychX5PCwnMrOl34YJHOviHY1nNSdLoAFS7IbbR-gAkrgbyjgLXdfbx4/s1600-h/DSC02879.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397705593289906" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMfJ9HFjDv1s2DvLW4K8xSRfAPxSGA6HEI6wq0G5Kzj0T-10GobLdZf0PXeJbpm8m24pdI9_newv6lWNPO7qkgychX5PCwnMrOl34YJHOviHY1nNSdLoAFS7IbbR-gAkrgbyjgLXdfbx4/s320/DSC02879.jpg" border="0" /></a> </p><p></p><p><strong>IW: Foreign relations 3.0 (2 U.S. presidential cycles): a paradigm shift between headline (high profile, low loss of life conflict) and macro killers (malaria/accidental child death/food poverty). If everyone you loved died, why would it - in these contexts - be important?</strong> </p><p><strong>Me? Knee rage.</strong> <strong>Not good. How would this be if I was alone?<br /></strong></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8KoTggUCCawyBIjM0Rn8ZMRTJ7n290DaVYpE4xklwhmZQTsG_2vtFR-XB1qWQrDvdK-Kw6PQto0Bzc4ezzyveL0cJLi-rdrbp4asXevpoOZh0E7s4B-VDppMOjUyUShsVKgSyBmiFE4Q/s1600-h/DSC02880.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397700265050418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8KoTggUCCawyBIjM0Rn8ZMRTJ7n290DaVYpE4xklwhmZQTsG_2vtFR-XB1qWQrDvdK-Kw6PQto0Bzc4ezzyveL0cJLi-rdrbp4asXevpoOZh0E7s4B-VDppMOjUyUShsVKgSyBmiFE4Q/s320/DSC02880.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>From canned goods to fresh, food banks adapt<br /></strong>By Katie Zezima<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />MADISON, Wisconsin: Vanessa Rosales comes to the St. Vincent DePaul Food Pantry here rather than others for one reason: She can choose what food she brings home, rather than being handed a bag filled with random groceries.<br />The pantry, which looks like a small grocery store, is indicative of broad changes going on at the nation's food banks and food pantries.<br />No longer simply the domain of canned corn and peanut butter, food banks are preparing ready-to-eat meals, opening their own farms and partnering with institutions as varied as local supermarkets and state prisons to help gather and process food. They are also handling much more fresh produce, which requires overhauling the way they store and distribute food.<br />Pantries, which distribute the food donated to food banks, are also acting as social service clearinghouses. Many are handing out information about screenings for breast and cervical cancer and sending volunteers out to sign up people for food stamps.<br />And as demand continues to rise, food banks are trying to feed more people with less food.<br />"It's not just handing out a box here or there anymore," said Peggy Grimes, executive director of the Montana Food Bank Network, which covers the state. "A lot of effort goes into thinking outside the box. It's becoming the focus of food banking." In Madison, thinking of new ways to dispense food was a necessity. The pantry used to pack and distribute food, only to find the bags of groceries discarded at a bus stop around the corner.<br />"It's not that they were ungrateful," said Ralph Middlecamp, the pantry's director. "They just knew they wouldn't eat it."<br />Many who left the food were recent immigrants who "don't relate to canned food," Middlecamp said.<br />The pantry now gives each person an allotted number of points, which they use to pick out items. Bread is free; eggs are three points, ham four, a giant tub of salsa six.<br />"We want to help accommodate the dignity and preferences of the people," Middlecamp said.<br />Rosales used some of her points on apples, meat and milk for her three children.<br />"I've been to pantries before where they give you things you don't need," said Rosales, who was recently laid off from her job as a preschool teacher. "This way you can pick what you're going to use, rather than saying, 'What am I going to do with this?' "<br />Years ago, food banks would ask the same question about large-scale donations of produce and meat, which would quickly spoil.<br />As consumers buy fewer canned products and more fresh vegetables, retailers have responded by meeting their needs. Consequently, the surplus product that stores donate to food banks switched to fresh food from canned, nonperishable items. Tighter inventory controls have also left some stores with less to donate.<br />Food banks and pantries are buying industrial-size freezers and refrigerated trucks to store food. Some have opened gleaming industrial kitchens where culinary students, volunteers or convicts in work-training programs prepare meals.<br />Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee, located in Nashville, built a federally certified manufacturing facility, where it churns out 50-gallon drums of tomato sauce, along with stews, chili and other food. Most is pumped into heat-sealed plastic bags, cooled and frozen. The food bank distributes the packages to pantries around the country.<br />"All an agency needs to do is pop it into boiling water, and then warm it up, cut it open and serve it to a client," said Jaynee Day, executive director of the food bank.<br />At the Vermont Foodbank in Barre, a walk-in freezer holds hundreds of frozen meals like chicken à la king and French bread pizza that are made in an adjacent kitchen from produce gleaned from grocery stores and local farms. Many times ingredients are added to help increase certain types of nutrients, like broccoli for calcium.<br />Vermont recently joined a growing group of food banks with their own farms, distributing the produce they grow to clients in need or using it to make meals.<br />Grimes of the Montana Food Bank Network said, "We deal with so much more produce now."<br />She has become a partner with the Montana State Prison, where inmates can much of the donated and bought produce, meat and fish, as well as beans and pasta.<br />"It helps us by allowing us to accept product donations we might have had to pass up," Grimes said, "just because we didn't have ability to get them distributed throughout the state in the short lifespan that they had."<br />The vastness of Montana makes food banking even more difficult, as it can take days for a shipment to reach a rural pantry.<br />In some communities, the pantry is the only social service agency for hundreds of miles.<br />"We're really focused in two directions," Grimes said. "We feed people, but we look at ways to get people to a place where they don't need emergency food. You can't just keep feeding people without looking for ways to help make their life better."<br />In central Florida, teams with laptops and food stamp applications are going to food pantries and signing up people for the program. The teams are also notifying people that they may be eligible for an earned income tax credit and other government services.<br />"They're not applying for them," said Dave Krepcho, executive director of the Food Bank of Central Florida. "There's a lack of awareness and a lack of transportation. Access isn't easy."<br />Signing people up for benefits is more crucial than ever, as more working-class people are finding it difficult to make ends meet and are coming to food banks for help.<br />"I keep hearing that demand is up and up and up," said Ross Fraser, a spokesman for Feeding America, which provides more than two billion pounds of food annually to food banks around the country. "I heard one person saying they're feeding schoolteachers. The needle is moving higher up the socioeconomic class, and people making more money are needing emergency food assistance."<br />Bill Bolling, founder and executive director of the Atlanta Community Food Bank, said he had "never seen anything" like the current economic situation.<br />"I've had people call me personally who have been donors for years, and said 'Bill, I need help,' " Bolling said. "That's disquieting to get those calls."<br />Food banks are trying to adapt to such outside forces.<br />"We're trying to navigate what is a time of great change in the work we do, and we're riding a roller coaster," said Kate Maehr, director of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, where need increased 33 percent this year from 2007. "We have to figure out a new model and do it under pressure. It's hard, but what choice do we have?"<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9VkT91JIhr3agiq7YPpj6s_TN0XN6yo71bT-CcY-FkZf9K5Kh7HT-OBEw3z_MuxIOs8JMayKTWFEdQBtbb7V-42g09A91nbjZbqN6qYyK6A3dQpzvuER01pdxTcPqsoC4bbCTD443t4c/s1600-h/DSC02881.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397702998070370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9VkT91JIhr3agiq7YPpj6s_TN0XN6yo71bT-CcY-FkZf9K5Kh7HT-OBEw3z_MuxIOs8JMayKTWFEdQBtbb7V-42g09A91nbjZbqN6qYyK6A3dQpzvuER01pdxTcPqsoC4bbCTD443t4c/s320/DSC02881.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Climate-change conference hampered by U.S. political change</strong><br />By Elisabeth Rosenthal<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />POZNAN, Poland: As ministers from 189 countries gather here to hammer out a new climate change treaty, progress is sorely hampered by the absence of one delegation: the team that will forge Barack Obama's climate policy.<br />The U.S. president-elect has called climate change "a matter of urgency," but his administration-in-waiting has not sent representatives to Poznan, where the United States is represented by the Bush administration. That has left this critical meeting in a bit of limbo, with many delegates saying they were waiting to size up the next administration's environmental commitment before making bold moves of their own.<br />"It has affected the meeting in a fairly significant way," said Gus Silva-Chavez, a policy expert at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, who has been observing the closed negotiations. "A lot of people think: 'this is not the time to put our cards on the table. Let's wait for the new administration. Why agree to anything now?"'<br />This problem is exaggerated by the fact that the European Union is struggling to finalize its own climate package - hampered by the global economic downturn - and so its delegates have been unusually quiet. In practice, that has meant little progress on anything except the basic decisions needed to keep the dream of a climate treaty alive.<br />"We have a sense of urgency but you don't see any strong decisions being taking here," said Elenita Dano, a member of the delegation from the Philippines. "Political developments in the U.S. and the EU are holding us hostage, and we have no choice but to wait."<br />The negotiations are meant to culminate in a treaty in Copenhagen in December 2009, which will take effect in 2013 and replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol.<br />So far, Obama has outlined broad policies but provided few specifics or a timetable for implementing them. His team is hashing out various options.<br />His administration could propose a climate bill designed to quickly pass though the U.S. Congress with concrete short-term goals like improving energy efficiency and creating "green" jobs, or it could hold off a bit to craft a more comprehensive policy proposal with long-term emissions reductions charting a course decades into the future.<br />"The fear is this could become a Clinton health plan, trying to do too much too soon, and ending up with nothing," said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House staffer, now with the National Commission on Energy Policy.<br />Even at the highest levels, officials in Poznan are awaiting results: "Another climate treaty without the U.S. doesn't make a lot of sense," said Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the sponsor of the meeting.<br />Still, the conference has achieved some important goals.<br />The delegates have agreed on a method for essentially paying countries and communities to preserve forests, through a system of carbon credits.<br />The delegates also are nearing agreement on a fund, conceptualized a year ago, to help developing countries adapt to climate change.<br />Talk of a climate-change unheaval was muted, since the meeting in Poznan was meant to be a midpoint in talks that would lead to a new treaty next year.<br />"Expectations for this meeting were pretty low, but we're on track for a work plan covering the next year," said Angela Anderson, director of the International Global Warming Campaign of the Pew Environment Group. "If the pace picks up we could get an agreement by Copenhagen."<br />Delegates have been hammering out proposals for the past 10 days. On Thursday, various ministers arrive for two days of meetings to approve them.<br />Still, there were disturbing rumblings that industrialized nations were seeking to scale back emissions-reduction targets recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which suggested that rich countries should cut emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020 to avert disastrous warming. Countries like Italy have suggested that they might have a hard time meeting previous emissions-reduction goals in the current economic malaise.<br />In addition, a group of developing countries called the G-77 complained that their proposals for help fell on deaf ears. "We got no support from developed countries, whether in technology transfer or finances," said Tasneem Essop, of the WWF South Africa.<br />Such hopes and frustrations underscore the pressure the new U.S. administration is likely to feel. Jake Schmidt of the National Resources Defense Council said, "Clearly one of the major stumbling blocks has been a lack of leadership at the U.S. level, and that's about to change."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Where the world dumps its garbage</strong><br />By William Pentland Forbes.com<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />The largest garbage dump in the world is roughly twice the size of the continental U.S. <a title="" href="http://www.forbes.com/logistics/2008/12/02/garbage-waste-landfills-biz-logistics-cx_wp_1202dumps_slide.html?partner=iht" target="_blank">In Pictures: Inside the world's superdumps</a><br />The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a continent-sized constellation of discarded shoes, bottles, bags, pacifiers, plastic wrappers, toothbrushes and every other type of trash imaginable, floating in the Pacific Ocean about halfway between Hawaii and San Francisco. The ocean's swirling currents have pushed the piles of debris, accumulated detritus of sea vessels and decades of under-the-radar ocean dumping, together in loose configurations just below the water's surface.<br />While nobody knows for sure where it came from or how to clean it up, the sheer size of the Garbage Patch has attracted attention to the world's seldom-discussed renegade waste problem. The remains of daily life are becoming a colossal problem with increasingly global implications. Some places are running out of space to put it, and others haven't even figured out how to pick it up in the first place. From toxic trash on the streets of Guiya to the mountain-sized municipal landfills in Michigan, the world is awash in waste - but not always in the places you'd expect.<br />Take, for example, the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico. Fertilizer and pesticide use by farmers in the Midwest and Great Plains states has gradually raised nutrient levels in the Mississippi's muddy waters to levels so high that algal blooms have appeared in the river drainage delta. These algal blooms deplete oxygen levels in the water to the point where it can no longer sustain fish, plants and microscopic species. Ergo, the "dead zone," an area that covers nearly 7,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico.<br />Everybody knows chemicals dumped in the wild can cause serious problems, and keeping them stored is not necessarily much safer. For decades, Africa was a major dumping grounds for toxic wastes. Since at least the early 1970s, there have been multiple cases of illicit toxic waste disposal deals between Western companies and African countries.<br />In 1987, for example, two Italian waste brokers, Gianfranco Raffaeli and Renato Pent, paid a Nigerian businessman, Sunday Nana, about $100 a month to store 18,000 drums of hazardous waste on his property in Nigeria. Nigerian officials discovered a cache of the illegal toxic waste, which contained high levels of PCB and dioxins, stored at the port of Koko.<br />Regardless of how they got there, mountains of obsolete pesticides like DDT, aldrin and chlordane remain stockpiled in poorly maintained storage facilities across much of Africa. Mali and Botswana have reported especially large stockpiles of industrial chemicals discarded as long as 40 years ago.<br />While some countries address legacy problems like abandoned pesticides, other countries are busy creating new ones for future generations. China and India are no exceptions.<br />Guiyu is a cluster of interconnected villages located about an hour's drive away from the South China Sea in the northern province of Guangdong. In the past decade, Guiyu has grown from a rice farming community to an enormous hub for recycling and disposal of electronic waste, including everything from defunct hard drives to broken television sets. The amount of e-waste that flows through the "recycling" plants of Guiya in a single year could create an acre-wide pile taller than the Statue of Liberty, according to an investigative report by Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and the Basel Action Network.<br />Truckloads of printers, fax machines, hard drives and all kinds of defunct electronics arrive daily in Guiyu from warehouses in the port of Nanhai, where the imported waste comes ashore in sea-going containers. Roughly half these computers and electronic components are recycled; the rest are dumped. Nobody knows for sure, but evidence suggests most of the discarded components are dumped locally, despite the substantial risk that the waste, laden with toxic lead, mercury and cadmium, will contaminate local soil and water supplies.<br />Although Chinese officials have recently stepped up efforts to enforce a longstanding ban on e-waste imports, there has likely been more than enough damage inflicted to last generations.<br />The city of Alang, which sits on the western coast of Gulf of Cambay in western India, is the largest ship-scrapping yard in the world. A ship that would cost millions to demolish in North America is worth millions in a place like Alang. The Alang shipyards dismantle hundreds of massive vessels from all over the world every year. Old ships are run ashore during high tide on a roughly six-mile-long stretch of beach; later, when the tide recedes, thousands of low-wage workers descend on them and use crude tools to strip them apart. The industry provides 30,000 jobs in Alang and produces millions of tons of recycled steel every year.<br />But that isn't all it produces. Old ships are, more often than not, chock full of toxic chemicals, like insulation with asbestos and polychlorinated biphenyls in hoses, foam insulation and paint. In addition, most ships contain huge quantities of heavy metals like lead, mercury and cadmium. If ships are not properly dismantled, they contaminate the area where they are broken down.<br />Although India has wrestled the shipbreaking business from yards in Europe and North America by effectively eliminating high-priced environmental safeguards, Bangladesh is now capturing more of India's business by lowering environmental standards even more dramatically.<br />These kinds of competing regulatory systems have reinforced a race-to-the-bottom dynamic in the waste trade, which all too often champions disposal sites with poor environmental practices. The global trade in trash rose from 2 million tons to more than 8.5 million tons between 1993 and 2001, according to data collected by the Basel Convention. And not all of those sites are outside U.S. borders. <a title="" href="http://www.forbes.com/logistics/2008/12/02/garbage-waste-landfills-biz-logistics-cx_wp_1202dumps_slide.html?partner=iht" target="_blank">In Pictures: Inside the world's superdumps</a><br />For example, two mega-sized landfills in Michigan - Carleton Farms in New Boston and Pine Tree Acres, slightly north of Detroit - have cornered the the waste disposal market in the Canadian province of Ontario. Michigan requires operators to maintain landfills for 30 years after they close, while Canada requires operators to monitor landfills for at least a century, and in a few cases, forever. The result: In 2006, it cost roughly $100 (U.S.) to dispose of a ton of trash in Ontario, but only $10 to dispose of the same ton of trash across the border in the U.S. Michigan landfills receive enough Canadian garbage annually to fill a football stadium.<br />"We love Canadian garbage," Norm Folson, site manager at the Pine Tree Acres Landfill in northeast Detroit, told a reporter from Canadian Architect recently. "Tipping fees pay our salaries and pave our roads. To us, Canadian garbage is like gold."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Asia goes on a bargain hunt for resources</strong><br />By Miyoung Kim and Joseph ChaneyReuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />SEOUL: A collapse in commodity prices as a result of the global financial turmoil is a blessing for Asia, whose huge appetite for natural resources has prompted cash-rich companies to go bargain hunting.<br />Analysts say Asia's hunger for resource assets, despite the financial crisis, shows that companies are prepared to risk further commodity price downside to secure raw material supplies to power economic growth that is still significantly faster than in the United States and Western Europe.<br />Shares in Santos, an Australian oil and natural gas company, jumped Monday after a report that China National Petroleum Corp., the parent of the top Asian oil and natural gas producer, PetroChina, might team up with a foreign partner to buy Santos.<br />On Tuesday, people with direct knowledge of the situation said Oz Minerals, a leading zinc miner, was attracting the interest of Chinese metals companies, including Citic Resources, Minmetals and Aluminum Corp. of China, which is also known as Chinalco.<br />"There are a number of companies that are distressed and that will have to sell assets," said Patrick Loftus-Hills, managing director of UBS Investment Bank and joint head of the Asia industrials group.<br />"From the Asian perspective, in Japan, Korea, China and India, there is still money available for those that want to do deals," he said. "Matching companies with balance sheet issues with those that have money is how many of us are spending the majority of our days."<br />The Japanese trading house Itochu, for example, said in October that it and six Asian steel makers would spend more than $3 billion to acquire a 40 percent stake in the Brazilian iron ore miner Namisa as they sought a stable supply of raw materials.<br />A month later, South Korea, which is poor in natural resources, offered $1 billion of financing to the Brazilian iron ore minor Vale do Rio Doce to bolster its interest in overseas mining projects.<br />While the Asian appetite for resource assets will grow, some analysts say tight credit markets and sellers' reluctance to part with assets at low prices may trim the number of huge deals and longer negotiations.<br />The recent abandonment by BHP, the world's top miner, of its hostile $66 billion bid for Rio Tinto highlights the increased risk of buying a highly indebted firm in a market downturn as well as a tendency for predators to be more selective.<br />Sharply reduced valuations - BHP's all-share offer slumped by two-thirds from its $193 billion peak - indicate that buyers and sellers will find it tough to narrow the price gap in volatile market conditions.<br />"China Inc. is cashed up in dollars," said Clarke Wilkins, an analyst with Citigroup, "and like many investors appears unwilling to catch a falling knife."<br />Some bankers predict that China, which has seen stakes in the private equity firm Blackstone Group and Morgan Stanley slump in value, is encouraging state-backed companies to wait until markets cool in 2009.<br />In Japan, whose trading companies are leading an overseas push, major companies like Mitsubishi are turning cautious and reviewing investment plans as they worry about a large appraisal loss as a result of a tumble in the value of resource investments.<br />Despite the risks, some aggressive bettors continue to increase their investments.<br />Chinalco said it would increase its stake in Rio Tinto to at least 14.99 percent, and the South Korean steel maker Posco raised its stake in the Australian iron ore miner Murchison Metals to above 12 percent as Murchison's shares dropped to below 1 Australian dollar, or 65 cents, from nearly 5 dollars in May.<br />Other companies see themselves as "saving" assets from strugglers, despite the difficulties faced in pricing a deal.<br />Last month, Sumitomo, the Japanese trading company, agreed to buy Apex Silver Mines's interest in a Bolivian zinc, copper and lead mine for $22.5 million. Apex shares have slumped to 60 cents from the close last year of $15.24.<br />"The Japanese will be very active," said Loftus-Hills, the UBS executive.<br />"The difference between the Japanese and Chinese is that the Japanese have been doing this for a long time. You'd never know it, but they have stakes in major assets all over the world. For the Chinese, the question is: Do we do it like the Japanese, or do we want control?"<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397093551333282" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMXLlDzQwNOfsLstjBwcHLmU4kUIRlxj1vT8royh2z6a1AljOCvqVTx8myF19lFiHipv-gigpdD-I6v5JyphZDpbqgw4_iK5aNhemKJbxk-u1HyAtl_j72ea6BSt0W7_6jjqWsAcmt6zs/s320/DSC02891.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><strong>Thomas L. Friedman: While Detroit slept</strong><br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />As I think about the U.S. government bailing out Detroit, I can't help but reflect on what, in my view, is the most important rule of business in today's integrated and digitized global market, where knowledge and innovation tools are so widely distributed.<br />It's this: Whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you. Just don't think it won't be done. If you have an idea in Detroit or Tennessee, promise me that you'll pursue it, because someone in Denmark or Tel Aviv will do so a second later.<br />Why do I bring this up? Because someone in the mobility business in Denmark and Tel Aviv is already developing a real-world alternative to Detroit's business model. I don't know if this alternative to gasoline-powered cars will work, but I do know that it can be done - and Detroit isn't doing it. And therefore it will be done, and eventually, I bet, it will be done profitably.<br />And when it is, America's bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet.<br />What business model am I talking about? It is Shai Agassi's electric car network company, called Better Place. Just last week, the company, based in Palo Alto, California, announced a partnership with the state of Hawaii to road test its business plan there after already inking similar deals with Israel, Australia, the San Francisco Bay area and, yes, Denmark.<br />The Better Place electric car charging system involves generating electrons from as much renewable energy - such as wind and solar - as possible and then feeding those clean electrons into a national electric car charging infrastructure. This consists of electricity charging spots with plug-in outlets - the first pilots were opened in Israel this week - plus battery-exchange stations all over the respective country. The whole system is then coordinated by a service control center that integrates and does the billing.<br />Under the Better Place model, consumers can either buy or lease an electric car from the French automaker Renault or Japanese companies like Nissan (General Motors snubbed Agassi) and then buy miles on their electric car batteries from Better Place the way you now buy an Apple cellphone and the minutes from another telecommunications operator . That way Better Place, or any car company that partners with it, benefits from each mile you drive. GM sells cars. Better Place is selling mobility miles.<br />The first Renault and Nissan electric cars are scheduled to hit Denmark and Israel in 2011, when the whole system should be up and running. On Tuesday, Japan's Ministry of Environment invited Better Place to join the first government-led electric car project along with Honda, Mitsubishi and Subaru. Better Place was the only foreign company invited to participate, working with Japan's leading auto companies, to build a battery swap station for electric cars in Yokohama, the Detroit of Japan.<br />What I find exciting about Better Place is that it is building a car company off the new industrial platform of the 21st century, not the one from the 20th - the exact same way that Steve Jobs did to overturn the music business.<br />What did Apple understand first? One, that today's technology platform would allow anyone with a computer to record music. Two, that the Internet and MP3 players would allow anyone to transfer music in digital form to anyone else. You wouldn't need CDs or record companies anymore. Apple simply took all those innovations and integrated them into a single music-generating, purchasing and listening system that completely disrupted the music business.<br />What Agassi, the founder of Better Place, is saying is that there is a new way to generate mobility, not just music, using the same platform. It just takes the right kind of auto battery - the iPod in this story - and the right kind of national plug-in network - the iTunes store - to make the business model work for electric cars at six cents a mile. The average American is paying today around 12 cents a mile for gasoline transportation, which also adds to global warming and strengthens petro-dictators.<br />Do not expect this innovation to come out of Detroit. Remember, in 1908, the Ford Model-T got better mileage - 25 miles per gallon - than many Ford, GM and Chrysler models made in 2008. But don't be surprised when it comes out of somewhere else. It can be done. It will be done.<br />If we Americans miss the chance to win the race for Car 2.0 because we keep mindlessly bailing out Car 1.0, there will be no one to blame more than Detroit's new shareholders: we the taxpayers.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>RWE takes stake in planned UK carbon capture project</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />LONDON: Germany's RWE has taken a controlling stake in a British carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, its local subsidiary said on Wednesday.<br />RWE npower bought a 75 percent stake in Peel Energy CCS, a joint venture between Peel Energy and Denmark's Dong Energy, which plans to develop a CCS plant of up to 400 megawatt if it wins British government support to build such a facility.<br />The plant should be up and running by 2014.<br />RWE npower did not disclose how much it was to pay for the stake, or the investment required for the CCS project.<br />Last month, a PWC report found RWE was the top overall emitter of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2007 among Europe's electricity producers.<br />"Clean coal generation is vital...to reconcile the often conflicting interests of security, environment and affordability, given the impending closure of many of our older power stations," RWE npower CEO Andrew Duff said.<br />"If carbon capture and storage can be proven at an industrial scale it would have major benefits, not just in the UK but also abroad...and may create opportunities for UK industry in the export of this technology, globally," he said.<br />Peel Energy is a unit of Peel Holdings, a leading UK real estate, transport and infrastructure investment company.<br />RWE npower has already commissioned a separate CCS test facility at its Didcot coal-fired power station in Oxfordshire.<br />It is also due to begin construction of a CCS pilot plant at its Aberthaw coal-fired station in Wales next year. The plant, due to be completed in 2010 would be the first to capture CO2 direct from a commercially operating power station in the UK.<br />(Reporting by Nao Nakanishi)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>U.S. gasoline use to decline most since 1979-80</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: U.S. gasoline demand is expected to decline more sharply this year and next than in any other two-year period since 1979-1980, the federal Energy Information Administration said on Wednesday.<br />Hit by high pump prices in the first half of 2008 and the weak economy, America's gasoline consumption will decline this year by 320,000 barrels per day, or 3.4 percent, and another 50,000 barrels per day, or 0.6 percent, in 2009, the Energy Department's analytical arm estimated.<br />In its weekly review of the oil market, the EIA said although the U.S. economy grew in 1979 and 2007, the number of vehicle miles travelled declined in both those years in response to huge increases in fuel prices.<br />The jump in gasoline costs also contributed to the economic slowdowns that followed each period, the agency said.<br />In 1980, gasoline demand fell by the largest volume ever, 455,000 barrels per day, and by the biggest proportion, down 6.5 percent, the agency said.<br />An economic recession then followed during the 1981-82 period, according to the EIA.<br />(Reporting by Tom Doggett; Editing by David Gregorio)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397423427660946" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh58oQkZ6SwOnubC2Ej-sV6LHNXJyHWipufqsrwkoWkE8MruG-Ehmft6VI4ERYKeAn-FN_Yuo3yW9sPTnKsUI6EMIFqIEdzt7kgLfHC74-Dro7Zec36LRKroDsf7MPnSlTjDRtQB94BUNg/s320/DSC02885.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Kouchner admits to clash between rights and policy<br /></strong>By Steven Erlanger<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />PARIS: The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, made his reputation as a fierce proponent of human rights, founding Médecins Sans Frontières and famously helping to carry rice up the beach in Mogadishu, Somalia, in the middle of intense civil warfare in 1992.<br />Kouchner, a Socialist, shocked many supporters when he agreed to join the center-right cabinet of President Nicolas Sarkozy. But he shocked them again Wednesday when he admitted in an interview that "there is permanent contradiction between human rights and the foreign policy of a state, even in France."<br />Speaking to the newspaper Le Parisien on Wednesday for the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Kouchner said that "one cannot decide the foreign policy of a country only as a function of human rights. To lead a country obviously distances one from a certain utopianism" - in French, "angélisme."<br />Kouchner, 69, who is known for his frankness and his emotional politics, also said that he had made a mistake in asking Sarkozy to name a minister of state for human rights in the Foreign Ministry. Sarkozy granted that request, and Rama Yade, 32, a Senegal-born French lawyer, was given the job.<br />But it was all a mistake, Kouchner said. "I think I was wrong to ask for a secretary of state for human rights," he said. The contradiction between human rights and foreign policy can be productive, he said, "but was it necessary to give it a governmental character by creating a secretary of state?" He answered: "I no longer believe so and it was an error on my part to propose it to the president." Yade, he said, "has done, with talent, as well as she could."<br />Yade said later that she was not naïve enough to think that foreign policy "is constructed simply on the values" of human rights, but she said that "France has not renounced its role as the country of human rights" and that the French people "know that human rights serve a purpose."<br />Others were quick to defend the job, including the leader of the party's deputies in the National Assembly, Jean-François Copé, who said the job was useful.<br />Hélène Flautre, a Green European legislator who heads that Parliament's human rights commission, blasted Kouchner, calling his remarks "intolerable" and "scandalous."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397692895725010" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRpPfm2Fc3fZe-ayl3I15N2FXz2JvgnFfHkl0biW1SNCiWN1VI1uPotdQnPEXJePCAqbdwRZ5hLNvE76zBr4-yg-4DlaHoqd9vYvQdfZBzSqdVhaIiBBsiQaXFFDcCglWOBkoxMfbJqSo/s320/DSC02882.jpg" border="0" /></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Despite arrests, doubts persist on Pakistan's resolve</strong><br />By Jane Perlez<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD: In the wake of efforts to curb militants like Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group suspected of conducting the Mumbai attacks, questions remained about how far the Pakistani government would go to rein in these groups.<br />Details of exactly what the government has actually done are unclear. Some of the groups have functioned as an arm of Pakistan's military and intelligence services for two decades.<br />This week, the authorities raided some of the militants' properties and arrested about 20 members, security officials said.<br />Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said Wednesday that Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of another militant group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, had been arrested.<br />Bush administration officials publicly praised the steps, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, demanded during their visits to the region last week.<br />The Indian police on Wednesday identified the key trainers of the 10 gunmen in the Mumbai attacks as Zaki ur-Rahman Lakhvi, Abu Hamza and a man known only as Khafa. All three are leading members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, said Rakesh Maria, the Mumbai joint police commissioner.<br />Lakhvi, who has been mentioned as a key figure in the plot, "planned out this whole thing," and was present throughout the men's training, Maria said.<br />Abu Hamza provided maritime training, along with lessons in explosives and weapons, and Khafa was a mentor, who worked closely with the gunmen and helped familiarize them with their targets, Maria said.<br />During their training, the 10 men also got a motivational talk from Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, the Lashkar founder, Maria said, and there were more than three people involved in training them. But Lakhvi appears to have been the key figure throughout the preparations for the assault.<br />He traveled with the gunmen to the Pakistani coast before they left for Mumbai and "bid farewell to them as they left Karachi," Maria said.<br />The Pakistani prime minister said Lakhvi and another militant, Zarrar Shah, had been arrested, Reuters reported. "They have been detained for investigation," Gilani said at a news conference in Punjab Province.<br />American counterterrorism officials in Washington have struck a skeptical tone, saying that they wanted to see proof that Lakhvi was actually in custody and that the arrests and raids actually represented a firm commitment by the government to crack down on the groups. The officials spoke before the prime minister's comments on Wednesday.<br />"In the past when they've promised to move against these guys, they'd pick up one or two of them and then several months later, they'd release them," said a senior U.S. official who has dealt with the Pakistani authorities for several years.<br />"Based on past patterns, we shouldn't expect much of this," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly on the case.<br />Administration officials said they were watching India's reaction to Pakistan's words and deeds to gauge whether the raids and arrests would ease tensions between the countries.<br />"There's a practical part of this - will these arrests lead to preventing further attacks and bringing people to justice," one senior administration official said, "and there's a political dimension - to what extent does this lower tensions between the two countries."<br />Pakistani officials have indicated in the past few days that there were no plans for a large-scale crackdown on Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group founded in the 1980s by the Pakistani Army to fight a proxy war against India in Kashmir.<br />The group's name means army of the pure.<br />Such a crackdown would run counter to popular sentiment and would appear to be at the behest of India and the United States, a politically unpalatable perception for Pakistan's government.<br />The Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, said Tuesday that those detained so far would not be extradited to India. "They are Pakistani citizens and will be dealt with according to the law of the land," he said.<br />Qureshi said Pakistan had offered India the chance to carry out a joint investigation of the terrorist attacks but had not yet received a reply.<br />Under pressure from the United States, Pakistan banned Lashkar in 2002 after it was accused of orchestrating an attack against the Indian Parliament.<br />But the Pakistani Army and its premier spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, has kept the group alive, regarding Lashkar fighters as reservists who could be called on according to need, the diplomats said.<br />It would be difficult, they said, for the army, the most powerful institution in Pakistan, to quickly abandon its policy of nurturing militants, even after the embarrassment of the Mumbai siege.<br />"The agenda of the establishment is to find a way out of this morass with the least damage to the institutions of the army and the ISI," a Pakistani politician said on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter. Zardari, the politician said, had a different agenda of "pleasing the Americans."<br />The United States has said that it cannot discern the involvement of the Pakistani military in the planning and operation of the Mumbai attacks.<br />Rather, it appeared that the assaults presented a predicament for Pakistan's military because they showed that a group that had been protected had gotten out of control, said a Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity according to diplomatic custom.<br />"Pakistan needs to make a profound change in its attitude to Lashkar-e-Taiba, and that doesn't seem to have happened yet," the Western diplomat said.<br />An important sign of whether Pakistan was serious in shutting down Lashkar would be if the group were demobilized by the government, and its fighters given alternative employment, experts on jihadist groups said.<br />After the ban in 2002, the United States and Britain tried to persuade Pakistan to demobilize the fighters but failed to do so, the experts said. Instead thousands of members were rounded up and then quietly released.<br />The groups were then offered a trade-off, the diplomats said. They were directed to slow down their militant activities against the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir but were allowed to transfer their assets to Pakistan's tribal areas. There, some Lashkar members have worked alongside the Pakistani Taliban, the diplomats said.<br />Since the start of the current roundup of Lashkar members, the group's founder, Saeed, has not been arrested. He remains at his headquarters in Lahore, where he gave the sermon at Friday prayers last week.<br />Saeed, a firebrand speaker who laces his speeches with anti-Semitic and anti-Indian statements, now calls himself the leader of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity that is Lashkar's parent.<br />Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Robert F. Worth from Mumbai.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Pakistan arrests met with Indian mistrust<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />By Simon Cameron-Moore<br />Pakistan confirmed on Wednesday the arrest of two men named by India as planners of the militant attack on Mumbai, but a senior Indian official described Pakistani actions so far as "eyewash."<br />Two operations commanders with the Lashkar-e-Taiba jihadi group, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and Zarrar Shah were being held, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told journalists in Multan city.<br />"They have been detained for investigation," he said, providing the first official confirmation since Lakhvi's arrest in a raid on a Lashkar camp in Pakistani Kashmir Sunday.<br />India has put the official death toll in the Mumbai attack at 179, and public anger with Pakistan is running high.<br />The United States has engaged in intensive diplomacy to stop tensions mounting between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan and keep Islamabad focussed on fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda threat on its border with Afghanistan.<br />While other media have reported up to 40 people had been arrested, Pakistani intelligence officials told Reuters only around a dozen people have been detained, mostly in the raid on a camp outside Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir.<br />Pakistan military spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas said an operation against banned militant organizations remained underway, and was being carried out in several places.<br />The prime minister said he had no up-to-date information on whether Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group, was also detained, as some media have reported.<br />SCEPTICISM ABOUNDS<br />Pakistan has been advised by the United States to take swift, transparent action to cooperate with India in the investigation into the slaughter in India's financial capital.<br />Islamabad, however, has said anyone arrested and accused of involvement in the Mumbai attack will be tried in Pakistan.<br />Scepticism abounds in India over the sincerity of Pakistan's actions because of alleged past ties between the Pakistani military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and groups like Lashkar and Jaish that had fought Indian rule in Kashmir.<br />"This is an eyewash. We want action that meets our concern," a senior Indian government official, who asked to remain anonymous, told Reuters.<br />"There is no modicum of doubt about the complicity of elements of Pakistan, including the ISI," the official said.<br />America's top military office, Adm. Mike Mullen, called the arrests a positive step but urged Pakistan to do more to address the militant threat from its soil.<br />"We measure by deeds," Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon. "It remains very important that the government of Pakistan take not just the steps they've taken but the steps that they need to continue to take to root this out so it doesn't happen again."<br />A Pakistani daily, The News, reported Tuesday there were also arrests made and records seized during raids on offices of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) charity in the Mansehra and Chakdra districts of North West Frontier Province.<br />The charity, which has thousands of followers, is widely regarded as a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba.<br />MORE SUICIDE SQUADS OUT THERE?<br />Having interrogated one gunman caught alive, Indian police have released names and photographs of the nine shot dead in the three-day assault, and revealed where they came from in Pakistan.<br />They were part of a group of 30 trained for suicide missions, a top police officer said.<br />"The other 20 were trained to carry out other missions. They did not come to India, they must have gone elsewhere," Deven Bharti, a deputy police commissioner, told Reuters on Wednesday.<br />Investigations into possible links with home-grown Indian Islamist militants have focussed on five suspects.<br />Police were following up leads related to two Indian Muslims caught in northern India in February. One had maps of Mumbai that highlighted several city landmarks hit in the attack.<br />U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said there was no doubt the militants behind the attack operated from Pakistan.<br />Neither Azhar nor his Jaish group have been mentioned as suspects in the attack on Mumbai.<br />But Azhar is one of the most-wanted men in India, and was on a list of 20 militants and criminals New Delhi asked Pakistan to hand over in the wake of the attacks to show its cooperation.<br />Representatives of the Azhar family and intelligence officials told Reuters Tuesday that media reports the jihadi leader was under house arrest were incorrect.<br />Confusion over his status was sown by Pakistan's Defence Minister Chaudhry Mukhtar Ahmed in comments to the Indian news channel CNN-IBN, and a report in The News daily.<br />Chaudhry told Reuters he had not been confirming anyone's arrest, but merely repeating names already in the media.<br />(Additional reporting by Asim Tanveer in Multan, Augustine Anthony in Islamabad, Rina Chandran in Mumbai, Alistair Scrutton in New Delhi; Editing by Jerry Norton)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Mother in India claims to be oldest</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />An Indian woman who says she is about 70 years old has given birth to her first child, her doctor said Tuesday. The woman, Rajo Devi, delivered a girl by Caesarean section last month, said Dr. Anurag Bishnoi of the National Fertility Center in northern Haryana State. The girl, conceived through in vitro fertilization, was born Nov. 28 and was in good condition, the doctor said. It is impossible to verify whether Devi is the world's oldest woman to give birth as she has no birth certificate.<br />Devi, from a village north of New Delhi, says she is about 70 and her husband, a farmer, around 72. She said that after being childless during 55 years of marriage, they received in vitro treatment in April. "I'm happy," Devi said in a telephone interview. "The baby is doing well."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>U.S. forces kill Afghan policemen and civilian in error<br /></strong>By Kirk Semple<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />KABUL: American forces killed six Afghan police officers and one civilian Wednesday during an assault on the hideout of a suspected Taliban commander, the authorities said, in what a senior U.S. military spokesman called a "tragic case of mistaken identity."<br />Thirteen Afghan security officers were also wounded in the incident.<br />A statement issued jointly by the U.S. and Afghan military commands said a contingent of police officers had fired on U.S. soldiers after the Americans had successfully overrun the hideout, killing the suspected Taliban commander and detaining another man.<br />The statement said the Americans had already entered the hideout, a building in Qalat District in Zabul Province, when they came under attack by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades from "a compound nearby."<br />"Multiple attempts to deter the engagement were unsuccessful," the statement said.<br />The Americans, concerned about women and children hiding in the building, decided to return fire using small arms and aircraft, the statement said, offering no further details about the level of force the Americans had employed.<br />After the firefight, the Americans discovered they had been shooting at Afghan police officers, the statement said.<br />But the deputy police chief of Qalat District said the police officers had been in a police station when they came under fire, which destroyed the building.<br />The official, Jailoni Khan Farahi, also said that the firing against the Americans had not originated from the police station but from a nearby building.<br />He said he did not know who was occupying the building at the time.<br />"Coalition forces deeply regret the incident of mistaken fire," said Colonel Jerry O'Hara, an American military spokesman. "Initial reports indicate this was a tragic case of mistaken identity on both parts."<br />Zabul's governor, Delbar Jan Arman, said a joint Afghan and U.S. delegation of military and civilian officials was going to the scene to conduct an investigation.<br />Khalid Fazly contributed reporting.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Indian bus fire kills 63 Hindu pilgrims</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />LUCKNOW: Sixty-three people were burnt alive when a bus packed with Hindu pilgrims caught fire in northern India, police said on Wednesday.<br />The bus was travelling on Tuesday evening on a national highway near Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal.<br />The victims, including 17 children, were returning from a Hindu pilgrimage in the town of Mathura.<br />"The bus was carrying more than 90 passengers of which 61 were inside," Agra deputy inspector general of police N.P.Srivastava told Reuters by telephone.<br />"The rest had perched themselves on the roof-top , when the bus suddenly went ablaze. While the ones on the rooftop managed to jump off and save their lives, those inside lost their lives." Police said the fire was caused by a mechanical fault.<br />(Editing by Alistair Scrutton)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>OPINION</strong><br /><strong>The Arab world's dirty secret</strong><br />By Mona Eltahawy<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />NEW YORK: I was on my way home on the Cairo Metro, lost in thought as I listened to music when I noticed a young Egyptian taunting a Sudanese girl. She reached out and tried to grab the girl's nose and laughed when the girl tried to brush her hand away.<br />The Sudanese girl looked to be Dinka, from southern Sudan and not the northern Sudanese who "look like us." She was obviously in distress.<br />I removed my headphones and asked the Egyptian woman "Why are you treating her like that?"<br />She exploded into a tornado of yelling, demanding to know why it was my business. I told her it was my business because as an Egyptian and as a Muslim who was riding the Metro, her behavior was wrong and I would not stay silent about it. I knew she was Muslim because she wore a scarf.<br />I told her that the way she was treating the Sudanese girl made the scarf on her head meaningless. Her mother asked me why I didn't cover my hair and I replied that I didn't want to be a hypocrite like her and her daughter.<br />As distressing as I found that young woman's behavior, I was even more distressed that the other women in the Metro car watched and said nothing. They made no attempt to defend the Sudanese girl nor to defend me when I confronted the Egyptian woman.<br />After the Egyptian woman got off at her station, I asked the other women why they didn't do anything. One woman said she stayed silent because the racist woman would've yelled at her. So what, I asked? If enough of the women had confronted her, she would have been outnumbered.<br />I apologized to the Sudanese girl for the Egyptian woman's behavior and she thanked me and told me "Egyptians are bad." I could only imagine other times she'd been abused publicly.<br />We are a racist people in Egypt and we are in deep denial about it. On my Facebook page, I blamed racism for my argument and an Egyptian man wrote to deny that we are racists and used as his proof a program on Egyptian Radio featuring Sudanese songs and poetry!<br />Our silence over racism not only destroys the warmth and hospitality we are proud of as Egyptians, it has deadly consequences.<br />What else but racism on Dec. 30, 2005, allowed hundreds of riot policemen to storm through a makeshift camp in central Cairo to clear it of 2,500 Sudanese refugees, trampling or beating to death 28 people, among them women and children?<br />What else but racism lies behind the bloody statistics at the Egyptian border with Israel where, since 2007, Egyptian guards have killed at least 33 migrants, many from Sudan's Darfur region, including a pregnant woman and a 7-year-old girl?<br />The racism I saw on the Cairo Metro has an echo in the Arab world at large, where the suffering in Darfur goes ignored because its victims are black and because those who are creating the misery in Darfur are not Americans or Israelis and we only pay attention when America and Israel behave badly.<br />We love to cry "Islamophobia" when we talk about the way Muslim minorities are treated in the West and yet we never stop to consider how we treat minorities and the most vulnerable among us.<br />The U.S. television network ABC recently staged a scenario in which an actor worked in a bakery in Texas and refused to serve an actress dressed as a Muslim woman in a headscarf. The scene was an experiment to see if other customers would help the Muslim woman.<br />Thirteen customers defended her by yelling at the clerk, asking for the manager or walking out in disgust. Six customers supported the bigoted clerk and 22 looked away and did absolutely nothing.<br />I wonder now which Egyptian television channel would dare to stage such an experiment? And which Arab television channel would dare to stage a program that so boldly confronts us with the question "what would you do?"<br />For those of us who move between different worlds - where one day we are a majority as I am as a Sunni Muslim in Egypt and another we are a minority as I am as a Muslim in America - it is clear that to defend the rights of a Sudanese girl on the Cairo Metro means to defend my right on the New York Subway.<br />We live in a world that is connected in unprecedented ways. And that connection now extends to rights. If we want our rights to be respected we must do the right thing, everywhere.<br />Mona Eltahawy is a columnist for Egypt's Al Masry Al Youm and Qatar's Al Arab. She is based in New York.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />***********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Inspired by Obama, black Iraqis run for office</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />By Mohammed Abbas<br />Barack Obama's election in the United States has already had an impact in Iraq, inspiring some black Iraqis to run in a forthcoming election in the hope of ending what they call centuries of discrimination.<br />"Obama's win gave us moral strength," said Jalal Chijeel, secretary of the Free Iraqi Movement.<br />He said the group would be the first to field black candidates in any Iraqi poll when it joins provincial elections scheduled for January 31.<br />President-elect Obama's ascendancy in the United States has coincided with increased public support for their cause: "When he became a candidate, so did we," Chijeel told Reuters.<br />He argues Iraqis of African origin are not represented in top office, suffer disproportionately from poverty and illiteracy and are commonly referred to in derisive terms.<br />Other Iraqis see no discrimination against Iraqis of African-origin, whose number is unclear given a lack of statistics. Chijeel said there were some 300,000 in the southern city of Basra alone.<br />This January's provincial election will be the first to be organized by Iraq and held under Iraqi laws since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 overthrew Saddam Hussein, and will be followed by national elections later in 2009.<br />As such it could be a crucial step to reconciling the country's sectarian and ethnic groups after years of bloodshed.<br />Black people in Iraq suffer discrimination partly because of their colour, and also partly because they do not belong to a tribe, Chijeel said. Tribal family networks and ancestry are important in Iraq and much of the Middle East.<br />The movement's eight candidates could suffer a backlash from their lighter-skinned countrymen, who respond with indignation to charges of racism and say blacks are treated with respect. They argue electioneering based on race is divisive.<br />Even fellow blacks in Basra's largely black district of Zubayr, where young men stood chatting and a boy herded sheep across the road, voiced reservations.<br />"There's no discrimination," said black shop worker Mohammed Nezal, sharing a view echoed mostly by older men, as they sat fingering worry-beads. "There's so many blacks that have done well in Iraq. There's respect."<br />THE "A" WORD<br />Chijeel argues that blacks in Iraq are subordinated, partly by a history of slavery.<br />"To this day blacks are not given their rights," he said. "We don't see blacks in local councils, in parliament or cabinet or as ambassadors ... We have educated people, doctors, graduates, but to our great regret we still have no importance."<br />In Zubayr -- dusty and poor, like most Basra neighbourhoods -- Salim Hussein stood chatting in the street with friends: "The people here don't treat us any differently. But look with your own eyes. Do you see a single black person with a decent job?"<br />During a five-day visit to Basra, Reuters mostly saw black people working as domestic help and car cleaners.<br />The Free Iraqi Movement's electoral candidates are teachers, engineers and office workers. They insist they are not a special interest group and want to tackle problems faced by all, such as unemployment.<br />For a brief period, long ago, blacks once controlled Iraq's south: there was a revolt in 869 AD by East Africans brought by landowners in Basra to work as slaves, draining marshes in the hot and humid south.<br />The rebels eventually took Basra and even parts of Iran. But by 883 AD the uprising was crushed, its leader's head delivered to the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad.<br />"From that time till now, the black has had no senior role in society," Chijeel said. "They suffered as slaves or servants, and worse. They did the most despised jobs."<br />As is often the case, language is a core of the problem.<br />The word "abd" is Arabic for slave, and even though slavery was abolished in Iraq in 1924, it persisted for many years and many people continue to use "abd" to describe a black person.<br />Those who use the word say they mean no insult and use it only as a descriptive term.<br />Muddying the debate is the fact that some Iraqis are as dark-skinned as those of African origin. For some for whom colour is irrelevant, ancestry and tribe is paramount and unknown lineage or having a slave ancestor is unacceptable.<br />"I would never allow my daughters to marry an 'abd' ... Who's their tribe? Do they know who their forefathers are?" said one dark-skinned Iraqi man who declined to be named.<br />BANDWAGON?<br />The Free Iraqi Movement wants the word "abd" to be banned.<br />The group also wants blacks to be a considered a minority, a status which gives some benefit to Iraq's Christians, Turkmen, Yazidis and Shabaks, who by their similar physical appearance to the Iraqi majority are less obviously different than blacks.<br />"Our fundamental demands are to be considered a minority, to have a paragraph in the constitution protecting black people and punish those who use the word 'abd' as defamation, and we want an apology for the crimes of the past," Chijeel said.<br />While these demands are unlikely to be achievable at the local level, wins for the Free Iraqi Movement in the January provincial polls could give momentum for a later parliamentary vote.<br />Younger blacks in Zubayr voiced support for the movement, some citing Obama's success.<br />"The racism is not obvious, but you feel it. I have a qualification, my Arab friend has the same qualification. He gets the job and I don't," said Mohened Omran.<br />Lighter-skinned Iraqis interviewed on Basra's streets saw the Free Iraqi Movement and its demands as introducing discrimination into a colour-blind society.<br />"The blacks are our friends and are Iraqis. There's no difference between us. This movement is in fact racist," said Farhan al-Hajaj, an engineer out shopping.<br />Basra University history professor Hamid Hamdan told Reuters intermarriage is common, as are highly educated blacks in top jobs. The Free Iraqi Movement is simply jumping on the bandwagon of sectarianism and ethnic fracture engendered by years of war.<br />"This is opportunism ... Now that there's sectarianism and ethnic differentiation, some people think they can use this to achieve a specific aim," he said, adding that though slang, "abd" is used by most Iraqis to simply mean black person.<br />Chijeel said you would have to be black to understand.<br />"This word describes a person as a slave, someone with no free will, no dignity, no humanity. There's no worse word ... Black people feel this. Others do not."<br />(Editing by Catherine Bosley and Sara Ledwith)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />***********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Fugitive Sunni leader thought to have been captured or killed in Syria<br /></strong>By Graham Bowley and Souad Mekhennet<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />The fugitive leader of a Sunni extremist group who led a prolonged standoff against the Lebanese Army last year at a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli, Lebanon, may have been killed or captured in Syria, according to a statement posted by the group on militant Web sites.<br />During the summer of 2007, the Lebanese Army battled fighters from the militant group, Fatah al-Islam, which claims to have allegiances with Al Qaeda in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp.<br />While the army routed the group and nearly leveled the camp, the group's leader, Shaker al-Absi, was never caught. In the statement, posted on Web sites on Dec. 8, the group said that Absi had fled to Syria, where he tried to rebuild his organization, but that he and two companions were ambushed by what it called Syrian security agents as they were traveling to meet supporters. Absi may have died in the resulting firefight, the Fatah al-Islam statement said.<br />The group named Abu Muhammad Awad as his successor, the statement said.<br />"Up to this moment, we have no knowledge, even though we are inclined to think they died," said the statement, which was provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors militant Web sites. "Yet, we have no evidence that proves this matter to us."<br />The authenticity of the statement could not immediately be verified. A senior Syrian security official could not confirm Absi's death or capture.<br />After the standoff in the camp, Lebanese officials said they believed Absi had died in the final hours of the 15-week battle, but DNA testing of the body thought to be Absi's proved negative, and a captured member of his group told officials he had escaped the night before the army's final assault.<br />Tensions have lingered in Tripoli since the battle at the camp, and many in the city believe a series of attacks on the Lebanese Army this year were meant to avenge the Fatah al Islam militants killed in the 2007 fighting. In August, a bomb hidden in a briefcase tore through a bus packed with soldiers on their way to work, killing 15 people, including nine soldiers, and in September, a remotely detonated car bomb exploded near another bus carrying army troops, killing four soldiers and a civilian.<br />A bombing in September in the Syrian capital Damascus, which killed 17 people and was the deadliest attack in Syria since the 1980s, was blamed by the Syrian government on Fatah al Islam. Syrian state television showed what it said were 12 members of the group, including Absi's daughter, confessing that they had helped plan the attack.<br />Absi was convicted and sentenced to death in Jordan for helping to organize the 2002 assassination of an American diplomat, Laurence Foley. Court papers show that he worked with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was killed in June 2006 in a bombing by United States forces in Iraq.<br />Absi established his group in Lebanon in 2006 with as many as 50 militants from other Arab countries who had fought American troops in Iraq.<br />In interviews in 2007 with The New York Times, Absi acknowledged being an associate of Zarqawi, and cast himself as a new face of Al Qaeda, saying he shared its goals of global jihad against the United States.<br />After fleeing the camp last year, according to the statement, Absi suffered a broken leg and he and other members of the militant group spent "about two months in a small room where they saw no sun and breathed no air from outside it" until traveling to Syria.<br />Graham Bowley reported from New York, and Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt. Robert F. Worth contributed reporting from Mumbai.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Winner of Nobel Peace Prize urges action on Middle East peace<br /></strong>By Walter Gibbs<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />OSLO: President-elect Barack Obama should move quickly to try to resolve conflicts in the Middle East, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate for this year said Wednesday after accepting a gold medal and $1.2 million in prize money.<br />"The credibility of the whole international community is at stake," said Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland and a veteran United Nations mediator. "We cannot go on, year after year, simply pretending to do something to help the situation in the Middle East. We must also get results."<br />He urged Obama to give the region high priority in his first year in office.<br />"The European Union, Russia and the UN must also be seriously committed so that a solution can be found to the crises stretching from Israel and Palestine to Iraq and Iran," he said. "If we want to achieve lasting results, we must look at the whole region."<br />The Middle East is one of few parts of the world where Ahtisaari has not been a major player in conflict resolution, though this year he brought dozens of Iraqi Sunni and Shiite leaders to Helsinki for dialogue with "facilitators" from Northern Ireland and South Africa, where reconciliation has been partly successful.<br />Although he failed last year to bring Serbs and ethnic Albanians to agreement over the final status of Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia, his final recommendation to the UN Security Council became the basis for the Kosovo Assembly's unilateral declaration of independence in February.<br />Perhaps his greatest achievement came in the wake of a tsunami that claimed the lives of an estimated 170,000 people in the Indonesian province of Aceh on Dec. 26, 2004. Ahtisaari used the Helsinki offices of his organization, Crisis Management Initiative, to hammer out a peace deal in which the Free Aceh Movement gave up violent secessionism and accepted limited autonomy for the province.<br />From 1977 to 1990, Ahtisaari helped engineer Namibian independence from South Africa, and became an honorary Namibian citizen in the process."Many boys in Namibia are named Martti," said Ole Danbolt Mjoes, the outgoing chairman of the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee. "That must be at least as great an honor as being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."Katri Merikallio, the author of a book about Ahtisaari and a journalist for the Finnish newspaper Suomen Kuvalehti, said the former president embodies a stoic toughness that Finns see as their national trait."In Finnish, we have a word, 'sisu,' which could be translated as having guts or stamina," she said in Oslo. "Once you decide something, you don't give in. We define ourselves quite a lot with this term, and it applies very much to him."In his acceptance speech, Ahtisaari said that resolving the Middle East conflicts would require determination and a willingness to reach out to all parties. He proposed harnessing the religious impulses that until now have driven groups apart, and noted that religion could play a role "in peace-building."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Accidents kill 830,000 children each year</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />By Michael Kahn<br />Car crashes, drownings and other accidents kill 830,000 children worldwide each year, a surprisingly large figure that marks a growing but often ignored problem, the World Health Organisation said on Wednesday.<br />The report, compiled using information from 200 experts around the world, is the first to assess the global scale of the problem and seeks to spur public health and development groups into action, officials said.<br />"We were surprised at how big the problem was at a global level," Etienne Krug, the WHO official who put together the report, told a news conference. "There is ignorance about the magnitude and the potential for prevention."<br />Africa has the highest rate overall for accidental deaths. The incidence there is 10 times higher than in high-income countries such as Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and Britain, which have the lowest rates of child injury, according to the report.<br />Around 95 percent of the deaths occurred in the developing world, mostly in Africa, but the problem is acute in richer nations as well where deaths from accidents disproportionately affect the poor.<br />In the United States, accidents involving motor vehicles killed the most children -- about 8,000 deaths each year, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said in a separate report.<br />It found that drowning was the leading cause of accidental death for children aged one to four.<br />The global report listed road crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, killing 260,000 children each year and injuring 10 million. Drowning, burns, falls and unintended poisoning round out the top five list.<br />About half of these deaths could be prevented by expanding the use of car seats, covering wells and pools of water in areas where children play, erecting barriers to keep young people from road construction and other proven measures, the joint report from the WHO and the United Nation's Children's Fund found.<br />"Poorer children have not shared in all the gains of children of wealthier nations," said Elizabeth Towner, a child health expert at the University of the West of England in Bristol, who contributed to the report. "Childhood injury is a cause of social injustice that needs to be addressed."<br />The WHO's Krug called on governments and health officials to tackle the problem as they would any other development issue, saying that death and disability from accidents plunge poor families further into debt and deepen a cycle of poverty.<br />"Every child lost to injury or severely disabled will cost the future economy of that country," the report said.<br />"(Reducing child injury) will reduce costs in the healthcare system, improve the capacity to make further reductions in injury rates and will most importantly protect children."<br />(Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Maggie Fox)<br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Zimbabwe cholera toll jumps<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />By MacDonald Dzirutwe<br />The death toll from Zimbabwe's cholera outbreak soared to nearly 800 on Wednesday and a court ordered police to find a missing rights activist, piling more pressure on President Robert Mugabe's government.<br />The spreading cholera, coupled with chronic food shortages, has highlighted the economic collapse of the southern African nation and prompted calls for Mugabe's resignation from Western leaders and some within Africa.<br />The World Health Organisation said 774 Zimbabweans had died from cholera and over 15,000 were likely infected, casting doubt on official assertions it was under control. In Mozambique, officials said four people had died of cholera in a border area near Zimbabwe.<br />Zimbabwe's government accuses foes abroad of using the epidemic to try to oust Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, and blames Western sanctions for ruining the once relatively prosperous southern African country.<br />Mugabe's critics say his policies have wrecked Zimbabwe.<br />There is little hope of recovery while deadlock remains between Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai over implementing a power-sharing deal. Recent abductions of government critics have added to doubts over the agreement.<br />The Zimbabwe High Court on Tuesday ordered police to find Jestina Mukoko, a former journalist and head of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, taken away at gunpoint in Harare on December 3.<br />"We got an order from the High Court instructing police to search for her," said Otto Saki of the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), which filed the court petition.<br />Police have said Mukoko is in not in their custody.<br />About 50 lawyers and rights activists marched in central Harare on Tuesday and handed a position to the speaker of parliament expressing concern at "the continued violation of human rights by the government of Zimbabwe, and its refusal to address the country's long standing human rights concerns."<br />ABDUCTIONS<br />Scores of opposition activists were abducted and killed in the run-up to a June presidential run-off election. MDC leader Tsvangirai boycotted the vote after the attacks, allowing Mugabe to win the one-candidate poll.<br />International outrage over the election spurred a round of power-sharing talks that led to a September 15 agreement to establish a unity government. That move has ground to a halt because of disagreement over control of key ministries.<br />MDC Secretary General Tendai Biti said the opposition would continue to negotiate with Mugabe's ZANU-PF despite attacks. He said about 30 MDC supporters and officials have been abducted in recent weeks.<br />"We cannot fold our hands and walk away from the agreement, given the collapse of the state and the suffering of the people. But it is extremely hard to be found on the negotiating table when our supporters are unaccounted for," Biti said.<br />"We will not walk away, we will look the dictator in the eye. He knows he's got a game on his hands."<br />ZANU-PF and the MDC are due to meet again later this month.<br />Tsvangirai told CNN that the cholera crisis highlighted the need for Mugabe to be more accommodating in the talks.<br />A unity government is widely seen as Zimbabwe's best hope of recovering. Prices double every 24 hours, the currency is worthless and much of the population has been pushed to the brink of famine.<br />U.S. President George W. Bush, Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu are among those who have called for Mugabe to go in the past week. The African Union, however, has resisted the calls for tougher action.<br />(Additional reporting by Robert Evans in Geneva; Writing by Paul Simao; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Sharif back in Mogadishu as death toll hits 16,210<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />By Abdi Sheikh<br />Somalia's moderate Islamist leader Sheikh Sharif Ahmed returned to Mogadishu for the first time in two years on Wednesday and a local rights group said fighting had killed 16,210 civilians since then.<br />Security was tightened in the capital as Sharif, who is in talks with the country's Western-backed interim government, was rushed to a hotel in a northern district of the city surrounded by government troops and Islamist militiamen.<br />The U.N. special envoy to Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, said Sharif's return was "most welcome," while the sight of gunmen who used to shoot at each other now working side by side cheered many of the capital's war-weary residents.<br />"His enemies have welcomed him as a friend today ... Sharif's presence will minimise the violence, even if it doesn't end it completely," said 44-year-old local Hassan Garaad.<br />"Islamists wearing turbans and soldiers with uniforms together in one place is a peaceful sign for Mogadishu."<br />Sharif was one of two main leaders of a sharia courts group driven from the capital by government soldiers and their Ethiopian military allies at the start of last year.<br />ISLAMISTS BATTLE<br />Sharif's return brought a rare ray of hope to some Somalis. But experts say he has little influence over Islamist hardliners who have steadily gained ground to control most of the south, and are camped on the outskirts of Mogadishu.<br />Exposing splits in the Islamist ranks, the latest battle between two rebel factions killed at least four people days ahead of a planned Ethiopian military withdrawal that could leave the capital open for an insurgent assault.<br />Witnesses said hardline al Shabaab fighters clashed with more moderate Islamic Courts militia on Tuesday in El Garas, 50 km (30 miles) southeast of the central town of Dusamareb. Both sides fired heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.<br />Spokesman from neither side were immediately available.<br />Addis Ababa has become increasingly frustrated by the financial cost, by feuding between its leaders, and the absence of a serious, international effort to pacify Somalia.<br />Now Ethiopia says it will pull out its troops by the end of December, leaving a probable power vacuum and more bloodshed.<br />The Mogadishu-based Elman Peace and Human Rights Organisation has been tracking the casualties since Islamist insurgents launched a rebellion against Somalia's interim government and its Ethiopian military allies early in 2007.<br />Elman said 7,574 civilians had been killed so far in 2008, adding to 8,636 killed the year before. In a report, it said nearly 29,000 people had been wounded over that two-year period.<br />The Islamists' main weakness is the rift between hardliners such as Shabaab -- which the United States accuses of having links to al Qaeda -- and the more moderate elements such as Sharif's.<br />Presidential spokesman Hussein Mohamed Mohamud told Reuters Sharif was a peace-loving leader who would change the situation in the country for the better. "He will also tell the truth to Somalis who were confused and disturbed by al Shabaab," he said.<br />(Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Louise Ireland)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Haj nears end as pilgrims stone devil<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />By Inal Ersan<br />More than two million Muslims performing the haj pilgrimage entered the final stage of the rituals Wednesday, visiting the Grand Mosque in Mecca and stoning walls representing the devil one more time.<br />For a third day pilgrims threw stones at the Jamarat Bridge in the valley of Mena outside the Islamic holy city of Mecca, which has been the scene of numerous stampedes in past years, including one which killed 362 in 2006.<br />The haj also has been marred in previous years by deadly fires, hotel building collapses and police clashes with protesters. More stringent security and crowd control this year appeared to have paid dividends, though there were still lapses.<br />"God makes things easy. The expansions have reduced crowding a little," said Mohammad Mousa, an Egyptian teacher and father of two pushing a twin pram by a pilgrim bus.<br />"Praise be to God -- things are smooth, we've not heard of any incident. The flow of pilgrims is moving very well," said Saudi preacher Ali Hussein Sawadi Mashour.<br />Saudi Arabia, Islam's birthplace and home to its holiest sites, has erected a massive four-level building with several platforms for throwing the stones at three walls in an ancient rite marking chapters of the story of the prophet Ibrahim -- the biblical Abraham -- in Mecca and the rejection of temptation.<br />The unfinished bridge is now a huge air-conditioned building the size of an airport terminal. Expansions also have been made to the Grand Mosque in Mecca.<br />Authorities have appealed to pilgrims to throw their stones at any time of day rather than only in the afternoon, as Saudi clerics often insisted in the past.<br />The sidewalks were filled with pilgrims who were praying, sleeping, eating, brushing their teeth or chattering ahead of the stoning ritual in the afternoon.<br />"I'm not scared of the crowds. I went to finish early before sunset, to leave room for other pilgrims," said Ramadan al-Habisi from Egypt.<br />Some people managed to enter the area to perform haj without official permits and set up makeshift camps on the road which have been a cause of overcrowding before.<br />"Sleeping on pavements is banned. Brothers, fathers, pilgrims -- please take a bus or walk to the tents," policemen repeatedly urged pilgrims through a loudspeaker.<br />One woman protested, pressing a reporter to intervene.<br />"Tell them to let us sleep here. It will be only a night or two, no harm done," said Sabiha, sitting on a pavement next to her son, an Egyptian who lives in Saudi Arabia and was performing haj without a permit.<br />At least 2.4 million worshippers from all over the world came to Mecca this year, including a record 1.72 million pilgrims from abroad, Saudi media reported.<br />Saudi Arabia grants haj visas to countries according to strict quotas but has increased the numbers after the expansions. Every able-bodied adult Muslim who can afford the trip must perform the haj at least once in a lifetime, which means numbers are likely to grow further in coming years.<br />Haj, one of the largest manifestations of religious devotion in the world, retraces the path of Prophet Mohammad 14 centuries ago after he defeated pagan forces in Mecca. Islam is now embraced by more than one billion people worldwide.<br />(Editing by Samia Nakhoul)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Nobel laureates at U.N. hit Muslim states on rights</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />By Robert Evans<br />Nobel laureates from Iran and Nigeria used a United Nations forum on Wednesday to condemn hardliners in power in some Muslim countries, and rulers of the world's last communist states, as gross abusers of human rights.<br />The two, Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi and Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, also insisted that human rights as set out in the 1948 U.N. Declaration, were universal and could not be limited on the basis of culture or religion.<br />"Some people believe that the Declaration's principles are based on Western standards and are not compatible with national or religious culture. Most non-democratic Islamic governments use this reasoning," declared Ebadi.<br />In the Muslim world today, said Soyinka, "the fanatical, absolutist truth enforcers of our time" were responsible for bloodshed among different Islamic groups and suppression of ideas not in line with their own.<br />The two were delivering keynote addresses in a series of lectures marking the 60th anniversary of the 1948 declaration, whose principles many critics say are being undermined by an Islamic, African and communist bloc in the U.N. system.<br />The informal alliance -- joined by Russia -- is in effective control of the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, where it has ensured that African and Islamic states, as well as Russia and communist-run Cuba and China, largely escape criticism.<br />The grouping -- which also operates in the U.N. General Assembly in New York -- has pushed through resolutions calling on states to ban "defamation of religion," which Western countries say are aimed at limiting freedom of expression.<br />U.S. ALSO CRITICISED<br />Ebadi and Soyinka also criticised the United States' reaction to the September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, saying the Bush administration had used them to violate rights by invoking national security.<br />But -- to a degree that surprised many diplomats and rights activists used to more cautious and bland speeches from U.N. platforms -- they each focussed separately on Islamic countries and on practices in some Muslim communities elsewhere.<br />"I was flabbergasted. I never expected to hear such forthright talk here," said one representative of a non- governmental organisation who has been active at the U.N. in Geneva for 30 years.<br />Soyinka, Nobel Literature laureate in 1986, said the "cultural relativism" many argue has become dominant in the U.N. meant that non-Muslims "are asked to accept such barbarities as honour killings as justified by tradition."<br />This stance -- which critics say many governments in the West are adopting to avoid upsetting vocal religious and especially Muslim minorities -- is evoked "to undermine or dismiss the universal nature of human rights," he said.<br />Ebadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for promoting the rights of women and children in Iran and is at odds with its government, said Muslim dictatorships used religion to underpin their own power.<br />The views of "enlightened Muslims" were dismissed, and any criticism of human rights violations and oppression of the people "is treated as criticism of religion itself and human rights defenders are accused of heresy," she said.<br />"They say: 'Our culture does not permit the exercise of dissent, or of other views -- end of discussion," said Soyinka. "'Our culture, they tell the world, is different and our traditions sacrosanct'."<br />Both said the rulers of officially atheist societies -- like China and Cuba -- abused that belief system too to perpetuate their power. "Atheism and belief in god are both used as an excuse for the oppression of people," said Ebadi.<br />(Editing by Tim Pearce)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC2Y-XVMfFS1zJ328jrMR3a5RrtPcaC9LhQ-BCCaAh-EBZuxZzW16-tv4ds0Up2c0HOhdB1Z5xNCJBfPbQR9U3XMXZqTGJCk2x0shybmSp1IKtejJ-CxaJp7jApmBwmOs6NVPn7UB76CM/s1600-h/DSC02883.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397424534073634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC2Y-XVMfFS1zJ328jrMR3a5RrtPcaC9LhQ-BCCaAh-EBZuxZzW16-tv4ds0Up2c0HOhdB1Z5xNCJBfPbQR9U3XMXZqTGJCk2x0shybmSp1IKtejJ-CxaJp7jApmBwmOs6NVPn7UB76CM/s320/DSC02883.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>House passes auto rescue plan</strong><br />By David M. Herszenhorn and David E. Sanger<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The House voted on Wednesday to approve a $14 billion government rescue of the American automobile industry, but the bailout plan, which would provide emergency loans to General Motors and Chrysler, was in jeopardy because of strong Republican opposition in the Senate.<br />The House approved the rescue plan by 237 to 170, mostly along party lines, with 32 Republicans mainly from states heavily dependent on the auto industry joining 205 Democrats in supporting the measure. Voting against were 150 Republicans and 20 Democrats.<br />The White House so far has failed to generate support among Senate Republicans, who have the power to kill the bill.<br />General Motors and Chrysler have said they cannot survive much longer without the federal aid, while Ford Motor Company, which is in better shape than its competitors, has said it will not seek the emergency loans.<br />As an amendment to the auto rescue plan, the House approved a measure that would require banks receiving assistance from the Treasury's $700 billion economic stabilization program to detail new lending activity each quarter.<br />The White House chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, attended a lunch at the Capitol with Republican senators to persuade them to back the auto rescue plan but met stiff resistance.<br />Some Republican senators said the automakers should be allowed to fail. Others said the proposed oversight of the rescue by a so-called car czar was too weak. Senator George Voinovich, an Ohio Republican who is one of the few outspoken Republican supporters of a taxpayer-backed rescue, emerged from the lunch sounding deeply pessimistic. Voinovich said that Senate Republicans had refused to participate in negotiations with the White House because of general opposition to an auto bailout.<br />"The leadership did not want to participate because they felt whatever came out of the negotiations, they probably wouldn't support," Voinovich said. He said he still intended to vote for the plan.<br />The Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, was noncommittal. The Republicans had a "spirited" discussion about the auto rescue plan, he said, but it was too soon to take a stand because they had just received a final draft of the bill.<br />"Everybody's still kind of poring through it, trying to figure out exactly what it does," McConnell said. "At this particular juncture, I couldn't handicap for you the level of support that may exist in our conference. But we did begin a conferencewide learning process during the course of the last hour."<br />Even some auto-state lawmakers were unhappy with the bailout plan the White House helped to design. "While I am fighting to save Missouri auto jobs," said Senator Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, "Congress is just putting off the inevitable unless we force the companies to reform fundamentally, which this latest plan fails to do and is why I am offering changes to make it work."<br />A number of other Senate Republicans said they had every intention of scuttling a taxpayer-financed rescue for General Motors and Chrysler.<br />Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, called the proposal "a travesty" and said that he would filibuster the bill. "This is an installment on a huge bailout that will come later," he said.<br />Others, while critical of the legislation, suggested there was hope of a compromise.<br />Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, who was working to draft alternative legislation, said the proposal put forward by the White House and congressional Democrats provided only weak authority for the car czar, who would supervise the sweeping reorganization plans that the automakers have agreed to carry out.<br />"I have a banking staffer who can carry out the responsibilities of this so-called czar," Corker said. "I mean it's a liaison. This person has no power."<br />Corker said the bill put forward by the Bush administration and Democrats and approved by the House would entangle the U.S. government in the operations of the auto companies for too long. Without substantial changes, he said, the legislation was unlikely to win passage in the Senate.<br />"I didn't see anybody in the group who is willing to blink," he told reporters. An aide to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said the Democrats were trying to negotiate a deal with McConnell under which there would be several votes on measures intended to aid the auto industry including, perhaps, alternative proposals by Corker or other Republicans.<br />Some congressional Democrats speculated that if Senate Republicans were kill the rescue plan, the Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, Jr., would have no choice but to keep GM and Chrysler afloat, at least until the new Congress begins early next month and wider Democratic majorities are sworn into office.<br />In the compromise measure that emerged from negotiations with the White House, House Democrats agreed to drop a provision to force the automakers to end their legal challenges to state emissions standards, including a lawsuit in California.<br />In the broadest sense, the House and Senate bills provide an identical government rescue of the two most imperiled automakers, GM and Chrysler, in the form of $14 billion in emergency loans. In exchange for the loans, the auto manufacturers would have to submit to strict government oversight and carry out sweeping reorganization plans.<br />GM has not said how it will respond if the federal loans are not forthcoming. It is spending more than $2 billion in cash each month, and is close to falling below the minimum level of cash needed to operate.<br />Without immediate U.S. government assistance, GM would be in danger of not paying its suppliers, employees and creditors, and could miss interest payments on its outstanding debt. Failure to pay creditors, for example, could result in legal actions leading to a forced bankruptcy filing.<br />"I wouldn't like to speculate what would unfold, but suffice it to say the survival of the company as we know it would be highly questionable if we don't get some bridge loan," GM's vice chairman, Robert Lutz, said in an interview on Monday.<br />The bill would also give the government warrants to take an equity stake in the automakers. It would limit executive pay, bar golden-parachute severance packages and prohibit the paying of shareholder dividends while the emergency government loans were outstanding.<br />The bill would require the companies and their stakeholders, including creditors, labor unions and dealers to agree on sweeping reorganization plans that would lead to long-term financial viability. If they failed to agree, the auto czar would be able to impose a plan, and could also force the companies into bankruptcy if they failed to meet requirements.<br />The plan seeks to save the auto industry from what one senior White House official called "30 years of slow suicide."<br />The bill sets a March 31 deadline for the automakers to produce long-term viability plans, but it is not certain how the auto czar would determine viability. Joel Kaplan, the deputy White House chief of staff, said that "simply stated, it's that the firm will have a positive value going forward when you take into account all of its costs."<br />Those costs include health care, pensions, salaries and research and development on new technologies, and depending on how they are accounted for, the companies — or the auto czar — could potentially tinker with the meaning of "viable." Kaplan said the White House goal was "a bridge to either fundamental restructuring, or bankruptcy."<br />The bill would require the automakers to seek permission from the auto czar for any business transaction of $100 million or more. congressional Democrats said that provision was intended specifically to prevent the companies from taking any steps that would result in American manufacturing jobs moving overseas.<br />But with overseas markets presenting better profit opportunities for the automakers these days, the Democrats' political goal of preserving jobs, and the overarching goal of the rescue legislation — to return the automakers to profitability — could be at odds, with the companies discouraged from seeking the most profitable markets.<br />The House-approved auto bailout measure would also grant federal judges a cost-of-living increase and would provide U.S. government guarantees for financial deals that some major transit agencies are in danger of defaulting on in part because of the credit crisis.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>73 an hour: Adding it up</strong><br />By David Leonhardt<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />Seventy-three dollars an hour.<br />That figure — repeated on television and in newspapers as the average pay of a Big Three autoworker — has become a big symbol in the fight over what should happen to Detroit. To critics, it is a neat encapsulation of everything that's wrong with bloated car companies and their entitled workers.<br />To the Big Three's defenders, meanwhile, the number has become proof positive that autoworkers are being unfairly blamed for Detroit's decline. "We've heard this garbage about 73 bucks an hour," Senator Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said last week. "It's a total lie. I think some people have perpetrated that deliberately, in a calculated way, to mislead the American people about what we're doing here."<br />So what is the reality behind the number? Detroit's defenders are right that the number is basically wrong. Big Three workers aren't making anything close to $73 an hour (which would translate to about $150,000 a year).<br />But the defenders are not right to suggest, as many have, that Detroit has solved its wage problem. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler workers make significantly more than their counterparts at Toyota, Honda and Nissan plants in this country. Last year's concessions by the United Automobile Workers, which mostly apply to new workers, will not change that anytime soon.<br />And yet the main problem facing Detroit, overwhelmingly, is not the pay gap. That's unfortunate because fixing the pay gap would be fairly straightforward.<br />The real problem is that many people don't want to buy the cars that Detroit makes. Fixing this problem won't be nearly so easy.<br />The success of any bailout is probably going to come down to Washington's willingness to acknowledge as much.<br />Let's start with the numbers. The $73-an-hour figure comes from the car companies themselves. As part of their public relations strategy during labor negotiations, the companies put out various charts and reports explaining what they paid their workers. Wall Street analysts have done similar calculations.<br />The calculations show, accurately enough, that for every hour a unionized worker puts in, one of the Big Three really does spend about $73 on compensation. So the number isn't made up. But it is the combination of three very different categories.<br />The first category is simply cash payments, which is what many people imagine when they hear the word "compensation." It includes wages, overtime and vacation pay, and comes to about $40 an hour. (The numbers vary a bit by company and year. That's why $73 is sometimes $70 or $77.)<br />The second category is fringe benefits, like health insurance and pensions. These benefits have real value, even if they don't show up on a weekly paycheck. At the Big Three, the benefits amount to $15 an hour or so.<br />Add the two together, and you get the true hourly compensation of Detroit's unionized work force: roughly $55 an hour. It's a little more than twice as much as the typical American worker makes, benefits included. The more relevant comparison, though, is probably to Honda's or Toyota's (nonunionized) workers. They make in the neighborhood of $45 an hour, and most of the gap stems from their less generous benefits.<br />The third category — the one that makes $70 misleading — is the cost of benefits for the Big Three's current retirees. These are essentially fixed costs that have no relation to how many vehicles the companies make. But they are a real cost, so the companies add them into the mix — dividing those costs by the total hours of the current work force, to get a figure of $15 or so — and end up at roughly $70 an hour.<br />The crucial point, though, is this $15 isn't mainly a reflection of how generous the retiree benefits are. It's a reflection of how many retirees there are. The Big Three built up a huge pool of retirees long before Honda and Toyota opened plants in this country. You'd never know this by looking at the graphic behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN last week, contrasting the "$73/hour" pay of Detroit's workers with the "up to $48/hour" pay of workers at the Japanese companies.<br />These retirees make up arguably Detroit's best case for a bailout. The Big Three and the UAW had the bad luck of helping to create the middle class in a country where individual companies — as opposed to all of society — must shoulder much of the burden of paying for retirement.<br />So here's a little experiment. Imagine that a congressional bailout effectively pays for $10 an hour of the retiree benefits. That's roughly the gap between the Big Three's retiree costs and those of the Japanese-owned plants in this country. Imagine, also, that the UAW agrees to reduce pay and benefits for current workers to $45 an hour — the same as at Honda and Toyota.<br />Do you know how much that would reduce the cost of producing a Big Three vehicle? Only about $800.<br />That's because labor costs, for all the attention they have been receiving, make up only about 10 percent of the cost of making a vehicle. An extra $800 per vehicle would certainly help Detroit, but the Big Three already often sell their cars for about $2,500 less than equivalent cars from Japanese companies, analysts at the International Motor Vehicle Program say. Even so, many Americans no longer want to own the cars being made by General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.<br />My family's story isn't especially unusual. For decades, my grandparents bought American and only American. In their apartment, they still have a framed photo of the 1933 Oldsmobile that my grandfather's family drove when he was a teenager.<br />By the 1970s, though, my grandfather became so sick of the problems with his American cars that he vowed never to buy another one. He hasn't.<br />Detroit's defenders, from top executives on down, insist that they have finally learned their lesson. They say a comeback is just around the corner. But they said the same thing at the start of this decade — and the start of the last one and the one before that. All the while, their market share has kept on falling.<br />There is good reason to keep GM and Chrysler from collapsing in 2009. (Ford is in slightly better shape.) The economy is in the worst recession in a generation. You can think of the Detroit bailout as a relatively cost-effective form of stimulus. It's often cheaper to keep workers in their jobs than to create new jobs.<br />But Congress and the Obama administration shouldn't fool themselves into thinking that they can preserve the Big Three in anything like their current form. Very soon, they need to shrink to a size that reflects the American public's collective judgment about the quality of their products.<br />It's a sad story, in many ways. But it can't really be undone at this point. If we had wanted to preserve the Big Three, we would have bought more of their cars.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/technology/satellite.php">EU considers spending €1 billion for satellite broadband technology</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Economic pain hits China as exports fell last month</strong><br />By Andrew Jacobs<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />BEIJING: China's exports fell for the first time in seven years, the government reported Wednesday, sliding 2.2 percent in November and providing stark evidence that the global financial crisis had arrived here in earnest. In October, by contrast, exports had surged 19.2 percent.<br />Imports also plunged sharply last month, falling 17.9 percent and widening the trade surplus to $40 billion from $35.2 billion in October.<br />Taken together, the trade figures will be bracing to those who have viewed China as a potential savior for the slumping economies of the United States, Europe and Japan.<br />"We were expecting a slowdown but the magnitude is a bit shocking," said Wang Tao, an analyst at UBS Securities.<br />The figures, together with further signs of a sagging economy in Japan, paint a picture of economic gloom spreading across Asia - even if much of the region will experience a less severe downturn than in the United States and Europe.<br />The worrisome developments will put added pressure on the Chinese government, which only last month announced a 4 trillion yuan, or $586 billion at the time, stimulus package aimed at cushioning the effects of the global slowdown. In recent weeks, the government has lowered interest rates and announced other measures aimed at lifting domestic consumption.<br />In a report broadcast on China National Radio after the trade figures were released, the government vowed to expand spending and cut taxes next year in an effort to spur job creation and bolster agriculture, social security, education and small and midsize enterprises.<br />Beijing will also seek to ensure "healthy and stable" growth of property markets, which has slowed sharply in recent months.<br />In another batch of sobering news, the government said that direct foreign investment fell 36.5 percent from a year earlier and the producer price index, a measure of inflation at the factory level, had fallen to its lowest rate in two years. That figure, 2 percent in November, had stood at 6.6 percent a month earlier. In August, when that number hit 10.1 percent, the government was focused on stemming the threat of inflation.<br />Exports are a mainstay of China's economy; by one measure they make up 40 percent of the gross domestic product. While some experts dispute that figure, analysts say the slumping demand for Chinese goods is likely to pull down the nation's growth rate, which was 9 percent in the third quarter, close to or even below the 7 percent figure that many Chinese economists contend is the minimum for maintaining social stability.<br />In recent months, evaporating export demand has led thousands of factories to close in the Pearl River Delta of southern China. Tens of thousands of jobs have disappeared, spurring protests by unemployed workers demanding back pay.<br />Late last month, President Hu Jintao warned that the global financial crisis was threatening to undermine three decades of head-spinning expansion.<br />Qu Hongbin, the chief China economist at HSBC, said he expected things to get worse in the coming months as the global recession further sapped the demand for Chinese goods. He suggested that exports could fall as much as 19 percent in the first quarter of 2009.<br />"Combined with cooling property markets, this points to the rising risk of a hard landing," he said in a statement. "It's official: as the world's workshop, China will suffer as the global downturn deepens."<br />Since it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, China's exports have quadrupled, helping transform it into the world's fourth-largest economy after the United States, Japan and Germany. In a survey of more than a dozen analysts last month, no one predicted that imports would decline. The drop in exports spanned all major trade groups, including electronics and machinery, with steel leading the downward spiral.<br />Exports to all of China's trading partners suffered, with those to the United States down 6.1 percent. Just last month, they were up 12.4 percent.<br />Bettina Wassener contributed reporting from Hong Kong.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>House questions spending of bailout money</strong><br />By Diana B. Henriques<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />A congressional hearing delivered a short "to-do" list on Wednesday morning to the Treasury department about its handling of the nation's financial rescue plan: First, follow the money. Second, fight more aggressively against the rising tide of home foreclosures.<br />Specifically, the lawmakers insisted that the Treasury do more to monitor what banks do with U.S. money that they receive, and tie more strings to that capital to make sure it is used to provide needed credit to homeowners, small businesses and consumers. And they demanded that Treasury pay more attention to developing a plan to prevent foreclosures that can be applied broadly and quickly.<br />Those instructions were common themes in an often contentious hearing by the House Financial Services Committee, called by Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and the committee's chairman, to weigh how well the financial rescue plan is being managed and monitored.<br />Lawmakers focused on warnings in a report last week from the Government Accountability Office, represented at the hearing by Gene Dodaro, the acting comptroller general. In that report, Dodaro's office urged that Treasury tighten the contracts under which it provides support to banks to ensure that the money was used to increase lending, and to monitor the use of it more carefully.<br />But lawmakers also repeatedly cited their concern that not enough was being done to prevent foreclosures.<br />"You have done nothing," said Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat of California. "What is your resistance to helping homeowners stay in their homes?"<br />This criticism fell largely on Neel Kashkari, the Treasury's interim assistant secretary for financial stability, who came under the fiercest questioning.<br />Kashkari, always polite, nevertheless stoutly defended the work the department had done so far to stabilize the financial system, noting that the nation had avoided a major bank failure and credit markets had shown some improvements.<br />"We are in an unprecedented period and market events are moving rapidly and unpredictably," he told the panel. "People often ask, How do we know our program is working? First, we did not allow the financial system to collapse. That is the most direct, important information. Second, the system is fundamentally more stable than it was."<br />While he said Treasury was working with bank regulators to address foreclosures, he noted that the preservation of financial stability was not an unrelated achievement.<br />"Imagine how many foreclosures we would have had if we'd allowed the financial system to collapse," he said.<br />It was not clear, despite all the questioning, whether Treasury opposed various suggestions that it more tightly control and monitor the use of the capital it injects into financial institutions.<br />Kashkari agreed that it was appropriate for Treasury to insist that banks use U.S. government money to foster the goals of the financial rescue plan, but he also said that Treasury should not be too restrictive in its investments, because the ultimate goal was to secure the stability of the banks themselves.<br />That questioning was interrupted to allow Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, to take the witness's chair to testify about the work of the congressional oversight panel, whose initial report was delivered on Wednesday without Hensarling's endorsement.<br />Hensarling said that he did not vote for the report because he was not sure the new oversight panel was working as he thought it should, although he commended it for its efforts.<br />"The report being issued today included many good points and questions that I agree need to be asked of Treasury," he said. He questioned whether "every panel member has the resources and rights necessary to conduct effective oversight."<br />He also disputed language in the report that he said "could be interpreted as a panel expectation that Treasury should make credit more expensive and less available for Americans and could delay the recovery of our housing market at exactly the wrong time in our nation's economic history."<br />The topics in the report range from the general, like Treasury's overall strategy, to the practical, like the method it is using to decide which institutions get bailed out. But they all pose detailed questions that the panel says have not yet been answered by the administration.<br />Several questions are aimed at assessing the bailout program's success so far in reducing foreclosures, stabilizing markets and helping American families. It specifically challenged Treasury to explain publicly why it did not support a foreclosure reduction plan proposed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It also asks the Treasury to outline its approach to bring down foreclosure rates.<br />In a particularly pointed criticism, the report said private investors seemed to receive much better terms on their investments in troubled financial institutions than the government had.<br />For example, the Treasury Department worked out a complex blend of taxpayer investments and loan guarantees from U.S. bank regulators to aid the troubled Citigroup.<br />But, as the report said, Warren Buffett invested in Goldman Sachs in September, getting a future equity stake and an immediate issue of preferred shares that pay a 10 percent dividend and can be redeemed only at a 10 percent premium. Those terms were roughly similar to a deal under which a Mitsubishi unit invested $9 billion in Morgan Stanley in October.<br />And the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority invested $7.5 billion in Citigroup itself in November, obtaining equity units paying an 11 percent dividend that can be converted into common stock in the future.<br />In comparison, the report said, the Treasury received a future equity stake in Citigroup and an immediate issue of preferred shares that pay an annual dividend of 5 percent for five years and 9 percent thereafter — less than the privately negotiated deals. Unlike the Goldman Sachs shares issued to Buffett, those shares are redeemable at face value, not at a premium, after three years.<br />The panel said it intended to work with the Treasury, the Government Accountability Office and the congressional Budget Office to determine how these and other capital investments were negotiated by the Treasury and whether taxpayers were adequately rewarded and protected by those arrangements.<br />The panel also questioned a Treasury and Federal Reserve initiative to support consumer credit by providing $20 billion in credit protection to the secondary market for car loans, credit card balances, student loans and loans to small businesses.<br />While increased consumer spending is important for economic recovery, financing that spending by increases in consumer debt will only add to the financial stress American families are experiencing, the report said.<br />It also questioned whether Treasury was demanding enough of the institutions that received its help, particularly those engaged in consumer lending.<br />For instance, the British government has ordered credit card companies there to "work with consumers," in some cases providing a 60-day moratorium on payments, as a condition of getting public money.<br />It called on the Treasury to use its leverage as rescuer in chief to demand the kind of corporate reforms and improved business plans among financial institutions that Congress was considering imposing on the auto industry as a condition of its bailout plan.<br />It is not clear yet whether the squabble surrounding the panel's first vote will deter its effort to provide Congress with a clearer road map for monitoring the bailout effort. More Articles in Business »<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Investors buy U.S. debt at zero yield<br /></strong>By Vikas Bajaj and Michael M. Grynbaum<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />When was the last time you invested in something that you knew wouldn't make money?<br />In the market equivalent of shoveling cash under the mattress, hordes of buyers were so eager on Tuesday to park money in the world's safest investment, United States government debt, that they agreed to accept a zero percent rate of return.<br />The news sent a sobering signal: in these troubled economic times, when people have lost vast amounts on stocks, bonds and real estate, making an investment that offers security but no gain is tantamount to coming out ahead. This extremely cautious approach reflects concerns that a global recession could deepen next year, and continue to jeopardize all types of investments.<br />While this will lower the cost of borrowing for the United States government, economists worry that a widespread hunkering-down could have broader implications that could slow an economic recovery. If investors remain reluctant to put money into stocks and corporate bonds, that could choke off funds that businesses need to keep financing their day-to-day operations.<br />Investors accepted the zero percent rate in the government's auction Tuesday of $30 billion worth of short-term securities that mature in four weeks. Demand was so great even for no return that the government could have sold four times as much.<br />In addition, for a brief moment, investors were willing to take a small loss for holding another ultra-safe security, the already-issued three-month Treasury bill.<br />In these times, it seems, the abnormal has now become acceptable. As America's debt and deficit spiral from a parade of billion dollar bailouts and stimulus packages, fund managers, foreign governments and big retail investors reckon they will get more peace of mind by stashing their cash, rather than putting it toward any of the higher-yielding risk that is entailed in stocks, corporate bonds and consumer debt.<br />The rapid decline in Treasury yields — which since summer have headed toward lows not seen since the end of the World War II — also renders the Federal Reserve less effective, as investors and banks stuff the money that the central bank is pumping into the financial system into Treasuries, rather than fanning it out across the broader economy.<br />"The last time this happened was the Great Depression, when people are willing to accept no return on their money, or possibly even a negative return," said Edward Yardeni, an independent analyst. "If people are so busy during the day just protecting the cash they have, it's not a good sign."<br />Stocks fell sharply as investors digested the implications. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 242.85 points, or 2.72 percent, to 8,691.33, and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index declined 2.31 percent, to 888.67. The Nasdaq composite index lost 1.55 percent, to 1,547.34.<br />If there is a silver lining to the Treasury market's gyrations, it is that the United States can borrow money more cheaply from investors, whether they be the governments of China or Japan, or big fund managers. That could help Washington finance various programs intended to revive the ailing economy.<br />Borrowing by the Treasury has already ballooned since Congress approved the $700 billion financial rescue plan, and policy makers expect the federal budget deficit to swell further next year as the Big Three automakers and other industries look for support.<br />"That sucking sound is all the world's capital going into the U.S. Treasury market," Yardeni said, "which means the Treasury and the Fed can tap into that liquidity pool to finance TARP and offer mortgages at 4.5 percent."<br />While that may offset some of the expense of the bailouts, economists say the fact that the United States must borrow so much to prop up large parts of the economy is a big cause for concern.<br />There are several explanations for the flight to safety in the bond market. The world of short-term money market funds, for instance, is still reeling from troubles at the Reserve Primary Fund, a money market fund frozen in September after it lost money on investments in Lehman Brothers. Since then, individual and large investors have put more than $200 billion into money funds that only invest in safe Treasury bills, according to iMoneyNet, a financial data publisher. At the same time, investors have withdrawn nearly $400 billion from prime funds.<br />That has forced portfolio managers to buy Treasury bills, driving down yields. "That group of investors has to invest in something," said Max Bublitz, chief strategist at SCM Advisors. "They don't have the luxury of saying, 'I will stick it in the mattress.' "<br />Yields for longer term Treasury securities have also slumped, with the 10-year now yielding 2.64 percent, down from 2.7 percent Monday and 3.75 percent a month earlier. That decline appears to reflect several other forces. Many investors are seeking safety because they believe that the economy is in its worst recession since the Depression. Rather than inflation, which was a worry for some a few months ago, many are now worried about deflation, or falling prices.<br />Thomas Atteberry, a bond fund manager, said at current prices the market is predicting that the United States will suffer the kind of "lost decade" that Japan suffered in the 1990s.<br />"I have a hard time justifying that," said Atteberry, a partner at First Pacific Advisors. "The Fed seems much more upfront about boosting its balance sheet by creating money."<br />Another reason, analysts say, that Treasury yields may be falling is that foreign investors are using American government securities to protect themselves against the falling value of their own currencies. Many investors are also pulling money out of mutual funds and hedge funds, forcing portfolio managers to sell more risky assets and hold Treasuries, which are easier to sell.<br />And some fund managers are simply looking to dress up their portfolios before the year ends.<br />"There is no doubt that there is potentially some hoarding of cash in anticipation of potential redemptions," said David Kovacs, a strategist at Turner Investment Partners. "People want to own it to show that they played it safe by year-end."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Fannie is faulted for an 'orgy' of subprime loans</strong><br />By Lynnley Browning<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac engaged in "an orgy of junk mortgage development" that turned the two mortgage-finance giants into vast repositories of subprime and similarly risky loans, a former Fannie executive testified on Tuesday.<br />The development, which began in 2005 and lasted until at least last year, happened as senior executives at the two government-sponsored enterprises ignored repeated warnings from internal risk officers that they were delving too deeply into dangerous territory, according to internal documents released at a congressional hearing in Washington.<br />Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the mortgage giants, which have been taken over by the government, now guarantee or hold 10.5 million nonprime loans worth $1.6 trillion — one in three of all subprime loans, and nearly two in three of all so-called Alt-A loans, often called "liar loans."<br />Such loans now make up 34 percent of the total single-family mortgage portfolios at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a level that will link them to eight million, or one in six, foreclosures in coming years, Pinto said. The nonprime loans, the riskiest made in 2007, "have turned the American dream of homeownership into the American nightmare of foreclosure," he said.<br />The hearing was the latest by Congress on the collapse of Fannie and Freddie, which guarantee half of all mortgages nationwide and are the engine of the housing market. The former chief executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron, and their predecessors, Franklin Raines and Leland Brendsel, faced pointed questioning from lawmakers.<br />But the oral and written testimony of Pinto, who was Fannie's chief credit officer in the late 1980s and has studied the company's financial statements, and other private analysts shed new light on the role of the housing giants in the current subprime crisis.<br />The extent of that role has not been fully recognized, in part because many subprime and Alt-A loans show up in databases as prime loans, a system that has allowed the mortgage giants to assert over the years that their role in nonprime lending has been minimal.<br />Arnold Kling, an economist and former Freddie Mac officer, testified that a high-risk loan could be "laundered," as he put it, by Wall Street and come back into the banking system as a triple-A rated security for sale to investors, obscuring its true risks. Charles Calomiris, a finance professor at Columbia, testified that nobody saw the crisis coming because the two mortgage giants "adopted accounting practices that masked their subprime and Alt-A lending," but did not elaborate.<br />Professor Calomiris added that the giants were "not only market players but standard setters, and should have known better."<br />The former executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were grilled on why they did not see the collapse in housing prices coming and why they ignored warnings from their risk officers about ramping up purchases of nonprime loans.<br />Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have long insisted that their involvement with subprime and other nonprime loans has been minimal. Asked about the ramp up, Mudd insisted that "Alt-A loans were essentially a subset of overall A loans," and not subprime.<br />But internal e-mail obtained by the committee told a different story.<br />A June 2005 presentation made by Mudd described the crossroads faced by the company, which at the time was focused on prime loans amid a burgeoning subprime market. "We face two stark choices: one, stay the course, or two, meet the market where the market is," Mudd wrote. Another 2005 Fannie document referred to "underground efforts to develop a subprime infrastructure and modeling for alternative markets."<br />And in March 2006, Enrico Dallavecchia, Fannie Mae's chief risk officer, wrote to Mudd to say that "Dan, I have a serious problem with the control process around subprime limits."Despite the concerns, Fannie Mae further increased its purchase of subprime loans, according to a January 2007 internal presentation.<br />Freddie Mac's senior executives ignored similar warnings. Donald Bisenius, a senior vice president, wrote in April 2004 to a colleague that "we did no-doc lending before, took inordinate losses and generated significant fraud cases. I'm not sure what makes us think we're so much smarter this time around."<br />Housing analysts say that the former heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ramped up their nonprime business because they felt pressure from the government and advocacy groups to meet affordable housing goals as well as pressure to compete with Wall Street.<br />But one in five Alt-A loans in recent years were made to investors, not to first-time home buyers, Pinto said.<br />Another lever was what Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said was more than $175 million in lobbying fees spent by the mortgage giants over 10 years, in part to counter attempts at stronger oversight.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>New City jobs at lowest level since crisis struck<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 11, 2008<br />LONDON: Vacancies in London's financial industry, known as the City, fell to their lowest number by far since the start of the credit crisis in August 2007, a report showed on Thursday.<br />The City had 3,780 unfilled financial jobs in November, a decrease of 59 percent from a year ago, and fewer than the previous low in the current crisis of 5,166 openings recorded in December last year, said recruitment firm Morgan McKinley.<br />Competition for jobs also peaked, with twice as many candidates as positions.<br />London is heaving with thousands of jobless financial professionals as banks slashed headcounts and freeze hiring.<br />"Where possible, financial services professionals are staying in their current positions rather than voluntarily venturing out into what is an extremely tough jobs market," said Robert Thesiger, who heads Morgan McKinley's parent company Imprint.<br />He added that hiring will drop further over Christmas and New Year beyond the usual seasonal slowdown.<br />The average City salary stood at 46,516 pounds, down 2 percent from November last year.<br />Morgan McKinley, which hires mainly for investment banks, hedge funds and asset managers, based the figures on records of new candidates registering with the firm in November. It worked out statistics for the full market using its market share.<br />(Reporting by Olesya Dmitracova; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Goldman may axe 200 staff in London</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />LONDON: Goldman Sachs Group is laying off some 200 staff in London this week as part of a 10 percent cut in global headcount first reported in October, two people familiar with the situation said on Wednesday.<br />Goldman, which had a record 32,569 employees in August, declined to confirm the actual number of job losses and did not say how many employees it had in London.<br />"This is part of the 10 percent headcout reduction previously announced," a Goldman Sachs spokesman said.<br />Sources familiar with the situation said the overall 10 percent cut includes a 5 percent reduction in its global workforce undertaken each year.<br />More than 240,000 jobs have been lost in the financial industry since August 2007 and Goldman has not been able to avoid a global slowdown in investment banking activity.<br />Goldman Sachs and rival Morgan Stanley recently became bank holding companies, and analysts expect the regulatory cost will be high.<br />Analysts say their new regulator, the Federal Reserve, is more demanding than the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and commercial banks have to report to the Fed, the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the New York State Bank authorities at the same time.<br />Last week brought fresh announcements of job cuts from Japan's Nomura Holdings Swiss bank Credit Suisse and middle-market investment bank Jefferies Group Inc..<br />(Reporting by Daisy Ku; editing by Elaine Hardcastle)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/germany.php">Merkel appears isolated on key EU policies</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/rio.php">Rio Tinto to cut 14,000 jobs as demand wanes</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/oil.php">Russia may cut oil output in step with OPEC</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/air.php">China urges airlines to delay or cancel plane orders</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/property.php">Conflicting forecasts for Hong Kong real estate</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/bank.php">Australian banks under pressure</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/10/business/OUKBS-UK-MEXICO-HSBC.php">HSBC Mexico says not in danger of losing license</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/10/business/OUKBS-UK-LOGICA.php">Logica to raise 85 million pounds</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/gmac.php">GMAC struggling to raise capital</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/10/business/OUKBS-UK-WOOLWORTHS.php">Woolworths to start closing down sale</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/10/business/OUKBS-UK-REED-SALE.php">Reed abandons unit sale as global slowdown bites</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/10/business/OUKBS-UK-CITIGROUP-EGG-FINE.php">Citigroup's Egg fined over insurance sales</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/america/deal11.php">As prices wallow, steel industry could consolidate</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/aig.php">AIG tries to quarantine another $10 billion in credit default swaps</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/10/business/OUKBS-UK-MARKETS-STERLING.php">Pound hits record low vs euro</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/10/business/OUKBS-UK-MARKETS-BRITAIN-STOCKS.php">FTSE slips as bank losses offset mining gains</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/10/business/OUKBS-UK-IRELAND-BANKS.php">Ireland reportedly holds off extending bank plan</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/10/business/OUKBS-UK-IDEALSHOPPING.php">Ideal Shopping sees trading loss as shares tumble</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/10rio.php">Rio Tinto to cut 14,000 jobs as demand wanes </a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/10/business/OUKBS-UK-MARKETS-GLOBAL.php">World stocks rise on bailout hopes</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/10/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-ECONOMY.php">Economic gloom grows</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/10global.php">Dire forecast for the global economy and world trade</a><br /><br />***********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Chase offers $400,000 in factory sit-in</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />By Andrew Stern<br />JPMorgan Chase offered $400,000 (271,000 pounds) on Wednesday to help pay severance to laid-off workers occupying a Chicago factory, whose protest symbolises resentment over the federal bailout of big banks while workers suffer.<br />JPMorgan Chase's offer, announced by U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who has been mediating the dispute, follows on Bank of America's pledge to make an unspecified, limited loan to Republic Windows & Doors on behalf of the 250 workers.<br />Both banks are creditors of Republic, a family-owned window and door manufacturer that fell victim to the housing downturn and shut down on Friday.<br />The workers, who were given three days' notice of the closure, have occupied the shuttered plant since then, demanding a legally mandated 60 days' pay for severance, and accrued vacation pay.<br />JPMorgan Chase's $400,000 pledge was described by Gutierrez as capital, and how the transfer would be structured was still to be worked out, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Democrat said.<br />Bank of America said its additional loan to Republic would have to be negotiated, as its previous line of credit to the company had "maxed out."<br />Several hundred supporters of the workers marched on Bank of America's Chicago offices, where negotiations among the parties were set to resume for a third day.<br />The worker sit-in that began on Friday has become a symbol of Main Street resentment of the federal bailout of Wall Street banks, which Bank of America has tapped for $15 billion and JPMorgan for $25 billion.<br />President-elect Barack Obama and other politicians have voiced support for the workers' cause, arguing that the Wall Street bailout was not serving its purpose to loosen credit for Main Street businesses.<br />Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, on the day before he was charged with corruption in office, had said he was ordering a withdrawal of state business from Bank of America. A spokeswoman for the governor said it was "premature" to discuss what actions were being taken, since there were promising signs that the factory dispute was nearer a resolution.<br />(Additional reporting by Deborah Charles, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Breakingviews.com: Today, a more sophisticated species of thug</strong><br />breakingviews.com<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />Now all the United States needs is Prohibition. The disastrous ban on alcohol during the boom and bust that heralded the Great Depression is one thing that distinguishes that crisis from the current one. Severe economic downturn? Check. Thousands losing their homes? Check. State governor accused of trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat while strong-arming a leading newspaper and the country's largest bank? Wait - it didn't get that bad even in the 1930s.<br />True, crime flourished during the Depression. But most of the tommy-gun-wielding thugs of that era spent their days unimaginatively robbing banks or peddling illegal booze. Those accused of headline-grabbing crimes today have apparently set their sights higher.<br />Take the governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, who according to federal investigators tried to sell the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. Prosecutors say they recorded Blagojevich, who has the power to appoint someone to serve the rest of Obama's term, on an expletive-laced telephone call saying the seat is a "valuable thing, you don't give it away for nothing."<br />Blagojevich has also been charged with threatening to withhold state assistance from the owner of The Chicago Tribune if it did not fire writers who had criticized him.<br />This is the same guy who made recent headlines by threatening to cut off the state's business with Bank of America if the lender did not reinstate a credit facility for a troubled Chicago-based building supply company. While not illegal, the decision to pick a fight with the country's biggest bank while under investigation for fraud shows that Blagojevich does not lack brio.<br />That story happens to coincide with news of a prominent New York lawyer, Marc Dreier, charged with selling bogus securities to hedge funds. That's another allegation which, if true, reflects moxie worthy of John Dillinger - without the violence, of course.<br />Today's financial crimes may fall well short of the deeds perpetrated by the armed robbers who regularly muscled in on business in the early 1930s. But it's a reminder that money, and the loss of it, will always have a seamy side. - Dwight Cass<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />***********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Frugality an everyday companion as recession hits Japan<br /></strong>By Isabel ReynoldsReuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />TOKYO: Japanese homemakers have made an art of living frugally in one of the world's most expensive countries, and they are now pruning their spending further as the economy plunges into what could be a long recession.<br />For many of the 17 million homemakers in Japan, it is already a struggle to manage household finances on their husband's monthly salary, which averages about ¥270,000, or $2,900.<br />As layoffs spread, consumer confidence has nose-dived. Household spending, which makes up more than half the economy, dropped 3.8 percent in October from a year earlier.<br />Asuka Suzuki, 27, who lives with her husband on the northern island of Hokkaido, says keeping monthly food spending to ¥19,000 a month, about a third of the national average for two people, requires meticulous planning and discipline.<br />"I do sometimes feel a bit down because I can't buy clothes, go traveling or take up any expensive hobbies," Suzuki wrote in an e-mail exchange. "But I have a goal, which is to buy a house some day, so I just keep on trying."<br />Before going food shopping, she searches the Internet for bargains at all the local supermarkets, makes an inventory of the contents of her refrigerator and puts together a weekly menu.<br />Only then does she tuck the minimum necessary cash into her wallet - no credit cards - and, weather permitting, rides her bicycle to the supermarket.<br />Suzuki is just one of the hundreds of housewives featured in "Sutekina Okusan," or "Lovely Wife," a monthly magazine offering recipes and tips for the budget-conscious, from switching off the television to save electricity, to re-using water after rinsing rice.<br />Other suggestions include using old clothes to make cushion covers and making children's playhouses out of cardboard boxes.<br />Food is the biggest expense for many Japanese households, and even the thriftiest housewives often pride themselves on serving something different every night.<br />"At first I was astonished," Satoko Sugiki, an editor at the magazine, said of her first encounters with the women who revealed their spending habits in the magazine.<br />"But now it seems quite normal for someone to spend only ¥10,000 a month on food, even though it's amazing when you think about it."<br />As shoppers have turned their backs on high-priced goods, sales at department stores have fallen. They dropped nearly 7 percent in October compared with the period a year earlier, the eighth consecutive month of declines.<br />Instead, shoppers hit bargain stores. The discount clothing chain Uniqlo saw a rise in sales of more than 30 percent in November.<br />"People are shopping at places that offer good value for money. But there are very few companies benefiting," said Dairo Murata, a retailing analyst at Credit Suisse in Tokyo.<br />Bookstores display notebooks for recording household accounts for the new breed of careful consumer.<br />Despite the savings made by these thrifty homemakers, some experts say many housewives may have to seek work outside the home as families increasingly struggle to cover their expenses on a single income.<br />"Even if it only pays ¥50,000 or ¥60,000 a month, it will help ease the pressure on the household budget," said Haruko Ogiwara, a financial journalist who has written several books on budgeting and saving.<br />"When it comes down to it, there are actually quite a lot of people in Japan who don't have much money," Ogiwara said.<br />Full-time housewives, she said, were a luxury Japan could no longer afford. "Even if that means people can't keep detailed household accounts, they will still be better off."<br />Finding a job, though, will be difficult as the economy slumps.<br />Suzuki said she would like to work part time if she could find a job within walking distance of home. But for now, fear of what the downturn may bring is spurring new levels of frugality.<br />"I worry about whether my husband's company might go bankrupt," Suzuki wrote, referring to the food manufacturer where her husband works. "We don't have children now, but will we be able to have them and bring them up? Will we have an old age without worries?"<br />At the end of each month, she analyzes her receipts to try to spot weak points, but Suzuki acknowledged she still had a way to go before catching up with some champions of thrift.<br />The couple have cut back on leisure trips. Suzuki tries to cook as much as possible. Her repertoire includes vegetable soup and tofu dishes that cost under ¥100.<br />"My husband is very cooperative, so we have fun saving money," she said. "I'm not that good at cooking, but he tells me what I serve is better than a restaurant, which helps me carry on."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>In hard times, going bottom up on the wine menu</strong><br />By Eric Asimov<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Forget about hard times. With so many sharp reminders all around, I know that isn't easy, but what I want to say is true regardless of the state of the economy.<br />Far too often, restaurant wine lists are judged from the top down. Many wine lists that are widely considered to be great are practically keeling over with luxurious selections of the world's great wines. The best are replete with copious older vintages as well. These bottles can cost thousands of dollars each and are no doubt wonderful treats for those who can afford them.<br />But what about the rest of us? Most people, even in the best of times, can no more afford these grand cru Burgundies, 20-year-old Barolos and first-growth Bordeaux than they can seats on a private jet. While wine lists like these can nourish a fantasy life, they mean little to the workaday reality that most wine lovers inhabit.<br />A wine list requires a reverse-angle analysis. It should be judged not from the top down but from the bottom up. It should offer thoughtful and possibly even exciting choices at every level. At the very least a good list needs to give bottom dwellers something to enjoy, that will make them feel welcomed, not just tolerated.<br />Lower-priced bottles signify the nature and identity of a restaurant as surely as the top of the list. No matter how good the food, budget-conscious wine lovers will take generic low-end choices as a sign of a mediocre restaurant. Conversely, while an imaginative list at all price ranges will not excuse culinary sinning, it may well earn the benefit of the doubt.<br />Good sommeliers understand this and will take as much if not more pride in their budget choices as in the higher end. They know that the more expensive precincts of the list must be filled dutifully, but the lower end is their opportunity for personal expression.<br />At Spigolo, for example, a good neighborhood trattoria on the Upper East Side, the whites are mostly about $30 to $60, and the reds $35 to $100, with a handful above that for the big spenders. This is about right for a restaurant that is not cheap, but is reasonably priced.<br />At a recent dinner I decided to order from the very bottom of the list. This is not always where the best values reside, but at Spigolo the choices were certainly decent. For a white, I ordered a Tuscan vermentino, a crisp and refreshing 2007 Casamatta from Bibi Graetz, a wine that if not exciting went perfectly with antipasti like baby octopus with preserved lemon and fennel. It would be hard to do better for $24.<br />For the red, I paid $21 for a 2007 Montepulciano d'Abruzzo from Pasqua, a lively wine with flavors of fruit and earth that was just right with the gutsy cuisine. It was not a wine for contemplation, but it was gratifying nonetheless.<br />Should I have expected more than gusto from the bottom end of the list? Well, on most wine lists you can expect to pay roughly two to two-and-a-half times the retail price of a wine. So for these prices I was buying bottles that cost about $10 in a wine shop. When I think of the oceans of dull, generic wine available at that price - and sold in restaurants for twice that or more - cherchez le gusto!<br />Like those wines, the ones on Spigolo's list are satisfying, but not inspiring. I found more excitement in SoHo, at Blue Ribbon, the venerable chef's hangout that seems packed at all hours. I could have had a decent but routine Rheingau riesling for $30 on this list, but for $10 or $15 more the values seemed better. A 2007 Kremser Freiheit grüner veltliner from Nigl, one of the better Austrian producers, was $42. It was served too cold, but as it warmed up its juicy, icy minerality began to shine through. For the red, a 2002 Chinon Picasses from Olga Raffault, overflowing with cherry and herbal flavors, was a great choice at $44.<br />Good low-end choices were easier among the whites than the reds, which had a heavy proportion of wines well above $100. This may reflect the usual SoHo clientele, but at least I found a comfortable refuge.<br />An eclectic menu like Blue Ribbon's offers an opportunity for creative cherry-picking around the wine world in a way that is not available to typical French or Italian restaurants, which express their regionality through their wines. Blue Ribbon does not take full advantage of this freedom, but Fatty Crab in the West Village, with a menu inspired by southeast Asian street food, does an exceptional job with this.<br />I've mentioned Fatty Crab's wine list before, and it continues to be a shining example of an imaginative list of wines that pair beautifully with a cuisine assumed to be unfriendly toward wine, with great choices in the $30 to $60 range.<br />Fatty Crab is a casual place. What about some fancier, more expensive restaurants? Thalassa in TriBeCa, a Greek restaurant where ultrafresh fish sold by the pound can get diabolically expensive, has a wine list to match. You can spend hundreds on white Burgundies, which is fine if your limo is idling outside, and yes, you can order a vertical of first-growth Bordeaux if so inclined.<br />But on a recent visit, with oysters and a grilled dorade royale, I had a 2006 Santorini assyrtiko, from Spyros Hatziyiannis, for $44, and I could not have been happier. The assyrtiko grape can produce wines with intense mineral flavors, and this wine, with a slight touch of sweetness, was delicious. (By the way, the fish cost more than the wine.)<br />Danny Meyer's restaurants have always done a good job at all ends of the wine list. Recently at Union Square Cafe I had a 2007 Soave Classico from Prà for $40, not the cheapest white on the menu but rewardingly Chablis-like in its austerity. We splurged on a $55 bottle of Chianti Classico riserva from Castello di Cacchiano. Like the Soave, it wasn't the cheapest choice, but with its classic dusty dried cherry flavors it might have been the best deal.<br />Even the budget-oriented get ambitious. Wine lovers of every income would love a pilgrimage to a restaurant like Cru, which offers one of the world's great wine lists.<br />Predictably, one can spend hundreds - no, thousands - of dollars on legendary bottles. If you've always wanted to experience Henri Jayer's 1985 Cros Parantoux, Cru offers it for $5,500. In a just universe, we all would have our chance, but what can one have when reality sets in?<br />At Cru, one can still have a memorable wine experience. At a recent dinner there I set a limit of $95 a bottle. By any reckoning that is expensive. But there are times when one can't stint.<br />I could have spent a lot less. Cru has a 2004 Bourgogne blanc from Roulot, a terrific producer, for $50. It's a lovely wine, but I don't need to go to Cru for that. For $95, though, I got a 2001 smaragd Wachstum Bodenstein from Prager, an Austrian riesling that is as brilliant to drink as it is difficult to say. It was richly textured yet taut and spring-coiled, with generous honeysuckle aromas yet as minerally as a mouthful of rocks. Did I say brilliant?<br />For the red, I could have spent $50 on a 2005 Oregon pinot noir from Patricia Green. A good wine, but again, not the stuff of which a pilgrimage is made. For $45 I could have had a 2000 Houillon Pupillin from the Arbois, a wine that I adore. But frankly, I have this bottle at home. No, I spent $85 for a bottle I had never seen before, a 2000 red Bourgogne from Jean-François Coche-Dury, a producer known worldwide for magnificent white Burgundies, but whose reds are little-known. I'd had his 2004 Volnay premier cru, though, and knew how good his reds could be. This wine was ethereal, wonderfully floral, delicate and pure. For good measure we added a 2000 Volnay from Michel Lafarge for $90, one of my favorite Volnay producers, and it was a gorgeous contrast, earthy and sensuous. Not cheap wines by any means. But unmatchable values, unforgettable at any price.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />**************<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Harvard unit halting faculty searches<br /></strong>By Tracy JanThe Boston Globe<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />BOSTON: Harvard University officials said they would postpone nearly all searches for tenure-track professors in the school's largest academic body, in a sobering indication of how the economic crisis has hit the world's wealthiest university.<br />The move by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which also plans to freeze salaries for its 720-member faculty, followed an immediate freeze on the hiring of nonfaculty staff announced last month, dramatic signals of a university scrambling to right itself after its once ballooning $36.9 billion endowment plummeted 22 percent over the past four months. The cuts announced Tuesday will take effect next school year and continue for an undetermined period until the budget picture improves.<br />The halt in filling most faculty openings, which many consider the pinnacle of academia, could stymie the dreams of professors around the world who are looking to cap their careers at Harvard. It also could cause a ripple effect across the higher-education landscape if other elite U.S. schools take their cue from Harvard.<br />A Harvard official familiar with its financial picture said the scenario could worsen. On top of the salary and hiring freezes, the university is considering significant personnel cuts, along with program reductions, the official said.<br />On Monday, Michael Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and other deans sent a letter to department heads describing the latest plans to cut costs. He presented the plans to faculty during a standing-room only meeting.<br />Of the 50 faculty searches under way, only 15 of the most essential will continue, said Bob Mitchell, spokesman for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Smith told faculty Tuesday that the financial shortfall "could take multiple years, definitely this year and next year" to be resolved, Mitchell said.<br />The salary freeze applies to faculty and all nonunion staff members.<br />While some faculty said in interviews that they were willing to forgo raises, others expressed dismay that their departments would have to hold off on most tenure-track and tenured-faculty searches. "It's just distressing," said Andrew Gordon, a history professor who serves on the faculty council. "It's not as if these faculty are unnecessary to do what we ought to do or want to do." Other professors said they had braced themselves for the inevitable cuts. "Everybody just sort of left a little glum, but understanding that the gravy train is over," Ingrid Monson, a professor of music and African and African-American studies who also serves on the faculty council, said after the meeting. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is expected to slash $105 million to $125 million from its current $1.2 billion operating budget in response to the university's plunging endowment, which has lost about $8 billion since July and is projected to fall by 30 percent by the end of the fiscal year. "The need for cuts is absolutely legitimate, and it's incumbent upon all of us to find room," said James Stock, chairman of the economics department. "I have no problem with a salary freeze. I think that there are many people being affected by this downturn in the economy who are far less fortunate than the Harvard faculty, and I think it's important to keep some perspective."<br />Across the United States, universities have taken steps to deal with the bleak financial picture, including delaying or halting capital projects and freezing hiring and travel. On Monday, Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, asked professors to voluntarily take a 1 percent salary cut to avoid layoffs.<br />But Harvard, which unlike most colleges and universities relies heavily on its endowment revenue, has gone the furthest in the Ivy League by imposing the mandatory wage freeze, said John Walda, president and chief executive of the National Association of College and University Business Officers in Washington. Given the uncertain economic picture, Walda said he expects other elite universities to take similar steps, because so much of their wealth is tied to the markets.<br />"Harvard's problems are exacerbated by the fact that their revenue model is different," said Walda. "It's unusual to be imposing a salary freeze on faculty, but there will be more institutions that will have to consider it, since salaries are such a big part of the operating budget."<br />A decade ago, distributions from Harvard's endowment accounted for just 35 percent of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences operating budget, compared with 56 percent today. The faculty's dependence on the endowment has grown over time because the endowment grew at a faster rate than other income sources. Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education in Washington, said Harvard's actions are prudent in light of the downturn. "I dare say that students at Harvard probably won't notice much in their academic programs as a result of the cuts," Hartle said. "In the long history of Harvard, this will be no more than a bump in a very long road."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVS398rAGT961TUdOy5aUHVnU9gHWILZwdojVwuF4w0eSH3Hxo0mbFeQgFn9NU_GtTeYOoVVMC6c3fYAG_1rHwhYa3L2LURb-dRPK3m7qMSLhvBBLz6dBXsl5sZcVmV8xnMpNqQYO14Pc/s1600-h/DSC02884.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397422317827154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVS398rAGT961TUdOy5aUHVnU9gHWILZwdojVwuF4w0eSH3Hxo0mbFeQgFn9NU_GtTeYOoVVMC6c3fYAG_1rHwhYa3L2LURb-dRPK3m7qMSLhvBBLz6dBXsl5sZcVmV8xnMpNqQYO14Pc/s320/DSC02884.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Book reviews: 'The Thin Blue Line' and 'The Responsibility to Protect'<br /></strong>By Scott Malcomson<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />The Thin Blue Line How Humanitarianism Went to War By Conor Foley 266 pages. Verso. $26.95. The Responsibility to Protect Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All By Gareth Evans 349 pages. Brookings Institution Press. $29.95.<br />It is hard to date exactly when humanitarianism got decisively bound up with making war, although many would point to Colin Powell's 2001 endorsement of relief workers in Afghanistan as a "force multiplier for us ... an important part of our combat team." In these two very different books, Conor Foley, an experienced relief worker, laments the transformation of humanitarianism into an aspect of politics, while Gareth Evans, a doughty Australian politician and head of the International Crisis Group, argues for something like its institutionalization. Both books are poised to influence debate as we make the turn into a post-Bush world.<br />As Foley notes in "The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War," human rights and humanitarianism became powerful movements in the 1980s and '90s, and by now Amnesty International UK "has over a quarter of a million members, overtaking ... the British Labor Party." This shift from class politics to values politics occurred across the Western political spectrum, particularly in the prosperous '90s. Nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, proliferated; governments integrated human-rights advocacy into their budgets and their diplomacy; the United Nations bureaucracy likewise seized the opportunity to promote human rights as central to the organization's mission. Soon enough, a transnational "common culture," in Foley's phrase, of human rights and humanitarianism had taken hold among a surprisingly large number of people.<br />And soon after that, as Foley shows, frustration set in. If humanitarian values were now universal (or universal enough), then why did they seem so threatened in the Balkans, Central Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere?<br />Foley says his fellow humanitarians looked to achieve their goals in two places: law and politics, not least armed politics. The legal route led in part through the United Nations, with its treaties and human-rights machinery, but the humanitarians' most fervent investment was in the International Criminal Court, whose efforts got under way in 2003.<br />It's much too early to give up on the court, but Foley's disappointment is pretty thorough. Anticipating that the court will change "from an instrument of justice to one of diplomacy," he concludes: "The ICC could become a useful mechanism for dealing with mid-level thugs and warlords, or retired dictators, where in-country prosecutions are considered too contentious. But it will not be the instrument of impartial, universal justice that its supporters claim. And for aid workers, this could make it as much of a problem as a solution in humanitarian crises."<br />Foley's treatment of the court's legal issues is informed and direct. He rightly draws attention to the coming debate on how the ICC will define the crime of aggression, a question that was deferred by the drafters of the court's treaty. This debate cuts very close to the privileges of powerful states, and Foley implies that for that reason, the identification of the crime of aggression will effectively be left to the great powers themselves. We shall see.<br />His discussion of the humanitarians' use of politics to further their ends benefits not only from his legal training but also from his insider's experience. Foley seems to have been in almost every geopolitical mess from Kosovo to Afghanistan. He has watched as the nongovernmental organizations began to endorse the use of force for humanitarian purposes. And he has watched as "the integration of humanitarian assistance into military interventions" has led to "a steady increase in the number of attacks on aid workers over the last decade, partly because an increasing number of armed parties no longer respect the 'humanitarian space' within which aid workers operate." One reason for that, of course, is that aid workers have often accepted the militarization of their work.<br />Foley concludes: "The only international principles that potentially fit all the situations in which humanitarians work are those of independence, impartiality and neutrality by which the movement has traditionally defined itself. The shift away from these principles in recent years has caused more problems than it has solved."<br />In many ways, the crucial flaw in the legal and political avenues is that they both lead back to the United Nations Security Council, which has been captive to the veto power of its five permanent members: Britain, Russia, China, France and the United States. There have been many proposals for changing or evading this. But Evans is probably right to say that "any concession that there are some circumstances that justify the Security Council being bypassed ... seriously undermines the whole concept of a rules-based international order. That order depends upon the Security Council ... being the only source of legal authority for nonconsensual military interventions."<br />Evans cuts a fascinating figure on the world stage. Always informed, sometimes alarming, never dull, he has a diplomat's ability to listen and reflect, and a politician's will to dominate a room. He is also an able and prolific writer. His achievements as foreign minister of Australia in the late 1980s and early '90s were out of proportion to the influence of his country. And as the head of a nongovernmental organization, he took the International Crisis Group from being a modest advisory council to its current status as a global foreign policy, investigative, analytical and advocacy organization, with considerable influence on governments and the general public. His purpose in writing "The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All" is to advance the doctrine known by the Spielbergian acronym R2P, for which Evans, in his capacity as political entrepreneur, has been a crucial spokesman.<br />Evans was extremely active on the international commissions that issued the reports in 2001 and 2004 that defined the doctrine of the responsibility to protect. And his reluctant acceptance of the centrality of the Security Council is of a piece with his general approach: that what matters in politics is the channeling of power toward humanitarian ends. He is seeking, with his advocacy of the responsibility to protect, to institutionalize the idea that all states have an obligation to shield their own citizens from mass atrocities, and that if a state fails to do so, it falls to other states to take on that obligation. His encyclopedic knowledge of the international system enables him to make many specific proposals.<br />Evans goes to heroic lengths, here and in the commission reports he helped write, to show that this doctrine is intended to be preventive first, meliorative second and invasive only as a last resort. In short, the international community should be oriented toward preventing atrocities before they get under way by helping the state in question, and only in extreme cases by using military force. The responsibility to protect is, in a sense, the reverse of its immediate doctrinal ancestor, the "right of humanitarian intervention," which began its life as a direct challenge to state sovereignty. The R2P approach is to stress the duties of the sovereign state, rather than the power of the international community to trump that sovereignty.<br />Evans readily acknowledges that the nature of the Security Council-based system means no R2P-based military action is ever likely to be taken against any of the permanent Council members. Unfortunately, it's easy to see where this can lead. "If all this talk about responsibility to protect . . . is going to be used only to initiate some pathetic debate in the United Nations and elsewhere, then we believe this is wrong," Sergey v. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told the Council on Foreign Relations not long ago. "So we exercised the human security maxim, we exercised the responsibility to protect." He was referring to Russia's protecting South Ossetia from Georgia. Neither author spends much time on Russia or China. But a values-based international system will not succeed without them.<br />Foley and Evans both end their books with rather unexpected salvoes of anti-Bush feeling, which I take to be backhanded adieus to a man who, by enabling the international community to unite against Washington, has provided it with a coherence it might not otherwise have had. It will be fascinating to see what the community does when it no longer has George W. Bush to kick around - or to hold it together.<br />Scott Malcomson, a former adviser to the UN high commissioner for human rights, is an editor at The Times Magazine. His most recent book is "One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race."<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdhCDNecE3vEupyx94nFinwN91Cs-l1XETuzxtjSb4g1i2qNwQ937xuzM7SJ0-u32hPXMiKSGYdAffYXc57YqQ1-HabiJEwcflj8wwSpCfB-HRt7PUn1cC2LVjaLIkcfD8A7ujGlu6p1Q/s1600-h/DSC02887.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397420445212466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdhCDNecE3vEupyx94nFinwN91Cs-l1XETuzxtjSb4g1i2qNwQ937xuzM7SJ0-u32hPXMiKSGYdAffYXc57YqQ1-HabiJEwcflj8wwSpCfB-HRt7PUn1cC2LVjaLIkcfD8A7ujGlu6p1Q/s320/DSC02887.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUsxTcxa6z_9LqwiWiECqavHOwJJ_OSbcB29zcZa_z2p03rCvBuvShsuIzl7ap5dR-yECkwDmTl_iv7otP6B-bvgykWKeTBPM0FcemihTX0RRgMaBtQSShYypah1XVzYzLjlSAq2Ru68s/s1600-h/DSC02888.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397414207533074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUsxTcxa6z_9LqwiWiECqavHOwJJ_OSbcB29zcZa_z2p03rCvBuvShsuIzl7ap5dR-yECkwDmTl_iv7otP6B-bvgykWKeTBPM0FcemihTX0RRgMaBtQSShYypah1XVzYzLjlSAq2Ru68s/s320/DSC02888.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH9kjSmoHRUnLkL9n1Fy-9FzpxdRw12hMsGoib5up60kSmfpksLwywIV7faJp3y5HL6RcadoJTLBcG2x7vHYcLje0swhEtVGcxIT62T3DcXqc4V46dJOLuL0uBBFZycZ0m4QTd_tzc0Vs/s1600-h/DSC02889.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397098032057538" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH9kjSmoHRUnLkL9n1Fy-9FzpxdRw12hMsGoib5up60kSmfpksLwywIV7faJp3y5HL6RcadoJTLBcG2x7vHYcLje0swhEtVGcxIT62T3DcXqc4V46dJOLuL0uBBFZycZ0m4QTd_tzc0Vs/s320/DSC02889.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmD9iWoV35LKnnPkCtoRfAFk4j65mdVJ9VaLcJgbPjfwJHU0DxdmtiYUFYwlv0jIbWPoZ41JgQH9g1DrZ3d1hcb8_Se6ZW-eExZHvay9guxgsNuY_fZcVtor9WnXPGJTm6qizjKsCbgm0/s1600-h/DSC02890.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397097635536930" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmD9iWoV35LKnnPkCtoRfAFk4j65mdVJ9VaLcJgbPjfwJHU0DxdmtiYUFYwlv0jIbWPoZ41JgQH9g1DrZ3d1hcb8_Se6ZW-eExZHvay9guxgsNuY_fZcVtor9WnXPGJTm6qizjKsCbgm0/s320/DSC02890.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb3pnLyBXf-N3tXbR2wekTgiyJzvX9Wh4Z04gN2w_wHNT-FwoyFe9jMeYODUsQvAorIMuzq22ykxazUmG2lzgNTDhlGTLOk6DwEoZeoVGS7vYaY6Jn9EU-n2iNL_STF6JzEgf919KcaPo/s1600-h/DSC02892.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397090053103618" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb3pnLyBXf-N3tXbR2wekTgiyJzvX9Wh4Z04gN2w_wHNT-FwoyFe9jMeYODUsQvAorIMuzq22ykxazUmG2lzgNTDhlGTLOk6DwEoZeoVGS7vYaY6Jn9EU-n2iNL_STF6JzEgf919KcaPo/s320/DSC02892.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMJSGd595680-PpTQbOKKlSuKxVAN-Hgr1tvtVpYX4pbFfu9ez3MtexBYjAYKVagXE6wBVoqW7VhAlfoVA0e0g15VamaWLFLq1CufkmR68DagrQMeDqf_cJcLHnVqckb4xBoi_S3J_cdQ/s1600-h/DSC02893.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278397088369854994" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMJSGd595680-PpTQbOKKlSuKxVAN-Hgr1tvtVpYX4pbFfu9ez3MtexBYjAYKVagXE6wBVoqW7VhAlfoVA0e0g15VamaWLFLq1CufkmR68DagrQMeDqf_cJcLHnVqckb4xBoi_S3J_cdQ/s320/DSC02893.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4_qmUp5htqia8ui5p0h1s17-mHHyjWXBKfvSMgrmESJbd9Vy11c9kL3F4SdM44Vo6XBRcaKS54UTrws8d_KeP2HKM4Z0u2fQ0BDFBmolhLWDGCJQdYu_9EGvAu3A8wsERRILFytoO6ik/s1600-h/DSC02894.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396794474537266" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4_qmUp5htqia8ui5p0h1s17-mHHyjWXBKfvSMgrmESJbd9Vy11c9kL3F4SdM44Vo6XBRcaKS54UTrws8d_KeP2HKM4Z0u2fQ0BDFBmolhLWDGCJQdYu_9EGvAu3A8wsERRILFytoO6ik/s320/DSC02894.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrkJolU6jqi6Sl0jH6abrJdRSasFRypCUvc7xjcQpStSC9g_V96v8p8syA_JMktPueOdKHODZOj96piWR8CNslsIc49tcgS-q9ObWu7ubDmnAqb3FORhxfzkHdufJbdek6HJvkyROK3-o/s1600-h/DSC02895.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396795312405490" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrkJolU6jqi6Sl0jH6abrJdRSasFRypCUvc7xjcQpStSC9g_V96v8p8syA_JMktPueOdKHODZOj96piWR8CNslsIc49tcgS-q9ObWu7ubDmnAqb3FORhxfzkHdufJbdek6HJvkyROK3-o/s320/DSC02895.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCpeljEjoqM0Va7ry3Qw1pu0sFyJUNi4J1qKRA-sqPb7m7xYpw2fEPNHxvL3yl3yVhjPuiehnxX1TgtoluhwxPRO-LGZ0Bt5fqUv5r1ojO9Q8lhZjv4f6muGHtA6PhmJa7WhDpLySeATA/s1600-h/DSC02896.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396786733745762" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCpeljEjoqM0Va7ry3Qw1pu0sFyJUNi4J1qKRA-sqPb7m7xYpw2fEPNHxvL3yl3yVhjPuiehnxX1TgtoluhwxPRO-LGZ0Bt5fqUv5r1ojO9Q8lhZjv4f6muGHtA6PhmJa7WhDpLySeATA/s320/DSC02896.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_dGQyHY5euV_Ub6pHB2VyhEiBVoMPxqkHaC8Y0yfXyl7V3hL2ngAK8ClFEYeGpv67SAKzPtTMSDJ5X37mzApB4RFEqETdY5AYW3zcSAc78F5IOBjIyCwT__zi95IU_-hJmKIOiirXj7M/s1600-h/DSC02897.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396783036347346" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_dGQyHY5euV_Ub6pHB2VyhEiBVoMPxqkHaC8Y0yfXyl7V3hL2ngAK8ClFEYeGpv67SAKzPtTMSDJ5X37mzApB4RFEqETdY5AYW3zcSAc78F5IOBjIyCwT__zi95IU_-hJmKIOiirXj7M/s320/DSC02897.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcq6IiiAy-gNQlvfKiny8J_NvcpC_P-kszLAl7GtpuCHt8xkuviQdjsUyy2pYoMAS5RQv4ovPuJOZGy3s-JDkUJcTM1jwiGuELc2-Ooi2knnleCHERFyEBrecIymK1GXE_ea9-4qXXTto/s1600-h/DSC02898.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396783169525346" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcq6IiiAy-gNQlvfKiny8J_NvcpC_P-kszLAl7GtpuCHt8xkuviQdjsUyy2pYoMAS5RQv4ovPuJOZGy3s-JDkUJcTM1jwiGuELc2-Ooi2knnleCHERFyEBrecIymK1GXE_ea9-4qXXTto/s320/DSC02898.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii-uLn8flqH9UdMazwt0MGFKZywu2NmuPOu2O-l2zIWMW017DW4Y1WZBORCMRtoe04NJB7eBa0HC4cOqtTkSmtYlCPfqBsbTMUs-EvKpDTKEFygX1IDFuDGbYhyphenhyphenlHSsP80ifHCQVmYbD0/s1600-h/DSC02899.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396379309164754" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii-uLn8flqH9UdMazwt0MGFKZywu2NmuPOu2O-l2zIWMW017DW4Y1WZBORCMRtoe04NJB7eBa0HC4cOqtTkSmtYlCPfqBsbTMUs-EvKpDTKEFygX1IDFuDGbYhyphenhyphenlHSsP80ifHCQVmYbD0/s320/DSC02899.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioQDdXPjZm8wxqmTf5h5fiErmtY6HgMrxGjnMTYAW8zg_jGx70wYMr0dMXSAxfkDTlTy1sh7r8AbEdASOBuijWD_rI0K7eV-wqAM5DZa51qG44gCVbjheO5ouZS6EXnpTlguyKe6aIgnE/s1600-h/DSC02900.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396376397989122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioQDdXPjZm8wxqmTf5h5fiErmtY6HgMrxGjnMTYAW8zg_jGx70wYMr0dMXSAxfkDTlTy1sh7r8AbEdASOBuijWD_rI0K7eV-wqAM5DZa51qG44gCVbjheO5ouZS6EXnpTlguyKe6aIgnE/s320/DSC02900.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwGXU37HIYOJVNyQWkGI2BgcEch-m0nbRKu-SH02M3pqqWPid5A47B4rCpcxt9G0uBuHBSCEmrUfJrE7zR5g9OKHhj99SVzn1iX_PDi9wj7w-lQuJy5eBn5KqAEvLH0p2mDdwJNXzlGos/s1600-h/DSC02901.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396373546579378" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwGXU37HIYOJVNyQWkGI2BgcEch-m0nbRKu-SH02M3pqqWPid5A47B4rCpcxt9G0uBuHBSCEmrUfJrE7zR5g9OKHhj99SVzn1iX_PDi9wj7w-lQuJy5eBn5KqAEvLH0p2mDdwJNXzlGos/s320/DSC02901.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCyO89EMe02dB_YpZanvHdeq2eYTzogSQ8uX-bbTSllakhr28wrbKCFkmJxHRtfnDARRcPpAZQwyUdJE0qDjQB9tb0BcS5CQ0LQkjJB08x9NZJDZf0PZobbgNXocZs91dI0weAom0RQ34/s1600-h/DSC02902.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396376405404306" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCyO89EMe02dB_YpZanvHdeq2eYTzogSQ8uX-bbTSllakhr28wrbKCFkmJxHRtfnDARRcPpAZQwyUdJE0qDjQB9tb0BcS5CQ0LQkjJB08x9NZJDZf0PZobbgNXocZs91dI0weAom0RQ34/s320/DSC02902.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggcasfFGUh1Hr1RQ5VJ3HOumN7WjZcgdU2GiK9bTbyIS2Xm3pVHXuFutQfoBXlU-xVhu-ZNV9UuJIOwQ8rJ-b_Rl2jBlDdHEiTU89VA3Qbey6WC0lKT8Tn-sqL90W8yr8TXuSnvom4OHI/s1600-h/DSC02903.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396372896726946" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggcasfFGUh1Hr1RQ5VJ3HOumN7WjZcgdU2GiK9bTbyIS2Xm3pVHXuFutQfoBXlU-xVhu-ZNV9UuJIOwQ8rJ-b_Rl2jBlDdHEiTU89VA3Qbey6WC0lKT8Tn-sqL90W8yr8TXuSnvom4OHI/s320/DSC02903.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBgm1hrUgCvtWDbG4WeuTtmoPJBJT-_VHDjkJMWbFFV48FrY3mJF_Gv8UYcZLMo-z_rapwddPZDQLZ5YA7RqsMZ1WdiWbddZ6cvTFFEQ6t2Ho618ZeYdvwCj3C1-aknVtj9iSs2jjas1c/s1600-h/DSC02904.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396093187007170" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBgm1hrUgCvtWDbG4WeuTtmoPJBJT-_VHDjkJMWbFFV48FrY3mJF_Gv8UYcZLMo-z_rapwddPZDQLZ5YA7RqsMZ1WdiWbddZ6cvTFFEQ6t2Ho618ZeYdvwCj3C1-aknVtj9iSs2jjas1c/s320/DSC02904.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0vLdzDwAKj1BIPZhW1tSnAfBQ_maDepJMSB-zKB2Qg1cuRGiwG720SDCof4cbTyi72F6krwi8VMnf9gUOToKuHuTPlmxpDuvv4A7hsRbJS7qtQ6lHNS20GLQyc7TZJ8dWR7eCb_G1d5I/s1600-h/DSC02905.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396088072466594" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0vLdzDwAKj1BIPZhW1tSnAfBQ_maDepJMSB-zKB2Qg1cuRGiwG720SDCof4cbTyi72F6krwi8VMnf9gUOToKuHuTPlmxpDuvv4A7hsRbJS7qtQ6lHNS20GLQyc7TZJ8dWR7eCb_G1d5I/s320/DSC02905.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU_ilBGIV_l8gRmYiE4Z82GE349bSXR2cZKBBjfdv8ymekePXQhqHUNPhfb0_-w9GgNp9w7jontrvzgtfijbmXxutncw7Bb6no_BKDsVTKIyqrKNFUuTwjUgSCEWdqZnRhOjs-2x17D0M/s1600-h/DSC02906.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396086402277282" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU_ilBGIV_l8gRmYiE4Z82GE349bSXR2cZKBBjfdv8ymekePXQhqHUNPhfb0_-w9GgNp9w7jontrvzgtfijbmXxutncw7Bb6no_BKDsVTKIyqrKNFUuTwjUgSCEWdqZnRhOjs-2x17D0M/s320/DSC02906.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCVmWpNcP9J8SDaHlcUH48LYFwohAtgmRhNpEjoaqXi9D8h1o1svA0p7BWWD-MifY5DSfQDsKuerl0EXbUvPeRQjkFUXfejyrHs0-FBjfoDSX-W09yipUH9SqAVaAi2R38_N1sN82fEj0/s1600-h/DSC02907.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396082032153826" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCVmWpNcP9J8SDaHlcUH48LYFwohAtgmRhNpEjoaqXi9D8h1o1svA0p7BWWD-MifY5DSfQDsKuerl0EXbUvPeRQjkFUXfejyrHs0-FBjfoDSX-W09yipUH9SqAVaAi2R38_N1sN82fEj0/s320/DSC02907.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQqr7MIKlJrrmsek9tKmgm9Eq7wNJkMlX9kGqVH8NYziS1E5Q0gGvmrac0EJBRRsQUytOcpS6Z58An4NPNZX3eG5TXw6Qw-dSuyOOa9soX6RsOw4QXPvSo0DHNzKbAA7JB3cSu1w__rd8/s1600-h/DSC02908.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278396080802198690" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQqr7MIKlJrrmsek9tKmgm9Eq7wNJkMlX9kGqVH8NYziS1E5Q0gGvmrac0EJBRRsQUytOcpS6Z58An4NPNZX3eG5TXw6Qw-dSuyOOa9soX6RsOw4QXPvSo0DHNzKbAA7JB3cSu1w__rd8/s320/DSC02908.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFk8pIXIehx6ZflSbOUX8wRTAEGXd9VbI6YEw31ocdljm6Sy23q_DlhKSJJ-K1Eq21gV7I46sWzxZ_wFgOv-SUDYBRMJfkl_XJjMmbOedQTzF9N0htgxrnW2SBMJKZQuuCPlYabjHeE7Q/s1600-h/DSC02909.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395831784054530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFk8pIXIehx6ZflSbOUX8wRTAEGXd9VbI6YEw31ocdljm6Sy23q_DlhKSJJ-K1Eq21gV7I46sWzxZ_wFgOv-SUDYBRMJfkl_XJjMmbOedQTzF9N0htgxrnW2SBMJKZQuuCPlYabjHeE7Q/s320/DSC02909.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyN2vDfBPY8GTT-AMEieBEJaQSWDhOngkZxJcwt-KAPS2HvewWSVM4GZge9VJ23eyPtlkfcFR6gjAdiDiyCUvT2bx1LpEmVfGbtNC77cF7GxmtJaIIhKr8hfzXfbty1wMo49UxrCmyiU8/s1600-h/DSC02910.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395824442147842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyN2vDfBPY8GTT-AMEieBEJaQSWDhOngkZxJcwt-KAPS2HvewWSVM4GZge9VJ23eyPtlkfcFR6gjAdiDiyCUvT2bx1LpEmVfGbtNC77cF7GxmtJaIIhKr8hfzXfbty1wMo49UxrCmyiU8/s320/DSC02910.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpFk2WQWKYI34Ei1fHKKdUZWbVG_HGITfFLIIy9aO3yWvrNXAuLAQH_B7Jxouj13W0vNh6CxwnOuWHHOc41cE0wq3azEuHnEK1_EeOFjPMNp2spbVzZvlTlPTcSjYzkc9XG11FaVWmBfE/s1600-h/DSC02911.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395823297877410" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpFk2WQWKYI34Ei1fHKKdUZWbVG_HGITfFLIIy9aO3yWvrNXAuLAQH_B7Jxouj13W0vNh6CxwnOuWHHOc41cE0wq3azEuHnEK1_EeOFjPMNp2spbVzZvlTlPTcSjYzkc9XG11FaVWmBfE/s320/DSC02911.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixQXpLPlxkBS4tGg5r6-xqv-thSBIYMmW7s7ZzGz_tjDOXrBiCnfXGIVMEIBf51bfjfeOs0PINXpa2HbvVgTwVgWTEC6iSpGAKXwnwSgtsh7xlmiR7F4xyJvwj1_rC89I5EDIB5GabBRo/s1600-h/DSC02912.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395815200632210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixQXpLPlxkBS4tGg5r6-xqv-thSBIYMmW7s7ZzGz_tjDOXrBiCnfXGIVMEIBf51bfjfeOs0PINXpa2HbvVgTwVgWTEC6iSpGAKXwnwSgtsh7xlmiR7F4xyJvwj1_rC89I5EDIB5GabBRo/s320/DSC02912.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBlyPw4MaXectLXV162YvuXkt3cNZbvc2_B-v8C2L7Z3xz8Kyku6nL_lkpgV36sITUtcl8zcod53_vcl_WBAxWvghk8p7Rs0MGxFo1ytL0UsKn6fdyGxkl_6H5jU_RGiXY-e2rzpcdmUQ/s1600-h/DSC02913.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395816538667554" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBlyPw4MaXectLXV162YvuXkt3cNZbvc2_B-v8C2L7Z3xz8Kyku6nL_lkpgV36sITUtcl8zcod53_vcl_WBAxWvghk8p7Rs0MGxFo1ytL0UsKn6fdyGxkl_6H5jU_RGiXY-e2rzpcdmUQ/s320/DSC02913.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNfBoxvKPHbW60gLi5h8WQlCUVg4HBRGuyIf9lzPCKqIi4Rkdo9jDgndqowGofshYc9F8E42Lrt5JSCKOfA1F9lqP-QS500Aq7GIZO8iPiQ8DB69Q958n0D08aiLrSd348Xwmm6QOa8MY/s1600-h/DSC02914.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395501128783746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNfBoxvKPHbW60gLi5h8WQlCUVg4HBRGuyIf9lzPCKqIi4Rkdo9jDgndqowGofshYc9F8E42Lrt5JSCKOfA1F9lqP-QS500Aq7GIZO8iPiQ8DB69Q958n0D08aiLrSd348Xwmm6QOa8MY/s320/DSC02914.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFFCRVU9_cG-11ej50DLWmuVno-IsV6RMb0eyE_hSp_bA_8SPuaYzYED4OtxtUIUp-ECFW8qr7kH85tBTJ8AqkuV31VggwsB5Xb0QMxFNSBzEt0iYN0WbGd2W0xc8SccE1_IdClalLY4c/s1600-h/DSC02915.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395498648216674" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFFCRVU9_cG-11ej50DLWmuVno-IsV6RMb0eyE_hSp_bA_8SPuaYzYED4OtxtUIUp-ECFW8qr7kH85tBTJ8AqkuV31VggwsB5Xb0QMxFNSBzEt0iYN0WbGd2W0xc8SccE1_IdClalLY4c/s320/DSC02915.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGn5zQsxb9iyWtmk5q7qABnCjuRQDiX7dQ_sODIo9zXmd9V5lG67lo8rtla6pHyhdKZHIHA5MLE7LxqTxOlA51h776MzV3MeDlm7Ji8DDze6WK2j9Sb8fTV_Uyn3M0ehO4fwqnQqJDogQ/s1600-h/DSC02917.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395494792745586" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGn5zQsxb9iyWtmk5q7qABnCjuRQDiX7dQ_sODIo9zXmd9V5lG67lo8rtla6pHyhdKZHIHA5MLE7LxqTxOlA51h776MzV3MeDlm7Ji8DDze6WK2j9Sb8fTV_Uyn3M0ehO4fwqnQqJDogQ/s320/DSC02917.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfbBaLGN5gIjcSAu0UscA4qKIo24glN6j1_NqW4nYyRz6y1jthA6G5vB-yyYkRvUKlVLu90tm706A6x-0SMlN9WNvtmVuxnVCQTkjt5hvTXtFqL91sfCc15T5Ilko4lVOAodcQtRPLybU/s1600-h/DSC02918.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395496299298162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfbBaLGN5gIjcSAu0UscA4qKIo24glN6j1_NqW4nYyRz6y1jthA6G5vB-yyYkRvUKlVLu90tm706A6x-0SMlN9WNvtmVuxnVCQTkjt5hvTXtFqL91sfCc15T5Ilko4lVOAodcQtRPLybU/s320/DSC02918.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1Sy1cF0FOn56G_mvOa1eiBgC-tOJpnRnsx-3r9HHSp26HD2gfDpLp4ZndPinrgkkTAxpvGNPzlzsjmDgtgCV-aeKayFobMv0MKdtFCkNcTKk-BMc-utL37Mlwa5DqBaXWCkm9PAA8I7Y/s1600-h/DSC02919.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395485986450370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1Sy1cF0FOn56G_mvOa1eiBgC-tOJpnRnsx-3r9HHSp26HD2gfDpLp4ZndPinrgkkTAxpvGNPzlzsjmDgtgCV-aeKayFobMv0MKdtFCkNcTKk-BMc-utL37Mlwa5DqBaXWCkm9PAA8I7Y/s320/DSC02919.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAKobFtbXvlWsU_01G7SjnqTMHicRJysn7vGFG2BPu6mbBQpyf6rbHFZn0Q_NXsmh44VzFG9Q0-eevyJ4X6ztiBsrL9u_YOfibp7H27qIyEcvQ2B2z8454Qz5KZcW91cQ-eoqoMDyq2IY/s1600-h/DSC02920.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395132279070626" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAKobFtbXvlWsU_01G7SjnqTMHicRJysn7vGFG2BPu6mbBQpyf6rbHFZn0Q_NXsmh44VzFG9Q0-eevyJ4X6ztiBsrL9u_YOfibp7H27qIyEcvQ2B2z8454Qz5KZcW91cQ-eoqoMDyq2IY/s320/DSC02920.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnovUglzjMyBhQ0HA_KLFYa_auQpAlLoBKsPyI2O8EVWuY6qBmTCvvq4DRriaUNQhtx74KTz4nwOkaN_XJZ3HEoNJ8Kw8BBJVYGRX5Sx1yGjhUN9ZQ4rNlXT6hV_Mr4UHUOkt07PBz09c/s1600-h/DSC02921.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395128791604738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnovUglzjMyBhQ0HA_KLFYa_auQpAlLoBKsPyI2O8EVWuY6qBmTCvvq4DRriaUNQhtx74KTz4nwOkaN_XJZ3HEoNJ8Kw8BBJVYGRX5Sx1yGjhUN9ZQ4rNlXT6hV_Mr4UHUOkt07PBz09c/s320/DSC02921.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoJ13FaikBp0FdZwtMAoXp4VHzyvLsai_VYWFOGSUWfMSDrpxUjOQ1PspHxPUHof8OXEq9cH-tv34yOuW57_aPCA1nZHMlHAyn6rIve-kSux6vCxgZdnKidzFdcwXztxnqcZtemrHovMQ/s1600-h/DSC02922.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395124404290786" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoJ13FaikBp0FdZwtMAoXp4VHzyvLsai_VYWFOGSUWfMSDrpxUjOQ1PspHxPUHof8OXEq9cH-tv34yOuW57_aPCA1nZHMlHAyn6rIve-kSux6vCxgZdnKidzFdcwXztxnqcZtemrHovMQ/s320/DSC02922.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaq8FAEjx4FrE3klUfi6PgTTXflsxZHEYxFXCVrNBML-TWGOp20nh-zZgDDg3zWcuCLGriC4Hw6oOZ4a_PQtseneIgbGoNkl0imHpTteKmGhcE9_MkljlBGInQkRhHSbLe1ECmWXqNGzo/s1600-h/DSC02923.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395123901352146" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaq8FAEjx4FrE3klUfi6PgTTXflsxZHEYxFXCVrNBML-TWGOp20nh-zZgDDg3zWcuCLGriC4Hw6oOZ4a_PQtseneIgbGoNkl0imHpTteKmGhcE9_MkljlBGInQkRhHSbLe1ECmWXqNGzo/s320/DSC02923.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlf-U84JVQOvUveOKdY5msyPMNMReSiwSAwkudfjXdyq0m1xAFQjjDRxkCQnfQDH5RH909JwnLwdR_Pg2CUdHerOJo0NUnZnyfeDiLIuVJu1Y8CyBUTrUokF-L1D4EFZTSA3RaHCRJnf4/s1600-h/DSC02924.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278395122189087090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlf-U84JVQOvUveOKdY5msyPMNMReSiwSAwkudfjXdyq0m1xAFQjjDRxkCQnfQDH5RH909JwnLwdR_Pg2CUdHerOJo0NUnZnyfeDiLIuVJu1Y8CyBUTrUokF-L1D4EFZTSA3RaHCRJnf4/s320/DSC02924.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhksZd9jvEfkQ5Ip4gdTg6Wx9UffBN614Ye0tuwjItJairFF0pqNznBtzc2BdSuGvbweBM7ozJ1QAu_LB9pM1vfE8Kao5PT5kZXcyYlqbC7o0fI6Ml7wjRD3M_0lPQHGxh5_011dgK6UVY/s1600-h/DSC02925.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394850621441314" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhksZd9jvEfkQ5Ip4gdTg6Wx9UffBN614Ye0tuwjItJairFF0pqNznBtzc2BdSuGvbweBM7ozJ1QAu_LB9pM1vfE8Kao5PT5kZXcyYlqbC7o0fI6Ml7wjRD3M_0lPQHGxh5_011dgK6UVY/s320/DSC02925.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVxxiB4HnIwyOnWdhW0S7HPS1ekZgRZIAojhcaDRQ1wvT8xt7TIpb5uxt19EMj60O3yAZIaJeXgcunFoRZpA_TYn7raA67KhimI-ZE0zXDmdnLeIuW7G1O8yPRH2AYeejHNVgxAwLoyrg/s1600-h/DSC02927.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394845426415314" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVxxiB4HnIwyOnWdhW0S7HPS1ekZgRZIAojhcaDRQ1wvT8xt7TIpb5uxt19EMj60O3yAZIaJeXgcunFoRZpA_TYn7raA67KhimI-ZE0zXDmdnLeIuW7G1O8yPRH2AYeejHNVgxAwLoyrg/s320/DSC02927.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUs4-GniKAJ4XKWAj1-pzj8CZKO40mYAYN9lI3aHbhPbsGdE-Acn1EUchFO79_DbvjAnlXTyCvfRw9DzG8j5op5hP3pbSZovOAm6fJqJlkk0UMji7mWmdb37LinGdNP07-QX4vwjlWNeQ/s1600-h/DSC02928.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394847907241282" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUs4-GniKAJ4XKWAj1-pzj8CZKO40mYAYN9lI3aHbhPbsGdE-Acn1EUchFO79_DbvjAnlXTyCvfRw9DzG8j5op5hP3pbSZovOAm6fJqJlkk0UMji7mWmdb37LinGdNP07-QX4vwjlWNeQ/s320/DSC02928.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVzdGDuEBcEsodBB2PNuLgjjFbWyqsZoRdhKMbfAwCSUpZZvrgE6DfCgOHS901F2_-9v48yedcGLTOF295r7vX3MJIn1MucEr-NZ4GqqvNbRiXPZT1XQcIt8aVH0PqzAtRCE4t6ki6878/s1600-h/DSC02929.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394843460996034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVzdGDuEBcEsodBB2PNuLgjjFbWyqsZoRdhKMbfAwCSUpZZvrgE6DfCgOHS901F2_-9v48yedcGLTOF295r7vX3MJIn1MucEr-NZ4GqqvNbRiXPZT1XQcIt8aVH0PqzAtRCE4t6ki6878/s320/DSC02929.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDyCVmRqwqTthgTSVXTWXMqLN6noWl39XbjpZGe4_AqCPBglAX_FMR7H6UJxj84a3Ab5kPtDKg0vPovlxh_ybYPbQnwYHXWZY-qd4e1Lund9So_FAUR3n-Ila8pu70mW0veKjt2Rqgpu4/s1600-h/DSC02930.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394837354384162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDyCVmRqwqTthgTSVXTWXMqLN6noWl39XbjpZGe4_AqCPBglAX_FMR7H6UJxj84a3Ab5kPtDKg0vPovlxh_ybYPbQnwYHXWZY-qd4e1Lund9So_FAUR3n-Ila8pu70mW0veKjt2Rqgpu4/s320/DSC02930.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj555LYGs0hOVygBj3o0w9Dy5-CKqDQzw_YGMwDYpKmBnW1sGaETPCS2dllwwrMRnodfqnQund09-vzCDGTUfmz3ubDDfRoN_ESDPCOiuYwYh6RNsNWvOtHRmnmAPLOSMIulQSj7tBf2O4/s1600-h/DSC02932.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394521809877074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj555LYGs0hOVygBj3o0w9Dy5-CKqDQzw_YGMwDYpKmBnW1sGaETPCS2dllwwrMRnodfqnQund09-vzCDGTUfmz3ubDDfRoN_ESDPCOiuYwYh6RNsNWvOtHRmnmAPLOSMIulQSj7tBf2O4/s320/DSC02932.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVq75cxQ4ay6i42ZPQhSvxnOrNRP1rq-4bo2iKDhe_nkcFV1H0kYL5ctXuQOr0019Pl1wXcFyrbYE5tPeIgkwZy3IV_5-07uWcqkFTpK9inDaEeAXQxTyHPl9pnwqFy2pO70M4RgZDQm4/s1600-h/DSC02934.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394520116672226" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVq75cxQ4ay6i42ZPQhSvxnOrNRP1rq-4bo2iKDhe_nkcFV1H0kYL5ctXuQOr0019Pl1wXcFyrbYE5tPeIgkwZy3IV_5-07uWcqkFTpK9inDaEeAXQxTyHPl9pnwqFy2pO70M4RgZDQm4/s320/DSC02934.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy_rZBTPTHghXJNp3Omc0nhRx2Mh3QPpx9Q5fll4DnB-T-DhYYZ7ruNqeld3kHses8WaynuE9B7BdhH-ZxgMDiuYE9ClZmT47MTdtbxuXl_UBB7MDie0PlM6Y23Ha6RM6mQVOgCZNwHXo/s1600-h/DSC02935.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394515571303714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy_rZBTPTHghXJNp3Omc0nhRx2Mh3QPpx9Q5fll4DnB-T-DhYYZ7ruNqeld3kHses8WaynuE9B7BdhH-ZxgMDiuYE9ClZmT47MTdtbxuXl_UBB7MDie0PlM6Y23Ha6RM6mQVOgCZNwHXo/s320/DSC02935.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGZgGh2urPk82FLRvz70Q39ZhpUamzif6G5aYntqnxPlS-J1v2iOogPs1v7Hr5GwxwIKv5zXXRHI93ONbf4q85gnmcrSvZOI1eY9rQWTXew70qfNqHE1ZdNH2agJQ7WxG5d8DFUDKS2F8/s1600-h/DSC02936.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394515615898882" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGZgGh2urPk82FLRvz70Q39ZhpUamzif6G5aYntqnxPlS-J1v2iOogPs1v7Hr5GwxwIKv5zXXRHI93ONbf4q85gnmcrSvZOI1eY9rQWTXew70qfNqHE1ZdNH2agJQ7WxG5d8DFUDKS2F8/s320/DSC02936.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZihNt9sdFLPqYSDf7e_k8NkCs5VKW9HyQj6UO_2Nkc7WclISl-nb_Ojn6yScCXrZzpb3L3Zz31wSygo71P5Bk6NOFbLgl1wE6ecjb-E6sIE3mmYrIc1eieoKiGv1r6LJvL8Ww0DduVjw/s1600-h/DSC02937.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394513114807890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZihNt9sdFLPqYSDf7e_k8NkCs5VKW9HyQj6UO_2Nkc7WclISl-nb_Ojn6yScCXrZzpb3L3Zz31wSygo71P5Bk6NOFbLgl1wE6ecjb-E6sIE3mmYrIc1eieoKiGv1r6LJvL8Ww0DduVjw/s320/DSC02937.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSU-MBIszuSD4SnE66iKaDphaCm_K9lHOSkLQ8KKre-bqePVXj1r52JOdqSJ6kmBpMBwfek70uH-AV7ot-5BkOF0dCaD3YIa57RM6LxJIlH4JLF4eweORd6H5h1Ot7ZhqL8x1kYZziEsU/s1600-h/DSC02939.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394204393984610" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSU-MBIszuSD4SnE66iKaDphaCm_K9lHOSkLQ8KKre-bqePVXj1r52JOdqSJ6kmBpMBwfek70uH-AV7ot-5BkOF0dCaD3YIa57RM6LxJIlH4JLF4eweORd6H5h1Ot7ZhqL8x1kYZziEsU/s320/DSC02939.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY6gsmb6OuUVi6ytpmdHgm1CdXcByyOG2GlQAx-qrFk7DmqlzbZUXVsW1CfENpM6jZ_WGVBWCuvyWXWaVaCC3-blVWKGw_1cEw_r-LnpB-7krJdviJWp6bkIVm_c7WV3p4yt5D0WIn9-Y/s1600-h/DSC02940.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394207769195762" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY6gsmb6OuUVi6ytpmdHgm1CdXcByyOG2GlQAx-qrFk7DmqlzbZUXVsW1CfENpM6jZ_WGVBWCuvyWXWaVaCC3-blVWKGw_1cEw_r-LnpB-7krJdviJWp6bkIVm_c7WV3p4yt5D0WIn9-Y/s320/DSC02940.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMJK1mcvgW61_-XY_UNIsU1G6It8YoLNntI6yIDuLJhYu3RD_uQTh9HfCBpSX6-116pjg39Hn-BGVHYuNxNfmd0aZsG7YS5b8D2Nw7q3ulGfrUB8TxjivmbYHFe_uBbAsAHOn_Nla0x3s/s1600-h/DSC02941.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394208233155122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMJK1mcvgW61_-XY_UNIsU1G6It8YoLNntI6yIDuLJhYu3RD_uQTh9HfCBpSX6-116pjg39Hn-BGVHYuNxNfmd0aZsG7YS5b8D2Nw7q3ulGfrUB8TxjivmbYHFe_uBbAsAHOn_Nla0x3s/s320/DSC02941.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih0BA2XVboNqlArr4CaoZMWZGlsrW1tlrUt5h2qrvD_pdvgiSn9DLhPMBxnlEao1026OcmD07m8eiwHnFlA2cgqLWtgL8sBkMT3nx81flJUdc3Gq0ZmxgzbDFdXvjxvv8p6-5zA-gwxco/s1600-h/DSC02942.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394200507900402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih0BA2XVboNqlArr4CaoZMWZGlsrW1tlrUt5h2qrvD_pdvgiSn9DLhPMBxnlEao1026OcmD07m8eiwHnFlA2cgqLWtgL8sBkMT3nx81flJUdc3Gq0ZmxgzbDFdXvjxvv8p6-5zA-gwxco/s320/DSC02942.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDO8grbWU9rEjk8Hm3UeccefLTD2O6HVaBA-Q6t9pRXQWV3l1e-3KJ4z2ELtw7LYv8_8vwqGDNQeeDIWGRd0wOgy8jLnZHNv9JbyZsSPFni9TkKUFbno7C5gVBp1v7NoEIatPdV6vB8H0/s1600-h/DSC02943.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278394196902354770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDO8grbWU9rEjk8Hm3UeccefLTD2O6HVaBA-Q6t9pRXQWV3l1e-3KJ4z2ELtw7LYv8_8vwqGDNQeeDIWGRd0wOgy8jLnZHNv9JbyZsSPFni9TkKUFbno7C5gVBp1v7NoEIatPdV6vB8H0/s320/DSC02943.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLxOvvT6_GqOJdmFjuL3135pcWdZ_D65qkf6OSNszryNX33mYLzXMSV1QEj9tCBN4LSpfV_ZHKCH0Gv6C0XU84sZV6MzddfIfteyJZUkb8fsfWdDmtvD7STifGfY2s1gnHOKdTudvQSj4/s1600-h/DSC02944.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393960099097490" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLxOvvT6_GqOJdmFjuL3135pcWdZ_D65qkf6OSNszryNX33mYLzXMSV1QEj9tCBN4LSpfV_ZHKCH0Gv6C0XU84sZV6MzddfIfteyJZUkb8fsfWdDmtvD7STifGfY2s1gnHOKdTudvQSj4/s320/DSC02944.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8b5EtzF-5ETPeLjXifAhbCtKySODfnCzRCjfBzbojZ-hQpHSJQrpZLc-KegiMn3lo4LGnxeE5nLf6JNZ8nv4d4389lzcJnlv03kyJHEFZOLgsmX932fcclYArqabvNUDJt3HoZCI-Y0Q/s1600-h/DSC02945.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393951273718578" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8b5EtzF-5ETPeLjXifAhbCtKySODfnCzRCjfBzbojZ-hQpHSJQrpZLc-KegiMn3lo4LGnxeE5nLf6JNZ8nv4d4389lzcJnlv03kyJHEFZOLgsmX932fcclYArqabvNUDJt3HoZCI-Y0Q/s320/DSC02945.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJdcnh8Bnl-e78ETydhaOu9lH8iZ-4wTpprxYYYGI0m0o405XelRJDJtQUNMP2Pst5gpCfAlZMDTBFFjy40lnJoBulOZNECVOdX4gHKmCp_0Zj_5mFKk9I7s-2mdyKsB1dgUfq56oLvnk/s1600-h/DSC02946.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393949312080210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJdcnh8Bnl-e78ETydhaOu9lH8iZ-4wTpprxYYYGI0m0o405XelRJDJtQUNMP2Pst5gpCfAlZMDTBFFjy40lnJoBulOZNECVOdX4gHKmCp_0Zj_5mFKk9I7s-2mdyKsB1dgUfq56oLvnk/s320/DSC02946.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT8VS5pwdqJI1MDspwvHmpYUb-a1gEhVLWYJJTAkIfdyMQ4-liX-t2CiUP7Rv0UJZ94IZoZDtXYBLE0mRmAiBabV7FhM_48A872QRnz89SOfOURxuVPRaS_OeBjPsdjphsf8EN2NUHr1w/s1600-h/DSC02947.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393950308472114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT8VS5pwdqJI1MDspwvHmpYUb-a1gEhVLWYJJTAkIfdyMQ4-liX-t2CiUP7Rv0UJZ94IZoZDtXYBLE0mRmAiBabV7FhM_48A872QRnz89SOfOURxuVPRaS_OeBjPsdjphsf8EN2NUHr1w/s320/DSC02947.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVNHjZaQ9aXaDS1tbaWwHEt7Ue0SqW0-7givlFWaY7_4srHsdPHT-fRkO29Qz3XhFxkZf-NAn373_tAw_l_ddqzB4tQXurixJuzRf_hsNwW6NnoK4_nTpI4I4Afkawk0Z2iRRBf9ATWHE/s1600-h/DSC02949.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393945116791602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVNHjZaQ9aXaDS1tbaWwHEt7Ue0SqW0-7givlFWaY7_4srHsdPHT-fRkO29Qz3XhFxkZf-NAn373_tAw_l_ddqzB4tQXurixJuzRf_hsNwW6NnoK4_nTpI4I4Afkawk0Z2iRRBf9ATWHE/s320/DSC02949.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKIiy-lcDBz_r9tqKBpbTJLJHMw3IPFXc8ZD9t7yListLd4nR-YWGa62kD0l92MvrMFKvmxR2QVBNGIfTqqTdlo3JvqBY6ADaZJINUouExuEzDgs1X_1ScksIvaPz0jkmgIXVzR-fxhEQ/s1600-h/DSC02950.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393701891067378" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKIiy-lcDBz_r9tqKBpbTJLJHMw3IPFXc8ZD9t7yListLd4nR-YWGa62kD0l92MvrMFKvmxR2QVBNGIfTqqTdlo3JvqBY6ADaZJINUouExuEzDgs1X_1ScksIvaPz0jkmgIXVzR-fxhEQ/s320/DSC02950.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtllqVgH5nt4UmevOaX-3UVlyRBQHrRcofiuArppZOLxv_dH4Wa_3H4pKJaGaJlAWCUQH9LCSaGVCGQ4eaqENX9cWVa1uVKjVWHOL79RLTD9cuuY-WIT6AweP8xxQTl3LIbVVTamqCjTA/s1600-h/DSC02951.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393703076183154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtllqVgH5nt4UmevOaX-3UVlyRBQHrRcofiuArppZOLxv_dH4Wa_3H4pKJaGaJlAWCUQH9LCSaGVCGQ4eaqENX9cWVa1uVKjVWHOL79RLTD9cuuY-WIT6AweP8xxQTl3LIbVVTamqCjTA/s320/DSC02951.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9sh8rZo_FB-4RH6JbTcpLHVJjIWXkwGyNyKQPaGSefbfH6Ud5EKbf1zKfSUn_snjYtDjgPRSgF99O_Cpi_E_wizXW9FW_OWJHq3NYaRw5JGSxQceKjk696pAb7OMeXw1NdPJwlcJYCeI/s1600-h/DSC02952.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393699404814882" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9sh8rZo_FB-4RH6JbTcpLHVJjIWXkwGyNyKQPaGSefbfH6Ud5EKbf1zKfSUn_snjYtDjgPRSgF99O_Cpi_E_wizXW9FW_OWJHq3NYaRw5JGSxQceKjk696pAb7OMeXw1NdPJwlcJYCeI/s320/DSC02952.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1kbpTbmNpodoWPnsGs3D7Q6YqYTYLFi_aVRU54pF8I7io_320RBROzLPIi56OEbN4rgwsuvY6dNyAlMVH9oMdfSgzKA1JoSIxbfcdHvL4OcfUj3B_8UAbTvtzQZz61A8gbSarJktDOzg/s1600-h/DSC02953.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393695436535426" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1kbpTbmNpodoWPnsGs3D7Q6YqYTYLFi_aVRU54pF8I7io_320RBROzLPIi56OEbN4rgwsuvY6dNyAlMVH9oMdfSgzKA1JoSIxbfcdHvL4OcfUj3B_8UAbTvtzQZz61A8gbSarJktDOzg/s320/DSC02953.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-kCjgPERyTHe5f0kDYu_dnNMfRuOF0DMa2nGMAj4ZHfMTD98LtT6lFJ_qRApx4pj39T17YwB6UUBF892lq58i5dZPeGcRigRt4q_6B_tHwMGu2517kq_zJ_s5wHQGLc3TCOGXMim_WUE/s1600-h/DSC02954.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393690964215938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-kCjgPERyTHe5f0kDYu_dnNMfRuOF0DMa2nGMAj4ZHfMTD98LtT6lFJ_qRApx4pj39T17YwB6UUBF892lq58i5dZPeGcRigRt4q_6B_tHwMGu2517kq_zJ_s5wHQGLc3TCOGXMim_WUE/s320/DSC02954.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Mexican congress approves widening police powers</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />MEXICO CITY: Mexico's Congress on Tuesday voted to broaden police powers, allowing law enforcement agencies to use undercover agents and taped conversations as evidence in a bid to help them fight increasingly bloody drug cartels.<br />The reforms, which were approved earlier by the Senate, are backed by President Felipe Calderon and come as Mexico is shaken by organized-crime violence that has claimed almost 5,400 lives so far this year, more than double the death toll from the same period of 2007.<br />They allow taped conversations to be used in court if submitted as evidence by one of the parties in the conversation, and let police request search warrants by e-mail or by telephone calls to judges rather than exclusively in writing, according to a Congressional statement.<br />The changes also permit undercover agents.<br />Many Mexican detectives currently operate in plain clothes, but the new measure would let them keep their identities secret in legal proceedings and be identified by a numerical code known only to superiors.<br />Drug gangs have increasingly targeted police officials for assassination in recent years.<br />The reforms include some safeguards meant to prevent police from abusing their powers, including one requiring that officers quickly register all detentions. Under current law, they have up to two days to present a suspect before a judge.<br />In the past, some police have been accused of using that period to threaten, pressure or torture suspects into confessing.<br />The bill also tightens the definition of catching a suspect "in the act," to mean just a few moments from the commission of a crime. Previously, police could detain suspects hours or even days after a crime and claim they had been caught in the act.<br />Also Tuesday, the Senate voted to create a registry of cell phone owners to combat kidnappings and extortions in which gangs often use untraceable mobile phones to make ransom demands.<br />Telecoms would be required to ask purchasers of cell phones or phone memory chips for their names, addresses and fingerprints, and to turn that information over to investigators if requested.<br />At present, unregulated vendors sell phones and chips for cash from streetside stands. It is unclear how such vendors would be made to comply with the new law.<br />The Senate also approved a bill previously passed by the lower house to standardize police training, vetting and operational procedures.<br />The law would create a national security council headed by the president and the governors of Mexico's 31 states to improve coordination among a disparate array of state, local and federal police.<br />The bill will return to the lower house for final approval after senators detected errors in its wording.</div><div><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1ZchetVXCpUv96ibrRibCkDVGZbJjLX6uGz7F2pbzN7AYetNJq2PBA4srMJ_asEK1lcz2-0Wa6WU48Im8PzCyF4K3g9jrofcyQ6zbMr0O-b_7AmE9Ld6BBh0OzoaWrT88PNY5M2NcYGk/s1600-h/DSC02956.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393392730778514" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1ZchetVXCpUv96ibrRibCkDVGZbJjLX6uGz7F2pbzN7AYetNJq2PBA4srMJ_asEK1lcz2-0Wa6WU48Im8PzCyF4K3g9jrofcyQ6zbMr0O-b_7AmE9Ld6BBh0OzoaWrT88PNY5M2NcYGk/s320/DSC02956.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Tuskegee Airmen land coveted Inauguration Day tickets</strong><br />By Katharine Q. Seelye<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />When the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black force of elite pilots, emerged from combat in World War II, they faced as much discrimination as they had before the war. It was not until six decades later that their valor was recognized and they received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor Congress can give.<br />Now, the roughly 330 pilots and members of the ground crew who are left from about 16,000 who served are receiving another honor that has surpassed their dreams: They are being invited to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama as the country's first black president.<br />"I didn't believe I'd live long enough to see something like this," said Lieutenant Colonel Charles Lane Jr., 83, of Omaha, Nebraska, a retired Tuskegee fighter pilot who flew missions over Italy.<br />"I would love to be there; I would love to be able to see it with my own eyes," he said, chuckling on the phone as he heard about the invitation. But, he said, he had a "physical limitation" and was not sure he would be able to attend.<br />Thousands of people who participated in the fight for civil rights over several decades helped pave the way for Obama's triumph. But the Tuskegee Airmen have a special place in history. Their bravery during the war - on behalf of a country that actively discriminated against them - helped persuade President Harry Truman to desegregate the military in 1948.<br />"The election of Barack Obama was like a culmination of a struggle that we were going through, wanting to be pilots," said William Wheeler, 85, a retired Tuskegee combat fighter pilot who lives in Hempstead, New York. He tried to become a commercial pilot after the war but was offered a job cleaning planes instead.<br />Obama has acknowledged his debt to the airmen, issuing a statement in 2007, when they received the Congressional Gold Medal. It said in part: "My career in public service was made possible by the path heroes like the Tuskegee Airmen trail-blazed."<br />The invitation to his swearing-in was extended on Tuesday by Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.<br />Tickets to the Jan. 20 inauguration are the most sought-after commodity, with more than 1.5 million people expected in Washington.<br />Of the 240,000 tickets, the airmen would have seats among the 30,000 on the terrace below the podium, along with former members of Congress and others.<br />For logistical reasons, the actual invitation ended up with Robert Rose, a retired Air Force captain in Bellevue, Nebraska, who was not a Tuskegee airman but is the first vice president of Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an association of the original airmen and their supporters.<br />The association will extend the invitation to the airmen, who must respond by Dec. 19. Each can bring one guest. The tickets are not transferable.<br />"We'll have a lot of happy fellows and ladies," said Rose, who predicted that many would try to attend.<br />He said that before the invitation was made on Tuesday, he had already been trying to get word to higher-ups that the airmen would like to be invited. "I thought if the name 'Tuskegee' surfaced at a high enough level, someone would recognize it and it would make sense to invite them," he said.<br />There is no firm handle on how many of the airmen are still alive. More than 300 came forward in March 2007 to collect their bronze replicas of the Congressional Gold Medal at a ceremony at the Capitol. The Gold Medal itself was given to the Smithsonian Institution.<br />In all, 994 pilots and about 15,000 ground personnel collectively known as the Tuskegee Airmen were trained at the segregated Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama from 1942 to 1946.<br />About 119 pilots and 211 ground personnel are still alive, according to Tuskegee Airmen Inc. They are in their 80s and 90s, many are frail, and it is unclear how many will be able to make the trip to Washington. And those who make it will face various challenges: they will most likely have to walk some distance, the weather could be harsh, the crowds will be huge and accommodations are scarce.<br />Still, these are some of the airmen who flew more than 150,000 sorties over Europe and North Africa during World War II, escorting Allied bombers and destroying hundreds of enemy aircraft. Some were taken prisoner. And most faced fierce discrimination during and after the war.<br />"Even the Nazis asked why they would fight for a country that treated them unfairly," President Bush said in awarding the medals.<br />Rose said he saw a direct connection between the Tuskegee experience and Obama's election.<br />If the airmen "hadn't helped generate a climate of tolerance by integration of the military, we might not have progressed through the civil rights era," he said. "We would have seen a different civil rights movement, if we would have seen one at all."<br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1OdEyXIYDIgjBNIg2ArVMGbQbGtCvPC73jETRF3lnvOgaVUzBbQYY3yGDcHisJhlzgSziDbqneKl2VlMv0Cf2wj7wtVvaoqDIdVLVo93dRs_wbi-TcR1hJI-8BKz_qs97I8twTB_6BvM/s1600-h/DSC02957.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393390630646322" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1OdEyXIYDIgjBNIg2ArVMGbQbGtCvPC73jETRF3lnvOgaVUzBbQYY3yGDcHisJhlzgSziDbqneKl2VlMv0Cf2wj7wtVvaoqDIdVLVo93dRs_wbi-TcR1hJI-8BKz_qs97I8twTB_6BvM/s320/DSC02957.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis_0Wjfxyr1-t5Kkl2Nqpf-nzCXkL6yOeIwcanucDaoCtL5ku1m-L8urSyD-Hc4_FHhvcAj6so9QWbaagElzLWdIOT8jkRLUhIVfzCVZ2PzCuO7gMoFRHkoDYaLp-vOBGlUSmQxa4AyNE/s1600-h/DSC02958.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393385536382370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis_0Wjfxyr1-t5Kkl2Nqpf-nzCXkL6yOeIwcanucDaoCtL5ku1m-L8urSyD-Hc4_FHhvcAj6so9QWbaagElzLWdIOT8jkRLUhIVfzCVZ2PzCuO7gMoFRHkoDYaLp-vOBGlUSmQxa4AyNE/s320/DSC02958.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht6NgP8Py7cYvwcN_Y8xXfC-ZXxw2h__3ponKgBu6m4kJ9l56-yULegLCOPcIyv4DQnO33Ha7TTkV2IMb46gJB-yVVTGAydnM-KFQn-ZQvfdlQVIKQ-Gc92x1WXkDmcnn7UqeqO7zITmM/s1600-h/DSC02960.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393386239632946" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht6NgP8Py7cYvwcN_Y8xXfC-ZXxw2h__3ponKgBu6m4kJ9l56-yULegLCOPcIyv4DQnO33Ha7TTkV2IMb46gJB-yVVTGAydnM-KFQn-ZQvfdlQVIKQ-Gc92x1WXkDmcnn7UqeqO7zITmM/s320/DSC02960.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Pilots outraged by release of cockpit recordings</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />BRUSSELS, Belgium: The main pilots' federation called for a ban on the public release of cockpit voice recordings from deadly crashes, saying Wednesday the final moments of accident victims should not be used for "public entertainment."<br />The London-based International Federation of Air Line Pilots' Associations also denounced the publication in Vanity Fair magazine of audio clips of an executive jet and a Boeing 737 involved in a deadly collision over Brazil two years ago.<br />The association said in a statement it was "outraged to learn that once again the cockpit voice recordings of aircraft involved in a fatal accident have been leaked and are being used by a media provider for public entertainment."<br />Vanity Fair released the complete audio recordings from the two jets involved in the mid-air crash over Brazil that killed 154 people in its January 2009 issue and on the magazine's Web site. They were attached to an article about the 2006 accident, "The Devil at 37,000 Feet."<br />The site also includes an interview with the author of the article, with snippets of audio from the actual accident sliced in. The pilots of the executive jet are heard saying "What happened?" while sounds from the 737 cockpit are obscured by the din of cockpit alarms.<br />Vanity Fair spokeswoman Beth Kseniak said in an e-mail that the magazine chose to make the recordings available "because they are newsworthy and serve as documentation to (the) article."<br />The cockpit voice recorder is one of two "black box" flight recorders carried by all civilian airliners. It records conversations on the flight deck and any radio instructions pilots receive via their headsets and is intended to help investigators in case of an accident.<br />Pilot groups do not object to the release of transcripts of the recordings. But they say it is disrespectful to the people in the cockpits and to their families to have their final moments replayed in the media.<br />Gideon Ewers of the international pilots group described it as morally and ethically wrong to use "actual recordings for anything other than accident investigation."<br />"They should never be used ... as a means to provide what can only be described as voyeuristic entertainment to the public at large," he said.<br />In the United States, the National Transportation Safety Board is legally banned from releasing the actual tapes. In most other countries, however, the legal requirements regarding the level of protection are less strict.<br />The collision of an Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet, flown by two American pilots, with a Boeing 737 belonging to Brazil's GOL airlines over the Amazon jungle spotlighted problems within Brazil's air transport system. The Boeing crashed into the Amazon jungle, killing all onboard, but the business jet landed safely.<br />On Tuesday, a federal judge in Sao Paolo threw out negligence charges against the two New York pilots accused of contributing to the crash, but refused to dismiss charges similar to involuntary manslaughter. The judge also dismissed some of the charges against four Brazilian air traffic controllers.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpiasm28kVEfsJapND6ZtY7nMpR7FX7czXwQTgj2ygZ3BGMqKA1JknYGqLcXJFXGskxbxXvNg4KQlMWBcL78Iv3e4Os0I7Q3UZl9uSCqETvTBrv2N9U1HveR-cKK1IANjP198VpiLUDlg/s1600-h/DSC02961.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393381608078530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpiasm28kVEfsJapND6ZtY7nMpR7FX7czXwQTgj2ygZ3BGMqKA1JknYGqLcXJFXGskxbxXvNg4KQlMWBcL78Iv3e4Os0I7Q3UZl9uSCqETvTBrv2N9U1HveR-cKK1IANjP198VpiLUDlg/s320/DSC02961.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Shedding feudalism, a Channel island fights over its future<br /></strong>By Sarah Lyall<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />SARK, Channel Islands: No one ever claimed it was normal to have a feudal government run by a bunch of unelected landowners whose legislative sessions began with rousing recitations of the Lord's Prayer in French. But the community always seemed to work, in its strange way.<br />"It's the kind of place where you'd never be left in your house dead for four or five days," said Peter Gabriel-Byrne, a singer-songwriter and sometime construction worker here.<br />Maybe not anymore. An angry dispute has poisoned relations among the 600 residents of this tiny island in the English Channel not far from the coast of Normandy as it prepares for its first democratic election, on Wednesday. The fight, over two different visions of Sark's future, has ripped families apart and turned lifelong friends into implacable enemies.<br />The mood is "vicious," said Amanda de Carteret, whose husband is descended from Helier de Carteret, Sark's first hereditary ruler, or seigneur, who received the island as a feudal landholding from Queen Elizabeth I in 1565. "Everyone's falling out with each other."<br />All the Channel Islands are peculiar in their own ways, but Sark is particularly peculiar. Considered a crown dependency, though by and large independent of Britain, Sark has no cars, income tax, unemployment or social security.<br />There is one jail cell, rarely occupied. The only way to get here is by boat, weather permitting. People travel on the alternately dusty and muddy roads by bicycle and in horse-drawn carts, goods are transported by tractor, and every year the seigneur pays the queen a sum equal to one-twentieth of a knight's service fee: £1.79, or about $2.65.<br />Until now, the legislature, known as Chief Pleas, has been made up mostly of the owners of the island's 40 plots of land, called tenements (pronounced tai-ne-MONT, in a vaguely Norman French way). This year, however, the legislature voted to replace itself with a fully elected 28-seat body. Wednesday's election will decide its makeup.<br />But the happy shift to democracy has been marred by extraordinary amounts of bad blood and ill will, reflected in the candidates running for Chief Pleas. On one side are the people who feel that Sark, in all its sleepy friendliness, should be left to make its own decisions as it always has, albeit now with democracy. The other side supports the development plans of a pair of reclusive identical-twin British billionaires who have bought up more than one-fifth of Sark in the last few years and feel its future should include paved roads, cars and a helicopter landing pad.<br />The pair, David and Frederick Barclay, also own the Ritz Hotel in London and The Daily Telegraph newspaper, among other things. In 1993, they bought Brecqhou, a 200-acre island next to Sark, from Sark for a reported £2.33 million, or about $3.5 million. (They had to pay a 13th of the price, known as a treizième, to the seigneur, a practice they found irksome; the custom has since been abolished.)<br />The Barclays built an enormous turreted gothic castle on Brecqhou and live there, traveling by helicopter. Though they rarely visit Sark, they are its largest investors. If things go their way, said Kevin Delaney, their estate manager here, they plan to invest some £5 million a year, or about $7.4 million, in Sark.<br />According to ancient Norman law, people here who believe their rights are being violated can halt the offending action by dropping to their knees, raising one hand and crying out in front of witnesses "Haro, Haro, Haro!" followed by a French phrase meaning, roughly, "I have been done wrong." Many of the old-timers appear to wish they could invoke something similar when confronted with the Barclays.<br />They say that the Barclays' attitude toward Sark is like that of a woman who professes to love a man and then, after marrying him, proceeds to try to change everything about him.<br />The critics say that the brothers have run roughshod over a once peaceful community, throwing their money around and then threatening to withdraw it, lobbing continual antigovernment lawsuits and ad hominem attacks at the old feudal rulers and trying to push through an un-Sarkian view of the future.<br />"We're in danger of going from feudalism to dictatorship," said Diane Baker, a member of Chief Pleas who is running in Wednesday's election. Speaking of the literature put out by the pro-Barclay camp, she added, "They called my husband a feudal Taliban, just because he was on the committee that refused permission to let them build a helipad."<br />On the contrary, Delaney said, the Barclays had all but saved a crumbling community, providing year-round employment, buying up neglected properties and restoring the boarded-up stores on one side of the Avenue, Sark's main (and only) shopping street.<br />"What is at stake is the economy, the economy, the economy," said Delaney, who is running for a seat in Wednesday's election, "and the tourist industry is the engine that drives the economy."<br />Despite the sudden onslaught of democracy, he said, the island is still operating the way it always has, as a feudal state, with shadowy decisions based on favoritism and patronage being made behind closed doors.<br />"I haven't come to ring the doorbell and ask that feudalism come down," he said. "I've come to smash the door down."<br />Jacqueline Squires, a 60-year-old housekeeper at the Aval du Creux, a hotel on Sark that is owned by the Barclays, said the old guard was missing the point, which is that the Barclays had been a financial boon to the island. "They're having their cages rattled, and they don't like it," she said of the critics.<br />But Charles Maitland, a candidate who wears a button with a photograph of a helicopter and the words "No Thanks," compared the Barclays' move into Sark to the invasion of Iraq.<br />"I think the Barclays came in thinking that everyone would be thrilled to get rid of the old tyranny," he said. "But a lot of old-timers liked the old system."<br />Speaking of the Barclays, his wife, Wendy, added, "They should have gone for hearts and minds, but instead they went for shock and awe."</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA8cOWpJBMXmKhUiiU9lYVZPp4CqyuCNxairzTl23_3aC_DvL5tToi1E8lG3iJ53Qcd4fmtJpJC2VW8jSG1r8k69uVLCDGsvCioCzKhqrJF_vgl7Fh-CHOmRIEXC-CAlnupXTGIzw3J_0/s1600-h/DSC02962.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393150254109906" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA8cOWpJBMXmKhUiiU9lYVZPp4CqyuCNxairzTl23_3aC_DvL5tToi1E8lG3iJ53Qcd4fmtJpJC2VW8jSG1r8k69uVLCDGsvCioCzKhqrJF_vgl7Fh-CHOmRIEXC-CAlnupXTGIzw3J_0/s320/DSC02962.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>U.S. newspapers' bubble burst</strong><br />By Richard Pérez-Peña<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />NEW YORK: The bankruptcy filing of Tribune this week is just the latest, largest evidence that the U.S. newspaper industry is suffering a hangover from an immense buying spree in 2006 and 2007 at what turned out to be the worst possible time for the buyers, just as the business was about to enter a drastic decline.<br />Newspapers would be in trouble either way. The steady leak of advertising and readers from print to the Web has become a torrent in this recession year. Most newspapers remain profitable, but the margins are dropping fast, with the industry losing about 15 percent of its ad revenue this year.<br />And that is not just in the United States. ZenithOptimedia this week projected ad spending in major media to decline 1 percent in Western Europe and global spending to be down slightly in 2009, by about $1 billion, or 0.2 percent, to $490.5 billion.<br />In Europe, newspapers have encountered similar trends as in the United States, especially in France, where the two leading French national dailies, Le Figaro and Le Monde, have each recently made deep cuts in their staffs. The two main French business papers, Les Échos and La Tribune, were recently sold.<br />In the United States, the companies in the weakest condition are there largely because they borrowed a lot of money to buy papers, often at inflated prices, and the biggest of those deals were struck in 2006 and early 2007. Tribune's was the biggest of those, $8.2 billion to take private a company whose assets include The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and 23 television stations. The transaction almost tripled the company's debt.<br />In the year before that takeover was announced, McClatchy bought Knight Ridder, including papers like The Miami Herald and The Kansas City Star; the MediaNews Group bought several papers, including The San Jose Mercury News and The Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minnesota; investors in Philadelphia bought The Inquirer and The Daily News; a private equity firm, Avista Capital Partners, bought The Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Smaller companies like GateHouse Media bought dozens of local papers.<br />Even if those deals could be unwound, "the business would still be in pretty difficult shape," said John Puchalla, a senior analyst for Moody's Investors Service.<br />"It wouldn't have changed the downturn," he said. "But it sure would have changed the vulnerability to the downturn. Ten to 15 years ago, most newspapers were carrying a pretty low amount of debt. But companies have levered up over time, and in the last couple of years, some companies pushed it too far."<br />Most newspapers still have earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization that are equal to 10 percent to 20 percent of their revenue. That is down from 20 percent to 30 percent in the middle of this decade, but tolerable - if not for the burden of debt payments.<br />McClatchy and MediaNews have paid down their debts to more manageable levels, but they also had to negotiate new terms this year with their creditors. Freedom Communications, which publishes The Orange County Register, warned recently that it might not be in compliance with the cash-flow requirements in its debt covenants.<br />Credit ratings for nearly every newspaper company judged by the major ratings agencies have been downgraded well below investment grade.<br />Some newspaper companies would like to merge with others in the same region but have been barred from doing so by media ownership regulations.<br />Putting papers up for sale, as several troubled companies have done, will not solve the industry's problems, said David Joyce, a media analyst at Miller Tabak, a small investment banking firm.<br />"Selling assets also means selling off cash flow, and they need that cash flow to service the debt," he said. "And any sales would be fairly close to fire-sale prices, because people aren't buying assets, especially in the newspaper business."<br />There are some exceptions to this story, including Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the United States.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/technology/paper.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/technology/paper.php</a><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdSHsayyUxA3Xdd8FhYHHOBGK5sYxQepDqwKxUDw4p71J_9-AeBdNNQZkh0DgI7xiktPOLAlO6E2jKvM_QdEoMI-0yF9u_TlCyf5yledpyv8q2D-nNDaj2tKE2UlxM3gi9taB66hqBHdw/s1600-h/DSC02965.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393143006504242" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdSHsayyUxA3Xdd8FhYHHOBGK5sYxQepDqwKxUDw4p71J_9-AeBdNNQZkh0DgI7xiktPOLAlO6E2jKvM_QdEoMI-0yF9u_TlCyf5yledpyv8q2D-nNDaj2tKE2UlxM3gi9taB66hqBHdw/s320/DSC02965.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>A merry and muscular Christmas</strong><br />By Garrison Keillor<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />The Christmas tree in Rice Park in St. Paul, Minnesota, is taller than the tree at Rockefeller Center in New York, 90 feet compared to 72, but New York's is the Tree de la Tree, the Tree Iconic, the one that we'll see on national TV, just as the Tonys get the attention even though there's better theater out in the hinterlands than most of the gilded schlock on Broadway. And it's The New York Times whose imprimatur you want on your book, movie, CD, TV show, dill pickles, your child's science project, the sweater you knit for your sister, and so forth. It is the National Good Taste Stamp of Quality, issued by wizened gnomes on Eighth Avenue.<br />We who live out in the frozen cornfields of the Midwest understand this very well and we don't mind. We are a modest people with much to be modest about, self-effacing, anxious to efface ourselves and not wait for others to do the job. We could, if we chose to, despise New York, especially if we thought about former Mayor Giuliani's curled-lip, bared-teeth speech at the 2008 Republican convention, sneering at Barack Obama as a city slicker. But we do not think about that. We admire New Yorkers for many, many things, for their excellent transit system that gives you close encounters with interesting individuals, their handy street-corner hot dogs, and also their ability to express personal preference, which we dirt farmers lost a long time ago. It was frowned out of us when we were children.<br />It seems so simple - say what you want, say what you think - but we gave up the ability in order to be unselfish and sociable and not be monsters, and so if we're asked what we want to do, we say, "Hey. Whatever you want. Makes no difference. Suit yourself." And having suppressed our likes and dislikes for so long, we are not sure what we want, or even who we are.<br />What I want is to be in New York in December, so here I am. The people I know in this city are whole-hearted people who tell you what they prefer, the noodles in garlic sauce or General Tso's Seven Joys of Meat Loaf. If you step on their toes, they don't smile and step back and then brood about it for six months, they say something terse and meaningful and let that be the end of it.<br />If they feel like crying, they do that. It's O.K. to cry in New York. You can sit on the subway, tears running down your cheeks, and no one will think less of you. Try this sometime. People may offer you some of their medication, or tell you about something going on in their life that's even worse. You could suddenly find yourself with three or four new best friends.<br />Our jolly old Santa Claus was a New York invention. The Dutch brought over a gaunt, stern-faced Santa who looked over your activities with a hairy eye and maybe gave you a box of chocolates or maybe a kick in the pants. The Santa of "A Visit From St. Nicholas" is a New York version, fat and his belly jiggles when he laughs. He opens up his big bag and pours out the goods.<br />We the people of the tundra feel that if we asked for something - say, a peppermint stick - that would mean we'd never taste peppermint again. "A peppermint stick! Who do you think you are?" Santa would yell. "Greedy little wretch. Go back to your stool in the corner and finish your gruel."<br />Christmas is a New York type of holiday. It's pure Christian entrepreneurship. Pure muscle. The early church fathers intended to give the faithful a big feast day very close to the pagan feast day of Saturnalia, sort of like one chain putting up a store next to a competitor. It worked. Paganism went belly up, and it was all Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, 24/7 coast to coast. Dickens shilled for it, Irving Berlin, and it's all about pleasure, food, bright lights, high spirits, glittering trinkets, razzmatazz. It is pure Broadway.<br />The Puritans didn't think much of it, and neither did my father. And I have my own problems with it. The great unspoken question of Christmas is, "What do you want? What would make you happy?" I don't know. Just give me some of what those people over there are having. They look happy. I'll have what they're having.<br />Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty." Distributed by Tribune Media Services.</div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtC0ECamp-RbW25535pkoP9N9mJpAtbM3iQot8OD52aHn9ZDcQbU_TRDv0S-4Usr4KeO1dOMZhrFFJ7hX8FdVGrVUNtkFwd3vIspsr_B7fMhWs59ysOVr7w0tBMehbGjWRtiUoH7m8xas/s1600-h/DSC02966.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393139338204578" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtC0ECamp-RbW25535pkoP9N9mJpAtbM3iQot8OD52aHn9ZDcQbU_TRDv0S-4Usr4KeO1dOMZhrFFJ7hX8FdVGrVUNtkFwd3vIspsr_B7fMhWs59ysOVr7w0tBMehbGjWRtiUoH7m8xas/s320/DSC02966.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>Illinois governor: Big ambition and bigger mouth</strong><br />By Susan Saulny, Monica Daveyand Jack Healy<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />CHICAGO: Little in Governor Rod Blagojevich's background prepared the people of Illinois for the man who was revealed in the criminal complaint that has dropped like a bombshell here. Delusional, narcissistic, vengeful and profane, Blagojevich as portrayed by federal prosecutors shocked even his most ardent detractors.<br />"I almost fell over," said Cindi Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform and a frequent critic of the governor. "I was speechless and sickened."<br />President-elect Barack Obama said Wednesday that Blagojevich should resign, adding his voice to a long list of Illinois political leaders who have urged the governor to step down after his arrest on accusations of putting Obama's former U.S. Senate seat up for sale. Several Illinois politicians hoped to strip Blagojevich of his appointment authority or even to impeach him.<br />"Under the current circumstances, it is difficult for the governor to effectively do his job and serve the people of Illinois," said Robert Gibbs, an Obama spokesman.<br />Legislators will reconvene Monday to address the political fallout from Blagojevich's arrest and are expected to draft a bill that would call for a special election to fill Obama's Senate seat, an approach Obama's spokesman endorsed Wednesday.<br />A bill could pass as soon as Tuesday. But Blagojevich could veto or delay it, taking no action at all for as long as 60 days. More than 50 lawmakers have signed a draft bill to pursue possible impeachment.<br />Some went further. Mike Jacobs, a Democratic state senator and former friend of the governor, suggested that Blagojevich may have lost his grip on reality. "I'm not sure he's playing with a full deck anymore," Jacobs said. "He's so gifted, but so flawed in a number of fundamental areas."<br />Drama and suspicion have long surrounded Blagojevich, a 52-year-old Democrat known for his quirky love of Elvis and a big black signature hairstyle. Though he ran for office as a reformer, he has been embroiled for years in a federal fraud investigation.<br />More recently, his reputation was badly damaged after the corruption trial of the political fund-raiser Antoin Rezko, who was convicted in June of fraud and bribery. Blagojevich's name surfaced repeatedly during the trial, and the governor's approval rating, according to The Chicago Tribune, has sunk to 13 percent.<br />Yet, despite what looked like his lead role over many years in a political theater of the absurdly corrupt, Blagojevich, the seemingly earnest son of a Serbian steelworker, was not charged with any wrongdoing.<br />Tuesday changed that. It was not simply the extortion and venality with which he was charged that left mouths gaping, but the ruthlessness and grandiosity revealed in the federal wiretap transcripts.<br />The language he used was more suited to Chicago's old stockyards than to a government office, according to the affidavit, and the quid pro quo he seemed to suggest between his power to appoint and the payoff he expected in return was crassly put. "I've got this thing," Blagojevich said, "and it's [expletive] golden. And I'm just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing. I'm not going to do it. And I can always use it. I can parachute me there."<br />The U.S. attorney in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, said that "Governor Blagojevich and others were working furiously to get as much money from contractors, shaking them down, 'pay to play,' before the end of the year," when new ethics laws take effect.<br />Canary, the reform advocate, said that such actions were not part of the classic style of Chicago corruption.<br />"He was raised in the old Chicago ward system where the most important principle is loyalty," she said. "It's about protecting one another, spreading perks, and earning personal power. It's not about huge personal enrichment." But that, according to the 76-page criminal complaint, seems to be exactly what Blagojevich was after.<br />He came into office with a very different persona. As a young congressman, Blagojevich was pegged as a rising star with a populist touch. With proven likability, he seemed hellbent on pushing reform and cleaning house in a state with an embarrassingly overt culture of political corruption.<br />He swept into the governor's office in 2002 mainly on promises that he would restore integrity after the previous chief executive, George Ryan, was sent to federal prison for racketeering and fraud.<br />Blagojevich's big dreams were no secret. The federal complaint suggested that he had his eyes trained on the presidency in 2016, despite the well-known investigation under way.<br />A lawyer for the governor said he has denied any wrongdoing.<br />Blagojevich's arrest stunned a state that thought it had seen every brand of corruption, creating doubt over how or when Obama's successor in the Senate might be selected; it left many wondering who else might yet be implicated in the governor's brash negotiations.<br />Obama, who Fitzgerald said was not implicated, said Tuesday that he did not discuss his Senate seat with Blagojevich. "I had no contact with the governor or his office, and so we were not - I was not aware of what was happening," Obama said.<br />Obama has long adroitly straddled the state's bruising politics, but he had long been estranged from the governor, even though some in his political circle have had relationships with both of them, including Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff.<br />In conversations with advisers that were recorded by the FBI, the governor seemed alternately boastful, flippant and spiteful about the Senate appointment, a federal affidavit showed. At times, he even spoke of appointing himself to the job.<br />Blagojevich was released from custody Tuesday on a $4,500 recognizance bond. A hearing in federal court will be held in January to determine whether there is probable cause to go forward.<br />According to the affidavit, Blagojevich considered numerous ways that he might personally and politically gain from the various unnamed Senate candidates.<br />Blagojevich was recorded telling an adviser on Oct. 31, before the election, that he was giving greater consideration to one candidate (described only as Senate Candidate 5) after an approach by "an associate" of that candidate who offered to raise $500,000 for Blagojevich.<br />Several people whose names have been suggested publicly as Senate possibilities did not respond to requests for interviews. Others, including Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., son of the famed civil-rights leader, issued statements expressing shock over the accusations but did not answer requests for interviews.<br />Jackson met with Blagojevich for 90 minutes on Monday to discuss the Senate opening. ABC News quoted unnamed sources on Wednesday as saying that Jackson was Senate Candidate 5 and federal authorities confirmed the report.<br />Jackson told ABC that he did not know whether he was the anonymous Candidate 5, adding that federal prosecutors in Chicago advised him he was not a target of the criminal inquiry. But he said they had asked him to submit to questions about the selection process by Blagojevich to fill the seat.<br />In November, Blagojevich asserted to an adviser, the affidavit says, that he knew whom Obama wanted named as his successor - described in the affidavit as Senate Candidate 1, a reference apparently to Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama - but cursed him in apparent frustration that "they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation." Jarrett later took her name out of consideration for the post.<br />Jack Healy, Steven Greenhouse, Jeff Zeleny, Carl Hulse and David Johnston contributed reporting. </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>*********************</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></div><div><strong>The strange tale of Governor Blagojevich</strong><br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />We have seen a lot of political hubris, scratch-my-back politics and sheer stupidity over the years. But nothing could prepare us for the charges brought Tuesday against Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois.<br />The governor's administration was already under investigation into whether it has been selling appointments to state boards and commissions and awarding contracts and jobs in exchange for financial benefits and campaign contributions.<br />So what does the FBI claim Blagojevich was up to while the feds were watching him? According to an FBI affidavit, in recent weeks the governor plotted to sell off the U.S. Senate seat just vacated by President-elect Barack Obama to the highest bidder.<br />In exchange, the authorities said Blagojevich was looking for a substantial salary for himself at a foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions, a highly paid position for his wife on corporate boards, a cabinet post or ambassadorship for himself or promises of future campaign funds.<br />The affidavit also claims that the governor weighed the option of appointing himself should no financially lucrative offer materialize.<br />All this was recorded on court-authorized wiretaps that any target of an investigation would have to assume were in place.<br />The U.S. attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, was clear that the complaint makes no allegations against Obama. Indeed, it quotes Blagojevich cursing the president-elect and his team "because they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation."<br />Blagojevich, a Democrat, was elected in 2002 after pledging to restore honor to the Illinois governor's office. His predecessor, Republican George Ryan, was convicted on federal fraud and racketeering charges and is now in prison. Blagojevich has urged President George W. Bush to reduce Ryan's sentence to time served as an act of compassion. It makes one wonder if the governor sensed that, somewhere down the line, he might need some of that compassion himself.<br />Blagojevich must be deemed innocent until proved guilty. But surely the recorded conversations, full of expletive-laced schemes, render him unfit to appoint anyone, least of all himself, to the vacant Senate seat.<br />If he refuses to step aside, the Illinois Legislature should move to bypass him by removing his appointment power, impeaching him or scheduling a special election. Certainly no self-respecting candidate should accept an appointment by Blagojevich.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>*********************</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>Roll over, Abe Lincoln</strong><br />By Timothy Egan<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />For some time now, the most unpopular governor in the United States, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, has been treated like a flu virus at a nursing home.<br />"He's kryptonite," one state representative called him in a Chicago Magazine profile last February. "Nobody wants to get near him."<br />But it wasn't until Tuesday, and the filing of a 76-page criminal complaint centered around the auctioning of a Senate seat, that we got a full X-ray of politics at its sickest.<br />Putting aside the peculiar dialect of desperation that made the governor sound like a John Malkovich character in a David Mamet play, the complaint showed a man trolling the depths of darkness.<br />The beloved Cubs, the sainted Warren Buffett, editorial writers from the Chicago Tribune, even financing for a children's hospital - all were targets or leverage points for a shakedown. The surprise is that he didn't offer to sell out exclusive rights to deep-dish pizza.<br />If the world was roused by the sight from Chicago barely one month ago, hundreds of thousands of people streaming into Grant Park to celebrate the triumph of possibility over tainted history, the arrest of Blagojevich on a dark and drizzly Chicago dawn was quite the opposite image.<br />Abe Lincoln may have rolled over once in pleasant surprise at the election of Barack Obama, and another time in revulsion at Blagojevich's arrest, as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said. More likely, Abe did a triple Lutz in his grave on Tuesday.<br />If nothing else, Blagojevich did Obama the favor of a non-endorsement quote for the ages. According to the federal transcript, the governor showed disgust, barely a week after Obama's election, that he could not get anything in return for offering the Senate seat to an ally of the president-elect. "They're not willing to give me anything except appreciation," the governor says, as outlined in the criminal complaint.<br />It would be comforting if there were a larger lesson here, or a map out of the banality of evil. But there is no trend or modern twist, no evidence of a greater criminal web, no overarching moral. Like a kid who beats up old ladies just because he knows no other way, the allegations against Blagojevich amount to what Fitzgerald called a crime spree, of the political variety.<br />The prosecutor's narrative of plotting bad intentions and narcissism - Blago actually thought he was a viable candidate for president in 2016 - is a particularly graphic example of why some men see things as they are and ask: What's in it for me?<br />Fitzgerald, who prosecuted Scooter Libby under the pressure of a White House not used to getting questioned by anyone, is the son of a Manhattan doorman and the product of Catholic schools at their finest. It's unlikely that his dad ever heard anything to match the conversations captured by federal wiretaps in Illinois.<br />Like all damaged politicians, the Blagojevich in the complaint knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.<br />What's a Senate seat worth? "Golden," and the governor vowed that he would not give it up for nothing.<br />How about help for the Tribune Co.'s attempt to sell Wrigley Field and the Cubs? That would require getting rid of editorial writers who had called for his resignation. Fire them all, Blagojevich is quoted as having said, adding, "And get us some editorial support."<br />Aid for a children's hospital? That would require a contribution of at least $50,000.<br />On and on it goes, trash talk of the want-to-be-rich-and-infamous. Even by Illinois standards, where the path from the Statehouse to the jailhouse holds the footprints of numerous governors, Tuesday's arrest and complaint was breathtaking.<br />"If it isn't the most corrupt state in the United States," said Robert Grant, a FBI special agent, "it's one hell of a competitor."<br />On Monday, the eve of his arrest, Blagojevich showed that he could include hubris among his many flirtations with disaster. At a rally of out-of-work factory hands soiled by his presence, he all but asked to be followed and recorded.<br />"I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead," he said. "I can tell you whatever I say is always lawful."<br />Then, like Huey Long at his most egregious, he cast himself as the person who has nothing to sell but an honest day's labor. If you were to tape him, he added, you would hear a governor "who tirelessly and endlessly figures out ways to help average, ordinary working people."<br />Substitute one word - himself - for working people, and you have the essence of Blagojevich.<br />Timothy Egan writes Outposts, a column at nytimes.com.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Officials say Jackson was 'Candidate 5' in case</strong><br />By Monica Davey<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />CHICAGO: Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., long seen here as someone who was willing, even happy, to clash with this city's old power structure, found himself tangled up on Wednesday in the fallout from the arrest of Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois — now a symbol of that old, unseemly political way.<br />Jackson was described in an affidavit filed in Blagojevich's arrest as one of at least six people being considered by the governor to fill President-elect Barack Obama's unfinished term in the United States Senate in exchange for money or a new job.<br />Specifically, federal authorities said, Jackson is "Senate Candidate 5," associates of whom, the governor said in a wire-tapped conversation, were willing to raise money for Blagojevich in exchange for the seat.<br />Jackson, an ambitious Democrat elected to Congress 13 years ago and the son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, made a defiant appearance before reporters in Washington on Wednesday, denying unequivocally that he had offered Blagojevich anything in exchange for the Senate seat or had sanctioned any offer by an intermediary, as Blagojevich seemed to suggest in recordings.<br />"I did not initiate or authorize anyone at any time to promise anything to Governor Blagojevich on my behalf," Jackson said. "I never sent a message or an emissary to the governor to make an offer, to plead my case or to propose a deal about a U.S. Senate seat, period."<br />It was an awkward moment for Jackson, who has successfully portrayed himself as an outsider, a reformer willing to buck the wishes of Mayor Richard Daley, Blagojevich and others on matters like his support for a third Chicago airport.<br />Jackson's sparring with the political establishment had become so well understood that when Jackson and Daley hugged at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, others in the Illinois delegation said they were astonished, and Jackson, apparently overwhelmed by the unlikely moment, welled up with tears.<br />Jackson, 43, represents the South Side of Chicago, where he grew up, and a swath of southern suburbs. He has long benefited, political experts said, from his father's name and fame, winning a seat in Congress at the age of 30 after working as a national field organizer for his father's organization, Rainbow PUSH.<br />But Jackson has also worked to distance himself from his father's image and define his own style and agenda, the experts said. He worked to create a center to eliminate health disparities, pushed to bring clean drinking water to a community in his district and supported the financing of preparatory school programs for more young people.<br />Dick Simpson, a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a former city alderman, described Jackson as "probably the strongest African-American politician in Illinois at the moment."<br />Jackson's relationship with Obama has been warm. Jackson, whose sister Santita went to high school with Michelle Obama, served as a national co-chairman of Obama's presidential campaign and as a co-chairman of his Senate race in 2004. That year, Obama approached Jackson about whether he was considering a run for the Senate before Obama decided to pursue it. ( Jackson said he had decided against it and gave Obama his blessing.)<br />This year, when a microphone he thought was turned off caught Jackson's father making crude, critical remarks about Obama, accusing him of "talking down to black people," Jackson publicly criticized the comments. "I thoroughly reject and repudiate his ugly rhetoric," he said of his father's comments.<br />In the past month, Jackson, who is not seen as having as strong support statewide as he has in Chicago, made clear his interest in being appointed to replace Obama. His aides even commissioned a poll, not long after the election, showing Jackson as having the strongest support among the names that were being talked about.<br />"Jesse has wanted to be Obama's heir apparent ever since Obama won the Senate seat," said Al Kindle, a South Side political consultant who helped Obama in the 2004 race. Since then, he said, Jackson "has tried to reposition himself to appeal to a broader audience."<br />Since Blagojevich's arrest on Tuesday, prosecutors have cautioned against presuming any wrongdoing on the part of the long list of characters named in the federal affidavit as "Advisor," "Individual," "Senate Candidate," "President-Elect advisor" or "Contributor." Unclear from the affidavit is whether the alleged efforts Blagojevich discussed to secure money or a high-paying job for himself or his wife in exchange for the Senate job were entirely in his own imagination, firm agreements with others, or something in between.<br />Of those alluded to, the affidavit's implications seemed especially troubling for Jackson, or Senate Candidate Five. According to the document, Blagojevich told advisers last Thursday that he was giving Jackson "greater consideration" to replace Obama because Jackson would raise money for him, "upfront, maybe."<br />"We were approached, pay to play," Blagojevich was recorded telling his advisers. "That, you know, he would raise me 500 grand. An emissary came. Then the other guy would raise a million, if I made him a senator."<br />And Blagojevich told one of his fund-raisers to pursue a potential financial donor who Blagojevich believed was a supporter of Jackson by saying that if the governor selected Jackson for the Senate, "some of this stuff's got to start happening now — right now — and we've got to see it. You understand?"<br />Jackson said he had spoken with federal prosecutors on Tuesday and was assured that he was not a target of the inquiry or accused of misconduct. He said he intended to offer his cooperation. He had met with Blagojevich for 90 minutes on Monday, the day before the arrest. It was, Jackson said, the first time the two had met in four years.<br />"I thought, mistakenly, that the process was fair, above board and on the merits," Jackson said Wednesday. "I thought, mistakenly, that the governor was evaluating me and other Senate hopefuls based upon our credentials and qualifications."</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Obama's intervention indirectly led to case against governor</strong><br />By Mike Mcintire and Jeff Zeleny<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />In a sequence of events that neatly captures the contradictions of Barack Obama's rise through Illinois politics, a phone call he made three months ago to urge passage of a state ethics bill indirectly contributed to the downfall of a fellow Democrat he twice supported, Governor Rod Blagojevich.<br />Obama placed the call to his political mentor, Emil Jones Jr., president of the Illinois Senate. Jones was a critic of the legislation, which sought to curb the influence of money in politics, as was Blagojevich, who had vetoed it. But after the call from Obama, the Senate overrode the veto, prompting the governor to press state contractors for campaign contributions before the law's restrictions could take effect on Jan. 1, prosecutors say.<br />Tipped off to Blagojevich's efforts, federal agents obtained wiretaps for his phones and eventually overheard what they say was scheming by the governor to profit from his appointment of a successor to the United States Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Obama. One official whose name has long been mentioned in Chicago political circles as a potential successor is Jones, a machine politician who was viewed as a roadblock to ethics reform but is friendly with Obama.<br />Beyond the irony of its outcome, Obama's unusual decision to inject himself into a statewide issue during the height of his presidential campaign was a reminder that despite his historic ascendancy to the White House, he has never quite escaped the murky and insular world of Illinois politics. It is a world he has long navigated, to the consternation of his critics, by engaging in a kind of realpolitik, Chicago-style, which allowed him to draw strength from his relationships with important players without becoming compromised by their many weaknesses.<br />By the time Obama intervened on the ethics measure, his relationship with Blagojevich, always defined more by political proximity than by personal chemistry, had cooled as the governor became increasingly engulfed in legal troubles. There is nothing in the criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday to indicate that Obama knew anything about plans to seek money and favors in exchange for his Senate seat; he has never been implicated in any other "pay to play" cases that have emerged from the long-running investigation of the Blagojevich administration.<br />But like those previous cases, this latest one features political characters who figure in various stages of Obama's climb from little-known state senator to presidential candidate, and who have since become politically radioactive because of corruption scandals. Some of those relationships posed a threat to Obama during the presidential campaign, forcing him to return tens of thousands of dollars in tainted campaign contributions and providing fodder for attack ads by rival candidates.<br />Though extreme examples, they were emblematic of the path cut by Obama through Chicago politics, where he became known for making alliances of convenience with personalities that seemed antithetical to his self-image of a progressive reformer. His political roots were in the left-leaning neighborhood of Hyde Park, but at key moments in his career he did not hesitate to form relationships with politicians who were fixtures of the Democratic machine.<br />When he ran for the United States Senate in 2004, he aggressively courted Jones, a sewer inspector turned legislator who had clawed his way up through ward politics and was viewed as something of a kingmaker in the Illinois Democratic Party. He also formed a good working relationship with Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, a symbol of establishment politics with whom Obama had never been close.<br />Obama was an adviser to Blagojevich's first campaign for governor, in 2002, and endorsed him again in 2006, even though by that time questions had been raised about the possible selling of state jobs. Obama has also credited one of Blagojevich's closest confidants, Antoin Rezko, a businessman who was convicted of corruption charges this year, with helping him get his own start in politics.<br />Rezko was among the first to contribute to Obama's earliest State Senate race, in 1995, and later became a major fund-raiser for his campaign for the United States Senate. Rezko was known around Chicago as a collector of politicians, and he did not hesitate to make the most of his high-level contacts. The New York Times reported last year that when he was entertaining Middle Eastern financiers at a Four Seasons hotel in Chicago, he arranged for Blagojevich and Obama to drop by, separately and on different occasions, to impress his guests.<br />Rezko derived his political influence mainly from his close relationship with Blagojevich, who relied on him to recommend loyal campaign contributors for state appointments to boards and commissions, according to the complaint unsealed on Tuesday. But as Rezko's legal troubles escalated, Illinois politicians who had previously found him useful, including Obama, disavowed him and started returning his campaign donations.<br />Obama's relationship with Blagojevich was not much better when he made the decision to call Jones in September about the stalled ethics bill. For Obama, the move marked an unusual return to Illinois politics, turf from which he had studiously worked to distance himself throughout the presidential race. At the time, one week before the first presidential debate of the general election campaign, Republicans were trying to tarnish him in the eyes of voters by attempting to link him to Chicago's history of corrupt politics.<br />Obama used leverage that he had seldom employed — publicly, anyway — and strongly urged Jones to bypass Blagojevich and approve the ethics law that would ban the so-called pay-for-play system of influence peddling in Illinois. When asked at the time how Obama had come to be involved, Jones replied, "He's a friend."<br />When the Illinois Senate passed the measure by 55 to 0 on Sept. 22, with Jones reversing his position, Obama praised the move as one creating "a tougher ethics law that will reduce the influence of money over our state's political process." Obama's intervention deepened a rift between him and Blagojevich that had been growing for some time.<br />When Blagojevich left Congress in 2002, he talked openly about the notion of running for president one day. After he was elected governor, and after Senator John Kerry lost the presidential race in 2004, he began eyeing a potential run in 2008.<br />It was short-lived. The federal corruption investigation that eventually led to Rezko's indictment, and Tuesday's charges against Blagojevich, had already begun to taint the governor's administration. And by 2006, Obama had eclipsed the governor as a plausible national candidate, dashing his presidential aspirations.<br />The criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday underscored the acrimony between the two men. Recorded telephone calls showed Blagojevich being far less than respectful when discussing the president-elect and voicing frustration at his inability to advance beyond the governor's office.<br />"If I don't get what I want and I'm not satisfied with it, then I'll just take the Senate seat myself," the governor said, according to the criminal complaint. Later, he said the Senate seat was "a valuable thing — you just don't give it away for nothing."<br />Meanwhile, Blagojevich was busily trying to shake loose up to $2.5 million in campaign donations, much of it from contributors with business before the state, according to federal prosecutors. The governor's goal was to bring in the money before the end of the year, the complaint said, "before a new state ethics law goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2009."<br /></div><div></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9aNYMGX6KIcSVu-hd5wB7HWIgELFM1CCyQHsfsNuC0ZWllxE4-vdGoN9Q1H5MmM0bHXSxycghIKUKwxBcWEtSjoRvQzM901OdgKQHG-QHz9w_b1z-9WHgKXmoABAxQ42PR87MRAARaho/s1600-h/DSC02968.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393137543257554" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9aNYMGX6KIcSVu-hd5wB7HWIgELFM1CCyQHsfsNuC0ZWllxE4-vdGoN9Q1H5MmM0bHXSxycghIKUKwxBcWEtSjoRvQzM901OdgKQHG-QHz9w_b1z-9WHgKXmoABAxQ42PR87MRAARaho/s320/DSC02968.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong> </strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>China hails 'progress' but quells protest on human rights anniversary</strong><br />By Andrew Jacobs<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />BEIJING: China marked international Human Rights Day on Wednesday with newspaper editorials and television commentaries hailing the country's "unremitting efforts" and "nonstop progress" in promoting free speech and individual rights.<br />It was also a busy day for public security officials, who were dispatched to quell a protest of about 40 people who rallied outside the gated headquarters of the Foreign Ministry in Beijing. After calling for free elections and demanding a crackdown on corruption for about 30 minutes, the demonstrators were herded onto buses and taken away.<br />For Liu Xiaobo, one of the most high-profile dissidents in China, Wednesday also marked the third day of detention for what friends and relatives say was his role in drafting a bold public letter that demands political, legal and constitutional reform. The document, published on the Internet and signed by 303 Chinese academics, artists, farmers and lawyers, was released to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a product of the United Nations and a foundation for human rights laws around the world.<br />In recent days, the Chinese police have also detained several other signers, including Zhang Zuhua, a rights activist who was told the letter was a serious affront to the governing Communist Party. After 12 hours of questioning, Zhang was sent home, although the authorities kept his passport, four computers, some books and money.<br />"I told them this is just a civilian proposal and there's nothing to be afraid of," he said in a telephone interview shortly after his release. "But they said senior officials attach great importance to it. I don't think this is the end of it yet."<br />Human rights advocates said they were especially worried about the fate of Liu, who may be facing more serious charges of "inciting subversion of state power," a crime that carries a three-year prison sentence. It would not be Liu's first experience in the Chinese penal system. In 1989, he began 20 months in jail for his role in the pro-democracy protests near Tiananmen Square. In 1996, he was sentenced to three years of hard labor for criticizing the Communist Party.<br />Such experiences have done little to quiet Liu, 53, a former philosophy professor who directs the Independent Chinese PEN Center, an association of writers who advocate broader free speech.<br />The charter that Liu and others put together does not mince words. It describes the current system as "disastrous" and blames the government for "stripping people of their rights, destroying their dignity and corrupting normal human interaction." Among the charter's 19 recommendations are a new constitution, legislative democracy, freedom of religion and an independent judiciary.<br />"Authoritarianism is in general decline throughout the world," the document says. "In China, too, the era of emperors and overlords is on the way out. The time is arriving everywhere for citizens to be masters of states."<br />Pu Zhiqiang, a noted free speech lawyer and one of the signers, said the authorities should embrace the charter as a set of suggestions to help them reach the goals that have been annunciated in its own laws and directives.<br />"We're not saying anything new here," Pu said. "This is not some plot to overthrow the Communist Party."<br />He acknowledged, however, that the charter was making a big splash, and with the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown six months away, the authorities are wary of any kind of public agitation.<br />"This only shows they lack confidence in their rule and are afraid to confront history," he said.<br />Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, said he feared the prosecution of Liu would signal that the government is taking a harder line against political dissidents. In recent years, he noted, public security officials have largely tolerated Liu's advocacy work but the charter, whose signers included economists, journalists and labor organizers, may have crossed a line.<br />"It cuts across social classes and brings together people from all over the country," he said. "This kind of thing traditionally rings alarm bells in police headquarters."<br />A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the charter or Liu's detention, saying he did not know about either of them. The state-run China Daily marked Human Rights Day with a sprawling opinion piece by Wang Chen, minister of the State Council Information Office.<br />The full-page article documents China's long pursuit of human rights, noting that the country has 229 laws and 600 administrative decrees that protect individual rights. In 2004, Wang wrote, China added "respecting and protecting human rights" into the Constitution.<br />"I firmly believe that so long as we unswervingly implement the constitutional principle of respecting and protecting human rights, constantly improve democracy and the rule of law, our society will become more harmonious and people will live a still better life," he wrote.<br />But he ended his essay with a warning that pushing China on the issue would poison international relations and harm the growth of human rights.<br />"All people of all countries should enjoy freedom and equality," he wrote. "But restrained by economic development level, cultural traditions and social systems, people have different understandings and demands with regard to human rights."</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Torture seen widespread in Tibet</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />By Ben Blanchard<br />The use of torture in the restless Chinese region of Tibet is widespread and routine and officials regularly ignore legal safeguards supposed to be in place to prevent it, a new report said Wednesday.<br />Even when detainees are released, they may die of their injuries, be scarred for life mentally or physically and not be able to afford medical treatment or be denied it completely, the Free Tibet group said.<br />"Despite claims by the Chinese government that there are 'extremely few cases of torture', the evidence tells a different story," Free Tibet director Stephanie Brigden said. "There is no doubt that the Chinese government is permitting the use of torture as a weapon to suppress the Tibetan people."<br />China's Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment and calls to the spokesman's office of the Chinese-run Tibetan government in Lhasa went unanswered.<br />Chinese troops marched into Tibet in 1950 and the region's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama fled into exile in 1959 after a failed uprising against Beijing's rule.<br />Mountainous and remote Tibet was rocked by anti-Chinese protests earlier this year, which China blamed on the Dalai Lama, whom it brands a separatist. He has repeatedly denied the claims.<br />Free Tibet said it had profiled numerous cases of torture carried out against people detained following the demonstrations, which spilt over into other ethnically Tibetan parts of China such as Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan provinces.<br />It said that one monk at the Labrang monastery in Gansu, Jigme Gyatso, had to be hospitalised for almost a month after his injuries received in detention.<br />"They would hang me up for several hours with my hands tied to a rope ... hanging from the ceiling and my feet above the ground. Then they would beat me on my face, chest, and back, with the full force of their fists," he said in the report.<br />"Finally, on one occasion, I lost consciousness and was taken to hospital. After I regained consciousness at the hospital, I was once again taken back to prison where they continued the practice of hanging me from the ceiling and beating me."<br />LITTLE PROGRESS<br />China has vowed to stamp out torture in its judicial system, described as widespread by some critics, in the face of international and domestic pressure.<br />Last month, the U.N. Committee Against Torture, in a rare public review of China's record, expressed dissatisfaction with a "very serious information gap" about abuses in the country where criminal justice information is often considered a state secret. Free Tibet, in the report issued to coincide with International Human Rights Day, said Chinese laws aimed at protecting detainees were regularly ignored in Tibet.<br />"The international community can no longer hide behind sound bites condemning China's human rights track record in Tibet and must now take specific actions to reverse the worsening crisis in Tibet," Brigden added.<br />China and envoys of the Dalai Lama have been meeting on and off for the past few years, but with little to show for their talks.<br />Beijing has rejected the Dalai Lama's calls for greater autonomy as being part of a plot for covert independence.<br />Wednesday, the semi-official China News Service quoted Si Ta, a deputy head of the United Front Work Department which handles relations with non-Communists and ethnic and religious minorities, as repeating that the door to talks was always open.<br />"The Party still has expectations of the Dalai Lama and plenty of patience, but 'Tibet independence', 'half independence' or 'covert independence' are unacceptable," it paraphrased him as saying in Washington.<br />(Editing by Nick Macfie)</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Court hears September 11 abuse case versus top aides<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />By James Vicini<br />Supreme Court justices voiced concern on Wednesday about including top U.S. government officials in a lawsuit by a Pakistani man claiming abuse while imprisoned in New York after the September 11 attacks in 2001.<br />They questioned whether Javaid Iqbal, who was held more than a year after the attacks, can proceed with his lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller without more evidence to support his claims.<br />"I don't know on what basis any of these allegations against the high-level officials are made," Justice Antonin Scalia told Alexander Reinert, the attorney arguing for Iqbal.<br />The Bush administration's top courtroom lawyer, Solicitor General Gregory Garre, argued that Ashcroft and Mueller have immunity, that they cannot be held personally liable and that the lawsuit against them must be dismissed.<br />The issue before the Supreme Court involved only whether the lawsuit against Ashcroft and Mueller can continue and did not address the claims of mistreatment by other current and former government officials.<br />Garre said the policy the two top law enforcement officials adopted after the September 11 attacks was to hold the suspects until cleared by the FBI. He denied Iqbal's claim that Ashcroft and Mueller approved of discriminatory acts or misconduct by lower-level officials.<br />Iqbal, a Muslim, said in the lawsuit he was subjected to verbal and physical abuse and to unlawful ethnic and religious discrimination.<br />Chief Justice John Roberts expressed doubt to Reinert that the lawsuit against Ashcroft and Mueller can go forward.<br />"What you have to allege are some facts showing that they knew of a policy that was discriminatory based on ethnicity and country of origin," Roberts said.<br />Besides Ashcroft and Mueller, Iqbal sued about 30 other current or former U.S. government officials, including the warden at the detention facility and the director of the federal Bureau of Prisons. He seeks unspecified damages.<br />Justice John Paul Stevens asked whether the lawsuit against the lower-level officials could go forward, that Mueller and Ashcroft could be dismissed as defendants for now and added later if evidence turned up against them.<br />In the weeks after the September 11 attacks, U.S. authorities detained 762 noncitizens, almost all Muslims or Arabs. Many of those held at the federal prison in Brooklyn suffered verbal and physical abuse, the U.S. Justice Department's inspector general found.<br />Justice Stephen Breyer said the U.S. government takes the position that those detained came from the same region of the world as the September 11 hijackers and the detention policy was adopted with the purpose of preventing further attacks.<br />He questioned Reinert on whether the lawsuit should be allowed to drag on for years and take up the time of Ashcroft and Mueller.<br />Iqbal was arrested for having false Social Security papers. He pleaded guilty in 2002, was released in 2003 and deported to Pakistan. The lawsuit was filed in 2004.<br />The U.S. government paid $300,000 to settle with Iqbal's co-plaintiff and fellow detainee Ehab Elmaghraby, an Egyptian.<br />A Supreme Court ruling in the case is expected by June.<br />(Editing by David Wiessler)</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>********************</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Thousands of human bone pieces found in Argentine jail<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />BUENOS AIRES: Inside a once secret detention center where political dissidents were tortured and killed during Argentina's dictatorship 25 years ago, forensic anthropologists have discovered a pit containing 10,000 bone fragments.<br />The discovery, the first of human remains in a detention center, supports the testimony of hundreds of survivors who have said for years that the authorities tortured and killed political opponents and burned their bodies.<br />"This scientifically confirms the testimonies of the detained," said Luis Fondebrider, a forensic anthropologist who helped uncover the remains in the former detention center in La Plata known as Arana.<br />The bone fragments were unearthed between February and September, and Fondebrider and his team announced Tuesday that the remains were human. Now, months of laboratory work is needed to determine even the minimum number of bodies that were destroyed in the pit.<br />But the evidence already shows that bodies were thrown into the pit, covered with fuel and burned along with tires, to mask the smell of burning flesh. More than 200 bullet marks were found along an adjacent wall.<br />The bones were not completely reduced to ash, allowing for genetic analysis to identify the dead. But Fondebrider cautioned that it would not be possible to identify many of the victims, because prolonged exposure to fire destroys most DNA.<br />"This is the first time there is proof that Arana wasn't only a detention and torture center, but also a center of elimination," said Marta Vedio, legal chairwoman for the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights La Plata.<br />Some backers of the military dictatorship have denied that detainees were tortured or killed, despite the well-documented toll from the so-called dirty war, a crackdown in which political opponents of the junta disappeared with their spouses, children and other innocent people whose names were in their address books.<br />Official records put the number who disappeared at 13,000. Human rights groups say 30,000 were killed.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Australia plans to test Web filter</strong><br />By Meraiah Foley<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />SYDNEY: The Australian government plans to test a nationwide Web filter that would require Internet service providers to block access to thousands of sites containing illegal content.<br />The proposed filter is part of a 125.8 million Australian dollar, or $82 million, "cyber-safety plan" begun in May with the goals of protecting children and stopping adults from downloading content whose possession is illegal in Australia, like child pornography or terrorist materials.<br />But the plan has sparked opposition from online advocacy groups and industry experts who say it would slow browsing speeds and do little to block undesirable content.<br />Last month, the minister of communications, Stephen Conroy, invited Internet service providers, or ISPs, and mobile phone operators to participate in a live trial of the program, which is set to begin this year.<br />The proposed system consists of two tiers. Under the first, all Australian service providers would be required to block access to around 10,000 Web sites on a list maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the federal monitor that oversees film classifications.<br />The second tier would require service providers to offer an optional filter that individuals could apply to block material deemed unsuitable for children.<br />The government says the list, which is not available to the public, includes only illegal content, mostly child pornography. But critics worry that the filter could be used to block sites focused on what some consider controversial topics, like gambling or euthanasia.<br />"Even if the scheme is introduced with the best of intentions, there will be enormous political pressure on the government to expand the list," said Colin Jacobs, the vice chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia, a technology advocacy firm. "We worry that the scope of the list would expand at a very rapid rate."<br />The proposal has sparked a flurry of anxious chatter on social networking sites like Facebook, where thousands of users said they planned to attend protests Saturday.<br />More than 85,000 users have also signed an online petition created by GetUp, an advocacy group that calls the mandatory filter "a serious threat to our democratic values."<br />Some industry experts have also criticized the plan.<br />Mark White, the chief operating officer at iiNet, one of the largest Australian ISPs, said the filter would have a limited impact because it would not monitor illegal activity on peer-to-peer or file-sharing networks, where most child pornography and other illicit content is exchanged. The filter would also slow Internet browsing speeds for all regardless of whether they were trying to access forbidden sites, he said. iiNet has agreed to take part in the trial.<br />This concern has been affirmed by the government's own research. A July report by the communications authority found that lab tests of six unidentified Internet filtering programs showed mixed results: The best filter slowed browsing speeds by 2 percent; the other five made the Internet run between 22 percent and 87 percent slower.<br />The study found that filtering programs were effective at blocking illicit material around 92 percent of the time, but that around 3 percent of legitimate sites were mistakenly caught up in the filters.<br />The country's largest service provider, Telstra, has also expressed doubts about the plan. The firm's chief operating, Greg Winn, said last week that using service-provider filters to stop illicit content was "like trying to boil the ocean." As soon as the filter was applied, he said, someone would find a way to break it.<br />Winn's reasoning about the plan was flawed, said Clive Hamilton, a senior ethics professor at the Australian National University, who supports the idea of banishing some sites over content.<br />"The laws that mandate upper speed limits do not stop people from speeding," he said. "Does that mean that we should not have those laws?<br />Meanwhile, Conroy says he and the government are open to feedback from Internet industry groups and the public as it presses forward with the plan.<br />On Tuesday, the minister introduced a blog seeking comment on the country's digital future.<br />In an e-mail message, Conroy said the government was taking note of the industry's concerns about the technical limitations of the proposed filter. He added that the trial would provide "an invaluable opportunity for ISPs to inform the government's approach."</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>***********************</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Greece defends its stance as clashes resume</strong><br />By Rachel Donadio and Anthee Carassava<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />ATHENS: The Greek government on Wednesday defended its response to the crisis that has gripped the country since a teenager was fatally shot in a clash with the police last weekend, saying that leaders in Athens had chosen not to crack down on a violent minority in an effort to avoid further bloodshed.<br />Even as new clashes erupted during a general strike that disrupted transportation, schools and services throughout Greece, a government spokesman said he expected the crisis to tail off in due course.<br />"I think it's going to fade out," said Panos Livadas, general secretary of the Information Ministry. "I think reason will prevail. I also think we will keep on doing our best not to have a future risk of innocent life. No more innocent blood. It's O.K. if we have to wait a day or two."<br />The statement coincided with an offer by Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis to compensate shopkeepers whose premises have been damaged in the riots that have swept Greece since Saturday, when the teenager, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 15, was shot and killed by the police.<br />Tensions remained high on Wednesday in Athens and other major cities. Clashes erupted outside the Parliament building, where several thousand demonstrators had gathered to mark the general strike, and also outside the main Athens courthouse, where two police officers involved in the shooting that sparked the riots were testifying behind closed doors. The riot police reacted by firing tear gas as youths hurled rocks and gasoline bombs.<br />Meanwhile, the policemen's lawyer, Alexis Cougias, told reporters that a ballistics examination showed that Grigoropoulos was killed by a ricochet and not a direct shot, The Associated Press reported. One of the officers had said that he had fired warning shots and did not shoot directly at the boy.<br />There was no comment from prosecutors, who do not make public statements on pending cases.<br />The general strike on Wednesday was a new blow to the government after four days of violent protests.<br />Airports were severely affected by the strike as air traffic controllers walked out. Scores of international and local flights were grounded, the state news media reported. Railways, subway and bus lines were virtually halted, as were intercity bus services.<br />But while labor unions went ahead with the national strike, they called off a planned protest to help limit the disorder that has unfurled through the country. Dozens of people have been arrested in the past four days as rioters have fought with the police and rampaged in Athens and other cities.<br />The general strike was originally called to press economic demands for increased pay and to protest belt-tightening measures put forward by the government.<br />But the antigovernment movement acquired new impetus after the shooting on Saturday.<br />While clashes between the police and students have been common in Greece for decades, the ferocity of the reaction to the boy's death took the nation — and its government — by surprise. Outrage over the death was widespread, fueled by what experts say is a growing frustration with unemployment and corruption in one of the European Union's consistently underperforming economies, worsened by global recession.<br />But it was expressed in violence in the streets by student anarchists. They had been quiet for several years but seemed revived by the crisis. Karamanlis, hanging on to power in Parliament by only one vote, has seemed frozen, his government, once popular but now scandal-ridden, increasingly under pressure.<br />"He's seriously troubled" about the riots, said Nicholas Karahalios, a strategy adviser to the prime minister. "Whereas before we were dealing with a political and economic crisis, now there's a third dimension attached to it: a security crisis which exacerbates the situation."<br />More demonstrations were expected in the national strike Wednesday.<br />On Tuesday, bands of militant youths threw gasoline bombs and smashed shop windows in central Athens, as rioters battled with the police here in the capital and in Salonika, Greece's second largest city. In the port city of Patras, residents tried to protect their shops from rioters, while other rioters blocked the police station, the authorities said.<br />While widespread and violent, the protests on Tuesday were seen as slightly smaller than those the day before, when after dark hundreds of professed anarchists broke the windows of upscale shops, banks and hotels in central Athens and burned a large Christmas tree in the plaza in front of Parliament.<br />At the Athens police headquarters, a spokesman said 12 police officers had been wounded in fighting with demonstrators that flared at 10 major locations around the Greek capital on Monday night. He said 87 protesters had been arrested and 176 people briefly detained because of the confrontations.<br />In the shattered city center on Tuesday, street-cleaning trucks tackled the mess. Mayor Nikitas Kaklamanis advised Athenians not to drive into the area and asked them to keep their trash indoors; rioters burned 160 big garbage containers in the streets on Monday night.<br />On Tuesday, the opposition leader, George Papandreou, a Socialist, renewed his call for early elections. Yet it remained unclear whether the riots would cause the government to fall or whether the current stalemate would continue.<br />"What I foresee is a prolonged political crisis with no immediate results for two or three years," said George Kirtsos, a political commentator and the publisher of City Press, an independent newspaper. "In that time, the country will be going from bad to worse."<br />On Tuesday, as youths scuffled with the police outside Parliament, Prime Minister Karamanlis met with his cabinet council and opposition leaders in an effort to get their backing for security operations. But he seemed uncertain exactly how to contain the disturbances. The authorities seem to fear that cracking down on the demonstrators may lead to other unintended deaths, provoking more rioting.<br />Asked why the riots had not been contained, a spokesman for the national police, Panayiotis Stathis, said, "Violence cannot be fought with violence."<br />But in a news conference, Karamanlis issued warnings somewhat stronger than his actions, saying there would be no leniency for rioters.<br />"No one has the right to use this tragic incident as an alibi for actions of raw violence, for actions against innocent people, their property and society as a whole, and against democracy," Karamanlis said after an emergency meeting with President Karolos Papoulias.<br />Karamanlis faced criticism for not acting with a stronger hand earlier, with some suggesting that this gave credibility to the rioters' anger.<br />"They chose to show tolerance, which backfired," said Nikos Kostandaras, the editor of Kathimerini, a daily newspaper. The riots, he added, "were radicalizing every sector of the population."<br />On Tuesday, schools and universities were closed, and thousands of teachers and students joined generally peaceful protests through Athens.<br />George Dimitriou, 22, a member of the agriculture students' union, said the teenager's death was an opportunity to protest other issues. "Our generation is facing a tougher future than our parents," Dimitriou said as he stood outside Athens University. "This is unheard of, because normally things get better."<br />Demonstrations, even occasionally violent ones, are nothing new in Greece, which has a long history of political protest and has been relatively tolerant of the professed anarchist groups that routinely hold antigovernment demonstrations.<br />To many Greeks, scarred by the memories of military rule in the 1970s, the police remain a hostile remnant of the military junta.<br />While Greece has a comparatively high ratio of more than 45,000 police officers for 10.7 million people, in the popular imagination, they are seen as ineffective and corrupt, so many Greeks view the police as a fair target for regular demonstrations.<br />The 15-year-old whose death is at the heart of the disturbances was shot on Saturday night while carousing with friends in the Athens neighborhood of Exarchia, where youths routinely battle the police. The police have said he died when officers clashed with a mob of some 30 youths.<br />One police officer has been charged with premeditated manslaughter in the case and another as an accomplice.</div><div></div><div>*</div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIYsOdcgLviyLMDM0DazYr-0jbo7yhOTzLEGYYOahlEnFSxkIdyDlB5SpQ1DFvqVkuudIoBuhmU8P2C1sKy00WlgNcuvvzxuow_MamYsBY74TRsJOWN6ZKSzuRuoklxAYSF1tM9xwCoyY/s1600-h/DSC02970.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278393134702276674" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIYsOdcgLviyLMDM0DazYr-0jbo7yhOTzLEGYYOahlEnFSxkIdyDlB5SpQ1DFvqVkuudIoBuhmU8P2C1sKy00WlgNcuvvzxuow_MamYsBY74TRsJOWN6ZKSzuRuoklxAYSF1tM9xwCoyY/s320/DSC02970.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>L. came over in evening.</strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>**************</strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>Britain to begin Iraq withdrawal in March</strong><br />By John F. Burns<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />LONDON: Britain's remaining troops in Iraq will begin withdrawing from the country in March on a timetable that will aim to leave only a small training force of 300 to 400 by June, according to Defense Ministry officials quoted by the BBC and several of Britain's major newspapers on Wednesday.<br />The long-expected drawdown of the British force next year from its current level of 4,100 troops will bring an effective end to Britain's role as the principal partner of the United States in the occupation of Iraq. In the invasion in March 2003, a British force of more than 46,000 troops participated in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.<br />In July, Prime Minister Gordon Brown already outlined a tentative plan for withdrawing most of Britain's remaining troops early in 2009 but gave no fixed timetable and left open the number of troops who would be returning home. The Defense Ministry issued a statement after the flurry of news reports about the withdrawal that did not deny their accuracy. Although the ministry did not confirm that March would mark the beginning of the drawdown, it confirmed that the ministry was "expecting to see a fundamental change of mission in early 2009."<br />As for the timetable involved in the withdrawal, the statement added, "Our position remains that we will judge it on military advice at the time."<br />The leaking of the British withdrawal plan appeared to have been prompted, at least in part, by President-elect Barack Obama's triumph in the presidential election last month, and his plans to draw up a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.<br />Brown's determination to withdraw Britain's Iraq contingent ahead of a general election that must be held here by June 2010 has led to months of edgy negotiations with the Bush administration.<br />American military commanders have contingency plans for American troops to replace the departing British units at their base outside Basra, the principal city in southern Iraq, and the British news reports on Wednesday said that was now a firm plan. But there has been no announcement of the shift from the Pentagon, possibly because the planning process there is now caught up with the Bush-Obama transition that will not be complete until Obama's inauguration in January.<br />Britain's plans - and its talks with Washington - have been complicated by pressure from the Bush Administration on the Brown government to couple the British drawdown in Iraq with an increase of British troop strength in Afghanistan. It is a demand that is not likely to relent under Obama, who has said that he plans to increase U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan as he refocuses the American military effort to make Afghanistan the focus of the American war on terrorism.<br />In recent months, British officials have been unwilling to commit to increase British troop strength in Afghanistan, though there have been signs that their position may ease after Obama takes office. A force of 7,800 British soldiers - proportional to populations of Britain and the United States, a commitment similar in size to the 33,000 American troops in Afghanistan - has been engaged in fierce combat with the Taliban in the southwestern province of Helmand. The British force is second only in size to the American force among more than 30 nations that have troops in Afghanistan.<br />British commanders have said that they need to get their troops out of Iraq without immediately recommitting them to Afghanistan as part of a broader plan to lower the "operational tempo" of Britain's military commitments, which have placed severe strains on Britain's armed forces. They have also said they are reluctant to commit more British troops to Afghanistan unless other NATO nations, including France and Germany, agree to step up their troop levels, and to share combat strains that have hitherto rested mainly on American, British and Canadian troops.<br />Meanwhile, the need to replace the departing British troops in Basra will place new strains on American commanders in Iraq. Since 2003, they have relied on British troops to maintain stability in southern Iraq and guard the vital overland supply route from Kuwait, past Basra and on into central Iraq, where most of the 130,000 American troops are based. Now, if the British reports are confirmed, they will have to detach an American force of brigade strength to the south, just as they begin drawing down their own troop levels further north.<br />The news reports, in The Times and The Guardian, among other British publications, quoted senior officials at the Defense Ministry as saying that the British force would be replaced by a brigade of 4,000 to 5,000 American troops, under a two-star American general, who would take over the base at Basra airport that has served as Britain's headquarters throughout the conflict.<br />All but a few hundred of the British troops remaining in Iraq are based at the airport, after withdrawing from outposts in the city of Basra last year. Like the departing British troops, the American force taking over at Basra would combine the task of protecting the supply route to the north with the role of a strategic reserve to Iraqi troops in Basra and elsewhere in southern Iraq, including the troublesome city of Amarah, northeast of Basra, the British reports said.<br />The British withdrawal will include the special forces troops, mainly from the Special Air Service, who have been partnered with American special forces at a base outside Baghdad, the British news reports said. Special forces operations have played a vital role in the Iraq conflict, and American commanders have said in the past that the role of the British contingent, involving a few hundred men, has been central to the special forces' success.<br />According to The Guardian and The Times, the 300 to 400 British service personnel who will remain after the drawdown will include a small force at the coalition forces' headquarters in Baghdad, where a British three-star general has until now served as deputy commander to the four-star American general in overall command of coalition forces in Iraq, currently General Raymond Odierno.<br />The remaining British contingent will mainly be assigned to tasks in the training of Iraq's armed forces, including the development of the country's fledgling navy, based at the port of Umm Qasr south of Basra, and officer training for the Iraqi army at colleges in Basra and Baghdad, the British newspaper reports said. Since early in the occupation, Iraq's main officer training academy outside Baghdad has been mainly a British responsibility.<br />Prime Minister Brown and other senior officials have been saying for months that British forces have largely fulfilled the mission of stabilizing the situation in Basra and the neighboring provinces in southern Iraq, and mentoring the Iraqi forces that have taken over day-to-day responsibility for security in the region. Their goal now, they have said, is to transit to a military relationship with Iraq similar to the ones Britain has with many other developing countries, centering on training local forces.<br />The withdrawal plan outlined in the British news reports appeared to have preempted a formal statement on its plans for Iraq that the government has promised to make in the parliament. The delay in making the statement appears to have reflected the delicate negotiations in recent months with Washington, and the need, since Obama's election, to reach agreement with the incoming administration, a process likely to have been eased, at least to some extent, by Obama's decision to retain Robert Gates, President George W. Bush's defense secretary, in the post.<br />By using a background briefing by senior defense officials to leak details of its plans to pull most of its troops out of the country in the next six months, instead of waiting for a formal statement in the House of Commons, the Brown government may have been hoping to send a political signal to opponents of the Iraq war in Britain, where opposition to the Iraq war has been intense, without appearing to jump the gun on its talks with Washington.</div><div><br /></div><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong></div><div align="center"><br />Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-56605363174486068352008-12-10T08:28:00.018+01:002008-12-10T11:37:19.649+01:00APlace in the Auvergne, Tuesday, 9th December 2008<div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong>Life sentence for failed bomb attempt in Germany </strong></div><strong><div align="justify"><br /></strong>By Nicholas Kulish<br />Wednesday, December 10, 2008<br />BERLIN: One of the two men behind a failed terrorist attack on commuter trains here received a life sentence from a German court on Tuesday.<br />The man, Youssef Muhammad el-Hajdib, was convicted on multiple counts of attempted murder for leaving two suitcase bombs on the trains in Cologne in July 2006 that failed to explode. The unsuccessful attack, reminiscent of the train bombing that killed 191 people in Madrid in 2004, deeply rattled Germany, which had just finished hosting some two million visitors for the World Cup soccer tournament.<br />Hajdib, 24, and his lawyers argued that the propane gas devices were never meant to explode and the attack was staged to incite fear.<br />The regional superior court in Düsseldorf agreed instead with prosecutors that Germany "never stood closer to an Islamist attack."<br />"The fact that it did not result in a devastating bloodbath with a multitude of dead was only thanks to a construction error by the culprit and his accomplice in building the detonation devices," said Ottmar Breidling, the presiding judge in the case. "It was their explicit aim to kill as many nonbelievers as possible."<br />Germany has not suffered a successful Islamist terror attack, as Britain, Spain and the United States have, but security officials say there have been several narrow misses. The September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington were planned and organized in part in Hamburg.<br />Police found the two unexploded suitcase bombs on trains in Dortmund and Koblenz. Hajdib was arrested in Kiel several weeks later after police released video from surveillance cameras showing el-Hajdib and his accomplice, Jihad Hamad, boarding trains with large suitcases at a Cologne train station.<br />German officials credited Lebanon's military intelligence agency for intercepting a panicked phone call Hajdib made to his family after the footage of him was broadcast here. Hamad surrendered to police in Tripoli.<br />A Lebanese court last year convicted Hamad and sentenced him to 12 years in jail for the failed bombing. The two men were motivated in part by anger over the publication in 2005 of cartoons in Denmark depicting the Prophet Muhammad, according to an investigator in the case. More Articles in World »</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong>Deadly nuclear club growing more slowly than feared</strong> </div><div align="justify"><br />By William J. Broad<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />In 1945, after the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities, J. Robert Oppenheimer expressed foreboding about the spread of nuclear arms.<br />"They are not too hard to make," he told his colleagues on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. "They will be universal if people wish to make them universal."<br />That sensibility, born where the atomic bomb itself was born, grew into a theory of technological inevitability. Because the laws of physics are universal, the theory went, it was just a matter of time before other bright minds and determined states joined the club. A corollary was that trying to stop proliferation was quite difficult if not futile.<br />But nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth. In the six decades since Oppenheimer's warning, the nuclear club has grown to only nine members. What accounts for the slow spread of atomic weapons? Can anything be done to reduce it further? Is there a chance for a future that is brighter than the one Oppenheimer foresaw?<br />Two new books by three atomic weapons insiders hold out hope. The authors shatter myths, throw light on the hidden dynamics of nuclear proliferation and suggest new ways to reduce the threat.<br />Neither book endorses the view held by Oppenheimer that bombs are relatively easy to make. Both document national paths to acquiring nuclear weapons that have been rocky and dependent on the willingness of spies and politicians to divulge state secrets.<br />Thomas Reed, a veteran of the Livermore weapons laboratory in California and a former secretary of the air force, and Danny Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, have teamed up in "The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation" to show the importance of moles, scientists with divided loyalties and - most important - the subtle and not so subtle interests of nuclear states.<br />"Since the birth of the nuclear age," they write, "no nation has developed a nuclear weapon on its own, although many claim otherwise."<br />Among other things, the book details how secretive aid from France and China helped spawn five more nuclear-armed states.<br />It also names many conflicted scientists, including luminaries like Isidor Rabi. The Nobel laureate worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II and later sat on the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science, a birthplace of Israel's nuclear arms.<br />Secret cooperation extended to the secluded sites where nations tested their handiwork in thundering blasts. The book says, for instance, that China opened its sprawling desert test site to Pakistan, letting its client test a first bomb there on May 26, 1990.<br />That alone rewrites atomic weapons history. It casts new light on the reign of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister of Pakistan and helps explain how the country was able to respond so quickly in May 1998 when India conducted five nuclear tests.<br />"It took only two weeks and three days for the Pakistanis to field and fire a nuclear device of their own," the book notes.<br />In another disclosure, the book says China "secretly extended the hospitality of the Lop Nur nuclear test site to the French."<br />The authors build their narrative on deep knowledge of the arms and intelligence worlds, including those outside the United States. Stillman has toured heavily guarded nuclear sites in China and Russia, and both men have developed close ties with foreign peers.<br />In their acknowledgments, they thank American Cold Warriors like Edward Teller as well as two former CIA directors, saying the intelligence experts "guided our searches."<br />Robert Norris, an atomic weapons historian and author of "Racing for the Bomb," an account of the Manhattan Project, praised the book for "remarkable disclosures of how nuclear knowledge was shared overtly and covertly with friends and foes."<br />The book is technical in places, as when detailing the exotica of nuclear arms. But it reads like a labor of love built on two lifetimes of scientific adventure. It is due out in January from Zenith Press.<br />Its wide perspective reveals how states quietly shared complex machinery and secrets with one another.<br />All trails of atomic-weapons information stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One began with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan Project. Stalin was so enamored of the intelligence haul, Reed and Stillman note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica of the weapon the United States had dropped on Nagasaki.<br />Moscow freely shared its atomic-related intelligence thefts with Mao Zedong, China's leader. The book says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave the mastermind of Mao's weapons program a detailed tutorial on the Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its first blast.<br />The book, in a main disclosure, discusses how China in 1982 made a policy decision to flood the developing world with atomic weapons know-how. Its identified clients include Algeria, Pakistan and North Korea.<br />Alarmingly, the authors say China created one bomb designed as an "export design" that nearly "anybody could build." The blueprint for the simple plan has traveled from Pakistan to Libya and, the authors say, Iran. That path is widely assumed among intelligence officials, but Tehran has repeatedly denied the charge.<br />The book sees a quiet repercussion of China's proliferation policy in the Algerian desert. Built in secrecy, the reactor there now makes enough plutonium each year to fuel one atom bomb and is ringed by anti-aircraft missiles, the book says.<br />China's deck also held a wild card: its aid to Pakistan helped A.Q. Khan, a rogue Pakistani metallurgist who sold nuclear gear on the global black market. The authors compare Khan to "a used-car dealer" happy to sell his complex machinery to suckers who had no idea how hard it was to make fuel for a bomb.<br />Why did Beijing spread its atomic weapons knowledge so freely? The authors speculate that it either wanted to strengthen the enemies of China's enemies (for instance, Pakistan as a counterweight to India) or, more chillingly, to encourage nuclear wars or terrorism in foreign lands from which Beijing would emerge as the "last man standing."<br />A lesser pathway involves France. The book says it drew on Manhattan Project veterans and shared intimate details of its bomb program with Israel, with whom it had substantial commercial ties. By 1959, the book says, dozens of Israeli scientists "were observing and participating in" the French program of weapons design.<br />The book adds that in early 1960, when France detonated its first bomb, doing so in the Algerian desert, "two nations went nuclear." And it describes how the United States turned a blind eye to Israel's own atomic weapons developments. It adds that, in the autumn of 1966, Israel conducted a special, non-nuclear test "2,600 feet under the Negev desert." The next year it built its first bomb.<br />Israel, in turn, shared its atomic weapons secrets with South Africa. The book discloses that the two states exchanged some key ingredients for the making of atom bombs: tritium to South Africa, uranium to Israel. And the authors agree with military experts who hold that Israel and South Africa in 1979 jointly detonated a nuclear device in the South Atlantic near Prince Edward Island, more than 1,000 miles, or 1,600 kilometers, south of Cape Town. Israel needed the test, it says, to develop a neutron bomb.<br />The authors charge that South Africa at one point targeted Luanda, the capital of neighboring Angola, "for a nuclear strike if peace talks failed."<br />South Africa dismantled six nuclear arms in 1990 but retains much expertise. Today, the authors write, "South African technical mercenaries may be more dangerous than the underemployed scientists of the former Soviet Union" because they have no real home in Africa.<br />"The Bomb: A New History," due out in January from Ecco Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, plows similar ground less deeply but looks more widely at proliferation curbs and diplomacy. It is by Stephen Younger, the former head of nuclear arms at Los Alamos and former director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon.<br />Younger disparages what he calls myths suggesting that "all the secrets of nuclear weapons design are available on the Internet." He writes that France, despite secretive aid, struggled initially to make crude bombs - a point he saw with his own eyes during a tour of a secretive French museum that is closed to the public. That trouble, he says, "suggests we should doubt assertions that the information required to make a nuclear weapon is freely available."<br />The two books draw on atomic weapons history to suggest a mix of old and new ways to defuse the proliferation threat. Both see past restraints as fraying and the task as increasingly urgent.<br />Reed and Stillman see politics - not spies or military ambitions - as the primary force in the development and spread of nuclear arms. States repeatedly stole and leaked secrets because they saw such action as in their geopolitical interest.<br />Beijing continues to be a major threat, they argue. While urging global responses like better intelligence, better inspections and better safeguarding of nuclear materials, they also see generational change in China as a great hope in plugging the atomic weapons information leaks.<br />"We must continue to support human rights within Chinese society, not just as an American export, but because it is the dream of the Tiananmen Square generation," they write. "In time those youngsters could well prevail, and the world will be a less contentious place."</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center"><strong>Terror from the sea</strong> </div><div align="justify"><br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div align="justify">By H.D.S. Greenway<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />What if by sea? With security tightening on the land routes into the United States from Canada and Mexico, and with new warnings that the United States could face a nuclear or biological attack within five years, could the next outrage come through America's largely unguarded ocean frontiers?<br />The distance from Karachi to Mumbai is about the same as from Haiti to Miami, Tampico to Houston, Halifax to Boston, and Baja, California, to Los Angeles, says an old shipmate from my Navy days. Wouldn't it be simple for terrorists to acquire a ship, perhaps a fishing trawler, and sail it into any number of ports virtually undetected?<br />"There is now no routine surveillance of the broad oceanic approaches to the homeland," he says. "Only in the close approaches to major U.S. ports does the Coast Guard maintain the type of active radar coverage essential to the control of shipping, and this surveillance is focused on the relatively large commercial ships ..."<br />Because he is still involved with government work he asked that I not use his name.<br />Much thought has been given to the possibility that mass death could arrive in a closed container aboard a container vessel, and be shipped directly from its port of entry to anywhere in the United States. Efforts are made to inspect ships in their ports of departure, with the cooperation of foreign governments, but even so only a tiny fraction get inspected.<br />But my friend argues that terrorists, having gone to great effort to acquire their death-dealing devices, might not be willing to consign them to commercial shipping systems.<br />"There is no system in place for detecting and investigating the larger number of ocean-going, noncommercial vessels plying our coastal waters that are capable of carrying weapons of mass destruction," he says.<br />A yacht could slip into Miami from the Caribbean virtually undetected and blow the city to smithereens. A small freighter offshore could launch smaller attack boats, as the Somali pirates do, and as was done in Mumbai, and remain undetected until too late.<br />The same would be true of any number of European ports, especially in the Mediterranean with close proximity to the discontent of North Africa. It wouldn't have to be nuclear to do great damage. One remembers the French ammunition ship that blew up by accident in Halifax harbor during World War I, devastating the city. Port cities everywhere are vulnerable to what would be powerful, maritime truck bombs.<br />Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard officer, now at the Council on Foreign Relations, points out that in addition to our sea ports, most of America's inland cities are located along waterways, "and the level of patrols is next to none. We are very exposed to water-borne attack."<br />My ex-Navy friend thinks we need a sea-traffic control system, "analogous to the one that manages all air traffic. But, politically, this is proving to be very hard. Commercial and general aviation grew up under the eye of government air traffic control systems. Seafaring has been unregulated and uncontrolled since the beginning of time," he says. There is no mandatory identification system for smaller boats entering U.S. waters.<br />The Coast Guard does have a "Marine Domain Awareness" program, and a volunteer auxiliary in which civilians donate their time, their boats, and sometimes planes, to patrol U.S. coasts and harbors looking out for anything unusual. According to Flynn, this is probably the best way to thwart an attack because terrorists like to carry out surveillance and make dry practice runs. People who work U.S. waterfronts and in coastal waters are in the best position to notice something strange.<br />Flynn thinks this should be greatly expanded, with Homeland Security "engaging with the maritime public, yacht clubs, fishermen, coastal home owners, dock workers, and the like, telling them what to look for." He says the British are much better at alerting communities than we are.<br />Drug runners now use semi-submersible submarines to avoid detection. Terrorists could follow suit with something much worse than heroin aboard. The 9/11 attacks came from the air from America's own airports. The fire next time could come undetected, as my Navy friend says, from the "great anonymity of the ocean."</div><div align="justify"><br /></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong>0433</strong></div><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMRIvjhhM-aW4a9CzY7utdN8fqVoQ8DO60fdeh94gUBxri1XqlywNr0jvBuda73kmB36Alrv1q-8H7TUf-8a5PhCkkW3DsjxqgWL7RI8zr5fBEi_iaSAeq8NdH1D-o0sQkBcvJ30CdQfU/s1600-h/DSC02828.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062639883180370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMRIvjhhM-aW4a9CzY7utdN8fqVoQ8DO60fdeh94gUBxri1XqlywNr0jvBuda73kmB36Alrv1q-8H7TUf-8a5PhCkkW3DsjxqgWL7RI8zr5fBEi_iaSAeq8NdH1D-o0sQkBcvJ30CdQfU/s320/DSC02828.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>IW:</strong><br /><br /><strong>The snow's coming. Bad day. Make things white, I need it. </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Knee not good, computer crashed out on me; back to bed; drugs, sleep; back to computer; drugs, sleep. </strong><br /><p><strong>Where are you? Where are you?</strong></p><p></p><p><br /><br /></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQgH-WNVrle80HYVckRrCcgZtBNjMJNVu9O8E-0wRMCzMczmLD8_jEEYYKGw0fYhStMy9XZc21wDjKNgWiWY0NGDJ4IwVOAi01gq6gA68pMB-OGgC1ai66I_Ou_QMqQ4-pWnHcEonT1FU/s1600-h/DSC02829.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062632697604898" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQgH-WNVrle80HYVckRrCcgZtBNjMJNVu9O8E-0wRMCzMczmLD8_jEEYYKGw0fYhStMy9XZc21wDjKNgWiWY0NGDJ4IwVOAi01gq6gA68pMB-OGgC1ai66I_Ou_QMqQ4-pWnHcEonT1FU/s320/DSC02829.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /></p><p> </p><p><strong>Nearly 1 billion people hungry<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Silvia Aloisi<br />High food prices helped push another 40 million people into hunger this year, the U.N.'s food agency said on Tuesday, raising the number of undernourished people in the world to 963 million.<br />A report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that said fewer and fewer people can afford decent meals, especially in Asia and Africa, despite a fall in food prices, gave a hollow ring to pledges to cut world poverty.<br />"High food prices have had a devastating effect on the most vulnerable and insecure part of the world's population," Kostas Stamoulis, head of FAO's agricultural and development economics division, told a news conference presenting the report.<br />He said unreplenished food stocks, price volatility and the global financial crisis continue to hurt food security, while food prices on domestic markets remain at record high levels.<br />The cost of food staples began rocketing in 2006 because of a spike in commodity prices, and reached a peak in June 2008.<br />While the global economic downturn has pushed prices of food items down since then, the FAO's food price index was still 28 percent higher in October than two years earlier.<br />But even before the food price surge and this year's financial turmoil, the number of hungry people kept rising steadily, despite a U.N. Millennium Development Goal to halve the proportion of the world's undernourished people by 2015.<br />Some 923 million people were suffering from hunger in 2007, up from 848 million in 2003-05 and 842 million in 1990-1992.<br />FAO preliminary estimates are that 14 percent of the world's population was undernourished this year, up from 12.9 percent in 2003-05 and only slightly lower than 15.8 percent in 1990-92.<br />EMPTY PROMISES<br />The head of FAO, Jacques Diouf, has been sounding alarm bells for years about the lack of progress in the fight against hunger.<br />"In 2006, I said that at this rate we would achieve the Millennium Goal not by 2015, but by 2150," he said on Tuesday.<br />The vast majority -- 907 million people -- of the world's hungry live in developing nations. Of these, 65 percent live in just seven 7 countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia.<br />In June, Diouf hosted a global food summit and said $30 billion a year were needed to boost farm output in developing countries. He said that represented just 8 percent of what more developed nations spent to support their agriculture sectors.<br />That conference produced no firm political commitments or policy changes, and since then the world's richest countries have poured hundreds of billions into their economies to fight a fast-spreading international recession.<br />Diouf acknowledged that the goal of halving the number of hungry people by 2015 looked increasingly difficult to achieve, also because the global economic slump is cutting aid flows to poor countries, but he refused to throw in the towel.<br />Calling the situation "morally unacceptable," he said he had asked U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to take the lead in the fight against hunger and hold a food summit next year.<br />"Obama started his campaign with the simple words 'Yes, We Can', and I hope that will help us make it happen. I say 'Yes, We Can' but only if everybody plays their role."<br />(additional reporting by Svetlana Kovalyova in Milan)<br />(Editing by Richard Balmforth)</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>*****************<br /></p><strong></strong><p><strong></strong> </p><p><strong></strong> </p><p><strong>Hong Kong reports bird flu outbreak<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />HONG KONG: Three dead chickens tested positive for bird flu in Hong Kong, prompting the city to suspend poultry imports for 21 days and begin slaughtering 80,000 birds, an official said Tuesday.<br />"We feel that Hong Kong is facing a new alert for bird flu," said York Chow, secretary for food and health.<br />Chow said the chickens, found Monday at a farm with 60,000 birds, had the H5 virus and further tests were being done to see if they had the deadly H5N1 strain.<br />The farm and neighboring poultry operations were declared part of an infected zone, and about 80,000 birds in the area would be killed to prevent the spread of the disease, Chow said.<br />He added that the 21-day ban on poultry imports would last through the Christmas holiday, a time when chicken is an important dish in celebratory dinners.<br />Hong Kong's biggest bird flu outbreak was in 1997, when the H5N1 strain jumped to humans and killed six people. That prompted the government to slaughter all 1.5 million poultry in the territory.<br />In 2001, the government also carried out a massive poultry slaughter, killing 306,000 birds in wholesale and retail markets and 951,000 in local farms to eradicate an outbreak of bird flu. The city now has 600,000 birds, Chow said.<br />At least 245 people have died of bird flu worldwide since 2003, according to the World Health Organization.<br />Hong Kong's government has been encouraging retailers to stop selling live birds, and the majority of shops have given up their licenses to sell live poultry. But eating fresh chicken is an important part of the culture and many shoppers still want freshly slaughtered birds.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>*********************</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><strong>Irish tests find dioxins in cattle</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />DUBLIN, Ireland: Irish officials confirmed Tuesday that cattle at three farms have tested positive for dioxin the cancer-causing chemical that has contaminated its pork industry but insisted the country's beef posed no real risk to health.<br />Ireland has already ordered the withdrawal and destruction of all pork products produced since Sept. 1, a sweeping move the government says should reinforce not undermine international confidence in Ireland's food exports.<br />But Agriculture Minister Brendan Smith said the government decided not to recall any Irish beef products at home or abroad because, unlike the contamination of pork products, the level and extent of dioxin found so far in cattle is much lower.<br />Smith said the cattle with excessive dioxin levels were "technically noncompliant, but not at a level that would pose any public health concern." Still, he said Ireland would prevent the movement of any cattle or beef from the three farms in question.<br />Alan Reilly, deputy director of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, stressed that the dioxin levels found in the most contaminated cattle were just two to three times European Union safety limits, whereas pigs at nine dioxin-threatened Irish farms recorded dioxin levels 80 to 200 times too high.<br />"There's a huge difference between 200 times above a legal limit, and two to three times," Reilly said.<br />The government declined to say whether any cattle from the three farms had produced beef that went to foreign markets. Reilly said most of the beef produced since September was still in storage, being aged to improve its tenderness and taste.<br />A recall of Irish beef would do even greater damage to Ireland's recession-hit economy than its emergency shutdown Saturday of the pork industry. Ireland has 69,000 beef farms but just 400 pig farms.<br />Ireland exports 85 percent of its beef to about 35 other countries, chiefly in Europe, a trade valued at more than 1.5 billion ($2.2 billion). Irish pork generates only a third as much money and reaches 25 other countries. In both cases, neighboring Britain is Ireland's major customer.<br />Irish investigators have traced the source of the contamination to a single animal-food maker, Millstream Power Recycling Ltd., which used an oil-fired burner to dry out-of-date bread, dough and confectionary.<br />The Agriculture Department says Millstream which has been shut down pending investigations by the government and police was using a kind of oil that should never be used around food, creating fumes that infused the food with dioxins. It also failed to get the appropriate oil-burning permit from the Irish Environmental Protection Agency.<br />Authorities say Millstream supplied oil-tainted feed to at least nine pig farms and 45 cattle farms in the Republic of Ireland, and nine pig farms and 10 cattle farms in the British territory of Northern Ireland.<br />Tuesday's test results that confirmed too-high levels of dioxin in cattle at three Irish farms also cleared eight others of contamination. The Irish government declined to specify when results on the 34 other cattle farms would be confirmed.<br />But Reilly said he expected the number of total positive results to be in similar proportion to Tuesday's findings. This would mean about a quarter, or nine, more cattle farms could test positive for excessive dioxin.<br />He noted the cattle ate much less of the Millstream product than the pigs, because cows still eat mostly grass in the fall while pigs rely on man-made fodder.<br />In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, authorities announced Tuesday that none of the pig farms that received the Millstream product actually used it, which means its pork products can return immediately to store shelves and export markets. But Northern Ireland's agriculture minister, Michelle Gildernew, said she was still awaiting test results later this week on the 10 suspect cattle farms.<br />International research shows that dioxins, a family of chemicals that can accumulate and be retained for years in body fat, can lead to an increased risk of cancer.<br />Irish authorities, however, point to Europe's last major dioxin scare in Belgium in May 1999, when thousands of farms were closed after dioxin-contaminated animal feed tainted meat, eggs and dairy products to show that short-term exposure should not pose a risk.<br />"We're dealing in broad terms with the same exposure levels as in Belgium, where the follow-up showed no impact on public health," said Ireland's chief medical officer, Dr. Tony Holoran.<br />He stressed that, even if anyone ate both the dioxin-tainted beef or pork daily for the past three months, it still wouldn't be enough to cause a health problem.<br />"The risks are extremely low from any exposure that may occur. People do not need to seek any direct medical advice. We do not expect to see symptoms occurring as a result of this," Holoran said.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><strong>*****************</strong></p><p><strong></strong> </p><p><strong></strong> </p><p><strong></strong> </p><p><strong>Researchers put a microscope on food allergies</strong><br />By Karen Ann Cullotta<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />CHICAGO: For 5-year-old Sean Batson, even a grandmother's kiss is to be feared.<br />"My mother was wearing lipstick, and when she kissed Sean's cheek, it broke out in hives," said his mother, Jennifer Batson.<br />At his first birthday party, Sean had a severe allergic reaction — hives, swollen eyes, vomiting and wheezing — to his first nibble of cake. And when a toddler with an ice cream cone touched Sean's arm with sticky hands during a play date, the arm erupted in hives.<br />The daily struggle of living with Sean's allergies to nearly unavoidable foods and food products — soy, eggs and milk, traces of which can turn up even in nonfoods like lipstick — prompted Batson and her husband, Tim, to participate in a project that scientists are calling the most comprehensive food allergy study to date.<br />The international study, led by Xiaobin Wang and Jacqueline A. Pongracic of Children's Memorial Hospital here, is searching for causes of food allergy by looking at hundreds of families in Boston, Chicago and Anhui Province in China.<br />Using questionnaires and interviews, the investigators are gathering data on a broad range of environmental, genetic and health factors, among them diet, hygiene, number of pets and the children's prenatal and postnatal medical histories.<br />Wang says the study's multicenter design allows researchers to look at startling variations in the prevalence and types of food allergies across diverse populations and regions.<br />In China, for example, skin-prick testing found that large percentages of one rural population were sensitive to shellfish (16.7 percent) and peanuts (12.3 percent). Yet actual food allergies in that population, as diagnosed by physicians, were all but unheard of: less than 1 percent.<br />In the United States, by contrast, 12 million people (4 percent of the population) suffer from food allergies, according to the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, a nonprofit information and advocacy group.<br />"We found something unexpected," said Wang, director of the Smith Child Health Research Program at Children's Memorial. "The apparent dissociation between high allergic sensitization and low allergic disease in this Chinese population is not seen in our two U.S. study populations.<br />"What can explain the U.S. and China difference?" she asked. "Is it urban versus rural exposure? Diet and lifestyle? Or genetic susceptibility? These are all questions we are trying to find some clear answers for."<br />For Sean Batson and his family, a recent clinical evaluation at the hospital included a skin-prick test to establish baseline data for Sean's sister, Audrey, 1, who does not seem to have food allergies. (Neither do their parents, Tim Batson, 38, a computer programmer, and Jennifer Batson, 36, a copy editor.)<br />Sean was given a fresh skin-prick test, too. The mild discomfort was tempered by an episode of "SpongeBob SquarePants" playing on a minimonitor affixed to a cushy reclining chair.<br />Wang said her own awareness of food allergies was heightened after her twin sons started kindergarten in Boston and began bringing home an abundance of notes warning of severe food allergies among their classmates.<br />"Going back 10 to 15 years ago, during my pediatric residency training, there was very little education about food allergies," said Wang, one of 12 principal investigators who were recently awarded grants by the National Institutes of Health to conduct innovative research on food allergies.<br />Indeed, with recent data showing a marked increase in the number of food allergies, which cannot be explained by a lack of detection in years past, the institutes have begun an initiative to address food allergies as an emerging health challenge.<br />Although it is possible to be allergic to any food, eight foods account for 90 percent of all reactions — milk, eggs, peanuts, fish, shellfish, soy, wheat, and tree nuts like cashews and almonds.<br />Up to 200 deaths each year are attributed to the most severe reaction, food-induced anaphylaxis, which also results in 30,000 trips to the emergency room. Some experts suggest that children in a culture smitten with antibacterial detergents and hand sanitizers are exposed to fewer germs, depriving the immune system of its germ-fighting job and leading it to misidentify certain foods as foreign.<br />But that is still just a hypothesis, and many researchers say the causes of food allergies are highly complex, and the "hygiene hypothesis" cannot be the sole explanation.<br />Pongracic, who has been treating children with food allergies for 17 years, says even trace amounts of allergens can cause life-threatening reactions.<br />"Ultimately, we hope that our research will lead to the discovery of ways to predict which child is likely to outgrow food allergy," she wrote in an e-mail message, adding that doctors hoped to develop therapies "that can lessen the severity of an allergic reaction, and even protect against the reaction in the first place."<br />Frustration over the lack of financing for food allergy research led one Chicago-area couple, David and Denise Bunning, to donate $3 million to the study at Children's Memorial. As the parents of two sons with life-threatening food allergies, they say they hope to convince lawmakers that food allergies deserve as much public attention as other chronic childhood diseases like asthma and Type 1 diabetes.<br />"At first I thought, 'O.K., you have this one-in-a-million kid with severe food allergies, and you just have to cope,' " said Bunning, a financial trader. "But when we learned that both Bryan and Daniel had severe food allergies, there was a lot of disbelief. It felt like we were hiding from a phantom."<br />Bunning, a former teacher, added: "Now, we're pretty excited about the future findings of the allergy study. We need to start looking at food allergies not as something you pick and choose as a parent, but as a childhood disease with potentially life-threatening reactions, even death."<br /></p><p> </p><p> </p><p><br /><br />******************<br /><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /><strong>Tesco may become world No.2 retailer by 2012<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />LONDON: Tesco will overtake France's Carrefour within the next five years to become the world's second-biggest retailer by turnover behind U.S. group Wal-Mart , according to a report on Tuesday.<br />Grocery market researchers IGD forecast Tesco would achieve compound annual growth of 11 percent between 2007 and 2012, led by expansion in China, the United States and India, and boosting its annual turnover to $157.1 billion (106.5 billion pounds) by the end of the period.<br />That would just overtake Carrefour which, with forecast compound annual growth of 7 percent, would reach turnover of $157 billion by the same date, it said.<br />Wal-Mart, however, would remain way ahead, with annual turnover expected to rise over $100 billion to $476.2 billion.<br />"Emerging markets will not be immune to the global economic slowdown, yet the pace of growth will continue to outstrip that of the developed world," said Jonathan Gunz, senior business analyst at IGD.<br />"We estimate that in grocery, retail markets in China and India will each grow at a compound annual rate of 13.2 percent between 2008 and 2012, exceeding any other country in the top ten. Other emerging markets to watch include Indonesia, Ukraine and Vietnam," he added.<br /><br /><br /><br /></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb4swpadTekiG2gyRyqfnodVDgDNugHxv7rdVraRcRetNy8oF80ctEYRJIz-FYv7Fq4UxfRNz_QTvr3dKQsGBI5nKyIrgTXxJJpXrjyISxp9MehRj4Wj0s-TMDi5QIUzit_ijet35e9Nk/s1600-h/DSC02830.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062628572111394" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb4swpadTekiG2gyRyqfnodVDgDNugHxv7rdVraRcRetNy8oF80ctEYRJIz-FYv7Fq4UxfRNz_QTvr3dKQsGBI5nKyIrgTXxJJpXrjyISxp9MehRj4Wj0s-TMDi5QIUzit_ijet35e9Nk/s320/DSC02830.jpg" border="0" /></a> </p><p> </p><p><strong>Obama meets with Gore for talks on environment<br /></strong>By Brian Knowlton<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />With President-elect Barack Obama poised to fill some cabinet positions with major environmental responsibilities, he met Tuesday with the best-known American advocate of greener practices, former Vice President Al Gore, and said they agreed that "the time for delay is over."<br />Joined in the Chicago meeting by Vice President-elect Joseph Biden, Obama said that he would work with lawmakers, businesses and consumers to try to forge a consensus on an aggressive approach to global warming.<br />"This is a matter of urgency and of national security and it has to be dealt with in a serious way," Obama said.<br />There were no signs that Obama planned to offer Gore a position in his cabinet, though he said during the presidential campaign that he would rely heavily on the former vice president's advice.<br />Gore, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a year ago for his work on global warming, has denied any interest in a cabinet post. Headed this week to the international climate conference in Poznan, Poland, he has said that he believes he can be a more effective advocate for change from a position outside government.<br />Gore campaigned for Obama, notably in Florida - the state where Gore fell 537 votes short of winning the presidency in 2000, but which Obama carried by about 200,000.<br />Environmental groups are hoping for a more receptive attitude in the new administration, and have been trying to weigh in as Obama prepares - possibly this week - to nominate secretaries of energy and the interior, and perhaps a top administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency.<br />Obama has said he will spend billions, as part of a broad economic stimulus package, to increase energy efficiency in American homes, offices and factories, protect the environment and create "green" jobs.<br />That objective sounds not unlike a goal Gore set in an op-ed article last month. "We can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth."<br />Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection issued a challenge just two days after Obama's election Nov. 4 to aggressively convert all U.S. energy users to non-polluting sources within 10 years by investing substantially in wind, geothermal and solar technology, promoting efficient plug-in cars and creating a unified nationwide power grid to make it easier to shift power where it is needed.<br />Obama elected not to send a delegate to the climate talks that Gore will attend as they wind up this week in Poland, but has said he will ask U.S. lawmakers at the conference to report back to him.<br />"Once I take office," he said in a statement last month, "you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations, and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change."</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>*******************</p><p> </p><p><br /><strong>EU carbon trading system brings windfalls for some, with little benefit to climate</strong><br />By James Kanter<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: The European Union started with the most high-minded of ecological goals: to create a market that would encourage companies to reduce greenhouse gases by making them pay for each ton emitted into the atmosphere.<br />Four years later, the carbon trading system has created a multibillion-euro windfall for some of the continent's biggest polluters, with little or no noticeable benefit to the environment so far.<br />The lessons learned are coming under fresh scrutiny now, both in Europe and abroad. EU leaders will meet Thursday and Friday to work on the next phase of their system, seeking, they say, both to extend its scope and correct its flaws. And in the United States, President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to move quickly on a similar program.<br />As originally envisioned in Europe, companies would buy most if not all of the permits needed to cover their projected carbon dioxide emissions for a year, one permit good for each metric ton of CO2, the main greenhouse gas. If they produced more gases than expected, they would have to buy more permits; if they came in below target, they would be able to profit by selling their extra permits to companies that were polluting over their limit.<br />The initiative also included another, quieter goal: to raise the price of electricity by letting utilities pass along permit costs, thereby encouraging energy efficiency and innovation among customers as well.<br />But the system that emerged was far from that model.<br />After heavy lobbying by giant utilities and smokestack industries, who argued their competitiveness could be impaired, the EU all but scrapped the idea of selling permits. It gave them out for free, in such quantities that the market came close to collapsing because of a glut.<br />But in line with the original strategy, utilities in countries from Spain to Britain to Poland still put a "market value" on their books for the permits and added some of that putative cost to the prices they charged industrial customers for electricity. And they did not stop there. In one particularly contentious case, regulators in Germany accused utilities of charging customers for far more permits than they were entitled to.<br />Nowhere was this behavior more evident than at RWE, a major German power company, which has acknowledged that it is the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe. Bank analysts and environmental advocates estimate RWE had received a windfall of roughly €5 billion, or $6.5 billion at current exchange rates, in the first three years of the system, concluding in 2007 - more than any other company in Europe.<br />In a confidential summary of its findings, obtained by the International Herald Tribune, the German cartel office in late 2006 accused RWE of engaging in "abusive pricing," piling on costs for industrial clients that were "completely out of proportion" with its own costs. It called for cuts of up to 75 percent.<br />RWE settled the case last year while denying any wrongdoing. It says price increases from 2005 to 2007 predominantly reflected higher costs for hard coal and natural gas.<br />Europe's overall experience with carbon trading has been a sobering one.<br />Its implementation has been marked by maneuvers and adjustments to the original framework that have yielded significant cost benefits to many of the continent's biggest polluting industries. Meanwhile, the amount of CO2 emitted by plants and factories participating in the system rose 0.4 percent in 2006 and an additional 0.7 percent in 2007.<br />The United States is now considering a system of its own, with Obama proposing to make industries buy all of their permits. He has said he would devote $150 billion from the sale of those permits over 10 years to energy efficiency and alternative energy projects.<br />Many of the framers of the European plan, meanwhile, have thought hard about the way the legislation evolved as they prepare to take up the next phase. But they face the prospect of trying to close numerous lucrative loopholes while confronting the same tug of war between lofty environmental goals and their immediate economic costs - a challenge made even more difficult by the onset of recession.Lofty goals at the outset for curbing CO2 emissions<br />During long negotiations on the landmark Kyoto climate treaty more than a decade ago, the United States, through the administration of Bill Clinton, was the loudest in insisting on including a reference to "emissions trading" in the treaty.<br />Americans had pioneered such markets in the 1970s and used them on a broader scale during the 1990s to reduce emissions from power plants blamed for acid rain.<br />U.S. officials argued that markets were the most effective way of encouraging innovative, emission-reducing technologies.<br />The European Union initially opposed emissions trading in favor of direct taxes on polluting industries, but later agreed to trading as the price for ratification.<br />The United States, however, ended up failing to either ratify Kyoto or to require U.S. companies to enter a carbon trading market outside of the Kyoto accord. But the European Commission, the EU executive body, began working on plans to start such a system in Europe.<br />"We ourselves had invested so much in the Kyoto Protocol in choosing a global deal," Margot Wallstrom, who was the European Union environment commissioner at the time, said during a recent interview. "I was eager to put it in place as soon as possible."<br />Today, the EU system represents about 75 percent of global carbon trading - a market worth about €60 billion in 2008, according to Andreas Arvanitakis, an analyst with Point Carbon, a research company.<br />Yet from the start, Wallstrom, who is now a vice president of the European Commission, said she was lobbied heavily by governments and by companies, seeking to limit the financial burden. She would not comment on any specific contacts. But Eurelectric, the main electricity industry lobby group, and its German affiliate met often with EU environment officials to discuss the shape of the emissions trading system.<br />A decision was made to limit the initial scope to some of the most energy-intensive sectors of the economy: electricity, glass, steel, cement, and pulp and paper. They were chosen primarily because their stationary factories were easier to regulate quickly than moving targets like transport or aviation.<br />The original idea of charging for all or even most of the permits never gained traction.<br />Many politicians said they feared that burdening European industries would undercut their global competitiveness, since rivals in Asia or the United States would not have such extra costs imposed on them.<br />In addition, Europe's energy market for industrial customers was opening to cross-border competition almost simultaneously.<br />Wallstrom and other at the commission describe the decision to give away the vast majority of permits as having been a necessary concession to get all the players in Europe on board - especially at a time when the Kyoto climate treaty was under attack from the administration of President George W. Bush.<br />Still, lawmakers at the European Parliament initially sought to require industry to pay for at least 30 percent of its permits, then 15 percent. (The actual trading price on the futures market at the time ranged from €5 to €13.)<br />But after long negotiations with EU governments, the Parliament enacted a law on July 2, 2003, allowing up to 100 percent of permits to be given away until 2013. Governments could sell some of the permits, up to 5 percent, but only Denmark, Ireland, Lithuania and Hungary did.<br />Denmark sold the full 5 percent, earning 226 million Danish kroner, or more than €30 million at current exchange rates. Had all the Danish permits been sold at the same price, the government could have reaped more than €600 million for the national budget.Debate turns to arguments of jobs vs. the environment<br />The EU system is highly decentralized, reflecting the political reality of a bloc that now numbers 27 countries. Thus, the lobbying did not stop in Brussels, but moved on to national capitals, where governments were left in charge of setting emissions levels and distributing the permits to companies within their borders, often with deep political connections.<br />Germany provided a stark example of what happened next. The cross-fire between environmental advocates and politicians who expressed concern about German competitiveness - and jobs - only intensified. The Greens, a political party, was in the federal government for the first time, as junior partner with the Social Democrats of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. But the issues were resolved in an arena where energy companies have long wielded enormous political clout, and here they benefited greatly.<br />After World War II, German energy companies were largely state-controlled. Today, following years of privatization and consolidation, the four energy giants, E.ON, RWE, Energie Baden-Württemberg and Vattenfall, own 70 percent of German capacity and produce an even greater share of the electricity.<br />Jürgen Trittin, a former Greens leader who was environment minister from 1998 to 2005, recalled being heavily lobbied by executives from power companies, and by politicians from eastern Germany seeking special treatment for burning lignite, a soft brown coal that is common around central Europe and which is highly polluting.<br />The EU system put the government in the position of behaving like "a grandfather with a large family deciding what to give his favorite grandchildren for Christmas," Trittin said by telephone.<br />RWE was a special case, he said. The company was "perfectly integrated into the Ministry of Economy, with no clear border," Trittin said.<br />Wolfgang Clement, the economics minister from 2002 to 2005, had, since 1998, been premier of North Rhine-Westphalia state, where RWE is based. He joined the supervisory board of RWE Power in 2006.<br />His deputy, Georg Wilhelm Adamowitsch, was, from 1996 to 1999, the representative for federal and European affairs at another energy company, VEW, which in 2000 merged with RWE. At least three other top government officials, including Schröder himself, went to work for energy companies after leaving office.<br />Trittin recalled a five-hour "showdown" with Clement on the night of March 29, 2004, in which he lost a battle to lower the overall limit on emissions from plants and factories to 488 million tons of CO2 each year, from the level then in force of 501 million tons. Trittin said he was overruled by Clement, who, with Schröder's backing, secured a reduction of just two million tons, to 499 million.<br />Trittin said Clement accused him of "wanting to de-industrialize Germany."<br />Environmental groups were disappointed, but industry leaders were relieved. "With this compromise, steel makers can apparently now continue to sustainably produce steel in Germany," Dieter Ameling, the president of the German steel makers' association WV Stahl, was quoted at the time as saying. "The steel industry thanks minister Clement for his input."<br />The Federation of German Electricity Companies, representing utilities like RWE, expressed its "relief"' as well. "Good sense triumphed in the end," the federation chief, Eberhard Meller, was quoted as saying.<br />In a recent e-mail message, Clement did not challenge Trittin's account of the meeting, but called his claims of industry influence on the ministry "just nonsense."<br />Clement said that, during his time in government, he had "many very serious and complicated discussions" with Trittin and other Greens politicians about climate change and the economic costs of fighting it. "I reproached them - and I'm doing this still today - that at the end of their policy there is the de-industrialization of Germany," Clement reiterated. "That's our conflict."<br />Adamowitsch said by phone that he was not an "ambassador for the German energy industry" while in government or at VEW.<br />Now an independent consultant working with the Austrian government and the European Commission, Adamowitsch said that the EU emissions system had meant much greater burden for industrial companies making products like cement, where up to one-fifth of the final cost is for energy.<br />"We are in an industrial battle in the middle of a period of globalization and high energy prices mean we have a real problem in Germany," he said.<br />Schröder declined to comment for this article.Big winners emerge in ranks of German power companies<br />The benefits won by German industry were substantial. Under the German national plan, electricity companies were supposed to receive 3 percent fewer permits than they needed to cover their total emissions from 2005 to 2007. The aim was to encourage them to make technical improvements that would reduce emissions and help the country meet its commitment under the Kyoto treaty.<br />Instead, the companies got about 103 percent of their annual needs, according to the German Emissions Trading Authority, which oversees the system in Germany. That surplus could have been sold for about €290 million at the peak of the market.<br />German lawmakers also approved scores of combinations of exemptions and bonuses allowing companies to gain additional free permits for things they had done years earlier, or that might only be done in the future. Among them:<br />Utilities could base their claim for permits at coal and gas-fired plants on emissions levels from as far back as 1994, even if improvements had been made to the plants since then.<br />Utilities were guaranteed free permits for 18 years to cover any newly built coal or gas plants (a perk that provoked such a reproach from Brussels that it was later revoked).<br />Utilities could forecast how many permits they needed for each of their plants, despite a history of conflict with regulators over projections used to set tariffs.<br />"It was lobbying by industry, including the electricity companies, that was to blame for all these exceptional rules," said Hans-Jürgen Nantke, the director of the German trading authority, which is part of the Federal Environment Agency. The exemptions "enabled companies to get allowances that did not reflect the real situation of their emissions."<br />Jürgen Frech, chief spokesman for RWE, said that policy makers had sought input from all parties affected in creating what was an unprecedented system, and that all the national plans had to be subsequently approved by the European Commission in Brussels. "For industries like electricity production with long investment cycles, it is crucial to have a stable regulatory environment," he added.<br />RWE received 30 percent of all the permits given out, more than any other company in Germany.<br />The company said it transferred some of them among its plants - including those in other EU countries - but still found itself running short, and thus did not sell any.<br />But there was even greater revenue to be found elsewhere.Outrage from customers as electrical bills shot up<br />Major power consumers in Germany began receiving bigger electricity bills shortly after the system officially started in 2005, amounting to increases of about 5 percent each year. The biggest effect was on heavy users of power in industries like steel that - unlike households - buy power wholesale at prices that are less regulated.<br />Those customers were enraged, and they asked the German cartel office to investigate.<br />RWE justified its prices to the cartel office by saying the permits, although received for free, had a value in the marketplace. By not selling them and producing electricity instead, the argument went, it was losing an opportunity for revenue that should be charged to its customers.<br />In a summary of its preliminary findings, sent to RWE lawyers in December 2006, the cartel office agreed that the company was justified in passing through genuine "opportunity costs." But it accused RWE of charging for more permits than it should have - and suggested that this had been done at a third of all power plants in Germany.<br />This was what led the cartel office to accuse RWE of "abusive pricing." Investigators said RWE lacked any real opportunity to sell many of its permits because it already had committed to providing substantial amounts of electricity. And they said RWE admitted as much at a closed-door hearing.<br />Frech, at RWE, said that putting a price on the carbon permits - thereby encouraging everyone to be more efficient - was "beyond reproach."<br />The company said it was "unable to quantitatively estimate what proportion of the end customer price" was attributable to the carbon permits, mainly because the final price was determined in part by supply and demand.<br />But the cartel office said RWE should reduce the amount it charged for the permits by 75 percent. At this point the case could have moved toward litigation. The company, however, agreed to a settlement involving auctions that should provide industrial customers in Germany with lower electricity costs from 2009 through 2012.<br />"Customers will have the CO2 allowances RWE receives for the auctioned product credited to them free of charge," the company said, referring to its permits. "This newfound understanding is preferable to protracted legal battles through several courts."<br />Selling power without the cost of the CO2 permits also has a downside, however. It undermines the EU goal of curbing emissions and encouraging conservation by raising the cost of electricity to consumers.No smooth path for overhaul as EU economies deteriorate<br />RWE's net profit jumped 73 percent, to €3.85 billion, in 2005, the first year of the system. RWE does not detail in its financial statements what percentage of net profits is attributable to the carbon system, and the company said it was not able to do so.<br />Seb Walhain, the global head of environmental markets at Fortis, said that RWE earned up to €5 billion from 2005 to 2007 from the EU system. Felix Matthes at the Institute for Applied Ecology, a German environmental research group, estimated that RWE benefited from windfall profits of €2.2 billion to €3.3 billion annually in 2005 and 2006. Matthes and Walhain said very little, or no, windfall profits occurred in 2007 as a result of the EU system because the price of CO2 permits had fallen virtually to zero.<br />But emissions have risen steadily at the German operations of RWE since the trading system began. RWE was responsible for nearly 158 million tons of CO2 in 2007, compared with about 147 million tons in 2006 and 120 million tons in 2005, according to its annual reports.<br />Frech said emissions rose "slightly" in 2007 in part because one of its nuclear power stations "was off line for quite a while." Nuclear-fueled power plants emit no carbon dioxide.<br />The company also said it was investing €32 billion over the next five years in projects including renewable energy and developing cleaner techniques for generating electricity from hard coal and lignite, which RWE mines in Germany.<br />"Every investment we make is linked to climate protection," Frech said.<br />Yet so far there are few signs the system is cutting emissions. The amount of CO2 emitted by plants and factories participating in the system rose marginally in 2006 and 2007, according to the European Environment Agency. (Neither it nor the European Commission made any forecast before the system started about how it would perform.)<br />Even so, the EU environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said in May that emissions would "most likely have been significantly higher" without the carbon trading system.<br />He called the 2005 to 2007 period a "learning by doing" phase, and noted that limits on emissions have been tightened for the 2008 to 2012 trading period, and the glut of free permits lessened, meaning the price should rise.<br />But negotiations on how to meet even more ambitious targets after 2012 are in danger of coming undone as the economy worsens.<br />Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy has led the assault on the package, saying that he was not in office last year when it was agreed on. "We don't think this is the moment to push forward on our own like Don Quixote," he said at a summit meeting in October. "We have time."<br />Poland - which depends on coal-fired plants for 95 percent of its electricity - has threatened to block the package at another summit meeting Thursday and Friday if a compromise is not found to lessen the burden on its energy sector.<br />RWE, meanwhile, insists that having to pay for all its permits, starting in 2013, with no phase-in period, would distort competition across Europe, which has recently opened up to cross-border energy sales. "Companies such as ours that are giving coal a future and rely on coal-powered generation will find themselves at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis companies like Électricité de France, which rely solely on nuclear and have virtually no CO2 to deal with," Frech said.<br />Industrial customers in Germany are issuing dire warnings of ballooning electricity prices they say are sure to come if utilities try to maintain their profit margins while complying with costly new rules.<br />The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is leading the political horse trading, continues to push for an agreement. "Europe must be an example for others," he was quoted as saying Saturday in Poznan, Poland.<br />Nicholas Stern, one of the world's foremost authorities on the economics of climate change since presenting a report for the British government in 2006, said during a recent interview that the United States should draw lessons from Europe's example. He recommended that Obama move quickly toward charging industry for the permits, to avoid such repeated, drawn-out battles.<br />"Everybody will fight their own corner," he said. "That's why it's so important to have a clear conception from the start." </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>*********************</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></p><p><strong>Jeff Jacoby: Skepticism on climate change</strong><br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />The mail brings an invitation to register for the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, which convenes on March 8 in New York City. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank, the conference will host an international lineup of climate scientists and researchers who will focus on four broad areas: climatology, paleoclimatology, the impact of climate change, and climate-change politics and economics.<br />But if last year's gathering is any indication, the conference is likely to cover the climate-change waterfront. There were dozens of presentations in 2008, including: "Strengths and Weaknesses of Climate Models," "Ecological and Demographic Perspectives on the Status of Polar Bears," and "The Overstated Role of Carbon Dioxide on Climate Change."<br />Just another forum, then, sounding the usual alarums on the looming threat from global warming?<br />Actually, no. The scientists and scholars Heartland is assembling are not members of the gloom-and-doom chorus. They dispute the frantic claims that global warming is an onrushing catastrophe; many are skeptical of the notion that human activity has a significant effect on the planet's climate, or that such an effect can be reliably measured or predicted. Some point out that global temperatures peaked in 1998 and have been falling since then. Indeed, several argue that a period of global cooling is on the way.<br />Nearly all would argue that climate is always changing, and that no one really knows whether current computer models can reliably account for the myriad of factors that cause that natural variability.<br />They are far from monolithic, but on this they would all agree: Science is not settled by majority vote, especially in a field as young as climate science.<br />Skepticism and inquiry go to the essence of scientific progress. It is always legitimate to challenge the existing "consensus" with new data or an alternative hypothesis. Those who insist that dissent be silenced or even punished are not the allies of science, but something closer to religious fanatics.<br />Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, far too many people have been all too ready to play the Grand Inquisitor. For example, The Weather Channel's senior climatologist, Heidi Cullen, has recommended that meteorologists be denied professional certification if they voice doubts about global-warming alarmism. James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wants oil-company executives tried for "crimes against humanity if they continue to dispute what is understood scientifically" about global warming. Al Gore frequently derides those who dispute his climate dogma as fools who should be ignored. "Climate deniers fall into the same camp as people who still don't believe we landed on the moon," Gore's spokeswoman told The Politico a few days ago.<br />But as the list of confirmed speakers for Heartland's climate-change conference makes clear, it is Gore whose eyes are shut to reality.<br />Among the "climate deniers" lined up to speak are Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT; the University of Alabama's Roy W. Spencer, a pioneer in the monitoring of global temperatures by satellite; Stephen McIntyre, primary author of the influential Climate Audit blog; and the meteorologist John Coleman, who founded the Weather Channel in 1982. They may not stand with the majority in debates over climate science, but - Gore's dismissal notwithstanding - they are far from alone.<br />In fact, what prompted The Politico to solicit Gore's comment was its decision to report on the mounting dissent from global-warming orthodoxy. "Scientists urge caution on global warming," the story was headlined; it opened by noting "a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation."<br />Coverage of such skepticism is increasing. The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Michael Scott reported last week that meteorologists at each of Cleveland's TV stations dissent from the alarmists' scenario. In the Canadian province of Alberta, the Edmonton Journal found, 68 percent of climate scientists and engineers do not believe "the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled."<br />Expect to see more of this. The debate goes on, as it should.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>*********************</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><strong>Higher risk of asthma found among children born in fall</strong><br />By Tara Parker-Pope<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />How, when and where a child is born may all play a role in lifetime asthma risk, new studies suggest.<br />Asthma occurs when airways in the lungs spasm and swell, restricting the supply of oxygen. The incidence of asthma in the United States has risen steadily for more than two decades, and about 6 percent of children now have asthma, up from less than 4 percent in 1980, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.<br />The reasons for the increase are not entirely clear. Genetics probably plays a role in the risk for asthma, but an array of environmental factors - pollen, dust, animal dander, mold, cockroach feces, cigarettes, air pollution, viruses and cold air - have all been implicated in its development.<br />This month, The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine is reporting that children born in the fall have a 30 percent higher risk for asthma than those born in other seasons. The finding is based on a review of birth and medical records of more than 95,000 children in Tennessee.<br />A possible explanation is that autumn babies tend to be about 4 months old at the peak of cold and flu season. By that age, many babies are in day care and regularly exposed to the outside world.<br />And while their lungs are still developing, they have yet to develop strong immune systems. As a result, fall babies are at particular risk to contract a severe winter virus, which may in turn increase their risk for asthma.<br />The lead researcher, Dr. Tina Hartert, director of the Center for Asthma Research and Environmental Health at Vanderbilt University, says some parents with a high familial risk for asthma may want to consider timing conception to avoid a fall birth.<br />But since that is impractical for many people, Hartert says, all parents should take precautions to reduce a baby's risk of a respiratory infection.<br />"It's premature to say you should time conception so children aren't born in the fall," she said. "But it's good sense to use typical hygienic measures to try and prevent illness."<br />As for how a baby is born, Swiss researchers are reporting in the journal Thorax this month that a Caesarean delivery is linked to a much higher risk for asthma compared with babies born vaginally.<br />In a study of nearly 3,000 children, the researchers found that 12 percent had been given a diagnosis of asthma by age 8. In that group, those born by C-section were nearly 80 percent more likely than the others to develop asthma. The explanation may be that a vaginal birth "primes" a baby's immune system by exposing it to bacteria as it moves through the birth canal.<br />Finally, researchers at Tufts reported last month in The Journal of Asthma that a baby's place of birth also influences asthma risk. In a study of black families in Dorchester, Massachusetts, they found that babies born in the United States were more likely to have asthma than black children born outside the country.<br />The reason for the disparity is not clear, but the sterile conditions under which American babies are born may be a factor.<br />Babies in developing countries encounter more infections, so they may be better equipped to withstand less serious assaults associated with asthma, like mold and dust mites.<br /></p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>*****************</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><strong>Primal, acute and easily duped: Our sense of touch<br /></strong>By Natalie Angier<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />Imagine you're in a dark room, running your fingers over a smooth surface in search of a single dot the size of this period. How high do you think the dot must be for your finger pads to feel it? A hundredth of an inch above background? A thousandth?<br />Well, take a tip from the economy and keep downsizing. Scientists have determined that the human finger is so sensitive it can detect a surface bump just one micron high. All our punctuation point need do, then, is poke above its glassy backdrop by 1/400,000th of an inch the diameter of a bacterial cell and our fastidious fingers can find it. The human eye, by contrast, can't resolve anything much smaller than 100 microns. No wonder we rely on touch rather than vision when confronted by a new roll of toilet paper and its Abominable Invisible Seam.<br />Biologically, chronologically, allegorically and delusionally, touch is the mother of all sensory systems. It is an ancient sense in evolution: even the simplest single-celled organisms can feel when something brushes up against them and will respond by nudging closer or pulling away. It is the first sense aroused during a baby's gestation and the last sense to fade at life's culmination. Patients in a deep vegetative coma who seem otherwise lost to the world will show skin responsiveness when touched by a nurse.<br />Like a mother, touch is always hovering somewhere in the perceptual background, often ignored, but indispensable to our sense of safety and sanity. "Touch is so central to what we are, to the feeling of being ourselves, that we almost cannot imagine ourselves without it," said Chris Dijkerman, a neuropsychologist at the Helmholtz Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "It's not like vision, where you close your eyes and you don't see anything. You can't do that with touch. It's always there."<br />Long neglected in favor of the sensory heavyweights of vision and hearing, the study of touch lately has been gaining new cachet among neuroscientists, who sometimes refer to it by the amiably jargony term of haptics, Greek for touch. They're exploring the implications of recently reported tactile illusions, of people being made to feel as though they had three arms, for example, or were levitating out of their bodies, with the hope of gaining insight into how the mind works.<br />Others are turning to haptics for more practical purposes, to build better touch screen devices and robot hands, a more well-rounded virtual life. "There's a fair amount of research into new ways of offloading information onto our tactile sense," said Lynette Jones of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "To have your cellphone buzzing as opposed to ringing turned out to have a lot of advantages in some situations, and the question is, where else can vibrotactile cues be applied?"<br />For all its antiquity and constancy, touch is not passive or primitive or stuck in its ways. It is our most active sense, our means of seizing the world and experiencing it, quite literally, first hand. Susan Lederman, a professor of psychology at Queen's University in Canada, pointed out that while we can perceive something visually or acoustically from a distance and without really trying, if we want to learn about something tactilely, we must make a move. We must rub the fabric, pet the cat, squeeze the Charmin. And with every touchy foray, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle looms large. "Contact is a two-way street, and that's not true for vision or audition," Lederman said. "If you have a soft object and you squeeze it, you change its shape. The physical world reacts back."<br />Another trait that distinguishes touch is its widespread distribution. Whereas the sensory receptors for sight, vision, smell and taste are clustered together in the head, conveniently close to the brain that interprets the fruits of their vigils, touch receptors are scattered throughout the skin and muscle tissue and must convey their signals by way of the spinal cord. There are also many distinct classes of touch-related receptors: mechanoreceptors that respond to pressure and vibrations, thermal receptors primed to sense warmth or cold, kinesthetic receptors that keep track of where our limbs are, and the dread nociceptors, or pain receptors nerve bundles with bare endings that fire when surrounding tissue is damaged.<br />The signals from the various touch receptors converge on the brain and sketch out a so-called somatosensory homunculus, a highly plastic internal representation of the body. Like any map, the homunculus exaggerates some features and downplays others. Looming largest are cortical sketches of those body parts that are especially blessed with touch receptors, which means our hidden homunculus has a clownishly large face and mouth and a pair of Paul Bunyan hands. "Our hands and fingers are the tactile equivalent of the fovea in vision," said Dijkerman, referring to the part of the retina where cone cell density is greatest and visual acuity highest. "If you want to explore the tactile world, your hands are the tool to use."<br />Our hands are brilliant and can do many tasks automatically button a shirt, fit a key in a lock, touch type for some of us, play piano for others. Lederman and her colleagues have shown that blindfolded subjects can easily recognize a wide range of common objects placed in their hands. But on some tactile tasks, touch is all thumbs. When people are given a raised line drawing of a common object, a bas-relief outline of, say, a screwdriver, they're stumped. "If all we've got is contour information," Lederman said, "no weight, no texture, no thermal information, well, we're very, very bad with that."<br />Touch also turns out to be easy to fool. Among the sensory tricks now being investigated is something called the Pinocchio illusion. Researchers have found that if they vibrate the tendon of the biceps, many people report feeling that their forearm is getting longer, their hand drifting ever further from their elbow. And if they are told to touch the forefinger of the vibrated arm to the tip of their nose, they feel as though their nose was lengthening, too.<br />Some tactile illusions require the collusion of other senses. People who watch a rubber hand being stroked while the same treatment is applied to one of their own hands kept out of view quickly come to believe that the rubber prosthesis is the real thing, and will wince with pain at the sight of a hammer slamming into it. Other researchers have reported what they call the parchment-skin illusion. Subjects who rubbed their hands together while listening to high-frequency sounds described their palms as feeling exceptionally dry and papery, as though their hands must be responsible for the rasping noise they heard. Look up, little Pinocchio! Somebody's pulling your strings.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>***********************</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><strong>The pain may be real, but the scan is deceiving<br /></strong>By Gina Kolata<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />Cheryl Weinstein's left knee bothered her for years, but when it started clicking and hurting when she straightened it, she told her internist that something was definitely wrong.<br />It was the start of her medical odyssey, a journey that led her to specialists, physical therapy, Internet searches and, finally, an M.R.I. scan that showed a torn cartilage and convinced her that her only hope for relief was to have surgery to repair it. But in fact, fixing the torn cartilage that was picked up on the scan was not going to solve her problem, which, eventually, she found was caused by arthritis.<br />Scans more sensitive and easily available than ever are increasingly finding abnormalities that may not be the cause of the problem for which they are blamed. It's an issue particularly for the millions of people who go to doctors' offices in pain.<br />The scans are expensive Medicare and its beneficiaries pay about $750 to $950 for an M.Rhode Island scan of a knee or back, for example. Many doctors own their own scanners, which can provide an incentive to offer scans to their patients.<br />And so, in what is often an irresistible feedback loop, patients who are in pain often demand scans hoping to find out what is wrong, doctors are tempted to offer scans to those patients, and then, once a scan is done, it is common for doctors and patients to assume that any abnormalities found are the reason for the pain.<br />But in many cases it is just not known whether what is seen on a scan is the cause of the pain. The problem is that all too often, no one knows what is normal.<br />"A patient comes in because he's in pain," said Dr. Nelda Wray, a senior research scientist at the Methodist Institute for Technology in Houston. "We see something in a scan, and we assume causation. But we have no idea of the prevalence of the abnormality in routine populations."<br />Now, as more and more people have scans for everything from headaches to foot aches, more are left in a medical lurch, or with unnecessary or sometimes even harmful treatments, including surgery.<br />"Every time we get a new technology that provides insights into structures we didn't encounter before, we end up saying, 'Oh, my God, look at all those abnormalities.' They might be dangerous," said Dr. David Felson, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Boston University Medical School. "Some are, some aren't, but it ends up leading to a lot of care that's unnecessary."<br />That was what almost happened with Weinstein, an active, athletic 64-year-old who lives in London, New Hampshire And it was her great fortune to finally visit a surgeon who told her so. He told her bluntly that her pain was caused by arthritis, not the torn cartilage.<br />No one had told her that before, Weinstein said, and looking back on her quest to get a scan and get the ligament fixed, she shook her head in dismay. There's no surgical procedure short of a knee replacement that will help, and she's not ready for a knee replacement.<br />"I feel that I have come full circle," she said. "I will cope on my own with this knee."<br />In fact, Weinstein was also lucky because her problem was with her knee. It's one of only two body parts the other is the back where there are good data on abnormalities that turn up in people who feel just fine, indicating that the abnormalities may not be so abnormal after all.<br />But even the data on knees comes from just one study, and researchers say the problem is far from fixed. It is difficult to conduct scans on people who feel fine most do not want to spend time in an M.Rhode Island machine, and CT scans require that people be exposed to radiation. But that leaves patients and doctors in an untenable situation.<br />"It's a concern, isn't it?" Dr. Jarvik said. "We are trying to fix things that shouldn't be fixed."<br />As a rheumatologist, Dr. Felson saw patient after patient with knee pain, many of whom had already had scans. And he was becoming concerned about their findings.<br />Often, a scan would show that a person with arthritis had a torn meniscus, a ligament that stabilizes the knee. And often the result was surgery orthopedic surgeons do more meniscus surgery than any other operation. But, Dr. Felson wondered, was the torn ligament an injury causing pain or was the arthritis causing pain and the tear a consequence of arthritis?<br />That led Dr. Felson and his colleagues to do the first and so far the only large study of knees, asking what is normal. It involved M.Rhode Island scans on 991 people ages 50 to 90. Some had knee pain, others did not.<br />On Sept. 11, Dr. Felson and his colleagues published their results in The New England Journal of Medicine: meniscal tears were just as common in people with knee arthritis who did not complain of pain as they were in people with knee arthritis who did have pain. They tended to occur along with arthritis and were a part of the disease process itself. And so repairing the tears would not eliminate the pain.<br />"The rule is, as you get older, you will get a meniscal tear," Dr. Felson said. "It's a function of aging and disease. If you are a 60-year-old guy, the chance that you have a meniscal tear is 40 percent."<br />It is a result that paralleled what spine researchers found over the past decade in what is perhaps the best evidence on what shows up on scans of healthy people. "If you're going to look at a spine, you need to know what that spine might look like in a normal patient," said Dr. Michael Modic, chairman of the Neurological Institute at the Cleveland Clinic.<br />After Dr. Modic and others scanned hundreds of asymptomatic people, they learned abnormalities were common.<br />"Somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of people who climb into a scanner will have a herniated disk," Dr. Modic said. As many as 60 percent of healthy adults with no back pain, he said, have degenerative changes in their spines.<br />Those findings made Dr. Modic ask: Why do a scan in the first place? There are some who may benefit from surgery, but does it make sense to routinely do scans for nearly everyone with back pain? After all, one-third of herniated disks disappear on their own in six weeks, and two-thirds in six months.<br />And surgeons use symptoms and a physical examination to identify patients who would be helped by operations. What extra medical help does a scan provide? So Dr. Modic did another study, this time with 250 patients. All had M.Rhode Island scans when they first arrived complaining of back pain or shooting pains down their leg, which can be caused by a herniated disc pressing on a nerve in the spine. And all had scans again six weeks later. Sixty percent had herniated disks, the scans showed.<br />Dr. Modic gave the results to only half of the patients and their doctors the others had no idea what the M.Rhode Island's revealed. Dr. Modic knew, though.<br />In 13 percent of the patients, the second scan showed that the herniated disk had become bigger or a new herniated disk had appeared. In 15 percent, the herniated disk had disappeared. But there was no relationship between the scan findings at six weeks and patients' symptoms. Some continued to complain of pain even though their herniated disk had disappeared; others said they felt better even though their herniation had grown bigger.<br />The question, though, was whether it helped the patients and their doctors to know what the M.Rhode Island's had found. And the answer, Dr. Modic reported, is that it did not. The patients who knew recovered no faster than those who did not know. However, Dr. Modic said, there was one effect of being told patients felt worse about themselves when they knew they had a bulging disk.<br />"If I tell you that you have a degenerated disk, basically I'm telling you you're ugly," Dr. Modic said.<br />Scans, he said, are presurgical tools, not screening tools. A scan can help a surgeon before he or she operates, but it does not help with a diagnosis.<br />"If a patient has back or leg pain, they should be treated conservatively for at least eight weeks," Dr. Modic said, meaning that they take pain relievers and go about their normal lives. "Then you should do imaging only if you are going to do surgery."<br />That message can be a hard sell, he acknowledged. "A lot of people are driven by wanting to have imaging," Dr. Modic said. "They are miserable as hell, they can't work, they can't sit. We look at you and say, 'We think you have a herniated disk. We say the natural history is that you will get better. You should go through six to eight weeks of conservative management.' "<br />At the Partners Healthcare System in Boston, spine experts have the same struggle to convince patients that an M.Rhode Island scan is not necessarily desirable, said Dr. Scott Gazelle, director of radiology there.<br />"The consensus is that you are a surgical candidate or not based on your history and physical findings, not on imaging findings," he said.<br />Dr. Gazelle had a chance last year to test his own convictions. He had the classic symptoms of a herniated disk shooting pains down his left leg, a numb foot and difficulty walking.<br />Dr. Gazelle went to see his primary-care doctor but, he said, "I didn't get an M.Rhode Island" That decision, he added, "was the right thing to do."<br />About three months later, he had recovered on his own.<br />In 1998, two medical scientists, writing in The Lancet, proposed what sounded like a radical idea. Instead of simply providing patients and their doctors with the results of an X-ray or an M.Rhode Island scan, he said, radiologists should put the findings in context. For example, they wrote, if a scan showed advanced disk deterioration, the report should say, "Roughly 40 percent of patients with this finding do not have back pain so the finding may be unrelated."<br />It is an idea that only would work for back pain, because that is the one area where radiologists have enough data. But it made eminent sense to Dr. Jarvik. "It gives referring physicians some sort of context," he said.<br />So, a few years ago, with some trepidation, his radiology group starting including epidemiological data in their reports. "We thought, 'What's going to be the reaction among referring physicians?' " Dr. Jarvik said. Their fear was that doctors would start choosing other places for M.Rhode Island's and that Dr. Jarvik's group would lose business.<br />Because of the way the university's records are kept, it's hard to know whether the new reporting system had that effect, Dr. Jarvik said. But he was heartened by the responses of some doctors, like Dr. Sohail Mirza, who recently moved to Dartmouth Medical School.<br />"We often see patients who have already had M.Rhode Island scans," Dr. Mirza said. "They are fixated on the abnormality and come to a surgeon to try to get the abnormality fixed. They'll come in with the report in hand."<br />The new sort of report, Dr. Mirza said, was "very helpful information to have when talking to patients and very helpful for patients to help them understand that the abnormalities were not catastrophic findings."<br />Others, like Dr. Modic, are hesitant about reporting epidemiology along with a patient's scan findings.<br />"It's an interesting idea," he said. But, he added: "The problem isn't what happens after they get their imaging. It's that they get the imaging in the first place."<br />That was what happened with Weinstein.<br />When she started looking up her symptoms on the Internet, she decided she probably had a meniscus tear. "I was very forceful in asking for an M.Rhode Island," she said.<br />And when the scan showed that her meniscus was torn, she went to a surgeon expecting an operation.<br />He X-rayed her knee and told her she had arthritis. Then, Weinstein said, the surgeon looked at her and said, "Let me get this straight. Are you here for a knee replacement?"<br />She said no, of course not. She skis, she does aerobics, she was nowhere near ready for something so drastic.<br />Then the surgeon told her that there was no point in repairing her meniscus because that was not her problem. And if he repaired the cartilage, her arthritic bones would just grind it down again.<br />For now, Weinstein says she is finished with her medical odyssey.<br />"I continue to live with this, whatever they call it, this arthritic knee," she said.<br />More Articles in Health » A version of this article appeared in print on December 9, 2008, on page D1 of the New York edition.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>***************</p><p> </p><p> </p><p><strong>Winter and economy chilling China quake zone<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />DUJIANGYAN, China: Seven months after the Sichuan earthquake levelled wide swathes of southwest China, millions of victims are battling biting cold and a fast-cooling economy to rebuild their shattered lives.<br />A rapid slowdown in Chinese tourism amid the global financial crisis only compounds the pain in Dujiangyan, a city surrounded by ancient waterworks but reduced to rubble by the May 12 quake which killed more than 80,000 people.<br />The downtown of Dujiangyan, a once thriving commercial hub popular with tourists and weekend visitors, is now eerily quiet, especially at night.<br />Many of the buildings here still stand, albeit at an angle, but most are empty. More than half the kerbside stores are shut, and shoppers are few and far between in the ones that are open.<br />"There are many fewer tourists here than before," said a gatekeeper at a local scenic spot surnamed Teng. "Partly because of the earthquake, partly because of the economic crisis.<br />"People will not go out for fun if they have no money."<br />Yang Tingxiu and her husband, both in their 50s, ran a business before the disaster, but now scratch out a living doing cleaning jobs around their temporary housing community.<br />"We lost everything in the earthquake except our lives," said Yang, who lives with her husband in a portable dwelling furnished with an old, donated television and a gas cylinder.<br />"We just scrape along. The only way for us to survive in winter is to put on more clothes."<br />BLACK YEAR FOR TOURISM<br />It has been a black year for China's tourism industry, hit by unseasonably cold weather last winter, by restrictions on travel to Lhasa and other Tibetan areas following a Tibetan uprising in March, and by the Olympics, when many Chinese stayed at home to watch the Games rather than travel in August.<br />China's National Tourism Administration has pledged to return up to 70 percent of travel agencies' deposits -- funds kept in reserve to compensate tourists in case of accidents and other claims -- to stem the flow of red ink in the sector, the China Daily said on Tuesday.<br />But in the quake zone, despite China's plans to spend 1 trillion yuan (98 billion pounds) on rebuilding, the fiscal stimulus package remains cold comfort for millions still living in tents and temporary housing.<br />A Siberian cold front lashed China last week, plunging temperatures in quake zones to below freezing. Officials forecast another cold winter this year.<br />Conditions in the temporary communities are spartan but livable, with communal kitchens, supermarkets, schools and even massage parlours. Some residents have grumbled online that the government has not provided enough assistance and the high price of vegetables is a recurring gripe.<br />"Dujiangyan's economy has shrunk to the level of the very beginning of China's reform and opening up," said Teng, referring to economic reforms launched 30 years ago this month.<br />Quake-hit families in Dujiangyan have been offered 140,000 yuan or a new 70-sq-m apartment on the condition they give up their property rights to their past homes.<br />For Teng, the gatekeeper, the rebuilding shows the government has done a good job.<br />"The relief is working and welfare is better than before."<br />Xiang'e, a nearby town that lost nearly all its children when the school collapsed, is now a massive construction site, complete with billboards showing the blueprints of "our new hometown."<br />"The construction needs some time," said a young bulldozer driver at Xiang'e. "But as we are working, it will be done soon."<br />($1=6.871 Yuan)<br />(For more information on humanitarian crises and issues visit www.alertnet.org)<br />(Reporting by Beijing newsroom; Writing by Ian Ransom and Lucy Hornby; Editing by Bill Tarrant)</p><p> </p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsAzCJgj0OHQZBYJ8rYWKLL6aDHksNqR9Fh83jj6EH1lL1CVZWyX9uTO69BUVUj-y0rYxqGCBrGT4mS0NOrsvVm68YyOAcDiw2d_wU3D8itHf8SeHuej1f4i3iFgm-Is14fDjown2zyXw/s1600-h/DSC02831.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062625295843954" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsAzCJgj0OHQZBYJ8rYWKLL6aDHksNqR9Fh83jj6EH1lL1CVZWyX9uTO69BUVUj-y0rYxqGCBrGT4mS0NOrsvVm68YyOAcDiw2d_wU3D8itHf8SeHuej1f4i3iFgm-Is14fDjown2zyXw/s320/DSC02831.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>Termites studied in quest for green fuels<br /></strong>By Carolyn Y. Johnson<br />The Boston Globe<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />Researchers have scooped soil near a reservoir in Massachusetts, visited a Russian volcano, and scoured the bottom of the sea looking for microbes that hold the key to new biofuels. Now, they are investigating termites more deeply.<br />The otherwise dreaded insect is a model bug bioreactor, adept at the difficult task of breaking down wood and turning it into fuel.<br />Learning the secret of that skill could open the door to creating a new class of plant-based fuels to offset a reliance on petroleum products.<br />What scientists have learned so far, however, suggests that it will not be easy to duplicate nature.<br />Over the past year, several studies elucidating termite innards have appeared in mainstream science journals. Last month, Japanese researchers added their own report on just how termites digest wood. A key, they said, can be found within termites' bodies like nested Russian dolls - a bacteria that lives within a microorganism that lives within the termite gut.<br />It is an intriguing, and complicated, symbiosis.<br />"We only need to look to nature to get a clear sign this is not going to have a simple solution," said Jared Leadbetter, associate professor of environmental microbiology at the California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. "With 100 million years-plus to streamline this process, you have species living within species, living within species. So we better embrace the fact this is going to have a complex answer."<br />In a study published last year, Leadbetter and others explored a small sample of termite gut bacteria genes, and found 1,000 involved in breaking down wood.<br />The new study, which focuses on one of the most voracious of the 2,600 termite species, illustrates yet more complexity. The work, published in the journal Science, shows how a partnership within termite guts helps explain wood digestion.<br />The microorganism, called P. grassi, breaks down cellulose, a component of wood. A bacteria that lives inside that microorganism provides nitrogen, which is necessary for life, but scarce in wood. Researchers have sequenced the genes of the bacteria and some of the protozoa and are now analyzing the ones involved in digesting cellulose in hopes of better understanding the secrets of the digestion process.<br />"As a team, we are aiming to find out factors useful for making a novel biofuel," one of the authors, Yuichi Hongoh, of the Ecomolecular Biorecycling Science Research Team at Riken, a research institute in Wako, Japan, wrote in an e-mail.<br />The challenge of making fuel from rigid plants, like trees, is that they lock away energy in complex molecules.<br />"Cellulose is a very, very tough molecule. You can hit it with acid - fairly concentrated acid - and it will just sit there," said Alexander DiIorio, director of the bioprocess center at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. He is looking at everything from termites to rotting wood foraged from local forests in the search for ways to make cellulosic ethanol. His work is funded by the California biofuels company EdenIQ.<br />Adding to the difficulty is that a rigid material called lignin is woven in with the cellulose. Researchers are looking for a variety of solutions to these problems. In another scourge-turned-science moment, Pennsylvania State University researchers reported this summer that a fungus harbored in the gut of the Asian longhorned beetle that is ravaging maples in the United States could help degrade lignin.<br />But even when promising enzymes and microbes have been identified, the work is not straightforward.<br />For example, a microbe discovered in a soil sample from the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts can convert woody plant matter directly into ethanol, according to Sue Leschine, a professor of microbiology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. But Qteros, the company she co-founded to work on the microbe, is untangling problems, like how to prepare the raw materials for microbe digestion more cheaply and speed up the process.<br />Entrepreneurs are moving forward. Mascoma, a cellulosic ethanol company based in Boston, announced in October that it had raised $49.5 million toward building a plant in Michigan.<br />Verenium, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, built a demonstration plant in Louisiana and is working to extract fuel from materials like bagasse, the remnants of sugar cane.<br />Verenium, like other companies, is interested in termite innards, but ultimately is taking a much broader approach. It is scanning the great microbiological diversity of the world, agnostic to whether it is from a termite or the rainforest floor.<br />To see the biofuel problem as a matter of scientific breakthroughs is itself misleading, Leadbetter said, considering the challenges posed by logistical issues like building plants, distribution networks and a supply chain of biomass.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Divided Kosovo city mines a dream of riches</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Adam Tanner<br />MITROVICA, Kosovo (Reuters) -- Nazmi Mikullovci puts the value of minerals beneath the ground here at 10 billion euros (8.7 billion pounds). But a river running through the area marks a rift so deep they cannot help the Balkans' newest state.<br />The Trepca mines are a loss-making mountain of debt, environmental damage and legal tangles straddling a disputed border between Serbia and Kosovo, the Albanian majority republic which declared independence from Serbia in February.<br />The muddied brown of the Ibar River marks that border.<br />On Tuesday, a mission of 1,900 European and American officials starts arriving to foster peace and stability under a United Nations plan.<br />Such stability could help revive the mines, a vast complex of lead, zinc and silver that in the past was a font of Yugoslav export revenue and employed 23,000 people.<br />With mining operations mostly halted during the 1998-99 Kosovo war, many of its factories and warehouses now lie abandoned, a jumble of rusted conveyer belts, pipes and cracked windows where weeds grow tall.<br />Across the river, half the complex lies in similar disrepair in the northern half of Mitrovica, run by Serbs. Albanian Kosovars rarely venture there to face the Serbs' bitter opposition to independence.<br />Mikullovci, a 65-year-old Albanian who directs the south side, has not crossed to the northern section in six years.<br />"It is strange," Mikullovci said. "In 2002, the last time I was in the north part of Trepca, I had problems, and they asked me so as to avoid future problems not to come again."<br />In the past Serb and Albanian miners cooperated, and experts say they could do so again if the mission -- overseen by the European Union in Kosovo up to the Ibar River and by the United Nations in Serbian areas -- helps ease tensions.<br />"Given the right circumstances they can work together," said Michael Palairet, an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh who has written a history of the Trepca mines.<br />Finding a legal and political basis for the mines would be a significant step for the country, recognized by 53 countries so far but not Russia or Serbia.<br />Wedged between Serbia, Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, its main exports are scrap metal and minerals along with food. Unemployment is around 45 percent and with corruption widespread, Kosovars make just $1,800 (1,200 pounds) per person annually -- a third less than their cousins in neighbouring Albania, according to the U.S. State Department.<br />$13 BILLION HEADACHE<br />Economically, the timing for Trepca could hardly be less propitious. Industry experts say it is the world's third largest mining region for lead, zinc and silver, but as the world economy slows prices for metals have slumped.<br />Silver has more than halved from its peak, zinc has fallen more than 60 percent this year, and lead is worth less than a third of its value at the height of the commodities boom.<br />"This year we have faced many problems because of the prices on the world market," Mikullovci said, adding the Trepca mines face a 1.2 million euro loss in 2008, excluding labour cost subsidies. "The situation at the moment is not sustainable."<br />Last year the mines broke even thanks to a three-million euro Kosovo government subsidy; the north side gets Serbian subsidies, said Mikullovci.<br />The south mines are running at a fraction of former capacity, extracting 7,000 tons of zinc concentrate a month, 4,000 tons of lead concentrate, and 4,000 kg of silver a year, Mikullovici said. The north side produces similar amounts.<br />Mikullovci estimates the mines' debt at 50 to 250 million euros, a hazy number as many past claims are disputed.<br />Environmental clean-up costs could add another 120 to 180 million euros, according to international officials based in Kosovo. Updating technology for major future operations could cost another 100-500 million euros.<br />Its ownership is tangled too. A socially owned firm under Yugoslav-era designation, the company is under government protection as it reorganizes. Even its name, "Trepca Under UNMIK Administration" is a reference to the local U.N. force.<br />"It's like a Latin American telenovella on television -- it's a very long story," said Mikullovci.<br />WORK FOR LAWYERS<br />"You've got, obviously, economic problems ... technical and engineering problems ... and political problems," said historian Palairet. "It's going to be a wonderful job for lawyers."<br />For the mine itself, some see no immediate hope.<br />"This global economic crisis discourages potential investors," south Mitrovica Mayor Bajram Rexhepi, Kosovo's first elected post-war prime minister, told Reuters. "I don't think Trepca has a perspective for more than five or 10 years.<br />"They try to present it as a success story but in reality it was not. People live with the illusion and dream that Trepca would be profitable again," he said.<br />Over on the Serb side of the river, Marko Jaksic, an influential Serb nationalist hospital director, is equally blunt: "If I were a businessman, it would be the last place I would invest my money."<br />Mikullovci acknowledges the difficulty but -- as he must -- sees a way forward. He believes a swift privatization would help, saying Trepca could be in private hands by end-2010.<br />One plan under consideration would be to sell off Trepca's assets while separating its debts and legal liabilities such as the future cost of environmental clean-up. Sale proceeds would fund a debt and legal settlement for past creditors.<br />"Our idea in the near future is for either a concession or privatization in 2009," Deputy Prime Minister Hajredin Kuci told Reuters.<br />Whoever would take on such headaches would make a big difference to the 2,500 or so people who work in the complexes. More than half of them are in the south and earn around 236-325 euros monthly.<br />As they head in thick rubber boots and helmet lamps for an elevator ride down, the ageing workforce entering the south mines pass under a large sign in Albanian: "Good Luck."<br />(Additional reporting by Branislav Krstic; Editing by Sara Ledwith)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>EU mission deploys in Kosovo</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Branislav Krstic<br />The European Union began a long-delayed police and justice mission in Kosovo Tuesday as international peacekeepers stepped up security in the north where Serbs oppose the move.<br />The first of a 1,900-strong force of European and American police, customs agents, judges and prosecutors began deployment in mainly Albanian Kosovo which seceded from Serbia in February.<br />"Today marks an important new step in the ever closer relationship between the EU and Kosovo," said Pieter Feith, the top EU official who oversees implementation of Kosovo's independence.<br />In the Serb-controlled part of the divided flashpoint town of Mitrovica, EU policemen arrived wearing black flak jackets with red badges from the mission, known as EULEX, pinned on their shoulders.<br />In February, the European Union decided to send a mission to take over from the U.N. mission running the province since 1999 when NATO bombing drove Serb forces out. But its deployment has been delayed due to Serb opposition which sees the effort as a symbol of Kosovo independence.<br />"Today is an special day, a day in which Kosovo is opening a new chapter with EULEX deployment throughout its territory," Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci told reporters.<br />DIVISION<br />Kosovo's minority Serb population of about 120,000 refuse to deal with Pristina institutions, leaving them in an uncertain legal status between Kosovo and Serbia authorities.<br />The situation is especially stark in Mitrovica, where Serbs live on one side of the river and Albanians on the other with little interaction. Younger residents rarely speak each other's language.<br />"The mission needs to perform its task on the basis of the full national support of all communities, of all the people here in Kosovo," the EU's Feith said.<br />EULEX spokesman Victor Reuter said about 100 police, border control and customs officers and advisers would be deployed in the Serb-controlled north.<br />The EU hopes its new mission will help build government institutions in the poorest corner of the Balkans, a region still recovering from the 1990s wars when Yugoslavia collapsed.<br />French KFOR troops stepped up security in the Serb-held north to prevent violence; no incidents were reported.<br />French Colonel Herve Messiot, in charge of EULEX command in the area, said his policemen in Mitrovica would have an advisory role. The mission will deal with organised crime, ethnic-based crime and war crimes, as well as when local authorities have unsolved cases.<br />The 27-nation EU won Serbia's consent by amending the deployment plan to enable police, judiciary and customs officers in Serb-held areas to report to the remaining U.N. administration. Albanian counterparts will work within Kosovo's ministry of interior and with EULEX.<br />Pristina's leadership opposed the deployment plan which said it would lead to a de facto partition of Kosovo. Several thousand ethnic Albanians have staged two protests against EULEX in Pristina in the past two weeks.<br />(Additional reporting by Shaban Buza in Pristina; Writing by Ivana Sekularac; editing by Myra MacDonald)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>German commuters to get a windfall</strong><br />By Judy Dempsey<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />BERLIN: German commuters can expect a tax windfall in the coming months after the Constitutional Court ruled Tuesday that a government decision to curtail subsidies for commuters last year was illegal.<br />The decision means that Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government of conservatives and Social Democrats will now have to find 7.5 billion, or about $9.7 billion, to reimburse commuters in a move that could further strain the government's attempts to reduce the national debt as Germany faces its worst recession in 14 years.<br />Merkel, who had come under strong pressure even from her own conservative bloc to reintroduce the allowances as a way to spur the economy and increase consumer spending, said commuters would be reimbursed. "It is absolutely right, given the economic situation, to give the people back this money," Merkel said in Warsaw, where she was meeting with Prime Minister Donald Tusk.<br />Merkel has been criticized abroad and by the business community at home for not taking sufficient action to protect Germany from the global financial crisis. So far she has kept all options open with regard to cutting taxes as a way to bolster spending, prevent unemployment from increasing and reduce the impact of the recession.<br />The government has allocated 500 billion in guarantees for banks and a 32 billion program of stimulus measures. In practice, as Merkel recently acknowledged, it means that the government's attempt to balance the budget by 2011 has been deferred until 2013.<br />Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, a Social Democrat, agreed that the government had no alternative but to give the money back. "Now that we have to raise debt for the repayment of the commuter subsidy anyway," he said in a statement, "the reimbursement should be made as quickly as possible, not only in the interests of commuters but also to hopefully give an additional impetus to spending."<br />About 3 billion could be returned to 20 million commuters in the first quarter of 2009, the Finance Ministry said in a statement. The total sum of the payments could be spread out over three years and could help bolster spending, it added. The ministry said the average taxpayer who lived about 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, from the workplace would be eligible for about 350.<br />The powerful car-industry lobby, VDA, welcomed the ruling, saying the tax break would help to tackle "a dramatic recession."<br />Merkel and Steinbrück introduced the restrictions on commuter subsidies in January 2007 in a bid to cut the deficit. As of 2007, the tax break - 30 euro cents a kilometer - was available only to commuters who lived more than 20 kilometers from their workplace. The measure had previously applied to all taxpayers, regardless of distance from work.<br />The Constitutional Court said in a statement Tuesday that "the goal of budget consolidation, which was mentioned almost exclusively during the legislative procedure, cannot justify the abolition."<br />The government was sharply criticized for the measure, particularly in northern and eastern Germany where commuters tend to travel longer distances to work. At the same time, the government raised the sales tax from 16 percent to 19 percent to compensate for reductions in social welfare contributions by employers.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuJ0wb8zsJBey_wB2vCnos4rqDmVlAAaMCetKn4D3-bR3FfCFKvW8OR_U4qZxRj_ebn__lUoRxxi3-sQ1gO0N8vj1x6q-vrZv8ZTeLFjXh2rhIf5fcpmCQSRJ2tUi5SsPpBIenY5Zm9H8/s1600-h/DSC02832.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062346862157874" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuJ0wb8zsJBey_wB2vCnos4rqDmVlAAaMCetKn4D3-bR3FfCFKvW8OR_U4qZxRj_ebn__lUoRxxi3-sQ1gO0N8vj1x6q-vrZv8ZTeLFjXh2rhIf5fcpmCQSRJ2tUi5SsPpBIenY5Zm9H8/s320/DSC02832.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Paris gem heist reward offered</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />PARIS: Insurers are prepared to pay a $1 million (675,000 pound) reward for information leading to the recovery of gems stolen from a luxury Paris jewellers last week in one of the biggest hold-ups in French criminal history.<br />"We're hoping to hear from someone who has heard something and we will pay the first person who brings us valid information that allows us to find the jewels," John Shaw, of Paris loss adjustors SW Associates, told France Info radio on Tuesday. "That person will get $1 million."<br />A gang of armed men, some disguised as women, stole around 85 million euros (73 million pound) worth of gems on Friday from jewellers Harry Winston's on the exclusive Avenue Montaigne just off the Champs Elysees.<br />The robbery, described in local media as the most lucrative ever in France and reminiscent of the old-style heists beloved of generations of French thrillers, garnered wide media interest and the insurers are expecting to have to field a wave of calls.<br />"I imagine that with a reward of that amount we're going to have a lot of calls from people who are curious and it's not worth sending us pieces of advice or general tips," Shaw said. "It's a reward that's worth it."<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF4G0BemJLSm9jmAuvCPREs3kzQOpgZFQztu2wTNnU5StvpIHDIgkgKVlB3AtVnqSjITjqa2do4DpSMnIKOX2hv6NiEM21HxOSc-WucvyTIjEUh8vbsD9ThtnIJjG4mXDxZxLPGZ0Jot0/s1600-h/DSC02833.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062343802008994" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF4G0BemJLSm9jmAuvCPREs3kzQOpgZFQztu2wTNnU5StvpIHDIgkgKVlB3AtVnqSjITjqa2do4DpSMnIKOX2hv6NiEM21HxOSc-WucvyTIjEUh8vbsD9ThtnIJjG4mXDxZxLPGZ0Jot0/s320/DSC02833.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Mumbai attackers were part of a larger group, Indian police say<br /></strong>By Jane Perlez and Salman Masood<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: The Mumbai police said Tuesday that the 10 men who carried out the terrorist attacks here belonged to a group of 30 recruits of the Lashkar-e-Taiba Pakistani militant organization who had been selected for suicide missions, and that the whereabouts of the other 20 were unknown.<br />It was the first time that that the Indian police had disclosed the larger number of suicide recruits, and while they said there was no reason to believe that the other 20 were in India, they expressed concern about such a possibility.<br />"Another 20 were ready to die," said Deven Bharti, a Mumbai Police deputy commissioner, in an interview. "This is the very disturbing part of it."<br />The Indian police have consistently maintained that only 10 gunmen participated in the Nov. 26-29 attacks in Mumbai that left 171 people dead and raised tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan to the the highest in years.<br />Bharti said the information about the other recruits came from the sole surviving attacker, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, who was arrested during the attacks and has been in police custody ever since.<br />The deputy commissioner also said that based on the questioning of Kasab, the 30 recruits were provided with highly specialized training, including learning marine combat skills.<br />Once Kasab and his nine fellow attackers were selected by Lashkar leaders, they were kept sequestered in a house for three months, the deputy commissioner said. Here they were further divided into two-man teams, each team assigned a different target within Mumbai to attack, information that they were forbidden from sharing with one another. They never saw the other 20 trainees again, the deputy commissioner said, according to the information provided by Kasab.<br />The Indian police also on Tuesday provided further names and photographs of the Mumbai attackers, and supplied new details of the weaponry and communications and navigation equipment that they used during their assault.<br />The authorities had already identified two of the Mumbai gunmen, including Kasab, the lone survivor from the attacks, from the village of Faridkot, and Ismail Khan, from Deira Ismail Khan.<br />Each of the men had aliases, and they knew each other only by those aliases during their training, the police said. Only in the final few days before the attack, while they traveled by boat from the port of Karachi in Pakistan across the Arabian Sea to Mumbai, did they learn each others' true names, said Rakesh Maria, Mumbai's joint police commissioner.<br />At a news conference in Mumbai, Maria said the attackers carried a dozen grenades, a 9 mm handgun with two 18 round clips and an AK-47, along with seven to nine 30 round magazines, in addition to more than 100 rounds of loose ammunition. Maria had said previously that each terrorist also carried an 8 kilogram bomb. Three of these bombs were recovered and diffused, while the others exploded at various locations around the city, according to the police.<br />As the Indian police gave more information about the attackers, the Pakistani government publicly confirmed for the first time on Tuesday that its forces had seized two militant leaders, including the operational commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba.<br />The confirmation of the arrest of the Lashkar leader, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, was made by Pakistani Defense Minister Ahmad Mukhtar in an interview on Indian television. It was the furthest the authorities in Pakistan have yet gone in publicly acknowledging the possible complicity of Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Mumbai attacks.<br />Mukhtar identified the second militant leader arrested as Masood Azhar, head of Jaish-e-Muhammad, another banned militant group based in Pakistan.<br />Azhar, who was freed in 1999 in exchange for hostages on a hijacked Indian Airlines plane in Kandahar, Afghanistan, was on a list presented to Pakistan by the Indian government days after the attacks in Mumbai. The list contained the names of 20 suspects wanted in connection with other terrorist attacks and pending criminal cases.<br />Lakhvi "has been picked up," Mukhtar said, according to the television channel, CNN-IBN. "About Masood Azhar, I don't think we had decided yesterday to pick him up but our president is determined that we remove all irritants and as a small irritant he has been picked up." He said that President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan was "determined that we must cooperate with India."<br />Zardari himself, in an op-ed article published in the Tuesday edition of The New York Times, said Pakistan feels India's pain and that Pakistan "is committed to the pursuit, arrest, trial and punishment of anyone involved in these heinous attacks." But Zardari also cautioned India against what he called "hasty judgments and inflammatory statements."<br />After mounting pressure from the United States and India, Pakistani authorities on Sunday raided a camp run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group, in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, Pakistani and American officials said.<br />That operation appeared to be Pakistan's first concrete response to the demands from India and the United States to take action against the militants suspected in the attacks.<br />Since then, the authorities have carried out raids on at least five more offices of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Associated Press reported Tuesday, citing an unidentified senior Pakistani security official. The official said that 20 more people had been arrested.<br />It was unclear from the defense minister's remarks whether Lakhvi was detained in the first raid on Sunday. Lashkar-e-Taiba was founded 20 years ago with the help of Pakistan's intelligence agencies as a proxy force to challenge Indian control of part of Muslim-dominated Kashmir.<br />American intelligence and counterterrorism officials told The New York Times that Pakistan's spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, continued nurturing the group, even after 9/11, when the Pakistani government pledged to sever its ties with militant groups.<br />While investigators and intelligence officials say there is no hard evidence linking Pakistan's spy agency to the Mumbai attacks, they have pointed to Lashkar as the likely culprit.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Mumbai attackers used sophisticated technology<br /></strong>By Jeremy Kahn<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />MUMBAI: The terrorists who struck this city in November stunned the authorities not only with their use of sophisticated weaponry but also with their comfort with modern technology.<br />The terrorists navigated across the Arabian Sea to Mumbai from Karachi, Pakistan, with the help of a global positioning system handset. While under way, they communicated using a satellite phone with those in Pakistan believed to have coordinated the attacks. They recognized their targets and knew the most direct routes to reach them in part because they had studied satellite photos from Google Earth.<br />And, perhaps most significantly, throughout the three-day siege at two luxury hotels and a Jewish center, the Pakistani-based handlers communicated with the attackers using Internet phones that complicate efforts to trace and intercept calls.<br />Those handlers, who were apparently watching the attacks unfold live on television, were able to inform the attackers of the movement of security forces from news accounts and provide the gunmen with instructions and encouragement, the authorities said.<br />Hasan Gafoor, Mumbai's police commissioner, said Monday that as once-complicated technologies - including global positioning systems and satellite phones - have become simpler to operate, terrorists, like everyone else, have become adept at using them. "Well, whether terrorists or common criminals, they do try to be a step ahead in terms of technology," he said.<br />Indian security forces surrounding the buildings were able to monitor the terrorists' outgoing calls by intercepting their cellphone signals. But Indian police officials said those directing the attacks, who are believed to be from Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group based in Pakistan, were using a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service, which has complicated efforts to determine their whereabouts and identities.<br />VoIP services, in which conversations are carried over the Internet instead of conventional phone lines or cellphone towers, are popular with people looking to save money on long-distance and international calls. Many such services, like Skype and Vonage, allow a user to call another VoIP-enabled device anywhere in the world free of charge, or to call a standard telephone or cellphone at a deeply discounted rate.<br />But the same services are also increasingly popular with criminals and terrorists, a trend that worries some law enforcement and intelligence agencies. "It's a concern," said one Indian security official, who spoke anonymously because the investigation was continuing. "It's not something we have seen before."<br />In mid-October, a draft U.S. Army intelligence report highlighted the growing interest of Islamic militants in using VoIP, noting recent news reports of Taliban insurgents using Skype to communicate. The unclassified report, which examined discussions of emerging technologies on jihadist Web sites, was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit group based in Washington that monitors the effect of science on national security.<br />VoIP calls pose an array of difficulties for intelligence and law enforcement services, according to communications experts. "It means the phone-tapping techniques that work for old traditional interception don't work," said Matt Blaze, a professor and computer security expert at the University of Pennsylvania.<br />An agency using conventional tracing techniques to track a call from a land line or cellphone to a VoIP subscriber would be able to get only as far as the switching station that converts the voice call into Internet data, communications experts said. The switch, usually owned and operated by the company providing the VoIP service, could be located thousands of miles from the subscriber.<br />The subscriber's phone number would also probably reveal no information about his location. For instance, someone in New York could dial a local phone number but actually be connected via the Internet to a person in Thailand.<br />In Mumbai, the authorities have declined to disclose the names of the VoIP companies whose services the Lashkar-e-Taiba handlers used, but reports in the Indian news media have said the calls have been traced to companies in New Jersey and Austria. Yet investigators have said they are convinced that the handlers who directed the attacks were actually sitting somewhere in Pakistan during the calls.<br />One senior Lashkar-e-Taiba leader who U.S. officials believe may have played a key role in planning the Mumbai attacks is Zarrar Shah.<br />Shah, known to be a specialist in communications technology, may have been aware of the difficulties in tracing VoIP.<br />To determine the location of a VoIP caller, an investigating agency has to access a database kept by the service provider. The database logs the unique numerical identifier, known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address, of whatever device the subscriber was using to connect to the Internet. This could be a computer equipped with a microphone, a special VoIP phone, or even a cellphone with software that routes calls over the Internet using wireless connections as opposed to cellular signals.<br />It would then take additional electronic sleuthing to determine where the device was located. The customer's identity could be obtained from the service provider as well, but it might prove fraudulent, experts said.<br />Getting the IP address and then determining its location can take days longer than a standard phone trace, particularly if service providers involved are in a foreign country.<br />"Ultimately, we can trace them," said Gafoor, referring to VoIP calls. "It takes a little longer, but we will trace them."<br />Washington is assisting the Indian authorities in obtaining this information, according to another Indian police official who also spoke anonymously because of the continuing investigation.<br />Further complicating this task is the fact that IP addresses change frequently and are less tied to a specific location than phone numbers.<br />Computer experts said that while these challenges were formidable, none were insurmountable. And they cautioned that security services and police forces might be disingenuous when they complain about terrorists' use of new technologies, including VoIP.<br />The experts said that VoIP calls left a far richer data trail for investigators to mine than someone calling from an old-fashioned pay phone.<br />Blaze, the computer security expert at the University of Pennsylvania, also noted that 15 years ago the Mumbai attackers would probably not have had the capacity to make calls to their handlers during the course of their attacks, depriving investigators of vital clues to their identities.<br />"As one door closes - traditional wire line tapping - all these other doors have opened," Blaze said.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Pakistan raids militants in push after Mumbai<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Simon Cameron-Moore<br />Pakistan has arrested militants following several raids to show its intent to hunt down anyone who was behind the attack on the Indian city of Mumbai that killed at least 171 people, President Asif Ali Zardari said.<br />"As was demonstrated in Sunday's raids, which resulted in the arrest of militants, Pakistan will take action against the non-state actors found within our territory, treating them as criminals, terrorists and murderers," Zardari wrote in an article published on The New York Times' website on Tuesday.<br />India has pressed Pakistan to take action, or risk deepening a crisis in relations between the two nuclear-armed states.<br />Islamabad has promised to cooperate in the investigation but has vowed that anyone caught in Pakistan would be tried there.<br />The tensions have already put a four-year-old peace process in jeopardy, and the United States has advised India to act with restraint while saying the onus was on Pakistan to take action against any groups involved in last month's Mumbai attack.<br />Zardari did not name the location of the raids or who had been arrested, and a military spokesman also declined to say.<br />Among those being held was one of the men who Indian officials say controlled the 10 gunmen sent from Pakistan to carry out the attack, according to an intelligence official and militant-linked sources.<br />Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, an operations chief of Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, was caught during a raid on Sunday by security forces on one of the jihadi organisation's camps in the hills outside Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir.<br />Reuters has not confirmed any other raids, but a Pakistani daily reported on Tuesday that the offices of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa charity, widely regarded as a front for Lashkar, were targeted.<br />The News said arrests were made and records seized during raids on the charity in the Mansehra and Chakdra districts of North West Frontier Province.<br />NO HANDING OVER<br />Whether Pakistan's action will satisfy India is uncertain.<br />"Those who are Pakistani, there is no question of handing them over to India," Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi reiterated to journalists in Multan city, in the central province of Punjab.<br />"And if any allegations are proved against them, Pakistan has its own laws, Pakistan has its own courts and its own regulations and action will be taken against them within these regulations."<br />Several jihadi groups that have sprung out of Punjab to fight Indian rule in Kashmir have had ties with Pakistani intelligence in the past, analysts say, raising apprehension over whether any investigation would be transparent.<br />The News also reported that Maulana Masood Azhar, the head of the Jaish-e-Mohammad group and one of the most wanted men in India, had also been detained, but there was no official word.<br />Jaish and Lashkar were blamed for the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001, which almost caused a fourth war between the uneasy neighbours.<br />Both organisations have been banned by Pakistan and Azhar and Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar who now heads the JuD charity, both have been detained from time to time.<br />Zardari was adamant that militants had nothing to do with the Pakistani state.<br />"Not only are the terrorists not linked to the government of Pakistan in any way, we are their targets and we continue to be their victims," he said in The New York Times article.<br />"The best response to the Mumbai carnage is to coordinate in counteracting the scourge of terrorism," he wrote.<br />He said nearly 2,000 Pakistanis had been killed in militant-related violence this year alone, including 1,400 civilians and 600 security personnel.<br />As the Muslim nation celebrated the Eid al-Adha festival on Tuesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up and wounded three children in the Buner district of North West Frontier Province.<br />(Additional reporting by Asim Tanveer in MULTAN and Augustine Anthony in ISLAMABAD; Editing by Paul Tait)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Bomber wounds three Pakistani children</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />MINGORA, Pakistan: A suicide bomber killed himself and wounded three children in a northwestern Pakistani town Tuesday as people elsewhere in the Muslim nation celebrated the Eid al-Adha festival, military officials said.<br />The attack was in the Buner district, next to the troubled Swat valley, where Pakistani troops have killed hundreds of militants in the past year.<br />"The bomber got out of the car and blew himself up and wounded three children, but there has been no other fatalities," said a military intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.<br />More than 30 people were killed and many more maimed and wounded in two car bomb attacks in northwest Pakistan last week.<br />Security has been beefed up for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha across Pakistan for fear of attacks by al Qaeda-linked and Taliban militants who have unleashed a wave of suicide attacks in response to military operations against them.<br />Forty-eight people were killed in a suicide attack during Eid in the northwestern town of Charsadda in December last year.<br />The surge in violence has raised concern about nuclear-armed Pakistan's stability as its civilian government struggles with a sharp economic downturn and pressure from India to widen its campaign against jihadi organizations in the wake of the militant attack that killed at least 171 people in Mumbai late last month.<br />(Reporting by Junaid Khan; Writing by Augustine Anthony; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Valerie Lee)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Plea by Blackwater guard helps indict 5 others</strong><br />By Ginger Thompson<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: In the first public airing of an investigation that remains a source of international outrage, the Justice Department unsealed its case against five private security guards, built largely around the chilling testimony of a sixth guard about the 2007 shootings that left 17 unsuspecting Iraqi civilians dead at a busy Baghdad traffic circle.<br />In pleading guilty to manslaughter, the sixth security guard, Jeremy Ridgeway of California, described how he and the other guards used automatic rifles and grenade launchers to fire on cars, houses, a traffic officer and a girls' school. In addition to those killed, at least 20 people were wounded.<br />The six guards were employed by Blackwater Worldwide, the largest security contractor in Iraq; the company, based in North Carolina, has not been charged in the case.<br />Ridgeway said in the court documents unsealed Monday that the episode in Nisour Square on Sept. 16, 2007, started when the guards opened fire on a white Kia sedan "that posed no threat to the convoy."<br />He told investigators that although he could not clearly see the front passenger in the Kia, he noticed that the passenger was moving his arms, according to the documents.<br />"Defendant Ridgeway then fired multiple rounds from his M-4 assault rifle into the front passenger's side windshield of the white sedan, killing the passenger," the documents read. The statement went on to say that even after it was clear the driver of the sedan had been killed, several others in the convoy continued to fire on the car, and at least one of them launched a grenade.<br />After the car was in flames, according to the statement, "Defendant Ridgeway recognized that there had been no attempt to provide reasonable warnings to the driver of that vehicle."<br />The five guards named in the indictment rejected those assertions, and, in a legal move aimed at challenging the venue for the case, they surrendered to U.S. authorities in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is considered a more conservative, pro-military part of the country than Washington, where the Justice Department made public its case.<br />The indictments and the defendants' cross-county legal maneuver set the stage for the first test of the government's ability to hold private security contractors accountable for what it considers crimes committed overseas. They are also likely to produce protracted arguments on technical matters aimed at scuttling the case well before a jury has the opportunity to evaluate the guards' actions.<br />The shooting by Blackwater guards that day ignited outrage about the use of private security contractors in war zones and severely strained relations between the United States and the fledgling Iraqi government.<br />The case remained a sore point during the Bush administration's negotiations with Iraq for an agreement setting new rules for the continuing presence of U.S. troops. Ultimately, a major provision of the agreement ended immunity for private contractors working in Iraq.<br />U.S. officials restated the government's commitment to pursue justice in the Nisour Square shootings.<br />Echoing the findings of previous investigations by the Iraqi and U.S. authorities, prosecutors said Monday that they had found no evidence that any of the Iraqis killed had posed a threat to the guards.<br />Instead, prosecutors accused the guards of acting with blatant disregard for human life and the rule of law.<br />Some military law specialists said the court of public opinion was likely to weigh as heavily in this case as the legal issues, which is why Ridgeway's testimony - the first time a guard has admitted to crimes while on duty - was so important to the prosecution, and why the venue was so important to the other defendants.<br />Mark Hulkower, a lawyer for one of the guards, said the lawyers believed Salt Lake City would provide a jury pool "where people are more sympathetic to the experiences of coming under enemy fire."<br />The five guards charged in the indictment were Paul Slough, 29, of Keller, Texas; Nicholas Slatten, 24, of Sparta, Tennessee; Evan Liberty, 26, of Rochester, New Hampshire; Dustin Heard, 27, of Maryville, Tennessee; and Donald Ball, 26, of West Valley City, Utah.<br />At a news conference in Washington, the prosecutors said the indictments were the culmination of one of the most complicated investigations in the history of the FBI, involving 10 agents who interviewed hundreds of witnesses during at least four trips to Iraq.<br />According to the indictments, the Blackwater guards disobeyed orders by leaving their base to respond to reports of a car bomb. Upon arriving at Nisour Square, the indictments said, the guards moved into the circle against the flow of traffic and, without warning, began firing.<br />The shootings were without provocation or justification, said Patrick Rowan, the assistant attorney general for national security. "The consequences were devastating," he said.<br />Blackwater has not publicly said whether it is paying the legal fees of the guards charged in the case, although a company spokeswoman said last week that Blackwater did cover legal expenses in some instances.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>OPINION</strong><br /><strong>Music and peace</strong><br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />Music and peace<br />The sovereign independent republic of the West-Eastern Divan, as I like to call the orchestra I founded with Edward Said to promote dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, began as an unpredictable experiment in 1999.<br />Over the years, it has grown into an example of how Middle Eastern society could function under the best of circumstances. Our musicians have gone through the painful process of learning to express themselves while simultaneously listening to the narrative of their counterparts. I cannot imagine a better way of implementing the first and most fundamental article of the United Nations' declaration of human rights: that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, that they are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.<br />Unfortunately, today in the Middle East, not all human beings are granted the same freedom and equality in dignity and rights. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a musical organization, not a political one, but for the approximately six-week duration of its annual existence it is able to provide its members with one basic need: equality.<br />The same two young people who might encounter each other at a checkpoint in the roles of border guard and citizen under occupation sit next to one another in this orchestra, equally striving for perfection of musical expression and equally responsible for the result of their striving.<br />Music, unlike any other art, requires the ability to express oneself with absolute commitment and passion while listening carefully and sensitively to another voice that may even contradict one's own statement. This is the essence of musical counterpoint and a limitless source of inspiration to us in our extramusical dialogues.<br />Before a Beethoven Symphony we are all equal. Regardless of our origins, we must all approach the music with the same humility, curiosity, knowledge and passion. Music makes it possible for the subjects of mutually hostile governments to support one another because it engenders a true and effortless spirit of creativity and brotherhood.<br />This year I carry the title of United Nations Messenger of Peace, which I believe gives me both the right and the responsibility to work toward abolishing ignorance, and to contribute in whatever modest way I can toward real equality. Without equality there can be no justice, and without justice there will be no peace.<br />Daniel Barenboim, New York<br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>They want to destroy Pakistan, too</strong><br />By Asif Ali Zardari<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: The recent death and destruction in Mumbai, India, brought to my mind the death and destruction in Karachi on Oct. 18, 2007, when terrorists attacked a festive homecoming rally for my wife, Benazir Bhutto. Nearly 150 Pakistanis were killed and more than 450 were injured. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai may be a news story for most of the world. For me it is a painful reality of shared experience. Having seen my wife escape death by a hairbreadth on that day in Karachi, I lost her in a second, unfortunately successful, attempt two months later.<br />The Mumbai attacks were directed not only at India but also at Pakistan's new democratic government and the peace process with India that we have initiated. Supporters of authoritarianism in Pakistan and non-state actors with a vested interest in perpetuating conflict do not want change in Pakistan to take root.<br />To foil the designs of the terrorists, the two great nations of Pakistan and India, born together from the same revolution and mandate in 1947, must continue to move forward with the peace process.<br />Pakistan is shocked at the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. We can identify with India's pain. I am especially empathetic. I feel this pain every time I look into the eyes of my children.<br />Pakistan is committed to the pursuit, arrest, trial and punishment of anyone involved in these heinous attacks. But we caution against hasty judgments and inflammatory statements.<br />As was demonstrated in Sunday's raids, which resulted in the arrest of militants, Pakistan will take action against the non-state actors found within our territory, treating them as criminals, terrorists and murderers. Not only are the terrorists not linked to the government of Pakistan in any way, we are their targets and we continue to be their victims.<br />India is a mature nation and a stable democracy. Pakistanis appreciate India's democratic contributions. But as rage fueled by the Mumbai attacks catches on, Indians must pause and take a breath. India and Pakistan - and the rest of the world - must work together to track down the terrorists who caused mayhem in Mumbai, attacked New York, London and Madrid in the past, and destroyed the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in September. The terrorists who killed my wife are connected by ideology to these enemies of civilization.<br />These militants did not arise from whole cloth. Pakistan was an ally of the West throughout the Cold War. The world worked to exploit religion against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by empowering the most fanatic extremists as an instrument of destruction of a superpower. The strategy worked, but its legacy was the creation of an extremist militia with its own dynamic.<br />Pakistan continues to pay the price: the legacy of dictatorship, the fatigue of fanaticism, the dismemberment of civil society and the destruction of our democratic infrastructure. The resulting poverty continues to fuel the extremists and has created a culture of grievance and victimhood.<br />The challenge of confronting terrorists who have a vast support network is huge; Pakistan's fledgling democracy needs help from the rest of the world. We are on the frontlines of the war on terrorism.<br />We have 150,000 soldiers fighting Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their extremist allies along the border with Afghanistan - far more troops than NATO has in Afghanistan.<br />Nearly 2,000 Pakistanis have lost their lives to terrorism in this year alone, including 1,400 civilians and 600 security personnel ranging in rank from ordinary soldier to three-star general.<br />There have been more than 600 terrorism-related incidents in Pakistan this year. The terrorists have been set back by our aggressive war against them in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the Pashtun-majority areas bordering Afghanistan. Six hundred militants have been killed in recent attacks, hundreds by Pakistani F-16 jet strikes in the last two months.<br />Terrorism is a regional as well as a global threat, and it needs to be battled collectively. We understand the domestic political considerations in India in the aftermath of Mumbai. Nevertheless, accusations of complicity on Pakistan's part only complicate the already complex situation.<br />For India, Pakistan and the United States, the best response to the Mumbai carnage is to coordinate in counteracting the scourge of terrorism. The world must act to strengthen Pakistan's economy and democracy, help us build civil society and provide us with the law enforcement and counterterrorism capacities that will enable us to fight the terrorists effectively.<br />Benazir Bhutto once said that democracy is the best revenge against the abuses of dictatorship. In the current environment, reconciliation and rapprochement is the best revenge against the dark forces that are trying to provoke a confrontation between Pakistan and India, and ultimately a clash of civilizations.<br />Asif Ali Zardari is the president of Pakistan.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />***********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>U.S. chief says Mumbai attacks reveal Pakistan challenges</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Phil Stewart<br />The attacks that killed 171 people in Mumbai spoke volumes about the security challenges in neighbouring Pakistan, U.S. General David Petraeus said on Tuesday.<br />"There are those that have said this may be more of a 9/11 moment for Pakistan than it is for India, in fact. And that is not to say that it is anything but horrific for India," said Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, during a trip to Italy.<br />"But I think it really highlights the extent of the challenges that Pakistan faces."<br />India has blamed Islamist militants based in Pakistan for the three-day assault on India's commercial capital and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said there was no doubt the militants behind the attacks operated from Pakistani soil.<br />Petraeus said it was "heartening" to hear that Pakistan was trying to capture militants behind the attacks.<br />But, speaking to a gathering at the American Studies Centre in Rome, he flagged militant safe havens in Pakistan's tribal areas as a "significant concern."<br />Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq from February 2007 to September 2008, took over U.S. Central Command on October 31.<br />"On November 1, my team and I got on a plane and our first stop was Pakistan ... because of the challenges that are there," said Petraeus, who now oversees U.S. military strategy in 20 countries in the Middle East and Central and South Asia.<br />On Afghanistan, Petraeus confirmed news last month that the U.S. aimed to send "somewhere around" 20,000 extra troops there over the next 12 to 18 months to quell rising Taliban violence.<br />"We are working these issues -- some of them are dependent on the possibility of drawing down, continuing the draw down that has taken place in Iraq," he said.<br />"It could be again somewhere around 20,000 or so over the course of the increase on the U.S. side (in Afghanistan)."<br />There are some 70,000 Western troops in Afghanistan, including 32,000 U.S. troops -- 14,500 under NATO command and 17,500 under U.S. command.<br />Petraeus declined to answer a question about a possible increase in NATO allies' forces, saying: "If you could ask that question in Brussels, we would be very grateful to you."<br />He was due to meet Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi later Tuesday. In closed-door talks with Italy's defence minister, Petraeus raised the need for more joint civilian and military efforts in Afghanistan, a top Italian military official told reporters.<br />(Reporting by Phil Stewart, editing by Tim Pearce)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />***********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>NATO sees no serious disruption of Afghan supplies</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: NATO said on Tuesday militants could not seriously disrupt its supply routes to Afghanistan, despite a weekend attack on a Western supply convoy in Pakistan that destroyed close to 100 military vehicles.<br />"They should be under no illusion that they can seriously disrupt the lines of communication for NATO because we have alternatives," NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told a news briefing.<br />Pakistani militants attacked a parked convoy of trucks carrying military vehicles for Western forces in Afghanistan near the northwestern town of Peshawar early on Sunday, destroying 96 trucks, police said.<br />NATO and U.S. officials have been pursuing alternative supply routes that would make Western forces in Afghanistan less dependent on the overland route via Pakistan.<br />NATO already transports supplies across Russia using an air bridge and in April signed a deal allowing it to use Russian land transit of non-lethal supplies. However talks are still going on with Afghanistan's neighbours Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan for the goods to reach the Afghan border.<br />Separately, Afghanistan's Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar, who will visit NATO on Wednesday, called on the European Union to step up its police training and reform mission EUPOL ahead of presidential elections due next year.<br />"We are here to advocate additional support and resources for EUPOL so it can live up to expectations," he told a joint news conference with EU Special Representative for Afghanistan Ettore Sequi. "With a view to the elections, some of these programmes will have to be accelerated," he said.<br />EU ministers agreed in May on a long-term objective of doubling the size of the mission to around 400 trainers. It currently numbers 169 international and 91 local staff.<br />Western backers of the Afghan government see police reform as crucial to combating a worsening Islamist insurgency and the ultimate aim of handing over all security duties to Afghan forces.<br />The EU approach to police reform has been criticised, particularly in the United States, as being too slow in bringing law and order to a country faced with endemic corruption and insurgency.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Bush told Pakistan that U.S. will protect Americans<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Jeremy Pelofsky<br />The United States has made clear to Pakistan it will do whatever is necessary to protect American soldiers and civilians, U.S. President George W. Bush said Tuesday.<br />Bush told cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point that one of the most important challenges they would face is helping allies assert control over largely ungoverned territory such as the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan.<br />Tensions between Washington and Islamabad have flared over U.S. drone strikes aimed at militants along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and some of his followers are believed to be hiding.<br />Pakistan has protested U.S. air attacks on its territory and in June summoned U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson to the foreign ministry to lodge a complaint about a strike in which Pakistani soldiers were killed.<br />"One of the most important challenges we will face and you will face in the years ahead is helping our partners assert control over ungoverned spaces," Bush said. "The problem is most pronounced in Pakistan, where areas along the Afghanistan border are home to Taliban and to al Qaeda fighters."<br />Pakistan understands the terrorism threat, Bush said, but added: "We have made it clear to Pakistan and to all our partners that we will do what is necessary to protect American troops and the American people."<br />The recent attacks in Mumbai, where militants killed 171 people, including six Americans, has further complicated ties between the United States and Pakistan.<br />India has said the attackers came from Pakistan and demanded Islamabad take immediate action. Pakistan has promised to cooperate with the investigation but denied the government was involved in the attack on its nuclear-armed rival.<br />"They're working to enforce the law and fight terror in the border areas," Bush said of Pakistan. "And our government is providing strong support for these efforts."<br />The United States has about 31,000 troops in neighbouring Afghanistan.<br />As Bush enters the final weeks of his presidency, he offered a laundry list of improvements his administration has made to the U.S. military to respond to an evolving enemy. While he did not name his successor, Democrat Barack Obama, he urged him to stay on the offensive.<br />"In the years ahead, our nation must continue developing the capabilities to take the fight to our enemies across the world," Bush said. "We must stay on the offensive. We must be determined and we must be relentless to do our duty to protect the American people from harm."<br />(Reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky in West Point, N.Y. and Tabassum Zakaria in Washington; Editing by John O'Callaghan and Cynthia Osterman)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Iraqi police arrest 30 in fatal truck bombing<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: Iraqi police have arrested 30 members of an al-Qaida cell, including the alleged mastermind of truck bombings that killed 17 people in the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, officials said Tuesday.<br />Tariq al-Karbouli, the alleged leader of the cell, was picked up Monday in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. The other members of the cell were apprehended in a series of raids that ended early Tuesday, the officials added.<br />They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.<br />Two bomb-laden trucks exploded Thursday at police stations in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, killing 17 people and leveling buildings, police reported.<br />The brazen attacks in the most heavily guarded city in Iraq raised questions about the ability of Iraqi security forces to ensure security as the U.S. scales down its combat role under the newly ratified U.S.-Iraqi pact, which calls for an American pullout within three years.<br />One of the Iraqi officials said al-Karbouli, who works for a government-owned yogurt company, said explosives used in the attacks were smuggled into the city over a period of time hidden under bananas and other foodstuffs.<br />The official said al-Karbouli had confessed to his role in the bombings, but that the 11 other people directly involved were still at large.<br />Fallujah is located in Anbar province, the mostly Sunni area of western Iraq that had been the main theater of the war until Sunni tribes there broke with al-Qaida last year and joined forces with the Americans.<br />The city has been under intense security since U.S. forces drove out al-Qaida and other Sunni extremists in November 2004 during the fiercest urban fighting of the Iraq war.<br />With a drop in violence, the U.S. transferred security control of the province to the Iraqis last September.<br />Although violence is down 80 percent nationwide since early this year, U.S. officials say the security situation remains tenuous, and some areas of the country are still dangerous.<br />Those areas include Diyala province north of Baghdad. On Tuesday, a local official there called for a six-month delay in regional elections in Diyala because the security situation is too fragile.<br />Ibrahim Bajilan, head of the Diyala provincial council, said parts of his province are still under the influence of insurgents and are no-go areas for certain religious groups.<br />Bajilan also said voting would be skewed because thousands of people displaced by sectarian violence have not returned to their homes.<br />Voters in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces will choose members of ruling provincial councils on Jan. 31.<br />Bajilan said voters in Diyala could face intimidation and candidates could be assassinated ahead of the January balloting. The U.S. military also has warned it expects attacks to rise ahead of the elections.<br />"There will be a wave of killings against the candidates due to an absence of law and real protection for them," Bajilan said.<br />U.S. and Iraqi officials hope the elections will redress problems created by the last regional balloting in January 2005, when Sunnis largely stayed away from the polls.<br />As a result, Kurds and Shiites won a disproportionate share of the power, including in areas such as Diyala which has a large Sunni population.<br />Qassim al-Aboudi, an official in the electoral commission, declined to comment on the postponement request but said the elections law included no provision for a delay.<br />In Karbala, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki urged a big turnout in the January ballot, saying it would help reconcile the country's rival religious and ethnic communities.<br />He urged people to vote according to the interest of the country.<br />"During the election contest, I hope that you will not bow to any pressure or any other calculations," al-Maliki, a Shiite, said.<br />____<br />Associated Press reporter Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Iraq violence seen at at 5-1/2 year low<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />ROME: Violence in Iraq has in the past few weeks fallen to its lowest level since summer 2003 and security gains, while still at risk of reversal, are less fragile than before, U.S. General David Petraeus said on Tuesday.<br />Petraeus, who leads the U.S. Central Command, said the past two weeks in particular had shown impressive gains for security in Iraq.<br />"I think that no one disputes at this point that there has been anything but very significant progress in Iraq," he said, addressing a gathering at the American Studies Centre in Rome.<br />"The situation, despite this progress, does remain fragile and it is reversible, but it is less fragile than it was, for example, when ... I last testified before the U.S. Congress back in May."<br />U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has said he believes U.S. combat troops could be withdrawn from Iraq in 16 months.<br />Petraeus was the top U.S. commander in Iraq from February 2007 to September 2008.<br />Leading Central Command since October 31, he oversees U.S. military operations and strategy in a volatile swathe of the world that covers 20 countries, from the Middle East to Central and South Asia, including Iraq and Afghanistan.<br />(Reporting by Phil Stewart, editing by Tim Pearce)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>U.S. declines to free Reuters photographer in Iraq</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: The U.S. military in Iraq is not obliged to obey an Iraqi court order to release a freelance photographer working for Reuters news agency and will hold him into 2009, a spokesman said on Tuesday.<br />The Iraqi Central Criminal Court ruled on November 30 that there was no evidence against Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed, and ordered the U.S. military to release him from Camp Cropper prison near Baghdad airport, where he has been detained since September.<br />"Though we appreciate the decision of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq in the Jassam case, their decision does not negate the intelligence information that currently lists him as a threat to Iraq security and stability," said Major Neal Fisher, spokesman for the U.S. military's detainee operations in Iraq.<br />"He will be processed for release in a safe and orderly manner after December 31st, in the order of his individual threat level, along with all other detainees," Fisher said in an email to Reuters.<br />"Since he already has a decision from the CCCI, when it is his turn for release he will be able to out-process without having to go through the courts as other detainees in his threat classification will have to do."<br />Jassam was detained in early September in a raid on his home in Mahmudiya by U.S. and Iraqi forces. His photographic equipment was also confiscated. Jassam works for other Iraqi media, in addition to Reuters News, a Thomson Reuters company.<br />Mahmudiya, 30 km (20 miles) south of Baghdad, was once one of the most violent areas of Iraq as sectarian bloodshed raged in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, but security there and elsewhere has improved markedly in recent months.<br />"I am disappointed he has not been released in accordance with the court order," Reuters News Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger said on Tuesday.<br />In the ruling issued by the Iraqi court at the end of last month, Iraqi prosecutors said they had asked the U.S. military repeatedly for the evidence it had against Jassam but that U.S. forces had failed to provide any material.<br />Fisher said that the U.S. military was "not bound" to provide military intelligence to Iraqi courts.<br />The legal situation changes next year when a security pact with the United States enters into force, replacing a U.N. mandate governing the presence of foreign troops and paving the way for U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraq by end-2011.<br />Under the pact, the U.S. military will no longer be able to detain people.<br />Most of the more than 15,000 detainees currently held in Iraq by U.S. forces will have to be set free as a result. Others who are subject to Iraqi arrest warrants will be transferred to Iraqi prisons. The pact gives no timeline for that process to happen but says it should be conducted in an orderly manner.<br />Fisher declined to arrange a meeting between Reuters and the U.S. commander of the prisons operations, Brigadier General David Quantock, to discuss Jassam's continuing detention.<br />"I will not ask him to make this detainee more important than the other 15,800 detainees, when he has already made his decision," Fisher said.<br />Reuters and international media rights groups have criticized the U.S. military's refusal to deal more quickly with suspicions apparently arising from the legitimate activities of reporters covering acts of violence.<br />In August, the U.S. military freed a cameraman working for Reuters after holding him for three weeks without charges. It had been the third time Ali al-Mashhadani, who also conducts freelance work for the BBC and Washington-based National Public Radio, had been detained.<br />(Reporting by Michael Christie; Editing by Samia Nakhoul)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />**********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Voters want people, not parties in Iraq's Basra<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Mohammed Abbas<br />For the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis could be seeing election candidates kissing babies and canvassing neighbours when a new polling system comes into force in January.<br />Provincial polls slated for January 31 will allow voters to pick people, not just parties, potentially thrusting individual candidates into the spotlight.<br />A dramatic fall in violence in Iraq over the past year has made it safer for people to publicly declare their candidacy, marking a degree of maturity in a long-thwarted democracy.<br />In previous polls in 2005 -- the first since the fall of Hussein in 2003 -- people could only vote for parties, a system known as closed-list. Now Iraqis are ready to move on.<br />"We have experience now, we know who's who. We're going to vote for people, not parties," said trader Faris Kadhim in the oil-rich city of Basra, which until recently was torn apart by gangs and militias vying for control.<br />The January elections will be the first to be organized and run by Iraq -- not the United States or United Nations -- since the fall of Saddam, making them a milestone.<br />How Basra, Iraq's second largest city, fares in January will be a key indicator of Iraq's ability to steer the struggle for power away from bullets to the ballot box.<br />The nationwide elections are for seats in Iraq's powerful provincial councils, whose responsibilities include local investment, utilities, education, and infrastructure.<br />Some 2.5 million people live in Basra, which like no other city highlights the years of wasted opportunity and devastation wreaked by incompetence and violence.<br />The capital of Basra province in the south, it sits on a sea of oil -- historically, two-thirds of production came from the region -- and has the country's only ports.<br />It is blessed with rich palm groves and picturesque canals and waterways and is close to marshland thought to be the biblical Garden of Eden, a contender for world heritage status.<br />Yet it is heaving with garbage and unemployment is rife. Waterways are clogged with waste, and the stench in even some genteel areas is overpowering. Most streets are potholed.<br />Until a government crackdown in late March, militias and gangs ruled the city, and even now some of Basra's elite go shopping with an escort of soldiers and armoured cars.<br />People are reluctant to venture out at night, when Basra largely becomes the preserve of packs of stray dogs, their barks echoing in the darkness.<br />VOTE FOR PEOPLE<br />Basra's potential has contributed to its decay as rival groups in Iraq's Shi'ite south fought for control, scaring away foreign investment and expertise.<br />Allegations of oil-smuggling and corruption abound, and bickering among the incumbent local politicians has held up development. Desperately needed cash has been returned to the central government because of delays in spending it.<br />Basra's citizens have had enough, and some 25 interviewed by Reuters vowed to vote only for candidates they know and trust, not parties or coalitions.<br />Voters now relish being able to pick named candidates, a demand the United Nations -- which is advising on the polls -- said it had heard loud and clear from Iraq's people.<br />"The problem with the past election was the closed list. We need to pick someone we know," said shopper Fattah al-Moussawi.<br />"We want to vote for people ... A list might have one only good person in it," said another shopper Farhan al-Hajaj.<br />Violence is down sharply from 2005, mostly because of a surge in U.S. troops, a shift against al Qaeda by Sunni tribal leaders once allied with the Islamist group, and a cease-fire by militia leader and Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.<br />With increased security, competition is set to be fierce. Some 1,286 candidates on about 80 lists are competing for just 35 seats on the provincial council.<br />The Sunni-dominated Iraqi National Dialogue political bloc said better security had allowed it open a base in mainly Shi'ite Basra. The two sects were once slaughtering each other.<br />More independents are competing. Three years ago, it would have been dangerous to stand as a candidate without the security a well-funded political party could provide.<br />"The security now is much better, and it is very encouraging for people who did not take part in politics before to do so now," said independent candidate and teacher Assad Attiya.<br />BIG CHANGE<br />The ability to pick single candidates could force election hopefuls onto the streets to make themselves known, a Western-style of campaigning virtually unknown in Iraq.<br />Tribal sheikhs, local notables and pillars of the community could have a better chance of office without party affiliation.<br />"This is a big change in the politics of Iraq," said Ahmed al-Hilali, head of a group fielding 17 independent candidates.<br />More independents will make it easier to hold individual politicians to account, said group members who were planning election campaigns in each of their local districts.<br />Even if voters choose established parties over independents, the chance to pick single candidates could change party make-up.<br />None of Basra's ruling parties could outline their campaign plans when Reuters visited, but all were busily filtering their membership to find individual candidates acceptable to voters.<br />The Islamic Fadhila Party was subjecting would-be candidates to a legal and political examination.<br />Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Dawa Islamic Party said it had spent "many long nights" screening candidates. The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council had committees to sift through hundreds of applicants.<br />"A clean record is paramount; otherwise they don't run," said a leader of Dawa in Basra Shiltagh al-Myyah.<br />Fadhila dominates Basra's provincial council, considered by many in Basra as a failure. Its current leader, who will not run in January, declined to give an interview to Reuters.<br />"Many see us as aloof, having no constituents or base," his deputy Nusaif al-Ibadi said when asked about campaign goals.<br />"We want to show that we do."<br />(Additional reporting by Aref Mohammed; Editing by Catherine Bosley and Sara Ledwith)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi61AB6JerwjvjwGK5cIjKRt4DZuco_Cj20D-rAoGd1UkBOdwHOWshzk0xJ_O8DXiku03mb_HILMv8lWb_oI4naqksx8-zKdLYFd1k2NKRks9uXw7tt2-Ifz2IsjMYF3sT_8NDjJ0jqmkQ/s1600-h/DSC02835.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062339989210082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi61AB6JerwjvjwGK5cIjKRt4DZuco_Cj20D-rAoGd1UkBOdwHOWshzk0xJ_O8DXiku03mb_HILMv8lWb_oI4naqksx8-zKdLYFd1k2NKRks9uXw7tt2-Ifz2IsjMYF3sT_8NDjJ0jqmkQ/s320/DSC02835.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Spain's hard times squeeze immigrants' toehold<br /></strong>By Victoria Burnett<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />MADRID: When Camelia Condurat could not muster the change to buy bread for her three young daughters, she found some flour and yeast in the cupboard and made it herself.<br />"If you do not even have 50 cents to buy a loaf of bread, what can you do?" she said. "You scrape by."<br />Getting by has become a grueling daily mission for Condurat, a 24-year-old Romanian. When her husband, Costel, lost his job as a bricklayer in October, she sought work for the first time since coming to Spain four years ago. She prepares food and cleans at a local restaurant, working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, for €700 a month, or about $900.<br />Half her wages pay the rent for the tiny three-bedroom apartment her family shares with two lodgers. What is left does not cover the family's needs, so she spends rare free moments queuing for handouts at the government welfare office, the Red Cross and the local church. Costel Condurat, 39, a former Romanian policeman who earned about €1,000 a month before he was laid off, stays home with their children.<br />"It is so, so hard," she said in fluent Spanish, looking down at her calloused hands as her girls, aged 3, 5 and 6, clambered onto her lap. "I'm ashamed to ask for help. But I have three girls, so I leave my pride at home."<br />In Coslada and other working-class suburbs with large immigrant populations on the outskirts of Madrid, stories like this have become common in the economic slide.<br />Spain created more jobs and drew more immigrants than any country in Europe over the past decade, largely because of a construction boom.<br />As the economy shrinks, companies are disgorging workers at an alarming rate - unemployment soared above 11 percent in the third quarter - and immigrants in low-skilled jobs have been hit hardest.<br />The once-permissive Spanish government is rolling up the welcome mat, even encouraging immigrants to return home on lump-sum welfare payments.<br />During its economic boom, Spain epitomized Europe's hunger for low-cost labor, but now, it could become a laboratory for strains that emerge when those people are unemployed, yet stay put.<br />Spain has not yet suffered the outbursts of xenophobia seen in Italy, and Spaniards say their own years as a nation of émigrés helps them sympathize.<br />The Condurats, for instance, said their elderly Spanish landlord had let them fall behind with the rent and popped by most days with bread or biscuits for the girls, who call him Grandpa.<br />But hospitality may wear thin. Spain's unemployment rate is now the highest in the European Union, up from 8 percent at the end of 2007.<br />Among immigrants, unemployment is estimated at 17 percent. About five million immigrants are registered as living in Spain, a country of 46 million, with Moroccans, Romanians and Ecuadorians topping the list.<br />Interviews with more than a dozen immigrants and leaders of migrants' associations and charities in Madrid revealed a picture of growing desperation among the million-strong community of foreign workers in and around Madrid. Many are living on unemployment benefits, but thousands do not qualify because they worked illegally or were self-employed, like Costel Condurat.<br />Many said life had become a grinding trail of employment centers, soup kitchens and local charities. Some are months behind on rent or mortgage payments and have racked up debts.<br />For René Bonilla, 33, a painter and decorator from Colombia, the economic crisis crushed a life he had built over seven hard years. In November last year, Bonilla began the process of bringing his wife, Iuli, and their daughter, Arancha, 2, from Colombia. He was earning €1,100 a month and was confident he could support them.<br />By the time they arrived in September, Bonilla had been out of work for a month. He had spent his €4,000 in savings bringing them to Madrid. Now the three spend their days cooped up in a room in an apartment in Alcorcón, a tough suburb with a high proportion of Latin American immigrants. Their one bed serves as a table to eat and a place to watch television and play with Arancha. They are surviving on loans from their landlord, an elderly Spaniard.<br />"Now I am back to where I started," said Bonilla, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep. "Actually, I am worse off. I am seven years older and now there are three of us to feed."<br />The authorities have cracked down on businesses that employ undocumented workers and immigrants say plain-clothed police prowl commuter trains, arresting those without papers. Prime Minister José Rodríguez Zapatero has said he supports the European Union's tough Return Directive, which would allow illegal migrants to be held for up to 18 months.<br />The government in November began a return program, under which immigrants can take unemployment benefit in a lump sum provided they go home and give up the right to return to Spain for three years.<br />Early next year, the government will curb the number of relatives who can join legally employed migrants after one year. Spouses and children under 18 will still be able to come, but not parents and parents-in-law.<br />"Spain saw really strong growth over the past five years and we could not have done this with our own citizens. But now we're in a very different situation," Labor Minister Celestíno Corbacho said in an interview.<br />Unable to send money home or support themselves, some immigrants are leaving. About 600 entered the government return program in the first three weeks, of an estimated 87,000 who would qualify. The Red Cross, which offers financial assistance to those who want to leave but cannot afford to, said it had helped about 900 people this year, double last year's figure. Immigrants said some are going home unassisted; there are no figures, either official or unofficial.<br />Corbacho admitted he did not expect "a huge exodus." "If you have a family that has kids in school, where one partner is working and the other is not - to break with all this, that is a decision that the family will take only after they have no other hope," he said.<br />Despite the cooler reception and grim job climate, most immigrants seem determined to stay. In interviews, some immigrants or leaders of immigrants' association said they feared the humiliation of returning empty handed, others that they had sacrificed too much to give up and leave.<br />Camelia Condurat was separated for four years from her two eldest daughters.<br />"When I went to fetch them from Romania, they cried, and I said: 'I'm your mom,"' she recalled, perched on a floral sofa in the narrow living room that also serves as the girls' bedroom.<br />"If we went back to Romania, we would start from zero, all over again," she said, adding, "People would say, 'After five years in Spain, have you come back with nothing?"'<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0MK-SzqC2XPRAjgF3ayVnzw85m28OoPXA0Kgi2CxHwflEpKl5UbQ5PWvvFwv0hZNQU10fjqW6_XGWlHwuRsMGbd5984FfgxUoTEj5cQFneKXz26vdZJMmfTtpb_ImDChI4TJ5QpiUXgw/s1600-h/DSC02836.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062337658799538" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 222px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0MK-SzqC2XPRAjgF3ayVnzw85m28OoPXA0Kgi2CxHwflEpKl5UbQ5PWvvFwv0hZNQU10fjqW6_XGWlHwuRsMGbd5984FfgxUoTEj5cQFneKXz26vdZJMmfTtpb_ImDChI4TJ5QpiUXgw/s320/DSC02836.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>As riots continue, Greece faces political crisis</strong><br />By Rachel Donadio and Anthee Carassava<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />ATHENS: Thousands of mourners turned out here Tuesday for the funeral of a 15-year-old boy whose shooting death by police officers has tipped the country into its worst riots in decades, exposing the government's fragile hold on a deeply divided society.<br />The authorities said more than 100 people were arrested for looting Tuesday, as roving bands of militant youths threw gasoline bombs and smashed shop windows in central Athens for a fourth day, clashing with riot police who did not seem able to contain the violence.<br />The two largest Greek labor unions said they would push ahead with a planned 24-hour strike Wednesday to demand more state social spending. But they cancelled a protest march in an attempt to avoid further violence. Flights and ferry links are expected to be cut and train services severely limited. The governments of the United States, Britain and Australia warned citizens to avoid traveling to Athens.<br />Overall, the clashes Tuesday were seen as less intense than those Monday, when after dark hundreds of self-described anarchists broke the windows of upscale shops, banks and five-star hotels in central Athens and burned a large Christmas tree in the plaza in front of Parliament.<br />On Tuesday, rioters also fought with the police for the fourth day in a row in Salonika, the second-largest city in Greece, while in the port city of Patras, citizens trying to protect their shops came into conflict with rioters.<br />That the shooting death of a teenager, however tragic, could bring an entire country to its knees speaks to the deep political, social and economic unrest in Greece.<br />The center-right government of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis hangs by a one-vote majority in Parliament and is roiled by a corruption scandal in which two senior ministers have already resigned. Unemployment is high and the global recession hitting hard.<br />For the second day in a row Tuesday, students, teachers and workers used the demonstrations inspired by the death of Alexandros Grigoropolos, 15, to protest everything from school reforms to the grim economic situation.<br />On Tuesday, the Socialist party leader, George Papandreou, renewed his call for early elections. Yet it remained unclear whether the riots would cause the government to fall.<br />"What I foresee is a prolonged political crisis with no immediate results for two or three years," said George Kirtsos, a political commentator and the publisher of City Press, an independent newspaper. "In that time, the country will be going from bad to worse."<br />On Tuesday, as youths scuffled with the police outside Parliament, Karamanlis met with his cabinet council and opposition leaders in an effort to get their backing for security operations.<br />He said that there would be no leniency for the rioters. "No one has the right to use this tragic incident as an alibi for actions of raw violence, for actions against innocent people, their property and society as a whole, and against democracy," Karamanlis said after an emergency meeting with President Karolos Papoulias.<br />Yet even Karamanlis's closest advisers conceded that the government did not have the security situation under control. "He's seriously troubled," said Nicholas Karahalios, a strategy adviser to the prime minister. "Whereas before we were dealing with a political and economic crisis, now there's a third dimension attached to it: a security crisis."<br />The authorities seem to fear that cracking down on the militants might lead to other unintended deaths and provoke more rioting. Asked why they had not contained the riots, a spokesman for the national police, Panayiotes Stathis, said "violence cannot be fought with violence."<br />Some questioned that approach. "They chose to show tolerance, which backfired," said Nikos Kostandaras, the editor of the Greek daily Kathimerini. The riots, he added, "were radicalizing every sector of the population."<br />Indeed, on Tuesday, schools and universities were closed, and thousands of teachers and students joined generally peaceful protests through Athens. George Dimitriou, 22 and a member of the agriculture students' union, said the teenager's death was an opportunity to protest other economic issues.<br />"Our generation is facing a tougher future than our parents," Dimitriu said as he stood outside Athens University. "This is unheard of, because normally things get better."<br />Demonstrations, even violent ones, are nothing new in Greece, which has a long tradition of political protest and has been relatively tolerant of the self-described anarchist groups that routinely hold anti-government demonstrations.<br />Ever since the country shed its seven years of military dictatorship to became a democracy in the mid-1970s, the police have been seen as a throwback to the era of the military junta. Although Greece has a comparatively high ratio of more than 45,000 police for 10 million people, in the popular imagination, they are seen as ineffective and corrupt.<br />To some, the instability reflects deeper problems. "These riots are a symptom of a deep cultural problem rather than a social one," said Stathis Kalyvas, a political science professor at Yale University. Since the mid-1970s, Kalyvas said, civil disobedience has been seen as "almost always justified."<br />Indeed, Grigoropolos was shot Saturday night in the Athens neighborhood of Exarcheia, where youths routinely fight the police. The police have said Grigoropolos died when officers encountered a mob. But one officer has been charged with premeditated manslaughter in the case and another has been charged as an accomplice.<br />On Tuesday, thousands lined the street outside the cemetery and small, whitewashed chapel where Grigoropolos was buried in Paleo Faliro, a middle class residential neighborhood where he grew up. His father is a bank manager and his mother a jeweler.<br />Although the funeral passed peacefully, dozens of militants fought afterward with the police and smashed car windows, though no one was injured.<br />Earlier on Tuesday, two demonstrations of teachers, students and workers wound their way largely peacefully through central Athens. Once they neared the Parliament building, some students shouted "Down with the government of murderers" and "Let it burn, let it burn, the brothel, the Parliament." Other militants fought the police.<br />Before the rioting, Karamanlis was popular, even if his government was less so. He won by a wide margin in 2004, promising change after two decades of Socialist rule. He was re-elected in 2007, but his center-right party's lead fell to two votes in Parliament.<br />But in the autumn of 2008, the government was stung by a corruption scandal in which it was accused of selling a monastery that is prime Athens real estate before the 2004 Olympics in exchange for cheaper land elsewhere.<br />Last month, two top ministers resigned over reports of more than 250 land swaps and lawmakers unanimously agreed to start a special investigation. The scandals have deeply weakened Karamanlis's government and curbed his chances of implementing changes.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />**************************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Picking Obama successor puts spotlight on governor<br /></strong>By Monica Davey<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />CHICAGO: This article was first published Nov. 12.<br />The task of filling President-elect Barack Obama's seat in the Senate offers Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois a rare chance to wield influence in Washington.<br />It also offers Blagojevich, a Democrat in his second term, the rare chance to focus public attention on something other than his litany of problems a federal investigation into his administration, his icy standoffs with the Democratic-controlled State Legislature and his dismal approval rating (which, according to a Chicago Tribune survey last month, has sunk to 13 percent, worse even than some approval marks for President George W. Bush).<br />"Compared to everything else, this is good publicity," said Kent Redfield, a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Springfield. "Now it's a matter of doing something on it that helps him politically. He needs to."<br />Since Election Day, Blagojevich's decision, assigned to him under Illinois law, has become this state's political parlor game, one buried in layers deeper than just which Democrat will best guard the seat until the 2010 election.<br />Among the many political concerns: Should another African-American finish the term of Obama? Should the replacement be a caretaker with no expectations of re-election, or someone who dreams of staying on? And how might Blagojevich navigate the choice in such a way that might shore up some specks of support for his own political future?<br />Under state law, the governor has wide discretion in coming up with a successor. He need only pick someone who is a resident of the state, is at least 30 years old and has been a United States citizen for at least nine years.<br />The list of those rumored to be under consideration (including some, it seems, who have blatantly offered themselves up to the governor) grows longer each day. Blagojevich, who is turning to a group of close advisers for guidance, is expected to make a decision around Christmas.<br />Meanwhile, the calls keep coming.<br />"It's unbelievable what this has become; he is hearing it from all sides," said Lucio Guerrero, Blagojevich's spokesman, who described some of the inquiries to the governor as amounting to people essentially dreaming aloud, "Boy, I'd be a good senator."<br />Most often, political analysts here mention names like Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., long a Democratic congressman from Chicago's South Side and the city's southern suburbs and son of the civil rights activist; Tammy Duckworth, a veteran of the war in Iraq who lost her legs when her helicopter came under fire and who is now director of the state's Department of Veterans Affairs; Valerie Jarrett, a close adviser to Obama and longtime ally of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago (she told The Chicago Tribune on Wednesday that she was not interested in the appointment); and several other members of Congress from in and near Chicago, including Melissa Bean, Danny Davis, Luis Gutierrez and Jan Schakowsky.<br />Many of the most-discussed names on the list are loathe to discuss the possibility publicly, instead staying silent or issuing brief, generic statements.<br />"Now that Senator Obama has won the presidency, I would be honored and humbled to be appointed to succeed him in the U.S. Senate," Jackson said in a statement. "But, in the end, the decision rests with Governor Blagojevich, and I'm confident that he'll make an appointment in the best interest of the state as well as the nation."<br />That said, Jackson's camp also commissioned and made public a poll that looked at what likely voters in Illinois thought about possible replacements for Obama. It showed Jackson, who has one of the most recognized names in Illinois politics, topping the list.<br />Duckworth, who was appointed to the veterans' affairs job by Blagojevich after she lost a bid for Congress in 2006, said in an interview that she had not spoken to him about the Senate opening.<br />"If I were to be considered, I'd be deeply honored," said Duckworth, who added that she would also be perfectly happy to stay put, "taking care of Illinois veterans."<br />Duckworth, who remains a major in the Illinois National Guard, has also been mentioned as someone who might be offered a role in the Obama administration. She and Obama have not discussed such a possibility, she said, but she noted that whenever a commander in chief had summoned her, "I have grabbed my boots and headed over."<br />While influential Democrats might usually weigh in as the governor makes such a decision, Obama has suggested that he will stay out of the matter. Blagojevich is also something of a loner in the political world here, having clashed over the years with Democratic leaders and wrestling with his public image.<br />Though Blagojevich came into office portraying himself as a reformer, his administration has come under federal scrutiny; by last month, 13 people had been indicted in a corruption probe into influence peddling. Blagojevich, who has left open the possibility of running for a third term in 2010, has not been charged with wrongdoing.<br />Blagojevich has indicated that he does not intend to appoint himself to the Senate seat, a seemingly far-fetched option, but one some of his severest critics seemed to think was possible. Some analysts still suggest he might consider appointing one of his potential rivals to remove them from a governor's race for example, Lisa Madigan, the state attorney general and daughter of Michael Madigan, the longtime speaker of the Illinois House; or Daniel Hynes, the state comptroller and son of Thomas Hynes, another powerful Illinois Democrat.<br />Some critics, only half jokingly, suggest that Blagojevich might want to consider Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States attorney here for the past seven years who has overseen investigations into the administrations of Blagojevich and his predecessor, City Hall, the county jail and former Chicago police officers, among others.<br />Guerrero, his spokesman, said Blagojevich was focused on finding someone who would be a strong advocate for the residents of Illinois on matters like health care and jobs.<br />"The other stuff I don't think is weighing on him as much as people make it out to be," Guerrero said, chalking up Blagojevich's low approval ratings to the bleak economic times. "When your name is on the door, you're the one people are going to be talking about."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />***************************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Illinois governor charged in scheme to sell Obama's former Senate seat</strong><br />By Monica Davey<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />CHICAGO: Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois was arrested Tuesday by the federal authorities and charged with corruption, including an allegation that he conspired to effectively sell President-elect Barack Obama's former seat in the U.S. Senate to the highest bidder.<br />Blagojevich, a Democrat, called his sole authority to appoint Obama's successor "golden," and he sought to parlay it into a job as an ambassador, as secretary of health and human services, or into a high-paying position at a nonprofit group or an organization connected to labor unions, prosecutors said.<br />He also suggested, they said, that in exchange for the Senate appointment, his wife could be placed on corporate boards where she might earn as much as $150,000 a year, and he tried to gain promises of money for his campaign fund.<br />At a news conference, Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, said that Blagojevich had gone on a "political corruption crime spree," and that his actions had "taken us to a truly new low."<br />In a state that already had a long reputation as one of the more corrupt in the United States, the allegations were "staggering" and "appalling," Fitzgerald said.<br />"The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave," Fitzgerald said, referring to another president from Illinois whom Obama often cites as a model.<br />But asked repeatedly about any knowledge or involvement by Obama, Fitzgerald was clear, saying, "The complaint makes no allegations about the president-elect whatsoever." He later added, "We make no allegations that he's aware of anything."<br />Blagojevich was arrested at the governor's home in an early-morning visit by two FBI agents that caught him by surprise. Fitzgerald said he was arrested Tuesday and not later in order to avoid possible further damage. The implication was that Blagojevich was close either to concluding another dubious deal or announcing his Senate pick in a way that would later be difficult to unravel. The governor has said he would announce his choice within weeks.<br />Blagojevich, who turns 52 on Wednesday and is in his second term, had portrayed himself as a reformer after the governorship of George Ryan, who was convicted of racketeering and fraud in 2006.<br />Under Illinois law, Blagojevich has sole authority to fill the seat being vacated by Obama, and the events Tuesday did not strip him of that power, Fitzgerald made clear. Obama's resignation from the Senate took effect Nov. 16.<br />But if the governor's arrest delays the appointment of Obama's replacement in the Senate, it would temporarily trim the Democratic total there from 58 to 57 seats and make it harder to round up sufficient centrist Republicans to pass controversial legislation.<br />A 76-page affidavit from the U.S. Attorney's office in the Northern District of Illinois quotes Blagojevich as saying in a secretly recorded conversation that if he could not secure a deal to his liking, he was willing to appoint himself to the Senate.<br />"I'm going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain," Blagojevich said, according to the affidavit.<br />The complaint says Blagojevich was heard on wiretaps over the last month planning to "sell or trade Illinois' United States Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama for financial and personal benefits for himself and his wife."<br />The authorities also say Blagojevich threatened to withhold state assistance from the Tribune Company, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, which filed for bankruptcy Monday. According to the authorities, Blagojevich wanted members of the Tribune's editorial board, who had criticized him, to be fired before he extended any state assistance. No one was fired, Fitzgerald said.<br />Tribune Company has been negotiating with the Illinois Finance Authority over the sale of Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, which the company owns.<br />Fitzgerald said the Chicago Tribune had honored a rare request to withhold publishing a story about the investigation that might have derailed it.<br />The charges are part of a five-year investigation into public corruption and allegations of "pay to play" deals in the clubby world of Illinois politics. Federal officials said Blagojevich's chief of staff, John Harris, was also indicted Tuesday.<br />Obama said Tuesday that he was "saddened and sobered by the news that came out of the U.S. attorney's office."<br />He made the comment to reporters before he held a meeting on climate change at his transition offices in Chicago with former Vice President Al Gore. As reporters were ushered out of the room, Obama was asked about his former Senate seat.<br />"I had no contact with the governor or his office, so I was not aware of what was happening," Obama said. "And as I said, it is a sad day for Illinois. Beyond that, I don't think it's appropriate to comment."<br />For more than a year, members of Blagojevich's administration have been under investigation. But few here have imagined that the decision on replacing Obama might have resulted in criminal charges.<br />In addition to the charges related to Obama's Senate seat, Blagojevich is accused of crimes related to past behavior. As part of the charges, he is accused, prosecutors said, of working to gain benefits for himself, his family and his campaign fund in exchange for appointments to state boards and commissions.<br />According to the indictment, while talking on the telephone about the Senate seat replacement with his chief of staff and an adviser, Blagojevich said he needed to consider his family and their financial struggles.<br />"I want to make money," he said, according to prosecutors. He then added, they allege, that he wanted to make $250,000 to $300,000 a year.<br />According to the affidavit, Blagojevich told an adviser last week that he might get some money "upfront, maybe" from one of the candidates hoping to replace Obama. That person was identified only as "Candidate 5." In an earlier recorded conversation, prosecutors say, Blagojevich said he had been approached by an associate of Candidate 5 with an offer of $500,000 in exchange for the Senate seat.<br />Jack Healy contributed reporting from New York, Jeff Zeleny from Chicago and Brian Knowlton from Washington.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Edward Kennedy agitates for Caroline Kennedy</strong><br />By David M. Halbfinger<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />While Caroline Kennedy is maintaining her silence about whether she wishes to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as senator for New York state, her uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, has been working behind the scenes on her behalf, according to Democratic aides.<br />In recent days, the Massachusetts senator has called Governor David Paterson and Senator Charles Schumer of New York and Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who took over last month as head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee when Schumer stepped down.<br />Kennedy's message, said Democratic aides who were not authorized to discuss the conversations, was that Caroline Kennedy - backed by her family's extensive fundraising network - would have the wherewithal to run back-to-back costly statewide races without having to seek help from Paterson or Schumer.<br />The ability to raise significant money is a key concern for Paterson, who has been deluged from every direction by politicians interested in the seat, which the governor is expected to fill early next year. Whoever is chosen will have to run in 2010 and again two years later.<br />Efforts to reach Caroline Kennedy on Monday were unsuccessful. A spokesman for Senator Kennedy declined to comment.<br />The governor has sought to downplay the frenzy over Caroline Kennedy's potential interest in the Senate seat. The mere suggestion that she might be Clinton's replacement has made headlines around the world.<br />On Sunday night, Paterson met with senior advisers, Schumer, and Representatives Charles Rangel, Nita Lowey and Gregory Meeks to discuss the process for making the appointment. Those gathered urged the governor to go slowly, Meeks said.<br />Asked about Caroline Kennedy, Meeks acknowledged her appeal. "Does she know politics?" he said. "Absolutely. Could she be a great senator? I don't see why not."<br />An aide to another official at the meeting said that those present also weighed the pros and cons of other contenders, including Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and Representative Kirsten Gillibrand from upstate New York.<br />But some influential Democrats have privately suggested that given the buzz set off by Kennedy's emergence, the governor would have little choice but to appoint her if she decided she truly wanted the job.<br />Some people close to Paterson, however, are trying to quash that notion.<br />"Governor Paterson is in charge; he is going to make the decision," Meeks said, adding that he would not be swayed by "pressure from the press or anyone else."<br />Meanwhile, Representative Carolyn Maloney announced that she had hired the political consulting firm of Bill Lynch, a sometime adviser to the governor, to promote her for the seat.<br />In what could be read as a dig at the waiting game for Kennedy, Maloney said in a statement: "This is no time for people to be coy about whether or not they are up to the job of stepping into Senator Clinton's big shoes."Republican wants to run<br />Peter King, a New York Republican congressman, said Tuesday that he is preparing for a run for the seat, even if that means facing off against Kennedy in two years, The Associated Press reported from Washington.<br />"I am seriously considering the race for Hillary Clinton's seat," King said. "I'm very serious about it." He is an eight-term lawmaker from Long Island.<br />"Obviously it would be a challenge to run against Caroline Kennedy," King said, adding: "Nothing in life is easy. If anything, that makes the adrenaline pump a little harder."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/america/senate.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/america/senate.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Tempting the thieves with the pocketables</strong><br />By Joe Sharkey<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />My air travel miseries have included being canceled, delayed, cramped, discombobulated, disturbed, price gouged, hassled, hustled and, on one occasion, nearly killed. So far, though, I have not been robbed.<br />I do everything the experts recommend to minimize the possibility of having something stolen when I check a bag. Mostly that means that I try not to put easily filched valuables in the bag.<br />Kathleen Kemper, of Kirkland, Washington State, an experienced domestic and international traveler, usually takes the same precaution.<br />But on a recent flight from Albuquerque through Phoenix to Seattle, Kemper casually slipped her Apple iPod into a zip pocket in a suitcase she was checking. When she got to Seattle, the iPod was gone. Inside her suitcase was one of those notes from the Transportation Security Administration, saying that a TSA inspector had opened the bag.<br />Kemper said that it had not occurred to her that putting a little iPod into an easily opened pocket made an easy target. "I thought, 'Oh, what a stupid thing to do,' " she said. "It made it just so easy for someone to slip a hand in there and palm something out."<br />Kemper said that losing a $250 iPod was less of an issue than the feeling of "personal violation." She added, "My perception is that the TSA is the government, and, therefore, your things will be safe."<br />After Kemper contacted the agency and filed a report on its Web site (www.tsa.gov), she said she received a "gracious reply" that apologized for the problem. Her next step is to file a claim.<br />The last time I wrote about theft from checked bags was in 2004, when there had been numerous reports of problems. I received hundreds of e-mail messages from travelers who told of having things like jewelry, electronics, prescription medicine, Swiss Army knives and even designer shirts and underwear filched.<br />(By the way, I learned that stashing expensive jewelry in a shaving case is not a good deterrent. It is one of the first places thieves look.)<br />Ellen Howe, a spokeswoman for the TSA, said Monday that the agency has fired 465 officers for theft since the spring of 2003. That is "a minuscule fraction of the work force," she said.<br />She also said incidents were down sharply. In 2005, she said, the agency paid $3 million in claims for missing possessions or damaged bags. "This year it has been less than $1 million," she said.<br />The agency has installed closed-circuit cameras in airport bag screening areas. In major airports that handle over half of originating passenger traffic, the agency uses what it calls in-line baggage systems that enable officials "to pinpoint exactly which bags are physically inspected and by whom," she said.<br />"The biggest way we catch thieves," she said, is through a "neighborhood watch" program in which the huge majority of honest inspectors are expected to report the dishonest ones.<br />In the small percentage of bags inspected by the TSA, a notice tells the owner that the bag was opened, as was the case with Kemper's bag. In most instances of reported theft, however, arrest records show that the pilferage was by airline baggage handlers, and not by agency inspectors.<br />Kemper said that she had a "TSA-approved" lock on her bag, and that the lock was in place when she got the bag back. The locks, sold widely in stores, are supposed to be opened only by TSA inspectors with master keys or combination codes.<br />When speaking with Kemper and her husband, Gary Smith, a commercial photographer, I joked that you used to get your checked bags pilfered free, but now most airlines charge you $15 for the honor.<br />Kemper, however, was traveling first class, where passengers can check bags without additional charges.<br />In fact, that might have been a tip-off for an alert thief, Smith speculated.<br />"Since we were traveling first class, our bags had a priority handling tag on them that may have made them stand out to a thief," he said.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Cybercrime rises as economy sinks</strong><br />Bloomberg News<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />SAN FRANCISCO: Cybercriminals around the world are taking advantage of the recession by recruiting lawbreakers and enticing nervous consumers into divulging confidential data, according to a study released Tuesday.<br />Governments, distracted by the economic crisis, are not paying enough attention to cybercrime and allowing illegal networks expand, McAfee, the Internet security company, said in an annual assessment, the Virtual Criminology Report. McAfee described current laws as "outdated and ill prepared" to fight Internet fraud.<br />"Service providers, law enforcement and private industry all need to work together to stop these crimes," said Pamela Warren, a cybercrime strategist with McAfee. "Cybercriminals don't let international boundaries get in their way."<br />McAfee, the second-largest maker of security software, after Symantec, found that cash-strapped consumers were responding to e-mail messages and Web links that appear to be legitimate work-from-home advertisements. The ads promise a percentage of money transferred between bank accounts.<br />McAfee also uncovered instances where Web site owners were, for a fee, adding software that would trap computers in networks called botnets. Hackers form botnets by taking control of other people's PCs without their knowledge and using them to send spam or wage Internet attacks.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Venezuelan given 15 months in suitcase of cash scandal</strong><br />By Alexei Barrionuevo<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />A Venezuelan businessman who testified against his friend and former business partner in a South American political scandal involving a suitcase of cash was sentenced Monday by a Miami judge to 15 months in prison on a conspiracy charge.<br />The businessman, Carlos Kauffmann, 36, was the second government witness in the case to be sentenced. Moisés Maiónica, a Venezuelan lawyer, was sentenced to two years in prison last week after providing what Judge Joan Lenard of United States District Court called "substantial assistance" in the case.<br />Both men testified against Franklin Durán, a Venezuelan businessman convicted in November of conspiracy and of acting as an unregistered agent of the Venezuelan government. Durán is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 12.<br />Prosecutors dropped a second charge against Kauffmann, of acting as an unregistered agent. Counting time served, he could be free by March.<br />Kauffmann and Maiónica each pleaded guilty and testified at Durán's trial. They detailed an elaborate plot by Venezuelan and Argentine officials to cover up the origin and destination of a suitcase containing $800,000, which prosecutors said had been sent by Venezuela's state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, to the campaign of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner two months before she was elected Argentina's president.<br />The case has been a scandal in Argentina and Venezuela since August 2007, when Guido Alejandro Antonini Wilson, a Venezuelan-American businessman, was caught with the suitcase in a Buenos Aires airport.<br />The accusations by American investigators have tested relations between the United States and both countries. Kirchner and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela have accused the United States of political motivation in bringing the case, an accusation American officials have denied.<br />Days after he was caught with the suitcase, Antonini Wilson sought help from the FBI in Florida. Investigators there soon began secretly recording Kauffmann, Maiónica and Durán as they tried to persuade Antonini Wilson to help cover up the details of the cash shipment.<br />Kauffmann and Maiónica testified that they were working on behalf of Venezuela's spy agency and that Chávez himself had directed his spy chief to pay up to $2 million in hush money to Antonini Wilson.<br />Four men, including Kauffmann and Maiónica, were charged in the case. Three have pleaded guilty; only Durán elected to go to trial. A fifth suspect, José Canchica, a high-level official with Venezuela's spy agency, remains a fugitive.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />**********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>BMW Oracle refuses to drop America's Cup suit<br /></strong>By Christopher Clarey<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />The America's Cup dispute between the defender Alinghi and the would-be challenger BMW Oracle Racing looks increasingly likely to be settled in court.<br />Recent developments had increased expectations that the 17-month stalemate would be resolved, but Golden Gate Yacht Club, the San Francisco club that BMW Oracle represents, released a letter Monday saying it would not be dropping its lawsuit against Alinghi and the Swiss yacht club it represents, Société Nautique de Genève.<br />The letter said Oracle would not meet the Dec. 15 deadline for entering a provisional Cup competition planned by Alinghi, because it had not been allowed to examine putative rules.<br />The New York State Court of Appeals has set a date of Feb. 10 for oral arguments in the case in which the Golden Gate Yacht Club is appealing a ruling earlier this year that restored Spain's Club Náutico Español de Vela as the challenger of record.<br />"Given the stakes involved for the future of the America's Cup, we do not believe a few more months represent an unreasonable delay," Marcus Young, commodore of Golden Gate Yacht Club, wrote in the letter.<br />Alinghi and its billionaire owner and crew member Ernesto Bertarelli retained the Cup, the most prestigious prize in sailing, last year in Valencia. Alinghi then named CNEV as its lead challenger and released a controversial set of rules for the next Cup, planned for 2009. In response, BMW Oracle and its billionaire owner and crew member Larry Ellison initiated legal proceedings to make their team the challenger of record.<br />BMW Oracle prevailed last year in the New York Supreme Court. That ruling was overturned by the court's Appelate Division in July.<br />In the expectation of winning in court, Alinghi has pushed ahead with plans for a conventional, multi-team America's Cup in 2010 and has been writing a revised set of rules in concert with prospective challengers.<br />BMW Oracle had not been part of that process. Its skipper, Russell Coutts, requested formal copies of those rules by Monday to examine them before the Dec. 15 deadline. Alinghi skipper Brad Butterworth said last week that the rules were not expected to be finalized until after a meeting Friday in Geneva.<br />In a statement Monday, Alinghi said that Oracle's decision to proceed with legal action "shows a tremendous arrogance and lack of respect for the teams involved in the process."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>These sailors embrace risk for reward</strong><br />By Carlos H. Conde<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />MANILA: Under the shade of the tall trees that line the sidewalk at Rizal Park, Marlon Arguelles scanned the job notices posted on the recruiting booths, a jumble of laser printouts marked with huge U.S. dollar signs.<br />Rizal, just off Manila Bay, is where Filipino sailors go seeking the best job offers, and where recruiters bid for the best sailors. On any given day, between 700 and 1,000 Filipino men try their luck in this sailors' market.<br />There has always been an element of risk in the seafaring life, but these days, with piracy resurgent off the Horn of Africa, the dangers have seldom been more glaring. Nevertheless, in the Philippines, whose citizens make up nearly a third of the world's commercial sailors, economic considerations trump concerns for personal safety. Recruiters say they've seen little falloff in demand for jobs on even the most dangerous routes.<br />Arguelles, 28, was looking for a job as a ship's cook. Many of the agencies were offering between $1,000 and $2,000 a month for the position. But he said he needed more money than that to help care for his mother, who suffers from hypertension.<br />And so he was interested when he heard that one recruiter was looking for crewmen for an oil tanker that would pass through the Gulf of Aden. According to the International Maritime Bureau, 63 of the 199 incidents of piracy or attempted piracy that were reported worldwide from January to September occurred in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia.<br />"I know it's dangerous but the agency is offering twice the salary," said Arguelles, who sometimes helps out in his parents' shop back home in Quezon, in the northern Philippines. "Besides, think about it: the pirates haven't killed any crew members so far, so it could be harmless."<br />Indeed, according to reports of some Filipino sailors who were freed late last month by Somali pirates, it could even be fun. The all-Filipino crew of the Greek-owned tanker Centauri, which was hijacked in September, told news agencies that the pirates treated them well, even playing cards with them and sharing meals.<br />Arguelles was in the park less than 15 minutes before a man in a white nautical uniform, carrying a sign advertising jobs, sidled up to him and spoke a few words. Arguelles nodded and, with a broad smile, walked away with the recruiter.<br />In late November, 134 of about 300 sailors held captive by Somali pirates were Filipinos, according to the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs. Twenty-six of them were from the Centauri. The other 108, taken captive while aboard a total of seven ships, are still in the hands of the pirates.<br />While some legislators in the Philippines have called for restrictions on the maritime recruiting market, Salvador Santos, assistant general manager of the Luneta Seafarer's Center, a private organization that offers counseling and other assistance to sailors and is located next to the recruiting booths, said he did not think the men were being exploited.<br />"It's up to the sailor whether to accept the offer," Santos said. "The important thing is he knows what he's getting into."<br />News reports of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden apparently had not deterred sailors from seeking jobs on oil tankers and other commercial ships.<br />"We haven't seen any change in the number of people who come here," Santos said. "On the contrary, perhaps because of what is happening in Somalia, we've heard that more sailors are seeking to be deployed there because the money is good."<br />A sailor who boards a ship bound for Somali waters gets double pay plus hazard pay, Santos said. That could mean more than $3,000 a month for a cook, more than a minimum wage-earner in the Philippines would make in a year.<br />What compels sailors like Arguelles to sign up despite the risk is not thrill-seeking or adventure, but the same motive that drives so many Filipinos to seek employment overseas: the responsibility of caring for families back home, Santos said. In the case of Arguelles, he hopes to cover not just his mother's medical expenses, but his three younger siblings' education.<br />Arguelles said he had always wanted to be a teacher, but teaching is one of the lowest-paid jobs in the Philippines.<br />"One hundred thousand pesos," or about $2,000 - roughly the monthly wage on a non-Somalia bound ship - "is a lot of money for a single man like me," Arguelles explained. "But I didn't become a sailor because I wanted to sail. It's because that's what would provide us the money and it's what many of my relatives have been doing."<br />Amid the global economic crisis, the government continues to pin its hopes on the more than eight million overseas Philippine workers who send back remittances equivalent to 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product.<br />The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration says that 30 percent of the world's merchant sailors, about 270,000, are Filipinos. They are likely to continue to find themselves in pirate-threatened waters for some time to come.<br />"The Philippine government is doing its best to protect its sailors, whom we consider heroes," said Crescente Relacion, executive director of the Office of Migrant Workers Affairs at the Department of Foreign Affairs. "We are in constant communication with the ship owners, with foreign authorities and with the families of the sailors who remain in captivity."<br />Santos, of the Luneta Seafarer's Center, said it should not surprise anyone that Filipino sailors are enthusiastic about sailing despite the dangers.<br />"Given how hard it is to find a job in the Philippines that pays as much as a sailor would get abroad, I think it's not surprising that sailors would take some risks," he said.<br />Santos noted that Filipino workers have even smuggled themselves into war-torn Iraq because of the high pay offered there.<br />"About the only thing we can do," Santos added, "is make sure that the sailor's needs are met and he is equipped with all the knowledge and information he must know before he embarks on a dangerous assignment."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />**********************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Cruise liner to evacuate clients to avoid piracy<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />BERLIN: A cruise ship will evacuate passengers before sailing past the Somali coast and fly them to the next port of call to protect them from possible pirate attacks, the German cruise operator Hapag-Lloyd said Tuesday.<br />An official with the European Union's anti-piracy mission said separately that it would station armed guards on vulnerable cargo ships, the first such deployment of military personnel during the international anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden.<br />The Columbus cruise ship will drop off its 246 passengers Wednesday at the port of Hodeidah, Yemen, before the ship and some of its crew sail through the Gulf, the cruise company said. The passengers will take a charter flight to Dubai and spend three days at a hotel waiting to rejoin the 150-meter, or 490-foot, vessel in the southern Oman port of Salalah for the remainder of a round-the-world tour that began in Italy.<br />Hapag-Lloyd said the detour was a "precautionary measure," given rampant piracy off the coast of lawless Somalia that recently has targeted cruise ships as well as commercial vessels.<br />Pirates last week fired on the Nautica - a cruise liner carrying 650 passengers and 400 crew members - but the ship outran its assailants. Pirates have attacked 32 vessels and hijacked 12 of them since NATO deployed a four-vessel flotilla on Oct. 24 to escort cargo ships and conduct anti-piracy patrols.<br />Hapag-Lloyd planned the detour for its passengers in response to a German Foreign Ministry travel warning, after the government denied the cruise company's request for a security escort through the Gulf, said a company spokesman, Rainer Mueller.<br />A U.S. Navy official said, however, that while the danger of a pirate attack was significant, the navy was not advising ships to avoid going through the Gulf.<br />"We are advising all ships to transit through the international traffic corridor within the Gulf of Aden," said Lieutenant Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain, referring to a security corridor patrolled by the international coalition since August.<br />The EU began its anti-piracy mission five days early on Tuesday, before it takes over for the NATO ships next Monday. The EU mission will involve six ships and up to three aircraft patrolling at any one time, and will station armed guards aboard the most vulnerable cargo vessels, such as ships transporting food aid to Somalia, according to the British naval commander in charge of the mission.<br />"We would seek to place vessel protect detachments on board World Food Program ships transiting to Somalia," British Rear Admiral Philip Jones said at a news conference in Brussels.<br />The NATO anti-piracy mission has also focused on escorting the UN aid agency's chartered vessels, helping about 30,000 tons of humanitarian aid reach Somalia since Oct. 24.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmB4F6eqd5Rlb91rPZ5QV38pD-fWaMycKvt_uKm-Y5IMB2iNWueE-QFKg_Ayj2C81BWwOlCpSM-hCVl0hmimI13j1AqXD4FOcqJDONyttY1n6-C4tijEcEa1pD6SYfBg15PXlsnltAY8M/s1600-h/DSC02838.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062334665303650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmB4F6eqd5Rlb91rPZ5QV38pD-fWaMycKvt_uKm-Y5IMB2iNWueE-QFKg_Ayj2C81BWwOlCpSM-hCVl0hmimI13j1AqXD4FOcqJDONyttY1n6-C4tijEcEa1pD6SYfBg15PXlsnltAY8M/s320/DSC02838.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVvRzQNB8HTRrO4rAz-4vEReLRCTTGJKt-6giG3D_CerfBw5wNGFhWl_qnLMDdKX9GEUzHkLCvY1bMdSy8Plv1q8mPL3lM_kV7Iwnw_RWKT_8zxgKLCtnlK3pZMOA9QJHLUKaIUGx2kbc/s1600-h/DSC02839.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062007328201938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVvRzQNB8HTRrO4rAz-4vEReLRCTTGJKt-6giG3D_CerfBw5wNGFhWl_qnLMDdKX9GEUzHkLCvY1bMdSy8Plv1q8mPL3lM_kV7Iwnw_RWKT_8zxgKLCtnlK3pZMOA9QJHLUKaIUGx2kbc/s320/DSC02839.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6pXY43BL18_3TGAseDW-G9Furb5taNDhQHD5ZXA_LuoRIPwY2B-p-T-JIZPkRR1VxvbWI-QNz6WeCWfRaRYEYZF7GlzuRfkwcSuzdTr13paRNpFtBRUuHL5MlLmTeBanHKucjoCGzEzc/s1600-h/DSC02840.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062008475755842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6pXY43BL18_3TGAseDW-G9Furb5taNDhQHD5ZXA_LuoRIPwY2B-p-T-JIZPkRR1VxvbWI-QNz6WeCWfRaRYEYZF7GlzuRfkwcSuzdTr13paRNpFtBRUuHL5MlLmTeBanHKucjoCGzEzc/s320/DSC02840.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/sony.php">Sony to cut 8,000 jobs and close plants</a> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div>***************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>David Brooks: This old house</strong><br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />The 1980s and 1990s was America's era of the great dispersal. Forty-three million people moved every year, and basically they moved outward - from inner-ring suburbs to far-flung exurbs on the metro fringe. For example, the population of metropolitan Pittsburgh declined by 8 percent in those years, but the developed land area of the Pittsburgh area sprawled outward by 43 percent.<br />If you asked people in that age of go-go suburbia what they wanted in their new housing developments, they often said they wanted a golf course. But the culture has changed. If you ask people today what they want, they're more likely to say coffee shops, hiking trails and community centers.<br />People overshot the mark. They moved to the exurbs because they wanted space and order. But once there, they found that they were missing community and social bonds. So in the past years there has been a new trend. Meeting places are popping up across the suburban landscape.<br />There are restaurant and entertainment zones, mixed-use streetscape malls, suburban theater districts, farmers' markets and concert halls. In addition, downtown areas in places like Charlotte and Dallas are reviving as many people move back into the city in search of human contact. Joel Kotkin, the author of "The New Geography," calls this clustering phenomenon the New Localism.<br />Barack Obama has said he would start an infrastructure that will dwarf Dwight Eisenhower's highway program. If, indeed, we are going to have a once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment, it would be great if the program would build on today's emerging patterns. It would be great if Obama's spending, instead of just dissolving into the maw of construction, would actually encourage the clustering and leave a legacy that would be visible and beloved 50 years from now.<br />To take advantage of the growing desire for community, the Obama plan would have to do two things. First, it would have to create new transportation patterns. The old metro design was based on a hub-and-spoke system - a series of highways that converged on an urban core. But in an age of multiple downtown nodes and complicated travel routes, it's better to have a complex web of roads and rail systems.<br />Second, the Obama stimulus plan could help localities create suburban town squares. Many communities are trying to build focal points. The stimulus plan could build charter schools, pre-K centers, national service centers and other such programs around new civic hubs.<br />This kind of stimulus would be consistent with Obama's campaign, which was all about bringing Americans together in new ways. It would help maintain the social capital that's about to be decimated by the economic downturn.<br />But alas, there's no evidence so far that the Obama infrastructure plan is attached to any larger social vision. In fact, there is a real danger that the plan will retard innovation and entrench the past.<br />In a stimulus plan, the first job is to get money out the door quickly. That means you avoid anything that might require planning and creativity. You avoid anything that might require careful implementation or novel approaches. The quickest thing to do is simply throw money at things that already exist.<br />Sure enough, the Obama stimulus plan, at least as it has been sketched out so far, is notable for its lack of creativity. Obama wants to put more computers in classrooms, an old idea with dubious educational merit. He also proposes a series of ideas that are good but not exactly transformational: refurbishing the existing power grid; fixing the oldest roads and bridges; repairing schools; and renovating existing government buildings to make them more energy efficient.<br />This is the federal version of "This Old House." And this is before the stimulus money gets diverted, as it inevitably will, to refurbish old companies. The auto bailout could eventually swallow $125 billion. After that, it could be the airlines and so on.<br />It's also before the spending drought that is bound to follow the spending binge. Because we're going to be spending $1 trillion now on existing structures and fading industries, there will be less or nothing in 2010 or 2011 for innovative transport systems, innovative social programs or anything else.<br />Before the recession hit, we Americans were enjoying a period of urban and suburban innovation. We could have been on the verge of a transportation revolution. It looks as if the Obama infrastructure plan may freeze that change, not fuel it.<br />And not to get all Rod McKuen on you or anything, but the larger point is this: Social change has a natural rhythm. The season of prosperity gives way to the season of economic scarcity, and out of the winter of recession, new growth has room to emerge. A stimulus package may be necessary, but unless designed with care, its main effect will be to prop up the drying husks of the fall.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/10auto.php">Democratic leaders push to complete U.S. auto rescue plan</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/10marketsA.php">Stocks slide as rush to bonds illustrates desperation</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/09ukecon.php">U.K. factory, retail and housing data show further weakness</a> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/10canada.php">Bank of Canada cuts rate to 50-year low</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/yen.php">A gloomy third quarter reinforces fears over Japanese economy</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/air.php">Airlines' outlook mixed for 2009</a> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Airing the depth of troubles at Fannie Mae</strong><br />By Lynnley Browning<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />The hole at Fannie Mae may be even deeper than feared.<br />Three months after the mortgage finance giant and its sibling, Freddie Mac, were effectively nationalized, a number of analysts fear that Fannie Mae's vast holdings of risky home mortgages, some of which they say are designated as safer loans, are deteriorating rapidly along with the housing market.<br />The extent of the problem is likely to come to the fore on Tuesday, when a former Fannie Mae executive and several outside experts are scheduled to testify before the House oversight committee about the company's condition.<br />Of particular concern is how Fannie Mae accounts for subprime mortgages and so-called Alt-A home loans, which are technically a rung above subprime. Some critics say that Fannie Mae defines these loans loosely, which could expose the company to new, gaping losses.<br />Among those scheduled to testify on Tuesday are Edward Pinto, a former credit officer at Fannie Mae, and Charles Calomiris, a finance professor at Columbia who has studied the government-sponsored enterprises, or GSE's. "Fannie has a vast universe of junk loans," Pinto said.<br />Peter Wallison, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime critic of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who issued a critical report of Fannie Mae with Calomiris in September, said Fannie Mae's vague definitions for risky mortgages had masked its potential losses.<br />"Fannie is a much bigger and deeper hole than anybody has yet realized," Wallison, a former Treasury Department counsel, said.<br />Fannie Mae lost $29 billion in the third quarter. Most of that deficit — more than $21 billion — reflected write-downs of deferred tax assets, rather than ailing mortgages. Fannie said last month that it was bracing for additional losses and might need more than the $100 billion that the government had pledged.<br />But in an interview, Wallison said that Fannie Mae's losses could rise at least $100 billion because of "junk loans" that are obscured on its books.<br />Subprime loans, which are often defined as loans made to borrowers with FICO credit scores below 660, accounted for $8.7 billion, or about 0.3 percent, of Fannie Mae's total holdings of single-family mortgages, according to its third-quarter financial statement. But Fannie uses its own definition for subprime loans and does not disclose some of these definitions.<br />In a recent statement, Fannie Mae said it classified loans as subprime if they had been originated by lenders specializing in subprime mortgages or by subprime divisions of large lenders. Amy Bonitatibus, a spokeswoman for the company, declined to comment on Monday on whether its nonsubprime categories contained subprime loans, saying only that "we believe that credit scores alone do not provide sufficient information to determine whether a loan should be classified as subprime."<br />She also declined to comment when asked whether Fannie Mae had additional definitions.<br />A second gray area is Alt-A loans, which were often made without verifying borrowers' incomes or assets. During the third quarter, Fannie Mae held about $299 billion of Alt-A loans, which accounted for about 11 percent of all the loans it guaranteed. But the Alt-A loans accounted for nearly 48 percent of the company's losses that quarter, while subprime loans accounted for 2.1 percent.<br />Wallison said those figures suggested that Fannie Mae's Alt-A loans were subprimelike loans.<br />"Alt-A is prime, in Fannie's world," Pinto, Fannie Mae's chief credit officer from 1987 to 1989, said. "But these are junk loans."<br />A third gray area involves loans with FICO scores below 620, which Fannie Mae does not necessarily designate as subprime. The company holds $126 billion of these loans. It also discloses little of its portfolio of loans to borrowers with credit scores of 620 to 660. The company also holds tens of billions of dollars of potentially worrisome interest-only and negative-amortization loans.<br />While Fannie Mae says its subprime exposure amounts to about $8 billion, its ultimate exposure, including Alt-A loans and other nonprime loans, probably exceeds $500 billion, Wallison and Calomiris said in a September paper for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative group in Washington. The figure reaches $619 billion when subprime loans bought as private-label securities are added.<br />Pinto said Fannie Mae's exposure on subprime and subprimelike mortgages was much higher, $960 billion.<br />In 2004, before Fannie Mae pushed into riskier loans, the Department of Housing and Urban Development suggested the definitions were becoming fuzzy.<br />"As the GSE's become more comfortable with subprime lending, the line between what today is considered a subprime loan versus a prime loan will likely deteriorate, making expansion by the GSE's look more like an increase in the prime market," the housing department said in a November 2004 report.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div>*********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Fannie and Freddie executives ignored warnings</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Executives at the mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ignored warnings that they were taking on too many risky loans long before the housing market plunged, according to documents released Tuesday by a committee in the House of Representatives.<br />E-mail messages and other internal documents released by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee show that the former chief executive of Fannie Mae, Daniel Mudd, and the former Freddie Mac chief, Richard Syron, disregarded recommendations that they stay away from riskier types of loans. The companies were seized by government regulators in September.<br />A month later, Freddie Mac asked for an injection of $13.8 billion in government aid after posting a massive quarterly loss. Fannie Mae has yet to request any government aid but has warned that it might need to do so soon.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>************************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Leading U.S. lawyer accused of $100 million hedge fund scam</strong><br />By William K. Rashbaum and Alison Leigh Cowan<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />NEW YORK: His legal lineage was impeccable. A Yale man with a law degree from Harvard, he was a litigation powerhouse, a leader at some of the more prominent firms at the New York bar who then started a top-shelf practice of his own.<br />But when the lawyer, Marc Dreier, stepped off a flight from Canada on Sunday night, the federal authorities in New York arrested him in a $100 million fraud scheme, portraying his recent undertakings as more high-stakes grifting than high-end lawyering.<br />In brazen and carefully choreographed scams in New York and in Canada, Dreier, who in 1996 founded the 250-lawyer firm that bears his name, is said to have tried to take advantage of the current financial crisis by selling phony debt to hungry hedge funds looking for deals.<br />But in an era when high-tech frauds and inside information seem to dominate the world of white-collar crime, the square-jawed lawyer, known for his forceful personality and his penchant for high living, apparently did it the old-fashioned way.<br />Using little more than his position, poise and a kind of reckless bravado, he cajoled his way into accounting, real estate and pension fund offices where he had no real business, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Monday.<br />Once there, seated in conference rooms that lent credibility to his charade, he peddled forged promissory notes - utterly worthless paper - linked in some way to his unwitting hosts, the complaint said. He backed up his claims with the help of a few confederates, using phony financial statements and bogus audit opinions from a reputable accounting firm and correspondence on the stationery of the New York real estate developer who supposedly issued the debt, the U.S. government said in court papers.<br />With these tools and little more, he allegedly took hedge fund executives for $100 million in one instance alone, money that the authorities say remains unaccounted for.<br />Dreier, 58, is charged with stealing a total of $113 million since October, according to the complaint, although the case is developing. A spokesman for Lev Dassin, the acting U.S. attorney in the New York borough of Manhattan, whose office investigated the matter, would not say whether other alleged frauds are under scrutiny.<br />Indeed, Dreier was working on getting an additional $33 million last Tuesday, according to the complaint, when that plan unraveled in a bizarre tableau played out in the offices of a Toronto pension fund, court records and officials said. He was arrested in Canada and held by the local authorities for several days on relatively minor charges. But the disclosure of that arrest eventually sent the law firm, which is also named Dreier, reeling. As details of the strange doings in Canada began coming out, it became apparent that Dreier was also under investigation by the federal authorities in Manhattan.<br />Suddenly, the law firm could not make its payroll, people there said; the Christmas party at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was canceled; Dreier could not make the rent at his firm's Park Avenue offices; lawyers started packing up their belongings and paperwork; and what had once been a lucrative law practice - a conglomeration of several separate firms - began to collapse.<br />On Monday, a U.S. magistrate judge, Douglas Eaton, ordered Dreier detained until a bail hearing on Thursday. However, because the Securities and Exchange Commission has sought to freeze his assets and those of the Drier law firm in a parallel civil action, it is unclear how he might post bond.<br />Despite the efforts of the Toronto police, who placed Dreier in handcuffs last week, his efforts to enrich himself apparently did not end with his arrest, according to the authorities. In a hearing on the SEC action, which immediately followed the arraignment, a lawyer for the commission said to Miriam Cedarbaum, the U.S. District Court judge, that Dreier "did attempt and may have transferred assets" while he was incarcerated in Canada last week. But the lawyer, Nancy Brown, would not elaborate.<br />Raymond Lohier and Jonathan Streeter, the assistant U.S. attorneys who are prosecuting the criminal case, and Dreier's lawyer, Gerald Shargel, said little during the brief arraignment that preceded Cedarbaum's hearing.<br />Afterward, Shargel said, "This is a very complicated matter - the facts are beyond reach of a sound bite." In an e-mail message later, he said he might have more to say in the coming weeks.<br />Questions in the case abound. Why - and perhaps more importantly, when - did Dreier begin the multimillion-dollar con game detailed in the criminal complaint? How was it that sophisticated investors and his highly educated colleagues were so easily duped?<br />The criminal complaint tells a remarkable story of hubris.<br />The document, which was made public on Monday, details three schemes and charges Dreier with one count each of wire fraud and securities fraud.<br />In one scheme, it says, Dreier sought to sell a total of $146 million worth of bogus promissory notes that appeared to have been issued by a realty firm, unidentified in the complaint. But Dreier convinced a receptionist at the Manhattan offices of the firm (which people involved in the matter said was Solow Realty, a firm that had retained Dreier in the past), that the developer's chief executive had authorized him and three other people to use the New York office to meet with the executive.<br />In fact, the chief executive had not scheduled such a meeting. But he later happened to see Dreier conducting a meeting in Solow's conference room, where he was negotiating to sell the notes.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div><strong>Heavy with debt, boom deals fare poorly in slump<br /></strong>By Megan Davies and Karen BrettellReuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Debt-laden companies bought with cheap money during the private equity boom are under increasing stress as the U.S. economy worsens, and more are expected to follow the media company Tribune into bankruptcy.<br />The collapse of Tribune, owner of The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, is the biggest yet among companies taken private in the leveraged-buyout boom that ground to a halt in mid-2007, but it is unlikely to be the last.<br />While not a private-equity deal, the buyout of Tribune by employees and the real estate mogul Sam Zell was one of those that epitomized the credit boom. The company took on about $8 billion of additional debt when it went private.<br />"This process of deleveraging America, whether financial institutions or Tribune, will be a long, slow and painful process," James Cox, a professor at Duke University Law School, said. "That's what's going to prolong this recession."<br />He said there were particular concerns over deals in industries whose fortunes rise and fall with the economy. "There are a lot of other deals, transactions, out there that tend to do well when the economy is expanding but really hit the floor when it's not," Cox said.<br />Retailers have been hit particularly hard. Linens 'n Things, acquired by the New York buyout firm Apollo Management, filed for bankruptcy in May; Mervyns, a department store chain acquired by Cerberus Capital Management and Sun Capital Partners, announced plans to liquidate in October.<br />"I think undoubtedly we will see more bankruptcies of private-equity-backed firms, but also regular operating firms, too," Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School, said.<br />"What's harder is to say whether the private-equity ones are more likely" to fail, he added. He cited a study he led this year showing that a small percentage of deals over the history of the private-equity industry worldwide had ended in a bankruptcy or a distressed reorganization. Failure rates appear to be far greater for megadeals concluded at the peak of buyout booms, Lerner said.<br />He cited a 1993 study concluding that of the 66 largest deals done at the peak of the 1980s buyout boom, 38 percent experienced financial distress and 27 percent defaulted on debt repayments, often in conjunction with a bankruptcy filing.<br />Loose loan covenants could help some private-equity firms stave off trouble, although these may simply prolong the pain. The deals, popular during the boom, lack the traditional restrictions on borrowers, while pay-in-kind deals allow firms to defer interest payments in favor of issuing more debt.<br />A number of private-equity firms' portfolio companies are trading at distressed levels in the credit-default-swap market, indicating concern in the market about their future.<br />Harrah's Entertainment, which operates nearly 40 casinos across the United States, was bought by Apollo Global Management and TPG Capital at the peak of the leveraged-buyout bubble. Now, Harrah's has put most of its development plans on hold as it grapples with a soft economy and a heavy debt load.<br />The cost of protecting Harrah's debt against default is 66.5 percent of the sum insured up front, or $6.65 million to insure $10 million in debt for five years. Swaps on the real estate firm Realogy, owned by Apollo Management, are trading around 76.5 percent. Swaps on Station Casinos are also trading at extremely distressed levels, costing 75 percent of the amount of debt insured.<br />These levels indicate high concerns that the companies risk bankruptcy if they are unable to reach agreement with their lenders to restructure their debt. TPG and Apollo declined to comment.<br />Realogy, which owns Century 21, ERA and Coldwell Banker, is being sued by the investor Carl Icahn over a debt deal announced last month. Icahn, whose investment vehicle, High River, owns Realogy bonds, thinks the deal unfairly pushes his senior bonds to the back of the repayment line, according to the lawsuit, filed in a Delaware court.<br />Station Casinos, purchased in a management-led-buyout, is trying to exchange its debt for longer maturities, though bondholders last week rejected the offer as "deficient." This leaves the company in a difficult situation, Barbara Cappaert, an analyst at KDP, said in a report last week, as it may not be able to afford to offer more compensation to bondholders without tripping terms in its bank loans, which Station is at risk of violating by year's end.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Breakingviews.com: The bottom line on Wall Street bonuses</strong><br />breakingviews.com<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />Bonuses for investment bankers need to come down. And today is a golden opportunity for the industry to do a hard reset on pay, and base remuneration at sharply lower levels.<br />Taxpayers are horrified at the idea that bankers could receive any bonus at all this year, at least in those banks that have benefited directly or indirectly from government bailouts. But the public clamor is not the only, nor even perhaps the primary, reason why banks should be resetting bonuses. The real issue is that the business model of investment banking is undergoing a structural shift.<br />Traditionally, bankers have taken home 50 percent of their employer's annual revenues in base salary and bonus. This so-called compensation ratio may dip in good years, leaving more for shareholders. The reverse applies in bad years: Morgan Stanley's comp ratio was 59 percent last year. The measure will be all over the place for 2008. Analysts are forecasting that the comp ratios of the worst-performing banks will skyrocket, as the gross-profit denominator in the fraction collapses.<br />When conditions stabilize, the world will look different. With lower leverage and smaller profits from proprietary trading, shareholders will need to be allocated a higher share of the gross cash flow in order to earn a respectable return on equity. That will leave less for workers.<br />The old 50 percent payout ratio will be too high - as long as shareholders stand up for their share. In effect, bonuses will account for a smaller share of lower profits.<br />This winter is an opportunity to start over. Banks have been cutting headcount, which will in itself help bring down compensation expenses. But revenues have been falling faster than headcount, and bankers have fixed base salaries too. So individual bonus payments will need to be squeezed disproportionately hard, although bankers will still be far from starving.<br />Merrill Lynch is reportedly preparing to cut bonuses by 50 percent, which still looks amazingly generous under the circumstances. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have just finalized their bonus awards, and hopefully they will set a good example for the industry to follow.<br />The good news is that many of the top brass of investment banking are forgoing bonuses altogether. This should make it easier to take a hard line with the middle ranks and so on down the line. If leaders are taking zero, then zero will look like the norm, and anything else will be, well, a bonus. - Christopher Hughes</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div>*********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Have you heard the one about the banker?</strong><br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />Bankers, it appears, can show contrition - under the right amount of duress. Facing a storm of criticism over his reported desire for a $5 million to $10 million bonus, John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, requested on Monday not to receive a bonus at all.<br />He joined the chief executives of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Lloyd Blankfein and John Mack, respectively, in forgoing bonuses in a year in which banks have led the nation into a market meltdown.<br />Merrill has reported almost $12 billion in losses this year. The bank tapped the Federal Reserve for money, took advantage of government debt guarantees to survive and avoided disaster only by selling itself to Bank of America, which got $25 billion from taxpayers. Up to a fifth of Merrill's employees could soon lose their jobs.<br />Mack, whose firm got a $10 billion government rescue, decided not to ask for a bonus. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs gave up his bonus earlier. For a chief executive to seek a bonus after leading his bank to the taxpayer trough is not just unseemly. Performance-related pay was at the core of the meltdown. Top bankers were paid enormous sums for strategies that paid handsomely in the short term but saddled the institutions with piles of securities of dubious value. When the bets went bad, taxpayers had to pick up the tab.<br />The strategy that brought Merrill down was the work of Thain's predecessor, E. Stanley O'Neal, who was forced to resign in October 2007. Thain worked to unload toxic assets and raise capital. His sale of Merrill to Bank of America potentially saved it from going down the drain. And he has been handsomely rewarded. He got a $15 million cash bonus when he was hired and stock and options worth several million more. When Bank of America completes its acquisition of Merrill, he will run most of what used to be Merrill's businesses.<br />Bankers and financial regulators will ultimately have to design a pay structure that rewards bankers for the performance of their strategies over several years, not just the current year or quarter. In the meantime, bankers are right in not getting any bonus at all.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>U.S. needs more public funds to pull out of recession, OECD says</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />PARIS: The U.S. economy will need further injections of public money to help it pull out of trouble, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said on Tuesday.<br />Beyond the short term, Washington not only needs to overhaul the financial sector, but also a system of health care provision that leaves 46 million people, or 16 percent of the population, unprotected, the OECD said in a report on the U.S. economy.<br />"The U.S. economy is going through an exceptionally difficult period," the Paris-based organization said in the report.<br />"Further fiscal stimulus will be desirable if financial conditions and economic prospects do not quickly improve."<br />The Paris-based think-tank did not revise its main economic forecasts in a report that primarily expands on policy advice to the world's largest economy, where the president-elect Barack Obama is promising to roll out the biggest infrastructure investment programme since the 1950s when he takes over as president on Jan. 20.<br />The report highlighted in particular the failings of health care insurance, saying the U.S. system compared poorly with most of the countries in the OECD's 30-country membership.<br />"With Mexico and Turkey, the United States is the only OECD country that does not get close to universal healthcare insurance," the report said.<br />"Making progress towards health insurance coverage for all Americans should be given a high priority."<br />Robert Ford, an OECD economist sent to Washington to present the report's findings at a seminar later on Tuesday, said this was the most important reform from a long-term perspective.<br />The OECD suggested replacing tax-breaks for job-related health insurance plans with some form of direct subsidy, since the current system did nothing for those not given insurance by their employers and also tended to favor higher earners.<br />Ford acknowledged that this was an option Obama had shunned during his election campaign.<br />The OECD also suggested insurance coverage should move away from being priced uniquely on the basis of an individual's health and more towards collective, community-rated pricing.<br />It urged greater cost efficiency given that Medicare, the health insurance programme catering to those of 65 and over as well as disabled people, currently accounted for about three percent of gross domestic product and was expected to rise sharply in future years.<br />"Some hospitals seem prone to high-cost procedures without additional benefits to patients," the report said.<br />The report repeated November OECD forecasts for U.S. GDP to drop 0.9 percent next year and expand again in 2010, by 1.6 percent, after a 1.4 percent rise in 2008, and reiterated the OECD's view that the U.S. economy was likely to need further fiscal stimulus to pull through the current sharp downturn.<br />Ford, the OECD economist, said infrastructure projects, while not always easy to roll out and wind up fast, could do the job, especially if the thrust was to advance programmes that would otherwise have been implemented at a later date.<br />If it is repairing a bridge and the plan was to do so in 2010 or 2011, doing so in 2009 was a good way of stimulating economic activity in the near term, Ford said by way of example.<br />"We have nothing against infrastructure per se," Ford told Reuters in a telephone interview. "Our concern is that the need is for stimulus that's immediate."<br />The OECD also recommended that the system of financial regulation and supervision be beefed up.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div>**********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div><strong>Barroso warns Europe not to fall short on stimulus</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Mark John<br />European Union leaders must show U.S. President-elect Barack Obama they are serious about tackling economic slowdown and climate change by agreeing firm action on both this week, the bloc's executive said on Tuesday.<br />European Commission President Jose Barroso said a two-day summit in Brussels starting on Thursday was the most important in years, with potential to set the stage for future European cooperation with a more like-minded U.S. president.<br />Barroso also voiced confidence the summit could pave the way for rules revamping the 27-nation EU's clunky decision-making structures by overcoming Ireland's veto of a reform treaty which backers say will give the EU more voice in the world.<br />With Obama announcing a recovery plan to create at least 2.5 million new jobs by 2011, Barroso said it was all the more vital that EU states overcame differences and agreed on a Commission plan to devote a total 1.5 percent of the bloc's 13 trillion euro (11.3 trillion pounds) output to reviving the economy.<br />"I will insist on that, that we have 1.5 percent as a sign that we mean business when we talk about fiscal stimulus," he told a pre-summit news conference of a plan many economists believe will not be enough to pull Europe out of recession.<br />Barroso refused to join calls on Germany -- Europe's largest economy -- to contribute more to the package but hinted that Berlin could at some point top up its 32-billion-euro scheme.<br />"I think Germany is doing and will do very important contribution to European efforts," he said.<br />Market reaction to the EU plan has been lukewarm, with analysts noting it will mostly incorporate national schemes that have already been announced by the bloc's main economies.<br />OUR WAY OF THINKING<br />The global economic downturn comes just as the EU wants to put itself in the vanguard of the fight against climate change before global talks next year, despite growing concerns by its industry over the cost of the schemes proposed.<br />However, Barroso said he was confident that the summit would agree the main lines of the plan -- which aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by a fifth by 2020 and boost renewable energy by the same amount -- and could form the basis of a consensus with the Obama administration on joint efforts.<br />"Americans are coming around to our way of thinking," he said of European hopes for Obama's climate policies, floating the idea of joint initiatives to cut carbon emissions blamed for the warming of the earth's temperature.<br />The main barriers to a successful agreement are Poland's worries that the plan will create heavy costs for its power sector, which is about 95 percent dependent on coal -- the most polluting source of energy.<br />Italy and Germany are worried it will increase costs for manufacturers and heavy industry, harming their ability to compete with rivals in less regulated areas.<br />Yet prospects of a final deal were given a boost on Tuesday as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said after talks in Warsaw they both now expected a compromise deal of some kind from the summit.<br />Barroso was also upbeat about the chances of EU leaders agreeing to the reassurances Ireland is expected to seek in return for holding a new referendum aimed at ratifying the Lisbon Treaty of reforms its voters rejected in June.<br />He said the Commission would not oppose an Irish demand to guarantee the right to send one commissioner to Brussels if a deal hung on that. The Lisbon Treaty foresees slimming the EU executive from 27 commissioners now to around 18, prompting Irish concerns about a loss of influence in Brussels.<br />He also floated the idea that his Commission could agree to have its mandate -- normally due to end next November -- extended by "some weeks or months" to allow continuity until the Lisbon Treaty finally came into force.<br />(Additional reporting by Marcin Grajewski, Jan Strupczewski and Pete Harrison' editing by Ralph Boulton)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div>***************************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/10auto.php">Democratic leaders push to complete U.S. auto rescue plan</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/10marketsA.php">Stocks slide as rush to bonds illustrates desperation</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/09ukecon.php">U.K. factory, retail and housing data show further weakness</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/10canada.php">Bank of Canada cuts rate to 50-year low</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/yen.php">A gloomy third quarter reinforces fears over Japanese economy</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/air.php">Airlines' outlook mixed for 2009</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/09/business/OUKBS-UK-MARKETS-GLOBAL.php">U.S. stocks down on weak outlooks as oil falls</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/oil.php">ONGC goes ahead with bid for Imperial Energy</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/09/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-RETAILERS-DISCOUNTS.php">M&S and Debenhams cut prices again</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/09eads.php">EADS expects to lose some Airbus orders in 2009</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/09/business/OUKBS-UK-BOE-SENTANCE.php">Bank's Sentance sees deep recession</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/10markets.php">Wall Street lower after company warnings</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/08cad.php">Canada cuts key rate three quarters of a point</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/09/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-ECONOMY.php">Bleak winter ahead as economy gloom grows</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/09/business/OUKBS-UK-PENSIONFUNDS-DEFICITS.php">Pension fund deficits worsen</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/09/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-MANUFACTURING.php">Industrial output falls sharply</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/09sony.php">Sony to cut 8,000 jobs</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/09/business/OUKBS-UK-SONY.php">Sony to cut 16,000 jobs</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/09/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-RETAIL-BRC.php">Retail sales post sharpest fall in 3 years</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/09/business/OUKBS-UK-MARKETS-OIL.php">Oil falls on forecast for shrinking demand</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/09/business/OUKBS-UK-BHP-IRONORE.php">BHP's monthly iron ore shipments fall to 9-mth low</a> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Chinese youth face the economic unknown<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Ian Ransom<br />While his father grew up wondering where his next meal would come from, Beijing resident Ran Zhao wonders whether he should buy a car, study in the United States or try to build up his fledgling snake medicine business.<br />The 25-year-old office worker is one of about 360 million Chinese born after 1978, when the Communist government officially launched economic reforms kicking off 30 years of spectacular growth and lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.<br />Ran, like many of his city-dwelling friends, has vague childhood memories of family austerity, but for the most part has enjoyed privileges and freedoms his parents never dreamed of.<br />"My father said that when he was my age, he thought China could never be anything but poor," Ran said at a classy dim sum restaurant in Beijing. "Now he's amazed that there are millions of people who actually own cars."<br />The 30th anniversary of economic reforms is a landmark state media have used to praise the Communist Party's sound economic stewardship, and some academics have used to call for wider political reform in the one-party state.<br />For many young Chinese, however, the date remains an abstract notion for a generation raised in a relative era of plenty.<br />"For me, the anniversary is not a big deal because 10 years later there will be a 40th anniversary, and 20 years later there will be a 50th anniversary," said Sarah Lai, a business graduate studying for a Masters at a British university.<br />Decades of growth and the unwinding of China's monolithic nanny state has brought young Chinese new entertainments and, increasingly often, the spending power to consume them.<br />It has also created a dangerous expectation that the good times will roll on, even as growth slows and the job market tightens amid the fall-out from the global financial crisis, said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a political analyst from the University of California, Irvine.<br />"The real challenge will come not from people being left behind in the short run, but if the sense disappears that there are still years of growth ahead from which those people may be able to benefit," said Wasserstrom.<br />"Young people frustrated by a sense that they won't have the opportunity to be part of a period of growth, that they missed out somehow on the good times, could become a volatile force."<br />UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE<br />China has warned that unemployment will rise next year as the global slowdown forces companies to shed staff and cut salaries, and has made finding jobs for the record 6.1 million university graduates a priority of social stability.<br />"The decrease of the youth share in the total population and the increase of the idle youth in the labour force are the two biggest contradictory factors of China youth employment," the Centre for China Study, at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University, said in a recent report.<br />University graduates have been told to lower their work and salary expectations, but have proved to have little tolerance when they have felt they have been duped.<br />A string of student riots has been recorded on Chinese campuses in recent years, sparked by disputes over qualifications and the classification of their diplomas.<br />Student-led protests, initially targeting foreign countries, have also turned against the government for being soft on perceived slights against China, as witnessed by anti-Japan demonstrations in 2005.<br />While the 30-year reform anniversary means little to most of the generation born after it, far more sensitive anniversaries lie in wait for the Communist Party, which has staked its legitimacy upon building and maintaining a "harmonious society."<br />In April, China passes the 20th anniversary of the start of student-led pro-democracy protests on Beijing's Tiananmen Square, that were ultimately crushed by army troops in June 1989.<br />Next year will also see the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, student-led demonstrations against foreign powers' transfer of colonial interests in China from Germany to Japan after the former's defeat in World War One.<br />The dates may provoke discussion on campuses and even some symbolic action, but the likelihood of frustrated, idle youth throwing down an open challenge to Party rule is unlikely, even amid rapidly worsening economic conditions, analysts have said.<br />"The level of helplessness that young people in China feel today compared with what they felt in the late 80s is of a very different kind of magnitude," said Rebecca MacKinnon, from the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of Hong Kong University.<br />"The frustrations are more akin to frustrations that people in any number of countries would feel during an economic downturn."<br />With rising numbers hooked up to the Internet, and increasingly aware of China's social ills -- ranging from rife official corruption to a cavernous gap between rich and poor -- the young would sooner blog about their gripes than try to march on city streets, said office worker Ran.<br />"In any case, for myself and most Chinese people, it's enough that our standard of living is becoming better," said Ran. "So I don't care about politics so much."<br />(Editing by Nick Macfie and Dean Yates)<br /></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVK2J6JlJBoEbkQTOWZbGXGYASqgP5g0efuXxV1RCU6YSK-F0gjs-Rr0IXdocV9SCLXdK2UONc_iOl_jLu_vaJFcVtnq6ovnbZpPSjJyk_hUMzEE3x-P1Q1KusAjC9UQzuUxs9u5wEw1c/s1600-h/DSC02841.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062004343282866" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVK2J6JlJBoEbkQTOWZbGXGYASqgP5g0efuXxV1RCU6YSK-F0gjs-Rr0IXdocV9SCLXdK2UONc_iOl_jLu_vaJFcVtnq6ovnbZpPSjJyk_hUMzEE3x-P1Q1KusAjC9UQzuUxs9u5wEw1c/s320/DSC02841.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/america/10jets.php">For new President, fighter jet decision poses a test</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/europe/kosovo.php">Nobel peace honoree pushes case for Kosovo independence</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/asia/letter.php">Cooperation with China critical for Obama</a> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></div><div><strong>A general for the war at home<br /></strong>Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />An excellent way to show concern for wounded veterans is not to make so many of them. General Eric Shinseki knew this when, as the U.S. Army chief of staff, he told Congress on the eve of the Iraq invasion that several hundred thousand soldiers would be needed to handle the occupation.<br />We all know the result. The Bush administration went to war on the cheap. The defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, vilified and marginalized General Shinseki, who retired. Five years on, Iraq is still crawling toward stability. Rumsfeld is long gone, leaving among his legacies a growing cohort of wounded veterans. And the vindicated Shinseki is back as President-elect Barack Obama's choice to run the Department of Veterans Affairs.<br />General Shinseki, 66, who commanded the NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia and is a Vietnam veteran with two Purple Hearts, has a solid reputation as someone committed to his troops. Running Veterans Affairs is daunting. Not only is the number of wounded veterans growing, but the type of suffering they endure - post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury, the two signature afflictions of Iraq and Afghanistan - is often difficult to diagnose and treat. The V.A. system has been marred by incompetence, inadequate funding and bureaucratic sloth.<br />"You must love those you lead before you can be an effective leader," Shinseki said at the time of his retirement in 2003. "You can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead without it." Those words were a rebuke to the Bush administration. It is heartening to know that the man who spoke them has been chosen to lead the agency charged with caring for America's veterans, who deserve far better treatment than the country has given them.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Blame the media</strong><br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />It is more undeniable than ever that TV fries the brain. It also attacks the body. In the most sweeping review yet, researchers at Yale, the National Institutes of Health, and California Pacific Medical Center examined 173 studies since 1980 and have tied media exposure - including video games and the Internet - to smoking, drugs, early sex, attention deficit, and physical ailments including obesity. American youth spend an average of 45 hours a week with media, compared with 30 hours in school and 17 with parents. Negative effects start with eight hours a week of exposure.<br />The NIH bioethics chairman Ezekiel Emanuel said in an interview that children should not sit in front of screens before age 2, and preferably not before reading age, 5 or 6. After that, exposure should be no more than one hour a day. Parents must compensate by encouraging imaginary play, sports, musical instruments, and crafts.<br />Emanuel raised his children, now ages 18 to 25, with no TV in the house. "When parents say they can't do this, it's time to ask if this is about the kids or you," he said.<br />There is a tantalizing chance such findings may finally go beyond pediatricians and children's advocates. Emanuel happens to be a brother of Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff for President-elect Barack Obama. A top applause line from candidate Obama was "government can't turn off the TV," and he is right. Obama and his government must make media overexposure a public health issue.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>The Bill Ayers I know<br /></strong>By William Ayers<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />CHICAGO: In the recently concluded U.S. presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here's why.<br />Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama's campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: "What do we really know about this man?"<br />Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an "unrepentant domestic terrorist." Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.<br />I was cast in the "unrepentant terrorist" role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the "Two Minutes Hate" scene from George Orwell's "1984," when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.<br />With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.<br />Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn't me, not even close.<br />Here are the facts:<br />I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and I later resisted the draft and was arrested several times in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices - the ones placed at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were perhaps the most notorious - as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.<br />The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our political effectiveness can be - and still is being - debated. It did carry out dramatic symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were a choice meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the war in Vietnam.<br />Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.<br />I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I've been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.<br />I have regrets, of course - including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.<br />The antiwar movement in all its commitment, its deep roots in the black freedom movement, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.<br />We - the broad "we" - wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet collectively we did not do enough: we were inadequate to end the killing of 3 million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.<br />The dishonesty of the narrative about Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other's behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we've been unable to rise above it.<br />President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn't pal around, and I had nothing whatsoever to do with his platforms or positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others today, I wish I knew him better.<br />Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let's hope they never will again. And let's hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.<br />William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of "Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist" and a co-author of the forthcoming "Race Course: Against White Supremacy."</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Mediator says Congo rebel talks make progress</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Humphrey Malalo<br />Eastern Congo rebels and the government made progress and will meet again soon after the first face-to-face talks to defuse tension that has threatened to trigger another regional war, a mediator said on Tuesday.<br />Diplomats had cautiously welcomed the two days of talks in Nairobi, even though neither Congolese President Joseph Kabila nor General Laurent Nkunda, head of the rebel National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), took part.<br />"They have made progress in their talks and they will continue," Olusegun Obasanjo, a former Nigerian president who is U.N. special envoy for the conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, told reporters.<br />The talks were aimed at ending fighting in Congo's North Kivu province between the military and Nkunda's Tutsi rebels that has displaced a quarter of a million people since August.<br />Obasanjo said substantive discussions would take place before Christmas. He said no date or venue had been decided.<br />"The doors are not closed," he added, saying that "other parties" were welcome to join the talks. He did not elaborate.<br />At the weekend, the Kinshasa government invited some 20 other armed groups to the U.N.-hosted talks -- but the CNDP said it would not sit down with other insurgents. No other rebel groups turned up, and the two delegations held two days of private meetings.<br />The CNDP declared a cease-fire after reaching the gates of North Kivu's provincial capital Goma in late October. The truce has been generally respected by both the rebels and the army, leading to more than a month of relative calm in the area.<br />But clashes continue between Nkunda's fighters, Mai Mai militia and Rwandan Hutu rebels, who roam a region rich in gold, diamonds, coltan and tin and who often support Kabila's weak and chaotic army.<br />FRANCE: 'NO COMBAT TROOPS'<br />Congo and Rwanda agreed last week to disband a Rwandan Hutu militia, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), in eastern Congo. Congo's 1998-2003 war sucked in six neighbouring armies and caused more than 5 million deaths.<br />The FDLR includes in its ranks perpetrators of the 1994 genocide of Tutsis by Hutus in neighbouring Rwanda. Congo accuses Nkunda of receiving support from the Tutsi-led Rwandan government of President Paul Kagame.<br />The United Nations has a 17,000-strong peacekeeping mission in Congo, known as MONUC, and has asked for an EU "bridging force" to reinforce it until 3,000 more U.N. troops and police arrive next year. EU ministers are split on how to respond.<br />French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in Paris that it was "out of the question" for France to send combat troops to Congo to help MONUC because the conflict zone is too close to Rwanda, further dimming hopes that an EU force can be put together to intervene quickly.<br />Kouchner did not exclude French participation in a possible EU force, but said it would have to be in a non-combat role.<br />France and Rwanda have extremely tense relations because of mutual accusations of a role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.<br />U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday repeated a call for an EU bridging force, saying it may take up to six months to deploy some 3,000 reinforcements for MONUC.<br />Hiroute Guebre Sellassie, head of MONUC's regional office in Goma, said at the U.N. headquarters in New York that MONUC was counting on Europe to come through with a bridging force.<br />Without one, MONUC would have to live with large areas of vulnerability for six months until the reinforcements arrive.<br />"The idea of a bridging force originally came from Europe and we would expect them to do something about it," she told Reuters. "This is not a luxury. MONUC needs those forces."<br />(Additional reporting by Clement Guillou in Paris and Louis Charbonneau at the United Nations; writing by Daniel Wallis and Louis Charbonneau; editing by Mohammad Zargham)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>**********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Obama urged to make genocide prevention a priority</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Claudia Parsons<br />A high-level U.S. taskforce on preventing genocide said on Tuesday it expected President-elect Barack Obama to support its call for a $250 million (169 million pound) fund to back emergency action in high-risk countries.<br />The Genocide Prevention Task Force, co-chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defence William Cohen, issued a report this week calling for prevention of genocide to be a top priority in the new U.S. administration that will take office in January.<br />Albright told reporters at the United Nations on Tuesday the United States should not bear the burden alone but should lead the way in taking responsibility to prevent mass atrocities and genocide wherever they may happen.<br />She called for the creation of a high level inter-agency mechanism to coordinate between various branches of the U.S. government to focus on early warning when the first signs of a problem occur. That should be backed by $250 million a year to finance specially tailored projects in countries at risk.<br />"This modest fund would give U.S. diplomats a potentially pivotal tool with which to avert catastrophe," Albright said.<br />Albright, who was secretary of state under U.S. President Bill Clinton, said the report was prepared with input from many people involved in Obama's transition team.<br />Cohen said the 34 recommendations in the report aimed to create the mechanisms to ensure early detection and preventative action to stop genocide before it was too late, retaining the option of military action as a last resort.<br />"We believe that president-elect Obama will support it, we don't know that for certain but we believe that to be the case," Cohen said.<br />Albright was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. She said the report by the taskforce was not a historical analysis but it did take account of lessons learned when the international community failed to stop the slaughter of some 800,000 people in Rwanda.<br />"There's broad range of foreign policy options between standing aside and ordering in the Marines," Albright said, emphasizing the importance of early warning systems and international cooperation to exert diplomatic pressure.<br />Cohen said it was vital that the United States not appear to be "meddling" in a unilateral way.<br />He said preventing genocide was in the national security interest of all countries, since it could lead to failed states with the potential to breed terrorism.<br />(Editing by Philip Barbara)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Killings in drug war in Mexico double in '08<br /></strong>By Marc Lacey<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />MEXICO CITY: Killings linked to Mexico's drug war have more than doubled this year compared with 2007 and are likely to grow even further before they begin to fall, Attorney General Eduardo Medina-Mora said Monday.<br />The prosecutor tied the sharp increase in deaths to a battle for control among cartels and a power vacuum created by a series of high-profile arrests and seizures.<br />The number of gangland killings reached 5,376 from the beginning of the year until Dec. 2, a 117 percent increase over the 2,477 killings in the same period in 2007, Medina-Mora said in a luncheon meeting with foreign correspondents.<br />The bulk of the killings have occurred in the border states of Chihuahua and Baja California, where traffickers have sought to wipe out rivals on the streets of Juárez and Tijuana, and in Sinaloa, where one of the country's most powerful cartels has its base.<br />"These criminal organizations don't have limits," said Medina-Mora, who previously served as Mexico's public safety director and spy chief. "They certainly have an enormous power of intimidation."<br />Even while acknowledging that there was a "significant increase" in drug-related homicides, Medina-Mora said the overall level of violence in Mexico remained moderate compared with that in other Latin American countries.<br />Mexico's overall homicide rate last year, 11 deaths per 100,000 people, was a small fraction of the rates in Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador and Brazil, he said.<br />Even as he released the new statistics though, the number of killings in Mexico was climbing. At least 18 people were killed in two southern states on Sunday, The Associated Press reported. They include two people whose heads were left in plastic buckets near the office of the governor of Guerrero State, and 10 suspected drug traffickers and one soldier killed in a gun battle in Arcelia, Guerrero.<br />Taking on the cartels that supply most of the illegal drugs consumed in the United States has been a frustrating exercise for Mexico. Officials complain that the guns the criminals use are coming from the United States and that the billions of dollars in drug profits have corrupted many institutions in Mexico.<br />The attorney general's office itself recently found that numerous officials in its organized crime unit were working for traffickers, receiving cash payments to tip off the cartels about impending raids.<br />But Medina-Mora said that the arrests of those officials showed that Mexico was taking seriously its fight to root out criminals wherever they are found.</div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFgJFvIHcOQ9vnFqdS9DilKauAVZ0jDSAv4p2yOkUtrJpXP8bgySHT4UtepAS9DOUKlSB6prSHFndLSzjLpVugI7dN_ccevbvzGPQXvJ-ZPIRL9u2XavBYLpqJO30Y9cH4gZDt-HNBx08/s1600-h/DSC02842.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061997703062082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFgJFvIHcOQ9vnFqdS9DilKauAVZ0jDSAv4p2yOkUtrJpXP8bgySHT4UtepAS9DOUKlSB6prSHFndLSzjLpVugI7dN_ccevbvzGPQXvJ-ZPIRL9u2XavBYLpqJO30Y9cH4gZDt-HNBx08/s320/DSC02842.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><strong>Online retail sales up 14 pct on "Mega Monday</strong>"<br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />LONDON: Monday was the biggest online shopping day in Britain this year, with sales up 14 percent on the comparable day last year to 320 million pounds, Internet retail industry group IMRG said on Tuesday.<br />The second Monday in December has been dubbed "Mega Monday" by the online retail industry because it has traditionally marked the high point of Christmas shopping on the Internet.<br />But IMRG said that with delivery times improving, there was still time for a stronger performance.<br />"We may even see next Monday being bigger still, which would be the first time ever that the third Monday in December marked the year's peak," it said.<br />The rise in sales beat the previous Monday's performance by 20 million pounds and was accompanied by an 18 percent rise in sales volumes.<br />"Online sales are holding up well, considering the economic conditions," IMRG said.<br />However, it added that Monday was only the third-biggest day this year in terms of traffic to retail websites, suggesting shoppers are researching thoroughly, both in stores and online, before committing to a purchase.<br />(Reporting by Mark Potter, editing by Will Waterman)<br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilVZxaYYNVt_zMcPw9WYyUfsXmSPv3DbzcXUj_obufsFQWgKqC04Upt6g9QSJi09A-SYlKy5yA_2JRr6ftRMUY9AuQ97McVNlE5V_lBVBbhk9v08imYDin6Fy7-_swNKqYq8rJJMcI8mk/s1600-h/DSC02843.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278062000340361698" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilVZxaYYNVt_zMcPw9WYyUfsXmSPv3DbzcXUj_obufsFQWgKqC04Upt6g9QSJi09A-SYlKy5yA_2JRr6ftRMUY9AuQ97McVNlE5V_lBVBbhk9v08imYDin6Fy7-_swNKqYq8rJJMcI8mk/s320/DSC02843.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div> </div><div><strong>It's the holidays. How about just one?</strong><br />By Jim Atkinson<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />I had my last drink nearly 16 years ago, so you'd think I would have assimilated pretty much every bit of unpleasantness associated with sober life in a society that remains thoroughly sodden with alcohol. But I still can't quite handle the holidays.<br />It's not that I'm driven to drink; just to a certain uncomfortable distraction that doesn't leave until the holiday season thankfully does. And it's not just that the holidays seem to have been invented for the express purpose of promoting - no, necessitating - irresponsible alcoholic consumption.<br />There's something in the alone-in-the-crowdness of the holiday party circuit, the forced pleasantries and laughter, the charge to be friendly and engaging - but only in a trivial and superficial way - that is very much like the existential condition of the alcoholic psyche. So the holidays not only remind me of drink; they remind me of how it felt to be a drunk.<br />In fact, I have frequently been overheard to explain to the sort of person who still finds it good sport to ask me how I came to be addicted to alcohol and what it's like now to be stone cold sober, "You know how you feel at Christmas at the umpteenth family gathering or company cocktail party. You really need that drink, right? That's the way I used to feel all the time."<br />And as with one's first adolescent love, a certain euphoric recall about the drinking life remains lodged in the psyche of any drunk no matter how many years he has remained sober. Even after 16 years, especially at holiday time, a tiny voice still occasionally visits, asking, "Why can't you just have one?"<br />Addiction scientists have puzzled over what distinguishes the alcoholic psyche from the "normal" one, or even, the mentally ill one. The best I can say from personal experience is that we all tend to be afflicted by a low-grade dysphoria, a sort of constant melancholy that causes feelings of unease, isolation and dissatisfaction with life - an "inexplicable ache," I once heard it called.<br />But is this nature or nurture? I personally have come to believe in a construction proposed by Dr. Mark Willenbring, director of the division of treatment and recovery research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which says it's both. Willenbring argues that the main thing that alcoholics share is a natural tolerance for alcohol, which leads them to overindulge without knowing it. Repeated overindulgence, in turn, changes their brain chemistry and literally creates the inexplicable ache by altering the activity of two systems: The brain's "reward system," which sends the message that drinking feels good; and the excitatory and stress response systems, which become "recruited" and, over time, produce an elevated anxiety when one is without alcohol in his system.<br />This would pretty much track my personal experience. It always took more to get me drunk, and the irony is, I always thought that was a good thing. Particularly during my 20's, when everyone was drinking pretty heavily.<br />Over time, drinking twice as much just to "get there" took its toll. Without realizing it, I crossed over from mere psychological addiction (a problematic, but self-manageable condition) to physical addiction, which involves blackouts and dangerous withdrawal symptoms, and for which medical intervention is necessary.<br />So how about that one holiday drink? Should I?<br />If I decided to take a drink at a party, I might be able to tough it out for that night, but I know that the next day, another drink would be someplace in my mind. That someplace might be a manageable place, but would it be worth the considerable hassle of having to think twice every time I took a sip?<br />Besides, my newly wired brain doesn't really have the interest to try. I've worked too hard at this, learned too much, have too much pride in accomplishing something that a lot of folks with this problem don't - a solid sobriety that has lasted at least as long as my addiction did - to risk a relapse.<br />But what to do about the holidays? I rather like the view of radio talk show host Don Imus, himself a recovering alcoholic who has been sober 20 years. When the subject of parties came up on his radio show a few years back, Imus noted that he was invited to many but went to very few, for one simple reason: "I don't drink."<br />This seemed to me to be one of the more sensible things ever said about parties or alcoholism. So as the holiday season gets underway, I try to look at it this way. No one really wants to go to all those parties. I'm one of the lucky ones who has an excuse to beg off.<br />Jim Atkinson is a writer at large for Texas Monthly.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Some Estonians return to pre-Christian animist traditions</strong><br />By Ellen Barry<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />TUHALA, Estonia: All day, people crunched through the frost-encrusted woods, in snowsuits, leather jackets and perilous heels, until they came to the spot where the water was churning.<br />According to legend, the witches of Tuhala were taking a sauna underground, beating each other vigorously with birch branches, oblivious to the commotion they were creating on the surface.<br />The famed Witch's Well of Tuhala erupted last week for the first time in three years, attracting pilgrims from all over Estonia.<br />Exhaling puffs of vapor in the slanting light, the visitors dangled pendants to test energy fields and held arthritic fingers perfectly motionless over stones.<br />"Estonia is full of natural magic," said Mari-Liis Roos, 37, a translator who had come to Tuhala with her husband and son. "It's hard to describe. Sometimes you don't want to explain these things, because it is so personal."<br />Estonia has been bullied into a series of belief systems over the centuries, from Catholicism to Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy and Soviet atheism. Seventeen years after gaining independence from the Soviet Union, Estonia is one of the world's most secular nations; in the 2000 census, only 29 percent of its citizens declared themselves followers of a particular faith.<br />That does not mean they are atheists. Craving an authentic national faith, Estonians have been drawn to the animistic religions that preceded Christianity: Taarausk, or Taaraism, whose god was worshiped in forest groves, and Maausk, which translates as "faith of the earth."<br />Ancient beliefs have survived in the form of folk tales. In stories, the sins of humans reverberate in nature - lakes fly away to punish greedy villagers, or forests wander off in the night, never to return. Trees demand the respect of a tipped hat and holes in the ground must be fed with coins.<br />In the case of Tuhala, the physical world begs for such explanations. The settlement, believed to be 3,000 years old, sits on Estonia's largest field of porous karst, where 15 underground rivers flow through a maze of caverns, audible but unseen by human inhabitants.<br />One result is sinkholes large enough to swallow horses - the Horse's Hole, as it is known, appeared in 1978 - or people, as in the Mother-in-Law's Hole. Streams appear and disappear like phantoms.<br />The most famous oddity is the Witch's Well. Geologists believe that after flooding rains, underground water pressure builds to the point that water shoots up out of the ground, usually for a few days. Each time it happens, people travel great distances to see it.<br />Ellu Rouk, 69, a thin woman with clear blue eyes, walked away slowly after a few moments by the well. She said she had a deep involvement with the natural world.<br />Her special ally is a birch tree in her yard, so powerful that a malicious neighbor has plotted to kill it, she said. When she cuts roses and sets them in a vase, she said, they sprout roots.<br />These dramas, she said, are an "inheritance" from her ancestors.<br />"There is an old Estonian god, Taara," Rouk said. "He lives. He exists. Though there are people who would like to get rid of him.<br />"Christians," she added, "have no respect for nature."<br />Magic seems to be back in fashion, said Evi Tuttelberg, who lives in a 500-year-old farmhouse near the well. Tuttelberg, 80, used to laugh when her mother-in-law reported seeing flaming devils flying over Tuhala. In her mother-in-law's day, people left offerings of money and food at the "sacred juniper" and spoke of secret underground chambers hidden in the fields.<br />Then Estonia entered its long Soviet period, and witches and wood elves receded from public discourse. The same went for the Witch's Well, she said.<br />"No one used to talk about it," she said. "It was just a hole in the ground."<br />But this year, it was a marvel. A fresh and loamy scent rose from the forest floor; electric-green moss sprang underfoot, and water had frozen into beads on bare branches. People wheeled their newborns all the way to the water's edge and watched as mist rose from the cropland.<br />Ants Talioja, whose family has owned the land for 11 generations, wandered around proud and distracted, like the headwaiter of a restaurant. When he stopped moving for a moment, though, his expression was pained. There are plans to build a limestone quarry about two and a half kilometers, or a mile and a half, from the Witch's Well, and Talioja said he feared that the project would drain the water that coursed mysteriously under Tuhala.<br />That would mean this year's eruption could be the last. Talioja, 62, was born over that flowing water, and he said he believed that it had given his family certain gifts; one woman in his family lived to the age of 105.<br />The mining company has offered to pipe in fresh drinking water to compensate for the 1,000 wells that could run dry, he said. But it was clear from the grim expression on Talioja's face that piped-in water was no substitute.<br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdl0_4TcDl3VtCWqSsW3xO0vhT7m9byeu6_7uPE8wTpThRi5U-MbwP0-GnzAsmntGaBugP7kZycHf05I8K8wUN1rIeQYX8Uwx2de1SiHGufxId1HssKOfXLvcu1KFxVX80tNvUWcUXJo/s1600-h/DSC02844.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061675596068674" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdl0_4TcDl3VtCWqSsW3xO0vhT7m9byeu6_7uPE8wTpThRi5U-MbwP0-GnzAsmntGaBugP7kZycHf05I8K8wUN1rIeQYX8Uwx2de1SiHGufxId1HssKOfXLvcu1KFxVX80tNvUWcUXJo/s320/DSC02844.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Spain warns of attacks after latest ETA arrest</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />MADRID, Spain: Spain warned Tuesday of possible retaliatory attacks by the armed Basque group ETA following the arrest of the organization's latest suspected leader.<br />French and Spanish police detained Aitzol Iriondo in a town square in southern France on Monday. Police believe Iriondo took over the leadership of ETA following the Nov. 17 arrest of Mikel de Garikoitz Aspiazu, alias Txeroki.<br />The Interior Ministry said two others were arrested with Iriondo and three more suspected ETA members were detained in Spain later Monday.<br />"I am sure ETA is preparing to carry out a criminal act," Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said Tuesday. "They're still there. This is not finished."<br />ETA, whose name stands for Basque Homeland and Freedom in the Basque language, has killed over 825 people since 1968 in its campaign for an independent state straddling northern Spain and southwest France. Most recently it is blamed for the fatal shooting of a 71-year-old Basque businessman in northern Spain last Wednesday.<br />Rubalcaba said Spain must keep up its guard.<br />"One always has the feeling that the more cornered they (the ETA) are, the more dangerous they may turn," he told reporters in the southern city of Granada.<br />Rubalcaba said police also found three guns, a computer and electronic material in the car during the operation in the French town of Gerde. He identified the other two arrested as Eneko Zarrabeitia and Aitor Artetxe.<br />Several hours later, police arrested three more suspected ETA members across the border in the Spanish town of Irun. Their identities were not released.<br />Investigators believe Iriondo may have been one of three ETA members who participated in the fatal shooting of two Spanish civil guard officers in the southern French town of Capbreton last December, Rubalcaba said.<br />Police cooperation between France and Spain has led to the arrests of dozens of ETA suspects in recent years. Previously, ETA member used Basque areas in southwest France as safe havens while preparing to carry out attacks in Spain.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqGavKDFAqU2cNxgJ6B-aa-YLEfXglZnS8YeIBegzxbe8b1v9xq9v6023-iqyxFwB1ATiKwKrSpUyb5ZvL2gwsvu0AJyTXyFuODL-jh5m8xOQh0_DY3-6Iq-grOCLRhBRthDpby5EKRkM/s1600-h/DSC02845.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061671053387122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqGavKDFAqU2cNxgJ6B-aa-YLEfXglZnS8YeIBegzxbe8b1v9xq9v6023-iqyxFwB1ATiKwKrSpUyb5ZvL2gwsvu0AJyTXyFuODL-jh5m8xOQh0_DY3-6Iq-grOCLRhBRthDpby5EKRkM/s320/DSC02845.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Q7Y3czCAnh_3LWemc7Cff6fndCU2l_i1cnQyam5vCg5ASNZpb1kQW1L6Q6HPbtrXlzBj7e51jUpsmEgcqtpYNvhBMuUoRP0Ldg4ZrXOY0W4QV-qRyFagI30zTU8Cl27OTYrQJdZLmsU/s1600-h/DSC02846.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061666919773522" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Q7Y3czCAnh_3LWemc7Cff6fndCU2l_i1cnQyam5vCg5ASNZpb1kQW1L6Q6HPbtrXlzBj7e51jUpsmEgcqtpYNvhBMuUoRP0Ldg4ZrXOY0W4QV-qRyFagI30zTU8Cl27OTYrQJdZLmsU/s320/DSC02846.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNa5FZOsNqHllrH590cJvIdRN-iX338ovGH1gNcimRDVoI18ofpXtKcJbB3qFm0Ztq0vNG4Zt9O4ABp39GeJwTZSMsebmZYALmJVpu79MAM3ZPfTid36r1_oWF5AopHHg5yvrQBj9fuQE/s1600-h/DSC02847.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061666603328210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNa5FZOsNqHllrH590cJvIdRN-iX338ovGH1gNcimRDVoI18ofpXtKcJbB3qFm0Ztq0vNG4Zt9O4ABp39GeJwTZSMsebmZYALmJVpu79MAM3ZPfTid36r1_oWF5AopHHg5yvrQBj9fuQE/s320/DSC02847.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaYDumaJmz83CE6dkJKRDwiAS4hZL0vdbAaSX06Hy5V5u0MYqFLHpdSSc9J1lmPSsCef-VaGjqxiYGj1JB3u7VasDov9qNDKZWjH9_AY5jMAYVbvfI-AfeH1jKpZuF9dJpuo8iGdw7Q-o/s1600-h/DSC02848.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061664473032418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaYDumaJmz83CE6dkJKRDwiAS4hZL0vdbAaSX06Hy5V5u0MYqFLHpdSSc9J1lmPSsCef-VaGjqxiYGj1JB3u7VasDov9qNDKZWjH9_AY5jMAYVbvfI-AfeH1jKpZuF9dJpuo8iGdw7Q-o/s320/DSC02848.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8jAOIIbi1w7nq4w0FRiFnW8135P4_lsc4yIuyn8cojcY5pHGDqFXM8fa8ga0E-Q-N8_Shfdisagkb5OHhpteSM3md2NUjLdlebwsukyt79SqsriWFPS4PDq8FnCSv9nfMPdzFen6tWhI/s1600-h/DSC02849.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061376383125746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8jAOIIbi1w7nq4w0FRiFnW8135P4_lsc4yIuyn8cojcY5pHGDqFXM8fa8ga0E-Q-N8_Shfdisagkb5OHhpteSM3md2NUjLdlebwsukyt79SqsriWFPS4PDq8FnCSv9nfMPdzFen6tWhI/s320/DSC02849.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGYqhb00JYznuCBtys9JLveqmoR994nKmHEJT4ik8vZ_nAPRV2FMQoBdBhzDxY_p8EVXop1NmXI9Ovx8INggu2uGU7tk5UnYaoPtVPHY9RnyNoQK47j-itflkJD9_Pd6eEm5g5T3kNsvw/s1600-h/DSC02850.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061370832948802" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGYqhb00JYznuCBtys9JLveqmoR994nKmHEJT4ik8vZ_nAPRV2FMQoBdBhzDxY_p8EVXop1NmXI9Ovx8INggu2uGU7tk5UnYaoPtVPHY9RnyNoQK47j-itflkJD9_Pd6eEm5g5T3kNsvw/s320/DSC02850.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZyS5pqdEolDWvG6D2WgV0-AvgDjEAyuscY3aw36kLTZ1shaRyQXoCTlnpu87xn8GgL314yE_gXtiE-HRBzhJaTv-Z-5iBIfg8Hv6rY3i3eByCjppmbqcvj3gSVW0BwzNtbe5xzj11O4s/s1600-h/DSC02851.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061367235384802" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZyS5pqdEolDWvG6D2WgV0-AvgDjEAyuscY3aw36kLTZ1shaRyQXoCTlnpu87xn8GgL314yE_gXtiE-HRBzhJaTv-Z-5iBIfg8Hv6rY3i3eByCjppmbqcvj3gSVW0BwzNtbe5xzj11O4s/s320/DSC02851.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt-mEGGJUlVW5IjWXWWQin6Lqw8RlCtizbjrJdLYMOhQ5mNiMEDrEtGDzeMZqUymkQkxFZtmBcc89GJbN3MIkyABTq3jKBQhwNbKvNCRhYQRzFdpAKt7RxDQOL7ZPOcOs-0cpInIpupUw/s1600-h/DSC02852.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061362041199010" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt-mEGGJUlVW5IjWXWWQin6Lqw8RlCtizbjrJdLYMOhQ5mNiMEDrEtGDzeMZqUymkQkxFZtmBcc89GJbN3MIkyABTq3jKBQhwNbKvNCRhYQRzFdpAKt7RxDQOL7ZPOcOs-0cpInIpupUw/s320/DSC02852.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlHUKJxYxNu-E7ZuIGemc2c331TUC9dgNSfKzva6d3keqaniDec3BoIGRZOKfnadVJCeVXcq67WYXoOfTmNHK29kEvVCOpUtQFG2LKsD4mdQxy4dCEmb0OcGgu8FcnXHsop4oxBPAgf_w/s1600-h/DSC02853.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061364726417298" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlHUKJxYxNu-E7ZuIGemc2c331TUC9dgNSfKzva6d3keqaniDec3BoIGRZOKfnadVJCeVXcq67WYXoOfTmNHK29kEvVCOpUtQFG2LKsD4mdQxy4dCEmb0OcGgu8FcnXHsop4oxBPAgf_w/s320/DSC02853.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRTCvNPCKcn_Vpwt0yq8otpS82A1LJ2Gr4n1XA_mPjeVHA8sbgcQUKR2wpoihGfhftVSTkCzCXjtrtieUJ2wSNg7omdDRv2rw9uA6qggaAbgb56DUZASdIv3JTJmk3FPfUjQEXLgH8Usg/s1600-h/DSC02854.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061110787424738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRTCvNPCKcn_Vpwt0yq8otpS82A1LJ2Gr4n1XA_mPjeVHA8sbgcQUKR2wpoihGfhftVSTkCzCXjtrtieUJ2wSNg7omdDRv2rw9uA6qggaAbgb56DUZASdIv3JTJmk3FPfUjQEXLgH8Usg/s320/DSC02854.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb2tf-zV5vesST0FmUyaR2ez3TKA_YARZRSx_lm4T4AnUsaL7wrIq0CwzaFRA7XtF2GGFQDpj9uCcpuCczq9_9YzMPwb-DeGRmyCgOC5TiFsGY2zeEwAq_B6A6X-lK5nP8bxjlpIg0i90/s1600-h/DSC02857.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061106410283474" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb2tf-zV5vesST0FmUyaR2ez3TKA_YARZRSx_lm4T4AnUsaL7wrIq0CwzaFRA7XtF2GGFQDpj9uCcpuCczq9_9YzMPwb-DeGRmyCgOC5TiFsGY2zeEwAq_B6A6X-lK5nP8bxjlpIg0i90/s320/DSC02857.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoBXUGiGKMgBkObrIu6_P9l5EYIa8w3j2iRUMN9j8ZfqwocZVcO2PFKUOqb4rW__Od7FIqZPM-IipOZpcAy2N2BwJdzKrcmZ98IRb8ZhwqKhtsQY9RmEW8oOQhb1EWSkOlrLqAyVp4H6I/s1600-h/DSC02859.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061101873618418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoBXUGiGKMgBkObrIu6_P9l5EYIa8w3j2iRUMN9j8ZfqwocZVcO2PFKUOqb4rW__Od7FIqZPM-IipOZpcAy2N2BwJdzKrcmZ98IRb8ZhwqKhtsQY9RmEW8oOQhb1EWSkOlrLqAyVp4H6I/s320/DSC02859.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYIHT6oFQwIqRKvO0CLqUtP5zG6MMMu-4VVRwDRimdZ9mT7qsm9LtRdpnBfSDGKbX8NTYoTDiIVKmKsbNLrwyiEIR0CXGnG_sry-S6uAbNnvvTyP0uXlHZ39-aDdXoCRMaqUMwjDByJ00/s1600-h/DSC02860.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061098233804274" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYIHT6oFQwIqRKvO0CLqUtP5zG6MMMu-4VVRwDRimdZ9mT7qsm9LtRdpnBfSDGKbX8NTYoTDiIVKmKsbNLrwyiEIR0CXGnG_sry-S6uAbNnvvTyP0uXlHZ39-aDdXoCRMaqUMwjDByJ00/s320/DSC02860.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGAoehWM9NuPteATynFLoOUkh9GYAyTd7vhH56_1IPBim1xKvk6LvWp1OypzP2fjDn7Kr4UD7hYiGyyh3xqtKw60_PngLm3I1uenegRVnnVePzJJWFyzP8g2HqD9WZlHRf8F7eMO05Ne4/s1600-h/DSC02862.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278061097720330274" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGAoehWM9NuPteATynFLoOUkh9GYAyTd7vhH56_1IPBim1xKvk6LvWp1OypzP2fjDn7Kr4UD7hYiGyyh3xqtKw60_PngLm3I1uenegRVnnVePzJJWFyzP8g2HqD9WZlHRf8F7eMO05Ne4/s320/DSC02862.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhejqKnjaehY-JNz0bse4_WEjEmKhLtk-OY8mKtobtc3JSy_UikxJQ4mPq-QJsJ-CgtbUjNPC38FcKFy5AJO5mL17hFevEyXg7v0GZ8yU5aq-MW6ZyfFYdTGFGNFN50j1Jd3Avt1cv2cYg/s1600-h/DSC02863.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060872225308498" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhejqKnjaehY-JNz0bse4_WEjEmKhLtk-OY8mKtobtc3JSy_UikxJQ4mPq-QJsJ-CgtbUjNPC38FcKFy5AJO5mL17hFevEyXg7v0GZ8yU5aq-MW6ZyfFYdTGFGNFN50j1Jd3Avt1cv2cYg/s320/DSC02863.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmyTf95CCnFW5idgIndhxH2c_xKotcBrCW65t99fI6MsokCW07bpp3WTjGiEnTyB7e8FdfAZtYIEby97vCEpeorCjkXjKU1vphQ43IIAhK0MB6H-evJTl0r9-CHVh2K2Msc-uLzmcVo90/s1600-h/DSC02864.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060869254968418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmyTf95CCnFW5idgIndhxH2c_xKotcBrCW65t99fI6MsokCW07bpp3WTjGiEnTyB7e8FdfAZtYIEby97vCEpeorCjkXjKU1vphQ43IIAhK0MB6H-evJTl0r9-CHVh2K2Msc-uLzmcVo90/s320/DSC02864.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiruZwTXcebDFFsyjeUmy3sAZk6S_u-LXOQ6lM7wSn54ke6TxbGQ9XnbQZH7c8VCUY8Z-JdzuCQy_RaN9yN7-nvvMw1vWvktriXeS0YzKVUWDn-0JQmvD4CRXkZ5nIoW7L1SlO9xC3NLnI/s1600-h/DSC02868.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060716031066082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiruZwTXcebDFFsyjeUmy3sAZk6S_u-LXOQ6lM7wSn54ke6TxbGQ9XnbQZH7c8VCUY8Z-JdzuCQy_RaN9yN7-nvvMw1vWvktriXeS0YzKVUWDn-0JQmvD4CRXkZ5nIoW7L1SlO9xC3NLnI/s320/DSC02868.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJOySjbCC000W8YSrXkkFlTJIoalJAbZ66g9dh2P_fHjr2n5msRkE3U7K2yqfJq4r581HJpwUgjXB9o6brt634MngjN_0J5qvRC2sDCn7a7DuJG-iKAA86CKlbwuQXmVdNnfy1U_Xx2fQ/s1600-h/DSC02869.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060706644791282" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJOySjbCC000W8YSrXkkFlTJIoalJAbZ66g9dh2P_fHjr2n5msRkE3U7K2yqfJq4r581HJpwUgjXB9o6brt634MngjN_0J5qvRC2sDCn7a7DuJG-iKAA86CKlbwuQXmVdNnfy1U_Xx2fQ/s320/DSC02869.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWo0fMGVQ8fdLorb6GF400BO59v0Vj4ZkTH7BmZXhaB-Na8oQ-zdye6QCTWjcb13gi4tyT7D3c-2ukNBEJ51qlSRhpt3JxAhuiEwLYniH427t_V2ReZRJgNkAo-wj1jiwjKguUfF4cYSs/s1600-h/DSC02870.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060701572949138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWo0fMGVQ8fdLorb6GF400BO59v0Vj4ZkTH7BmZXhaB-Na8oQ-zdye6QCTWjcb13gi4tyT7D3c-2ukNBEJ51qlSRhpt3JxAhuiEwLYniH427t_V2ReZRJgNkAo-wj1jiwjKguUfF4cYSs/s320/DSC02870.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhugFzF9jYUO92SQIzralATvmkIO-HZGcwd2YRQEwyB59fOC-b-UVCr4lrfGgOI_MDiAoz2qaPRFKiUfpCCjARxhZGiaMLUdJYQMLnnnlDmm8tuSshQ71-xGjEdXr5qg59G_5h4a2EPRzE/s1600-h/DSC02871.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060700534887282" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhugFzF9jYUO92SQIzralATvmkIO-HZGcwd2YRQEwyB59fOC-b-UVCr4lrfGgOI_MDiAoz2qaPRFKiUfpCCjARxhZGiaMLUdJYQMLnnnlDmm8tuSshQ71-xGjEdXr5qg59G_5h4a2EPRzE/s320/DSC02871.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu2FGFZLktL_MSeMkquJspQM46XrO9QWNYLOsg7gKTMxM-Idg79t3GikaktWXGKJ7RwYdeQdzb2A3k8C6xak6qwFCiiEph9rZqP3m98eIxUqfOuDUTupMapmJeMRy8mNWkDHZo3b2MZCk/s1600-h/DSC02872.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060700931495858" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu2FGFZLktL_MSeMkquJspQM46XrO9QWNYLOsg7gKTMxM-Idg79t3GikaktWXGKJ7RwYdeQdzb2A3k8C6xak6qwFCiiEph9rZqP3m98eIxUqfOuDUTupMapmJeMRy8mNWkDHZo3b2MZCk/s320/DSC02872.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2uTL14Lw7DkjK_uFFSxS_JdooMZgQbtpWuc3GKb3rNEk0M4ZCyXa6lMJ9yR8G1niwdV8GQMdbsB4N4bkldlYG2z94pkZ6FqOgsi4PaSiZCxfLD5hpKdgfPzAd4dV1pub3ADHmhyqSpSI/s1600-h/DSC02874.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060469127674146" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2uTL14Lw7DkjK_uFFSxS_JdooMZgQbtpWuc3GKb3rNEk0M4ZCyXa6lMJ9yR8G1niwdV8GQMdbsB4N4bkldlYG2z94pkZ6FqOgsi4PaSiZCxfLD5hpKdgfPzAd4dV1pub3ADHmhyqSpSI/s320/DSC02874.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAaumZdeShKk1v-kZinG3i7vIV_hVurWakensbmnUO5ENYgdjaSMgJejoredwnLOuKr9RfftaboyTU3dvfSCJjZih7XrgUDJZgHxRIpqJFko5aslTKPm3qs1L7UCygdAOs9SHyqVRBWRE/s1600-h/DSC02875.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060466398944402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAaumZdeShKk1v-kZinG3i7vIV_hVurWakensbmnUO5ENYgdjaSMgJejoredwnLOuKr9RfftaboyTU3dvfSCJjZih7XrgUDJZgHxRIpqJFko5aslTKPm3qs1L7UCygdAOs9SHyqVRBWRE/s320/DSC02875.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhHg8pkUKjG5If1zK6Gl6sVH47F6nhXqVxWQcJBqb3jrjCcox0Al8KChrPnZipldx7NRHhYu_Z-IUVMNEkjcH9SwyUubm9NM5t1xk7IJoi_0I5J0ZRlnhoxWBm0CaYWbrB7dvpitQRfx8/s1600-h/DSC02876.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060463114782498" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhHg8pkUKjG5If1zK6Gl6sVH47F6nhXqVxWQcJBqb3jrjCcox0Al8KChrPnZipldx7NRHhYu_Z-IUVMNEkjcH9SwyUubm9NM5t1xk7IJoi_0I5J0ZRlnhoxWBm0CaYWbrB7dvpitQRfx8/s320/DSC02876.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFMlFavn1MLlxrL7pq-V9KmfMplr3Weyo-TfNdZxjpGfW66I-bIZhGI7ciiRSPTyyuxYBbp_1xdXHKGGFvG7jKw2PDYvQA-yttI9Z0Pt017rSJJ1aQj7_paIJyTaYhOb55OXjiEUHmg5g/s1600-h/DSC02877.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060463610023682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFMlFavn1MLlxrL7pq-V9KmfMplr3Weyo-TfNdZxjpGfW66I-bIZhGI7ciiRSPTyyuxYBbp_1xdXHKGGFvG7jKw2PDYvQA-yttI9Z0Pt017rSJJ1aQj7_paIJyTaYhOb55OXjiEUHmg5g/s320/DSC02877.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Sam Zell's 'transaction from hell' ends in bankruptcy for Tribune</strong></div><div><strong>By DealBook<br /></strong><br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Sam Zell acknowledged from the start that his deal for Tribune Co. was flawed.<br />"I'm here to tell you that the transaction from hell is done," Zell said last December when he sealed his $8.2 billion takeover of the publisher of The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times.<br />But just how hellish this deal was, particularly for Tribune employees, became painfully clear Monday when the 161-year-old company filed for bankruptcy.<br />There is a lot of blame to go around, and much of it will be directed at Zell, the real estate baron whose knack for buying when everyone else is selling earned him a fit sobriquet for the news business these days: the Grave Dancer.<br />Advertising is in a free fall, and every newspaper is suffering.<br />But Zell literally mortgaged the future of Tribune's employees to pursue what one analyst, Jack Newman, at the time called "a childhood fantasy."<br />Zell financed much of his deal's $13 billion of debt by borrowing against his employees' pension plan. The folks who work for Tribune ended up with equity, and they will probably be left with nothing.<br />As Newman, an analyst at CreditSights, explained at the time: "If there is a problem with the company, most of the risk is on the employees, as Zell will not own Tribune shares." He continued: "The cash will come from the sweat equity of the employees of Tribune."<br />And so it is.<br />Granted, Zell, 67, put up some money. He invested $315 million in the form of subordinated debt in exchange for a warrant to buy 40 percent of Tribune in the future for $500 million. It is unclear whether his money will be protected in bankruptcy.<br />But with one of the grand old names of American journalism confronting an uncertain future, it is worth remembering all the people who helped orchestrate this ill-fated deal - and made a lot of money in the process. They include members of the Tribune board, the company's management and the bankers who walked away with millions of dollars for financing and advising on a transaction that many of them knew, or should have known, could end in ruin.<br />It was Tribune's board that sold the company to Zell - and allowed him to use the employee's pension plan to do so. Despite early resistance, Dennis FitzSimons, then the company's chief executive, backed the plan. He was paid about $17.7 million in severance and other payments. The sale also bought all the shares he owned - $23.8 million worth. The day he left, he said in a note to employees that "completing this 'going private' transaction is a great outcome for our shareholders, employees and customers."<br />Well, at least for some of them.<br />Aiding and abetting the board were a group of bankers from Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, which walked off with $35.8 million and $37 million, respectively, for advising Tribune. Those banks played both sides: they also happened to lend Zell the money to buy the company. For that, they shared an additional $47 million pot of fees, according to Thomson Reuters.<br />And then there was Morgan Stanley, which wrote a "fairness opinion" blessing the deal, for which it was paid a $7.5 million fee (plus a $2.5 million advisory fee).<br />On top of that, a firm called Valuation Research Corp. wrote a "solvency opinion" suggesting that Tribune could meet its debt covenants. Thomson Reuters, which tracks fees, estimates VRC was paid $1 million for that opinion. VRC was so enamored with its role that it put out a news release.<br />"We were proud to be selected to provide these services to the Tribune Company Board," Bryan Browning, a VRC senior vice president, wrote in that statement. I called Browning on Monday. He didn't call back.<br />In some corners of the world, you could arguably applaud Tribune's board for selling the company when they did. The Chandler family, which owned 12 percent of Tribune through its prior sale of Times Mirror, campaigned for a sale and eventually won, though the family accepted a much lower price than they had hoped for.<br />You could even call them prescient, having sold before the financial crisis and economic downturn that has put so many companies in harm's way. And at $34 a share, Tribune shareholders made out like bandits.<br />The share price of the company's closest rival, McClatchy, has tumbled 84 percent since the Tribune deal closed.<br />But what about those employees? They had no seat at the table when the company's own board let Zell hijack its pension plan in exchange for $34 a share. Newman, the analyst who predicted the trouble, said during an interview Monday, "The employees were put in a very bad situation." He added that while boards were typically only responsible to their shareholders, this situation might be different. "There has to be a balance," he said, "to create sustainability for all the stakeholders."<br />Dan Neil, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Los Angeles Times, led a lawsuit with other Tribune employees against Zell and Tribune this autumn. The lawsuit contended "through both the structure of his takeover and his subsequent conduct, Zell and his accessories have diminished the value of the employee-owned company to benefit himself and his fellow board members."<br />If the employees win, they will probably become Tribune creditors - and stand in line with all other creditors in bankruptcy court.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/sorkin.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/sorkin.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>**********************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div></div><div><strong>Governor said to push for firings at Chicago paper<br /></strong>By Richard Pérez-Peña<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />As if the Tribune Company did not have enough problems, a day after the company filed for bankruptcy protection, federal law enforcment officials said on Tuesday that the governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, had been illegally threatening to withhold the state's help in a business deal, unless the Chicago Tribune newspaper fired editorial writers who had criticized the governor and called for his impeachment.<br />The writers were not fired, the editorial page continued to take on the governor, Tribune editors said Tuesday that they were not aware of any pressure from the governor's office, and the company said it did not do the governor's bidding.<br />But conversations recorded by federal investigators, and excerpted in a criminal complaint filed on Tuesday by the United States attorney's office for the Northern District of Illinois, suggest that for a few weeks, Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, believed that Tribune would give in to their demands.<br />The allegation stems from the Tribune Company's efforts to sell the Chicago Cubs baseball team and its stadium, Wrigley Field. That deal, originally expected to be completed early this year, is crucial to giving the company the cash it needs to survive in the short term, but it has been delayed several times.<br />Company executives had looked into getting a state agency, the Illinois Finance Authority, to help arrange the financing for a stadium sale because it would have big tax advantages for the company. The complaint states that in one of several secretly recorded conversations, Harris told the governor that the savings to Tribune would be $100 million to $150 million.<br />The complaint says that last month, Blagojevich sent Harris to tell Tribune that he could not move the stadium deal forward as long as the editorial writers were in place ostensibly because would bypass the Ilinois Legislature, the very kind conduct those writers had criticized him for.<br />In one recorded conversation, the complaint says, the governor said, "someone should say, 'get rid of those people.' " He advises telling the Tribune of the stadium deal, "Maybe we can't do this now," and in a profanity-laced phrase says the paper should dismiss the editorial writers who have criticized him if it wants an agreement.<br />In conversations recorded several days later, the complaint says, Harris told the governor that he had spoken with an unidentified advisor to a person identified as "Tribune Owner," clearly a reference to Sam Zell, chairman and chief executive of Tribune Company. In one case, Harris said, the advisor assured him that Zell "got the message and is very sensitive to the issue," and that there were "certain corporate reorganizations and budget cuts coming and, reading between the lines, he's going after that section." Later, he tells the governor that the cuts will be made by the end of November.<br />But since then, the editorial page has continued to criticize Blagojevich. There have been staff cuts in several part of Tribune Company, but the paper says there have been none at The Tribune's editorial page. The one editorial writer the governor complained about by name, John P. McCormick, remains the deputy editorial page editor.<br />Tribune Company released a statement on Tuesday afternoon saying, "No one working for the company or on its behalf has ever attempted to influence staffing decisions at The Chicago Tribune or any aspect of the newspaper's editorial coverage as a result of conversations with officials in the governor's administration."<br />In a separate statement, the paper's editor, Gerould Kern, said, "There was never an instance where I was contacted or called, where any influence at all was placed against me."<br />As for the allegation that Blagojevich was trying to get the writers fired, Kern said, "I was as surprised as everyone else when I saw that."<br />In a news conference, Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States Attorney whose office led the investigation, did not characterize Tribune's conduct in the scheme. But he did praise the Tribune newspaper for delaying publication of certain articles at his request during the investigation. What the subject of those articles was, he did not say. Recommend More Articles in US »</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/america/09tribune.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/america/09tribune.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>**********************</div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Next year is looking even worse</strong><br />By Stuart Elliott<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />The bankruptcy filing on Monday by the Tribune Company underscored that the brunt of the injuries being suffered by the media during the recession are in local markets — especially newspapers.<br />Already, advertising is bracing for the possibility of the first two consecutive yearly declines in spending since the early days of the Great Depression. The effects of the financial crisis, which exacerbated the woes that have befallen advertisers since the recession began last December, are certainly being felt broadly among television, magazines, cable and other media. But newspapers in particular are being hit hard by the slump.<br />Many executives who spoke at an annual media conference in New York, sponsored by UBS, released forecasts that predicted across-the-board declines in ad spending in 2009.<br />Another sign of how lackluster the results have been for newspapers is that UBS canceled a presentation on newspaper ad spending for Monday, the first morning of the conference. Such presentations had long been a mainstay of the event, formally called the Global Media and Communications Conference; this year's, which continues through Wednesday, is the 36th annual conference.<br />For the United States, ZenithOptimedia is forecasting a decline in ad spending this year of 3.8 percent compared with 2007 and a decline of 6.2 percent in 2009 compared with 2008.<br />One reason for the larger decline next year is a slowdown in demand for ad space in newspapers, compared with relatively "robust" demand for commercial time on television, said Steve King, chief executive at ZenithOptimedia, a unit of the Publicis Groupe.<br />"We're in turbulent and challenging times," he said, resulting in "a sharp downturn in advertising spending."<br />King did offer a ray of hope to the ad and media industries. "It's not as though everyone has turned off the tap," he said. "People are still trying to sell goods and services."<br />However, a UBS analyst who spoke at the conference, Matthieu Coppet, revised downward his estimates for ad spending. He previously forecast a decline in the United States next year of 5.9 percent compared with 2008; he changed that to a decline of 8.7 percent, primarily because local advertising could fall by a "double-digit level."<br />Coppet is predicting that local ad spending in newspapers in 2008 could fall 9 percent from 2007 and in 2009 it could fall 21 percent from 2008.<br />For newspapers in general — local and national ads, in America and other regions around the world — the declines Coppet is forecasting are, he wrote in a report, "the worst in the history" of the medium.<br />Martin Sorrell, the chief executive at WPP, said he believed that an economic recovery would not take hold until 2010.<br />Although there is likely to be "more pressure in the first half than the second half" of 2009, Sorrell said, forecasts of a comeback in the second half are "optimistic."<br />"The real world won't change for the better till 2010," he added, "when greed has overcome fear yet again."<br />Ad spending in the United States this year is being "really pulled down by extreme softness in spending at the local level," according to another speaker at the conference, Robert Coen, senior vice president and forecasting director at Magna in New York, a media services unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies.<br />He is predicting a 16 percent decline in ad spending for local newspapers in 2008 compared with 2007. By comparison, Coen is expecting local television ad spending in 2008 to fall 9 percent from 2007; local radio, 8 percent; local yellow pages, 3 percent; and other local media, 0.5 percent.<br />And it will be almost as bad for local newspapers come next year, Coen predicted, with ad spending declining 12 percent compared with 2008.<br />The figures for other local media in 2009 are not as bad: local TV, down 7 percent; local radio, down 6 percent; local yellow pages, down 5 percent; and other local media, down 3.7 percent.<br />Spending in newspapers this year by national advertisers is also falling. Coen is forecasting a decline of 10 percent compared with 2007. That would tie newspapers with radio for the worst showing for national advertising in 2008.<br />The Coen forecast for national ad spending next year in newspapers echoes the local outlook. He is projecting a 10 percent decline compared with 2008, second only to national spot TV, with a decline of 11 percent.<br />If Coen's predictions come to pass, they would stir memories — or nightmares — on Madison Avenue of the 1930s. Coen, who has been tracking ad trends for decades, revised his forecast for total ad spending in the United States in 2008 to a decline of 3.2 percent from 2007. At different times in the last year and a half, he had forecast gains for 2008 of 2 percent, 3.7 percent and 5 percent.<br />Coupled with Coen's final figures for American ad spending in 2007, which showed a decline of 0.7 percent from 2006, two consecutives down years in 2007 and 2008 would be the first since 1932 and 1933.<br />Coen is also forecasting a decline for 2009, of 4.5 percent from 2008. That also represents a downward revision; he predicted in July that ad spending next year would rise 3.1 percent from this year.<br />If there are indeed three consecutive years of declines — 2007, 2008, 2009 — it would be the first time that has happened since 1931-33.<br />(For the record, there were four consecutive down years at the start of the Depression, according to Coen's records; ad spending in 1930 fell compared with 1929.)<br />Among the reports issued by companies not presenting at the conference were forecasts from the Carat media agency, part of the Aegis Group. Carat predicted that ad spending in the United States this year would rise 1.7 percent from 2007 but fall in 2009 by 6.5 percent from 2008.<br />Spending for ads in newspapers next year will decline "by another 10 to 15 percent" from 2008, the Carat report said, as categories like real estate, retail and classified "all may see their newspaper spending drop by double digits."<br />Speakers at the UBS conference reiterated that ad spending will be slow to return.<br />Adam Smith, futures director at GroupM, a media division of WPP, predicted an increase in American ad spending this year compared with last, albeit just 0.3 percent.<br />But Smith agreed that 2009 would be weaker than 2008; he is predicting a 3.2 percent decline.<br />For worldwide ad spending next year, Smith said, newspapers will suffer the largest decline of any medium, down 3.6 percent from 2008.<br />As a result, Smith forecast a "cultural shift" in the newspaper industry, as local and regional papers adjust from 30 percent profit margins to 10 percent margins — "forever."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/09adco.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/09/business/09adco.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrzWpRLZiO5N7hunG9WDdjX9mHj5I_maF6lanu0r3QcWnHPvd8gaPCrLr8JK8qWST0HSiqoQUcCiEQZw2ORTiUtnk7M9b6HVFEiw8PJ7R4E4EOzbfl0OToCh1YqatiKOy73MlTr5jL55s/s1600-h/DSC02878.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278060457655064322" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrzWpRLZiO5N7hunG9WDdjX9mHj5I_maF6lanu0r3QcWnHPvd8gaPCrLr8JK8qWST0HSiqoQUcCiEQZw2ORTiUtnk7M9b6HVFEiw8PJ7R4E4EOzbfl0OToCh1YqatiKOy73MlTr5jL55s/s320/DSC02878.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>U.K. factory, retail and housing data show further weakness<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />LONDON: British manufacturing contracted in October by almost three times as much as economists had forecast, retail sales slumped in November and housing sales fell to the lowest in three decades, as the country slipped deeper into recession, data showed Tuesday.<br />Factory output fell 1.4 percent from September, the Office for National Statistics said. Economists had predicted a 0.5 percent decline, according to the median of 22 forecasts in a survey.<br />Meanwhile, real-estate agents and surveyors sold the fewest properties since records began in 1978, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said.<br />The data intensify "pressure on the Bank of England to deliver yet another hefty interest-rate cut in January," said Howard Archer, chief European economist at IHS Global Insight in London. "It is far from inconceivable that interest rates could come all the way down to zero."<br />The pound, which has fallen 25 percent against the dollar this year, dropped to $1.4779 in London.<br />The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicts the world's largest economies, including Britain, the United States, Japan and the euro region, will all shrink next year.<br />Factory production fell for an eighth month, the longest streak since the 1980 recession, when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.<br />Ten out of 13 categories of factory production fell on the month, led by paper and publishing, basic metals and transport equipment, the statistics office said. The decline on the month was the biggest since 2005. Manufacturing accounts for 14 percent of the economy, compared with about 75 percent for services.<br />DS Smith, which produces paper and corrugated packaging, said Dec. 3 that its first-half operating profit fell 10 percent as the company struggled to pass along higher raw material costs to its customers.<br />"This is a big concern, and adds to the sense that activity has just ground to a halt," said Ross Walker, an economist at Royal Bank of Scotland. "These numbers keep us on track for further rate cuts."<br />The housing market slump is also deepening. House prices dropped 7.4 percent from a year earlier in October, the government's Department for Communities and Local Government said on its Web site. Mortgage approvals fell 52 percent from a year earlier, the Council of Mortgage Lenders said. Banks granted 39,900 loans, compared with 34,900 in September.<br />Banks are not passing on the full extent of the Bank of England's interest-rate reductions. The average cost of a loan fixed for 24 months with a 25 percent deposit fell to 5.11 percent from 5.82 percent in October, compared with the central bank's 1.5 point cut, the bank said today on its Web site.<br />The British economy stalled in the second quarter and contracted 0.5 percent in the third. The economies of the OECD's 30 members will shrink 0.4 percent in 2009 after expanding 1.4 percent in 2008, the group said Nov. 25.<br />Bank of England policy makers cut the key rate by a percentage point last week, joining central banks around the world in reducing borrowing costs to keep inflation from slowing too much.<br />Separately, British retail sales fell in November for the second consecutive month as consumers, worried about the shaky economy, tightened their belts ahead of Christmas - the first such back-to-back drop since the survey started in 1995.<br />In its monthly assessment released Tuesday, the British Retail Consortium found that total sales, which include new stores and space, fell 0.4 percent in November from the previous year.<br />November's decline followed October's 0.1 percent decline and means total sales have fallen for two months in a row for the first time since the BRC survey started in January 1995.<br />Same store sales, which exclude new stores and space, fell 2.6 percent.<br />"Retailers will be hoping that customers have been putting off Christmas shopping - not canceling it," said Stephen Robertson, the BRC's director-general.<br />Robertson said there were some hopes that the "extraordinary" levels of discounting, offers and promotions at present will entice some shoppers back in the crucial Christmas trading period.<br />For some retailers, December accounts for nearly 80 percent of annual revenue.</div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div><strong>Bank's Sentance sees deep recession<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />By Carolyn Cohn and Jessica Mortimer<br />The economic recession gripping Britain is likely to be as long and deep as the previous three major post-war downturns, Bank of England policymaker Andrew Sentance said on Tuesday.<br />Speaking at a monetary policy and markets conference in London, Sentance said the Bank remained focused on countering the economic fallout from the global financial crisis and heading off the risk of deflation.<br />It had already delivered a significant easing of monetary policy, but this would take time to have an effect, he added.<br />"Even if we do see a recovery beginning in the second half of 2009 -- as suggested by the Bank's November Inflation Report forecast -- this recession is likely to be comparable in length and depth with the previous three major post-war UK downturns in the mid-70s, early-80s and early-90s," Sentance said.<br />The Bank last week cut interest rates by one percentage point to 2 percent, their lowest level since 1951 and indicated more needed to be done to lessen the impact of the economic downturn.<br />The Bank's November Inflation Report forecast a recession slightly less deep than the three major post-war downturns.<br />"However, recent survey data have been weaker than that forecast implied and so I now expect the recession to be of comparable depth to those previous downturns," Sentance said.<br />Earlier on Tuesday, official data showed a big fall in factory output in October, while surveys showed retail sales sliding and property sales at a record low.<br />Sentance said the short-term challenge for monetary policy was to counter the impact on demand from the global banking crisis and "to head off the potential deflationary risks created by an emerging large margin of spare capacity (in the economy)."<br />In the longer term, policymakers needed to develop better instruments for maintaining the stability of financial systems.<br />Monetary policy cannot do this unaided, Sentance said, but he also warned against "heavy-handed regulatory interventions."<br />"We need to take time to decide what a new regime for regulating the financial sector looks like," he said.<br />Sentance said the Bank had made bold decisions, such as its 150-basis-point cut in interest rates last month.<br />"The 150 basis point cut in November changed the goalposts of perceptions of the measures the Monetary Policy Council would take," he said.<br />But he added it would take time for rate cuts to work.<br />"There is a need to allow a reasonable amount of time to see policy measures take impact," he said. "It takes several quarters for the real side of the economy to respond."<br />(Writing by Mark Potter, Editing by Stephen Nisbet)</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>British campaign to 'save' a popular Titian<br /></strong>By Sarah Lyall<br />Tuesday, December 9, 2008<br />LONDON: The painting shows the mythical hunter Actaeon at the most unfortunate moment of his soon to be cut short young life, when he stumbles upon the chaste goddess Diana and her nymphs bathing naked in the woods. (She is not pleased.) Painted by Titian in the mid-16th century, the work, "Diana and Actaeon," is generally acknowledged to be one of the great masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance.<br />For 63 years it has been the crowning glory of the National Galleries of Scotland - "our Mona Lisa," as the director general, John Leighton, put it - on loan with 27 other works by Rembrandt, Raphael and the like from their owner, the Duke of Sutherland. But that is all about to change. The duke announced in August that he wanted to sell the works, known as the Bridgewater Collection. That has raised the unhappy prospect that "Diana and Actaeon" and another Titian, "Diana and Callisto," would leave Britain and slip out of public view altogether.<br />The two paintings, part of a series of "poésies," as Titian called them, for Philip II of Spain, are insured for £180 million (about $263 million). And at least before the economic downturn, experts were estimating that they might fetch £300 million on the open market. But intriguingly, the duke presented an alternative solution, offering the gallery, along with the National Gallery in London, a bargain: the two Titians for £100 million.<br />He also set a deadline, giving them until Dec. 31 to secure the first £50 million - enough to buy "Diana and Actaeon." If the money is found, he said, he will give them until 2012 to find the next £50 million for the second Titian and will also guarantee the loan of the rest of the Bridgewater Collection for the next 21 years.<br />With less than a month to go, in the worst economic climate in years, the museums say they are nonetheless cautiously optimistic. Their effort has been buoyed by pledges of £1 million from the Art Fund and £10 million from the National Heritage Fund, as well as by unsolicited public donations.<br />Britain goes through these sorts of convulsions every few years. Some of the country's best art has been owned for centuries by a handful of aristocratic families. When those families decide to sell, the art establishment, backed by the news media, tends to argue that the works should be "saved for the nation." This happened most recently in 2004, when Raphael's "Madonna of the Pinks" was bought by the National Gallery for £34.88 million, after a public appeal and last-minute government intervention.<br />But the art world says it is not crying wolf about "Diana and Actaeon," a far more important work than the Raphael and perhaps the most beloved painting in the Scottish National Galleries.<br />"This case is the real thing," The Guardian wrote in an editorial.<br />But whether the museums succeed, their sometimes emotional campaign has seized the public's imagination, stirring up unexpected passion for a painting that has influenced and inspired artists for more than 400 years.<br />"It's been a marvelous experience for us," said Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery in London, where the painting is on special display through Sunday. "Even if this campaign is a failure, it's reminded people of how powerful a truly great painting can be."<br />There are those, of course, who argue that this is not the time to spend so much money on a work of art. In a letter to The Observer of London, two officials at the University of the Arts in London warned that the effort might divert attention from helping today's art students. Kelvin Mackenzie, the former editor of the populist tabloid The Sun, was quoted in the newspapers as saying, "I don't want a plug nickel to be spent on anything until my house price is secure, my job secure, my children's education secure."<br />But theirs has been the minority view, at least publicly. In November, 40 artists, including Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Tracey Emin, sent a letter to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, asking that he refuse to allow the painting to leave the country by, if necessary, denying it a license for export. (It is highly unlikely that a private collector in Britain would have the means to buy the painting; most likely it would go to a foreigner or to a foreign institution.)<br />The notoriously camera-shy Freud agreed to be filmed in the gallery, telling Channel 4 News, "I can't imagine anything more beautiful." When he looks at the painting, he added, "I immediately think of myself as this man - as Actaeon."<br />In London, "Diana and Actaeon" is in a prime spot: Room 1, just up the stairs from the main entrance. It is alone except for "The Death of Actaeon," a companion Titian that is already owned by the National Gallery - after a similar appeal, in 1972 - that shows Actaeon being eaten by his own dogs as the wrathful Diana transforms him into a stag. The lights in the room are muted; the dark walls are bare except for text that tells the story of the paintings and reproduces the stirring lines from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" that were Titian's inspiration.<br />The painting draws a steady stream of visitors, including artists eager to revel in its mixture of joy and cruelty, and marvel at the way Titian worked so hard and made it look so effortless. "It's the most fantastic thing in the world, the epitome of rhythm and energy and harmony," said David Woodcock, a painter.<br />The work was so sophisticated, said David Jaffe, the National Gallery's chief curator, that it would go on to influence painters for generations - Cézanne, Seurat and Picasso, among others. Its way of becoming increasingly coherent as the observer moves farther away foreshadows Impressionism, he said, while the way Titian painted Diana from several angles at once is a harbinger of Cubism.<br />"He's so confident of his means that he's deliberately pushing the boundaries," Jaffe said.<br />Penny said the campaign had originally not been aimed at members of the public. The plan was to seek government and institutional money first, then approach private individuals: "It never occurred to us that people would see it and say, 'Where's the collection box?"'<br />The collection box is at the front desk, stuffed full of spur-of-the-moment gifts. Penny, who said he was getting plenty of checks for sums as small as £5, added that donations from the public were expected to reach £250,000 to £500,000.<br />"There are crucial contributions still being deliberated, and it would be imprudent to announce them before they were made," he said. "But we've been bowled over by the support."<br />If the money is found, the two museums, in Edinburgh and London, would share "Diana and Actaeon" at five-year intervals.<br />"Without getting overemotional, it's a battle for the heart and soul of our collection," Leighton of the Scottish museum said.<br />Among those who love the painting with a passion is Jaffe, the National Gallery curator, who said he stopped in every day to admire it. "It's very hard, in a collection of this quality, to get something that takes everything else up three or four notches, and this one does," Jaffe said recently, all but vibrating with excitement as he gazed at "Diana and Actaeon."<br />"You look at other paintings in a different way because of this one."</div><div></div><div><br /><br /><br /></div><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008 </strong></div><strong><div align="center"><br /></strong>Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-35539195245573731442008-12-09T06:31:00.029+01:002008-12-09T15:48:21.255+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Monday, 8th December 2008<div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong>Iran urges Obama to change nuclear approach</strong> </div><div align="justify"><br />By Nazila Fathi<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />Tehran: Iran said Monday that it would not abandon its nuclear program and urged President-elect Barack Obama to change America's carrot-and-stick policy toward Iran, the official IRNA news agency reported.<br />Hassan Ghashghavi, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Monday that Iran, which has repeatedly refused to suspend uranium enrichment, would not change its nuclear policy. He added that Iran expected Obama to stick to his campaign promise to change the previous administration's policy.<br />"What Mr. Obama said is the same old carrot-and-stick approach," he said. "He must be able to change this policy based on his slogan of "change." The spokesman said that the carrot-and-stick approach "is a failed policy" and Iran expected Obama to change the "confrontational policy to one based on interaction."<br />"They have to recognize our legal rights and we are willing to engage in an interaction to resolve their concerns," he said. "We need to engage in progress and development," he added.<br />Ghashghavi's comments were a response to televised statement by President-elect Barack Obama, who said Sunday that he would pursue the carrot-and-stick approach toward Iran.<br />"In terms of carrots, we can provide the economic incentives that would be helpful to a country that despite being a net oil producer is under enormous strain, huge inflation, a lot employment problems," Obama said.<br />"But we also have to focus on the sticks," he said, adding that to force Iran to change its behavior it may be necessary to tighten economic sanctions. The United Nations Security Council has already imposed three sets of sanctions on Tehran for refusing to halt its enrichment program.<br />Western countries accuse Iran of having a clandestine weapons program under the guise of a civilian one. Enrichment is a process that can be used to make nuclear bombs if the uranium is enriched to high levels. Iran contends that its program is peaceful.</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center"><strong>Israel postpones release of Palestinian prisoners</strong></div><div align="justify"><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />JERUSALEM: Israel postponed the release of 230 Palestinian prisoners until December 15, nearly a week later than planned, Israeli and Palestinian officials said Monday.<br />The prisoners make up only a fraction of the 11,000 Palestinians held by Israel. The release, described by Israel as a goodwill gesture to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, had been scheduled for Tuesday to coincide with the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.<br />"There was a request from the Palestinians for logistical reasons to postpone the release for just a few days, and we, of course, have agreed," said Mark Regev, spokesman to outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.<br />Regev would not specify what those reasons were. Abbas has been attending the haj pilgrimage in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.<br />Palestinian officials denied Abbas sought the delay. Abbas aide Saeb Erekat said it stemmed from "legal" procedures on the Israeli side.<br />Israel announced last month that it would free 250 prisoners, but a ministerial committee Sunday approved a list of only 230 names.<br />Olmert's office said the prisoners would come from the ranks of Abbas's Fatah secular faction and other non-Islamist groups.<br />Such releases are highly emotive for Palestinians, who regard prisoners as symbols of resistance to Israeli occupation.<br />Israel freed nearly 200 prisoners in August.<br />U.S.-sponsored peace talks between Olmert and Abbas, rejected by Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, have shown little sign of progress.<br />(Writing by Adam Entous; Editing by Keith Weir)</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"><strong>Kurdish rebels halt attacks for Muslim holiday</strong> </div><div align="justify"><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />SULAIMANIYA, Iraq: Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq will halt attacks within Turkey in a week-long cease-fire in honour of Eid al-Adha, the Muslim holiday, an official said on Monday.<br />Ruz Walat, an official with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), said the cease-fire for the separatist group, which has fought for years with Turkish forces in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey, would last until Saturday.<br />"PKK fighters will stop attacks inside Turkey, but if the Turkish army does not respect the cease-fire then we will fight back," he added.<br />Turkish forces have routinely bombed and shelled remote PKK areas in the mountains of northern Iraq, from which rebels have launched attacks into Turkey.<br />The PKK, which the United States and European Union deem a terrorist organisation, claimed responsibility for detonating a section of the Kirkuk-Ceyhan oil pipeline between Iraq and Turkey last month.<br />Also last month, U.S., Turkish and Iraqi officials held talks in Baghdad on how to restrain PKK activities.<br />(Reporting by Sherko Raouf in Sulaimaniya; writing by Ahmed Rasheed and Missy Ryan in Baghdad; Editing by Charles Dick)</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center"><strong>Drone set to begin patrolling northern U.S. border</strong></div><div align="justify"><br />By Monica Davey<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />FARGO, North Dakota: Federal Customs and Border Protection authorities are preparing to launch unmanned aircraft patrols from this state, the first time such monitoring will occur along the northern border of the United States.<br />A Predator B aircraft that can fly at 260 miles an hour - it was delivered to Grand Forks on Saturday - will make runs along the northern edge of North Dakota using sensors that can provide video and detect heat and changes to landscape, customs officials said.<br />The plane, which is about 66 feet long, or 20 meters, weighs more than 10,000 pounds, or 4,500 kilograms. It can fly as high as 50,000 feet and can stay aloft for 18 hours. The first missions, designed to locate people crossing the border illegally or avoiding ports of entry, are expected to start next month.<br />Similar aircraft have patrolled the nation's southern border since 2005, where they have helped lead to the discovery of more than 18,000 pounds of marijuana and 4,000 illegal immigrants, a spokesman for the agency said.<br />John Stanton, executive director of the service's national air security operations, said the authorities decided to move to the northern border because enough aircraft had become available. (The base cost for the Predator is about $10 million.)<br />Along the entire northern border, customs and border officials make about 4,000 arrests and intercept about 40,000 pounds of illegal drugs each year.<br />For the moment, though, the flights from Grand Forks will remain mostly along the 300 miles of the upper edge of North Dakota and a slim part of Minnesota, Stanton said.<br />Asked whether he expected to uncover a significant problem with drugs, border crossings or terrorism in northern North Dakota, Stanton said no one was sure. "We hope to actually use this aircraft to measure that," he said. "You don't know what you don't know."<br />Some experts have questioned the safety of unmanned planes. In 2006, a Predator patrolling the southern border crashed near Nogales, Arizona. No one was hurt and no property was damaged. Investigators blamed human error; the pilot was at a control panel far from the plane.</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center"><strong>Muslim pilgrims stone devil amid tight control</strong> </div><div align="justify"><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By Inal Ersan<br />Hundreds of thousands of Muslim pilgrims stoned walls symbolising the devil in a narrow valley outside Mecca in Saudi Arabia on Monday at the most dangerous stage of the haj pilgrimage.<br />Pilgrims began three days of stoning and celebrated the first day of Eid al-Adha, commemorating the willingness of biblical patriarch Abraham to sacrifice his son for God.<br />"It took a long time since they made us go in one line, but it was easy to do," said Osama Khashaba, an Egyptian accountant, after throwing stones at the Jamarat Bridge in a ritual that represents rejection of temptation.<br />The bridge in the valley of Mena just outside Mecca has been the scene of a number of deadly stampedes. The last was in 2006 when 362 people were crushed to death in the worst haj tragedy since 1990.<br />Saudi authorities have made renovations to ease the flow of pilgrims at the bridge, adding an extra level so that they have four platforms from which to throw stones each day.<br />Authorities also appealed to pilgrims this year to throw their stones at any time of day rather than only in the afternoon, as Saudi clerics have often insisted in the past.<br />Saudi Arabia has not so far reported any glitches in the haj, a challenging logistical feat that has been marred in previous years by deadly fires, hotel collapses, police clashes with protesters and stampedes caused by overcrowding.<br />"Let's make the accidents at the stoning part of history, may it never return," Saudi television said in one programme.<br />Elaborate crowd control measures, involving security forces and a maze of paths marked by barriers, guided pilgrims to the three spots by the bridge in the Mena valley where they threw stones they had collected overnight at a spot called Muzdalifa.<br />"This crowdedness is really scary," said Umm Mohammad, a Syrian pilgrim. "God willing no one will be hurt."<br />The government has also been tougher this year in preventing Saudis and foreign residents taking part without official haj permits. Saudi media put the pilgrim total at a relatively low 2.4 million people, including a record 1.72 million from abroad -- a sign that the crackdown has worked.<br />SHAVED HEADS<br />Many pilgrims returned to the Grand Mosque in Mecca after the first round of stoning rituals late on Sunday.<br />They crowded into the mosque in the early hours of the morning and into the day, circling the Kaaba, a cube-shaped structure towards which Muslims around the world turn in prayer.<br />Afterwards men had their heads shaved, according to the rules of haj. "It will take three minutes a head," said a man ushering people into a busy barbershop near the mosque.<br />The haj retraces the path of Prophet Mohammad 14 centuries ago after he removed pagan idols from Mecca, his birthplace, and years after he started calling people to the new faith, which is now embraced by more than one billion people worldwide.<br />On Sunday, pilgrims spent the day in prayer at Arafat 15 km (10 miles) east of Mecca at the climax of haj, a duty for every able-bodied Muslim once in a lifetime and one of the largest manifestations of religious devotion in the world today.<br />Although there have been no disasters, the Saudi authorities were not able to stop political activities that pilgrims had been called on to avoid.<br />Iranian television showed Iranian pilgrims on Sunday chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."<br />Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammadi Reyshahri, head of Iran's haj mission, said Islam was now resurgent, despite some Muslims' despair "in the face of Western civilisation's onslaught."<br />(Editing by Diana Abdallah)</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="center"><strong>0415</strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong>IW: </strong></div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong>The hardeset frost of the winter.</strong></div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong>When I came down to my study, carrying a crutch and a coffee, seeing my way by a pencil torch gripped beneath my teeth, the moon-lit sky had a streak of long, thin, curved dust and I thought, in my sleepy state, it was a rainbow.</strong></div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left"><strong>Only when I saw the whitened black of the moutains, picked up and shined by the moon, did I realise it was a cloud.</strong></div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left"><strong>Later, as I compiled this blog, I had this thought in the dawn light and cold. What would happen if everyone you loved died, and you realised, that among all those exploded stars, they were just ashes in the wind?</strong></div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong>I read about a man who said his address had always been five years in the future; that the only problem with this was that everyone thinks you're either nuts, or paranoid, or both.</strong></div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong>So late in the year, but finally I have a strong sense I know what is going on in The Shop while I am here in The Valley; that I know this as it happens, not when I find out in the newspaper, not that I know the future, but that I can feel the present run through me.</strong></div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong>I think the black site I went to in my sleep was Azerbaijan; I think here we did wrong. And they're going to throw stones at us, before this year or President is out.</strong></div><div align="left"><strong>Big stones.</strong></div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong></strong> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWSlv3ZxNx2wM7_WwC2lBrwl_cN3erYY8iGPDt6fa1NWjy6rqnq1K_9FAjGEV_YqJxUfgi43kJJ9NbrHb5UMh9O5mqamY8co08jMgXCIcrEAglBy7bbyYuI99aJT3Mip7AbO_8MRWKAzw/s1600-h/DSC02787.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770885166609026" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWSlv3ZxNx2wM7_WwC2lBrwl_cN3erYY8iGPDt6fa1NWjy6rqnq1K_9FAjGEV_YqJxUfgi43kJJ9NbrHb5UMh9O5mqamY8co08jMgXCIcrEAglBy7bbyYuI99aJT3Mip7AbO_8MRWKAzw/s320/DSC02787.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Plunging shipping costs send grains globetrotting</strong><br />By Lisa ShumakerReuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />CHICAGO: Ocean shipping costs have plunged to 22-year lows, skewing global grain-trading patterns to the point where hog farmers in the United States are importing wheat from Britain and Japan has shunned American corn in favor of supplies from Ukraine.<br />In some countries, it is now less costly to ship grain thousands of kilometers across the ocean rather than move supplies hundreds of kilometers by barge or railroad cars. But the phenomenon should be short-lived and the United States should remain the world's top exporter of corn, wheat and soybeans, according to specialists in the sector.<br />"It has opened up opportunities that perhaps wouldn't have been conceivable before and one-off trades may well happen, but it is not really changing the grain flows," said David Doyle, head of wheat at Openfield, a farmers' cooperative in England.<br />Ocean freight rates reached a record high in May and have since fallen more than 90 percent in a few months to as little as $10 a ton to most destinations.<br />"Ocean shipping costs are so low that it would be cheaper for south Indian buyers to import Russian wheat than move wheat from north India by train," said one European trader who was not authorized to speak to the news media.<br />The consensus is that the current low freight rates will not last beyond the next 12 months. Prices will have to rise for shipping companies to remain in business and trading patterns will return to normal.<br />"It's the anomaly of the excess supply of grain available and the low freight," said John Kruse, managing director at Global Insight. "The U.S. is usually the most cost-effective producer of corn. I see it more as a temporary phenomenon versus a major shift in trading patterns."<br />Collapsing ocean shipping costs have leveled the playing field for wheat exporters, which now compete solely on the price of the grain.<br />Russia and Ukraine have been able to make sales far beyond their traditional markets in Europe and the Middle East, reaching out to Asia, European traders said.<br />In a recent and closely followed international tender for wheat shipped to Egypt, U.S. wheat freight was $11 per ton, an insignificant difference from Russian freight at $12. French and German wheat were also offered at $11-$12 per ton to Egypt.<br />"Ship owners are giving away bulk carriers at operating costs just to generate cash flow and to pay crews' wages," said another European trader who was also not authorized to speak to the news media. "This will expand the selling range of U.S., Argentine and Australian wheat in the Middle East market if they can compete against the Russians on prices."<br />Though the export season in the Black Sea region is quickly closing, the low freight rates will allow countries like Argentina and Australia to be more competitive. "It is happening all because of the freight rates," Vijay Iyengar, managing director of Agrocorp International, grain trader in Singapore. "I think it will go on for a longer period as the freight market doesn't show any signs of improving."<br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><strong>WTO may call meeting on Doha pact</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />GENEVA: Pascal Lamy, the director general of the World Trade Organization, is urging member nations to show flexibility and narrow their remaining differences as he weighs whether to call a meeting to reach a new trade deal.<br />Mediators of the WTO's core talks on agriculture and industrial goods have issued new negotiating texts that could serve as blueprints for possible deals, or modalities, as the WTO called them, in the seven-year-old Doha round.<br />"With these revised texts we are closer to our goal of clinching modalities in agriculture and industry, a stepping stone toward the conclusion of the Doha round," Lamy said in a statement. "This is not the time for unrealistic demands. Nor is it the time for inflexible stances. This is the time for collective moves toward global solutions."<br />If a meeting is to take place, Lamy has indicated it would probably be around next weekend, meaning he would have to decide by Monday whether to go ahead.<br />Leaders of the Group of 20 countries called last month for the outline of a deal in the Doha talks by the end of this year to counter the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.<br />The revised negotiating drafts make it clear that big gaps remain on several sticky issues, so that any meeting this month would not be guaranteed success.<br />The talks were begun in Doha, the Qatari capital, in late 2001 to liberalize trade in goods from food to clothing and cars as well as services like banking and telecommunications, while helping developing countries export their way out of poverty.<br />But a deal has proved elusive as rich and poor countries and exporters and importers squabbled over the need to create new business opportunities while protecting sensitive industries and farm sectors.<br />Australia, Brazil and the European Union are pushing hard for a meeting and a deal. But the United States and India have shown recently that they are more skeptical.<br />New Zealand's ambassador to the WTO, Crawford Falconer, who chairs the farm talks, and his Swiss counterpart, Luzius Wasescha, who mediates industry, relied on compromises from a meeting of ministers in July to draft the latest proposals on overall cuts in agricultural subsidies and in farm and industrial tariffs.<br />Those would see the limit for EU farm subsidies fall by 80 percent, while the ceiling on U.S. farm subsidies would drop 70 percent to $14.5 billion - still above current outlays of about $7 billion, but well below the current ceiling of $48.2 billion.<br />Industrial tariffs in developed countries would be capped at 8 percent, while in developing countries subject to tariff cuts the ceiling would average 11 percent to 12 percent, with a maximum of 25 percent.<br />And in an "anti-concentration clause," developing countries would not be able to use waivers to shield entire industrial sectors from lower duties - a key U.S. and EU concern.<br />But Falconer said that more work needed to be done on a safeguard to protect farmers in poor countries from a surge in imports through a temporary rise in tariffs - the issue on which the July talks foundered.<br />India wants a mechanism to protect the livelihoods of its 600 million subsistence farmers from the uncertainties of volatile world markets flooded with subsidized produce from rich countries. But the United States and developing country exporters like Uruguay fear that such a safeguard could be abused to choke off the normal growth in agricultural trade.<br />The dispute centers on what increase in imports would be needed to trigger the safeguard, in what conditions tariffs could rise over current "pre-Doha" levels, and how quickly an increase could be reimposed after it was lifted.<br />In industry, Wasescha says more work is needed on proposals to eliminate tariffs in individual sectors like chemicals.<br />The United States is insisting these sector deals should be part of an agreement, as it sees them offering the best chances for new export opportunities. But emerging countries like China insist that sector deals must be voluntary.<br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Fat's in the fire for Ireland over pork scandal</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />DUBLIN: Oil that ended up in animal feed could force Ireland to destroy 100,000 pigs, food safety officials said Monday as the European Union advised that nations did not need to ban Irish pork imports.<br />The Food Safety Authority of Ireland has traced the problem to machine oil added to foodstuffs at one small animal-food maker in southeast Ireland. The maker, Millstream Power Recycling, supplied the oil-tainted feed to 10 pig farms in Ireland and nine in Northern Ireland.<br />The government revealed the potential threat to health Saturday and ordered the recall or destruction of all Irish pork products produced since Sept. 1. It now faces an uphill struggle to restore international confidence in an industry worth more than €450 million annually, or $570 million.<br />But the Agriculture Department's chief veterinary adviser, Paddy Rogan, said the oil-tainted product never went to the vast majority of Ireland's approximately 500 pig farms. He said slaughtering and processing of meat from many farms could resume Monday - to be accompanied by specially designed labels "so the consumer will be absolutely crystal clear that this is safe Irish product."<br />While such moves could minimize the damage to sales in Ireland itself, the country faces a harder time persuading customers overseas to resume accepting Irish sausages, ham, bacon and pork-based ingredients so quickly. Rogan said about 25 other countries could have received Irish pork with the contamination problem.<br />Japan, Singapore and South Korea announced Monday that they were suspending imports of Irish pork indefinitely. But the 27-nation European Union said in Brussels that no nation needed to ban Irish imports of pork, citing Ireland's strong actions and the low risk from short-term consumption of the toxins in question.<br />To that end, many nations in Europe and Asia scrambled to determine whether any Irish pork goods were on their store shelves and remove them. Germany, the No. 2 importer of Irish pork behind Britain, said it had received 2.4 tons of Irish pork since Sept. 1, largely in the form of unprocessed meat, and had found Irish-sourced pork in products at five supermarkets.<br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>EDITORIAL</strong><br /><strong>Only a radical move will save the bluefin tuna</strong><br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />Late last month in Marrakesh, Morocco, the international commission that sets fishing limits for tuna approved an annual quota of 22,000 tons of bluefin from the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean. This is less than the 30,000 tons previously allowed but far more than recommended by scientists advising the commission, who asked for a limit somewhere between 8,000 and 15,000 tons.<br />Under this new quota, there is a real danger that fishermen will catch most of the existing bluefin tuna within a very few years, causing a catastrophic collapse of the species. That is the conclusion of a new report by scientists studying bluefin populations in the waters governed by the tuna commission. They predict that the bluefin population in 2011 will be 75 percent lower than it was in 2005 and that current quotas will "allow the fishery to capture legally all of the adult fish."<br />Bluefin fishing is a billion-dollar industry driven by a fervent global appetite for tuna. The European members of the commission clearly wanted to do everything they could to support the commercial interests of French, Italian and Spanish fishermen. But this new quota completely ignores the scientific reality of already-decimated tuna populations.<br />What the fishermen - and the politicians who represent them - don't acknowledge is that this new quota will ensure their own extinction too.<br />Preserving the species they fish for will require sharply reduced quotas or, better, a moratorium on tuna fishing. It is a radical move, but only a radical move will save the bluefin and the industry.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuPm3NV4pFgx2XEQOrDl0qkp_9-JF5WmKx3zXrCuSjpS2QC89X6_LzmOOK52RpesF3ya4XecUCkpKXN3X1E8Q5SxNK_K-hUvf5rL9DTT5MYXuhdIiYpaJzDzTnyzeKDmwiK5rYYRs0AiQ/s1600-h/DSC02788.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770879822122450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuPm3NV4pFgx2XEQOrDl0qkp_9-JF5WmKx3zXrCuSjpS2QC89X6_LzmOOK52RpesF3ya4XecUCkpKXN3X1E8Q5SxNK_K-hUvf5rL9DTT5MYXuhdIiYpaJzDzTnyzeKDmwiK5rYYRs0AiQ/s320/DSC02788.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>IW: I've worked it out now, thanks to an article in yesterday's IHT. It isn't ENVIRONMENT, it's Nature and Development (N'nD)</strong><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><strong>"Made in China" label battered by product scandals</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By Ben Blanchard<br />Milk, toothpaste, cough syrup, pet food, eels, blood thinner, car parts, pork, eggs, honey, chicken, dumplings, cooking oil and rice -- if you can fake it or taint it, you can almost guarantee it's happened in China.<br />A string of product safety scandals, including contaminated infant formula that is believed to have killed six babies and sickened thousands of others, have rocked the faith of shoppers, making them wary of buying products made in China despite the often cheaper price tag.<br />"I was physically disgusted when I saw it on the TV," said Sally Villegas, a mother of two in Australia, referring to the melamine-tainted infant formula scandal that came to light in September.<br />"If I'm shopping and I pick up a product made in China, yes I would put it back."<br />The melamine scandal was the latest in a string of recent high-profile safety problems that included lead paint on toy cars and contaminated Chinese-made blood thinner heparin which was blamed for fatalities in the United States and Germany and prompted a global recall early this year.<br />After each scandal, Beijing seemed to have the same response: launching a crackdown, destroying tainted goods on television, jailing a few officials and saying they "pay great attention" to the problem.<br />Trouble is, for all the government's efforts and exhortations, the scandals keep happening, and will likely keep on happening, due to lax rule enforcement, fragmented industries, widespread poverty and the sheer size of China, analysts say.<br />"I'm sure that there will be more. It's a near certainty. Not only in the fields that we've seen already, but in other ones," said Duncan Innes-Ker, a China analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit in Beijing.<br />"China faces a lot of problems because it is developing into a big but very poor economy, and obviously you can't have Western-style safety mechanisms in an economy where half the population doesn't earn much more than a couple of dollars a day," he added.<br />CHINESE PRODUCTS SHUNNED<br />Jin Biao, vice president of Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group, one of China's largest dairy producers, admitted the melamine problem had dented the country's already badly tattered reputation overseas.<br />"The contamination was our management problem. We must first resolve it without trying to pass the blame on to the farmers, or to society, or the country," he told Reuters.<br />Yili was named as one of 22 companies found to have produced drinking milk contaminated with melamine, though after thorough inspections China now insists the problem has been effectively removed from the dairy industry.<br />Melamine, a chemical used to make plastics, was added to infant formula to cheat quality control tests on protein levels. The scandal led to bans around the world on food containing Chinese dairy products.<br />The United States last month issued an import alert for Chinese-made food products, calling for foods to be stopped at the border unless importers can certify that they are either free of dairy goods or free of melamine.<br />"I think it's evident to the Chinese that when there's a quality problem, it does more than just hurt that industry segment," U.S. Health Secretary Mike Leavitt said on a recent visit to Shanghai. "It damages the entire made-in-China brand."<br />The U.S. move prompted an angry reaction from China, which called it "unilateral" and expressed "deep regret."<br />But consumers are already voting with their wallets.<br />Following the melamine problem, Taiwan supermarkets for example reported soaring sales from goods clearly marked as being "made in Taiwan," stressing that they did not come from across the strait and were therefore trustworthy and top notch.<br />It is not a simple matter just to boycott all Chinese goods, said Matthew Crabbe, managing director of research firm Access Asia.<br />"I don't think really people understand how much is actually made in China," he said.<br />Moving production to some other low-cost country would also not solve the problem, Crabbe added.<br />"They'd just have the same problems over again. They'd go to Bangladesh or somewhere, and then they'd have exactly the same problems yet again. It's the quality control."<br />COVER-UPS<br />The challenges posed by China's poverty are exacerbated by corruption and the autonomy carved out by local governments, many of them hundreds of kilometres from officials in Beijing trying to rehabilitate the country's reputation.<br />A culture of covering-up bad news, or delaying reporting problems to higher-ups, only adds to the challenge.<br />The city government of Shijiazhuang, home to the Sanlu company that was at the centre of the melamine scandal, initially failed to report the problem, fearing perhaps it could have wrecked the happy image being portrayed for the Beijing Olympics.<br />This attitude is changing though, observers said.<br />Anthony Hazzard, the World Health Organisation's Manila-based regional adviser on food safety, said he was heartened by the way China had begun sharing information following the melamine scandal.<br />"That there is an openness and sharing of information will strengthen confidence," he told reporters in Beijing.<br />"Of course, confidence at the moment is battered. But the only way to rebuild confidence is to put in place an effective food control system from the farm to the table, and we hope that they do that."<br />Still, it is probably only a matter of time before the next scandal unfolds in a country where even drugs are fair game for the unscrupulous seeking to make a fast buck.<br />"Next would probably be the fake pharmaceuticals industry, the herbal pills sector," said Access Asia's Crabbe. "God knows what goes into those things, and what regulation there is, if any, of that industry."<br />(Additional reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison in Beijing, Rujun Shen in Shanghai and Pauline Askin in Sydney; Editing by Megan Goldin)<br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><strong>Whistleblowers sent to mental ward, Chinese paper says<br /></strong>By Andrew Jacobs<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />BEIJING: Local officials in Shandong Province have apparently found a cost-effective way to deal with gadflies, whistleblowers and all manner of muckraking citizens who dare to challenge the authorities: dispatch them to the local psychiatric hospital.<br />According to an investigative report published Monday by a state-owned newspaper, public security officials in Xintai city have been institutionalizing residents who persist in their personal campaigns to expose corruption or to protest the unfair seizure of their property. Some people said they were committed up to two years, and several of those interviewed said they had been forced to consume psychiatric medication.<br />The article, in The Beijing News, said most inmates had been released after they agreed to give up their causes.<br />Sun Fawu, 57, a farmer seeking compensation for land spoiled by a coal mining operation, said he was seized by the local authorities on his way to petition the central government in Beijing and brought to the Xintai Mental Health Center in October.<br />During a 20-day stay, he said he was tied to a bed, forced to take pills and given injections that made him numb and woozy. When he told the doctor he was a petitioner, not mentally ill, the doctor reportedly said, "I don't care if you're sick or not. As long as you are sent by the township government, I'll treat you as a mental patient."<br />In an interview with the paper, the hospital's director, Wu Yuzhu, acknowledged that some of the 18 patients brought there by the police in recent years were not deranged, but he had no choice but to take them in. "The hospital also had its misgivings," he said.<br />Although China is not known for the kind of systematic abuse of psychiatry that occurred in the Soviet Union, human rights advocates say forced institutionalizations are not uncommon in smaller cities. Robin Munro, the research director of China Labour Bulletin, a rights organization in Hong Kong, said such "an kang" wards - Chinese for peace and health - are a convenient and effective means of dealing with pesky dissidents.<br />In recent years practitioners of Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, have complained of coerced hospitalizations and one of China's best-known dissidents, Wang Wanxing, spent 13 years in a police-run psychiatric facility under conditions he later described as abusive.<br />In one recent, well-publicized case, Wang Jingmei , the mother of a man convicted of killing six policemen in Shanghai, was held incommunicado at a mental hospital for five months and only released last Sunday, the day before her son was executed.<br />The Beijing News story about the hospitalizations in Xintai was notable for the traction it gained in China's constrained state-run media. Such Communist Party stalwarts as People's Daily and the Xinhua news agency republished the story, and it was picked up by scores of Web sites. At the country's most popular portal, Sina.com, it ranked the fifth most-viewed news headline and readers posted more than 20,000 comments by evening. The indignation expressed was universal, with many clamoring for the dismissal of those involved. "They're no different than animals," read one post. "No, they're worse."<br />Reached by phone on Monday, a hospital employee said Wu, the hospital director who voiced his misgivings to The Beijing News, was unavailable. The employee, Hu Peng, said local government officials had taken him away for "a meeting" earlier in the day and had also looked through patient records.<br />Although Hu said the hospital was not authorized to diagnose patients, he nonetheless defended the hospitalizations, saying that all the patients delivered by the Public Security Bureau were certifiably ill. "We definitely would not accept those without mental problems," he said.<br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Back at junk value, recyclables are piling up<br /></strong>By Matt Richtel and Kate Galbraith<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />Trash has crashed.<br />The economic downturn has decimated the U.S. market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices.<br />Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life.<br />"It's awful," said Briana Sternberg, education and outreach coordinator for Sedona Recycles, a nonprofit group in Arizona that recently stopped taking certain types of cardboard, like old cereal, rice and pasta boxes. There is no market for these, and the organization's quarter-acre yard is already packed fence to fence.<br />"Either it goes to landfill or it begins to cost us money," Sternberg said.<br />In West Virginia, an official of Kanawha County, which includes Charleston, the state capital, has called on residents to stockpile their own plastic and metals, which the county mostly stopped taking on Friday. In eastern Pennsylvania, the small town of Frackville recently suspended its recycling program when it became cheaper to dump than to recycle. In Montana, a recycler near Yellowstone National Park no longer takes anything but cardboard.<br />There are no signs yet of a nationwide abandonment of recycling programs. But industry executives say that after years of growth, the whole system is facing an abrupt slowdown.<br />Many large recyclers now say they are accumulating tons of material, either because they have contracts with big cities to continue to take the scrap or because they are banking on a price rebound in the next six months to a year.<br />"We're warehousing it and warehousing it and warehousing it," said Johnny Gold, senior vice president at the Newark Group, a company that has 13 recycling plants across the country. Gold said the industry had seen downturns before but not like this. "We never saw this coming."<br />The precipitous drop in prices for recyclables makes the stock market's performance seem almost enviable.<br />On the West Coast, for example, mixed paper is selling for $20 to $25 a ton, down from $105 in October, according to Official Board Markets, a newsletter that tracks paper prices. And recyclers say tin is worth about $5 a ton, down from $327 earlier this year. There is greater domestic demand for glass, so its price has not fallen as much.<br />This is a cyclical industry that has seen price swings before. The scrap market in general is closely tied to economic conditions because demand for some recyclables tracks closely with markets for new products. Cardboard, for instance, turns into the boxes that package electronics, rubber goes to shoe soles, and metal is made into auto parts.<br />One reason prices slid so rapidly this time is that demand from China, the biggest export market for recyclables from the United States, quickly dried up as the global economy slowed. China's influence is so great that in recent years recyclables have been worth much less in areas of the United States that lack easy access to ports that can ship there.<br />The downturn offers some insight into the forces behind the recycling boom of recent years. Environmentally conscious consumers have been able to pat themselves on the back and feel good about sorting their recycling and putting it on the curb. But most recycling programs have been driven as much by raw economics as by activism.<br />Cities and their contractors made recycling easy in part because there was money to be made. Businesses, too — like grocery chains and other retailers — have profited by recycling thousands of tons of materials like cardboard each month.<br />But the drop in prices has made the profits shrink, or even disappear, undermining one rationale for recycling programs and their costly infrastructure.<br />"Before, you could be green by being greedy," said Jim Wilcox, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "Now you've really got to rely more on your notions of civic participation."<br />The impact of the downturn on individual recycling efforts varies. Most cities are keeping their recycling programs, in some cases because they are required by law, but also because the economics, while they have soured, still favor recycling over landfills.<br />In New York City, for instance, the city is getting paid $10 for a ton of paper, down from $50 or more before October, but it has no plans to cease recycling, said Robert Lange, the city's recycling director. In Boston, one of the hardest-hit markets, prices are down to $5 a ton, and the city expects it will soon have to pay to unload its paper. But city officials said that would still be better than paying $80 a ton to put it in a landfill.<br />Some small towns are refusing to recycle some material, particularly the less lucrative plastics and metals, and experts say more are likely to do so if the price slump persists.<br />Businesses and institutions face their own challenges and decisions. Harvard, for instance, sends mixed recyclables — including soda bottles and student newspapers — to a nearby recycling center that used to pay $10 a ton. In November, Harvard received two letters from the recycler, the first saying it would begin charging $10 a ton and the second saying the price had risen to $20.<br />"I haven't checked my mail today, but I hope there isn't another one in there," said Rob Gogan, the recycling and waste manager for the university's facilities division. He said he did not mind paying as long as the price was less than $87 a ton, the cost for trash disposal.<br />The collapse of the market is slowing the momentum of recycling overall, said Mark Arzoumanian, editor in chief of Official Board Markets. He said the problem would hurt individual recycling businesses, but also major retailers, like Wal-Mart Stores, that profit by selling refuse.<br />Arzoumanian said paper mills in China and the United States that had signed contracts requiring them to buy recycled paper were seeking wiggle room, invoking clauses that cover extraordinary circumstances. "They are declaring 'force majeure,' which is a phrase I'd never thought I'd hear in paper recycling," he said.<br />Arzoumanian and others said mills were also starting to become pickier about what they take in, rejecting cardboard and other products that they say are "contaminated" by plastic ties or other material.<br />The situation has also been rough on junk poachers — people who made a profitable trade of picking off cardboard and other refuse from bins before the recycling trucks could get to it. Those poachers have shut their operations, said Michael Sangiacomo, chief executive of Norcal Waste Systems, a recycling and garbage company that serves Northern California.<br />"I knew it was really bad a few weeks ago when our guys showed up and the corrugated cardboard was still there," he said. "People started calling, saying 'You didn't pick up our cardboard,' and I said, 'We haven't picked up your cardboard for years.' "<br />The recycling slump has even provoked a protest of sorts. At Ruthlawn Elementary School in South Charleston, West Virginia, second-graders who began recycling at the school in September were told that the program might be discontinued. They chose to forgo recess and instead use the time to write letters to the governor and mayor, imploring them to keep recycling, Rachel Fisk, their teacher, said.<br />The students' pleas seem to have been heard; the city plans to start trucking the recyclables to Kentucky.<br />"They were telling them, 'We really don't care what you say about the economy. If you don't recycle, our planet will be dirty,' " Fisk said.<br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><strong>Island's battles over land use halt development</strong><br />By Dan Barry<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />MAUNALOA, Hawaii: Scattered along the western stretch of the island of Molokai are the deserted structures of a vanquished people.<br />This building with the title-free marquee was once a movie theater.<br />That building, a luxurious lodge with a cow-ranch motif.<br />Farther on, past the swimming pool now filled with sand, are the skeletal frames of what were known as tentalows. People once came from far away, paying handsomely too, for the chance to sleep behind canvas drapes, the Pacific within sight, the night stars almost within reach.<br />These structures stand as eerie remnants of a years-long battle waged over the future of this island, an oasis of 7,500 with no traffic lights and no buildings taller than a coconut tree; with the state's highest unemployment and highest percentage of Native Hawaiians; with a sweet way of saying you are welcome to visit as long as you understand its ways.<br />On one side of the fight were the off-island owners of Molokai Ranch, a sprawl of property covering a third of Molokai's 260 square miles, or 670 square kilometers. They worked for years with some community members on a broad development proposal that included lots of jobs, the reopening of a closed hotel, the unheard-of donation of 26,000 acres, or 10,520 hectares, for conservation. And this:<br />The building of 200 luxury homes along a gorgeous oceanfront spot called La'au Point. The development, the owners said, was necessary to help pay for parts of the tantalizing plan.<br />A 2006 marketing report described how "an unspoiled oceanfront" would attract people of means: "For the ocean-view lots, this would generally require a net worth of at least $1 million, and for the oceanfront properties the market for real estate at La'au Point comes from the premium pentamillionaire ($5 million) market and above."<br />Opposing the plan was a majority of the Molokai community, including many who took pride in the island's long resistance to anything that might somehow make it less Hawaiian. The La'au Point proposal gave breath to their rallying cry of "Keep Molokai Molokai." The property is sacred, they said, its crabs and limpets vital to their subsistence. It should be shared by the people who live on Molokai, not owned by people who do not.<br />"We're just caretakers," said Walter Ritte, 64, a veteran warrior against anything he thinks might despoil Molokai. "That comes from our culture. The resources come first, and man comes second."<br />So began the Battle of Molokai Ranch. At stake: "pono" - the Hawaiian concept for what is honorable, righteous, in balance.<br />The matter of balance has loomed over Molokai Ranch ever since some businessmen bought the property more than a century ago. Over the years, local people needed the jobs created by the various uses of the property - to raise livestock, grow crops, even serve as a wildlife park - but they also resented the dominance of the ranch over land and culture.<br />Owners came and went, parcels were bought and sold, development battles were won and lost. In the 1970s, protesters managed to thwart a plan to develop ranch land into a Honolulu suburb, with airport. But in the 1990s they failed to block the ranch's razing of historic homes in this old pineapple plantation town of Maunaloa, as well as the rising of the Molokai Ranch Lodge, a 22-room luxury hotel featuring the island's only elevator.<br />The ranch's current owners, Molokai Properties, a subsidiary of GuocoLeisure of Singapore, set out to improve its image. When dozens of jobs were lost in 2001 with the closing of the Kaluakoi Hotel, a few miles away, they bought the property, reopened the adjacent golf course and intimated that they would someday do the same with the hotel. They also invited the community to help shape a development plan for the ranch property, which was hemorrhaging millions of dollars a year.<br />Ultimately, the "Community Based Master Land Use Plan," with its sly appropriation of "community," was developed, earning the endorsement of several elected officials, including the governor of Hawaii, Linda Lingle.<br />Thousands of acres of land to be donated. The resurrection of the Kaluakoi Hotel. The continuing operation of the Molokai Ranch Lodge, the golf course and other businesses. And that 200-lot luxury subdivision on 500 acres down at La'au Point.<br />"It wasn't going to be perfect; we all knew that," said John Sabas, 61, who grew up on Molokai and worked for a while as the ranch's communications manager. "But it would set us on a path of providing a sustainable future for the island."<br />Others, though, chose the path of resistance. Some distrusted yet more outsiders promising a better future. Others feared disturbance of the holy compact between the land and its people.<br />Asserting their own claim to the word "community," they supplemented the local flora with colorful signs saying "Save La'au" and "La'au Sacred." They staged an occupation at La'au Point. In dozens of meetings and hearings they challenged every aspect of the plan, every comma - especially its proposed use of the island's precious water supply.<br />Many feared that a subdivision at La'au Point would change more than the shoreline. "If you have a lot of wealthy people moving in, who don't fathom life without a Starbucks, that starts to change the culture," explained Karen Holt, 56, an opposition leader and director of the Molokai Community Service Center. "Don't just come and make it a pentamillionaire's estate."<br />In late March, the battle abruptly ended. Molokai Ranch, which was losing an estimated $300,000 a month, announced that it was shutting everything down: the hotel, the tentalows, the movie theater, the golf course, the development plans. More than 100 jobs lost, just like that.<br />In explaining the decision to "mothball" the ranch, its chief executive, Peter Nicholas, said, "Unacceptable delays caused by continued opposition to every aspect of the master plan means we are unable to fund continued normal company operations."<br />Today, nearly nine months later, the Kaluakoi Hotel remains deserted, the ocean view from its Ohia Lodge enjoyed by no one. A few miles away, glorious spider webs stretch undisturbed on the grounds of the closed Molokai Ranch Lodge. The quiet in western Molokai seems both natural and unnatural.<br />The ranch's owners, who apparently anticipated the current economic free fall, have not revealed their plans for the third of Molokai they own. "At this time we simply are putting the past behind us and are moving forward," a spokesman said by e-mail, though he did not say what "moving forward" means.<br />Here on the island, words said in the past still sting for some, but are forgiven or forgotten by others. Ritte and Sabas, who as younger men fought together against other development plans for Molokai, spoke to each other the other day. Each still maintains that his was the just cause.<br />Some, including Ritte and Holt, harbor dreams of buying Molokai Ranch and restoring much of the land as a low dryland forest, which they say would replenish the water supply and ultimately make Molokai more self-sufficient. A wind-farm company has already promised to chip in $50 million, though several times that would be needed.<br />But no one knows whether the ranch would even sell to its adversaries. And there is another challenge: achieving this elusive thing called pono.<br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>A lifestyle distinct: The muxe of Mexico<br /></strong>By Marc Lacey<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />MEXICO CITY: Mexico can be intolerant of homosexuality; it can also be quite liberal. Gay-bashing incidents are not uncommon in the countryside, where many Mexicans consider homosexuality a sin. In Mexico City, meanwhile, same-sex domestic partnerships are legally recognized — and often celebrated lavishly in government offices as if they were marriages.<br />But nowhere are attitudes toward sex and gender quite as elastic as in the far reaches of the southern state of Oaxaca. There, in the indigenous communities around the town of Juchitán, the world is not divided simply into gay and straight. The local Zapotec people have made room for a third category, which they call "muxes" (pronounced MOO-shays) — men who consider themselves women and live in a socially sanctioned netherworld between the two genders.<br />"Muxe" is a Zapotec word derived from the Spanish "mujer," or woman; it is reserved for males who, from boyhood, have felt themselves drawn to living as a woman, anticipating roles set out for them by the community.<br />Anthropologists trace the acceptance of people of mixed gender to pre-Colombian Mexico, pointing to accounts of cross-dressing Aztec priests and Mayan gods who were male and female at the same time. Spanish colonizers wiped out most of those attitudes in the 1500s by forcing conversion to Catholicism. But mixed-gender identities managed to survive in the area around Juchitán, a place so traditional that many people speak ancient Zapotec instead of Spanish.<br />Not all muxes express their identities the same way. Some dress as women and take hormones to change their bodies. Others favor male clothes. What they share is that the community accepts them; many in it believe that muxes have special intellectual and artistic gifts.<br />Every November, muxes inundate the town for a grand ball that attracts local men, women and children as well as outsiders. A queen is selected; the mayor crowns her. "I don't care what people say," said Sebastian Sarmienta, the boyfriend of a muxe, Ninel Castillejo García. "There are some people who get uncomfortable. I don't see a problem. What is so bad about it?"<br />Muxes are found in all walks of life in Juchitán, but most take on traditional female roles — selling in the market, embroidering traditional garments, cooking at home. Some also become sex workers, selling their services to men.<br />Acceptance of a child who feels he is a muxe is not unanimous; some parents force such children to fend for themselves. But the far more common sentiment appears to be that of a woman who takes care of her grandson, Carmelo, 13.<br />"It is how God sent him," she said.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRKdpXnOGpM8A1M84HBUgayheUBl0smvK45IDnj3zsEmvkeV45a6qiA4O_Odpm63PBuSpF_VBBHC8rpk0FAhU1t0iqdGEvksXr_Y64sD5D99qKt4r_iUP1GKRSF0Wig-LfTJqY4gmVxE4/s1600-h/DSC02789.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770610594619042" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRKdpXnOGpM8A1M84HBUgayheUBl0smvK45IDnj3zsEmvkeV45a6qiA4O_Odpm63PBuSpF_VBBHC8rpk0FAhU1t0iqdGEvksXr_Y64sD5D99qKt4r_iUP1GKRSF0Wig-LfTJqY4gmVxE4/s320/DSC02789.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>IBM and Harvard tap computer power for green energy</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Scientists at Harvard University and IBM are hoping to harness the power of a million idle computers to develop a new, less expensive form of solar power that could transform the way green energy is generated.<br />Researchers have begun the effort using the World Community Grid. The grid is sponsored by IBM and taps into volunteers' computers around the world to run calculations on a myriad of compounds, potentially shortening a program that could take as long as 22 years but as few as just 22.<br />The Harvard scientists are hoping that the program will allow it to discover a combination of organic materials that can be used to manufacture plastic solar cells that are less expensive and more flexible than the silicon-based ones typically used to turn sunlight into electricity.<br />The technology could be used to coat windows, make backpacks or line blankets to produce electricity from the sun's rays.<br />Technology to make the plastic cells already exists, but they are not yet efficient enough to be rolled out in commercial products.<br />"It is not now cost efficient, although the materials are cheap because it's plastic," said Alan Aspuru-Guzik, a chemistry researcher at Harvard University.<br />The most efficient silicon-based photovoltaic solar cells convert about 20 percent of the sunlight that strikes them into electricity.<br />For now, the organic cells can turn only about 5 percent of the sunlight into power - half the level needed to make the low-cost cells a viable energy source.<br />The researchers plan to publish results of the work once they have discovered a possible combination of compounds.<br />IBM developed the World Community Grid to advance research of humanitarian projects, like fighting cancer, dengue fever and AIDS.<br />The World Community Grid connects computers in homes or offices through the Internet with program on each machine to run calculations that feed back to the database.<br />"It's a way for people that have computers to do some good for the world," said Joe Jasinski, an engineer with IBM.<br />With more than a million volunteers linked to the World Community Grid, IBM has said that created a network with a calculating capability that would rank it among the world's 10 most-powerful supercomputers.<br />Members of the grid download software to their personal computers that run the calculations as a screensaver program on the machine when it is turned on but not in use.<br />IBM includes security software to protect the participants' computers.<br />Such virtual networks are also in place to crunch data for other projects, like the SETI Institute's effort to sift through radio telescope signals for signs of other life in the universe.</p><p></p><p>*********************</p><p></p><p><strong>OPINION</strong></p><p><strong>The key to the Caucasus</strong><br />By Stanley A. Weiss<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />BAKU, Azerbaijan: 'Welcome to Houston on the Caspian," said Anne Derse, the U.S. ambassador to this booming, oil-rich nation, as our delegation of American business executives arrived on the final leg of a visit to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.<br />After days of discussion with political, military and business leaders across the region - including a talk with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, whose office overlooks the Caspian Sea, home to perhaps a quarter of the world's new oil production - it all seemed obvious. As one U.S. diplomat put it, Azerbaijan "is central to all we're trying to do in this part of the world."<br />Azerbaijan is the indispensable link to reducing European energy dependence on Moscow, with the only pipelines exporting Caspian oil and gas that bypass Russia altogether, with routes through Georgia and Turkey.<br />Without Azerbaijan, there will never be what the U.S. energy secretary Samuel Bodman calls "a new generation of export routes" bypassing Russia. Known as the "southern corridor," it includes plans by Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to ship oil and gas by barge across the Caspian to Baku, as well as the EU's long-planned Nabucco gas pipeline from Turkey to Europe.<br />Aliyev stresses that, unlike President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, he will not taunt the Russian bear, continuing instead to walk a fine line between East and West. This policy includes allowing his military to train with NATO, but not rushing to become a NATO member.<br />Aliyev insists that "time is up" for the return of the Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh - the Armenian-majority region occupied by Armenia, with Russian support, since the war over the area in the early 1990s. Still, he seems determined not to give Moscow a pretext to intervene, as it did with its invasion of Georgia this summer.<br />Azerbaijan - like Turkey, with which it shares deep ethnic and linguistic ties - is one the world's most secularized Muslim countries, with a strict separation between mosque and state. Moreover, the nearly 20 million ethnic Azeris living in neighboring Iran - about a quarter of Iran's population - are culturally closer to their brethren in Baku than their Persian rulers in Tehran. Azerbaijan also draws the ayatollahs' ire as one of the few Muslim nations with diplomatic ties with Israel.<br />Yet for all its strategic significance - and its support for the U.S. war on terrorism, including sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq - Azerbaijan remains the neglected stepchild of U.S. Caucasus policy. Despite Saakashvili's miscalculations with Russia, Georgia remains the darling of the West, garnering another $1 billion in post-war aid from the U.S. atop the nearly $2 billion Washington has bestowed over the years. The powerful Armenian-American lobby has not only secured some $2 billion for Armenia to date, it has succeeded in limiting U.S. aid to Azerbaijan because of the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.<br />To be sure, this country is no democracy; the 46-year-old Aliyev learned well from his authoritarian father, who ruled Azerbaijan both as a Soviet Republic and after independence. Indeed, not long before our delegation arrived, Aliyev claimed re-election with 89 percent of the vote.<br />But if Azerbaijan is "central" to everything Washington is trying to accomplish in the Caucasus, then Azerbaijan should be at the forefront of U.S. Caucasus policy. To help Azerbaijan - and the region - realize its full economic potential, the incoming Obama administration should make a major push to resolve Nagorno-Karabakh, which - as one development official here tells me - "is the main issue that prevents regional integration."<br />A breakthrough is possible. Every member of the so-called Minsk Group charged with resolving the conflict - Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, several European countries and the U.S. - have powerful incentives for compromise.<br />Aliyev wants Nagorno-Karabakh back, but understands that Moscow won't allow him to take it by force. Landlocked, impoverished Armenia desperately wants Azerbaijan and Turkey to end a 16-year economic blockade of its borders. Turkey wants to improve relations with Armenia. Europe wants to avert another crisis that would complicate plans for its Nabucco pipeline. And with new competing diplomatic initiatives, Turkey and Russia clearly want to play a leadership role in the region.<br />This "frozen conflict" will not thaw easily. But through a gradual process backed by the major powers, the Caucasus countries could finally focus on economic cooperation rather than military confrontation. And the trade routes of the old Silk Road could become a new energy corridor of the 21st century.<br />Stanley A. Weiss is founding chairman of Business Executives for National Security, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington.<br /><br /><br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEc3sAd9e38eGJ1zGhbEjcrD3fuJLmbbKO7nHFFidiDLXPiRfNsbXQmtuaAHmxpffRw2CjpH_tqfKGzWlvyfbqLTQK47ddxfmn6Rxt3bXxjjTf0XPWxp93MTJXu-qZgjrK7FuVTB8niFE/s1600-h/DSC02790.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770609172796098" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEc3sAd9e38eGJ1zGhbEjcrD3fuJLmbbKO7nHFFidiDLXPiRfNsbXQmtuaAHmxpffRw2CjpH_tqfKGzWlvyfbqLTQK47ddxfmn6Rxt3bXxjjTf0XPWxp93MTJXu-qZgjrK7FuVTB8niFE/s320/DSC02790.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><strong>Brown and Sarkozy: A potential power duo<br /></strong>By John Vinocur<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />If you believe in the attraction of opposites and trust among ambitious men, the new closeness between Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy could be a good thing for Europe.<br />If you weigh instead the fragility of politicians in a time of world economic upheaval and the deep contradictions of interests and instincts in France and Britain - ever hear of dirigistes or euroscepticism? - then you may cross off this 2008 rapprochement as another of the dalliances that have dotted the relationship over the last 40 years.<br />Right now, the positive take has a lot going for it:<br />It says that a Sarkozy-Brown meeting Monday, without Angela Merkel but including the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, signifies a capacity to seek urgent solutions for the global recession that go beyond old European confrontations between interventionist and laissez-faire policies.<br />It argues that Europe's ability to act is not automatically shackled by a Germany whose current indecisiveness and relative unpredictability means it could tell its European partners just six weeks ago it had too little confidence in them to put cash into a common bailout fund.<br />And it demonstrates real determination (although with significant variations in tone and degree) to make better financial market regulation on the world scale a fact in 2009.<br />All this, with Sarkozy still holding the European Union's rotating presidency and with Brown to serve as chairman of the G-7 and G-20 economic groupings next year, is intended to look like strong leadership.<br />And it almost does - but, as noted in conversations in different European capitals, with the caveats, limits and potential for breakdowns of a state-to-state relationship that is extremely personalized.<br />Generally, Sarkozy overwhelms people or is quickly bored with them. In Gordon Brown's case, he found a former finance minister like himself, who has been quicker and more fluently analytical in articulating remedies for aspects of the financial meltdown.<br />According to the British side, Sarkozy "doesn't try to bulldozer him. He doesn't defer, but he listens. He basically said to Brown, 'You design the policy. I'll find the right words and contribute leadership."'<br />The French line is, "Everything is easy in dealing with the English. Things are intuitive. There's a psychological compatibility."<br />Which, deciphered, shouts out what's already obvious: Sarkozy finds Brown easier work than Merkel.<br />What's not so plain is that Sarkozy sees in Brown a colleague who recognized his central role in bringing about the first expanded G-20 meeting in Washington last month. It was clearly a major initiative, providing for the entry of China, India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia into global economic decision-making.<br />Can that be taken to mean Brown will preserve Sarkozy's mark on a bit of history - no small change for the self-involved French president - and keep him downstage center as a partner when the crisis group meets again, probably in April?<br />Call it a French assumption. But that is where the fragility of personalized diplomacy enters.<br />Here is a British version of this precariousness: Brown, I was told, "believes we are in the first crisis of the globalized age. He is interested in being the first person to find its answer."<br />The prime minister's response excludes an anti-capitalist "corralling of the Anglo-Saxon Wild West."<br />"What Sarkozy doesn't really seem to get," this British account says, "is that we're not for tearing up the system and shooting all the people in the hedge funds. We're not going to destroy vitality and energy. We want to regulate the system better, not destroy it."<br />Take that as meaning Britain favors modifications in market regulation, but no essential changes in its free-trade views or acceptance of the more heavily bridled capitalism Sarkozy wants. For the French themselves, the truth in the long run says German notions of economics and financial policy are probably closer to their own than Britain's are.<br />Tack on years of precedent and a list of current differences, and you can come out with an inconclusive projection - assuming Germany's return to greater coherence following elections next year - about the durability of this sunny French-British interval.<br />The Georges Pompidou-Edward Heath friendship of the 1970s had no real successor. Margaret Thatcher got interested in more European integration in the '80s, but without much of a French response. Jacques Chirac, en route to the presidency in the mid-'90s, spoke of Britain as France's new frontier, minus any visible follow-up.<br />Even the Francophile Tony Blair, with an open path to European leadership as EU president in 2005, backed off because it hardly seemed to enchant British public opinion.<br />But this moment - the world trudging into a recession with blackened perspectives - has its own new parameters for change.<br />Ironically, it is now Sarkozy who is the supplicant in the old cross-Channel relationship. His leverage with Germany seemingly suspended, his EU presidency at an end on Jan. 1, it is Sarkozy who has sought a place next to the Americanophile Brown in Europe's class picture.<br />These days, Sarkozy would take great precautions to avoid any reference to Britain possibly adopting the euro for fear of irritating Brown and jostling theiralliance de circonstance.<br />Yet Britain, comfortably and just short of explicitly, reached beyond stimulus packages and tax incentives to say no last week to Sarkozy's call (in support of Russian urging) for a summit next summer on a new European security architecture.<br />It's clearly a time that encourages bursts of frankness. Barack Obama's inauguration Jan. 20 magnifies that potential.<br />Under the circumstances, who's to say that Gordon Brown won't tell Sarkozy that sending more French troops to Afghanistan, where Britons are dying and Obama wants help, is a very good way to cement the relationships he needs most in the new year?<br /><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><strong>EU approves French bank rescue plan</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: The European Commission on Monday approved a French plan to rescue its banks and said that it expected to sign off on similar agreements involving Germany, Austria and other countries in the coming days, signaling an end to a standoff with national governments.<br />The approval came as Denmark became the most recent country to announce a bank support plan aimed at allaying the worst global credit crunch since the Great Depression, but said it was not considering any move to nationalize financial institutions.<br />The European Union competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, said she had not compromised strict EU aid rules under political pressure. She said that France had tightened the terms under which banks must pay back aid and that Germany still needed to make "minor changes" in its plan.<br />"You will see that as far as state aid rules are concerned, no concessions have been made," she said.<br />The commission also said it expected to ease rules soon for state aid in general, notably by increasing the threshold under which it had to be notified of such plans.<br />A major point of contention has been the rate at which fundamentally healthy banks caught up in the credit crunch would be made to pay for any state aid.<br />The commission is demanding higher rates than those proposed by national governments.<br />Details of the agreement with Paris showed a compromise after weeks of haggling over the terms of the support. The commission said that the repayment rate would be fixed for the first five years and variable after that.<br />"The remuneration, which will average about 8 percent, will reflect the degree of solvency of each beneficiary bank," the commission said.<br />Eight percent was in line with the rate sought by Paris. In return, the commission said, France offered improved incentives for the early repayment of state capital and extra safeguards to ensure that bank lending went to the real economy.<br />Kroes said the plan dovetailed with commission guidelines under which state capital injections should be priced at central bank base rates plus a premium reflecting the riskiness of each case. German and Austrian plans should be approved shortly, she said.<br />In Copenhagen, authorities said that they would step in after the central bank governor, Nils Bernstein, warned that some banks were finding it almost impossible to obtain new financing because of the turmoil on international markets.<br />"The government is looking into how a capital injection from the state can strengthen the capital base of Danish financial institutions," the minister of economic and business affairs, Lene Espersen, said at a banking conference.<br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><strong>French economy surpassing U.K., report finds<br /></strong>Bloomberg News<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />PARIS: The financial crisis is recasting the league table of economies, with Britain sliding behind its European neighbors and China gaining on its richer rivals, the Center for Economics and Business Research said in a study released Monday.<br />A recession and a decline in the pound's value pushed Britain's gross domestic product below France's this year and it will be passed by Italy in 2009, the CEBR said in the report. China has overtaken Germany and will top Japan in 2010 to become the world's second-largest economy behind the United States, it said.<br />"The recession associated with the credit crunch will change the position of many countries in the world's GDP league table," the London-based CEBR said in the report.<br />The study shows how countries that ran up debts during expansion, like Britain, will now suffer, while emerging-market economies will wield increasingly more power in the global economy as they develop. Governments from the Group of 7 nations are under pressure to broaden their membership to reflect the changing shape of the world economy.<br />Brazil will rise to eighth-biggest economy from 10th by 2010 and India to 10th from 12th, the CEBR said. Canada will drop to 13th from ninth in the same period as its currency falls, it said.<br />The CEBR also said the British and Italian economies would suffer the deepest downturns with 18 quarters of GDP below its previous peaks. Spain's slump will last 16 quarters and Japan's 11 quarters. The United States will rebound after nine quarters. China will not suffer a single quarter of contracting growth, the report said.<br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><strong>Mugabe 'must go,' Sarkozy says<br /></strong>By Stephen Castle<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: With cholera spreading and the Zimbabwean economy in crisis, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France joined calls for the leader of Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe, to step down as the European Union extended its travel ban on government officials in Harare.<br />The move by Sarkozy, echoed by the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, marked a significant increase in European pressure on a Zimbabwean leader who has so far proved immune to efforts to unseat him.<br />At a meeting in Brussels, Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France, which holds the EU presidency, said that 11 more Zimbabwean officials had been added to the EU visa-ban list that already includes the president. The total on the list now stands at 160 officials, Kouchner said. An EU spokesman later put the new total at 178.<br />"President Mugabe must go," Sarkozy said in Paris. "It is time to say to Mr. Mugabe: 'You have taken your people hostage, the inhabitants of Zimbabwe have the right to freedom, security and respect."'<br />But many policymakers said that only a withdrawal of support by Zimbabwe's southern African neighbors will have any practical impact on Mugabe's grip on power.<br />Although the cholera epidemic has killed at least 575 people, infected thousands and spread to South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana and Zambia, there is still no sign of a tougher line from influential countries in the region.<br />In Brussels, David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, welcomed the more aggressive EU stance. "There is real unity," he said, "about the fact that, while cholera has got the headlines, the real disease at the heart of Zimbabwe is the misrule of the Mugabe regime."<br />Miliband said there was a growing view that Zimbabwe's problems now pose a threat to regional stability. That could be significant because, when Britain sought to take the Zimbabwe issue to the United Nations Security Council in July, it was rebuffed by Russia and China.<br />Both countries were reluctant to see internal - rather than international - issues debated there.<br />Miliband hinted that another attempt may be made to raise the matter at the Security Council. He said British officials were in the "foothills of the discussion" to overcome resistance.<br />The Zimbabwean information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, said Mugabe was constitutionally elected and rejected such demands.<br />"No foreign leader, regardless of how powerful they are, has the right to call on him to step down on their whim," Ndlovu said, Reuters reported.<br />One EU diplomat, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said ministers had changed their tone, with none now arguing that engagement and negotiation with Mugabe needed to be given more time.<br />"Here in the EU," he said, "we have had it with Mugabe but there is some frustration because it is so difficult to see how we can change the situation."<br />The foreign minister of Luxembourg, Jean Asselborn, said that the EU was too far from Zimbabwe to exert genuine pressure on Mugabe and that southern African nations needed to act.<br />In September, after disputed elections, Mugabe and the main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, agreed to share power, though they have been unable to agree on the allocation of cabinet posts.Nations split on Congo force<br />EU countries were divided Monday over whether to send an EU peacekeeping force to eastern Congo after UN officials appealed for more troops, The Associated Press reported from Brussels.<br />The Belgian foreign minister, Karel De Gucht, urged the 27-nation bloc to send a temporary "bridging force" to aid the 17,000-strong UN force in Congo amid a worsening humanitarian crisis. The UN Security Council has authorized an additional 3,000 troops to support forces in eastern Congo, but it will take time to organize the deployment of the new troops.<br />"It is urgent that we take a decision on a bridging force," De Gucht said. "It will take four to six months before the additional troops for Monuc arrive and the humanitarian situation is dramatic." He was using the French acronym for the peacekeeping force.<br />Belgium has been the most outspoken European country in appealing for help for Congo, its former colony.<br />De Gucht said the EU could send up to two of its elite 1,500-strong "battle groups," but Germany and Britain are against sending an EU force.<br />Years of sporadic fighting in eastern Congo intensified in August. An estimated 250,000 people have fled to escape clashes between the army and rebels.<br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Muslim soldiers' tombs desecrated in France<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />PARIS: Vandals desecrated at least 500 tombs of Muslim soldiers in northern France on Monday — an act President Nicolas Sarkozy denounced as "repugnant racism."<br />The desecration near the town of Arras appeared timed with the start of Eid al-Adha, the most important holiday in the Muslim calendar.<br />The administration for the Pas-de-Calais region said the damaged tombs were in the Muslim section of the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette cemetery, a well-groomed burial ground for World War I soldiers. Some had swastikas scrawled on the tombstone, others had lettering whose meaning was unclear.<br />There are 576 graves in the Muslim section of the cemetery, where more than 30,000 soldiers are buried.<br />Sarkozy, in a statement, said the "abject and revolting act" equates with "repugnant racism against France's Muslim community" and insults the memory of all World War I combatants.<br />It was the third time the Muslim section of the cemetery has been targeted. Last April, 148 tombs were desecrated, and a year before that 52 headstones and an ossuary were vandalized.<br />The French Council for the Muslim Faith, a group representing France's numerous Muslim groups, decried "these odious, revolting and scandalous acts" and said it expected authorities to find out who carried out the attack.<br />Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said police were investigating the incident.<br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>Sarkozy leads EU push to cut nuclear weapons<br /></strong>By Steven Erlanger<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />PARIS: The European Union is attempting to revive a movement to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world, proposing a global ban on nuclear testing and a moratorium on production of all fissile material, according to a letter from the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, made public Monday.<br />France, a nuclear power, holds the European Union presidency until the end of the year, so Sarkozy wrote to the UN secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, in the name of the European Union.<br />"We are convinced of the necessity to work for general disarmament," Sarkozy wrote in the two-page letter, dated Dec. 5. "The United Nations has an important role to play in the debate on disarmament. Europe wants to play an important role."<br />There are an estimated 20,000 or more nuclear weapons around the world, and there is a new interest in reviving efforts to sharply reduce their number in a post-Cold War world where smaller, less stable countries are thought to be pursuing nuclear weapons, and where nuclear terrorism is a concern.<br />President-elect Barack Obama promised in his campaign to make "the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy."<br />The growing debate over the Iranian nuclear program is an important backdrop to the European effort, French officials said. Iran has refused to stop uranium enrichment despite UN sanctions. Iran says its enrichment program is only for peaceful nuclear power; no Western government believes that to be true, given the size and nature of the Iranian program, and there is a consensus among intelligence agencies that Iran is likely to have enough enriched material for a nuclear weapon by the end of 2009.<br />The EU is also proposing "the opening of consultations on a treaty forbidding short- and medium-range surface-to-surface missiles," which is highly unlikely because of their increasing use in conventional warfare.<br />The proposals include the universal ratification of the comprehensive test ban treaty, the dismantling of nuclear bomb test sites and a universal inspection regime, and urges further progress in talks between the United States and Russia on a follow-on treaty to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.<br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>France says arrests new ETA military leader<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />PARIS: French police have arrested three suspected members of the Basque separatist organisation ETA including one who is believed to be the new military leader of the group, the French government said on Monday.<br />The man suspected of being ETA's previous military chief, who was wanted in connection with the bombing of Madrid airport in 2006, was arrested in France last month.<br />"Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie ... congratulates the police ... who arrested three members of the Basque terrorist organisation ETA, including one who has already been identified as Balak, the presumed successor to Txeroki as the military head of ETA," Alliot-Marie's office said in a statement.<br />Balak is the name used by French police for the suspect named by Spanish authorities as Aitzol Iriondo. The three were armed but arrested peacefully near Bagneres-de-Bigorre in southwestern France. They have been transferred to Bayonne.<br />Txeroki (Cherokee) is the alias for Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina who was arrested near the Spanish border last month.<br />Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba told a news conference in Madrid that Iriondo, 31, was "in all probability" responsible for the killing of two Spanish undercover policemen in the French seaside town of Capbreton in December 2007.<br />Rubalcaba added that the other two arrested men were believed to be Eneko Zarrabeitia and Aitor Artetxe, who had fled to France to avoid capture. He said police would continue to track down other ETA members.<br />"I don't know if any terrorist is now thinking of replacing Aitzol Iriondo. What I can guarantee is that we will be looking for him as of right now, and so on, until it is over," he said.<br />Txeroki was also suspected in the Capbreton case but French police are no longer investigating him in connection with the incident but are pursuing him for leading a terrorist organisation.<br />Monday's arrests follow the December 3 fatal shooting of a 71-year-old businessman in the Basque town of Azpeitia, which the Spanish government blamed on ETA.<br />Rubalcaba said that "it is not risky to say" that either Txeroki or Iriondo was responsible for the killing.<br />Spanish authorities say ETA has been reduced to a relatively small number of fighters after a series of arrests of senior figures. But it has continued to carry out regular bombings.<br />ETA began its violent campaign for the independence of traditional Basque territories in northern Spain and southwest France in the late years of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in the 1960s, and has killed more than 800 people in four decades.<br />(Reporting by Anna Willard and Gerard Bon in Paris, Nichols Fichot in Toulouse, Claude Canellas in Bordeaux and Martin Roberts and Emma Pinedo in Madrid; editing by Tim Pearce and Sophie Hares)<br /><br /><br />*************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Hopes low for French Socialists hurt by infighting</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By Estelle Shirbon<br />French voters have little faith that the opposition Socialist Party will overcome months of bitter infighting to find a winning strategy against President Nicolas Sarkozy, an opinion poll showed on Monday.<br />An interminable leadership contest saw Martine Aubry, author of the 35-hour working week law, snatch a razor-thin victory over failed presidential candidate Segolene Royal, but Aubry's first act as party leader failed to heal the wounds.<br />She presented a party executive at the weekend that included none of Royal's allies despite the fact that the two women won an almost equal share of party members' votes. Aubry won by a margin of 102 votes out of 134,800 cast.<br />A Viavoice poll for left-wing newspaper Liberation found that 63 percent of voters expected Aubry and Royal to continue to put personal interests ahead of the good of the party. Only 25 percent thought they would take the party forward together.<br />The poll will make depressing reading for the Socialists, paralysed by their divisions since Sarkozy soundly beat Royal in May 2007. Almost unopposed, Sarkozy has launched ambitious reforms and cultivated a high profile on the world stage.<br />In the latest of an endless series of vitriolic exchanges, Aubry and Royal blamed each other for the failure to generate a unified executive. Aubry said Royal had declined to join, while Royal said she and her allies had been offered only crumbs.<br />"Martine Aubry has just taken responsibility for deeply dividing the party," said Royal's right-hand man Vincent Peillon on LCI television on Monday.<br />But it appeared that even those sympathetic to the Socialists were losing interest in these details.<br />"Who, Martine Aubry or Segolene Royal, was responsible for the failure of the reunification? It doesn't matter. The net result is, again, a divided and ineffective Socialist Party," Liberation said in its Monday editorial.<br />The resentment created by Royal's exclusion from Aubry's team raises the spectre of yet more acrimony when the Socialists choose their candidate for the next presidential poll, in 2012. Royal has already signalled her interest.<br />Aubry's executive team includes an equal number of women and men, a few members of ethnic minorities and several youth leaders, in line with her promises to rejuvenate the party and make it more representative of modern French society.<br />However, most of the key posts were given to so-called party "elephants," or influential veterans, from rival Socialist factions who united around Aubry, the daughter of former European Commission President Jacques Delors and a former labour minister, only to defeat Royal.<br />(Editing by Charles Dick)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><p><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770894747528450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBnJcZEQ4V_M3i0IQOMCeLxbPjIPIJUlSQMmWWXzgRNhvCFsolNndVwagUt112efAUTr60xKdz_h3Jbg2hT0vACO9TAf1UAoLTSlCniRhzqfxiu9tFOkycKAv7eO5rh3SyBxhkZ7IXJfk/s320/DSC02785.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><strong>James Carroll: Surviving winter<br /></strong>Monday, December 8, 2008<br />Now begin the darkest days of the year. This phenomenon of the revolutions of the Earth has long defined one pole of the human psyche. For the next two weeks, the days shorten, the nights grow longer, and the eyes of all people lift to see what's coming.<br />Now is when American theaters should mount "Waiting for Godot," or "Waiting for Lefty," bringing alive the national melodrama, which could be called, "Waiting for Barack." In fact, it is appropriate to these weeks that America's election euphoria has given way to the low-key stasis of, as we say, an administration-in-waiting.<br />Of course, what America overwhelmingly awaits is the economy's recovery, a hope that has been magically tied to the coming presidential inauguration.<br />Waiting is normally the most passive of experiences, yet in these weeks ahead of the comeback of the sun, waiting is positively exhausting. The seasonal observances - whether religious feasts, the festivals of light, the parties, or only shopping - all give expression to a fundamental longing, which in turns reveals the built-in contradiction of awareness.<br />On the Christian calendar, this is the time of Advent, which means coming. The genius of the sacramental imagination is to recognize in the givens of nature signals of the transcendent, and so the birth of the Lord was located at the winter solstice so that the lengthening of days could be seen as an emblem of the coming of the absent God, also known as Light of Light. But Christianity was merely lifting themes that adhere in the broad perceptions of the planet's cosmic dance.<br />Before God's presence can be felt, God's absence must be reckoned with, and absence is the first present of December.<br />"Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel," Christians sing, picking up on Isaiah's prophecy, but primordial longing for what does not yet exist is the point.<br />What does the season's shopping frenzy reveal, even in an economy when shopping makes little sense?<br />Humans are conceived with a constitutional inability to be satisfied with the present moment ("conceived," as the tradition says, "in original sin"). That in-built dissatisfaction is so efficiently appealed to by ideas of acquisition and consumption that an entire financial system has been constructed around it. The darkest days of the year, when the unconscious is most at the mercy of longing, inevitably trigger the commercial mechanism of desire. Shoppers are after not what they buy, but the pure effervescence of buying. That lightheadedness substitutes for light, but it is fleeting. Capitalism is founded on an illusion. It is not only the delayed pain of the credit card bill that comes later, but the inevitable regret when, once home, the purchase disappoints. Is it possible that the present economic crisis is a final reckoning with the lie that happiness can be purchased?<br />Curious, isn't it, that depression is the word for both economic collapse and nervous breakdown. Of the latter, they say that depression is a three-part disease: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. Our bad luck this year is that the economic and emotional letdowns have arrived together, perfectly timed for an epidemic of the solstice blues, which are sometimes diagnosed as seasonal affective disorder. Poignantly known as SAD, that condition is directly tied to the absence of light, and the provision of light is its treatment. But perhaps darkness is less the source of our anguish than the medium in which it is most painfully felt.<br />Memory and expectation define the days of December - nostalgia for holidays of yore, the letter to Santa - because the past and the future are the unpolluted zones of consciousness. The present is always less than we imagine it could be, and that aspect of awareness most profoundly shapes the human condition.<br />I began by saying that darkness defines one pole of the psyche. Darkness is not its axis: there is something else. The double-mindedness that insists in the time of long nights that long days are surely coming back is itself the antidote. Humans cannot have the experience that something is missing without supplying it through an unwilled act of imagination. That is why, finally, longing and desire weigh so much more than nostalgia and regret. To want, in the true economy, is already to have. What we know of the light, we learn in the dark. </p><p></p><p><br /><br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770891245320050" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSK4U3r8phYgDmE7FMPR1-POSrbKpZkNQZ3dpUxzo8PkATubwiAbPY6asnCr_YUHdADG1uAGHlaLUiClmvPgZ_tS7BYYoUQ4wdIkNpx-ybYx_1sSC3Sde9Y8u-ECqKp_r32Sm1FPbyylY/s320/DSC02786.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><strong>IW: For the first time this year, Kaplan's piece below seems to indicate that opinion formers, over 7 years since 9/11, are beginning to understand what this blog has tried to show during one year - that there are no vertical silos, but continuums that cirlce the world, not just streching from the Med to Burma, but running west to from Israel, to Gitmo, Mexico and the Philipinnes, round and round. Everything is related. </strong><br /><br /><br />**********************<br /><br /><strong>OPINION</strong><br /><strong>The other Middle East</strong><br />By Robert D. Kaplan<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The divisions we split the world into during the Cold War have at long last crumbled thanks to the Mumbai terrorist attacks.<br />No longer will we view South Asia as a region distinct from the Middle East. Now there is only one long continuum stretching from the Mediterranean to the jungles of Burma, with every crisis from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the west to the Hindu-Muslim dispute in the east interlocked with the one next door.<br />Yet this elongated Greater Near East does not signify something new but something old.<br />For significant parts of medieval and early modern history, Delhi was under the same sovereignty as Kabul, yet under a different one from Bangalore. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, the Mughal Dynasty, created by Muslims from Central Asia, governed a sprawling empire encompassing northern and central India, almost all of Pakistan and much of Afghanistan - even as Hindu Maratha warriors in India's south held out against Mughal armies. India's whole history - what has created its rich syncretic civilization of Turko-Persian gems like the Taj Mahal and the elaborate Hindu temples of Orissa - is a story of waves of Muslim invaders in turn killing, interacting with and ultimately being influenced by indigenous Hindus. There is even a name for the kind of enchanting architecture that punctuates India and blends Islamic and Hindu styles: Indo-Saracenic, a reference to the Saracens, the term by which Arabs were known to Europeans of the Middle Ages.<br />Hindu-Muslim relations have historically been tense. Remember that the 1947 partition of the subcontinent uprooted at least 15 million people and led to the violent deaths of around half a million. Given this record, the relatively peaceful relations between the majority Hindus and India's 150 million Muslims has been testimony to India's successful experiment in democracy. Democracy has so far kept the lid on an ethnic and religious divide that, while its roots run centuries back, has in recent years essentially become a reinvented modern hostility.<br />The culprit has been globalization. The secular Indian nationalism of Jawaharlal Nehru's Congress Party, built around a rejection of Western colonialism, is more and more a thing of the past. As the dynamic Indian economy merges with that of the wider world, Hindus and Muslims have begun separate searches for roots to anchor them inside a bland global civilization. Mass communications have produced a severe Hinduism from a host of local variants, even as the country's economically disenfranchised Muslims are increasingly part of an Islamic world community.<br />The Muslim reaction to this Hindu nationalism has been less anger and violence than simple psychological withdrawal: into beards, skullcaps and burqas in some cases; self-segregating into Muslim ghettos in others.<br />The terrorist attacks in Mumbai had a number of aims, one of which was to set a fuse to this tense intercommunal standoff. The jihadists not only want to destroy Pakistan, they want to destroy India as well. India is everything they hate: Hindu, vibrantly free and democratic, increasingly pro-American, and militarily cozy with Israel. For Washington, this is no simple matter of defending Pakistan against chaos by moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. It is a whole region we are dealing with. Thus for the jihadists, the concept of a 9/11-scale attack on India was brilliant.<br />Just as the chaos in Iraq through early 2007 threatened the post-Ottoman state system from Lebanon to Iran, creeping anarchy in Pakistan undermines not only Afghanistan but also the whole Indian subcontinent. The existence of terrorist outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba that have links with the Pakistani security apparatus but are outside the control of Pakistan's own civilian authorities is the very definition of chaos.<br />A collapsing Pakistan, and with it the loss of any real border separating India from Afghanistan, is India's worst nightmare. It brings us back toward the borders of the Mughal world, but not in a peaceful way. Indeed, the route that intelligence agencies feel was taken by the fishing boat hijacked by the terrorists - from Porbandar in India's Gujarat state, then north to Karachi in Pakistan, and then south to Mumbai - follows centuries-old Indian Ocean trade routes.<br />The jihadist attack on India's financial center not only damages Indian-Pakistani relations, but makes Pakistan's new civilian government - which has genuinely tried to improve ties with India - look utterly pathetic. Thus, the attack weakens both countries. Any understanding over Kashmir, the disputed Muslim-majority territory claimed by Pakistan, is now further than ever from materializing, with mass violence there a distinct possibility.<br />This, in turn, reduces the chance of an Indian-Pakistani rapprochement on Afghanistan, whose government Pakistan seeks to undermine and India sends millions of dollars in aid to help prop up.<br />The Pakistani security services want a radical Islamized Afghanistan as a strategic rear base against India, while India wants a moderate, secular Afghanistan as a weapon against Pakistan.<br />Pakistan is not only chaotic but dangerously lonely. Islam has not proved effective in bringing together its regionally based ethnic groups, and thus a resort to a fierce ideology as a unifying device among fundamentalist Muslims has been the country's signal tragedy.<br />Meanwhile, Pakistan's military suspects that Washington will desert their nation the moment the leadership of Al Qaeda is killed or captured.<br />Making matters worse, every time the United States launches an air attack into Pakistan from Afghanistan, it further destabilizes the Pakistani state. That is why the Mumbai attacks bring true joy to the most dangerous elements of the Pakistani security establishment: The tragedy has caused the world to focus on India's weaknesses - most of all, the constant threat of caste and tribal violence - that have been obscured by its economic success. See, many Pakistanis are saying, your beloved India is not so stable either.<br />This is nonsense, of course. India, with all its troubles, is far more stable than Pakistan. Every day that goes by without riots in India is a defeat for the Mumbai terrorists. Indeed, India's own Muslims have demonstrated against the attacks.<br />But India, not just Pakistan, desperately needs help. Just as solving or at least neutralizing the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a requirement for reducing radicalism and Iranian influence throughout the Levant, the same is true of the Indian-Pakistani dispute at the other end of the Greater Middle East. Our notion of the "peace process" is antiquated and needs expanding. We need a second special negotiator for the Middle East, a skilled diplomat shuttling regularly among New Delhi, Islamabad and Kabul. (There has been some speculation, in fact, that Barack Obama is considering Richard Holbrooke, the former UN ambassador, for just such a job.)<br />The Middle East is back to where it was centuries ago, not because of ancient hatreds but because of globalization. Instead of bold lines on a map we have a child's messy finger painting. Our best strategy is, as difficult and trite as it sounds, to be at all places at once, Not with troops, necessarily, but with every bit of energy and constant attention that our entire national security apparatus - and those of our allies - can bring to bear.<br />Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. </p><p></p><p>*******************</p><p></p><p><strong>Troops and separatists clash in southern Philippines</strong><br />By Carlos H. Conde<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />MANILA: As many as five marines and five Muslim separatist rebels were killed during intense fighting in the southern Philippines, military officials said Monday. They said an undetermined number of government troops and rebels were also wounded.<br />The fighting began Sunday and continued Monday morning in the two Muslim-dominated provinces of Sulu and Basian, islands that the government had earlier declared to be free from terrorists and Islamic extremists after a U.S.-supported counterterrorism campaign that began in 2002.<br />Officials said Monday that the number of those killed could sharply increase, particularly on the side of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a Muslim separatist group.<br />"We are now on a defensive stance," said an army spokeswoman, Lieutenant Steffani Cacho. She said the government was mainly going after members of the Abu Sayyaf and "rogue elements" of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the separatist group. She said a recent spate of kidnappings in the region prompted the military operation.<br />Cacho said that the marines were killed in a firefight in the town of Al-Barka in Basilan Province, a former stronghold of the Abu Sayyaf. In July last year, 14 marines were also killed in the same town after a firefight, 10 of whom were beheaded.<br />Cacho said the rebels had sought cover in some of the villages. It was not clear whether those wounded, estimated to be more than 50, were mainly rebels or included villagers.<br />But Mohagher Iqbal, the front's chief negotiator, said the offensives aimed at the separatists, not the Abu Sayyaf.<br />"The military is making it more difficult for the peace process to continue," he said. He criticized what he called a "devious campaign" to link the front with the Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group notorious for kidnapping and beheading its victims.<br />Peace talks collapsed two months ago after the government backed out of an agreement to provide the Muslim rebels with their own territory. The Philippine Supreme Court later ruled that the agreement was unconstitutional.<br />Since then, fighting has been occurring between the front and the military, displacing more than 300,000 Filipinos from their homes. This prompted third-party observers to appeal to both sides to resume negotiations.<br />"An immediate cessation of the hostilities is of the utmost urgency, not only to re-launch the peace process, but to allow relief efforts and rehabilitation" of the refugees, the Organization of the Islamic Conference said last week.<br />The military had earlier said that it would not stop with the offensive.<br />"Our objective is clear: to get them, specifically their leaders," Lieutenant Colonel Ernesteo Torres, an army spokesman, said last month, referring to the Abu Sayyaf and the Islamic front.<br />Despite efforts to flush the Abu Sayyaf from the southern Philippines, it continues to remain the country's biggest terrorism threat. Last month, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had to cancel a trip to the south after the terrorists shot at a convoy of vehicles with American soldiers on it.<br />U.S. troops have been stationed in the region since 2002, helping in humanitarian programs and in counterterrorism training for Philippine soldiers.<br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><strong>Pakistan raids group linked to Mumbai attacks</strong><br />By Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: In an operation that appeared to be Pakistan's first concrete response to demands by India and the United States that it take action against the militants suspected of orchestrating the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan has raided a camp run by a "banned" militant group and arrested a number of suspects, according to a Pakistani official and an American military official.<br />The attack appeared to be on a camp run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani militant group that long focused on the disputed territory of Kashmir and that has been accused by India of being in control of the attackers in Mumbai as they terrorized the city during a three-day siege last month in which 163 people were killed.<br />The U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials say Lashkar has quietly gained strength in recent years with the help of Pakistan's main spy service, assistance that has allowed the group to train and raise money while other militants have been under siege.<br />A spokesman for Lashkar said Monday that Pakistani security forces had started a crackdown on his group in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, but did not say anything specific about who or how many people had been detained. The Pakistan government has not provided details of the military raid.<br />U.S. officials said that there was no hard evidence to link the Pakistani spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to the Mumbai attacks. But the ISI has shared intelligence with Lashkar and provided protection for it, the officials said, and investigators are focusing on one Lashkar leader who they believe is a main liaison with the spy service and the mastermind of the attacks.<br />As a result of the assault on Mumbai, India's financial center, U.S. counterterrorism and military officials said they were reassessing their view of Lashkar and believe it to be more capable and a greater threat than they had recognized.<br />"People are having to go back and re-look at all the connections," said one U.S. counterterrorism official, who was among several officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still in progress.<br />Pakistani officials have denied any government connection to the attacks in late November.<br />While Al Qaeda has provided financing and other support to Lashkar in the past, the links between the two groups remain murky.<br />Senior Qaeda figures have used Lashkar safe houses as hide-outs, but Lashkar has not merged its operations with Al Qaeda or adopted the Qaeda brand, as did an Algerian terrorist group that changed its name to Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb, U.S. officials said.<br />Unlike Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, who have been forced to retreat to mountain redoubts in western Pakistan's tribal areas, Lashkar commanders have been able to operate more or less in the open. They do so behind the public face of a popular charity, with the implicit support of official Pakistani patrons, U.S. officials said.<br />Indian and U.S. officials said they believed that one senior Lashkar commander in particular, Zarrar Shah, was one of the group's primary liaisons to the ISI. Investigators in India also are examining whether Shah, a communications specialist, helped plan and carry out the attacks in Mumbai.<br />"He's a central character in this plot," one U.S. official said.<br />On Monday, in the first hours after news of the raid emerged on Pakistani television and in news agencies, a senior Pakistani security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that a man suspected of being the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks had been arrested. But the same official said later that even though about a dozen people had been arrested in the raid at the camp, the suspect, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, had not been arrested.<br />Lakhvi has been accused by Indian officials of being in control of the attackers in Mumbai. Indian and Western investigators said he commanded the attack and then kept in communication with the gunmen by cell and satellite phone as they rounded up guests in two hotels, killing some of them. Lakhvi is an operational leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba.<br />For years, U.S. intelligence analysts have described Lashkar as a group with deadly, yet limited, ambitions in South Asia. But terrorism experts said it clearly had been inspired by the success that Al Qaeda experienced in rallying supporters for a global jihad.<br />"This is a group that years ago evolved from having a local and parochial agenda and bought into Al Qaeda's vision," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor and terrorism expert at Georgetown University who has closely followed Lashkar for several years.<br />Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means "army of the pure," was founded more than 20 years ago with the help of Pakistani intelligence officers as a proxy force to challenge Indian control of Muslim-dominated Kashmir.<br />Indian officials have implicated Lashkar operatives in a July 2006 attack on commuter trains in Mumbai and in a December 2001 attack against Parliament. But in recent years, Lashkar fighters have turned up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting and killing Americans, senior U.S. military officials have said.<br />While European and Middle Eastern governments - as well as the United States - crack down on Al Qaeda's finances, Lashkar still has a flourishing fund-raising organization in South Asia and the Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, counterterrorism officials say. The group primarily uses its charity wing, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, to raise money, ostensibly for causes in Pakistan.<br />The Mumbai attacks, which included foreigners among its targets, seemed to fit the group's evolving emphasis and determination to elevate its profile in the global jihadi constellation.<br />Lashkar also has a history of using local extremist groups for knowledge and tactics in its operations. Investigators in Mumbai are following leads suggesting that Lashkar used the Students' Islamic Movement of India, a fundamentalist group that advocates establishing an Islamic state in India, for early reconnaissance and logistical help.<br />An Indian man arrested in connection with the attacks, Fahim Ahmad Ansari, had been described beforehand by Indian newspaper reports as a former member of the Students' Islamic Movement who met with Lashkar operatives in Dubai in 2003.<br />U.S. officials said investigators were looking closely at the likelihood that the attackers had some kind of local support in Mumbai.<br />Hoffman said that Lashkar had developed particularly sophisticated Internet operations, and that intelligence officials believed the group had forged ties with regional terrorist organizations like Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia by assisting them with their own Internet strategies.<br />Although the government of Pakistan officially banned Lashkar in 2002, U.S. officials say that the group has maintained close ties to the Pakistani intelligence service even since that date. U.S. spy agencies have documented regular meetings between the ISI and Lashkar operatives, in which the two organizations have shared intelligence about Indian operations in Kashmir.<br />"It goes beyond information sharing to include some funding and training," said a U.S. official who follows the group closely. "And these are not rogue ISI elements. What's going on is done in a fairly disciplined way."<br />Still, officials in Washington said they had yet to unearth any direct link between the Pakistan spy agency and the most recent attacks in Mumbai.<br />"I don't think that there is compelling evidence of involvement of Pakistani officials," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on CNN's "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer" on Sunday. "But I do think that Pakistan has a responsibility to act."<br />She said evidence showed "that the terrorists did use territory in Pakistan."<br />A U.S. counterterrorism official said: "It's one thing to say the ISI is tied to Lashkar and quite another to say the ISI was behind the Mumbai attacks. The evidence at this point doesn't get you there."<br />Moreover, some terrorism analysts said that Lashkar's dependence on its original sponsors had lessened in recent years.<br />With wealthy donors in no short supply, an established recruiting pipeline and a series of training camps, Lashkar "has outgrown ISI's support," said Urmila Venugopalan, a South Asia analyst for Jane's Information Group.<br />The protection that Lashkar operatives enjoy inside Pakistan has allowed the group to thrive at the same time that Al Qaeda's leaders have been forced to hide in caves and occasionally transmit messages to one another using donkey couriers.<br />Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, Jane Perlez and Salman Masood from Islamabad and Yusuf Jameel from Srinagar, Kashmir. Reporting was contributed by Waqar Gillani in Lahore and Margot Williams in New York. </p><p></p><p>**********************</p><p></p><p><strong>UK health service wants no products of child labor</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />LONDON: Britain's state-funded health service on Monday published plans to ensure hospitals know where their surgical instruments are coming from, after acknowledging that some may be produced by child laborers in Pakistan.<br />Many of the scalpels and forceps used in Britain, the U.S. and other Western countries are manufactured in the Pakistani city of Sialkot, which has more than 2,000 instrument makers.<br />Surgical instruments are among Pakistan's major exports, but labor activists say many are made in tiny workshops by child laborers who earn just a few dollars (euros) a month.<br />The proposed National Health Service guidelines call on hospitals to introduce "ethical procurement" policies and to consider labor standards when they are buying goods.<br />Research published in June found there was a "significant risk" some health service goods and services came from places where labor standards had been abused. The report said it was ironic that "the labor standards in the supply chains of products procured by the NHS to administer health care in the U.K. may be unnecessarily damaging the health of workers in those supply chains."<br />UNICEF, the U.N.'s children's agency, estimates there are 3.6 million working boys and girls under age 14 in Pakistan, mostly engaged in carpet weaving, brick making, agriculture and deep sea fishing.<br />Various U.N.-backed initiatives try to encourage them to go to school part-time, and the Sialkot surgical-supply industry insists most manufacturers do not exploit their workers.<br />The issue gained attention in Britain after a London surgeon, Mahmood Bhutta, wrote about it in the British Medical Journal two years ago. Bhutta said surgical instruments should be bound by the same fair trade standards as coffee or bananas.<br />Health Minister Ben Bradshaw said Britain's health service spent 20 billion pounds ($30 billion) a year on goods and services, and was "in a strong position to influence improvement in labor standards across health care supply chains."<br />A consultation on the guidelines runs until April. They could take effect by mid-2009 but would be voluntary.</p><p></p><p>*********************</p><p></p><p><strong>OPINION</strong></p><p><strong>Why the terrorists hate India</strong><br />By Patrick French<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />LONDON: As an open, diverse and at times chaotic democracy, India has long been a target for terrorism. From the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi in 1948 to the recent attacks in Mumbai, it has faced attempts to change its national character by force. None has yet succeeded. Despite its manifest social failings, India remains the developing world's most successful experiment in free, plural, large-scale political collaboration.<br />The Mumbai attacks were transformative, because in them, unlike previous outrages in India, the rich were caught: not only Western visitors but also Indian bankers, business owners and socialites. This had symbolic power, as the terrorists knew it would.<br />However, I recently saw a televised forum in which members of the public vented their fury against India's politicians for their failure to act, and it soon became apparent the victims were poor as well as rich. One survivor, Shameem Khan - instantly identifiable by his name and his embroidered cap as a Muslim - told how six members of his extended family had been shot and killed. Still in shock, he said: "A calamity has fallen on my house. What shall I do?" His neighbors had helped pay for the funeral. Like most of India's 150 million Muslims, Khan is staunchly patriotic. The city's Muslim Council refused to let the terrorists be buried in its graveyards.<br />When these well-planned attacks unfolded, it was clear that they almost certainly originated from Pakistan. Yet the reaction of the world's news media was to rely on the outmoded idea of Pakistan-India hyphenation - as if a thriving and prosperous democracy must be compared only with an imploded state that is having to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund. Was Pakistan to blame, asked many pundits, or was India at fault because of its treatment of minority groups?<br />The terrorists themselves offered little explanation, and made no clear demands. Yet even as the siege continued, commentators were making chilling deductions on their behalf: Their actions were because of American foreign policy, or Afghanistan, or the harassment of Indian Muslims. Personal moral responsibility was removed from the players in the atrocity. When officials said the killers came from the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, it was taken as proof that India's misdeeds in the Kashmir Valley were the cause.<br />These misdeeds are real, as are India's other social and political failings. But there is no sane reason to think Lashkar-e-Taiba would shut down if the situation in Kashmir improved. Its literature is much concerned with establishing a caliphate in Central Asia, and murdering those who insult the Prophet.<br />Its leader, Hafiz Saeed, who lives on a large estate outside Lahore bought with Saudi money, goes about his business with minimal interference from the Pakistani government.<br />Lashkar-e-Taiba is part of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders (the Qaeda franchise). Saeed's hatreds are catholic - his bugbears include Hindus, Shiites and women who wear bikinis. He regards democracy as "a Jewish and Christian import from Europe," and considers suicide attacks to be in accordance with Islam. He has a wider strategy: "At this time our contest is Kashmir. Let's see when the time comes. Our struggle with the Jews is always there."<br />As he told his followers in Karachi at a rally in 2000: "There can't be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them - cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy."<br />In short, he has an explicit political desire to create a state of war between the religious communities in India and beyond.<br />Like other exponents of Islamist extremism, he has a view of the world that does not tolerate doubt or ambiguity: His opponents are guilty, and must be killed. I have met other radicals like Saeed, men who live in a dimension of absolute certainty and have contempt for the moral relativism of those who seek to excuse them. To achieve their ends, it is necessary to indoctrinate boys in the hatred of Hindus, Americans and Jews, and dispatch them on suicide missions. It is unlikely that any of the militants who were sent from Karachi to Mumbai - young men from poor rural backgrounds whose families were paid for their sacrifice - had ever met a Jew before they tortured and killed Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, at the Mumbai Jewish center.<br />America's so-called war on terror has been, in many respects, a catastrophe. In Pakistan, it has been chronically mishandled, leading to the radicalization of areas in the north that were previously peaceful. Yet links between the military, the intelligence services and the jihadis have remained intact: Lashkar-e-Taiba is merely one of a number of extremist organizations that continues to function.<br />The prime solution to the current crisis is to force the closing of terrorist training outfits in Pakistan, and apply the law to those who organize and finance operations like the Mumbai massacres. Hafiz Saeed and other suspects should be sent to India to stand trial. The remark by Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari that he did not think the terrorists came from Pakistan would be funny if it were not tragic.<br />The United States gives around $1 billion a year in military aid to Islamabad; that is leverage. It does the people of Pakistan no favors for Washington to allow their leaders to continue with the strategy of perpetual diversion, asking India to be patient while denying the true nature of the immediate terrorist threat. I received this e-mail message recently from a friend in Karachi: "Nowhere can get more depressing than Pakistan these days - barring some African failed states and Afghanistan."<br />Patrick French is the author, most recently, of "The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul."</p><p><br /><br />**********************<br /><br /><strong>Turmoil in India to drive fund houses' joint ventures</strong><br />By Nishant Kumar and Jeffrey Hodgson<br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />MUMBAI: Global financial turmoil and recent attacks in Mumbai will likely spur foreign fund houses still looking to enter the market in India to hedge their risks with local partnerships rather than going it alone.<br />Factors like high brand building costs and knowledge of local issues have already driven most international players to favor joint ventures over so-called greenfield operations, those that are starting from scratch, as they seek to tap the relatively fast-growing and savings-rich Indian economy.<br />The requirement that foreign fund houses put up $50 million in capital for a wholly owned operation, compared with a tenth of that or less for a joint venture, is also seen as fueling the trend as Western money managers seek to preserve cash.<br />Vivek Prasad, a partner at Price Waterhouse in Mumbai, said: "There is liquidity crunch, so people would rather partner than commit that much of their resources. If you can still get a share of India pie with $5 million as opposed to $50 million, that's a no-brainer."<br />Even before the attacks on the Indian financial capital, in which 163 people died along with nine suspected terrorists, foreign firms eyeing the country's 35-member fund industry had to weigh the impact of a drop of more than 50 percent this year in its once high-flying stocks.<br />But industry watchers said this has actually helped to spur interest among some international money managers, who had balked at paying the high prices demanded after a bull market helped industry assets quadruple from 2002 to 2007.<br />Last month, Religare Enterprises agreed to buy Lotus Mutual Fund from the Singapore state investor Temasek and Sabre Capital Worldwide, a firm based in London, for about 1 percent to 2 percent of assets under management, according to media reports.<br />By comparison, Infrastructure Development Finance agreed to buy Standard Chartered's Indian fund unit for about 6 percent of assets in March. And a year ago, Eton Park, a hedge fund, paid about 13 percent of assets for a piece of Reliance Capital's fund arm.<br />Rajan Ghotgalkar, the India country head of the U.S. firm Principal Financial Group, said to Reuters last month that it was looking to acquire a fund firm to expand its existing operation. It has a fund venture with Punjab National Bank and Vijaya Bank.<br />"Valuations have moderated," Ghotgalkar said. "It's a better time to buy now."<br />Marna Whittington, the chief operating officer of Allianz Global Investors, a unit of the insurer Allianz SE, also said to Reuters recently that Allianz Global is actively pursuing a joint fund venture in India. Allianz SE operates a life insurer in partnership with Bajaj Auto.<br />While the Indian economy is slowing, with many economists forecasting a growth rate around 7 percent this fiscal year, this is still far better than the contraction many Western economies are facing.<br />A savings rate of more than 32 percent, much of which is in low-yielding bank deposits, an emerging middle class and the world's second largest population also make the market a powerful long-term lure to international fund management firms.<br />Prasad of Price Waterhouse said that even weighed against the recent attacks, few firms could pass up India's market potential.<br />"I am sure some of these people would have taken the next flight home," he said. "But I do not think, and I have spoken to a number of clients, it is going to defer their India plans."<br />Unlike China, which requires foreign fund houses to form joint ventures and caps ownership at 49 percent, India allows stand-alone operations, a route favored by the global fund giant Fidelity and Mirae Asset of South Korea.<br />But with the exception of the Indian arm of Franklin Resources, which operated as a joint venture till 2006, all of India's top 10 players are homegrown or partnerships. They include ventures co-owned by Standard Life, Prudential and Sun Life Financial.<br />Joint ventures and local firms like Reliance Capital, whose fund unit is the industry leader, each controlled about 43 percent of the market.<br />By comparison, 10 foreign players including Fidelity had just a 14 percent share at the end of November compared with 18 percent a year ago.<br />"India continues to be a very good market for the asset management players," said Ashvin Parekh, national leader of financial services at Ernst & Young. "If they do take good Indian partners with either reach or customer base or with good brand name, they will be better off." </p><p></p><p></p><p>*****************</p><p><strong>Congress party surprises in Indian state elections</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />India's governing party won two state elections and was leading in a third Monday, defying predictions of a political battering after an economic slowdown and the militant attacks on Mumbai.<br />Counting went on for five state elections, mostly in central and west India, with final results due by late Monday.<br />The votes come before national elections in the first half of 2009 that will pit a coalition led by the governing Congress party against an opposition alliance led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.<br />Congress held on to Delhi. Meanwhile, the BJP conceded control of the western state of Rajasthan. Incumbents traditionally fare badly in Indian elections.<br />Congress also had an unassailable lead in the remote and small northeastern state of Mizoram, where it was fighting a regional party. The BJP has a similarly commanding lead in Madhya Pradesh and looked close to returning to power in Chhattisgarh.<br />The outcome is a boost for Congress, which has suffered a string of state election defeats against the BJP in the last year amid rising inflation and perceived weak leadership.<br />"This is the beginning of the decline of the BJP," said a Congress spokesman, Veerappa Moily.<br />It is also a setback for the BJP, which had hoped its policy of criticizing Congress for being soft on terrorism would reap political dividends.<br />"The BJP's terror plank hasn't worked. People have started to see through it. Ironically it backfired after the most horrific terror attacks," said a political analyst, Amulya Ganguli, referring to the attacks last month in Mumbai that killed at least 171 people.<br />Criticism of the government for security lapses appeared to have little impact on voters. The BJP had taken out front-page advertisements criticizing Congress as unable to defend the nation.<br /><br /><br />**********************<br /><br /><strong>Suspects in 9/11 plot attempt to plead guilty</strong><br />By William Glaberson<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba: All five of the Guantánamo prisoners charged with planning and coordinating the Sept. 11 attacks have asked a military judge to accept their confessions in full.<br />The request appeared to be intended to cut short any effort to try them, and to challenge the U.S. government to put them to death. But the military judge in the case, Colonel Steven Henley of the army, indicated that he would not accept guilty pleas from the men right away, and that formal proceedings to do so may be a while off.<br />At the start of what had been expected to be routine proceedings Monday, Henley disclosed that he had received a written statement from the five men. The statement said the five planned to stop filing written motions and instead "to announce our confessions to plea in full."<br />Henley began methodically questioning each of the five men to determine if they agreed with the joint statement, which was written after lengthy meetings among them that military officials had permitted in recent months. The statement was submitted Nov. 4, but the judge said he did not read it until Sunday because he was not at the secure facility here before then, and he cannot examine classified materials related to the detainee cases anywhere else.<br />As he questioned one of the men, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has described himself as the mastermind of the 2001 attacks, Henley asked whether Mohammed was prepared to enter pleas to the charges against him today. "Yes," Mohammed answered brusquely.<br />"We don't want to waste our time with motions," Mohammed said. "All of you are paid by the U.S. government. I'm not trusting any American."<br />Another of the prisoners, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, told the judge, "We the brothers, all of us, would like to submit our confession." Shibh is charged with being the primary contact with the Sept. 11 hijackers.<br />Military prosecutors have sought the death penalty against all five men.<br />Henley directed the prosecutors to provide him with a legal brief on whether the Military Commissions Act, which governs the proceedings here, would permit the imposition of the death penalty without a vote of the military panel that hears cases here, much as a jury votes on cases in civilian court.<br />Because the proceedings this week were to consider legal motions to be decided by the judge alone, there was no panel present Monday.<br />In addition, the question of whether two of the five men are mentally competent to represent themselves arose again in the hearing.<br />Those two prisoners are represented by lawyers appointed by the court, who have raised the competency issue. The other three, including Mohammed, are representing themselves, with advice from civilian and military lawyers.<br />The judge ruled that he would permit the three men who represent themselves to withdraw all legal motions filed on their behalf, which would set the stage for a guilty plea. But he said that the two whose competency is in question, Shibh and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, would not be permitted to make decisions about their cases Monday. "That may happen at some point in the future," Henley said.<br />He directed the two men's appointed lawyers to proceed in arguing a series of legal motions that had been on the commission's agenda. After a recess, the commission was to reconvene at 1 p.m.<br />The judge also indicated at the hearing that even if he agreed to accept the pleas, from some or all of the five men, he would hold a later session to examine the full facts behind the detainees' decisions to plead guilty.<br />The unusual events were not a complete surprise. There had been indications for months that the prisoners were resisting working with the military lawyers assigned to represent them. In addition, a move to cut short the proceedings had been seen by some lawyers working in the system here as a way Mohammed and the other men could draw maximum public attention to their cases and, potentially, to make statements about their political views without the government having the opportunity to detail their acts, including the specifics of the plot that caused the deaths of nearly 3,000 people, in court.<br />The American political calendar may also be a factor. President-elect Barack Obama has said he planned to close down the Cuban camp and the military commissions that have been used by the Bush administration and to direct that many prisoners now held in Guantánamo Bay be prosecuted instead in the civilian American legal system.<br />If that happens in the first days of the Obama administration, the Monday proceedings will have been the prisoners' last opportunity to challenge the widely criticized system here with guilty pleas that could yield them the opportunity for what they see as martyrdom. </p><p></p><p></p><p>**********************</p><p><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></p><p><strong>Tortured justice in America<br /></strong>Monday, December 8, 2008<br />America's courts continue to grapple with the abuses committed by President Bush's administration in the name of fighting terrorism.<br />The extent of the damage to American liberties, and how lasting it will be, will be told in part by the outcome of two cases that are to be heard by the federal courts.<br />On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that turns on Bush's claim that he can order people living in the United States to be detained by the military indefinitely without charges. The case involves Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was in the United States legally. He was declared an enemy combatant in mid-2003 and has been held in a U.S. Navy brig since then.<br />The detention was upheld by an appeals court panel, which should be quickly and definitively reversed by the Supreme Court. This intolerable reading of the law would leave a president free to suspend the rights of anyone, including American citizens.<br />The other, equally notorious case is being heard on Tuesday by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Manhattan. It involves Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian with no ties to terrorism who became a victim of the Bush team's lawless policy of "extraordinary rendition" - the outsourcing of interrogations to foreign governments known to torture prisoners.<br />Arar's ordeal began in 2002, when he was seized by federal agents as he tried to change planes on his way home to Canada from a family vacation. After being held incommunicado in solitary confinement and subjected to harsh interrogation without proper access to a lawyer, he was "rendered" to Syria, where he was tortured. He was locked up for almost a year in a dank underground cell the size of a grave before he was finally let go.<br />The Canadian government later declared that it had provided erroneous information about Arar to the American authorities. It apologized to him in 2007 and agreed to pay him $10 million.<br />Last June, the Homeland Security Department's inspector general, Richard Skinner, and its former inspector general, Clark Ervin, said at a congressional hearing that U.S. officials may have violated federal criminal laws in sending Arar to Syria, knowing he was likely to be tortured.<br />Yet that same month, a three-judge federal appeals panel dismissed Arar's civil rights lawsuit on flimsy national security grounds and, absurdly, his failure to seek court review of his rendition within the time period specified in immigration law. In essence, the 2-to-1 ruling rewarded the administration's egregiously bad behavior in denying Arar's initial requests to see a lawyer, and then lying to his attorney about his whereabouts, which obstructed his access to the courts.<br />In addition, by treating this as an immigration case, the ruling overlooked reality. The salient issue is the improper and unconstitutional tactics used by U.S. officials to obtain information they wrongly thought Arar possessed. That point was emphasized by Judge Robert Sack in his cogent dissenting opinion from the first appeals court ruling.<br />We took it as an encouraging sign when the appellate court took the rare step of scheduling Tuesday's rehearing before its entire bench before an appeal was filed. A decision allowing Arar's case to proceed would recognize the court's essential role in protecting constitutional rights. It also would firmly reject the Bush administration's seamy efforts to frustrate accountability for executive branch excesses.<br />The Obama administration will then have to decide whether to defend the indefensible when the case comes to trial. That will provide an interesting test of the new Justice Department's commitment to due process.<br /><br />**********************<br /><br /><strong>Indictments unsealed in Blackwater shootings<br /></strong>By Ginger Thompson<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: In the first public airing of a case that remains the source of international outrage, the Justice Department on Monday unsealed indictments here against five guards working for the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, accusing them of manslaughter and misuse of their firearms for the 2007 shooting in a Baghdad traffic circle that killed 17 Iraqi civilians.<br />Prosecutors also announced that one guard, Jeremy Ridgeway, 35, of California, has pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter. Court documents said Ridgeway told investigators that he and the other guards improperly used deadly force against drivers and pedestrians who "posed no threat to the convoy" of Blackwater contractors.<br />The documents said, "When defendant Ridgeway fired his assault rifle into the Kia sedan and the white Chevrolet Celebrity, he acted knowingly, unlawfully and purposefully, and not by accident, inadvertence or mistake, or with any legal excuse or justification."<br />Meanwhile, the five others, all of them decorated veterans who had previously served the United States in trouble spots around the world, surrendered together at a federal courthouse in Salt Lake City, Utah, where their attorneys accused the government of overstepping their authority and of tarnishing their clients' records of honorable service.<br />Mark Hulkower, an attorney for one of the defendants, said the men surrendered in Utah, a relatively conservative, pro-military area, because they hoped to find a jury pool where "people are more sympathetic to the experiences of coming under enemy fire."<br />Legal experts characterized the move as a long shot, but said it suggested that the defendants were trying to fend off the prosecution on technical grounds before an examination of the events at the center of the case.<br />Laws covering the actions of private contractors remain both unclear and untested, legal experts said.<br />Prosecutors said charges against the contractors were filed under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which has been used to prosecute military personnel for crimes committed abroad.<br />In 2004, the law was amended to cover personnel whose work provides support to military personnel overseas. Prosecutors said they would argue that the amendment covers security contractors working for the State Department in Iraq. The government will apparently argue in court that because Iraq is a war zone, Blackwater's diplomatic security work might have been handled by the U.S. military if it had not been outsourced to contractors.<br />The indictments are the culmination of a series of multi-pronged investigations that were started Sept. 16, 2007, when a Blackwater convoy opened fire in the busy Nisour Square in Baghdad. The guards told investigators they believed they were under attack. Investigators found no evidence of the guards' accounts.<br />Joseph Persichini Jr., the assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington field office, said that the Blackwater shooting case was one of the most difficult investigations ever conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A team of 10 special agents deployed to Iraq for four weeks, with four follow-up trips to the country. More than 250 interviews of witnesses were conducted, and 200 pieces of physical evidence have been gathered for the trial, he said.<br />Jeffrey Taylor, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said at a news conference Monday at the Justice Department that the government believed it had answers to the questions of jurisdiction and venue that are expected to be raised by the defense.<br />He also said that the government "takes no pleasure" in prosecuting those who help defend their fellow Americans overseas, but that the shootings in Nisour Square represented a blatant disregard for human life of non-Americans.<br />"We honor the brave service of the many U.S. contractors who are employed to support the mission of our armed forces in extremely difficult circumstances," Taylor said. "Today, we honor that service by holding accountable the very few individuals who abused that employment by committing some very serious crimes against dozens of innocent civilians."<br /><br />**********************<br /><br /><strong>Life, liberty and GPS: What technology means in Egypt<br /></strong>By Noam Cohen<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />Among international outrages, depriving citizens of personalized maps seems far down on the list.<br />Still, that was the condition put on the introduction of Apple's 3G iPhone in Egypt. The government demanded that Apple disable the phone's global-positioning system, arguing that GPS was a military prerogative.<br />The company apparently complied, most likely taking a cue from the telecommunication companies that sell the phone there, said Ahmed Gabr, who runs a blog in Egypt, gadgetsarabia.com, and wrote about the iPhone's release there. "The point is that using a GPS unit you can get accurate coordinates of any place, and thus military bases and so on could be easily tagged," he wrote in an e-mail message.<br />I met Gabr last summer in Alexandria, Egypt, at the worldwide conference for Wikipedia. He was typical of the young Egyptians in attendance - hungry for new technology, hopeful about what it would mean for their country.<br />As much as any country, however, Egypt illustrates the push-me-pull-you nature of technology under a government that is wary of it.<br />Young people flock to Facebook, in a way I never could have imagined.<br />In the largest Arab country in the world, Facebook was a way for the educated elite to reach out to one another and to those who had left the country for an even more elite education.<br />Andrew Bossone, an American in Cairo who writes about technology, said that despite its expense, the iPhone in Egypt was "really popular - everyone knows the iPhone." In addition to editing a technology magazine, he teaches at the American University in Cairo. "One of my students who comes from a wealthy family has the iPhone, and one of my designers, who is not rich, bought it on credit," he said.<br />Bossone said he thought the government would relent on issues like GPS because it would side with business even at the expense of security concerns.<br />"The economy is itself a security issue," he said. "The slower the economy grows, the more people become discontented, and that is a security issue."<br />But thus far, each time technology has promised to help introduce democracy to the country, the young peoples' hopes have been dashed. A movement for political reform that used Facebook to organize protests over the spring was shut down. The authorities cracked down, jailing many of its organizers. In the last few weeks, a blogger affiliated with the radical group the Muslim Brotherhood was arrested for his writings, according to the Arabic Network for Human Rights. Another blogger is being held in a military camp, the group says.<br />It is enough to make one wonder if new technologies - the personal computer, the Web, the smartphone - will help set us free or merely give us that illusion.<br />Apple modified its phone without any public acknowledgment. In a series of e-mail exchanges and brief telephone conversations, an Apple spokeswoman detailed the success of the iPhone rollout around the world - a total of 13 million phones shipped since it was introduced in June 2007, and more than 200 million applications downloaded.<br />But she did not address how the iPhone came to be disabled or whether Apple had a policy it followed in modifying its products to meet the demands of governments worldwide.<br />This issue remains acutely relevant as Apple negotiates the introduction of the iPhone to China, whose estimated 500 million users make it the big kahuna of cellphone markets. Some reports say that in addition to issues like revenue sharing, there has been talk about modifying the phone so as not to use the 3G network or offer Wi-Fi capability.<br />Gabr described in his e-mail message what he considered to be the faulty rationale for the policy in Egypt.<br />"From a technical point of view, this is totally pointless because Google Maps works flawlessly here - you can even get a clear snap (with accurate coordinates) of places you're not supposed to see."<br />As an aside, he said that months ago he "bought an American iPhone 3G via eBay" with full functionality. "Cheaper, earlier and without compromise," he wrote, signing his note with a self-satisfied smiley-face emoticon.<br />I must admit, I didn't exactly think that the right to GPS was one of the basic freedoms. But Arvind Ganesan, director of the business and human rights program of Human Rights Watch, placed the issue in a larger context.<br />First, he described freedom of information as part of the broader, better known, freedom of expression. Transparency about the government's budget, for example, can be crucial to eliminating corruption and instituting democratic reforms.<br />Second, he argued that it was important for technology companies to set principles and follow them. "Here is the big question for Apple: Is this an ad hoc approach, or is there a fundamental policy, balancing the freedom of expression and information with the demands of the government?"<br />It is easy to get swept up in the utopianism embedded in new technologies. That we will be more politically engaged because of the organizing and fund-raising tools of social networking; that we will think greater thoughts now that anyone can have access to nearly everything ever written; that our tribal hatreds will melt away as the world recognizes that we are all connected.<br />Even those like Ganesan, who see technology abused, are cautiously hopeful. "Technologies do not hold people accountable. They give people the tools to hold people accountable." But he added: "We believe as a human rights group that the Internet can have an opening and transforming effect."<br />When Human Rights Watch was founded in 1978, he said, people were "smuggling letters by hand from the Soviet Union - that was how the world found out about a dissident." Today, there is a range of tools for spreading the word, from blogs to e-mail to YouTube videos.<br />"We may not know what the maximum impact of openness is," he said. "But we do know that in the most closed places the worst things happen." </p><p></p><p>*******************</p><p></p><p><strong>Congressional panel wants inquiry into wiretapping of Muslim scholar</strong><br />By Eric Lichtblau and James Risen<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: A U.S. congressional oversight panel plans to ask the National Security Agency to start an investigation into new evidence that the agency illegally wiretapped a Muslim scholar in Northern Virginia and concealed the eavesdropping during a 2005 trial in which the scholar was convicted on terrorism charges.<br />Representative Rush Holt, the New Jersey Democrat who is chairman of the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, said in an interview that he planned to ask the inspector general of the NSA to open what would be the first formal investigation by the agency into whether its eavesdropping program had improperly interfered with the right to a fair trial in the United States.<br />Holt said he was responding to new evidence presented to him and other congressional leaders by the Muslim scholar's lawyer indicating that the Bush administration had tried to hide the full extent of the government's illegal spying in the criminal case.<br />If the NSA inspector general begins an inquiry, analysts said, that could also signal a new willingness by the agency, under a new administration, to examine its own operations in the eavesdropping program.<br />President-elect Barack Obama was a critic of the Bush administration's domestic spying program while he was in the Senate and on the campaign trail, and specialists on intelligence matters are waiting to see whether he takes action early in his administration to rein in the program.<br />"I find the allegations troubling," Holt said. His select intelligence panel was created last year by the speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, in response to the Sept. 11 Commission's recommendations to provide more comprehensive congressional oversight of the intelligence community.<br />The scholar, Ali al-Timimi, once a spiritual leader in Northern Virginia and described by prosecutors as a "rock star" in the Islamic fundamentalist world, is now serving a life sentence in prison after he was convicted in 2005 on charges of inciting his Muslim followers to commit acts of violence overseas.<br />Prosecutors described Timimi as the spiritual mentor of a group of young men in Northern Virginia who were convicted of giving material support in Kashmir to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Kashmiri separatist group blamed by India for the recent attacks in Mumbai.<br />Several of the Northern Virginia men received paramilitary training in Pakistan, apparently at the urging of Timimi, but there was no evidence that they had taken part in any terrorist attacks.<br />Lawyers for Timimi maintain that the NSA, without acquiring court-approved warrants, used the eavesdropping operation approved by President George W. Bush weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to tap Timimi's communications. They say that the interceptions might include evidence that would point to his innocence in what they regard as a free-speech case. They also charge that the government has intentionally withheld that material despite repeated requests.<br />The Justice Department has denied that it had any other evidence of eavesdropping against Timimi other than what it turned over to his lawyers. But the federal judge in the case, Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, has expressed increasing annoyance over persistent questions about the NSA's possible role.<br />In an unsealed transcript of an October closed-court hearing in the case, the judge stated that she believed that the government appeared to have committed violations of national rules governing evidence and discovery. She also ordered the government to search for further evidence of its use of secret surveillance operations against Timimi.<br />A review of the public court file in Timimi's case, which includes the titles of classified filings, also strongly indicates that the court has received evidence that the NSA was used to intercept conversations between Timimi and Suliman al-Buthe, a Saudi fundamentalist suspected of having ties to terrorists.<br />At Timimi's trial, prosecutors presented evidence that in a telephone conversation with Buthe, Timimi had celebrated the 2003 destruction of the space shuttle Columbia. But the government has never publicly acknowledged that it used the NSA program to intercept conversations between the two men.<br />In a letter sent Thursday to Holt and other members of the congressional intelligence committees, Jonathan Turley, a lawyer for Timimi, said that a classified filing given to the judge, Brinkema, had "revealed that some of the interceptions (that were specifically sought) did in fact exist."<br /></p><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Lebanon losing battle to keep the lights on<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent<br />A candle flickering in her darkened home, Fouada Hawi rails against the daily 10-hour power cuts that Lebanon's ailing electricity utility inflicts on her.<br />"It's unbearable," said the headscarved mother. "No one has money to buy fuel for generators, so you have to live by candle light. You have to put up with everything in this country, you work and you are patient, but nothing changes."<br />Many developing countries have power problems, but Lebanon's go beyond mere technical issues, a World Bank report issued this year suggests, pointing to corruption and vested interests.<br />It says the electricity sector's woes are typical of countries where "there are multiple beneficiaries of the dysfunctional status quo ... ranging from corruption in payments flows or procurement, to buying of voters through free electricity, to profiteering from energy shortages."<br />Hawi, 33, lives with her husband and child in Ouzai, just south of Beirut -- where luckier residents have still had to endure three hours without power a day for the last two years.<br />Anger over the blackouts turned violent in January when army troops shot dead eight protesters in the mainly Shi'ite southern suburbs, fuelling wider political turmoil.<br />Tensions have calmed since rival factions reached a deal on a national unity government in May, but the chronic malaise gripping the electricity sector is not so readily cured.<br />Nor can the drain on the public purse be easily plugged. Subsidies cost the equivalent of 4 percent of Lebanon's Gross Domestic Product last year, the World Bank estimates.<br />Lebanon built two gas-fired power plants in 1996, but they still lack a gas supply and run on expensive diesel instead. Older turbines use the costliest grade of fuel oil.<br />State-owned Electricity du Liban (EdL) can meet only two-thirds of peak demand. More than a third of the power it does generate gets lost in distribution or is not paid for.<br />How to overhaul a utility whose 2,000 staff have an average age of 58, whose tariffs were fixed in 1996 when oil cost $21 a barrel, and whose last audited accounts were issued in 2004?<br />TOO MANY COOKS?<br />Lebanon's fiendishly intricate sectarian power-sharing system makes consensus on reform elusive, and dozens of reports proposing solutions for the problems are gathering dust.<br />The latest energy minister to try his hand acknowledges the scale of the task.<br />"Today we are able to generate about 1,500 megawatts and our peak requirement is estimated at 2,200, so we have a deficit of around 700," Alain Tabourian told Reuters. "That's why we see a lot of power cuts, especially in summer."<br />Back-up generators used by shops, homes and factories hammer in the streets of Beirut during outages -- which cost business around $400 million (271 million pounds) last year, according to the World Bank.<br />Tangled overhead cables reveal illicit links to unmetered supplies. Public sector consumers like ministries, the army, police and hospitals are all supposed to get billed. Few pay.<br />Subsidising EdL cost the government $1.2 billion in the first 10 months of 2008, or more than 15 percent of its spending and a fifth of its revenue, Finance Ministry figures show.<br />The bill for imported fuel surged mainly because world oil prices spiked to nearly $150 a barrel in July before collapsing.<br />But Lebanon, with a $44.5 billion public debt -- among the world's biggest at 170 percent of GDP -- can ill afford such costs, let alone the investments to expand capacity.<br />Existing power stations are obsolete, poorly maintained or unsuited to the fuel available, Tabourian said.<br />Initially Syria was to supply natural gas for the two modern combined-cycle gas turbine units, but now has a shortfall itself, so Lebanon turned to Egypt. After successive delays, the Egyptians are promising the first deliveries in January.<br />"Unfortunately they cut the amount in half compared to what we originally agreed," Tabourian said. "That means only one of the two turbines in one plant will be able to run on gas."<br />"REAL WORD IS THEFT"<br />Tabourian put technical losses in the distribution system at about 15 percent, or double those typical of a well-run network.<br />"Non-technical losses -- the real word is theft -- have gone up to around 22 percent," he said, blaming Lebanon's political upheavals for the reversal of a trend which had curbed these to 17 percent from a crippling 40 percent in 2000-2002.<br />The ministry is considering how to restructure the outdated electricity tariff, without too much pain for poorer consumers -- although even they might pay up if EdL's service improved.<br />"Let them ration or raise the bills a bit, but give us electricity," pleaded Hawi at her home in Ouzai. "People can't live a normal life. School-kids can't study by candle light."<br />Albert Khoury, deputy general manager of a private power distribution concession in Aley, east of Beirut, blamed EdL's management. "Every area in Lebanon would pay if we had clean power and reliable billing and collection."<br />Computerisation at EdL is incomplete. Anyone trying to do business at its Beirut headquarters must navigate a maze of desks where clerks shuffle records in dusty ledgers and files.<br />EdL's chairman, Kamal Hayek, declined to be interviewed.<br />Tabourian said the widely discussed option of privatising EdL was out of reach for now: "First it needs to be corporatised so it can operate on commercial rules, so it can hire and fire."<br />He saw private-public partnerships as the way to combine the public sector's ability to raise affordable financing with the private sector's skills at building and operating projects.<br />Tabourian aims to put in place a strategic power plan for the next 25 years -- a tall order since the government will only last until a parliamentary election next May or June.<br />Such a master plan would set policy on the future energy mix -- coal, natural gas, liquefied natural gas and renewables all have their advocates alongside the fuel oil and diesel now used.<br />But long-term investments need consistent political support.<br />"Unfortunately what we have seen is successive governments often re-examining issues and taking a different tack," said Simon Stolp, a World Bank expert. "What they really need to do is set in train a course of action and pursue it to the end."<br />Khoury champions a bigger private sector role and more emphasis on renewables like solar and wind power.<br />"I hope the government will listen to us," he said. "But they need to listen more to the people who get six-hour power cuts a day, who cannot warm their water or light their homes.<br />"Unfortunately because of the lack of good services in Lebanon, we tend to consider that 24-hour electricity is a luxury. This is quite sad. It is our right."<br />(Editing by Sara Ledwith)<br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>NATO says no Afghan winter lull in fight with Taliban<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By Jonathon Burch<br />NATO forces said on Monday they would not let up the fight against Taliban insurgents during the Afghan winter and coordinated operations with the Pakistani army would likely hamper the militants' traditional rest from combat.<br />Violence rose in eastern Afghanistan in the spring and summer this year as ceasefires between Pakistan and militants on its side of the border gave insurgents more freedom to attack international forces on the Afghan side.<br />But as those peace deals have broken down and the Pakistani army has gone on the offensive, NATO-led forces see the winter months as an opportunity to apply pressure on the militants.<br />U.S. troops from the 101st Airborne, which specialises in helicopter air assaults, have already stepped up operations against insurgent positions before the winter fully sets in, their deputy commander told Reuters on Monday.<br />"Usually here, because of the weather, people hibernate. But now because we're the 101st Airborne Division and we have the mobility, we plan on going after those sanctuaries (in Afghanistan) where the enemy may be trying to wait out the winter," U.S. Brigadier General James McConville said.<br />"The bottom line is, we do not want the enemy to be allowed to rest in Afghanistan during the winter," he said.<br />But while many Taliban fighters stay in Afghanistan, many others make their way to Pakistan to sit out the cold months.<br />Even though heavy snows and poor visibility hamper the use of air power, particularly helicopters, as in previous years, NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) sees the winter as an opportunity to strike militarily and forge ahead with development projects to try to win hearts and minds.<br />"SQUEEZING A JELLYFISH"<br />But when ISAF has launched offensives near the border in the past, the Taliban and their allies have simply slipped over the into Pakistan and where the Pakistani army has pushed into its border tribal regions, militants have crossed into Afghanistan.<br />"It was like squeezing a jellyfish; it would poke out somewhere else," said U.S. Navy Captain Benjamin Brink, in charge of a joint intelligence operations centre between ISAF, Afghanistan and Pakistan.<br />What is new this year though is the better levels of cooperation between ISAF, the Afghan and the Pakistani military culminating in a coordinated operation in Kunar province of northeast Afghanistan and Pakistan's adjacent Bajaur district begun on November 4.<br />"The Pakistanis are forcing them towards the border and we are blocking the border," Brink told Reuters.<br />"The Pakistanis tell us they see a decrease in movement across the border in their direction...and we suspect it's down the other way as well because we are performing blocking operations along the passes and we will continue to do that through the winter," Brink said.<br />The Pakistani military says it has killed more than 1,000 militants in Bajaur alone and there are other smaller operations going on in other parts of the tribal region.<br />As the winter progresses, the Pakistani operations are due to sweep south along the border and ISAF is preparing similar blocking moves, Brink said.<br />While the military plans may be in place, much depends on the fragile diplomatic thaw between Afghanistan and the new civilian government in Pakistan, and also on Pakistan's ability to fight militants in its border regions and at the same time deal with tension with rival India in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks.<br />In Washington, the Pentagon said attacks by Pakistani militants on supply convoys have had an insignificant effect on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.<br />"While some of our equipment has been interrupted in these cross-border movements, we've still been able to resupply U.S. forces in Afghanistan without any impact on their operations," spokesman Bryan Whitman said.<br />The route from Peshawar through the Khyber Pass to the border town of Torkham is the most important supply line for U.S. and NATO forces fighting the Taliban insurgency .<br />(Additional reporting and writing by Jon Hemming; Editing by Angus MacSwan)<br /><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Taliban said in 72 percent of Afghanistan</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By Jon Hemming<br />The Taliban hold a permanent presence in 72 percent of Afghanistan, a think-tank said on Monday, but NATO and the Afghan government rejected the report, saying its figures were not credible.<br />The findings by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) come in the wake of a series of critical reports on Western-led military and development efforts to put an end to the seven-year Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.<br />The U.S. government is conducting a wide-ranging review of strategy aimed at countering the Taliban guerrilla and bombing campaign which analysts agree has grown in both scale and scope in the last year.<br />But while the trends in the ICOS report reflected prevailing sentiment on Afghanistan, many of its findings appeared flawed and contained some glaring errors, security analysts said.<br />"The Taliban now has a permanent presence in 72 percent of the country," ICOS, formerly known as the Senlis Council, said in the report, adding that the figure had risen from 54 percent last year.<br />ICOS is an independent think-tank and research organisation based in Brazil that has researchers in the region.<br />The report defines a permanent presence as an average of one or more insurgent attacks per week over the entire year.<br />According to ICOS, a "permanent presence" then would include many areas of the country where the Taliban traditionally launch a large number of attacks in the spring and summer "fighting season," before melting away during the harsh winter months.<br />"We don't see the figures in this report as being credible at all," said NATO spokesman James Appathurai. "The Taliban are only present in the south and east which is already less than 50 percent of the country."<br />The Afghan government also rejected the report and said "in addition to the questionable methodology of the report and its conceptual confusion, the report has misinterpreted the sporadic, terrorising and media-oriented activities of the Taliban."<br />CLOSING ON KABUL?<br />At least 4,000 people have been killed in fighting in Afghanistan this year, around a third of them civilians, according to United Nations figures.<br />In the traditional Taliban heartlands of the mainly ethnic Pashtun south and east, NATO-led and U.S.-led coalition forces are engaged in daily clashes with militants fighting to overthrow the Afghan government and drive out foreign troops.<br />But the insurgents generally shy away from massed attacks against Afghan and international troops, preferring "shoot and scoot" ambushes, backed by roadside and suicide bomb attacks.<br />The Taliban, said Appathurai, "don't control any areas where Afghan and international forces are present. Whenever Afghan or international forces patrol into an area they simply run away."<br />"So the idea that the Taliban control large swathes of the country is simply impossible," Appathurai said.<br />ICOS said the Taliban are "closing a noose" around the Afghan capital, Kabul, "establishing bases close to the city from which to launch attacks ... Using these bases, the Taliban and insurgent attacks in Kabul have increased dramatically."<br />While the Taliban have built up a presence in provinces just to the south, west and east of Kabul in the last year, the number of insurgent attacks inside the city has actually gone down this year, the U.N. says.<br />That is largely due to a much stronger and highly visible police presence in the city in response to a series of high-profile suicide attacks in Kabul last year.<br />ICOS said Kabul was "virtually Taliban-free a year ago" and said in the city there were "no police checkpoints at night and few in the day."<br />An ICOS map of Kabul also showed the area occupied by the U.S. embassy, the sprawling NATO headquarters and the Afghan presidential palace as one of "high Taliban/criminal activity."<br />(Additional reporting by Golnar Motevalli; Editing by Paul Tait)<br /><br /><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimXJSkztEyVpYabeWGCww-JwYXG_s60SrogZCYWmAQ-tOQhv3TQP2qIon3NdUp1MU7HylfZUFvKh7nK0Uk-MFPLp9i5je99MzLrfFj7WYmSm-R8KFK4GD3fPLzJbqcr1Yc8fiXoxI665k/s1600-h/DSC02791.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770602553460466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimXJSkztEyVpYabeWGCww-JwYXG_s60SrogZCYWmAQ-tOQhv3TQP2qIon3NdUp1MU7HylfZUFvKh7nK0Uk-MFPLp9i5je99MzLrfFj7WYmSm-R8KFK4GD3fPLzJbqcr1Yc8fiXoxI665k/s320/DSC02791.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Obama strives to strike the right inaugural tone</strong><br />By Katharine Q. Seelye<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: President-elect Barack Obama has ordered his first new tuxedo in 15 years for his inaugural celebration. And he has invited the marching band from Punahou School, his high school in Hawaii, to join the parade. More than 1,400 bands have applied; only a few dozen will be chosen.<br />Plans for Obama's inauguration Jan. 20 are slowly taking shape.<br />But how do you achieve the right tone without appearing insensitive at a time of deepening unemployment and financial crisis?<br />As excitement builds, inaugural planners are considering having Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph Biden Jr. take part in some community service in Washington. If Obama and Biden pitch in, they would probably call upon people around the country to do the same in their own towns, which could help mitigate any criticism of the inaugural celebrations.<br />"What we are looking to achieve is a tone that is hopeful," said Linda Douglass, a spokeswoman for Obama's inaugural committee.<br />Some old Washington hands say the staging should not necessarily be elaborate, but it should be festive.<br />"We need it," said Letitia Baldrige, White House social secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy and long-time arbiter of taste in Washington. "It's a great historical moment."<br />The swearing-in of the first black president will be a historic occasion and one that many in the country are anticipating with exceptional pride. Washington is expecting at least 1.5 million people, which would make it the biggest inauguration ever. For the first time, the full length of the National Mall will be opened to accommodate the crowd.<br />But with increasing numbers of people out of work and American soldiers enmeshed in two wars, inaugural planners face the task of balancing respect for the mood of the country while still celebrating Obama's achievement.<br />"You want the appropriate symbolism that goes with the inauguration of a new president," said the historian Robert Dallek. "Obama impresses me as a very intelligent politician who has been so in tune with the mood of the country that I can't imagine he would be so ham-handed as to be unmindful of this, but it would be a gross error to have some kind of huge celebration that seems profligate."<br />One option under consideration, officials said, is for Obama to participate in a national day of community service the day before the inauguration.<br />And one guidepost in terms of atmosphere is Obama's rally on election night in Grant Park in Chicago - celebratory but serious, striking in its simplicity, where Obama tried to raise hopes, but not expectations.<br />"The road ahead will be long," Obama said that night before a crowd of 200,000. "Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term. But America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there."<br />Obama formed his inauguration committee only recently and it has yet to establish a schedule for the day or reveal what events it may be planning after the swearing-in ceremony, which takes place just before noon on the West Front of the Capitol.<br />Much of the day is pro forma, but presidents like to tailor the details on everything from which marching bands join the parade to which inaugural balls will be designated as official. And all will be dissected for meaning.<br />The Obama sense of stagecraft came in for rare criticism during the Democratic National Convention in Denver, when a set of Greek columns dominated the stage at Invesco Field. Obama himself said he was uncomfortable with it, and Republicans took the opportunity to portray Obama as more show than substance, with a healthy ego to boot.<br />Robert Schmuhl, who teaches American Studies at Notre Dame University and wrote "Statecraft and Stagecraft," said that while the inaugural planners had to walk a fine line, the act of ushering in the first black president would be so dramatic in itself that little extra fanfare would be necessary.<br />"You don't need to import artificial Greek columns to heighten the drama," he said.<br />There will be inaugural balls, but it is not clear how many will be official. That number has been rising over the last decades, with Bill Clinton topping out at 14 in 1997; George W. Bush scaled back to nine in 2005, but his was still the most expensive inauguration, costing $42.3 million in private funds.<br />At the same time, dozens of unofficial balls and parties are being planned all over town. They are beyond the control of the Obama team and probably will be less restrained, especially since the District of Columbia is keeping its bars open until 5 a.m. for four nights.<br />It is those galas where the words lavish and raucous will almost certainly apply. One, hosted by the Creative Coalition and seeking corporate sponsorships of up to $150,000, will feature Elvis Costello. Another, hosted by Impact Film Fund at the Fur nightclub and seeking sponsorships of $100,000, is headlined by Kanye West.<br />Obama is starting to put his own touches on the day. His new tuxedo is from Hart Schaffner Marx, a Chicago menswear firm that uses union labor, said Bruce Raynor, president of Unite Here, which represents apparel workers. The news was first reported by WWD, a fashion-industry trade journal.<br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><strong>William Kristol: Small isn't beautiful<br /></strong>Monday, December 8, 2008<br />President-elect Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress are about to serve up a supersized helping of big-government liberalism. Conservatives will be inclined to oppose much of what Obama and his party cook up. And, I believe, rightly so.<br />But conservatives should think twice before charging into battle against Obama under the banner of "small-government conservatism." It's a banner many Republicans and conservatives have rediscovered since the election and have been waving around energetically. Jeb Bush, now considering a Senate run in 2010, even went so far as to tell Politico last month, "There should not be such a thing as a big-government Republican."<br />Really? Jeb Bush was a successful and popular conservative governor of Florida, with tax cuts, policy reforms and privatizations of government services to show for his time in office. Still, in his two terms state spending increased more than 50 percent - a rate faster than inflation plus population growth. It turns out, in the real world of Republican governance, that there aren't a whole lot of small-government Republicans.<br />Five Republicans have won the presidency since 1932: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. Only Reagan was even close to being a small-government conservative. And he campaigned in 1980 more as a tax-cutter and national-defense-builder-upper, and less as a small-government enthusiast in the mold of the man he had supported - and who had lost - in 1964, Barry Goldwater. And Reagan's record as governor and president wasn't a particularly government-slashing one.<br />Even the Republican Party's 1994 Contract With America made only vague promises to eliminate the budget deficit, and proposed no specific cuts in government programs. It focused far more on crime, taxes, welfare reform and government reform. Indeed, the "Republican Revolution" of 1995 imploded primarily because of the Republican Congress' one major small-government-type initiative - the attempt to "cut" (i.e., restrain the growth of) Medicare. George W. Bush seemed to learn the lesson. Prior to his re-election, he proposed and signed into law popular (and, it turned out, successful) legislation, opposed by small-government conservatives, adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.<br />So talk of small government may be music to conservative ears, but it's not to the public as a whole. This isn't to say the public is fond of big-government liberalism. It's just that what's politically vulnerable about big-government liberalism is more the liberalism than the big government. (Besides, the public knows that government's not going to shrink much no matter who's in power.)<br />Now it's true that the size of the government and the modern liberal agenda are connected. It's also true that modern conservatism has to include a strong commitment to limited (though energetic) government and to constitutional (though not necessarily small or weak) government. Still, there's a difference between a conservatism that is concerned with limited and constitutional government and one that focuses on simply opposing big government.<br />So: If you're a small-government conservative, you'll tend to oppose the bailouts, period. If you more or less accept big government, you'll be open to the government's stepping in to save the financial system, or the auto industry. But you'll tend to favor those policies - universal tax cuts, offering everyone a chance to refinance his mortgage, relieving auto makers of burdensome regulations - that, consistent with conservative principles, don't reward irresponsible behavior and don't politicize markets.<br />Similarly, if you're against big government, you'll oppose a huge public works stimulus package. If you think some government action is inevitable, you might instead point out that the most unambiguous public good is national defense. You might then suggest spending a good chunk of the stimulus on national security - directing dollars to much-needed and underfunded defense procurement rather than to fanciful green technologies, making sure funds are available for the needed expansion of the U.S. Army and Marines before rushing to create make-work civilian jobs. Obama wants to spend much of the stimulus on transportation infrastructure and schools. Fine, but lots of schools and airports seem to me to have been refurbished more recently and more generously than military bases I've visited.<br />I can't help but admire some of my fellow conservatives' loyalty to the small-government cause. It reminds me of the nobility of Tennyson's Light Brigade, as it charges into battle: "Theirs but to do and die." Maybe it would be better, though, first to reason why. </p><p>*************</p><p><strong>OPINION</strong></p><p><strong>Most of us are 'mutts'<br /></strong>By Ernest Hebert<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />When President-elect Barack Obama talked about what kind of dog to get for his daughters, one of the possibilities was, "A mutt like me."<br />Obama's words threw me into the past. I was thinking about something my mother smacked me with on her death bed. I'll get to that in a minute.<br />I grew up in Keene, New Hampshire, with a French-Canadian background. I didn't even speak English until I was 5, after I started kindergarten.<br />In the summer of 1958 when I turned 17, I worked at my father's factory. For fun, my dad learned from his co-workers to count to 10 in German, Lithuanian, Polish, Greek and Italian. He taught them to count to 10 in French. It wasn't France French exactly, more like New England Franco-American patois - uh, duh, twah, caht, saynk, siss, set, wit, nuf, dziss.<br />If your people were not recent immigrants, you were a Yankee. Nobody identified themselves strictly as American. In print one might be referred to as, say, a Polish-American. In vernacular conversation, you were Polish. And, of course, there were ethnic and racial slurs best not repeated here. In polite company, black people were negroes. I remember only one negro man in Keene - George Miller, manager of the Latchis Theatre. In those days, young boys addressed men as Mister, but we called George Miller George. He's long since departed, and I hope wherever he wound up they're calling him Mr. Miller.<br />Hebert is one of the oldest North American names from Old Europe. My ancestors arrived from France in Acadia, what is now Nova Scotia, in 1632. Though the Heberts have been in North America ever since, I grew up believing I was French. It was the same with my friends. My pal Billy Sullivan was Irish, though neither he nor his immediate relatives had been to Ireland. Your last name gave you your identity.<br />I thought of myself as 100 percent French until my teens when I learned that my great-grandfather on my mother's side had landed in Canada via Italy. Then my father told me that one of his grandparents was English. O.K., so now I was French, English, and Italian.<br />Years later, my distant cousin Connie Hamel Hebert did a genealogy of the Heberts. Among the French names I came across a Cormac MacDonald, a Scotsman. My mother dropped the big bomb on her death bed. Her grandmother was a Native American.<br />She was ashamed of her mixed heritage, but in the end she felt the need to purge herself by confessing to me, her eldest son. So here I am Mom - French, Italian, Scottish, English, Native and who knows what else. In my heart I'm American as apple pie, pizza, tacos and Big Macs.<br />For a while I thought the old prejudices had disappeared, that the succeeding generations could call themselves Americans without hesitation. I was wrong.<br />When I directed a Dartmouth College foreign studies program at a university in Scotland, some students referred to themselves by their ancestral roots, sometimes with "American" tagged onto the end of a hyphen, sometimes not. I also taught Scottish students. They had no identity problems. They were always Scots.<br />Recently, one of my students at Dartmouth, a young woman with a Jewish father and a Chinese mother, wrote about going to a Chinese restaurant with the Chinese side of her family. The server brought her a knife and fork and everyone else chopsticks.<br />The experience was a punch to her solar plexus. Like many young people, she felt she had to choose which part of herself to identify with.<br />I want to tell my student to get over it. Most of us in America, like the newly elected president, are mutts of one kind or another, but I doubt we're ready to accept a mutt president and a mutt identity for ourselves.<br />Barack Obama will always be known as the first black president, not black-white president. In my own mind and in the minds of my acquaintances, I'll always be French. Que Dieu benisse l'Amerique.<br />Ernest Hebert is a professor of English at Dartmouth College and the author of 10 books.<br /><br /><br /><br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrwGtZUUUhVTcL_zsqNimlir4wyF967wjAQuYoCdi_Bw5y66oqrKMT1E9_sYbHT7zO1kYMGUJCnJ_Nsj9xmLf3kOCfR_DVy0gZ2wQhx497uO53ntbTx6nh4j7KRmWOKGqi1D7Yzgaq-IY/s1600-h/DSC02792.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770600702391794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrwGtZUUUhVTcL_zsqNimlir4wyF967wjAQuYoCdi_Bw5y66oqrKMT1E9_sYbHT7zO1kYMGUJCnJ_Nsj9xmLf3kOCfR_DVy0gZ2wQhx497uO53ntbTx6nh4j7KRmWOKGqi1D7Yzgaq-IY/s320/DSC02792.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>World's oldest profession, too, feels crisis</strong><br />By Dan Bilefsky<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />PRAGUE: On a recent night at Big Sister, which calls itself the world's biggest Internet brothel, a middle-aged man selected a prostitute from an electronic menu on a flat-screen television, pressing his index finger against it to review the age, hair color, weight and languages spoken by the women on offer.<br />Once he had chosen an 18-year-old brunette, he put on a mandatory burgundy terry cloth robe and proceeded to one of the brothel's luridly-lit theme rooms, an Alpine suite decorated with foam rubber mountains covered with fake snow.<br />Nearby, in the brothel's cramped control room, two young technicians used joysticks to control the dozens of hidden cameras that would film his performance and stream it, live, on Big Sister's Internet site.<br />Sex is free at Big Sister, but that is not cheap enough for some men. Customers get the cut rate in return for signing a release form that allows the brothel to film their sexual exploits.<br />Even with this financial incentive, Big Sister's marketing manager, Carl Borowitz, 26, a Moravian computer engineer, lamented that the global financial crisis had diminished the number of sex tourists in Prague.<br />"Sex is a steady demand, because everyone needs it, and it used to be taboo, which made a service like ours all the more attractive," said Borowitz, who looks more like Harry Potter than a Czech Larry Flynt. "But the problem today is that there is too much competition, too many free pornography sites and people are thinking twice before making impulse purchases, including paying for sex."<br />Big Sister is not the only brothel suffering the effects of a battered global economy. While the world's oldest profession may also be one of its most recession-proof businesses, brothel owners in Europe and the United States say belt-tightening caused by the global financial crisis is undermining a once-lucrative industry.<br />Egbert Krumeich, manager of Artemis, the largest brothel in Berlin, said that the recession had helped dent revenue by 20 percent in November, which is usually peak season for the sex trade. Meanwhile, in Reno, Nevada, the multimillion-dollar Mustang Ranch recently laid off 30 percent of its staff, citing a decline in high-spending clients.<br />Big Sister is not struggling as much as some of its more traditional rivals; its revenue is largely derived from the €30, or $40 monthly fee each of the company's 10,000 clients pay to gain access to its Web site.<br />But Borowitz said Big Sister hoped to offset a 15 percent drop in revenue over the past quarter by expanding into the United States. Big Sister also produces cable TV shows that air on Sky Italia and Television X in Britain, as well as DVDs like "World Cup Love Truck" and "Extremely Perverted."<br />Ester, an 18-year-old prostitute at Big Sister who declined to give her last name, said that big-spending clients had diminished, but noted that she was still earning nearly €3,000 a month, enough to pay rent and to pay for her favorite Louis Vuitton purses.<br />"The reason I do this is for the money," she said, after gyrating half-naked around a pole. Being filmed, she added, made her feel more like an actress than a sex object.<br />In the Czech Republic, where prostitution operates in a gray zone but is largely tolerated, the sex industry is big business, generating nearly €400 million in annual revenues, 60 percent of which is derived from foreign visitors, according to Mag Consulting, a tourism research company in Prague that also studies the sex industry.<br />Since the fall of Communism in 1989, the Czech Republic has become a major transit and destination country for women and girls trafficked from countries farther east, including Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Moldova, the police say. Czechs and those transiting the country are most often sent to Western Europe or the United States.<br />Since 1989, tens of thousands of sex tourists have streamed into Prague, the pristinely beautiful Czech capital, drawn by inexpensive erotic services, an atmosphere of anonymity for customers and a liberal population tolerant of adultery.<br />Mag Consulting said 14 percent of Czech men admit to having had sex with prostitutes, compared with an EU-wide average of 10 percent.<br />Dozens of cheap flights to Prague have also ensured a steady flow of bachelor parties from across Europe. In 2005, an average of 30 flights arrived in Prague every day from Britain alone, a figure that analysts said has dropped by a third.<br />Jaromir Beranek, the director of Mag, said that when Germany and Britain - the two countries that send the most tourists to Prague - began to stagnate, sexual tourism suffered too.<br />The strength of the Czech crown against the euro, lower spending power and competition from even lower-cost sex capitals like Riga, Latvia, and Krakow, Poland, were threatening one of the country's most thriving sectors, he said. "If you ski and there is no snow, you stay home. The same applies to sex."<br />Many Czechs are more than happy to see Prague shrug off its reputation as one of the world's top-20 sex destinations, but some in the hotel industry are so alarmed by the drop in tourists that they are lobbying the government to legalize the trade, in hope that it will help lure more clients.<br />Jiri Gajdosik, the manager of Le Palais, one of Prague's top hotels, argues that regulating prostitution would help attract business by making prostitution safer. "We must ensure that the city loses its bad reputation of a city where foreigners are afraid that they will be robbed," he said in an interview with Hospodarske noviny, a Czech financial daily.<br />While some critics have warned that legalization would effectively transform the Czech state into the country's biggest pimp, the government is considering whether to emulate the Netherlands and Germany by regulating prostitution, just as it would any other industry. It is considering passing legislation by the end of this year that would require the Czech Republic's estimated 10,000 prostitutes to register with the local authorities.<br />Dzamila Stehlikova, the Green Party minister for minorities and human rights who is shepherding the bill through Parliament, said that forcing the business out into the open would make it harder for human traffickers to thrive, while also helping to assure mandatory health check-ups for prostitutes. Other advocates argue that legalization would generate millions of euros in tax revenue from an industry that now largely operates underground.<br />Not everyone is enthusiastic, including the prostitutes themselves, who warn that being issued prostitution identification cards would further stigmatize them.<br />Hana Malinova, director of Bliss Without Risk, a prostitution outreach group, said she feared the current credit crunch was pushing more poor women into prostitution, since they could make more money selling their bodies - about €120 for a half-hour session at some upmarket sex clubs in Prague - than flipping burgers at McDonalds.<br />Even with the economic downturn, she added, prostitution was far more resilient than other industries, though the downturn was discouraging adultery.<br />"An Austrian farmer from a remote area who is not married will still cross the border to the Czech Republic looking for sex," Malinova said. "On the other hand, the recession is helping to keep husbands at home who might otherwise be cheating on their wives."<br />Near the border with Germany, in towns in northern Bohemia that were long blighted by a daily influx of sex tourists seeking cheap thrills, many are rejoicing in the decline.<br />Only a few years ago, the town of Dubi was so overrun by prostitution that a nearby orphanage was opened to provide refuge for dozens of unwanted babies of prostitutes and their German clients. Sex could be purchased for as little as €5 - the price of a hamburger in nearby Dresden - drawing a daily influx of more than 1,000 sex tourists.<br />The more than three dozen brothels that once operated in Dubi have been winnowed down to four, with several of the former brothels having transformed into goulash restaurants or golf clubs.<br />Petr Pipal, the conservative mayor of Dubi whose zero-tolerance policy is largely responsible for the change, said that installing surveillance cameras and police officers at the entrance of brothels had deterred sex tourists by depriving them of their anonymity. Rising prices for sexual services and the global financial crisis, he added, were also helping to tame demand.<br />"Two or three years ago, we would get 1,000 men coming here for sex on a Friday night, which is a lot for a town of 8,000 people," Pipal said from police headquarters, where members of the anti-prostitution squad sat in a surveillance room, controlling outdoor cameras filming 13 now mostly deserted streets.<br />"The one good thing about the economic crisis is that it is helping to keep sex tourists away."<br />Even brothels in areas of the Czech capital most popular with tourists complain that they are suffering from economic hardship. On a recent night near Wenceslas Square in Prague, dozens of young men outside a row of neon-lit sex clubs beckoned tourists with offers of complimentary alcohol and racy strip shows.<br />Inside Darling, a giant multifloor cabaret famous for cancan shows modeled on the Moulin Rouge in Paris, scantily clad young women stripped on a stage surrounded by leopard skin couches, flashing disco balls and French impressionist paintings of naked women.<br />Suzana Brezinova, the club's marketing director, said sex tourism to Prague had been hit because prices had risen nearly to the levels of Rome. But she added that some high-spending businessmen still came to Darling to shrug off the economic doldrums, thinking nothing of splurging €1200 for a night of sexual pleasure and escapism.<br />"People have less money," she said. "But hard times also mean that people want to be cheered up."<br />Jan Krcmar contributed reporting from Prague and Victor Homola from Berlin.<br /><br /><br />**********************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Agreement near on bailout for U.S. automakers<br /></strong>By David M. Herszenhorn and Jackie Calmes<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: An agreement between the White House and Democrats in Congress on the shape of a rescue plan for the U.S. auto industry appears to be close, the chief spokeswoman for President George W. Bush said Monday.<br />"I think it's very likely," the spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said when asked whether an agreement might be reached before the end of the day. "We've made a lot of progress on Friday."<br />The Democrats have been drafting legislation for tight government control of the crippled industry.<br />While the form of oversight was still under discussion, including the powers of a potential "car czar" to oversee the rescue package, the talks between the White House and Congress made clear the extent to which the auto companies would have to submit to substantial government supervision in order to receive a taxpayer-financed bailout.<br />"Our idea was one person that would serve as an adviser, somebody appointed by the president," Perino said. "Of course, when you're working on a negotiation, you talk to them about their ideas, as well; we'll see what they come back with. But our concern right now is on the process, because we haven't seen the legislation, so we can't give you any more details."<br />Whatever oversight entity is created, it would direct the drastic reorganization plans that the auto companies have said they were willing to undertake in exchange for billions of dollars in short-term government loans to keep them in business, a senior congressional aide said.<br />A main factor complicating the deliberations was the imminent transition between the Bush administration and that of President-elect Barack Obama, set to take office Jan. 20.<br />The discussions of how strong a hand the government should take with the auto industry came as congressional and White House negotiators sought to put the final touches on emergency bridge loans of about $15 billion to keep General Motors, Chrysler and Ford Motor afloat.<br />The final legislation is also expected to impose stringent taxpayer protections, including stock warrants that would give the government an equity stake in the three companies, new limits on executive pay and a ban on stock dividends while the loans are outstanding.<br />One proposal would require the auto companies to seek government approval for any business transaction of $25 million or more.<br />Once a bill offering aid to the industry is completed by congressional Democrats and the White House, it would still need the approval of some Senate Republicans.<br />Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, one of the auto industry's biggest supporters, said Sunday that it was uncertain whether the plan would win the 60 votes needed to advance in the Senate.<br />Obama, whose transition team has been involved in the talks, made starkly clear during an interview and at a brief news conference Sunday that any aid to the Big Three auto companies should not come without significant concessions.<br />"They're going to have to restructure," Obama said during an interview on the "Meet the Press" television program.<br />"And all their stakeholders are going to have restructure. Labor, management, shareholders, creditors - everybody is going to recognize that they have - they do not have a sustainable business model right now, and if they expect taxpayers to help in that adjustment process, then they can't keep on putting off the kinds of changes that they, frankly, should have made 20 or 30 years ago."<br />Still, the bill seemed likely to stop short of authorizing the broad powers that some lawmakers had urged to allow what could have amounted to an out-of-court bankruptcy proceeding, in which the creditors of the automakers could be forced to accept reduced payments, labor contracts could be rewritten and executives could be summarily dismissed.<br />Senator Christopher Dodd, a Democrat of Connecticut who is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, which is drafting the legislation, called for the dismissal or resignation of Rick Wagoner, the chief executive of GM, which is the most imperiled automaker.<br />"I think you've got to consider new leadership," Dodd said Sunday in an interview on the "Face the Nation" television program. "If you're going to really restructure this, you've got to bring in a new team to do this, in my view."<br />Asked specifically about Wagoner, Dodd said: "I think he has to move on."<br />A GM spokesman, Steve Harris, said that the company was grateful for Dodd's assistance and that it was willing to accept tough oversight, but that it retained confidence in Wagoner.<br />"We appreciate Senator Dodd's support in trying to provide some assistance for the industry, but General Motors' employees, dealers, suppliers and the GM board of directors feel strongly that Rick Wagoner is the right person to continue the transformation of the company that he began and has presented plans to Congress to continue and accelerate," Harris said.<br />All of the proposals made clear that congressional Democrats and the White House, furious over the need for another huge corporate bailout, intended to make the automakers pay a price far greater than the 5 percent interest on the emergency loans.<br />Congressional Democrats said that if any of the companies failed to meet government requirements by the end of March, the emergency loans could be called in for immediate repayment.<br />At the news conference in Chicago, Obama affirmed his position that it would be unacceptable to allow the auto industry to collapse.<br />But using somewhat tougher language than he had before, he said it made "no sense for us to shovel more money into the problem" if the companies were unwilling to reorganize.<br />The Bush White House, in its proposal for an auto rescue plan, called for the creation of a "financial viability adviser" within the Commerce Department charged with negotiating a "long-term financial viability plan" for each of the auto companies.<br />If such a viability plan could not be negotiated, the White House proposal called for allowing the adviser to mandate one.<br />Democrats were weighing counterproposals calling for the creation of a full oversight board, made up of the secretaries of the departments of commerce, energy, labor, transportation and of the Treasury, and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.<br />Many lawmakers in both parties say they are troubled by the Bush administration's handling of the $700 billion rescue of the financial system, which Congress approved in October.<br />Several lawmakers said they did not want to be pressured again into spending billions of taxpayer dollars to rescue private companies.<br />"I think Congress is tired of being stampeded," Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, said on "Face the Nation."<br />"We haven't even seen a bill yet," he said. "So I think there's still a lot of skepticism out there."<br />Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, on "Fox News Sunday" urged his Republican colleagues to block an automative bailout bill through the use of a filibuster.<br />"I think this is a bridge loan to nowhere," he said.<br />As lawmakers grappled with ways to aid the auto industry. Obama cautioned on "Meet the Press" that it was critical to think about both short- and long-term solutions to the nation's economic woes. "Things are going to get worse before they get better," Obama said.<br /><br />********************<br /><br /><strong>Saving Detroit - but at what price?<br /></strong>By Bill Vlasic<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />DETROIT: So what would it cost to fix the Big Three automakers?<br />Now that Congress has signaled its willingness to help the ailing car companies with short-term loans, that question has gained new urgency, particularly for Barack Obama, who will inherit the crisis in Detroit when he takes office on Jan. 20 as president.<br />The ultimate price tag for a new and improved U.S. auto industry may be as unfathomable as questions about the potential harm to the economy if any of the companies were allowed to collapse.<br />But estimates of the final bill are rising rapidly, particularly as the economy weakens and car sales keep falling.<br />A comprehensive bailout for General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler could cost as much as $125 billion, and even the companies themselves are hard pressed to dispute that figure.<br />Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com, testified before Congress last week that the Big Three's request for $34 billion in loans "will not be sufficient for them to avoid bankruptcy at some point in the next two years." He said $75 billion to $125 billion would be needed to pay for a full-scale reorganization of the automakers.<br />Lawmakers have indicated they may give GM and Chrysler about $15 billion in emergency aid to keep them in business until the spring, when the Obama administration and the new Congress, which is sworn in Jan. 6, can draft a longer-term rescue plan.<br />Through four hearings on Capitol Hill, the chief executives of GM, Ford and Chrysler have tried to reassure lawmakers that all they need is temporary assistance until the sick economy and the depressed auto market recover.<br />GM's chairman and chief executive, Rick Wagoner, tried to assure Congress last week that GM could be profitable again with $18 billion in U.S. loans and an aggressive reorganization plan.<br />"Our plan is far-reaching and extensive," Wagoner said. "It is a different way of thinking and our team is committed to achieving it."<br />Still, there are many variables that could derail the Big Three's recovery plans.<br />Despite an infusion of $700 billion into financial institutions, there are few signs that car loans are becoming more available to consumers - a critical component in any rebound in vehicle sales, which have fallen to their lowest level in 25 years in the United States.<br />Important foreign markets in Europe and Asia are also deteriorating, further reducing revenues at GM and Ford.<br />And Detroit is also facing huge bills - interest payments on their enormous debt loads, large contributions to health care trusts for retired hourly workers as well as tens of billions of dollars in expenses to meet stringent new government fuel-economy requirements.<br />The magnitude of the companies' obligations left some lawmakers groping for answers during the testimony of the Big Three executives.<br />"Do we know what we're doing? Do we know what we're trying to achieve?" asked Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. "If I was reasonably convinced that the money was going to work, I would support it."<br />After losing tens of billions of dollars in recent years, Detroit's credibility has evaporated among investors and analysts who have seen a series of reorganization efforts and new products fail to produce a lasting turnaround.<br />The fact that the companies first asked for $25 billion in mid-November, then upped the ante to $34 billion two weeks later, hardly gave lawmakers confidence in the automakers' plans.<br />"I don't want to send you home again because it's going to get more expensive in another two weeks," Representative Gary Ackerman, Democrat of New York, said at one hearing.<br />Because it is the biggest and most troubled of the automakers, GM generated the most skepticism with its plan. The company says that it needs $10 billion to get through March, another $2 billion for the remainder of 2009, and a $6 billion line of credit beyond that.<br />But this is a company that has lost $20 billion so far this year, spent $2 billion a month in cash since July, and consistently missed its sales targets and financial benchmarks.<br />GM has already cut its U.S. work force in half in the past three years. Yet its latest reorganization plan calls for downsizing its brands and dealerships and cutting another 30,000 jobs - without addressing how it would generate new revenue.<br />Because GM also has more than $60 billion in debt outstanding and a bill for $21 billion in retiree health care benefits coming due, experts cannot see how it will survive with temporary government loans.<br />"Even with the most generous assumptions as to operating results and carefully adhering to GM's proposed restructuring, GM is still a highly distressed company and likely to go bankrupt, probably within in one year," said Edward Altman, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University.<br />Despite the willingness of the United Automobile Workers to make concessions on job security and health care payments, GM desperately needs its bondholders and other creditors to allow it to revamp its debt payments.<br />GM could accomplish those ends if it sought bankruptcy protection, but the company maintains steadfastly that such a filing would ruin its already shaky reputation among consumers.<br />In a bankruptcy proceeding, the UAW would be in jeopardy of losing its $28-an-hour wage scale and its long-term health care benefits. The union president, Ron Gettelfinger, argued during the hearings that Congress should appoint a trustee or oversight committee with authority to force concessions from GM's debtors.<br />"What Congress can and should do is put in place a process that would require all the stakeholders to participate outside of bankruptcy," Gettelfinger said.<br />But an appointed "car czar" would hardly have the same legal authority as a bankruptcy judge to demand that bondholders, for example, take equity in exchange for reducing their debt.<br />The situations at Ford and Chrysler are a little different, but both companies still have large obligations to debtors and union health care trusts.<br />While Obama has repeatedly said that bankruptcy is not preferable for the companies, several lawmakers see it as the only viable way for the Big Three to get a fresh start as smaller, less-indebted entities.<br /><br />********************<br /><br /><strong>$17 billion auto bailout, or repeat of Lehman?<br /></strong>By Steven Greenhouse<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />NEW YORK: In the days before Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail, U.S. Treasury officials made it clear that they did not think the investment bank's collapse would have a major ripple effect.<br />And in recent weeks, in congressional hearing rooms and at water coolers across the country, a lot of people have been saying the same thing about Detroit's beleaguered automakers.<br />What Lehman's failure shows, supporters of the Big Three bailout contend, is that there can be unanticipated consequences of allowing a major company to go under, and the full extent of the risks becomes clear only after the fact - when it can be too late to contain the fallout.<br />Over the weekend, congressional leaders and the Bush administration provisionally agreed to a bailout in which about $17 billion in taxpayer money would be used to keep General Motors and Chrysler afloat. Ford, meanwhile, says it does not need immediate federal aid.<br />But some lawmakers and economists continue to argue that General Motors and Chrysler are too far gone to be saved and that trying to bail them out amounts to throwing away taxpayer dollars. Moreover, those lawmakers warn that rushing to the rescue with U.S. government money will reward the automakers for years of poor management and myopic decisions.<br />Back in September, Treasury officials similarly argued that bailing out Lehman would have wrongly rewarded it for its excessive risk-taking, and thereby would have given the U.S. financial sector a green light for future bad behavior.<br />Seeing how Lehman's collapse shocked the stock and credit markets, Robert Barbera, chief economist at ITG, an investment firm, cautioned that not bailing out the Big Three could prove short-sighted.<br />"It's very different from Lehman because you don't have the systemic financial system risk, but it would be equally stupid," he said. "If Congress allows the auto companies to fail and with the effect that this would have on sales and production, what this means to the real economy will have instantaneous and brutal effects on the stock market."<br />In other words, Barbera warned that opposition to lending either the $17 billion agreed to - or the $34 billion that the car companies originally requested - could result in the stock markets' plunging by hundreds of billions of dollars. And that does not include the billions of dollars in unemployment insurance benefits and pension bailouts that would be required to assist not just the displaced autoworkers, but also the many other workers, like truck drivers and waitresses, whose jobs depend on the Big Three.<br />"There will be tremendous regret if we don't help them avoid bankruptcy in the next few weeks or months," said Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody's Economy.com. "If they go into bankruptcy now, they'll go into liquidation, and there will be the loss of hundreds of thousands, if not a million, jobs - on top of the four or five million we're going to lose. That will add almost a point to unemployment by itself."<br />At a House committee hearing on Friday on Detroit's woes, Edward Altman, a professor of finance at New York University, recommended that the automakers enter bankruptcy reorganization. Through such a move, he said, the automakers could sharply cut their costs by negotiating deals with their creditors, dealers and labor unions.<br />Many supporters of a bailout say filing for bankruptcy reorganization could quickly lead to liquidation because car buyers might lose faith in the companies and worry that their auto warranties would not be honored.<br />Altman said large-scale debtor-in-possession lending - either by the federal government or banks that would have priority over other creditors - could help keep the automakers operating (and guaranteeing their warranties) as they reorganize and reduce costs on the way to regaining their competitiveness.<br />He said a revamping, helped by such financing under the bankruptcy laws, could actually reassure the stock market that "the damage can be minimized with a large debtor-in-possession financing" because "there will be more assurance that GM will be around for a long time."<br />Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, which held the hearing Friday, warned against a wholesale liquidation, saying it would jeopardize three million jobs. Yet he also opposed a U.S. bailout "because it's just taking money and putting it into an inefficient operation, and that money will be simply washed down the drain."<br />Bachus voiced confidence that bankruptcy filings by one or more auto companies would not cause markets to plunge. "I think a restructuring plan done with the protection of certain benefits of bankruptcy might be positively perceived," he said.<br />But Barbera warned against overconfidence, saying Treasury officials thought they would carefully exact only a pound of flesh from Wall Street by letting Lehman fail, helping teach other investment banks not to take excessive risks.<br />"But," he said, "it turned out not to be a pound of flesh that was taken. It was a ton."<br /><br /><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><strong>Economic signals point to long, deep recession</strong><br />By Michael M. Grynbaum<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Despite months of rescue efforts, hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending and an avant-garde apparatus of financial tools, the U.S. economy has only worsened, and at a faster rate than nearly anyone predicted.<br />This recession, which officially began in December 2007, now appears virtually certain to be the longest downturn - and possibly most severe - since the end of World War II, as evidenced last week by a demoralizing series of grim reports on jobs, sales and public confidence.<br />The reports signaled that even after 11 months - more than the entire length of the last two downturns - this recession has only now entered its fiercest phase, and economists say the pain will not end soon.<br />"For the average American, it's going to be devastating for the next six to 12 months," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, a research and forecasting firm. "I have not seen anything particularly hopeful right now, which tells me we have a ways to go."<br />In an appearance Sunday on the television program "Meet the Press," President-elect Barack Obama promised a stimulus plan "large enough to get the economy moving," but conceded that "things are going to get worse before they get better."<br />Some analysts had hoped that the worst was over after October's market shocks, which made consumers skittish and choked off credit.<br />Instead, Americans retrenched even further in November, sending sales at U.S. retailers tumbling to the weakest level in more than 35 years and leading the U.S. automakers to record their worst sales in a quarter-century. Manufacturers have not seen conditions this bad since 1982.<br />The decline in spending is likely to continue, depriving the economy of its primary growth engine, as layoffs continue to mount.<br />More than half a million Americans, from financial analysts to factory workers, lost their jobs in November alone. Rarely has a labor downturn affected such a broad swath of income levels.<br />Most frightening of all is that the worst job losses may be yet to come. If history is any guide, millions more Americans could lose their jobs before businesses start to expand again.<br />The worst jolts to the labor market tend to be only the precursor of six months or more of additional layoffs. Employment suffered a major contraction in December 1981 and January 1982, and workers did not see a stable market for about 10 months, including another big round of layoffs in July 1982.<br />A similar pattern occurred in the other great postwar recession, in 1974, when several months of a stagnant labor market were followed by a violent contraction over the new year. After the worst month, December 1974, the job market took about six more months to stabilize.<br />So in the best case - where November's 533,000 lost jobs signals the bottom of the labor market contraction - workers could face six more months or so of hard times.<br />"We'll be lucky if the unemployment rate is below double digits by the end of next year," said Jared Bernstein, who has been chosen as the chief economic adviser to Vice President-elect Joseph Biden. "Even if the economy improves, the growth won't be enough to rehire laid-off workers, much less absorb those coming into the labor force."<br />There is no guarantee, of course, that November's numbers will be the worst of the current round of layoffs.<br />Now that the full magnitude of the financial crisis is apparent, companies are tightening their belts further. Just last week, AT&T, CreditSuisse, DuPont and Viacom announced deep cuts. Dow Chemical said Monday that it would cut 5,000 jobs. Layoffs are expected in the financial and automotive industries after the new year.<br />"This current environment requires action, and that's what we're doing," said Mohammed Nakhooda, a spokesman for Nortel Networks, the telecommunications equipment maker, which has lost business this fall from large corporate clients cutting costs.<br />Nortel, based in Toronto, said it would cut about 1,300 jobs, or 5 percent of its work force, including some at its U.S. operations. It will also begin a hiring freeze and cut back on employee travel.<br />"It's tough, but it's necessary," Nakhooda said. "The business environment has obviously changed pretty drastically over a short period of time."<br />Some economists predict that the U.S. economy could lose as many jobs in the first six months of 2009 as the entirety of 2008. Nearly two million jobs have been lost since the start of the recession last year, two-thirds of them since September. Still, some forecasters say the pessimistic talk may be overblown, and possibly a problem in itself.<br />"The numbers are giving us a darker view than is actually the case," said Chris Varvares, president of Macroeconomic Advisors, a research firm, adding that some of the economic indicators that have been flashing red are based on subjective surveys of businesses and households.<br />"There is such a thing as self-fulfilling prophecy," he said.<br />Even Americans who are lucky enough to still collect a paycheck are likely to save more, cut back on luxury items and restaurants, and channel more of their income into savings accounts for college and retirement.<br />"Even Americans who still have a job are looking around and saying, 'Well, you know, how much longer?"' said Joshua Shapiro, chief domestic economist at MFR, a research firm.<br />All of this is likely to make many people hesitant to invest any money they do have. Many Americans chose to save over the last two decades by investing in stocks and real estate. Now, a more conservative approach may return, analysts said - the equivalent of hiding money under the mattress.<br />"It is quite conceivable - many would say probable - that the severe asset price collapses that have occurred in both equity and real estate will prompt a lasting increase in the desired saving rate, at least on the part of many consumers," Ed McKelvey, a Goldman Sachs economist, wrote in a note last week.<br />Those who benefit from the downturn could be those still willing to take a trip to the shopping mall, where they will find deep discounts on a range of products. First-time home buyers may also find deals, as long as they can obtain a mortgage - no easy task in a time of tight credit.<br />Many economists pointed to government stimulus as the way out of the economic mess, and they applauded the U.S. government's announcement that it might try to drive down interest rates on mortgages to 4.5 percent, about one percentage point lower than current rates.<br />A major stimulus package is also expected to be announced in January or February, soon after Obama takes office. Economists hope that the package will create jobs and stimulate spending, and many predict that economic growth will improve slightly after this quarter with the government help.<br />In an address taped for broadcast Saturday morning on radio and YouTube, Obama committed to the largest public works program since the creation of the interstate highway system a half century ago. "We need action - and action now," he said.<br />Still, analysts said government assistance would probably not result in a full recovery by May, 16 months into the recession. That would match the record for the longest postwar recession, set in 1975 and reached again in 1982.<br />"Up until mid-September, a plausible scenario was that it would be a short and shallow recession," said Edward Yardeni, an investment strategist. "After mid-September, it became quite obvious that that was wishful thinking."<br /><br />********************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/summit.php">European leaders call for closer cooperation on economic crisis</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/tribune0.php">Tribune Co. files for bankruptcy protection</a><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><strong>Luxe is losing its edge<br /></strong>By Nelson D. Schwartz<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />ROME: With a world-weary sigh, Francesco Trapani slips off his $10,000 steel and white-gold Bulgari watch, revealing the band's dull underside. Bulgari once polished it to a fine gleam to match the shiny exterior.<br />The change is a subtle one, but it captures the cost-consciousness that the first recession in luxury-goods sales in nearly 20 years has forced on companies like Bulgari, Burberry, Cartier, Montblanc and other top designers, a modification of their traditional focus on glamour and glitter.<br />The challenge is as delicate as polishing one of Bulgari's hallmark gems. In Bulgari's case, if Trapani, the company's chief executive, cuts too deeply, he risks harming the brand's image of opulence and exclusivity, carefully honed over decades and reinforced by stars like Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron and Scarlett Johansson, wearing Bulgari on red carpets at Cannes or the Oscars.<br />"Instead of talking about stars and spending, you think about cutting costs," Trapani said during an interview in his office overlooking the Tiber. "Luxury is not immune."<br />Economizing does not come naturally to Trapani, 51. He is a skilled yachtsman whose wife is a princess from Liechtenstein. Until now, his claim to fame was transforming Bulgari from a handful of boutiques founded by his great-grandfather into a worldwide luxury powerhouse.<br />But with the company's profit plunging 44 percent in the most recent quarter, and its stock suddenly tarnished, he has no choice. Shares closed Thursday at 4.76 euros, less than half what they were a year ago.<br />Since the 1990s, sales of luxury goods have exploded, along with the growth of a well-heeled new global elite, turning once little-known European brands into giants and transforming chic addresses like Fifth Avenue, Bond Street and the Champs-Élysées into veritable open-air malls for the upper middle class.<br />Few brands epitomized this trend better than Bulgari, which has grown to 259 stores from just 5 when Trapani took over as chief executive in 1984. Demand for Bulgari's bold combinations of sapphires, diamonds and emeralds seemed insatiable as sales boomed worldwide, lifting the company's revenue to more than 1.1 billion euros, or $1.41 billion.<br />Even as Wall Street collapsed this fall, Trapani presided over the star-studded opening of the flagship Bulgari store in Paris, and the debut of its first company-owned boutique in the Middle East, with separate parties for men and women in Qatar.<br />Now, reality has caught up with Bulgari and the rest of the industry. Sales at the 125-year-old jeweler rose an anemic 2 percent in the third quarter. Analysts are pessimistic about a recovery in its current fourth quarter, a period that is responsible for an outsize portion of the company's annual results. And demand for luxury goods is expected to drop by 3 to 7 percent next year, according to a recent study by Bain & Company, the first time the sector has recorded an annual sales decrease since Bain began tracking it in the early 1990s.<br />There is no sign of a pre-Christmas rush at Bulgari's boutique on the Via Condotti, where Richard Burton once bought diamonds for Elizabeth Taylor, and where unique pieces start at 70,000 euros, or $88,900.<br />"It's not politically correct to show off in this environment," said Claudia D'Arpizio, a partner at Bain who specializes in luxury goods. "Even if they're not affected in terms of purchasing power, consumers feel it's ethical to spend less. They don't want the additional piece of jewelry."<br />In response to the times, Trapani has embarked on broad cost-cutting that includes shelving plans for new stores, except in locations where leases have already been signed.<br />Burberry has announced a similar initiative, while Richemont, the owner of Cartier and Montblanc, is limiting openings to a few fast-growing markets in the Middle East and Asia.<br />"Past slowdowns were more regional in nature and people could perceive the end game," Angela Ahrendts, Burberry's chief executive, said in an interview. "This is global. We were with an investor last week who has had to rerun his worst-case scenario five times in the last five months, and we're still not there yet."<br />Bulgari is also renegotiating existing leases with landlords to save on rent, Trapani said, and even pressing suppliers for better deals on diamonds, sapphires and other precious stones that are the raw material of its most expensive creations.<br />Then there are slight adjustments — like the unpolished watch band — that may save only a few euros an item but add up at a company that sells thousands of timepieces annually, most priced from $4,000 to $32,000. Or introducing lower-cost boxes and bottles for Bulgari's perfume line, which Trapani said customers will not notice.<br />"We want the best solution for both the eye and the cost," Trapani said. "The challenge is to cut costs and diminish expenses, without negatively affecting the image of the brand or the quality."<br />Of the watchband, he said, "It's more wearable and costs less."<br />But Trapani is resisting a shift to lower-price offerings, even though margins tend to be higher on less expensive items.<br />"This isn't a business where you reduce prices to sell more," he said. "This is totally wrong."<br />With price cuts and more drastic style changes off the table, even Bulgari's most basic internal operations are changing, like the workshop where its most expensive jewelry is made by hand.<br />Here, where loose rubies, emeralds and sapphires sit like pens and paper clips at a bank, goldsmiths do double-duty and shine up their creations when polishers are out sick.<br />Overtime expenses, which are typical this time of year as the 21 goldsmiths rush to get one-of-a-kind necklaces and earrings to stores in time for the holidays, have been nearly eliminated.<br />Of course, demand for the most expensive ornaments has not disappeared entirely. During a recent visit, three of the craftsmen were busy finishing custom-ordered pieces, including cufflinks featuring Greek coins from the fifth century B.C. and a pair of pendant earrings heavy with diamonds and sapphires.<br />"We won't change the game of life, thank God," said Nicola Bulgari, Trapani's uncle and a vice chairman of the company.<br />"It's part of the joy of life to wear jewelry, for the man and his ego. It is a world of fantasy and folly. Men will always be in love with women and want to make them happy," he said.<br />Perhaps, but even Bulgari, who at 67 remains active in designing the highest-end collections, is having to adapt to new economic realities: he has stopped making additions to his collection of vintage American automobiles.<br />"If I need to sell them, I will," he said. He added that he was still buying shares in the company, which is publicly traded. The family holds a controlling stake.<br />"It's a test for everybody," he said of the tight times. "I know what they're selling at Bergdorf and Saks; they're cutting numbers with an ax."<br />He noted that Bulgari's perfume business was a bright spot. "People are buying perfume like no tomorrow," he said. "It's a great consolation, it's not expensive, so you don't feel guilty."<br />Giovanna Gambarelli would certainly agree.<br />A few yards from the workshop where the goldsmiths create custom pieces behind thick glass and tight security, Gambarelli was recently shopping for bargains at Bulgari's little-known factory outlet in an industrial area on the edge of Rome.<br />Sporting a Rolex watch and a Tiffany bracelet, Gambarelli, 39, recalled how she had shopped three years ago at the Via Condotti store. This year, eyeing watches marked with a little green label that signified the deepest markdowns, she said, "If you don't want the new collection, you can choose anything here and get a 40 percent discount."<br /><br />********************<br /><br /><strong>Stephen Webster of Garrard's: The crown hipster of jewelry</strong><br />By Suzy Menkes<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />LONDON: Stephen Webster remembers standing in front of Garrard, the crown jeweler, as a young, unknown designer, when the grand London store was the first to give him a break by stocking his bold and edgy work.<br />This week, Webster can walk into Garrard with a new role as creative director. And this time, he is expected to bring more than the rock 'n' roll spirit he tuned into when he spent the 1980s in California. Ron Burkle, Garrard's current owner, is hoping to match heritage with hip and welcome Webster's smoking-hot celebrity clientele. That star-studded list includes Christina Aguilera through Cameron Díaz and Jennifer Lopez to Elton John.<br />"It's a historical brand - the only one left and it's everything I've been passionate about," says Webster, referring to the history of the oldest jewelry company in the world, founded in 1735, and the supplier of jewels to generations of royals.<br />Queen Elizabeth may have given her last big order for a ruby and diamond tiara back in 1978 and withdrawn last year the royal warrant, but Webster has the energy and the confidence to - as he describes it - put "Garrard back on the map."<br />The jeweler is certainly a striking advertisement for his own designs, especially the men's collection that he says is flying out of the stores.<br />From under his artfully chaotic hair, two sapphire and diamonds twinkle in his ears; a trip of bracelets circle his wrist; and under the tautly fitted shirt is a belt with a buckle that looks like a Hell's Angel has mated with a goth night-clubber.<br />In his offices in a London town house, the walls are dominated by photographs of David Bowie and Elvis Presley and an art piece by Banksy pronouncing: "I fought the law - and I won." Downstairs, a design team works, in hand sketches or with a computer, on a new "organic" collection with a "Jules Verne" inspiration.<br />It has been a long journey since the 15-year-old from the port town of Gravesend saw his draftsman father ground down by drawing blue prints of water pumps - and set out at Medway College to become a fashion designer.<br />"But everything about it was wrong - a room full of girls and the teacher looked like Quentin Crisp, he was so flamboyantly gay!" says Webster.<br />The student escaped to the jewelry room and "fell in love with the industrial making process."<br />The skills that Webster learned all those years ago can be seen in a silver ring of entwined thorns or in the lacy wings of bats and bugs.<br />Like all of Webster's work, there is something of the night about it - an underground spirit far from the dainty diamond flowers of conventional jewelry. He, his wife Anastasia and their family may live in a cliff top house as well as in London, but this is not a designer who would be drawn to that English idyll of a country cottage with roses round the door.<br />But then Webster's formative years were spent outside Britain, first in Canada where he was apprenticed to a jeweler who "spent his life down the mines" and who became his mentor. Webster traces from this point his fascination with exotic stones with "a brilliant color palette," like rings centered on hematites, coral and blue goldstone.<br />Not that Webster has anything against diamonds - and that started with Elizabeth Taylor. She was one of the many "jewelry junkies" with "amazing enthusiasm" who flocked to the designer's store when he relocated from Canada to Santa Barbara, California. John Travolta and Oprah Winfrey were other clients who wandered through the "open door" and into his life.<br />It seems fitting that the entrepreneur who invested in the Stephen Webster brand last year was Californian. Ron Burkle, supermarket billionaire, used his Yucaipa Companies private equity fund to buy into the jeweler after a fortuitous encounter with Webster's friend and muse, Aguilera.<br />Burkle was also the investor who has rescued Garrard from its checkered recent history, first under Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei, then with luxury entrepreneurs Lawrence Stroll and Silas Chou, who saw their money pouring down a gilded plug-hole.<br />Jade Jagger, a scion of rock royalty, was the first designer to shake up Garrard, as the brand started to make the cultural shift from old grandeur to new money. Webster, the incarnation of glam rock, feels that he has lived fine jewelry's new journey, away from its position as gifts for traditional engagement, marriage and first baby. He became part of that process when he returned to England in the early 1990s, continuing to finance himself by trips back to America and developing a personal style and confidence.<br />"Jewelry actually became part of fashion," says Webster, whose silver collection sells at relatively modest prices (from $250 to $2,000) while fine white and yellow jewelry runs from $1,500 to $175,000. The dramatic brooch with a bat mothering a swarm of moths sells at $35,800 and bespoke jewelry starts at $15,000, moving ever upwards.<br />Webster looks back at the "painfully slow process" of building his business with his brother David who is now product development director. First there was the shared stand at the Basel, Switzerland, trade fair; the gradual opening of accounts with leading stores; the personal visits, which he still does to loyal provincial shops; the opening of a London store in 1994, as the city became more international and cosmopolitan.<br />But always there was the problem of the expensive inventory - the gold and the gem stones - and the periods when a store like Neiman Marcus would "become my bank."<br />"As a company, we had huge growth and no funds," Webster says. "From everything you hear now, bankers were giving it away. But I couldn't get a loan. And I couldn't bear being told we were high risk."<br />But finally, spurred by the fresh investment, the Stephen Webster brand has made it, with 20 international boutiques and global points of sale from Dubai through Moscow to Hong Kong and Tokyo and including far-flung spots like Seoul and Yekateringburg, Russia. The crowning glory will be the opening of a flagship in London's Mount Street in April.<br />Or perhaps it will be this week, as Webster walks through Garrard, thinking of its 300-year history, which is about to start a new phase with a designer who can turn a moth into a jewel and who has brought to the temple of high end rocks a blast of rock 'n' roll.<br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/09markets.php">Wall St. rallies on hopes for stimulus</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/dow.php">Dow Chemical to cut 5,000 jobs to cope with downturn</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/inside09.php">Crisis has China looking inward</a><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>As other sources of funding dry up, Japanese companies turn to banks<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />TOKYO: Lending growth by Japanese banks hit a record high in November, with companies tapping their credit lines as access to funds through financial markets narrowed in the wake of the global credit crisis.<br />Fund-raising has increasingly become a headache for many companies already struggling from slack exports and consumption, and the global downturn looks set to weigh on the Japanese economy, already in its first recession in seven years, well into next year.<br />Underscoring the effect of the global downturn on the Japanese economy, the current-account surplus in October was less than half the level a year earlier as exports fell and import costs were bloated by oil prices that remained high until the middle of this year.<br />Bank lending increased 3.2 percent in November from a year earlier, accelerating from a revised growth rate of 2.1 percent in October and the biggest increase since records became available in 2001, data from the Bank of Japan showed Monday.<br />"There was a conspicuous rise in lending by major banks, which means that even large companies that are considered blue chips are taking on more bank loans in the face of tighter conditions for direct financing," said Junko Nishioka, chief economist at RBS Securities.<br />Weakened corporate activity is expected to be seen in the release of revised data Tuesday on gross domestic product. Analysts forecast that the economy shrank 0.2 percent in the July-September period, double the preliminary reading of a 0.1 percent contraction, according to a Reuters poll.<br />The Bank of Japan data showed that the outstanding balance of commercial paper dropped 9.9 percent in November from a year earlier after falling 8.5 percent in October, the largest decline in nearly two years.<br />A growing number of borrowers are turning to banks because raising funds in financial markets has become difficult and costly amid the turmoil on global financial markets.<br />Since mid-September, when the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers defaulted on its yen-denominated bonds, the interest rates offered on new commercial paper in Japan have jumped and the issuance of corporate bonds has became difficult for companies with low credit ratings.<br />The plunge in Japanese share prices and a sharp appreciation in the yen against major currencies in October added to the strain on Japanese credit markets, which had previously been shielded from the severe shortage of liquidity afflicting much of the developed world.<br />Alarmed by the quick deterioration in the ability of Japanese companies to secure funds, the Bank of Japan held an emergency policy meeting last week, and announced measures to bolster corporate finances.<br />The central bank said it would expand its lending by about ¥3 trillion, or $32 billion, and accept lower-rated corporate bonds as collateral for its market operations to help tide over companies through a year-end credit squeeze.<br />"What is happening in Japan now is that only large firms can issue commercial paper or corporate bonds, and even if the BOJ purchases some of these, it will not be able to quite get around to the capital crunch of the small and midsized firms," said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at Norinchukin Research Institute.<br />Overwhelming weakness in the global economy is likely to hobble Japan's export-oriented economy, which has fallen into its first recession in seven years, economists said. Japanese government bond futures rose Monday as the plunge in the country's current-account surplus, coupled with the U.S. report last week of the biggest number of monthly job losses in 34 years, bolstered concerns about a global recession.<br />The expected 0.2 percent contraction of the Japanese economy in the third quarter to September would follow a 0.9 percent contraction in the second quarter, its sharpest quarterly decline in seven years, and the two quarters together tipped Japan into a recession.<br />While the weakness in those quarters largely stemmed from the effect of high oil prices, the economy is expected to take the full brunt of the global downturn in the fourth quarter and beyond.<br />Recent data has shown that Japanese companies are curtailing production at an unprecedented pace as demand plunges not just in the United States and Europe, two of the main markets for Japanese goods, but also in emerging countries that had weathered the global financial turmoil until recently.<br />Many analysts expect the Bank of Japan to cut interest rates again by March, the end of the Japanese business year, after trimming its main rate to 0.3 percent from 0.5 percent in October.<br />"Given that economic conditions are expected to worsen further, it's probable that the BOJ will cut interest rates again this month and will bring them to around zero by March," said Yasuhiro Takahashi, an economist at Nomura Securities.<br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>In defaults, can creditors trust courts?<br /></strong>By Umesh Desai and Andrew Marshall<br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />HONG KONG: Facing a wave of Asian corporate defaults as the global crisis bites, debt investors are taking a close look at the protection they can get from courts, putting pressure on borrowers in countries with weak legal systems.<br />Many of the Asian legal systems provide weak safeguards to creditors in distress, are extremely slow and suffer from poor enforcement, or fail to provide enough deterrents to stop company directors from siding with shareholders rather than creditors.<br />In times of growth, this matters less. But with corporate default rates expected to jump, legal codes are in the spotlight.<br />Rachana Mehta, head of fixed income at KE Capital Partners, said the absence of trading liquidity in secondary markets would mean that more investors would have a hold-and-buy strategy and thus would need to know about the enforceability of their claims in the event of a default.<br />Companies in countries where creditors have weaker rights, or where the rights they have are enforced poorly or at a glacial pace, may find it even harder to attract buyers for their debt.<br />"Compared to North America, Australia or Western Europe, Asia in general is a more challenging environment for enforcing creditor rights," said David Maund, managing director at Alvarez & Marsal, a debt-restructuring consultancy.<br />He said the legal difficulties in Asia related to inconsistent interpretation and implementation of the law. "That tends to be an issue particularly in places like the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, India and China."<br />Measuring legal risk requires experience, and isn't always precise, but several comprehensive surveys of competing Asian legal systems paint a relatively coherent and consistent picture.<br />The Strength of Legal Rights Index, one of the variables used in calculating the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business rankings, shows Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia as having the legal codes that best protect the rights of borrowers and creditors, while Indonesia and the Philippines are much weaker.<br />The index measures the letter of the law, not implementation, but another World Bank rating, the Rule of Law Index from the World Governance Indicators, gives an idea of law enforcement. Singapore and Hong Kong again score highly, and Malaysia is also among the strongest in emerging Asia with a 2007 rating of 65.2 out of 100 - well above India at 56.2, China at 42.4, the Philippines at 33.8 and Indonesia languishing at 27.1.<br />The indices show the importance of looking at enforcement. Bangladesh scores 8 out of 10 for the quality of its legal code, but only 24.8 out of 100 for how well the law is enforced.<br />The Economist Intelligence Unit risk consultancy also seeks to quantify legal risk, and its results are similar. Malaysia does well among emerging southeast Asian nations, with a legal risk score of 38, with zero being lowest risk and 100 highest. India is ahead of China, as in the World Bank rankings, with a risk score of 60 versus China's 63.<br />The Philippines, an underperformer in most stability and governance indices, does well with a score of 55. And once again Indonesia is among the worst performers, with a score of 73, riskier even than Pakistan and Bangladesh.<br />But investors also need to go beyond overall measures of country legal risk and look at the details of the law. Experts say some Asian legal codes fail to impose strong enough sanctions on company directors who fail in their duties, in contrast with cases like Enron and Worldcom, whose executives went to jail. This creates moral hazard as there is little incentive for directors to ensure creditors are fairly treated.<br />Peter Gibson, Standard & Poor's rating services managing director and associate general counsel, said some jurisdictions were hampered by problems like a lack of certainty about judicial outcomes and the time needed for the legal process to reach completion.<br />The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks countries on similar measures. While India's overall rank is above China, it has the bottom score for speed of judicial process. China scores relatively well on speed, and even Indonesia, for all its faults, is faster.<br />Christopher McKee, head of the U.S.-based International Country Risk Guide, said Indian courts showed a high level of independence from political interference. "However - and I think this is key - the rate of case flow in India, especially in urban areas, is quite sluggish, which, in the end does little to improve creditors' rights," he said.<br />In China, laws were improving, but interference was a worry.<br /><br />***************************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/ford.php">Ford to cut production in Russia</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/08/business/OUKBS-UK-NORTHERN-ROCK.php">Northern Rock cuts variable rate</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/08/business/OUKBS-UK-FINANCIAL-SUMMIT-BORROSO.php">EU's Barroso sees broad support for stimulus plan</a><br /><br />***************************<br /><br /><strong>Wall Street braced for grim views from industrials</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By Scott Malone<br />With some of the United States' largest and most diversified companies ready to spell out their 2009 financial forecasts over the next two weeks, Wall Street is braced for bad news.<br />The question is how bad?<br />Investors expect many U.S. industrials to follow the lead of 3M , which on Monday set a profit target for next year that was about 12 percent lower than analysts had forecast. What will be on their mind is how General Electric , United Technologies and other manufacturers plan to ride out the deepening global recession.<br />More job cuts are likely to be a key theme. Companies across all sectors of the U.S. economy, including Dow Chemical , AT&T and Caterpillar , are all shedding workers in a bid to cut costs.<br />A key worry for investors will be how order backlogs are holding up. Big-ticket capital goods such as jet engines, electricity-producing turbines and automation equipment are typically ordered months if not years in advance and industrial companies count on a backlog of orders to help smooth out results when the economy weakens.<br />"What are they seeing in terms of cancellations and how is the backlog holding up for projects that they've signed?" is a top concern of Peter Sorrentino, senior vice president and portfolio manager at Huntington Asset Advisors in Cincinnati, which holds stakes in GE, United Technologies and Honeywell International .<br />"If we're starting to already see large-scale cancellations and a rapid erosion of backlog, the stocks are definitely vulnerable for another leg down," Sorrentino said.<br />Industrial shares have been hit hard this year, with the Standard & Poor's capital goods industry index down about 46 percent, a steeper fall than the 38.5 percent slide of the broad S&P 500 and the 33 percent decline of the Dow Jones industrial average .<br />3M shares tumbled 5 percent on Monday after the company warned profit would fall next year.<br />LOWER GUIDANCE<br />Wall Street's expectations are already low ahead of outlook briefings from United Technologies, Danaher , Honeywell, GE and ITT over the next two weeks.<br />Analysts, on average, expect GE earnings per share to tumble 18.3 percent next year and Honeywell to fall 5.6 percent, according to Reuters Estimates. They look for United Tech EPS to grow 3.4 percent, ITT to rise 2.3 percent and Danaher to tick up 0.9 percent.<br />But even those forecasts may be too high, given the recessions in the United States, Japan and much of Europe, and fears that U.S. unemployment could near 10 percent next year.<br />"We sense that 2009 EPS forecasts are likely to be further trimmed by most companies," Sterne Agee analyst Nicholas Heymann wrote in a note to clients.<br />He forecast that, even in the wake of recent job cuts, major U.S. companies could slash payrolls another 20 percent next year as they make dramatic moves to cut costs.<br />Some observers have already warned aggressive job cutting could set off a self-reinforcing vicious cycle in the U.S. economy, which is highly dependent on consumer spending.<br />"Frankly, I hate to see it," Sorrentino said of the flurry of pink slips. "Typically, the first victim when you start doing layoffs is productivity, so in a way it almost amplifies the downward push on profitability when you get into this."<br />Another worry for the industrial sector is slowing demand in emerging markets, which had kept many diversified manufacturers on a growth footing even as the U.S. economy slowed over the past year.<br />"A recession among our trading partners has weakened the outlook for exports, which is one of the few remaining pillars providing positive support to the economy, particularly to the manufacturing sector," said Daniel Meckstroth, chief economist the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI trade group.<br />MAPI forecast on Monday that U.S. manufacturing production would fall 4.2 percent next year.<br />While U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's plan for major investment in the nation's infrastructure, which sparked a rally in stocks on Monday, was a bright spot for the sector investors said the benefits of that plan might not be felt till the latter part of next year.<br />That leaves industrials facing an uncertain start to 2009.<br />"We would not be surprised if companies were to abandon quarterly EPS targets in favour of annual guidance updated quarterly," Deutsche Bank AG analyst Nigel Coe wrote in a note to clients.<br />(Editing by Andre Grenon)<br /><br />**********************<br /><br /><strong>Group says finance crisis shows transparency vital</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By Peter Apps<br />Lack of transparency in the banking sector helped cause the global financial crisis and multinational companies, inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations must do more to open up, a report said on Monday.<br />In its annual Global Accountability Report, the London-based One World Trust rated 30 corporations and organisations from Goldman Sachs to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR but found only one met what it described as minimum standards.<br />The overall worst performers were UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), defence alliance NATO and in bottom place the International Olympic Committee (IOC), all accused of lacking openness and accessibility to those their actions affected.<br />"The credit crunch and global financial crisis shows just how important transparency is in all sectors," said trust deputy head of research Letitia Labre. "Companies and organisations are not doing enough to be accountable to those they affect."<br />The impact from bad debts in the US mortgage market spread through the global financial system, with banks no longer trusting each other to lend money, prompting a credit crunch and worldwide slump in markets and economic growth.<br />Critics blame banks and other investment institutions for packaging and selling financial products they did not fully understand, with little clarity on who would take responsibility and with mutual mistrust now paralysing markets.<br />The report, which focuses on a representative sample of organisations each year, rated only one private sector bank -- one of the few surviving Wall Street banks, Goldman Sachs. It put the bank in the bottom third of the list.<br />AFFECTING EVERYONE<br />In contrast, mining firm BHP Billiton and oil giant Shell -- representatives of industries often criticised for their lack of transparency in negotiating contracts with developing world governments -- were among the best performing corporates.<br />Transparency campaigners have praised the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative for improving the transparency of mining and similar firms, although say colossal problems still remain.<br />The International Foundation for Organic Agriculture topped the table followed by multilateral lender the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), World Bank group member of the International Finance Corporation and UN children's fund UNICEF.<br />They were followed by aid agencies and non-governmental groups Plan International, Transparency International, Catholic Relief Services and Islamic Relief.<br />The poor performance of organisations such as the IAEA and International Olympic Committee were particularly worrying, the trust said.<br />"These are very powerful bodies which have the ability to affect the lives of all of us," said Labre.<br />The report graded the organisations according to four dimensions of accountability: transparency, participation of stakeholders, evaluation of performance and scalability and response to complaints.<br />Researchers examined documents provided by the organisations, interviewed their key officials and examined publicly available information as well as talking to stakeholders and experts on each of the organisations.<br />(Editing by Charles Dick)<br /><br />************************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/083m.php">3M sheds 1,800 jobs </a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/08/business/OUKBS-UK-BORROWING-IRELAND.php">Irish debt mountain puts it in trillion-dollar club</a><br /><br />************************<br /><br /><strong>Stoking fear everywhere you look<br /></strong>By David Carr<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />With unemployment figures beginning to resemble a mushroom cloud and the Fed running out of card tricks, I told a friend we were going to spend the weekend at my house making hard choices — scrutinizing every expense, eliminating spending where we could and downsizing at every turn.<br />"Really," he said. "What has changed at your house?"<br />Well, nothing really — I might toil in a threatened industry, but my ID card still works when I go to the office and my wife is prospering in a job she loves. But like everyone else, I am making my way through a data cloud that is crackling with panic.<br />The other day, I got in a cab and there was a news report on the back seat television about soaring unemployment in New York. An info-screen on an ascending elevator ride in Manhattan suggested that we were all only going one way — down. The news zippers in Times Square were full of reports of crumbling consumer confidence even as people streamed in to the stores beneath them.<br />Once I made it to my office, it got worse. An RSS feed from Reuters was waiting on my desktop saying, "U.S. employers axed 533,000 jobs from payrolls in November, the most in 34 years." My e-mail inbox not only included a note from a friend that she had been laid off, but it was flanked by contextual ads from Google labeled "Unemployed?"<br />I have a pal who is persistently I.M.-ing me because he is at loose ends after being laid off, and my social networks are rife with digital fretting and various versions of, 'Did you hear about so-and-so?' Why, yes I did. Over and over.<br />Every modern recession includes a media séance about how horrible things are and how much worse they will be, but there have never been so many ways for the fear to leak in. The same digital dynamics that drove the irrational exuberance — and marketed the loans to help it happen — are now driving the downside in unprecedented ways.<br />The recession was actually not officially declared until last week, but the psychology that drives it had already been e-mailed, blogged and broadcast for months. I used to worry that my TiVo thought I was gay — doesn't everyone enjoy a little "Project Runway" at the end of a long, hard week? Now I worry that my browser knows I am about to lose my job.<br />"When everyone is talking about recession, we all feel like something has to change, even if nothing has changed for us," said Dan Ariely, author of "Predictably Irrational," a book that explains why people do things that defy explanation. "The media messages that are repeating doom and gloom affect every one, not just people who really have trouble and should make changes, but people who are fine. That has a devastating effect on the economy."<br />With unemployment, auto sales, home foreclosures and consumer confidence all benchmarking historic levels of distress, news outlets are hardly making it up. But the machinery of the economy began to freeze in place far more quickly than it has in the past, in part because so much scary data is circulating so much faster than it used to. This recession got deeper faster because we knew more bad stuff quickly.<br />"Our collective hive-mind gets into a tizzy over other things that suddenly zoom into focus," said Xeni Jardin, one of the editors of the blog Boing-Boing. "It's a hurricane! OMG, salmonella in the hamburgers! Wait, we're all fat! There is an escalation of attention that feeds itself, because this recession is appearing throughout all forms of digital human expression. And unlike any of those other topics, this affects everyone."<br />Nobody fears getting caught out on a down cycle more than those who run public companies, and defensive layoffs — not based so much on current realities but on horrors to come — have become the norm. Last week, speaking at the Reuters Media Summit, Barry Diller, the chief executive of IAC/Interactive, chided the leaders of entertainment economies for the kind of panic and greed-driven right-sizing that was anything but.<br />"The idea of a company that's earning money, not losing money, that's not, let's say, 'industrially endangered,' to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one's counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level," he said. "First of all, it's certainly not necessary. It's doing it at the worst time. It's throwing people out to a larger, what is inevitably a larger, unemployment heap for frankly no good reason."<br />Media companies have been hammered on the leading edge of the recession because they run on advertising, a discretionary expenditure that always is among the first things to go. Viacom had third-quarter earnings of over $400 million in 2008, down 37 percent compared with the same quarter last year, but it was still nicely profitable. Nonetheless, the company laid off 850 people.<br />Michelle Rabinowitz, a producer at MTV News, was one of them. A Web and pop-cult savvy journalist who has covered everything from Britney Spears to the shootings at Virginia Tech, she is, at 28, just the kind of talent media companies fought over in the last couple of years and will again in the future. But for now, they're dumping bodies off the back of the truck.<br />"A lot of young people had to find jobs after 9/11, so we know about tough times, but at least we know what that was about," she said. "I go outside and the sky is not falling, but my job is not there, the value of the apartment that I bought is not there, my 401(k) is not there. It's weird, it's like somebody made a bad decision somewhere — the Federal Reserve, a media company, an executive, who knows? Everything sort of looks the same, but everything has changed."<br />There is a kind of emotional contagion afoot. James Fowler, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, recently co-wrote a study looking at how happiness can be spread among friends. The opposite is true as well.<br />"There are studies on bank runs, and it shows that people who know others who have taken their money out of the bank are much more likely to do it as well," he said. "We always overshoot the upside and, because of the same contagious effects, we overshoot the downside. Everything is fine, and then all of the sudden we are looking for water and supplies to ride out the coming storm."<br />Courtesy of the media, we no longer have to be obsessed to be neurotic: the neurosis comes to us. On CNN.com, I came across this scary bit about Paul Nawrocki, a former toy company executive who takes a 90-minute train ride into New York to walk the streets with a sandwich board. "Almost homeless," reads the sign. "Looking for employment. Very experienced operations and administration manager."<br />I'm already working on mine. "Will write for food."<br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/08times.php">Times Co. to borrow against building</a><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/08volvo.php">Volvo cutting fewer jobs than planned; Sweden said to be preparing auto aid</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/08oxan-BOLEXPORTS.php">BOLIVIA: Government faces economic dangers</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/08/business/OUKBS-UK-ECONOMY-MANPOWER.php">Employers plan to further slow hiring</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/08euaid.php">Brussels set to approve French, Austrian bank aid</a><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><strong>S&P cuts Russia's credit rating<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />MOSCOW: The credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's lowered Russia's foreign currency sovereign credit rating a notch on Monday, citing heavy outflows of capital amid the global financial turmoil.<br />Russia's international reserves have dropped from $583 billion to $455 billion since August as the government has spent billions to prop up the ruble, weakened by plunging oil prices. S&P lowered the rating to "BBB/A-3" from "BBB+/A-2."<br />"The lowering of the ratings on Russia reflects risks associated with the sharp reversal in external portfolio and other investment flows, which has increased the cost and difficulty of meeting the country's external financing needs," S&P's credit analyst, Frank Gill, said in a statement.<br />S&P said the rating is likely to be further downgraded "if the banking crisis and external pressures continue to impair the government's balance sheet and its still substantial arsenal of liquid assets."<br />It said Russia's unpredictable business environment still impedes its ability to attract capital.<br />Independent analysts said the rating downgrade reflects severe external pressure on Russia's economy.<br />"It's an unavoidable product of a deep fall in oil prices," said Ron Smith, chief economist at Moscow-based Alfa Bank. He said the rating would have to be further reviewed if oil prices dip below $40 a barrel.<br />The price of crude oil, the backbone of Russia's economy, dropped from a record-high $147 a barrel in July to $40 last week. Russian producers of metals and other commodities have been laying off employees as demand shrinks.<br /><br />********************<br /><br /><strong>Pension funds eye battle on executive pay<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By James Molony<br />Executive pay will be the most important corporate governance issue next year for pension fund investors wrestling with the fallout from the financial crisis, the governance chief for Railpen Investments said.<br />Deborah Gilshan told Reuters worried trustees will be more inclined to vote against pay deals at AGMs and will try to block the re-election of directors, as well as casting circumspect eyes over new bonus deals designed to retain top directors.<br />Railpen is one of the country's largest pension funds with some 20 billion pounds in assets under management.<br />Gilshan said the issue of remuneration has gained greater importance among pension scheme trustees as they absorb the furore over bankers receiving payouts as their firms made losses.<br />Some commentators have argued bonus schemes at banks contributed to the crisis by encouraging excessive risk-taking.<br />Gilshan said the fund managers employed by pension schemes will now see more pressure from trustees to rigorously question companies over remuneration.<br />"You will see next year more public engagement between shareholders and companies," Gilshan said at last week's Local Authority Pension Fund Forum annual conference.<br />"Votes against will go up and we may see more defeats of company resolutions... and not just on remuneration but also on things like director's re-elections," she said.<br />Another potential area of conflict will emerge where boards propose extraordinary remuneration measures.<br />SPECIAL BONUSES<br />As bonuses are hit due to the economic slowdown, some remuneration committees may look to retain directors by issuing special bonuses -- and they will have to have "good, credible" explanations for doing so, Gilshan said.<br />One consequence of the crisis may be that companies return to more traditional bonus schemes such as share options, while assessing performance over longer time horizons, she added.<br />"Within companies there seems to have emerged a more short-term approach. We might go back to a longer term view," she said. "Some of the pay systems were quite short term."<br />"When I started working long-term incentives were five years -- now three years is seen as long term.<br />"The whole bonus structure around banks was something which caused a lot of what happened," she said. "Bonus schemes were incentivising the wrong sorts of behaviours."<br />"We're keen to see risk-adjusted remuneration incentive schemes which take into account the risk that's been taken as well as the return," Gilshan said.<br />(Editing by Simon Jessop) <p></p><p>******************</p><p><strong>In Chicago factory sit-in, an anger spread wide<br /></strong>By Monica Davey<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />CHICAGO: The scene inside a long, low-slung factory on this city's North Side this weekend offered a glimpse at how the nation's loss of more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs in a year of recession is boiling over.<br />Workers laid off Friday from Republic Windows and Doors, who for years assembled vinyl windows and sliding doors here, said they would not leave, even after company officials announced that the factory was closing.<br />Some of the plant's 250 workers stayed all night, all weekend, in what they were calling an occupation of the factory. Their sharpest criticisms were aimed at their former bosses, who they said gave them only three days' notice of the closing, and the company's creditors. But their anger stretched broadly to the government's costly corporate bailout plans, which, they argued, had forgotten about regular workers.<br />"They want the poor person to stay down," said Silvia Mazon, 47, a mother of two who worked as an assembler here for 13 years and said she had never before been the sort to march in protests or make a fuss. "We're here, and we're not going anywhere until we get what's fair and what's ours. They thought they would get rid of us easily, but if we have to be here for Christmas, it doesn't matter."<br />The workers, members of Local 1110 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, said they were owed vacation and severance pay and were not given the 60 days of notice generally required by U.S. law when companies make layoffs. The workers voted Friday afternoon to stage the sit-in.<br />Company officials, who were no longer at the factory, did not return telephone or e-mail messages. A meeting between the owners and workers is scheduled for Monday. The company, which was founded in 1965 and once employed more than 700 people, had struggled in recent months as home construction dipped, workers said.<br />Still, as they milled around the factory's entrance this weekend, some workers said they doubted that the company was really in financial straits, and they suggested that it would reopen elsewhere with cheaper costs and lower pay. Others said managers had kept their struggles secret, at one point before Thanksgiving removing heavy equipment in the middle of the night but claiming, when asked about it, that all was well.<br />Workers also pointedly blamed Bank of America, a lender to Republic Windows, saying the bank had prevented the company from paying them what they were owed, particularly for vacation time accrued.<br />"Here the banks like Bank of America get a bailout, but workers cannot be paid?" said Leah Fried, an organizer with the union workers. "The taxpayers would like to see that bailout go toward saving jobs, not saving CEO's."<br />In a statement issued Saturday, Bank of America officials said they could not comment on an individual client's situation because of confidentiality obligations. Still, a spokeswoman also said, "Neither Bank of America nor any other third party lender to the company has the right to control whether the company complies with applicable laws or honors its commitments to its employees."<br />Inside the factory, the "occupation" was relatively quiet. The Chicago police said that they were monitoring the situation but that they had no reports of a criminal matter to investigate. About 30 workers sat in folding chairs on the factory floor. (Reporters and supporters were not allowed to enter, but the workers could be observed through an open door.) They came in shifts around the clock. They tidied things. They shoveled snow. They met with visiting leaders, including Representative Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat from Chicago, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Throughout the weekend, people came by with donations of food, water and other supplies.<br />"All the workers are saying is, If I build you a house, and you want to sell the house after I build it but you don't pay me, I want to place a lien," Gutierrez said in an interview. "With their bodies and their voices, they're placing a lien."<br />The workers said they were determined to keep their action — reminiscent, union leaders said, of autoworkers' efforts in Michigan in the 1930s — peaceful and to preserve the factory and its equipment.<br />"The fact is that workers really feel like they have nothing to lose at this point," Fried said. "It shows something about our economic times, and it says something about how people feel about the bailout."<br />Until last Tuesday, many workers here said, they had no sense that there was any problem. Shortly before 1 p.m. that day, workers were told in a meeting that the plant would close Friday, they said. Some people wept, others expressed fury.<br />Manuela Rivera, 58, who had worked at the factory for 13 years, said her blood pressure had risen dangerously high from the stress, the prospect of paying this month's bills and searching — "Where?" she said — for a new job. "There are no jobs," Rivera said.<br />Many employees said they had worked in the factory for decades. Lalo Muñoz, who was among those sleeping over in the building this weekend, said he arrived 34 years ago. The workers — about 80 percent of them Hispanic, with the rest black or of other ethnic and national backgrounds — made $14 an hour on average and received health care and retirement benefits, Fried said.<br />"This never happens — to take a company from the inside," Mazon said. "But I'm fighting for my family, and we're not going anywhere."<br /><br />******************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/08/business/OUKBS-UK-WAGON.php">Car parts firm Wagon calls in administrators</a><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>Detroit churches pray for 'God's bailout'</strong><br />By Nick Bunkley<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />DETROIT: The Sunday service at Greater Grace Temple began with the Clark Sisters song "I'm Looking for a Miracle" and included a reading of this verse from the Book of Romans: "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us."<br />Pentecostal Bishop Charles Ellis III, who shared the sanctuary's wide altar with three gleaming sport utility vehicles, closed his sermon by leading the choir and congregants in a boisterous rendition of the gospel singer Myrna Summers's "We're Gonna Make It" as hundreds of worshipers who work in the automotive industry — union assemblers, executives, car salesmen — gathered six deep around the altar to have their foreheads anointed with consecrated oil.<br />While Congress debated aid to the foundering Detroit automakers Sunday, many here whose future hinges on the decision turned to prayer.<br />Outside the Corpus Christi Catholic Church, a sign beckoned passers-by inside to hear about "God's bailout plan." Roman Catholic churches in the Detroit area distributed a four-page letter from Cardinal Adam Maida, the archbishop, offering "some pastoral insights and suggestions about how we might prepare to celebrate Christmas this year when economic conditions are so grim."<br />In the letter, Cardinal Maida acknowledged that "things in Michigan will probably never be the same" but encourages the region's 1.3 million Catholics to maintain their faith. "At this darkest time of the year, we proclaim that Christ is our light and Christ is our hope," he wrote.<br />Last week Cardinal Maida gathered 11 Detroit-area religious leaders, representing Christian, Jewish and Muslim congregations, to call on Congress to approve the $34 billion in government-backed loans that the automakers have requested.<br />At Greater Grace Temple, an 8,000-member Pentecostal church in northwest Detroit, the Sunday service was dedicated to addressing the uncertainty facing workers whose livelihood depends on the well-being of General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler.<br />"We have never seen as midnight an hour as we face this coming week," Bishop Ellis said, referring to the possibility that Congress would soon vote on a deal to give the carmakers enough money to stay afloat into next year.<br />"I don't know what's going to happen, but we need prayer," he said. "When it's all said and done, we're all in this thing together."<br />Greater Grace, the largest church in Detroit, invited officials from the United Automobile Workers union to speak before Bishop Ellis gave his sermon, titled "A Hybrid Hope."<br />The SUVs on the stage, a Chevrolet Tahoe, Ford Escape and Chrysler Aspen on loan from local dealerships, were all gas-electric hybrids, and Bishop Ellis urged worshipers to combat the region's woes by mixing hope with faith in God.<br />"We have done all that we can do in this union, so I turn it over to the Lord," General Holiefield, a UAW vice president for Chrysler, told the crowd. A vice president for the parts suppliers, James Settles Jr., asked those present "to continue your prayers, so we can see a miracle next week."<br />Bishop Ellis encouraged the congregation to pray, not that Congress would "do the right thing" and approve loaning money to the car companies, but that Detroiters would "make it" through these tough times.<br />"We've got to keep the faith," said Mike Young, 47, who works for the Dana Corporation, a parts supplier, and has spent more than three months of this year on furlough. His factory, in the suburb of Auburn Hills, builds drive shafts for Chrysler, which has said it would soon run out of money without billions of dollars in aid from Congress. "But you can't count on that," Young said. "All my hope is in God."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLBf1cYOtiXr41hd1X0jRlNtSizRd5o6yBhId8Yvfl9ofOPtGNU2mZLd_z2aIYm-tnSFvmzxU2nlZ8HUJmbcYZv3lqLChUSUFvX1oRjbbvBmn8bpjfX7b1inLNLgjDrgHH7_R3NPKi55E/s1600-h/DSC02794.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770598255242754" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLBf1cYOtiXr41hd1X0jRlNtSizRd5o6yBhId8Yvfl9ofOPtGNU2mZLd_z2aIYm-tnSFvmzxU2nlZ8HUJmbcYZv3lqLChUSUFvX1oRjbbvBmn8bpjfX7b1inLNLgjDrgHH7_R3NPKi55E/s320/DSC02794.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Panel urges creation of genocide alert system<br /></strong>By Brian Knowlton<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Declaring the prevention of genocide "an achievable goal," a task force that includes several prominent figures close to President-elect Barack Obama recommended Monday that an interagency group be created to analyze threats, work with other countries and coordinate action in places like Darfur.<br />"Preventing genocide and mass atrocities is a truly difficult issue, and there has to be a different approach," Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state and a co-chairwoman of the task force, said in a telephone interview. The challenge, she said, is "to develop a system within the United States government where there will be a group of people whose main job it will be to stay on top of these particular issues."<br />Albright is an Obama supporter and adviser. Also on the panel is a close political adviser of the president-elect, Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, who is said to be Obama's choice for secretary of health and human services. The group consulted several people linked to the Obama team.<br />Brooke Anderson, chief national security spokeswoman for Obama, welcomed the report, but would say only that the president-elect was "committed to strengthening U.S. leadership and international efforts to prevent and respond to genocide and other humanitarian crises."<br />Adding heft to the panel's prescriptions was the presence on the panel of William Cohen, a former Republican senator who was defense secretary in the Clinton administration, and Anthony Zinni, former chief of the U.S. Central Command.<br />But Albright said that military involvement was just one of several possible tools considered in the report, which emphasizes early detection and diplomatic efforts to prevent crises.<br />"We needed to have a choice between doing nothing and sending in the Marines," Albright said.<br />Several top Obama appointees have taken hard-line positions on the genocide in Sudan's Darfur region, including Susan Rice, the United Nations ambassador-designate, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, nominated as secretary of state.<br />Rice and another Obama foreign-policy adviser, Tony Lake, held senior posts in the Clinton administration and have said they regretted the failure to halt the Rwandan genocide of 1994.<br />The panel called for the creation of an interagency Atrocities Prevention Committee at the National Security Council, which would be headed by the retired general James Jones if he is confirmed by the Senate. It would analyze threats, help coordinate diplomatic and other measures, and develop international responses to emerging genocide threats. Jones said last year that in chaotic places like Darfur, "there is an application for military forces." But Obama has been more cautious, speaking of U.S. "help" for Darfur but not of direct intervention.<br />And the risks and high costs of intervention in a chaotic region might appear dissuasive at a time when the United States is already engaged in two wars.<br />Albright said that, while she was not speaking for him, she expected Obama to give the subject serious attention. (She also said that while she had "no ambitions" of any post in the Obama administration, "I will be helpful in any way I can.") The group calls for an early-warning system on worldwide risks of genocide, with input from the country's intelligence agencies. Acute warning of looming crises would trigger automatic policy review.<br />"While there are things like volcanic genocide where there's just an eruption" that is not foreseen, Albright said, "there are actually some patterns to be seen."<br />The report recommends making genocide prevention and response a part of military planning, defense doctrine and training, while at the same time redoubling U.S. support for international partners like the United Nations and the African Union, both of which are involved in Darfur.<br />Obama addressed genocide in the second presidential debate.<br />"When genocide is happening, when ethnic cleansing is happening somewhere around the world and we stand idly by, that diminishes us," he said, before adding: "We're not going to be able to be everywhere all the time. That's why it's so important for us to be able to work in concert with our allies."<br />In Darfur, Obama said, "we could be providing logistical support, setting up a no-fly zone at relatively little cost to us, but we can only do it if we can help mobilize the international community and lead."<br />The task force was sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace, the American Academy of Diplomacy and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. </p><p></p><p>*****************</p><p></p><p><strong>EU joins demands for Mugabe to quit</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By Ingrid Melander<br />The European Union extended a travel ban to 11 more Zimbabwean officials Monday and joined calls for President Robert Mugabe to step down after 28 years in power.<br />Spreading cholera, food shortages and economic collapse have brought new demands for Mugabe's resignation from his old foes in the West. He blames Western sanctions for Zimbabwe's hardship. Critics blame his increasingly authoritarian rule.<br />French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said EU foreign ministers added 11 more names to a list of over 160 Zimbabweans -- including Mugabe -- banned from visiting the bloc, a move meant to increase pressure on Zimbabwe's government.<br />"I think the moment has arrived to put all the pressure for Mugabe to step down," EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said before the ministers' meeting in Brussels.<br />Echoing similar calls from the United States and former colonial power Britain, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said "President Mugabe must go. Zimbabwe has suffered enough."<br />EU ministers said in a statement that the people added to the blacklist were "actively engaged in violence or human rights infringements." The list was confidential until published in the EU's official journal, diplomats said.<br />One said those added included five members of a Joint Operations Command, which comprises security service chiefs who the opposition say were instrumental in organising a violent campaign that returned Mugabe to power.<br />However, ministers also agreed to take one person off the bloc's black list, diplomats said.<br />One named him as Simba Makoni, former finance minister who left the ruling ZANU-PF party earlier this year and contested the presidential election against Mugabe in March.<br />Zimbabwean Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu told Reuters the EU had no right to call Mugabe to step down, saying he was constitutionally elected.<br />"No foreign leader, regardless of how powerful they are, has the right to call on him to step down on their whim," he said.<br />The United States said it would continue to push for the international community to act on Zimbabwe, but said the country's neighbours held the most influence.<br />"We made extensive efforts in the Security Council to get the international system to act, and we are going to continue those efforts, but quite frankly some of the states in the region have to step up. They need to use their leverage," U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.<br />South African ruling ANC party leader Jacob Zuma urged swift action to end Zimbabwe's humanitarian crisis, exacerbated by political deadlock between Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai over implementing a power-sharing deal.<br />The impact of Zimbabwe's crisis is felt keenly in South Africa, where cholera victims seeking treatment have joined millions of immigrants who have fled in search of jobs.<br />"Some swift action is clearly needed," Zuma said in Namibia.<br />South African officials were in Zimbabwe to assess the scale of the crisis, responding to an unprecedented appeal for international help from Mugabe's government.<br />Basic foodstuffs are running out and the cholera epidemic has killed at least 575 people. Prices of goods are doubling every 24 hours, and the 100 million Zimbabwean dollar a week limit for bank withdrawals buys only three loaves of bread in the once relatively prosperous country.<br />CONTAMINATED WATER<br />Hopes of rescuing Zimbabwe have dimmed as deadlock continues between Mugabe and Tsvangirai over forming a government in line with a deal in September that followed widely condemned and violent elections.<br />"More pressure needs to be brought to bear on the negotiating parties to ensure a speedy conclusion of an agreement," Zuma said.<br />Zimbabwe's health system cannot cope with the cholera epidemic and the water supply network has failed, forcing people to drink from contaminated wells and streams.<br />Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga urged the African Union Sunday to hold an emergency summit to formulate a resolution to send troops into Zimbabwe to deal with the crisis.<br />Botswanan Foreign Minister Phandu Skelemani and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel laureate, have also called for Mugabe's removal.<br />Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a statement issued by the Elders, a group of prominent figures that includes ex-U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Tutu, that there was "bitter disappointment in the current leadership."<br />South Africa's powerful COSATU trade union federation said Monday 38 members of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions arrested during protests last week had been released after five days in detention.<br />Seven of those released had appeared in court and been charged "with inciting the public to rise against the government" before being released on bail, COSATU said.<br />(Additional reporting by Nelson Banya, James Mackenzie and Francois Murphy in Paris and Paul Simao in Pretoria; editing by Matthew Tostevin and Sophie Hares)</p><p></p><p></p><p>******************</p><p></p><p><strong>EU split on call for Congo bridging mission<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By Ingrid Melander and David Brunnstrom<br />European Union ministers were split on Monday over the U.N.'s call for an EU force to boost peacekeepers in Congo, with Belgium urging the bloc send a bridging mission and Britain wanting it to bolster U.N. troops.<br />Last Friday, United Nation's Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon repeated a call for a EU "bridging force," saying it may take up to six months for the U.N. to deploy 3,000 more peacekeepers to Congo to boost its 17,000-strong force, known as MONUC.<br />The foreign ministers took no decision at a meeting in Brussels on Monday and tasked EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and the European Commission to prepare a response to Ban's letter, an EU official said.<br />The idea of an EU mission has been in the air for a few weeks but the bloc has so far been reluctant to commit troops, and prospects appeared to dim after Belgium said last week there was little appetite for such a mission.<br />Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht said before the discussions there was an urgent need for bridging mission of 2,500-3,000 troops.<br />"It will take four to six months before the additional troops for MONUC will arrive and the humanitarian situation is dramatic over there," De Gucht told reporters.<br />Foreign Secretary David Miliband told reporters beefing up the U.N. peacekeeping force was the priority.<br />"Our position has always been that there is a ... a U.N. commitment to increase the size of the MONUC force, so the first port of call is for countries to see whether they can add, either at a planning or operational level to that MONUC force," said Miliband.<br />Some 250,000 people have been displaced by the violence in Congo, in which forces of renegade Congolese Tutsi Gen. Laurent Nkunda has been battling pro-government militias.<br />Two EU "battle groups" are on standby for missions at any given time. One of those on standby until the year-end is British, while the other is led by Germany with contributions from France, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg.<br />"EUROPE SHOULD BE EFFECTVE"<br />From January 1, Italy will head one standby battle group with forces from Spain, Portugal and Greece, and Greece the other, with troops from Bulgaria, Cyprus and Romania.<br />Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said it was premature to say if his country would be ready to send troops in a battle group but added that some countries would call for such a deployment and he was willing to discuss it.<br />"One point is very clear, Europe should be effective. We cannot stay as inactive as we are now," he told reporters.<br />The EU's Solana said ministers would discuss Ban's call, but added: "Let me also underline that the situation on the ground is getting slightly better, and politically also."<br />The U.N. says fighting in Congo has triggered a humanitarian catastrophe and aid groups have criticised the EU's failure to respond with troops.<br />"We have had a month of every possible excuse as to why Europe will not send forces to bolster U.N. peacekeepers," said Elise Ford, Head of Office at Oxfam International in Brussels.<br />"Without an adequate professional force supporting U.N. peacekeepers to provide a measure of security for the population, the killing, raping and looting will continue unabated. We cannot stand by and watch."<br />Congo's 1998-2003 war sucked in six neighbouring armies and caused more than 5 million deaths. EU soldiers intervened in the country in 2003 to halt militia violence that grew out of the broader war and to protect 2006 elections that returned President Joseph Kabila to office.<br />(Writing by Ingrid Melander and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Sophie Hares)</p><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><strong>Shipowners losing this battle of wits<br /></strong>By Mark McDonald<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />HONG KONG: A nightmare scenario has shipowners, insurers, seafarers and naval officers in something of a panic, given a sharp increase in brazen pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden.<br />The scenario unfolds with the Somali pirates in control of the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star becoming frustrated in negotiations over their ransom demands. They pump 50,000 gallons of crude oil into the water - a fraction of the tanker's load - and they threaten to leave the pumps running until their demands for $15 million are met. To reinforce their message, they toss a crew member over the side, and he drowns in the oily muck.<br />The scenario is horrifying but plausible. In the Gulf of Aden alone, the huge expanse of water between Yemen and Somalia, 14 ships are being held for ransom, including the Sirius Star and a Ukrainian ship, the Faina, with 32 battle tanks aboard. Rumors are swirling in the region that both ships could soon be released.<br />Shipowners and governments are desperately seeking successful countermeasures to address what has clearly become a crisis situation. On Monday, the European Union began a yearlong naval operation in the pirate-infested gulf, the EU's first maritime mission ever.<br />Eight countries are participating in the flotilla, which will be backed up with three airplanes. Ground-based personnel are at Northwood Headquarters in Britain.<br />Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, said the mission would have "robust rules of engagement" while coordinating with other navies operating in the region, including those of the United States, India and Russia.<br />This week the UN Security Council passed a resolution allowing navies to breach the 20-kilometer, or 12-mile, territorial limit and enter Somali waters in pursuit of pirates.<br />In the gulf this year 102 ships have been attacked and 40 have been hijacked. With 21,000 ships passing through the region each year and only a handful of international navies to run interference, the risk-to-reward ratio for impoverished Somalis has been unbeatable.<br />"Somali fishermen simply changed their business model, and they've got military hardware in the meantime," said Dieter Berg, head of marine underwriting for the huge reinsurance company Munich Re. "Piracy is now a real industry in Somalia. Whole clans are living off it."<br />Berg said some pirate outfits were now getting inside information in Europe about upcoming shipments of dangerous cargo and shipping routes, the better to plot and pick their attacks.<br />Interviews with owners, insurers, security companies and anti-piracy experts suggest that many technical innovations are being tried now, everything from high-tech sonic cannons to jury-rigged electrified wires strung around the hulls of their boats.<br />Some ships have put on extra crew to stand 24-hour watches. Sonic guns and night-vision goggles are now in such demand in the region that they have doubled in price. Nonlethal weapons like low-impact claymore mines and laser-light rifles known as "dazzle guns" are being considered.<br />Foam sprayers and high-pressure fire hoses have been used to drench the speedboats of approaching hijackers. Huge floodlights have been installed on ships and gasoline bombs prepared. Some ships are stocking special sprays developed by the U.S. military to make decks so slippery that the pirates, if they do come aboard, will not be able to stand up. Some ships have built - and actually used - panic rooms for crews to hide in.<br />Private enterprise also is getting involved. A number of the world's best-known security companies, including Blackwater and Aegis, are trying to expand into the maritime-security business. They are offering teams of onboard guards - most of them former military combat veterans - to repel the pirates.<br />"Blackwater offered to put a couple ships in the water, but they don't have the UN mandate," said Arthur Bowring, managing director of the Hong Kong Shipowners Association, referring to the legal protections afforded national navies. "I've had lots of e-mails from these security companies offering us their services - at vast expense."<br />The effectiveness of security guards remains to be seen, and most anti-piracy experts and insurers do not endorse the use of armed guards. But without armed guards, some analysts say, there is no real deterrent for the pirates.<br />"How do pirates in a small boat stop a 30,000-ton ship? It's firearms, that's all it is," Andy MacDonagh, a director of the private military contractor Raven Special Projects, said in an interview with Lloyd's List. "But as soon as you fire back, they are going to turn round and go the other way because they're so vulnerable."<br />An unarmed three-man team was overwhelmed by pirates who captured the chemical tanker Biscaglia in the gulf last week. The guards, two Britons and an Irishman, jumped overboard as the pirates clambered onto the ship. They were pulled from the water by a helicopter deployed from a nearby French frigate.<br />"Of course they went overboard," said Bowring. "They didn't want to sit on a beach in Somalia for three months. They're far too experienced for that."<br />The security team, employed by Anti Piracy Maritime Security Solutions, in Poole, England, carried no firearms but did have water sprayers and a sonic cannon. The cannon - a long-range acoustic device, or LRAD, which can cost as much as $125,000 - shoots sound waves from a dish transmitter. The noise, if properly aimed and focused, can be debilitating at 100 meters, or 330 feet.<br />"The pirates were basically laughing at our guys," said the company owner, Nick Davis. "LRADs don't work when they take an AK-47 round through them."<br />So the pirates won that battle and the Biscaglia remains anchored offshore, with hijackers negotiating for its release.<br />The pirate clans, meanwhile, are untouchable at their bases in Somalia, which has not had an effective government since the early 1990s.<br />"The problem," said Berg, "lies ashore."<br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><strong>EU launches Somalia anti-piracy operation<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />By David Brunnstrom<br />The European Union agreed on Monday to launch an anti-piracy naval operation off the coast of Somalia involving warships and aircraft from several nations.<br />The mission, the first such naval operation mounted by the 27-member EU, will initially involve three warships -- from Greece, Britain and France, and two maritime surveillance aircraft from France and Spain.<br />The naval force will be joined by a fourth ship from Germany upon approval of the mission by the German parliament, which is expected mid-month, EU officials said. Two maritime surveillance aircraft will be provided by France and Spain, they said.<br />A surge in piracy in one of the world's busiest shipping lanes off Somalia has pushed up insurance costs, brought pirate gangs tens of millions of dollars in ransoms and prompted foreign navies to rush to the area to protect merchant shipping.<br />There are already several international naval operations in the area, including a NATO mission to counter piracy, but they have done little to deter the pirates.<br />European foreign ministers meeting in Brussels agreed to the launch of the EU mission from Tuesday, foreign policy chief Javier Solana told a news conference.<br />Solana said it would be the EU's first naval operation "and in a place in the world that everybody's looking at."<br />"The rules of engagement are very robust, with the possibility of using all means, including force to protect, to deter and to prosecute all acts of piracy."<br />An EU official said the British and French ships were in the region and the Greek flagship would sail from Greece Tuesday.<br />It is under the operational command of Britain and command of the naval force at sea will be held for an initial four months by Greece, then by Spain and then the Netherlands.<br />"THREAT TO TRADE"<br />There have been around 95 pirate attacks in Somali waters this year, with some 40 ships taken, including a Saudi tanker holding $100 million (67 million pounds) of oil.<br />Foreign Secretary David Miliband told reporters the mission was significant.<br />"Piracy is a threat to European trade; also to global trade. The fact there are 19 hostage ships now in harbour is very clear proof of the need. The fact that the European Union is stepping up to the plate on this is a significant step forward," he said.<br />The U.N. Security Council last week cleared the way for the EU mission when it renewed its authorisation for countries to use military force against pirates off Somalia.<br />The U.S.-drafted resolution, adopted unanimously by the 15-nation council, extends for one year the right of countries with permission from Somalia's transitional government to enter Somali waters to pursue and attack pirates.<br />French U.N. Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert said last week he was confident the EU operation would improve security in the Gulf of Aden, a major sea lane for Middle East oil used by ships heading to and from the Suez canal.<br />An unresolved issue has been jurisdiction over captured pirates and where they can be prosecuted. U.S. envoy Rosemary DiCarlo told reporters last week Washington hoped more countries would use a 1988 convention against unlawful acts committed at sea to put captured pirates on trial.<br />(Additional reporting by Ingrid Melander)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5DdRkzI-IDUUK4Hhbj6dnXqho_N71gU_tUAMiZYQIFUGZqV9sxiQ99Un9X2K6e0afLTXmi8VU1Y8gz-4IZQe8b-wTVOKLIMiCRyrxrnpLrOtS2Yw8CH5BzIKJenURAKOuHoaHIPwAFSU/s1600-h/DSC02795.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770308913427218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5DdRkzI-IDUUK4Hhbj6dnXqho_N71gU_tUAMiZYQIFUGZqV9sxiQ99Un9X2K6e0afLTXmi8VU1Y8gz-4IZQe8b-wTVOKLIMiCRyrxrnpLrOtS2Yw8CH5BzIKJenURAKOuHoaHIPwAFSU/s320/DSC02795.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Rioting in Greece continues</strong><br />By Anthee Carassava<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />ATHENS: The violence in Greece by youths angry over the killing of a teenager by the police raged for a third day on Monday as thousands of police officers failed to contain some of the worst rioting in recent years.<br />A major street march through the center of central Athens quickly turned violent Monday night, as demonstrators threw concrete slabs, rocks and flaming gasoline bombs at police officers. A Christmas tree set up by the government in the center of the city was set on fire.<br />The rioting also intensified in the country's second-largest city, Salonika, and for the first time spread to Trikala, a city in the country's agricultural heartland.<br />Schools were shut in Athens, the capital, and high school and university students spilled onto the streets, leading to scattered violence throughout the day. But the evening demonstration, which had attracted thousands and was organized by the nation's Communist Party, was accompanied by some of the worst of the violence of the past several days, and bystanders said they were growing more frustrated with the police's inability to stop the riots.<br />The windows of one of Athens' luxury hotels, the Athens Plaza on Syntagma Square, were smashed, and the lobby was filled with tear gas or smoke. A hotel guard said guests were evacuated. A small fire burned in the lobby of the Foreign Ministry opposite the Parliament building, The Associated Press reported.<br />On Sunday, protesters took to the streets in Athens and other Greek cities, burning shops, cars and businesses despite swift action by the government, which charged a police officer with premeditated manslaughter in the shooting death of the 15-year-old on Saturday night.<br />Senior security officials said they had put the country's entire 45,000-member police force on alert in one of the biggest security mobilizations since Athens hosted the 2004 Summer Olympics. Britain and Australia issued travel advisories for their citizens visiting Athens.<br />Panayiotis Stathis, an Athens police spokesman, said security forces were "trying to control the situation," while using restraint in putting down any protests. "The orders decreed to officers is to be tolerant but responsive to any criminal attack," Stathis said.<br />As night fell on Sunday, rioters were barricaded at two university campuses in the capital. The Greek police and military have not been permitted to enter college campuses since 1973, when tanks quashed a student uprising at Athens Polytechnic, leading to at least 22 civilian deaths.<br />Panagiotis Sotiris, 38, a spokesman for Uniting Anti-Capitalist Left, a coalition of leftist groups which helped take over the Athens Law School on Monday, said in an interview with Reuters that the violence was not only connected to the killing of the 15-year-old boy, "but is a struggle to overthrow the government's policy."<br />"We are experiencing moments of a great social revolution," he said.<br />Young people also continued to clash with the police in other cities. In the northern city of Salonika, 300 students fought pitched battles with the police on Monday, overturning scores of trash cans and setting them ablaze. The rioting seemed to worsen Monday night, as dozens of buildings were damaged and rioters threw homemade firebombs, The Associated Press reported. In Veroia, a town about 40 miles from Salonika, an estimated 400 stone-wielding students clashed with the local police, who retaliated with tear gas. In the small Greek town of Trikala, a student protest march turned violent and one policeman was injured.<br />In Athens, some 15,000 police officers fanned out across the city's meandering streets, the authorities said. Rebel youth and self-styled anarchists threw rocks at police officers in riot gear and shouted anti-establishment slogans.<br />Workers in the capital's central district had returned to their jobs on Monday but expressed frustration as they surveyed the damage done by the rioters. Department stores, banks and scores of cars have been destroyed in the rioting.<br />"What happened with the teenager was terrible," said Marina Christodoulou, a teller at a bank destroyed by rioters. "But watching these rebellious youths tear down the town without an inkling of a response from the police makes the authorities look like cowards."<br />The details of the Saturday night confrontation that led to the death of the 15-year-old, whose name has not been officially released by the authorities, remained in dispute. The police said two police officers had been stopped by about 30 aggressive youths in Exarchia, a central Athenian district of bars, restaurants and bookstores that is a gathering place for anarchists.<br />The police said one officer, Epaminondas Korkoneas, fired three warning shots, one of which struck and killed the boy. Greek media quoted witnesses who said the officer had aimed at the boy. Korkoneas has been charged with premeditated manslaughter. The other officer present has been charged as an accomplice.<br />An autopsy is being carried out on the boy's body to determine the trajectory of the bullet that killed him.<br />Clashes between the police and anarchists and other radical youth in Greece are common, but the rioting represented the worst of such violence in years. A longstanding, delicate co-existence between the police and the groups of far-left youth in parts of the capital had been shattered, political analysts said.<br />"For decades," said John Brady Kiesling, a former American diplomat in Athens, "there has been a modus vivendi whereby police tolerate certain crime in Exarchia, and anarchists refrain from waging attacks against them. That live-and-let-live attitude has worked well for both sides. But once there is some type of police action, anarchists retaliate massively and leftist-leaning youth gangs rally to their cause of police resentment."<br />The anarchist movement in Greece traces its roots to a military junta that ruled the country from 1967 to 1974. Because of the population's sensitivity to state violence against civilians, however, the authorities are hesitant to use overwhelming force against them, even when they become violent.<br />Kiesling and other analysts contacted Monday suggested that the authorities were holding out against coordinated security operations until a public outcry empowered the police to take action.<br />With the conservative government stung by a string of corruption scandals and its popularity plummeting in the face of difficult economic conditions, politicians and security officials were weighing the options of a large-scale police operation to uproot radical elements propelling the protests.<br />"The timing may not be right for such a move," said Marianna Giannakou, a former conservative lawmaker. "But Greece must move on and end its tolerance of extremism."<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNK2UNy-JU1rZhbSBqHZ7WTZjzz2tQP8a612psQrtF67R00RzVU3SpNgHTDJtF8DLc4qrKFAYv9lPHl7GO3ENhEORRRcKn62vf77jZnTfUfRX9e8TrA1Uymmn9x21fcak1KwcxfpCQD8E/s1600-h/DSC02796.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770312332482994" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNK2UNy-JU1rZhbSBqHZ7WTZjzz2tQP8a612psQrtF67R00RzVU3SpNgHTDJtF8DLc4qrKFAYv9lPHl7GO3ENhEORRRcKn62vf77jZnTfUfRX9e8TrA1Uymmn9x21fcak1KwcxfpCQD8E/s320/DSC02796.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Fought over any good books lately?<br /></strong>By Joanne Kaufman<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />Jocelyn Bowie was thrilled by the invitation to join a book group. She had just returned to her hometown, Bloomington, Indiana, to take an administration job at Indiana University, and thought she had won a ticket to a top echelon. "I was hoping to network with all these women in upper-level jobs at IU, then I found they were in the book group," she said. "I thought, 'Great! They'll see how wonderful I am, and we'll have these great conversations about books.' "<br />Bowie cannot pinpoint the precise moment when disillusion replaced delight. Maybe it was the evening she tried to persuade everyone to look beyond Oprah Winfrey's picks, "and they all said 'What's wrong with Oprah?' " she said.<br />Or perhaps it was the meeting when she lobbied for literary classics like "Emma" and the rest of the group was abuzz about "The Secret Life of Bees," a pop-lit best seller.<br />The last straw came when the group picked "The Da Vinci Code" and someone suggested the discussion would be enriched by delving into the author's source material. "It was bad enough that they wanted to read 'Da Vinci Code' in the first place," Bowie said, "but then they wanted to talk about it." She quit shortly after, making up a polite excuse: "I told the organizer, 'You're reading fiction, and I'm reading history right now.' "<br />Yes, it's a nice, high-minded idea to join a book group, a way to make friends and read books that might otherwise sit untouched. But what happens when you wind up hating all the literary selections — or the other members? Breaking up isn't so hard to do when it means freedom from inane critical commentary, political maneuvering, hurt feelings, bad chick lit and even worse chardonnay.<br />"Who knew a book group could be such a soap opera?" said Barb Burg, senior vice president at Bantam Dell, which publishes many titles adopted by book groups. "You'd think it would just be about the book. But wherever I go, people want to talk to me about the infighting and the politics."<br />One member may push for John Updike, while everyone else is set on John Grisham. One person wants to have a glass of wine and talk about the book, while everyone else wants to get drunk and talk about their spouses. "There are all these power struggles about what book gets chosen," Burg said. Then come the complaints: "It's too long, it's too short, it's not literary enough, it's too literary ... "<br />The literary societies of the 19th century seemed content to leave the drama to authors and poets, whom they discussed with great seriousness of purpose. Some book groups evolved from sewing circles, which "gave women a chance to exercise their intellect and have a social gathering," said Rachel Jacobsohn, author of "The Reading Group Handbook," which gives a history of the format plus dos and don'ts for modern hosts.<br />Today there are perhaps four million to five million book groups in the United States, and the number is thought to be rising, said Ann Kent, the founder of Book Group Expo, an annual gathering of readers and authors.<br />"I firmly believe there was an uptick in the number of book groups after 9/11, and I'm expecting another increase in these difficult economic times," she said. "We're looking to stay connected and to have a form of entertainment that's affordable, and book groups are an easy avenue for that."<br />Most groups are all-female, but there are plenty of all-male and coed ones. Lately there have emerged plenty of online-only book groups too, though — given the difficulty of flinging a drink in the face of a member who suggests reading Trollope — those are clearly a different animal.<br />And more clubs means more acrimony. Sometimes there is a rambler in the group, whose opinion far outlasts the natural interest of others, or a pedant, who never met a literary reference she did not yearn to sling. The most common cause of dissatisfaction and departures?<br />"It's because there's an ayatollah," said Esther Bushell, a professional book-group facilitator who leads a dozen suburban New York groups and charges $250 to $300 a member annually for her services. "This person expects to choose all the books and to take over all the discussions. And when I come on board, the ayatollah is threatened and doesn't say anything." Like other facilitators, she is hired for the express purpose of bringing long-winded types in line.<br />For Doreen Orion, a psychiatrist in Boulder, Colorado, the spoiler in her book group was a drama queen who turned every meeting into her own personal therapy session. Orion was used to such people in her practice, but in her personal life — well, no thanks. "There were always things going on in her life with relationships, and she'd want to talk about it," she said. "There'd be some weird thing in a book and she'd relate it to her life no matter what. Everything came back to her. It was really exhausting after a while."<br />What attracted Susan Farewell to a book group called the IlluminaTea were guidelines that precluded such off-putting antics. No therapy talk, no chitchat and no skipping meetings. "It was very high-minded," said Farewell, a travel writer in Westport, Connecticut Members took turns selecting books, "and you felt that your choice was a measure of how intelligent and sophisticated and worldly you were," she said.<br />The high standards extended to the refreshment table. "When it was your month to host a meeting, you would do your interpretation of a tea, and the teas got very competitive," Farewell said. Homemade scones and Devonshire cream were par for the course, and Farewell recalls spending the day before her hostess stint making watercress and smoked salmon sandwiches.<br />This started to feel oppressive. "If the standards had been more relaxed, I would have stayed in the group," she said. "But I just felt I couldn't keep getting clotted cream. I couldn't work and carry on the formality and get through the novel every month, so I just said I couldn't make the meetings anymore."<br />Some who leave one group find happiness in another. Orion and another woman broke from their original group and contacted another woman who had also left. "Then we secretly reconstituted as another group," Orion said. "We've been going strong for 10 years, but our experience has made us cautious about inviting new members. We've become very selective."<br />Nancy Atkins Peck, an artist and historian in Glen Rock, New Jersey, has also made a successful transition. Until the election cycle of 2004, she had loved her book group — the members read "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," novels by Virginia Woolf "and sometimes a paperback of no importance," she said.<br />Then, after a presidential debate, an argument about the candidates ensued, "so it was decided that we couldn't read any political books or have any political discussions anymore," recalled Peck, who had just suggested the group read a book about the Bush White House.<br />"It was nixed, and I just felt that was unnatural," given that the group had successfully discussed other sensitive issues, she said. She and her husband then joined a coed group, which has worked out well. "And we read a heck of a lot of political books," she said triumphantly.<br />Sometimes the problem is a life-stage mismatch among group members. "I know of a group where all but one member has young children," said Susanne Pari, author of the novel "The Fortune Catcher" and the program director at Book Group Expo. "They talk for 15 minutes about the book and then launch into a discussion of poopy diapers and nap times and preschool."<br />Then the one member who had nothing to bring to the soiled Pampers conversation announced she did not have time for the group. For etiquette reasons, "it's very uncommon" for people to give the real reason for their disenchantment, Pari said.<br />Bushell, the book-group facilitator, tells of one woman who left a group "because she didn't envision herself sitting around talking about a book — she thought some business networking would take place."<br />Another woman decamped because she wanted to read more chick lit. "I hate to sound ponderous," Bushell said, "but I have a certain moral obligation. I don't feel I can be paid for leading a discussion about 'The Devil Wears Prada.'"<br />At Book Passage, a store with two branches in the San Francisco area, Kate Larson is something of a Miss Lonely Hearts for newcomers and disgruntled book group members. "I collect names, and when I get 12 or 14 I ask them to come to a meeting at the store," she said. "If it looks like they all agree about what kinds of things they want to read, they've got a book club."<br />Larson uses a newsletter to help people find special-interest groups — say, in science fiction or spirituality. Groups made up of total strangers seem to last longer, she said, "because the focus is truly on the book."<br />As for Bowie of Indiana University, she was asked to join another group but has chosen to stay unaffiliated. "My experience was a real disappointment," she said. "Now when I look at a novel in a store and it has book group questions in the back, it almost puts me off from buying it."<br /><br /><div><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwyzVAR553YP5IfCexWI-iGQZqXO7msd3U_KYIbWhm4lpR4jGMBA6Ij2xYPnKFsM-PAW7GaKUaUXy5irFEpafrMNFk0TxwZOKwTuGHZtx_HarnEQMcMWEivfuHZteoDVNDxsKodRc7hOs/s1600-h/DSC02798.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770304752957442" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwyzVAR553YP5IfCexWI-iGQZqXO7msd3U_KYIbWhm4lpR4jGMBA6Ij2xYPnKFsM-PAW7GaKUaUXy5irFEpafrMNFk0TxwZOKwTuGHZtx_HarnEQMcMWEivfuHZteoDVNDxsKodRc7hOs/s320/DSC02798.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div></div><div></div><div>The fights of Machu Picchu: Who got there first?<br />By Simon Romero<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />CUSCO, Peru: From the postcards bearing his swashbuckling, fedora-topped image to the luxury train emblazoned with his name that runs to the foot of the mountain redoubt of Machu Picchu, reminders are ubiquitous here of Hiram Bingham, the Yale explorer long credited with revealing the so-called Lost City of the Incas to the outside world almost a century ago.<br />But in recent months, a confluence of contrary events has threatened to upend the legacy of Bingham, the ostensible model for the fictional Indiana Jones. Peru has threatened legal action against Yale to recover thousands of artifacts Bingham removed. Evidence has emerged suggesting that a German adventurer may have arrived there first. And a dispute has been grinding on over who owned the site when Bingham supposedly discovered it.<br />Scholarly circles in Peru have been abuzz with revisionist debate.<br />Not only may Bingham not be quite the heroic pioneer that he has been portrayed as, but it may well be that the Lost City of the Incas was never really lost after all.<br />The disputes over who discovered or rediscovered the sacred site have become so contentious they have been living up to the phrase "the fights of Machu Picchu," coined by the U.S. writer Daniel Buck in an allusion to a Pablo Neruda ode, "The Heights of Machu Picchu."<br />No one in the field of Machu Picchu studies seriously challenges the fact that Bingham arrived at the jungle-shrouded ruins in 1911, excavated and photographed them, and largely introduced them to the world.<br />But his claims have been challenged over time.<br />"Hiram Bingham never thought someone would doggedly investigate his path," said Mariana Mould de Pease, a Peruvian historian.<br />Soon after Bingham led his expeditions to Machu Picchu, claims surfaced that a British missionary, Thomas Payne, and a German engineer, J.M. von Hassel, had beaten him there. And maps found by historians show references to Machu Picchu as early as 1874.<br />The latest challenge comes from recently publicized claims raising the possibility that a German adventurer arrived at Machu Picchu and looted it decades before Bingham even set foot in Peru. Records show that the German, Augusto Berns, purchased land in the 1860s opposite the Machu Picchu mountain, built a sawmill on his property and then tried to raise money from investors to plunder nearby Incan ruins, all with the blessing of the Peruvian government.<br />"The Berns information is a matter that has to be investigated further," said Jorge Flores Ochoa, a prominent Peruvian anthropologist. "Hiram Bingham painted himself as a great explorer who ventured to the ends of the Earth, but that was a fantasy. The truth is that others, perhaps many others, arrived at Machu Picchu long before he did."<br />Berns, an engineer, went to Peru to work on the Southern Peruvian Railway. An article this year in the magazine South American Explorer by Paolo Greer, a cartographer based in Alaska, offered additional detail about Berns, showing how he stopped cutting railroad ties on his property in the 1880s and started trying to lure investors into ventures for prospecting the area for gold and silver.<br />"Berns's mining claims proved worthless," Greer said in an e-mail message. "However, he spent years purposely searching for Inca sites, employing local guides who were intimate with the area."<br />Moreover, some scholars say, Bingham may have known about Berns's activities. Mould de Pease said she found in Yale's own archives an 1887 Peruvian government document authorizing Berns to remove treasure from areas that may have included Machu Picchu. She reported the find in a 2003 book.<br />"If this document was in Bingham's own papers, then he knew that Berns could have arrived there first," she said.<br />Others scoff at the possibility that Berns set foot on Machu Picchu, pointing to discrepancies in the richly worded prospectuses that he sent out to investors. In one document, Berns referred to an "ancient gold-washing apparatus" called "llamajcansha," which "in the ancient Indian languages, means 'gold yard."'<br />"It is unlikely that readers of his prospectus in the United States spoke Quechua," Buck wrote in an essay published in the Lima newspaper La República, referring to the indigenous language spoken in this part of Peru. "Otherwise they would have figured out that llamajcansha meant 'llama yard."'<br />Buck added, "Berns was selling a load of llama dung."<br />Skeptics also say no substantive proof has emerged that Berns ever spirited away artifacts from Machu Picchu.<br />Meanwhile, in an effort to assert greater control over its cultural heritage, the Peruvian government said last month that it would take legal action against Yale in an effort to secure the return of thousands of artifacts Bingham took to the university. Peru claims the artifacts had been lent to Yale and therefore should have been returned. The threat of legal action is an abrupt turnaround from a recent preliminary understanding between Yale and Peru that appeared to put the parties on the road to resolving the dispute.<br />Both sides in the case have seized on the revelations about Berns as supporting evidence.<br />An aide to Cecilia Bákula, director of the National Institute of Culture in Lima, which manages the Machu Picchu site, said she was unavailable for comment. But in the view of Mould de Pease, the historian, the authorization given to Berns shows that Peru had sovereignty over Machu Picchu before Bingham arrived there.<br />For Yale, revelations that an earlier adventurer had designs on Incan ruins may reinforce its view that the items removed by Bingham are neither unique treasures nor critically important artifacts. "It is quite possible that all the treasures were removed by the German, Augusto Berns, many years before Bingham arrived," said R. Scott Greathead, a lawyer representing Yale.<br />Complicating matters further, property records indicate that tracts of land, including Machu Picchu, were repeatedly bought and sold by families in the Cusco area before Bingham arrived.<br />"My great-grandfather, Mariano Ignacio Ferro, owned Machu Picchu when Hiram Bingham claimed to have discovered it, and even helped the American find his way there," said Roxana Abrill Nuñez, a museum curator in Cusco who is waging a high-profile legal battle to be compensated for her family's loss of Machu Picchu. She claims that the state expropriated the site from her family without payment.<br />For others in Cusco, the actions of a German once forgotten to history offer insight into a city that may have been lost and found repeatedly since the Incas abandoned it, even if it took Bingham's work to lodge it in the public imagination.<br />"All I know is that anything was possible in the turbulent years before Bingham made it to Machu Picchu, with others probably arriving even before this German," said David Ugarte Vega, an anthropologist at the National University of San Antonio Abad in Cusco.<br />"What is certain is that the image of Bingham is at last being challenged," Ugarte Vega said, "while the descendants of those great builders who assembled Machu Picchu are working as porters for the newest wave of travelers who come to see the site from afar."</div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Historians refute cover-up of message signaling Pearl Harbor<br /></strong>By Sam Roberts<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />It has remained one of World War II's most enduring mysteries, one that resonated decades later in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: Who in Washington knew what and when before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941?<br />Specifically, who heard or saw a transcript of a Tokyo shortwave radio news broadcast that was interrupted by a prearranged coded weather report? The weather bulletin signaled Japanese diplomats around the world to destroy confidential documents and codes because war with the United States, the Soviet Union or Britain was beginning.<br />In testimony for government inquiries, witnesses said that the "winds execute" message was intercepted as early as Dec. 4, three days before the attack.<br />But after analyzing U.S. and foreign intelligence sources and decrypted cables, historians for the National Security Agency concluded in a historical documentary released last week that whatever other warnings reached Washington about the attack, the "winds execute" message was not one of them.<br />A Japanese message intercepted and decoded on Nov. 19, 1941, at an American monitoring station on Bainbridge Island, Washington, appeared to lay out the "winds execute" situation. If diplomatic relations were "in danger" with one of three countries, a coded phrase would be repeated as a special weather bulletin twice in the middle and twice at the end of the daily Japanese-language news broadcast.<br />"East wind rain" would mean the United States; "north wind cloudy," the Soviet Union; and "west wind clear," Britain.<br />In the history "West Wind Clear," published by the Center for Cryptologic History at the National Security Agency, Robert Hanyok and David Mowry attribute accounts of the message being broadcast to the flawed or fabricated memory of some witnesses, perhaps to deflect culpability from other officials for the United States' insufficient readiness for war.<br />A congressional committee grappled with competing accounts of the "winds execute" message in 1946, by which time the question of whether it had been broadcast had blown into a controversy. The New York Times described it at the time as a "bitter microcosm" of the investigation into American preparedness.<br />"If there was such a message," the paper wrote, "the Washington military establishment would have been gravely at fault in not having passed it along" to military commanders in Hawaii. If there was not, then the supporters of those commanders "would have lost an important prop to their case."<br />In an interview, Hanyok said there were several lessons from the controversy that reverberate today. He said that some adherents of the theory that the message was sent and seen were motivated by an unshakable faith in the efficacy of radio intelligence, and that when a copy of the message could not be found they blamed a cover-up - a reminder that no intelligence-gathering is completely foolproof.<br />Washington also missed potential warning signs because intelligence resources had been diverted to the Atlantic theater, he said, and the Japanese deftly practiced deception to mislead Americans about the whereabouts of Tokyo's naval strike force.<br />"The problem with the conspiracy theory," Hanyok said, "is that it diverted attention from the real substantive problems, the major issue being the intelligence system was so bureaucratized."<br />Beginning about Dec. 1, Washington became aware that the Japanese were ordering diplomats overseas to selectively destroy confidential documents. But, the NSA study found, "because of the sometimes tardy exploitation of these messages, intelligence officers in the army and navy knew only parts of the complete program. It is possible that they viewed the Japanese actions as ominous, but also contradictory and perhaps even confusing. More importantly, though, the binge of code destruction was occurring without the transmittal of the winds execute message."<br />The authors concluded that the weight of the evidence "indicates that one coded phrase, 'west wind clear,' was broadcast according to previous instructions some six or seven hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor."<br />"In the end, the winds code never was the intelligence indicator or warning that it first appeared to the Americans, as well as to the British and Dutch," they wrote, and did not add to the view that prevailed then in Washington and London "that relations with Tokyo had deteriorated to a dangerous point."<br />"From a military standpoint, the winds coded message contained no actionable intelligence either about the Japanese operations in Southeast Asia and absolutely nothing about Pearl Harbor.<br />"In reality," they concluded, "the Japanese broadcast the coded phrase(s) long after hostilities began - useless, in fact, to all who might have heard it."<br />That war with Japan was anticipated is apparent from a separate memorandum to President Franklin Roosevelt dated Nov. 13, 1941, from William Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. The memorandum was found in the National Archives last year by the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group.<br />Reporting on a conversation the week before between Hans Thoman, the German chargé d'affaires to the United States, and Malcolm Lovell, a Quaker leader, Donovan quoted Thoman as saying that Japan was trying to buy time.<br />"In the last analysis, Japan knows that unless the United States agrees to some reasonable terms in the Far East, Japan must face the threat of strangulation, now or later. Should Japan wait until later to prevent this strangulation by the United States, she will be less able to free herself than now, for Germany is now occupying the major attention of both the British empire and the United States.<br />"If Japan waits, it will be comparatively easy for the United States to strangle Japan," Donovan's memorandum quoting Thoman continued. "Japan is therefore forced to strike now, whether she wishes to or not."</div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7eDIhfbnW1GR0rI1Gtg5Y8eRYzREHxJmRDW9JBcPBoSahFNVVRayfz1G0-54VW28AiiHHQMnlIOt1nXHy14HZSkGHphKfOXN7cSM9DeyKgNhxNHM-plqO4Gd6PznxGmDYNmO44EQ8agM/s1600-h/DSC02799.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770303274351890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7eDIhfbnW1GR0rI1Gtg5Y8eRYzREHxJmRDW9JBcPBoSahFNVVRayfz1G0-54VW28AiiHHQMnlIOt1nXHy14HZSkGHphKfOXN7cSM9DeyKgNhxNHM-plqO4Gd6PznxGmDYNmO44EQ8agM/s320/DSC02799.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDqN5Sh-61x2h-i6PUmLVIBpo8HVGvqej96nr-u3OfLeqxkPGeBj1v2CAuwNR9r9-A7PwBNISAsBll27tL9gmqKrGwpEXL68C8XM5-PmyBZOiDwwKMSJ50s3FH7b4XKyeFu8PT3anxRgU/s1600-h/DSC02800.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770031348474018" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDqN5Sh-61x2h-i6PUmLVIBpo8HVGvqej96nr-u3OfLeqxkPGeBj1v2CAuwNR9r9-A7PwBNISAsBll27tL9gmqKrGwpEXL68C8XM5-PmyBZOiDwwKMSJ50s3FH7b4XKyeFu8PT3anxRgU/s320/DSC02800.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKfyTG3meeNI7c0Y4gYFEOfgX8crNSwlhhYs6q9vu4ZQ7CACNT1Xx6YHszn_mQs0-X-FXG9LRHizZkcH4j3tuYRxO1sbbT_4nuQss_AReLbrn9kbNM8Nxb_vc5dqDe3VbVL7ZyOXHi8UI/s1600-h/DSC02802.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770027128676818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKfyTG3meeNI7c0Y4gYFEOfgX8crNSwlhhYs6q9vu4ZQ7CACNT1Xx6YHszn_mQs0-X-FXG9LRHizZkcH4j3tuYRxO1sbbT_4nuQss_AReLbrn9kbNM8Nxb_vc5dqDe3VbVL7ZyOXHi8UI/s320/DSC02802.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDWlOE5_Afgq3ov8sVGKyu53HphW5kSoXn7BDZTztd25xS22sqHzZSBbCBCiGmtkuBEcA1VLSM13xDwjcm648pmQ32-Vwjn4khGzxqjptZ7pd2EIMyqWdh0Ei6sJN1-lRpZLAmbAQxfW_R/s1600-h/DSC02804.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770018192605394" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDWlOE5_Afgq3ov8sVGKyu53HphW5kSoXn7BDZTztd25xS22sqHzZSBbCBCiGmtkuBEcA1VLSM13xDwjcm648pmQ32-Vwjn4khGzxqjptZ7pd2EIMyqWdh0Ei6sJN1-lRpZLAmbAQxfW_R/s320/DSC02804.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvBhZpZUKdecAgKFma2bTv9qStOkBnB3__49viSyE_KQpdbr57PDoSFMHBNODQbwYVEZLNAwppR7BpC3YDv410qBlsf8MAsADmYp0M3pT2QIQckgQQpa_FI0SplvmeDBDTSqjMyFmejg5Q/s1600-h/DSC02805.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770010339595714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvBhZpZUKdecAgKFma2bTv9qStOkBnB3__49viSyE_KQpdbr57PDoSFMHBNODQbwYVEZLNAwppR7BpC3YDv410qBlsf8MAsADmYp0M3pT2QIQckgQQpa_FI0SplvmeDBDTSqjMyFmejg5Q/s320/DSC02805.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMDUo1LhNu2dEfxRqRhqfXucapslKzTmd2MlBTuiqVdd0qOc099s_Hg2Ljnu8P-cgWk-VMViFzA2OdbwYgr-Wqj2h4gPE_QKF16eTr922GuEGnFhnyyJjgy_PtWvNajsVCNqh2L02Ff1I/s1600-h/DSC02806.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277770009991838498" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMDUo1LhNu2dEfxRqRhqfXucapslKzTmd2MlBTuiqVdd0qOc099s_Hg2Ljnu8P-cgWk-VMViFzA2OdbwYgr-Wqj2h4gPE_QKF16eTr922GuEGnFhnyyJjgy_PtWvNajsVCNqh2L02Ff1I/s320/DSC02806.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL6-pZtvwrLvf45bolzn4YjvBs3roB3jDiJWnkGeVbX2qv3fn3OrOG86n8BYoU3tyJSYRrPbm0shjpRDEhQQTGkLK__DUfmCcrLtNb2Om7YN09Kd2LUrl2h6JzhktvinS9yWGZ0r5DE3M/s1600-h/DSC02807.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769754299045794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL6-pZtvwrLvf45bolzn4YjvBs3roB3jDiJWnkGeVbX2qv3fn3OrOG86n8BYoU3tyJSYRrPbm0shjpRDEhQQTGkLK__DUfmCcrLtNb2Om7YN09Kd2LUrl2h6JzhktvinS9yWGZ0r5DE3M/s320/DSC02807.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_lKPIPCEILC0ZbWJS_962nSVTqrpLU9F9BOCdHqbXV_MyKfan1UqtDECc2xuybkcUtfiknmizCGwpOnHa1nOT6TR8pOwJSrhDmGyRlEaVY66ytP2C66SQ8ZRo6MRVZdi2jH54FkDMVbE/s1600-h/DSC02808.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769744387915778" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_lKPIPCEILC0ZbWJS_962nSVTqrpLU9F9BOCdHqbXV_MyKfan1UqtDECc2xuybkcUtfiknmizCGwpOnHa1nOT6TR8pOwJSrhDmGyRlEaVY66ytP2C66SQ8ZRo6MRVZdi2jH54FkDMVbE/s320/DSC02808.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0MfZ5BzQzc2num_nklKotdz2aSKu2Zwm4f4eZciHuNQaCFSK94bipvHIC1szEmc08TOpX-KuM2kqHJhPcaD8xVptcUXukwNl6NRQPJXwAOyNmmNi9tyThozp5Jo6dIz1AXk3Ugc5Hwz4/s1600-h/DSC02809.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769735129678642" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0MfZ5BzQzc2num_nklKotdz2aSKu2Zwm4f4eZciHuNQaCFSK94bipvHIC1szEmc08TOpX-KuM2kqHJhPcaD8xVptcUXukwNl6NRQPJXwAOyNmmNi9tyThozp5Jo6dIz1AXk3Ugc5Hwz4/s320/DSC02809.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-ZgvbPRKP1ZSjRyRCHO3gXtouctqn-3k21Xd9I9QYppwYuDbe65XggmRCbm9geXQXSuwWWmUURJdRg-3RrvYdT0G0tQdZ1YKbcxKIh3ys2YktH5R0hZxKNjFlbf_f4aTvg02vwVKGcwg/s1600-h/DSC02810.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769731343327714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-ZgvbPRKP1ZSjRyRCHO3gXtouctqn-3k21Xd9I9QYppwYuDbe65XggmRCbm9geXQXSuwWWmUURJdRg-3RrvYdT0G0tQdZ1YKbcxKIh3ys2YktH5R0hZxKNjFlbf_f4aTvg02vwVKGcwg/s320/DSC02810.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfGos4T6cNKd0GMINeZYh91XH_hzzm8SiM_8g-V9ZYpPdyleR1UZLvNG_qeWxfqPLm4a_b0r0Tsy_R9ha-NRvPNT-dXx5A9-Ui4gPMvF2vPSfQtIWKnS9FjC4ZphtllF2f40FXF7QybcI/s1600-h/DSC02811.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769731432871666" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfGos4T6cNKd0GMINeZYh91XH_hzzm8SiM_8g-V9ZYpPdyleR1UZLvNG_qeWxfqPLm4a_b0r0Tsy_R9ha-NRvPNT-dXx5A9-Ui4gPMvF2vPSfQtIWKnS9FjC4ZphtllF2f40FXF7QybcI/s320/DSC02811.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwTYD4LVQZwlxL8hct78EKMR8LVlsvCRc4xDM_kkHSOwavzN2uIk-X9ls1GQSnKoipKeiaB08o80b5sRHIVnpxK7VVvr-vk0p-v4kKb7ZCl0riMM9nKYe2XcX9ZnX-770dZRfY3nvsJpU/s1600-h/DSC02813.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769491083649682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwTYD4LVQZwlxL8hct78EKMR8LVlsvCRc4xDM_kkHSOwavzN2uIk-X9ls1GQSnKoipKeiaB08o80b5sRHIVnpxK7VVvr-vk0p-v4kKb7ZCl0riMM9nKYe2XcX9ZnX-770dZRfY3nvsJpU/s320/DSC02813.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_HLNZKV3lkCsO7-Rit-ekisvwx6mbx5-vhTun8rnJn9ScGq7ZEejrNRyHu9NlhYefjfMzPQMTxDbLa9eAZIvxvXEHYsA3f-x8sMw62ItoN2Y7e8uRaaSrM71IQXrdkfw1A5Qwx776f1o/s1600-h/DSC02814.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769492286944034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_HLNZKV3lkCsO7-Rit-ekisvwx6mbx5-vhTun8rnJn9ScGq7ZEejrNRyHu9NlhYefjfMzPQMTxDbLa9eAZIvxvXEHYsA3f-x8sMw62ItoN2Y7e8uRaaSrM71IQXrdkfw1A5Qwx776f1o/s320/DSC02814.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvpRhHiRw1qLMfSnxYjjAaDmNG7dWslBj1_ZZsBCw7DNyGJik4ykcPLVS0ewvWbq0JQtvsPSbY-RZ9C5goZixnclQ-9t8AdXHW7whTVBIq80H6CRW4YTX4MbpCLSoM3HG4YzzYWC5vpQU/s1600-h/DSC02816.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769485956815938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvpRhHiRw1qLMfSnxYjjAaDmNG7dWslBj1_ZZsBCw7DNyGJik4ykcPLVS0ewvWbq0JQtvsPSbY-RZ9C5goZixnclQ-9t8AdXHW7whTVBIq80H6CRW4YTX4MbpCLSoM3HG4YzzYWC5vpQU/s320/DSC02816.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7NL6mY01VNNyjyJkHuNvPKWjfmGmoVEzcNMq3cdCjBu7XeO0B17yLhXhnEPbar_sAHIbHPkXnlRG4kzetBUgtB5VSvFmfrGokFUDkKZxWD2b3IG54vT2taFq0m9695vyA2-ylkgEpiBk/s1600-h/DSC02818.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769482155508482" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7NL6mY01VNNyjyJkHuNvPKWjfmGmoVEzcNMq3cdCjBu7XeO0B17yLhXhnEPbar_sAHIbHPkXnlRG4kzetBUgtB5VSvFmfrGokFUDkKZxWD2b3IG54vT2taFq0m9695vyA2-ylkgEpiBk/s320/DSC02818.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXWJSsCI8Vv7frIOQRnaFujJKpMnNVCC7GwiwGRDIh0DPoEp3kS8AVsipRK8UY8UQc0yCKAG9xCBiBDHrJKax9nnFPgai9tvvH9dPI5yRPmaRS4mlGstnhi7Ihrl3VVx8_lhIi3rvf8b0/s1600-h/DSC02819.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769476126096066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXWJSsCI8Vv7frIOQRnaFujJKpMnNVCC7GwiwGRDIh0DPoEp3kS8AVsipRK8UY8UQc0yCKAG9xCBiBDHrJKax9nnFPgai9tvvH9dPI5yRPmaRS4mlGstnhi7Ihrl3VVx8_lhIi3rvf8b0/s320/DSC02819.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLoUtKXGzAiKgwvoWSMLj12A8ZB9o2XckkoxVXcDfBi1q1CHvQU9zuO3f1AYjHf2QW9enzpnAwTfTo0mKgJewidwY1MTVqUFQvPq7SEDFr5bZ5pUYbh3tn5cO7Ava0ToImcrZDPOdFDaw/s1600-h/DSC02820.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769275869627218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLoUtKXGzAiKgwvoWSMLj12A8ZB9o2XckkoxVXcDfBi1q1CHvQU9zuO3f1AYjHf2QW9enzpnAwTfTo0mKgJewidwY1MTVqUFQvPq7SEDFr5bZ5pUYbh3tn5cO7Ava0ToImcrZDPOdFDaw/s320/DSC02820.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghrLkTWayYSOEeU69qdsRyBy7h3JxykynghvtNAqRzFZL3XP_jjBPQoJjGY0pe3KZdgknCPeX1R1g2mBDyhLnJfatjmCDqmewF_wEJ9QY0B8L7mOSWqGPT_fqoPWs48qYTGOTUq-C0gAk/s1600-h/DSC02824.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769273534036706" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghrLkTWayYSOEeU69qdsRyBy7h3JxykynghvtNAqRzFZL3XP_jjBPQoJjGY0pe3KZdgknCPeX1R1g2mBDyhLnJfatjmCDqmewF_wEJ9QY0B8L7mOSWqGPT_fqoPWs48qYTGOTUq-C0gAk/s320/DSC02824.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrl1xkXTygKrYmnOYerXonJJ3XRh3hAgB88YQl8bYzOcB-n-Db6d7yoy08PULWcoOiiQfnY80UXWh-hnugB2JSmU1LQdfZ7OkS7j-rkGE0MD0MVhyt98CFEPBII2heLAC0-PDH4XonhH8/s1600-h/DSC02825.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769266108123122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrl1xkXTygKrYmnOYerXonJJ3XRh3hAgB88YQl8bYzOcB-n-Db6d7yoy08PULWcoOiiQfnY80UXWh-hnugB2JSmU1LQdfZ7OkS7j-rkGE0MD0MVhyt98CFEPBII2heLAC0-PDH4XonhH8/s320/DSC02825.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA4A1HxIcqrW5oL40i0TWpnymsSzVXRAwhXtxRTDTLw98waj5CDsjDY33hvvyL9mCnbEcftkt3JMvGKRI44uCoh6a51VkNobXw9ab0wQV2j2X3TSqErHbcmrcS_mxGEjElBbNFz7yHo7E/s1600-h/DSC02826.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769257667675410" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA4A1HxIcqrW5oL40i0TWpnymsSzVXRAwhXtxRTDTLw98waj5CDsjDY33hvvyL9mCnbEcftkt3JMvGKRI44uCoh6a51VkNobXw9ab0wQV2j2X3TSqErHbcmrcS_mxGEjElBbNFz7yHo7E/s320/DSC02826.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOGM-5qyT1X30KefkPLXVUFxCCg2792LGaKCXgfbHKaiFSaLatAhwvn3jbBZ8ZHSnUPXPmpMHC5zhsVyphQqVTtBoOwIbsKRtCL7NxOqjrx6Wi-4OCwpWwZX1M4rref2CvZU4eHjwQzTc/s1600-h/DSC02827.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277769255869804242" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOGM-5qyT1X30KefkPLXVUFxCCg2792LGaKCXgfbHKaiFSaLatAhwvn3jbBZ8ZHSnUPXPmpMHC5zhsVyphQqVTtBoOwIbsKRtCL7NxOqjrx6Wi-4OCwpWwZX1M4rref2CvZU4eHjwQzTc/s320/DSC02827.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div></div><div></div><div><strong>Co-founder resigns from Carphone Warehouse board<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />LONDON: David Ross, a co-founder of the British mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse, resigned Monday as deputy chairman of the company after failing to declare he had pledged shares he owned in the business against personal loans.<br />Ross, with an estimated fortune of £873 million, or $1.3 billion, is one of Britain's best-known businessmen and was chosen in May by Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, to help organize the 2012 Olympics.<br />Ross also had failed to disclose similar arrangements for his shares in the bus and rail company National Express, of which he is chairman, and two other companies of which he is a director, regulatory filings showed Monday.<br />Shares in Carphone, which Ross founded with Charles Dunstone in 1989, fell 4 pence, or 4.3 percent, to close at 89 pence, its lowest close since July 2003, on concerns that Ross might have to sell his 19 percent stake in the business.<br />British regulations require that directors should disclose immediately if they have pledged shares against personal loans.<br />Carphone said Ross had struck his loan agreements from 2006 to 2008.<br />"The company hadn't been aware of this until this time," Dunstone told analysts during a conference call. "As a result of that, David has tendered his resignation to the board."<br />Ross could not be immediately reached for comment. The Financial Services Authority, a British regulator, declined to comment on whether it would be taking action on the matter.<br />The London mayor's office and the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games had no immediate comment.<br />Carphone said Ross had pledged 136.4 million shares against personal loans from 2006 to 2008. This was on top of around 41 million shares pledged against loans which he had previously disclosed.<br />It said Ross had notified the company Sunday that none of the loans were in default and that he had no current intention of selling his shares.<br />"In addition, he has given an undertaking to the board to facilitate an orderly market, where possible, for any potential future disposal of shares in the company," Carphone said.<br />The self-storage company Big Yellow said Ross, a director of the company, had also pledged a holding of 11.46 million of its shares against personal loans.<br />National Express said he had pledged a holding of 3.01 million shares against personal loans, while the marine safety group Cosalt said he had pledged a holding of 3.99 million shares for the same purposes.<br />Big Yellow and Cosalt also said Ross had no intention of selling his holding, while National Express said he would attempt to ensure an orderly sale process if one were to occur.<br />Dunstone said he did not know why Ross had not declared his loan arrangements earlier and said the details of the loans were a personal matter.<br />"I think it was probably an oversight or a misunderstanding of what needs to be done," he said. "It's clearly a great personal sadness to me, having worked with David for such a long time, to lose him from the board."<br />Carphone said that no other directors had undertaken similar loan arrangements.</div><div></div><div>********************</div><div></div><div><strong>Pound hits record low vs euro</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 8, 2008<br />LONDON: Sterling hit a record low against a broadly stronger euro on Monday, with doubts about Britain's ability to navigate a quick path through recession undermining sentiment and euro buy orders hastening the pounds fall.<br />By 4:38 p.m., the euro had hit 87.38 pence -- a level not seen since the euro's inception in 1999.<br />"Sterling is getting hammered by stops," a London-based trader said, adding that 90 pence was a realistic target.<br />(Reporting by Veronica Brown)</div><div></div><div>********************</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-7621469264530660252008-12-08T05:16:00.031+01:002008-12-09T05:10:42.455+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Sunday, 7th December, 2008<div align="center"></div><div align="center"><strong>The deluder in chief </strong></div><strong></strong><br /><div align="justify">NYT EDITORIAL<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />We long ago gave up hope that President Bush would acknowledge his many mistakes, or show he had learned anything from them. Even then we were unprepared for the epic denial that Bush displayed in his interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson the other day, which he presumably considered an important valedictory chat with the American public as well.<br />It was bad enough when Bush piously declared that he hopes Americans believe he is a guy who "didn't sell his soul for politics." (We suppose we should not bother remembering how his team drove Senator John McCain out of the 2000 primaries with racist attacks or falsified Senator John Kerry's war record in 2004.)<br />It was skin crawling to hear him tell Gibson that the thing he will really miss when he leaves office is no longer going to see the families of slain soldiers, because they make him feel better about the war. But Bush's comments about his decision to invade Iraq were a "mistakes were made" rewriting of history and a refusal to accept responsibility to rival that of Richard Nixon.<br />At one point, Bush was asked if he wanted any do-overs. "The biggest regret of the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq," he said. "A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction" were cause for war.<br />After everything the American public and the world have learned about how Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated Congress, public opinion and anyone else they could bully or lie to, Bush is still acting as though he decided to invade Iraq after suddenly being handed life and death information on Saddam Hussein's arsenal.<br />The truth is that Bush, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been chafing to attack Iraq before Sept. 11, 2001. They justified that unnecessary war using intelligence reports that they knew or should have known to be faulty. And it was pressure from the White House and a highly politicized Pentagon that compelled people like Secretary of State Colin Powell and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to ignore the counter-evidence and squander their good names on hyped claims of weapons of mass destruction.<br />Despite it all, Bush said he will "leave the presidency with my head held high." And, presumably, with his eyes closed to all the disasters he is dumping on the American people and his successor.</div><div align="justify"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edeluder.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edeluder.php</a> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"><strong></strong></div><div align="justify"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong>0515</strong></div><p><br /><br /><br /><strong>IW: In three weeks and three days and I will close as many windows onto The Shop as I can. I have studied The Shop this year, more closely each day. As each day has passed I have become increasingly angry, ashamed, disgusted, frightened and depressed. Most of the beauty I find in this world I find in The Valley. </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>For some weeks, each morning, as I set out to compile this blog, my stomach is knotted with excitement, tension, fear and desire. Desire and excitement that I will discover that perhaps something glorious will have happened out there, that perhaps I'll understand it all.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Mostly however, I must admit, I am excited that I am one day closer to shutting the windows.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>We've gone long on safety for our family, until at least May 2010. That deal came through at the end of last week and it feels good.</strong><br /><br /><br /></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb8RPLWxCL4mwUkJWsXgKjMNEjDV3W-3Mxx5ZeQ7Fu7hriRANio94I1PF_Yf1nrw6hEcwmHd86FyP7UTFt8fqCqefJib0Dx-35s98xPWIvwhZ8mJJa5PwTlC2W0DVyxslm6eIuNe2qYLo/s1600-h/DSC02681.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273701774953058" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb8RPLWxCL4mwUkJWsXgKjMNEjDV3W-3Mxx5ZeQ7Fu7hriRANio94I1PF_Yf1nrw6hEcwmHd86FyP7UTFt8fqCqefJib0Dx-35s98xPWIvwhZ8mJJa5PwTlC2W0DVyxslm6eIuNe2qYLo/s320/DSC02681.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Irish pork products recalled after dioxin is found<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />LONDON: European supermarkets were ordered Sunday to clear their shelves of Irish bacon, ham and sausages after the authorities announced that Irish pork products had been tainted with a potentially cancer-causing chemical.<br />Health officials across the continent warned their consumers not to eat Irish pork after the discovery of dioxins in Irish pigs and pig feed at 80 to 200 times the safety limit. Irish government officials described the recall - which affects all pig products produced since Sept. 1 - as precautionary. Farmers called it a nightmare for the industry.<br />The Food Safety Authority said the dioxin made its way into the food chain after pig feed from one producer was tainted with some sort of industrial oil. While only 10 percent of Ireland's pig meat was affected, that was processed and mixed in with other meat, resulting in widespread contamination.<br />On Sunday the crisis spread to Britain, as the government of Northern Ireland announced that nine farms there had used the same tainted feed.<br />"We're actually reeling in shock at the moment at the scale of this disaster," Tim Cullinan, an official with the Irish Farmers Association and a pig farmer, told the Irish state radio network RTE.<br />He said he believed that the authorities had identified the source of the contamination and hoped to get fresh pork back on the shelves within days. Meanwhile, he said, the recall had dealt a body blow to pig farmers and processors.<br />"It couldn't have come at worse time, the weeks leading up to Christmas," he said "It's a nightmare, to be honest."<br />Tony Holohan, the Irish Department of Health's chief medical officer, urged people not to purchase or consume pork products, but stressed the move was precautionary.<br />"We're not anticipating significant health effects," he said on RTE. His comments were echoed by the British Food Standards Agency, which said it did not see any significant risk to consumers.<br />Ireland's farms produce more than three million pigs a year, nearly half of which are consumed within the republic. But Irish pork also is heavily exported to Northern Ireland and Britain - and appears in grocery stores and processed meats through much of Europe and Asia.<br />Last year Ireland exported 113,000 tons of pig meat, nearly half of that to Britain. Ireland also shipped more than 500,000 live pigs to Britain for slaughter and processing there.Ireland's other major customers for pork are Germany, which bought 9,000 tons last year; France, Italy and several Eastern European countries, which together took more than 20,000 tons; Russia, 6,600 tons, and China, 1,100 tons.<br />The German ministry for consumer protection said Sunday that it had called on wholesalers and supermarkets to pull any Irish pork from their shelves, but said it was too early to say how much meat was involved. Similar warnings were issued by other European bodies.<br />The British arm of the discount supermarket chain Lidl said it was recalling Irish-made black pudding and pork bellies as a precaution. Other British grocers said they were also checking their stocks.<br />European Union authorities said they were monitoring the situation.<br />Dioxins typically result from industrial combustion and other chemical processes. Exposure to dioxins at high levels is linked to increased incidence of cancer, though experts said there was unlikely to be any immediate cause for concern in this case.<br />"These compounds take a long time to accumulate in the body, so a relatively short period of exposure would have little impact on the total body burden," said Alan Boobis, a toxicologist at Imperial College in London. "One would have to be exposed to high levels for a long period of time before there would be a health risk."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/europe/irish.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/europe/irish.php</a><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeNE5njacH0jaihR1R_ZJ7UQeX1meSjcUaVop7NdU6oYLbzslel5fDS4nn-zazCcvuGMC1pNqrFpGfhv4a2PwYGjhd9VHgIx5kRVAau1ufqOUSJ2eaqah_CP29dpKSz9jF784kDl-gpFs/s1600-h/DSC02682.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273697288765666" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeNE5njacH0jaihR1R_ZJ7UQeX1meSjcUaVop7NdU6oYLbzslel5fDS4nn-zazCcvuGMC1pNqrFpGfhv4a2PwYGjhd9VHgIx5kRVAau1ufqOUSJ2eaqah_CP29dpKSz9jF784kDl-gpFs/s320/DSC02682.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>OPINION</strong><br /><strong>Managing our investment in nature<br /></strong>By Julia Marton-Lefèvre and Nikita Lopoukhine<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />While economists are developing solutions to the economic crisis, they are not considering investment, at least so far, in the values of nature. Nature's provision of clean water, pollination, food and fiber are discounted as free services. Even in the best of times, investments in nature conservation and restoration get low priority.<br />Nature, of course, is not like a bank looking for a bailout, but when we accept the impoverishment of biological diversity, we compromise future options and risk losing the ecological services we take for granted. Nature can be restored, however, and it can yield incredible benefits, but actions have to be real, massive and must start now.<br />In the coming days, two major global gatherings will debate key issues of our time: climate change, global development and poverty reduction. The conferences will provide a definitive look at our relationship with nature and how and what we produce and consume. It is vital that these two conferences integrate the issues of nature and development - not consider them in isolation - and that global economic solutions recognize the values of nature.<br />In Poznan, Poland, experts are meeting to continue discussions toward a post-Kyoto agreement that is complicated by factors such as the rapidly growing economies in China, India, Russia and Brazil, and the increasing awareness that combating climate change will require concessions and significant lifestyle changes.<br />Meanwhile, in Doha, Qatar, the United Nations will host a conference on Financing for Development. At the Monterrey conference in 2002, governments confirmed their target for development funding of 0.7 percent of gross national product. Sadly, many rich countries have not met this target. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development also just released an updated report, "Aid targets slipping out of reach," whose pessimistic title suggests that the future for development finance is not bright.<br />Governments are looking for ways to stimulate the economy. The objective of any economic jolt must diminish greenhouse gas emissions and should consider the protection and restoration of ecosystems as well as provide for effectively managed protected areas for species.<br />Similarly, decisions on investment for development and poverty reduction should not play second fiddle to considerations of nature. Achieving sustainable development is vital to long-term economic global stability, but it can only succeed if it is built upon well-managed environmental infrastructure.<br />Rather than looking to traditional ways to boost consumption, let us use stimulant investments for more efficient energy use, to improve the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. Working with nature assures the safest, most efficient and cheapest solutions.<br />This would not be the first time decision-makers have turned to the environment to solve a problem. Uganda, for example, uses wetlands to treat wastewater for Kampala. And a decision by New York City officials to conserve a watershed in the Catskills at a cost of $1.5 billion was a bargain compared to the estimated cost of as much as $8 billion to construct new filtration plants.<br />The value of nature's services has been catalogued many times and includes a value of $270 billion per year for global forest products or more than $60 billion in the growing carbon market.<br />We already have centuries of experience in managing the environment to produce the services we need. But the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment warned us that more than half of nature's services are "endangered." If we want them to continue to support us, now is the time to invest in our environment and restore the benefits we often take for granted. We are about to witness a wave of public spending on an unprecedented scale. Let's make sure that the planned benefit to economies will have an equally positive impact on nature, its ecosystems and species. In so doing we will protect nature's capacity to mitigate climate change and provide for holistically our children and their children for years to come.<br />Julia Marton-Lefèvre is director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Nikita Lopoukhine is chairman of the union's World Commission on Protected Areas.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edlefevre.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edlefevre.php</a><br /><br />*************<br /><strong>State tv reports earthquake shakes south Iran</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />TEHRAN: A 5.6 magnitude earthquake hit an area in southern Iran, Iran's state Press TV reported on Sunday, giving no detail of any damage.<br />"Magnitude 5.6 quake rocks Dargahan area in south Iran," the English-satellite television station said in a scrolling headline, without specifying the time it struck.<br />Iran, the world's fourth-largest oil producer, is criss-crossed by faultlines and often experiences earthquakes.<br />(Writing by Fredrik Dahl; Editing by Charles Dick)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-QUAKE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-QUAKE.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjca3nsU2CvZXb81SdVqhE7-yiAqfOTvNnw_Cr-mQIxBd1O1DtJRdrXwWpKfUT5Pj2YF0VvXw-7p3rt5TRgjAMvaz5VEYUhq_bDTHZ57B7rIhAarPTZDVYaPU-pxL4Xg24Sm4Jq6jXsuzM/s1600-h/DSC02683.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273691700785170" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjca3nsU2CvZXb81SdVqhE7-yiAqfOTvNnw_Cr-mQIxBd1O1DtJRdrXwWpKfUT5Pj2YF0VvXw-7p3rt5TRgjAMvaz5VEYUhq_bDTHZ57B7rIhAarPTZDVYaPU-pxL4Xg24Sm4Jq6jXsuzM/s320/DSC02683.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Ghana votes for new president to usher in oil era</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />By Kwasi Kpodo and Alistair Thomson<br />Ghanaians voted in large numbers on Sunday to choose between two foreign-trained lawyers hoping to lead them into an era of oil-funded prosperity in a tight poll that may set an example for African democracy.<br />Observers said voting was generally peaceful despite delays in some areas and violence at a handful of polling stations.<br />Successful polls would be a boost for democracy in Africa after electoral bloodshed in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Nigeria, and would underpin a country that has become one of Africa's brightest investment prospects due to its political stability.<br />Blue-clad Electoral Commission workers at the Richard Akwei Memorial School polling station in the coastal capital Accra said a prayer, emptied hundreds of ballot papers onto a table and counted them out loud, to cheers from a crowd of onlookers.<br />Provisional results are expected mid-week, but local media are likely to broadcast early voting trends before then.<br />Many voters queued from the early hours for the 7 a.m. (0700 GMT) start.<br />"I was here at 3:15 a.m. I'm anxious for my party to win," Gregoire Adukpo, 62, a retired private security official, said at a polling station set up at a Catholic church.<br />Local radio stations reported that delays distributing vote materials by helicopter meant voting started hours late and may be extended in some islands in Lake Volta, one of the biggest man-made lakes in the world.<br />The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) said it was concerned by the delays and other irregularities.<br />"Voter turnout is going to be very high. I should expect a higher number than we saw in the last elections because I could see this one is very competitive," Electoral Commission Chairman Kwadwo Afari-Gyan said. Turnout in 2004 was a record 85 percent.<br />President John Kufuor, who turns 70 on Monday, is standing down on January 7 after serving the maximum two terms.<br />"What excites me is that I've ended my tenure, I believe, on a good note with the entire nation showing readiness to help select my successor and members of the next parliament," he said after voting near his home in one of Accra's most exclusive areas.<br />He has asked Ghanaians to hand a first-round win to his New Patriotic Party's (NPP) chosen successor Nana Akufo-Addo, a British-trained lawyer and son of a former president.<br />RUN-OFF<br />Seven other candidates are standing but many people expect a December 28 run-off between Akufo-Addo and main opposition candidate and tax law expert John Atta Mills, of the centre-left NDC.<br />Mills voted in Accra and Akufo-Addo in his home constituency north of Accra. Both said they would win in the first round.<br />NDC founder Jerry Rawlings, a former coup leader who brought democratic rule in the 1990s and stood down eight years ago, voted to loud cheers in a poor neighbourhood behind the seat of government Christianborg Castle, a former slave-trading fort.<br />Voters are also electing the National Assembly, which is currently dominated by Kufuor's NPP with 128 of the 230 seats.<br />The discovery of offshore oil, which Britain's Tullow Oil plans to start pumping at a rate of 120,000 barrels per day in late 2010, has heightened international attention to the poll. But the global slowdown means celebrations may be delayed.<br />"Although there is "everything to play for' in terms of oil, the economic reality is that 2009 will be a difficult year in which to manage the economy," Razia Khan, Africa research head at Standard Chartered Bank, said in a note to investors.<br />Kufuor's centre-right administration has seen the economy grow by over 5 percent annually in recent years and in 2007 launched black Africa's first Eurobond outside South Africa.<br />The former British colony is the world's second biggest cocoa grower and Africa's No. 2 gold miner. But many Ghanaians say the increased wealth has passed them by.<br />"We want the new government to provide jobs. They should give us better schools, better health facilities," said jobless Derrick Agbanyo, 28, waiting to vote in a poor part of Accra.<br />Government critics complain about corruption, and a wave of cocaine trafficking in West Africa over the past few years has not spared Ghana. Last year a member of Kufuor's ruling NNP was jailed in the United States for heroin smuggling.<br />Ghana's fifth consecutive multiparty elections will lead to the second transfer of power from one leader to another through the ballot box -- a rare achievement in a continent beset by conflicts often made worse by vote-rigging.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-GHANA-ELECTION.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-GHANA-ELECTION.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>Sudan confirms troop build-up in oil region</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />By Andrew Heavens<br />Sudan's government on Sunday confirmed it had moved troops to a volatile energy-rich central region, telling state media it wanted to halt "feverish attempts" to attack the area by Darfur rebels.<br />The deployment into South Kordofan raised tension in the province that contains key oil fields and borders some of Sudan's most sensitive areas, including the western Darfur region, southern Sudan and the contested town of Abyei.<br />The announcement came days after officials in semi-autonomous southern Sudan accused the north of building up a large force in South Kordofan over the past three weeks.<br />A southern official on Friday said the new deployment of six northern battalions broke the terms of the constitution and the 2005 peace deal that ended two decades of north-south civil war.<br />On Sunday, an unnamed government spokesman told the state Suna news agency the northern army had built up its forces "to thwart the feverish attempts of JEM (the Darfur rebel Justice and Equality Movement) to transfer their activities to the state of Southern Kordofan."<br />There have been unconfirmed rumours circulating among United Nations agencies, aid groups and government bodies that a JEM force crossed into South Kordofan around three weeks ago.<br />No one was immediately available to comment from JEM, a movement which has fought in South Kordofan before and repeatedly said it wants to take its struggle beyond Darfur to what it sees as other marginalised areas of Sudan.<br />The rebel movement's spokesman last week told Reuters he would not "confirm or deny" a new JEM push into South Kordofan.<br />The Sudanese government has been on the lookout for large-scale movements of JEM forces since the insurgents launched an unprecedented attack on the country's capital Khartoum in May.<br />The government told Suna on Sunday it had sent assurances that the new northern forces had no intention of attacking the south's Sudan People's Liberation Army also deployed in the area.<br />The statement did not respond to the southern accusations that the move broke the terms of the 2005 peace deal.<br />The north and the south have had a troubled relationship since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Their troops have clashed, most recently in May over the oil town of Abyei, which both sides claim.<br />Under the deal, the north's Sudan Armed Forces were to be reduced to pre-war levels in South Kordofan, one of three "transitional areas" bordering the south where large sections of the population supported the southern rebels during the war.<br />The International Crisis Group think tank said in October the 2005 peace deal was at risk in South Kordofan, which had "many of the same ingredients" that produced the raging conflict in the neighbouring region of Darfur.<br />Sudan says it produces 500,000 barrels of oil a day, a figure which it hopes to raise to 600,000 in 2009.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-SUDAN-TROOPS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-SUDAN-TROOPS.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJg0yizmuLMktFW1en0lrvvWfxQEbmNcnGYLpsfaH3eO1Z_rRUYm4mB0W4BmPBb4xrChEMVXJnWEhcTAD4u52xtmEtpPy0itAbH6wBwcNBMNmmmRZL5o7_fa4uecZc6kdz2vh3G-1vQkE/s1600-h/DSC02684.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273690479751138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJg0yizmuLMktFW1en0lrvvWfxQEbmNcnGYLpsfaH3eO1Z_rRUYm4mB0W4BmPBb4xrChEMVXJnWEhcTAD4u52xtmEtpPy0itAbH6wBwcNBMNmmmRZL5o7_fa4uecZc6kdz2vh3G-1vQkE/s320/DSC02684.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Beijing assails Sarkozy for meeting Dalai Lama</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />BEIJING: President Nicolas Sarkozy of France drew an angry protest from China on Sunday over a meeting with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, with Beijing warning of broader damage to relations with the European Union.<br />The two met privately Saturday in Gdansk, Poland, during celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of former President Lech Walesa's Nobel Peace Prize. The Dalai Lama has also received the prize.<br />The meeting came five days after China had called off a summit meeting with the EU to protest Sarkozy's plans. China says Tibet has been part of its territory for more than seven centuries and denounces the Dalai Lama as a separatist who seeks to end Chinese rule of the Himalayan region. Many Tibetans say they were an independent country for most of that time.<br />Although China routinely lodges protests when world leaders meet with the Dalai Lama, the complaint Sunday - reported by the official Xinhua News Agency - came as China hardens its line toward the Himalayan region.<br />China's relations with the French have been especially strained over the issue of Tibet since April, when pro-Tibetan activists protested en masse in the streets of Paris as the Olympic flame passed through the city on its world tour. Some Chinese called for boycotts of French products afterward.<br />China demanded several times over the last week that Sarkozy cancel the meeting and called off a major China-EU meeting this month in protest. Sarkozy played down the furor, saying, "There's no need to dramatize things."<br />But on Sunday, China's deputy foreign minister, He Yafei, summoned the French ambassador to China, Hervé Ladsous, "and lodged a strong protest," Xinhua said. It quoted He as saying the meeting "grossly interfered in China's internal affairs."<br />"It also severely undermined China's core interest, gravely hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and sabotaged the political basis of China-France and China-EU relations," He said.<br />France now holds the rotating presidency of the 27-nation bloc.<br />Chinese state television quoted He as saying France now must "correct its mistake with actual deeds to enable China-France relations to continue to be healthy and stable and advance forward."<br />Sarkozy stressed that his talk with the Dalai Lama posed no threat to Beijing.<br />"I told him how much importance I attach to the pursuit of dialogue between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese leadership," Sarkozy said. "The Dalai Lama confirmed what I already knew, that he is not demanding independence."<br />The West is pushing for closer Chinese cooperation, especially in the areas of trade and currency in the hopes of limiting damage from a worldwide economic crisis. Beijing, in turn, views Europe as a major market for Chinese industrial goods that it sees threatened by further tariffs or restrictions.<br />Some French commentators criticized what they called Sarkozy's inconsistent policies over China and human rights.<br />"They are only punishing the numerous about-turns in our policy," Jean-Luc Domenach, a researcher on China at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, told the weekly Journal du Dimanche, which is usually supportive of Sarkozy.<br />"Since the Tibetan riots in March, Sarkozy has changed his attitude toward Beijing several times. First he was very pro-Chinese, then he took a harder line before returning to a position in the middle."<br />Sarkozy campaigned on the promise of putting human rights at the center of his foreign policy, saying he opposed lifting an EU weapons embargo on China that was imposed after Beijing's crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.<br />But shortly after taking office, he reversed his position on the arms embargo and went on a visit to China, during which French companies sealed about $30 billion in business deals.<br />After the deadly riots in Tibet, Sarkozy said he might not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, depending on China's handling of the situation in Tibet. It was not until July that he said he would go.<br />An official in Sarkozy's office said last week that he had seen no sign of any French products being boycotted, adding that the EU and China were mutually dependent economically.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/europe/france.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/europe/france.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><br /><strong>Roger Cohen: Paris-Cuba<br /></strong>By Roger Cohen<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />PARIS: Since visiting Cuba a few weeks ago, I've been thinking about the visual assault on our lives. Climb into a New York taxi these days and a TV comes on with its bombardment of news and ads. It's become passé to gaze out the window, watch the sunlight on a wall, a child's smile, the city breathing.<br />In Havana, I'd spend long hours contemplating a single street. Nothing - not a brand, an advertisement or a neon sign - distracted me from the city's sunlit surrender to time passing. At a colossal price, Fidel Castro's pursuit of socialism has forged a unique aesthetic, freed from agitation, caught in a haunting equilibrium of stillness and decay.<br />Such empty spaces, away from the assault of marketing, beyond every form of message (e-mail, text, twitter), erode in the modern world, to the point that silence provokes a why-am-I-not-in-demand anxiety. Technology induces ever more subtle forms of addiction, to products, but also to agitation itself. The global mall reproduces itself, its bright and air-conditioned sterility extinguishing every distinctive germ.<br />Paris, of course, has resisted homogenization. It's still Paris, with its strong Haussmannian arteries, its parks of satisfying geometry, its islands pointing their prows toward the solemn bridges, its gilt and gravel, its zinc-roofed maids' rooms arrayed atop the city as if deposited by some magician who stole in at night.<br />It's still a place where temptation exists only to be yielded to and where time stops to guard forever an image in the heart. All young lovers should have a row in the Tuileries in order to make up on the Pont Neuf.<br />Yet, for all its enduring seductiveness, Paris has ceased to be the city that I knew. The modern world has sucked out some essence, leaving a film-set perfection hollowed out behind the five-story façades. The past has been anaesthetized. It has been packaged. It now seems less a part of the city's fabric than it is a kitschy gimmick as easily reproduced as a Toulouse-Lautrec poster.<br />I know, in middle age the business of life is less about doing things for the first than for the last time. It is easy to feel a twinge of regret. Those briny oysters, the glistening mackerel on their bed of ice at the Rue Mouffetard, the drowsy emptied city in August, the unctuousness of a Beef Bourguignon: These things can be experienced for the first time only once.<br />So what I experience in Paris is less what is before me than the memory it provokes of the city in 1975. Memories, as Apollinaire noted, are like the sound of hunters' horns fading in the wind. Still, they linger. The town looks much the same, if prettified. What has changed has changed from within.<br />At dinner with people I'd known back then, I was grappling with this elusive feeling when my friend lit a match. It was a Russian match acquired in Belgrade and so did not conform to current European Union nanny-state standards. The flame jumped. The sulfur whiff was pungent. A real match!<br />Then it came to me: What Paris had lost to modernity was its pungency. Gone was the acrid Gitane-Gauloise pall of any self-respecting café. Gone was the garlic whiff of the early-morning Metro to the Place d'Italie. Gone were the mineral mid-morning Sauvignons Blancs downed bar-side by red-eyed men.<br />Gone were the horse butchers and the tripe restaurants in the 12th arrondissement. Gone (replaced by bad English) was the laconic snarl of Parisian greeting. Gone were the bad teeth, the yellowing moustaches, the hammering of artisans, the middle-aged prostitutes in doorways, the seat-less toilets on the stairs, and an entire group of people called the working class.<br />Gone, in short, was Paris in the glory of its squalor, in the time before anyone thought a Frenchman would accept a sandwich for lunch, or decreed that the great unwashed should inhabit the distant suburbs. The city has been sanitized.<br />But squalor connects. When you clean, when you favor hermetic sealing in the name of safety, you also disconnect people from one another. When on top of that you add layers of solipsistic technology, the isolation intensifies. In its preserved Gallic disguise, Paris is today no less a globalized city than New York.<br />Havana has also preserved its architecture - the wrought-iron balconies, the caryatids, the baroque flourishes - even if it is crumbling. What has been preserved with it, thanks to socialist economic disaster, is that very pungent texture Paris has lost to modernity.<br />The slugs of Havana Club rum in bars lit by fluorescent light, the dominos banged on street tables, the raucous conversations in high doorways, the whiff of puros, the beat through bad speakers of drums and maracas, the idle sensuality of Blackberry-free days: Cuba took me back decades to an era when time did not always demand to be put to use.<br />I thought I'd always have Paris. But Havana helped me see, by the flare of a Russian match, that mine is gone.<br />Readers are invited to comment at my blog: <a href="http://www.iht.com/passages">www.iht.com/passages</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edcohen.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edcohen.php</a><br /><br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273701969548306" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzFO0bnYx6zAi7hFVgpRtcn2K4ORDnwGXAmoEtncV9p6QQoM2v1lBAEyuUT4QRFvV11bfxlnJvTbHQrIvZ8UIcDM4c5DaIOAjycJzFHt9XiRM0Q6u85Na0RV4wX0yw8a6Z2D0AbEN5WDE/s320/DSC02680.jpg" border="0" /><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Kenyan prime minister calls for military intervention in Zimbabwe</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />NAIROBI: Foreign troops should prepare to intervene in Zimbabwe to end a worsening humanitarian crisis and the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, should be investigated for crimes against humanity, the Kenyan prime minister said Sunday.<br />Raila Odinga, in the latest sign of growing international frustration over Zimbabwe's slide into chaos, urged the African Union to call an emergency meeting to authorize sending troops into Zimbabwe.<br />"If no troops are available, then the AU must allow the Un to send its forces into Zimbabwe with immediate effect, to take over control of the country and ensure urgent humanitarian assistance to the people dying of cholera," Odinga said.<br />According to official statistics, more than 500 Zimbabweans have died of the disease since an outbreak in August. But health officials fear the toll may be much higher. They warn that deaths could spiral into the thousands due to the collapse of Zimbabwe's health system, the scarcity of food and the oncoming rainy season, which may help spread infections.<br />Odinga said Mugabe had reduced a once-prosperous country to a "basket case" and warned, "Mugabe's case deserves no less than investigations by the International Criminal Court at The Hague."<br />Odinga assailed other African leaders for being slow to criticize Zimbabwe, saying they had shamed the continent by treating Mugabe with "kid gloves" because Mugabe had supported their liberation struggles.<br />"We refuse to accept the idea that African countries should be judged by lesser standards than other countries in the world," Odinga said. "Participation in the liberation struggle is no license for anyone to own a country."<br />He declined to say whether Kenya was ready to send troops. The AU and UN are already over-stretched in Africa, unable to fulfill commitments in Sudan's Darfur region and Somalia.<br />Global criticism of Mugabe is growing louder. On Sunday former President Jimmy Carter, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the human rights campaigner Graça Machel issued a report in Paris urging Zimbabwean leaders to end their power-sharing impasse and concentrate on saving lives. The three members of group called The Elders were refused visas to enter Zimbabwe but interviewed aid workers, politicians and others for the report.<br />Machel is the wife of the Elders founder Nelson Mandela, the former South African President. She said either Zimbabwe's leaders do not understand how deeply their people are suffering "or they don't care."<br />In the United States, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told ABC News that the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe endangered the whole of southern Africa and the international community was failing to protect the people of Zimbabwe.<br />"I am still really appalled at the inability of the international community to deal with tyrants," she said. "Robert Mugabe should have gone a long time ago."<br /><strong><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/africa/07kenya.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/africa/07kenya.php</a></strong> </p><p></p><p>*****************</p><p><strong>Future of Somalia's transitional government looks bleak<br /></strong>By Jeffrey Gettleman<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />NAIROBI: Somalia's transitional government looks as if it is about to flatline. The Ethiopians who have been keeping it alive for two years say they are leaving the country, essentially pulling the plug on their military support.<br />For 17 years, Somalia has been ripped apart by anarchy, violence and famine. It seems as though things there can never get worse. But then they do.<br />The pirates off Somalia's coast are getting bolder, wilier and somehow richer, despite an armada of Western naval ships hot on their trail. Shipments of emergency food aid are barely keeping much of Somalia's population of nine million from starving. The most fanatical wing of Somalia's Islamist insurgency is gobbling up territory and imposing its own harsh brand of Islamic law, like whipping dancers and stoning a 13-year-old girl to death.<br />With the government on the brink of collapse and the Islamists about to seize control for the second time, the operative question inside and outside Somalia seems to be: Now what?<br />"It will be bloody," predicted Rashid Abdi, a Somalia analyst at the International Crisis Group, a research institute that tracks conflicts worldwide. "The Ethiopians have decided to let the transitional government sink. The chaos will spread from the south to the north. Warlordism will be back."<br />Abdi sees Somalia deteriorating into an Afghanistan-like cauldron of militant Islamism, drawing in hard-core fighters from the Comoros, Zanzibar, Kenya and other neighboring Islamic areas, a process that seems to have already started. Those men will eventually go home, spreading the killer ethos.<br />"Somalia has now reached a very dangerous phase," he said. "The whole region is in for more chaos, I'm afraid."<br />Most informed predictions go something like this: If the several thousand Ethiopian troops withdraw by January, as Addis Ababa has said they would, the 3,000 or so African Union peacekeepers in Somalia could soon follow, leaving the country wide open to the Islamist insurgents who have been massing on the outskirts of Mogadishu, the capital.<br />The transitional government, which in reality controls only a few city blocks of the country, will collapse, just as the 13 previous transitional governments did. The only reason it has not happened yet is the Ethiopians.<br />The government has been a mess for the past few weeks - many would argue for the past few years - with the president and the prime minister bitterly and publicly blaming each other for the country's crisis. More than 100 of the 275 members of Parliament are in Kenya, refusing to go home, saying they will be killed.<br />Western diplomats, UN officials and the Ethiopians finally seem to be turning against the transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, a cantankerous former warlord in his 70s who has thwarted nearly every peace proposal.<br />"Yusuf has gone from being seen as the solution to being seen as the problem," said a senior Western diplomat in Kenya, speaking on condition of anonymity. But Yusuf's clan still backs him, and Western diplomats said he might soon flee to his clan stronghold in northeast Somalia.<br />Most analysts predict that the war-weary people of Mogadishu will initially welcome the Islamists, out of either relief or fear.<br />In 2006, Islamist troops teamed up with clan elders and business owners to drive out the warlords who had been preying upon Somalia's people since the central government first collapsed in 1991. The six months the Islamists ruled Mogadishu turned out to be one of the most peaceful periods in modern Somali history.<br />But today's Islamists are a harder, more brutal group than the ones who were ousted by an Ethiopian invasion, backed by the United States, in late 2006. The old guard included many moderates, but those who have tried to work with the transitional government have mostly failed, leaving them weak and marginalized, and removing an influence on the die-hard insurgents.<br />On top of that, the unpopular and bloody Ethiopian military operations over the past two years have radicalized many Somalis and sent hundreds of unemployed young men - most of whom have never gone to school, never been part of a functioning society and never had much of a chance to do anything but shoulder a gun - into the arms of militant Islamic groups.<br />The most militant group is the Shabab, a multi-clan insurgent force that the United States classifies as a terrorist organization. A few weeks ago, the Shabab kidnapped and brutally beheaded a man it accused of being a spy.<br />Somalia is nearly 100 percent Muslim, but most Somalis are moderate Muslims. Many analysts expect that the militant Islamic wave will soon crest because Somalis will inevitably chafe under strict Islamist law, especially when the Islamists try to take away their beloved khat, the ubiquitous, mildly stimulating leaf that Somalis chew like bubble gum.<br />Then, many analysts say, the Islamist groups will slug it out among themselves, with Ethiopia and other neighboring countries backing rival factions, and with clan warlords jumping in.<br />Osman Mohamed Abdi, deputy chairman of the Somali Youth Development Network, a nonprofit group in Mogadishu, called this possibility the "worst man-made catastrophe."<br />Two possibilities could avert this bloodbath, but both are long shots.<br />Ethiopia could delay its pullout until a larger peacekeeping force arrived. But with both Darfur and now Congo needing peacekeepers, there are few volunteers for lawless Somalia.<br />Or the transitional government could share power with the Islamists. There is a piece of paper called the Djibouti Agreement that paves the way for moderate Islamists to join the transitional government.<br />But the problem with the Djibouti Agreement, Abdi of the International Crisis Group said, is that "the interlocutors have no power on the ground."<br />The government's collapse and the human disaster that would follow would be strike three for U.S. efforts in Somalia.<br />The United States failed disastrously in its peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s. In 2005 and 2006, the CIA paid some of Somalia's most reviled warlords to fight the Islamists. That backfired. In the winter of 2006, the United States took a third approach, encouraging Ethiopia to invade and backing them with U.S. airstrikes and intelligence.<br />"The Bush administration made a major miscalculation," said Dan Connell, who teaches African politics at Simmons College in Boston.<br />He likened the situation to America's involvement in Lebanon in the 1980s, "when a regional ally, Israel, pulled us into a failed state in a quixotic effort to transform a hostile neighbor into a pliant ally." That only radicalized the population, he said, adding that in Somalia, "again, we will be in its sights."</p><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/africa/somalia.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/africa/somalia.php</a><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>******************</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Taliban destroys U.S. transport center</strong><br />By Jane Perlez<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: More than 100 trucks loaded with supplies for U.S. forces in Afghanistan were destroyed Sunday by militants in Peshawar, the city that serves as an important transit point for the Afghan war effort.<br />It was the third major attack by Taliban militants on NATO supplies in Pakistan in less than a month, and served to expose the vulnerability of the route from the port of Karachi through Peshawar and over the border into Afghanistan.<br />The United States relies on the route for an overwhelming proportion of its supplies for the war in Afghanistan. The damaged trucks were loaded with U.S. war materiel, including Humvees, destined for the Afghan National Army, said Colonel Greg Julian, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Kabul.<br />The militants overwhelmed the rudimentary security system at two parking lots where the trucks were parked in the heart of Peshawar.<br />At about 2:30 a.m., they easily disarmed security guards and then threw grenades and fired rockets at the loaded trucks.<br />"We were unable to challenge such a large number of armed men," said Muhammad Rafiq, a security guard. "The police and militias reached the spot when the attackers had accomplished operation."<br />Rafiq estimated that about 200 militants took part in the attack.<br />Pakistani security forces apparently fired artillery at the attackers.<br />"There was artillery and rapid exchange of fire," said a retired police official, Hidyatullah Arbab, who heard the firing from his home. "Peshawar is becoming a battleground."<br />Over all, Julian said the loss of equipment would have a minimum impact on the overall war effort.<br />"It's a very insignificant loss in terms of everything transported into Afghanistan," he said.<br />But critics of the war effort in Afghanistan have argued that the United States needs to more urgently shape the Afghan Army into an effective fighting force. The loss of supplies to the Afghan Army would be a setback in that endeavor.<br />About 80 percent of supplies for the war move from Karachi through Pakistan and onto Afghanistan.<br />Peshawar is the last staging point before the border 60 kilometers away, or 40 miles, about an hour's journey.<br />From Peshawar, the Pakistani trucks loaded with military supplies travel through the Khyber section of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.<br />The Khyber area is almost totally controlled by various factions of the Taliban, and many civilian government officials no longer dare to travel the road that the trucks use.<br />The Pakistani government said two weeks ago that it had beefed up protection for the supply trucks along the route.<br />But the brash attack Sunday showed that the militants could destroy the supplies even as they waited to move forward from Peshawar. The ease with which the militants destroyed the vehicles exposed the susceptibility of stationary equipment to attack, even in the center of a city that houses the 11th Corps of the Pakistani Army.<br />Militants attacked another parking area in Peshawar this month. About 12 trucks with NATO supplies were ruined in that attack.<br />Perhaps the most brazen attack came on Nov. 10 when about 60 Taliban militants hijacked a convoy of trucks as it traveled through the Khyber road in broad daylight. To make their point, they offloaded a Humvee, called photographers and then, with rifles in hand, the Taliban posed in front of the vehicle, their banner draped over the hood.<br />The Pakistani government is anxious to hold onto the trucking business that supplies the war in Afghanistan.<br />The companies that control the trucks are a powerful constituency in Karachi, the port city, and the revenue from the supply route is important, particularly in the middle of a national economic crisis.<br />But the truck owners complain that the government is impotent in the face of the Taliban.<br />The hijacking of the truck convoy last month was carried out by Taliban loyal to Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the umbrella group called Tehrik-e-Taliban. After that incident, one trucker said that the government had stood by, a "silent spectator." The Taliban attacked his trucks, looted them and killed his drivers even as they passed near security check points, he said.<br />The Pakistani military had proved unable to stop them, he said.<br />The three attacks in less than a month makes the need for alternate routes more urgent, Julian said.<br />The U.S. military has said that it is looking to supply the Afghan war theater through Central Asia, and once negotiations are completed to move material through the new routes, the dependence on Pakistan will diminish, American military officials have said.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/pakistan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/pakistan.php</a><br /><br />************<br /><br /><strong>UN official calls for more sensitivity to Afghan demands</strong><br />By Kirk Semple<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />KABUL, Afghanistan: In unusually blunt remarks, the chief of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan warned in an interview this weekend that unless Afghanistan's international partners conducted their military operations with more care and cultural sensitivity, redoubled their work to minimize civilian casualties and accelerated their reconstruction programs, they risked jeopardizing their efforts to stabilize and rebuild the country.<br />Kai Eide, the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, also came to the defense of the embattled president Hamid Karzai, saying that Karzai's harsh public criticism of his foreign allies on both the military and development fronts had been authentic, not to mention an accurate reflection of widespread and growing frustration among Afghans.<br />Some foreign diplomats have dismissed Karzai's recent remarks as a cynical effort to curry favor with Afghan voters during the prelude to national elections, Eide said.<br />"Listen to the concerns of the Afghan people, and listen to what President Karzai said," Eide said. "I think he reflects a deep and growing concern within the Afghan public about the impact of what we're doing on the ground."<br />He said he was compelled to speak out because of what he called the "opportunity" presented by a change of presidential administrations in Washington.<br />"It's a unique opportunity to mobilize energy and also to streamline our efforts," he said.<br />There has been growing outrage in Afghanistan over American-led military operations, including aerial bombings and house raids, that have inflicted civilian casualties and increasingly alienated the international security forces from the Afghan population that they are trying to protect.<br />In addition, Afghans have grown weary of the slow reconstruction process. More than seven years after the invasion that drove the Taliban from power, infrastructure still remains poor, and poverty and unemployment are high.<br />During a visit here late last month by a United Nations Security Council delegation, Karzai lashed out in a private meeting at his foreign partners, criticizing mounting civilian casualties inflicted by coalition security forces and the lack of coordination in the development sector.<br />Karzai, whose office later distributed a transcript of his comments publicly, also urged the international community to do more to "Afghanize" the country by strengthening its security forces and government institutions.<br />"Every debate about what we're planning to do in Afghanistan must be an Afghan-led debate, it must take place on Afghan terms," Eide said Saturday during an interview in his office in a guarded United Nations compound here.<br />"If what we seek is to strengthen Afghan institutions and strengthen the Afghan government — and that's what we've been saying — then it must be clear to everybody that the debate that we are conducting involves the Afghans fully and has the Afghan in the leading role."<br />Eide, a Norwegian, assumed his current post in April and, among other responsibilities, is in charge of coordinating the civilian redevelopment effort. Publicly, he has cut a figure of quiet determination. But during the interview, his emotions occasionally overrode his normally low-key demeanor, his voice rising in crescendos of pique.<br />His comments come as the United States is planning to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to fighting a strengthening insurgency, train Afghan security forces and prepare for national elections.<br />An army brigade is scheduled to arrive next month.<br />Eide said that he welcomed the debate about more deployments, but that all future deployments must be done hand in hand with a parallel debate, informed by the concerns of the Karzai administration and the Afghan people, about the impact of the military engagement.<br />"Are we sufficiently sensitive to Afghan concerns?" he asked. "Are we sure that we behave in a way that brings Afghan communities closer to the government? Do we listen sufficiently to the concerns we hear from the president and so many Afghans? I'm not convinced that we are."<br />He added, "We see how we can go wrong now."<br />Eide referred to an episode in August in Azizabad, a village in eastern Afghanistan, where cannon fire from an AC-130 gunship against a suspected Taliban hideout killed dozens of civilians. He said the incident "shook" Karzai and helped to focus his concerns more acutely on the problem of civilian casualties and other problems of the foreign military engagement.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/08afghan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/08afghan.php</a><br /><br /><br />**************<br /><br /><strong>Bush aides preparing Afghanistian strategy review for Obama</strong><br />By David E. Sanger<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The Bush administration is preparing to present President-elect Barack Obama with a lengthy, classified strategy review aimed at reversing the gains that militants have made in destabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan.<br />The review contains an array of options, including telling the military in Pakistan that billions of dollars in American aid will depend on the military's being reconfigured to effectively fight militants. That proposal amounts to a tacit acknowledgment that roughly $10 billion in military aid provided to Pakistan as "reimbursements" for its efforts to root out militant groups has largely been wasted.<br />The payments have been the source of increasing criticism on Capitol Hill and from independent review groups, which have concluded that Pakistan diverted much of the money to build up its forces against India.<br />Revamping the aid to the military was part of a three-month study of what has gone wrong in the seven-year war along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The study calls for a new and broadly regional approach to insurgencies that move freely across the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.<br />In the short term, it calls for continued covert strikes into Pakistani territory from Afghanistan, though the U.S. military has been reluctant to repeat the kind of ground attack that led to an open exchange of fire with Pakistani border forces in September.<br />The report, which is expected to be presented to Obama's top national security advisers in the next week or two, was the product of a highly unusual strategy review begun in mid-September, just four months before President George W. Bush leaves office.<br />"We've gone seven long years proclaiming that Pakistan was an ally and that it was doing everything we asked in the war on terror," said one senior official involved in drafting the report. "And the truth is that $10 billion later, they still don't have the basic capacity for counterinsurgency operations. What we are telling Obama and his people is that has to be reversed."<br />As a war that Bush once believed he had won came back to life in 2005 and 2006, the White House began a series of strategic reassessments, the most recent one reporting in the autumn of 2006, just before the forced resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense.<br />But those past studies looked primarily at the dynamics in Afghanistan. The current one, headed by the White House's top coordinator for Afghanistan policy, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, took a far broader view. The drafts prepared for the incoming Obama administration suggest that the United States has never focused sufficiently on nation-building, jobs creation, construction of schools and roads, and, most important, pushing the Pakistani government to focus on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.<br />It also urges Obama to take a far more regional approach to the problem, something he has indicated in speeches he is inclined to do.<br />"The Pashtun tribes treat these countries as one territory, and we have to begin to do something similar," one official familiar with the report said, declining to speak on the record because the contents of the report are confidential.<br />The report includes options, not "recommendations," so that Obama would not be put in the position of endorsing or rejecting Bush's suggested policies.<br />It was completed just before the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the commercial capital of India, last month, and the reaction to those events is likely to complicate some of the central options even before they are handed off to Obama.<br />Though Pakistani officials regularly promised Bush, his intelligence chiefs and top American military officials that they would rout Al Qaeda and other militants from their sanctuary in Pakistan's tribal areas, mountains of intelligence suggest that the country was playing both sides, financing the Taliban even while fighting them. The group accused of the Mumbai attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was essentially the creation of the Pakistani intelligence services, as a proxy to fight in Kashmir against India.<br />Now, with the strong possibility that India will strike back for the Mumbai attacks, many in the Pakistani military are expected to argue that they were prudent to keep their forces primarily arrayed against India, rather than hunting down Al Qaeda and other militants.<br />"The real danger here is that what happened in Mumbai is going to reinforce all the instincts to focus on India," said one official familiar with the contents of the strategy review. "It worsens their paranoia."<br />As recently as 2006, Bush would speak regularly of eventual "victory" in Afghanistan, as he did in Iraq. He is leaving office declaring that the so-called military surge in Iraq was successful, and with a status of forces agreement that calls for the withdrawal of the bulk of the American force over the next two years. But he has said little about Afghanistan, where the fighting has worsened, and the strategy review was premised on intelligence assessments that said that the United States was not losing the war, but was in danger of losing ground.<br />Several members of the strategy review, notably David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency expert, have publicly offered a significantly grimmer view. Kilcullen told senior officials before he left a State Department post that the United States could begin to lose the war soon if strategy was not reversed. He has advocated working to secure major population centers rather than using NATO troops to chase the Taliban around the Afghan countryside.<br />A senior aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Eliot Cohen, also joined the panel, along with a top Marine general and a number of officials from the intelligence agencies.<br />Asked about the study, a White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said only: "We are concluding our review. We intend to pass it to the new team, since most policy adaptations would take place on their watch. This is another part of our efforts to ensure a smooth transition."<br />The tone of the new report, officials familiar with it say, is in line with arguments made over the past year by the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, who has agreed to remain in his post under Obama. He has made clear in an article he wrote for a forthcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs that the kind of military victory Bush once spoke of, the military crippling of militants in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, is not the way to think about the future of the conflict.<br />"Over the long term, the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory," Gates wrote. "Where possible, what the military calls kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit. It will take the patient accumulation of quiet successes over a long time to discredit and defeat extremist movements and their ideologies."<br />Yet the problem in Pakistan has been getting the military to accept help from the United States, which it suspects is tilting toward India and may harbor plans to seize Pakistan's nuclear arsenal if the government in Islamabad collapses. In Afghanistan, the problem is incompetence, corruption, and the inability of President Hamid Karzai to extend his control of the country significantly beyond the capital, Kabul.<br />A senior military official said "the message of the report is that you can't win in Afghanistan without first fixing Pakistan.<br />"But even if you fix Pakistan," the official said, "that won't be enough."Militants burn 106 vehicles<br />Suspected militants attacked a transport terminal used to supply NATO and U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan, killing a guard and burning 106 vehicles early Sunday, The Associated Press reported from Peshawar, Pakistan, citing a police official.<br />The assault by 30 assailants at the Portward Logistic Terminal was the boldest yet on trucks carrying supplies to foreign troops in Afghanistan, feeding concern that Taliban militants could cut or disrupt the route through the famed Khyber Pass.<br />Up to 75 percent of the supplies for Western forces in Afghanistan pass through Pakistan.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/strategy.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/strategy.php</a><br /><br /><br />*************<br /><strong>Mumbai, Kashmir and the Pakistan connection<br /></strong>Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />Pakistan's government has fiercely denied any role in the terrorist attacks on Mumbai that killed more than 160 people. We hope that is true. But there are strong signs that the terrorists were members of the Pakistani-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba, a former proxy of Islamabad's powerful intelligence service that - despite being officially banned - continues to operate in plain sight in Pakistan.<br />Any act of terrorism is horrifying, but the potential aftermath of this one is even more so.<br />India and Pakistan have already fought three wars. Both have nuclear weapons. It is not hard to imagine that the attackers' real goal was to disrupt recent efforts to improve relations - and provoke an even greater cataclysm. Everything must be done to avoid that.<br />India has so far shown extraordinary restraint. It will have to continue to do so as the investigation moves forward. Pakistan, which has bounced between sympathy and bluster, must provide full cooperation - no matter where the investigation leads.<br />Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, must face up to his country's involvement - whether official or nearly so. We know his new civilian government is weak, and he may not be able to accede to New Delhi's demands that all suspects be turned over to India for prosecution.<br />At a minimum, his government must be ready to arrest and try anyone involved in the attacks, and mete out long jail terms if they are convicted. Islamabad must finally shut down all the Lashkar training camps and recruitment.<br />We also are waiting for a forceful public repudiation of the militant groups from the army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and his personal pledge that all ties between Pakistan's military and the extremists will be severed. His silence is deafening.<br />India must share intelligence with Pakistan on the attack. Instead of boxing Zardari in, it should ask his government to arrest only people who are directly linked to the Mumbai attacks, not other incidents.<br />For any lasting peace, India and Pakistan must settle their dispute over Kashmir, the biggest flashpoint. India's growing investment and intelligence network in Afghanistan also is feeding Islamabad's insecurity and sense of encirclement. India must be transparent about its involvement in Afghanistan.<br />If the two countries are going to inch back from the brink, they will need strong support from the United States, China and others powers. These countries also must develop a strategy to strengthen Pakistan's fragile civilian government and stop the country from becoming even more ungovernable.<br />That does not mean impunity for anyone involved in the Mumbai attacks. It means that the leaders of Pakistan's military and intelligence services must finally realize that the extremists pose a clear and present threat to their own country's survival.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edpakistan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edpakistan.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>Indian police arrest 2 in Mumbai investigation</strong><br />By Jeremy Kahn<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />MUMBAI, India: The police in New Delhi and Calcutta arrested two men on Friday night and were investigating whether they helped procure SIM cards that terrorists used to make calls during their attacks last month in Mumbai, a deputy Calcutta police commissioner said.<br />The men, Tauseef Rehman, a native of Calcutta, and Mukhtar Ahmed, originally from the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, are charged with fraud and criminal conspiracy, accused of using false documents to buy subscriber identity module, or SIM, cards. Rehman was arrested in Calcutta and Ahmed in New Delhi.<br />The police official, Javed Shamim, said both men were in Calcutta in October when Rehman used a dead relative's photo identification to buy the SIM cards. Rehman then activated them and either gave or sold them to Ahmed, Shamim said. He emphasized that no definitive links to the attacks in Mumbai had been established by the police.<br />Rakesh Maria, a joint commissioner with the Mumbai police, said Friday that the police had recovered seven cellphones, in addition to three Global Positioning System handsets and one satellite phone, all of which they believed the terrorists had used.<br />The police have said that 10 terrorists carried out the attacks on luxury hotels and several other locations that began on Nov. 26, and that all of them came from Pakistan. This was the first sign that the attackers may have had help from Indian citizens.<br />In a signal of how fraught the relations between nuclear-armed Indian and Pakistan have become, the English-language newspaper Dawn in Pakistan reported Saturday that the Pakistani government had put its forces on high alert during the siege in Mumbai after what appeared to have been a prank call to the president. The caller pretended to be India's foreign minister and threatened military action unless Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, acted immediately against those responsible for the attacks, Dawn said.<br />The report said the air force was on alert for 24 hours.<br />The Indian Foreign Ministry on Sunday morning issued a statement officially denying that the Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, made a "threatening call" to the Pakistani president.<br />"I had made no such telephone call," Mukherjee said in the statement. "It is, however, worrying that a neighboring state might even consider acting on the basis of such a hoax call, try to give it credibility with other states, and confuse the public by releasing the story in part."<br />Decribing the lead-up to the Friday night arrests, Shamin said the police traced the SIM cards used during the Mumbai attacks to Rehman in Calcutta. The police then forced Rehman to call Ahmed and ask him his location. This allowed the police to find and arrest him in New Delhi, the deputy commissioner said.<br />Ahmed is believed to be a member of a police force in the city of Srinagar, in Indian-controlled Kashmir, but the Calcutta police have not verified this, according to Manab Bandopadhy, a Calcutta police spokesman.<br />Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani-based militant group that Indian and American officials believe was behind the attacks in Mumbai, which killed 163 people, has long been focused on trying to wrest Kashmir from Indian control and has had a history of infiltrating militants into that state.<br />The Mumbai police said last week that they were searching for anyone in Mumbai or elsewhere in India who might have aided the attackers. Friday's arrests were the first thought to be connected to the case other than that of the single surviving gunman, a Pakistani citizen identified by the police as Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, who is in custody in Mumbai.<br />In a brief conversation Saturday night, Maria of the Mumbai police confirmed reports that FBI agents had taken DNA samples from Kasab that they hoped to compare with relatives in Pakistan to confirm his identity. But he denied reports that the FBI or other foreign governments had been given direct access to Kasab.<br />Police investigators say that an Indian man, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, in jail in Uttar Pradesh, India, may also be linked to the militants who attacked Mumbai. Ansari, who was detained in February, has told the authorities that he scouted targets in Mumbai for another Lashkar-e-Taiba plot. That plan was foiled when he and five co-conspirators were captured in connection with an attack on a police training camp in the city of Rampur that took place last New Year's Eve.<br />Ansari told the police in Uttar Pradesh that he had been in contact with two Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, and a man known alternately as Yusuf or Muzammil. Those two men also directed the Mumbai attacks, according to the police.<br />In an additional development, an explosive device was found at a hospital in Nagpur, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, according to Pravin Dikshit, the police commissioner there. The hospital was evacuated and the bomb was being defused, Dikshit said. He declined to provide further details, and it was unclear whether the bomb was linked to the attacks.<br />The militants in the Mumbai attacks each carried a 17-pound bomb, which they planted throughout the city, according to the police. Seven of the bombs exploded.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/08mumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/08mumbai.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>Kashmiris queue at poll booths despite boycott call<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />CHADORA, India: Thousands of war-weary Kashmiris defied a separatist call for a boycott and queued up to vote on Sunday in the disputed Himalayan region for the fourth phase of state elections.<br />At least 15 people were injured when police fired teargas shells and batons to disperse hundreds of anti-poll protesters in a separatist stronghold, Sopore town, north of Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital.<br />"Elsewhere polling was brisk and peaceful," Javid Ahmad a senior police official said.<br />Six photographers, including one from Reuters, were hurt in the violence.<br />Separatist leaders, most of them locked up or under house arrest, have called for a boycott of the seven-stage state polls saying New Delhi portrays voting as an endorsement of its rule over the Kashmir region.<br />But in the elections so far there has been a high turnout.<br />"It is for the first time since 1990 that I am voting because our locality has been neglected by the government and we are suffering," 65-year-old Ali Mohammad, a retired government employee, said near a highly guarded polling booth.<br />"And I want to get rid of violence completely."<br />More than 47,000 people have been killed since a revolt against New Delhi's rule broke out in 1989.<br />Women in headscarves and men in skullcaps formed long queues to vote.<br />Thousands of troops patrolled streets and guarded 1,836 polling stations in the region, where polling officials said the turnout in 18 constituencies was nearly 40 percent in the first six hours of voting.<br />Srinagar, which goes to the polls in the last phase, was totally locked down, as thousands of troops were out in force to prevent anti-election rallies.<br />Officials say violence involving government forces and Muslim militants has declined in the region after India and Pakistan, who claim the region in full but rule in parts, launched a peace process in 2004.<br />But people are still killed in daily shootouts and occasional explosions.<br />Government forces have shot dead four separatist militants, including two members of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba rebel group, since Saturday, police said.<br />Lashkar-e-Taiba is blamed by Indian authorities for the three-day rampage in Mumbai that killed 171 people.<br />(Reporting By Sheikh Mushtaq; Editing by Alistair Scrutton)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/asia/OUKWD-UK-KASHMIR-ELECTIONS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/asia/OUKWD-UK-KASHMIR-ELECTIONS.php</a><br /><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>Indian foreign minister denies "threatening call" to Pakistani leader</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />MUMBAI: The Indian Foreign Ministry issued a statement Sunday morning officially denying that its minister, Pranab Mukherjee, had made a "threatening call" to President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan at the height of the recent attacks on Mumbai, prompting Zardari's government to put the Pakistani Air Force on high alert.<br />"I had made no such telephone call," Mukherjee said in the statement. "It is, however, worrying that a neighboring state might even consider acting on the basis of such a hoax call, try to give it credibility with other states, and confuse the public by releasing the story in part."<br />In a signal of how fraught the relations between Indian and Pakistan have become, the English-language Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported Saturday that the Pakistani government had put forces on high alert during the siege in Mumbai after what appeared to have been a prank call to the president. The caller pretended to be the Indian foreign minister and threatened military action unless Zardari acted immediately against those responsible for the attacks, Dawn reported.<br />The exchange over the call came as India continued its investigation into the three-day standoff that killed 169 people, plus nine gunmen.<br />The police in New Delhi and Calcutta arrested two men Friday night and were investigating whether they had helped procure SIM cards that the terrorists used to make calls during the attacks in Mumbai, a deputy Calcutta police commissioner said.<br />The men, Tauseef Rehman, a native of Calcutta, and Mukhtar Ahmed, originally from the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, are charged with fraud and criminal conspiracy, accused of using false documents to buy subscriber identity module, or SIM, cards. Rehman was arrested in Calcutta and Ahmed in New Delhi.<br />The police official, Javed Shamim, said both men were in Calcutta in October when Rehman used a dead relative's photo identification to buy the SIM cards. Rehman then activated them and either gave or sold them to Ahmed, Shamim said. He emphasized that the police had not established any definitive links to the attacks in Mumbai.<br />Rakesh Maria, a joint commissioner with the Mumbai police, said Friday that the police had recovered seven cellphones, three global positioning system handsets and one satellite phone, all of which they believed the terrorists had used.<br />The police traced the SIM cards used during the attacks to Rehman in Calcutta, Shamim said. The police then forced Rehman to call Ahmed and ask him where he was. This allowed the police to find and arrest him in New Delhi, the deputy commissioner said.<br />Ahmed is believed to be a member of a local police force in the city of Srinagar, in Indian-controlled Kashmir, but the Calcutta police have not verified this, according to Manab Bandopadhy, a Calcutta police spokesman.<br />Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani militant group that Indian and U.S. officials believe was behind the attacks, has long been focused on trying to wrest Kashmir from Indian control and has had a history of infiltrating militants into that state.<br />The Mumbai police said last week that they were searching for anyone in India who might have aided the attackers. The Friday arrests were the first thought to be connected to the case other than that of the single surviving gunman, a Pakistani citizen identified by the police as Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, who is in custody in Mumbai. The police have said that 10 terrorists carried out the Nov. 26 attacks and that all of them came from Pakistan. This was the first sign that they may have had help from Indian citizens.<br />Speaking of the continuing investigation in India, Maria, in a brief conversation Saturday night, confirmed reports that FBI agents had taken DNA samples from Kasab that they hoped to compare with relatives in Pakistan to confirm his identity. But he denied reports that the FBI or other foreign governments had been given direct access to Kasab.<br />Police investigators say that an Indian man, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, in jail in Uttar Pradesh, India, may also be linked to the militants who attacked Mumbai. Ansari, who was detained in February, has told the authorities that he scouted targets in Mumbai for a different Lashkar-e-Taiba plot. That plan was foiled when he and five co-conspirators were captured in connection with an attack on a police training camp in the city of Rampur that took place last New Year's Eve.<br />Ansari told the police in Uttar Pradesh that he had been in contact with two Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, and a man known alternately as Yusuf or Muzammil. Those two men also directed the Mumbai attacks, according to the police.<br />In an additional development, an explosive device was found at a hospital in Nagpur, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, according to Pravin Dikshit, the police commissioner there. The hospital was evacuated and the bomb was being defused, Dikshit said. He declined to provide further details, and it was unclear whether the bomb was linked to the attacks.<br />The militants in the Mumbai attacks each carried a 17-pound, or eight-kilogram, bomb, which they planted throughout the city, according to the police. Seven of the bombs exploded, and two were defused on the night of the attacks, the police said. The 10th bomb was discovered last Wednesday afternoon in one of the city's main train stations, where two of the militants, including Kasab, had opened fire on passengers. The station had been reopened for almost a week before the bomb was found. The police now say that all of the bombs have been accounted for, but Indian news reports have disputed this.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/mumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/mumbai.php</a><br /><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>Pakistan raids camp of group blamed for Mumbai</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />By Kamran Haider<br />Pakistani security forces on Sunday raided a camp used by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), two sources said, in a strike against the militant group blamed by India for last month's deadly attacks on Mumbai.<br />Local man Nisar Ali told Reuters the operation began in the afternoon in Shawai on the outskirts of Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Pakistani side of disputed Kashmir region.<br />"I don't know details as the entire area was sealed off, but I heard two loud blasts in the evening after a military helicopter landed there," Ali said.<br />An official with the Jamaat-ud-Dawa charity, which is linked to LeT, said security forces had taken over the camp.<br />India has demanded Pakistan take swift action over what it says is the latest anti-India militant attack emanating from Pakistani soil. No comment on the raid was immediately available from Indian officials.<br />At least 171 people were killed during the three-day assault last month across Mumbai, India's financial capital, which has imperilled the improving ties between the south Asian nuclear rivals.<br />Mumbai police have said the gunmen were controlled by the Pakistan-based LeT group blamed for earlier attacks including a 2001 assault on India's parliament that nearly sparked the two countries' fourth war since independence from Britain in 1947.<br />LeT was formed with the help of Pakistan's intelligence agencies to fight Indian rule in Kashmir, but analysts say it is now part of a global Islamist militant scene. They say it is sympathetic to, and may have direct ties with, al Qaeda.<br />HOAX CALL ROW<br />Pakistani territory was used to stage the attacks on Mumbai, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday, again urging Islamabad to help bring the perpetrators to justice.<br />"I think there's no doubt that Pakistani territory was used, by probably non-state actors," Rice told CNN's "Late Edition."<br />She has just returned from a trip to the region to urge cooperation between the old enemies India and Pakistan.<br />"I don't think that there is compelling evidence of involvement of Pakistani officials," she added.<br />India's foreign minister had earlier accused Pakistan of trying to dodge blame over the Mumbai attacks' Pakistani origins by leaking a story about a hoax call to Pakistan's president that set off diplomatic panic.<br />Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reported on Saturday that Pakistan had put its forces on high alert after a caller pretending to be Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee threatened President Asif Ali Zardari while the attacks were still going on.<br />Police in the Himalayan region of Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan have fought for six decades, said on Sunday that one of two men arrested on Friday for helping get mobile phone cards to the gunmen had recently been hired as a constable.<br />"We are investigating whether he was on an undercover operation," a top Kashmir police officer said on condition of anonymity. The man, Mukhtar Ahmed, had worked for years as an informal anti-militant informant, the officer said.<br />An LeT-linked man suspected of reconnoitring Mumbai well before the attacks has been in custody since February in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, police Special Task Force chief Brij Lal told Reuters.<br />The disclosure about Faim Ansari, a 26-year-old native of Mumbai, was the first evidence to emerge of Indian complicity in the attacks.<br />(Reporting by New Delhi, Mumbai and Islamabad bureaux and Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow and Sheikh Mushtaq in Srinagar; Editing by Keith Weir and Mark Trevelyan)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI.php</a> </p><p></p><p>**************</p><p><strong>Mumbai siege mobilizes the prosperous<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />MUMBAI: An extraordinary public interest lawsuit was filed Wednesday in this city's highest court. It charged that the government had lagged in its constitutional duty to protect its citizens' right to life, and it pressed the state to modernize and upgrade its security forces.<br />The lawsuit was striking mainly for the people behind it: investment bankers, corporate lawyers and representatives of some of India's largest companies, which have their headquarters here in the country's financial capital, formerly known as Bombay.<br />The Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the city's largest business association, joined as a petitioner. It was the first time it had lent its name to litigation in the public interest.<br />The three-day siege of Mumbai, which ended more than a week ago, was a watershed for India's prosperous classes. It prompted many of those who live in their own private Indias, largely insulated from the country's dysfunction, to demand a vital public service: safety.<br />Since the attacks, which killed 163 people, as well as nine gunmen, there has been an outpouring of anger from unlikely quarters. On Wednesday, tens of thousands of urban, English-speaking citizens stormed the Gateway of India, a famed waterfront monument, venting anger at their elected leaders. There were similar protests in the capital, New Delhi, and the southern technology hubs, Bangalore and Hyderabad. All were organized spontaneously, with word spread through text messages and Facebook pages.<br />On Saturday, young people affiliated with a new political party, called Loksatta, or People's Power, gathered at the Gateway, calling for a variety of reforms, including banning criminals from running for political office. (Virtually every political party has convicts and suspects among its elected officials.)<br />Social networking sites were ablaze with memorials and citizens' action groups, including one that advocated refraining from voting altogether as an act of civil disobedience. Never mind that in India, voter turnout among the rich is far lower than among the poor.<br />Another group advocated not paying taxes, as though that would improve the quality of public services. On Saturday an e-mail campaign began called "I Am Clean," urging citizens not to bribe police officers or drive through red lights. And there were countless condemnations of how democracy had failed in this, the world's largest democracy. Those condemnations led Vir Sanghvi, a columnist writing in Mint, a financial newspaper, to remind his readers of 1975, when Indira Gandhi, then the prime minister, imposed emergency rule.<br />Sanghvi wrote, "I am beginning to hear the same kind of middle-class murmurs and whines about the ineffectual nature of democracy and the need for authoritarian government."<br />Perhaps the most striking development was the lawsuit, because it represented a rare example of corporate India confronting the government outright rather than making backroom deals.<br />"It says in a nutshell, 'Enough is enough,"' said Cyrus Guzder, who owns a logistics company. "More precisely, it tells us that citizens of all levels in the country believe their government has let them down and believe that it now needs to be held accountable."<br />In India's city of gold, the distinction between public and private can be bewildering. For members of the working class, who often cannot afford housing, public sidewalks become living rooms. In the morning, commuters from gated communities in the suburbs pass children brushing their teeth at the edge of the street. Women are forced to relieve themselves on the railroad tracks, usually in the dark, for the sake of modesty. The poor sometimes sleep on highway medians, and it is not unheard of for drunken drivers to mow them down.<br />Mumbai has been roiled by government neglect for years. Its commuter trains are so overcrowded that 4,000 riders die every year on average, some pushed from trains in the fierce competition to get on and off. Monsoon rains in 2005 killed more than 400 people in Mumbai in one day alone; so clogged were the city's ancient drains, so crowded its river plains with unauthorized construction, that water had nowhere to go.<br />Rahul Bose, an actor, suggested setting aside such problems for the moment. In a plea published last week in The Hindustan Times, he laid out the desperation of this glistening, corroding place. "We overlook for now your neglect of the city," he wrote on the newspaper's opinion page. "Its floods, its traffic, its filth, its pollution. Just deliver to us a world-standard anti-terrorism plan."<br />None of the previous terrorist attacks, even in Mumbai, had so struck the cream of Bombay society. Bombs have been planted on commuter trains in the past, but few people who regularly dine at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, one of the worst-hit sites, travel by train. "It has touched a raw nerve," said Amit Chandra, who runs a prominent investment firm. "People have lost friends. Everyone would visit these places."<br />In any event, public anger could not have come at a worse time for incumbent politicians, who were at their most contrite last week. National elections are due next spring, and security is likely to be one of the principal issues in the vote, particularly among the urban middle class. It remains to be seen whether outrage will prompt them to turn out to vote in higher numbers or whether politicians will be compelled to pay greater attention to them than in the past.<br />"There's a revulsion against the political class I have never seen before," said Gerson D'Cunha, a former advertising executive whose civic group, AGNI, presses for better government. "The middle class that is laid back, lethargic, indolent, they've been galvanized."<br />For how long? That is a question on everyone's lips. At a memorial service on Thursday evening for a slain alumnus of the elite St. Xavier's College here, a placard asked: "One month from now, will you care?" "It's helplessness - what do we do?" said Probir Roy, the owner of a technology company and an alumnus of St. Xavier's. "All the various stakeholders - the police, politicians - you can't count on them anyway. Now what do you do?" Tops, a private security agency, has plenty to do. It is consulting schools, malls and "high net individuals" on how to protect themselves better. Security was a growth industry in India even before the latest attacks. Tops's global chairman, Rahul Nanda, said the company employed 73,000 security guards today, compared with about 15,000 three years ago.<br />Mumbai is not the only place suffering from official neglect. Public services have deteriorated across India, all the more so in the countryside. Government schools are mismanaged. Doctors do not show up to work on public health projects. Corruption is endemic.<br />In some of India's booming cities, private developers drill for their own water and generate electricity for their own buildings.<br />Political interference often gets in the way of India's woefully understaffed and poorly paid police force. Repeatedly, courts and commissions have called for law enforcement to be liberated from political control. Politicians have balked.<br />The three-day standoff with terrorists was neither the deadliest that India has seen, nor the most protracted; there have been other extended convulsions of violence, including mass killings of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.<br />Yet, the recent attacks, which the Indian police say were the work of a Pakistan-based terrorist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, were profoundly different. Two of the four main targets were luxury hotels frequented by the city's wealthy elite: the Taj and the twin Oberoi and Trident hotels, a few miles west on Nariman Point.<br />They were the elite's watering holes and business dinner destinations. And to lose them, said Alex Kuruvilla, who runs the Condé Nast publications in India, is like losing a limb. "It's like what I imagine an amputee would feel," he said. "It's so much part of our lives."<br />In The Indian Express newspaper on Friday, a columnist named Vinay Sitapati wrote a pointed open letter to "South Bombay," shorthand for the city's most wealthy enclave. The column first berated the rich gently for lecturing at Davos and failing in Hindi exams. "You refer to your part of the city simply as 'town,"' he wrote, and then he begged: "Vote in person. But vote in spirit, too: Use your clout to demand better politicians, not pliant ones. "In your hour of need today," he added, "it is India that needs your help."</p><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/india.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/india.php</a></p><p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhvR2uth8kr263L9IA-ZGlvl_wnaJ_PTxSj3vaT_3Oda-AP6-c2Tp6gp6CizmHR5GyvECCT65W4XsMHzYmTGj03bMGFiZi91_raghJ-t-fENVM3_6GfESRPyQD4FI9DSJ6Xw-UWMm38pY/s1600-h/DSC02684.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273418970265762" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhvR2uth8kr263L9IA-ZGlvl_wnaJ_PTxSj3vaT_3Oda-AP6-c2Tp6gp6CizmHR5GyvECCT65W4XsMHzYmTGj03bMGFiZi91_raghJ-t-fENVM3_6GfESRPyQD4FI9DSJ6Xw-UWMm38pY/s320/DSC02684.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>U.S. prosecutor in Blackwater shooting case arrives in Baghdad<br /></strong>By Katherine Zoepf<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: An American prosecutor working on the case against the five Blackwater security guards indicted in connection with a 2007 shooting in Baghdad has arrived in Iraq and will be meeting with victims' families this week.<br />An Iraqi official familiar with the investigation told The New York Times that the meeting would take place Saturday in the National Police Headquarters, a stone's throw from Nisour Square, the traffic circle in Baghdad where at least 17 Iraqis were killed on Sept. 16, 2007, by private security guards working for Blackwater Worldwide.<br />The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is contacting victims' families before that meeting, the official said. The prosecutor will make a presentation to the families as a group, he said, briefing them about how the investigation has been conducted to date, taking them through what will happen during the trial and explaining how they can make claims against Blackwater.<br />"The prosecutor is coming on Saturday to tell people what is going to happen, and especially how to make claims," said the official, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak about the investigation. "He will speak in front of all of them. The families of the victims deserve to know what comes next."<br />A team from the FBI is in Iraq, the official said, and has been interviewing Iraqi witnesses to the shootings. Four witnesses have been extensively interviewed and are preparing to fly to the United States to testify at the trial, he added. An FBI spokeswoman, reached in Washington, said she had "no comment on Blackwater," before hanging up the phone.<br />Blackwater maintains that its employees - hired to guard American diplomats in Iraq - were firing in response to an attack. But Iraqi investigators, supported by witness accounts, have failed to turn up evidence of any attack on Blackwater guards that might have provoked the shooting.<br />Abdulwahab Abdulkader, 33, a bank employee who is one of the four witnesses expected to testify at the trial, said he was on his way to buy a birthday gift for a friend's daughter when he got caught in a traffic jam at Nisour Square on the morning of the shooting. The gridlock, he said, included a convoy of Blackwater vehicles.<br />Abdulkader said the company's guards opened fire on the vehicles in the traffic circle without warning or apparent provocation.<br />He said he watched a car with a woman and a young man inside explode into flames after it came under fire. Frightened, he said he started to drive in the direction of his house, but a Blackwater vehicle followed and forced him to stop by ramming into his car. He said guards then fired three shots through the roof. One of the bullets hit him in the right arm. He said he still has difficulty performing certain tasks with his arm.<br />In the weeks after the shooting, Abdulkader said, FBI agents showed him satellite images of the circle and asked him detailed questions about the position of his car and the direction that the bullets had come from. Agents also examined his car, he said, and eventually purchased it from him.<br />Abdulkader said he had been flown to the United States in May where he appeared before a federal grand jury. He said that he and other victims had been invited to Blackwater's offices in Baghdad's Green Zone and that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad had given him $7,500 as partial compensation.<br />Mohammed Hafedh, whose 9-year-old son was killed in the incident, said he has refused offers of compensation from the U.S. Embassy.<br />"We were guilty of nothing more than being Iraqis," he said. "I'm glad they are going to trial because this will stop them. Justice has to be accomplished."<br />In Baquba on Sunday, meanwhile, a bomb exploded in a busy market just as a large group of local government and security officials arrived in the area.<br />Thirty-six people were wounded, some of them seriously, an official of the Iraqi Interior Ministry said.<br />Among the wounded were the mayor of Baquba, Abdullah al-Hayali, and Raghib al-Omairi, the municipal security chief.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/mideast/iraq.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/mideast/iraq.php</a><br /><br />*************<br /><strong>Bomb targets Iraqi police as they lift barricades</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: A bomb went off on Sunday, wounding 35 police and neighbourhood patrolmen in the volatile northern city of Baquba as they were ceremoniously dismantling security barriers to show that violence was on the decline.<br />Twenty-nine of the wounded were police, including a police commander of Diyala province, Lieutenant Colonel Raghib al-Umairi, police said. Also wounded was the Baquba city mayor, Abdullah al-Hiyali.<br />The police officers and officials had been removing concrete barriers placed across downtown streets in Baquba two years ago, when ethnic and sectarian bloodshed raged across Iraq and Baquba, a volatile and religiously mixed city, was a war zone.<br />"They were just walking along in a group when they reached an electrical appliance store. Suddenly a powerful blast happened. The front of the store was totally destroyed," said Ali Abu Shahad, a Sunni Arab patrolman who witnessed the blast.<br />Six members of Shahad's "Sons of Iraq" neighbourhood patrol were among the wounded in Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) northeast of Baghdad. It lies in Diyala, a province that was once in the grip of Sunni Islamist al Qaeda and which continues to be one of Iraq's most restive regions.<br />"They were all walking together. That's why we had so many wounded," Shahad said.<br />Violence has fallen significantly in Iraq this year but insurgents are still capable of carrying out bloody attacks.<br />Tensions remain high in Diyala between majority Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs, some of whom initially sided with al Qaeda, ahead of provincial elections next year and the withdrawal by mid-2009 of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities and towns.<br />(Editing by Charles Dick)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-VIOLENCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-VIOLENCE.php</a><br /><br />*************<br /><br /><strong>Palestinians fear Israeli moves in parts of East Jerusalem</strong><br />By Isabel Kershner<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />JERUSALEM: A series of recent Israeli actions in the mainly Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem have raised tensions there, with Palestinian and Israeli critics contending that they are part of a wider plan to "Judaize" historically charged areas around the Old City.<br />The actions, ostensibly unconnected, include the demolition of two Arab homes in Silwan, a neighborhood adjacent to the Old City above the ruins of an ancient Jewish site; the start of a controversial infrastructure project there; and the eviction of a Palestinian family from its home in Sheik Jarrah, another neighborhood coveted by Jewish nationalists near the Old City.<br />None of these actions in themselves are that unusual here. But the spate of high-profile, highly symbolic moves in the past few weeks has reignited concerns that an increasing Jewish presence in Arab areas will further complicate the chances of reaching an Israeli-Palestinian political agreement based on a two-state solution that calls for a division of powers in a shared capital.<br />And they come as a new Jerusalem mayor who has vocally supported expansion of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem takes office.<br />"East Jerusalem must be the capital of the Palestinian state," said Hatem Abdel Qader, an adviser on Jerusalem affairs to the Palestinian Authority prime minister, Salam Fayyad. "Israel is trying to create facts on the ground and determine the results before we reach any solution."<br />Some believe that the Israeli authorities and Jewish nationalists, who are increasingly gaining footholds in the Arab neighborhoods, are intentionally exploiting the period of political transition in the United States, as well as the political vacuum in Israel before the February elections.<br />"Several elements combine to make the situation in Jerusalem much more dangerous," said Hagit Ofran of Peace Now, a left-wing Israeli group that opposes Jewish settlements in areas that are expected to be part of a Palestinian state. The conditions are ideal, she said, "for settlers to seek to force their agenda without fear of challenge or repercussions."<br />A spokesman for Jerusalem City Hall, Gidi Schmerling, rejected the accusations, saying municipal enforcement is carried out equally and according to the law in the eastern part of the city and the predominantly Jewish western part. He added that the demolition of the houses, which were built on public land, was carried out after the residents lost their appeals in the district and supreme courts.<br />The home demolitions in that part of Silwan, where a volatile mix of about 7,000 Palestinians and a few hundred Jewish ultranationalists live in cramped quarters on steep hillsides above the ruins of the ancient City of David, set off a riot. They were the first of 88 homes to be razed in a compound built without proper permits where Israeli planners want to expand a national archaeological park.<br />The infrastructure improvements, in ordinary circumstances, would be welcome news in a poor and neglected neighborhood like Silwan. But in the charged atmosphere of East Jerusalem, which Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 war and later annexed, some perceive even municipal road works and new traffic arrangements as part of a larger plan.<br />In late November, thee Jerusalem city authorities and East Jerusalem Development, an Israeli government company, began a project to lay new water and sewage pipes and to repave one of Silwan's main roads. The road, known to Arabs as Wadi Hilweh and renamed by the Israeli authorities as City of David Steps, runs roughly from the main entrance of the City of David site down toward the compound known as the Bustan, where the demolitions took place.<br />Many local residents oppose the traffic changes, which have already been instituted, as well as plans to turn empty spaces along the road into parking lots, saying they will benefit the tourists to the detriment of the local residents.<br />"We lack schools, playgrounds, everything," said Jawwad Siyam, an activist in Silwan. "The Israeli government and Jerusalem city are now like tools in the settlers' hands."<br />With the help of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a human rights group, Siyam and several other residents have gone to court to try to halt the work. They told the court that they feared that the road works would turn up archaeological finds, requiring a salvage dig "that could paralyze life in the area for years."<br />Eli Shmuelyan, the deputy director of East Jerusalem Development, dismissed the complaints. "We're creating parking lots for the residents as well," he said, "so the streets will be clear and the buses can move."<br />Perhaps the opponents of the project "enjoy traffic jams," he said.<br />But what the opponents see is a pattern, a direct line extending from the City of David and the Bustan - where the demolition orders were issued in 2005 but were delayed, largely because of international pressure - to the eviction of the Palestinian family in Sheik Jarrah.<br />The family, the Kurds, which had lived in its home there for more than 50 years, was evicted in early November. A Jewish association claims ownership of the land and has plans to build a large Jewish housing complex there.<br />For years, the Kurds had refused to pay rent as protected tenants in their own home, as they had been ordered to do, pending the outcome of a protracted legal battle against the Jewish claimants. Religious Jewish nationalists had already moved into an extension of the Kurds' small, single-story stone house.<br />The Kurds' home is adjacent to a site held by Jews to be the ancient tomb of Shimon Hatzadik, or Simeon the Just, a Jewish high priest from the days of the Second Temple. A Jewish organization has reclaimed the land based on property deeds whose authenticity is disputed, and which date back to the 1870s, long before the Jewish state was established in 1948.<br />Another 27 Palestinian families are threatened with eviction on the same grounds.<br />"People in the neighborhood are very upset and fear they will be next," said a resident, Mahmoud Abu Turk, who was visiting the mourning tent.<br />The Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, is responding by trying to assert its presence.<br />Abdel Qader and Rafiq Husseini, the director of the president's office, took a group of foreign consular officials on a tour of Silwan, Sheik Jarrah and other problematic areas of East Jerusalem last week.<br />The tour was "symbolic," Abdel Qader said, a "message to Israel" that the Palestinian leadership can also operate in Jerusalem.<br />Others note that the Jewish reclamation of pre-state property in East Jerusalem could open a political Pandora's box of counterclaims.<br />In a symbolic protest Thursday, Muhammad al-Kurd's widow, Fawziyah, 56, accompanied by Palestinian and Israeli activists and two Arab Israeli members of Parliament, briefly set up a tent in the affluent West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbieh.<br />She said her parents abandoned a home there when they became refugees in 1948.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/mideast/israel.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/mideast/israel.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Steven Soderbergh's 'Che': Revolutionary glamour</strong><br />By Terrence Rafferty<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />"We only won the war," Commandante Ernesto Guevara says a couple of hours into the movie that bears his memorable nickname, "Che." "The revolution begins now."<br />Not in this picture, though. Steven Soderbergh's ambitious new film, opening Dec. 12 in the United States and worldwide through February, consists of two parts (each running 131 minutes). The first is set in Cuba, where Guevara helped Fidel Castro overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista in a long guerrilla campaign that ended in December 1958; the second takes place in Bolivia, where Guevara went in 1966 to start a revolution that he hoped would spread throughout Latin America (he was Argentine by birth) and where he died a year later. What's missing in the film is the very revolution whose beginning he has so solemnly announced.<br />This is odd but somehow not surprising, because movies about revolutions do tend to give pride of place to the fighting and to elide the duller, often grimmer business of actually governing in a revolutionary way. And movie revolutionaries frequently deliver themselves of weighty pronouncements like Guevara's, to which the viewer is expected to nod thoughtfully in agreement.<br />His revolution-begins-now statement is something he really said, and it was stirring enough to reappear, paraphrased, as the wisdom of an Algerian insurgent in Gillo Pontecorvo's classic 1966 "Battle of Algiers." "It's hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it," says one of the more intellectual leaders of the militants in that film. "But it's only afterward, once we've won, that the real difficulties begin."<br />Both Guevara and his North African counterpart are, of course, absolutely right: what happens after the battles have been won is indeed the most difficult part of the strange, inherently improvisatory process of revolution - so tricky that many leaders, Castro among them, manage to maintain power only by declaring a kind of eternal state of revolution. (It keeps beginning and beginning and beginning. ...) And because this strategy is neither dramatically nor humanly very satisfying, the movies have rarely shown much interest in the internal dynamics of revolutionary governments; in this Soderbergh's film is not alone.<br />But weirdly, Richard Fleischer's much maligned 1969 "Che!," with its ridiculous exclamation point, does make at least an attempt to deal with the first few years of the Castro regime, to examine the peculiar relationship between the Maximum Leader, Fidel, and the ideological hard-liner Che, and even to acknowledge Guevara's complicity in the orgy of executions that accompanied the new government's ascension to power. The movie's studio gloss undermines its pretensions to seriousness, as does its old Hollywood approach to ethnic casting: the Egyptian matinee idol Omar Sharif as Guevara and the ineffably absurd Jack Palance as a cartoon Castro, wily and doltish by turns. (The new "Che" has a far more convincing Guevara in Benicio Del Toro and a slyly funny performance by Demián Bichir as Castro.) But in its maladroit way "Che!," though clearly designed to exploit the fascination of late-'60s radical youth with their favorite countercultural martyr, does get at some uncomfortable truths about the ambiguities of revolutionary governance.<br />Naturally, you never see anything of that sort in films made under the auspices of the revolutionary regimes themselves, for which art exists only to perpetuate the heroic mythology of the (permanent) struggle. That's as true of Cuba in the past half-century as it was of the Soviet Union in the 70-plus years between the Bolshevik revolution and perestroika, though the early Soviet filmmakers did a much, much better job of mythologizing their cause.<br />Sergei Eisenstein's first two films, "Strike" (1924) and "The Battleship Potemkin" (1925), are, despite the crudeness of their propaganda, fiercely exciting as cinema, full of eloquent compositions and startlingly inventive editing and with a passionate, nervous energy that was like nothing else in movies at the time.<br />Castro's Cuba never enjoyed that sort of cinematic renaissance, not even for a short time. There is virtually nothing of value to be learned from the Cuban movies of the last 50 years, most of which adhere to the dreary Stalinist aesthetic of socialist realism, as if artistic imagination were somehow threatening to the revolution, an unseemly and dangerous form of competition.<br />This would probably have been the case in the French Revolution, too, had the movies been invented in time for the likes of Robespierre to lop off the heads of pesky auteurs. And although France is at this point pretty definitively postrevolutionary, it's still uncommon to see a French film that does full justice to the bloodbath in which the republic was born. To do so would risk violating the nation's sense of itself, as even the venerable Eric Rohmer discovered when his bracingly intelligent "The Lady and the Duke" (2001) was pilloried in the Paris press. The most penetrating movie about the French Revolution, "Danton" (1983) was directed by a Pole, Andrzej Wajda, who brings to the story of deadly factional politicking a welcome objectivity and a macabre sense of absurdity - a cold-eyed horror at the spectacle of murder in the name of revolution.<br />So it could be a while before we get the whole story of Guevara, Castro and the Cuban revolution; and when we do, it's sure to come from outside Cuba. Probably not from Hollywood, which hasn't had much success with this piece of history, the most notable attempt being Sydney Pollack's expensive flop "Havana" (1990). That picture tried, strenuously, to do something that wasn't worth doing, to make a Cuban "Doctor Zhivago," one of those ordinary-people-swept-up-in-the-tides-of-history epics whose fatal flaw is that they tend to leave the politics out of the most obviously political events.<br />The 2005 film "The Lost City," which covers much of the same ground, is better, perhaps because it was written by a Cuban exile, G. Cabrera Infante, and directed by a Cuban-American, Andy Garcia. (It certainly isn't apolitical; it's unabashedly anti-Castro, and whether you agree with that position or not, it gives the movie the focus and the drive that "Havana" conspicuously lacks.)<br />You can get a little more of the sad story from Julian Schnabel's moving "Before Night Falls" (2000), about the persecution of the gay Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas, and more still from Néstor Almendros's blistering documentaries "Improper Conduct" (1984) and "Nobody Listened" (1987). (Only the latter is available on DVD, though there's a clip from "Improper Conduct" on the DVD of "Before Night Falls.")<br />But that's if you're interested in something like the truth, and truth isn't always of paramount importance when it comes to revolution (or movies, for that matter). Revolution is, in many people's minds, more about ideals, wild hopes, romance; too many facts, and the world looks impossible to change.<br />Che Guevara was literally the embodiment of the romantic notion that unyielding dedication and unceasing struggle could achieve the liberation of all the world's oppressed, and this is such an attractive idea that one may prefer not to dwell on his humorlessness, his rigidity, his icy ruthlessness. Most revolutions are necessary, most end up betraying the ideals they claimed to represent, and most revolutionaries are at least mildly sociopathic. "Revolutions attract crazies; it's a well-known fact," the French leftist filmmaker Chris Marker says in his brilliant documentary essay "The Last Bolshevik" (1993). But he says it sort of tenderly.<br />Marker's film (which is available on DVD through the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio) is perhaps the only completely sane movie ever made on the deranging subject of revolution, because it's all paradoxes. The film takes the form of a series of letters from Marker to his dead friend Aleksandr Medvedkin, a Soviet filmmaker and committed Communist whose work often displeased his Kremlin masters.<br />"The Last Bolshevik" is about the power of images to reveal and to lie, and about the insidious effect of images on those who make them, whether innocently (as Medvedkin mostly did) or more calculatingly. Sometimes in a revolution, it can be hard to tell the difference.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/arts/soder.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/arts/soder.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Olmert slams "pogrom" but Palestinians still fearful<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />By Alastair Macdonald<br />Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Sunday that attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians last week were a "pogrom" and that Israeli police must end "intolerable leniency" towards such violent offenders.<br />"As a Jew, I am ashamed of other Jews doing such a thing," Olmert told his cabinet, referring to a shooting incident.<br />But in the West Bank city of Hebron, where at least three Palestinians were wounded by gunfire on Thursday after troops cleared dozens of hardline, religious settlers from a large building, many locals were sceptical of such Israeli promises.<br />"We're expecting to be attacked again at any time by the settlers," said Bassem al-Jabari, as he and other neighbours looked at the evacuated site on Sunday. "No one cares about us."<br />Olmert, who has resigned over a corruption scandal but stays on as caretaker until after a February 10 election, has lately taken to describing settler attacks as "pogroms," using the Russian term for violence against Jews a century ago that drove some to emigrate to Palestine and, in time, establish the Israeli state.<br />"We are a people whose historical ethos is built on the memory of pogroms," Olmert told his cabinet, according to a statement. "The sight of Jews standing with guns and shooting at innocent Palestinian civilians can only be called a pogrom."<br />His latest remarks were among his strongest yet. They follow the broadcasting of video apparently showing a settler shooting and wounding Palestinians, as well as stone-throwing and other violence across the West Bank, including the torching of olive groves, which Palestinians leaders described as "waging war."<br />Olmert said he was pressing for prosecutions and "an end to the intolerable leniency ... towards settlers who break the law."<br />An Israeli court remanded one settler in custody on Sunday over the shooting allegation and released another on bail.<br />The United States, which failed in efforts to broker a peace in this final year of George W. Bush's presidency, has described the settlement of half a million Israelis in the West Bank since Israel captured the territory in 1967 as an obstacle to peace.<br />Olmert says Israel should clear outposts but draw borders with a new Palestinian state to ensure major settlements, deemed illegal under international law, are incorporated into Israel.<br />TENSIONS, VIOLENCE<br />In Hebron, troops now occupy the building, dubbed "House of Peace" by the dozen or so settler families who refused to obey a court order to leave last month. A Palestinian denies selling it to them and is asking Israeli courts to return his property.<br />Mohammed al-Jabari, who lives close by the building, on a strip of hillside separating Hebron's ancient centre from the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, said neighbours were glad the army was now in control: "It's better now. There is respect for the law. When the settlers were here, there was no law."<br />Longer term, however, his neighbours are not optimistic.<br />Jabari and other householders, mostly also from the Jabari clan, living in flat-roofed houses among patches of field and olive trees around the evacuated building recount a year or more of tension and clashes with the Jewish former occupants.<br />Though the allegations could not easily be verified, tales of rocks thrown at homes, women intimidated, a dead dog tossed into the courtyard of the local mosque, a horse poisoned, and so on were repeated by several Palestinians living close to a hard core of settlers. These see expansion in Hebron, which is home to the tomb of Abraham, as a religious and nationalist duty.<br />Israeli troops protect some 650 Jews living in the centre of Hebron, a city of 180,000, as well as surrounding settlements.<br />Palestinians say Israeli forces turn a blind eye to settler attacks while punishing Arabs who resort to violence: "It's double standards," Issa Amro, 28, a human rights activist.<br />He said local people were particularly fearful that settlers are allowed to carry rifles: "There is an Israeli soldier to protect every one of them," Amro said. "Why do they need M-16s?"<br />Another neighbour, using his nickname Abu Firas, recalled how his children had been terrified as settlers attacked their home with burning material and stones on Thursday: "They burnt our homes with the protection of the Israeli state," he said.<br />"Right now, I see no Israeli government. I see gang law," he added, surveying the hillside from a cemetery where at least two Muslim headstones have been daubed with a star of David.<br />"The only way to end this is for Israel to pull all settlers from the West Bank. It's a fight for survival. It's us or them."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL-HEBRON.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL-HEBRON.php</a><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edcohen.php"></a><br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Millions of Muslims prepare to stone devil at haj<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />By Inal Ersan<br />More than two million Muslim pilgrims headed to Muzdalifa on Sunday to cast stones at the devil in the most dangerous part of the haj pilgrimage.<br />A sea of pilgrims, some on foot, some in vehicles, moved from the plain of Arafat down a desert boulevard lit by towering floodlights. At Muzdalifa, just outside Mecca, they gathered small pebbles to throw at large walls at the Jamarat Bridge, symbolising the rejection of temptation.<br />"I'm very proud to be a Muslim today. No other religion can gather this many people for any event," said Zahi Khan, a 58-year-old Pakistani.<br />Pilgrims will spend the next three days visiting the bridge as well as revisiting the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Monday is also Eid al-Adha, commemorating the willingness of biblical patriarch Abraham to sacrifice his son for God.<br />The bridge has been the scene of a number of deadly stampedes -- 362 people were crushed to death there in 2006 in the worst haj tragedy since 1990.<br />Saudi authorities have made renovations to ease the flow of pilgrims at the Bridge, adding an extra level so that pilgrims have four platforms from which to throw stones each day.<br />They are also making clear appeals to pilgrims this year to throw their stones at any time of day rather than only in the afternoon, as Saudi clerics have often insisted in the past.<br />Saudi Arabia has not so far reported any glitches in the haj, a logistical feat of organisation that has been marred in previous years by deadly fires, hotel collapses, police clashes with protesters and stampedes caused by overcrowding.<br />But authorities were not able to stop some political activities, which pilgrims had been called on to avoid.<br />Iranian television showed Iranian pilgrims at Arafat chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel." Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammadi Reyshahri, head of Iran's haj mission, said Islam was now resurgent, despite some Muslims' despair "in the face of Western civilization's onslaught."<br />PRAYER AT ARAFAT<br />Pilgrims spent the day in prayer at Arafat 15 km (10 miles) east of Mecca at the climax of haj, a duty for every able-bodied Muslim once in a lifetime and one of the largest manifestations of religious devotion in the world today.<br />Throughout the day men in white seamless robes and veiled women in long dresses wept with emotion while sprinklers cooled temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit).<br />"O God, I am answering your call," many chanted.<br />"Being here is better than anything I have ever experienced ... better than the time I saw my children for the first time," said Rawya Mohammad, a secretary from Egypt.<br />"I feel privileged. I am one in a million Muslims with the honour of performing pilgrimage this year. This is a reward," said Omar Salah, a 38-year-old engineer, also from Egypt.<br />The haj retraces the path of Prophet Mohammad 14 centuries ago after he removed pagan idols from Mecca, his birthplace, and years after he started calling people to the new faith, which is now embraced by more than one billion people worldwide.<br />Some prayed for an end to the global financial crisis. "The economic crisis is on the mind of most pilgrims ... It's an unexpected crisis and the only solution is mercy from heaven," said Mohammad Fateh, from an Egyptian brokerage.<br />Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al al-Sheikh said in a sermon at Arafat that straying from Islamic sharia law was behind the financial collapse and other problems.<br />As part of its beefed-up crowd control measures, the government has been tougher this year in preventing Saudis and residents taking part without official haj permits.<br />Saudi media said a record 1.72 million pilgrims came from abroad this year; over half a million come from inside the country, home to Islam's holiest sites.<br />(Additional reporting by Hashem Kalantari in Tehran; Editing by Elizabeth Piper)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-HAJ.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-HAJ.php</a><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Israel halts boat planning to deliver aid to Gaza</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />TEL AVIV: Israeli police on Sunday blocked an attempt by Israeli Arabs to sail a boat from Israel to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip with a cargo of food and medical supplies.<br />Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip has been stepped up in recent weeks amid a surge of violence along its frontier with the Palestinian territory.<br />An Islamic group in Israel comprised mainly of Arab citizens of the Jewish state organized what was to have been the first voyage of a boat from Israel to the Gaza Strip with humanitarian supplies.<br />But police in the port of Jaffa instructed the boat's owner not to set off for Gaza and ordered him to move the vessel to the nearby Tel Aviv marina, where it was put under watch.<br />"We warned the boat's owner that he would be breaking the law and would be arrested if his boat were to try to sail to Gaza," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.<br />Israeli law bans Israeli citizens from travelling to the Gaza Strip, territory Israeli soldiers and settlers quit in 2005.<br />"This is a cowardly act by people and the police who fear our delivery of medication to Gaza's Shifa hospital. But we will continue to try to break the siege," said Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of Israel's parliament.<br />About a fifth of Israel's citizens are Arabs, many of whom see themselves as Palestinians. Most are descendants of Palestinians who stayed in what became Israel while hundreds of thousands of others fled or were driven out in a 1948 war over the state's establishment.<br />Many of Israel's Arab citizens belong to the same families as Palestinians living in coastal Gaza and the West Bank, territories captured by Israel in a 1967 Arab-Israeli war.<br />The United Nations and human rights groups have voiced concern about the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and called on Israel to ease its blockade.<br />Last week, the Israeli navy turned back a Libyan ship which Palestinian and Libyan officials said was trying to deliver 3,000 tonnes of food, medicine and other aid to the Gaza Strip.<br />Israel, apparently seeking to avoid a public confrontation, had previously allowed several boats carrying pro-Palestinian foreign activists and humanitarian goods to dock in the Gaza Strip after setting sail from Cyprus.<br />Israel said it launched an air strike in Gaza on Sunday against a group of Palestinians preparing to fire rockets at Israel. There were no reported casualties. Dozens of rockets and mortar bombs have been fired at Israel since the weekend.<br />(Writing by Ori Lewis and Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Charles Dick)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL-BOAT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL-BOAT.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Obama's best pick yet: Jones as national security adviser</strong><br />By Albert R. HuntBloomberg News<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />Last week, the world was taken by President-elect Barack Obama's new foreign policy team: Hillary Rodham Clinton as U.S. secretary of state and Robert Gates, who is being kept on as head of the Defense Department.<br />Both choices are remarkable. There has not been anything approaching the selection of Clinton since 1980, when Ronald Reagan offered the vice presidency to an old rival, the ex-President Gerald Ford; in contrast, the Clinton appointment is probably a good idea.<br />Only a year ago, a central theme of the Obama insurgency campaign was his opposition to the war in Iraq. Imagine if it was suggested then that he would win the election and keep President George W. Bush's defense chief.<br />This is a testament to both Gates and to the recent U.S. success in Iraq.<br />Yet the most impressive, and perhaps important, choice may have been Obama's tapping General James Jones to be his national security adviser.<br />In his own right, Jones, 64, is as formidable as the other two heavyweights. He's a retired four-star general; a highly decorated 40-year Marine veteran; a former commandant of the corps and supreme allied commander of NATO forces. He also rejected Bush's overtures for positions including deputy secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.<br />Jones looks the part. If there was a movie about this team, the tall, broad-shouldered Jones would play himself, now that John Wayne is gone.<br />"He has a terrific military background, great discipline, considerable diplomatic skills and a commanding presence," said former Defense Secretary William Cohen. Cohen has known Jones for 30 years - the general was his top military aide at the Pentagon - and still doesn't know whether Jones is a Republican or a Democrat.<br />Although Jones and Obama barely know each other, people who know them well predict they will forge a close relationship. Both are intellectually curious, self-confident, more pragmatic than ideological, and interested in seeking out people with different perspectives.<br />"If they didn't think there would be a rapport, the offer would not have been given or accepted," said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who is one of the preeminent military specialists in Congress. "Intellectually and temperamentally, they are similar."<br />If so, Jones would bring something to the national security job that has been sorely missing. He is an honest and effective mediator and broker of ideas, assuring that strong policy differences are framed for the president in a fair way and that only big matters are brought to him.<br />This is the role so effectively played by another general, Brent Scowcroft, during the first Bush presidency. Scowcroft, who was personally close to George H.W. Bush, has been an adviser to and a model for Jones and helped Jones decide to accept this post, associates say.<br />During the first Bush administration, Scowcroft served as a go-between for high-powered officials - Jim Baker at State, Dick Cheney at Defense and Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs - and always did it with skill and sensitivity and with the president's interests preeminent.<br />The honest-broker national security role was derailed for most of the current Bush presidency. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney bypassed all channels, intent on outmaneuvering Secretary of State Powell. With an acquiescent and passive president, they succeeded in making a travesty of the national security decision-making process.<br />Even before Clinton has been confirmed by the Senate, fears are being stoked that she will try similar end runs in an Obama administration. Some of her associates have put out the word that she will have a unique ability to deal with the president directly and be more equal than others.<br />"That would not be a great prescription," warned Cohen, who headed the Pentagon during Bill Clinton's presidency.<br />If anyone tries an end run, they would be likely to find the national security adviser a formidable obstacle. Jones has privately been appalled and frustrated at the breakdown of a coherent interagency national security system and is determined to restore that process.<br />His record suggests he will be a realpolitik internationalist and reject the neoconservative unilateral approach.<br />He has told friends that it is important to "get it right" on Russia and not simply to act reflexively on Vladimir Putin's aggressiveness.<br />He appreciates that the most important bilateral relationship will be with China. In the Middle East, as in other matters, he will follow the president's directives while advocating more engagement. And he wants to close the Guantánamo detention center and end torture.<br />It is not hard to see why he and Rumsfeld did not see eye to eye.<br />Jones, never a fan of the Iraq war, has indicated that he considers Afghanistan an enormous challenge. Although he supports sending more forces there, he also believes that success is impossible without a comparable effort to reform the Afghan government and to use American "soft power."<br />He brings another credential that Reed, a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division, considers vital: "He has commanded marines in combat. He knows decisions made in Washington ultimately are carried out by young marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen."<br />Jones is a tough marine. He also has wide-ranging interests and an attractive gentle side. He and his wife, parents of a special-needs daughter, created a program for Marine families in similar situations when he was commandant.<br />When recognized several years ago by the Atlantic Council, a musical response was suggested. In fluent French, he sang Édith Piaf's "La Vie en Rose."<br />Indeed, about the only myth in the Jones lore is that he was an outstanding basketball player for a renowned Georgetown University basketball program in the 1960s. Actually, he played there before Georgetown became a national power and averaged only 0.8 points per game.<br />Yet Cohen, once an all-state basketball player in Maine, has played pickup games with Jones for years and warns he can be fairly imposing on the court. Not nearly as imposing, Cohen adds, as off the court.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/america/letter.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/america/letter.php</a><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><strong>Ahead of new nuclear talks, North Korea lashes out at Japan</strong><br />By Choe Sang-Hun<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />SEOUL: As representatives from five regional powers converged in Beijing on Sunday to join what is possibly the Bush administration's final major effort to revive a nuclear disarmament deal with North Korea, Pyongyang vowed to ignore Japan at the talks.<br />The U.S. assistant secretary of state, Christopher Hill, will use the Beijing talks, scheduled to begin Monday, to try to persuade North Korea to allow outside experts to take nuclear waste samples for testing, considered a key procedure in determining the extent of the reclusive Communist country's past nuclear activities.<br />Hill held preliminary talks with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye Gwan, in Singapore last week and later said he expected the Beijing conference to be "difficult." On Sunday, Kim Sook, the South Korean envoy to the six-nation talks, said: "I am not very optimistic."<br />In its final weeks in power, the Bush administration is struggling to complete the so-called "second phase" of a program working toward Washington's ultimate goal of dismantling North Korea's nuclear weapons programs.<br />The plan for that phase called for North Korea to disable - but not destroy - its main nuclear complex north of Pyongyang and to agree to a method of verifying its past nuclear activities in return for one million tons of fuel aid and its removal from Washington's list of state sponsors of terrorism.<br />Hill's last-ditch efforts face serious hurdles in Pyongyang, where analysts say the regime is more interested in dealing with the new administration of President-elect Barack Obama, and also in Tokyo, where disgruntled policy makers have refused to join Washington and others in shipping fuel aid to North Korea.<br />In a rebuff to Washington's approach, Japan has refused to donate its share of 200,000 tons of aid fuel unless North Korea first addresses the kidnappings of more than a dozen Japanese citizens in the 1970s and '80s.<br />Washington and Seoul are now talking with countries like Australia and New Zealand about shouldering Japan's share.<br />Only half of the promised one million tons of fuel has been delivered. North Korea in turn is slowing down the disablement of its nuclear complex in Yongbyon, where it has produced plutonium for weapons.<br />Barring a dramatic breakthrough in Beijing this week, officials in Seoul say that the task of completing the second phase would be handed over to the Obama administration.<br />"We will neither treat Japan as a party to the talks nor deal with it even if it impudently appears in the conference room, lost to shame," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying Saturday by the official Korean Central News Agency.<br />North Korea has issued similar threats in the past. China and Russia are also party to the talks, which began after Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 2003.<br />Since Hill became Washington's front man on North Korea in 2005, he has cobbled together key agreements with North Korea, including the September 2005 deal that laid out a road map toward the North's nuclear disarmament. But he has stumbled over Pyongyang's tactic of giving vague commitments to win U.S. concessions and then retracting them, saying that nothing was written down.<br />The latest case in point involves the dispute over nuclear samples. In October, Washington announced that the North had agreed to allow sampling, and removed the North from its terrorism blacklist. But a month later, the North said that it had never given such a promise and that Washington had no written document to prove otherwise.<br />Washington seeks a comprehensive method of verifying North Korea's nuclear history. It wants, for example, to check whether North Korea has a uranium-enrichment program and whether it has proliferated nuclear technology to countries like Syria.<br />But North Korea insists that separate, more detailed verification systems be renegotiated in line with progress in the disarmament talks. It intends to keep key parts of its nuclear programs in the dark so it can use them as leverage in future talks, analysts say.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/north.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/asia/north.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSuXdDbvsF4fTAmtJ6qa__8en_sTfnvbhjoIHi2soJfSAHjoW9vOjS9BVVmXeTnzR_A83Hl4Gez3NAQ-uDRKqd6IK4pM6lLHUPom57yVM3zc_qoI9Tr1LIMVWq_rEcfPlTzLoq0qpkZ3g/s1600-h/DSC02685.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273413417614034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSuXdDbvsF4fTAmtJ6qa__8en_sTfnvbhjoIHi2soJfSAHjoW9vOjS9BVVmXeTnzR_A83Hl4Gez3NAQ-uDRKqd6IK4pM6lLHUPom57yVM3zc_qoI9Tr1LIMVWq_rEcfPlTzLoq0qpkZ3g/s320/DSC02685.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Debt watchdogs: Tamed or caught napping?</strong><br />By Gretchen Morgenson<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />"These errors make us look either incompetent at credit analysis or like we sold our soul to the devil for revenue, or a little bit of both."<br />— A Moody's managing director responding anonymously to an internal management survey, September 2007.<br />The housing mania was in full swing in 2005 when analysts at Moody's Investors Service, the nation's oldest and most prestigious credit-rating agency, were pressured to go back to the drawing board.<br />Moody's, which judges the quality of debt that corporations and banks issue to raise money, had just graded a pool of securities underwritten by Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest mortgage lender. But Countrywide complained that the assessment was too tough.<br />The next day, Moody's changed its rating, even though no new and significant information had come to light, according to two people briefed on the change who requested anonymity to preserve their professional relationships.<br />Moody's had assigned high grades to many securities containing Countrywide mortgages. Those securities and mortgages, issued during the lending spree of recent years, later soured — leaving investors with large losses and homeowners and communities struggling with foreclosures.<br />That was not the only time Moody's softened its stance on Countrywide securities. It elevated ratings several times after Countrywide complained, the people briefed on the matter say.<br />Since the subprime mortgage troubles exploded into a full-blown financial crisis last year, the three top credit-rating agencies — Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings — have faced a firestorm of criticism about whether their rosy ratings of mortgage securities generated billions of dollars in losses to investors who relied on them.<br />The agencies are supposed to help investors evaluate the risk of what they are buying. But some former employees and many investors say the agencies, which were paid far more to rate complicated mortgage-related securities than to assess more traditional debt, either underestimated the risk of mortgage debt or simply overlooked its danger so they could rake in large profits during the housing boom.<br />A Moody's spokesman, Anthony Mirenda, said the company would not change ratings without substantive reasons. "As a matter of policy, Moody's is obligated to reconvene a rating committee if there is new information put forth by an issuer that could have a material impact on a security's creditworthiness," he said, "and our policies prohibit changes to ratings for anything other than credit considerations."<br />He added that "Moody's knows of no instances in which a reconvened rating committee resulted in improper changes to ratings on Countrywide securities."<br />Bank of America, which took over Countrywide earlier this year, said it could not verify details of prior management's interactions with Moody's.<br />Members of Congress have grilled the agencies, asking their executives to answer accusations of incompetence and to say whether they assigned glowing ratings to keep clients happy and expand their business.<br />State and U.S. government officials are also making inquiries. Moody's recently disclosed in its regulatory filings that it had received subpoenas from state attorneys general and other authorities pertaining to its role in the credit crisis.<br />Moody's said it was cooperating with the investigations.<br />"Moody's credit ratings play an important but limited role in the financial markets — to offer reasoned, independent, forward-looking opinions about relative credit risk, based on rigorous analysis and published methodologies," Mirenda said. The company denies that it went easy on ratings to generate income.<br />That the credit-rating agencies missed immense problems in the mortgage-related securities they blessed is undeniable. Moody's declined to say how many classes of the securities it has downgraded. But the number is in the thousands and the original value in the hundreds of billions of dollars.<br />When Moody's began lowering the ratings of a wave of debt in July 2007, many investors were incredulous.<br />"If you can't figure out the loss ahead of the fact, what's the use of using your ratings?" asked an executive with Fortis Investments, a money management firm, in a July 2007 e-mail message to Moody's. "You have legitimized these things, leading people into dangerous risk."<br />Whether such risks were truly undetectable, or were ignored by Moody's and the other agencies, is at the core of what regulators, legislators, investigators and investors are trying to determine.<br />Moody's current woes, former executives say, were set in motion a decade or so ago when top management started pushing the company to be more profit-oriented and friendly to issuers of debt. Along the way, the firm, whose objectivity once derived from the fact that its revenue came from investors who bought Moody's research and analysis, ended up working closely with the companies it rated, and being paid by them.<br />And in 2000, when Moody's issued stock to the public for the first time, executives hungry to churn out quarterly profit growth had another incentive to redirect the firm's focus from low-margin ratings of relatively simple bonds to highly lucrative assessments of much more complex debt securities.<br />As it rode the mortgage wave, Moody's came to enjoy profit margins that were higher than those of the mightiest of Fortune 500 companies, including Exxon and Microsoft.<br />"Moody's was like a good watchdog that had regarded the financial markets as its turf and barked and growled when anybody it didn't know came near it," said Thomas McGuire, a former director of corporate development at the company who left in 1996. "But in the '90s, that watchdog got muzzled and gelded. It was told to turn into a lapdog."<br />A lucrative niche<br />A key reason for the soaring housing market was a process known as securitization. The machinery, devised by Wall Street, packaged individual mortgages into ever larger and more complex bundles. This allowed banks to sell their loans to investors, thereby reducing the banks' risk and allowing them to lend more to aspiring homeowners.<br />Wall Street made handsome profits bundling and selling the loans, and investors stepped up to buy the packaged debt, often because rating agencies like Moody's had graded it as safe enough for the investors' portfolios.<br />The agencies divided the securities into slices known as tranches and analyzed each based on its risk. The securities deemed safest received the rating Moody's called Aaa.<br />Consider a residential mortgage pool put together in summer 2006 by Goldman Sachs. Called GSAMP 2006-S5, it held $338 million of second mortgages to subprime, or riskier, borrowers.<br />The safest slice of the security held $165 million in loans. When it was issued on Aug. 17, 2006, Moody's and S&P rated it triple-A. Just eight months later, Moody's alerted investors that it might downgrade the top-rated tranche. Sure enough, it dropped the rating to Baa, the lowest investment-grade level, on Aug. 16, 2007.<br />Then, on Dec. 4, 2007, Moody's downgraded the tranche to a "junk" rating. On April 15 of this year, Moody's downgraded the tranche yet again; today, it no longer trades. The combination of downgrades and defaults hammered the securities.<br />Reversals like this have enraged investors. Internal e-mail messages disclosed by Congress in October, for example, recounted a July 2007 conversation Moody's had with an irate customer at Pimco, a major money management firm.<br />"He feels that Moody's has a powerful control over Wall Street but is frustrated that Moody's doesn't stand up to Wall Street," the e-mail stated. "They are disappointed that in this case Moody's has 'toed the line. Someone up there just wasn't on top of it,' he said."<br />For decades after its founding in 1909, Moody's was an independent and respected arbiter of credit quality. Today, the company's 1,200 analysts rate debts of 100 nations, 12,000 corporate issuers, 29,000 public issuers like cities and 96,000 complex securities known as "structured finance." It is a franchise that generated revenue of $1.35 billion and earnings of $370 million in the first three quarters of this year alone.<br />Edmund Vogelius, a Moody's vice president, explained the company's business model in a 1957 article in The Christian Science Monitor.<br />"We obviously cannot ask payment for rating a bond," he wrote. "To do so would attach a price to the process, and we could not escape the charge, which would undoubtedly come, that our ratings are for sale."<br />In the early 1970s, Moody's and other rating agencies began charging issuers for opinions. The numbers of securities — and their complexity — had increased and the agencies could no longer finance their operations on revenue from investors who bought Moody's publications.<br />In 1975, the Securities and Exchange Commission secured the rating agencies' positions by allowing banks to base their capital requirements on the ratings of securities they held. The upside of this was that it theoretically created an elegant self-policing mechanism: any firm that ran afoul of the agencies also would run afoul of investors. The heavier hand of direct government regulation could be scaled back.<br />But for McGuire, the former director of corporate development at Moody's, there were also dangers in relying on ratings as a form of regulation because the agencies would be able to sell ratings even if they failed investors.<br />"Rating agencies are staffed by ordinary people with families to support and bills to meet and mortgages to pay," he said in a speech to the SEC in 1995. "Government regulators are inadvertently subjecting those people to improper pressure, and share accountability for any scandals which may result."<br />Fortunes tied to issuers<br />As the agencies exerted growing sway, they became the arbiters that issuers loved to hate. Yet instead of viewing that ire as a reflection of their independence, Moody's executives decided that it signaled a need to become more friendly to issuers of debt, according to Jerome Fons, a former managing director for credit quality at Moody's.<br />"In my view, the focus of Moody's shifted from protecting investors to being a marketing-driven organization," he said in testimony before Congress last month. "Management's focus increasingly turned to maximizing revenues. Stock options and other incentives raised the possibility of large payoffs."<br />An early proponent of the profit push was John Rutherfurd Jr., who joined Moody's in 1985. In 1998, he became chief executive; a news release that year praised him for helping the company's bottom line.<br />According to people who worked with him at Moody's, Rutherfurd was very focused on profit. They recall a conversation about 10 years ago in which he said he wanted every Moody's analyst to produce at least $1 million in revenue each year. This encouraged Moody's to generate as many ratings per analyst as possible.<br />In an interview, Rutherfurd said that he might have discussed such a goal but that he did not recall it specifically.<br />"Moody's has to be all the time both a standards business and a service business," he said. "I wasn't in Moody's in the old days, so to speak, but I think I always understood both elements of what we had to do."<br />By the time Moody's became a public company in 2000, structured finance had become its top source of revenue. Employees in this unit rated bundles of assets like credit card receivables, car loans and residential mortgages. Later they rated collateralized debt obligations, or CDO's, yet another combination of various bundles of debt.<br />Moody's could receive between $200,000 and $250,000 to rate a $350 million mortgage pool, for example, while rating a municipal bond of a similar size might have generated just $50,000 in fees, according to people familiar with Moody's fee structure.<br />A standard of profitability at many companies is its operating margin, which measures how much of its revenue is left over after it pays most expenses. While operating margins at Moody's were always enviable — in 2000 they stood at 48 percent — they climbed even higher as revenue from structured finance rose. From 2000 to 2007, company documents show, operating margins averaged 53 percent.<br />Even thriving companies like Exxon and Microsoft had margins of 17 and 36 percent respectively in 2007. But Moody's and its counterparts were not founded to be profit machines.<br />"The mistaken notion that Moody's was a company like any other, that was very fundamental," said Sylvain Raynes, a former Moody's analyst who is co-founder of R&R Consulting, a firm that helps investors gauge debt risks. "It is not just a profit-maximization entity like Exxon or Microsoft. Moody's has a duty to the American public. People trusted it."<br />Moody's soaring fortunes were tied to the housing boom. When the Federal Reserve Board cut interest rates to 1 percent in 2003, Moody's structured-finance revenue stood at $474 million, more than twice the amount generated just three years earlier.<br />As low interest rates fed the housing surge, Moody's structured-finance business continued to rack up impressive gains. In 2005, structured finance generated $715 million, or 41 percent, of Moody's total revenue.<br />In both 2005 and 2006, almost all of the unit's growth came from mortgage-related securities, the company said, rather than other forms of debt like credit card receivables or auto loans. By the first quarter of 2007, structured finance accounted for 53 percent of Moody's revenue.<br />The man overseeing Moody's structured-finance unit in the midst of the mania was Brian Clarkson, 52. He had joined Moody's as an analyst in 1991 and rose through the organization until he became president in 2007. He resigned last May; he declined to comment for this article.<br />As mortgage securities grew more complex, investors leaned more heavily on the agencies' ratings. There was little transparency around the composition and characteristics of the loans held in the pools, and the securitization process grew so complicated that it required sophisticated systems to assess the risks embedded in each bundle.<br />Even though the standards at many lenders declined precipitously during the boom, rating agencies did not take that into account. The agencies maintained that it was not their responsibility to assess the quality of each and every mortgage loan tossed into a pool.<br />Anger from investors<br />By early 2007, it was becoming more and more obvious that the subprime mortgage boom was ending. Yet Moody's did not start downgrading mortgage-related securities until that summer. In July and August, the firm cut the ratings on almost 1,000 securities valued at almost $25 billion.<br />"These loans are defaulting at a rate materially higher than original expectations," Moody's said. Investors sharply criticized Moody's over the tardiness of the response, internal documents made public in congressional hearings show.<br />Two e-mail messages in July 2007 recount conversations Moody's had with executives at Vanguard, BlackRock and Fortis, three huge money management firms. While Fortis offered some of the harshest assessments, none of the firms were pleased.<br />The Vanguard executive, the messages show, was frustrated that Moody's was willing to "allow issuers to get away with murder." As a result, the Moody's messages say, Vanguard "finds itself 'less and less relying on the opinions of rating agencies.' " BlackRock, meanwhile, said that Moody's "relied too much on manufactured data that is weak" when rating residential mortgage securities.<br />Two months later, Moody's executives held a meeting for their managing directors to talk about the crisis. The tone of the meeting, according to a transcript released by Congress, was defiant.<br />Moody's had become a "punching bag," said one of its executives, an easy target for investors eager to deflect responsibility for escalating mortgage losses.<br />"One of the questions everybody asks is, 'Why does everybody hate us so much?' " Clarkson said during the meeting. "The theory that I've come up with lately is the fact that it's perfect. It's perfect to be able to blame us for everything."<br />During the meeting, Moody's executives predicted that the current crisis of confidence would pass, just as investor outrage over the company's failure to detect trouble at Enron and Worldcom had several years earlier.<br />Other employees at the meeting were not so sure. When asked by top management if the meeting addressed the topics of greatest concern, one managing director whose anonymous comments were part of the documents given to Congress said there had been "really no discussion of why the structured group refused to change their ratings in the face of overwhelming evidence they were wrong."<br />And two months later, Christopher Mahoney, former vice chairman of Moody's and the person who led its credit policy committee, wrote in an e-mail message to Raymond McDaniel, the firm's chief executive, that although mistakes had been made in subprime mortgage loss estimates, "more importantly I think sector wide risk management rules should have done more to alert investors of problems."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/07rating.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/07rating.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>Obama economic recovery plan includes vast public works program</strong><br />By Brian Knowlton, Peter Baker and John M. Broder<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Saying that the U.S. economy would probably worsen before it improved, President-elect Barack Obama on Sunday pledged to pursue a recovery plan "equal to the task ahead," with a vast public works program built around not just bridge and highway projects, but also the creation of "green jobs" and the spread of new technologies.<br />"This is a big problem," Obama said of the economic crisis, "and it's going to get worse."<br />He also said in an interview with NBC News that any bailout of the domestic automakers should be tied to a reinvention by Detroit of an industry "that really works." But with Congress poised to act on the automakers' urgent pleas for help, he also said that despite the industry's mistakes, "I don't think it's an option to simply allow it to collapse."<br />As his transition team formulates its plans for recovery, Obama promised far tougher regulation of the financial sector.<br />"What you will see coming out of my administration right at the center," he said, "is a strong set of new financial regulations, in which banks, ratings agencies, mortgage brokers, a whole bunch of folks start having to be much more accountable and behave much more responsibly."<br />But with jobs evaporating and the recession deepening, the biggest news Obama made probably came in the details he offered Saturday for the recovery program he is trying to fashion with congressional leaders in hopes of being able to enact it shortly after being sworn in on Jan. 20.<br />It would be, he told NBC, elaborating on remarks he made Saturday, "the largest infrastructure program in roads and bridges and other traditional infrastructure since the building of the federal highway system in the 1950s."<br />His comments followed a report on Friday indicating that the country lost 533,000 jobs in November alone, bringing the total number of jobs lost over the past year to nearly two million.<br />Obama would not put a dollar value on his proposed works program, but said the key in deciding which projects to finance would not be "the old, traditional politics" but assessing which projects could most quickly boost the economy while providing longer-term benefits.<br />His remarks showcased his ambition to expand the definition of traditional work programs for the middle class, like infrastructure projects to repair roads and bridges, to include jobs in technology and so-called green jobs that reduce energy use and global-warming emissions.<br />Obama's plan would be in part a government-directed industrial policy, with lawmakers and administration officials picking winners and losers among private projects and raining large amounts of taxpayer money on them.<br />It would cover a range of programs to expand broadband Internet access, to make government buildings more energy-efficient, to improve information technology at hospitals and doctors' offices, and to upgrade computers in schools.<br />"It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption," Obama said Saturday. "Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online."<br />President George W. Bush and many conservative economists have opposed such large-scale government intervention because it supports enterprises that might not survive in a free market. That is the crux of the argument against a government bailout of the auto industry.<br />But Obama proposes to charge ahead, asserting that extensive government support is needed to preserve and create jobs while building the latticework of a 21st-century economy.<br />Obama said he would invest record amounts of money in an infrastructure program, which would include work on schools, sewer systems, mass transit, electrical grids, dams and other public utilities. The green jobs would include those dedicated to creating alternative fuels, windmills and solar panels; building energy-efficient appliances; or installing fuel-efficient heating or cooling systems.<br />Paul Bledsoe, a former White House energy adviser in the Clinton administration, said that Obama had now settled whatever debate there was in his transition team and among Democrats in Congress over how to lift the economy in the short term and over a longer horizon.<br />"It's now clear that Obama intends to stimulate the economy through large direct government spending on infrastructure projects as well as through business and individual tax cuts," said Bledsoe, now an official of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. "He is advocating things like guaranteeing every American a college education, wiring the entire country for Internet, putting in a smart electric grid. If he can do it, these will be major systemic advantages for the United States in the competitive global economy."<br />Obama and his team are working with congressional leaders to devise a spending package that some lawmakers suggest could total $400 billion to $700 billion.<br />A big part of that will be public works spending. When Obama met with the nation's governors last week, they said the states had $136 billion worth of road, bridge, water and other projects ready to go once money became available.<br />Local and regional transit systems have $8 billion more in projects that could begin immediately, like buying hybrid buses and expanding light rail systems.<br />"He hasn't given us any commitment, but we are fairly certain it's going to be large," Governor Edward Rendell of Pennsylvania, a Democrat and chairman of the National Governors Association, said Saturday. "I think he understands if you're trying to reverse the economy and turn it around, this is not the time to do it on the cheap."<br />Bush and other Republicans have resisted such an approach partly out of concern for the already soaring federal budget deficit, which could easily hit $1 trillion this year.<br />Conservative economists say public works spending has not been a reliable catalyst for short-term growth and lends itself to political misuse.<br />Obama implicitly tried to counter such arguments by invoking the federal interstate highway program, seen as one of the most successful public works efforts in American history.<br />President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, ultimately resulting in the construction of 42,795 miles of roads, dramatically improving highway travel. In 1991, the government concluded that the total cost came to $128.9 billion.<br />The green-jobs portion of the economic package could run as high as $100 billion over two years, according to an aide familiar with the discussions.<br />Obama, on NBC, reiterated his pledge to give tax cuts to 95 percent of Americans, and said that the days of the rich benefiting disproportionately while the middle class loses ground were a "real aberration." He would not say how quickly he might move to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans.<br />His NBC interview was aired a few hours before an afternoon news conference at which he said he would be nominating General Eric Shinseki as his secretary of veterans affairs.<br />The general fell out with the Bush administration after predicting that it would take hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to occupy Iraq. The nomination of a Japanese-American held special poignance, falling on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.<br />Asked about the Mumbai attacks, Obama said the United States needed strong strategic relationships with every country in the region and said that so far, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan had "sent the right signals" by indicating that he knew terrorists in his border area threatened not just outsiders, but also Pakistan itself.<br />And, at a time of considerable tension with Russia, he said that his administration would "reset relations with Russia" - without offering any elaboration of how he planned to do so.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/america/works.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/america/works.php</a><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><strong>News Analysis: Are automakers really too big to fail?</strong><br />By Steven Greenhouse<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />NEW YORK: In the days before Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail, U.S. Treasury officials made it clear that they did not think the investment bank's collapse would have a major ripple effect.<br />And in recent weeks, in congressional hearing rooms and at water coolers across the United States, a lot of people have been saying the same thing about the beleaguered Detroit automakers.<br />What Lehman's failure shows, supporters of the Big Three bailout contend, is that there can be unanticipated consequences of allowing a major company to go under, and the full extent of the risks becomes clear only after the fact - when it can be too late to contain the repercussions.<br />Over the weekend, congressional leaders and the Bush administration provisionally agreed to a bailout in which some $17 billion in taxpayer money would be used to keep General Motors and Chrysler afloat. Ford, meanwhile, says it does not need immediate U.S. aid.<br />But some lawmakers and economists continue to argue that General Motors and Chrysler are too far gone to be saved and that trying to bail them out would amount to throwing away taxpayer dollars. Moreover, those lawmakers warn that rushing to the rescue with U.S. money would reward the automakers for years of poor management and myopic decisions, like producing gas guzzlers.<br />Back in September, Treasury officials similarly argued that bailing Lehman out would have wrongly rewarded it for bad behavior and excessive risk-taking, and thereby would have given the U.S. financial sector a green light for future bad behavior.<br />Seeing how Lehman's collapse shocked the stock and credit markets, Robert Barbera, chief economist at ITG, an investment firm, cautioned that not bailing out the Big Three could prove short-sighted.<br />"It's very different from Lehman, because you don't have the systemic financial system risk, but it would be equally stupid," Barbera said. "If Congress allows the auto companies to fail, and with the effect that this would have on sales and production, what this means to the real economy will have instantaneous and brutal effects on the stock market."<br />In other words, Barbera warned that opposition to lending either the $17 billion agreed to - or to the $34 billion that the car companies originally requested - could result in stock markets plunging by hundreds of billions of dollars. And that does not include the billions of dollars in unemployment insurance benefits and pension bailouts that would be required to assist not just the displaced auto workers, but also the many other workers, from truck drivers to waitresses, whose jobs depend on the Big Three.<br />"There will be tremendous regret if we don't help them avoid bankruptcy in the next few weeks or months," said Mark Zandi, chief economist with Economy.com. "If they go into bankruptcy now, they'll go into liquidation and there will be the loss of hundreds of thousands, if not a million jobs - on top of the four or five million we're going to lose. That will add almost a point to unemployment by itself."<br />At a House Committee hearing Friday about Detroit's woes, Edward Altman, a professor of finance at New York University's Stern School of Business, recommended that the automakers enter bankruptcy reorganization.<br />Through such a move, he said, the automakers could sharply cut their costs by negotiating deals with their creditors, dealers and labor unions.<br />Many supporters of a bailout warn that filing for bankruptcy reorganization could quickly lead to liquidation because car buyers might lose faith in the companies and worry that their auto warranties would not be honored.<br />Altman said that large-scale debtor-in-possession lending - either by the U.S. government or banks that get a superpriority over other creditors - could help keep the automakers operating (and guaranteeing their warranties) as they restructure to regain competitiveness.<br />He said a restructuring, helped by financing under the bankruptcy laws, could actually reassure the stock market that "the damage can be minimized with a large debtor-in-possession financing" because "there will be more assurance that GM will be around for a long time."<br />Representative Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Financial Services, which held the hearing Friday, warned against a wholesale liquidation because it would jeopardize three million jobs. Yet he also opposed a U.S. bailout "because it's just taking money and putting into an inefficient operation, and that money will be simply washed down the drain."<br />Bachus voiced confidence that bankruptcy filings by one or more auto company would not cause markets to plunge. "I think a restructuring plan done with the protection of certain benefits of bankruptcy might be positively perceived," he said.<br />But Barbera warned against overconfidence, saying that Treasury officials thought they would carefully exact only a pound of flesh from Wall Street by letting Lehman fail, helping teach other investment banks not to take excessive risks.<br />"But," he said, "it turned out not to be a pound of flesh that was taken. It was a ton."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/detroit.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/detroit.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>About those charges of bailout bias...</strong><br />By David M. Herszenhorn<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Word that congressional Democrats were prepared to hammer out a government rescue plan for the beleaguered American auto industry came late Friday, not quite 12 hours after the Labor Department reported staggering new job losses.<br />But even before the unsettling news that another 533,000 Americans had fallen out of work, there was an angry undercurrent to the debate in Congress: the notion that Washington was much more motivated to bail out Wall Street financial firms than blue-collar manufacturers.<br />"In the district, people feel that this is clearly Congress caring more about people who wear Guccis than people who wear Levi's," said Representative Thaddeus McCotter, Republican of Michigan, one of the most conservative members of the House, whose constituents live just west of Detroit.<br />Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, made a similar point at a hearing with the auto executives Friday but slung the arrow at the Bush administration. "I do think there is, at the decision-making level, a blue-collar, white-collar bias," he said.<br />For all the heated language, though, lawmakers and administration officials close to the decision making say class warfare was a negligible factor, compared with other critical differences, in how the two bailout cases have played out.<br />The culture clash over helping the auto companies was less Main Street vs. Wall Street than it was the usual battles in Washington: White House vs. Congress, House vs. Senate, Democrat vs. Republican. Politics, timing and the broader economic circumstances also factored into the debates on Capitol Hill.<br />While some have suggested that the American public was less sympathetic to the auto industry because more people than ever prefer to drive Toyotas and Hondas, lawmakers say that they actually heard much louder opposition from their constituents to the Wall Street bailout than to the rescue plan for the auto industry.<br />By Friday afternoon, Representative John Yarmuth, Democrat of Kentucky, had received roughly 700 calls about the automakers' pleas for help, running 60-40 in favor of a taxpayer rescue, a spokesman, Stuart Perelmuter, said. In September, Yarmuth received thousands of calls about the $700 billion bailout, at first with 20 to one opposed, and then four to one against, after the House initially voted the plan down and stock markets plummeted.<br />But the biggest difference, officials say, was that the case for the $700 billion was made to Congress directly by the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, two public officials, who testified that urgent congressional action was needed to prevent a global economy cataclysm. And Congress did not have to pick and choose among the financial firms to help.<br />"We authorized the program but the specific beneficiaries, the specific details were worked out by Treasury," said Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, adding that Chrysler, General Motors and Ford have had to make their own case for aid.<br />"They are making the presentation themselves, not a public official who says we need a program to help these people, and in that sense it's harder for them to get traction."<br />Reed, who favors a government rescue plan, said that if the individual financial firms had been forced to plead their case in the same way, Congress would have debated the merits of each request, just as the Treasury had to make separate decisions about Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, American International Group and Citigroup.<br />And just as lawmakers questioned why the American automakers seemed to be so much worse off than their foreign-based counterparts, Reed said Congress would have raised similar questions about the financial firms.<br />"They would have run into the same types of perceptions," Reed said. "Why this company? What about the other companies in this industry?"<br />The automakers also faced a much steeper climb because of their unfortunate timing, coming to Washington tin cup in hand during a post-election, lame duck session, and at a time when there is severe bailout fatigue on Capitol Hill.<br />Unlike the financial system bailout, which was debated six weeks before a major election, with the entire membership of the House facing the voters' judgment, there was not a similar level of political urgency, despite the projections by some experts that General Motors could collapse before year's end.<br />The awful November jobs report helped provide some of that urgency.<br />In recent days, outrage among many Democrats over the Bush administration's handling of the bigger bailout, fueled by a sharply critical report by the Government Accountability Office, only added to the reluctance to put taxpayer money on the line.<br />Whether that reluctance can be overcome will be known when congressional Democrats put the rescue package up for votes later this week.<br />The White House flatly dismissed suggestions that it favored white-collar financial firms over the blue-collar automakers and accused Pelosi and Democrats of playing politics. The administration said it was working with Congress toward a deal.<br />"The financial rescue isn't about white collar vs. blue collar or Wall Street vs. Main Street," said Tony Fratto, the deputy press secretary. "And it's not about knee-jerk Democratic class warfare. It's about preventing the collapse of our entire economy."<br />Fratto noted that thousands of financial firm employees had lost their jobs in recent months, and that the U.S. government's intervention in the case of Bear Stearns led to the dissolution of the storied investment bank — not exactly a cheery ending.<br />At times there were also charges of regional bias, and some defenders of the auto industry suggested that there was an anti-union animus among lawmakers from areas where organized labor has only a small presence.<br />Still, some lawmakers said they could only conclude that the automakers were forced to travel an unduly rough road, and that the financial firms got a free pass.<br />At a banking committee hearing on Thursday, Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, gestured angrily at a chart showing the billions that have been received by the financial firms. "You guys have been put under far more scrutiny, far more scrutiny than the people up here on the board, for far less money," he told the auto executives. "I would love to have those birds in here again because they need to be talked to."<br />Frank noted on Friday that the United Auto Workers had agreed to cuts in base pay while the financial bailout legislation required only the end of bonuses and golden-parachutes for high-flying financial executives.<br />"I am sure the autoworkers would be willing to give up their bonuses," Frank scoffed.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/news/07herszenhorn.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/news/07herszenhorn.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>At GM, innovation sacrificed to profits<br /></strong>By Micheline Maynard<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />General Motors did not apologize for anything in its first trip to Congress more than two weeks ago to plead for a U.S. government rescue. The company's only problem, it insisted, was the current financial crisis.<br />"What exposes us to failure now is not our product lineup, or our business plan, or our long-term strategy," Rick Wagoner, GM's chief executive, said in his testimony.<br />On its return visit to a skeptical Congress this week, however, General Motors bowed its head. "GM has made mistakes in the past," Wagoner told Congress, and named three: agreeing to expensive union contracts, not investing enough in smaller cars and failing to convert its plants so they could build more than one type of vehicle.<br />It was an unusual concession from a company that has rarely felt the need to apologize for anything, given its bragging rights as the world's largest automaker with operations in 35 countries, and as a company that has built 445 million vehicles and sat atop corporate America for much of its 100-year history.<br />But the mistakes Wagoner acknowledged do not begin to explain why General Motors finds itself on the brink of insolvency, begging Congress for financial help.<br />GM's biggest failing, reflected in a clear pattern over recent decades, has been its inability to strike a balance between those inside the company who pushed for innovation ahead of the curve, and the finance executives who worried more about returns on investment.<br />The two views were rarely in sync — in effect, fighting over the steering wheel that controlled GM's direction — and the internal battles distracted GM from spotting shifts in the marketplace.<br />Time and again over the last 30 years, GM has spent billions of dollars on innovative ideas like its Saturn small-car company in the 1980s and the EV1 electric vehicle in the 1990s, only to then deprive those projects of further financing because money was needed elsewhere or because they were not delivering enough profit.<br />The failure is frustrating to those who remember the high value placed on innovation by legendary company leaders like Alfred Sloan Jr. and Charles Wilson, who felt GM could sell cars to the masses by demonstrating it was out in front.<br />"Until the 1960s, innovation was part of GM's DNA," said John Casesa, a veteran industry analyst with the Casesa Shapiro Group. "Now, it's a matter of trying to play catch-up."<br />One such area is hybrid technology, an area where GM might be leading if it had encouraged the engineers who led its hybrid development as long ago as the 1970s, and continued building on expertise it gained with the EV1.<br />While Toyota has sold more than 600,000 Prius hybrids in the United States since 2000, General Motors will not start selling its Volt plug-in hybrid until 2010, when it hopes to sell 10,000 of them in the first year.<br />"We were late on hybrids," George M. C. Fisher, the lead outside director on GM's board, said in an interview this week. "Why were we late? We made a business decision as opposed to a marketing decision. That's probably a mistake, in retrospect."<br />Another, as Wagoner said last week, was its slow reaction to greater demand for smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. Although more are on the way, the only small car in its vast lineup of models to compete with the likes of the Honda Fit and the Toyota Yaris is the Chevrolet Aveo, a car made in Korea by GM's Daewoo subsidiary.<br />General Motors has tried to answer the call for greater fuel efficiency in the short run by outfitting some of its pickups, big SUV's and larger cars with hybrid-electric engines, but they have not caught on with consumers.<br />In the early 1990s, the company lagged Chrysler's Jeep and Ford by five years in bringing an SUV to market with mass appeal. Once it had ramped up its offerings, GM was reluctant to shift from big profitable vehicles to building small, less profitable cars, even when gas prices spiked.<br />By contrast, Ford, which also minted profits on a lineup heavy with SUV's, shifted its lineup faster to cars, although it still does not have one that can compete directly with the Fit and Yaris.<br />"We would have been chastised the other way if we had missed that opportunity," said Fisher, referring to its decision to focus so many resources on producing SUV's. "Giving consumers what they want is not a bad business decision."<br />Indeed, that approach worked well for GM for decades.<br />Its strategy of offering consumers an array of brands and choices, like the 70 different models across eight separate brands that it sells now, was meant to fulfill the goal set by its legendary chairman, Alfred Sloan, to offer a "a car for every purse and purpose."<br />(The idea was meant to contrast with Henry Ford's quip that a consumer could have any color he wanted, "as long as it's black.")<br />GM executives have long defended the myriad choices as necessary to defend the company's turf in a market crowded with competition both from across town as well as overseas. Likewise, its bet was always that GM, with its enormous marketing and research and development budget, could afford to offer such options.<br />Only now, in its second plea to Congress, did it acknowledge what just about every industry analyst has said for years: that GM has too many brands, now that its market share has fallen by nearly two-thirds from its peak in 1960 to just 22 percent today.<br />GM said last week that it would focus on just four core brands — Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac — and sell or play down Saturn, Pontiac, Saab and Hummer.<br />The goal, it said in its new plan, is "to focus available resources and growth strategies on the company's profitable operations."<br />That may sound like an obvious strategy for any car company, but the automobile industry, like the aviation business, involves bets of billions of dollars that may not pay off for years, if at all.<br />For those willing to gamble and to follow through on their bets — like Chrysler did with minivans, like Toyota did with Prius and as Honda has done with its focus on fuel efficiency even when gas was cheap — the payoff in sales and reputation can be enormous.<br />But GM, despite its tradition of fostering innovation, has often been impatient for profits to emerge.<br />Casesa said that pattern stemmed from the fact that so many of the company's top executives had a background in finance, not in engineering and designing cars and trucks.<br />For the last half-century, virtually all of GM's chief executives, including Wagoner, have come from its financial side, which has judged most initiatives based on whether they will be profitable.<br />That "earn it" philosophy has led to the demise of some of GM's most publicized efforts to try something new, like the EV1 electric car, which GM leased to owners from 1996 to 1999, before killing the program as too expensive.<br />It also led GM not to introduce any new Saturn models for five years during the 1990s, effectively starving the division of new products that might have lured in new customers.<br />By contrast, Toyota lost money for years on Prius, which never caught on in Japan until Toyota halved its price. Likewise, Prius might have remained a cult car in the United States had gas prices remained low. But Prius sold out once prices topped $3 a gallon, and gave Toyota political cover when it introduced the big Tundra pickup truck in 2007.<br />Worries over profits has also stifled innovation at GM. Engineers actually started work on minivans a decade before Chrysler popularized them in the 1980s, said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the son of a former GM president, who has advised GM for years. But GM's finance staff refused to give the go-ahead.<br />"They looked at it and thought, 'Why would people need minivans if they had station wagons?' " Cole said. After Chrysler's vans were a big hit, GM tried to capture attention in the early 1990s with a series of slope-nosed vans derided as "Dustbusters" that failed to sell well. After other attempts, General Motors stopped selling minivans this year.<br />GM's failure to press forward with its own hybrids was a deep disappointment to Robert Stempel, the former chief executive who gave the go-ahead to the EV1 program during his brief tenure in the early 1990s.<br />"I'm furious," Stempel said in a 2003 interview. "GM had the technology. The lead was there. I know it."<br />This week, Wagoner told Congress that GM would innovate once more, this time in the hope of securing some sort of aid. The company's restructuring plan, he said, is "a blueprint for creating a new General Motors, one that is lean, profitable, self-sustaining and fully committed to product excellence and technology leadership."<br />This new blueprint undoubtedly was not what Wagoner had in mind less than three months ago, when he stood before hundreds of employees and executives to mark GM's centennial.<br />"What's our assignment for today and tomorrow?" Wagoner asked, and then provided the answer. "Above all, it's to demonstrate to the world that we are more than a 100-year-old company. We're a company that's ready to lead for 100 years to come."<br />Now the question is whether GM will make it to its 101st birthday as a solvent company.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/06motors.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/06motors.php</a><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>In hard times, fear can impair decision-making<br /></strong>By Gregory Berns<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />WORK is feeling more and more like a Skinner box.<br />Technically, a Skinner box is an operant conditioning chamber — in other words, a cage that automatically trains a laboratory animal to associate flashing lights and levers with rewards and punishments. It was invented in the 1950s by B. F. Skinner, the experimental psychologist, to study learning.<br />A green light flashes, or the animal pushes the right lever, and it is rewarded with a morsel of food. But some operant conditioning chambers were built with electrified floors: a red light comes on, and zap!<br />It doesn't take long for a rat to figure out which light goes with the shock and which goes with the food pellet. All animals, including we primates, are good at making these associations. Pretty soon, we don't even need the light — the mere sight of the cage can send some of us into a state of apoplexy.<br />And while the workplace is not quite an electrified cage, I think I would prefer a brief jolt of electricity over the intermittent shocks of watching the blinking red arrow of the stock market or the jolts of cutback after cutback by businesses.<br />Everyone I know is scared. Workers' fear has generalized to their workplace and everything associated with work and money. We are caught in a spiral in which we are so scared of losing our jobs, or our savings, that fear overtakes our brains. And while fear is a deep-seated and adaptive evolutionary drive for self-preservation, it makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but saving our skin by getting out of the box intact.<br />Ultimately, no good can come from this type of decision-making. Fear prompts retreat. It is the antipode to progress. Just when we need new ideas most, everyone is seized up in fear, trying to prevent losing what we have left.<br />I am a neuroeconomist, which means that I use brain-scanning technologies like magnetic resonance imaging to decode the decision-making systems of the human mind. It is a messy business, but a few pearls of wisdom have emerged about the fear system of the human brain and how to keep it from short-circuiting sound decision-making.<br />My colleagues and I conducted a brain-imaging experiment with our version of a Skinner box. Instead of a box, our participants were inside an MRI scanner. Instead of using an electrified floor, we attached electrodes to the tops of their feet. Although not unbearably painful, the shocks were designed to be unpleasant enough that the individual would prefer to avoid them altogether.<br />The kicker was that they had to wait for the shocks. Every trial began with a statement of how big the shock would be and how long they would have to wait for it: a range of one to almost 30 seconds. For many people, the wait was worse than the shock. Given a choice, almost everyone preferred to expedite the shock rather than wait for it. Nearly a third feared waiting so much that, when given the chance, they preferred getting a bigger shock right away to waiting for a smaller shock later. It sounds illogical, but fear — whether of pain or of losing a job — does strange things to decision-making.<br />Some people showed strong fear conditioning, and their brains displayed it through early and strong deployment of neural resources to deal with the impending shock. Most of this activity appeared in the parts of the brain devoted to processing pain. That makes sense, but the activity rose well in advance of receiving the shock. All of this worrying took energy. It means that these extreme responders had less available neural processing power to deal with other tasks.<br />Why is this important? The reason has to do with the "endowment effect," the innate tendency to value things you own more highly than everyone else does. A recent brain imaging study showed that the same parts of the brain we observed in our experiment are also active when people must sell something they are attached to. The cause and effect have not been fully sorted out, but the implication is that when our brains sense pain, or anticipate loss, we tend to hold onto what we have. When everyone does this at once, the result is a downward economic spiral.<br />The most concrete thing that neuroscience tells us is that when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off. The first order of business, then, is to neutralize that system.<br />This means not being a fearmonger. It means avoiding people who are overly pessimistic about the economy. It means tuning out media that fan emotional flames. Unless you are a day-trader, it means closing the Web page with the market ticker. It does mean being prepared, but not being a hypervigilant, everyone-in-the-bunker type.<br />I DON'T care what your business is, but if you think it will eventually come back to what it was — your brain is in the grips of the fear-based endowment effect. What I am doing is looking for new opportunities. This means applying neuroscience discovery to realms where it hasn't been used before.<br />I have teamed up with anthropologists to apply brain imaging to understand the biological roots of political conflict. I am starting another project to use brain imaging to predict which teenagers are likely to make fatally bad judgments and, hopefully, train them to make better decisions.<br />This strategy keeps the exploratory system of my brain active. And right now there are incredible opportunities to do something differently. Yes, they're risky, and some will fail. But while others wait for the storm to pass, I'm busy expanding into new areas. If I wait for money to start flowing again, the opportunities will have passed.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/news/07pre.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/news/07pre.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><strong>Diversification failed this year</strong><br />By Natsuko Waki<br />Reuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />LONDON: The attractiveness of spreading your investment eggs in many baskets is fading fast in the short term, as strengthening correlations of different asset classes are aggravating losses on a diversified portfolio.<br />During the credit boom from 2002 to early 2007, investors were encouraged to diversify their traditional equity-bond portfolio, spread risks and seek extra returns by buying commodities, hedge funds and real estate, which were seen as having almost no correlation with traditional stocks and bonds.<br />However, since the credit crisis began in August 2007, these alternatives fell in lockstep with, or sometimes faster than, equities, driving volatility higher and amplifying the losses of a risky portfolio.<br />"Diversification failed in 2008," said Terence Moll, head of multi-asset strategy at Investec Asset Management. "Some alternative assets went through bubbles, and precisely these bubbles got punished. Assets that are overpriced do not give diversification."<br />His analysis shows that returns to an eight-asset-class portfolio, comprising stocks, bonds, emerging market stocks and bonds, real estate, commodities, hedge funds and managed futures, lost 29.1 percent since October 2007.<br />This compares with a loss of 26.3 percent in a simple equity-bond portfolio. And adding in fancier asset classes such as timber or infrastructure, a 12-asset class portfolio lost an even deeper 43 percent in roughly the same period.<br />For example, world stocks, measured by MSCI, fell 5 percent last week. Light crude plunged 25 percent on the New York market, while the Reuters-Jefferies CRB index of commodities and futures fell 14 percent.<br />"Until the last three months it used to be said that diversification is the only free lunch in the market, but that free lunch seems to have gone away," said Andrew Dyson, head of Europe, Middle East and Africa institutional business at BlackRock.<br />Analysts say the very unique nature of the deleveraging this year has resulted in all risk assets falling at the same time.<br />"We are under stress, and the correlation is going up," said William De Vijlder, chief investment officer at Fortis Investments. "But undervaluation is not related to the view that diversification is bad. Valuation on a diversified portfolio has gone down, but that creates opportunities."<br />Investec's Moll thinks investors may not want to seek out new and seemingly uncorrelated asset classes to diversify their portfolio, but they should consider mixing traditional and alternative assets in the right proportions.<br />"Alternative is never going to be alternative again," he said.<br />Last week, central banks from New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Britain and the euro zone slashed interest rates, with Sweden surprising investors with an aggressive cut of 1.75 percentage points.<br />This week's expected data on British manufacturing and retail sectors and U.S. retail sales and investor confidence, among others, is only likely to reinforce the argument that interest rates have further to fall in the next few months.<br />Merrill Lynch estimates that central banks around the world have cut interest rates by a total of 88 basis points this year. It expects an additional 86 basis point of cuts by the end of 2009.<br />Speculation is also swirling that interest rates in major economies are heading to zero, especially in the United States, where investors expect the Federal Reserve to cut the cost of borrowing to 0.25 percent this month.<br />The world of zero rates seems even closer in reality, looking at real interest rates - nominal interest rates minus inflation. Credit Suisse estimates that official rates of 1 percent in both Britain and Europe would give a real rate of zero.<br />The Swiss bank has found that in Europe defensive stocks such as food and health care tended to outperform the market three months after the first rate cut, followed by cyclical stocks such as technology and autos three months after the second cut.<br />However, the bank cautions against overbuying cyclical stocks, as they do not yet fully discount recession, and its model suggests a further 5 percent underperformance.<br />Fund managers also agree generally on the issue of getting back into stocks now.<br />"A lot of people admit that there are a lot of opportunities. But they are on a buyers' strike," De Vijlder of Fortis said. "If you get the timing wrong you can lose 7 to 8 percent. It's not the environment where you do your asset allocation on Jan. 2 and not do anything for the rest of the year."<br />Sebastian Tong contributed reporting.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/markets08.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/markets08.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>It may not look that way, but diversification still works<br /></strong>By Paul J. Lim<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />THIS market meltdown is testing not only investors' patience and risk tolerance, but also their faith in one of the most widely accepted principles of investing: diversification.<br />When you own different types of assets in a portfolio, some holdings should be rising while others are falling. That's the theory, anyway. But it hasn't been working out that way for many investors.<br />With the exception of Treasury securities, virtually all asset classes have fallen in unison of late. These include even supposedly safe investments like high-quality corporate bonds; the average intermediate-term, investment-grade fixed-income fund has lost more than 6 percent of its value since the stock market peaked on Oct. 9, 2007.<br />Many asset classes have performed even worse, falling by various double-digit percentages since the market peak. This group includes domestic blue-chip stocks, small-company shares, foreign equities, commodities, real estate investment trusts, high-yield bonds and emerging-market debt.<br />Over the short term, diversification does not promise that your portfolio won't decline. Rather, the strategy is intended to ensure that at least some of your investments hold their value at any given time.<br />By this token, diversification hasn't entirely failed in the current downturn. But investors needed to diversify some of their money into two specific assets — Treasury securities and cash — to call this strategy a success.<br />Simply diversifying your types of stocks didn't help. For example, between the October 2007 peak and the start of December this year, both the Standard & Poor's 500 index of domestic stocks and the Morgan Stanley Capital International EAFE index of foreign shares fell more than 40 percent.<br />Nor did it help to own commodities, which some investors thought would soar regardless of the health of the United States economy. But as it became clear that the entire global economy was slowing — and as crude oil prices fell to less than $50 a barrel from around $140 — most of the major commodity indexes plummeted.<br />Clearly, the most important step in diversifying your portfolio is to hold some of your money in stocks and some in bonds, said James Shambo, a financial planner in Colorado Springs. But only if you had put a large portion of your bond holdings into Treasury securities would your overall portfolio not have fallen so severely.<br />Say you invested $100,000 in the S&P 500 on Oct. 9, 2007, and held it there until the start of this month. Thanks to the bear market, you would be left with just $58,750. Had you diversified properly — say, by putting 40 percent of your money in the S&P 500; 25 percent in foreign stocks in the MSCI EAFE index; 25 percent in the broad bond market as represented by the Barclays Capital U.S. Aggregate Bond index; and 10 percent in cash instruments like Treasury bills, you would still be down, but your portfolio would be worth more than $72,825.<br />As for your stocks, the only strategy that seemed to work — or at least incur smaller losses — was dollar-cost averaging, a way of diversifying by making purchases in regular increments.<br />For example, if you invested $150,000 in a lump sum in the S&P 500 at the start of October 2007, you would have had $90,400 left by the start of this month. But had you invested $10,000 a month, every month, starting last October, you would have had roughly $106,000 left in your account.<br />Time is a crucial ingredient in all diversification strategies. "Pooh-poohing diversification will always work if you pick a short-enough time period to look at," said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at S&P<br />This is particularly true if you examine only periods of crisis. In a panic, there tends to be a "flight to quality." This means frightened investors are likely to sell their risky assets to move into Treasury securities, which has happened in the current crisis. Of course, all the assets investors sell during panics will move in lock step.<br />That would explain why, in most bear markets, "there is simply no place to hide in the stock market," Stovall said. He studied bear markets going back to 1946 and found that every sector in the S&P 500 lost ground by double-digit percentages during the average downturn.<br />Only over time does diversification really show its worth. For example, over the 10 years through November, the S&P 500 lost almost 1 percent a year, on average. But a diversified portfolio of 40 percent S&P 500 stocks, 25 percent foreign shares in the MSCI EAFE index, 25 percent in fixed-income securities found in the Barclays Capital U.S. Aggregate Bond Index, and 10 percent in Treasury bills gained nearly 2 percent annually, on average, according to T. Rowe Price.<br />At least that was a gain. And the diversified portfolio was also 36 percent less volatile than the all-stock portfolio.<br />Investors need to appreciate the limits of diversification, said Ned Notzon, chairman of the asset allocation committee of T. Rowe Price.<br />"If someone is really concerned about the losses they suffered in the past year — if on Dec. 31, 2007, they thought they needed to preserve all their money as of Dec. 31, 2008 — then they really shouldn't have been diversified to begin with," Notzon said. Instead, those short-term investors should have kept their money in cash, or a combination of cash and short-term debt.<br />Shambo adds that investors who are growing skeptical of diversification need to ask themselves an important question: What other choices do they have?<br />"If the alternative is to concentrate your bets, where would you have concentrated during this sell-off?" he asked.<br />The answer, of course, is Treasuries. But even if you were smart enough to put all your money in them before the stock market peaked in October 2007, you would now have a portfolio that is concentrated in the sole asset class that is trading at frothy prices in this bear market.<br />OF course, if your intention is simply to hold Treasuries to maturity, you'll have no problem. But if you want to sell those bonds — or a Treasury bond fund — once the economy starts to recover, you may be disappointed by the price you are offered.<br />That is why it still makes sense for long-term investors to diversify — to ensure that not all of their money is tied up in the priciest asset at any given moment.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/07fund.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/07fund.php</a><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>An economic downturn? Not yet for North Dakota</strong><br />By Monica Davey<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />FARGO, North Dakota: As the rest of the United States sinks into a 12th grim month of recession, this state, at least up until now, has been quietly reveling in a picture so different that it might well be on another planet.<br />The number of new cars sold statewide was 27 percent higher this year than last, state records through November showed. North Dakota's foreclosure rate was minuscule in the second quarter of this year, among the lowest in the country. Many homes have still been gaining modestly in value and, here in Fargo, construction workers can be found on any given day hammering away on a new condominium complex in the city center, complete with a $540,000 penthouse (still unsold, but with a steady stream of lookers).<br />While dozens of states, including neighboring ones, have desperately begun raising fees, firing workers, shuttering tourist attractions and even abolishing holiday displays to overcome gaping deficits, lawmakers this week in Bismarck, the state capital, were contemplating what to do with a $1.2 billion budget surplus. And as some states' unemployment rates stretched perilously close to the double digits in the autumn, North Dakota's was 3.4 percent, among the lowest in the country.<br />"We feel like we have been living in a bubble," said Justin Theel, part owner of a dealership that sells Toyotas, Dodges and Scions in Bismarck. "We see the national news every day. We know things are tough. But around here, our people have gone to their jobs every day knowing that they're going to get a paycheck and that they'll go back the next day."<br />North Dakota's cheery circumstance - which economic analysts are quick to warn is showing clear signs that it, too, may be in jeopardy - can be explained by an odd collection of circumstances: a recent rise in oil production that catapulted the state to fifth-largest producer in the nation; a mostly strong year for farmers (agriculture is the state's biggest business); and a conservative, steady, never-fancy culture that has nurtured fewer sudden booms of wealth like those seen elsewhere ("Our banks don't do those goofy loans," Theel said); and also fewer tumultuous slumps.<br />As it happens, one of the state's biggest worries right now is precisely the reverse of most other states: North Dakota has about 13,000 unfilled jobs and is struggling to find people to take them.<br />"We could use more people with skills for some of these jobs," Marty Aas, who leads the Fargo branch of the state's Job Service North Dakota, said on a recent afternoon, as his offices - where the unemployed might come for help - sat quiet and nearly empty. State employees outnumbered approximately six clients on a recent afternoon. (Aas insisted that such a slow afternoon was rare.)<br />State officials and private companies have begun looking elsewhere to recruit workers, including traveling in October to Michigan, where tens of thousands of workers have been laid off and, this month, holding an "online job fair," anything to lure people to a place that is, at least for now, removed from the deep financial dismay - if also just plain removed.<br />"Our problem is that everybody thinks that it's a cold, miserable place to live," said Bob Stenehjem, a Republican and the majority leader of the state Senate. "They're wrong, of course. But North Dakota is a pretty well-kept secret."<br />With 635,867 residents, North Dakota is among the least populous states in the country and, in the past few years, more people have moved away, census figures show, than have moved there.<br />Katie Hasbargen, a spokeswoman for Microsoft's Fargo campus, which is in the middle of a $70 million or so building expansion and is, even now, looking for a few additions to its work force (of more than 1,500 people), said false perceptions of the state were the problem when it came to recruiting workers.<br />"The movie," she said, referring to the 1996 film that bears this city's name, "didn't do us a lot of favors."<br />On a recent evening, as the night shift arrived at DMI Industries, where 383 workers (an all-time high) weld gigantic towers for wind turbines and where a $20 million expansion is under way, Phillip Christiansen, the general manager, wandered the plant, noting those who had been recruited from elsewhere - three from Michigan not long ago, another from Louisiana. "It's very competitive around here trying to find people," Christiansen said. "In this environment, it's a little hard."<br />Not that people are complaining much. Downtown, in the line of gift shops along Broadway, where shop owners reported sales that were healthy, residents said they were pleased - if a tad guilty - about the state's relative good fortune.<br />No one was gloating. No wild spending sprees were apparent. No matter how well things seemed to be going, many said, they were girding, in well-practiced Midwestern style, for the worst. "You're always a little worried," Christiansen said. "You get a tickle at the pit of your stomach."<br />Economic analysts said North Dakota has already begun showing some of the painful ripples seen elsewhere. Some manufacturing companies here have lately made temporary job cuts as orders for products have dropped nationally. Shrinking 401(k) retirement plans are no bigger here than anywhere else. And, most of all, drops in oil prices and farm commodity prices are sure to sink local fortunes, experts said.<br />An economist at Moody's Economy.com recently warned that conditions in North Dakota had "slowed measurably in recent months, and the state is now at risk of being dragged into recession." In an interview, Glenn Wingard, the economist, described North Dakota as "an outlier" up to now in a broad, national slump.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/fargo.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/fargo.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Dogfighting subculture is taking hold in Texas</strong><br />By James C. Mckinley Jr.<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />HOUSTON: The two undercover agents were miles from any town, deep in the East Texas countryside, following a car carrying three dogfighting fanatics and a female pit bull known for ripping off the genitals of other dogs. A car trailed the officers with two burly armed guards, hired to protect the dog and a $40,000 wager.<br />When the owners of the opposing dog, a crew from Louisiana, got cold feet and took off, the men in the undercover agents' party reacted with fury, offering to chase them down and kill them. The owner of the female pit bull, an American living in Mexico, was merciful. He decided to take the opposing dog and let the men live, the officers said.<br />Over 17 months, the agents from the Texas state police penetrated a murky and dangerous subculture in East Texas, a world where petty criminals, drug dealers and a few people with ordinary jobs shared a passion for watching pit bulls tear each other apart in a 12-foot-square pit.<br />Investigators found that dogfighting was on the rise in Texas and was much more widespread than they had expected. The ring broken up here had links to dogfighting organizations in other states and in Mexico, suggesting an extensive underground network of people devoted to the activity, investigators said.<br />Besides a cadre of older, well-established dogfighters, officials said, the sport has begun to attract a growing following among young people from hardscrabble neighborhoods in Texas, where gangs, drug dealing and hip-hop culture make up the backdrop.<br />The investigation here led to the indictments of 55 people and the seizing of 187 pit bulls, breaking up what officials described as one of the largest dogfighting rings in the country.<br />"It's like the Saturday night poker game for hardened criminals," said one of the undercover agents, Sergeant C. T. Manning, describing the tense atmosphere at the fights.<br />In between screaming obscenities at the animals locked in combat, Manning said, the participants smoked marijuana, popped pills, made side deals about things like selling cocaine and fencing stolen property, and, always, talked about dogs.<br />Dogfighting drew national attention in 2007 when Michael Vick, the quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, was convicted of felony conspiracy after holding dogfights on his property in Smithfield, Virginia On Monday, officials in Los Angeles announced the breakup of a dogfighting ring. It was the outcry among animal-welfare groups after Vick's arrest that prompted the Texas Legislature to make dogfighting a felony in September 2007. Before that, the police in Texas had largely ignored the phenomenon because the offense was a misdemeanor.<br />In the Texas case, law enforcement officials described a secretive society of men who set up prize fights between their pit bulls and bet large sums on the outcome. Many of those indicted had long criminal records, but they also include a high school English teacher, a land purchaser for an oil company and a manager at a Jack in the Box restaurant.<br />The participants generally arranged the fight over the phone, matching dogs by weight and sex, and agreeing to a training period of six or eight weeks.<br />The training techniques were brutal. One man who was indicted trained a dog by forcing it to run for up to an hour at a time through a cemetery with a chain around its neck that weighed as much as it did. Then he forced dogs to swim for long periods before running on a treadmill. Every day the dogs would be given dog protein powders, vitamins and high-grade food to build muscle.<br />Then, as the fight date approached, the trainers would starve the dog, give it very little water and pump it full of an anti-inflammatory drug.<br />The fights were held in out-of-the-way places — an abandoned motel in the refinery town of Texas City, a horse corral in a slum on the Houston outskirts, behind a barn on a farm near Jasper and at a farmhouse in Matagorda County, south of Houston.<br />The two undercover agents, Manning and his partner, S. A. Davis, posed as members of a motorcycle gang who stole automated teller machines for a living. They infiltrated the ring, allied themselves with a group of people who owned fighting dogs and rented a warehouse in Houston, where fights were eventually held.<br />People came to the contests from as far away as Tennessee, Michigan and the Czech Republic. Every weekend, fights were held throughout the area for purses that usually ran about $10,000. The agents documented at least 50 fights.<br />"The undercover cops were sometimes invited to three different dogfights in a night," said Belinda Smith, the Harris County assistant district attorney prosecuting the cases, along with Stephen St. Martin.<br />The ring members called the fights "dog shows." The two dogs would be suspended from a scale with a thin cord tied around their neck and torso. If one of the dogs did not make weight, the owner would forfeit his half of the prize money, or the odds would be adjusted. After the weigh-in, the owners washed each others' dogs in water, baking soda, warm milk and vinegar to make sure their coats were not poisoned.<br />Then dogs were forced to face off in a portable plywood box two feet tall, usually with a beige carpet on the floor, to show the blood, officials said. At the command of "face your dogs," the animals were turned toward each other. When the handlers released them, the dogs would collide with a thud in the center of the ring, tearing at each other's mouths, jaws, necks, withers and genitals, officials said. A referee usually would let the dogs fight until one backed off, then the handlers would take them back to their corners and wash them for 30 seconds.<br />During the fight, the exhausted animals would sometimes overheat, lock onto each other and lie in the ring. The handlers would blow on them to cool them off and force them to fight.<br />The fight usually ended when a dog refused to cross a line in the center of the ring to confront the opponent, known as "standing the line." Such dogs were usually drowned or bludgeoned to death the next day, officials said.<br />"These guys take it very personally," Manning said. "It's a reflection on them."<br />Most of the dogs seized were kept outside in muddy yards, chained to axles sunk in the ground, with only six feet of tether and no shelter, beyond, in some cases, a toppled plastic 40-gallon barrel. All suffered from multiple parasites, veterinarians said.<br />"These dogs were kept in more than cruel conditions — they were subjected to torturous conditions," said Timothy Harkness, of the Houston Humane Society. "Death was more pleasant than what they had to exist for."<br />Many of the surviving animals had battle wounds on their necks and mouths, Harkness said. Although some were not aggressive toward people, they were all bred to attack other dogs, and officials made the decision to euthanize them last week.<br />Dawn Blackmar, director of veterinary public health for Harris County, said that putting down more than 80 dogs in her care was heart-wrenching. "It was absolutely awful," Blackmar said. "It's not the dogs' fault. It's that people have taken and exploited this breed."<br />The members of the dogfighting ring were careful about who attended a fight, often limiting each side to 10 guests and quizzing people about who they were, who they knew.<br />The principals would keep the location of the fight secret until the last minute and then go in a caravan of cars to the rendezvous point, making it difficult to collect evidence, law enforcement officials said. They were also secretive about where they kept their dogs, for fear of robbery.<br />"People would go to the fights and talk about their yards," said Smith, the assistant district attorney. "But they were very secretive about where their yards are."<br />Smith said dozens of people who attended fights had yet to be identified, despite photos, because they piled into cars that did not belong to them to go to the events and never used their real names.<br />"There are a lot of people doing this," she said. "We could have gone on and on and on with this investigation."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/america/07dogs.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/america/07dogs.php</a><br /><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><br /><strong>A case for scrapping the Bush tax cuts<br /></strong>By Robert H. Frank<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />On the campaign trail, Barack Obama promised to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for top earners after taking office in January. Now he seems to favor letting those cuts expire as scheduled in 2010.<br />His apparent concern is that raising anyone's taxes right away might worsen the economic crisis. As Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, said when asked about the delay on Fox News, "The main thing right now is to get this economic recovery package on the road, to get money in the pockets of the middle class, to get these projects going, to get America working again."<br />The U.S. government's first priority must of course be to stimulate spending as quickly as possible, deficits be damned. But it's important to get the biggest possible stimulus for any given deficit. To that end, it makes sense to stick with Obama's original timetable. Eliminating the Bush tax cuts right away would make it possible to generate a much larger immediate increase in total spending.<br />A robust finding in behavioral research is that people are extremely reluctant to accept cutbacks in their standard of living. With few exceptions, high-income taxpayers earn substantially more during their lifetimes than they spend, generally bequeathing the surplus to heirs or charities. If these taxpayers faced slightly higher rates, they would have ample resources to maintain their current lifestyle, so most of them would continue spending as before. The only consequence would be that they would leave smaller bequests.<br />The additional revenue from eliminating the Bush tax cuts would pay for larger temporary tax cuts for low- and middle-income families than the permanent tax cuts that are currently planned. And because these families spend most or all of their post-tax income, the immediate effect would be an increase in total spending roughly equal to the additional revenue from repealing the Bush tax cuts.<br />Or, the extra revenue could be used to raise benefits such as unemployment insurance and extend them more broadly. That would lift total spending by almost the full amount of the additional revenue.<br />Still another option would be to increase grants for city and state road maintenance crews. Here again, 100 percent of the distributions would be spent immediately.<br />But the additional stimulus would not stop there. When someone spends an extra dollar this way, others receive an extra dollar of income, some portion of which they spend, creating still more income for others. Appearing before the Senate Budget Committee last month, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, testified that because of this multiplier effect, each dollar of new U.S. government spending would generate roughly $1.50 of additional demand.<br />In brief, there would be a lot more stimulus for any given budget deficit if the Bush tax cuts for top earners were scrapped immediately and the resulting revenue steered to people who would spend it.<br />Those who oppose repealing the Bush tax cuts will offer the same argument they employed to promote those cuts during Bush's first term in office, and echoed during the campaign by Senator John McCain: that low tax rates for top earners spur job creation by small businesses. Although this claim went largely unchallenged during the campaign, it flies in the face of the economic logic of hiring decisions. It rests implicitly on the premise that business owners will hire new workers whenever they can afford to do so. What matters, however, is not whether owners can afford to hire but whether hiring will increase their profits. If the goods produced by additional workers can be sold for at least enough to cover their salaries, hiring makes economic sense. But if additional workers won't produce enough to cover their salaries, hiring is a losing move. The after-tax personal incomes of business owners are irrelevant for hiring decisions.<br />Wouldn't tax cuts encourage additional hiring by owners who need cash to cover recruiting and training costs before new workers start generating extra revenue? In normal circumstances, cash-strapped owners would borrow to cover those costs if they expected additional workers to be productive enough to cover not just their salaries but also repayment of the loans. But during the current financial crisis, bank loans may not be readily available, so tax cuts could help. It would make far more sense, however, to offer hiring loans - as Obama proposed during the campaign.<br />In any event, the most important barrier to current hiring is not an absence of credit but the fact that not enough people want to buy what companies are selling. To eliminate this demand deficit as quickly as possible, the Bush tax cuts on top earners should be repealed right away, freeing up money for more effective use.<br />Although the new administration's first concern must be to get the economy back on its feet, economic justice was a central theme of Obama's campaign. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were poised to respond to a call for national sacrifice. Instead, President George W. Bush and his allies in Congress enacted huge tax cuts for the wealthiest families. Those tax cuts made income inequality worse and drove deficits to record levels.<br />Referring to those cuts, Obama said, "People didn't need them, and they weren't even asking for them."<br />Economic fairness and economic growth are sometimes conflicting goals. But not here. Repealing the Bush tax cuts immediately is not just the fairest policy option but also the most efficient.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/business/wbview06.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/business/wbview06.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><strong>Grim times spur hunt for new fix</strong><br />By Emily KaiserReuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The U.S. recession is deepening, and even massive government spending may not be enough to stop the downturn.<br />U.S. job losses hit a 34-year high last month, which worsens an already grim outlook for U.S. consumer spending and thus undercuts what had been one of the most reliable global growth engines for the past decade.<br />If recent downturns are any guide, it may be well into 2010 or perhaps even 2011 before unemployment peaks, which means the global economy should not count on a substantial U.S. consumer spending rebound any time soon.<br />"The economy is now locked in a vicious downward spiral in which employment, incomes and spending are collapsing together," said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight.<br />Gault said the worsening outlook was putting pressure on President-elect Barack Obama to devise an even larger stimulus package to arrest the decline.<br />"We had assumed a $550 billion package over three years," Gault said. "We will need more than that."<br />Figures due this week are likely to illustrate just how hard household finances have been hit, and how far the repercussions from the yearlong U.S. recession has spread.<br />A U.S. Federal Reserve report Thursday is expected to show that household wealth declined for a fourth straight quarter through September. A separate report that day from the U.S. Commerce Department will likely indicate that the U.S. trade deficit narrowed, with exports and imports declining.<br />"Right now the economy, globally and domestically, is in a mutually reinforcing downward spiral," said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial.<br />Slower consumer spending has limited U.S. imports and contributed to a steep drop in the price of oil. As demand in the rest of the world weakens, that is hurting U.S. exports, exacerbating job losses.<br />Figuring out when the vicious cycle will end would entail predicting when credit markets will return to something resembling normal, which is uncertain. But this much is clear: employment typically rebounds long after recessions end.<br />In the 1990 downturn in the United States, it took another 15 months for unemployment to peak. In the 2001 downturn, the jobless rate topped out 19 months after the recession ended.<br />Even in the most optimistic forecasts, few economists can envision the current episode ending before April, so if the economy follows a similar trajectory, that would put the unemployment peak well into 2010 or even 2011.<br />In the last three months alone, nearly 1.3 million U.S. jobs were lost, sending the unemployment rate to a 15-year high of 6.7 percent.<br />Steven Wieting, an economist with Citigroup, thinks unemployment may rise toward 9 percent by mid-2010, and that presumes some "healing" in credit markets.<br />Citigroup expects a global recession next year, with growth remaining slow into 2010 even with big spending plans in the United States, Europe, China and elsewhere.<br />Interest rates are also falling quickly, as evidenced by steep reductions in the euro zone and Britain last week. The U.S. Federal Reserve has already cut its benchmark rate to 1 percent, and many economists now think it will reach zero in January, if not this month.<br />Yet despite the steps taken so far and expectations of more, economic indicators offer little hope that the U.S. or global economy will bottom any time soon.<br />The series of reports last week on global manufacturing and services showed record lows in new orders, which heralds even more job losses.<br />So how to break the cycle? Government spending will help, but it will take time to be felt.<br />The developed world will probably need a boost from other sources.<br />The answer may lie with reserve-rich countries like China and the oil exporters, which are increasing spending at home to compensate for falling exports.<br />With the drop in U.S. spending and the slide in oil prices and global trade, the gap between surpluses in those nations and the U.S. deficit has narrowed.<br />That trend looks set to continue as Americans rediscover savings after years of relying on real estate and stock market wealth to fund retirement.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/econ08.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/econ08.php</a><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/rupee.php">India moves to bolster growth </a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/innovate.php">Innovation is a team sport</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/spot08.php">EU antitrust chief faces battle between principles and politics</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/toys.php">Unexpected shocks for Chinese manufacturers </a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/06charts.php">A domino effect in the global work force</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/morg08.php">A closer look at GE Capital</a><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>The last temptation of plastic</strong><br />By Eric Dash<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />Was that a layaway sign I saw?<br />For the last two decades in the United States, layaway has been a relic, a vestige of a time when banks promoted Christmas savings clubs and a Depression ethos of thrift reigned. Instead of swiping a credit card and walking off with the goods, shoppers would put their objects of desire on hold until they paid for them.<br />Almost sounds like a novel idea: "Pay first. Buy later."<br />Today, with the financial crisis worsening, the layaway sign has crept back into consumption culture. Discount retailers like Kmart and Sears are aggressively promoting layaway as a smart and exciting way to buy. No less a tastemaker than Oprah Winfrey has suggested that a new frugality might herald the return of the installment plan. "Remember layaway?" she prodded on her talk show this fall. "That is where we are heading."<br />Perhaps. But never underestimate the cravings of the American consumer and the convenience of the credit card. Fifty years ago, the financial industry was transformed by a thin piece of plastic. It was an innovation that lifted the American economy — and the world's, too. By making it easier to obtain credit — sometimes recklessly easy — the credit card empowered people to buy their dreams.<br />Still, the economic upheaval now under way raises the question: will the current crisis leave a lasting impression on the credit card? Consumers, having watched their home values, their retirement plans and in many cases even their jobs evaporate, are plucking more slowly from their wallets. Banks, already crippled by billions of dollars in mortgage-related losses and fearful that bad credit card debt will balloon, are tightening standards and raising interest rates. And the U.S. government is considering tough new regulations that the industry says will end up restricting credit further.<br />"We are in the throes of a global credit crisis that has implications on consumers at all income levels," said Carl Pascarella, a former chief executive of Visa USA. "People are going to have to live within their means."<br />If they do, the impact on the American economy could be profound. Debt-fueled consumer spending accounts for as much as 70 percent of gross domestic product.<br />"We are probably going to be in a period of slower growth for the next two to five years," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group.<br />Ever since BankAmerica blanketed Fresno, California, with a mass mailing of credit cards in 1958, flexing plastic has been part of daily life. With a flick of the wrist, we could buy groceries or a refrigerator, pay for a vacation or a hospital stay, furnish a home or finance a business. It might not have been life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness, but easy access to credit was surely an inalienable right.<br />For the last half-century, that basic precept has held true. Credit card debt has grown to roughly $822 billion today, increasing almost every year, even when the economy slumped.<br />Amid the recession of the early 1980s, lenders put more cards in the hands of senior citizens, students and other low-income customers. By charging high interest and pesky fees, banks were making money as borrowers defaulted.<br />During the recession of the early 1990s, lenders continued to extend credit to a broad range of borrowers, including those who already had two or three cards. Subprime lenders aggressively marketed their cards to unemployed workers for "bridge loans" until they found another job.<br />And after the technology bubble burst in 2001, credit card issuers confidently loosened lending standards and even went after indebted borrowers with zero-interest teaser rates. Lenders reasoned that cardholders who lost their jobs could still refinance debts by extracting the equity from the rising value of their homes.<br />Still, this recession is different. Many consumers today have maxed out on their credit and have little or no home equity. And credit card lending is no longer as profitable for banks since their own borrowing costs have risen.<br />"This is the first crisis of the modern credit card industry," said Robert Manning, the author of "Credit Card Nation" and a critic of credit practices.<br />And the crisis is widening.<br />Credit card lenders are on pace to write off at least $45 billion on bad debt this year. As the unemployment rate soars — the loss of 533,000 jobs in November was the largest one-month drop in 34 years — the industry could lose an additional $60 billion or so in 2009. Many analysts and bankers believe that loss rate could easily eclipse the record 7.9 percent level of outstanding credit card debt reached in early 2002.<br />Lenders have been rushing to slow the spread. Every major credit card issuer — from Bank of America, Chase and Citigroup to the finance arms of General Electric and Target Corporation — is approving fewer new applicants, pulling in credit limits and canceling unused accounts.<br />And sweeping regulatory changes could reduce the amount of credit available to consumers even more. Having missed the implications of the housing bubble, the Federal Reserve and Congress are considering rules to crack down on unfair lending practices.<br />"Lenders will ultimately choose to provide fewer credit lines to fewer customers," Meredith Whitney, a banking analyst, said recently. By her projections, consumers could lose access to $2 trillion in credit in the next 18 months.<br />This would force many Americans to radically change their behavior — saving for what they can afford rather than financing what they covet.<br />Already, there are some signs of such a shift. Visa said that spending on its credit cards in the United States dropped in the first three weeks in October after barely increasing in the third quarter. Spending volume has fallen only twice before — immediately after the 9/11 attacks, and in late 1980, when the country slipped into recession.<br />Cardholders are also changing how they spend their money. Bank executives say more customers are using their credit cards for groceries, gasoline and other necessities and are deferring purchases of big-ticket items like furniture and flat-screen televisions. Retailers are bracing for the worst holiday shopping season in decades.<br />New government statistics, meanwhile, suggest that Americans are socking away more money. The savings rate has been climbing since it flattened out in April at a record low of zero.<br />Thrift is hot on Madison Avenue and Hollywood, too. Wal-Mart's new slogan is "Save money. Live better." Bank of America has been advertising its "Keep the Change" debit card savings program and risk-free certificates of deposit. And in what was either prescient or a lucky bit of timing, "Confessions of a Shopaholic," a morality tale for the "Sex and the City" set, is coming to theaters in February. Its protagonist is head over her high heels in credit card debt until she becomes Successful Savings magazine's advice columnist, finds true love with her handsome editor and ultimately pays off her loans and learns to live within her means.<br />Whether there will be a lasting cultural change in the way consumers use their credit cards is likely to depend on the depth and duration of the current recession. History suggests that we are quick to forget. Often when the American economy contracts, some new innovation in credit seems to follow, paving the way for an even bolder era of consumption.<br />After the Great Depression, commercial banks began moving into the consumer lending business, which blossomed into the Golden Era of Consumption of the 1950s. The downturn of the late 1970s ushered in the electronic payment revolution. Credit cards became even more convenient to use. The 1980s are remembered for "Generation Me."<br />This time, Americans may think twice about using credit cards and start flexing debit cards more frequently — just as they do in Europe and Asia, where credit cards are less a part of daily life.<br />In 2007, Americans used a debit card in roughly 21 percent of all transactions; credit cards accounted for about 19 percent, according to The Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. By 2012, debit card use is expected to rise to about 29 percent of all transactions, while credit card use would stay about the same.<br />Gary Perlin, Capital One's chief financial officer, said he has seen a "mild shift" to debit card use in the past three months as his customers hunker down. Other industry experts suggest that the downturn could accelerate this trend.<br />Indeed, some banks have begun offering an overdraft line of credit on debit cards. Others are testing a rewards point program, as they have done with credit cards for years.<br />The layaway and other installment plans that are making a return this holiday season may also be here to stay. Burlington Coat Factory, Marshalls, and TJ Maxx are filling up their layaway racks. Business is also bustling at E-Layaway.com, an online service bringing the old-fashioned installment plan into the new economy.<br />It's probably premature to suggest that consumers will wean themselves from their costly addiction to credit cards, though. "I have always been struck by how many people want to see this as the end of an era of consumer excess and the beginning of a new age of thrift," said Lendol Calder, a history professor at Augustana College who has studied the role of consumer credit in American culture. "I don't see that happening."<br />"We will see people pulling in their belts for one or two years," Calder added, "and then it will be back to where we left off."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/news/07dash.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/news/07dash.php</a><br />*****************<br /><br /><strong>In private equity, the limits of Apollo's power</strong><br />By Julie Creswell<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />LEON BLACK, one of Wall Street's buyout kingpins, is having a tough year.<br />In the spring, the home furnishings retailer Linens 'n Things went bust, costing the Apollo Group, the private equity firm that Black co-founded 18 years ago, its entire $365 million investment.<br />Apollo's attempt to disentangle itself from another potentially bad deal — an acquisition of Huntsman, the chemical company — has resulted in a messy flurry of lawsuits.<br />The sagging economy and piles of debt, meanwhile, are causing several other companies that Apollo owns, including Harrah's, Claire's and a real estate entity that controls Century 21 and Coldwell Banker, to struggle — putting at risk about a third of some $10 billion Black raised years ago during the buyout boom.<br />On top of all that, a gymnasium that housed Black's indoor tennis courts on his 90-acre Westchester County estate burned to the ground in October. And just last week, in a new twist on the term "frenemies," Black's good buddy and longtime tennis partner Carl Icahn sued another Apollo company because he was unhappy with its plans to restructure debt.<br />So it just ain't easy being Leon Black — or any other Master of the Universe — these days.<br />"Traditional private equity is dead and has been for a year," says Black, seated at a round conference table in an office once occupied by L. Dennis Kozlowski, who was ousted as chief executive of Tyco International. "It will probably remain so for a couple of years."<br />Part of the allure of private-equity honchos like Black is that they made an art out of making money during the boom years. Their fist-pounding negotiations were legendary. Their corporate turnarounds became Harvard Business School case studies. Their multiple homes, black-tie parties, sports cars and yachts were alternately envied and vilified.<br />Today, with Wall Street in tatters and the easy money long gone, the question now for Black and his peers is whether they have enough moves left to turn the bleak outlook for private equity into something rosier for themselves, their companies, their investors and the legions of workers they employ.<br />Achieving that will hinge on whether Black and his peers can persuade banks and investors to give their companies more time to make good on their debts, something that Icahn's lawsuit suggests is not always easy.<br />The other parts of the equation — how long the economic malaise lasts and how deep it becomes, as well as its ultimate impact on the companies they own — are something that even the Wall Street power brokers can't control.<br />Over the last year, Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, has watched his company's high-profile stock plunge 71 percent. And Henry Kravis has yanked copycat plans for his storied firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, to go public as well.<br />Several other superstars in the private-equity universe, including TPG and the Carlyle Group, are scrambling as some of their companies collapse — firms for which they paid top dollar during the recent buyout boom.<br />Those mounting losses — and the dearth of cheap and easy financing that fueled private equity's rocketing returns over the years — have some people wondering what the future holds for private-equity firms and the companies they have acquired.<br />Black has an answer. His shirt wrinkled and his tie askew, he calmly says that the outlook for him and his competitors is not as bleak as it seems. In fact, he says his firm is poised to take advantage of the turbulence.<br />Apollo has just raised $20 billion in new money that he says will go, in part, toward buying cheap debt.<br />"We've totally turned into a bond house," he declares.<br />BLACK says the big money over the next few years will be made in vast restructurings — the financial, operational and structural changes that companies will need to make if they hope to survive the economic malaise.<br />Of course, the question is how many of these overhauls will involve Black's own companies.<br />Apollo thought it had a home run with Linens 'n Things. It bought that struggling retailer in 2005 for $1.3 billion — $365 million of its own money, the rest from co-investors and banks — and installed a retail industry veteran as its chief executive.<br />The deal, however, soured quickly. Sales continued to slide and nervous investors who held its debt started to dump it. In May, a mere two years after Apollo acquired the company, Linens 'n Things filed for bankruptcy.<br />"It was an incredibly fast implosion," said Kim Noland, the director of high-yield research with Gimme Credit.<br />Some point to the collapse of Linens 'n Things as an omen for the private-equity industry and some of the companies these firms acquired during the gold rush.<br />Armed with cheap bank funding, private-equity firms — just like consumers who bid up home prices on the back of cheap mortgages — paid sky-high prices for troubled companies that they promised they could streamline and make more efficient.<br />They piled layers and layers of debt — "leverage," in Wall Street parlance — onto these companies just before the economy came screeching to a halt.<br />"The idea was that Apollo was going to turn it around and fix whatever was causing the issues, but operations just got worse and worse and then there was the overleverage," Noland said of Linens 'n Things. "They just didn't have too much of a chance."<br />Black calls the Linens collapse "unusual," saying that Apollo "underestimated the severity of the downturn of the housing market."<br />Besides, he says, the Linens bankruptcy barely singed his investors, costing them half a percentage point on returns. (The Apollo fund that held Linens has returned 49 percent to investors, net of fees, since its inception in 2001.)<br />The promise behind private-equity firms like Apollo is that they can fix broken companies far from the bright glare of the public eye. No longer tied to meeting investors' quarterly earnings expectations, company management can focus instead on improving operations.<br />Private-equity firms raise huge sums from investors like pension funds and endowments and then borrow more from banks and other lenders so they can put ever larger sums to work.<br />During the period when they own a company, private-equity firms pay out some of the company's profits to their investors — and the buyout firm itself — sometimes recouping several times their original investment in dividends before they either sell the company or take it public again.<br />One of the longstanding criticisms of buyout firms is that they engorge targets with debt and skim the profits for themselves. That image was reinforced during the boom with stories about buyout executives' over-the-top birthday parties and other lavish excesses.<br />The notion that buyout firms were only on the hunt for quick gains was further strengthened by actions of Apollo and some of its peers. Sometimes within just a year of acquiring a company, they issued debt that was used to pay fat dividends to the funds themselves.<br />Besides layering more debt onto the companies, the move effectively allowed Apollo and its competitors to handily recoup some, if not all, of their initial investments.<br />Earlier this year, a major ratings agency, Moody's Investors Service, said that Apollo and a handful of other buyout firms were particularly aggressive about yanking out nearly all of their initial investments.<br />"We saw some firms taking out a large amount of the equity they put in, and they were doing this less than a year after announcing the buyouts," said John Rogers, an analyst at Moody's. "It would be rare that the performance of the business had improved so much during that time."<br />Black defends the payouts.<br />"In some cases, we took 60 percent, 85 percent or even 100 percent of our investment out," says Black, adding that Apollo can put more money into the deals if necessary. "It was the right thing to do for our investors."<br />Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied private equity, says it is too soon to say whether those debt deals further weakened the affected companies.<br />"So far," he said, "I think it's hard to find any statistical difference between the performance of companies that did the dividend deals and those that didn't."<br />But do these deals remove the incentive that Apollo and others have to stick around and fix troubled companies, when they have already cashed out?<br />"There is a fundamental conflict in private equity between taking steps that generate a good return for investors and doing things that are in the best interests of the companies," Lerner says. "In an ideal world, those are aligned. But in the real world, they aren't always."<br />Some data suggests that that disconnect is causing trouble.<br />In a report by the ratings agency Standard & Poor's, 86 companies weren't meeting their debt obligations through mid-November of this year, with 53 of those, or 62 percent, having ties to private-equity firms at one point in their lives.<br />The firm's analysts anticipate that an additional 125 companies could default by next fall, raising the nation's default rate to 7.6 percent from current levels of 3.2 percent.<br />Whatever transpires, Black says he's not planning to walk away from his stable of companies.<br />"Most of the companies we own are businesses or industries that we really like," he says. In the same breath, however, he concedes that that won't be the case with every company.<br />"There are going to be cases like Linens 'n Things," he says. "We didn't put more money into Linens because it would have been just putting good money after bad."<br />That argument could be sorely tested with Apollo's troubled sixth fund, which raised about $10 billion from investors and went on a spending spree from 2006 through this year.<br />It acquired a broad range of companies — cruise lines, paper companies and grocery store chains. Black allows that five of those companies are "cyclically challenged."<br />Those five are the hot-tub manufacturer Jacuzzi; the accessories retailer Claire's; Realogy (which owns Century 21 and Coldwell Banker) and the Countrywide real estate firm in Britain; and a gambling company, Harrah's.<br />WHILE Black remains upbeat about the prospects for those companies, some analysts say most of them are severely indebted and are crumbling quickly because of the economy.<br />That has had an impact on Apollo's 2006 fund. The fund has had a net internal rate of return of negative 12.8 percent from its inception through the end of September, according to someone with direct knowledge of its performance who was not authorized to release the data. The fund didn't disclose its more recent performance to investors in a November letter.<br />That letter did state that the fund has returned $1.3 billion to investors through dividends, but that it marked down the overall value of its holdings by $789 million.<br />In an effort to conserve cash and give themselves some breathing room, Harrah's and Realogy are trying to persuade investors to exchange the securities for new debt that will reduce overall leverage or lengthen maturities. Currently, Harrah's, Realogy and Claire's are keeping up with some of their debt payments by issuing more debt to investors rather than paying them in cash — a maneuver made possible by agreements reached during the boom.<br />Some analysts see these moves as little more than putting off the inevitable.<br />"What they're doing is putting more debt on a company at a time when we are in a recessionary environment. Also, the companies that we're talking about are some of the lowest-rated companies out there, so the margin for error is razor thin," says Diane Vazza, head of global fixed-income research at Standard & Poor's. "What this does is buys them a little bit of time, but the day of reckoning is around the corner."<br />Black has one of the financial world's most interesting and varied pedigrees. And some of his past is rooted in tragedy.<br />On Feb. 3, 1975, his father, Eli Black, strode into his office on the 44th floor of the Pan Am Building in Manhattan. He then used his heavy attaché case to smash through his office window and leapt to his death.<br />It was later revealed that regulators were investigating whether payments made by the company Black led, United Brands (predecessor to Chiquita), to a Honduran official were illegal.<br />Until that moment, Leon Black had led a fairly serene and even gilded life. His mother is an artist and a beloved aunt owned a Manhattan gallery, which he says influenced his early appreciation of the arts.<br />Today he is one of Manhattan's best-known collectors. "Art and literature are what differentiate us from barbarians," he says, adding that he will probably give away most of his collection eventually. Black and his family have also given or committed more than $150 million to various educational, health care and cultural institutions.<br />After studying history and philosophy at Dartmouth, Black envisioned himself someday teaching at Oxford, but his father convinced him to give business school a try. He was in his second year at Harvard Business School when his father died. ( Black has financed chairs at Dartmouth in Shakespearean studies in his own name and Jewish studies in his father's honor.)<br />"After my father died, we were pretty much wiped out, financially, as a family," Black says. "So I decided to give finance a try."<br />AFTER Harvard, Black landed on the steps of the investment banking firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, where he had a rocky start.<br />His boss at the time said Black wanted to jump immediately into big-picture planning, but he believed Black needed to understand the basics first. He "wasn't working as hard as we had hoped, so I had some harsh discussions with him," recalls Frederick Joseph, the former head of Drexel.<br />Not long after that little heart-to-heart, Black began climbing the ranks at the firm and became an influential financier as Drexel began financing megabuyouts.<br />"He would work all day, party all night and come back and do it again the next day," Joseph says. "But he brought a lot more brains and a lot more strategic capacity to his deals than a lot of other guys on Wall Street at the time."<br />Black and Drexel financed deals orchestrated by the likes of Icahn, Ted Turner and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, particularly in its famed takeover of RJR Nabisco.<br />Although Black comes across as a quiet, introverted man, he has a famous temper. Joseph recalls seeing that temper flare a few times at Drexel when he disagreed with co-workers over whether to get involved in deals.<br />But Black said that what he loved most in his 13 years at Drexel was the frenetic pace.<br />"The day they closed the doors was a bad day," he says, nodding ruefully.<br />Drexel collapsed in 1990 after investigations into illegal activities in the bond market, driven by one of Black's close associates, Michael Milken, who was eventually imprisoned for securities violations.<br />"I think what happened to the firm was unfair, but we were very politically naïve," Black says. "I'm not sure fairness was relevant."<br />Black, who was the head of Drexel's huge mergers-and-acquisitions group at the time of its demise, walked away from the collapse unscathed. Along with two other Drexel refugees, he started Apollo in 1990.<br />Armed with the experience he and his team earned at Drexel in tearing apart balance sheets and understanding complex credit structures, Black and Apollo emerged as one of the shrewdest investors of the 1990s, specializing in distressed companies.<br />"When we do distressed-debt investing, we have made money in 98 percent of those deals," he says.<br />In Apollo's early days, Black sought to distance himself and his firm from the bad-boy image of leveraged buyout firms in the 1980s. His message was that he was a long-term investor, not a raider out for short-term gains.<br />"We want to be like Warren Buffett," Black said in an interview with The New York Times in 1993. In that same interview, Black also eschewed the notion of investing in high-tech companies and said that any future leveraged buyouts would be "more rational" and involve "less leverage, more equity."<br />Yet, over time, Black would venture again into leveraged buyouts — and those buyouts would involve, in more recent deals, gobs of debt.<br />Over the years, Apollo has built up a strong track record, posting net internal rates of return of 27 percent, on average, after fees, according to filings Apollo made with the Securities and Exchange Commission this summer.<br />That compares with about 19 percent for Blackstone and 20 percent for Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.<br />Today, of course, the returns at Apollo are threatened, and the company is also mired in a legal fracas.<br />In July 2007, the Hexion Specialty Chemicals unit of Apollo offered $28 a share, plus assumption of debt, to buy Huntsman in a deal valued at $10.6 billion. Hexion was buying a company twice its size in a deal financed almost entirely by two banks, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse.<br />But earlier this year when soaring commodity prices and the sharply declining dollar took a huge bite out of Huntsman's profits, Hexion tried to pull out of the deal, citing earnings declines.<br />Huntsman's management said that Apollo merely had cold feet and regretted the bidding war that forced it to pay handsomely to get the deal done. In court, Hexion argued that if the two entities were combined, the resulting company would be insolvent.<br />The Delaware Chancery Court ordered Hexion to move forward with the merger, but by then nervous banks wanted no part of the deal. Huntsman has sued the banks in Texas to force them to back the deal.<br />NOW Apollo is stuck trying to figure out how to make an unwanted marriage work out and how to persuade the banks to be a part of the nuptials, analysts say. Black declined to speak about the deal other than in generalities.<br />"Sure, I regret where things stand now. But there was originally a very good industrial logic to doing the deal," he says. "I'm not smart enough to predict how things will turn out."<br />As for the rest of the companies he now oversees, Black acknowledges that the markets have all but written off some of them.<br />But he's been in tight corners before, Black notes, saying that he has overcome previous downturns and produced solid returns.<br />"I don't believe in the notion of Masters of the Universe. People either do their job or they don't," he says, shrugging. "It's ultimately all about performance."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/07leon.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/07leon.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><strong>Trading stocks for beach time</strong><br />By Michelle Higgins<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />Need a vacation from watching your stocks drop?<br />Hoping to lure travelers amid the slumping economy, a resort chain in the Caribbean is offering to barter rooms for depressed stock.<br />Elite Island Resorts, a chain of upscale hotels - including the St. James's Club on Antigua and the Palm Island Resort in the Grenadines - announced Friday that it would accept payments in stock for vacations booked by Jan. 31 using the value the stock was trading at on July 1. The deal, in effect, gives travelers a chance to roll back the value of currently depressed stocks to levels before the market began to really tank.<br />"Things are so quiet you have to do things out of the box," said Steven Heydt, president of Elite Island Resorts, who concocted the idea. "I've been thinking about what could I do to turn things around and somehow relate to the overall economy and the stock market declines."<br />Here's how the promotion works: An all-inclusive seven-night stay for a family of four begins at $4,445 based on a nightly rate of $635 at the Verandah Resort and Spa in Antigua. A traveler with American Express stock, which closed at $21.78 Friday, would need about 111 shares for the trip, with Elite Island Resorts valuing the stock at $40 per share or what it was approximately trading on July 1.<br />Merrill Lynch stock is even better. It closed at $13.04 on Friday, down from $32.25 on July 1.<br />The deal is good for vacations through mid-December of next year, with no blackout dates. So travelers can use stock for payment even during peak holiday travel periods like Christmas, New Year's or Easter, as long as space is available. Vacationers "paying" with stock may hold a reservation for a specific date if they wish with a credit card, which will not be charged, while the stock is being transferred into a dedicated Merrill Lynch account. Travelers should consult their accountant about any possible tax implications resulting from such a transaction.<br />The maximum credit per room that will be accepted in stock is $5,000. If a vacation costs more than $5,000, the difference will be charged to a credit card.<br />Elite Island Resorts initially set aside $10 million in room inventory for the promotion, but it may expand the program.<br />The company has selected about 100 stocks of major companies including Aetna, Citigroup, General Electric and MetLife (a complete list is at EliteIslandResorts.com/stocks).<br />The company plans to hold on to the stock until it can trade or sell it. With demand off between 25 and 30 percent, said Heydt, the promotion is "a far better way for us to have a return on our investment." He added, "We all believe there is great value in the U.S. stock market. We are willing to wait for this market to turn around."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/barter.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/barter.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN7Q1ml_5FVGfoPab70egYzYTpbm3xAlMrVUjQXCou3jADc5kTdF-2Le3c_jmucZ8S4i2xm0mTw0-leEkyIqcVdvHS5J4KpEGPEeWOcuOae8Gs7E1m2KdjwysEySMrhL0TcXNYFoAiIHI/s1600-h/DSC02686.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273400076091714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN7Q1ml_5FVGfoPab70egYzYTpbm3xAlMrVUjQXCou3jADc5kTdF-2Le3c_jmucZ8S4i2xm0mTw0-leEkyIqcVdvHS5J4KpEGPEeWOcuOae8Gs7E1m2KdjwysEySMrhL0TcXNYFoAiIHI/s320/DSC02686.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Police shooting sparks riots in Greece</strong><br />By Anthee Carassava<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />ATHENS: Youth angry over the killing of a teenager by police rioted in Athens and other Greek cities for a second day on Sunday, while the police announced that two officers had been arrested for their roles in boy's death.<br />The country's worst riots in recent years began hours after a 15-year-old boy was shot Saturday night during a confrontation between police and youth in the Exarchia neighborhood of central Athens, a district of bars, bookshops and restaurants where clashes between far-left youth and the police have previously occurred.<br />As news of the death spread, hundreds of youth took to the streets, burning scores of shops, cars and businesses while throwing fire bombs and stones at riot police, who countered with tear gas. At least six people were arrested in Athens for looting goods from the debris of destroyed department stores and boutiques.<br />The violence spread to other cities on Sunday, including Greece's second-largest city, Thessaloniki, as well as Chania on the island of Crete.<br />Stylianos Volirakos, an Athens police spokesman, said "dozens" of officers had been injured in their bid to seal off streets around Athens Polytechnic University, where rioters, hiding behind blazing trash bins and the university's soaring gates, threw stones and fire bombs at security forces. It remained unclear Sunday night whether authorities would move to storm the state university, a move forbidden by Greek law after military tanks in 1973 rammed the gates of the school to quash a student uprising against the then-ruling military junta. At least 22 civilians died in that attack, which is marked every year by youth-led marches that occasionally turn violent.<br />Authorities fired several rounds of tear gas, which cloaked parts of Athens with plumes of acrid grey smoke. At least one apartment block was evacuated after masked youth torched a French car dealership and ensuing flames reached the balconies of residents, the private television station Alpha reported.<br />An Athens prosecutor charged two officers from an elite police corps with the shooting death of the 15-year-old, Andreas Grigoropoulos.<br />A 37-year-old officer who allegedly fired the shots was charged with manslaughter, while the other officer in the car was charged with abetting him, a statement from the prosecutor's office said. Agence France-Presse identified Epaminondas Korkoneas as the older officer and Vassilis Saraliotis as his partner.<br />According to the police, the two police officers had been patrolling Exarchia when their car was stopped by some 30 youths, many of them hurling stones, at about 9 p.m. Both officers left their car to confront the mob, "firing three shots that resulted in the death of the minor," according to the statement, even though witness accounts differ.<br />Private Greek media and a website popular among leftist youths, www.indymedia.org, said the teenager had been shot in the chest and died while being transferred to a local hospital.<br />Both officers were being detained at the nation's police headquarters in Athens, the police said.<br />Greece's prime minister, Costas Karamanlis, wrote a letter to the boy's parents expressing his sorrow. "I know nothing can relieve your pain, but I assure you . . . the state will act, as it ought to, so that yesterday's tragedy won't be repeated," he wrote.<br />"It is inconceivable for there not to be punishment when a person, let alone a minor, loses their life," Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos said at a Saturday news conference. "The loss of life is something that is inconceivable in a democracy."<br />As government officials quickly moved to condemn the shooting, thousands took the streets oin protest. A march on Sunday in central Athens with some 3,000 demonstrators was peaceful until it was interrupted by youths throwing more rocks and handmade bombs, and police shot tear gas in an attempt to disperse the crowd. Private television networks broke into scheduled programming to broadcast the street fighting. Young men were seen smashing storefronts, targeting banks and burning dozens of refuse containers and cars along the meandering streets of Athens' high-end commercial district.<br />Pavlopoulos, who offered to resign early Sunday, called for restraint. His resignation was not accepted by the prime minister.<br />"People have the right to protest and will do so, but while the pain and grief caused by the minor's death is understandable, no outrage," he said, "can lead to the violence and destruction of private property that was witnessed."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/europe/greece.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/europe/greece.php</a><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-JEBAUR0I1jWJpOrV1XlGsmS8w1nINiTd__wjoYwfzTO0mKHvmG2ABzQK9JA2SNrZjNiMZtxyW1IVTR0JPzEriDQRD8abFCnl-Ao8FuhvzD_0xqJ9daeW1FC3z_7Otk2k_w5QCDLHDAg/s1600-h/DSC02687.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273397804486946" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-JEBAUR0I1jWJpOrV1XlGsmS8w1nINiTd__wjoYwfzTO0mKHvmG2ABzQK9JA2SNrZjNiMZtxyW1IVTR0JPzEriDQRD8abFCnl-Ao8FuhvzD_0xqJ9daeW1FC3z_7Otk2k_w5QCDLHDAg/s320/DSC02687.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><strong>Nicholas D. Kristof: A killer without borders<br /></strong>Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />YEREVAN, Armenia: As if you didn't have enough to worry about ...<br />consider the deadly, infectious and highly portable disease sitting in the lungs of a charming young man here, Garik Hakobyan. In effect, he's a time bomb.<br />Hakobyan, 34, an artist, carries an ailment that stars in the nightmares of public health experts - XDR-TB, the scariest form of tuberculosis. It doesn't respond to conventional treatments and is often incurable.<br />XDR-TB could spread to your neighborhood because it isn't being aggressively addressed now, before it rages out of control. It's being nurtured by global complacency.<br />When doctors here in Armenia said they would introduce me to XDR patients, I figured we would all be swathed in protective clothing and chat in muffled voices in a secure ward of a hospital. Instead, they simply led me outside to a public park, where Hakobyan sat on a bench with me.<br />"It's pretty safe outside, because his coughs are dispersed," one doctor explained, "but you wouldn't want to be in a room or vehicle with him." Then I asked Hakobyan how he had gotten to the park.<br />"A public bus," he said.<br />He saw my look and added: "I have to take buses. I don't have my own Lincoln Continental." To his great credit, Hakobyan is trying to minimize his contact with others and doesn't date, but he inevitably ends up mixing with people.<br />Afterward, I asked one of his doctors if Hakobyan could have spread his lethal infection to other bus passengers. "Yes," she said thoughtfully. "There was one study that found that a single TB patient can infect 14 other people in the course of a single bus ride."<br />People don't think much about TB. But drug-resistant TB is spreading - half a million cases a year already - and in a world connected by jet planes and constant flows of migrants and tourists, the risk is that our myopia will catch up with us.<br />Barack Obama's administration should ensure it isn't complacent about TB in the way that Ronald Reagan was about AIDS. Reagan didn't let the word AIDS pass his lips publicly until he was into his second term, and this inattention allowed the disease to spread far more than necessary. That's not a mistake the Obama administration should make with tuberculosis.<br />One-third of the world's population is infected with TB, and some 1.5 million people die annually of it. That's more than die of malaria or any infectious disease save AIDS.<br />"TB is a huge problem," said Tadataka Yamada, president of global health programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "It's a problem that in some ways has been suppressed. We often don't talk about it."<br />Ineffective treatment has led to multi-drug resistant forms, or MDR-TB. Scarier still is XDR-TB, which stands for extensively drug resistant TB. That is what Hakobyan has. There were only 83 cases of XDR-TB reported in the United States from 1993 to 2007, but it could strike with a vengeance.<br />"We always think we live in a protected world because of modern medicines and the like," Yamada said. "But if we get a big problem with XDR, we could be in a situation like we had in the 19th century when we didn't have good treatments."<br />If we were facing an equivalent military threat capable of killing untold numbers of Americans, there might be presidential commissions and tens of billions of dollars in appropriations, not to mention magazine cover stories. But with public health threats, we all drop the ball.<br />Because of this complacency about TB, there hasn't been enough investment in treatments and diagnostics, although some new medication is on the horizon.<br />"Amazingly, the most widely used TB diagnostic is a 19th-century one, and it's as lousy as you might imagine," said Dr. Paul Farmer, the Harvard public health expert whose Partners in Health organization was among the first to call attention to the dangers of drug-resistant TB.<br />In Armenia, the only program for drug-resistant TB, overseen by Doctors Without Borders, can accept only 15 percent of the patients who need it. And the drugs often are unable to help them.<br />"After two years of treatment with toxic drugs, less than half of such chronic TB patients are cured, and that's very demoralizing," noted Stobdan Kalon, the medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders here. And anyone who thinks that drug-resistant TB will stay in places like Armenia is in denial. If it isn't defused, Hakobyan's XDR time bomb could send shrapnel flying into your neighborhood.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edkristof.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edkristof.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><strong>Sin may pay, but Obama is ethical investors' hope<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />By Cecilia Valente<br />The combination of recession and efforts to jump-start economies can be an investment headache.<br />In recessions, vices like tobacco and alcohol win ground among those daring enough to buy shares. But if Barack Obama's plans to invest in clean energy and tighten regulation set a trend, growth plays in worthier sectors may also reward.<br />This mix of slowdown and conscientious investment suggests that while a sprinkling of traditional defensive vice may help short-term, some ethical stocks could benefit too.<br />Received wisdom among fund managers is that the next generation of fund products will be designed to be "back to basics', easy to understand. Among classic defensive plays, companies focussing on human habits fit that bill squarely.<br />"People will not stop smoking in recession, they might even smoke more because they are nervous," said professor Andrew Clare, chair in asset management at London Cass Business School.<br />"Whatever happens people need cigarettes and do not tend to cut back on alcohol," he said.<br />Amid the fracas of recent months, many investments in classic defensive sectors -- of the type offered by a U.S.-based fund that uses the idea of "vice" as its promotional gimmick -- have fallen less sharply than the broader market.<br />British firm Imperial Tobacco on November 25 reported an annual adjusted earnings increase of 15 percent, despite smoking bans enforced in Britain and other Western countries.<br />In the year to November 30 the stock declined by 31.2 percent, but still outperformed the FTSE 100's 35.8 percent fall. British American Tobacco fell by just 14.6 percent over the period, and drinks producer Diageo also outperformed, falling 18.1 percent.<br />More ethical, or socially responsible, funds have to date shown a marked underperformance, but the changing tune coming from the United States could give some a lift.<br />"My view is that the clean energy sector will be one of the first to come out of the recession," forecast Nick Robins, senior analyst on Socially Responsible Investing at HSBC and author of a book, "Sustainable Investing."<br />DEFENSIVE VICE<br />Investors prepared to look beyond the obviously addictive products such as alcohol and cigarettes to invest in gambling and weapons manufacturers in the aerospace industry could explore the "Vice Fund," which covers just these four sectors.<br />Data on its Web site shows the fund was hit by the market downturn but outperformed its benchmark of reference, the S&P 500, in the year to March 31, when it yielded a positive 4.44 percent return against a 5.08 percent fall for the index.<br />It underperformed in the first 10 months of the year, returning minus 37.5 percent versus the S&P's minus 34 percent.<br />"We focus on four sectors that have the potential for long-term gains in a variety of different market and economic conditions," said Charles Norton of GNI Capital Inc, which is involved with the fund's management. "They also are often overlooked and underfollowed, which means our target sectors tend to offer more inefficiencies and opportunities."<br />The Vice Fund's main fund manager, Mutual Advisors, declined comment.<br />But if some plain vanilla defensive investments -- whether focussed on escapist sins or basic necessities -- offer shelter in times of trouble, they also tend to lag a market recovery.<br />Karina Litvack, head of governance and socially responsible investment at UK-based asset manager F&C argues investors would be better off preparing for a recovery that demands stricter corporate governance and higher accountability.<br />"People talk about environmental social and ethical factors as "non financial'," she told Reuters. "From my perspective anything that is a value-driver and makes the company succeed over the longer term is a financial risk factor, only it does not drive the share price up or down in the next 24 hours."<br />With its launch of the Stewardship Growth Fund to exclude alcohol, tobacco and gambling stocks in 1984, F&C was one of the first to join the broad church of investment products known as ethical or socially responsible investments (SRI).<br />At the end of October the Stewardship Growth Fund had 468.3 million pounds in assets, having underperformed its benchmark, the FTSE All-Share Index. On a year-to-date basis, the fund yielded minus 38.7 percent versus the FTSE's minus 31.2 percent.<br />In spite of the losses, Litvack said investors in this fund, most of them retail investors, have remained generally loyal due to their long-term view.<br />A patient customer base is also what Christian Zimmermann, portfolio manager for the 739 million euro Pioneer Global Ecology Fund, says he can count on.<br />Zimmermann said most of its investors stuck to the fund, even though assets had nearly halved since the end of 2007 when it had 1.3 billion euros.<br />Though considering upping the fund's cash weighting from the current five percent, he maintained opportunities would come from Obama.<br />"Obama has committed to renewable energy," he said. "At the moment it looks like the immediate future is depressing but looking beyond 2009, it is brighter than it seems now."<br />Cass Business School's Clare warned against reading too much into funds' simplistic tags, noting that subtleties of definition could disappoint some investors.<br />He also doubted there is any financial advantage in the ethical route: "The academic data that I have seen suggests that the difference in the performance of an SRI fund and an ordinary (one) are very limited."<br />Of course, HSBC's Robins disagreed.<br />He said investments in companies incorporating ethical social and corporate governance (ESG) principles outperformed the MSCI World index in the five years to 2007.<br />(Editing by Sara Ledwith)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/business/OUKBS-UK-INVESTMENT-STRATEGIES.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/07/business/OUKBS-UK-INVESTMENT-STRATEGIES.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfew9nM4AviFK_MiLMCUn2ukkzFYh81vNHOaqrCbrh9zMfj6t-CaZ-xPfaF04RfPSVwr99u9ZOg4xl9kfQyrPwyMceGO1kCYPYXf-3GwBGu17aefW-foROV3n0JXPMYK2l9c02FysAJss/s1600-h/DSC02688.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273396030211010" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfew9nM4AviFK_MiLMCUn2ukkzFYh81vNHOaqrCbrh9zMfj6t-CaZ-xPfaF04RfPSVwr99u9ZOg4xl9kfQyrPwyMceGO1kCYPYXf-3GwBGu17aefW-foROV3n0JXPMYK2l9c02FysAJss/s320/DSC02688.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>The return of the Gotcha! Gang</strong><br />By William Safire<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />This is that time of the year when your language maven feels the compulsion to grovel.<br />"In your article on 'Boots on the Ground,"' e-mails Dr. David Sachar, "did you deliberately bypass the opportunity to introduce your readership to that wonderful figure of speech, synecdoche?" Another reader, Katherine Noone agrees: "I noticed a synecdoche in your column (boot). When I was in elementary school, I found a book that explained the difference between metonymy and synecdoche, which time seems to have fudged. Given Kaufman's new movie, it is time for some attention to the figure of speech."<br />They must have forgotten my column of only 16 years ago, which explained that metonymy, pronounced muh-TAHN-uh mee, identifies a person or thing by something closely associated with it - like "the brass" for high military officers, "the crown" for royalty and "the suits" for executives, usually male, and other stiffs in traditional business garb. "Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche," I wrote, "which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole" like "wheels" for automobiles and "head" for cattle.<br />No one is a somebody who correctly notes the re-emergence of the synecdoche (sih-NECK-doe-key) in the punning title of a new movie directed by the Oscar-winning surrealist screenwriter Charlie Kaufman: "Synecdoche, New York." Kaufman's new work - whose hero is described as a narcissist haunted by the thought of death - is hailed as one of the best films of the decade by Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post. That reviewer notes that "my death is your death is her death is our death - possibly accounting for the title, which isn't just a phonetic play on Schenectady but a speech form in which a part of something can stand for the whole." Headline of his review: "Synecdoche: A Part of Life That Makes Us Whole."<br />Other headline writers are beginning to catch synecdochal fever. A recent article in The New York Times, datelined Rutshuru in eastern Congo, reported on "white-collar rebels" known as guerrilla warriors who are now trying as civilians to administer the territory they control. The rhyming headline: "Rebels Used to Boots, Not Suits, Seek to Govern Congo."<br />Charlie Kaufman has taken a term of grammar that had been suffering in desuetude and put it up in metaphoric lights. The city in New York State whose name he plays upon (possibly derived from the Mohawks' word for "near the pines") is going through industrial hard times, but worried residents can hope to have found their avant-guardian.<br />Only a few months ago, the euphemism of choice for writers of corporate reports and economic analysts who did not want to strike fear into investors' hearts was headwind. The metaphor was breezily chosen to show that the profit picture of individual companies was quite likely to meet with economy-wide resistance.<br />Some headwind, with major financial indexes down by half. My semantic error, however, in a column titled "Toxic Bailout," was in writing: "A headwind is one that is blowing in your face. It was popularized in the 1920s by pilots; 'bucking a headwind' cuts down on air speed." Right date, wrong definition.<br />"I'm probably the one-millionth pilot to comment on this," writes Bill Flemer of Princeton, New Jersey. (In fact, he was the 60th.) "But what one loses when bucking a headwind is groundspeed, or forward progress over the ground." Isabelle Hunter of Providence, Rhode Island, a former private pilot, notes: "Actually a headwind increases air speed, which is the speed of the plane relative to the air it's traveling through. A headwind decreases groundspeed, the speed of the plane relative to the ground." Tom Morris writes: "Gotcha! At long last! Groundspeed equals airspeed minus headwind speed." (Or plus tailwind speed.)<br />O.K. If you're in the prediction dodge, blow off the euphemism headwinds. The term on the tip of financial tongues today is volatile, from the Latin volare, "to fly." In the 17th century, the meaning became "birdlike, capable of flying," and that ability to soar and swoop gave rise to today's primary sense of "unexpected, dramatic movement." But we can all cheer up, even as the economic groundspeed slows down, by recalling Francis Bacon's usage in 1626: "The Catterpiller toward the End of Summer waxeth Volatile, and turneth to a Butterflie."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edsafire.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/opinion/edsafire.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><strong>Off ramp to on ramp: It can be a hard journey for women</strong><br />By Hannah Seligson<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />JAMIE MARKOVITZ HOFFMAN, 40, a former senior vice president at UBS, the global financial company, had what she describes as "one of those extreme jobs."<br />"I loved working," she says. But her career path reached a crossroads when her second child was born, and she left her job in February 2007.<br />Markovitz Hoffman is one of many people who have left the work force to take a break. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy, has described this type of career detour — which is more common for women than for men — as "off-ramping." Typically it occurs when the balancing act of parenting and work becomes too arduous.<br />A study by the center found that more than 90 percent of women who off-ramp want to on-ramp back into the work force eventually. But making the transition back to work is rarely easy, and it is even harder in this economic climate of layoffs and hiring freezes.<br />To address some of the obstacles faced by on-rampers, Merrill Lynch recently held a three-day program called "Greater Returns: Restarting Your Career" at Columbia University. Attending the program were 37 women — including Markovitz Hoffman — who had taken breaks from high-level jobs in fields like finance, law, technology and retail.<br />The women met with a cross-section of leaders from a range of businesses, including Ernst & Young, KPMG and Intel. They also attended sessions on topics like how to re-enter the job market in a down economy, how to differentiate yourself from the competition and how to tap into your ambition.<br />"The goal of the three days was to have them walk away with a new set of peers and senior mentors and a big shot of confidence," said Hewlett, who was tapped by Merrill Lynch to run the program.<br />Subha Barry, managing director of global diversity and inclusion at Merrill Lynch, said her company's involvement was not about paying lip service to a women's issue; it was about finding talent and improving the bottom line.<br />"As a business," Barry said, "we need diversity of thoughts and experience to stay relevant in the marketplace, so we started digging into the question of why we don't attract more women at higher levels when we have the same number of men and women at the entry level."<br />She said examining that question meant looking at the psychology of re-entry and accepting that demands on women, especially in terms of child-rearing, are greater.<br />The company wants to help women "re-acclimate to their careers when, after raising young children for a few years, the slope looks so steep," she said<br />One woman who successfully made the transition is Lori Brown, who left her job as a principal at a consulting firm in 2004 to spend more time with her two young sons. She was recently hired as the director of benefits, strategy, and compliance at L'Oréal in Clark, New Jersey.<br />Brown, 48, found the position on Theladders.com, a site for jobs that pay more than $100,000. She said her search, which lasted seven months, was much more involved than just mining postings on the Internet.<br />Not only did she "network like crazy," she said, but she also went to see a career coach to ensure that her re-entrance looked more like a pirouette than a clumsy stumble.<br />"Coming back into the work force after five years means you have to be incredibly clear about what you value both personally and professionally," said Brown. "Seeking outside help was helpful in setting that direction."<br />Emma Gilbey Keller, who wrote "The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women Who Went From Career to Family and Back Again," says that one of the most efficient ways to return to the work force is to look for project-based employment and temporary work, particularly in this economy.<br />"Jobs are being cut, but companies still need hands on deck," said Keller (who is married to Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times). "Right now, short-term work is going to be easier to come by than landing the managing editor position or a getting on the partner track at a law firm."<br />According to one school of thought, women looking to make a comeback might even have an advantage in the current economy, especially if they are looking for part-time or consultant positions that do not offer benefits. And a majority of on-rampers are women with extensive résumés that could give them an edge over less-experienced competition.<br />Regardless of the job sought, though, experts and those in the trenches warn to be prepared for resistance.<br />"You have to anticipate questions about whether you are really ready to get back into the work force and why now," said Sarah Grayson, a partner at On-Ramps, a recruiting and consulting firm specializing in workplace innovation. "Some employers have been burned by on-rampers" who have changed their minds, she said.<br />BROWN said she ran into one recruiter who told her that she was a very attractive candidate, but that her five-year break was a huge liability. That encounter was the exception, she said.<br />Still, even if many on the hiring side are empathetic, coming up with a language to talk about a career detour is crucial.<br />"You absolutely cannot be defensive about why you off-ramped," Brown said.<br />Markovitz Hoffman says "defensive" would have been her default tone if the Greater Returns program had not taught her how to describe the years she spent at home. "I now feel confident talking to an employer and saying, 'Yes, I have been out of the work force, but here is where I can make significant contributions.' "<br />Markovitz Hoffman says she is puzzled that companies aren't doing more to address the issue of women returning to work. "Most firms have a diversity office; why don't they have an on-ramping department?" she said.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/news/07return.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/news/07return.php</a><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI5OWdja5yMDeB9PYG_Pz-Km4v5l8rylTY0h3tNQBXanFWco8tVHtaymjifJxz6Brx_EAtusLWMM7pQ8IwMFPKeFcJ4sRa1qtqwA4L-oCtnOcLtRgLfhJn107_2wGs6F8gWeW0HGpfPTo/s1600-h/DSC02689.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273107967654450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI5OWdja5yMDeB9PYG_Pz-Km4v5l8rylTY0h3tNQBXanFWco8tVHtaymjifJxz6Brx_EAtusLWMM7pQ8IwMFPKeFcJ4sRa1qtqwA4L-oCtnOcLtRgLfhJn107_2wGs6F8gWeW0HGpfPTo/s320/DSC02689.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory about 'winds' message refuted</strong><br />By Sam Roberts<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />It has remained one of World War II's most enduring mysteries, one that resonated decades later in the aftermath of Sept. 11: Who in Washington knew what and when before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941?<br />Specifically, who heard or saw a transcript of a Tokyo shortwave radio news broadcast that was interrupted by a prearranged coded weather report? The weather bulletin signaled Japanese diplomats around the world to destroy confidential documents and codes because war with the United States, the Soviet Union or Britain was beginning.<br />In testimony for government inquiries, witnesses said that the "winds execute" message was intercepted as early as Dec. 4, three days before the attack.<br />But after analyzing American and foreign intelligence sources and decrypted cables, historians for the National Security Agency concluded in a historical documentary released last week that whatever other warnings reached Washington about the attack, the "winds execute" message was not one of them.<br />A Japanese message intercepted and decoded on Nov. 19, 1941, at an American monitoring station on Bainbridge Island, Washington, appeared to lay out the "winds execute" situation. If diplomatic relations were "in danger" with one of three countries, a coded phrase would be repeated as a special weather bulletin twice in the middle and twice at the end of the daily Japanese-language news broadcast.<br />"East wind rain" would mean the United States; "north wind cloudy," the Soviet Union; and "west wind clear," Britain.<br />In the history "West Wind Clear," published by the National Security Agency's Center for Cryptologic History, Robert Hanyok and David Mowry attribute accounts of the message being broadcast to the flawed or fabricated memory of some witnesses, perhaps to deflect culpability from other officials for the United States' insufficient readiness for war.<br />A congressional committee grappled with competing accounts of the "winds execute" message in 1946, by which time the question of whether it had been broadcast had blown into a controversy. The New York Times described it at the time as a "bitter microcosm" of the investigation into American preparedness.<br />"If there was such a message," the paper wrote, "the Washington military establishment would have been gravely at fault in not having passed it along" to military commanders in Hawaii. If there was not, then the supporters of those commanders "would have lost an important prop to their case."<br />In an interview, Hanyok said there were several lessons from the controversy that reverberate today. He said that some adherents of the theory that the message was sent and seen were motivated by an unshakable faith in the efficacy of radio intelligence, and that when a copy of the message could not be found they blamed a cover-up - a reminder that no intelligence-gathering is completely foolproof.<br />Washington also missed potential warning signs because intelligence resources had been diverted to the Atlantic theater, he said, and the Japanese deftly practiced deception to mislead Americans about the whereabouts of Tokyo's naval strike force.<br />"The problem with the conspiracy theory," Hanyok said, "is that it diverted attention from the real substantive problems, the major issue being the intelligence system was so bureaucratized."<br />Beginning about Dec. 1, Washington became aware that the Japanese were ordering diplomats overseas to selectively destroy confidential documents. But, the NSA study found, "because of the sometimes tardy exploitation of these messages, intelligence officers in the Army and Navy knew only parts of the complete program. It is possible that they viewed the Japanese actions as ominous, but also contradictory and perhaps even confusing. More importantly, though, the binge of code destruction was occurring without the transmittal of the winds execute message."<br />The authors concluded that the weight of the evidence "indicates that one coded phrase, 'west wind clear,' was broadcast according to previous instructions some six or seven hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor."<br />"In the end, the winds code never was the intelligence indicator or warning that it first appeared to the Americans, as well as to the British and Dutch," they wrote. "In the political realm, it added nothing to then current view in Washington (and London) that relations with Tokyo had deteriorated to a dangerous point.<br />"From a military standpoint, the winds coded message contained no actionable intelligence either about the Japanese operations in Southeast Asia and absolutely nothing about Pearl Harbor.<br />"In reality," they concluded, "the Japanese broadcast the coded phrase(s) long after hostilities began - useless, in fact, to all who might have heard it."<br />The New York Times<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/america/pearl.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/america/pearl.php</a><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1swhA8VzwD_9tOEWwWV0cjVcrPQ0BPV8p2qLaTiI9GPyuTMW40QNaQfm7fX3_8KPZ0TBfGPNUTeyZ7wnBoyWTCskdLv2I-fqYPZ5o8VPQpjdN7nVuOgfjkJ3x4W-yBGnjbtCihyutCD4/s1600-h/DSC02690.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273102315435698" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1swhA8VzwD_9tOEWwWV0cjVcrPQ0BPV8p2qLaTiI9GPyuTMW40QNaQfm7fX3_8KPZ0TBfGPNUTeyZ7wnBoyWTCskdLv2I-fqYPZ5o8VPQpjdN7nVuOgfjkJ3x4W-yBGnjbtCihyutCD4/s320/DSC02690.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF9MCuEYIBDdbzaUuVO6ZIQz55bLUMbDh6-mfUlZScnqqbP7lLDJJ7Sran4LmVzeAeXyXTvfQr22O14yoLf2rncCEf3GgGImVtp7bsCFfXyQiqN1rh5J_-MwzrsLdhad1D6dsrmi_aSD4/s1600-h/DSC02691.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273103631121986" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF9MCuEYIBDdbzaUuVO6ZIQz55bLUMbDh6-mfUlZScnqqbP7lLDJJ7Sran4LmVzeAeXyXTvfQr22O14yoLf2rncCEf3GgGImVtp7bsCFfXyQiqN1rh5J_-MwzrsLdhad1D6dsrmi_aSD4/s320/DSC02691.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAz3KRWUCOvDL3BQ-NoY9l1a0OTO0arhIpUo2TcI7Ku8553tXJWm8ZeyjL6j0M82XzSe71Onc8v1k13gllLM65dqa0h45gOCXaMmqCPAeFhR6hLls1EsjuN8PgYLQBYBnDadsjmBjjIhA/s1600-h/DSC02692.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273099782271746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAz3KRWUCOvDL3BQ-NoY9l1a0OTO0arhIpUo2TcI7Ku8553tXJWm8ZeyjL6j0M82XzSe71Onc8v1k13gllLM65dqa0h45gOCXaMmqCPAeFhR6hLls1EsjuN8PgYLQBYBnDadsjmBjjIhA/s320/DSC02692.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiryirzyhe3Dgkq9LQDoZ-RIgS5ETR1wbldd57ZAk6nfSXKe71BVkAEIyRyp5Hb3R_gfaw3s-jXOlg850ZzZ8RoNVSOzJFOL8ycKTNcGOfzHaZCk2vmQOLT5y6oaavfWE0ZHrLiA_pAf60/s1600-h/DSC02695.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277273096743087858" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiryirzyhe3Dgkq9LQDoZ-RIgS5ETR1wbldd57ZAk6nfSXKe71BVkAEIyRyp5Hb3R_gfaw3s-jXOlg850ZzZ8RoNVSOzJFOL8ycKTNcGOfzHaZCk2vmQOLT5y6oaavfWE0ZHrLiA_pAf60/s320/DSC02695.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMyUR22BKpOFpHyFgkgsUSfLoDGwNhAu_D0uBl1sBaNH5v1wY96eC1hHTAAGYyRsRMknNa8glRL8NKu8_PIx384PLgELlHcog3md3lUyCfQLfRM9FZJ_P2Und-IF6aSuq9xClQaW3JH5c/s1600-h/DSC02696.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272789059634866" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMyUR22BKpOFpHyFgkgsUSfLoDGwNhAu_D0uBl1sBaNH5v1wY96eC1hHTAAGYyRsRMknNa8glRL8NKu8_PIx384PLgELlHcog3md3lUyCfQLfRM9FZJ_P2Und-IF6aSuq9xClQaW3JH5c/s320/DSC02696.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNmjYCtLtIQBly0kx4Xrc4biQxovGs9p-LNBK1dK5BvzsPlkYAH1MsAcw_mu6RhJJuJgGeHTGu2TaexJM3YK59lY3R2SJwhhsBA5kTzV7IeWFAV2gh3YEedS1OPy_Ga5Hb6tLIwbEDz-4/s1600-h/DSC02697.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272787157942034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNmjYCtLtIQBly0kx4Xrc4biQxovGs9p-LNBK1dK5BvzsPlkYAH1MsAcw_mu6RhJJuJgGeHTGu2TaexJM3YK59lY3R2SJwhhsBA5kTzV7IeWFAV2gh3YEedS1OPy_Ga5Hb6tLIwbEDz-4/s320/DSC02697.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc554tCmsR25eANXayNSADKBXTVKDMmEqWaNVIMphD9BpZ8u7Kpz0Uec2mKMtR3L2oOUSTS_b8-PBqEklms6TtBQdwI0uHMPMD9GnGmAIWDSRObWzaUnhyphenhyphenPLBhuKGxiHdyH62vemCVeq8/s1600-h/DSC02698.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272788035466626" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc554tCmsR25eANXayNSADKBXTVKDMmEqWaNVIMphD9BpZ8u7Kpz0Uec2mKMtR3L2oOUSTS_b8-PBqEklms6TtBQdwI0uHMPMD9GnGmAIWDSRObWzaUnhyphenhyphenPLBhuKGxiHdyH62vemCVeq8/s320/DSC02698.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJoLT1iXvw3ung9aRzXs5r6t3tbR7vF0YedbVoEKOY7v-5opYuZ3mx4NWx5zO8yoUhx_8ccalg60g4Kj3_tGWV3f4ITQ-SSuydfNvwrPpJaSKkXVk5PNWWmPFrBNlkisegZgLijmxPv0o/s1600-h/DSC02700.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272781493233090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJoLT1iXvw3ung9aRzXs5r6t3tbR7vF0YedbVoEKOY7v-5opYuZ3mx4NWx5zO8yoUhx_8ccalg60g4Kj3_tGWV3f4ITQ-SSuydfNvwrPpJaSKkXVk5PNWWmPFrBNlkisegZgLijmxPv0o/s320/DSC02700.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcx6wKqe7R6YN3G972bKjn6OqBekz-_kfpm0FU_8s09XNgscsrNNJRsMP4J01EMtaZVgZbsRHFmQDI7-cVVrxA3snaP9ABxzlFQ__hGugxv0YxluDgRQ_T33FbpicxHB6SI5aHYIbd5rE/s1600-h/DSC02702.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272779065726866" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcx6wKqe7R6YN3G972bKjn6OqBekz-_kfpm0FU_8s09XNgscsrNNJRsMP4J01EMtaZVgZbsRHFmQDI7-cVVrxA3snaP9ABxzlFQ__hGugxv0YxluDgRQ_T33FbpicxHB6SI5aHYIbd5rE/s320/DSC02702.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnOYqEWz3LcL0SPJI-USnbewD-Dbtam7X7LdJj7QWwXZHg57eoi03XtXVKWy_CdtDC9t9xyoRoZg53XF4gvu9pkjxWpEKjLvl7la-8lHlruBhguwOcWhWqfLnX1IIRv5RhQqXKwIQOfSo/s1600-h/DSC02705.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272460289767522" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnOYqEWz3LcL0SPJI-USnbewD-Dbtam7X7LdJj7QWwXZHg57eoi03XtXVKWy_CdtDC9t9xyoRoZg53XF4gvu9pkjxWpEKjLvl7la-8lHlruBhguwOcWhWqfLnX1IIRv5RhQqXKwIQOfSo/s320/DSC02705.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWNCpN1mG2OFbIsNPzJDYOjfYjQvi919v9jwvemk-XFYhrbdtMKkVscWZcWU-CfClCshNGc3m7MhgK9jwgBN2Hgij4koFnLpapKnm9yJDROH0HRu5D3Uic729h3iK2CKMiJIWT3WS2iHg/s1600-h/DSC02712.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272460656812546" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWNCpN1mG2OFbIsNPzJDYOjfYjQvi919v9jwvemk-XFYhrbdtMKkVscWZcWU-CfClCshNGc3m7MhgK9jwgBN2Hgij4koFnLpapKnm9yJDROH0HRu5D3Uic729h3iK2CKMiJIWT3WS2iHg/s320/DSC02712.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDneOoJxpjkGkAbYJtpkpU0eWpCJdEXxo_KGN-Fc8PIJegqU2vVMqnjZK0KDU68dkI_kSbZtDkOat7lp2NKIyClcdnq90T_-GyR692pvoKBoZBflB0ddYIBP7CzZQrVVMgDfc3RYlBRt4/s1600-h/DSC02714.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272450027322866" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDneOoJxpjkGkAbYJtpkpU0eWpCJdEXxo_KGN-Fc8PIJegqU2vVMqnjZK0KDU68dkI_kSbZtDkOat7lp2NKIyClcdnq90T_-GyR692pvoKBoZBflB0ddYIBP7CzZQrVVMgDfc3RYlBRt4/s320/DSC02714.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNeHniFm3rod8aubJq6UMEXF893HqEo2Gsv9eINkzGZryRA3D-eVDFukryt357_J8utVtECwBMrzijCvTXb3FzNHHDLDC9kDLGPxuKRwvw8q941Qbzp5QnyjFSReiA5IC-PRHe4HThoww/s1600-h/DSC02715.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272446413344354" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNeHniFm3rod8aubJq6UMEXF893HqEo2Gsv9eINkzGZryRA3D-eVDFukryt357_J8utVtECwBMrzijCvTXb3FzNHHDLDC9kDLGPxuKRwvw8q941Qbzp5QnyjFSReiA5IC-PRHe4HThoww/s320/DSC02715.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin4xej5HhYm6SSlnLFmrbxuYYm6NNmOnBAsYv_b9Ou7dTy9XEmBZ1wEQptT-KZd6kNP_1KZyxHpFKL7in5r5HGmT15AUE50-qqhryKN7GN23DazpGtT_Dl_qg7k87L0UcIY5hJ0rEFx70/s1600-h/DSC02716.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272444835263730" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin4xej5HhYm6SSlnLFmrbxuYYm6NNmOnBAsYv_b9Ou7dTy9XEmBZ1wEQptT-KZd6kNP_1KZyxHpFKL7in5r5HGmT15AUE50-qqhryKN7GN23DazpGtT_Dl_qg7k87L0UcIY5hJ0rEFx70/s320/DSC02716.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih_-x_P0ukwwPgyvGNe2tde-V3TCU5Ma5xpx1ww57BSj9mqOTSeC8aHC6Kphg3d_QtgmiTc-GS1Zjb33OAgPYYrkZN_Iv-HG2Q07Bl9lGnoYiaImY72OnWkzhecJY3kPo0XCCR_W6N1qM/s1600-h/DSC02717.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272154851395666" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih_-x_P0ukwwPgyvGNe2tde-V3TCU5Ma5xpx1ww57BSj9mqOTSeC8aHC6Kphg3d_QtgmiTc-GS1Zjb33OAgPYYrkZN_Iv-HG2Q07Bl9lGnoYiaImY72OnWkzhecJY3kPo0XCCR_W6N1qM/s320/DSC02717.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi52StdVMVlGO2OR7j4F3OPQtbckCRFeeIeAXKh0HPWNF_6EYlaKMojSTAmBvhfBGpSkvseh91oC8PGiZRimrMBtZpWMLzD-Hr7MpSfKrxJV3X3GhWuItPSUvbzkEI6-NchrchMHtHwo-U/s1600-h/DSC02718.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272146960887314" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi52StdVMVlGO2OR7j4F3OPQtbckCRFeeIeAXKh0HPWNF_6EYlaKMojSTAmBvhfBGpSkvseh91oC8PGiZRimrMBtZpWMLzD-Hr7MpSfKrxJV3X3GhWuItPSUvbzkEI6-NchrchMHtHwo-U/s320/DSC02718.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhElsHLOYZVHxU6ZSNcXZN2Ktk8yW-F51vY1ICzDCN_s2Qv-bt_UZZ2TTlVfG8W4hfp1Ycliulzwag5OK00VA6CH6zwZ-Nk3MIdnldpHURv6L9FEpHCCZQkhW8937ZIHwmTYlBYxutDsk4/s1600-h/DSC02719.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272144953814818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhElsHLOYZVHxU6ZSNcXZN2Ktk8yW-F51vY1ICzDCN_s2Qv-bt_UZZ2TTlVfG8W4hfp1Ycliulzwag5OK00VA6CH6zwZ-Nk3MIdnldpHURv6L9FEpHCCZQkhW8937ZIHwmTYlBYxutDsk4/s320/DSC02719.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5rOGv3L3geQGtAHfdx9UDH1Fkzmy2a2FZh7hH3DYWvNeVwoy0EnCTqUv5K2OkGi05CAlim0txySQd4rz-GXh0gpQMAjD4GAkUMqF7qnSIoWKvkfmw7fqUBoBI8hzwowUwHcUbweccPyE/s1600-h/DSC02720.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272140134757778" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5rOGv3L3geQGtAHfdx9UDH1Fkzmy2a2FZh7hH3DYWvNeVwoy0EnCTqUv5K2OkGi05CAlim0txySQd4rz-GXh0gpQMAjD4GAkUMqF7qnSIoWKvkfmw7fqUBoBI8hzwowUwHcUbweccPyE/s320/DSC02720.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifj1QatqKB7pzSeCJ9ZxEPokpNdKHCiE1-HB10xWbYGNTa8nRu6mbNHCfS2B1UXI-FCWPidcFgCkSttZkBwfQQ-WDQhzwRU-yvWFYrzWteIvjtDFuTWCYYdf43wZI4QmVf4RrBRktr8MM/s1600-h/DSC02721.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277272141104187570" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifj1QatqKB7pzSeCJ9ZxEPokpNdKHCiE1-HB10xWbYGNTa8nRu6mbNHCfS2B1UXI-FCWPidcFgCkSttZkBwfQQ-WDQhzwRU-yvWFYrzWteIvjtDFuTWCYYdf43wZI4QmVf4RrBRktr8MM/s320/DSC02721.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh11l4KBTbUS5N1gHPhxodtEX62WdJF4LwNRD9qy8cJ_PYqlB8Py0JJUK9mYLd1xrDC0FEOJ7nHepBkPf109kyerKK1XyQJduCzx1ysf6xBy-YfDYTwcW9kIHz2v5RpB_GPPDrxnCLCiPI/s1600-h/DSC02723.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271903240142354" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh11l4KBTbUS5N1gHPhxodtEX62WdJF4LwNRD9qy8cJ_PYqlB8Py0JJUK9mYLd1xrDC0FEOJ7nHepBkPf109kyerKK1XyQJduCzx1ysf6xBy-YfDYTwcW9kIHz2v5RpB_GPPDrxnCLCiPI/s320/DSC02723.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwbnxO70w7yKQrFE1VRoOKJeLiybxQ7iQ1hgLWAd1Gp6x-akMQPn0VIZ-zExwBomio25cfD0o0e5egwQdf06l9L1d5QJoudYdjyUAoPigQvUdU6lU7QjwLMHCCaxQoG1lOraT0XmOgjmw/s1600-h/DSC02726.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271898614216802" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwbnxO70w7yKQrFE1VRoOKJeLiybxQ7iQ1hgLWAd1Gp6x-akMQPn0VIZ-zExwBomio25cfD0o0e5egwQdf06l9L1d5QJoudYdjyUAoPigQvUdU6lU7QjwLMHCCaxQoG1lOraT0XmOgjmw/s320/DSC02726.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkCQn5q1i621xf5MAtkk7rZ6ECvILf6e9cgTIAAXzYtdWv_eUiroOpV4PpNA-LDrDiwuyPQP-rgf2T9PHV9Fm9aE46EL37tLXcJSpZdHuefbRCn696TdlHa5bwialo97kXECDGeowPpno/s1600-h/DSC02727.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271897153702530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkCQn5q1i621xf5MAtkk7rZ6ECvILf6e9cgTIAAXzYtdWv_eUiroOpV4PpNA-LDrDiwuyPQP-rgf2T9PHV9Fm9aE46EL37tLXcJSpZdHuefbRCn696TdlHa5bwialo97kXECDGeowPpno/s320/DSC02727.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0agZdkWNPorREmzBMquP8PM5ao27Enn-JmdR28q5KfdSbcGlXX-xNA7G0SAnPMt-8OS9fagg2GKpViIL-mbaRqzpKmhyphenhyphenBis7NZ9-0PA3Eb4Kp1crdRrbkCicjgYwWwPa7A72WscEYHfk/s1600-h/DSC02728.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271889092366738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0agZdkWNPorREmzBMquP8PM5ao27Enn-JmdR28q5KfdSbcGlXX-xNA7G0SAnPMt-8OS9fagg2GKpViIL-mbaRqzpKmhyphenhyphenBis7NZ9-0PA3Eb4Kp1crdRrbkCicjgYwWwPa7A72WscEYHfk/s320/DSC02728.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoR5FgvhjYHlMzmN3mgxe9Cde2RUpOgBC3anSPnnAzTR-41rEhROI9N2lKr6E10b-qZwBoL2nLmZxNwou-4ywZuJDPYCCW6tm1Dhz7_Rphc-32fFhLsg7NU-tbeH-JX-WwjazHgrBpxZc/s1600-h/DSC02729.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271890336908050" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoR5FgvhjYHlMzmN3mgxe9Cde2RUpOgBC3anSPnnAzTR-41rEhROI9N2lKr6E10b-qZwBoL2nLmZxNwou-4ywZuJDPYCCW6tm1Dhz7_Rphc-32fFhLsg7NU-tbeH-JX-WwjazHgrBpxZc/s320/DSC02729.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMkMwixvxyHAycZACtaNqZR3dDAbRxgz-Zu42Hb03Jx3jh4IG5p_FKDuQYhdS-lmIspuos4C699NSWGDqS4plZSLRZuXmcFTPf2cVVHDNNgHEXuFbTIrIWsFaoFf7CdcSzLkRoSePQtOc/s1600-h/DSC02729.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271635950782434" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMkMwixvxyHAycZACtaNqZR3dDAbRxgz-Zu42Hb03Jx3jh4IG5p_FKDuQYhdS-lmIspuos4C699NSWGDqS4plZSLRZuXmcFTPf2cVVHDNNgHEXuFbTIrIWsFaoFf7CdcSzLkRoSePQtOc/s320/DSC02729.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr-pzE_daHsRRN8G9xE6PLxWDa-nVOv1hJNrx2UzlBj_vR79tJKrDwPbekt5vcMZtwIQcgXkk0Oe0xE91qf_Z10LM1XtTnek3pbeZZBaKNVYyg-B9J-hpCfUprWovCexaDdssWu4bg-Jo/s1600-h/DSC02730.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271624677316514" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr-pzE_daHsRRN8G9xE6PLxWDa-nVOv1hJNrx2UzlBj_vR79tJKrDwPbekt5vcMZtwIQcgXkk0Oe0xE91qf_Z10LM1XtTnek3pbeZZBaKNVYyg-B9J-hpCfUprWovCexaDdssWu4bg-Jo/s320/DSC02730.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYGgobJ6__oYWh_awFigy7Kacr3z6IIHz-EeUBdJzVzsism_bT-7dlVqh28b-z0pAHMdcprGKuCzrIf5yQKzewKHX6TWJ_-NOV5bhzFFbzhIUdsTsf2L0onl-IHc36ybpJT_JKh2huViw/s1600-h/DSC02731.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271571947799794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYGgobJ6__oYWh_awFigy7Kacr3z6IIHz-EeUBdJzVzsism_bT-7dlVqh28b-z0pAHMdcprGKuCzrIf5yQKzewKHX6TWJ_-NOV5bhzFFbzhIUdsTsf2L0onl-IHc36ybpJT_JKh2huViw/s320/DSC02731.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9vtCrXAbEuLOXV4I8FfpaJqxlLFi_TvraOOOgJ9dx-lkAJPDwyw90fUSQa_VLYag0Gir4k45m6uT83NBDA9WnGd8-hbWSPNfle7qlbOWwXmlMj6p_7FD0TIgG4AvZxUfJtxnklJ4Dkdg/s1600-h/DSC02732.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271570574630322" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9vtCrXAbEuLOXV4I8FfpaJqxlLFi_TvraOOOgJ9dx-lkAJPDwyw90fUSQa_VLYag0Gir4k45m6uT83NBDA9WnGd8-hbWSPNfle7qlbOWwXmlMj6p_7FD0TIgG4AvZxUfJtxnklJ4Dkdg/s320/DSC02732.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSPJtBnF22wCESYFAMf7-l7ti69mYpjaUE8dSKyUmh4K89k2d6GqcglxmQbWkkWBn0bTQUzfe4gEvJY58oGByI5Mf-T5dUAbVWfe77nGVQHj6_a7wnaGewrRG6Qqwp-RZXPU96qWI-V0s/s1600-h/DSC02733.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271563970230930" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSPJtBnF22wCESYFAMf7-l7ti69mYpjaUE8dSKyUmh4K89k2d6GqcglxmQbWkkWBn0bTQUzfe4gEvJY58oGByI5Mf-T5dUAbVWfe77nGVQHj6_a7wnaGewrRG6Qqwp-RZXPU96qWI-V0s/s320/DSC02733.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw7NPgyW46Ejz5i8ZKYNBfajdAEQb2-2yluov52Kcs0t-OSPGzC_HvHIFIWp-mgk_BKjVbPqohUlaoJhEh4G6Jh4XIBvnCc6r3E9LpKlXgB9BjjlQTvPT5-IulFym8cBfDoSRUVjxihIc/s1600-h/DSC02734.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271293915670770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw7NPgyW46Ejz5i8ZKYNBfajdAEQb2-2yluov52Kcs0t-OSPGzC_HvHIFIWp-mgk_BKjVbPqohUlaoJhEh4G6Jh4XIBvnCc6r3E9LpKlXgB9BjjlQTvPT5-IulFym8cBfDoSRUVjxihIc/s320/DSC02734.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM96veQgUJxI5pfaYRbcBIN8X7bKPfFIGseQMhM-_1cFKnbUh0Fz2pqSZOsXidLwq4Nxu5CPoY2Jhpmgb_XQPGi_4iT7MG6hN3I3kTYi6_XU19EnA0fd4f2FZGuKUjqwu0imZwT6p2UuE/s1600-h/DSC02735.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271290008704386" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM96veQgUJxI5pfaYRbcBIN8X7bKPfFIGseQMhM-_1cFKnbUh0Fz2pqSZOsXidLwq4Nxu5CPoY2Jhpmgb_XQPGi_4iT7MG6hN3I3kTYi6_XU19EnA0fd4f2FZGuKUjqwu0imZwT6p2UuE/s320/DSC02735.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOHsiuyNUPbbiciXGATsEwIRMWD3wP8l1ioTZ2pncrPi2ifOsCZuNfU6T8_JjOoHLoLncmubfyKkOhf964UGWM67M-qm2Oe5VpqhF8HNGQDvMaM-LfBsVA5OiqGXKwdnuMi4_1mHpYUa8/s1600-h/DSC02737.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271288050405746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOHsiuyNUPbbiciXGATsEwIRMWD3wP8l1ioTZ2pncrPi2ifOsCZuNfU6T8_JjOoHLoLncmubfyKkOhf964UGWM67M-qm2Oe5VpqhF8HNGQDvMaM-LfBsVA5OiqGXKwdnuMi4_1mHpYUa8/s320/DSC02737.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwIQx1AiolkCSVh9Dt5WO1GR41r9iHG-f5mzL51c7mBC7zgpTKbZ83fmMRz0YHkZwEGOyiYjiX7gK8PHczRsDeLD8VVqga6DobFyFvo4qshE2p4iKDFSEBAURVRU4Z3s9JJ7R7wulS3rw/s1600-h/DSC02739.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271284675917010" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwIQx1AiolkCSVh9Dt5WO1GR41r9iHG-f5mzL51c7mBC7zgpTKbZ83fmMRz0YHkZwEGOyiYjiX7gK8PHczRsDeLD8VVqga6DobFyFvo4qshE2p4iKDFSEBAURVRU4Z3s9JJ7R7wulS3rw/s320/DSC02739.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwAuqzTjYXkxSq_bHru9m1-N6enj9qGBy4ps9oMDHxiTVPggW7vv9SshDknUMCa4f4yhzicvLsWf-q7vuvqPpIziQ3lXlvMdxTyhTf9r8XD6q6QpWBUmM_SIE0GLkZRqNIKD__xfXwL9U/s1600-h/DSC02740.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277271276255326834" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwAuqzTjYXkxSq_bHru9m1-N6enj9qGBy4ps9oMDHxiTVPggW7vv9SshDknUMCa4f4yhzicvLsWf-q7vuvqPpIziQ3lXlvMdxTyhTf9r8XD6q6QpWBUmM_SIE0GLkZRqNIKD__xfXwL9U/s320/DSC02740.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1xS3TuUxakzQl-bnUTRwN2aDL93xlbJZ7GiWnc0O4OqcNKCwuHg4kHUPJhbqrfLyyWJuAEgofG6FsB27bXxx7sAu4P94nxj6wh0U4GxJNMSLAOyaxR0otUMQ7G3jZM2OJoimYOuzAjdU/s1600-h/DSC02741.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270983780806146" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1xS3TuUxakzQl-bnUTRwN2aDL93xlbJZ7GiWnc0O4OqcNKCwuHg4kHUPJhbqrfLyyWJuAEgofG6FsB27bXxx7sAu4P94nxj6wh0U4GxJNMSLAOyaxR0otUMQ7G3jZM2OJoimYOuzAjdU/s320/DSC02741.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvL93CNBrhIADib5xVs1-9ribav3J4wYoJUgl_Ds43rgUs5-8jKf_SsZYLcA0EUE5bwFudcBAt67QCGrS-VQGTkcU8jONyzrWSPrFEDG70HbfhhqUNDVnvhBb9DQmQQ6JD7Ya-lqH_Qpg/s1600-h/DSC02742.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270975364580658" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvL93CNBrhIADib5xVs1-9ribav3J4wYoJUgl_Ds43rgUs5-8jKf_SsZYLcA0EUE5bwFudcBAt67QCGrS-VQGTkcU8jONyzrWSPrFEDG70HbfhhqUNDVnvhBb9DQmQQ6JD7Ya-lqH_Qpg/s320/DSC02742.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ5s9HRfXvWKBrY9IQFnHIuzPTMgXByCjZDRnWcRauS2AFqZ88W0gCVOd81MIr5G68MOoCxL-PhlOq4YXqjr-qZ1jKVTzz9zgGd7hp6DenVKRChbg4_9Wyws7YDo9B4Rm3wt12riz3WBo/s1600-h/DSC02744.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270971308005218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ5s9HRfXvWKBrY9IQFnHIuzPTMgXByCjZDRnWcRauS2AFqZ88W0gCVOd81MIr5G68MOoCxL-PhlOq4YXqjr-qZ1jKVTzz9zgGd7hp6DenVKRChbg4_9Wyws7YDo9B4Rm3wt12riz3WBo/s320/DSC02744.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdSFmmfskRMgYAWTpez0LluznMEyEwAFjGVaK9ZGee6d4G-arHiLvlglMbT78G_yEyZzGr8eHaL5hDGYpwYCA7EJUSbheja0KJxXmTT4PMJjXW5u4bZFdlDEkfBDvIhIiUiR7wf0LtJP8/s1600-h/DSC02745.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270964699507762" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdSFmmfskRMgYAWTpez0LluznMEyEwAFjGVaK9ZGee6d4G-arHiLvlglMbT78G_yEyZzGr8eHaL5hDGYpwYCA7EJUSbheja0KJxXmTT4PMJjXW5u4bZFdlDEkfBDvIhIiUiR7wf0LtJP8/s320/DSC02745.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBiuvP6cj_pwXUtKlnmQuyIwJzmoaiSZ4OErlOAb2uVcKSNj8UEV6EIxRM2TlT0TkZYcGWw2eYi8bzM9z3-9n-qdBzA8WlteR7HxXQ0h4lHKFlCwQTD63JUApQjIr43xRKNZVuscc_mYU/s1600-h/DSC02746.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270960397355362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBiuvP6cj_pwXUtKlnmQuyIwJzmoaiSZ4OErlOAb2uVcKSNj8UEV6EIxRM2TlT0TkZYcGWw2eYi8bzM9z3-9n-qdBzA8WlteR7HxXQ0h4lHKFlCwQTD63JUApQjIr43xRKNZVuscc_mYU/s320/DSC02746.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhex0FXDnm0oWliDsP0OK_-bhaZLe2irt9GyxY-qoQ1-ss4nt5g6ZsSVvtO78uQwVIwiQkaX5_blgidHjPEQVC-wvDymzNLPESo-yrYmh4YELuqqnYa-p_3jucpoW2rxeLaw5CpIbWw3Kw/s1600-h/DSC02747.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270602448266178" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhex0FXDnm0oWliDsP0OK_-bhaZLe2irt9GyxY-qoQ1-ss4nt5g6ZsSVvtO78uQwVIwiQkaX5_blgidHjPEQVC-wvDymzNLPESo-yrYmh4YELuqqnYa-p_3jucpoW2rxeLaw5CpIbWw3Kw/s320/DSC02747.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWqlEFHXYTbPegmm22kJJnHNNXxbIP5roazfd8Ji20Nk36mZZoorzKCFUXzOhimQrNhYNc0vdn_BxrbABRQcSUrNDLE1HgpiI_PV1nZ3xw_zZYtHPvdIizz9gPvyhxMxm-IYRYPjSgl30/s1600-h/DSC02748.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270598975667538" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWqlEFHXYTbPegmm22kJJnHNNXxbIP5roazfd8Ji20Nk36mZZoorzKCFUXzOhimQrNhYNc0vdn_BxrbABRQcSUrNDLE1HgpiI_PV1nZ3xw_zZYtHPvdIizz9gPvyhxMxm-IYRYPjSgl30/s320/DSC02748.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYfKQyptMrNTdljhhxVH-noibIiYfiSqqFGdHVSKaqvF34uaBfnW0_ai9DYURFeojIj2tJagQbiPoW9zJKSjKGT3DRRx-TUkWU-2OlVks90xSApVE4Up5wQ7D9kNAa06GUNNWDb4qfhG8/s1600-h/DSC02750.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270596895167634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYfKQyptMrNTdljhhxVH-noibIiYfiSqqFGdHVSKaqvF34uaBfnW0_ai9DYURFeojIj2tJagQbiPoW9zJKSjKGT3DRRx-TUkWU-2OlVks90xSApVE4Up5wQ7D9kNAa06GUNNWDb4qfhG8/s320/DSC02750.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLo3DonBr2rdTLEIC4SQKOg806QbwxfwBfkuEKCwE7tukTj_BjXEd4qarM-Oa6q33iYF0wCRn7aTk6RD63wAv95YZRivq4xxdhmmkhZjfYM-uFurDvV4NjzZawXiwRbokGf4cOd0_uyks/s1600-h/DSC02754.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270591557445426" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLo3DonBr2rdTLEIC4SQKOg806QbwxfwBfkuEKCwE7tukTj_BjXEd4qarM-Oa6q33iYF0wCRn7aTk6RD63wAv95YZRivq4xxdhmmkhZjfYM-uFurDvV4NjzZawXiwRbokGf4cOd0_uyks/s320/DSC02754.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrifLbokRSm916O1qcu4p_1LvZaX7wwe_KSahLEk_0uFR-di-QHNWNIKqmwdXH2JtHbikF0D3Dehw6NhaqRtJfjK0prqLWqzfiDGYPUGbkAdMqChji8-xbpkV_VzYIoxUlnzPTZSwwu6o/s1600-h/DSC02755.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270586877556370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrifLbokRSm916O1qcu4p_1LvZaX7wwe_KSahLEk_0uFR-di-QHNWNIKqmwdXH2JtHbikF0D3Dehw6NhaqRtJfjK0prqLWqzfiDGYPUGbkAdMqChji8-xbpkV_VzYIoxUlnzPTZSwwu6o/s320/DSC02755.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs9PvDOYJCh2lPUy_udcmRJ1sa_x1RpLq467tqLl365VC3bSQpdKz7G2hzCzVmxxAze70jktu2xsdfJGcwrljxzNsOmdVs7bXMrM86fX7D62K19CebxgIAjoElk1CPgvXDarnsc78todw/s1600-h/DSC02756.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270283335254290" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs9PvDOYJCh2lPUy_udcmRJ1sa_x1RpLq467tqLl365VC3bSQpdKz7G2hzCzVmxxAze70jktu2xsdfJGcwrljxzNsOmdVs7bXMrM86fX7D62K19CebxgIAjoElk1CPgvXDarnsc78todw/s320/DSC02756.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRjjPy2dDPNvwiNnDNwH51VUC6vXQcYnC4n2kytvyVCHIDci-QbMtJpGh6uX6cB14CpaYXCaz5WFCQphit2qy508TxU9_wUyrEf900vcStZe5nVCAoBaLaK2D19-fFhX4rJNST_JQDpvg/s1600-h/DSC02757.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270281728852450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRjjPy2dDPNvwiNnDNwH51VUC6vXQcYnC4n2kytvyVCHIDci-QbMtJpGh6uX6cB14CpaYXCaz5WFCQphit2qy508TxU9_wUyrEf900vcStZe5nVCAoBaLaK2D19-fFhX4rJNST_JQDpvg/s320/DSC02757.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM2Q3vKmcxYX2E1FcZKU6vDsmJkIGUx4extC3KM9lCVfCRIBdvUzuGulQh7ztL8ij31bbiYi-Ce5cYs2AX4JafDZqXEH-0XaadlxueLriIc9iPrERUFSWO4bHrzcnEECQ8NUH6iyErecc/s1600-h/DSC02758.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270276410801986" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM2Q3vKmcxYX2E1FcZKU6vDsmJkIGUx4extC3KM9lCVfCRIBdvUzuGulQh7ztL8ij31bbiYi-Ce5cYs2AX4JafDZqXEH-0XaadlxueLriIc9iPrERUFSWO4bHrzcnEECQ8NUH6iyErecc/s320/DSC02758.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5WSxAkK1pda5IiF2WEi6wce7wK-1lkJEjEqNZB4HzojtfB5c0NJxttaLIsSJn4o_X0nuz6LdTCzY93V8c2v4zOlKTbgJH-1nLWhKZHSw-cleJ71zH48LZErwa1KAH6cPutKhIDhpZUOE/s1600-h/DSC02759.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270277998590450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5WSxAkK1pda5IiF2WEi6wce7wK-1lkJEjEqNZB4HzojtfB5c0NJxttaLIsSJn4o_X0nuz6LdTCzY93V8c2v4zOlKTbgJH-1nLWhKZHSw-cleJ71zH48LZErwa1KAH6cPutKhIDhpZUOE/s320/DSC02759.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQqX5DlzIvCeyaw5VUlRIndUYsO1iVwIXCCqrZz_rZP8WQkVvSxqrYtKgpjVh711fTnnu0i-13ShaJISTR3V4UBfjVks5Ycb3qPKM6bdpMYYc-UDmH2FFKfgCQ71LKJlEsml6FMBkdI5s/s1600-h/DSC02760.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270273886456130" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQqX5DlzIvCeyaw5VUlRIndUYsO1iVwIXCCqrZz_rZP8WQkVvSxqrYtKgpjVh711fTnnu0i-13ShaJISTR3V4UBfjVks5Ycb3qPKM6bdpMYYc-UDmH2FFKfgCQ71LKJlEsml6FMBkdI5s/s320/DSC02760.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSq_YFS7Aa8YN1BeiwJlxx40tOiyBtuOKp4N7eo5kWuQK3Bd_Rb0e_n3YqTt4vcyKsm67T4uhpL6ziA6YJp5zjHNno-kUKokgM7UI4Iyy6yxcuf1hZqckAmNQUdcnQJpieJL2DLl9VhCI/s1600-h/DSC02761.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270034852928450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSq_YFS7Aa8YN1BeiwJlxx40tOiyBtuOKp4N7eo5kWuQK3Bd_Rb0e_n3YqTt4vcyKsm67T4uhpL6ziA6YJp5zjHNno-kUKokgM7UI4Iyy6yxcuf1hZqckAmNQUdcnQJpieJL2DLl9VhCI/s320/DSC02761.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9hKRNeJuQxFYczXkuxgAchY2l1MF2CBo-G-o_sLUVN3ilCEpj5nPcyRftohS9hTRlDrOuQ3HqzApSKurNR63c1TNif6XYxLFn60l00krnes9IOXZrW9K832pztGbH5CLh5s6aIaWIRWc/s1600-h/DSC02763.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270028803385106" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9hKRNeJuQxFYczXkuxgAchY2l1MF2CBo-G-o_sLUVN3ilCEpj5nPcyRftohS9hTRlDrOuQ3HqzApSKurNR63c1TNif6XYxLFn60l00krnes9IOXZrW9K832pztGbH5CLh5s6aIaWIRWc/s320/DSC02763.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioMfS-tLgnZItvkrJ2mHk6gVL1XN8nK4Gqw9R5GV9OesvejR8cSGvrChau2VmFGvkpUYSxW2i2GJoIcy9Y3jvRyjI2zZ2HQj7IUO1xmxr-aDwLjTVs1sCe1Y6aRc8egPDaWRFRyOiA_co/s1600-h/DSC02764.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270021375593938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioMfS-tLgnZItvkrJ2mHk6gVL1XN8nK4Gqw9R5GV9OesvejR8cSGvrChau2VmFGvkpUYSxW2i2GJoIcy9Y3jvRyjI2zZ2HQj7IUO1xmxr-aDwLjTVs1sCe1Y6aRc8egPDaWRFRyOiA_co/s320/DSC02764.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUAGD8wrXbowQ9jqy7ee35sqkaWhmyrVogX1eDnXd4fzvD_oTOk6XTEPIT2Efy7bLUSbGj3W4lpmn46IPKI5T1B4exjipQSCXYO7pdSPWLto98qVAOH-zqGXa6t4hNU8dG6FqOi8Fl-DM/s1600-h/DSC02765.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270011233020850" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUAGD8wrXbowQ9jqy7ee35sqkaWhmyrVogX1eDnXd4fzvD_oTOk6XTEPIT2Efy7bLUSbGj3W4lpmn46IPKI5T1B4exjipQSCXYO7pdSPWLto98qVAOH-zqGXa6t4hNU8dG6FqOi8Fl-DM/s320/DSC02765.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh7jvy-hfAxapAfWJR960FVJEMk4tXrOv-i_f13Tia1FDJkKTSuEYiZwX3l86EG6Ravu-AI2vPwmb_Ja_TkGefjlertgWEvV90Dvp1r8LgUOko_hZUZQHWLMwiSSfjhEleNQmrVRvIUP0/s1600-h/DSC02767.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277270012798493378" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh7jvy-hfAxapAfWJR960FVJEMk4tXrOv-i_f13Tia1FDJkKTSuEYiZwX3l86EG6Ravu-AI2vPwmb_Ja_TkGefjlertgWEvV90Dvp1r8LgUOko_hZUZQHWLMwiSSfjhEleNQmrVRvIUP0/s320/DSC02767.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTJomtOG2jb-dzwfINXhC6WDQzHXKVeOv9_FBnUqno-6DLlbBuRdDnIpG9DQuwaHh4I2PUh2kqDCpbTgSbVWKqklDOjzzpqjoUDzxmQMxBKmfmSIeU_BolWOEAlu2w2K77N7Yjm061eiw/s1600-h/DSC02768.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277269615788133586" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTJomtOG2jb-dzwfINXhC6WDQzHXKVeOv9_FBnUqno-6DLlbBuRdDnIpG9DQuwaHh4I2PUh2kqDCpbTgSbVWKqklDOjzzpqjoUDzxmQMxBKmfmSIeU_BolWOEAlu2w2K77N7Yjm061eiw/s320/DSC02768.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJBQMSppbjO-bp0jAYh3yupync99ojLnPc1jy3sZ52leRn8PkaZpntZM2fW_pFofsg9I5rT5vLPWk7o8elNrWyCrtG7mKuQ9Xau7nVvuje35yUZsWMzTD49gPDyKe3yNDk0njP0gHaVbs/s1600-h/DSC02769.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277269615403505650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJBQMSppbjO-bp0jAYh3yupync99ojLnPc1jy3sZ52leRn8PkaZpntZM2fW_pFofsg9I5rT5vLPWk7o8elNrWyCrtG7mKuQ9Xau7nVvuje35yUZsWMzTD49gPDyKe3yNDk0njP0gHaVbs/s320/DSC02769.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWE7uMg3w2xZ6DmGa9dCzRCmyEMYm24PO9gkR0O1BTPm8HxT_DGLsr9wUqCvf1T3yyf7WaHeyMHrLYne74BBv89vFFQKUCFKcnTRtiGgRk5qe2-Y3mPBBVmJAxb_EGeKqfEiLOjGjE5WU/s1600-h/DSC02770.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277269610235704370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWE7uMg3w2xZ6DmGa9dCzRCmyEMYm24PO9gkR0O1BTPm8HxT_DGLsr9wUqCvf1T3yyf7WaHeyMHrLYne74BBv89vFFQKUCFKcnTRtiGgRk5qe2-Y3mPBBVmJAxb_EGeKqfEiLOjGjE5WU/s320/DSC02770.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir8Ml-NVeDnW6hZl320XMOzB-pQqaEYTbk3fqKWUvhlQzbNvX-8TblxD_MJDYHH75oxlUqK04hEWvxYX0lIObWdr0p5XjW_jgrPIuAK8vBqSbhyphenhyphenW9Vt3KFZBacqpaBX0Jwlf4gnAQ6wzY/s1600-h/DSC02771.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277269611597295298" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir8Ml-NVeDnW6hZl320XMOzB-pQqaEYTbk3fqKWUvhlQzbNvX-8TblxD_MJDYHH75oxlUqK04hEWvxYX0lIObWdr0p5XjW_jgrPIuAK8vBqSbhyphenhyphenW9Vt3KFZBacqpaBX0Jwlf4gnAQ6wzY/s320/DSC02771.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKXUualcmfgex6SlGhASaryYT4Np61QAaqokrpshy94LqTL8hp9N4hyphenhyphenLIIfgVGD3clE-jMyeTI6oLltzgDRv6vc2PBFEFlqFLJby-EZ8ZvM-WBBFoqHvtQsIY4nE4kBpZKkTLyAfQH2m4/s1600-h/DSC02772.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277269606283670370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKXUualcmfgex6SlGhASaryYT4Np61QAaqokrpshy94LqTL8hp9N4hyphenhyphenLIIfgVGD3clE-jMyeTI6oLltzgDRv6vc2PBFEFlqFLJby-EZ8ZvM-WBBFoqHvtQsIY4nE4kBpZKkTLyAfQH2m4/s320/DSC02772.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-vlmTGuH2WQo6X00buKdgjE72C5h_MhfloxQrJlnkG49cE_nP50E0dyn9E3_z_bt11oA5MRSihSiwfIszd0QkKFguMomW-MSYdM6BB2oySvLhV9sinBUx6d-sbZOakoeOxJ-NjjUvmVQ/s1600-h/DSC02773.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277269318527500082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-vlmTGuH2WQo6X00buKdgjE72C5h_MhfloxQrJlnkG49cE_nP50E0dyn9E3_z_bt11oA5MRSihSiwfIszd0QkKFguMomW-MSYdM6BB2oySvLhV9sinBUx6d-sbZOakoeOxJ-NjjUvmVQ/s320/DSC02773.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCsbmiflcteAPZDIUUamOASh2mrEFTEXoWMepW1cRy3Lba2aW8RtYlSktXmHZ9-cT9Wtsul7cTXSnZJ0cmU488mJPNuNwAr3_aeFmqOQRpBxzhR7ZMvwh6Aazllhyphenhyphen_cFsDPFaEPNkEyx0/s1600-h/DSC02775.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277269319675376786" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCsbmiflcteAPZDIUUamOASh2mrEFTEXoWMepW1cRy3Lba2aW8RtYlSktXmHZ9-cT9Wtsul7cTXSnZJ0cmU488mJPNuNwAr3_aeFmqOQRpBxzhR7ZMvwh6Aazllhyphenhyphen_cFsDPFaEPNkEyx0/s320/DSC02775.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTGZmdhOcD_8LY3GW07GKeE96gZVB0VDlFhfHuPeEAeHzVp5DNMqnF6kUF-0nSkgSRNSH2_11ferz01b7V1_Ab5a-mILkS5f1P7YLJqXQvA2_64qV0b0sqnkE_02nMwCkb0XzHFEv_LTw/s1600-h/DSC02776.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277269315523652082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTGZmdhOcD_8LY3GW07GKeE96gZVB0VDlFhfHuPeEAeHzVp5DNMqnF6kUF-0nSkgSRNSH2_11ferz01b7V1_Ab5a-mILkS5f1P7YLJqXQvA2_64qV0b0sqnkE_02nMwCkb0XzHFEv_LTw/s320/DSC02776.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWikVh9UjBHLPrQJfCWmW_vqXSOH_hsiKYglQl3kdTtgAtemBFEN7zZcXc_CrCXkjNtmMfvj6dgmLCZiI5IQm7qIISIgeAKfYMh_7HB7-Ew4TsQ2DypsX3M6c_gslLJK_qXi1QCjrfG4U/s1600-h/DSC02781.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277269308350329906" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWikVh9UjBHLPrQJfCWmW_vqXSOH_hsiKYglQl3kdTtgAtemBFEN7zZcXc_CrCXkjNtmMfvj6dgmLCZiI5IQm7qIISIgeAKfYMh_7HB7-Ew4TsQ2DypsX3M6c_gslLJK_qXi1QCjrfG4U/s320/DSC02781.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ_pgZqVvICYGlob9oGgglPezxem_ZgpVCYzuWfT8Z8BpbpsVzyU_jwa_qvpSeVxzZINi0N3Sh0tVoVK-jEV9qGrf7gldT39LaEgT6UgwaBbAOzJrLiNOC3Kyf9EpVOovCsVasbuL1PyY/s1600-h/DSC02784.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277269307488049458" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 231px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ_pgZqVvICYGlob9oGgglPezxem_ZgpVCYzuWfT8Z8BpbpsVzyU_jwa_qvpSeVxzZINi0N3Sh0tVoVK-jEV9qGrf7gldT39LaEgT6UgwaBbAOzJrLiNOC3Kyf9EpVOovCsVasbuL1PyY/s320/DSC02784.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong>Britain finds foul-mouthed chefs a little too salty<br /></strong>By Eric Pfanner<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />PARIS: During a recent episode of "Jamie's Ministry of Food," the British television chef Jamie Oliver let fly with a four-letter word and its variations 23 times in 50 minutes. Nary a "bleep" was heard.<br />A tolerance for foul-mouthed television chefs and talk-show hosts is one of those little things that used to separate Britain from an America riven by culture wars. But after several unusually saucy broadcasts, even the British seem to be having second thoughts about the language that goes out over their airwaves.<br />A lobbying group called Mediawatch-UK last month started a petition calling on the government to "stop the use of unnecessary swearing and bad language" on television and in the movies.<br />"The language we hear on television is damaging our language, our culture, our educational system," said John Beyer, director of Mediawatch-UK. "If they were to do something about that, it would have benefits across the board."<br />Beyer introduced the petition after the BBC Trust, which oversees the BBC, rebuked the broadcaster over a television talk show in which the host, Jonathan Ross, used a four-letter word in a sexual reference to a guest, the actress Gwyneth Paltrow.<br />In another case cited by the BBC Trust, Ross and another host, Russell Brand, left messages on a retired actor's telephone answering machine during a radio show, saying Brand had slept with the actor's granddaughter. Their language, of course, was slightly more colorful than that.<br />This year, Ofcom, the British media regulator, reprimanded the BBC for failing to stop Madonna, Phil Collins and other musicians from swearing during broadcasts of the Live Earth concert.<br />This summer, the BBC embarked on a review of its editorial guidelines, which deal with matters like language. Even before the new guidelines are put in place, the BBC has been moving to curb the use of four-letter words, according to Jana Bennett, the BBC director of vision, a job that includes overseeing the broadcaster's television channels.<br />"We have actually been pushing back a bit on language," she was reported as saying at a conference last month. "It is possible that some language alienates some audiences unnecessarily."<br />Because it relies on public money for most of its funding, the BBC has to pay close attention to public opinion, even when outrage is whipped up by tabloid newspapers, as has been the case over swearing.<br />Bennett's comments followed similar remarks by Michael Grade, the chairman of ITV, the biggest commercial television company in Britain, who complained last month that swearing on television had become "rather indiscriminate."<br />But another British broadcaster, Channel 4, is having none of that kind of talk. The channel, which features Oliver and another chef with a salty tongue, Gordon Ramsay, "strives to reflect the reality of life and society in its programs, and strong language is frequently part of that reality," a spokesman said.<br />"We judge each program individually, but strong and potentially offensive language will continue to feature in our programs where we consider the context justifies its use and the program is responsibly scheduled," said the spokesman, who declined to be named because of company policy.<br />Ofcom can fine the BBC up to £250,000, or $367,000, and other broadcasters up to 5 percent of their revenue, for violations of its broadcasting code. The code says "the most offensive language" must not be broadcast before 9 p.m., when children are most likely to be watching.<br />Even after 9 p.m., when television chefs heat up their kitchens, strong language must be justified by the context, according to the code.<br />Unlike the Federal Communications Commission in the United States, which has gone to the Supreme Court to try to stamp out swearing on broadcast television, Ofcom makes no distinction between over-the-air TV and cable or satellite transmission, where American channels have more linguistic leeway. Last spring, MTV was fined £255,000 in Britain because of profanity in music videos and other programming that, like Live Earth, was shown before 9 p.m.<br />One challenge for broadcasters and regulators is to determine what words are considered offensive. The FCC has been helped in this regard by the late comedian George Carlin, whose routine about seven dirty words formed the basis of a 1978 Supreme Court decision that has allowed the commission to try to keep swearing off the American airwaves.<br />The FCC has gone back to the Supreme Court in a case against the Fox television network over the use of "fleeting expletives" that creep into broadcasts.<br />In Britain, there is no pithy equivalent to Carlin's summation. In fact, it took Ofcom 87 pages to write up the results of a 2005 investigation into the matter.<br />In the study, focus groups were shown clips that included epithets with sexual, excretory, religious, ethnic and other connotations, and asked for their opinions.<br />Bennett, in her comments at the media festival, shed some light on the BBC's thinking with regard to the degree of offensiveness of certain swear words.<br />Any on-air use of a notorious four-letter word, she said, required her personal clearance. The heads of individual BBC channels, however, are permitted to approve the use of off-color words.<br />Beyer, at Mediawatch, said regulators ought to make it simple and ban swearing outright.<br />"The only way to do it is to publish a list and say, these words should not be used on television," Beyer said. "No matter how illiberal that sounds, that's the best way to do it."<br />Another media watchdog, Richard Lindley, chairman of a group called Voice of the Listener and Viewer, said an outright ban would be a step too far, though he, too, expressed concern about the amount of swearing on British television.<br />"I don't see why some television chef has to swear his way through his entire show," he said.<br />"But we don't want to go back to the days of World War II feature films where you went 90 minutes without hearing the word 'damn."'<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/swear.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/swear.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div><br />Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/"><strong>Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment</strong> </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-7546151115313192292008-12-07T05:50:00.017+01:002008-12-07T06:52:42.789+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Saturday, 6th December 2008<strong></strong><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>0401</strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnninFduSmWo6nAPT2iNCzQgEUFAtdlfJ89H6Hop_GVEvDXDy-cH130Yw1CTv-q1zTHvx790rUk1NlI_aUMnyswhnaW-61qXPZlwvlY6YoclbnQfEEfrcJKLJTz94MNvuR8A79nhO0rZ8/s1600-h/DSC02626.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908826396894962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnninFduSmWo6nAPT2iNCzQgEUFAtdlfJ89H6Hop_GVEvDXDy-cH130Yw1CTv-q1zTHvx790rUk1NlI_aUMnyswhnaW-61qXPZlwvlY6YoclbnQfEEfrcJKLJTz94MNvuR8A79nhO0rZ8/s320/DSC02626.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgIMxPN3Ryrvi26Z7TcvWCcgV20Lo5X6PuShq83fBx2xiqmQjtfdSEDw76Edrku2wxchB_ukAbgHsTryJWtdkqsQZBayrh3WpgytPa2kFCrzVGABaKUf3DfNm6u44W_VkBNbIossWGOq4/s1600-h/DSC02627.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908821592549394" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgIMxPN3Ryrvi26Z7TcvWCcgV20Lo5X6PuShq83fBx2xiqmQjtfdSEDw76Edrku2wxchB_ukAbgHsTryJWtdkqsQZBayrh3WpgytPa2kFCrzVGABaKUf3DfNm6u44W_VkBNbIossWGOq4/s320/DSC02627.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="left"><strong>Muslim pilgrims retrace prophet's path as haj starts<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Saturday, December 6, 2008<br />By Inal Ersan<br />More than two million Muslims began the haj pilgrimage Saturday, heading to a tent camp outside the holy city of Mecca to follow the route Prophet Mohammad took 14 centuries ago.<br />Over the past week, a sea of worshipers swept into Mecca, where authorities have mounted a vast security operation to avert any militant attacks, deadly stampedes or political activities that could embarrass Saudi Arabia.<br />"It's a bit like drinking from the sea -- no matter how much you drink your thirst is never quenched. That's why I come over and over again," said Hassan al-Sayed, an Egyptian pilgrim.<br />Some pilgrims walked, carrying their bags, while others took buses moving slowly through the crowds to the Mina area east of Mecca. Men were dressed in simple white robes, marking a state of ihram, or ritual purity.<br />"It's a beautiful feeling, very beautiful, especially when you see the Kaaba," said a Moroccan woman called Sanna after visiting the ancient cubic shrine at the centre of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. "I hope I can return again, with God's help."<br />Late Saturday pilgrims on foot, in buses and some in wheelchairs head to Mount Arafat, about 15 km (10 miles) outside the city, for the climax of haj Sunday. When they arrive they will spend hours in prayer and asking for forgiveness.<br />"I pray to God to plant mercy in people's hearts," said 55-year-old carpenter Muhammad Hassan as he walked with a carpet rolled up over his shoulder, trying to find a place to sleep.<br />The Eid al-Adha, or feast of the sacrifice, begins on Monday, when pilgrims begin three days of casting stones at walls in a symbolic renunciation of the devil.<br />Authorities have made renovations over the past year to ease the flow of pilgrims inside the Grand Mosque and on the disaster-prone Jamarat Bridge. In January 2006, 362 people were crushed to death on the bridge, the worst haj tragedy since 1990.<br />"I came here because I have always wished to come," said Umm Hassan from Egypt. "I hope God gives me the health and fortune to come a second and third and even more times."<br />STRINGENT CHECKS<br />The flow of traffic was notably smoother than last year, as more pilgrims were transported on buses and authorities imposed stringent checks on entry points to the Mecca area to keep out people without haj permits hoping to join the rites.<br />The government says it will stop Saudis and foreign residents from taking part without official permits, a main cause of overcrowding. Over 1.75 million haj visas have been granted to Muslims abroad, and at least 500,000 locals receive authorisation.<br />"The objective of this work is to account for all pilgrims, whether they are Saudis or non-Saudis," said organiser Ahmed al-Sulaimi as security forces stopped cars at a checkpoint.<br />The government warned pilgrims not to politicise the haj.<br />"Saudi Arabia is above any party or political intentions behind the haj. Pilgrims should not raise any slogans other than that of Islam," Islamic Affairs Minister Saleh bin Abdul-Aziz Al al-Sheikh said in comments published in Saudi newspapers.<br />There have been clashes between police and Iranian pilgrims in the past over political slogans. Sectarian tensions have arisen recently in the Arab world after Shi'ite Muslims came to power in Iraq, emboldening Iran and its Shi'ite allies.<br />Disputes between Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah delayed and prevented some Palestinian pilgrims from arriving, adding another potential flashpoint.<br />Speaking in Mecca, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas blamed Hamas. "Unfortunately, this is the first time in the history of the Palestinian people that pilgrims were prevented. Israel never once prevented pilgrims," he told reporters.<br />The Saudi government is also wary of militancy. Despite an al Qaeda campaign to destabilise Saudi Arabia from 2003 to 2006, The haj has never been targeted by al Qaeda militants.<br />Islamist militants rampaged through the Indian financial capital of Mumbai last week, killing 171 people.<br />(Additional reporting by Nael al-Shyoukhi; editing by Matthew Jones)</div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/06/africa/OUKWD-UK-HAJ-START.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/06/africa/OUKWD-UK-HAJ-START.php</a><br /><br /></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik2FiDR_QDSmbOzUqpfzsAtKFHttk460XOwHWxpVdpVUON7rDGuMKeKA5AQ4OT2FKjxYhINsJt8Ucq3jhboJW7Bgfm6IPqfN2Af3B9SHRjizmLgQjo_mLxhAP8_LdKRnjKI3DLVj5_w2Q/s1600-h/DSC02628.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908822276305138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik2FiDR_QDSmbOzUqpfzsAtKFHttk460XOwHWxpVdpVUON7rDGuMKeKA5AQ4OT2FKjxYhINsJt8Ucq3jhboJW7Bgfm6IPqfN2Af3B9SHRjizmLgQjo_mLxhAP8_LdKRnjKI3DLVj5_w2Q/s320/DSC02628.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifkLZS_emY7rZS5vuwfDMvZArFJX-XpsvP_cx_YixPqmZ3Nr7ruIyAx0DAsxrV2-ysZt5xbEGtGbwA8VmUg25Oq5GmKVgzjHL3TC27Tu1XFp-h2wykCyhvtMmyPDZS1KQJ0VFqn0ojZeU/s1600-h/DSC02629.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908815638926498" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifkLZS_emY7rZS5vuwfDMvZArFJX-XpsvP_cx_YixPqmZ3Nr7ruIyAx0DAsxrV2-ysZt5xbEGtGbwA8VmUg25Oq5GmKVgzjHL3TC27Tu1XFp-h2wykCyhvtMmyPDZS1KQJ0VFqn0ojZeU/s320/DSC02629.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><div align="left"><strong>Activists protest UN climate talks</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Saturday, December 6, 2008<br />POZNAN, Poland: About 700 environmental activists have marched through Poznan, Poland, to demand that delegates at a U.N. conference do more to combat climate change.<br />They rallied Saturday as delegates from 190 countries in a nearby conference center worked on a new climate change deal. The deal should be sealed in a year, and would succeed the Kyoto Protocol.<br />Groups that took part included Greenpeace, WWF and Oxfam, as well as small numbers of anti-globalists and anarchists. The rally was peaceful.<br />Angela Corbalan of Oxfam says her group is calling on rich countries to urgently cut their emissions of polluting greenhouse gases. Environmentalists have sharply criticized rich countries for not offering deeper commitments at the talks.</div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/06/europe/EU-Poland-Climate-Protest.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/06/europe/EU-Poland-Climate-Protest.php</a></div><div><br /></div><div> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOI6AAfNXJxlBAWbvTD2rUZqmI8eoeNjuOlq54VltP0rIF45_OvMJhyQc3PAq9uXNEUmlhvNhXwTRqQrUa2AfbbvoCUl9CIeviIMZf9hglZ1yrBGpiFZ6HjaewiZBhrcZt_F0Og9vDf48/s1600-h/DSC02630.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908818995883106" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOI6AAfNXJxlBAWbvTD2rUZqmI8eoeNjuOlq54VltP0rIF45_OvMJhyQc3PAq9uXNEUmlhvNhXwTRqQrUa2AfbbvoCUl9CIeviIMZf9hglZ1yrBGpiFZ6HjaewiZBhrcZt_F0Og9vDf48/s320/DSC02630.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div align="left"><strong>Ashmore to buy Petron stake for £360 million</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, December 6, 2008<br />MANILA: A unit of British investment manager Ashmore Group has agreed to a Philippine government offer to buy a 40 percent stake in oil refiner Petron for 25.7 billion pesos (360 million pound), a source close to the deal said on Saturday.<br />The deal would raise the Ashmore group's holdings in Petron, the Philippines' largest oil refiner, to about 90 percent.<br />The source told Reuters Ashmore has agreed on the price of 6.85 pesos a share set by the government, despite a steep 57 percent premium to the oil firm's closing price of 4.35 pesos on Friday.<br />Earlier this year, Ashmore unit SEA Refinery Holdings bought a 40 percent stake in Petron from Saudi Aramco for $550 million (377 million pound), or 6.531 pesos per share, below the government's sale price.<br />Ashmore's unit later increased its Petron stake to slightly more than 50 percent after buying shares from minority shareholders via a tender offer at the same share price as its deal with Saudi Aramco.<br />"I know something was sent," Eric Recto, Petron president and Ashmore representative to the board told Reuters when asked whether Ashmore made the December 5 deadline to agree to or reject the government's offer. He declined to give details.<br />The sale would boost the Philippine government's coffers and help keep its budget deficit within a goal of 75 billion pesos this year despite increased spending to cushion the economy from the impact of the global financial crisis.<br />(Reporting by Rosemarie Francisco and Manolo Serapio Jr.; Editing by Jan Dahinten)</div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/06/business/OUKBS-UK-PETRON.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/06/business/OUKBS-UK-PETRON.php</a></div><div align="left"><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDCdkrBr_ouYH2UUAt6ZiBBDAXowry9AJ0fwRaG2TBuDO7tt4C_ouOlMSYoUO8YY6MRVdkyuA1LiW0eZy52EB2_CgaiMsSGhyfhk0yioAQz63kg2FEmPC5HHa3Vo45m04LLG7XiKn4lyc/s1600-h/DSC02631.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908448224129778" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDCdkrBr_ouYH2UUAt6ZiBBDAXowry9AJ0fwRaG2TBuDO7tt4C_ouOlMSYoUO8YY6MRVdkyuA1LiW0eZy52EB2_CgaiMsSGhyfhk0yioAQz63kg2FEmPC5HHa3Vo45m04LLG7XiKn4lyc/s320/DSC02631.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixzcBlx04kQRaeDZ8LXt3tq5BrMpoEFl2NwQ9wsoGmyfvO4oTzlRmUmjNKYMpLffQaRhKTCt9U5dh34riRyRleL4w-yb4mT6MDTEPICLI7KCNBNmA_EcCa-TngDYLnYFCtkWM0wW_36ms/s1600-h/DSC02632.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908446433432146" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixzcBlx04kQRaeDZ8LXt3tq5BrMpoEFl2NwQ9wsoGmyfvO4oTzlRmUmjNKYMpLffQaRhKTCt9U5dh34riRyRleL4w-yb4mT6MDTEPICLI7KCNBNmA_EcCa-TngDYLnYFCtkWM0wW_36ms/s320/DSC02632.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUQP0L21upDcn78uV54KlIjijodGSwAuLNlZAYre4bj5ktpLN1XEdm1gL2Kmvo4jg-gO3JqCeehMyiQ5vjMRPiTY2iTTGipCVm6Anu2pg3dTA2EfmTfcKaLbvT62cglg7ZIeCe8gx8DmE/s1600-h/DSC02633.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908442676673874" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUQP0L21upDcn78uV54KlIjijodGSwAuLNlZAYre4bj5ktpLN1XEdm1gL2Kmvo4jg-gO3JqCeehMyiQ5vjMRPiTY2iTTGipCVm6Anu2pg3dTA2EfmTfcKaLbvT62cglg7ZIeCe8gx8DmE/s320/DSC02633.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRj3I0XyuFACKcwLgdnlzzPnq9ku9IXPvHyLSivGi6Ys7QHdf4iPVusg8kNVwZa7XJBBmQlpsOnV1bje6zTdVbaBxnpU4PzcmCrwi-yRxxZaul4Ng5qH9U8vn8O-AGc9ugLXSp8QWDZF8/s1600-h/DSC02634.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908442112834706" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 198px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRj3I0XyuFACKcwLgdnlzzPnq9ku9IXPvHyLSivGi6Ys7QHdf4iPVusg8kNVwZa7XJBBmQlpsOnV1bje6zTdVbaBxnpU4PzcmCrwi-yRxxZaul4Ng5qH9U8vn8O-AGc9ugLXSp8QWDZF8/s320/DSC02634.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div align="left"><strong>Mumbai terror siege politicizes an upper class long insulated<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta<br />Saturday, December 6, 2008<br />MUMBAI, India: Last Wednesday, an extraordinary public interest lawsuit was filed in this city's highest court. It charged that the government had lagged in its constitutional duty to protect its citizens' right to life, and it pressed the state to modernize and upgrade its security forces.<br />The lawsuit was striking mainly for the people behind it: investment bankers, corporate lawyers and representatives of some of India's largest companies, which have their headquarters here in the country's financial capital, also known as Bombay. The Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the city's largest business association, joined as a petitioner. It was the first time it had lent its name to litigation in the public interest.<br />The three-day siege of Mumbai, which ended a week ago, was a watershed for India's prosperous classes. It prompted many of those who live in their own private Indias, largely insulated from the country's dysfunction, to demand a vital public service: safety.<br />Since the attacks, which killed 163 people, plus nine gunmen, there has been an outpouring of anger from unlikely quarters. On Wednesday, tens of thousands of urban, English-speaking, tank-top-wearing citizens stormed the Gateway of India, a famed waterfront monument, venting anger at their elected leaders. There were similar protests in the capital, New Delhi, and the southern technology hubs, Bangalore and Hyderabad. All were organized spontaneously, with word spread through text messages and Facebook pages.<br />On Saturday, young people affiliated with a new political party, called Loksatta, or people's power, gathered at the Gateway, calling for a variety of reforms, including banning criminals from running for political office. (Virtually every political party has convicts and suspects among its elected officials.)<br />Social networking sites were ablaze with memorials and citizens' action groups, including one that advocated refraining from voting altogether as an act of civil disobedience. Never mind that in India, voter turnout among the rich is far lower than among the poor.<br />Another group advocated not paying taxes, as though that would improve the quality of public services. An e-mail campaign began Saturday called "I Am Clean," urging citizens not to bribe police officers or drive through red lights.<br />And there were countless condemnations of how democracy had failed in this, the world's largest democracy. Those condemnations led Vir Sanghvi, a columnist writing in the financial newspaper Mint, to remind his readers of 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule. Sanghvi wrote, "I am beginning to hear the same kind of middle-class murmurs and whines about the ineffectual nature of democracy and the need for authoritarian government."<br />Perhaps the most striking development was the lawsuit because it represented a rare example of corporate India's confronting the government outright rather than making back-room deals.<br />"It says in a nutshell, 'Enough is enough,' " said Cyrus Guzder, who owns a logistics company. "More precisely, it tells us that citizens of all levels in the country believe their government has let them down and believe that it now needs to be held accountable."<br />In India's city of gold, the distinction between public and private can be bewildering. For members of the working class, who often cannot afford housing, public sidewalks become living rooms. In the morning, commuters from gated communities in the suburbs pass children brushing their teeth at the edge of the street. Women are forced to relieve themselves on the railway tracks, usually in the dark, for the sake of modesty. The poor sometimes sleep on highway medians, and it is not unheard of for drunken drivers to mow them down.<br />Mumbai has been roiled by government neglect for years. Its commuter trains are so overcrowded that 4,000 riders die every year on average, some pushed from trains in the fierce competition to get on and off. Monsoons in 2005 killed more than 400 people in Mumbai in one day alone; so clogged were the city's ancient drains, so crowded its river plains with unauthorized construction that water had nowhere to go.<br />Rahul Bose, an actor, suggested setting aside such problems for the moment. In a plea published last week in The Hindustan Times, he laid out the desperation of this glistening, corroding place. "We overlook for now your neglect of the city," he wrote. "Its floods, its traffic, its filth, its pollution. Just deliver to us a world-standard antiterrorism plan."<br />None of the previous terrorist attacks, even in Mumbai, had so struck the cream of Bombay society. Bombs have been planted on commuter trains in the past, but few people who regularly dine at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, one of the worst-hit sites, travel by train. "It has touched a raw nerve," said Amit Chandra, who runs a prominent investment firm. "People have lost friends. Everyone would visit these places." In any event, public anger could not have come at a worse time for incumbent politicians, who were at their most contrite last week. National elections are due next spring, and security is likely to be one of the top issues in the vote, particularly among the urban middle class. It remains to be seen whether outrage will prompt them to turn out to vote in higher numbers or whether politicians will be compelled to pay greater attention to them than in the past.<br />"There's a revulsion against the political class I have never seen before," said Gerson D'Cunha, a former advertising executive whose civic group, AGNI, presses for better governing. "The middle class that is laid back, lethargic, indolent, they've been galvanized."<br />For how long? That is a question on everyone's lips. At a memorial service on Thursday evening for a slain alumnus of the elite St. Xavier's College here, a placard asked: "One month from now, will you care?"<br />"It's helplessness, what do we do?" said Probir Roy, the owner of a technology company and an alumnus of St. Xavier's. "All the various stakeholders — the police, politicians — you can't count on them anyway. Now what do you do?"<br />Tops, a private security agency, has plenty to do. It is consulting schools, malls and "high net individuals" on how to protect themselves better. Security was a growth industry in India even before the latest attacks. Tops's global chairman, Rahul Nanda, said the company employed 73,000 security guards Saturday, compared with about 15,000 three years ago.<br />Mumbai is not the only place suffering from official neglect. Public services have deteriorated across India, all the more so in the countryside. Government schools are notoriously mismanaged. Doctors do not show up to work on public health projects. Corruption is endemic. In some of India's booming cities, private developers drill for their own water and generate electricity for their own buildings.<br />Political interference often gets in the way of the woefully understaffed and poorly paid police force. Courts and commissions have called for law enforcement to be liberated from political control. Politicians have balked.<br />The three-day standoff with terrorists was neither the deadliest that India has seen, nor the most protracted; there have been other extended convulsions of violence, including mass killings of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.<br />Yet, the recent attacks, which Indian police say were the work of a Pakistan-based terrorist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, were profoundly different. Two of the four main targets were luxury hotels frequented by the city's wealthy elite: the Taj, facing the Gateway of India, and the twin Oberoi and Trident hotels, a few miles west on Nariman Point. They were the elite's watering holes and business dinner destinations. And to lose them, said Alex Kuruvilla, who runs the Condé Nast publications in India, is like losing a limb.<br />"It's like what I imagine an amputee would feel," he said. "It's so much part of our lives."<br />Last Wednesday, on the night of the candlelight vigil, Kuruvilla's driver made a wrong turn. A traffic policeman virtually pounced on the driver and then let him go with a bribe of 20 rupees, less than 50 cents. Kuruvilla is not optimistic about swift change. "Our cynicism is justified," he said.<br />Ashok Pawar, a police constable from the police station nearest the Taj, entered the hotel the night the siege began. It was full of gunfire and smoke. He could not breathe, and he did not know his way around. "It was my first time inside the Taj," he said. "How can a poor man go there?"<br />In The Indian Express newspaper on Friday, a columnist named Vinay Sitapati wrote a pointed open letter to "South Bombay," shorthand for the city's most wealthy enclave. The column first berated the rich for lecturing at Davos and failing in Hindi exams. "You refer to your part of the city simply as 'town,' " he wrote, and then he begged: "Vote in person. But vote in spirit, too: use your clout to demand better politicians, not pliant ones."<br />"In your hour of need today," he added, "it is India that needs your help."</div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/asia/07india.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/asia/07india.php</a></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">*******************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>In new strategy, U.S. will defend Kabul environs<br /></strong>By Kirk Semple<br />Saturday, December 6, 2008<br />KABUL, Afghanistan: Most of the additional American troops arriving in Afghanistan early next year will be deployed near the capital, Kabul, American military commanders here say, in a measure of how precarious the war effort has become.<br />It will be the first time that American or coalition forces have been deployed in large numbers on the southern flank of the city, a decision that reflects the rising concerns among military officers, diplomats and government officials about the increasing vulnerability of the capital and the surrounding area.<br />It also underscores the difficult choices confronting American military commanders as they try to apportion a limited number of forces not only within Afghanistan, but also between Afghanistan and Iraq.<br />For the incoming Obama administration, a first priority will be to decide the greater risk: drawing down American forces too quickly in Iraq, potentially jeopardizing the gains there; or not building up troops quickly enough in Afghanistan, where the war effort hangs in the balance as security worsens.<br />The new army brigade, the Third Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, New York, is scheduled to arrive in Afghanistan in January and will consist of 3,500 to 4,000 soldiers. The "vast majority" of them will be sent to Logar and Wardak Provinces, adjacent to Kabul, said Lieutenant Colonel Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman for the American units in eastern Afghanistan. A battalion of at least several hundred soldiers from that brigade will go to the border region in the east, where American forces have been locked in some of the fiercest fighting this year.<br />In all, the Pentagon is planning to add more than 20,000 troops to Afghanistan in response to a request from General David McKiernan, the top commander in Afghanistan. Those troops are expected to be sent to violent areas in the south. But they are expected to be deployed over 12 to 18 months. Nearly all would be diverted from Iraq, officials say.<br />The plan for the incoming brigade, then, means that for the time being fewer reinforcements — or none at all — will be immediately available for the parts of Afghanistan where the insurgency is most intense.<br />It also means that most of the newly arriving troops will not be deployed with the main goal of curbing the cross-border flow of insurgents from their rear bases in Pakistan, something American commanders would like and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has recommended.<br />In recent months, amid a series of American military operations that caused civilian casualties, Karzai has repeatedly said that the fight against the insurgents should not be waged "in the villages" of Afghanistan but rather in the rugged borderlands to the east and south.<br />In an interview, the president's spokesman, Humayun Hamidzada, said there was no conflict between the January deployment and Karzai's declarations. While Karzai had requested a focus on border areas, the spokesman said, additional reinforcements were also needed throughout the country, including in Wardak and Logar.<br />There are about 62,000 international troops currently in Afghanistan, including about 32,000 Americans, a military spokesman said, but they are spread thinly throughout the country, which is nearly the size of Texas.<br />American commanders say they desperately need more. Military officials say that if McKiernan's requests are met, deployments in the next year and a half or so will include four combat brigades, an aviation brigade equipped with attack and troop-carrying helicopters, reconnaissance units, support troops and trainers for the Afghan army and the police, raising American force levels to about 58,000.<br />The United States and NATO forces are hoping to expand the Afghan army to 134,000 from nearly 70,000 over the next four or five years.<br />Colonel Gregory Julian, a top military spokesman, said that for security reasons he could not say where exactly those troops would go, but NATO's southern command in Afghanistan includes Kandahar, Helmand, Oruzgan and Zabul Provinces.<br />Of immediate concern, American and NATO commanders say, is the need to safeguard the capital, to hit new Taliban strongholds in Wardak and Logar, and to provide enough security in those provinces for development programs, which are essential to maintaining the support of Afghan villagers.<br />Unlike in previous winters, when there was a lull in fighting as many Taliban fighters returned to Pakistan, American commanders expect more Taliban fighters to remain in Afghanistan and continue the fight. If so, the change would seem to reflect an effort by the emboldened insurgency to maintain its momentum and hold newly gained territory.<br />Wardak and Logar had been relatively secure until late last year. But by most accounts, Taliban activity has soared in the two provinces in the past year, as the insurgents have stepped up attacks against Afghan and foreign forces, sometimes even controlling parts of major roads connecting Kabul to the east and south.<br />The number of attacks in Wardak by the Taliban and other insurgent groups has increased about 58 percent since last year, and in Logar about 41 percent, according to statistics collated by Sami Kovanen, a security analyst in Kabul.<br />Insurgents now have significant influence, if not control, in much of the two provinces, said Kovanen, who draws his information from a wide range of government, nongovernment and private sources.<br />The American military command said it had incomplete statistics for the level of violence in those provinces. "Frankly, in Wardak and Logar, we don't know what we don't know," Colonel Nielson-Green said in an e-mail message. "There are few of our forces present in those areas, hence the reason for the incoming brigade there."<br />"I suspect that violence will increase as we place this unit but will go down over time," she added, "because we assess that there are considerable enemy support areas in both provinces and we will be going after them."<br />In June, three American soldiers and their Afghan interpreter were killed in an ambush when their vehicles were hit by mines and rocket-propelled grenades as they drove through Wardak Province.<br />In August, three Western women and an Afghan driver, all working for the International Rescue Committee, a relief group based in New York, were killed in Logar. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.<br />The next month, the governor of Logar Province and three of his guards were killed in the explosion of a mine buried in a road.<br />American and NATO military commanders eventually hope to turn over the country's security to Afghan forces, but the Afghan police and military are nowhere near ready to assume that responsibility, officials say.<br />The Afghan government has already begun to work with local and provincial elected officials to extend the influence of the central government in the region, improve public services and gain the support of residents. But the government's efforts have been continually hampered by criminal gangs and insurgent groups.<br />Sediqa Mubariz, a member of Parliament from Wardak, said in an interview that she would welcome any additional American troops in her province.<br />Mubariz said security had been so poor that since last year she had not been able to travel from Kabul to her home district in Wardak, only 50 miles away.</div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/asia/07troops.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/asia/07troops.php</a></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">********************</div><div align="left"><strong>Analysis: Obama defense agenda resembles Gates'<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Saturday, December 6, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: For a Democrat whose opposition to the Iraq war was a campaign centerpiece, President-elect Barack Obama is remarkably in sync with Defense Secretary Robert Gates on many core defense and national security issues — even Iraq.<br />The list of similarities suggests the early focus of Obama's Pentagon may not change dramatically from President George W. Bush's.<br />Given that Obama made the unprecedented decision to keep the incumbent Republican defense secretary, it would seem natural to expect that they see eye to eye on at least some major defense issues. But the extent of their shared priorities is surprising, given Obama's campaign criticisms of Bush's defense policies.<br />In his first public comments about signing on with the incoming administration, Gates said Tuesday that in his decisive meeting with the president-elect in November, they talked more about how his appointment would be made and how it would work in practice, than about substantive policy issues.<br />The two "share a common view about the importance of integrating all elements of American power to make us more secure and defeat the threats of the 21st century," Brooke Anderson, the Obama transition office's chief national security spokeswoman, said Saturday.<br />She said Obama "appreciates Secretary Gates' pragmatism and competence and his commitment to a sustainable national security strategy that is built on bipartisan consensus here at home."<br />The apparent harmony between Gates and Obama on broad defense and national security aims is on display in a Foreign Affairs magazine article by the defense chief that was released Thursday. Gates lays out a comprehensive agenda based on the Bush administration's new National Defense Strategy. In numerous ways it meshes with the defense priorities that Obama espoused during the campaign. Examples include:<br />_better integrating and coordinating military efforts with civilian agencies, including the State Department. This is one of the lessons the Bush administration learned from the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, where initial combat efforts went well, only to fail to avert destabilizing insurgencies.<br />_building up the security capacity of partner nations. This is central to a belief, advocated by Gates and shared by Obama, that the fight against Islamic extremism — what the Bush administration calls the war on terror — cannot succeed in the long run without help from allies and partners.<br />_not overlooking the possibility of future threats from conventional military powers, even while continuing to focus on prevailing in the counterinsurgency campaigns where conventional firepower plays a lesser role.<br />There also are points of potential differences between Obama and Gates: closing the prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and expanding the U.S. missile defense system into Eastern Europe.<br />Gates advocates both, but on Guantanamo he lost the argument in Bush administration councils.<br />Obama has been unequivocal that he will close the prison. On missile defense, he has indicated support in general while emphasizing it must not divert resources from other priorities "until we are positive the technology will protect the American people." That condition could lead to delays in the Europe project, although the Pentagon managed a successful test intercept of a target missile over the Pacific on Friday.<br />But even on Iraq, Gates said that he considers Obama's focus on troop withdrawals to be an "agreeable approach," given that Obama has said he would listen to his commanders on how to proceed. Reminded that he previously had opposed setting a firm timetable for withdrawal, Gates said the situation changed when the Bush administration accepted Iraq's demand for an agreement in writing to remove U.S. combat troops from Iraqi cities by next June and to withdraw entirely by Dec. 31, 2011.<br />"So we will confront or have a different kind of situation in Iraq at the end of June 2009 than we would have thought perhaps in June of 2008," Gates said. "And I think that the commanders are already looking at what the implications of that are, in terms of the potential for accelerating the drawdown."<br />Obama has said he believes a full withdrawal of combat troops can be accomplished within 16 months of his swearing in on Jan. 20. But he also has said the withdrawal should be done responsibly. This appears in line with indications that in a meeting last July in Baghdad with Gen. David Petraeus — then the top U.S. commander in Iraq and now the overseer of U.S. military operations across the Middle East — Obama gave hints, if not outright assurances, that he could be flexible on a pullout timetable.<br />Both Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, who will remain as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after Obama takes office, have stressed their eagerness to shift resources, including troops, from Iraq to Afghanistan, where the insurgency has grown in intensity. That, too, is in line with Obama's agenda.<br />Obama has pledged to continue the expansion of the Army and the Marine Corps that Gates started. They are on the same page, too, with regard to overhauling Pentagon's procurement system.<br />Also, both emphasize a need to improve the government's ability to address concerns of military families who are under strain from repeated, lengthy and frequent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.<br />___<br />EDITOR'S NOTE — Robert Burns has covered defense and national security issues for The Associated Press since 1990.</div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/06/america/Obama-on-Defense.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/06/america/Obama-on-Defense.php</a></div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left">****************</div><div align="left"><strong>World Bank warns Gaza banks may collapse</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Saturday, December 6, 2008<br />RAMALLAH, West Bank: The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on Saturday warned that Gaza's severe cash shortage may cause local banks to collapse, the most serious warnings yet regarding the consequences of Israel's continued refusal to allow new money infusions into Gaza banks.<br />Israel has not allowed money to enter Gaza since October, causing cash shortages in local banks. Israel's refusal to allow Palestinian banks to transfer cash to their Gaza branches is a part of a larger blockade imposed on the territory in response to Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza.<br />"The liquidity crisis could lead to the collapse of the commercial banking system in Gaza," the World Bank warned in a statement. The International Monetary Fund offered a similar prediction.<br />The cash shortage means around 77,000 Palestinian civil servants will not be able to withdraw their salaries before a Muslim holiday early next week. The cash shortage also forced the United Nations in November to halt cash payments to thousands of Gaza's poorest residents.<br />Gaza banks closed on Thursday payday for civil servants because of cash shortages. Bank officials have not said if they will open Monday, their next working day.<br />Monetary officials estimate Gaza banks hold less than a quarter of the cash needed to pay wages. The Israeli shekel is Gaza's main currency.<br />Jihad al-Wazir, head of the Palestinian Monetary Authority in the West Bank, said Gaza's banks have around 47 million shekels (about $12 million) between them. They need 220 million shekels ($54 million) to pay salaries, he said.<br />Al-Wazir said salaries may be paid in a mix of currencies to bypass the shekel shortage.<br />President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's partner in peace talks, lost control of Gaza to the Hamas militant group in June 2007. Based in the West Bank, he still claims authority over Gaza and has continued to pay tens of thousands of civil servants there each month through the banking system.<br />The cash crunch appears to be hurting Abbas much harder than Hamas, since the militant group pays 20,000 of its own employees with cash it smuggles into Gaza from Egypt. Their employees received December salaries.<br />Israel imposed the blockade on Gaza after Hamas took power last year, only allowing in humanitarian aid, fuel and some commercial goods.<br />The blockade tightened in early November after an Israel incursion into Gaza set off Palestinian rocket fire at nearby Jewish communities. Militants fired a rocket into the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. The army said it landed in an empty industrial area and no one was hurt.<br />Israel says despite the blockade, it wont allow a humanitarian crisis to develop. However, Israel's Defense Ministry, which signs off on goods entering Gaza, says cash supplies are not vital humanitarian aid.<br />Ministry officials were not immediately available for comment Saturday. But they have repeatedly said the cash will start flowing when the rocket fire stops.<br />__________<br />With reporting by Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah</div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/06/news/ML-Israel-Gaza-Cash-Crunch.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/06/news/ML-Israel-Gaza-Cash-Crunch.php</a></div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0O9fdb5QjUeSmXHYNsyhBSMMXeRoJpz_JhfWAaO9_Q90-QlrGc9qOPOFyutUWcpd7o5njdiPE89bSKuabnmMqWjAOprkRetEfckW0z_Y97YiKbp0tYcXZmGtu6ag8-qbU7SIoPkFmLOQ/s1600-h/DSC02635.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908444227766242" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0O9fdb5QjUeSmXHYNsyhBSMMXeRoJpz_JhfWAaO9_Q90-QlrGc9qOPOFyutUWcpd7o5njdiPE89bSKuabnmMqWjAOprkRetEfckW0z_Y97YiKbp0tYcXZmGtu6ag8-qbU7SIoPkFmLOQ/s320/DSC02635.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div align="left"><strong>In Iraq, anger and relief over Blackwater charges<br /></strong>By Katherine Zoepf and Tariq Maher<br />Saturday, December 6, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: On Nisour Square here in the Iraqi capital, where at least 17 civilians were killed last year by guards working for the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, Iraqis reacted with satisfaction and anger to the news that five Blackwater guards had been indicted by the United States Justice Department.<br />"They started shooting randomly at people without any reason," recalled Ali Khalf Selman, a traffic policeman who said he witnessed the killing of 21 people on the day of the shootings. "I wish I could see the criminals in person, and I hope that they will pay a price for killing people who just happened to be in the wrong place on that bad day."<br />The shootings occurred on Sept. 16, 2007, as a Blackwater convoy traveled through Nisour Square, which was crowded with pedestrians, police officers and cars. The guards have said that they fired after coming under attack, and Blackwater has maintained that its guards did nothing wrong.<br />In Washington, lawyers for the five guards described them as decorated military veterans who had honorably served the United States. The five were identified as Paul Slough of Keller, Texas, a former member of the army Infantry, who served as a peacekeeper in Bosnia and on a security detail in Iraq as part of the Texas National Guard; Nick Slatten, of Sparta, Tennessee, a former army sergeant who served two tours in Iraq; Donald Ball, of Valley City, Utah, a former marine who served twice in Iraq; Dustin Heard, of Knoxville, Tennessee, a former marine who served in Afghanistan and Iraq; and Evan Liberty, of Rochester, New Hampshire, also a marine, who was stationed at embassies in Cairo and Guatemala City.<br />Iraq has not yet filed any claims against Blackwater, said an Iraqi official, who asked not to be identified because he had not been authorized to speak on the subject.<br />The Nisour Square shootings have had a deep impact on the Iraqi government's relationship with the Bush administration, and immunity for security contractors became a major issue recently in negotiations of the security pact that lays the ground rules for American troops' continuing presence in Iraq.<br />"This was one of the main issues in the pact," said Shatha al-Abousi, a Sunni member of Parliament. "It was a big problem, giving immunity to American soldiers and bodyguards. But everywhere on earth the guilty one must pay. It is a good thing this issue was completely solved in the pact."<br />Also last week, McClatchy Newspapers reported that about 1,000 men from several South Asian countries who had been hired by a subcontractor for the American military were held for months in conditions like slavery near Baghdad International Airport. The men had paid middlemen to obtain jobs in Iraq with Al Najlaa International Catering Services, a Kuwait-based subcontractor to KBR, a contractor that provides services to the United States military, McClatchy said. When they arrived in Iraq, it said, they were held in cramped conditions in warehouses, without jobs, salaries or adequate food.<br />The American military, in a statement, said that it took the allegations seriously and that it "will work closely with KBR and any other contractor involved to investigate and ensure that future violations do not occur.".<br />KBR responded with a brief statement, saying that it "in no way condones or tolerates unethical or illegal behavior." A spokeswoman for KBR, Heather Browne, wrote in an e-mail message that "KBR has been in discussions with the government on this issue and we will continue to monitor the situation."<br />In Kirkuk on Saturday, a suicide bomber attacked a police academy, killing one person and wounding 15, the authorities said. Saman Ghafour, a police captain who witnessed the attack, said that the bomber appeared to be 12 to 16 years old.</div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/africa/07iraq.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/africa/07iraq.php</a></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">********************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/asia/07troops.php"></a></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><br /></div><div align="left"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3KDNWzwms4fOqvp32MhnyOnvAzW6aldKVXjbtjUX78HMYMqPCcdcuBDR0mk_LXDVjfzkpHiD7KBykHpiye2J__3DkMCC8Uxv6bv6A6TUzIclWa4R_rclTcTJ2_d_RtQDGgyhBNY8fNnw/s1600-h/DSC02636.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908150443396322" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3KDNWzwms4fOqvp32MhnyOnvAzW6aldKVXjbtjUX78HMYMqPCcdcuBDR0mk_LXDVjfzkpHiD7KBykHpiye2J__3DkMCC8Uxv6bv6A6TUzIclWa4R_rclTcTJ2_d_RtQDGgyhBNY8fNnw/s320/DSC02636.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>Stocks rally sharply despite heavy losses of jobs<br /></strong>By Jack Healy<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />Wall Street shook off the grim new unemployment numbers and its early losses on Friday afternoon, swinging sharply higher as bargain-hunting investors snapped up long-suffering financial and technology stocks.<br />At the close, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 259.18, or 3.1 points, at 8,635.42, a stark reversal after falling more than 200 points earlier in the day. The broader Standard & Poor's 500-stock index was up 30.85 points, or 3.7 percent, at 876.07, while the Nasdaq composite index was up 63.75 points, or 4.4 percent, 1,509.31.<br />Even with Friday's gains, Wall Street finished the week modestly lower, and analysts said the stock market was likely stay volatile and keep teetering between sharp gains and deep losses for the foreseeable future.<br />"I think we're just due for bear market rallies," said Brian Gendreau, investment strategist at ING Investment Management. "I don't know anyone who thinks this is the start of a bull market."<br />Commercial banks, finance companies and insurance companies helped lead the rally, with biotechnology companies, software makers and computer manufacturers posting strong gains. As with previous rallies in the midst of a broad economic downturn, the hardest-hit sectors were pulling ahead on Friday.<br />"We're seeing those beaten-down sectors rallying a little bit," said Richard Sparks of Schaeffer's Investment Research. "We're seeing buyers step in on what had been the riskiest or toxic types of stocks."<br />Shares of Hartford Financial Services more than doubled after the company offered a sunnier profit outlook for 2008 and said it had enough cash to weather more turmoil in the markets. The company's stock, which plunged to from more than $80 a share at the beginning of the year to less than $5 recently, rebounded to more than $14 a share on Friday.<br />Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase each posted solid gains.<br />But energy companies lagged on Friday afternoon, and crude oil prices tumbled for a second day, settling at $40.81 a barrel in New York. Oil futures hit their lowest price in four years as traders bet that a deep and painful economic slowdown would curb demand in the United States, China and across the globe.<br />Shares of General Motors and Ford were higher as the leaders of the Big Three American automakers spent a second day on Capitol Hill, trying to persuade skeptical lawmakers to provide a $34 billion bailout for the automobile industry.<br />A broad range of retailers including Wal-Mart, Sears, Macy's, and Target watched their shares bounce back after an earlier tumble.<br />Although the decline in nonfarm payroll jobs announced Friday by the Labor Department was nearly 200,000 more than an expected drop of 335,000, for the worst monthly losses in 34 years, analysts said that many investors had quietly been bracing for starker figures than the consensus projections.<br />"The whisper numbers, we were hearing some 4's and 5's out there," said Philip Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors. "It's not as if it were completely out of the realm of possibility."<br />And analysts said that the markets appeared to anticipate Friday's bleak data with a late sell-off on Thursday that dragged down the Dow by 215 points.<br />If the headline number of 6.7 percent unemployment looked stark, economists saw only grimmer signals buried in the data.<br />"As bad as minus 533,000 looks at the surface, it's actually much worse than that when you dig through the details," said David Rosenberg, the chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch, who cited downward revisions in employment from previous months and a shrinking workweek for people who still have jobs. "This was the equivalent of a million job losses."<br />In a grim omen for year-end employment, temporary jobs fell by 78,000 and retailers slashed 91,000 positions. News of the cutbacks came one day after a host of retailers announced double-digit declines in their November sales, and analysts said Friday that retailers would reduce their wholesale buying and offer deeper discounts to stay above water this winter.<br />"No matter how one parses through the various indicators, there is nothing to change the first impression conveyed by the headline number — this is a historically awful employment report," Michael Feroli, United States economist at JPMorgan, said in a note.<br />The job losses in November, the 11th straight month of declines, portend months of struggle for the American economy. Economists said that consumers would continue to slash their spending through the holiday season, businesses would keep scaling back and industrial production and manufacturing would continue their decline.<br />"The economy is suffering from cardiac arrest," Rosenberg said. "It really needs help immediately."<br />Adding to the economic malaise, the combined number of foreclosures and delinquent home loans increased to a new high in the third quarter, according to a report from the Mortgage Bankers Association. Nearly 10 percent of all home loans were past due or already in foreclosure at the end of September, up from 9.2 percent in June, the industry group said Friday.<br />While the absolute number of homeowners behind on payments is high and rising, what is perhaps more alarming is that people who become delinquent on payments are much more likely to lose their homes today than in past.<br />The Mortgage Bankers Association reports that 30 percent of homeowners who miss one payment end up in foreclosure a few months later. Historically, only 12 percent to 15 percent fell that far behind and most borrowers were able to catch up or strike a deal with their lender.<br />In California and Florida, 75 percent and 65 percent respectively of homeowners who miss one payment make it to foreclosure.<br />Mortgage delinquencies are rising sharply among borrowers with good, or prime, credit histories, providing clear evidence that the problems that first identified among risky loans has become more widespread as the economy has weakened.<br />"It's clear that the mortgage market now is being driven by the fundamental issues, jobs and the economy," said Jay Brinkmann, the chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association.<br />Brinkmann estimated that foreclosures this year would total 2.2 million, in line with a prediction by the Federal Reserve's chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, that home foreclosures would reach 2.25 million by the end of 2008.<br />European markets all fell sharply to close lower for the week. The FTSE 100 in London closed down 2.7 percent on Friday, while the DAX in Frankfurt dropped 4 percent. The CAC 40 index in Paris fell the farthest, ending the day down 5.5 percent.</div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/06markets.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/06markets.php</a></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">*******************</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>When a job disappears, so does the health care</strong><br />By Robert Pear<br />Saturday, December 6, 2008<br />ASHLAND, Ohio: As jobless numbers reach levels not seen in 25 years, another crisis is unfolding for millions of people who lost their health insurance along with their jobs, joining the ranks of the uninsured.<br />The crisis is on display here. Starla Darling, 27, was pregnant when she learned that her insurance coverage was about to end. She rushed to the hospital, took a medication to induce labor and then had an emergency Caesarean section, in the hope that her Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan would pay for the delivery.<br />Wendy Carter, 41, who recently lost her job and her health benefits, is struggling to pay $12,942 in bills for a partial hysterectomy at a local hospital. Her daughter, Betsy Carter, 19, has pain in her lower right jaw, where a wisdom tooth is growing in. But she has not seen a dentist because she has no health insurance.<br />Darling and Wendy Carter are among 275 people who worked at an Archway cookie factory here in north central Ohio. The company provided excellent health benefits. But the plant shut down abruptly this fall, leaving workers without coverage, like millions of people battered by the worst economic crisis since the Depression.<br />About 10.3 million Americans were unemployed in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of unemployed has increased by 2.8 million, or 36 percent, since January of this year, and by 4.3 million, or 71 percent, since January 2001.<br />Most people are covered through the workplace, so when they lose their jobs, they lose their health benefits. On average, for each jobless worker who has lost insurance, at least one child or spouse covered under the same policy has also lost protection, public health experts said.<br />Expanding access to health insurance, with U.S. government subsidies, was a priority for President-elect Barack Obama and the new Democratic Congress. The increase in the ranks of the uninsured, including middle-class families with strong ties to the work force, adds urgency to their efforts.<br />"This shows why — no matter how bad the condition of the economy — we can't delay pursuing comprehensive health care," said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. "There are too many victims who are innocent of anything but working at the wrong place at the wrong time."<br />Some parts of the U.S. government safety net are more responsive to economic distress. The number of people on food stamps set a record in September, with 31.6 million people receiving benefits, up by two million in one month.<br />Nearly 4.4 million people are receiving unemployment insurance benefits, an increased of 60 percent in the past year. But more than half of unemployed workers are not getting help because they do not qualify or have exhausted their benefits.<br />About 1.7 million families receive cash under the main U.S.-state welfare program, little changed from a year earlier. Welfare serves about 4 of 10 eligible families and fewer than one in four poor children.<br />In a letter dated Oct. 3, Archway told workers that their jobs would be eliminated, and their insurance terminated on Oct. 6, because of "unforeseeable business circumstances." The company, owned by a private equity firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut, filed a petition for relief under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code.<br />Archway workers typically made $13 to $20 an hour. To save money in a tough economy, they are canceling appointments with doctors and dentists, putting off surgery, and going without prescription medicines for themselves and their children.<br />Archway cited "the challenging economic environment" as a reason for closing.<br />"We have been operating at a loss due largely to the significant increases in raw material costs, such as flour, butter, sugar and dairy, and the record high fuel costs across the country," the company said. At this time of year, the Archway plant is usually bustling as employees work overtime to make Christmas cookies. This year the plant is silent. The aromas of cinnamon and licorice are missing. More than 40 trailers sit in the parking lot with nothing to haul.<br />In the weeks before it filed for bankruptcy protection, Archway apparently fell behind in paying for its employee health plan. In its bankruptcy filing, Archway said it owed more than $700,000 to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, one of its largest creditors.<br />Richard Jackson, 53, was an oven operator at the bakery for 30 years. He and his two daughters often used the Archway health plan to pay for doctor's visits, imaging, surgery and medicines. Now that he has no insurance, Jackson takes his Effexor antidepressant pills every other day, rather than daily, as prescribed.<br />Another former Archway employee, Jeffrey Austen, 50, said he had canceled shoulder surgery scheduled for Oct. 13 at the Cleveland Clinic because he had no way to pay for it.<br />"I had already lined up an orthopedic surgeon and an anesthesiologist," Austen said.<br />In mid-October, Janet Esbenshade, 37, who had been a packer at the Archway plant, began to notice that her vision was blurred. "My eyes were burning, itching and watery," she said. "Pus was oozing out. If I had had insurance, I would have gone to an eye doctor right away."<br />She waited two weeks. The infection became worse. She went to the hospital on Oct. 26. Doctors found that she had keratitis, a painful condition that she may have picked up from an old pair of contact lenses. They prescribed antibiotics, which have cleared up the infection.<br />Esbenshade has two daughters, ages 6 and 10, with asthma. She has explained to them why "we are not Christmas shopping this year — unless, by some miracle, mommy goes back to work and gets a paycheck."<br />She said she had told the girls, "I would rather you stay out of the hospital and take your medication than buy you a little toy right now because I think your health is more important."<br />In some cases, people who are laid off can maintain their group health benefits under a U.S. government law, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986, known as Cobra. But that is not an option for former Archway employees because their group health plan no longer exists. And they generally cannot afford to buy insurance on their own.<br />Wendy Carter's case is typical. She receives $956 a month in unemployment benefits. Her monthly expenses include her share of the rent ($300), car payments ($300), auto insurance ($75), utilities ($220) and food ($260). That leaves nothing for health insurance.<br />Darling, who was pregnant when her insurance ran out, worked at Archway for eight years, and her father, Franklin Phillips, worked there for 24 years.<br />"When I heard that I was losing my insurance," she said, "I was scared. I remember that the bill for my son's delivery in 2005 was about $9,000, and I knew I would never be able to pay that by myself."<br />So Darling asked her midwife to induce labor two days before her health insurance expired.<br />"I was determined that we were getting this baby out, and it was going to be paid for," said Darling, who was interviewed at her home here as she cradled the infant in her arms.<br />As it turned out, the insurance company denied her claim, leaving Darling with more than $17,000 in medical bills.<br />The latest official estimate of the number of uninsured, from the Census Bureau, is for 2007, when the economy was in better condition. In that year, the bureau says, 45.7 million people, accounting for 15.3 percent of the population, were uninsured.<br />M. Harvey Brenner, a professor of public health at the University of North Texas and Johns Hopkins University, said that three decades of research had shown a correlation between the condition of the economy and human health, including life expectancy.<br />"In recessions, with declines in national income and increases in unemployment, you often see increases in mortality from heart disease, cancer, psychiatric illnesses and other conditions," Brenner said.<br />The recession is also taking a toll on hospitals.<br />"We have seen a significant increase in patients seeking assistance paying their bills," said Erin Al-Mehairi, a spokeswoman for Samaritan Hospital in Ashland. "We've had a 40 percent increase in charity care write-offs this year over the 2007 level of $2.7 million."<br />In addition, people are using the hospital less. "We've seen a huge decrease in MRI.'s, CAT scans, stress tests, cardiac catheterization tests, knee and hip replacements and other elective surgery," Al-Mehairi said.</div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/america/07uninsured.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/america/07uninsured.php</a></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><br /></div><div align="left"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDuzi8ci6MUtgFn-GDQJUIrqT-uNsd8ZIPV7EW-J7SSdxpL_GpXU-1V71078kx0Dr0aCwhtnVMnuLKy5iEH7GmD315y5TvS8k71rr8STRxYqX5YvN-njZLLtHTLmp8Z318JEQH0cLe93U/s1600-h/DSC02637.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908148409720034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDuzi8ci6MUtgFn-GDQJUIrqT-uNsd8ZIPV7EW-J7SSdxpL_GpXU-1V71078kx0Dr0aCwhtnVMnuLKy5iEH7GmD315y5TvS8k71rr8STRxYqX5YvN-njZLLtHTLmp8Z318JEQH0cLe93U/s320/DSC02637.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0DvyFUJAa8rT_Uh4e2lh2eFF1_Wxj7iYde4TJxkLnrwo1u7whKWCmdTbJfXcdMBdEInZf6T3qQZ-L2a3dOWVAVNPiLRVqrDUbDbD2Q3kCRLtDJ3Ken2AuBxMz8LedNK75kMIenyuZOdM/s1600-h/DSC02638.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908147560757650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0DvyFUJAa8rT_Uh4e2lh2eFF1_Wxj7iYde4TJxkLnrwo1u7whKWCmdTbJfXcdMBdEInZf6T3qQZ-L2a3dOWVAVNPiLRVqrDUbDbD2Q3kCRLtDJ3Ken2AuBxMz8LedNK75kMIenyuZOdM/s320/DSC02638.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEBeYFZsh3wFVba3IOOIkNUfGpstOabi1U5VYmNKfLjdhDedBKndBnf6Oh-D9lIT5eQNEmR53uhKS-YZaqlrW_cAw9cZneTWycSlvbDcR_5QIMTnGhYfiJ213cVVzO44eCfvGCPOj-L9E/s1600-h/DSC02639.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908145044525826" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEBeYFZsh3wFVba3IOOIkNUfGpstOabi1U5VYmNKfLjdhDedBKndBnf6Oh-D9lIT5eQNEmR53uhKS-YZaqlrW_cAw9cZneTWycSlvbDcR_5QIMTnGhYfiJ213cVVzO44eCfvGCPOj-L9E/s320/DSC02639.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCPWuq07l1EuYHt0ownN29taZmqPEd-AcSTFABs4NgbIdagEiLhoT6StBlb6uJ3AZQt5vN1hWsacMfIVyPwpCcRdlBMxjGSUv6fFoZjnsi2k8RLT1tQM0yHq75OlA2kz9f9qEHmE90SjE/s1600-h/DSC02640.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276908144510120930" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCPWuq07l1EuYHt0ownN29taZmqPEd-AcSTFABs4NgbIdagEiLhoT6StBlb6uJ3AZQt5vN1hWsacMfIVyPwpCcRdlBMxjGSUv6fFoZjnsi2k8RLT1tQM0yHq75OlA2kz9f9qEHmE90SjE/s320/DSC02640.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbz0-bF3ZnCccWPr-BNXaithTrSt0IK36AkNYLgTHlgIPCJX_dV687pg6nplbcl9haHRzytipxmh-iMHCApkwpflJGbkHp5soRcwG37mdU6RmeLDgDt0rPHUUCtf6wJCuCBkmjrELvU_c/s1600-h/DSC02642.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907863031659634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbz0-bF3ZnCccWPr-BNXaithTrSt0IK36AkNYLgTHlgIPCJX_dV687pg6nplbcl9haHRzytipxmh-iMHCApkwpflJGbkHp5soRcwG37mdU6RmeLDgDt0rPHUUCtf6wJCuCBkmjrELvU_c/s320/DSC02642.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX6r6DpJSU47jtmqaesxo2omU64rGgEIga7j-yYs0fvxPHGEIPqLuzy-IWZGRRh6HKqbOrpGUW2KeCPTeugk7ZHtQXRrDh5FO1CMLbv8LNtZGYHTNSayQSMyLzJNGCAc6hV3_ekBpvrRE/s1600-h/DSC02643.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907863905467090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX6r6DpJSU47jtmqaesxo2omU64rGgEIga7j-yYs0fvxPHGEIPqLuzy-IWZGRRh6HKqbOrpGUW2KeCPTeugk7ZHtQXRrDh5FO1CMLbv8LNtZGYHTNSayQSMyLzJNGCAc6hV3_ekBpvrRE/s320/DSC02643.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn87Tgi8OU1vgdy6_Z1OyhRXVxnV1zf4E7MzCylBIbcZmUvG0xh5lCYwrzQe0lPAyseok33BKCuOn3CjWJQ5UdhGJhbtLB5C0mAa6SRPgRWD9pfStyGq5Ic6q74CNk-KnLkdByCrM72Ok/s1600-h/DSC02644.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907860661851122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn87Tgi8OU1vgdy6_Z1OyhRXVxnV1zf4E7MzCylBIbcZmUvG0xh5lCYwrzQe0lPAyseok33BKCuOn3CjWJQ5UdhGJhbtLB5C0mAa6SRPgRWD9pfStyGq5Ic6q74CNk-KnLkdByCrM72Ok/s320/DSC02644.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>All eyes on Ghana as election nears<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Saturday, December 6, 2008<br />ACCRA, Ghana: Voters in this coastal African nation are acutely aware of the responsibility they bear when they head to the polls Sunday to elect their next president.<br />Flanked on one side by Togo, a nation ruled for 41 years by the same family, and on the other by Ivory Coast, which is only now emerging from civil war, Ghana is a rare example of democracy.<br />The candidate they elect Sunday will mark the country's second successive transfer of power, a litmus test for a mature democracy and a feat that only a handful of other nations in Africa have accomplished.<br />"The significance of this election, is that Ghana is going to tell the world, 'We understand the need for democracy and we can do it," says Akwasi Osei, a Ghanaian who is now a political science professor at Delaware State University, "We can get it right."<br />An estimated 12.4 million registered voters, roughly half the country's population of 23 million, will choose from one of eight candidates to succeed President John Kufuor, who is stepping down after two terms as required by law.<br />But the race is really against Kufuor's chosen successor Nana Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party, or NPP, and opposition leader John Atta Mills of the National Democratic Congress, or NDC. With Ghana averaging 6 percent growth, roughly three times the global average, the ruling NPP Party is campaigning on a platform of continuity.<br />They have plastered the country with posters that say "We are moving forward" and their tens of thousands of supporters use a hand signal to greet each other: They place their two palms out in front of them and make a back-and-forth motion, indicating forward momentum.<br />They point to the fact that during Kufuor's two terms in office Ghana has become an economic success story. Foreign investment has grown 2000 percent, while exports shot up 1 1/2 times from $1.6 billion in 2001 to $4.2 billion now.<br />Yet for all the statistics indicating success, many here say they have little to show for what economists quantify as progress. Much of the country has no electricity and even in the capital, the poor relieve themselves on the white sand beach because they have no latrines.<br />The seven opposition candidates use a different hand signal to greet each other. They roll their fists in a circular motion, like the turning of two wheels, signifying they stand for change.<br />"We need change," says Samuel Asante, a taxi driver, whose meager salary hasn't changed much in the past eight years. "It's not good for one government to stay in power for so long. We want to keep them on their toes."<br />Polls open at 7 a.m. Sunday at an estimated 22,000 polling stations and close at 5 p.m. Early results are expected within days. The winner needs to secure more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff.<br />Regardless of who wins, Ghanaians are keenly aware of the example they set. Ever since 1957 when they became the first nation in Africa to declare independence from their colonial ruler, Ghana has had the weight of history on its shoulders. For them, it's important that the election goes off without the all-too-common hooliganism, ballot stuffing and violence that continues to plague African elections.<br />On one local TV station, a group of activists paid to have a continuous ticker run along the bottom of the screen. It quotes the French novelist Albert Camus, who said: "Peace is the only battle worth waging."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/06/africa/AF-Ghana-Election.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/06/africa/AF-Ghana-Election.php</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfBXVKl2sxqUQqABMDZvST3Kru8PdCEa5duZ2PZRh2c5FxnOjqCXKiPPXNSRXtnyHesOxqARc-QLhn7adURLxh_2O-aX7u34oFuEuTbRhpH42TON8P0TSy1jzIYtqeO8Thhnl51WpA_Yo/s1600-h/DSC02645.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907859814072850" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfBXVKl2sxqUQqABMDZvST3Kru8PdCEa5duZ2PZRh2c5FxnOjqCXKiPPXNSRXtnyHesOxqARc-QLhn7adURLxh_2O-aX7u34oFuEuTbRhpH42TON8P0TSy1jzIYtqeO8Thhnl51WpA_Yo/s320/DSC02645.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQGIt6UXR5ZqxH_jx3sHqqfcrQpCZ_Ge7gdwUmyJu199r-J5DDSvkGrV6tsJCMkI6CZL4qa_-mg4xUyjYJpTPiu4uyA99ZqgZPptTGTKznMEutd7giCa0bDMXcPo_Ox2iyzSQ1HjVYcW0/s1600-h/DSC02646.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907857526892162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQGIt6UXR5ZqxH_jx3sHqqfcrQpCZ_Ge7gdwUmyJu199r-J5DDSvkGrV6tsJCMkI6CZL4qa_-mg4xUyjYJpTPiu4uyA99ZqgZPptTGTKznMEutd7giCa0bDMXcPo_Ox2iyzSQ1HjVYcW0/s320/DSC02646.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeCxVHTY15KiubxDA85SHc2EHVcCscj64wpJ5fjalAWXK62QR0lCvWEVZ0eNWO3xFhJMfAOgjUgBYXPzYlN6kAg0hG7D4vB2dUBx3v7J9iqrm13Rue3jJd-yzwYnE5CzQ2Z2zrC-ZBuyY/s1600-h/DSC02647.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907548676935234" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeCxVHTY15KiubxDA85SHc2EHVcCscj64wpJ5fjalAWXK62QR0lCvWEVZ0eNWO3xFhJMfAOgjUgBYXPzYlN6kAg0hG7D4vB2dUBx3v7J9iqrm13Rue3jJd-yzwYnE5CzQ2Z2zrC-ZBuyY/s320/DSC02647.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>H. M., an unforgettable amnesiac, dies at 82</strong><br />By Benedict Carey<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />He knew his name. That much he could remember.<br />He knew that his father's family came from Thibodaux, Louisiana, and his mother was from Ireland, and he knew about the 1929 stock market crash and World War II and life in the 1940s.<br />But he could remember almost nothing after that.<br />In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories.<br />For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time.<br />And for those five decades, he was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science. As a participant in hundreds of studies, he helped scientists understand the biology of learning, memory and physical dexterity, as well as the fragile nature of human identity.<br />On Tuesday evening at 5:05, Henry Gustav Molaison known worldwide only as H. M., to protect his privacy died of respiratory failure at a nursing home in Windsor Locks, Connecticut His death was confirmed by Suzanne Corkin, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had worked closely with him for decades. Henry Molaison was 82.<br />From the age of 27, when he embarked on a life as an object of intensive study, he lived with his parents, then with a relative and finally in an institution. His amnesia did not damage his intellect or radically change his personality. But he could not hold a job and lived, more so than any mystic, in the moment.<br />"Say it however you want," said Dr. Thomas Carew, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, and president of the Society for Neuroscience. "What H. M. lost, we now know, was a critical part of his identity."<br />At a time when neuroscience is growing exponentially, when students and money are pouring into laboratories around the world and researchers are mounting large-scale studies with powerful brain-imaging technology, it is easy to forget how rudimentary neuroscience was in the middle of the 20th century.<br />When Molaison, at 9 years old, banged his head hard after being hit by a bicycle rider in his neighborhood near Hartford, scientists had no way to see inside his brain. They had no rigorous understanding of how complex functions like memory or learning functioned biologically. They could not explain why the boy had developed severe seizures after the accident, or even whether the blow to the head had anything do to with it.<br />Eighteen years after that bicycle accident, Molaison arrived at the office of Dr. William Beecher Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital. Molaison was blacking out frequently, had devastating convulsions and could no longer repair motors to earn a living.<br />After exhausting other treatments, Dr. Scoville decided to surgically remove two finger-shaped slivers of tissue from Molaison's brain. The seizures abated, but the procedure especially cutting into the hippocampus, an area deep in the brain, about level with the ears left the patient radically changed.<br />Alarmed, Dr. Scoville consulted with a leading surgeon in Montreal, Dr. Wilder Penfield of McGill University, who with Dr. Brenda Milner, a psychologist, had reported on two other patients' memory deficits.<br />Soon Dr. Milner began taking the night train down from Canada to visit Molaison in Hartford, giving him a variety of memory tests. It was a collaboration that would forever alter scientists' understanding of learning and memory.<br />"He was a very gracious man, very patient, always willing to try these tasks I would give him," Dr. Milner, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Montreal Neurological Institute and McGill University, said in a recent interview. "And yet every time I walked in the room, it was like we'd never met."<br />At the time, many scientists believed that memory was widely distributed throughout the brain and not dependent on any one neural organ or region. Brain lesions, either from surgery or accidents, altered people's memory in ways that were not easily predictable. Even as Dr. Milner published her results, many researchers attributed H. M.'s deficits to other factors, like general trauma from his seizures or some unrecognized damage.<br />"It was hard for people to believe that it was all due" to the excisions from the surgery, Dr. Milner said.<br />That began to change in 1962, when Dr. Milner presented a landmark study in which she and H. M. demonstrated that a part of his memory was fully intact. In a series of trials, she had Molaison try to trace a line between two outlines of a five-point star, one inside the other, while watching his hand and the star in a mirror. The task is difficult for anyone to master at first.<br />Every time H. M. performed the task, it struck him as an entirely new experience. He had no memory of doing it before. Yet with practice he became proficient. "At one point he said to me, after many of these trials, 'Huh, this was easier than I thought it would be,' " Dr. Milner said.<br />The implications were enormous. Scientists saw that there were at least two systems in the brain for creating new memories. One, known as declarative memory, records names, faces and new experiences and stores them until they are consciously retrieved. This system depends on the function of medial temporal areas, particularly an organ called the hippocampus, now the object of intense study.<br />Another system, commonly known as motor learning, is subconscious and depends on other brain systems. This explains why people can jump on a bike after years away from one and take the thing for a ride, or why they can pick up a guitar that they have not played in years and still remember how to strum it.<br />Soon "everyone wanted an amnesic to study," Dr. Milner said, and researchers began to map out still other dimensions of memory. They saw that H. M.'s short-term memory was fine; he could hold thoughts in his head for about 20 seconds. It was holding onto them without the hippocampus that was impossible.<br />"The study of H. M. by Brenda Milner stands as one of the great milestones in the history of modern neuroscience," said Dr. Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. "It opened the way for the study of the two memory systems in the brain, explicit and implicit, and provided the basis for everything that came later the study of human memory and its disorders."<br />Living at his parents' house, and later with a relative through the 1970s, Molaison helped with the shopping, mowed the lawn, raked leaves and relaxed in front of the television. He could navigate through a day attending to mundane details fixing a lunch, making his bed by drawing on what he could remember from his first 27 years.<br />He also somehow sensed from all the scientists, students and researchers parading through his life that he was contributing to a larger endeavor, though he was uncertain about the details, said Dr. Corkin, who met Molaison while studying in Dr. Milner's laboratory and who continued to work with him until his death.<br />By the time he moved into a nursing home in 1980, at age 54, he had become known to Dr. Corkin's MIT team in the way that Polaroid snapshots in a photo album might sketch out a life but not reveal it whole.<br />H. M. could recount childhood scenes: Hiking the Mohawk Trail. A road trip with his parents. Target shooting in the woods near his house.<br />"Gist memories, we call them," Dr. Corkin said. "He had the memories, but he couldn't place them in time exactly; he couldn't give you a narrative."<br />He was nonetheless a self-conscious presence, as open to a good joke and as sensitive as anyone in the room. Once, a researcher visiting with Dr. Milner and H. M. turned to her and remarked how interesting a case this patient was.<br />"H. M. was standing right there," Dr. Milner said, "and he kind of colored blushed, you know and mumbled how he didn't think he was that interesting, and moved away."<br />In the last years of his life, Molaison was, as always, open to visits from researchers, and Dr. Corkin said she checked on his health weekly. She also arranged for one last research program. On Tuesday, hours after Molaison's death, scientists worked through the night taking exhaustive M.R.I. scans of his brain, data that will help tease apart precisely which areas of his temporal lobes were still intact and which were damaged, and how this pattern related to his memory.<br />Dr. Corkin arranged, too, to have his brain preserved for future study, in the same spirit that Einstein's was, as an irreplaceable artifact of scientific history.<br />"He was like a family member," said Dr. Corkin, who is at work on a book on H. M., titled "A Lifetime Without Memory." "You'd think it would be impossible to have a relationship with someone who didn't recognize you, but I did."<br />In his way, Molaison did know his frequent visitor, she added: "He thought he knew me from high school."<br />Henry Gustav Molaison, born on Feb. 26, 1926, left no survivors. He left a legacy in science that cannot be erased.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/05hm.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/05hm.php</a></div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6NGMWQb19E75OfL-kE2uL3VDbtIdg7KCt6nnRgsQZ_4Y9zTiZEVvdWLB-MIhQNh2Uzb2uJMpIkyqrapVMsB2jU6QLkSVU46e6BVBPsTH_CwOQ7PrYx-emc8j4vzLcUZaTaOw5HJUfDvM/s1600-h/DSC02648.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907548616509842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6NGMWQb19E75OfL-kE2uL3VDbtIdg7KCt6nnRgsQZ_4Y9zTiZEVvdWLB-MIhQNh2Uzb2uJMpIkyqrapVMsB2jU6QLkSVU46e6BVBPsTH_CwOQ7PrYx-emc8j4vzLcUZaTaOw5HJUfDvM/s320/DSC02648.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjytZXj8J5E3HF9-RXWVpdc5vqwvlG9uVmK_OIMHgWoJEaGH4nLZU8U0KkYCmIdPNGyLo8kriUK4x25SFg_HdKs_ZSFnxaTkIeOGZZknLrgXwzWdCktWBsULywQyVKkt0Uuk1v213BE7So/s1600-h/DSC02649.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907538110459074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjytZXj8J5E3HF9-RXWVpdc5vqwvlG9uVmK_OIMHgWoJEaGH4nLZU8U0KkYCmIdPNGyLo8kriUK4x25SFg_HdKs_ZSFnxaTkIeOGZZknLrgXwzWdCktWBsULywQyVKkt0Uuk1v213BE7So/s320/DSC02649.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRKOigyJdqqsSWsKCCYaY7aNYVc0FvXhCKom9POytfXQ8SjXIeu5N_5QA4LncQ8odEF11G6tVldD5o7yBxH7gYeLebVK6vm82MI4BZqp2exKmZlodR7xU3gSln9mpnpZ-QigirV6Qqpkw/s1600-h/DSC02650.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907538177083586" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRKOigyJdqqsSWsKCCYaY7aNYVc0FvXhCKom9POytfXQ8SjXIeu5N_5QA4LncQ8odEF11G6tVldD5o7yBxH7gYeLebVK6vm82MI4BZqp2exKmZlodR7xU3gSln9mpnpZ-QigirV6Qqpkw/s320/DSC02650.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifFC2YC_XVhj0qRUh28fGSMM42WzTy7TKZDqgFuxBDGFedHiT72BJEZkBBFK0cEEhoXqrLkqELf8vR0JEe0GS0zMQJAjwh29BmPGKUzfDcwoyx_KUA2Zn9ANliFxU9N1S5zbPCMEgXuj8/s1600-h/DSC02651.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907538124927186" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifFC2YC_XVhj0qRUh28fGSMM42WzTy7TKZDqgFuxBDGFedHiT72BJEZkBBFK0cEEhoXqrLkqELf8vR0JEe0GS0zMQJAjwh29BmPGKUzfDcwoyx_KUA2Zn9ANliFxU9N1S5zbPCMEgXuj8/s320/DSC02651.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7m17LaIqVswdo90l9FUOW4DVF0PE4OC5PLnkng2GDXkhipwTDBYQKcwDbne4BHOhDAGMi2xHuReatPzayanJ6lVykvjO2Wu6XehZN8ak6AzR-B25VpG12g3zqWgATBWpd7P9U-quSBQk/s1600-h/DSC02652.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907291988507330" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7m17LaIqVswdo90l9FUOW4DVF0PE4OC5PLnkng2GDXkhipwTDBYQKcwDbne4BHOhDAGMi2xHuReatPzayanJ6lVykvjO2Wu6XehZN8ak6AzR-B25VpG12g3zqWgATBWpd7P9U-quSBQk/s320/DSC02652.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqVpy6ktKh6SvK-0W0S6Or4kympZHuYySSTaMqoDSE5YAg_m7DBMcWO8Y-Y-a6Twd4HT26UB6RbvWQt_e9bVdQm2g_8y4k0Id2fVuWOU9r3lD8aKphxPnUOWOO10G4eobbWWbjHBWSi5s/s1600-h/DSC02653.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907291747898194" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqVpy6ktKh6SvK-0W0S6Or4kympZHuYySSTaMqoDSE5YAg_m7DBMcWO8Y-Y-a6Twd4HT26UB6RbvWQt_e9bVdQm2g_8y4k0Id2fVuWOU9r3lD8aKphxPnUOWOO10G4eobbWWbjHBWSi5s/s320/DSC02653.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipIO1mpSokCd6fEMlIy8vVRbDNoBH6AXiP4ls_XE9u4e4EqRltAXu85HQL_XgwQjBGWJMKYybo4I8puPgH8gdRkFlrAlOtQRso3xzFZUKZ5YwxH-qp7dFdllzuwt7I5BvsZmVumz3HL2w/s1600-h/DSC02654.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907282156056722" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipIO1mpSokCd6fEMlIy8vVRbDNoBH6AXiP4ls_XE9u4e4EqRltAXu85HQL_XgwQjBGWJMKYybo4I8puPgH8gdRkFlrAlOtQRso3xzFZUKZ5YwxH-qp7dFdllzuwt7I5BvsZmVumz3HL2w/s320/DSC02654.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGbHI-_KJcutOUH0f9ZgooUlACDYwDhfAAff6wr5pKaR0RkaBTUGkFdbvp2mTuwQPWlCVgMQWZ_peCFRF9Zacl6o2yvyxP8smYwbDosHyTyzZ3kQ4wwY82iHSyfR-49lk7AE1AZEsjMd4/s1600-h/DSC02655.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907279731114162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGbHI-_KJcutOUH0f9ZgooUlACDYwDhfAAff6wr5pKaR0RkaBTUGkFdbvp2mTuwQPWlCVgMQWZ_peCFRF9Zacl6o2yvyxP8smYwbDosHyTyzZ3kQ4wwY82iHSyfR-49lk7AE1AZEsjMd4/s320/DSC02655.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9SwiuodgjiRbnsiOh7_CIBUFcRa4yw-LslC4wUHgkMNHmOEDw0u6HFmrCQ4FD2r3zetNyAJSTvqx-pypadqiqFvgywbGBYvKvqzcCVtZXhpu3UWRAl-EqkdwtL2FCmZ_LCg3yG5vjkBk/s1600-h/DSC02656.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276907275161903202" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9SwiuodgjiRbnsiOh7_CIBUFcRa4yw-LslC4wUHgkMNHmOEDw0u6HFmrCQ4FD2r3zetNyAJSTvqx-pypadqiqFvgywbGBYvKvqzcCVtZXhpu3UWRAl-EqkdwtL2FCmZ_LCg3yG5vjkBk/s320/DSC02656.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div><strong>Amsterdam to close many brothels, marijuana cafes<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Sunday, December 7, 2008<br />AMSTERDAM, Netherlands: Amsterdam has unveiled plans to close brothels, sex shops and marijuana cafes in its ancient city center as part of a major effort to drive organized crime out of the tourist haven.<br />The city is targeting businesses that "generate criminality," including gambling parlors, and the so-called "coffee shops" where marijuana is sold openly. Also targeted are peep shows, massage parlors and souvenir shops used by drug dealers for money-laundering.<br />"I think that the new reality will be more in line with our image as a tolerant and crazy place, rather than a free zone for criminals" Lodewijk Asscher, a city council member and one of the main proponents of the plan, said Saturday.<br />The news comes just one day after Amsterdam's mayor said he would search for loopholes in new rules laid down by the national government that would close marijuana cafes near schools citywide. The measures announced Saturday would affect about 36 coffee shops in the center itself — a little less than 20 percent of the city total.<br />Asscher underlined that the city center will remain true to its freewheeling reputation.<br />"It'll be a place with 200 windows (for prostitutes) and 30 coffee shops, which you can't find anywhere else in the world — very exciting, but also with cultural attractions," he said. "And you won't have to be embarrassed to say you came."<br />Under the plan announced Saturday, Amsterdam will spend €30 million to €40 million ($38 million to $51 million) to bring hotels, restaurants, art galleries and boutiques to the center. It will also build new underground parking areas.<br />Amsterdam already had plans to close many brothels and some coffee shops, but plans announced Saturday go further.<br />Asscher said the city would reshape the area, using zoning rules, buying out businesses and offering assistance to upgrade stores. The city has shut brothels and sex clubs in the past by relying on a law allowing the closure of businesses with bookkeeping irregularities.<br />Prostitution will be allowed only in two areas in the district — notably De Wallen ("The Walls"), a web of streets and alleys around the city's medieval retaining dam walls. The area has been a center of prostitution since before the city's golden shipping age in the 1600s.<br />Prostitution was legalized in the Netherlands in 2000, formalizing a long-standing tolerance policy.<br />Marijuana is technically illegal in the Netherlands, but prosecutors won't press charges for possession of small amounts. Coffee shops are able to sell it openly.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/07/europe/EU-Netherlands-Amsterdam-Cleanup.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/07/europe/EU-Netherlands-Amsterdam-Cleanup.php</a></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Philippine police says 16 dead in robbery shootout<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Saturday, December 6, 2008<br />MANILA: Sixteen people died after suspected robbers engaged police in a shootout outside the headquarters of a transport firm in a Manila suburb, police said Saturday.<br />Highway police and special operatives acting on an informant's tip were deployed to the transport firm's office but were spotted by the robbers and met by a volley of gunfire, according to police chief inspector Glenn Tigson's official report.<br />Eight robbers inside a sports utility vehicle died on the spot after the policemen returned fire. A second vehicle with two thieves on board sped away during the crossfire but was chased by the police.<br />The two robbers later abandoned their vehicle and grabbed a motorcycle from a passing motorist but were intercepted by police who shot and killed the suspects on the spot.<br />A father and his 7-year-old daughter on board a passing sports utility vehicle were also hit in the crossfire and later died. Two other people manning a truck near the office of the transport firm also died from gunshot wounds.<br />The police report said one member of the police's elite special action force and the transport firm's security guard also died after being hit in the crossfire.<br />Two police officers were wounded, including the chief of the police highway patrol group's special operations unit..<br />Police recovered four M16 rifles, two .45 calibre guns, handheld radios, ammunition and a police jacket in the robbers' vehicle.<br />Police are investigating the possibility that the robbers may have been former police officers involved in a spate of bank heists, Chief Superintendent Perfecto Palad, director of the police highway patrol group told reporters.<br />"They are ruthless criminals who will not hesitate to kill at the slightest provocation," Palad said.<br />Leopoldo Bataoil, Manila police chief, told reporters he has ordered an inquiry into the shootout after receiving complaints from witnesses and relatives of the victims that the passing motorists were hit by police.<br />(Reporting by Rosemarie Francisco; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/06/asia/OUKWD-UK-PHILIPPINES-CRIME.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/06/asia/OUKWD-UK-PHILIPPINES-CRIME.php</a></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXy4EGFdptEdLjHqibMeNx9BDiEJIA2o4Pq4nKQJl9ZuQSJZeYp6GSHg6nbhLH1eXe__0oKfnlGXzt3I_Rs3eQYII7l6qRwXV2u5jP3du58kl9DtryTLLtnPv5dWx2buev5gvdlHDTwT0/s1600-h/DSC02657.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906978600433906" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 121px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXy4EGFdptEdLjHqibMeNx9BDiEJIA2o4Pq4nKQJl9ZuQSJZeYp6GSHg6nbhLH1eXe__0oKfnlGXzt3I_Rs3eQYII7l6qRwXV2u5jP3du58kl9DtryTLLtnPv5dWx2buev5gvdlHDTwT0/s320/DSC02657.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGYe00Yw8gT5lIQszc7U6BjD-ecVjvKCqCaA6Wvt86laIwcHhIcrwcgtYIPLJJAHXWSxpy0ucV_2SVgSVVUjJsq-E8y80ba5tghiynH9WzfHhCxxJ1RIlhKEVooWInFQHzq0XoiCEsQ3U/s1600-h/DSC02658.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906973827653890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 303px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGYe00Yw8gT5lIQszc7U6BjD-ecVjvKCqCaA6Wvt86laIwcHhIcrwcgtYIPLJJAHXWSxpy0ucV_2SVgSVVUjJsq-E8y80ba5tghiynH9WzfHhCxxJ1RIlhKEVooWInFQHzq0XoiCEsQ3U/s320/DSC02658.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWRJ1N-5R1iRgYiJhVjU2sYSAt18ejuOGx2TeZBn9QSfj1lviIu4X0DC2PDG6NGOfYNEnXxw-gLUcxPCtf9BI2RJ9atGy4Rslyvb5sFZWgn_CC2j5V29UWXuLUSe0dBrdp59dY_odDq3E/s1600-h/DSC02659.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906972068998866" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWRJ1N-5R1iRgYiJhVjU2sYSAt18ejuOGx2TeZBn9QSfj1lviIu4X0DC2PDG6NGOfYNEnXxw-gLUcxPCtf9BI2RJ9atGy4Rslyvb5sFZWgn_CC2j5V29UWXuLUSe0dBrdp59dY_odDq3E/s320/DSC02659.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVdLR1WF-jWEmhIoN_-RW29zXkJTHPVeJE25eDX6anBNXrwzxwzCP9pj3NYbFcbgMOnv8wKeYCFw-YOpO69jeMp7UY548-6d8G021wvM0vnO4ZhCcwWxnaV2V87SXKIdN19PS-hFz-zdc/s1600-h/DSC02660.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906969429876562" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVdLR1WF-jWEmhIoN_-RW29zXkJTHPVeJE25eDX6anBNXrwzxwzCP9pj3NYbFcbgMOnv8wKeYCFw-YOpO69jeMp7UY548-6d8G021wvM0vnO4ZhCcwWxnaV2V87SXKIdN19PS-hFz-zdc/s320/DSC02660.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYWDHTg8iOvIRNA3LdLIOctRDbgZDWl0xyFPSBEFigSmGfamqDufDvGrNdE_IjBm5rW8G5ncWg6QQfpHS_Umr1UQFl49MzHSaJn2CzBhFafEqWA7FFquS7FLZ034C9BJOLbjSj0YvCkAY/s1600-h/DSC02661.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906968918700818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYWDHTg8iOvIRNA3LdLIOctRDbgZDWl0xyFPSBEFigSmGfamqDufDvGrNdE_IjBm5rW8G5ncWg6QQfpHS_Umr1UQFl49MzHSaJn2CzBhFafEqWA7FFquS7FLZ034C9BJOLbjSj0YvCkAY/s320/DSC02661.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRgXDKGlAVZi7Uwkr155V9Fdt4aXK19o8u3wtclN67DGyNdtB3OrSB9XRnSOjlt8HzoI7E5gm5NzdAPs3BmmRiLleatBXs34kogwMYHeqr58IQaR09N0T-96iaIbgkls__f10RvJeEfBU/s1600-h/DSC02663.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906699147176578" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRgXDKGlAVZi7Uwkr155V9Fdt4aXK19o8u3wtclN67DGyNdtB3OrSB9XRnSOjlt8HzoI7E5gm5NzdAPs3BmmRiLleatBXs34kogwMYHeqr58IQaR09N0T-96iaIbgkls__f10RvJeEfBU/s320/DSC02663.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8Y6fJtYIofzYn07LVfUgC15Z8BAS-8IMHwi0W39DJrr42ygXrEjvHgqbejZTLq-X3sJWbJUfwJQ1fGMoOfbYkVNe4bnyWVChmIH11VrK8UuxxeJZDkgiseCdjrgtlnVoDA9EpRk1OqeE/s1600-h/DSC02666.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906701804174194" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8Y6fJtYIofzYn07LVfUgC15Z8BAS-8IMHwi0W39DJrr42ygXrEjvHgqbejZTLq-X3sJWbJUfwJQ1fGMoOfbYkVNe4bnyWVChmIH11VrK8UuxxeJZDkgiseCdjrgtlnVoDA9EpRk1OqeE/s320/DSC02666.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-IFpQ7fNKwqq61awfVxyNUwVzwnlx8EJc4bedTHcCfiVsQmwXlO7VDapsYysupvQpZKdxP8n-cKYdVmZCliKyI-yc2cG-1H1OEWcvqq7CjoARhDBur1JpNRYtqWA_kqLw13zLxzq3ULk/s1600-h/DSC02667.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906694620981314" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-IFpQ7fNKwqq61awfVxyNUwVzwnlx8EJc4bedTHcCfiVsQmwXlO7VDapsYysupvQpZKdxP8n-cKYdVmZCliKyI-yc2cG-1H1OEWcvqq7CjoARhDBur1JpNRYtqWA_kqLw13zLxzq3ULk/s320/DSC02667.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8v1rqtQZJ0jh2vmQQNhmPA8QJ5B-n8sgj8kUDUVwMAMD0jpE7pyn7X4AsAOhOwqTJ2b9p1grNtu0dAjdJc4mVeNb1ooITy9WeTj0ZKFoTDqFIF2AU9ABjTmIcWCk-_SlJP7KLd32EmM4/s1600-h/DSC02669.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906696002713106" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8v1rqtQZJ0jh2vmQQNhmPA8QJ5B-n8sgj8kUDUVwMAMD0jpE7pyn7X4AsAOhOwqTJ2b9p1grNtu0dAjdJc4mVeNb1ooITy9WeTj0ZKFoTDqFIF2AU9ABjTmIcWCk-_SlJP7KLd32EmM4/s320/DSC02669.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFxq6LGC2Dn5mJF_GXGhlvKzQqgdiPRPdXE0WPAa1Ph5bPYz5K8LxL7_HKiErsXZx9w8bLeOqg07i-39mYGupGkA5xRxsS8KZPzm-li1AHlypP6PN_JA6jITJnl-3mhinmsuPl-Uk7Q9c/s1600-h/DSC02670.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906695252690786" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFxq6LGC2Dn5mJF_GXGhlvKzQqgdiPRPdXE0WPAa1Ph5bPYz5K8LxL7_HKiErsXZx9w8bLeOqg07i-39mYGupGkA5xRxsS8KZPzm-li1AHlypP6PN_JA6jITJnl-3mhinmsuPl-Uk7Q9c/s320/DSC02670.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPUD7j1UNXU_4GrBKeh5l-BxoyuXdnmHtPbvPKXPyvLRUJfz8Pjr-jzOFCbkldYIAs1Jl75X4fQ1w87DRi8mFNWgtS47fQBH1pyckxzOTyszdmEuyFbbjz1_j91UjCugOynuvXS9JE2wc/s1600-h/DSC02671.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906437309888626" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPUD7j1UNXU_4GrBKeh5l-BxoyuXdnmHtPbvPKXPyvLRUJfz8Pjr-jzOFCbkldYIAs1Jl75X4fQ1w87DRi8mFNWgtS47fQBH1pyckxzOTyszdmEuyFbbjz1_j91UjCugOynuvXS9JE2wc/s320/DSC02671.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil9MKQapKTE8ePMGM4t5JppcYRtoNs22Gv83aWzWCFyWdHFvVeeL4ahzIszcpUC19ScmlmdHE05pGYfw6VOzK7YeJ4nCwu51XXo5S7AYDy0WGmkRwgHUmGbUbbEECSz8ugmtGa5oytWg4/s1600-h/DSC02672.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906436293183378" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil9MKQapKTE8ePMGM4t5JppcYRtoNs22Gv83aWzWCFyWdHFvVeeL4ahzIszcpUC19ScmlmdHE05pGYfw6VOzK7YeJ4nCwu51XXo5S7AYDy0WGmkRwgHUmGbUbbEECSz8ugmtGa5oytWg4/s320/DSC02672.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFKWie5ooPYblmSbCcS2v7zxy3jOzgcIYUDm2Qss9cQ7vuKg_fImpymR-h2yK4xfl-IFQXFNsI-XsKhrvYejcYS8I90_9JWc1ncLFvhHVCniQ0fEsIWDY0l3GsqkRnnhRMDwQLuNlrJPA/s1600-h/DSC02676.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906431877378066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFKWie5ooPYblmSbCcS2v7zxy3jOzgcIYUDm2Qss9cQ7vuKg_fImpymR-h2yK4xfl-IFQXFNsI-XsKhrvYejcYS8I90_9JWc1ncLFvhHVCniQ0fEsIWDY0l3GsqkRnnhRMDwQLuNlrJPA/s320/DSC02676.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw0wWo__LCsqsE0g_e_ShqVkFI9-DM9AMbiybQsTDJenzDjQYJyVW8-cfxm1qFbP28Kz9fCw-jT9JT5gAw3BRD___g4E1zZaEvE2dnzZdT-wzMRPdG6ZO8-ofSrnJaZU0yLvlv0xzRzNI/s1600-h/DSC02678.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906429868270626" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw0wWo__LCsqsE0g_e_ShqVkFI9-DM9AMbiybQsTDJenzDjQYJyVW8-cfxm1qFbP28Kz9fCw-jT9JT5gAw3BRD___g4E1zZaEvE2dnzZdT-wzMRPdG6ZO8-ofSrnJaZU0yLvlv0xzRzNI/s320/DSC02678.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUYl3durxhXGq2yYWExYxf5A4pObGUdELQXi4eaiQOlmAJblzNGIdTmUIZZl_CrdylgZQCedqGTS2sP7M-U2PwfL0_vLl9X1DFGcM_3HektcDz8LnB_zqwe09fecn88UbpM31GBfncbhU/s1600-h/DSC02679.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276906424685676706" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUYl3durxhXGq2yYWExYxf5A4pObGUdELQXi4eaiQOlmAJblzNGIdTmUIZZl_CrdylgZQCedqGTS2sP7M-U2PwfL0_vLl9X1DFGcM_3HektcDz8LnB_zqwe09fecn88UbpM31GBfncbhU/s320/DSC02679.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Turner Prize reflects a 'new language'</strong><br />By Claudia Barbieri<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />PARIS: What is a group of Bangladeshi rickshaw drivers doing in London, staring impassively at their unseen observer? And what do they have in common with an ethereal young woman tentatively breaking pieces of china? For an answer, turn to Runa Islam, the Bangladeshi-born artist whose video works - "First Day of Spring," featuring the Dhaka rickshaw riders, and "Be the First to See What You See as You See It," a slow-motion study of smashing porcelain - helped propel her onto the short list for this year's Turner Prize.<br />Sometimes shocking and controversial, in other years more thought-provoking, the Turner Prize has become not just a barometer of the state and direction of British contemporary art but also a fixture on the social calendar.<br />Founded in 1984 by a group of contemporary art patrons linked to the Tate gallery, the prize is awarded to an artist under the age of 50, born or working in Britain, whose publicly exhibited work over the past year has seemed especially innovative or important. The winner is selected from a short list of four, chosen by a five-member jury; the first prize is worth £25,000, or about $37,500, and the three runners-up receive £5,000 each.<br />Past winners have included some of the most notorious enfants terribles of British Art - Gilbert and George in 1986; Damien Hirst in 1995; Chris Ofili, with his elephant dung paintings, in 1998; the transvestite potter Grayson Perry in 2003; Tracy Emin's unmade bed failed to win in 1999.<br />"In the 1990s, the Turner Prize became like the Grand National, in terms of it being a national event," said Virginia Button, curator of the prize from 1993 to 1998 and author of its regularly updated official history.<br />The notoriety of the prize wins envious recognition beyond sometimes insular confines of the British art world.<br />"The Turner Prize goes far beyond an art prize - it has become a national event with a global profile," said Gilles Fuchs, president of the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art, organizer of the Marcel Duchamp contemporary art prize, in Paris.<br />This year's jury, led by Stephen Deuchar, director of the Tate Britain gallery, included Suzanne Cotter, senior curator and deputy director of the Oxford-based gallery and publisher of the Modern Art Oxford; Jennifer Higgie, co-editor of Frieze magazine; Daniel Birnbaum, director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, in Frankfurt; and the architect David Adjaye.<br />Their short-listed contenders, whose works are on exhibit at the Tate Britain gallery until Jan. 18, included, alongside Islam, two other women - Goshka Macuga, who was born in Poland, and Cathy Wilkes, who was born in Northern Ireland - and Mark Leckey, a British-born professor of film studies in Frankfurt.<br />Leckey, the bookmaker's favorite and eventual winner - the jury's verdict was announced on Monday - uses a mix of media in his works including film, sculpture, performance and lecture, referencing fine art, music, clubbing and pop culture. His works on show at the Tate Britain engage their audience with images of cultural icons that include Felix the Cat, Jeff Koon's steely rabbit and the Simpsons.<br />"There is no hierarchy in his work - anything is up for grabs," said Carolyn Kerr , one of the show's curators.<br />To a casual observer all four short-listed artists share some fundamental stylistic traits. They work in installation film and multimedia genres. Paint, apparently, is out.<br />"Art today is no longer about pretty pictures," said Marc-Olivier Wahler, director of the Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary-art museum space in Paris. "The artist is free to express whatever he wants; artworks are more often than not frustrating, troubling and make the viewer re-examine his preconceptions."<br />That approach is perhaps most apparent in Wilkes's work. "Give you all my money" is a collection of found objects with a centerpiece of two stripped down checkout counters surrounded by an assortment of junk: leftover food in bowls; hair clippings, burned wood and other detritus, forming an extended personal iconography echoing Emin's bed. Into this meticulously dysfunctional installation two mannequins bring an abstractedly human counterpoint; one sits on a toilet, naked except for a nurse's hat and the other leans against a counter, her head in bird cage. Both have various domestic bits and pieces hanging by strings from their skulls. The whole work seems to add up to an expression of everyday feminine drudgery.<br />This year's short-listed artists were not especially easy to understand, said Deuchar, the jury chairman. But, he added in a interview broadcast by the BBC, "the public is not frightened by art that requires some investigation and whose meaning is not instantly clear."<br />No less enigmatic, Macuga's has been likened to cultural archeology, in which she constructs histories and explores conventions of archiving, exhibition making and museum display. In her Tate installation - described as an exploration of the professional and romantic relationships between the World War I artist Paul Nash and the surrealist painter Eileen Agar and the Bauhaus architects and designers Mies Van der Rohe and Lily Reich - she uses photos and archive material from the Tate in a set of photomontages and collages surrounding a minimalist sculpture of glass and steel. Drawings of rain adorn the walls. The relationship between these elements is, indeed, not instantly clear.<br />Leckey's offering, "Cinema in the Round," is a video of a 40-minute performance art lecture in which the artist talks of his fascination with the life of images on screen, mixing ideas about language and film with shots of filmed objects and images, in a looping exploration of the relation between self and image.<br />These works are the product of "a seismic shift in the appreciation of the visual arts in Britain," said Button, the historian of the prize. "They are polythemic; they can be appreciated on many different levels." This adds to their richness and complexity, she said. "No contemporary artist would say there is one way of looking at a work," Button said.<br />Kerr, the curator, agreed. Artists are engaging in a multilayered exploration of their universe, she said, "a sort of collaging in every sense."<br />"New media are available to artists," Kerr said. "Art is no longer confined to painting and sculpture. Art is taking on a whole new language, about testing and exploring, in a sense growing up, moving on from sensationalist statements to something more thoughtful and thought-provoking."<br />She added: "British art is heading into a different place. The work requires more attention; it's in a more thoughtful place. It's intriguing, challenging, deeply rooted in aesthetics. We're heading to redefining what it means to be modern - post-post-modernism."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/arts/rcarturn.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/arts/rcarturn.php</a></div><div><br /> </div><div align="left"><br /></div><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><br />Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment</a> </div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-28381404866071205352008-12-06T04:44:00.027+01:002008-12-06T06:22:17.055+01:00A Place in the Auvernge, Friday, 5th December 2008<div align="center"><strong>0512</strong></div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVoA2lQragBaPk9ORXjP4XWCTxkDNFnfxj6N89C6Z8n4jTMyzmv_92Cn0bKNKlNg9c62_GnJ8h4mwKxgl8Oc0zg1mTkPuvEdp7OWdR9Ib1SO6OT7woJApSwV-aK7Wuy9AWtMNOc_Bq2Pk/s1600-h/DSC02570.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276520487668772514" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVoA2lQragBaPk9ORXjP4XWCTxkDNFnfxj6N89C6Z8n4jTMyzmv_92Cn0bKNKlNg9c62_GnJ8h4mwKxgl8Oc0zg1mTkPuvEdp7OWdR9Ib1SO6OT7woJApSwV-aK7Wuy9AWtMNOc_Bq2Pk/s320/DSC02570.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlFlAJXAmdY0JdxlwO7BpX4gHLDnAHuGroPRUK29ZX8XFYlkpo6rY3GULHgShJg1FarLUMpkWgTtvj08EjhlCTDNcjnwZKFy98TSutsIAHMDUnlAlibninwqfXnm6uKPdTgJird2UF09U/s1600-h/DSC02594.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276520312359085890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlFlAJXAmdY0JdxlwO7BpX4gHLDnAHuGroPRUK29ZX8XFYlkpo6rY3GULHgShJg1FarLUMpkWgTtvj08EjhlCTDNcjnwZKFy98TSutsIAHMDUnlAlibninwqfXnm6uKPdTgJird2UF09U/s320/DSC02594.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><strong>China prepares blacklist of dangerous food additives</strong><br />By Mark McDonald<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />HONG KONG: As China continues to try to repair the reputation of its damaged food and dairy industries, the Ministry of Health is preparing a blacklist of dangerous food additives, "especially toxic or harmful substances, which are likely to be used in food products."<br />The blacklist was disclosed by Su Zhi, deputy director of the ministry's Food Safety and Sanitation Surveillance Bureau. His comments came on a Chinese television program and were reported by state media on Friday.<br />The ministry also said it would be establishing stricter food-labeling requirements and quality standards, starting with the dairy sector.<br />The blacklist, which Su said would be "updated constantly," is seen as the latest in a series of measures intended to clean up the dairy industry, one of the largest in the world. Chinese farmers, food producers and government inspectors have come under intense pressure in recent months as dangerously contaminated products have been discovered, ranging from baby formula, milk and eggs to candy, cookies and pet food.<br />The most significant culprit in the dairy scandal has been the industrial chemical melamine, typically used in the production of plastics and pesticides. Melamine has been widely added to milk and milk products in China, and while the chemical does not add protein, it does trick food tests into showing elevated protein levels.<br />Contaminated milk has sickened 300,000 children in China, officials said this week, and 860 children remain hospitalized with kidney and urinary tract problems. At least six children have died in the scandal, officials said.<br />Melamine found in products containing Chinese milk powder has led to widespread recalls both in China and around the world. The state-run newspaper China Daily reported this week that Chinese milk exports had dropped by 92 percent since September, when news of the scandal first broke.<br />In response to the surge of contaminated Chinese products, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month opened its first overseas inspection offices in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou.<br />Andrew Jacobs contributed reporting from Beijing.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/asia/china.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/asia/china.php</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTMmTn8Rn03eYihyLfKhNzJdzSu7C5yeu1SilcIMsbeZkhX4o-Y4XXdMi-fJLjZL3wbabHRbgnMuOxuZtOdekSWL0OiX3RjUQ0PGogbzPBRGqNuSAOhiuJf_KZml2KIdV-vrxJ1Bx9cw/s1600-h/DSC02595.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276520306315479714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTMmTn8Rn03eYihyLfKhNzJdzSu7C5yeu1SilcIMsbeZkhX4o-Y4XXdMi-fJLjZL3wbabHRbgnMuOxuZtOdekSWL0OiX3RjUQ0PGogbzPBRGqNuSAOhiuJf_KZml2KIdV-vrxJ1Bx9cw/s320/DSC02595.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>UN climate official defends global emissions program</strong><br />By Elisabeth Rosenthal<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />After a U.S. government report this week called into question the efficacy of the United Nations' global trading scheme to reduce greenhouse emissions, the top UN climate official defended the program Friday and said he expected the United States to commit to emissions targets under a new administration.<br />Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, called the report, released this week by the U.S. General Accounting Office, "constructive criticism," rather than "an excuse not to participate."<br />"This is trying to foster a debate about how we can make what we're doing more effective," he said.<br />The report questioned whether the UN program, called the Clean Development Mechanism, led to environmental improvements in the developing world that were significant and verifiable.<br />Under UN auspices, climate officials from around the globe are meeting this week and next in Poznan, Poland, to discuss a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, the international emissions treaty that expires in 2012. They must reach an agreement by next December.<br />The United States, which emits more greenhouse gases than any other industrialized country, will need to sign a new treaty to ensure the agreement's success in controlling emissions, but Washington's exact role or intentions remain unclear at this time of transition. The United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, under which dozens of other industrialized nations pledged to reduce their emissions.<br />During the U.S. presidential campaign, Barack Obama said the United States should be party to a future climate treaty and should cap its emissions, but Washington is represented by the Bush administration team in Poznan.<br />Under the UN's Clean Development Mechanism, countries that have set targets to reduce emissions can do so in two ways: by reducing emissions at home or by paying for new projects to reduce emissions in the developing world, gaining so-called carbon credits. Such projects might include paying to clean up a cement factory in Central Asia, for example, or supporting a hydroelectric power project in Africa.<br />The U.S. report, released Tuesday, said that the system did not always have the desired effect because it was hard to monitor and assess the distant projects. Some people were gaming the system, getting offsets for projects that would have occurred anyway or which not actually have beneficial environmental effect.<br />"Carbon offsets involve fundamental tradeoffs and may not be a reliable long-term approach to climate change mitigation, the report said, adding: "It's not possible to ensure that every credit represents a real, measurable and long-term reduction in emissions."<br />De Boer said several safeguards were in place to ensure that emissions reduction were real, but noted "we're in a learning experience."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/climate.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/climate.php</a></div><div><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIuauuNEvmZb_iKAPu6J4huDQWXcoej-uokN1rcUzXMdndg7Yx720FP4HMXuE9invtZ6kEKi6IfZJBMGyVAQQAZZZYNPe4jyIkFnIYB02OvTs_zb5lItsEy-fRtUTHfQ3Zw95raKR-x34/s1600-h/DSC02597.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276520278755806530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIuauuNEvmZb_iKAPu6J4huDQWXcoej-uokN1rcUzXMdndg7Yx720FP4HMXuE9invtZ6kEKi6IfZJBMGyVAQQAZZZYNPe4jyIkFnIYB02OvTs_zb5lItsEy-fRtUTHfQ3Zw95raKR-x34/s320/DSC02597.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Mixed report on renewable energy in U.S.</strong><br />By Kate Galbraith and Matthew L. Wald<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />NEW YORK: In hopes of slowing global warming and creating "green jobs," the U.S. Congress and the incoming administration may soon impose a mandate that the United States get 10 or 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources within a few years.<br />Yet the experience of U.S. states that have adopted similar goals suggests that passing that requirement could be a lot easier than achieving it. The record so far is decidedly mixed: Some states appear to be on track to meet energy targets, but others have fallen behind on the aggressive goals they set several years ago.<br />The states' goals have contributed to rapid growth of wind turbines and solar power stations in some areas, notably the West, but that growth has come on a minuscule base. Nationwide, the hard numbers provide a sobering counterpoint to the green-energy enthusiasm sweeping Washington.<br />Al Gore, the former vice president, is running advertisements saying that the United States could switch entirely to renewable power within a decade. But most experts do not see how. Even with the fast growth of recent years, less than 3 percent of the nation's electricity is coming from renewable sources, excepting dams. "I think we are really overselling how quick, how easy and how complete the transition can be," said George Sterzinger, executive director of the Renewable Energy Policy Project, a Washington advocacy group.<br />More than half the 50 states have adopted formal green-energy goals. In many states, the standards are too new to be evaluated, but so far the number of successes and failures is "sort of a 50-50 kind of affair," said Ryan Wiser, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who is co-author of a recent report on the targets.<br />Connecticut and Massachusetts have made their utilities pay for missing targets, and utilities in Arizona and Nevada are lagging. California and New York appear almost certain to miss deadlines that are looming in the next few years.<br />A few states have met their goals, or even exceeded them. One big success has been Texas, which has capitalized on a wind-power boom and already exceeded its 2015 goal. The state gets 4.5 percent of its electricity from the turbines. New Mexico's big utilities are at 6 percent renewable power, within striking distance of the state's 10 percent goal by 2011.<br />The structure and aggressiveness of the targets varies widely among states; some have been able to meet their goals because they set relatively modest ones in the first place. Maine set a goal of 30 percent renewable power by 2000, an impressive-sounding target that was essentially meaningless because the state was already getting close to half its electricity from sources that counted against the goal, including dams. A more recent law requires development of new renewables in Maine.<br />In those states that set aggressive goals and have had trouble meeting them, a big hurdle has been building power lines that could transmit the electricity, Wiser said. Another has been the utilities' inability to secure enough long-term contracts to buy renewable power.<br />California is the prime example of a state reaching high and falling short. Big utilities there are supposed to get 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010, and most are expected to miss that deadline.<br />San Diego Gas & Electric gets a mere 6 percent of electricity from renewable sources, and the state's other two big utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison, are at 14 and 15.7 percent, which includes some dams. The Edison number is a 2007 figure; the other two are more recent.<br />Fines for missing the targets can run to $25 million a year, but because of fine print in the regulations, the San Diego utility and Pacific Gas & Electric said they did not expect to incur fines; a representative for Southern California Edison said he was not sure.<br />The utilities cited a catalog of reasons for falling short. These include stop-and-start federal tax incentives for renewable power, problems finding reliable suppliers among the many young and fragile startups in the industry, and difficulty getting transmission lines built and obtaining permits to build solar stations and wind farms.<br />"Not every part of the country is equally blessed in terms of having locations for renewables," said Debra Reed, president and chief executive of San Diego Gas & Electric, which is having trouble getting new transmission lines built to an area with a lot of sunshine.<br />Moreover, for utilities, the effective goals keep changing. As customers' electricity use rises, so does the amount of renewable-derived electricity the utilities must produce to meet their percentage targets. "When you're judged based on customer demand, you're always chasing a moving target," said Stuart Hemphill, vice president of Southern California Edison, which serves a fast-growing population.<br />The only mechanism the states have to force utilities into line is to fine them for not meeting the targets, but such costs would ultimately be passed on to electricity customers or company shareholders, neither of whom would look favorably on politicians who imposed such a burden in tough times.<br />That may explain why most of the penalties issued to date have been modest. In 2006, the payments totaled around $18 million for Massachusetts and $5.6 million for Connecticut, and virtually nothing in any other state, Wiser's report said.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/power.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/power.php</a></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>U.S. lawmaker warns of carmaker job loss "disaster"</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />By Kevin Drawbaugh and John Crawley<br />A senior U.S. congressional leader warned on Friday of an "unmitigated disaster" if a major U.S. automaker were allowed to collapse at a time when the economy is already losing jobs at an alarming pace.<br />With new data showing employers axed more than 533,000 jobs in November -- the highest monthly job-loss in 34 years -- Rep. Barney Frank urged the Bush administration to use money from a $700 billion (479.4 billion pound) bank bailout programme to assist Detroit.<br />The financial system and the economy would be devastated if General Motors, Ford or Chrysler were forced into bankruptcy or shutdown, said the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the House Financial Services Committee.<br />"In the midst of the worst economic situation since the Great Depression it would be an unmitigated disaster," Frank said as the CEOs of the Big Three U.S. automakers testified to lawmakers for a second straight day.<br />Despite the grim economic outlook, the auto industry's drive for a $34 billion emergency taxpayer bailout was stuck in neutral with lawmakers trapped in a political gridlock.<br />Broad consensus exists between Congress and the Bush administration that the automakers need help, but officials are refusing to budge from their views on how to do it, with some lawmakers opposed to doing anything at all.<br />The White House refuses to carve out for Detroit some of the $700 billion bailout it is already showering on Wall Street and the banks, saying that money is intended only to help stabilise the financial sector. It backs helping the automakers by modifying a $25-billion Energy Department loan program meant to promote fuel-efficient technologies.<br />President George W. Bush told reporters on Friday it was important for Congress to act next week on redirecting those energy loans.<br />DEMOCRATS TARGET TARP<br />But Congressional Democrats oppose this and insist the administration should help the automakers with money from the bank bailout -- the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).<br />While U.S. leaders argued, other nations were moving to help their auto sectors.<br />The German government said on Friday it is looking at options to help GM's Opel unit and is on track to make a decision by Christmas.<br />Australia said local banks agreed to help the country's crippled car-financing industry with new funding worth A$2 billion (867 million pounds).<br />U.S. employers axed 533,000 jobs in November, the most since 1974, the Labour Department said on Friday. The unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent from 6.5 percent in October.<br />On a combined basis, GM, Ford and Chrysler have cut more than 100,000 factory jobs since sales began to slow in 2006.<br />GM said on Friday it will lay off 2,000 unionised workers and eliminate a production shift at three plants in Michigan, Ohio and Canada.<br />Congressional Democratic leaders would like to address aid for the auto sector in the House and Senate next week.<br />House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said earlier in the week that Congress or the Bush administration would have to act quickly to prevent the collapse of one or more automakers.<br />GM and Chrysler want immediate loans to forestall possible failure, while Ford is asking for a $9 billion credit line that would be tapped later if necessary. GM wants $12 billion in loans, with $4 billion of that immediately, as well as a $6 billion credit line. Chrysler wants $7 billion immediately.<br />"This is about survival at this point in time. There's going to be, unfortunately, (job) losses," United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger told lawmakers.<br />"We can't sugarcoat it, we can't stick our heads in the sand," said Gettelfinger, appearing before the House hearing with chief executives Rick Wagoner of GM, Alan Mulally of Ford and Bob Nardelli of Chrysler.<br />All four testified before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday.<br />Shares of GM were down 2.7 percent at $4 in late morning trading, while Ford rose 3.4 percent to $2.75, both on the New York Stock Exchange. Chrysler is owned by private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management.<br />(Reporting by John Crawley, Kevin Drawbaugh and Karey Wutkowski; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/business/OUKBS-UK-AUTOS-BAILOUT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/business/OUKBS-UK-AUTOS-BAILOUT.php</a></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Russia and India sign nuclear pact<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />NEW DELHI: President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia signed agreements Friday to develop new nuclear plants in India as the countries sought to deepen ties beyond their historical defense and weapon sales relationship.<br />The deal will allow Russia to build more reactors at the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and plants elsewhere in country, the Indian government said in a statement.<br />The deal comes after India earlier this year signed a nuclear pact with the United States, giving New Delhi access to civilian nuclear fuel and technology on the international market for the first time in three decades.<br />Overturning a U.S. ban on nuclear trade instituted after India first tested an atomic device in 1974, the U.S. pact provides India with access to nuclear fuel, reactors and technology to generate power for its 1.1 billion plus people.<br />"The signing of the agreement on civil nuclear cooperation with Russia marks a new milestone in the history of our cooperation with Russia in the field of nuclear energy," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said at a news conference with Medvedev.<br />Russia is competing with the United States for influence in India, a Cold War ally of Moscow which the Kremlin sees as a growing partner in Asia.<br />"The cooperation in the energy sector remains a priority for us," Medvedev said. "We are very interested in developing cooperation in the nuclear sector. It is especially important now that various energy sectors are being developed."<br />Both countries signed a contract for India to buy 80 Mi-17 transport helicopters (Mi-17), worth more than $1 billion, said Anatoly Isaikin, head of Russia's state-run arms-export monopoly Rosoboron.<br />India, which wants to buy billions of dollars of weapons as it rearms, has been unhappy with holdups on major Russian arms contracts, including a delay to a $1.5 billion aircraft carrier modernisation.<br />"Our main task is to switch from buying or selling weapons to jointly designing and producing them. We have such plans in rocket building and aviation," Medvedev said.<br />India, along with China, is one of Russia's biggest clients for arms sales.<br />The two also signed a deal to cooperate on future manned space flight, and in building an astronaut training centre, said Anatoly Perminov, head of Russia's space agency Roskosmos.<br />The first Indian cosmonaut is expected to fly on the Soyuz rocket in 2013, he said. India launched its first unmanned moon mission Chandrayaan-1 on Oct. 22, joining the Asian space race in the footsteps of rival China.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/asia/05medvedev.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/asia/05medvedev.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRCB89h7huBbL9wA2CxpIJu871yOjyOe5bLiDrO-iJ3FcGa-MY-unPHLQUK12NbUJih-yTdiXeQfzRdsErbriwn7L3nAD3RDr_kkL8knOYOFD0BkBsgAT69miMuAMkxPU7HcbY8a2EGY4/s1600-h/DSC02598.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276520274797706402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRCB89h7huBbL9wA2CxpIJu871yOjyOe5bLiDrO-iJ3FcGa-MY-unPHLQUK12NbUJih-yTdiXeQfzRdsErbriwn7L3nAD3RDr_kkL8knOYOFD0BkBsgAT69miMuAMkxPU7HcbY8a2EGY4/s320/DSC02598.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Thieves get €85 million in jewelry from Paris boutique<br /></strong>By Doreen Carvajal<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />PARIS: A savvy band of jewel thieves, armed with guns and some posing as women, have struck in the heart of the city's golden triangle of luxury shops, stealing more than €85 million worth of diamonds, rings and watches from a posh Harry Winston boutique.<br />The brazen $108 million theft Thursday, which some French newspapers quickly branded the heist of the century, reflected a savvy knowledge of the jewelry business, happening during the peak of the holiday season, when jewelry stocks are plentiful.<br />It was the second time that the boutique on Avenue Montaigne was robbed in the past 14 months and came a little more than a week after Cartier in Paris lost a €635,000 diamond ring to a veiled woman posing as a tourist from Qatar who switched the real gem for a fake.<br />"Harry Winston is not the only target," said Doron Lévy, a spokesman for the Union of French Jewelers in Paris, who huddled with executives of Harry Winston on Friday to debate a public response. "It is interesting how imaginative these thieves are. They are very observant and they know how people work in the shops. And they are always looking for vulnerable points."<br />The police said that at least four people were involved in the robbery of Harry Winston, which is on a street of deluxe shops near the Champs Élysées that is crowded with boutiques for Chanel, Dior and Gucci. Around closing time at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, the thieves entered and confronted 15 employees. At least two of the robbers were dressed in wigs and women's clothes, while a fourth accomplice apparently waited outside as the getaway driver, Lévy said.<br />The robbers struck two employees and then scooped up the jewels in the display cases into sacks and were gone in less than 15 minutes. No one was seriously hurt, the police said.<br />On Friday, Harry Winston issued a terse two-sentence response from its headquarters in New York.<br />"We are cooperating with the authorities in their investigation," a spokeswoman, Rhonda Barnat, said in the statement. "Our first concern is the well-being of our employees."<br />The golden doors of its boutique on Avenue Montaigne were locked Friday, and some of its display windows were empty. Barnat said by telephone that the reopening date had not been set. Even so, knots of television cameramen gathered around its entrance, along with tourists taking unlikely souvenir photos.<br />The boutique has already weathered an earlier audacious robbery of €10 million of goods, in October 2007. At the time, the company offered a €500,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of its diamonds. In April, Harry Winston posted a pre-tax gain of $13.5 million from the settlement of its insurance claim in that earlier robbery.<br />To date, the record for jewelry theft remains a heist in February 2003, when thieves reaped €100 millions in diamonds from the vaults at Antwerp's diamond exchange.<br />Lévy, of the jewelers' trade group, said thieves were becoming more imaginative and were carefully studying how stores functioned.<br />For example, the culprits in the latest Harry Winston robbery knew the names of some of the store's employees, he said, and they dressed as women because they were aware that typically jewelers are more trusting of females and so more likely to allow them to enter.<br />"It's a very sensitive moment when someone tries to enter a shop," Lévy said, noting that the employees study the potential customer before unlocking the doors. "If they know you are not a client, they will not open."<br />In a jewelry robbery in London, he added, thieves successfully overcame suspicion by arriving in a Bentley automobile. The thieves, one dressed in a dark blazer and a Panama hat and the other in a cream-colored suit, struck Graff Diamonds on Sloane Street, in West London, in June 2007. In the Paris case, the thieves were young white men who were speaking in French but had accents, he said.<br />"They were professionals," Lévy said.<br />One investigator told the newspaper Le Monde that it would be difficult to resell the jewels in Western Europe. But apparently it is another story in Eastern Europe, with the investigator calling that territory "a new El Dorado for some years for traffickers."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/europe/paris.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/europe/paris.php</a></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Trader blamed for loss at Société Générale is denied permission to confront chairman</strong><br />Bloomberg News<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />PARIS: Jérôme Kerviel, blamed by Société Générale for its record trading loss, has been denied permission by investigators to question the bank's chairman, Daniel Bouton, lawyers for both sides said Friday.<br />The judges leading the investigation decided that arranging a meeting between the two would not add anything new to their understanding of how the trading loss occurred, or when the bank's leadership discovered that Kerviel had been taking unauthorized positions, the lawyers said.<br />"It's the first time that the judges declared clearly that, in light of statements by Mr. Kerviel, they consider that the hierarchy was not informed of the fraudulent positions," Jean Veil, a lawyer for the bank, said by telephone.<br />Kerviel, 31, is under investigation by the judges, Renaud Van Ruymbeke and Françoise Desset, for his role in the bank's €4.9 billion, or $6.3 billion, trading loss.<br />While he has admitted to taking positions that exceeded limits, faking documents and evading internal controls, Kerviel has said that the bank was aware of his actions and that the loss stemmed from a decision to unwind his positions over three days of falling markets.<br />"We asked to meet with Bouton not to humiliate him but to ask for explanations" about letters from him attesting to the bank's internal controls, Kerviel's lawyer Caroline Wassermann said. She said Kerviel's legal team would appeal the decision to not call Bouton.<br />Bouton, 58, stepped down as chief executive in May but remained as chairman. He had held both roles since 1997 and his offer to resign after the bank revealed the trading loss was turned down twice.<br />Kerviel is scheduled to be questioned by Société Générale's general counsel, Gérard Gardella, on Monday at a closed-door meeting with the judges. Kerviel faces charges including breach of trust, falsifying documents and hacking the bank's computers to input faked information.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/socgen.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/socgen.php</a></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div><strong>Deconstructing the war of the words over Lance Armstrong</strong><br />By Samuel Abt<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />PARIS: Now that Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes have joined the Immortals (the ones in the sky, not those in the Académie Française) and the equally late Paul de Man (definitely not da man) has been unmasked as a Nazi collaborator and cad, who is left to deconstruct the war of words over Lance Armstrong's safety among the French? Semiotics majors, to your posts.<br />Our slugfest thus far: Armstrong, seven consecutive times the winner of the Tour de France, and his Astana team director, Johan Bruyneel, a speaker of five languages, accuse Marc Madiot, the director of the Française des Jeux team and fluent in French, of calling for insurrection if Big Tex, witty and eloquent in English, otherwise not, enters a race in France.<br />Which is what he intends to do. Armstrong confirmed recently that he plans to enter the Tour and said that concerns for his safety, almost unanimously voiced by him, had been overstated.<br />In an e-mail message, the Armstrong-Bruyneel prosecution cited an interview, complete with video, that Madiot granted to the obscure coach365.fr Web site in which he supposedly dissed Armstrong's comeback by saying in a translation supplied by Bruyneel, "I think he has a real will of taking over cycling (in French it says put his hands on cycling). But I don't know under which form. One thing is for sure: we will have to defend ourselves.<br />"More than ever, we will have to tighten our elbows amongst us, the little French, to keep the ethical line. And then cycling is played out on the public roads. We can not allow that no matter who does no matter what on our roads." (That's French, the language of Rimbaud?)<br />Challenged on his translation, Bruyneel replied in a recent conversation, "What about when he calls for national solidarity?"<br />Good point, except that Madiot did not say that. The coach365 interviewer, who lives in blogosphere anonymity, did. As for tightening the elbows, that's the old "il faut se serrer les coudes," or, more idiomatically and less threateningly, "stand together."<br />Another good point: Bruyneel and Madiot have often clashed in their interpretations of the moral boundaries in bicycle racing. For example, the intense Bruyneel has hired lepers like Ivan Basso, a decision denounced by Madiot.<br />On the other hand, Bruyneel's riders have won 8 of the last 10 Tours de France, Madiot's guys have not finished in the top five in any of them.<br />What's the verdict? Did Madiot call for revolt, a veritable Bastille Day in the streets at the next Tour de France? Should Armstrong be worried?<br />All answers, please, to www.whyshouldicare.iht.com.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/sports/BIKE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/sports/BIKE.php</a></div><div></div><div>********************</div><div></div><div><strong>Royal shuns new French Socialist leadership team</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />PARIS: Maverick French Socialist Segolene Royal and her allies have refused to join the leadership team of newly elected party chief Martine Aubry, a supporter said on Friday, a further sign of deep divisions in France's opposition.<br />The move raises the prospect of a protracted split between Royal, who shot to prominence last year in a failed presidential election campaign against Nicolas Sarkozy, and Aubry, the architect of France's 35-hour work week.<br />Aubry beat Royal last month by a razor-thin margin in a battle for leadership of the Socialist party. Royal at first disputed the result but conceded defeat after an internal party review confirmed she had lost.<br />Royal and her supporters see themselves as the modernising wing of the party and describe Aubry as more traditional.<br />"To us, the conditions for renovation and unity do not seem to be there," Royal's ally, Vincent Peillon, said on Friday.<br />Royal's aides say she will not attend a Socialist party meeting on Saturday at which Aubry will officially unveil her leadership team.<br />The Socialists have been bogged down by acrimonious infighting for months, allowing Sarkozy to pursue his ambitious reform programme almost unopposed.<br />(Reporting by Laure Bretton, writing by Brian Rohan; editing by Tim Pearce)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-FRANCE-SOCIALISTS-DIVISION.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-FRANCE-SOCIALISTS-DIVISION.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>**********************</div><div><strong>Dalai Lama row sparks new France boycott calls</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />By Emma Graham-Harrison<br />Angry Chinese nationalists are gathering online momentum for a boycott of French products in protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to meet the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, this weekend.<br />Beijing has already warned Paris about Sarkozy's decision and said it forced the government to postpone a planned EU-China summit, but some citizens want a more tangible response to what they see as a slight to national pride.<br />"I am using my real name to swear to the French: I am going to boycott French goods for my whole life. I will never use French brands or any product made in France," said one poster, who identified himself as Yan Zhongjie. A first boycott call put online earlier this week has been blocked, probably by government censors wary of anger that escalated into widespread protests after the Paris leg of the Olympic torch relay was disrupted by anti-China protesters.<br />But cached records show it was seen by nearly 850,000 readers and notched up 90,000 comments before it disappeared.<br />Fiery nationalists like Yan see the Dalai Lama as a Machiavellian separatist who wants to split China just as it is rising to international power after over a century of humiliation, poverty and political impotence.<br />The elderly monk, ultimate spiritual and political leader for millions of Tibetans, says he does not seek independence, only autonomy, for his people, because he fears their cultural and religious traditions are being slowly crushed.<br />He fled into exile in 1959 after a failed insurrection against Chinese rule in Tibet, and is now based in India but travels the world promoting Tibetan issues, to the irritation of Beijing and many ordinary Chinese.<br />"Our country must speak out on this affair, make some kind of protest. This can't be tolerated," said retiree Lan Fusheng, heading out of French-owned boycott target Carrefour.<br />Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou on Friday also said the Dalai Lama would eventually be welcome on the self-ruled democratic island which Beijing claims as a renegade province.<br />He had earlier come under huge pressure from Buddhist groups after quashing hopes for a 2009 visit, saying the time was wrong, as his government works to improve relations with Beijing.<br />CALMING<br />China's government, while it has been unusually vehement on an issue that always raises hackles, still seems keen to keep nationalist sentiment as low key as is politically feasible.<br />Although there is a massive French presence in China, and much for companies like Carrefour to lose, China has a trade surplus with the European nation and antagonising key partners during a global slowdown could be risky.<br />Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said on Thursday that Sarkozy's proposed meeting with the Dalai Lama had caused "a lot of dissatisfaction" with the Chinese people, but also called on the public to be "calm and rational."<br />But even web users who have not joined the boycott calls are infuriated by the meeting.<br />"Sarkozy is a typical flip-flopping runt," said one posting on the website of the official People's Daily newspaper (www.people.com.cn).<br />"China should stiffen its spine on issues of sovereignty and take a harder line against Europe and America."<br />(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard and Chris Buckley in Beijing and Ralph Jennings in Taipei; Editing by Nick Macfie)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-CHINA-DALAI-FRANCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-CHINA-DALAI-FRANCE.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeJEt9kwjy8MoSR-7-AlLx1Zk9UNIyREtQH2z8fCtWG-gqnZ9MRgyXEoZJWA82xV92rLaak4ezU0Tebc0YHWx-GONmAmhDhsiYNsY0ixcO83XWU4AoXIv3_h9Q26jBkxjrExgIoYzis5o/s1600-h/DSC02571.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276520027050533202" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeJEt9kwjy8MoSR-7-AlLx1Zk9UNIyREtQH2z8fCtWG-gqnZ9MRgyXEoZJWA82xV92rLaak4ezU0Tebc0YHWx-GONmAmhDhsiYNsY0ixcO83XWU4AoXIv3_h9Q26jBkxjrExgIoYzis5o/s320/DSC02571.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>At least 22 dead in Pakistan blast</strong><br />By Pir Zubair Shah<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD: A powerful explosion struck a crowded central bazaar in the chaotic city of Peshawar in Pakistan's northwest Friday, killing at least 22 people and wounding more than 90, Pakistani officials said.<br />The chief of police in Peshawar, Malik Naveed, told a television station that the explosion occurred in an area in the center of the city at a time when many people were out shopping for a coming festival. He said that the explosion, which took place at 7:20 p.m. local time, struck near a Shiite mosque and that he expected the number of dead and wounded to rise.<br />According to a Peshawar resident, Rasool Din, who was reached by telephone, the large explosion occurred in a congested area, and rescue operations were being hampered by power failures. Gas pipes had also exploded, making even more difficult the task of dousing the fire caused by the explosion, he said.<br />The dead and wounded were being taken to the local hospitals, where the authorities had declared an emergency and were asking for donations of blood.<br />Peshawar has witnessed a series of suicide bombings by Taliban militants in the past few months. In November, gunmen abducted an Iranian diplomat in the city, a day after the assassination of an American aid official there.<br />The diplomat, Hesmatollah Atharzadeh, who was the commercial counselor at the Iranian Consulate, was leaving his house in a suburb when the gunmen attacked. The police said they suspected that Islamist militants were involved in the killing of the American aid worker, Stephen Vance.<br />Also last month, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the city's main stadium after the closing ceremony of interprovincial games, the first such event after a new secular provincial government lifted the ban on sports imposed by a coalition of religious parties.<br />In August, a Pakistani Air Force bus was bombed in Peshawar in an attack that killed 14 people, many of them air force personnel. The Taliban took responsibility for that attack, which was carried out by a remote-controlled bomb.<br />Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/asia/pakistan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/asia/pakistan.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>India acknowledges errors in response to attacks</strong><br />By Somini Sengupta and Jane Perlez<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />MUMBAI, India: India conceded Friday that the devastating terrorist attacks on Mumbai last week revealed "lapses" in its security arrangements, while the country's prime minister articulated the scale of anger and grievance stirred by the attacks in the Indian public.<br />"The people of India feel a sense of hurt and anger as never before," said the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, at a news conference in New Delhi.<br />That anger has been directed in part at India's neighbor, Pakistan, where Indian and American officials believe the attackers received training, and Manmohan said on Friday that other countries around the world should now confront Pakistan over the alleged presence of terrorists on its soil.<br />"We expect the world community to come to the same conclusion, that the territory of a neighboring country has been used for this crime," he said, referring to Pakistan.<br />But the anger is also focused domestically too, as Indians rage at their government for not having done more to protect them.<br />In the most public outrage so far, tens of thousands in Mumbai marched near the attacked sites on Wednesday, while similar rallies were held in New Delhi and in the southern technology hubs of Bangalore and Hyderabad.<br />Speaking in Mumbai on Friday, India's new home minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, admitted that there had been "lapses" in the way India handled the crisis and said his government was trying to "improve the effectiveness of the security systems."<br />"There have been lapses," he told reporters. "I would be less than truthful if I said there had been no lapses."<br />Questions raised include why Indian intelligence had no forewarning of the plot, why security was so loose at the sites attacked in Mumbai, and why Indian security forces were so poorly armed — and in some cases so slow to respond.<br />Meanwhile, evidence linking the attackers to Pakistan builds. Fresh evidence unearthed by investigators in India has indicated that the Mumbai attacks were stage-managed from at least two Pakistani cities by top leaders of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.<br />Indian and American intelligence officials have already identified a Lashkar operative, who goes by the name Yusuf Muzammil, as a mastermind of the attacks. On Thursday, Indian investigators named one of the most well-known senior figures in Lashkar, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi.<br />The names of both men came from the interrogations of the one surviving attacker, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, according to police officials in Mumbai.<br />While Muzammil appears to have served as a control officer in Lahore, Pakistan, Lakhvi, his boss and the operational commander of Lashkar, worked from Karachi, a southern Pakistani port city, said investigators in Mumbai.<br />It now appears that both men were in contact with their charges as they sailed to Mumbai from Karachi, and then continued guiding the attacks even as they unfolded, directing the assaults and possibly providing information about the police and military response in India.<br />Some of the calls appeared to be conversations about who would live and who would die among the gunmen's hostages, according to an official who interviewed survivors and a report by security consultants with contacts among the investigators.<br />While Indian officials have pointed a finger directly at Pakistani elements, terrorism experts and some Western officials warned that the emerging sketch of the plotters was still preliminary and could broaden even to include militants within India. India, too, has a long history of antagonism with Pakistan.<br />In Mumbai, meanwhile, Chidambaram issued a lower tally on Friday for casualties in the attacks, saying 163 people — including 18 members of the security forces — died along with nine suspected terrorists. The number of injured was 293, he said. Previous accounts put the death count among the attackers' victims at more than 170.<br />On Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met in Islamabad with Pakistani leaders, a day after meeting with Indian leaders, to urge that the two countries work together to find the attackers' commanders and bring them to justice.<br />"What I heard was a commitment that this is the course that will be taken," Rice told reporters at Chaklala Air Base in Pakistan after meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.<br />But while Pakistan's leaders offered polite assurances, they made no public announcement of concrete measures to be taken against Lashkar. They have also continued to express skepticism of Pakistani involvement and have resisted handing over 20 suspects demanded by India.<br />Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose name means "army of the pure," was founded with the help of Pakistani intelligence officers more than 20 years ago as a proxy force to challenge Indian control of Muslim-dominated Kashmir.<br />Since then, the group has broadened its ambitions, its reach and its contacts with an international network of jihadi groups. Its fighters have turned up in Afghanistan and Iraq and have been blamed for several other high-profile attacks in India before.<br />Today it is technically banned in Pakistan but operates openly through affiliates. Its links to Al Qaeda remain murky, as does the extent of its current ties to Pakistan's main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.<br />In an interview this week, Muhammad Yahya Mujahid, a spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a parent organization of Lashkar, denied that Lashkar or its leader, Haffiz Muhammad Saeed, had any connection to the attack. The surviving gunman in Mumbai claimed to have met Saeed at a training camp in Pakistan.<br />American counterterrorism officials said there was no clear evidence that the Pakistani intelligence service played a role in the Mumbai attacks, or that Pakistani operatives were linked to the attackers.<br />Deven Bharti, a deputy commissioner on the Mumbai police force, would not comment on Indian media reports claiming direct links between the ISI and the Mumbai attacks.<br />But, he said, "we have certain evidence of government complicity that we are trying to verify."<br />The weapons used in the attacks, he said, came from a factory based in Punjab Province in Pakistan that is under contract to the Pakistani military, he said.<br />The factory was also the source of grenades and explosives used in several earlier terrorist attacks in India, Bharti said. Those included bombings in Mumbai in 1993; a suicide attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in July, he said.<br />Investigators discovered the link to the Pakistan factory, Bharti said, after recovering a grenade left by the attackers that had EN ARGES printed on it.<br />That corresponds to a brand name belonging to a German company that granted a license to the factory to make weapons for the Pakistani military.<br />One possible collaborator in the plot, the authorities say, was an Indian named Faheem Ahmed Ansari, who was arrested in February in a northern Indian state, Uttar Pradesh, along with two other suspected Lashkar members.<br />Ansari told the police interrogators that from fall 2007 to February 2008 he surveyed possible targets for Lashkar in Mumbai, including the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the old Victoria rail station.<br />The Uttar Pradesh police said he was arrested in connection with a gun and grenade attack on New Year's Eve on a police camp in Rampur when he returned to pick up weapons left behind. His intention was to take the weapons to Mumbai for use in a later operation, they said.<br />Other evidence emerged Thursday highlighting the sophistication and cruelty of the attacks.<br />Some of the six people killed at the Jewish center in the city had been treated particularly savagely, the police said, with bodies bearing what appeared to be strangulation marks and other wounds that did not come from gunshots or grenades.<br />Even before the attackers landed on Mumbai's shores, Lakhvi, the Lashkar commander, who is normally based in Kashmir, helped organize the plot from Karachi for the last three months, said a Pakistani official in contact with Lashkar.<br />The gunmen also kept in contact with their handlers in Pakistan with cellphones as they rounded up guests at the two hotels, officials say.<br />The attackers left a trail of evidence in a satellite phone they left behind on the fishing trawler they hijacked near Karachi at the start of their 500-mile journey to Mumbai.<br />The phone contained the telephone numbers of Muzammil, Lakhvi and a number of other Lashkar operatives, according to a report on the Mumbai siege released Thursday by M. J. Gohel and Sajjan M. Gohel, two security analysts who direct the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London.<br />The numbers dialed on the phone found on the trawler used to call Muzammil matched the numbers on the cellphones recovered from the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the report said.<br />Based on evidence found on the trawler, it was possible that five other men were involved in the plot and were still at large, the report said.<br />In one of the hotels, a gunman asked several Indian guests what caste they belonged to and what state they came from, said an official who interviewed the guests.<br />Once the attacker found out these details, he then called someone believed to be Muzammil, who was also identified by the surviving gunman and who was in Lahore, according to phone records recovered by investigators.<br />The surviving guests said the attacker told the person on the other end of the phone the guests' details and asked whether they should be killed or not.<br />At one point, a guest said one of the calls seemed to be a conference call with two people on the other end.<br />Once the calls were finished, the attacker moved the small group of guests, who did not know what their fate would be, into a room. When the attackers became distracted by tear gas fired by the police, the hostages managed to escape.<br />In another instance, the gunmen forced a Singaporean hostage at the Oberoi hotel, Lo Hwei Yen, to call her husband in Singapore. She told him that the hostages were demanding that Singaporean officials tell India not to try a rescue operation. The next day, Lo was killed, the foundation's report said.<br />Investigators found that after the gunmen killed her, they used the phone she had called her husband with, the report said.<br />"The worrying scenario is that Muzammil may have ordered her execution along with two other hostages that were found murdered in the same room," the report said.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/asia/06mumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/asia/06mumbai.php</a></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>8 prisoners die in uprising at Afghan prison</strong><br />By Kirk Semple<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />KABUL: The Afghan government has begun an investigation to determine how eight inmates died during an uprising against prison guards and police officers trying to search two cell blocks at the notoriously overcrowded Pul-i-Charki prison here, a justice ministry official said Friday.<br />The clash, which also left 13 people wounded, including three prison guards, erupted Thursday when inmates resisted an attempt by the security forces to sweep the blocks for hidden weapons and cell phones, said Mohammad Qasem Hashemzai, the deputy justice minister.<br />Pul-i-Charki is bedeviled by corruption, poor infrastructure, overcrowding and a violent mix of criminals that includes many Taliban fighters. It has become a symbol of the dysfunction and shortcomings of the Afghan judicial system. Criminals have been able to bribe their way out. Riots are common.<br />During the revolt on Thursday, the prisoners set fire to mattresses and attacked the guards with weapons, including scissors and homemade blades, the official said. A prisoner in another cell block who requested anonymity said in a telephone interview Friday that he heard gunfire coming from cell blocks 3 and 4 throughout the day on Thursday.<br />Hashemzai said the security forces that stormed the cell blocks were armed with guns but he refused to confirm if there had been gunfire or whether any of the victims had been struck by bullets.<br />"The matter is under investigation to see how these eight people were killed, whether through gunshots or through manmade weapons," he said.<br />During the clash, the prisoners took two prison guards hostage, the official said, though one was freed late Thursday and the other was freed early Friday, when calm was finally restored, Hashemzai said.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/asia/06afghan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/asia/06afghan.php</a></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div><strong>Rights groups fret over Iraqi prisoners</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />By Tim Cocks<br />They have outraged Iraqis and been condemned by human rights groups, but next year the prisons in which U.S. forces hold thousands of Iraqis will be flung open under a U.S.-Iraq security pact.<br />That worries both the U.S. military, which fears hardened insurgents could again roam the streets, and rights campaigners who fear the opposite: that Iraqi authorities will transfer the detainees to Iraqi prisons -- and maybe torture or execute them.<br />"We are concerned that we will most likely release dangerous detainees back into the communities of Iraq who have directly contributed to the deaths of not only Iraqi and Coalition Forces, but countless numbers of civilians," said Major Neal Fisher, spokesman for U.S. detainee operations.<br />"Every detainee in our custody came to us because they posed an imperative threat to the security and stability of Iraq."<br />The security pact agreed with Iraq will give U.S. troops a legal basis to remain in the country for three more years, replacing a U.N. mandate that covered the presence of foreign forces in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.<br />For the first time, Iraq will have authority over roughly 150,000 U.S. troops in the country.<br />Iraq's presidency council ratified the pact on Thursday, bringing it formally into effect until a referendum in July.<br />One of the powers the U.S. military loses under the new deal is the right to detain Iraqis indefinitely without charge.<br />That means it will have to turn the 16,000-17,000 detainees currently in its custody over to Iraqi authorities in an orderly manner. Under Iraqi law, they will have to be tried or released.<br />For U.S. officials, that is a headache. Thousands of prisoners, some of them former Sunni Arab insurgents or Shi'ite militiamen, will be back on the streets. For most, there is simply not enough evidence to keep them under lock and key.<br />The U.S. commander in charge of the detainee programme, Brigadier-General David Quantock, was unavailable for an interview, but he told USA Today that officials were working hard to build cases against dangerous detainees.<br />"We're going to... make sure they stay behind bars," he said.<br />"NO ONE KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE"<br />The U.S. military has released some 15,000 prisoners in the past year. Fisher said it plans to release 1,500 more a month.<br />For rights groups, there is a dark irony in U.S. concerns about having to release Iraqis against whom there's no evidence.<br />"Why are they detained if they don't have adequate evidence against them?" asked Malcolm Smart, Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme.<br />"The numbers who've been released suggest that maybe there weren't good reasons to hold a lot of those people in the first place ... We need a proper process of law and order -- and that does mean not holding people in detention without trial."<br />One Iraqi, Jassim al-Mashhadani, said he spent three months in a U.S. prison. Details of his story could not be independently verified.<br />Eight U.S. soldiers burst into his house around midnight on January 21, 2006, seized him and placed a hood over his head, he says. They kept him in isolation for two weeks while they interrogated him.<br />"They used to tell me: no one knows where you are. If we kill you now, no one will know what happened to you," he said.<br />After that, he was sent to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, where revelations of serious abuse by U.S. guards sent shockwaves around the world in 2004.<br />"They never let me call anyone, until a few days before they released me. Until now, I don't know why they arrested me," he said.<br />Abu Ghraib shot into the spotlight when pictures showing U.S. soldiers tormenting and sexually humiliating prisoners made world headlines. Mashhadani said he was not mistreated there.<br />But rights groups now fear Iraqi prisoners will face torture by Iraqi guards, after the transition to their control.<br />"Reports of torture and ill treatment of people (in Iraq) are persistent and so there's clearly a risk," Smart said.<br />He added that the legal system was not delivering fair trials, even in high profile cases of former members of ex-dictator Saddam Hussein's government.<br />Joost Hiltermann, Iraq expert at the International Crisis Group, said possible mistreatment of the mostly Sunni Arab prisoners under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led government could stoke sectarian tensions.<br />Sunni Arab politicians say it doesn't have to be that way, as long as they keep only those they have evidence against.<br />"We do not support the release of terrorists," said Abdul al-Kareem al-Samarrai'i, a leading member of the Islamic Party. "(But most) ... detainees in American prisons are innocent."<br />(Additional reporting by Waleed Ibrahim and Aseel Kami; Editing by Michael Christie and Samia Nakhoul)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-PRISONERS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-PRISONERS.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpF18Kaolqw1ZFqUV9NfZTnP5wlwyDadr6eZmqGHTP3OXUy4I3HYp7WlpT_fZnRzvPPNxu43IE7rALV1w_5U5htIAmfQzMy31CJ_i2M0WwqkVFKUcryvydMiJflAlZy2xW1vglYvorvhU/s1600-h/DSC02572.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276520025386253650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpF18Kaolqw1ZFqUV9NfZTnP5wlwyDadr6eZmqGHTP3OXUy4I3HYp7WlpT_fZnRzvPPNxu43IE7rALV1w_5U5htIAmfQzMy31CJ_i2M0WwqkVFKUcryvydMiJflAlZy2xW1vglYvorvhU/s320/DSC02572.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>U.S. Supreme Court to decide on military detentions</strong><br />By Adam Liptak<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide the most fundamental question yet concerning executive power in the age of terror: May the president order the indefinite military detention of people living in the United States?<br />The case concerns Ali al-Marri, the only person on the American mainland being held as an enemy combatant, at the U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina. Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was legally in the United States when he was arrested in December 2001 in Peoria, Illinois, where he was living with his family and studying computer science at Bradley University.<br />Eighteen months later, when Marri was on the verge of a trial on credit card fraud and other charges, President George W. Bush declared him an enemy combatant, moving him from the custody of the Justice Department to military detention. The government says Marri is a sleeper agent sent by Al Qaeda to the United States to commit mass murder and disrupt the banking system.<br />The case, which will probably be argued in the spring, will present the Obama administration with a series of difficult strategic choices. It can defend the Bush administration's expansive interpretation of executive power, advance a more modest one or short-circuit the case by moving it to the criminal justice system.<br />In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Virginia, issued a fractured decision in the case. In one 5-to-4 ruling, the court ruled that the president has the legal authority to detain Marri.<br />But a second, overlapping 5-to-4 majority of the court ruled that he must be given an additional opportunity to challenge his detention in federal court. An earlier court proceeding, in which the government had presented only a sworn statement from a defense intelligence official, was inadequate, the second majority ruled.<br />The government had urged the Supreme Court to put off consideration of the case, al-Marri v. Pucciarelli, No. 08-368, until the trial-court do-over was completed.<br />Two other men have been held as enemy combatants on the American mainland since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Rulings in their cases will inform the Supreme Court's treatment of Marri.<br />In 2004, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, five justices of the Supreme Court said Congress had granted the president power to detain at least those enemy combatants captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, even if they are American citizens, for the duration of hostilities there. But the detainee in that case, Yaser Hamdi, was freed and sent to Saudi Arabia not long after the court's decision, which also allowed him to challenge his detention.<br />Based on the Hamdi decision, the Fourth Circuit in 2005 upheld the detention of Jose Padilla, an American arrested at a Chicago airport. Although Padilla was said to have ties to Al Qaeda, the Fourth Circuit decision largely turned on his own activities on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Just before the Supreme Court was to decide whether to hear his case for a second time, Padilla was transferred to the criminal justice system and convicted on charges related to terrorism last year.<br />In a recent brief, the government provided the justices with a sworn 2004 statement from Jeffrey Rapp, the defense intelligence official. The statement, declassified in 2006, said that Marri had met with Osama bin Laden and Khalid Shaykh Muhammed in the summer of 2001.<br />"Al-Marri offered to be an Al Qaeda martyr or to do anything else that Al Qaeda requested," Rapp said.<br />The Qaeda officials told Marri, the statement said, to leave for the United States and to make sure he got there before Sept. 11.<br />The government's brief said the congressional authorization must have intended to allow the detention of people like Marri, and called a contrary interpretation absurd. Such a reading, the brief said, "relies on the assumption that when Congress authorized the use of military force to respond to the Sept. 11 attacks, it did not intend to reach individuals virtually identically situated to the Sept. 11 hijackers."<br />In a brief filed three weeks ago, lawyers for Marri, who has been held without charge in isolation for more than five years, said the court should not delay consideration of the case.<br />"Since the nation's founding," the brief said, "persons lawfully residing in this country have correctly understood that they can be imprisoned for suspected wrongdoing only if the government charges them with a crime and tries them before a jury."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/scotus.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/scotus.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>A great team of rivals<br /></strong>By Henry A. Kissinger<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />On its face, the team Barack Obama has appointed for national security policy violates some maxims of conventional wisdom: that to appoint to the Cabinet individuals with an autonomous constituency and who are therefore difficult to fire circumscribes presidential control; that to appoint as security adviser, secretary of state and secretary of defense individuals with established policy views may absorb the president's energies in settling disputes among strong-willed advisers.<br />It took courage for the president-elect to choose this constellation and no little inner assurance - both qualities essential for dealing with the challenge of distilling order out of a fragmenting international system.<br />In these circumstances, ignoring conventional wisdom may prove the precondition for creativity. Both the president-elect and the secretary of state-designate, Hillary Clinton, must have concluded that the country and their commitment to public service require their cooperation.<br />Those who take the phrase "team of rivals" literally do not understand the essence of the relationship between a president and a secretary of state. I know of no exception to the principle that secretaries of state are influential if and only if they are perceived as extensions of the president. Any other course weakens the president and marginalizes the secretary of state.<br />The Beltway system of leak and innuendo will mercilessly seek to widen any even barely visible split. Foreign governments will exploit the rift by pursuing alternative White House-State Department diplomacies.<br />Effective foreign policy and a significant role for the Department of State in it require that the president and the secretary of state share a common vision of international order, of overall strategy and of tactical measures. Inevitable disagreements should be settled privately; indeed, the ability of the secretary to warn or question is in direct proportion to the discretion in which it is expressed.<br />As the president-elect has pointed out, neither of the principals could possibly be undertaking their new relationship unless they had come to similar conclusions. Performance and not formal certification as the leading agency will define the role of the State Department. No president will feel obliged to take advice because an organizational chart requires it.<br />The Foreign Service of the United States is an incomparable instrument honed by a lifetime of dedicated service. Like every elite service, it does not avoid a certain clannishness. The views of those who did not rise through its ranks are not always taken seriously enough. Secretaries of state have been frustrated by its complex internal clearances, and presidents have complained in their memoirs about the slowness of its reactions.<br />In its daily business, the State Department is in effect a big cable machine responding to thousands of incoming reports from posts all over the world. Processed through the various assistant secretaries for formal action, only a small percentage of these cables ever reach the secretary, and an even smaller number make it to the White House. Left to itself, the system therefore involves a series of lateral clearances achieved by the mutual balancing of special concerns. Geopolitical and strategic considerations have no organic constituency.<br />No one can question the secretary-designate's leadership potential for breaking through encrusted patterns or her formidable presence in a negotiation. Her most immediate challenges are to provide strategic guidance and to reorganize the department so that its implementing capacity matches its extraordinary reporting skill.<br />The guardian of the process of the execution of long-range foreign policy is the national security adviser, institutionally indispensable though treated with reservation by the traditional departments. No one like General James Jones has ever been appointed security adviser, with his experience as former head of the Marine Corps and NATO Commander.<br />The security adviser's job in its present form emerged in 1961 in the Kennedy administration because no purely administrative staff could handle the flow of papers into the White House. Unless the flow of memoranda is disciplined into defined options, the president would be spending much of his time refereeing intramural disputes. In fact, when the security adviser is weak, interdepartmental arguments have been especially intense.<br />The security adviser must take care that the president is given all relevant options and that the execution of policy reflects the spirit of the original decision. This is a formidable task because the departments tend to equate internal morale with the adoption of their own recommendations.<br />The maxim that the security adviser should act as a traffic cop, not a participant in the policy process, is more theoretical than practical. Any individuals able enough to supervise the development of options will be informed enough to contribute to their content. And the daily frequency of the security adviser's contact with the president makes the distinction psychologically untenable.<br />The security adviser inevitably has the advantage of propinquity. His or her office is 50 feet down the hall from the president's; the secretary of state is 10 minutes away. Then, institutionally, the security adviser works almost exclusively on problems of concern to the president. The secretary of state has many clients around the world requiring attention, sometimes not of overwhelming presidential interest. The secretary of state travels frequently; the security adviser is almost always within reach of the president.<br />Inevitably, the facilitating function of the security adviser has been accompanied by a role in policymaking based on a vast, almost unique, experience. His special relationship to the president requires a delicacy in conduct not always achieved by security advisers, including the author.<br />The continuation in office of Robert Gates as secretary of defense is an important balancing element in that process. Alone among the key players, he is at the end, not the beginning, of his policy role. Having agreed to stay on in a transitional role, he cannot be interested in the inevitable jockeying that accompanies all new administrations.<br />The incoming administration must have appointed him with the awareness that he will not reverse his previous convictions. He must make the difficult adjustment from one administration to another - a tribute to the non-partisan nature of the conduct of his office in the Bush administration. He is a guarantor of continuity but, at the same time, the shepherd of necessary innovation.<br />Process is no substitute for substance, of course. But even with this caveat, the new national security team encourages the hope that America is seeking to move beyond its divisions to its opportunities.<br />Henry A. Kissinger served as national security advisor and secretary of state in the administrations of Presidents Nixon and Ford. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edkissinger.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edkissinger.php</a></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>EU urged to seize Obama security opportunity<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />By David Brunnstrom<br />The European Union should seize on Barack Obama's election as U.S. president as a chance to press for a more collaborative, U.N.-led approach to tackling world crises, an EU security review will say next week.<br />"At a global level, Europe must lead a renewal of the multilateral order...we have a unique moment to renew multilateralism, working with the United States and with our partners around the world," a draft of the review says.<br />The United Nations should be at the "apex" of such an approach, it adds.<br />The document is an update of an EU security strategy agreed in 2003 in a bid to heal deep splits within the bloc over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.<br />Many EU states were alarmed by the unilateral approach pursued by U.S. President George W. Bush, especially in his first term, and have been heartened by the prospect of Obama, who opposed the Iraq war and has favoured multilateralism.<br />The security review highlights growing threats posed by nuclear proliferation, cyber crime and disruption to energy supplies. It will stress the need to remain engaged with Russia and to fully involve emerging global powers such as China and India in international decision-making.<br />"Europe faces increasingly complex threats and challenges," said a draft summary to be presented to EU foreign ministers on Monday before endorsement by EU leaders at a December 11-12 summit.<br />"Globalisation has...made threats more complex and interconnected," it says. "(It) is accelerating shifts in power and is exposing differences in values. Recent financial turmoil has shaken the developed and the developing world alike."<br />"Terrorism and organised crime have evolved with a new menace," the paper adds. "The Iranian nuclear programme has significantly advanced, representing a danger for stability in the region and the whole non-proliferation system."<br />"MORE CAPABLE, MORE COHERENT AND MORE ACTIVE"<br />For the EU to lead a renewal of multilateralism, it was necessary for it to be "more capable, more coherent and more active" in world affairs.<br />The paper highlights progress in developing a common European security policy, with more than 20 missions deployed in response to crises ranging from Aceh to Chad.<br />"But there is no room for complacency," it says. "To ensure our security and meet the expectations of our citizens, we must be ready to shape events. That means becoming more strategic in our thinking, and more effective and visible around the world."<br />A senior EU official said the review would stress the need for the EU to strengthen its ability to deploy missions by making up shortfalls in equipment such as transport aircraft and helicopters and improved training.<br />It will also stress the need to build on relations with eastern and southern neighbours and to cooperate with Russia, despite concerns about Moscow's war with Georgia in August.<br />"We need to engage Russia; we need to tie Russia to a rules-based system on the economic and political level," the official said. "There is no other alternative; indignation is not a policy. The solution can only be engagement."<br />(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-EU-SECURITY.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-EU-SECURITY.php</a></div><div></div><div>********************</div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>Piracy is terrorism<br /></strong>By Douglas R. Burgess Jr.<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />The golden age of piracy has returned. Just as Henry Every and William Kidd once made their fortunes in the Red Sea, a new generation has emerged, armed with grenade launchers and assault rifles, to threaten trade and distract the world's navies. With the recent capture of the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star, a crime that once seemed archaic has again claimed center stage.<br />And yet the world's legal apparatus is woefully confused as to how to respond to piracy. Are the Somali pirates ordinary criminals, or a quasi-military force?<br />The question is not insignificant. It has virtually paralyzed the navies called to police the Gulf of Aden. The German Navy frigate Emden, on patrol this spring to intercept Qaeda vessels off the Somali coast, encountered pirate vessels attacking a Japanese tanker. But since it was allowed to intervene only if the pirates were defined as "terrorists," the Emden had no choice but to let the pirates go.<br />Currently, 13 vessels are held by pirates in the Gulf of Aden, while the navies of a dozen nations circle almost helplessly. The legal confusion extends to what happens once pirates have been caught. In theory, any nation can shoulder the burden of prosecution.<br />In fact, few are eager to do so.<br />Prosecuting pirates puts enormous strain on a country's legal system. A state whose ship was not attacked, and whose only involvement with the incident was as rescuer, might balk at being asked to foot the bill for lengthy and costly proceedings. Yet it might find itself forced to do so, if neither the victim's nor the pirates' state is willing. As Somalia has not had a recognized government since the early 1990s, the situation is all the more precarious for would-be capturers. The result is that ship owners, knowing that no rescue is imminent, pay the ransom. This emboldens the pirates further, and the problem worsens.<br />Fortunately, there is a way out of this legal morass. Indeed, the law is very clear - we just seem to have forgotten about it. The solution to piracy lies in the very nature of piracy itself.<br />The Roman lawmaker Cicero defined piracy as a crime against civilization itself, which English jurist Edward Coke rephrased as "hostis humani generis" - enemies of the human race. As such, they were enemies not of one state but of all states, and all states shared in the burden of capturing them.<br />From this precept came the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, meaning that pirates - unlike any other criminals - could be captured wherever they were found, by anyone who found them. This recognition of piracy's unique threat was the cornerstone of international law for more than 2,000 years.<br />Though you wouldn't guess it from the current situation, the law is surprisingly clear. The definition of pirates as enemies of the human race is reaffirmed in British and U.S. trial law and in numerous treaties.<br />As a customary international law it cuts through the Gordian knot of individual states' engagement rules. Pirates are not ordinary criminals. They are not enemy combatants. They are a hybrid, recognized as such for thousands of years, and can be seized at will by anyone, at any time, anywhere they are found.<br />And what of the Emden's problem? Are pirates a species of terrorist? In short, yes. The same definition of pirates as hostis humani generis could also be applied to international organized terrorism. Both crimes involve bands of brigands that divorce themselves from their nation-states and form extraterritorial enclaves; both aim at civilians; both involve acts of homicide and destruction, as the United Nations Convention on the High Seas stipulates, "for private ends."<br />For this reason, it seems sensible that the U.S. and the international community adopt a new, shared legal definition that would recognize the link between piracy and terrorism. This could take the form of an act of the U.S. Congress or a new jurisdiction for piracy and terrorism cases at the International Criminal Court.<br />There is ample precedent. In the 1970s, the hijacking of airliners was defined by the UN as "aerial piracy." In 1985, when Palestinian terrorists seized the cruise ship Achille Lauro and held its passengers hostage, President Ronald Reagan called the hijackers "pirates." Recent evidence also indicates that the Somali pirates hand over a part of their millions in ransom money to Al Shabaab, the Somali rebel group that has been linked to Al Qaeda.<br />The similarities and overlaps between the two crimes have prompted some jurists to advocate abandoning the term piracy altogether in favor of "maritime terrorism." By reasserting the traditional definition of pirates as hostis humani generis, and linking it to terrorism, the U.S. and other nations will not only gain a powerful tool in fighting the Somali pirates, but other incidents of terrorism around the world as well.<br />Recognizing piracy as an international crime will do something else: It will give individual states that don't want to prosecute pirates an alternative - the international court. If pirates are recognized under their traditional international legal status - as neither ordinary criminals nor combatants, but enemies of the human race - states will have a much freer hand in capturing them. If piracy falls within the jurisdiction of the international court, states will not need to shoulder the burden of prosecution alone.<br />Today the world's navies are hamstrung by conflicting laws and the absence of an international code. A comprehensive legal framework is the only way to break the stalemate off Somalia. In a trial before the Old Bailey in 1696, Dr. Henry Newton, the Admiralty advocate, declared, "Suffer pirates and the commerce of the world must cease."<br />More than 300 years later, the world is suffering again. Fortunately, this time we have the answer.<br />Douglas R. Burgess Jr. is the author of "The Pirates' Pact: The Secret Alliances Between History's Most Notorious Buccaneers and Colonial America."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edburgess.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edburgess.php</a></div><div></div><div>********************</div><div></div><div><strong>Grand theft nautical<br />By John S. Burnett<br /></strong>Friday, December 5, 2008<br />To the horror of many and the fascination of most, the Sirius Star, an enormous tanker transporting 2 million barrels of crude oil to the United States, was captured by pirates far off the African coast on Nov. 15.<br />The tanker, owned by Aramco, the Saudi oil company, was carrying enough crude to supply New England with fuel oil for 10 days - in the winter. It is seven times the size of the Titanic. How, then, could a dozen pirates in two puny boats armed with rifles and a grenade launcher board a ship this size?<br />Quite easily - as I found out after spending weeks on a nearly identical ship on a passage from Saudi Arabia to Singapore five years ago.<br />From the bridge nine stories above the sea, there was a feeling of absolute invincibility. I remember the captain of the ship telling me that it was inconceivable that pirates could board his vessel. I imagine he feels differently today.<br />The Sirius Star was plodding at service speed - 15 knots - about 480 miles off the East African coast. This is far away from known pirate waters, so the 25 crewmen aboard were probably working their regular watches, performing duties during a normal day at sea.<br />The Sirius was on autopilot; the proximity alarm on the radar - the collision avoidance system - had been set, and a young third officer was most likely alone on the bridge reading a magazine or sending e-mail messages to his family and occasionally glancing at the myriad dials and gauges embedded in the instrument panel. He may have seen a small blip on the radar screen; this far offshore, it was likely a fishing trawler. But the mysterious vessel was watching him; it then launched its boats for the attack.<br />The aft deck of a fully laden crude carrier is only 10 to 13 feet above the surface of the sea. Motoring up to the ship, the pirates hooked grapnels connected to ropes and fastened to aluminum ladders onto the railings above, scaled the hull, rushed the bridge and commandeered the ship. It was probably over in minutes.<br />The Sirius was just a target of opportunity. Pirates had no idea that they were about to capture a potential floating bomb. It is not the crude oil that is volatile. You can douse a cigarette in the stuff. It is the vapor from the cargo that is vented into the air that is explosive. For this reason, no one is allowed on deck with a camera, flashlight, cellphone or a plastic cigarette lighter in his pocket. One can imagine the captain of the Sirius Star pleading with his captors not to shoot their guns on deck.<br />No one wants to contemplate the effects of an exploding tanker laden with 300,000 tons of crude oil. To place this ship in some perspective, the Exxon Valdez, which ran aground in the Gulf of Alaska in 1989, carried 53 million gallons of crude oil. The Sirius is carrying nearly 84 million gallons. If that amount of crude were to escape, the environmental damage to the Indian Ocean and the East African coast would be catastrophic.<br />So what can be done?<br />Given the failure to stop the pirates, shipping companies are now diverting their fleets - instead of sailing through the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aden, tankers and other merchant vessels are forced to travel around the tip of South Africa to get from the Middle East to Europe and the U.S., all of which adds weeks to the passage and increases the cost of delivery.<br />But this is merely a short-term solution. The only long-term fix has to take place on shore in Somalia. Somalia has not had a recognized functioning government since 1991. Law is dispensed through the barrel of a gun.<br />There was some semblance of law and order in 2006, when the Islamic Courts Union, loosely linked with Al Qaeda, took over much of the country and imposed Shariah law. Though there were cruel tradeoffs, the Islamists virtually eradicated piracy. (The crime was a capital offense punishable by beheading.)<br />When Ethiopian forces, supported by the United States, replaced the Islamists with an ineffective transitional government in 2006, piracy returned.<br />It is evident that no nation can impose its will on Somalia. And certainly no nation can force Somalis to stop the best business in town. But if the West really hopes to eliminate piracy in these strategic shipping lanes, then it should consider involving the courts union, the only entity that has proved it could govern the country, and its militant wing, Al Shabaab, in a new government. If there is movement to talk to the Taliban in Afghanistan, then there should be some effort to talk to the fundamentalists in Somalia.<br />If the Islamists were permitted to form a viable, functioning and effective government, this shattered land might be able to return to the community of nations - and supertankers will be able to deliver oil to the United States without fear of getting hijacked.<br />John S. Burnett, the author of "Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas," is working on a book about the hijackings off the Somali coast.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edburnett.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edburnett.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM5fxeex7PxAQOEhsTrQ6CT2hwXmYlL3ieSWkxdurR2_To08FQRBLNBBqqjC2_uDTS23D9TLcelmrTm077uxh5ntqbT2Rmwr0fBKaBhVHvBTctWqBFpsLi_WdA4H4Di3jgRJsCH43SZBY/s1600-h/DSC02573.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276520018139283810" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 263px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM5fxeex7PxAQOEhsTrQ6CT2hwXmYlL3ieSWkxdurR2_To08FQRBLNBBqqjC2_uDTS23D9TLcelmrTm077uxh5ntqbT2Rmwr0fBKaBhVHvBTctWqBFpsLi_WdA4H4Di3jgRJsCH43SZBY/s320/DSC02573.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>U.S. loses 533,000 jobs; worst month since 1974</strong><br />By Louis Uchitelle<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />NEW YORK: With the American economy deteriorating rapidly, companies in the United States shed 533,000 jobs in November, the government reported Friday, in the largest one-month decline in employment in 34 years.<br />The unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent in what was the 11th consecutive monthly fall in employment.<br />The data offered fresh evidence that the economic contraction accelerated in November. This promises to make the current recession, already 12 months old, the longest since the Great Depression. The previous record was 16 months, in the severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s.<br />The job decline suggests that American consumers and businesses have pulled back sharply on spending in response to the worsening credit crisis. That has put pressure on Congress and the White House to come up with a stimulus package that would substitute for the missing private-sector outlays.<br />Over all, the losses since the recession began in December 2007 now total about 1.9 million, with most coming in the last three months.<br />"We have gone from recession into something that looks more like collapse," said Ian Shepherdson, chief domestic economist at High Frequency Economics, referring to the accelerating job losses in recent months.<br />The losses in November far exceeded the 350,000 figure that was the consensus expectation of economists.<br />"Business shut down in November," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "Businesses are in survival mode and are slashing jobs and investment to conserve cash. Unless credit starts flowing again soon, big job losses will continue well into next year."<br />The employment report, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, included sharp upward revisions in job-loss figures for October (to 320,000, from the previously reported 240,000) and for September (to 403,000, from 284,000).<br />A mass departure from the labor force - people who have stopped actively looking for work - helped hold down the unemployment rate in November, which was up only two-tenths of a percentage point from October's 6.5 percent. The so-called underemployment rate, however, jumped to 12.5 percent, up 1.5 percentage points since September. Most of the underemployed are people working part time who want to work full time but cannot.<br />The 12.5 percent is the highest level of underemployment since the statistic was first compiled in 1994.<br />More than 420,000 men and women who had been working or seeking work in October left the labor force in November. Most presumably gave up looking for a job, the bureau's report suggests. If they had continued that search, the unemployment rate in November would have been closer to 7 percent.<br />In addition, 70 percent of the job loss was in the service sector, particularly in retailing, temporary work and hotel and restaurant employment. Indeed, the only sectors adding jobs in November were health care and education.<br />"The service sector had been holding up relatively well into this downturn, but now the service sector is just imploding," said Michael Darda, chief economist at the research firm MKM Partners. "As goes the service sector, so goes the U.S. economy."<br />The employment report increased the likelihood that the next Congress, with the support of Barack Obama as president, will enact a stimulus package by late January that could exceed $500 billion over two years.<br />Obama issued a statement on Friday that called the employment report "a dramatic reflection of the growing economic crisis we face." He said it was further evidence that "we need an economic recovery plan that will save or create at least 2.5 million more jobs over two years while we act decisively to maintain the flows of credit on which so many American families and American businesses depend."<br />Under the stimulus plan, over half the money would probably be channeled into public infrastructure spending. Many economists consider such investments an effective way to counteract, through federally financed employment, the layoffs and hiring freezes spreading through the private sector.<br />"Basically, $100 billion of public investment in such things as roads, bridges and levees would generate two million jobs," said Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts. "That would offset the two million jobs that we are now on track to lose by early next year."<br />The manufacturing sector has been particularly hard hit, losing about 600,000 jobs this year. That is roughly a third of the jobs lost since employment peaked in December and, in January, began its uninterrupted decline.<br />Manufacturing layoffs seem likely to accelerate as the three U.S. automakers close more factories and shrink payrolls even more as they try to qualify for the federal government loans they asked Congress this week to approve.<br />While manufacturing has led the way, the job cuts are rising in nearly every sector of the economy.<br />"My sense is there is just a collapse in demand," said Mark Levinson, chief economist for the union Unite Here, whose 450,000 members are spread across apparel manufacturing, hotels, casinos, industrial laundries, airport concessions and restaurants. "Our members are being laid off big time."<br />The latest jobs report came during a week of compelling evidence that the American economy was falling precipitously. On Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research ruled that a recession - the 12th since the Depression - began last December, even earlier than many people had thought.<br />That news was followed by fresh reports of cutbacks in construction spending, home sales, consumer spending, business investment and exports. And companies in every industry sector announced layoffs this week, including AT&T, the telecommunications company, with 12,000 job cuts; DuPont, the chemical company, 2,500; and Viacom, the media company, 850.<br />Even retail sales in the Christmas season were off sharply. The International Council of Shopping Centers on Thursday described November sales at stores open at least a year as the weakest in more than 30 years.<br />With all this in mind, and particularly the shrinking employment rolls, economists are estimating that the gross domestic product is contracting at an annual rate of 4 percent or more in the fourth quarter, after a decline of 0.3 percent in the third quarter.<br />"Our GDP forecast for 2009 is now minus 1.8 percent, rather than minus 1 percent," HIS Global Insight, a forecasting and data gathering service, told clients in an e-mail message this week, explaining that all the latest bad news left it no choice but to issue a sharp downward revision.<br />"We see the unemployment rate at 8.6 percent by the end of 2009," Global Insight said.<br />John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia, said the new unemployment data suggested that economic growth was falling at a rate of 5 percent in the fourth quarter.<br />"There's no quick fix here," he said. "There's no quick rebound."<br />Jack Healy contributed reporting.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/jobs.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/jobs.php</a></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Honda withdraws from Formula One racing</strong><br />By Mark McDonald and Brad Spurgeon<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />HONG KONG: Honda announced on Friday that it would withdraw from Formula One, a startling pullout that has its origins in the dismal state of the auto industry and that is likely to have huge repercussions on the high-profile global racing circuit.<br />A glum Takeo Fukui, the chief executive officer of Honda, made the announcement at a news conference in Tokyo.<br />He called the company's withdrawal from the series "a difficult decision" caused by the worldwide economic gloom and "the quickly deteriorating operating environment facing the global auto industry."<br />"I offer my sincere apologies," he said, "to everyone involved."<br />The governing body for Formula One racing said in a statement Friday that the sport's finances were in "an already critical situation."<br />Honda has struggled badly this year, battered by weaker sales and a stronger yen. November sales, for example, were off 32 percent from a year earlier.<br />"Honda must protect its core business activities and secure the long term," Fukui said. "A recovery is expected to take some time."<br />While he cited economic reasons for departing from Formula One, the Honda team could have used the sporting equivalent of a bailout. Honda finished in ninth place out of the 10 teams that finished the season. A co-sponsored team, Super Aguri-Honda, withdrew after just four races of the 2008 season, citing a lack of funding.<br />The Honda team's drivers also fared poorly: Rubens Barrichello of Brazil finished 14th in the standings and Jenson Button of Britain was 18th.<br />With the Honda racing team now up for sale, one of the principal worries among frenzied Formula One bloggers around the world was the future of the Toyota Formula One team - and perhaps the future of the circuit itself.<br />Toyota, the world's largest automaker, has had its own financial troubles this year, and its November sales were down 34 percent from a year earlier.<br />But a Toyota spokesman was quoted earlier in the week as saying the company had no intention of putting its Formula One team on the block. The company said it would introduce its new racing car on Jan. 15 over the Internet instead of its usual glamorous unveilings.<br />Also, last week, LG Electronics announced a multiple-year technological partnership and marketing sponsorship program with the overall race series.<br />But car companies are cutting costs, laying off workers, closing factories and, in the United States, pleading for bailouts. Those woes clearly extend to racing sponsorships. Audi, the German carmaker, announced this week that it would withdraw from the popular Le Mans sports car series in Europe. And on Friday, it said it would withdraw from the American version of the same series.<br />Formula One bills itself as the world's richest sport. Its race teams subsist on sponsorships, television rights money, advertising contracts and sales to the so-called Paddock Club, which caters to the wealthy during the 17 to 19 annual races, each known as a Grand Prix. The sport features some of the world's heftiest brands in some of the glossiest sectors - telecommunications, drinks, computers, banking and automobiles.<br />For their sponsorships, the companies get global television exposure for their logos - even if those trademarks are flashing by at 220 miles an hour - along with big promotional dividends. The Formula One race in Brazil last year was the world's second-most-watched sports event with 78 million viewers, trailing only the 2007 Super Bowl with an audience of 97 million.<br />The 11 teams on the Formula One circuit spent a reported $1.6 billion during the 2008 season, which ended on Nov. 2. Max Mosley, the president of the International Automobile Federation, which governs Formula One and other racing series, has called that spending figure "unsustainable."<br />A statement Friday from the federation reiterated that view, even repeating the word "unsustainable" and adding that "the global economic downturn has only exacerbated an already critical situation."<br />Even successful, winning teams on the circuit lose money, and the budget for the Honda operation was said to be between $217 million and $300 million this season. The team employed more than 700 people at its headquarters in Brackley, England.<br />The Honda withdrawal came as a surprise to the team, Formula One sources said.<br />Until recent years, Formula One was a Eurocentric sport. And while TV revenues from Europe still dominate, half the races are now outside Europe, including events in Australia, Brazil, Bahrain, Malaysia, China, Turkey and Singapore. A race in India is planned for the 2011 season.<br />Honda entered the series racing in the early 1960s, not long after it first started making cars. The team's first Formula One race was the 1964 German Grand Prix - in the backyard of BMW and Mercedes, no less - and the first victory came the following year in Mexico.<br />The Honda driver Jo Schlesser was killed at the French Grand Prix in 1968, leading the team to shut down its team and withdraw from Grand Prix racing at the end of that year. It returned to Formula One in 1983 but only as an engine supplier, most notably to the highly successful McLaren and Williams teams.<br />By the time it left again in 1992 it had won 69 more races and several world championships, dominating the series. It returned again in 2000 as an engine provider to the British American Racing team, and it bought the team outright in 2006, when it began to race under the Honda name again.<br />At the time, a share of Honda stock on the Tokyo exchange was priced at ¥3,980, or $43. The stock closed Friday at ¥1,653, down 8.3 percent for the day.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/05honda.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/05honda.php</a></div><div></div><div>*******************</div><div></div><div><strong>For Iceland, an exodus of workers</strong><br />By Helga Kristin Einarsdottir and Meera Bhatia</div><div>Bloomberg News<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />REYKJAVIK: Almost 1,200 years after the Viking chief Ingolfur Arnarson left Norway to found Reykjavik, the crisis engulfing Iceland is forcing his descendants home.<br />"There are no jobs here," Baldvin Kristjansson, an 18-year-old from western Iceland who once worked repairing containers, said at a European job fair here. "I'm going to move away and go to Norway."<br />Iceland, an Atlantic island of 320,000, is facing the biggest exodus in a century, a result of its worst financial crisis since gaining independence from Denmark in 1944.<br />Iceland's $7.5 billion annual economy may shrink about 10 percent next year, according to the International Monetary Fund, which is helping provide a $4.6 billion bailout package.<br />About half of Icelanders aged 18 to 24 are considering leaving the country, the Icelandic newspaper Morgunbladid said, citing a survey of 1,117 people taken Oct. 27 to 29.<br />"Tens of thousands" will depart, estimated Lars Christensen, chief analyst at Danske Bank, the biggest lender in Denmark.<br />Iceland's biggest wave of emigration was in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Then, 15,000 out of a total population of 70,000 left, joining a flow to North America from countries including Norway, Sweden and Ireland.<br />A hundred years later, Iceland's economy is struggling after the nation's banking system collapsed last month under the weight of its foreign debt.<br />Inflation surged to an 18-year high of 17.1 percent in November after a currency collapse that drove up prices. A protest against the government turned violent last week as the police used pepper spray to battle demonstrators in front of Reykjavik's main police station.<br />Unemployment is forecast to rise to 7 percent by the end of January from a three-year high of 1.9 percent in October, the Labor Directorate estimates.<br />"A lot of people are registering unemployed," said Valdimar Olafsson, who is an adviser in Reykjavik for Eures, a network of European public employment services. "It's very hectic, and Icelanders are asking for jobs, especially in Norway."<br />Norse settlers arrived in Iceland around 874 on sail-powered wooden longships. The country came under Norwegian control in 1262 and then under Danish dominion in 1380. It gained autonomy 90 years ago this month and became fully independent in 1944.<br />The Danes and Norwegians, along with Germans and Poles, returned to pluck Icelandic talent at a job fair on Nov. 21 and 22. It drew 2,500 people.<br />Neither Denmark nor Norway has been fully spared from the effects of the global crunch. Denmark's economy will shrink 0.5 percent next year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Norwegian economic growth more than halved to 0.2 percent in the third quarter.<br />Both remain in much better shape than Iceland, though, and Norwegian and Danish companies are seeking skilled workers.<br />"Iceland is more or less in a state of coma," said Sigrun Thormar, who runs a consulting business for Icelanders moving eastward. "There will be an increase in the number of Icelanders seeking work in Denmark."<br />Danish unemployment is 1.6 percent. In Norway, the jobless rate rose to 1.8 percent last month from 1.7 percent the previous month. Norway's Labor and Welfare Administration expects unemployment to stay below 3 percent over the next two years.<br />Teknova, a research institution based in Kristiansand that is looking for scientists, and Aibel, a provider of products and services to the oil and gas industry based in Billingstad, are among Norwegian companies seeking Icelandic workers.<br />In total, Norway's employment service has 350 vacancies posted, said Ragnhild Synstad, a Eures adviser from Norway who attended the job fair.<br />"I have been absolutely swamped with employers that are interested," Synstad said. "The response was overwhelming. We heard some very sad stories about families who have lost everything."<br />Stefan Gudjonsson, 37, who was laid off from his job as an account manager at an information technology company, said he might have to leave his 6-year-old son behind for work elsewhere.<br />"I don't like the look of things right now and also worry about what has yet to happen," he said. "People are trying their best to be optimistic, but the prospects look anything but good."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/iceland.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/iceland.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Investors win $141 million in suit against Bank of America</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />A jury in New York decided Thursday that a unit of the Bank of America Corporation had defrauded several investors, including the American International Group and other financial companies, by selling them low-value asset-backed securities.<br />The jury in U.S. District Court in New York awarded the plaintiffs a total of $141 million, including interest.<br />The verdict came after less than two days of deliberations.<br />"We are pleased with the outcome and grateful to the jury for their hard work over many weeks," said David Spears, a lawyer representing all of the investors except AIG<br />The jury ruled in favor of the investors on all claims under U.S. securities laws and also claims under New York State common law for fraud.<br />Société Générale, the Travelers Companies, the New York branch of Bank Leumi Le-Israel BM , the Allstate Corporation, Bayerische Landesbank and the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank, were among the plaintiffs.<br />The suit was filed in 2001 and went to trial in late October this year before Judge John Koeltl of Federal District Court.<br />A Bank of America spokeswoman, Shirley Norton, said the bank was "evaluating all options" for judicial review of the verdict.<br />"We do not believe the verdict is supported by the evidence presented," she said in a statement.<br />The lawsuit contended that Nationsbanc, which Bank of America acquired in 1998, sold asset-backed securities based on consumer receivables from Heilig-Meyers, a furniture retailer based in Richmond, Virginia The plaintiffs contended that Nationsbanc made them appear to be high-quality receivables, when in fact they were of low quality.<br />"We are pleased with the verdict," an AIG spokesman said.<br />Heilig-Meyers was not a defendant in the case. It filed for bankruptcy in 2000. More Articles in Business »</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/06bank.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/06bank.php</a></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>For troubled fund's shareholders, a tough choice</strong><br />By Diana B. Henriques<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />The Reserve Primary Fund has presented its deeply frustrated shareholders with a stark choice.<br />If they are patient, they might ultimately get back 98.5 cents for each dollar they had in the money-market fund, which in September became only the second such fund to ever "break the buck," or report a share price below a dollar.<br />But if they continue to wage legal battles against the fund and its managers, the company will use investors' own money to defend itself against their accusations of mismanagement and deception.<br />So this money fund seen as relatively safe has presented investors with a painful dilemma: if they fight for more than 98.5 cents, they risk getting far less, because more of their money will be used to pay the fund's legal expenses. Those terms, described in a "plan of liquidation" posted on the Reserve Fund's Web site late Wednesday, are part of the contract that fund trustees negotiated with the money manager that has been running the fund since its inception more than 30 years ago.<br />Even so, the choice struck some legal experts as somewhat brazen.<br />"This is a very smart thing they have done," said Tamar Frankel, a law professor at Boston University who has written extensively on mutual fund legal issues. "It pours not only ice water but ice on any claims" by shareholders, she added.<br />But if the fund's manager or trustees are to blame for the fund's current troubles, Frankel said, she is very skeptical that they would be allowed to tap shareholder money for their legal bills.<br />The fund's shareholders are off the hook for those legal bills only if the trustees or the fund advisor have committed willful malfeasance, acted in bad faith, displayed gross negligence or shown a reckless disregard for their duties.<br />But in a classic Catch-22, it is not clear how anyone could prove they engaged in such behavior without some sort of litigation — which could in turn reduce the 98.5 cents return that shareholders will get if there are no new legal expenses.<br />"This is a complicated and unprecedented situation," a spokesman for the trustees said. "The trustees are acting in good faith to treat all shareholders fairly and equitably."<br />The offer is the latest jolt for investors in the once-formidable Primary Fund, whose founders invented the money fund concept more than 30 years ago. The fund was the largest of more than a dozen money funds operated by the Reserve Management Company.<br />The fund began to fray on Sept. 15, the morning Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, when it was hit by a wave of redemption orders. By the next day, it had broken the buck.<br />The run was a shock to Primary Fund investors because the fund held only a small amount of Lehman Brothers notes — $785 million, out of $64 billion in assets. And it was a shock to the entire money fund industry, prompting U.S. regulators to quickly introduce an insurance program for money funds, in a bid to restore investor confidence.<br />The next day, the fund froze all Primary Fund redemptions and announced plans to liquidate the Primary Fund; within days, it had frozen all its money funds, even those that had not broken the buck, and began trying to liquidate assets in today's weak credit markets.<br />The latest plan shows that the fund trustees still have not decided how to handle a fundamental dispute between shareholders who redemeed before the fund broke the buck and those who redeemed afterward. It says only that it "will attempt to resolve the question," and said it hoped to announce in three weeks how big its legal contingency fund will be.<br />One of the most potentially damaging claims facing the fund is pending in U.S. court in Minneapolis, where Ameriprise Financial, which had hundreds of thousands of customers caught in the fund, is accusing the fund managers of tipping some investors in advance that the fund was in danger of breaking the buck.<br />"The Reserve's plan is ingenious," said Harvey Wolkoff, a lawyer with Ropes & Gray in Boston who is handling that case for Ameriprise. "Their plan is that their own investors reimburse them for their wrongdoing."<br />Along with the liquidation plan, the fund also announced on Wednesday that it is making a second distribution of cash to shareholders who have been unable to withdraw their money since the fund broke the buck.<br />The latest distribution of $14.4 billion, added to $25 billion in October, brings the shareholders' recovery so far to about 80 cents on the dollar.<br />There is about $10.8 billion in assets left in the fund, about half of which matures between July and October of next year. Unless the credit markets strengthen enough to allow those notes to be sold at par before maturity, the final payments to shareholders could come more than a year after their money was first frozen.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/05fund.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/05fund.php</a></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Risk-wary investors send pound down vs dollar</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />LONDON: Sterling stumbled against a broadly stronger dollar on Friday, as investors seized on data showing the U.S. economy lost more than half a million jobs in November as a fresh reason to unload exposure to risk.<br />U.S. employers axed payrolls by 533,000 in November, the most in 34 years and far more than expected, government data showed, as the year-old recession hammered every corner of the U.S. economy.<br />Along with other currencies, sterling has lost traction in recent months as central banks race to boost growth by slashing borrowing costs, while investors favour lower-yielding units like the dollar and notably the Japanese yen.<br />"The fact that we had such weak payroll numbers dampens any pick up in risk appetite we may have had earlier in the week," said Geraldine Concagh, economist at AIB Group Treasury in Dublin.<br />"We see a continuation of factors that have been weighing on sterling -- the weak outlook for the UK economy and the expectation for further monetary easing from the Bank of England," she added.<br />By 3:34 p.m., the pound was down 0.8 percent on the day at $1.4565 after hitting a 6-3/4 year low of $1.4467 according to Reuters data on Thursday. The euro was down 0.1 percent at 87.00 pence but still near a record high of 87.25 pence reached late on Thursday.<br />The Bank slashed borrowing costs to 2.00 percent from 3.00 percent on Thursday in an attempt to shore up the battered economy and hinted at more cuts to come as it warned normal lending volumes would not be restored without further measures.<br />The cut was deeper than a 75 basis point reduction by the European Central Bank, whose benchmark rate is still half a percentage point higher than the UK's. Analysts say that this leaves the pound vulnerable to further declines against the euro.<br />"When all is said and done a 100 basis point cut in the UK and 75 basis points from the euro zone implies a higher euro/sterling rate," Standard Bank's head of G7 currency strategy Steve Barrow said.<br />"Euro/sterling is likely to push higher going forwards towards the 90 pence mark," he added.<br />Most analysts expect the Bank of England to take interest rates down further in the new year, raising the possibility that the UK will have to embark on a policy of quantitative easing as the central bank seeks to counter a deflation risk.<br />The economy is seen as one of the most vulnerable in the developed world to the current financial crisis given high levels of indebtedness, a slowing housing market and heavy reliance on the financial sector.<br />A string of weak data recently have pointed to weakness in all areas of the economy and sparked worries that the country could be set for a deep and prolonged recession.<br />(Additional reporting by Veronica Brown and Harpreet Bhal)<br />(Reporting by Jessica Mortimer; Editing by Victoria Main)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/business/OUKBS-UK-MARKETS-STERLING-CLOSE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/business/OUKBS-UK-MARKETS-STERLING-CLOSE.php</a></div><div></div><div>********************</div><div><strong>BMW and Mercedes sales plunge</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />By Michael Shields and Alastair Himmer<br />Global sales at the world's top premium carmakers, BMW and Mercedes, plunged by a quarter in November and Honda backed out of Formula One racing as the economic downturn exacted a mounting toll on automakers.<br />With even well-heeled consumers keeping a tight grip on their wallets, group vehicle sales at BMW fell 25.4 percent to 96,570 units, led down by a 26.2 percent drop at the flagship BMW brand, it said on Friday.<br />Daimler's Mercedes-Benz Cars premium division saw unit sales drop 25.2 percent to 84,500 vehicles. Unit sales at its core Mercedes-Benz brand fell 27.6 percent to 74,400 units.<br />Car sales across the globe have plummeted as consumers curb spending in the face of mass lay-offs and a credit crunch, pushing big U.S. carmakers to the brink and heaping pressure on their foreign rivals, too.<br />In Germany, Europe's biggest auto market, new car sales are expected to hit post-reunification lows this year and next before recovering somewhat in 2010, the VDA auto industry association forecast this week.<br />In Japan, Honda delivered a major blow to Formula One by withdrawing from the sport with immediate effect.<br />Japan's number two carmaker is seeking to cut costs to combat the global economic crisis and concluded it would no longer bankroll the Formula One team and its estimated annual budget of $500 million (342.4 million pounds).<br />Honda Chief Executive Takeo Fukui told a news conference a return to the sport could take time, and that there were no plans to continue as an engine supplier.<br />"This difficult decision was taken recently and was made in light of the quickly deteriorating operating environment facing the global auto industry," Fukui told reporters.<br />"Honda must protect its core business activities and secure the long term as widespread uncertainties in the economics around the globe continue to mount."<br />DOMINOS FALLING?<br />Honda could trigger a domino effect of manufacturers toppling out of Formula One unless costs fall dramatically, International Automobile Federation (FIA) President Max Mosley said.<br />"I have to say it was not entirely unexpected," the Briton told reporters after Honda's news.<br />"I've been expecting one of the major manufacturers to stop for some time, because even before the current situation the costs were completely out of control.<br />"And now I think it's difficult to imagine how any manufacturer could stay in unless we make really substantial reductions in cost," he added in a conference call.<br />Toyota, BMW, Mercedes, Renault and Fiat each burn through $200 million a year competing in Formula One.<br />BMW shares fell 2.6 percent and Daimler's had retreated 4.2 percent in Frankfurt by 2:19 p.m. British time, while the DJ Stoxx autos index was down 2.9 percent. Honda shed 1.9 percent in Tokyo.<br />Detroit remains the epicentre of the consumer earthquake shaking the automotive world.<br />The chief executives of General Motors and Chrysler told the U.S. Congress on Thursday they would consider restarting merger talks if needed to win their slice of up to $34 billion in emergency U.S. government aid.<br />"I would be very willing to look at it seriously," GM CEO Rick Wagoner told the Senate Banking Committee, adding that merger talks earlier this year were dropped on concerns GM did not have the financing to merge with Chrysler.<br />Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli said his job would likely be the first to go in a merger with GM, but if that would save Chrysler and its workers, "I would do it."<br />The chiefs of the Big Three automakers, including Ford CEO Alan Mulally, pledged to refocus on higher fuel efficiency vehicles and lower production costs.<br />But they encountered deep scepticism among lawmakers suspicious of such promises, given the companies' past failures to wean themselves from gasoline guzzlers and to make innovative cars that consumers want to buy.<br />"I don't trust the car companies' leadership," said New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer at the hearing. But in a comment reflecting many lawmakers' sentiments, he added, "We can't let the industry fail."<br />Even mighty Toyota has been humbled by the global market turmoil. It cut the ribbon on a new $860 million SUV plant in Canada on Thursday, but has already had to scale back production plans for the factory.<br />(Additional reporting by Alan Baldwin in London and by John Crawley and Kevin Drawbaugh in Washington, editing by Will Waterman)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/business/OUKBS-UK-AUTOS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/business/OUKBS-UK-AUTOS.php</a></div><div></div><div>********************</div><div><strong>Washington's new tack: Helping homeowners<br /></strong>By Edmund L. Andrews<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: After pouring vast amounts of money into financial institutions of almost every type, and having little to show for it, the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve are suddenly taking a new look at ordinary homeowners.<br />Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned on Thursday that the soaring number of foreclosures threatened the economy. He then proposed some ideas — government-engineered loan modifications, and more taxpayer money to help people refinance — to keep people in their homes.<br />"The public policy case for reducing preventable foreclosures does not rely solely on the desire to help people who are in trouble," Bernanke said. "More needs to be done."<br />At the Treasury Department, meanwhile, top officials continued to work on a plan to bolster the housing market by subsidizing 30-year home mortgages with rates as low as 4.5 percent — a level that home buyers have not seen since the early 1960s.<br />Both actions highlighted how economic policy makers have come almost full circle. Since the financial crisis began last summer, both the Fed and the Treasury had focused almost exclusively on patching up the financial system — propping up banks, Wall Street firms, money market funds and issuers of commercial debt.<br />But the new focus on helping individuals could create a bitter split between those who want to buy homes and those who already own them. It has already opened up a rift between the real estate industry, which wants to increase sales, and the banking industry, which wants to get out from under staggering volumes of troubled mortgages.<br />Under a plan that top Treasury officials are weighing, the Treasury Department would underwrite tens of billions of dollars worth of 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages at rates far lower than most Americans have ever seen.<br />According to Bankrate.com, the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages fell on Thursday to 5.58 percent, down from 5.76 percent last week. The 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.55 percent late Thursday, a new low.<br />But the cheap mortgages would be available only for people buying houses, not the roughly 50 million families that already have mortgages and would want to refinance at a lower rate.<br />As a result, the plan offers no direct relief to the millions of people who face foreclosure because they took out exotic mortgages that they could not afford. Nor would the plan offer any benefit to people who have stayed current on their mortgages and would simply be interested in taking advantage of a lower rate. As envisioned by Treasury officials, homeowners who now pay 6 percent would be watching new neighbors arrive whose monthly payments were almost one-third lower.<br />"At this point, our view is that such a program may do more harm than good," said Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, which represents about 8,000 small banks.<br />"You have thousands of banks that made loans and have them sitting on their books, and whose borrowers have worked their rear ends off to make the payments," he said. "Those people are going to go to their banks and tell them their neighbor just got a 4.5 percent loan, and the banks aren't going to be able to help them. They're going to have extremely angry and disgruntled customers."<br />But the National Association of Realtors, whose members want to bolster home sales, is lobbying hard for the idea.<br />"We believe that the only way to really address the housing situation is to increase sales," said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the association. "Home prices will not stabilize until we address the inventory problem, and the only way to bring down the inventory of houses on the market is to bring in a new set of buyers. We think this would do the trick."<br />Yun estimated that a one-year program to provide home buyers with an interest rate of 4.5 percent would cost the government about $50 billion. It would result, he predicted, in about 500,000 home sales — an increase of slightly more than 10 percent over today's depressed sales rate. If the program were extended to people who simply wanted to refinance, Yun warned, the government's cost could easily be 10 times higher.<br />Neel Kashkari, the assistant Treasury secretary who is overseeing the $700 billion bailout plan, publicly confirmed on Thursday that the mortgage plan was under consideration but offered no other details.<br />People familiar with the discussions said Treasury officials were still debating the exact mechanism for financing the cheap mortgages. The main idea is to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-controlled mortgage-finance companies, to buy up and guarantee 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages paying 4.5 percent interest.<br />The Treasury would provide the money by buying up the mortgage-backed securities from Fannie and Freddie.<br />The plan closely resembles a proposal developed by Christopher J. Mayer, vice dean at the Columbia Business School.<br />"This really is the opportunity of a lifetime," he said. "If you ask someone if this is the time to come into the market, I think anyone who would have bought a house in 2007 and was sitting on the sidelines, or who wants to buy this year or would buy in 2010, would want to take advantage of this."<br />Mayer said long-term Treasury rates are so low right now that the government could actually make a profit on the cheap loans. The Treasury can sell 10-year bonds right now and pay only 2.7 percent a year, far below the 4.5 percent that it would be charging home buyers.<br />But he said his own preference was to make the mortgages available to existing homeowners as well as home buyers.<br />"I think there are additional benefits one could have by extending the program for people who refinance," Mayer said. "At 4.5 percent, you might be looking at 25 million people who could refinance and the average savings could be $400 to $500 a month."<br />In the past, Treasury and Fed officials often pleaded that their rescues of Wall Street were crucial to the well-being of Main Street. But the new Treasury idea would amount to directly helping Main Street.<br />Meanwhile, Bernanke all but reversed the rhetoric of recent months by arguing that helping homeowners avoid foreclosure were critical for the whole economy.<br />"Steps that stabilize the housing market will help stabilize the economy as well," Bernanke said. "Reducing the number of preventable foreclosures would not only help families stay in their homes, it would confer much wider benefits."<br />Bernanke, speaking at a Fed conference on housing, outlined proposals for bolder government action. He suggested that the Treasury subsidize lower fees and interest rates on a new program, Hope for Homeowners, that is intended to help troubled homeowners refinance at much lower rates. At the moment, lenders pay an upfront insurance premium of 3 percent of the loan value and borrowers face fairly high interest rate of 8 percent.<br />Bernanke also supported a proposal by the Sheila C. Bair, chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to have the government engineer as many as 1.5 million loan modifications. The Treasury and White House have fought the idea for months.<br />Finally, Bernanke proposed that the government share the cost when a mortgage servicer reduces a borrower's monthly payment. Preventing foreclosures, he said, "should be high on the agenda."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/05housing.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/business/05housing.php</a></div><div></div><div>********************</div><div></div><div><strong>Chinese contemporary art bubble goes flat<br /></strong>By Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />SINGAPORE: The enigmatic self-portraits of Yue Minjun with their jaw-breaking grin are one of the most recognizable images of Chinese contemporary art and, when the going was good, those dealing in Yue's smiling men also laughed all the way to the bank.<br />The "Execution of Maximilian," inspired by the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, sold for $5.9 million in 2007 and "Gweong-Gweong," considered one of his best early works, sold in May this year for a record $6.85 million.<br />But collectors are no longer snapping up Yue's work. After four years of unprecedented boom, some sense is returning to the market.<br />"The market for Chinese contemporary art had long been overheated. Many artworks and artists are overpriced and overrated, notwithstanding the fact that they are good artworks by good artists. Needless to say, there is a lot of junk being traded as "meaningful' artwork," said Daniel Komala, the president of Larasati Auctioneers in Singapore.<br />"For good artworks, the bubble has deflated significantly; for meaningless artworks, the bubble simply burst," Komala said. "The market is looking for a new equilibrium, which is somewhere between 30 to 40 percent below its peak."<br />At Christie's Hong Kong evening sale of Asian contemporary art on Nov. 30 only 18 of the 32 lots sold. Works by Yue, Fang Lijun and Wang Guangyi found no takers, while Zhang Xiaogang's "Bloodline: Big Family No. 2," a large family portrait from the collection of the film director Oliver Stone, sold for $3.4 million, below an already conservative estimate of $3.9 million.<br />A rare early work by Zeng Fanzhi, "From the Masses, To the Masses," valued by Christie's at around $3.9 million, failed to make its reserve price - in sharp contrast with the May sale when "Mask Series 1996 No. 6" fetched $9.7 million, a record for a Chinese contemporary work.<br />"The logic of the market is quite simple right now," said Ingrid Dudek, a specialist in Asian contemporary art at Christie's. "Things that are fresh and well-priced will perform well, and things that are pushed too hard or come back at auction quickly may struggle.<br />"At the end of the day we would have hoped for better, but as with the sales in New York and London over the last month and a half, we're actually very happy that the market is still displaying as much liquidity as it did. For many of these works, clients have put in after-sale offers and many are now being sold."<br />Still, Dudek said, there was "definitely some kind of correction going on." Financial crisis aside, collectors of Chinese contemporary art appeared to be developing more discrimination. "There was really a moment where everything was high and easy," she said. "That's no longer the case."<br />In retrospect, Sotheby's inaugural evening sale of Asian art in Hong Kong on Oct. 4 was a turning point. That night, it became clear that top names no longer attracted a blind following, as only 28 of the 47 lots on offer sold. Works by Liu Wei, Wang Guangyi and Yue crashed.<br />A "Bloodline" painting by Zhang Xiaogang, another iconic painter of the good times, topped the sale at $2.96 million, at the lower end of its estimate, but another from the same series went unsold.<br />At the Borobodur auction in Singapore on Oct. 11, Yue's "Life Pose," depicting a naked man sitting on the floor, had a relatively low pre-sale estimate of $250,000 but it still did not sell. Early November sales in China confirmed the trend as lot after lot of contemporary work remained unsold at China Guardian's Grand Fall auction, while Beijing Huachen Auctions canceled all its forthcoming contemporary sales.<br />Nicole Schoeni, director of the Hong Kong-based Schoeni Art Gallery, said recent auction results would "humble a lot of people."<br />"I'm in a sense quite relieved to see this happening," she added. "A lot of the speculators are also not getting involved anymore."<br />Vinci Chang, head of 20th century Chinese and Asian contemporary art at Christie's Hong Kong, also sees a bright side. "This is a buyer's market," she said. "If you have a keen eye and know what is best, this is probably the best time to get the best work at the best price."<br />Komala said: "As long as the price of the top Chinese contemporary artists such as Zhang Xiaogang and others is still a fraction of Damien Hirst's," the buyers will return.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/arts/rcartchin.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/arts/rcartchin.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS9fkf1u1iusd4SzDS9JIswfJmlSeFrFACXp8g5rY6eG7ufs8OEkJPUXGlk2xk8ipIupa_wZTxOPJS_aAqo8AddKswjMUy7V0kf7Xdiz-oycPPVRorXWZ-1T2UhymPdKqees4hHaYiyjU/s1600-h/DSC02577.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276520014775228994" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS9fkf1u1iusd4SzDS9JIswfJmlSeFrFACXp8g5rY6eG7ufs8OEkJPUXGlk2xk8ipIupa_wZTxOPJS_aAqo8AddKswjMUy7V0kf7Xdiz-oycPPVRorXWZ-1T2UhymPdKqees4hHaYiyjU/s320/DSC02577.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art: Despite flaws, a house of masterpieces<br /></strong>By Souren Melikian<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />DOHA, Qatar: Few can boast of having created from scratch a museum that deals with the arts of the past, no matter from what culture. This feat pulled off within a couple of decades or so by the ruling family of Qatar was revealed this week as the Museum of Islamic Art opened its doors to the public.<br />Like any Utopian realization, this one displays some remarkable features matched by equally blatant weaknesses. The new building designed by I.M. Pei was meant to be "an architectural gem, home to a thousand treasures," as posters along avenues leading to the museum claim. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder as the saying goes, and not all beholders will be overwhelmed by the geometrical volumes that seemed to be heaped upon one another when seen from a distance.<br />Once inside, visitors may wonder why little attention has been given to some basic requirements for the display of objets d'art. Daylight, which would have been of immense benefit to ceramics and silver-inlaid brass wares, has been largely shunned in a land where it is often glorious.<br />Had artificial lighting been devised with greater sensitivity for the objects, this might be forgiven. But apparently someone forgot to warn those who installed the lighting equipment that directional light aimed from high up in the ceiling on sensational candlesticks from Iraq, Iran and Syria would cause nasty reflections, leaving other areas barely discernible.<br />The contrast with a few objects displayed in individual cases properly lit where their splendor duly comes out, as is the case with a 10th-century bronze animal from Arab Spain, makes these elementary mistakes all the more irksome. In fairness to the new museum, such mishaps are not uncommon in world-famous, long-established institutions. The Louvre exhibition of treasures from Qatar two years ago suffered from similar deficiencies.<br />These mistakes are compounded by the larger problem of the overall distribution of the art which does not follow any discernible purpose.<br />Visitors stepping into one of the galleries where the objects are set in individual cases several steps apart may be forgiven if they fail to detect any logic in the arrangement - there is none. A very beautiful bowl with blue lettering on the ivory ground and a label assigning it to 10th-century Iraq sits a short distance away from a 10th-century bronze animal from Arab Spain described as a fountainhead. A 16th-century decanter (not a "water bottle") from the Turkish city of Iznik is there, too, and as they approach a corner of the room, the more diligent art lovers may spot an important astrolabe from Iran signed in 374 of the Islamic calendar (984-985 A.D.) by Hamid ibn al-Khizr al-Khujandi. With luck, they may even catch sight in a wall vitrine of an extraordinary flask of deep blue glass decorated in gold with a stylized pomegranate tree and parrots that is tentatively attributed to Syria.<br />If confined to one room, the random grouping might conceivably be justified as an anthology of stunning pieces, each to be admired in isolation. But this goes on endlessly.<br />In the room next to this one, the theme of "patterns" is supposed to justify the selection. Extremely fine revetment tiles from Iznik dating from the 1580s are visible on a wall. Nearby, the opening page of a Moghul manuscript with a magnificent rosette is said to have formed part of an album put together for the emperor of Hindustan, Shah Jahan. The label, alas, omits to specify for the layman's benefit that the page is cropped on all sides, which drastically alters its balance.<br />Further on, a rare bowl from 15th-century Iran with turquoise cloud bands and lotus blossoms on black ground sits in a case on its own. No aesthetic link connects any of the above.<br />What could have led to the decision of setting side by side in a central vitrine an ivory oliphant from 12th-century Italy (perhaps Sicily, the label speculates), and a 17th-century tinned copper bowl from Iran with a date possibly to be read 1[0]89 (1678-1679 AD), is puzzling.<br />If the reason is simply the presence of a hunting scene (naturally involving animals) on the Iranian bowl and of animal effigies carved in sunken relief on the oliphant, the parallel is hardly illuminating. This is the equivalent of displaying together a 12th-century Romanesque sculptural group from France and a 17th-century picture by Rubens on the grounds that both represent Mary and the infant Jesus.<br />Such lack of visual coherence is the inevitable consequence of the concept of "Islamic art" that underpins the display. This is a European construct of the 19th century that gained wide acceptance following a display of Les Arts Musulmans at the old Trocadero palace in Paris during the 1889 Exposition Universelle. The idea of "Islamic art" has even less substance than the notion of "Christian art" from the British Isles to Germany to Russia during the 1000 years separating the reigns of Charlemagne and Queen Victoria might have.<br />Should any art historians declare themselves competent to deal with paintings, artifacts or monuments created across Europe during that period, not many would take them seriously, and were a museum director to prepare haphazardly a similar artistic concoction, he would not last long in the job.<br />Yet that is roughly how the Western art world, academic or not, approaches the lands where Islam prevails. Never mind that the sundry cultures are more diverse taken as a whole than those of Europe.<br />The reasons for the enduring myth are many. In the West, museums stick to the notion of "Islamic art" because they lack the money, the space or the competencies required to set up separate Arab, Iranian, or Turkish departments. Similar lack of financial and/or human resources lead universities to run "Islamic departments."<br />In Islamic countries, the situation varies. The general tendency to import wholesale Western European concepts and fashions, from clothes to constitutional matters, paved the way for the adoption of the "Islamic art" myth. Ironically, the anachronistic phrase translated from European languages would have been incomprehensible in earlier times. Humans alone can be "Muslims," i.e. entrust themselves unto God, inert things cannot - even if the qualifier is changed to "Islamic." The myth is particularly popular in those parts of the Muslim world that have only made a modest contribution to art because by using an all-encompassing qualifier, they feel that they, too, somehow own the art of the more powerful cultures.<br />This overall confusion has a corollary - inadequate scholarship, regrettably reflected in easily half the labels that require urgent revision. Many do not yield basic information that can be culled merely by glancing at the inscriptions painted on the pottery or inlaid in gold on the brass vessels and candlesticks.<br />Nonspecialists might be interested to learn that the ceramic bowl with blue lettering ascribed to "Iraq (probably Basra)" is signed. The line reads in Arabic mimma 'amala S[a]lih," "made by S[a]lih." It says a lot about the status of artists - and the fame of some - that the sole decoration is confined to that signature. Add in passing that the bowls with such blue lettering on ivory ground that have appeared in the market are traceable to Iranian, not Iraqi, sources. This, added to various bowls recovered from archaeological excavations across Iran, carries greater weight than the shards excavated in Samarra, the Iraqi city that was briefly a caliphal capital where goods arrived from all over the world.<br />It would be of even greater interest to visitors who are not specialists in Arabic epigraphy to be told that the fantastic Syrian brass incense burner inlaid with silver and gold carries the titles and names of the great Mamluk Sultan of Syria and Egypt, al Malik an-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun.<br />On the third floor, a candlestick of extraordinary importance is likewise inscribed with the titles and names of a ruler, Sheykh Abu Eshaq, the Injuid Sultan of the southern Iranian region of Fars, who reigned from 1341-1356. This not only makes the bronze piece decorated with miniature-like court scenes a royal object, it also tells us that it was made in the capital of the Sultanate, Shiraz. The label is again silent on these matters.<br />Curiously, the very names of the objects in English and Arabic are often wrongly stated. Truncated conical pottery bowls are dubbed "dish" in English and "sultaniyya" in Arabic, not the classical word, which is ka's or sometimes jam.<br />Most regrettably, no special emphasis is laid on some of the most important objects in the collection. A group of brass pieces from 13th-century Iraq, including two pairs of stunning door knockers, and some unique candlesticks, can be seen for the most part on the third floor. Only one, decorated with dazzling silver-inlaid scrollwork, and assigned to Baghdad, is in a main gallery on the first floor. Trade sources report that these all left a Shiite shrine on the outskirts of Baghdad in the days of Saddam Hussein. Later, they passed into the hands of a great Kuwait collector, the late Jasem al-Homaizi, whose objects were acquired by Qatar.<br />There are several more objects of cardinal importance unmatched in most of the world's museums. Two velvet panels illustrating wine drinking at the Safavid court of late-16th-century Iran are miraculously well preserved.<br />If only for these masterpieces, anyone who has a chance should pay a visit to this imperfect museum with many unforgettable works of art.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/arts/melik6.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/arts/melik6.php</a></div><div></div><div>********************</div><div><strong>Soaring in art, a museum trips over finances</strong><br />By Edward Wyatt and Jori Finkel<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />LOS ANGELES: When this city's Museum of Contemporary Art appointed a classically trained curator from the Art Institute of Chicago as its director in 1999, many viewed it as a welcome sign that art rather than business would be kept at the forefront of one of the most dynamic museums in the country.<br />They did not know how right they were. Nearly 10 years later, the museum remains internationally renowned for its collection of postwar art and for organizing some of the most serious and ambitious contemporary art exhibitions anywhere.<br />Yet by putting art ahead of the bottom line, the Museum of Contemporary Art has nearly killed itself. The museum has operated at a deficit in six of the last eight years, and its endowment has shrunk to about $6 million from nearly $50 million in 1999, according to people who have been briefed on the finances.<br />Now the California attorney general has begun an audit to determine if the museum broke laws governing the use of restricted money by nonprofit organizations. And a growing chorus of local artists, curators and collectors, including current and former board members, are lobbying to remove the museum's director, Jeremy Strick, its board, or both.<br />The museum's tailspin has brought an outpouring of grief and disbelief in a city that has recently cast itself as a rival to New York as the nation's art capital. The closing of such a respected museum, or even its merger into another institution, would leave a formidable hole not only in the city's psyche but in the national cultural landscape as well.<br />"The museum has a very significant role beyond the culture of Los Angeles," said Connie Butler, a former curator there who is now chief drawings curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "People in the art world feel they are going to wake up one morning and one of the greatest resources in terms of contemporary art in the Western world is going to be permanently altered."<br />Museum officials say they expect a solution to the crisis by the end of the year, if not by the next board meeting, on Dec. 16. A possible merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been discussed and is supported by some trustees, although the museum's official position is that it wants to remain independent.<br />Eli Broad, the billionaire philanthropist who frequently plays the role of Medici here, offered $30 million last month in support of the Museum of Contemporary Art, on the condition that half of it be matched by contributions from other donors. So far, no other donors have publicly stepped forward.<br />Museum officials would not agree to be interviewed for this article or to discuss the scope of the state's audit. In written responses to questions, the museum said it was "pursuing and assessing all of its options," including talks with Broad and with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art about possible partnerships. "Central to all these discussions is MOCA's commitment to its core mission," the museum said.<br />Part of its challenge may be that the very people who are considering the museum's options include those who oversaw its decline. One of the board's two co-chairmen, Tom Unterman, for example, has served on the board's finance committee for the last eight years and was finance chairman the last three. David Johnson, the other co-chairman of the board, was previously head of its governance committee.<br />"It's obvious that there needs to be new management," said Jane Nathanson, a member of the boards of both the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "MOCA needs to look deeply into the way it has functioned and move forward to rebuild the reputation of the museum."<br />Some trustees have departed in recent years, frustrated with what they called the museum's financial recklessness and lack of leadership. "I saw the train wreck coming," said Susan Nimoy, a collector who left the board in 2006 after pushing hard, she said, to bring the budget in line with available money.<br />"My main complaint to the board was that none of you would run your household budget the way this institution is run," Nimoy said. "I think every one of those trustees should resign and Jeremy should resign."<br />The museum was founded in 1979 by a corps of collectors after the demise of the Pasadena Art Museum left Los Angeles without a major museum dedicated to modern or contemporary art. The city agreed that if the founders could raise $10 million for operating costs, it would help pay for construction of a new museum downtown.<br />While the building was in development downtown, a nearby city warehouse was renovated for use as a temporary home. It opened in 1983, three years before the main building was completed on Grand Avenue. (The museum also maintains a small gallery at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.)<br />Dean Valentine, a media entrepreneur and former museum trustee, described the museum as central to the city's becoming a major cultural center. "For many artists in Los Angeles, it was the first institution that expressed interest in their work," Valentine said, comparing its importance for West Coast artists to that of MoMA in New York for the Abstract Expressionists some 50 years ago.<br />Historically, one problem dogging the museum has been the lack of a proper home for its permanent collection, which features early work by John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. The Grand Avenue building is considered too small by today's standards while the larger Geffen Contemporary lacks necessary climate controls to preserve art.<br />"It's a source of frustration for many of us," Valentine said. Like Nimoy, he left the museum board in 2006, unhappy with the leadership; both have since joined the board of the Hammer Museum here.<br />Given its financial crisis, the Museum of Contemporary Art has announced plans to close the Geffen for six months next year and is promoting the location online for rental to film crews.<br />According to its financial statements, the only time in the last seven years that the museum has managed to finish with a surplus was in the 2007 fiscal year, when its revenues topped expenses by $3 million. But much of that surplus came from a gain on the sale of investments; admissions and membership revenues had declined, and the budget surpassed $21 million, the highest ever.<br />The museum said it expected its audited financial statements, once completed, to show that it generated a surplus in the 2008 fiscal year as well, although it declined to provide details.<br />Yet in nearly every year since 2000, the museum has drawn down on the principal of its endowment to pay for operations, a practice frowned upon as risky in the museum world.<br />And at times the museum has secured financing for exhibitions in ways that many other museums would shun. To help pay for last year's Takashi Murakami exhibition, the museum solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from art galleries that represented the artist and therefore stood to gain from any related career boost.<br />The museum said in a statement that it recently bolstered its ability to raise money, hiring a new director of development and nearly doubling its donations in the last two years. It noted that in the last seven years, 20 of the board's 40 members, including life trustees, have given more than $1 million in addition to their required annual gifts.<br />But others say the reluctance of potential donors to respond publicly to Broad's offer of matching money stems from a lack of confidence in the museum's stewardship.<br />Meanwhile, his rescue plan has stirred concern that Broad will try to call the shots at the Museum of Contemporary Art, as he did while a trustee there in the 1980s, before a rift led to his departure. Some potential donors have said privately that his role as a major benefactor of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art would give him too much power if he were to lead the rescue of the Museum of Contemporary Art.<br />In an interview this week, Broad offered additional details of his plan, saying he would give the museum $15 million in installments equal to however much the museum raised, plus $3 million a year for five years to pay for operations and exhibitions.<br />Broad has also said privately that he favors a management change, according to people who been part of the discussions. Although the museum does not receive direct city financing, its main buildings were financed by or leased from the city. Eric Garcetti, who as president of the Los Angeles City Council is a nonvoting member of the museum's board, said, "There does seem to be a consensus forming that new leadership should be brought in to run the museum, that the board should be reinvigorated and there should be a paring down of the budget."<br />"I believe," Garcetti said, "that the public deserves more reassurance that an institution that the public helped fund will be held to a higher standard."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/arts/05moca.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/arts/05moca.php</a></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR-Qb2nmho3nL1Leq4xT8pEESCswr6QyQiaevWJK8AHKUWVE1u1b0yHFfrpgE1VlAUb5lo9h1UEknaFKmEPkDdjjqLgVx2stlIhpjmBhinst3ouvjcAjfzeP3M27ngKy2onZK9sWWjO_E/s1600-h/DSC02584.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276520013161608978" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR-Qb2nmho3nL1Leq4xT8pEESCswr6QyQiaevWJK8AHKUWVE1u1b0yHFfrpgE1VlAUb5lo9h1UEknaFKmEPkDdjjqLgVx2stlIhpjmBhinst3ouvjcAjfzeP3M27ngKy2onZK9sWWjO_E/s320/DSC02584.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>36 hours in Zermatt, Switzerland</strong><br />By Nicholas Kulish<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />Zermatt is defined by altitude, by the principle of the vertical, where the highest peaks in Switzerland tower overhead on all sides. To glide among the pale blue glaciers, breathing the hard, clean wind on nearly 200 miles of marked trails is the essence of skiing. The town is rich in history, dating back to the famously fatal climbing accident that ended the first successful ascent of the Matterhorn and cemented the town's legend. Glitz and glamour may be the allure, but class and understatement are still the rule, with a mum discretion among its famous guests that would not be out of place in Zurich's private banks.<br />Friday<br />4 p.m. 1) WATCH OUT<br />Ski trips usually begin with the realization of an absence, the taunting solitary glove or partnerless wool sock. Zermatt's main commercial strip street, Bahnhofstrasse, can fill most worldly wants, as well as orient you to the town itself. Start at the train station and pop into the bakery Biner (Bahnhofplatz 4; 41-27-967-61-67; www.biner.ch) for mini baumnusstörtli, a Swiss walnut treat (3.20 francs, or about $2.60 at 1.25 francs to the dollar), to nibble as you walk the cobblestone lane. For luxury watches, visit Haute Horlogerie Schindler (Bahnhofstrasse 5; 41-27-967-11-18), which carries timepieces by Breguet, Blancpain and Vacheron Constantin. Duck into one of the kitschy cuckoo clock stores down the block to catch your breath from the five-figure price tags. It may be the first — but not the last — sticker shock you'll encounter in Zermatt.<br />6 p.m. 2) MOUNTAIN ICON<br />The stark, jagged silhouette of the Matterhorn is the symbol of Zermatt, as well as a local obsession, featured on every photograph and logo as if required by law. To understand why, visit the subterranean Matterhorn Museum (Kirchplatz 11; 41-27-967-41-00; www.zermatt.ch/e/matterhornmuseum; admission, 10 francs). Enter through the 3-D glass rendering of the mountain jutting upward in the town's Kirchplatz. Follow the stairs down to discover the village being excavated by archaeologists. Exhibitions range from a Neolithic stone ax to the very rope that snapped and sent four of the first climbers to reach the Matterhorn's summit to their deaths. The museum is a good primer, but nothing resonates like the rough tombstones at the nearby church, where the climbers are buried.<br />8 p.m. 3) THE LILT OF LAMB<br />There are more than a few mediocre, yet overpriced, restaurants specializing in uninspired lamb dishes. The taxidermy and glitter-filled funhouse Chez Heini (Wiestistrasse 45; 41-27-967-16-30; www.dandaniell.ch) is the happy exception, a cult favorite in town for its food and madcap décor. The chef, Dan Daniell, tends to the succulent lamb on an open wood fire in one corner of the restaurant, with a four-course meal running a not-inexpensive 76 francs a person. But it comes with priceless entertainment. When the lights dim, the chef-cum-recording star grabs a microphone and serenades diners with his own brand of Switzo-pop, under a giant video screen showing helicopters swooping around the Matterhorn like a karaoke fusion of "The Swiss Family Robinson" and "Apocalypse Now." Warning: You may find yourself singing his Matterhorn ditty for the remainder of your trip.<br />Saturday<br />8:30 a.m. 4) OVER THE BORDERLINE<br />There are few attainable real-life experiences that make one feel like James Bond, and fewer still that don't involve tuxedos and roulette. Crossing a border on skis is one of them. Take three gondolas up over 12,500 feet on the Klein Matterhorn. Blaze through the fresh snow on Theodul glacier, so high you can ski it year-round. When you're ready to switch nationality, glide over the Plateau Rosa into Italy. There's no border post, but your cellphone might trill and vibrate as you carve down the Italian slope, pledging its allegiance to a new national carrier. To complete your mission, have a cappuccino on the terrace at Bontadini (Piste 6 on the Italian side of the Theodul Pass; 39-335-250312).<br />1 p.m. 5) SKI-UP DINING<br />Before exploring Rothorn and Sunnegga, on the other side of Zermatt, make your way to the quaint village of Findeln for lunch. Findlerhof bei Franz und Heidi (41-27-967-25-88; www.findlerhof.ch) offers unbeatable views and Swiss classics (reservations strongly recommended). The quiche with leeks, onion and cheese sets a new standard, worth every penny of 25 francs. A rösti, a kind of potato pancake, will fuel a full afternoon of skiing. After lunch, experts should make a beeline for the famous moguls at the Triftji glacier, the traditional home of the annual Bump Bash, a half-party, half-competition held in Zermatt every March. Beginners beware!<br />4:30 p.m. 6) WHEEL OF FORTUNE<br />You won't find a more festive après ski scene than at Papperla Pub (Steinmattenstrasse 34; 41-27-967-40-40; www.papperlapub.ch), where live bands hammer out classic rock tunes and the revelers dress up as everything from gorillas to Teletubbies. For something a little harder than glühwein, 20 francs buys a spin on the wheel of drinks, with prizes ranging from four shots all the way up to a bottle of the special house brew. The recipe is secret, but sambuca and Tia Maria are among the confirmed ingredients. The only losers on the wheel are the four shots of Evian water, but if you hit that aqua-snake eyes, the bartender will take pity on you and give you a half-price second spin.<br />8 p.m. 7) DINNER AT A MOVIE<br />Between a full day on the slopes and a few pints worth of après ski, a little rest is needed. Instead of a nap, head over to the Swiss army knife of night life, Vernissage (Hofmattstrasse 4; 41-27-967-66-36; www.vernissage-zermatt.com), which is a bar, art gallery, restaurant and movie theater. Built by the local artist and architect Heinz Julen, the space is a technical and aesthetic marvel. Glass panes seal off the theater from the hubbub of the bar upstairs. Have a drink and sit back, knowing that at intermission your tiger prawns or chicken with lentils — fusion foods that offer a nice break from the local cuisine — will be brought to your seat. Starting at around 60 francs for the meal and the movie.<br />10 p.m. 8) A TOUCH OF TARTAN<br />For a pick-me-up, stop by Edward's Bar café in the Hotel Monte Rosa (Bahnhofstrasse 80; 41-27-966-03-33; www.seiler-hotels.ch), the city's oldest hotel, which is scheduled to reopen in a few days after renovations. The small bar is as cozy as an old pair of plaid pajamas, in large part because it is decorated in red and green tartan pattern, from the walls to the stool covers. Watch the bartender lovingly prepare your Irish coffee (15 francs), lighting the whiskey on fire and swirling it in the glass to melt the sugar.<br />Midnight 9) NOT QUITE DISNEY<br />The DJ's spin into the morning at Schneewittchen (German for "Snow White"), adjoining the Papperla Pub. Schneewittchen is the spot for foam parties, beach parties and a Heaven and Hell night, where partygoers dress like devils and angels, but no one acts like the latter. The Hotel Post (Bahnhofstrasse 41; 41-27-967-19-31; www.hotelpost.ch) has five bars and clubs, featuring everything from live music, laid-back lounges and the notorious Broken Bar Disco, where you can dance on a wine barrel into the morning.<br />Sunday<br />10 a.m. 10) SLIDEWAYS<br />Don't let the innocent-looking wooden toboggan fool you. This is not taking your Flexible Flyer to the neighborhood hill. The Gornergrat toboggan course (41-27-921-47-11; www.gornergrat.ch/winter1/toboggan.php) is steep and curving, and for 8 francs an hour you can let gravity takes its course. Acceleration is rapid, and there are no brakes, except for your feet. So make like Fred Flintstone and plow down the speedy, combed turns and expect a hard wipeout or two. The adrenaline thrill will have you back up the hill in no time.<br />THE BASICS<br />Swiss, Continental and American fly nonstop from New York to Zurich, starting at around $700 for travel this month. Zermatt is three and a half hours by train from Zurich. The Swiss rail system (www.swisstravelsystem.ch) has a special Swiss Transfer Ticket for 127 francs, about $100 at 1.25 francs to the dollar, round trip from the airport.<br />Hotel rates in Zermatt vary throughout the year. In ski season, rooms at the Grand Hotel Zermatterhof (Bahnhofstrasse 55; 41-27-966-66-00; www.zermatterhof.ch), the luxury hotel synonymous with Old World belle époque elegance, start at 700 francs for a double.<br />Across the street, the historic Hotel Monte Rosa (Bahnhofstrasse 80; 41-27-966-03-33, www.seiler-hotels.ch) has doubles starting at 500 francs during the season.<br />The Hotel Mirabeau (Untere Mattenstrasse 12-14; 41-27-966-26-60; www.hotel-mirabeau.ch) offers cool, modern décor that is the antithesis of mountain kitsch, with doubles starting at 540 francs. The spa offers a warm Swiss chocolate massage from 120 francs.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/travel/07hours.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/travel/07hours.php</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1TvJA73GorBF_QVxI10ayKv38p1uAy0RwrHr70sCLAepueZisDcuXnADDZYvsjTaWpT3j2loBrSPxQRjeX7Vm9urNa_VUv2bCfKFfguNL5PhFPCTnkMgV_QIe6yok4X6jtyb_rhSahlE/s1600-h/DSC02587.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276519761845856850" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1TvJA73GorBF_QVxI10ayKv38p1uAy0RwrHr70sCLAepueZisDcuXnADDZYvsjTaWpT3j2loBrSPxQRjeX7Vm9urNa_VUv2bCfKFfguNL5PhFPCTnkMgV_QIe6yok4X6jtyb_rhSahlE/s320/DSC02587.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>MEANWHILE</strong></div><div><strong>Google and the libraries<br /></strong>By Alex Beam<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />It seemed like a great idea at the time.<br />In 2004, Google signed a deal with five major research libraries to digitize all the books in their collections. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and we're excited to be working with libraries to help make this mission a reality" proclaimed company cofounder Larry Page. It looked like an encouraging first step toward a world in which all knowledge was online, all the time.<br />Not everyone was so enthralled with this beatific vision of the Future According to Google.<br />Authors had the temerity to insist they be paid for their digitized content, which was going to be used to sell Google ads, or, down the road, be loaded into a possible Google Reader. The Authors Guild sued, and eventually settled with Google, resulting in a complicated agreement about royalty payments that awaits the approval of a judge.<br />Libraries excluded from the Google project wondered where they would fit in. The words "Free to All" are etched in stone above the Boston Public Library, but last I checked, those words do not appear on the fuselages of the Boeings and Gulfstreams owned by Google founders Page and Sergey Brin.<br />Google executives sound like they are doing the world an immense favor by digitizing books, rarely mentioning that they are in business to sell stuff, not give it away.<br />"We felt it would be extremely useful to the world if books were in digital format," is how product manager Adam Smith explained to me the original impetus behind the digitization project.<br />But this wasn't a charitable undertaking, was it? "It is useful to Google, and that's why we've done this," he said.<br />Is resistance futile? Not everyone thinks so. In 2005, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and the nonprofit Internet Archive launched an actual charity called the Open Content Alliance, which signed up 19 Massachusetts libraries, including the BPL, MIT, Brandeis, and Boston College, as well as huge systems like the University of California's.<br />Open means open access to digitized books; by inference, Google means closed. Primary funder Microsoft withdrew its support this year, and the OCA is morphing into the Open Knowledge Commons, now supported by the Sloan Foundation, which will hold an organizational meeting at the Library of Congress next week.<br />Everyone's terrified of trashing Google, mainly because of the company's astonishing power in the marketplace, and because it has already digitized 7 million books that libraries want access to.<br />"There's no Google-bashing," insists Maura Marx, executive director of the new Commons. "We need to ensure that there is a viable alternative and that access to knowledge remains open and does not become commodified." She and Google executive Smith note that some libraries, like California's, are cooperating both with Google and with open access initiatives.<br />Happily, not everyone is scared of Google. Harvard, one of the original participants in the 2004 deal, has decided not to allow Google to sell any of the university's copyrighted holdings. In a letter published by the Harvard Crimson, chief librarian Robert Darnton told his staff that Google's settlement with the Author's Guild "contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher-education community and by patrons of public libraries. ...For now, the Harvard University Library will continue to explore other ways to open up its collections more broadly for the common good."<br />In a heated philippic, "Free Our Libraries!" posted on the Web site of the Boston Library Consortium, Richard Johnson, an adviser to the Association of Research Libraries, decries the "momentous, ill-considered shift...that threatens to limit the public rights in the collections assembled and maintained, often at public expense, in libraries around the globe."<br />"Companies are paying nothing for access to the crown jewels," Johnson writes. "We may awaken one day to find that our digital heritage has become private property rather than a public good."<br />Librarians of the world, unite! You have everything to lose: your books.<br />Boston Globe</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edbeam.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edbeam.php</a></div><div></div><div>***********************</div><div></div><div><strong>Bob Dylan and Barry Feinstein's 'Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric'</strong><br />By Charles McGrath<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric The Lost Manuscript. Text by Bob Dylan. Photographs by Barry Feinstein. 141 pages. Simon & Schuster. $30; £14.99.<br />The Bob Dylan archives amount to what the British call a lumber room - a cavernous storage space so full of odds and ends that even Dylan himself doesn't know what's in there. Just when you think the place has been emptied out, something new - a bootleg tape, some video footage, a collection of sketches and doodles - pops to light. The newest unboxing, which Dylan in characteristic fashion had forgotten all about, is a series of 23 poems he wrote in the early 1960s to accompany a collection of Hollywood photographs by Barry Feinstein. Either half of this collaboration would be worth having, but combined, under the quizzical title "Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric," they add up to one of the oddest coffee-table books to come along in a while.<br />That "f" in "foto-rhetoric" leads you to anticipate a volume in tabloidy, Hollywood Confidential style, and there are a couple of glimpses of weird Kenneth Anger-like Hollywood. But most of the photographs are more moody, even arty, than they are leering or sensational. Feinstein went on to become the court photographer of rock 'n' roll royalty, but in the early '60s he was working as a studio flunky for the mogul Harry Cohn, and he took these pictures backstage on movie sets or driving around town after hours. They're suffused with a kind of anti­glamour that was probably meant to be tough and unflinching at the time but now seems almost tender. There are pictures of discarded props, spoiled film, headless mannequins, out-of-work actors and actresses. Jerry Mathers turns up in a group photo with his real-life relatives, who look even more Cleaverish than his television family. Among the other actors portrayed are a gaunt and weary Judy Garland; Bette Davis, troweled with makeup, dragging on a cigarette between takes; and Jayne Mansfield, blowzy and overweight, not many years before she died. The dust jacket, in case you missed the message, shows the crumbling "Hollywood" sign in the Los Angeles Hills photographed from behind. Feinstein's Hollywood is a land of make-believe, and now, in the bleached-out sunlight, its best days are clearly past.<br />What Dylan brings to this vision is a kind of antic surrealism, at times reminiscent of the liner notes he wrote for "Highway 61 Revisited." In an introductory Q. and A., he is reluctant to call the text poetry. "If they are poems, or if they are not poems . . . does it really matter?" he says. "And who would it matter to?" But they certainly look and read like poems, in tense, narrow lines, of just one or two beats sometimes, that stack on the page, Billy Collins says in the introduction, like "a teetering column of poker chips." The style seems learned partly from the Beats, terse and jangly, with no capitalization and lots of dropped letters:<br />off an runnin<br />runner up<br />bound t go<br />bust the top<br />just t find out<br />what i'm missin.<br />But the voice is reliably Dylanesque:<br />from the outside<br />lookin in<br />every finger wiggles<br />the doorway wears long pants<br />an slouches<br />no rejection<br />all's fair<br />in love and selection.<br />Occasionally a poem will explicitly comment on the accompanying photograph. The one next to a picture of a heartbroken Marlene Dietrich at Gary Cooper's funeral, for example, reads:<br />t dare not ask your sculpturer's name<br />with glance back hooked, time's hinges halt<br />as curiosity's doom inks beauty's claim<br />that sad-eyed he shall turn t salt.<br />More often the poems take off on the theme of a photo or enact a scenario (a casting-office interview, say) suggested by it. And sometimes the relation of text to picture is pretty oblique. Without Luc Sante's explanatory note in the foreword, you would probably never guess that the last poem, illustrating several pictures of Academy Award-winning actors holding their Oscars, was inspired by the time Dylan, receiving an award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, compared himself to Lee Harvey Oswald. The poem next to a photo of a dancing Judy Garland imagines, for some reason, a fight between a man and the husband of a woman he has been ogling. Go figure.<br />Most of these poems, it must be said, read like the work of just a few moments. They lack the complexity, the emotional power of some of the great Dylan song lyrics, which, as Christopher Ricks demonstrated in "Dylan's Visions of Sin," really can stand comparison to Marlowe, Keats and Tennyson. They're mostly riffs, the poetic equivalent of scale playing. On the other hand, you can read these little verses without humming the tune in your head, and they allow you to appreciate Dylan's verbal dexterity ' his gift for rhyme and free association - in isolation, as it were. This is the kind of quickness and improvisatory brilliance that allowed those great lyrics to happen.<br />Nor is the text of "Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric" entirely rhetorical. The best poems add up to a wary meditation on fame and celebrity, on the disguises we all put on ' themes to which he would later return. When Dylan wrote these poems he could not have guessed that he would become one of the most photographed musicians ever, and yet his engagement with Feinstein's comfortless vision of Hollywood may explain why in photographs Dylan himself so seldom smiles, so often looks wary, so rarely looks unposed. He's like those Plains Indians who feared that the camera could steal your soul.<br /></div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/arts/idbriefs6B.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/arts/idbriefs6B.php</a></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMyS0CwUQ-UKS_rnlGbJXRR7XkNkBlUo3lD5lN3vwHTcVpvXCv7nCyyLlocP02UPpOdPL1e4RCGT9E4M1OGEDmiX23dMthfXAIWNBsQwkNrq8QLJ7ud9XCazUaAmVFyYxaPXGqFOfkaoM/s1600-h/DSC02589.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276519754421668626" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMyS0CwUQ-UKS_rnlGbJXRR7XkNkBlUo3lD5lN3vwHTcVpvXCv7nCyyLlocP02UPpOdPL1e4RCGT9E4M1OGEDmiX23dMthfXAIWNBsQwkNrq8QLJ7ud9XCazUaAmVFyYxaPXGqFOfkaoM/s320/DSC02589.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>New study tracks the transmissibility of happiness<br /></strong>By Pam Belluck<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends' friends' friends are, even if you don't know them at all.<br />And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse's mood.<br />So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years - happiness is more contagious than previously thought.<br />"Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don't even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you," said Nicholas Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. "There's kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence - they are not just an individual phenomenon."<br />In fact, said his co-author, James Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, their research found that "if your friend's friend's friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket."<br />The researchers analyzed information on the happiness of 4,739 people and their connections with several thousand others - spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbors and coworkers - from 1983 to 2003.<br />"It's extremely important and interesting work," said Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton, who was not involved in the study.<br />Several social scientists and economists praised the data and analysis, but raised possible limitations.<br />Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, questioned whether the study proved that people became happy because of their social contacts or some unrelated reason.<br />Kahneman said that unless the findings were replicated, he could not accept that a spouse's happiness had less impact than a next-door neighbor's.<br />A study also being published Friday in BMJ, by Ethan Cohen-Cole, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and Jason Fletcher, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health, criticizes the methodology of the Christakis-Fowler team, saying that it was possible to find what look like social-contagion effects with conditions like acne, headaches and height but that contagion effects go away when researchers include environmental factors that friends or neighbors have in common.<br />"Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends to social network effects," the dissenting authors say.<br />In an interview, Christakis said that criticism and the acne-headache study's methods were flawed.<br />An accompanying BMJ editorial about the two studies called the Christakis-Fowler study "groundbreaking," but said "future work is needed to verify the presence and strength of these associations."<br />The team previously published studies concluding that obesity and quitting smoking were socially contagious.<br />But the happiness study, financed by the National Institute on Aging, is unusual in several ways. Happiness would seem to be "the epitome of an individualistic state," said John Cacioppo, director of the University of Chicago's Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, who was not involved in the study.<br />And what about schadenfreude or good old-fashioned envy when a friend lands a promotion or wins the marathon?<br />"There may be some people who become unhappy when their friends become happy, but we found that more people become happy over all," Christakis said.<br />Cacioppo said that suggests that unconscious signals of well-being pack more zing than conscious feelings of resentment.<br />"I might be jealous of the fact that they won the lottery," he said, "but they're in such a good mood that I walk away feeling happier without even being aware that they were the site for my happiness."<br />The subtle transmission of emotion may explain other findings, too. In the obesity and smoking cessation studies, friends were influential even if they lived far away. But the effect on happiness was much greater from friends, siblings or neighbors who lived nearby.<br />A next-door neighbor's joy increased one's chance of being happy by 34 percent, but a neighbor down the block had no effect. A friend living half a mile, or four-fifths of a kilometer, away was good for a 42 percent bounce, but the effect was almost half that for a friend two miles away. A friend in a different community altogether can win an Oscar without making you feel better.<br />"You have to see them and be in physical and temporal proximity," Christakis said.<br />The BMJ study used data from the federal Framingham Heart Study, which began following people in Framingham, Massachusetts, after World War II and ultimately followed their children and grandchildren. Beginning in 1983, participants periodically completed questionnaires on their emotional well-being.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/healthscience/happy.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/healthscience/happy.php</a></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>Many children lack stability long after Katrina<br /></strong>By Shaila Dewan<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />BATON ROUGE, Louisiana: Last January, at the age of 15, Jermaine Howard stopped going to school. Attendance seemed pointless: Jermaine, living with his father and brother in the evacuee trailer park known as Renaissance Village since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had not managed to earn a single credit in more than two years.<br />Not that anyone took much notice. After Jermaine flunked out of seventh grade, the East Baton Rouge School District allowed him to skip eighth grade altogether and begin high school. After three semesters of erratic attendance, he left Baton Rouge in early spring of this year and moved in with another family in a suburb of New Orleans, where he found a job at a Dairy Queen.<br />A shy, artistic boy with a new mustache, Jermaine is one of tens of thousands of youngsters who lost not just all of their belongings to Hurricane Katrina, but a chunk of childhood itself.<br />After more than three years of nomadic uncertainty, many of the children of Hurricane Katrina are behind in school, acting out and suffering from extraordinarily high rates of illness and mental health problems. Their parents, many still anxious or depressed themselves, are struggling to keep the lights on and the refrigerator stocked.<br />For some, like Kearra Keys, 16, who was expelled from her Baton Rouge school for fighting and is now on a waiting list for a GED program, what was lost may be irretrievable. For others, like Roy Hilton, who stands a head taller than his third-grade classmates, recovery may lie in the neighborhood school near the New Orleans duplex where his family has finally found a home.<br />The families profiled in this series were among the last to leave Renaissance Village when the Federal Emergency Management Agency closed it in May. The government was trying to nudge the poorest, least-educated and sickest evacuees toward self-sufficiency — or at least toward agencies other than FEMA.<br />More than 30,000 former trailer residents landed in apartments paid for by the federal government until March 2009, a small fraction are in the hands of private charities or government housing programs for the disabled, and thousands more simply traded in their trailers for other temporary quarters. Case managers promised by FEMA to help these families find permanent homes have yet to start work in Louisiana.<br />Many of the adults are at least partly victims of their own poor choices. But the children are another matter. For them, the experts prescribe the one thing that has been hardest to obtain: stability. Their parents sometimes work against that goal.<br />Jermaine's father, Joseph Griffin, has had trouble holding on to steady work and said he did not see much value in his son's attending school this semester because he had already missed so much class. "If he doesn't get no credits for it, what sense does it make for him to sit up in there?" Griffin said. "I was going to try to get him a job."<br />The health problems of Hurricane Katrina children are daunting. When the Children's Health Fund, whose mobile health clinics have provided the only doctors and psychologists available to many of these families, reviewed the charts of children seen this year, researchers with the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University found that 41 percent under age 4 had iron-deficiency anemia — twice the rate for children in New York City's homeless shelters. Anemia, often attributable to poor nutrition, is associated with developmental problems and academic underachievement.<br />Forty-two percent of the children, who lived in trailers laced with dangerous levels of formaldehyde, had allergic rhinitis or an upper respiratory infection, the study found.<br />More than half of those ages 6 to 11 had a behavior or learning problem, yet in the East Baton Rouge School District children can wait for as long as two years to be tested for learning disabilities.<br />"Not only has their health not improved since the storm," the study said, "over time it has declined to an alarming level."<br />Medical care, counseling and child care are hard to find. In that respect, LaTonya London has been lucky. Her youngest children, born while the family lived at Renaissance Village, have two of the 16 Early Head Start slots — down from 200 right after the storm — reserved for evacuees of Hurricane Katrina in Baton Rouge. The baby, Edbony, was born with no forearms. Darren, 2, was two months premature and suffers from asthma and delayed speech.<br />The eldest of London's five children, Darrell, 7, has developed behavior problems so serious that he has already been suspended several times from first grade, causing London to abandon plans to start vocational training, she said. In response, she has resumed counseling sessions for Darrell at the mobile clinic.<br />Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the Children's Health Fund, notes that there is as yet no comprehensive method of tracking these children, who are supposed to be the subject of a long-term study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.<br />The key to giving these children a future, doctors and educators have long said, is providing them with a sense of stability — a home that seems permanent, a school where they can put down roots. The recommendation is underscored by the gains made by those families that have found a toehold.<br />After months of looking, Laura Hilton, who is functionally illiterate, finally found an apartment in New Orleans for her and her two sons, George, 17, and Roy, 11, that was within walking distance of Roy's school. Laura's husband was murdered in New Orleans after the storm, and at the trailer park the Hilton children attended school only fitfully. Roy was known for being both endearing and utterly ungovernable.<br />Now Roy, who is at least three grades behind and needs special education, tutoring and counseling, can hardly be persuaded to leave school when the last bell rings. He helps teachers on their work days and shows up for Saturday detention even when he has not misbehaved. He fights less, and recently volunteered to sit in the principal's office at recess to keep from getting into trouble and losing his field-trip privileges.<br />"When he first came in, I was like, 'Why me?' " Wanda Brooks, the principal at the James Weldon Johnson Elementary School, said. "As a school, you're frustrated — why didn't somebody look at this when he was 10?" But then she got to know Roy.<br />"They begin to talk to you, and you begin to realize what the child went through," Brooks said. "He has not gotten over his dad's death."<br />Roy has received special attention from a male role model, Edward Williams, the football coach at Johnson. On a recent morning, Williams went into Roy's classroom to find him sulking at his desk while the other children practiced a dance routine.<br />Drawing Roy aside, Williams told him: "You got to get up and move around. You got to try."<br />Moments later, Roy was dancing.<br />But life outside the trailers has not been a relief for every child. With its white tent that served as a community center, Renaissance Village reeked of impermanence, though for many young children who lived there it was almost the only home they had known.<br />Since the park closed, Adrian Love and her father, Alton, have moved into a Baton Rouge apartment (her mother, a crack user, lives in New Orleans). Love, who has not been able to hold a job since the storm, does not allow Adrian, 9, to play outside much, instead writing out long-division problems for her in a notebook after dinner.<br />On Adrian's first report card this year, she got straight A's. But she sees her friends from Renaissance Village only rarely. "I wish I still lived there," she said.<br />Despite her wistfulness, Adrian projects a poise that makes her seem resilient.<br />Children who had no serious problems before the storm are likely to recover well, said Toni Bankston, who until recently was the director of mental health at the Baton Rouge Children's Health Project. But, she estimated, only about 60 percent fall into that category.<br />Bankston has particularly grave concerns about the children who have fallen so far behind in school that there is little chance of their catching up. "What you're looking at is our future juvenile justice, our prison population," she said.<br />In October, Jermaine Howard returned to Baton Rouge and moved into the one-bedroom apartment occupied by his father, brother and grandmother. With the help of Sister Judith Brun, a nun who has been working with evacuees since the storm, he enrolled in ninth grade at Broadmoor High School.<br />That process alone provided a snapshot of the chaos of Jermaine's life. From several plastic baggies and a dented metal canister, the family could barely amass the documents needed to prove his address.<br />School administrators balked when they discovered that he had previously been registered under his father's last name, Griffin, not the name on his birth certificate. Jermaine, with tears in his eyes, was forced to explain that his mother was in prison. He was told to pay a visit to the ominous-sounding Board of Hearings. Then came the kicker: because he had already missed so much, he would receive no credit for this semester.<br />"Nice to see y'all," the school guidance counselor said by way of welcome. "Just too bad it wasn't about three months ago."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/05trailer.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/05trailer.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div></div><div><strong>UNHCR says 90,000 Congolese unaccounted for<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />GENEVA: More than 90,000 people who fled their homes in eastern Congo because of violence are unaccounted for, the United Nations refugee agency said on Friday.<br />Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said aid workers visiting parts of North Kivu province that had been inaccessible during recent fighting had found three makeshift displacement sites empty.<br />Three other UNHCR-run camps in the Rutshuru area -- Nyongera, Kasasa and Dumez -- were forcefully emptied and destroyed several weeks ago, Redmond said.<br />"With the latest findings, the total number of IDPs who cannot be accounted for in the area has surpassed 90,000," he said, using the acronym for "internally-displaced persons," the official term for people who have fled their homes but have not crossed an international border.<br />The fate of those who abandoned or were forced out of the camps is unclear, but Redmond said many were thought to have returned to their villages or be staying with host families in the area.<br />The UNHCR and its aid partners are distributing emergency supplies in the region, hit by fighting between government troops and forces loyal to Congolese Tutsi leader General Laurent Nkunda.<br />(Reporting by Laura MacInnis; editing by Andrew Roche)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC-DISPLACED.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC-DISPLACED.php</a></div><div></div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Congo agrees to peace talks with eastern rebels<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />GOMA, Congo: Congo's government will meet eastern Tutsi rebels in Nairobi, Kenya on Monday for their first direct talks to formalise a cease-fire and discuss a peace process, Foreign Minister Alexis Thambwe Mwamba said on Friday.<br />Rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda has been demanding direct talks with President Kabila's government as one of the conditions for ending his four-year-old revolt in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.<br />Congo's government had been resisting the idea of direct talks with Nkunda's National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) rebels, insisting instead that they return to a wider peace pact signed in January with several armed groups.<br />"A meeting between representatives from the Democratic Republic of Congo and from the CNDP, under the auspices of United Nations and African Union facilitators, will take place on December 8, 2008 at Nairobi, Kenya to formalise the cease-fire and discuss a peace plan for eastern Congo," Mwamba said.<br />He made the announcement in Goma, the capital of Congo's eastern North Kivu province, following talks with his Rwandan counterpart Rosemary Museminali.<br />Nkunda, who says he wants to discuss security and the situation of ethnic minorities with the government, has seized territory in North Kivu in advances since August which routed Kabila's army and displaced a quarter of a million people.<br />He has declared a cease-fire with government forces, but fighting between his rebels and pro-government militias has continued in the province bordering Rwanda and Uganda.<br />(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/) (Reporting by Joe Bavier; Editing by Pascal Fletcher)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div><strong>Tutu calls for Mugabe's removal</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />AMSTERDAM: South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said on Thursday that Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe must step down or be removed by force.<br />"I think now that the world must say: 'You have been responsible with your cohorts for gross violations, and you are going to face indictment in The Hague unless you step down'," Tutu, a Nobel peace prize winner, told Dutch current affairs TV programme Nova.<br />Asked if Mugabe, who has been in power since independence from Britain in 1980, should be removed by force, Tutu said: "Yes, by force -- if they say to him: step down, and he refuses, they must do so militarily."<br />Tutu, who was one of the continent's leading voices against the former apartheid regime in South Africa, said the African Union or the Southern African Development Community (SADC) would have the capacity to remove Mugabe, 84.<br />"He has destroyed a wonderful country. A country that used to be a bread basket -- it has now become a basket case," Tutu said.<br />Tutu's comments came on the day Zimbabwe declared a national emergency to halt a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 560 people.<br />Economic meltdown, which many blame on Mugabe, has left the health service ill-prepared to cope with an epidemic that it once would have prevented or treated easily.<br />Once hailed as a model African democrat, Mugabe has become increasingly criticised, particularly in the West over a worsening political and economic crisis that critics blame on his policies.<br />International help for Zimbabwe's collapsed economy is on hold while Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai remain deadlocked over implementing a power-sharing arrangement.<br />Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party won parliamentary elections while Mugabe was re-elected as president after Tsvangirai pulled out of a two way run-off, citing intimidation by Mugabe supporters.<br />(Reporting by Niclas Mika; Editing by Matthew Jones)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-ZIMBABWE-MUGABE-TUTU-sb.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-ZIMBABWE-MUGABE-TUTU-sb.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div>U.S. says Mugabe's time is up<br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />By Nelson Banya<br />The United States said on Friday that President Robert Mugabe's departure from office was long overdue and a food crisis and cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe meant it was now vital for the international community to act.<br />Zimbabwe has declared an emergency and appealed for international help to battle a cholera outbreak that has killed 575 people, with 12,700 reported cases of the disease, according to the United Nations.<br />"It's well past time for Robert Mugabe to leave," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Copenhagen.<br />In a further sign of growing international pressure on Zimbabwe, European Union diplomats said the bloc planned more sanctions next week unless progress was made in ending a deadlock over how to implement a power-sharing deal.<br />Nobel laureate and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said on Thursday that Mugabe must step down or be removed by force and that he faced indictment for war crimes in The Hague unless he quit.<br />Rice said the stalled power-sharing talks, a "sham election" earlier this year, economic meltdown and the humanitarian toll from the cholera epidemic required swift action.<br />"If this is not evidence to the international community that it's time to stand up for what is right I don't know what will be," Rice told a news conference.<br />"Frankly the nations of the region have to lead it."<br />British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said in a statement that Zimbabwe's neighbours should know there was "massive international support for any collective effort to bring a real change to Zimbabwe."<br />South Africa said on Friday that Zimbabwe's call for international help was encouraging. "We think that that's a major breakthrough," government spokesman Themba Maseko said.<br />Zimbabwe's neighbours in the 15-nation Southern African Development Community have so far failed to persuade Mugabe and the opposition to form a unity government.<br />But, faced with Zimbabwe's worsening economic collapse and the humanitarian crisis spilling over into their own countries, they may now be forced to take a stronger stand against the veteran Zimbabwean leader.<br />AID PACKAGE<br />Zimbabwe, isolated by Western countries under Mugabe's increasingly authoritarian rule, has the highest rate of inflation seen in modern times -- officially 231 million percent, but prices are actually doubling every 24 hours.<br />Basic foods are scarce and the currency is worthless and often unavailable in banks.<br />Trade union activists took to the streets earlier this week to protest about the financial crisis, and dozens of protesters were arrested. Harare residents clashed with soldiers, accusing them of robbery.<br />"I think if we demonstrate and put pressure, things might change. We also need our leaders to understand that we are suffering, they should see to it that our demands are heard," said a Harare resident who identified himself as David.<br />The economic meltdown has left the health system ill-prepared to cope with the cholera epidemic that it would once have prevented or treated effectively.<br />The cholera outbreak follows the collapse of the water system, which has forced residents to drink from contaminated wells and streams. The disease has spread to neighbouring South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia and Botswana.<br />South Africa said it would send a team of senior government officials to Zimbabwe next week to assess the food crisis and investigate what aid is needed.<br />Thousands of Zimbabweans are believed to cross the border, often illegally, into South Africa each day. A cholera centre has been set up in the South African border town of Musina.<br />Mozambique said on Friday it had put all border areas on maximum alert over the threat of cholera, while Zambia said one Zimbabwean had died from the disease in a border town and two were receiving treatment.<br />Zimbabwe does not have the funds to pay doctors and nurses or buy medicine, and aid agency Oxfam said at least 300,000 people weakened by hunger are in danger from the epidemic.<br />South Africa will announce an aid package for Zimbabwe next week, Maseko said, adding that Zimbabwe's political parties have agreed that all aid should be distributed in a non-partisan way.<br />Western nations, which accuse Mugabe of running the once prosperous nation into the ground, have also promised aid. EU ministers have agreed to provide an initial 200,000 euros ($254,000) to the Red Cross and other aid agencies.<br />(Additional reporting by Sue Pleming in Copenhagen, Wendell Roelf in Cape Town, Charles Mangwiro in Maputo, Shapi Shacinda in Lusaka, Ingrid Melander in Brussels, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Adrian Croft in London; writing by Marius Bosch; editing by Paul Simao and Tim Pearce)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-ZIMBABWE-CRISIS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-ZIMBABWE-CRISIS.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div><strong>Republicans paid Palin's stylist nearly $55,000</strong><br />By Michael Luo<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: A woman who appears from campaign finance records to have been the fashion stylist for Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, the former Republican vice presidential nominee, was paid $54,900 by the Republican National Committee, according to a report filed with the Federal Election Commission.<br />A charge for that amount to "Lisa Kline & Co." for "Consulting-Campaign" appears on Oct. 17 in the RNC's campaign finance report. Kline is a New York stylist whose name had previously appeared alongside some of the $150,000 in charges for clothing and other "campaign accessories" from luxury stores.<br />Repeated calls to her home and office in New York over the last month or so since her name first appeared in reports were not returned.<br />The newest report appears to show about $23,000 in additional charges labeled as "campaign accessories" from a variety of stores, including Saks, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Victoria's Secret, Brooks Brothers, Ann Taylor and Target.<br />Republican officials have said that all of the clothing is now in their possession and will be turned over to charity.<br />In addition, the McCain campaign paid Palin's traveling hair stylist and makeup artist more than $110,000 for roughly two months of work, according to campaign finance records. The makeup artist was paid $68,400 and her hair stylist received more than $42,000, the FEC report shows<br />The makeup artist, Amy Strozzi - who was nominated for an Emmy award for her cosmetics work on the television show "So You Think You Can Dance?" - was paid $32,400 by the campaign between Oct. 16 and Nov. 24, the period covered by the most recent reports filed with the commission.<br />This amount came on top of the $36,000 she had already been paid in previous reports, dating back to September. In addition, Palin's traveling hair stylist, Angela Lew, was paid a total of $42,225, with $23,400 coming during the period covered by the latest reports to the commission, which were due at midnight on Thursday.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/palin.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/palin.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div><strong>An inaugural gift for some strangers<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: At the JW Marriott Hotel, $1 million will buy you 300 hotel rooms, $200,000 worth of food and private access to a tented, heated balcony overlooking the parade route of President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration.<br />Earl Stafford is buying it all - and giving it away to strangers.<br />Stafford, a Virginia businessman, plans to invite disadvantaged people, wounded soldiers and others to the prime location on Pennsylvania Avenue. He is calling it the "People's Inaugural Project," inviting those who would never otherwise have a chance to wear tuxedos or satin dresses to the president's swearing in.<br />"We believe it is important to include those who are less fortunate, because like Barack Obama, we, too, believe in the American dream," Stafford said Thursday.<br />Stafford bought the package a week before the election, said Erick Speight, the hotel's senior sales executive. Several corporations expressed interest, but Stafford was quick to turn in his deposit. "My initial reaction was probably shock," Speight said.<br />"Listening to Mr. Stafford and what he wanted to do seemed surreal; that he was going to purchase the package and venue for such a selfless act was really mind-blowing."<br />Stafford, the founder of Universal Systems & Technology in Centreville, Virginia, paid $1 million for the hotel package, but is working to raise more money for an inaugural ball for 1,000 people, as well as a youth ball.<br />Guests found by nonprofits and social service groups will also get gowns and tuxedos, and grooming from hairstylists and makeup artists. There will be a prayer breakfast and luncheon the day before the inauguration, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/hotel.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/hotel.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Obama hauls in record $750 million for campaign<br /></strong>By Michael Luo<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />President-elect Barack Obama brought in nearly $750 million for his presidential campaign, a record amount that exceeds what all of the candidates combined collected in private donations in the previous race for the White House, according to a report filed Thursday with the Federal Election Commission.<br />Underscoring the success of his fund-raising, Obama reported that he had nearly $30 million in the bank as of Nov. 24, despite spending furiously at the end of his campaign.<br />Obama, who became the first major-party nominee to bypass public financing since the system began in the 1970s, spent more than $136 million from Oct. 16 to Nov. 24, the period covered in the report. By comparison, his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, who was limited to the $84 million allotted to him from the Treasury under public financing, spent $26.5 million during that time, according to his latest campaign finance report. Although McCain had $4 million left over, he had $4.9 million in debt, the report said.<br />Obama reported taking in $104 million in contributions. Assuming most of that money came in before Election Day, Nov. 4, it appears his fund-raising stepped up significantly as the campaign drew to a close. In the first half of October, he raised just $36 million.<br />An exact figure is difficult to calculate because of vagaries in the way fund-raising numbers are reported. But it appears that Obama raised over $300 million for the general election alone — more than triple what McCain had at his disposal from public financing.<br />When Obama decided after he clinched the Democratic nomination to forgo public financing, campaign officials said they needed to raise at least twice as much as they would receive in public money, with a goal of raising three times as much, to make it worth the added time away from campaigning that he needed to devote to fund-raising.<br />Obama's fund-raising total — fueled by both small donors giving incremental amounts online and large donors who were wined and dined and given the chance to mingle with him — appeared to more than validate his campaign's gamble.<br />Indeed, it could very well mark the epitaph to the public financing system, which critics have long declared is badly in need of updating to stay relevant in presidential elections.<br />At a minimum, it sets an imposing bar for any potential Republican challenger to Obama in 2012.<br />"Assuming Obama runs again and his fund-raising prowess is sustained, then it will be a daunting undertaking for any opponent," said Kenneth Gross, a campaign finance lawyer at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.<br />In one illustration of the scope of Obama's fund-raising haul, all the candidates running for president in 2004, including President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, together collected less than $650 million, not counting the money received under public financing during the primary and the general elections, according to Federal Election Commission figures.<br />McCain collected less than $220 million for the campaign's primary phase, compared with the more than $410 million that Obama did in that period.<br />In the final two months of the race, the Obama campaign spent nearly $170 million on television advertising, compared with $61 million by the McCain campaign, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks advertising spending.<br />McCain had hoped that money raised by the Republican National Committee, which was able to spend on his behalf under certain restrictions, could help compensate for his financial disparity with Obama. But the R.North Carolina only spent another $31 million on advertising, which left McCain still facing a large deficit on television.<br />Obama officials said their final tally of individual contributors surpassed 3.95 million, including 547,000 new contributors in the period covered by their latest finance report.<br />It is unclear what Obama plans to do with the leftover money. In 2004, when Kerry reported that he had more than $14 million remaining in his account for the primaries, some Democratic officials reacted in anger and disbelief that he had not spent all of his resources. Kerry officials said they had reserved some money to pay for a recount or legal challenges.<br />That type of second-guessing is less likely this time because Obama won. He has several options for his remaining cash, Gross said, like transferring it to the Democratic National Committee or another party committee, or rolling it over to his 2012 re-election campaign.<br />What is not an option for Obama is to help Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton with paying off the debt from her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.<br />According to reports filed last month, Clinton is still struggling to retire about $7.5 million, and she faces fund-raising constraints should Congress approve her as secretary of state in the Obama administration. Gross said the most the Obama campaign could transfer to her was $2,000.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/05donate.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/05donate.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRz6XGJhgkBdOHmM6tIccD1U-SXyiDV-seKrHvECxjnRbyOdnhdMDdZ05FMYEPbwbJo0-vojPNoNLanEyKAN-wBJIxivENOaslmKalt4Tio8L8mTFU0v_vGUHrZ3DoRMYc29WZxJ_udpw/s1600-h/DSC02591.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276519754327565906" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 258px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRz6XGJhgkBdOHmM6tIccD1U-SXyiDV-seKrHvECxjnRbyOdnhdMDdZ05FMYEPbwbJo0-vojPNoNLanEyKAN-wBJIxivENOaslmKalt4Tio8L8mTFU0v_vGUHrZ3DoRMYc29WZxJ_udpw/s320/DSC02591.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></div><div><strong>Taking down the Blogfather of Iran</strong><br />The Boston Globe<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />To Iran's 700,000 bloggers, he is the Blogfather. Hossein Derakhshan is known not only for his erratic opinions and insinuations but also for having discovered a technical solution that made blogging in Farsi possible. When he was arrested last month in Iran and accused of spying for Israel, Derakhshan disproved his own contention that Iran is the freest country in the Middle East other than Israel.<br />Derakhshan's true offense was that he visited Israel twice, and in a most public way - giving interviews to major newspapers, participating in a university conference, and expressing idiosyncratic views about society, politics, and political figures in Iran. He lauded the liberty of the Iranian blogosphere; defined himself as an atheist who admires Ayatollah Khomeini and believes Iran's theocratic system should be a model for other countries; said he wanted Iranians to realize Israelis are not devils, and Israelis to learn that their received ideas about Iran are all wrong; and argued that Iran should have nuclear weapons for deterrence - but not nuclear energy plants, because of the danger to the environment.<br />Whatever Derakhshan's peculiar, fluctuating views may have been, he is clearly no spy. A spy would not make high-profile visits to Israel on his expatriate's Canadian passport, or praise President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before flying into Tehran for the first time in years. The famed figure, who goes by the blogonym "hoder," risks paying a terrible price for assuming that Iran's rulers could be tolerant of the free expression that most bloggers take for granted.<br />Everyone in the global village who values that freedom should be calling for the release of the Blogfather.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edblog.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edblog.php</a></div><div></div><div>***********************</div><div></div><div><strong>Bush says Iran nuclear program remains threat</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />By Tabassum Zakaria<br />U.S. President George W. Bush said on Friday that Iran's nuclear program remained a threat to peace and the United States would not allow Tehran to develop an atomic weapon.<br />The West has offered Iran diplomatic and economic incentives to suspend uranium enrichment and to support a civilian nuclear power program, Bush said in a speech he planned to give to the Saban Forum later in the day.<br />"While Iran has not accepted these offers, we have made our bottom line clear: For the safety of our people and the peace of the world, America will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon," Bush said in the speech released by the White House.<br />Amid hopeful signs of political, economic and social reforms advancing in the Middle East, serious challenges remain, Bush said.<br />"Iran and Syria continue to sponsor terror, Iran's uranium enrichment remains a major threat to peace, and many in the region still live under oppression," he said.<br />Bush defended his decision to go to war against Iraq in March 2003 and topple Saddam Hussein, saying that after the September 11, 2001, attacks the United States could not risk the threat Baghdad posed at that time.<br />"It is true, as I have said many times, that Saddam Hussein was not connected to the 9/11 attacks," Bush said.<br />But after nearly 3,000 people died in the September 11 attacks, the United States had to decide whether it could tolerate an enemy that supported terrorism and was believed to have weapons of mass destruction, and found "this was a risk we could not afford to take."<br />Weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion, and this is considered a major intelligence failure. Bush in a recent television interview said the faulty intelligence on Iraq was the biggest regret of his presidency.<br />"When Saddam's regime fell, we refused to take the easy option and install a friendly strongman in his place," Bush said. "Even though it required enormous sacrifice, we stood by the Iraqi people as they elected their own leaders and built a young democracy."<br />He acknowledged that efforts have not always gone according to plan and sometimes fell short, saying "the fight in Iraq has been longer and more costly than expected."<br />(Additional reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky; Editing by Eric Walsh)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-MIDEAST-BUSH.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-MIDEAST-BUSH.php</a></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div><strong>Iranian artillery pounds remote area in Iraq</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />SULAIMANIYA, Iraq: Iranian artillery fire rained down on a remote area of northeastern Iraq on Friday, causing some material damage but no casualties, a local Kurdish official said.<br />The artillery bombardment was intermittent, said Azad Asso, a district mayor for Jarawa district at the Iranian border, around 195 km (120 miles) northeast of Sulaimaniya.<br />Asso said the bombardment began in the afternoon and continued into the early evening.<br />Iran occasionally shells northern Iraq, where it says Iranian Kurdish separatist fighters take shelter.<br />The last reported bombardment occurred in August, when an Iraqi civilian was wounded by rocket fire.<br />(Reporting by Sherko Raouf; Writing by Michael Christie; Editing by Louise Ireland)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-IRAN-SHELLING.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-IRAN-SHELLING.php</a></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7EObLRmZXWb5gOefRQT6FYpJ65x0rZ8es7UvTsg9zEUWsbSI8idR5TZzti_FKw2LyVvvV3tBI4Yh9FBnQeaz0IAVAiF7fXhnpq-udOr40JJx8oV0JywtQcZt1CoweDrSSuK7PV0wE-bE/s1600-h/DSC02592.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276519744255901138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7EObLRmZXWb5gOefRQT6FYpJ65x0rZ8es7UvTsg9zEUWsbSI8idR5TZzti_FKw2LyVvvV3tBI4Yh9FBnQeaz0IAVAiF7fXhnpq-udOr40JJx8oV0JywtQcZt1CoweDrSSuK7PV0wE-bE/s320/DSC02592.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>Ministers dismissed in Georgia<br /></strong>By Olesya Vartanyan and Michael Schwirtz<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />TBILISI, Georgia: Prime Minister Grigol Mgaloblishvili dismissed Georgia's defense and foreign ministers Friday, as the government continued to reckon with the disastrous effects of its war with Russia in August.<br />Mgaloblishvili, who was himself appointed to his post in October, announced the shake-up at a news conference, saying the government needed to focus on "new realities."<br />"Changes need to be made in the sphere of defense," he said, according to news agencies. "It is important to strengthen foreign policy, and more experience is needed in this direction."<br />The ongoing government overhaul comes amid mounting criticism of President Mikheil Saakashvili's government over its handling of the five-day August war, which decimated Georgia's military and seriously diminished any hope of regaining control over the two separatists enclaves, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, that were at the heart of the conflict.<br />Last month, thousands of anti-government protesters spilled into the streets of Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, and many opposition parties have called for Saakashvili's ouster before the scheduled end of his presidential term in 2013.<br />Opponents of the president may get a boost from news that Irakly Alasania, the Georgian ambassador to the United Nations, resigned Thursday.<br />Alasania, whom political insiders consider to be a potential challenger to Saakashvili, would not disclose his plans, but said in an interview by phone that he would remain in politics.<br />"I decided to leave the government to do something good for Georgia" he said.<br />Saakashvili, who has said his decision to go to war was in response to an imminent Russian military danger, indicated Friday that a lingering security threat from Russia and current economic woes were behind the cabinet changes.<br />In the cabinet, Batu Kutelia, a deputy defense minister, has been named acting defense minister, replacing David Kezerashvili. Grigol Vashadze, the current culture minister and onetime diplomat in Moscow, will take over the Foreign Ministry from Eka Tkeshelashvili. The prime minister also appointed new ministers of sports, culture and education.<br />Olesya Vartanyan reported from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Michael Schwirtz from Moscow.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/europe/georgia.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/europe/georgia.php</a></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>U.S. says Russia must stop blocking Georgia monitors</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />By Christian Lowe and Brett Young<br />A senior U.S. diplomat said on Friday Russia must stop blocking international monitors from going into Georgia's separatist South Ossetia region to assess reports of human rights abuses.<br />The monitors have been unable to return to the Moscow-backed region since a war in August between Russia and Georgia, and human rights groups say that in their absence ethnic Georgians are being harassed by the separatists.<br />"There is, unfortunately, a silence and darkness with respect to the international monitors that has descended on South Ossetia," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried told reporters at a security conference in Helsinki.<br />"The solution is hardly to keep monitors out of South Ossetia ... Russia has an obligation, since it controls this territory, to let in international observers."<br />Russia launched a counter-attack in August after Georgian troops tried to retake South Ossetia, a Moscow-backed region that threw off Tbilisi's rule in the 1990s.<br />Moscow said it was acting to prevent genocide of the region's population, but Western governments said its response -- including sending troops beyond South Ossetia and deep into Georgia -- was disproportionate.<br />NO CIGAR<br />The row over Georgia dragged diplomatic relations between Moscow and the United States to a post-Cold War low.<br />Diplomats at the gathering of the 56-member Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said differences with Russia were mainly to blame for derailing attempts to agree on a joint declaration setting out the organisation's mission.<br />The OSCE -- the only major security organisation that encompasses the United States, Russia and Europe -- last agreed on a joint declaration in 2002.<br />"We were close to getting a political declaration, probably closer than we have been for many years, but no cigar this time," said Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb, whose country holds the OSCE's rotating chairmanship.<br />Other points of difference with Russia were a major arms control treaty that the Kremlin has threatened to quit, and a lukewarm response to a Russian proposal for a new security pact for Europe, the diplomat said.<br />Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says the NATO military alliance is a Cold War relic that cements U.S. dominance on the continent. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said his government would keep up its drive for an alternative.<br />"There are those who want to preserve everything as it was in the 1990s. In other words, a group of countries that positions itself as the most advanced and civilised, determines and controls the direction of travel for the others," he said.<br />Under a cease-fire agreement after Russia's war with Georgia, Moscow undertook to allow the small group of OSCE military observers stationed in South Ossetia before the fighting to go back, but that has not happened.<br />Russian officials say they have no objection to the OSCE monitors entering South Ossetia but that the separatist authorities should be consulted -- an obstacle because most states do not recognise them.<br />Talks will resume on Monday in Moscow on extending the mandate of the OSCE observers in South Ossetia, Stubb said. The current agreement expires at the end of this year.<br />Greece will take over chairmanship of the OSCE in 2009, followed in 2010 by Kazakhstan, the first ex-Soviet state to lead the organisation.<br />(Writing by Christian Lowe; editing by Andrew Roche)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-OSCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/europe/OUKWD-UK-OSCE.php</a></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFjOBV_o6WyLa84_XXF67f8RFP6_3JYoyZDXTWdeylR1rN1okDElnlK12qjrITV-wyxjf4lrRn-DVY7Y3tSDwRlxLZlwk9k37NLOw0DtgquIp84CS6iBmyFm-cMFTHFJJOJJ3Ih-vSGvM/s1600-h/DSC02593.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276519743756213858" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFjOBV_o6WyLa84_XXF67f8RFP6_3JYoyZDXTWdeylR1rN1okDElnlK12qjrITV-wyxjf4lrRn-DVY7Y3tSDwRlxLZlwk9k37NLOw0DtgquIp84CS6iBmyFm-cMFTHFJJOJJ3Ih-vSGvM/s320/DSC02593.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>Hospitals now a theater in Mexico's drug war<br />By Marc Lacey</strong><br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />TIJUANA, Mexico: The sedated patient, his bullet wounds still fresh from a shootout the night before, was lying on a gurney in the intensive care unit of a prestigious private hospital here late last month with intravenous fluids dripping into his arm. Suddenly, steel-faced gunmen barged in and filled him with even more bullets. This time, he was dead for sure.<br />Hit men pursuing rivals into intensive care units and emergency rooms. Shootouts in lobbies and corridors. Doctors kidnapped and held for ransom, or threatened with death if a wounded gunman dies under their care. With alarming speed, Mexico's violent drug war is finding its way into the seeming sanctuary of the nation's hospitals, shaking the health care system and leaving workers fearing for their lives while trying to save the lives of others.<br />"Remember that hospital scene from 'The Godfather?' " asked Dr. Héctor Rico, an otolaryngologist here, speaking about the part in which Michael Corleone saves his hospitalized father from a hit squad. "That's how we live."<br />An explosion of violence connected with Mexico's powerful drug cartels has left more than 5,000 people dead so far this year, nearly twice the figure from the year before, according to unofficial tallies by Mexican newspapers. The border region of the United States and Mexico, critical to the cartels' trafficking operation, has been the most violent turf of all, with 60 percent of all killings in the country last month occurring in the states of Chihuahua and Baja California, the government says. And it has raised fears that violence could spill across the border, because dozens of victims of drug violence have been treated at an El Paso hospital in the last year.<br />The federal government argues that the rising death toll reflects President Felipe Calderón's aggressive stance toward the cartels, which has forced traffickers into a bitter war over the dwindling turf that remains.<br />In fact, most of the deaths do appear to be the result of infighting among traffickers. But plenty of innocent people are dying too, and the spate of horrifying killings — bodies are routinely decapitated or otherwise mutilated and left in public places with handwritten notes propped up nearby — has left people from all walks of life worried that they might be next.<br />"If a patient is in the ER bleeding, we should be focused on the wounds," said Rico, who has led doctors in street demonstrations to protest the rising violence in and around Tijuana, where 170 bodies were discovered in November alone, the bloodiest month on record. "Now we have to watch our backs and worry about someone barging in with a gun."<br />Doctors feel particularly vulnerable. When they leave their offices, they say they face the risk of being kidnapped and held for ransom, as about two dozen local physicians have been in the last few years. Doctors also complain about receiving blunt threats from patients or patients' relatives. "Sálvame o te mato," save me or I will kill you, is what one orthopedic surgeon said he was told by a patient, who evidently did not grasp the contradiction.<br />Adding to the anxiety, hospitals and health care workers have to notify the authorities when a patient comes in with a gunshot or knife wound, a legal requirement that the traffickers know well. That leads to further threats.<br />Then, there is the risk of shootouts.<br />Authorities suspect that the killers and the victim in the intensive care unit at the private hospital, Hospital del Prado, had links to the drug cartels that are wreaking so much havoc across Mexico. Nowhere to be found were the police, who received a call from the hospital authorities when the shooting victim, who was in his 20s, first arrived, as is required by law. The police did not show up until after the gunmen had come and gone and bullet casings littered the hospital floor.<br />Hospital General de Tijuana, the city's main public hospital, has twice been ringed by police officers and soldiers in the past 20 months. The first time, in April 2007, gunmen stormed the building either to rescue a fellow cartel member who was being treated in the emergency room or to kill a rival, said the police, who were not certain which scenario it was. Two police officers were killed, and all but one of the gunmen got away.<br />A video taken by a hospital worker revealed a terrifying scene, with two state police officers firing inside the emergency room to protect patients while doctors, nurses and others cowered in closets, under gurneys and wherever else they could find cover.<br />An elderly woman in a wheelchair is seen hiding under a blanket, while a patient in a hospital gown is sprawled on the floor near his hospital bed.<br />Meanwhile, panicked patients were escorted out of the building, some with IVs in their arms, to a nearby sports field.<br />The second time was this past April, when soldiers in camouflage ringed Hospital General de Tijuana, shutting it down while doctors treated eight traffickers who were wounded in various shootouts in the city. The Mexican Army was apparently trying to prevent a repeat of the 2007 shootout. In a recent third episode, soldiers were sent to the hospital for a bomb scare.<br />"Fear has become part of our lives," said one of the doctors at Hospital General de Tijuana, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from organized-crime figures. "There's panic. We don't know when the shooting is going to break out again."<br />The violence is already affecting service, as hospitals armor themselves with more police officers and guards. To protest the spate of killings, some doctors closed their offices for a day in November. And Tijuana clinics are closing earlier on a regular basis, with more and more doctors shunning late-night medical care as too risky.<br />In Ciudad Juárez, which abuts El Paso, the local Red Cross hospital called a halt to 24-hour emergency service earlier in the year after gunmen killed four people who were being treated for gunshot wounds. Emergency service now ends at 10 p.m.<br />Paramedics in Ciudad Juárez temporarily stopped treating gunshot victims one day in August after receiving death threats over their emergency radios. They resumed ambulance service later the same day, but only after they were provided armed police escorts.<br />An episode that took place in the early morning hours of Oct. 5 in Tijuana shows the complicated new environment in which health care workers find themselves. After a major shootout, two wounded men were carried to Clínica Londres, a private health clinic that was closed for the night. There was a lone nurse inside the locked facility, tending to the patients there, and she initially did not open up to the small group of anxious people outside.<br />The nurse was not qualified to treat gunshot victims, and the clinic did not offer emergency care. But the crowd outside included two men dressed in law enforcement uniforms, who banged menacingly on the door.<br />Frightened of the men in uniform — criminals routinely wear police uniforms in Mexico — she eventually relented, she told authorities. What happened next is shrouded in confusion.<br />Tipped off, the army and the police arrived at the clinic and asked the nurse and two other employees who had since arrived if they were treating gunshot victims, and they were told no. Then, hearing a groan from another room, the authorities discovered the two wounded men — the men in uniform had already fled — and accused the health care workers and the group of people who arrived with the patients of having links to the drug traffickers.<br />The clinic workers, who have been detained for two months while authorities decide whether to charge them, deny that they did anything wrong. "It is not true that this is a narco-clinic," said their lawyer, Rafael Flores Esquerro.<br />Another Tijuana doctor, Dr. Fernando Guzmán Cordero, has also found himself denying connections to traffickers. Guzmán, a prominent general surgeon, was kidnapped in April and suffered a bullet wound to his leg. But the kidnappers released him 36 hours later, even giving him cab fare home.<br />Then two weeks later, after another Tijuana shootout, a group of gunshot victims were taken to his clinic for treatment. In radio call-in shows and on Internet chat sites, local residents wondered whether the traffickers were now in cahoots with Guzmán, something he vehemently denied.<br />"People can say whatever they want," he said. "They say I kidnapped myself or made a pact with them. They say a million things. I know who I am. Why would I get involved with criminals?"<br />The problem everyone in Tijuana faces, no matter their line of work, is that they might be associating with traffickers without even knowing it. Doctors say they now screen their patients carefully. Traffickers pay well and in cash, but they are not worth the trouble they bring, doctors say.<br />But hospitals do not have that luxury. "We're not judges," said Carolina Aubanel Riedel, whose family owns Hospital del Prado. "We treat those who arrive."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/05mexico.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/america/05mexico.php</a></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div><strong>U.S. police chief indicted after boy killed by Uzi</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />BOSTON: A police chief was indicted on Thursday for involuntary manslaughter in the death of an 8-year-old boy who accidentally shot himself in the head with an Uzi submachine gun at a Massachusetts weapons show.<br />Christopher Bizilj lost control of the weapon on October 26 at the Machine Gun Shoot & Firearms Expo in Westfield, about 100 miles (160 km) west of the state capital Boston, police said.<br />Pelham Police Chief Edward Fleury, owner of COP Firearms & Training that co-sponsored the event, faces another four counts of furnishing a machine gun to someone under age 18.<br />The grand jury also indicted the sportsman's club where the expo was held and two men who supplied the Uzi that killed the boy.<br />"It is not a hunting weapon. It has a rate of fire of 1,700 rounds per minute," Hampden County District Attorney William Bennett said of the Uzi.<br />Under Massachusetts law, children can fire a weapon if they are supervised by a licensed instructor and have consent from a parent or legal guardian. But the law bars the furnishing of machine guns to minors regardless of whether parents consent, said Bennett.<br />The boy's father was 10 feet (3 metres) behind the boy with a camera as his son fired the weapon.<br />Fleury was not immediately available for comment.<br />There are an estimated 250 million privately owned guns in the United States, which has a population of about 300 million. About 30,000 Americans a year die from gun wounds.<br />(Reporting by Jason Szep; Editing by Xavier Briand)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/america/OUKWD-UK-USA-SHOOTING-BOY.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/america/OUKWD-UK-USA-SHOOTING-BOY.php</a></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZHmVGXEw1_ZPCwx9UIwkTt2CosyAXbo-hsfX648BuucCeXXMEJ6UlKMrnLovDnGfr05U7SZ9CqvHpdA-Qhn15WMTN1lieamQomlsI2RVuJPAhizyBWDzfV0yLWV3TDUcAwRbjiWJQcAM/s1600-h/DSC02599.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276519412037826770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZHmVGXEw1_ZPCwx9UIwkTt2CosyAXbo-hsfX648BuucCeXXMEJ6UlKMrnLovDnGfr05U7SZ9CqvHpdA-Qhn15WMTN1lieamQomlsI2RVuJPAhizyBWDzfV0yLWV3TDUcAwRbjiWJQcAM/s320/DSC02599.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmf1gqu6M9Uu5E_Y2j7R3XnUmlQCgmwR-7YhFYSI6SzyG6wxETfg0hVsQpppx9oIJeS9DIMYnZ0J4vu440PmnzyyeTBiKGC1zxk5uw9-Dh_Sm0GL-ZPFDctyoCE2__rpklvnEiBggZx7Q/s1600-h/DSC02600.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276519166972591682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmf1gqu6M9Uu5E_Y2j7R3XnUmlQCgmwR-7YhFYSI6SzyG6wxETfg0hVsQpppx9oIJeS9DIMYnZ0J4vu440PmnzyyeTBiKGC1zxk5uw9-Dh_Sm0GL-ZPFDctyoCE2__rpklvnEiBggZx7Q/s320/DSC02600.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Palestinians protest at Hebron settler violence</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />By Nayef Hashlamoun<br />Palestinians protested on Friday against a rampage by Jewish settlers in response to Israel's eviction of Jews from a disputed building in Hebron, and Israel deployed extra forces to contain the unrest.<br />Palestinian youths burnt tyres in Hebron and threw stones at Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint, who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, witnesses said.<br />Violence spread to another West Bank town where Palestinians said settlers torched olive orchards, a day after settlers shot and wounded three Palestinians in anger at the removal of Jewish families from a building occupied in defiance of a court order.<br />Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki accused the settlers of "waging war" on Palestinians and urged the United Nations Security Council to take up the issue.<br />Malki told reporters in the West Bank town of Ramallah that settlers were taking advantage of a power vacuum since Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's recent resignation in a corruption probe.<br />Olmert is staying on as caretaker premier with limited power until a February 10 Israeli election. Until then, Israel seems "too weak to take any action against settlers," Malki said.<br />Israeli Justice Minister Daniel Friedman called the settlers' assaults a "shocking pogrom" and told Israel's Channel One television "I regret very much the security forces weren't prepared to prevent" them.<br />Robert Serry, the U.N. envoy for the Middle East, issued a statement saying he was "concerned about the potential escalation." He demanded "an immediate end to the settler attacks and restraint and calm from all parties."<br />Serry also urged "vigilance from the Israeli authorities to ensure that the events of yesterday are not repeated."<br />FLASHPOINT<br />Hebron has long been a flashpoint, where 650 Jewish settlers live in fortified enclaves guarded by Israeli troops in a city of 180,000 Palestinians.<br />Palestinians and Western countries see the dozens of Jewish settlements Israel has built in the West Bank since capturing it in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war as a key obstacle to peace efforts.<br />Tensions have flared anew in Hebron since settlers defied a November 16 court order to vacate a house they said they had bought from a Palestinian man who denied ever selling it.<br />Israel sent in club-wielding troops to remove a dozen settler families from the building on Thursday, after days of stone-throwing protests there between Palestinians and settlers.<br />The Jewish state reinforced security in Hebron by deploying 500 riot police on Friday, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.<br />Some restrictions were also imposed on Palestinians. Rosenfeld said Palestinians under 45 were barred from attending Friday prayers at al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to prevent any violence from spreading there.<br />Some violence was reported on Friday but there were no reports of injuries.<br />Palestinian witnesses said settlers set fire to hundreds of olive trees near the town of Qalqilya on Friday, near the scene of similar torchings on Thursday.<br />Palestinians said settlers had erected makeshift roadblocks on several roads in the territory on Thursday, blocking their travel.<br />Israeli border police stood guard outside the padlocked disputed house in Hebron on Friday, allowing settlers in only to remove their belongings from the building.<br />Faiz Rajabi, the building's owner, said he had not yet regained access. "I am waiting to get my house back," he told television stations.<br />(Additional reporting by Mustafa Abu Ghaniya in Hebron and Joseph Nasr and Roleen Tafakji in Jerusalem; writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; editing by Tim Pearce)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS.php</a></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuxICPwm-2qgOO_3QFcO3OSqM_8ngppmAZYBsjUslMJrjad7VtZknvdBn9_oNakoRd0HTvyLScHLawzM-lXp4Uvh-2VCdXoXFKWRmxFGdojhlvTw75xWxS03A8cyDiOwrc3Cx933tAFmg/s1600-h/DSC02601.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276519161021160594" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuxICPwm-2qgOO_3QFcO3OSqM_8ngppmAZYBsjUslMJrjad7VtZknvdBn9_oNakoRd0HTvyLScHLawzM-lXp4Uvh-2VCdXoXFKWRmxFGdojhlvTw75xWxS03A8cyDiOwrc3Cx933tAFmg/s320/DSC02601.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>Shelling kills at least 15 in Somalia's capital<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, December 5, 2008<br />MOGADISHU: At least 15 people died on Friday when shells hit an insurgent stronghold in the north of Somalia's capital Mogadishu, witnesses said.<br />Islamist militants have been battling the Western-backed Somali government and its Ethiopian supporters since early 2007 and now control the south of the Horn of Africa nation.<br />Some 10,000 civilians have died in the fighting, a million people have been driven from their homes and 3 million rely on emergency food aid.<br />Residents said they believed the shells were fired by Ethiopian troops in Mogadishu targeting an Islamist base on the edge of a livestock market in the northern area.<br />"A shell landed in the market killing five women and two men," said resident Omar Mohamed. "We are shocked and collecting their scattered flesh. I could see 10 injured people."<br />Another resident, Halima Bare, said two mortar shells killed four people and a baby in a restaurant and that she saw three more bodies at a bus stop.<br />The Islamists said they had not been fighting the Ethiopians Friday. There was no immediate comment from the Ethiopians.<br />"We have great sympathy for the innocent civilians who are being killed," said Sheikh Abdirahim Isse Adow, spokesman for the Islamic Courts, which were driven from the capital two years ago by Somali and Ethiopian forces.<br />Ethiopia said last month it would pull all its troops out of Somalia by the end of the year and there are fears the already chaotic country could descend further into anarchy unless more peacekeepers are sent soon.<br />(Reporting by Abdi Sheikh and Abdi Guled; editing by David Clarke)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-SOMALIA-CONFLICT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-SOMALIA-CONFLICT.php</a></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFgtEeHM-1PUmfnCiusr1rRCq0CHHdmjvIogE7YaKsaPWNSF_B72vRZPQAX-0C8_m5-5siBF9suXqscADIF-uAN_Lr9hRr41_FQd30DrLUvF-lxW8MYTrJ_6-1Sp0FyMixcnzHYNYnh4Q/s1600-h/DSC02603.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276519159843850162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFgtEeHM-1PUmfnCiusr1rRCq0CHHdmjvIogE7YaKsaPWNSF_B72vRZPQAX-0C8_m5-5siBF9suXqscADIF-uAN_Lr9hRr41_FQd30DrLUvF-lxW8MYTrJ_6-1Sp0FyMixcnzHYNYnh4Q/s320/DSC02603.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiia-OpgfHsQUrRey7nrNew_L0ahen030ikOwz44Ww3ksERFAKUENeUVtWyoZ7mMGWSfSL9GSafbjvZKT0ynL5BSr3VQuPYm4WiRrt6oPZ0d2BIGRpNZA3xWiKeSh2lbOL1AddwCcil6X4/s1600-h/DSC02604.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276519156703827138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiia-OpgfHsQUrRey7nrNew_L0ahen030ikOwz44Ww3ksERFAKUENeUVtWyoZ7mMGWSfSL9GSafbjvZKT0ynL5BSr3VQuPYm4WiRrt6oPZ0d2BIGRpNZA3xWiKeSh2lbOL1AddwCcil6X4/s320/DSC02604.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg8WS_Px75eu-s_2SQt5yfH3MHtwF_d_h6jczN92ZqvzB1T4Aqtmma4R0arcmH3I1TRRG0lbEqi-9E-1Q_PfVMm8HlDtAeA1HjrUoGuq6ZSsPtpuVKf_D0ldhhOAZpBfcKpMAf2EMyBRQ/s1600-h/DSC02606.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276519150423514850" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg8WS_Px75eu-s_2SQt5yfH3MHtwF_d_h6jczN92ZqvzB1T4Aqtmma4R0arcmH3I1TRRG0lbEqi-9E-1Q_PfVMm8HlDtAeA1HjrUoGuq6ZSsPtpuVKf_D0ldhhOAZpBfcKpMAf2EMyBRQ/s320/DSC02606.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP_9KgfNr86WuHuE3H97eZsE3bFpx4JIQpj2Y_TTCGzeUcuj2AOGdN5CLMkh07wnI8Eme37pxpLXfuCmgQgP0JRCbN1QYjdZxtldiTmGbrhF0Y9f4Y_44J_oFYzEHZ9OZw-rwTGY1CqO0/s1600-h/DSC02609.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276518895690089154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP_9KgfNr86WuHuE3H97eZsE3bFpx4JIQpj2Y_TTCGzeUcuj2AOGdN5CLMkh07wnI8Eme37pxpLXfuCmgQgP0JRCbN1QYjdZxtldiTmGbrhF0Y9f4Y_44J_oFYzEHZ9OZw-rwTGY1CqO0/s320/DSC02609.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMz4FdJDVgNUFXUfDONYKnadbasDMOJiQBJ1h5auyMeuNtMbpffGhI_26edgqjnSaYhbxyxRuCaSvrqFxv9E9Qtbji4CJVPgxItcUmpDKyjanEm5slRoYZLT3u3KbHmkAi2dLjpPYttNo/s1600-h/DSC02610.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276518889444387746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMz4FdJDVgNUFXUfDONYKnadbasDMOJiQBJ1h5auyMeuNtMbpffGhI_26edgqjnSaYhbxyxRuCaSvrqFxv9E9Qtbji4CJVPgxItcUmpDKyjanEm5slRoYZLT3u3KbHmkAi2dLjpPYttNo/s320/DSC02610.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF7uyMd5svtOuxjp92YZwoyGd3hunLiwoHVk16SF5rC-l3FQ1O4WT2Ma_mxKx3ksBvj-x2g09nGwAGGgVHodvbAQoHKLtS-oVd40rl257hb8zfPqfvJf2zAxebUz21ylpusx4LAF2bVto/s1600-h/DSC02611.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276518885923384018" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF7uyMd5svtOuxjp92YZwoyGd3hunLiwoHVk16SF5rC-l3FQ1O4WT2Ma_mxKx3ksBvj-x2g09nGwAGGgVHodvbAQoHKLtS-oVd40rl257hb8zfPqfvJf2zAxebUz21ylpusx4LAF2bVto/s320/DSC02611.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7HfKPUolQG2D7oIw9FlA22Km9h_Ah5EgnveZQa9iWdHIw8UYnH2uK9_c-mymlE9V5CFDpxPl2riv3YbqMwu3APi40WJ2Ad1NHoKMG3IaiuftqHCqiikHK_4ozJhFuBvyjbxChkTGkDDM/s1600-h/DSC02613.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276518886467031906" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7HfKPUolQG2D7oIw9FlA22Km9h_Ah5EgnveZQa9iWdHIw8UYnH2uK9_c-mymlE9V5CFDpxPl2riv3YbqMwu3APi40WJ2Ad1NHoKMG3IaiuftqHCqiikHK_4ozJhFuBvyjbxChkTGkDDM/s320/DSC02613.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNMVsCKYUfNhwpTXxZiMS177iu_gQUAZz4MZJCM8xHRjw2byO_9aWT7gtkZ3AEDzR05Qzgc7CoqP0MnilgbVaT61-DhWw5TxPETbS4rVb-anu5n2kYc5zq_fJFqy3e2fBEjEd8eHnmz58/s1600-h/DSC02617.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276518882271314402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNMVsCKYUfNhwpTXxZiMS177iu_gQUAZz4MZJCM8xHRjw2byO_9aWT7gtkZ3AEDzR05Qzgc7CoqP0MnilgbVaT61-DhWw5TxPETbS4rVb-anu5n2kYc5zq_fJFqy3e2fBEjEd8eHnmz58/s320/DSC02617.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk0s1NIoylSNAiy-yY3cCY_SyfI6I9YpbKBq5RpjQU1yoKWyJgzXP_uFyx_hEGYjZb3NaD1QhCt-5QcGU4tM2J6biSqO9q9vfNIsA75obL6TYowQDJs-lN7e2gMgHWo2Q_uCXU-MI5vO0/s1600-h/DSC02618.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276518564430914034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk0s1NIoylSNAiy-yY3cCY_SyfI6I9YpbKBq5RpjQU1yoKWyJgzXP_uFyx_hEGYjZb3NaD1QhCt-5QcGU4tM2J6biSqO9q9vfNIsA75obL6TYowQDJs-lN7e2gMgHWo2Q_uCXU-MI5vO0/s320/DSC02618.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZvrTYWHf-mIpdRm07RD7gk7upTck7SdWjt0OWU-gWrXhj7oLDhDFzlu5R2k1WJtb_eiakCSSfAAZPqHYb4dTtlHr3qq8-X1GpwZJVefB2MO0tfEdUylDpUECEjr-_IT1i8CTt7C_9UP0/s1600-h/DSC02621.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276518561667664034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZvrTYWHf-mIpdRm07RD7gk7upTck7SdWjt0OWU-gWrXhj7oLDhDFzlu5R2k1WJtb_eiakCSSfAAZPqHYb4dTtlHr3qq8-X1GpwZJVefB2MO0tfEdUylDpUECEjr-_IT1i8CTt7C_9UP0/s320/DSC02621.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG5lMIwSPjX3YAJuFy4DJwYKseou9G4JILe9_W5c-AGuCNcRbmRcFKvhyAYE5JbIyMc6ZP0yr_ZJWEOIOPAoraUv5baWeBPGN3PQzxOVT_3PaJyjbxoFM2ZTGaf97Ky0PmVGx3wVC9P30/s1600-h/DSC02623.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276518555581594626" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG5lMIwSPjX3YAJuFy4DJwYKseou9G4JILe9_W5c-AGuCNcRbmRcFKvhyAYE5JbIyMc6ZP0yr_ZJWEOIOPAoraUv5baWeBPGN3PQzxOVT_3PaJyjbxoFM2ZTGaf97Ky0PmVGx3wVC9P30/s320/DSC02623.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZpPEh4C0pYiSf1hB81USM3nhwLAyu7h1zEmUmV4E9BGL8OtUWRW8TfqgE0lyZWrgwd5PobMaZmg2AYRrhI3WVbNG87cRciIj7LHc7vlUJcQ9i8EQQIbUU3jfxvhbD-i0OwGaMhvC5jco/s1600-h/DSC02624.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276518552380604210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZpPEh4C0pYiSf1hB81USM3nhwLAyu7h1zEmUmV4E9BGL8OtUWRW8TfqgE0lyZWrgwd5PobMaZmg2AYRrhI3WVbNG87cRciIj7LHc7vlUJcQ9i8EQQIbUU3jfxvhbD-i0OwGaMhvC5jco/s320/DSC02624.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguAncldR0dkqyPLDqY_oH1SeN3x-BAEpQVFwdxsd7qx7feEQOpDmzrEco2UIZQGGGbaSjt1m8XHDqCy0rUcmSDuUTaIrS5AQsdvdI_JBfpfuPQCpLlljnetYiQLWo6TS8JMH8tzxsCLr8/s1600-h/DSC02625.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276518549094539666" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguAncldR0dkqyPLDqY_oH1SeN3x-BAEpQVFwdxsd7qx7feEQOpDmzrEco2UIZQGGGbaSjt1m8XHDqCy0rUcmSDuUTaIrS5AQsdvdI_JBfpfuPQCpLlljnetYiQLWo6TS8JMH8tzxsCLr8/s320/DSC02625.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong> </div><div><br />Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-18708619652238678582008-12-05T06:31:00.030+01:002008-12-05T17:36:55.578+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Thursday, 4th December 2008<p align="center"><strong></strong></p><br /><p align="center"><strong>Gloom, but not doom</strong> </p><br /><p align="justify"></p><br /><p align="justify"><strong>EDITORIAL</strong><br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />There has been a fair amount of hand-wringing since the nation's intelligence community surveyed the world of 2025: America losing dominance; China and India rising; fierce competition for water, food and energy; increased danger that terrorists will get a nuclear weapon.<br />That's all sobering. But the headlines from "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World," published by the National Intelligence Council, are not the whole story.<br />President-elect Barack Obama is inheriting a world that is more complicated and more frightening than the one George W. Bush found in 2001. But while the trends may be apparent, the end results are not inevitable. Decisions Obama and other leaders make will matter more.<br />Take the assertion that the world is on a path to a multipolar system with China, India and Russia plus various businesses, tribes, religious groups - even criminal networks - vying for influence. Commentators have been predicting this dreaded multipolarity since the end of the cold war. And Vice President Dick Cheney and former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz notably vowed to do everything they could to head it off - up to ensuring that close European allies never aspired to power and influence to rival the United States.<br />That arrogance and bullheadedness has instead weakened this country - creating new enemies and making it harder to win cooperation on important challenges, like the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. If there is one clear lesson from the last eight years, it is that bullying other countries, and jockeying for zero-sum gains doesn't work.<br />It also is the new conventional wisdom that this will be the century of China or India. But both face serious economic, demographic and other challenges - including the threat of terrorism, as the Mumbai attacks so tragically demonstrated.<br />A relative decline in power also does not mean that the United States will not remain powerful. The U.S. can and must continue to lead. There will be a particular premium on nimble and farsighted decision-making and cooperation. Giving rising powers a bigger role could help persuade them to take more responsibility for problems like terrorism, climate change, nonproliferation and energy security.<br />The report suggests that Al Qaeda's indiscriminate use of violence and its failure to focus on problems like poverty and unemployment could diminish its appeal. But other extremist groups that curry favor with social programs will likely have more staying power. The next administration will have to counter their influence by promoting economic development in the Middle East as well as a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Warnings that terrorists will have an easier time acquiring nuclear, biological and advanced conventional weapons argue for serious new initiatives to control the spread of these horrifying weapons.<br />Obama appears to understand the challenges. So do some of the experts who are expected to be part of his administration, including Susan Rice, his choice for ambassador to the United Nations, and James Steinberg, reported to be on the short list for deputy secretary of state. As members of a group called the Phoenix Initiative, they spent several years formulating a concept of American strategic leadership for the 21st century.<br />Their report states that "leadership is not an entitlement; it has to be earned and sustained. Leadership that serves common goals is the best way to inspire the many different peoples of the world to make shared commitments." That is a good place to start.</p><br /><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edworld.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edworld.php</a><br /></p><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>0523</strong></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrPjno8DZOAoUO-0n4nJS-E-RkSS0TihPaLvH7p_wNov_4CXWwoq_ALR0obwI5G6eOQBtDQ4GfWJLintFWfZU0mr4joMFnkfmWj74NnSZpupNFgIIfYBoyAFlQCk6cK4fqBuAy81zl52I/s1600-h/DSC02461.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276179489943184482" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrPjno8DZOAoUO-0n4nJS-E-RkSS0TihPaLvH7p_wNov_4CXWwoq_ALR0obwI5G6eOQBtDQ4GfWJLintFWfZU0mr4joMFnkfmWj74NnSZpupNFgIIfYBoyAFlQCk6cK4fqBuAy81zl52I/s320/DSC02461.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZhOulCV9voXTdnEEgg4TBKK_J5Mlusucl5pv7H9cOqBXoEGVX3Mxmft0GhQV87M8p9oEp1dzTYB3XMMZrqFTcHhQi9q1PP2HSPo0DN3AY1IGjSBBujKDJ8MD_cIYODQfyqwWfyiCVmwU/s1600-h/DSC02462.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276179483598102706" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZhOulCV9voXTdnEEgg4TBKK_J5Mlusucl5pv7H9cOqBXoEGVX3Mxmft0GhQV87M8p9oEp1dzTYB3XMMZrqFTcHhQi9q1PP2HSPo0DN3AY1IGjSBBujKDJ8MD_cIYODQfyqwWfyiCVmwU/s320/DSC02462.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Cambodia revives Pol Pot's deadly canals</strong><br />By Thomas Fuller<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />BARAY, Cambodia: The dry season has taken hold here, but water is everywhere. It pours out of sluice gates with the roar of an Alpine torrent. Playful children do back flips into the ubiquitous canals and then pull their friends in with them. Fishermen cast their nets for minnows, and villagers wash their Chinese-made motorcycles.<br />"It's never dry here," said Chan Mo, a 36-year-old rice farmer standing on top of an irrigation dike.<br />The Khmer Rouge canals have come back to life.<br />By the time the brutal government of Pol Pot was toppled three decades ago, 1.7 million Cambodians were dead from overwork, starvation and disease, and the country was a ruin. But the forced labor of millions of Cambodians left behind something useful - or that's how the current government sees it.<br />The leaders of the Khmer Rouge were obsessed with canals, embankments and dams. They presided over hundreds of irrigation projects to revive Cambodia's glorious but perhaps mythical past of an agrarian wonderland.<br />"There has never been a modern regime that placed more emphasis and resources towards developing irrigation," wrote Jeffrey Himel, a water resource engineer, in a recent study of Cambodia's irrigation system.<br />"The Khmer Rouge emptied all cities and towns, and put practically the entire population to work planting rice and digging irrigation dikes and canals." Some of the canals were poorly designed - "hydraulic nonsense," says Alain Goffeau, a French irrigation expert with the Asian Development Bank. But many were viable.<br />The Khmer Rouge built around three-quarters of Cambodia's more than 1,000 canal networks, according to a survey commissioned by the United Nations in the 1990s.<br />Now, across this impoverished nation of 14 million people, the canals are being rebuilt by a government hoping to take advantage of the world's increasing demand for rice.<br />The Asian Development Bank is helping finance the rehabilitation of a dozen canals, adding to projects financed by the Japanese and South Korean governments.<br />"There's a lot of possibility," Goffeau said.<br />For older Cambodians, the canals are a source of ambivalence. Men like Loh Thoeun, 61, now a rice farmer, think back to the baskets of dirt that he carried away, hour after hour.<br />He recalls the horrors of the Khmer Rouge - the laborers, hands tied behind their backs, who were "dragged away like cows" and never returned, the Muslim families who were thrown down a nearby well. The foremen of the irrigation project in Baray were killed after the canals and embankments were completed - without explanation. Loh says he once saw Pol Pot inspect the canals on what he described as a "speedboat."<br />All of the work was done by hand here in Baray, a two-hour drive north of the capital, Phnom Penh. No talking was allowed among laborers. The Khmer Rouge played revolutionary songs and banged hubcaps to encourage the workers. Contemporary photos show huge crowds toiling in the dust.<br />"The earth here is very hard, and when we dug deeper we got to the hardest part - the most compact ground," said Loh, sitting in a bamboo shelter beside his rice fields. "We had to hammer at it. It was like cutting down a tree."<br />For so many Cambodians the Khmer Rouge years, from 1975 to 1979, were about digging. Villagers and residents of Phnom Penh, who were forced to move to the countryside, were organized in small work units.<br />"I was a slave," said Ang Mongkol, now the deputy director general of the Ministry of Interior who was a law student when the Khmer Rouge came to power and was assigned to haul dirt.<br />Yet despite the sorrow of those years, there are only traces of remorse here about taking full advantage of the canals. Loh hopes the canals he built in slave-like conditions will help double or triple his rice output.<br />"I always recall the past to my children," Loh said. "I say, "We have water from this canal that was built by the people. And many of them died."<br />Ang is leading an experimental project that uses water from the canal to irrigate fields of hybrid rice varieties that promise to yield four times as much as the variety traditionally grown here. Because only about 20 percent of Cambodia's fields are irrigated, its rice farmers harvest on average half as much as Vietnam's and one third as much as China's.<br />The irrigation system in Baray, which is fed from water diverted from the nearby Chinit River, functioned for several years after the Khmer Rouge left power. But in the mid-1980s it fell into disrepair. It was only in 2005 that the government began rebuilding it. Today, the local municipality hires a maintenance crew to keep the water flowing.<br />Among the workers is Sim Vy, 48. As a teenager she was enlisted by the Khmer Rouge to help build the canals. She was told she was working for national glory but received only a watery gruel as recompense. Now she is paid $55 a month. "I prefer working this way," she said.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/canal.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/canal.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><br /><strong>From hoof to dinner table, a new bid to cut emissions</strong><br />By Elisabeth Rosenthal<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />STERKSEL, the Netherlands: The cows and pigs dotting these flat green plains in the southern Netherlands create a bucolic landscape. But looked at through the lens of greenhouse gas accounting, they are living smokestacks, spewing methane emissions into the air.<br />That is why a group of farmers-turned-environmentalists here at a smelly but impeccably clean research farm have a new take on making a silk purse from a sow's ear: They cook manure from their 3,000 pigs to capture the methane trapped within it, and then use the gas to make electricity for the local power grid.<br />Rising in the fields of the environmentally conscious Netherlands, the Sterksel project is a rare example of fledgling efforts to mitigate the heavy emissions from livestock. But much more needs to be done, scientists say, as more and more people are eating more meat around the world.<br />What to do about farm emissions is one of the main issues being discussed this week and next, as the environment ministers from 187 nations gather in Poznan, Poland, for talks on a new treaty to combat global warming. In releasing its latest figure on emissions last month, United Nations climate officials cited agriculture and transportation as the two sectors that remained most "problematic."<br />"It's an area that's been largely overlooked," said Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He says people should eat less meat to control their carbon footprints. "We haven't come to grips with agricultural emissions."<br />The trillions of farm animals around the world generate 18 percent of the emissions that are raising global temperatures, according to United Nations estimates, more even than from cars, buses and airplanes.<br />But unlike other industries, like cement making and power, which are facing enormous political and regulatory pressure to get greener, large-scale farming is just beginning to come under scrutiny as policy makers, farmers and scientists cast about for solutions.<br />High-tech fixes include those like the project here, called "methane capture," as well as inventing feed that will make cows belch less methane, which traps heat with 25 times the efficiency of carbon dioxide. California is already working on a program to encourage systems in pig and dairy farms like the one in Sterksel.<br />Other proposals include everything from persuading consumers to eat less meat to slapping a "sin tax" on pork and beef. Next year, Sweden will start labeling food products so that shoppers can look at how much emission can be attributed to serving steak compared with, say, chicken or turkey.<br />"Of course for the environment it's better to eat beans than beef, but if you want to eat beef for New Year's, you'll know which beef is best to buy," said Claes Johansson, chief of sustainability at the Swedish agricultural group Lantmannen.<br />But such fledgling proposals are part of a daunting game of catch-up. In large developing countries like China, India and Brazil, consumption of red meat has risen 33 percent in the last decade. It is expected to double globally between 2000 and 2050. While the global economic downturn may slow the globe's appetite for meat momentarily, it is not likely to reverse a profound trend.<br />Of the more than 2,000 projects supported by the United Nations' "green" financing system intended to curb emissions, only 98 are in agriculture. There is no standardized green labeling system for meat, as there is for electric appliances and even fish.<br />Indeed, scientists are still trying to define the practical, low-carbon version of a slab of bacon or a hamburger. Every step of producing meat creates emissions.<br />Flatus and manure from animals contain not only methane, but also nitrous oxide, an even more potent warming agent. And meat requires energy for refrigeration as it moves from farm to market to home.<br />Producing meat in this ever-more crowded world requires creating new pastures and planting more land for imported feeds, particularly soy, instead of relying on local grazing. That has contributed to the clearing of rain forests, particularly in South America, robbing the world of crucial "carbon sinks," the vast tracts of trees and vegetation that absorb carbon dioxide.<br />"I'm not sure that the system we have for livestock can be sustainable," said Pachauri of the United Nations. A sober scientist, he suggests that "the most attractive" near-term solution is for everyone simply to "reduce meat consumption," a change he says would have more effect than switching to a hybrid car.<br />The Lancet medical journal and groups like the Food Ethics Council in Britain have supported his suggestion to eat less red meat to control global emissions, noting that Westerners eat more meat than is healthy anyway.<br />Producing a pound of beef creates 11 times as much greenhouse gas emission as a pound of chicken and 100 times more than a pound of carrots, according to Lantmannen, the Swedish group.<br />But any suggestion to eat less meat may run into resistance in a world with more carnivores and a booming global livestock industry. Meat producers have taken issue with the United Nations' estimate of livestock-related emissions, saying the figure is inflated because it includes the deforestation in the Amazon, a phenomenon that the Brazilian producers say might have occurred anyway.<br />United Nations scientists defend their accounting. With so much demand for meat, "you do slash rain forest," said Pierre Gerber, a senior official at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Soy cultivation has doubled in Brazil during the past decade, and more than half is used for animal feed.<br />Laurence Wrixon, executive director of the International Meat Secretariat, said that his members were working with the Food and Agriculture Organization to reduce emissions but that the main problem was fast-rising consumption in developing countries. "So whether you like it or not, there's going to be rising demand for meat, and our job is to make it as sustainable as possible," he said.<br />Estimates of emissions from agriculture as a percentage of all emissions vary widely from country to country, but they are clearly over 50 percent in big agricultural and meat-producing countries like Brazil, Australia and New Zealand.<br />In the United States, agriculture accounted for just 7.4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2006, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.<br />The percentage was lower because the United States produces extraordinarily high levels of emissions in other areas, like transportation and landfills, compared with other nations. The figure also did not include fuel burning and land-use changes.<br />Wealthy, environmentally conscious countries with large livestock sectors — the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and New Zealand — have started experimenting with solutions.<br />In Denmark, by law, farmers now inject manure under the soil instead of laying it on top of the fields, a process that enhances its fertilizing effect, reduces odors and also prevents emissions from escaping. By contrast, in many parts of the developing world, manure is left in open pools and lathered on fields.<br />Others suggest including agriculture emissions in carbon cap-and-trade systems, which currently focus on heavy industries like cement making and power generation. Farms that produce more than their pre-set limit of emissions would have to buy permits from greener colleagues to pollute.<br />New Zealand recently announced that it would include agriculture in its new emissions trading scheme by 2013. To that end, the government is spending tens of millions of dollars financing research and projects like breeding cows that produce less gas and inventing feed that will make cows belch less methane, said Philip Gurnsey of the Environment Ministry.<br />At the electricity-from-manure project here in Sterksel, the refuse from thousands of pigs is combined with local waste materials (outdated carrot juice and crumbs from a cookie factory), and pumped into warmed tanks called digesters. There, resident bacteria release the natural gas within, which is burned to generate heat and electricity.<br />The farm uses 25 percent of the electricity, and the rest is sold to a local power provider. The leftover mineral slurry is an ideal fertilizer that reduces the use of chemical fertilizers, whose production releases a heavy dose of carbon dioxide.<br />For this farm the scheme has provided a substantial payback: By reducing its emissions, it has been able to sell carbon credits on European markets. It makes money by selling electricity. It gets free fertilizer.<br />And, in a small country where farmers are required to have manure trucked away, it saves $190,000 annually in disposal fees. John Horrevorts, experiment coordinator, whose family has long raised swine, said that dozens of such farms had been set up in the Netherlands, though cost still makes it impractical for small piggeries. Indeed, one question that troubles green farmers is whether consumers will pay more for their sustainable meat.<br />"In the U.K., supermarkets are sometimes asking about green, but there's no global system yet," said Bent Claudi Lassen, chairman of the Danish Bacon and Meat Council, which supports green production. "We're worried that other countries not producing in a green way, like Brazil, could undercut us on price."<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/healthscience/04meat.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/healthscience/04meat.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br />**************<br /><br /><strong>Hong Kong finds more tainted eggs</strong><br />By David Barboza<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />SHANGHAI: Hong Kong food safety authorities said late Tuesday that for the fourth time in less than two months they had found a batch of eggs imported from China that were contaminated with illegal levels of melamine, the industrial chemical blamed for sickening hundreds of thousands of young Chinese children, six fatally.<br />The Hong Kong food safety agency has been conducting random tests for melamine on a variety of foods imported from China since a global recall of Chinese dairy products earlier this fall.<br />The agency said the tainted eggs were imported from a company based in Jilin Province in northern China and were being sold to bakeries in Hong Kong. The agency asked that the eggs be withdrawn from the market. It said the eggs 4.7 parts per million of melamine, nearly twice the level allowable in food products sold in the U.S., Hong Kong and China.<br />Still, Hong Kong authorities said a child would have to eat about 13 eggs in a single day to be strongly affected.<br />The finding comes a day after Chinese authorities gave a raised its count of the number of affected babies, raising the death toll from four and upping those sickened from 50,000 to 300,000. The stricken babies suffered from kidney stones and other ailments.<br />The melamine scandal has been a huge embarrassment for Beijing, which late last year had completed a nationwide food safety crackdown that involved closing thousands of illegal food factories and conducting food safety checks on small food producers. The crackdown came after thousands of pets in the United States were sickened after eating melamine-tainted pet food produced with ingredients imported from China.<br />This year many of China's biggest dairies were accused of selling melamine-tainted products, leading to massive recalls and renewed calls by leaders in Beijing for an overhaul of the country's food safety standards and stricter regulatory enforcement.<br />In recent months, Chinese dairy goods, animal feed and eggs have all been found to have been tainted by melamine. The government has blamed dishonest farmers and food and feed dealers who are believed to be intentionally using the chemical, which is usually used to make plastics and fertilizers, to falsely raise the protein counts of diluted dairy products.<br />Last month, the Food and Drug Administration said that imports of a variety of Chinese products that contain milk, including candy, snacks, baker products and pet foods, would be held at the United States border until they are tested for contamination.<br />The melamine scandals this year have alarmed Chinese consumers, and slowed sales, severely damaging this country's once booming dairy industry. Egg sales have also plummeted, sending egg prices down and leading many farmers to abandon the poultry industry, according to farmers in northern China's Hebei province.<br />Hong Kong food safety officials say the latest batch of melamine tainted eggs were produced in North China and contained<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/04melamine.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/04melamine.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4DYXG4osfnBobgtQa_jDDnEiMDpq09eYv5msxuhez9w8Jy3nzIInW3SUkMupUhEUgv61-BKmFVK-qljKq6ld2NpZ0D_be4YDCJPXbeS3Km5uzUTuYfjqyeIP8L3GaP0nuWYo0eQxp5mk/s1600-h/DSC02463.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276179477961144050" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4DYXG4osfnBobgtQa_jDDnEiMDpq09eYv5msxuhez9w8Jy3nzIInW3SUkMupUhEUgv61-BKmFVK-qljKq6ld2NpZ0D_be4YDCJPXbeS3Km5uzUTuYfjqyeIP8L3GaP0nuWYo0eQxp5mk/s320/DSC02463.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>OPINION</strong><br /><strong>Nice females also hunt</strong><br />By Marlene Zuk<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />What is it about sex and hunting? The recent discovery that among bonobos - those small chimpanzee relatives previously known for their active sex lives and female-dominated societies - females as well as males hunt prey, has taken the pundits aback.<br />According to at least some conventional primatology wisdom, the leaner, meaner chimpanzees evolved male bonding and thus an aggressive and hierarchical society through the thrill of the chase, while bonobos groomed, hugged or performed other acts not suitable for description in a family newspaper.<br />Some anthropologists and psychologists take this further, tracing human aggression and male violence to an early history of hunting. Locating a living animal, stalking it and killing it are thought to represent aggressive acts, and because in the hunter-gatherer society, men are supposed to have done much of the hunting, the reasoning goes that natural selection for good hunters gave us, willy-nilly, hostile men.<br />We humans have certainly made hunting into a masculine avocation, and we like to point to male animals as bolstering that macho stereotype. Even when women hunt, like the moose-chasing Sarah Palin, we emphasize the aftermath, not the killing. Every news item about the vice-presidential hopeful talked not about her ability to bring down that moose, but to "field dress" it. We're more comfortable when women prepare food instead of shooting it in the head. But that's our gender stereotype, not a reflection of anything inherent in the act of bringing down prey.<br />But hunting is a more widespread - and less glamorous - profession than it is sometimes made out to be. And it has less to do with aggression than you might think.<br />It's true that competition among males for access to fertile females is common among animals from butterflies to baboons, and the wrangling can be vicious. But the link between being aggressive and predatory is tenuous. We usually think of predators as animals like wolves or eagles subduing large, usually warm-blooded, prey, but why dismiss insectivores like, say, warblers or hedgehogs, from their ranks?<br />Some biologists refer to any food item as "prey" and talk about animals like seed-eating kangaroo rats as seed predators. Even if that is going a bit too far, why is a hawk swooping down on a rabbit seen as more aggressive than a songbird snapping its bill against the hard shell of a beetle? Hunting is getting food, not waging war.<br />To be sure, group hunting such as that seen in the chimpanzees and now the bonobos as well as many human societies does involve elaborate behavioral rituals. And in some cultures, hunting, because it requires bravery when the prey is itself dangerous, is used as a test of manhood. But this does not mean that predation itself is aggressive in any form.<br />Even if predation were aggressive, the fact remains that in virtually all animals that eat live food, males and females both hunt. In lions, of course, females even do most of the hunting; male violence is directed toward the rival males and their offspring. The role of male hunting in human evolution is the subject of hot debate among anthropologists. But except for a few kinds of animals, males do not go out and bring home the bacon (or the caterpillars) while the females stay home with the kittens, pups or chicks. Both sexes share the foraging duties. Any tendencies toward aggressive behavior that evolved out of hunting food would have to occur in both sexes.<br />It is undeniable that aggression, violence, dominance and war are all "gendered" in our society; that is, they all have connotations with maleness and femaleness. And I am not suggesting that human aggression is just as common in women as it is in men. But the idea that hunting somehow signals a tendency toward violence should be as much of a surprise to us as it would be to the bonobo.<br />Marlene Zuk is the author of "Riddled With Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edzuk.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edzuk.php</a><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><strong>EDITORIAL</strong><br /><strong>The surprising life of a polar archipelago<br /></strong>Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />Life on this planet always surprises us. Animals turn out to be smarter than humans expect. Biological interrelationships turn out to be more intricate and more finely tuned than we had predicted.<br />The latest example is a biological survey in and around the South Orkney Islands - a clutch of islands halfway between the tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula - that shows greater biodiversity than scientists had expected. It included familiar species, like chinstrap penguins, as well as less familiar ones, like aquatic worms and soft corals. Scientists also discovered five new species of sea mosses and minute crustaceans related to wood lice.<br />It is a welcome reminder that the perceived biological "poverty" of the polar regions derives from the fact that it's easier to count species on land than in the ocean. Once you look beneath the waves - the team of scientists aboard a British Antarctic Survey research vessel spent seven weeks doing so - it becomes clear how rich these regions are. The vast majority of the species recorded - 821 out of 1,224 - live on the ocean floor.<br />One of the more striking conclusions is that the South Orkney Islands, and other polar islands like them, may be the last regions on the globe where biodiversity has changed relatively little over the past century. This survey provides a base-line estimate of polar life before the increasing effects of climate change are felt. It is part of the Census of Marine Life, a 10-year project.<br />What those effects may be, and how hard we need to work against them, are also suggested in a new report from the World Wildlife Fund. It warns that 75 percent of the major penguin colonies in the Antarctic may well perish with a 2 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edantarctic.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edantarctic.php</a><br /><br />**********************<br /><strong>Cruise ship stranded in Antarctic with 122 on board</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />BUENOS AIRES: An Antarctic cruise ship carrying 122 passengers and crew started to take on water and leak fuel after it ran aground on Thursday, an Argentine naval official said.<br />Admiral Daniel Martin told local television a nearby passenger ship was on its way to the stricken Panamanian-flagged vessel, called the Ushuaia after the Tierra del Fuego port from which it sailed in Argentina on Sunday.<br />He said none of the boat's passengers had been injured.<br />"We've received information from the captain of the Ushuaia that the boat is grounded ... with a minimal amount of water coming in and some fuel loss," Martin said.<br />He said the ship lay some 186 miles (300 km) southwest of Argentina's Marambio military base on the Antarctic Peninsula.<br />Cruise travel has grown in Antarctica in recent years, with tourists paying thousands of dollars to see towering icebergs, seals, whales and penguins.<br />A year ago, more than 150 crew and passengers, many of them elderly, escaped unhurt in a dramatic rescue after their cruise ship hit ice off Antarctica and sank.<br />The ship is operated by Antarpply Expeditions, based in Ushuaia.<br />(Reporting by Helen Popper, Editing by Sandra Maler)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/america/OUKWD-UK-ANTARCTICA-CRUISESHIP.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/america/OUKWD-UK-ANTARCTICA-CRUISESHIP.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3D-qU1d-diAJiDr9TRyRgNXuWZ77x3gNX-1Euk4HDY3H1cc4YU84ORRlRErr4Dp_GZTrNy5fG3gk1J8N7aoFcPU3DfFzCLWaNSF8RESfz_W1WiewvC5u-AeYnovISh0wa5YJd9m2aRh0/s1600-h/DSC02464.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276179471945330642" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3D-qU1d-diAJiDr9TRyRgNXuWZ77x3gNX-1Euk4HDY3H1cc4YU84ORRlRErr4Dp_GZTrNy5fG3gk1J8N7aoFcPU3DfFzCLWaNSF8RESfz_W1WiewvC5u-AeYnovISh0wa5YJd9m2aRh0/s320/DSC02464.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Hopes fade for aid to U.S. automakers<br /></strong>By David M. Herszenhorn and David Stout<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: As the Senate Banking Committee opened the latest round of congressional hearings Thursday on a potential rescue package for U.S. automakers, the committee chairman, Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, suggested that it would be difficult for lawmakers to approve a financial lifeline for the Big Three.<br />Dodd used his initial round of questioning to emphasize that the administration of President George W. Bush or the Federal Reserve could act unilaterally to aid the auto industry.<br />"There are a number of ways that we could address this issue," Dodd said. "The one that has received a lot of attention is whether Congress will act. If Congress is going to act, it is going to require some significant effort of the coming days. There are alternatives to that."<br />Dodd then used his questioning of the first witness of the day, Gene Dodaro, the acting comptroller general of the United States, to highlight the authority that the Treasury or the Fed could use to aid the auto companies, either by tapping the $700 billion economic stabilization program approved by Congress in the autumn or the Fed using its existing powers to aid imperiled industries.<br />"Both of those avenues of authority are available," Dodaro said.<br />The Democratic congressional leadership has said it is eager to aid the industry, but there is substantial rank-and-file resistance to another corporate bailout, which opinion polls indicate is deeply unpopular with the public.<br />In recent days, congressional aides said it might be impossible to muster the votes for a rescue package even if the auto executives make a strong case during hearings before the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee on Friday. Congressional leaders have indicated that there is only a narrow window to approve an aid package for the automakers before Congress adjourns for the year, and that any effort to adopt legislation would likely prove futile if a protracted debate over policy or procedure were to break out.<br />But as the Senate banking hearing got under way, such a debate seemed unavoidable. Already some conservative House Republicans have called for letting one or more of the three companies fail and go into some sort of bankruptcy proceeding. And Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho pressed the question about bankruptcy as an option early in the hearing Thursday.<br />Also at the hearing, Senator Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, raised a new idea that would call on financial firms receiving assistance under the Treasury's $700 billion program to convert any auto company debt that they hold into equity stakes, easing the cash liquidity problems of the Big Three, and potentially allowing additional infusions of government cash into the financial firms.<br />As the legislative debate played out, the auto chief executives were back on Capitol Hill asking for assistance. Two weeks ago, the executives - Alan Mulally of Ford, Rick Wagoner of General Motors and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler - sought $25 billion in loan guarantees but left Washington empty-handed after skeptical lawmakers refused to approve aid until they heard detailed plans on how the companies could be viable.<br />"It's fair to say that last month's hearings were difficult for us," Wagoner said Thursday. "But we learned a lot."<br />This time, the executives are seeking more money - $34 billion - and also altered their approach. Instead of telling lawmakers about the fallout to the economy if the carmakers are allowed to collapse, the executives talked about building fuel-efficient cars and long-term strategies.<br />"Our plan dramatically accelerates and expands the restructuring that we've been driving in North America for the past several years," Wagoner said in prepared remarks.<br />"It's a blueprint for creating a new General Motors," he added, "one that is lean, profitable, self-sustaining and fully committed to product excellence and technology leadership, especially in alternative combustion."<br />In its plan to Congress, GM said it would sharply reduce jobs, factories, brands and executive compensation in a broad effort to become more competitive with American plants operated by Toyota, Honda and other foreign auto companies.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/cars.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/cars.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>EU adopts renewable energy proposals<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: The European Union agreed Thursday on a series of measures to promote green energy after resolving a long-running battle over biofuels.<br />But Italy would not drop its demand to review the legislation in 2014, preventing the EU from signing off on a deal to get 20 percent of the region's energy from renewable sources by 2020.<br />"We have agreement on everything except the deletion of the review clause," the European Parliament's lead negotiator, Claude Turmes, said after talks that went on until the early hours.<br />The green energy laws are a major part of an EU package to fight climate change, which it hopes will help spur a global deal with other big polluters like China and the United States.<br />"Europe faces a moment of truth over the next week on the issue of climate change as to whether this package goes through and goes through with environmental integrity," said the British secretary for energy and climate change, Ed Miliband.<br />Until Thursday, debate over biofuels had been deadlocked, holding back other measures to promote wind farms, solar power and energy from tides.<br />The European Commission proposed in January that 10 percent of road transport fuel should come from renewable sources by 2020. Much of that would come from biofuels, creating a large market that is coveted by exporters like Brazil and Indonesia, along with EU farming nations.<br />But environmentalists say biofuels made from grains and oilseeds increase food prices and force subsistence farmers to expand agricultural land by hacking into rainforests and draining wetlands, a process known as indirect land-use change.<br />The stand-off over biofuels ended with an agreement that up to almost a third of the EU's 10 percent goal would be met not through biofuels but through electric cars and trains.<br />"The 10 percent agri-fuels target has been seriously undermined," said Turmes, the negotiator. "The future cars will be electric," he added, "and there will be a strong push to get all trains in Europe to run on green electricity."<br />The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, will also come forward with proposals in 2010 to limit indirect land-use change, and biofuels made from non-food sources will be promoted. Turmes said Italy's demand for a review would undermine investment security and put at risk thousands of new jobs. Environmental groups also criticized the proposal.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/renew.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/renew.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong></strong><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>U.S. economic stimulus plan tied to energy savings<br /></strong>By John M. Broder<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: President-elect Barack Obama and leaders in Congress are fashioning a plan to pour billions of dollars into a jobs program to jolt the economy and lay the groundwork for a more energy-efficient one.<br />The details and cost of the so-called green-jobs program are still unclear, but a senior Obama aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a work in progress, said it would probably include the weatherizing of hundreds of thousands of homes, the installation of "smart meters" to monitor and reduce home energy use, and billions of dollars in grants to state and local governments for mass transit and infrastructure projects.<br />The green component of the much larger stimulus plan would cost at least $15 billion a year, and perhaps considerably more, depending on how the projects were defined, aides working on the package said.<br />During the campaign, Obama supported a measure to address global warming by capping carbon emissions while allowing companies to buy and trade pollution permits. He said he would devote $150 billion of the revenue from the sale of those permits over 10 years to energy efficiency and alternative energy projects to wean the nation from fuels that are the main causes of the heating the atmosphere.<br />But the Obama adviser who discussed the green energy project said Obama would not await passage of a global warming bill before embarking on the new energy and infrastructure spending. House and Senate supporters of a climate bill said they would continue working on legislative language but did not expect quick action on a cap-and-trade law because of the economic emergency.<br />That means that the green-jobs program would not be financed with pollution credits bought by power generators and other carbon emitters, but instead would be added to the budget deficit.<br />Congressional officials working with the Obama administration said the stimulus program was also likely to involve tax breaks or direct government subsidies for a variety of clean energy projects, including solar arrays, wind farms, advanced biofuels and technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants.<br />The programs will be a part of a larger economic stimulus package whose outlines are faint but which is expected to cost $400 billion to $500 billion. Obama has said that his goal is to create or save 2.5 million jobs in the next two years. He has assigned to his economic and environmental advisers the task of devising a proposal that is expected to combine a shot of new federal money into existing federal and state programs and the possible creation of agencies modeled on New Deal public works programs.<br />"We'll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead," Obama said in a radio address last month, echoing a campaign promise with a new sense of urgency.<br />The political climate seems favorable to an economic stimulus plan, but large sums of new money touch off lobbying frenzies and energy projects spur debate between conservationists and those who want to more fully exploit domestic sources of oil, natural gas and coal.<br />Some experts said the record of government's intervention in energy markets and new technologies was not promising, citing as a spectacular example the Carter-era Synthetic Fuels Corporation, which spent more than $3 billion without producing any commercially usable amount of coal-based liquid fuel.<br />Ethanol and other non-oil-based fuels have also not proved their commercial value, in some cases yielding less energy than was needed to produce them, or, in ethanol's case, diverting land to corn and driving up food prices.<br />The plan could also face resistance from fiscal hawks. In 2004, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, almost single-handedly blocked a $100 billion energy package, saying the billions of dollars in subsidies for ethanol and other alternative fuels were little more than a special-interest boondoggle. The bill was revived a year later at half the cost, and much of the money in it has not been spent.<br />"Now they're talking about some large amount of money — what, $100 billion? — and spending it on windmills, job training, whatever," said David Kreutzer, who studies energy economics and climate change at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group. "But where do you get the $100 billion in the first place? Are you going to take $100 billion from some other part of the economy, are you going to tax some people to pay for it? Are you just going to print it or borrow it? The money has to come from somewhere."<br />The Obama team and congressional leaders say they want a plan ready shortly after Congress reconvenes in January.<br />Obama has said that, after stabilizing the economy and the markets, putting the nation on the path to a more energy-efficient future is his top priority. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, said this week that rebuilding infrastructure and creating green jobs was "the first order of business that we will have" when Congress reconvenes in January. Several hearings are planned even before Obama takes office on Jan. 20.<br />State officials say a lack of financing has stalled billions of dollars in projects. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California told Obama this week that the states were ready to break ground with $136 billion in infrastructure projects that could provide new jobs within two years.<br />The American Public Transportation Association, which represents local mass transit authorities, said there were $8 billion in "ready-to-go" projects that could preserve or create thousands of jobs and provide more energy-efficient transportation.<br />Beverly Scott, the chief executive of Atlanta's transit agency and head of the national association, told Congress in October that the projects included diesel-electric hybrid buses for Chicago; a new bus maintenance shop for Eugene, Oregon; and a set of crossover tracks to allow San Francisco's rapid transit trains to turn around more quickly and carry more riders.<br />The Obama aide said the residential smart meters were a relatively small project that would not create a large number of jobs, but the aide said they would be an essential building block for the electric grid of the future. The new grid — a multiyear, multibillion-dollar project — would more efficiently move electricity from its source to its destination and would reward those who saved power or used it during off-peak hours.<br />Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, who heads the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he was sympathetic to Obama's desire to pump up the economy and reduce energy usage. But Bingaman said he was wary of big government spending programs without sufficient oversight or expertise.<br />"Just buying smart meters for everybody doesn't really move the ball very far," said Bingaman, who will hold a hearing next week to gather ideas for energy-related stimulus spending. "Realistically speaking, getting money properly spent in a short period of time requires some degree of competence in the government agency doing it. The best plan is to start with existing programs that work, like weatherization, and build on those."<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/04green.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/04green.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Nippon Oil to merge with Nippon Mining<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />TOKYO: Nippon Oil, the biggest Japanese refiner, said Thursday that it was merging with Nippon Mining in an effort to cut capacity and costs as a global economic slowdown reduced demand for oil products.<br />The merger, expected to be completed next October, may signal the start of a long-awaited consolidation in the Japanese refining sector, which is saddled with aging plants and weak retail margins, and could presage more global deals as operators see the end of four years of record margins and prepare for contracting oil demand.<br />Shares in both companies jumped more than 15 percent in Tokyo after the merger was announced, before weakening later, taking their combined market value to more than $8.8 billion. Two Japanese rivals, Showa Shell - partly owned by Royal Dutch Shell - and Idemitsu Kosan rose by about 6 percent as talk of consolidation grew.<br />A combined Nippon Oil-Nippon Mining will cut refining capacity by about a fifth, or 400,000 barrels per day, by April 2012, the presidents of the two companies said at a news conference. The cut is the equivalent of about 8 percent of the total capacity the Japanese market.<br />The new company, which will also be the top Japanese copper processor, will aim to cut costs by ¥60 billion, or $645 million, by April 2013, and eventually cut more than $1 billion in annual costs.<br />The global slowdown has halved refining margins since spring, with Japan hit particularly hard, with its population quick to switch to more fuel-efficient cars after oil prices spiked this year.<br />"This could trigger consolidation and realignments among local oil refiners," a Merrill Lynch analyst, Takashi Enomoto, said in a note to clients. "And low oil refining margins in Japan, compared to global levels, may see structural correction."<br />Toshihiro Nikai, the Japanese minister of economy, trade and industry, said the move was ambitious and "extremely important" for Japan, which has to import all its fuel.<br />The combined sales at Nippon Oil and Nippon Mining are forecast at ¥13.15 trillion in the year ending in March.<br />The president of Nippon Oil, Shinji Nishio, said refinery capacity was being reduced to make the companies more competitive. "It's important we win in terms of cost effectiveness, at least in the Asian market," he said.<br />A merger would allow the companies to take advantage of scale and could lead to closing underutilized or unprofitable refineries.<br />Mitsunori Takahagi, the head of Nippon Mining, said: "We must take drastic measures to cut costs and implement changes if we are to win in an increasingly competitive industry."<br />A UBS analyst, Toshinori Ito, said the merger was positive for both companies and would be good for the industry as a whole, as it would create leadership in pricing, help eliminate excess price competition and tighten the supply-demand balance.<br />Japanese refiners with excess capacity in the Japanese market have turned to exports to keep plants busy, but lower oil demand in industrialized nations and a halt in Chinese fuel imports have squeezed profit out of exports.<br />Major refiners have been reducing crude refining plans in response to the economic slowdown. Japanese oil product sales in October tumbled to their lowest level for that month in 20 years. Nippon Oil plans to cut its crude runs by 18 percent this month from a year ago and has said it may continue to refine less until January if demand stays weak.<br />Nippon Oil closed up 3.4 percent at ¥331, while Nippon Mining ended 11.3 percent higher at ¥285.<br />The merger ratio and the new company's name will be set later, the companies said. The new business will have three units: refining and sales, oil exploration and metals.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/nippon.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/nippon.php</a><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>Nigerian state pays for peace in oil fields</strong><br />By Will Connors<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />ESCRAVOS, Nigeria: As dusk approached and the glow from the oil rig gas flares grew stronger, the oilmen, politicians and militants arrived by boat in small groups to celebrate the opening of 911 Resort, a half-finished villa accessible only by boat at the outer edge of the creeks of the oil-rich Niger Delta.<br />Among the crowd at the resort - which takes its name from Operation 911, the original campaign by the Nigerian military against the militants - state ministers mingled with American oil contractors and Lebanese businessmen chatted to militants-turned-local politicians before they all sat down at long tables cluttered with bottles of wine and champagne. Hundreds of villagers watched from behind a barbed-wire fence prowled by guard dogs as comedians and musicians entertained the guests.<br />The scene, surreal as it was, would have been all but unimaginable two years ago, when this remote region of southern Nigeria was in the midst of a torrid stretch of kidnappings, killings and pipeline vandalism.<br />"The fact that I went there without security is a huge statement, but it's still on a knife's edge," said one American oil worker who attended the opening and did not want to be named because of company rules about speaking publicly.<br />For years the Niger Delta has been plagued by instability caused by armed militants who kidnap foreign oil workers or wealthy Nigerians for ransom, clash with the military and sabotage oil pipelines.<br />Oil worth billions of dollars is pumped out of Nigeria every year, and yet the average Nigerian earns less than $2 a day. The militants have claimed to be fighting on behalf of local people who get no share of the oil riches, but their actions often boiled down to profit-driven criminality.<br />And while other states in the region continue to be hampered by violence between militant gangs and the military, Delta State, under its governor, Emmanuel Uduaghan, has found a rare measure of peace. It has accomplished this not by fighting the militants but by drawing them into the government and making sure they are awarded valuable contracts from the oil companies, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell, that dominate the oil business here.<br />"The state government has established favorable circumstances and has been very pragmatic," said a retired Nigerian general, Henry Clark, who has been following the situation in the Niger Delta and whose brother is a prominent regional leader. "The state governor is using the militants, he's buying them over. You give them positions in government and empower them, these are money-multiplying effects. The moment people see economic development, they come to your side."<br />While the relative peace has allowed for events like the 911 Resort opening, the means by which the peace was attained has attracted severe scrutiny from observers who feel that the local government is dealing with a ticking time bomb.<br />"It's not peace, it's just quiet," said Damka Pueba, of the delta-based Democracy Stakeholders Network, an advocacy group for delta residents and communities.<br />"I don't think it's smart because at the end of the day things are going to spill over. They need to address the real, core issues. There's nothing sustainable about what the governor is doing."<br />Uduaghan, a former doctor who took office in 2007, has quickly risen to national prominence for his pragmatic approach to dealing with the militants.<br />The most significant and controversial decision by Uduaghan was to hand out government positions to militant leaders. One newly created office in particular, the Delta State Waterways Security Committee, is led by and staffed with many former militants, or "youth activists," as they are often referred to locally.<br />Militants still active in the creeks quickly recognized the benefits of this approach and made concessions to the state government in return for financial assistance or contracts from oil and construction companies.<br />"Including activists is a necessity because one of the problems before was political exclusion, which has been resolved," said George Timinimi, a former high-level militant and now the commissioner for the Delta State Waterways Security Committee. "Development is a gradual thing. The oil companies are doing their best. It's not them alone. Once the people see that the developments are happening there will be lasting peace."<br />Uduaghan is troubled by the willingness of the oil companies to deal directly with the militants, setting them up as powerful figures outside the state's control. "The trend that is dangerous right now is the oil companies' awarding contracts to militants," he said in a recent speech. "People of Delta State are entitled to contracts from oil companies, and I urge the oil companies to continue to give contracts to local communities."<br />The governor did not say whom he had in mind, but local officials quickly pointed to a militant leader who goes by the name Tom Polo and is reputed to be the most powerful person in the region. A shadowy figure who is the object of constant speculation, Polo has placed himself and his allies in strategic positions throughout the state and is earning vast sums of money from multinational oil companies and the Nigerian government by providing security for oil pipelines running through the Niger Delta.<br />"Tom Polo is paid by Chevron and Shell, and by the NNPC for protection," said a Western regional analyst, referring to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. "The only way to get things done is through him."<br />Even if the government manages to rein in Polo - and that is far from assured - local human rights advocates remain leery of the Uduaghan approach, calling it a Band-Aid that will lead only to greater problems.<br />"I think it's the buying of temporary peace. They cannot continue to give militants juicy contracts and money forever," said Chris Alagoa, of the Niger Delta Peace and Security Secretariat, a community organization. "They will collaborate today, but for how long will that go on? At some point it will explode. They will come to realize they've been used and are not part of the establishment. It's like sweeping things under the carpet, where they will be left to fester."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/africa/nigeria.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/africa/nigeria.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Gunmen kidnap 3 at Nigeria oil facility</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />LAGOS: Gunmen in Nigeria attacked a vessel near an offshore oil facility and kidnapped two expatriates and a Nigerian in the restive Niger Delta, a private security source said on Thursday.<br />The vessel Oceanic Orion was attacked at the Adanga crude oil flow station, operated by Canada's Addax Petroleum, in Akwa Ibom state in the delta, the source said.<br />Kidnappings are frequent in the Niger Delta, home to Nigeria's oil sector. Hundreds of foreigners have been seized in the region since early 2006, most of whom have been released unharmed.<br />Gunmen last week kidnapped a Scottish man working for an oil services firm, while militants have held two Britons captive for more than two months in the delta.<br />(Reporting by Nick Tattersall; Writing by Randy Fabi; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-NIGERIA-DELTA.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-NIGERIA-DELTA.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276179153044111890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipwn-pjcC6kRgVzfwtd9zDxOQ0GfP_AZBJpsoFtpyoHvVuLVUN-lZegYjknBxA7ybisBn_OGsX4GHmfvdz1bD2Y8gEe5XUN6FIZB83tg7LTGcrREEJe3eEtkWVSamDGHDseJ9teuY4npg/s320/DSC02466.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Sarkozy announces €26 billion stimulus plan for France</strong><br />By Katrin Bennhold<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />PARIS: President Nicolas Sarkozy of France vowed Thursday to spend some €26 billion over the next two years in an effort to soften the blow of an economic crisis that was already increasing jobless lines and risked pushing the economy into recession.<br />The plan, worth about 1.3 percent of the French gross domestic product, is designed to add as much as 0.8 percentage point to growth next year, officials said. It breaks with French tradition by focusing on stimulating investment, rather than consumption. It seeks to bolster companies' cash flow by bringing forward €11.4 billion, or $14.6 billion, in tax credits, tax rebates and other state debts owed to businesses, and accelerating €10.5 billion in public infrastructure investment.<br />In a week where temporary factory closures again made headlines, the package also set aside funds to help the country's auto and construction industries, two sectors that have been hit particularly hard by the current slump in demand.<br />Sarkozy, who announced the plan in the northern industrial town of Douai, near a troubled Renault plant, struck a forceful tone in explaining why, unlike many of his predecessors, he chose not to focus the package on consumers.<br />"Our response to the crisis is investment," he said in an address televised live. "Because it is the best way to underpin activity and to save the jobs of today. Because it is the only way to prepare the jobs of tomorrow."<br />But he also peppered his hourlong speech with characteristic references to state interventionism, making the proposed aid conditional on companies making the French national interest their priority.<br />"I will not allow a dismantling of France's industrial base," Sarkozy said. "There will be no bailout - neither in the auto sector, not elsewhere - without a counterpart. There will be no aid without the commitment not to outsource abroad." His remarks were greeted with loud cheers and applause.<br />Specifically addressing the country's managerial class, he warned against taking a cavalier attitude toward job cuts. "I want to tell them: they have to guard against the temptation of taking advantage of the crisis to make layoffs that are not absolutely necessary," he said.<br />The plan for France, the third-largest economy in Europe, follows other stimulus programs announced across Europe in recent weeks. Germany, the largest European economy; Britain, the second largest; as well as Spain and Italy have all sought to reassure consumers and business leaders that they were acting to restore economic growth and ease the crisis.<br />The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, called last week for member states to spend about 1.5 percent of their gross domestic product on reviving economic growth. While national governments have announced tens of billions of euros in stimulus plans, economists note that the numbers have not included much in the way of new money.<br />This criticism is partly valid for the French program, which counts the payment of tax rebates that would have been paid out anyway, only later.<br />Still, the package was broadly welcomed by economists and executives accustomed to French governments that concentrate their efforts on consumers rather than companies. Following the oil shocks in the 1970s and 1980s, Sarkozy's predecessors Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and François Mitterrand both took action in favor of consumers - one reason, analysts say, that France fell behind some of its neighbors on investment in recent decades.<br />Laurence Parisot, the president of the largest French employers' federation, Medef, said Thursday that she shared Sarkozy's "vision" of focusing on investment. "This crisis is a painful convulsion," she said in a statement. "But it is forcing us all to accelerate the modernization of our country."<br />Among the planned investment projects Sarkozy outlined are €4 billion in state spending on military, research and infrastructure projects. State-owned companies like the national railways, the Paris urban transport network and Électricité de France will step up their investment by another €4 billion.<br />Meanwhile, €1.8 billion was earmarked for the housing sector, including funds to renovate state-owned housing for the poor and to broaden subsidies for no-interest housing loans. Among the measures dedicated to the auto industry is a provision giving households a €1,000 rebate if they replace a vehicle more than 10 years old with a new car emitting less than 160 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer, or 5.6 ounces per 0.62 mile.<br />Sarkozy's plan is expected to widen the French deficit to 3.9 percent of GDP next year and add €20 billion to French debt. Still, despite the stimulus package, few observers expected France to avoid recession next year, after the economy unexpectedly expanded by 0.1 percent in the third quarter. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the French economy will contract by 0.4 percent in 2009, falling into its first recession in more than 15 years.<br />The overall economy of the 15-member euro zone has probably already entered recession. It contracted in the third quarter and finance ministers said this week it could shrink further in the fourth quarter.<br />European economists are already describing 2009 as "a lost year."<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/stimulus.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/stimulus.php</a><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Use of French terrorism law on railroad saboteurs draws criticism<br /></strong>By Celestine BohlenBloomberg News<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />PARIS: The French police last month swooped down on the village of Tarnac with helicopters and dogs and dragged several young people out of bed.<br />By Nov. 15, the police had arrested nine people, including five living in a farmhouse on a hill overlooking Tarnac, and accused them of associating with "a terrorist enterprise." Their alleged crime: Causing massive train delays by draping horseshoe-shaped iron bars over 25,000-volt power lines on four separate tracks, disabling 160 trains.<br />The charges have reignited debate over a 1996 anti-terrorism law long criticized in France and elsewhere as overly broad. On Wednesday, the Liberation newspaper's banner headline about the case was: "Terrorists, Really?" Last week, raucous demonstrators went to a Paris courthouse to demand the release of five suspects. Three were freed Dec. 2, four were let go earlier and two remain in custody, all pending further investigation.<br />"To go from sabotage to terrorism is a gigantic qualitative leap," said Michel Gillabert, a 27-year-old stonecutter who heads a support group for the suspects. "We're looking at 20 years in prison for causing train delays."<br />The sabotage stranded about 40,000 travelers for up to six hours on Nov. 8, but no one was hurt and there was no risk of derailment, said Jean-Paul Boulet, a spokesman for Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français, or SNCF, the national rail company.<br />Opponents of the law claim it could become a cudgel to intimidate nonviolent protesters, especially as France teeters on the brink of recession, making the social fabric more fragile.<br />"There is a temptation during a time of crisis to consider any illegal manifestation of political expression to be of a terrorist nature," Gilbert Thiel, a member of France's team of anti-terrorist magistrates, said in an interview.<br />Under French law, magistrates decide what charges, if any, to take to trial. Thiel said a decision on whether to use the police's initial terrorist-law charges was months away.<br />The French terrorism law was criticized in a July report by Human Rights Watch, an organization in New York. The report said the law requires a "low standard of proof" to arrest suspects only tangentially associated with any terrorist groups.<br />Government officials say the suspects are dangerous. Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie described them on Nov. 11 as "ultra-leftists" who share a "total rejection of any democratic expression of political opinion, and an extremely violent tone."<br />The suspects are mostly graduate students from middle-class families, aged 22 to 34. One of the two suspects still in custody, Julien Coupat, 34, is being charged with "directing a terrorist group," said Isabelle Montagne, a spokeswoman for the Paris Prosecutor's office.<br />She said the police believed he was the anonymous author of a 2007 book entitled "The Coming Insurrection," which mixes an anarchist political philosophy with instructions on disrupting state symbols, like railroads.<br />The book's implicit threats prompted the police to begin monitoring Coupat's group in mid-2007, said Xavier Raufer, a professor of the Institute of Criminology in Paris.<br />Montagne said various objects, such as heavy cable cutters, climbing gear, screw cutters and leftist literature were found in the searches of the farmhouse at Tarnac.<br />The police said the nine suspects sabotaged the high-speed rail lines on the night of Nov. 7, just before the long Armistice Day weekend.<br />"To take on the railroads, particularly on a holiday weekend, is a sure way to impress public opinion," Guillaume Pepy, the head of SNCF, said in an interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien.<br />Boulet, the SNCF spokesman, said the French railroads, with two million passengers a day, had never been targeted in such a systematic way.<br />The last time France dealt with home-grown anarchists, they were of a more violent variety. In the 1970s and 1980s, Action Directe - the French version of the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy - carried out commando-type actions, including bank robberies and assassinations.<br />Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on extremist groups at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations, in Paris, said the authorities' concerns about the train saboteurs was understandable.<br />"When a group of people goes from theorizing about violence against state institutions to taking action, that is the moment for the police to do something," Camus said. The police reaction "was designed to be dissuasive."<br />Thiel, the magistrate, said today's economic climate could give rise to potentially violent fringe groups. "The more tensions there are in society, and God knows we are in a period of economic and financial crisis which only makes inequalities all the more obvious, it is certain that some young people will be easily manipulated," he said.<br />In Tarnac, where a 160-year-old oak in the main square is named "Liberty Tree," residents are aghast at the use of the terrorism law in this case. "Guilty, not guilty, that's not the issue," said Manu, 28, a forest worker who declined to give his last name because he did not want to be associated with the case. "The problem is the word terrorism."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/europe/trains.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/europe/trains.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivguigEP84FELeV6xRHJfg9zWBfzJ8HlZD1jDIT6pojY7T2jLRwYNrqXza5d3Kqqdk_oMoGDfM-jzEiNVJ3jw6TPj-Ja-znOZs5-d0m5uvWWSrq4CLM8IiygQiNOhL8enyuc2SoBxa4EU/s1600-h/DSC02465.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276179464503110002" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivguigEP84FELeV6xRHJfg9zWBfzJ8HlZD1jDIT6pojY7T2jLRwYNrqXza5d3Kqqdk_oMoGDfM-jzEiNVJ3jw6TPj-Ja-znOZs5-d0m5uvWWSrq4CLM8IiygQiNOhL8enyuc2SoBxa4EU/s320/DSC02465.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Fresh links to Pakistan complicate U.S. diplomacy after Mumbai attacks<br /></strong>By Salman Masood and Robert F. Worth<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD: The Mumbai police on Thursday identified a second Pakistani terrorist as an engineer of the bloody assaults on the city last week and confirmed that they were investigating whether a Mumbai man arrested on terrorism charges had scoped out some of the high-profile targets the attackers struck, leaving more than 170 dead.<br />The new links to Pakistan added fresh complications to American diplomatic efforts to secure cooperation between India and Pakistan, which has questioned some of the evidence that Pakistanis were involved. On Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met in Islamabad with Pakistani leaders, a day after meeting with Indian leaders, to urge that the two countries work together to find the attackers and bring them to justice.<br />"What I heard was a commitment that this is the course that will be taken," Rice told reporters at Chaklala Air Base after meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.<br />Rice's brief visit to Pakistan completed a delicate diplomatic minuet with visits to the region by the secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, who was in Pakistan on Wednesday and flew to India on Thursday for meetings.<br />In Mumbai, Rakesh Maria, India's joint commissioner of police, said that the second Lashkar-e-Taiba military commander who helped engineer the attacks was Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. Maria said that the surviving attacker, 21-year-old Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, identified Lakhvi and said he helped indoctrinate all the attackers.<br />Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani guerrilla group that long focused on the disputed territory of Kashmir, is officially banned in Pakistan but, with a history of links to Pakistan's intelligence, has been hiding in plain sight for years. On Thursday, a spokesman for the group's leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, denied involvement in the Mumbai attacks, Pakistani news media reported.<br />Maria also said that it was believed that the attackers were in contact with Lakhvi on their journey from Karachi to Mumbai by sea and may have been during the attacks as well. Indian and American intelligence officials have already identified another Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, Yusuf Muzammil, as a mastermind of the attacks, and said he was in contact by satellite phone with the attackers during their journey.<br />Another police official, Deven Bharti, said the interrogation of Kasab, the captured gunman, was focusing on three lines of inquiry: the identities of the other nine; their training and planning; and whether they had local accomplices.<br />The suspected collaborator, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, was arrested on Feb. 10 in Rampur in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh a in connection with gun and grenade attack on New Year's Eve on a police camp. He was arrested with two others; all three are suspected members of Lashkar-e-Taiba.<br />Ansari told police interrogators in Uttar Pradesh that from fall 2007 to February 2008, he had been in Mumbai scoping out possible targets for the guerrilla group, including the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the old Victoria rail station.<br />The Uttar Pradesh police said that Ansari was arrested after he returned to Rampur to pick up weapons left behind from the New Year's Eve attack and take them to Mumbai for use in a later operation.<br />Ms Rice, during talks with Pakistani leaders, stressed that Pakistan should be seen as acting sincerely and quickly.<br />"Pakistan should also take the necessary steps to prevent any non-state actors from indulging in such activities against any country from its soil," Rice said, according to a statement from the Pakistani prime minister's office.<br />At the news conference in Chaklala, Rice said that the Indian government is concerned and determined "to find the perpetrators, bring them to justice, determined to prevent the next attack."<br />"I found the Pakistani leadership understanding the importance of doing so. Particularly in rooting out terrorists and rounding up whoever perpetrated this attack, from wherever it was perpetrated, whatever its sources, whatever the leads, because everybody wants to prevent further attacks," she said.<br />For his part, Zardari told Rice that he will take "strong action against any Pakistani elements found involved in the Mumbai attacks," according to a spokesperson for the Pakistani president.<br />Rice said Pakistan should be seen as acting sincerely and quickly.<br />Within India, sharp questions have been raised about the stunning inadequacy of Indian security forces and intelligence services. On Thursday, the Indian Air Force chief, Fali Homar Major told reporters that new intelligence reports had persuaded the authorities to declare an alert at airports. "This is based on a little warning that has been received," he said. "We are prepared as usual."<br />He offered no further details, but an Indian television network, NDTV, said the warning related to what it called a "9/11" plot timed to coincide with the anniversary on Dec. 6 of the destruction by Hindu militants of the Babri mosque in northern India in 1992.<br />News reports on Thursday said six airports, including those at New Delhi and Mumbai, were on alert, with heightened security searches for passengers and warplanes ready to take to the skies.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/05mumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/05mumbai.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>India seen as unequal to counterterrorism task</strong><br />By Robert F. Worth<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />MUMBAI: In the wake of the devastating terrorist attacks here last week, one thing has become clear: India's security forces are so spectacularly unprepared, its intelligence agencies so riven by conflict and miscommunication, that it lacks the ability to respond adequately to such attacks, much less prevent them.<br />This nation of 1.2 billion has only a few hundred counterterrorism officials in its intelligence bureau. Its tiny, ill-paid police force has little training, few weapons and even less ammunition. The coast guard has fewer than 100 working boats for a shoreline nearly 7,000 kilometers, or 4,300 miles, long.<br />In the latest revelation of India's lack of preparedness, on Wednesday, a full week after the attacks, sniffer dogs discovered a bag with a nearly 8-kilogram, or 17-pound, bomb that was left by the terrorists in the city's central train station and that was later deposited in a pile of lost bags, police officials said. The police defused the bomb on the spot and never bothered to clear the station, Victoria Terminus. It is also known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and is Mumbai's busiest train station.<br />Long before the attacks last week on Mumbai, which stunned the world and left 173 people dead, Indian intelligence officials and their Western counterparts had passed on various tips about the possibility of such assaults. But the Indians utterly lacked the ability to assess the significance of those tips or respond to them.<br />As a result, a group of just 10 attackers, according to the police, took the city by surprise on Nov. 26. They easily killed the police officers who opposed them and seized control of some of the city's best-known landmarks, as all of India watched in horror on television.<br />"The scale of the task before us is colossal," said Ajai Sahni, a former Indian intelligence official and the executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in Delhi. "We are looking at a system which does not have the capacity to either generate adequate intelligence, or to respond to it."<br />Although India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has promised far-reaching reforms, earlier efforts to improve police training and effectiveness have gone nowhere.<br />That could leave India, a crucial American ally and one of the engines of global economic growth in the past decade, dangerously vulnerable to more terrorist strikes.<br />The Mumbai attacks have pushed tensions between India and Pakistan, where the gunmen are said to have been trained, to their highest level in years. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to New Delhi on Wednesday and to Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, on Thursday in an effort to calm the situation.<br />The violence has also fed an unprecedented and broad-based rage at the Indian government for not having done more to protect its people.<br />On Wednesday evening, tens of thousands in Mumbai marched near the attacked sites, chanting slogans that made their anger clear. Similar rallies were held in New Delhi and in the technology hubs of Bangalore and Hyderabad.<br />Many Indians were stunned to discover how easily, and thoroughly, the group of militants initially overpowered the police who tried to stop them (all but one of the militants were eventually shot and killed).<br />The attackers all had AK-47 rifles and pistols, and plenty of ammunition - far more firepower than any of the officers who confronted them. None of the police officers who initially encountered the terrorists had bulletproof vests, allowing the attackers to kill a number of them quickly, despite some heroic efforts at resistance.<br />Scenes from closed-circuit cameras, played endlessly on TV in the days after the attacks, showed police officers running from the gunmen alongside terrified civilians. In all, 20 police officers and commandos were killed.<br />After the assault began on the night of Nov. 26, it took hours for the Indian commando squad to arrive in Mumbai because it is based near Delhi, hundreds of miles away, and does not have its own aircraft.<br />Even after the commandos, who are better armed and trained than police officers are, began fighting the terrorists holed up in the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel, they lacked a floor plan, whereas the militants seemed to know the hotel's layout well.<br />In a sense, none of this was a surprise. India's National Security Guards force has only about 7,400 commandos, and it has often taken hours to respond to crises in the past, Sahni said. As for the city and state police forces, their equipment and training are far more meager, and they are lightly scattered across a vast population. India has 125 police officers for every 100,000 residents, one of the world's lowest ratios.<br />Intelligence failures also played a role in India's inability to deal properly with the Mumbai attacks. The United States warned Indian officials in mid-October of possible terrorist attacks on "touristy areas frequented by Westerners" in Mumbai, echoing other general alerts by Indian intelligence. In the past week, reports of other, far more detailed warnings have been rife in the Indian news media, though government officials have disputed them.<br />But the debate masks a broader problem, Sahni said: Neither the intelligence agencies nor the government has the ability to prioritize or assess those threats, or to act on them. The various wings of India's intelligence apparatus, like their American counterparts before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are famous for failing to communicate and share intelligence.<br />In the wake of the attacks, some police officials have become remarkably outspoken and even angry about their inability to defend the citizenry or even themselves.<br />"You see this old musket? It is useless," said Ankush Hotkar, a police officer, as he stood Wednesday in the cavernous hall of the main train station. He was pointing to a battered old hunting rifle in the hands of one of his fellow officers. Hotkar himself, despite his 26 years in the Mumbai police force, carried only a lathi, the wooden or Lucite pole that most police officers here carry as their only weapon. "The weapons they give us are no good, so policemen died," he said.<br />The Mumbai police are given scarcely any training and no opportunities to fire their weapons, Hotkar said. Starting salaries are 3,050 rupees a month, just over $60. "Maximum corruption is going on," Hotkar said wearily.<br />Somini Sengupta and Jeremy Kahn contributed reporting.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/security.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/security.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><strong>Pressure builds on Pakistan to rein in militants<br /></strong>By Jane Perlez and Somini Sengupta<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />LAHORE, Pakistan: Mounting evidence of links between the Mumbai terrorist attacks and a Pakistani militant group is posing the stiffest test so far of Pakistan's new government, raising questions as to whether it can - or wants to - rein in militancy here.<br />President Asif Ali Zardari says his government has no concrete evidence of Pakistani involvement in the attacks, and American officials have not established a direct link to the government. But as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice landed in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Thursday morning, pressure was building on the government to confront the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which Indian and American officials say carried out the Mumbai attacks.<br />Though officially banned, the group has hidden in plain sight for years. It has had a long history of ties to Pakistan's intelligence agencies. The evidence of its hand in the Mumbai attacks is accumulating from around the globe:<br />A former Defense Department official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that American intelligence analysts suspect that former officers of Pakistan's powerful spy agency and its army helped train the Mumbai attackers.<br />According to the Indian police, the one gunman who survived the terrorist attacks, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, told his interrogators that he trained during a year and half in at least four camps in Pakistan and at one met with Muhammad Hafeez Saeed, the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader.<br />And according to a Western official familiar with the investigation in Mumbai, another Lashkar leader, Yusuf Muzammil, whom the surviving gunman named as the plot's organizer, fielded phone calls in Lahore from the attackers.<br />Many of the charges against Lashkar originate from investigators in India, which has a long history of hostility with Pakistan. The United States shares an interest with India in shutting down Pakistani militant groups that pose threats to its soldiers in Afghanistan.<br />Today, Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose name means "army of the pure," operates openly in Lahore. Its militant wing, Western officials say, has used camps in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir and Pakistan's tribal areas to change from a group once focused primarily on Kashmir into one now determined to join the ranks of a global jihad. The Mumbai attacks, which included foreigners among its targets, seemed to fit the group's evolving emphasis.<br />The 63-year-old Saeed lives in a large compound that includes a cream-colored mosque that faces on to a bustling commercial street. A sign outside says Center of Qadsisiyah, a triumphant reference to the place where the Arabs defeated the Persians in the seventh century.<br />A spokesman for Saeed, Muhammad Yahya Mujahid, denied in an interview on Wednesday that Saeed was involved in the Mumbai attacks, and described the Indian demand that he be turned over along with 19 others as "propaganda."<br />"India wants him because he exposes India on Kashmir and on water closure," Mujahid said, referring to Pakistani complaints about India cutting off water sources to Pakistan.<br />The group's public face, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, runs Islamic schools and charity works and maintains a 30-hectare, or 75-acre, campus about 24 kilometers, or 15 miles, north of Lahore, at Muridke, he said. Since the terrorist attacks on the United States of Sept. 11, 2001, he added, "the scene has changed and the relationship is not so good with the establishment."<br />According to Western intelligence officials, Lashkar was formed in 1989 with the assistance of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, with Saeed as its head collaborator.<br />How far that relationship extends today remains a topic of intense debate, Western officials said. Critics in Pakistan of the ISI maintain that the intelligence agency still protects Lashkar.<br />Though established as a proxy force to fight India in Kashmir, Lashkar has since turned itself into a transnational group, officials say. Today it has cells in Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas, and a few of its fighters have even turned up in Iraq, officials said.<br />Whether the group has come under the influence of Al Qaeda is uncertain.<br />"We're not saying there's a direct hand in it, but you have to think there's some learning going on, emulation going on, there are influences or contacts of some kind," a senior American official said.<br />India security officials say that while Lashkar remains active in Indian-administered Kashmir, violent militant activities there have fallen significantly in recent years.<br />Accounts from the captured gunman in Mumbai as well as those from a former Lashkar fighter who spoke with The New York Times provided glimpses of its recruitment methods and how the Mumbai attacks were planned.<br />According to Rakesh Maria, the chief of the crime investigation branch of the Mumbai police, the surviving gunman, Kasab, came from a village called Faridkot, in Punjab. The son of a laborer, he dropped out of school after fourth grade and moved to Lahore to join an older brother and make a living as a day laborer.<br />There, he told investigators, he was recruited into Lashkar.<br />One of the camps he attended was in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, where Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Lashkar affiliate, did relief work after a big earthquake in 2005.<br />There were roughly 25 people, sometimes more, in each camp, said Deven Bharti, a police commissioner in Mumbai. Whether some of them were being prepared for other attacks on other targets, in India or elsewhere, is not known. "We can't rule it out," Bharti said.<br />Kasab received training in handling arms, navigating the sea and survival techniques. He was shown Google Earth maps and video images of his targets. At one of the sessions, he told interrogators, Saeed, the Lashkar leader, gave a motivational speech, covering a host of pan-Islamic grievances from Palestinian territory to Iraq to Kashmir.<br />A GPS navigational device was found on the boat that the gunmen used to get close to Mumbai, before killing its captain and abandoning it in the Arabian Sea. The GPS device showed that they left Karachi on Nov. 23.<br />He had only limited information about his conspirators, Bharti said. He did not know whether there were plans to attack other targets. "He was only a foot soldier," Bharti said.<br />He was given an AK-47, a pistol, grenades and 5,400 rupees, about $110. The police said they were still looking into whether they had collaborators who helped them plot the attack beforehand, or during the day of the siege. The police dismissed earlier reports that they had rented rooms earlier and positioned weapons.<br />Bharti said that the information Kasab had provided so far had checked out, including his most recent tip: that he and a partner, Ismail Khan, had abandoned a bag with an 8-kilogram, or 17-pound, bomb at Victoria Terminus, also known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the railway station where they began their killing spree. The police recovered the bag on Wednesday.<br />But much remains unclear or unknown about him. A strict practice among the trainers of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the former Lashkar fighter told The New York Times, was a system of changing the names of the members every few months, so that everyone had layers of names that were discarded over time.<br />That system was intended to make it very difficult to identify members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, and is a likely explanation why Pakistani investigators have had little luck in finding Kasab's family in Faridkot.<br />The former fighter, who comes from the tribal areas of Pakistan, said he joined Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2000, stayed for eight months, then switched to another group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, for "ideological reasons."<br />He said that retired Pakistani Army officers impressed with Lashkar's ideology joined its ranks as volunteers. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified to his former associates.<br />According to the former fighter, some members of Lashkar moved to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, particularly the Mohmand region, close to the city of Peshawar.<br />The group focused on waging war against India, he said, but was also committed to wider goals, among them the creation of an Islamic state in south and central Asia.<br />At its start in 1989, Osama bin Laden was widely reported to have been a financial supporter. Since 2002, Lashkar trainers have worked closely with Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, according to Seth Jones, an expert on militant groups at the RAND Corporation who has spent time in Afghanistan.<br />Their presence has increased in Afghanistan in the last year, Jones said. "They have had small numbers of fighters embed with local Afghan units on the ground such as the Taliban to gain combat experience and improve their tactics, techniques and procedures," he said.<br />Lashkar was banned under strong American pressure in 2002. Since then, Saeed disassociated himself from Lashkar, said his spokesman, Mujahid. Lashkar was now an "operational wing" to fight in Kashmir - its fighters no longer under Saeed's control.<br />Asked if he knew the operational commander of Lashkar, Mujahid waved his hand dismissively and said he was in Kashmir.<br />He also denied even knowing the name of Muzammil, the man identified by the Indian authorities as the person in charge of the Mumbai operation.<br />"Everyone who was interested in Kashmir, went to Kashmir," he said. "They are doing there what they have to do."<br />Jane Perlez reported from Lahore, and Somini Sengupta from Mumbai. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Jeremy Kahn from Mumbai.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/militants.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/militants.php</a><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Mumbai's elite see price of indifference</strong><br />By Anand Giridharadas<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />VERLA, India: Anand Sivakumaran saw Mumbai's security loopholes. He noticed hotels that checked passports upon check-in, but not bags. He noticed police officers at thronging train stations armed with bamboo sticks, but not guns. He saw soft spots for terrorists. And he did what many upright, affluent citizens of Mumbai do in such instances.<br />Nothing.<br />Well, not nothing. He may not have alerted anyone to it, but he used it as material. As a screenwriter in Bollywood, with movies like "Kalyug" and "Nazar" to his name, Sivakumaran, 37, tucked the loopholes into the plot line of his latest film to make it seem more believable.<br />Indians at all levels are asking questions after the terror attacks in Mumbai last week. But Sivakumaran, like many in the country's educated elite, is also turning the interrogation lamp on himself, asking: Was this our fault?<br />India's young, educated professionals can be accused of a kind of secessionism. While the poor vote in droves, they often sit elections out. They move into gated communities, sequestering themselves from the country around them; work for foreign firms in industrial parks that do not depend on the state for electricity and water; and insulate themselves from the smoggy air and potholed roads in their sleek sedans.<br />And then the gunmen arrived on their boats, and the government dithered and fumbled, and the educated classes began to see the price of apathy.<br />"The magnitude of this attack has, for the first time, shown to the present generation that indifference is cool only in college," said Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, a 31-year-old writer whose latest novel, "The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay," examines the mores of the young and prosperous. "On the streets of modern India, indifference is also called death."<br />Now it is indifference that is being besieged.<br />In the days since the attacks, thousands of young Indians have vented their outrage with the government on the Internet and via text message and signed up for various causes. Facebook communities seeking to galvanize action have attracted thousands of members. Marches have been organized. Petitions have been signed.<br />But the most intriguing plan may be the revival of an old, failed idea: that India be run by its brightest, not dullest, bulbs.<br />Strange thought, right?<br />In many countries, it is the affluent who vote and the poor who don't. India does the reverse. And so, in a country with an urban middle class in the tens of millions, few politicians reflect their values or even their styles of dress and speech. To watch Parliament on television is to witness a scene more evocative of a rural vegetable market than of a life in a modest office in Delhi or Mumbai.<br />Educated middle- and upper-class people have made some efforts over the years to penetrate the slow-moving, tea-sipping, sycophantic world of Indian politics. But with their unprofitable ideas of accountability and honesty, political parties like the Lok Paritran, founded by a group of engineers, have had limited luck. And so the rich enjoy their money and the poor enjoy their politics, and that is that.<br />The Mumbai attacks could - just could - interrupt that pattern. It seems that, when their own five-star hotels were struck, the elite quickly realized that, when you pay no attention to public life, you get what you pay for.<br />Sivakumaran, the screenwriter, in a Facebook post that ricocheted quickly among Indian Internet users, proposed a new kind of political party - "a party of professionals - engineers, doctors, architects, media people, ad guys, film makers, TV folk," he wrote.<br />The party, he added, would find the best minds and "put them up as candidates, raise money for them, market them, publicize them, get support at the grass-root level for them and try and get them elected."<br />Jaago Re! (Hindi for "Wake Up!") is a separate campaign, established in 2007, to register young urbanites to vote for leaders attentive to their issues. In the first days after the attacks, it reported a 30 percent spike in registrations in Mumbai.<br />Meanwhile, a campaign called Change India, based in Bangalore, sent out a mass text message urging city dwellers to behave like other Indian groups that vote in blocs and tend to be listened to by politicians.<br />These legions of disaffected people share a disgust for the government's handling of the Mumbai siege. They complain that it took a full night to bring commandos to the two hotels, since none were stationed in Mumbai. They complain that Indian officials maintained no floor plans of the biggest hotels. They complain that one official had the gall to say on television that "these things happen."<br />Some officials have resigned, and in the past that might have been enough. Middling governance has thrived in a country whose brightest minds seem not to care. Apathy is partly a consequence of the eternal Indian devotion to the family, which often comes at society's expense. A popular local refrain is that an Indian will throw garbage into the public square in order to have a pristine home.<br />In an earlier age of scarcity, the educated concentrated, understandably, on themselves, not on saving the world. But they continue to do so in an age of abundance, as the quest to make money overwhelms other quests. The young long to be bankers and programmers, not intelligence analysts or generals.<br />Sivakumaran graduated from the Indian Institutes of Technology, a group of engineering academies that are among the world's most selective. His friends, many of whom do not vote, work in various private industries. He could think of no friends from grade school or college who had entered politics or had even studied political science. But now his friends are speaking of voting regularly, of getting more involved, even of running for office themselves.<br />"Earlier, my only connection with politics and society was my one vote in five years, or complaining at a dinner with friends," Sivakumaran said. "It's got to be a hell of a lot more."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/letter.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/asia/letter.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>LETTERS</strong><br /><strong>Pakistan's fragile state<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />Pakistan's fragile state<br /></strong>William Pfaff asks the question "What was the message?" (Views, Dec. 4) and suggests motives for the Mumbai attacks.<br />I agree with his assessment that the new Pakistani government does not benefit from the attacks, so I doubt the Pakistani leaders were responsible. But the attacks have put the new civilian government on the defensive. Who benefits from that? Perhaps the Pakistani military, which has launched several coups in Pakistan's history?<br />If enough heat is put on the Pakistani civilian government, the military may have the perfect excuse to say, "We need to take control again."<br />Christian Haerle, Zurich<br /><br />Thomas Friedman ("Calling All Pakistanis," Views, Dec. 3) suggests that reactions from Pakistanis to the Mumbai attacks have been insufficient.<br />Pakistan's leadership, media and civil society have been very vocal in expressing solidarity with India. The Pakistani government has offered full cooperation. Pakistanis from all parts of society have come forward to condemn the common enemy. After all, Pakistan has become a playing field for terrorists as well.<br />Fair enough? Not according to Friedman who advises Pakistanis to take to the streets as they did when a Dutch cartoonist mocked Prophet Muhammad through his caricatures.<br />A better comparison would be to examine Pakistani reactions in the aftermath of the country's own 9/11, when the Marriott in Islamabad was razed by suicide bombers. Precious lives were lost. Did Pakistanis take to the streets? No. Why expect otherwise for Mumbai?<br />Saira Yamin, Arlington, Virginia<br /><br />Thomas Friedman is spot on. Regular Pakistanis can do the most to prevent more terrorist attacks like the horrific acts in Mumbai.<br />Indeed, it takes a village. When a would-be suicide bomber sees his own family denouncing such acts while he's contemplating them, the chances are better that he will not follow through.<br />The wellspring from which these misguided people emerge has to be dried up. That can only happen at the grassroots level. If not, then any number of government commandos will not be enough to contain the murder that will be unleashed.<br />If there is one group that is capable of quick mobilization and discipline, it is the Muslims. It is now time for them to look toward their young and stop them from going down the path of no return.<br />If for nothing else, this is critical for their own survival. As Friedman points out: Behavior toward perceived external enemies could at any point be directed inward as well, and at that point it may be too late.<br />Madhuri Pai, Singapore<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edlet.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edlet.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Nicholas D. Kristof: Raising the world's IQ</strong><br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />RAWALPINDI, Pakistan: Travelers to Africa and Asia all have their favorite forms of foreign aid to "make a difference." One of mine is a miracle substance that is cheap and actually makes people smarter.<br />Unfortunately, it has one appalling side effect. No, it doesn't make you sterile, but it is just about the least sexy substance in the world. Indeed, because it's so numbingly boring, few people pay attention to it or invest in it. (Or dare write about it!)<br />It's iodized salt.<br />Almost one-third of the world's people don't get enough iodine from food and water. The result in extreme cases is large goiters that swell their necks, or other obvious impairments such as dwarfism or cretinism. But far more common is mental slowness.<br />When a pregnant woman doesn't have enough iodine in her body, her child may suffer irreversible brain damage and could have an IQ that is 10 to 15 points lower than it would otherwise be. An educated guess is that iodine deficiency results in a needless loss of more than 1 billion IQ points around the world.<br />Development geeks rave about the benefits of adding iodine and other micronutrients (such as vitamin A, iron, zinc and folic acid) to diets. The Copenhagen Consensus, which brings together a panel of top global economists to find the most cost-effective solutions to the world's problems, puts micronutrients at the top of the list of foreign-aid spending priorities.<br />"Probably no other technology," the World Bank said of micronutrients, "offers as large an opportunity to improve lives ... at such low cost and in such a short time."<br />Yet the strategy hasn't been fully put in place, partly because micronutrients have zero glamour. There are no starlets embracing iodine. And guess which country has taken the lead in this area by sponsoring the Micronutrient Initiative? Hint: It's earnest and dull, just like micronutrients themselves.<br />Ta-da - Canada!<br />(Years ago, The New Republic magazine held a contest for the most boring headline ever. The benchmark was from a Times opinion column - not mine - that read "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative." Alas, that's salt iodization!)<br />Pakistan is typical of the challenges. Until recently, six in 10 Pakistani schoolchildren were iodine-deficient. Iodine just wasn't on anyone's mind.<br />"I had never heard of iodized salt," said Haji Sajjawal Khan, a 65-year-old owner of a small salt factory here, near the capital of Islamabad. Officials from the Micronutrient Initiative and other aid agencies reached out to factory owners like Khan and encouraged them to iodize salt, in part to help make Pakistanis healthier and more intelligent.<br />"It will prevent people's necks from being swollen and will make people smarter," Khan said. So he agreed to add an iodine drip into his salt grinder.<br />One of the obstacles is the rumor that iodized salt is actually a contraceptive, a dastardly plot by outsiders to keep Muslims from having babies. That conspiracy theory spread partly because the same do-good advertising agency that marketed iodized salt also marketed condoms.<br />Yet progress is evident. One of the attractions is that a campaign to iodize salt costs only 2 cents to 3 cents per person reached per year.<br />"We are spending very little, but the benefit is enormous," said Dr. Khawaja Masuood Ahmed, an official of the Micronutrient Initiative here. "We're preventing people from becoming mentally retarded."<br />Indeed, The Lancet, the British medical journal, reported last month that "Iodine deficiency is the most common cause of preventable mental impairment worldwide."<br />Occasionally in my travels I've been unnerved by coming across entire villages, in western China and elsewhere, eerily full of people with mental and physical handicaps, staggering about, unable to speak coherently. I now realize that the cause in some cases was probably iodine deficiency.<br />Indeed, the problem used to be widespread in the Alps. The word "cretin" is believed to come from a mountain dialect of French, apparently because iodine deficiency in the Alps produced so many cretins. The problem ended when food was brought in from elsewhere and salt was iodized.<br />There is talk that President-elect Barack Obama may reorganize the American aid apparatus, perhaps turning it into a Cabinet department. There are many competing good causes - I'm a huge believer in spending more on education and maternal health, in particular - but there may be no investment that gets more bang for the buck than micronutrients.<br />So, yes, salt iodization is boring. But if we can add 1 billion points to the global IQ, then let's lend strong American support - to a worthwhile Canadian initiative.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edkristof.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edkristof.php</a><br /><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><strong>Losing on the battlefield of the mind</strong><br />By Christopher Boucek<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />GUANTÁNAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba: When you fly to Guantánamo, the United States government insists you carry your passport, as though you're going to a foreign country. It's all part of the elaborate legal fiction that the detainees on the American military base here can be outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law without really being outside U.S. territory.<br />Just as Guantánamo's legal and geographic isolation from the United States denies its prisoners recourse to the American judicial system, it also denies its military administrators the benefits of the most current research on how to de-radicalize prisoners and reintegrate them into society.<br />The problem is that the U.S. government looks at Guantánamo as the destination rather than as part of a process. The base's military authorities talk a lot about "the battlefield of the mind," but they seem to be doing more to provide the prisoners with distractions than to prepare the profoundly alienated men for whatever future awaits them. Geology classes, Game Boys and crayons may provide diversion, but they do not provide alternatives to Islamic extremism.<br />For instance, officials of Joint Task Force Guantánamo, the military unit that runs the detention center, state that the facility employs no outside religious guides for its prisoners, instead allowing them to choose religious authorities from their ranks.<br />Yet research from around the world demonstrates that one of the most successful ways to engage religious extremists is through religious debate and dialogue, challenging the underlying beliefs that support and encourage violence. In Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Iraq religious authorities are used to arguing against violence with security offenders.<br />When asked about this, JTF officials replied that the detainees are not interested in speaking with outside religious scholars. Yet detainees who have been repatriated to Saudi Arabia, for example, go through an intensive rehabilitation process incorporating large amounts of religious instruction and discussion. There are a number of knowledgeable scholars and imams, including former radicals with credibility and legitimacy who could be deployed in Guantánamo to work with the detainees.<br />There is a growing body of work on how to deal with offenders preparing to leave custody, and this research needs to be put to use in Guantánamo. But despite the refrain that Guantánamo is a battlefield of the mind, it seems we have all but given up in that fight, ceding victory to violent extremists.<br />According to officials here, there is an active Al Qaeda cell among the detainees that includes a religious authority. It is unclear what steps have been taken to isolate this leader from his followers, but present policies all but assure that the cell will continue its activities.<br />Separating or segregating prisoners is not enough. Any successful counter-radicalization effort must offer a positive in addition to the removal of a negative. Religiously motivated prisoners must be given a way to practice their faith in a way that includes being challenged on the premise that faith can be used to justify violence and terror.<br />Under the present system at Guantánamo, detainees are housed according to their behavior and perceived importance, from medium security to high security. Fifteen or so "High Value Detainees" are held separately in Camp 7. (The existence of this has been acknowledged, but its precise location remains secret.) Prisoners of different ethnic and national groups are mixed together.<br />Grouping detainees by risk may make sense for a normal prison, but it complicates successful deradicalization and preparation for repatriation at Guantánamo. If the government were to separate detainees first by their nations of origin, and then by their behavior, it could use more specific cultural factors to influence their behavior.<br />This could also facilitate greater participation by officials from a detainee's home country. In addition, the current arrangement reinforces the notion of a global jihad. Officials claim there about 40 different nationalities represented here, making separation difficult. But surely not impossible.<br />Officials should at least try to break down the social groups that radicalized these men and replace them with different forms of social reinforcement. To date, there have been no such efforts.<br />Though the exact number remains classified, there are probably about 250 detainees currently at Guantánamo. Under the solution President-elect Barack Obama is exploring, the United States would charge those who can be charged and repatriate others to their countries of origin, where they would be charged or rehabilitated.<br />That leaves those whom the government cannot or will not charge, but whose release is believed to pose serious risks. The goal is to make that number as small as possible, and, to that end, the government must conduct a thorough review of all the cases as soon as possible.<br />Closing Guantánamo will not be the end of all detentions of extremists. As long as the United States and its allies continue to detain individuals around the world in the struggle again Islamist violence, they will need a comprehensive and international approach on how to hold and process extremists. The ultimate goal should be to send these prisoners back to their home countries to be charged, housed and reintegrated.<br />Reliable figures are difficult to come by. The Saudi re-arrest rate is under 10 percent, and in Iraq, counter-radicalization and rehabilitation have been credited with drastic reductions in the number of detainees. There is always the risk that some of the men released from Guantánamo will resume violent activities, but these early indicators suggest positive results. And indefinite detention is simply not an option.<br />Christopher Boucek is an associate in the Carnegie Middle East Program where his research focuses on regional security challenges.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edboucek.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edboucek.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>OPINION</strong><br /><strong>Mired in 'surge' dogma</strong><br />By Gian P. Gentile<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />The U.S. Army and other parts of America's defense establishment have become transfixed by the promise of counterinsurgency. Since the surge in Iraq began in February 2007, the panacea of successful counterinsurgencies has become like an all-powerful Svengali, holding hypnotic sway over the minds of many of the nation's military strategists.<br />The promise of counterinsurgency is to turn war into a program of social-scientific functions that will achieve victory - if performed correctly by adhering to the guidance of counterinsurgency experts. The program is simple: increase and maintain long-term American combat presence on the ground; use those combat troops to protect the local population and win their hearts and minds; and build a new nation. The program's appeal lies in its purported simplicity, perceived relative bloodlessness, and seductive ability to remove the friction from war.<br />The current U.S. counterinsurgency program rests on the dubious assumption that the surge in Iraq was a successful feat of arms that was the primary cause for the lowering of violence. Yet there were other reasons why violence ebbed, including the buying off of America's former Sunni insurgent enemies and a decision by the Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr to cease attacks. Without those conditions in place, levels of violence would have remained high even in the face of a few more American combat brigades on the ground.<br />The recent uptick in bloodshed shows that the war is not over. The notion proposed by some pundits that the surge has "won" the war is a chimera, to say the least.<br />But the surge and the counterinsurgency program that purportedly lowered the violence in Iraq has become the template for action in Afghanistan. Moreover, the program has become an immutable template that must be followed when America deals with insurgencies in other ungoverned parts of the world. It is in this sense that the U.S. Army has lost its ability to think creatively.<br />A leading expert on counterinsurgency who is an adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, David Kilcullen, has called for the U.S. counterinsurgency program, similar to Iraq, to be applied in Afghanistan.<br />Many army officers and Department of Defense thinkers seem to be able to think only about how to apply the perceived counterinsurgency lessons from Iraq to Afghanistan. A recent group of colonels asked the question "how should the army execute a surge in Afghanistan," instead of the more important questions of whether the army should use the surge counterinsurgency program there. A professor from a major Department of Defense university has gone so far as to call for the surge and its counterinsurgency techniques as the model for American strategy and policy throughout the entire Middle East.<br />These proposals may have surface appeal, but the fact is that they are nothing but a rehashing of Vietnam era approaches to counterinsurgency and nation-building using the method of clearing, holding and building.<br />Kilcullen, for example, speaking in a recent interview with the New Yorker writer George Packer, cited counterinsurgency experts from the Vietnam era like David Galula of France Sir Robert Thompson of Britain, who sought to counter Maoist inspired communist revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s - a world fundamentally different from ours today.<br />Yet influential American counterinsurgency experts have simply co-opted the counter-Maoist model. There is no originality - or at least a serious consideration for very different alternatives - in these concepts for changes in policy, strategy, and operations in Afghanistan. Galula, Thompson and other experts of the early 1960s would have argued for exactly the same thing.<br />Perhaps this is the right approach, but it seems to be the only approach that we are able to come up with. Proponents of this program tell us repeatedly that the "problem" in Afghanistan is essentially one of security and protection for the Afghani people. But by defining the problem in this way, strategy and operational methods are predetermined, requiring the long-term involvement of American combat forces.<br />There are other ways to define the problem, or center of gravity, in Afghanistan. If the "enemy" there is defined as Al Qaeda, then perhaps other policy, strategy and operational options might be considered. In this different conceptual formulation, perhaps a substantial American combat presence on the ground might not be necessary and instead the "enemy" might be dealt with by other means of military power, rather than large numbers of conventional combat forces trying to win hearts and minds.<br />The use of American "soft power" might be applied in innovative ways that become decoupled from military power and long-term, militarized nation building.<br />But because parts of the U.S. defense establishment are intellectually dominated by the proponents of the surge counterinsurgency program, we do not seem to be able to break out of this conceptual straightjacket.<br />But there are other experts who are beginning to expose the dogma. The best example is that of the former army chief of staff, General John A. Wickham (retired), who argues that "the time may be right for Americans to re-examine our policy to fight insurgencies." As army chief from 1983 to 1987, Wickham helped create the so-called Army Light Divisions designed to be a principle force in the conduct of small wars and insurgencies. Wickham argues that the current approach to counterinsurgency based on population security requiring very large commitments of combat troops on the ground may in fact be counterproductive.<br />Wickham may be right, or he may be wrong. But at least he questions the accepted dogma and considers alternatives. The counterinsurgency proponents have us transfixed on a one-way-only approach to dealing with insurgencies throughout the world.<br />Perhaps under the Obama administration, the army and the greater defense establishment will embrace creativity instead of dogma and at least consider other options. If not, our way ahead has already been decided for us.<br />Gian P. Gentile, a colonel in the U.S. Army, served in Iraq in 2003 and 2006.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edgentile.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edgentile.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>Suicide bombers hit Afghan southeast</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />KHOST, Afghanistan: Suicide bombers killed at least four people when they attacked two government offices in the southeastern Afghan town of Khost on Thursday, a police officer said.<br />One bomber targeted the department for counter-narcotics, the officer said. The second detonated explosives inside the main intelligence headquarters a few hundred metres away, Guldad said.<br />"The bomber had managed to get inside the intelligence department by wearing the agency's uniform," he said.<br />Two intelligence officers and two police officers were killed and at least nine others wounded in the attack among officials in the intelligence department.<br />Gunfire also erupted inside the building, an official source said. It was not clear whether foreign troops were hit in either of the attacks.<br />Afghan and foreign troops had cordoned off the area and at least one helicopter belonging to foreign troops was hovering overhead, residents said.<br />Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for the strikes, saying that three members of the Islamists group were involved and their target was the head of intelligence in Khost and his deputy, a Taliban spokesman said via a website.<br />A surge of violence in Afghanistan this year has marked the bloodiest period since the Taliban's removal in 2001. The violence has raised fears about Afghanistan's stability despite an increase in the number of foreign troops.<br />Regrouping in 2005, the al Qaeda-backed Taliban have carried out a number of high-profile attacks this year, including several in the capital, Kabul.<br />These included an assassination plot against President Hamid Karzai during a military parade near his palace. Officials say some members of the security forces helped the insurgents in that incident and in several other major attacks.<br />Separately on Thursday, authorities began a search of two prison cells where Taliban prisoners are held in the key Pul-i-Charkhi jail on the eastern outskirts of Kabul, the deputy justice minister said.<br />The aim of the search was to disarm prisoners possibly holding guns or knives, Mohammad Qasim Hashimzai told Reuters.<br />The prison has been the scene of a series of bloody riots in recent years. Thursday's search was the second this year.<br />In a major attack several months ago, Taliban fighters freed several hundred of their jailed comrades along with many other prisoners in the southern province of Kandahar.<br />A prisoner from the jail in Kabul telephoned Reuters to say that Afghan forces had opened fire during the operation and that there were some casualties among the inmates.<br />The sound of gunfire could be heard in the background. Hashimzai said he was not aware force had been used or if casualties had been reported.<br />(Writing by Sayed Salahuddin and Golnar Motevalli; Editing by Paul Tait)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/asia/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-VIOLENCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/asia/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-VIOLENCE.php</a><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>Two Danish soldiers killed in Afghanistan</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />COPENHAGEN: Two Danish soldiers were killed Thursday in fighting in the Helmand province of south-west Afghanistan, the Danish Army Central Command said.<br />The first soldier died from wounds suffered when his patrol was hit by an explosion and attacked by light-arms fire about 8 kilometres south of the town of Gereshk.<br />The second man was killed by a second explosion as Danish and British troops attempted to aid the first victim, the Army said.<br />The deaths were the first Danish casualties in Afghanistan since a soldier was killed in August after his vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device.<br />Denmark has about 550 combat troops in Afghanistan. Fourteen have died in combat so far and three others were killed while trying to dismantle a mine.<br />(Reporting by Kim McLaughlin; Editing by Matthew Jones)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/europe/OUKWD-UK-DENMARK-AFGHANISTAN-SOLDIERS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/europe/OUKWD-UK-DENMARK-AFGHANISTAN-SOLDIERS.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Obama's thoughts evolve on U.S. troops in Iraq<br /></strong>By Thom Shanker<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: On the campaign trail, Senator Barack Obama offered a pledge that electrified and motivated his liberal base, vowing to "end the war" in Iraq.<br />But as he moves closer to the White House, President-elect Obama is making it clearer than ever that tens of thousands of American troops will be left behind in Iraq, even if he can make good on his campaign promise to pull all combat forces out within 16 months.<br />"I said that I would remove our combat troops from Iraq in 16 months, with the understanding that it might be necessary - likely to be necessary - to maintain a residual force to provide potential training, logistical support, to protect our civilians in Iraq," the Illinois Democrat said this week as he introduced his national security team.<br />Publicly at least, Obama has not set a firm number for that "residual force," a phrase certain to become central to the debate on the way ahead in Iraq, though one of his national security advisers, Richard Danzig, said during the campaign that it could amount to 30,000 to 55,000 troops. Nor has Obama laid out a timetable beyond 16 months for troop drawdowns or suggested when he believes a time might come for a declaration that the war is over.<br />In the meantime, military planners are drawing up tentative schedules aimed at meeting both Obama's goal for withdrawing combat troops, with a target of May 2010, and the Dec. 31, 2011, date for sending the rest of American troops home that is spelled out in the new agreement between the United States and the Iraqi government.<br />That status-of-forces agreement remains subject to change, by mutual agreement, and U.S. Army planners acknowledge privately that they are examining projections that could see the number of Americans hovering between 30,000 and 50,000 - and some say as high as 70,000 - for a substantial time even beyond 2011.<br />As U.S. combat forces decline in numbers and more provinces are turned over to Iraqi control, these military planners say, those security forces will remain reliant on significant numbers of Americans for training, supplies, logistics, intelligence and transportation for a long time to come.<br />There always was a tension, if not a bit of a contradiction, in the two parts of Obama's campaign platform to "end the war" by withdrawing all combat troops by May 2010. To be sure, Obama was careful to say that the drawdowns he was promising included only combat troops. But supporters who keyed on the language of ending the war might be forgiven if they thought that would mean bringing home all of the troops.<br />Planners at the Pentagon say that it is possible that Obama's goal could be accomplished at least in part by relabeling some units, so that those currently counted as combat troops could be "re-missioned," their efforts redefined as training and support for the Iraqis.<br />In Iraq today, there are 15 brigades defined as combat forces in this debate, with one on its way home. But the overall number of troops on the ground is more than 50 brigade equivalents, for a total of 146,000 troops, including service and support personnel.<br />Even now, after the departure of the five "surge" brigades that President George W. Bush sent to Iraq in January 2006, the overall number of troops in Iraq remains higher than when Bush ordered the troop increase, owing to the number of support and service personnel remaining.<br />At his news conference in Chicago on Monday, Obama emphasized his willingness to listen to the advice from senior officers and that of his new national security team, which includes Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the first Pentagon chief in history asked to continue serving under a newly elected president; Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and, as national security adviser, General James Jones, the retired four-star Marine officer who served as NATO's supreme commander.<br />Since the election, Obama has held unannounced consultations with both Gates and Mullen, described by Obama aides and Pentagon officials as having focused less on tactics and operations and more on broad, strategic views for U.S. national security. Obama telephoned Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, according to the Obama transition office.<br />To date, there has been no significant criticism from the anti-war left of the Democratic Party of the prospect that Obama will keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for at least several years.<br />At the Pentagon and the military headquarters in Iraq, the response to the statements this week from Obama and his national security team has been one of relief; the words sounded to them like he would take a measured approach on the question of troop levels.<br />"I believe that 16 months is the right time frame, but, as I've said consistently, I will listen to the recommendations of my commanders," Obama said at the news conference Monday. "And my No.1 priority is making sure that our troops remain safe in this transition phase, and that the Iraqi people are well served by a government that is taking on increased responsibility for its own security."<br />An apparent evolution of Obama's thinking can be heard in contrast to comments he made in July, when he called a news conference to lay out his Iraq policy in unambiguous terms.<br />"I intend to end this war," he said then. "My first day in office I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war - responsibly, deliberately, but decisively." And in a news conference that month in Amman, Obama acknowledged that the American troop increase had bolstered Iraqi security but declared that he would not hesitate to overrule American commanders and redirect troops to Afghanistan.<br />Gates, speaking at the Pentagon on Tuesday, one day after he appeared with Obama for the announcement of the new national security team, made clear that the direction of troop levels now had been decided, with the only decisions remaining on how fast and how low.<br />"And so the question is, how do we do this in a responsible way?" Gates said. "And nobody wants to put at risk the gains that have been achieved, with so much sacrifice, on the part of our soldiers and the Iraqis, at this point."<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/assess.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/assess.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Iraqi council approves security agreement</strong><br />By Campbell Robertson<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: Iraq's three-person presidency council on Thursday approved the security agreement that calls for the withdrawal of American forces, the last necessary step for its official adoption.<br />But the approval came on a day of widespread violence in Iraq, with bombings in several cities and death toll estimates that ranged as high as 22.<br />The approval of the security agreement, which governs the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq from Jan. 1 until the end of 2011 and an accompanying strategic framework that lays down a broad outline of U.S.-Iraqi relations, was widely expected.<br />Parliament approved the measures last week. A deal was made in Parliament when the Shiite and Kurdish lawmakers who backed the pact agreed to demands by Sunni lawmakers for a nonbinding resolution on political reforms and the holding of a nationwide referendum on the pact, both of which were also approved Thursday.<br />The approval of the council, which consists of President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and two vice presidents - Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite, and Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni - had to be unanimous, or the pact would have been sent back to Parliament.<br />But the challenges for Iraq were underscored by the bloodshed Thursday.<br />Two truck bombs targeting police stations in the western city of Falluja killed 15 people and wounded more than 140, an Iraqi security official said. Reports varied, however: A U.S. military spokeswoman said early reports showed that nine Iraqi police officers and four civilians were wounded.<br />In the northern city of Mosul, two coalition soldiers were killed when a car bomb exploded shortly after 2:30 a.m., the U.S. military said in a statement. Nine civilians were wounded in that attack.<br />Near Baquba, the capital of the turbulent Diyala Province in eastern Iraq, a bomb attached to a bicycle exploded in front of a café, killing four and wounding 13, a local police official said.<br />Some were attributing the increase in violence to the provincial elections scheduled for the end of January, which could significantly alter the balance of power at the provincial level for the first time since 2005.<br />"We expect more bombs as the provincial elections get closer," said Lieutenant Colonel Ali Taei of the Baquba police force. "Al Qaeda is active and they exploit gaps in security."<br />Abeer Mohammed, Muhammed Hussein and Tariq Maher contributed reporting in Baghdad, as did Iraqi employees of the New York Times in Anbar and Diyala provinces.British soldier found dead<br />The British Ministry of Defense said Thursday that a soldier had been found dead in southern Iraq with a gunshot wound to his head. It said no enemy forces were involved.<br />The ministry said the body of a soldier serving with 9 Regiment Army Air Corps was discovered Thursday morning and there was no evidence suggesting anyone else was involved.<br />The military is investigating the death and the soldier's next of kin have been informed, the ministry said.<br />About 4,000 British troops are in southern Iraq, carrying out training. A major reduction in Britain's presence is planned for the first half of 2009.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/mideast/iraq.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/mideast/iraq.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Iraqi army finds 80 bodies in four mass graves<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: The Iraqi army unearthed 80 decomposed bodies from four mass graves in northern Iraq's volatile Diyala province, a security source for the region said on Thursday.<br />The mass graves were in two Shi'ite villages close to the provincial capital of Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) northeast of Baghdad, an area where Sunni Islamist al Qaeda militants once ruled and carried out mass sectarian killings against Shi'ites.<br />The bodies were found over the last three days, and may have been buried there about a year ago, the security source said.<br />Iraqi security forces regularly uncover mass graves, most of them from a sectarian conflict in 2006 and 2007 that pushed Iraq to the brink of all-out civil war. Police found 30 bodies in another grave in Diyala on Saturday.<br />(Writing by Mohammed Abbas: Editing by Keith Weir)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-GRAVES.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-GRAVES.php</a><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>A new approach, no illusions<br /></strong>By Volker Perthes<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />Whether a peaceful resolution of the nuclear conflict with Iran is possible still hinges on three factors: an international consensus that Iran should not acquire a nuclear weapon; the willingness of the United States and the West in general to communicate to Iran and others that the conflict with the Islamic Republic is about proliferation, not about the character of the regime; and domestic politics in Iran. The latter includes the balance of forces between Islamo-nationalist ultras and pragmatists in the Iranian elite, and Iran's reading of world developments, U.S. intentions and other factors that influence Tehran's security perceptions.<br />It is quite clear that Iran's nuclear program is carried by an elite consensus. There is no agreement, however, about how far the program should go. Tehran seems to have made no decision yet about whether to proceed with building a nuclear bomb.<br />The Iranian nuclear program is not so much driven by ideology as by a mixture of ambitions and fear. Ambitions include the wish for prestige and scientific progress; fear concerns genuine feelings of insecurity - not only because Iran is virtually surrounded by U.S. troops and allies.<br />The election of Barack Obama and the prospect of a new administration with a new agenda have an impact on policy debates in Tehran. The Iranian elite and broader public have once again taken note that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who asserted earlier this year that America would never elect a black man as president) lacks some understanding of world affairs, whereas pragmatists like Ali Larijani, the speaker of Parliament, clearly pinned his country's hopes on an Obama victory.<br />More importantly, here is an incoming American president who has stated that he is prepared to talk to Iran directly and, in principle, without preconditions. He also has made clear that he wants to involve countries in the region - certainly including Iran - in efforts to stabilize Afghanistan. Obama has no intention to keep U.S. troops in Iraq longer than necessary.<br />It is no coincidence that some members of the Iranian elite have gone so far as to applaud the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, recently approved by the Iraqi Parliament. While this agreement legalizes the U.S. presence in Iraq for another period, it also shows that this presence is going to end in a foreseeable future. Even more important, the accord illustrates that foreign troops in Iraq will not be used to launch attacks on other countries in the region.<br />Obama's agenda on Iran is generally sound. The question now is how to proceed. With an eye both on domestic developments in Iran and the need for thoroughly prepared diplomatic moves, the "freeze-for-freeze" offer of the so-called EU 3 plus 3 (France, Germany, Britain, China, Russia and the United States) seems just the right option for the time being: It foresees that Iran refrains from installing new centrifuges while the six members of the group refrain from further Security Council action for the same period, initially for six weeks. This period can be used to calm fears on all sides and continue talks in the current format, under the leadership of the EU's minister of foreign affairs, Javier Solana, with the presence of a high-ranking U.S. official.<br />High-level bilateral talks between Washington and Tehran would not begin before the fall of 2009. And they should not, unless Iran responds to Obama's inauguration with a considerable confidence-building measure, such as the suspension of enrichment or improving the IAEA's access to Iranian nuclear installations.<br />The prospect of re-opening diplomatic relations between the two countries would boost Ahmadinejad's domestic popularity tremendously before Iran's presidential elections next summer. But there is little reason to help him win re-election, if he does not show that he wants to do business.<br />Parallel to the 3+3 talks, the new U.S. administration will have to rely on a low-level engagement with Iran for the first half of the coming year, concentrating on bilateral confidence-building measures such as the possible opening of a visa section in Tehran.<br />In addition, the two sides should focus on areas of cooperation with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no doubt that Iran needs to be involved in international efforts to stabilize Afghanistan. Iranian and Western interests overlap there in many instances: Neither wants the Taliban to return to power and both want to curb drug production.<br />After the Iranian presidential elections, Washington and Tehran may be prepared to hold serious bilateral talks. We should not have too many illusions, though. Most probably, the West will have to realize that Iran, with or without Ahmadinejad, will not be prepared to give up its nuclear "achievement" - the 4,000 or more centrifuges that will be installed by that time.<br />It would be totally unrealistic for the United States and the West to insist on dismantlement of centrifuges as a condition for or the outcome of negotiations. Instead, it would be necessary to reach a package deal that includes maximum safeguards and controls of Iran's nuclear program.<br />It may be useful to explore issues such as improving various options of an IAEA-controlled international consortium for the production of nuclear fuel that would involve Iran and other countries in the region. Exploratory seminars with the participation of Iranian and international experts could help to prepare the negotiations.<br />The possible package deal also would have to refer to the cooperation of Iran on Afghanistan and Iraq, an Iranian acceptance of the content of the Arab Peace Initiative; a restoration of full U.S.-Iran diplomatic relations and the settlement of bilateral issues between the two countries, such as frozen Iranian assets in the United States.<br />Would Iran be prepared to accept such a deal? We don't know for certain, but probably yes. Iranians understand that if Obama tried this approach, and Iran still refused to cooperate, the legitimacy of other, more coercive options would steeply increase.<br />Volker Perthes is the executive chairman of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin. He is the author of a recent Report to the Trilateral Commission on "Engaging Iran and Building Peace in the Persian Gulf."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edperthes.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edperthes.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><strong>Iran cracks down on "satanic" clothes<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />TEHRAN: Police have arrested 49 people this week in a northern Iranian city during a crackdown on "satanic" clothes, IRNA news agency reported on Thursday.<br />The measures are the latest in a country-wide campaign against Western cultural influence in the Islamic Republic, where strict dress codes are enforced.<br />"Police confronted rascals and thugs who appeared in public wearing satanic fashions and unsuitable clothing," Qaemshahr city police commander Mahmoud Rahmani told IRNA.<br />Rahmani also said that five barber shops were shut and 20 more warned for "promoting Western hairstyles."<br />In the past, such crackdowns have lasted a few weeks or months, but the current campaign was launched in 2007 and has not let up.<br />It includes measures against men sporting spiky "Western" hairstyles or women wearing tight trousers and high boots.<br />Women are supposed to wear clothing that covers their hair and disguises the shape of their bodies. But some, particularly in cities, wear headscarves pushed back well beyond their hairlines and sport tight-fitting outfits.<br />Some analysts say the authorities fear such open acts of defiance against the Islamic Republic's values could escalate if they go unchecked. This worries them when Iran is under pressure from the West over its disputed nuclear work, they say.<br />"Some individuals, not knowing what culture they are imitating, put on clothing that was designed by the enemies of this country," Rahmani said.<br />"The enemies of this country are trying to divert our youth and breed them the way they want and deprive them of a healthy life," he added.<br />Rahmani did not say how the offenders would be punished. Usual penalties are a warning or a fine.<br />Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has in the past suggested Iran's enemies may try to stage a "soft" or "velvet" revolution by infiltrating corrupt culture or ideas.<br />(Reporting by Hashem Kalantari, Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Catherine Bosley and Kevin Liffey)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-CLOTHING.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-CLOTHING.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>EU court annuls EU's new Iran terror list move<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: A European Union court on Thursday annulled a new move by the bloc to freeze the assets of an exiled Iranian opposition group in the latest in a string of legal setbacks to its blacklist of suspected terrorist groups.<br />The European Court of First Instance already threw out last month a 2007 move to freeze the assets of People's Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI), the group which exposed Iran's covert nuclear programme in 2002.<br />However the judgement had no practical consequences as it did not cover a subsequent EU decision in July of this year to put the same group on a revised blacklist.<br />A new ruling from the court said that decision also breached the PMOI's right of self-defence because it did not inform the group of new information on it obtained by France.<br />"Consequently the court annuls the funds-freezing decision," the statement said, adding that no such decision should be based on information that a country was not ready to make available to the court.<br />An EU spokesman said the EU Council -- the body responsible for decisions by the 27 member states about the blacklist -- would study the ruling and decide whether to appeal or not.<br />The PMOI has accused the European Union -- which has so far led unsuccessful efforts to persuade Iran to curb its nuclear programme -- of seeking to "appease" Tehran by keeping the PMOI blacklisted.<br />Iran rejects Western suspicions that its nuclear programme is aimed at producing an atom bomb.<br />Analysts say it is difficult to gauge what support the group has inside Iran, adding that many Iranians oppose the organisation for siding with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the 1980s war with Iran.<br />(Editing by Samia Nakhoul)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-EU-OPPOSITION.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-EU-OPPOSITION.php</a><br /><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><strong>Moroccan convicted of links to Madrid bombings<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />RABAT: A Moroccan court convicted a drug trafficker Thursday of links to the 2004 Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people, Moroccan state news agency MAP reported.<br />Hicham Ahmidan, already serving a five-year prison sentence for international drug trafficking, was charged with links to the group that carried out the attacks in the Spanish capital and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, MAP said.<br />Prosecutors said Ahmidan helped provide equipment used in the bombings. His lawyer Ali Ammar said he denied the charges and planned to appeal.<br />Ammar said some of the bomb plotters were Ahmidan's cousins but his client knew nothing of their plans and was in another country when the attacks took place.<br />The conviction was unlawful, Ammar said, because Ahmidan had been acquitted of similar charges.<br />The 10 bombs, packed into sports bags and detonated by mobile phones, tore through packed commuter trains on the morning of March 11, 2004, throwing bodies onto the tracks.<br />Three weeks later, seven men, including two suspected ringleaders of the bombings, blew themselves up in an apartment after police closed in on them.<br />Following a lengthy trial, a Spanish court last year sentenced two Moroccans and a Spaniard to 42,924 years in jail after they were convicted on multiple counts.<br />The high nominal sentences reflected convictinos on multiple counts but the figures are academic as Spanish law says nobody can serve more than 40 years in jail.<br />Another Moroccan, Abdelilah Hriz, was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison but a Moroccan judge acquitted him in May 2007 for lack of evidence.<br />In February, Moroccan authorities detained Ahriz again after Spanish authorities produced new evidence which they said linked him to the attacks.<br />A judge at the court near the Moroccan capital Rabat adjourned Ahriz's hearing Thursday until December 18, MAP said.<br />(Reporting by Tom Pfeiffer; editing by Michael Roddy)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/europe/OUKWD-UK-MOROCCO-SPAIN-BOMBINGS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/europe/OUKWD-UK-MOROCCO-SPAIN-BOMBINGS.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-lrtNkaibYe8f_C3dyrV2hV23s1Vcu3yvwhmxPBlN-BSw0zOexdFYYzDEkBGpczLJxClCSr6V0rTFPkAjKPdbxm8u843c_cY0ZAWk6FvC5nD70KIC66-xmyWGtLmu80kbjeJfPA2KkKY/s1600-h/DSC02467.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276179150271317090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-lrtNkaibYe8f_C3dyrV2hV23s1Vcu3yvwhmxPBlN-BSw0zOexdFYYzDEkBGpczLJxClCSr6V0rTFPkAjKPdbxm8u843c_cY0ZAWk6FvC5nD70KIC66-xmyWGtLmu80kbjeJfPA2KkKY/s320/DSC02467.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><br /><br /><div><strong>Israeli troops forcibly evict Jewish settlers in Hebron<br /></strong>By Ethan Bronner<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />HEBRON, West Bank: Israeli troops forcibly evicted about 200 hard-line Jewish settlers from a contested building in this volatile biblical city Thursday, the first serious clash in what seems to a spiraling confrontation between the government and defiant settlers.<br />The operation, carried out by 600 soldiers and policemen with stealth and efficiency, took half an hour with just two dozen relatively light injuries. But events did not end there. Young settlers then rampaged through Palestinian fields and neighborhoods, setting olive trees ablaze and trashing houses.<br />Major Avital Leibovich, an Israeli Army spokeswoman, said the southern part of the West Bank was now designated as a closed military area - meaning only those who live here may enter, an effort to prevent outside settlers from causing further trouble. Within an hour of the order, huge car lines were backed up at new military roadblocks.<br />The contested building, which occupants had dubbed "The House of Peace," is on the road to the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives are said to be buried, a site Muslims and Jews have fought over for centuries.<br />As the sun descended, the area around the building looked like a war zone. Evacuees were still being dragged about, four police per person, rocks were strewn on roads, plumes of black smoke were rising from the olive groves, and hundreds of helmeted troops in riot gear confronted a crowd of furious settlers.<br />The men in the crowd wore beards and sidecurls, women had long skirts and covered heads. Members of the religiously observant Jewish population in and around Hebron number several thousand among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.<br />As Palestinians watched from rooftops and windows, some settlers shouted at the troops, calling them Nazis. A few had sewn yellow stars on their shirts, like those Jews had been obliged to wear under Hitler. On a wall near the confrontation, Hebrew graffiti declared: "There will be a war over the House of Peace."<br />Much is at stake for both sides in this confrontation since the government says it wants to facilitate the building of a Palestinian state in most of the West Bank, whereas the settlers and their backers say they will do all in their power to prevent such a state. They are focusing partly on increasing their numbers in Hebron, second only to Jerusalem in its historic and religious significance to them.<br />The four-story building in question was built and owned by a Palestinian who agreed to sell it. He said he had not been aware the buyers were Jews, that he had been tricked and that he had backed out of the deal. The settlers said he knew very well what he was doing but threats had made him claim otherwise.<br />The Israeli government ordered the settlers out. They challenged the order. Three weeks ago, the Supreme Court took the government's side and gave it 30 days to make good on the order. In the past week or two, settlers had grown more rebellious, throwing rocks at soldiers and defacing Palestinian buildings and graves. It was clearly only a matter of time before the army would step in.<br />The official who made the call for the evacuation Thursday was Ehud Barak, the defense minister and head of the Labor Party, who said at a news conference later that "what was tested today was the ability of the state to enforce its laws and its essence upon its citizens."<br />Barak had met with settler leaders Thursday morning to find a way out of the confrontation. The settlers emerged from the meeting believing there was still negotiation to be done but Barak clearly thought otherwise.<br />Since elections are scheduled for February and Barak is his party leader, opponents of the evacuation accused him of seeking political advantage through his decision.<br />"Barak sent the army and police as part of the left wing's election campaign and the blood of the casualties is on his hands," declared Arieh Eldad of the National Religious Party.<br />Settler leaders were indignant, saying Barak had tricked them after talking soothingly to them in the morning. They said there was nothing more scandalous in the land of Israel than for Jews to evict Jews from their homes.<br />In a separate development, Israel agreed Thursday for the first time in four weeks to allow journalists and foreign aid workers to enter Gaza. The area, ruled by the militant group Hamas, is under a closure led by Israel that severely limits goods and people from going in and out. But only recently did the closure include foreign journalists who had appealed to the government and Supreme Court for renewed permission to enter.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/mideast/mideast.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/mideast/mideast.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>******************</div><br /><br /><div><strong>DNA study shows Spain's Jewish and Muslim ancestry<br /></strong>By Nicholas Wade<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />Spain and Portugal have a history of fervent Catholicism, but almost a third of the population now turns out to have a non-Christian genetic heritage. About 20 percent of the current population of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and 11 percent bear Moorish DNA signatures, a team of geneticists reports.<br />The genetic signatures reflect the forced conversions to Christianity in the 14th and 15th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control.<br />The new finding bears on two very different views of Spanish history: One holds that Spanish civilization is Catholic and all other influences are foreign, the other that Spain has been enriched by drawing from all three of its historical cultures - Catholic, Jewish and Muslim.<br />The genetic study, based on an analysis of Y chromosomes, was conducted by a team of biologists led by Mark Jobling of the University of Leicester in England and Francesc Calafell of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.<br />The biologists developed a Y chromosome signature for Sephardic men by studying Sephardic Jewish communities in places where Jews migrated after being expelled from Spain in the years from 1492 to 1496.<br />They also characterized the Y chromosomes of the Arab and Berber army that invaded Spain in 711 A.D. from data on people now living in Morocco and Western Sahara.<br />After a period of forbearance under the Arab Umayyad dynasty, Spain entered a long period of religious intolerance, with its Muslim Berber dynasties forcing both Christians and Jews to convert to Islam, and the victorious Christians then expelling Jews and Muslims or forcing both to convert.<br />The genetic study, reported online Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics, indicates there was a high level of conversion among Jews.<br />Jonathan Ray, a professor of Jewish studies at Georgetown University, said that a high proportion of people with Sephardic ancestry was to be expected.<br />"Jews formed a very large part of the urban population up until the great conversions," he said.<br />The genetic analysis is "very compelling," said Jane Gerber, an expert on Sephardic history at the City University of New York, and weighs against scholars who have argued that there were very few Jewish conversions to Christianity.<br />Ray raised the question of what the DNA evidence might mean on a personal level. "If four generations on I have no knowledge of my genetic past," Ray said, "how does that affect my understanding of my own religious association?"<br />The issue is one that has confronted Calafell, an author of the study. His own Y chromosome is probably of Sephardic ancestry - the test is not definitive for individuals - and his surname is from a town in Catalonia; Jews undergoing conversion often took surnames from place names.<br />Jews first settled in Spain during the early years of the Roman empire. Sephardic Jews bear that name because the Hebrew word for Spain is Sepharad.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/europe/gene.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/europe/gene.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>*****************</div><br /><br /><div><strong>Parents torn over fate of frozen embryos<br /></strong>By Denise Grady<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />For nearly 15 years, Kim and Walt Best have been paying about $200 a year to keep nine embryos stored in a freezer at a fertility clinic at Duke University — embryos that they no longer need, because they are finished having children but that Best cannot bear to destroy, donate for research or give away to another couple.<br />The embryos were created by in vitro fertilization, which gave the Bests a set of twins, now 14 years old.<br />Although the couple, who live in Brentwood, Tennessee, have known for years that they wanted no more children, deciding what to do with the extra embryos has been a dilemma. He would have them discarded; she cannot.<br />"There is no easy answer," said Best, a nurse. "I can't look at my twins and not wonder sometimes what the other nine would be like. I will keep them frozen for now. I will search in my heart."<br />At least 400,000 embryos are frozen at clinics around the country, with more being added every day, and many people who are done having children are finding it harder than they had ever expected to decide the fate of those embryos.<br />A new survey of 1,020 fertility patients at nine clinics reveals more than a little discontent with the most common options offered by the clinics. The survey, in which Best took part, is being published on Thursday in the journal Fertility and Sterility.<br />Among patients who wanted no more children, 53 percent did not want to donate their embryos to other couples, mostly because they did not want someone else bringing up their children, or did not want their own children to worry about encountering an unknown sibling someday.<br />Forty-three percent did not want the embryos discarded. About 66 percent said they would be likely to donate the embryos for research, but that option was available at only four of the nine clinics in the survey. Twenty percent said they were likely to keep the embryos frozen forever.<br />Embryos can remain viable for a decade or more if they are frozen properly but not all of them survive when they are thawed.<br />Smaller numbers of patients wished for solutions that typically are not offered. Among them were holding a small ceremony during the thawing and disposal of the embryos, or having them placed in the woman's body at a time in her cycle when she would probably not become pregnant, so that they would die naturally.<br />The message from the survey is that patients need more information, earlier in the in vitro process, to let them know that frozen embryos may result and that deciding what to do with them in the future "may be difficult in ways you don't anticipate," said Dr. Anne Drapkin Lyerly, the first author of the study and a bioethicist and associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University.<br />Dr. Lyerly also said discussions about the embryos should be "revisited, and not happen just at the time of embryo freezing, because people's goals and their way of thinking about embryos change as time passes and they go through infertility treatment."<br />Many couples are so desperate to have a child that when eggs are fertilized in the clinic, they want to create as many embryos as possible, to maximize their chances, Dr. Lyerly said. At that time, the notion that there could be too many embryos may seem unimaginable. (In Italy, fertility clinics are not allowed to create more embryos than can be implanted in the uterus at one time, specifically to avoid the ethical quandary posed by frozen embryos.)<br />In a previous study by Dr. Lyerly, women expressed wide-ranging views about embryos: one called them "just another laboratory specimen," but another said a freezer full of embryos was "like an orphanage."<br />Dr. Mark Sauer, the director of the Center for Women's Reproductive Care at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, said: "It's a huge issue. And the wife and husband may not be on the same page."<br />Some people pay storage fees for years and years, Dr. Sauer said. Others stop paying and disappear, leaving the clinic to decide whether to maintain the embryos free or to get rid of them.<br />"They would rather have you pull the trigger on the embryos," Dr. Sauer said. "It's like, 'I don't want another baby, but I don't have it in me; I have too much guilt to tell you what to do, to have them discarded.' "<br />A few patients have asked that extra embryos be given to them, and he cooperates, Dr. Sauer said, adding, "I don't know if they take them home and bury them."<br />Federal and state regulations have made it increasingly difficult for those who want to donate to other couples, requiring that donors come back to the clinic to be screened for infectious diseases, sometimes at their own expense, Sauer said.<br />"It's partly reflected in the attitude of the clinics," he said, explaining that he does not even suggest that people give embryos to other couples anymore, whereas 10 years ago many patients did donate.<br />Best said her nine embryos "have the potential to become beautiful people."<br />The thought of giving them up for research "conjures all sorts of horrors, from Frankenstein to the Holocaust," she said, adding that destroying them would be preferable.<br />Her teenage daughter favors letting another couple adopt the embryos, but, Best said, she would worry too much about "what kind of parents they were with, what kind of life they had."<br />Another survey participant, Lynnelle Fowler McDonald, a case manager for a nonprofit social service agency in Durham, North Carolina, has one embryo frozen at Duke, all that is left of three failed efforts at the fertility clinic.<br />Given the physical and emotional stress, and the expense of in vitro fertilization, McDonald said she did not know whether she and her husband could go through it again. But to get rid of that last embryo would be final; it would mean they were giving up.<br />"There is still, in the back of my mind, this hope," she said.<br />At the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, Andrew Dorfmann, the chief embryologist, said many patients were genuinely torn about what to do with extra embryos, and that a few had asked to be present to say a prayer when their embryos were thawed and destroyed.<br />Jacqueline Betancourt, a marketing analyst with a software company who took part in the survey, said she and her husband donated their embryos at Duke "to science, whatever that means." It was important to them that the embryos were not just going to be discarded without any use being made of them.<br />Betancourt, who has two sons, said: "We didn't ask many questions. We were just comfortable with the idea that they weren't going to be destroyed. We didn't see the point in destroying something that could be useful to science, to other people, to helping other people."<br />Betancourt said she wished there had been more discussion about the extra embryos early in the process. If she had known more, she said, she might have considered creating fewer embryos in the first place.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/04embryo.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/04embryo.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><br /><br /></div><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_kBeTtXrMgMz-MUM7JxySuat6oG8hIqWbl05Pe09vrMjFBwCMPZ3j684YRpUl4WozvffJinpkjhk8HgjQOOSKnowSN_Gzl80Zi-D6Zrc5xWgWpvuigzqevIZ7IbgTFnfxNyVIKEuFWzs/s1600-h/DSC02468.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276179144788984786" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_kBeTtXrMgMz-MUM7JxySuat6oG8hIqWbl05Pe09vrMjFBwCMPZ3j684YRpUl4WozvffJinpkjhk8HgjQOOSKnowSN_Gzl80Zi-D6Zrc5xWgWpvuigzqevIZ7IbgTFnfxNyVIKEuFWzs/s320/DSC02468.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><strong>Thousands more lose investment bank jobs</strong><br />By Julia Werdigier and Bettina Wassener<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />LONDON: In a new wave of job cuts in European investment banking, Credit Suisse announced plans Thursday to eliminate 5,300 jobs, or 11 percent of its global work force, and Nomura, which recently acquired Lehman Brothers' European business, said it planned to cut 1,000 jobs at its London office.<br />In addition, the Frankfurt-based Commerzbank said it would eliminate 1,200 jobs in London, primarily at its corporate finance, fixed-income and research divisions, adding to the hundreds of thousands of jobs that financial institutions have already cut worldwide to survive the current financial crisis.<br />Matthew Clark, an analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in London, said the cuts "signal a refocusing on simpler products and a move to adjust risk."<br />Banks are focusing on their more traditional businesses, including wealth management, and abandoning riskier and more capital-intensive operations as the credit crisis and the resulting economic downturn deepen. Citigroup plans to erase 52,000 jobs worldwide and some analysts expect more cuts at banks worldwide before the end of the year. The reductions also spread to fund managers and private equity firms, including Carlyle Group, which said Wednesday that it would eliminate 100 positions.<br />Credit Suisse said it planned to abandon certain proprietary and principal trading activities and said that the job cuts, to be made in the first half of next year, would reduce costs by 2 billion Swiss francs, or $1.7 billion. About two-thirds of the cuts will be in the investment banking division, which will increasingly focus on areas that require less capital, like the foreign exchange and rates business. Investment banking will remain a "valuable contributor to the integrated bank" but will be less volatile and risky, said the bank, which is based in Zurich.<br />The staff reductions, which include 650 job cuts in London that were reported earlier this week, will bring the number of employees in Credit Suisse's investment banking business back to 2005 levels, the chief executive, Brady Dougan, said during a conference call.<br />"These actions will better position us to weather the continuing challenging market conditions, capture opportunities that arise amid the continuing disruption and prosper when markets improve," Dougan said.<br />Dougan, Walter Kielholz, the bank chairman, and Paul Calello, head of its investment bank, joined other executives in forgoing their bonuses for this year after the bank lost about 3 billion francs in October and November and the investment banking unit had a "significant" pretax loss. The private banking division has bucked the trend affecting the bank's other units and attracted "solid" asset inflows, the bank said.<br />Credit Suisse shares initially fell on the news, but closed 10.11 percent higher in Zurich on Thursday. Shares of its rival UBS, which announced about 9,000 job cuts earlier and had to seek government help to cope with its exposure to the U.S. subprime mortgage market, closed up 5.31 percent.<br />When Nomura, the Japanese bank, took on about 2,500 Lehman employees in Europe in September, it said it expected to avoid job cuts. But on Thursday, it said about a fifth of its total London work force would have to leave, including some former Lehman employees. Nomura employs 26,000 people worldwide.<br />The job cuts in financial services centers like London are already affecting other industries, including the leisure, luxury goods and housing sectors. Luxury home prices in London are expected to decline 14 percent next year after a similar drop this year, according to the real estate adviser Savills.<br />London may lose as many as 62,000 financial jobs by the end of 2009 and bonuses for this year may drop by 60 percent to £3.6 billion, or $5.3 billion, the Center for Economics and Business Research said. HSBC, the biggest bank in Europe, said Monday that it would cut 500 jobs at its British banking business. Standard Chartered, a British bank that makes most of its profit in Asia, announced 200 cuts in Hong Kong.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/bank.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/bank.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>***************</div><br /><br /><div><strong>Citigroup top execs reportedly ready to forego bonuses<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />(Reuters) - Citigroup's top executives and Robert Rubin, a director and senior counsellor at the firm, are ready to forgo their bonuses this year as the bank reels from the effects of the financial crisis, the Financial Times reported.<br />Rubin, a former U.S. treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, told the board he felt the funds that would have been used for his bonus could be better spent on other employees, according to a person close to Rubin, the paper reported.<br />The U.S. government's rescue of the bank made it almost impossible for the company's board to award cash bonuses to other senior executives, led by Chief Executive Vikram Pandit, people close to the situation told the paper.<br />Citigroup could not be immediately reached for comment.<br />No formal decision on bonuses would be taken until January, but Citigroup's executives had to make a significant gesture to defuse criticism from politicians and regulators, people familiar with the situation told the paper.<br />Rising dissent among employees, many of whom face redundancy or lower bonuses, has also weighed on the company's deliberations, the paper said.<br />Citigroup is trying to shore up investor confidence as it sells assets and sheds 52,000 jobs after winning a government rescue that should limit potential losses on $306 billion (208 billion pounds) of troubled assets.<br />CEO Pandit has blamed Citigroup's problems on prior management's decision to expose the bank too heavily to U.S. real estate.<br />(Reporting by Pratish Narayanan in Bangalore; Editing by Erica Billingham)</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-CITIGROUP-BONUSES.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-CITIGROUP-BONUSES.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>*******************</div><br /><br /><div><strong>This season's must-have: The humble coupon</strong><br />By Stuart Elliott<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />THE faltering economy could mean renewed interest in coupons as U.S. shoppers refocus on the cost of the products they buy — that is, if they do actually buy anything these days.<br />Coupons that offer cents off — or percents off — the price of things like groceries, clothing and restaurant meals are particularly popular when consumers need to stretch their dollars. So word that a recession began last December could bring an increase in the number of coupons offered by marketers, as well as redemption rates by consumers.<br />"Thrift is the new normal," said Lance Saunders, executive vice president and head of account planning at Campbell Mithun in Minneapolis, an agency owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies.<br />"There's no stigma to getting anything on discount," Saunders said. "Instead, there's a sense of pride."<br />Already, there are some signs of a nascent coupon chic:<br />¶The Lucky Brand of apparel sold by Liz Claiborne is offering coupons on a humorous holiday Web site (luckybuckoff.com). The more skillfully computer users play a game, the larger the discount they earn on coupons redeemable at stores or on the regular Lucky Web site (luckybrandjeans.com). The discount, 20 percent off for every player, can be raised to 25 or 30 percent.<br />"It's a tough time for all of us," said Kristin Patrick, vice president for marketing at Lucky Brand in Los Angeles. "This is about entertaining your customers and getting them engaged with the brand." The campaign was created by Lime Public Relations and Promotion in New York, part of the Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners unit of MDC Partners.<br />¶Procter & Gamble, the nation's largest advertiser, is producing a retail version of BrandSaver, the coupon booklets that the company inserts in Sunday newspapers 14 times a year. A temporary store named BrandSaver Live opened on Friday on West 57th Street at the Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan.<br />At the store, scheduled to remain open through Dec. 11, visitors can receive advance copies of the BrandSaver coupons to be distributed with Dec. 14 newspapers, along with samples and demonstrations of products like Clairol, Downy, Olay and Tide.<br />Coupons are "an effective trial and awareness vehicle," said Jim Leish, director for North American commercial operations at P.& G. in Cincinnati. Translated from marketer-ese, that means coupons encourage consumers to try products and raise the profiles of brand names, especially as the lower prices of store-label products at supermarkets and drugstores are luring shoppers.<br />¶All You magazine, published by the Time Inc. division of Time Warner and sold by Wal-Mart Stores, is offering subscribers to a new weekly e-mail newsletter, All You Deals and Meals, a sneak peek at the coupons to appear in the coming issue of the magazine.<br />"Our reader is a value-driven consumer," said Diane Oshin, publisher of All You, which regularly runs so many coupons in each issue that it carries a coupon index, typically next to the masthead.<br />"We are not an FSI," Oshin said, using the industry term for a newspaper coupon booklet, free-standing insert. But many advertisers in All You have found that the coupons give them a great return on their investment, she said.<br />¶Valpak Direct Marketing Systems, which distributes coupons under the Valpak brand, has been advertising on national television programs like "ABC World News."<br />New technologies are also helping to renew interest in coupons, especially for younger consumers. There are scores of Web sites where coupons can be obtained by clicking rather than clipping; among them are coupons.com, couponcabin.com, couponcode.com, couponmom.com, 8coupons.com, fatwallet.com and shortcuts.com. Many also deliver coupons by e-mail messages.<br />And coupons are increasingly available on cellphones and other mobile devices from companies like Cellfire and Outalot. Among the marketers offering mobile coupons are Arby's, Caribou Coffee and GameStop.<br />An advantage of coupons delivered through new technologies is that they can be customized and personalized, which could help make them more effective and efficient for the sponsors.<br />"Consumers are craving value, and marketers are no different," said Todd Morris, senior vice president at Catalina Marketing in St. Petersburg, Florida, which provides coupons that can be aimed at specific customers at the checkouts of more than 200 store chains, for products sold by more than 300 companies.<br />Morris describes such coupons as "discretionary discounting" rather than "one size fits all." For instance, shoppers who buy a tube of a certain brand of toothpaste can receive a coupon to save money on their next purchase — if they buy three tubes.<br />"Only when they change behavior, and buy more, more often, do they get a discount," he said.<br />Complete data for coupon use in 2008 will not be available until next year. In 2007, according to the Coupon Council of the Promotion Marketing Association, 89 percent of the population said they used coupons, compared with 86 percent in 2006.<br />"I've looked at some data that show 94 percent say they're using coupons in 2008," said Charles Brown, co-chairman of the council and vice president for marketing services at NCH Marketing Services in Deerfield, Illinois, a unit of Valassis Communications.<br />Last year was the first time since 1992 that redemption rates for coupons did not decline from the previous year. Brown attributed that to the problems that consumers began to have with subprime mortgages, which "made them start being more conscious about saving."<br />"Back in the recessions of the 1970s and the 1980s," he said, marketers saw "consumers redeem more coupons."<br />In recent years, less than 1 percent of all coupons issued by marketers have been redeemed by consumers. One reason for that was a decision to shorten the expiration dates of coupons, Brown said, to an average of nine weeks, from nine months in the '80s.<br />Another reason he cited was the proliferation of customer loyalty programs sponsored by retailers, which offer shoppers a chance to save money by using plastic cards rather than paper coupons.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04adco.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04adco.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>******************</div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><strong>German coupon idea to stimulate economy finds few takers<br /></strong>By Judy Dempsey<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />BERLIN: As governments across Europe struggle to find country-specific responses to the recession, the question facing Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative-led coalition is how to persuade the thrifty German to spend.<br />Lower taxes or rebates will not work, because Germans would most likely just deposit the money in their savings account. So the latest idea to surface is offering people a sort of state-subsidized bargain.<br />The plan, introduced by Karl Lauterbach, health and economics expert for the Social Democrats and an adjunct professor at Harvard University, would get a €500 voucher, or Gutschein, in the hands of every adult - on the condition that he or she buy something.<br />His idea has generated a huge amount of news media attention in recent days: "Here's a check!" The Frankfurter Rundschau trumpeted; "Checks for all citizens!" Bild blared.<br />But Merkel and Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, a Social Democrat, are loath to open up the recently balanced public purse for more big spending, especially if it means a return to big deficits.<br />Lauterbach's plan would cost an enormous amount, well over €40 billion, or about $51 billion. And as someone who was raised in East Germany, where the Communist state was omnipresent, Merkel is unlikely to sign on to a system that would allow the government to tell people how to spend their money.<br />Many Germans seem to agree.<br />"This is a pathetic idea," said Kirstin Stober, 42, an accountant who has voted for the Social Democrats.<br />"They have the nerve to suggest giving me a €500 voucher - which is actually money from my taxes - and then they tell me how to spend it? I do not want to be told by the state how to spend my money."<br />The plan itself is complicated. Germans would have to fork out €200 of their own money to receive the €500 voucher.<br />For that privilege, they would not be allowed to put the money into a savings account or an insurance policy. Instead, they would have to use it for a major purchase or to pay for services like house repairs.<br />Finance Ministry officials, who say the entire project would have to be financed by raising debt, which in turn would be paid off by the taxpayer, do not want to even consider how the system would be administered.<br />"It would be a bureaucratic monster to administer," said Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, general secretary of the Christian Social Union, Merkel's political allies in Bavaria.<br />Still, even conservative leaders in the big western German states have suggested that the government allocate more beyond the €12 billion, spread over two years, it has so far announced. That money would be largely directed toward infrastructure projects.<br />Yet even if Merkel and Steinbrück double, or even triple that spending, the economic effect would not be felt for years.<br />"It takes a long time to turn around projects, what with permits, planning, etc.," said Stefan Schneider of Deutsche Bank Research.<br />So as politicians argue about big spending sprees to pull Germany out of recession, German households are adopting the traditional method: saving.<br />Indeed, the first decision that Merkel and Steinbrück made once they realized that the global financial crisis was going to hit Germany was to guarantee all personal savings accounts. It had an immediate impact.<br />Germans did not rush to the banks to take out their savings. Instead, they started to save more in a country where 11.5 percent of disposable income, one of the highest rates in Europe, is siphoned off to the Sparbuch, or savings book.<br />"The Germans, are saving, saving still and saving more," said Ralf Palm, a spokesman for Postbank, one of the country's major banks.<br />"The government's decision to guarantee savings was a signal to Germans that their money was safe in the banks."<br />It is the same with the other banks.<br />"We are winning new customers because we have attractive, guaranteed interest rates on savings accounts and because accounts are guaranteed," said Anke Veil, a spokeswoman for Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest.<br />But even as the Germans are opening new savings accounts, there are some signs that they may be willing to open their wallets as well.<br />Already, the big retailers are cutting prices and offering credit at zero interest to attract customers. This helped lift the consumer confidence index in November. There is other good news, too: Energy prices and inflation are falling.<br />Some are expecting an increase in consumer spending to help lift the economy for a brief spell over the Christmas season, at least.<br />"If we know are savings are safe and inflation is going down, these things matter," said Lutz Pilger, who runs his own house maintenance business. "But if the government starts telling me how to spend my money, they can think again. I do not want to pay my taxes to a paternalistic state."</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/coupon.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/coupon.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>******************</div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><strong>An online sales boom that may not last</strong><br />By Claire Cain Miller<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />SAN FRANCISCO: In a rare bright spot for the U.S. retail industry, e-commerce sites had a strong holiday weekend, with online sales from Friday through Monday up 13 percent compared with last year, according to data released Wednesday by comScore.<br />The Monday after Thanksgiving was the second-heaviest online spending day on record, comScore said, behind only Dec. 10, 2007. Online sales climbed to $846 million, up 15 percent from the previous year.<br />"It was higher than I would have anticipated, but I'm not entirely surprised, just because the level of discounting was so aggressive," said Andrew Lipsman, a senior industry analyst at comScore, which tracks a variety of Internet data.<br />Still, strong Web sales are unlikely to bail out the retail industry, which is contending with a recession and a sharp decline in consumers' wealth. E-commerce now accounts for only 7 percent of overall sales, according to Shop.org, the e-commerce arm of the National Retail Federation. And online sales were down 2 percent for the season so far — the first decline since the Web became a significant retail channel.<br />The Monday after Thanksgiving — which Shop.org calls Cyber Monday — has been a bellwether for online holiday sales. Sales growth on that day has historically fallen within two percentage points of total online sales growth for the season.<br />This year will be a different story, Lipsman said. ComScore has predicted that sales will be flat this season, and the firm is not changing its forecast as a result of sales Monday.<br />"There was evidently some pent-up demand," said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org. "The consumer could have said, 'I'm going to do most of my shopping this day,' and we could see a drop-off for the rest of the season."<br />The online sales growth over the weekend mirrored offline sales, which the National Retail Federation said increased 18 percent over last year. Many retailers will give precise figures Thursday in their November sales reports.<br />Online, the virtual big-box stores, which had some of the steepest discounts, got the most visits. On Monday, eBay, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy were the top e-commerce sites, Nielsen Online said.<br />At PayPal, which is used to process almost all eBay sales, the number of transactions Monday was up 27 percent from the year before, said Jim Griffith, whom eBay calls its marketplace expert. To lure shoppers, the auction site is promoting $1 holiday "doorbusters."<br />The most popular product sold on eBay Monday was the Nintendo Wii game console — 3,017 were sold for an average price of $349. The Wii Fit, an add-on device for the console, was also popular, with 1,305 units sold for an average $143.<br />Amazon.com had strong sales of consumer electronics and toys, said Sally Fouts, a spokeswoman for the company. Deals included a Logitech universal remote control, marked down to $137.28 from $249.99, and a Canon digital camera, down to $159.94 from $299.99.<br />Beauty products accounted for a surprisingly large slice of sales Monday, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an e-commerce analyst at the research firm Forrester. "Cosmetics are doing really well this year, because it's those affordable luxuries," she said.<br />Average order values have been smaller this year, Mulpuru said: "It may not be a sweater, but it's a scarf."<br />One reason that shoppers finally filled their online shopping carts might be that there are five fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year than last. "People have to spend a certain amount of money during Christmas," Mulpuru said, "and that money was not spent in November, which means it has to be spent in December."</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/technology/04online.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/technology/04online.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>*******************</div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><strong>Bankers, risk and warnings unheeded</strong><br />By James SaftReuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />LONDON: Just as every society has a creation myth, banking is now busily writing a destruction myth that seeks to explain and soothe in a world torn to its foundations.<br />The myth, as expounded by regulators, bankers and their various service providers, is that we were hit by a perfect storm, a 1,000-year flood so unpredictable that we could not possibly be held accountable for it. An act of God, rather than the folly of man.<br />Or as the excellent financial blog Calculated Risk - located at http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/ - puts it: "Hoocoodanode?"<br />The implication, of course, is: Now that banks know these sorts of things can happen, banks will behave sensibly because it is in their best interest to do so. It is just that the data we put into the models covered only the boom years. Now that we are getting good data on a downturn, well, problem solved. No need for overly heavy-handed regulation; that will only stifle growth and recovery.<br />No need for intrusive compensation controls; this would simply drive risk-takers from banking into less regulated areas, or prompt a brain drain, in which the best minds might go into industry.<br />There is a pronounced unwillingness to take responsibility and to recognize that many of the factors that went into creating and sustaining the bubble were not so much unknowable as, for those in a position to do something about them at the time, either unprofitable, unpleasant or politically inconvenient to know.<br />Take, for example, Robert Rubin, former U.S. Treasury secretary and current board member at Citigroup.<br />"Nobody was prepared for this," Rubin told The Wall Street Journal. He has been paid $115 million, excluding stock options, since 1999 and was advising Citigroup when it decided to mimic its peers and take on more risk.<br />"What came together was not only a cyclical undervaluing of risk," Rubin said, but also "a housing bubble, and triple-A ratings were misguided."<br />There is simply no doubt that a number of people were raising red flags about risk, about the use of ratings, about issues around securitization, and most certainly about an emerging real estate bubble. But it proved impossible for those risks to get a proper hearing within a system that was throwing off so much life-changing money.<br />Rubin, when queried on his pay, answered that he could have made more elsewhere. But while everyone is free to take money that is on offer, that is different from saying that you have earned it, or that, in a system in which pensioners and taxpayers are the ultimate bag-holders, it is appropriate and should not be subject to regulation.<br />There is a similar argument on pay making the rounds: that since so many senior managers lost so much of their fortunes in the failure of companies like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, this demonstrates that there was not a misalignment of risks between employees, shareholders and the governments that ultimately must pick up the pieces when things go wrong.<br />It is very sad that so many people lost so much, but this is not even close to being an argument for continued light-touch regulation. The issue is not so much that people in banking and finance have skin in the game, but that they are far from alone in having it, and that their ultimate cost of capital is in part a function of the fact that it is and has been understood that the state will step in if things come to grief.<br />That argues, in my view, for stricter regulation of bank capital and of bank compensation so as to decrease the risks.<br />That means tying compensation more closely to risks, including the risk that things that look good today go bad in three years' time. A scheme now being implemented at UBS, under which bankers can "lose" money they "earn" based on various performance factors in subsequent years, is not a bad start.<br />Those who argue against more stringent regulation have one thing right: It is going to cost, and requiring banks to hold more capital will impose a ceiling on the speed at which the economy can easily grow.<br />One idea worth consideration is proposed by Paul Miller of FBR Capital Markets and would involve regulating assets and how they are funded, not just the institutions.<br />That would help to guard against the next shadow banking system and another highly leveraged and ultimately government-insured bout of speculation.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/col05.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/col05.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>****************</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/asiacar.php">Asian carmakers don't want Big 3 to fail</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/fed.php">Bernanke calls for measures to stem foreclosures</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/05markets.php">Following a pattern, U.S. stocks stumble at finish line</a><br />G<a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/rupiah.php">lobal credit crisis squeezes Indonesian tycoon</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/nokia.php">Nokia reduces quarterly outlook for 2nd time</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/paulson.php">China calls for U.S. moves to help avert a global recession</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/rupee.php">Indian companies hit by global slowdown</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04Forbes-realestate.php">Real estate slump continues around the world</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04harvard.php">Harvard endowment loses 22%</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04babcock.php">Babcock & Brown gets lifeline</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04nomura.php">Nomura to cut up to 1,000 workers in London</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04refi.php">A rush into refinancing as U.S. mortgage rates fall</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/place.php">Fortress, an investment firm under siege</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/philips.php">Philips issues warning and further restructuring</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/att.php">AT&T, DuPont and Viacom announce job cuts</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/auto.php">Autoworkers offer contract concessions to Big 3</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04swap.php">GM is trying to ease a crushing debt load</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04saturn.php">With Saturn, GM failed a makeover</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/shop.php">Most U.S. retailers report a dismal November</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-USA-ECONOMY.php">U.S. jobless rolls at 26-year peak</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-STARBUCKS.php">Starbucks to cut more costs</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-PENSIONS-AON.php">Firms to bargain harder in pension deals</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-COOP.php">Co-op lines up buyers for more Somerfield stores</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-AUTOS-TESTIMONY-GM.php">GM pledges faster cost-cuts in return for bailout</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-STANDARD-CHARTERED-BONDS.php">Standard Chartered bond buyback to lift profit</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-BIOTECH.php">Biotech bosses call for government-backed funds</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-BROWN-RBS.php">Brown says doesn't want to keep RBS stake for long</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-RYANAIR-AERLINGUS.php">Ryanair met Irish minister over Aer Lingus bid</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-WOOLWORTHS.php">Theo Paphitis pulls out of Woolworths talks</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-EXPERIAN-JOBS.php">Credit checker Experian to cut up to 300 jobs</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-CREDITSUISSE.php">Credit Suisse to cut 5,300 jobs after 1.7 billion pound loss</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-MARKETS-BRITAIN-STOCKS.php">FTSE slips as rate cut fails to inspire</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-AUTOS-BAILOUT-OPTIONS.php">GM and Chrysler considering bankruptcy to get bailout</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-NOMURA.php">Nomura says to cut up to 1,000 staff in London</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-MARKETS-OIL.php">Oil drops below $44 to lowest in nearly 4 years</a> </div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>*****************</div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><strong>Publishing industry hit by job cuts<br /></strong>By Motoko Rich<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />NEW YORK: In a day of especially grim news for the book business, Random House, the world's largest publisher of consumer books, announced a sweeping reorganization aimed at trimming costs, while Simon & Schuster laid off 35 people, including the head of its children's book publishing unit.<br />The moves signaled just how bad sales have become in bookstores and followed the news this week that the publisher of the adult division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the house that represents authors like Philip Roth and José Saramago, had resigned, presumably to protest a temporary freeze on the acquisition of new books.<br />Industry insiders were already calling the day "Black Wednesday" as news trickled out about further layoffs at Houghton Mifflin; a cut of 10 percent of the staff at Thomas Nelson, the world's largest publisher of English-language Bibles; a freeze on raises at the Penguin Group unit of Pearson; and a delay of pay increases at HarperCollins, the books division of News Corp.<br />The news at Random House, which included the resignations of the heads of two of its largest groups, followed months of speculation about the company's future. Ever since Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate that owns the publishing group, appointed Markus Dohle, formerly head of the company's printing unit, to head Random House in May, most people assumed he would consolidate some imprints and make staffing changes.<br />In a memo to staff members Wednesday, Dohle said that Irwyn Applebaum, publisher of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, and Stephen Rubin, publisher of the Doubleday Publishing Group, had stepped down. In a separate memo, Dohle said that he was in discussions with Rubin about "creating a new role for him at Random House."<br />Bantam Dell publishes authors like Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel. Doubleday's authors include John Grisham and Dan Brown.<br />Most people in the industry were not surprised that Applebaum was resigning from Bantam, which has long been considered Random House's weak link.<br />Dohle did not announce any further layoffs Wednesday. But in an interview, a spokeswoman, Carol Schneider, said publishers would be reviewing their staffs. "There may be some difficult choices that they're going to have to make down the road," she said.<br />In a memo to the Simon & Schuster staff, Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive, said the 35 layoffs at the company had resulted from "an unavoidable acknowledgment of the current bookselling marketplace and what may very well be a prolonged period of economic instability." The cuts included Rick Richter, president of the Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division. Reidy said Richter had resigned to "explore other opportunities in publishing."<br />Simon & Schuster, publisher of authors like Stephen King and Bob Woodward, is the books division of the CBS Corp.<br />The shakeout in the industry comes during what publishers and booksellers have described as the worst retailing environment in memory. Recently, Leonard Riggio, chairman and largest shareholder of Barnes & Noble, predicted a dreadful holiday shopping season and wrote in an internal memorandum that "never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in."<br />The deterioration in book sales appears to have come late in the year. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, sales for the year are actually up slightly. But several publishers said that sales in October and November had weakened drastically.<br />The industry was bracing for further layoffs. Last month, John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, whose publishing houses include Farrar, Straus and Giroux and St. Martin's Press, said in a companywide staff meeting that he could not guarantee that everyone in the room would have a job in the future. Sargent declined to comment. Macmillan is part of the Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group.<br />"These kinds of times force people's hands," said Robert Gottlieb, chairman of the literary agency Trident Media. "During good times, you can better absorb a variety of lines not doing well than you can when the economy is in this kind of condition."</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/technology/publish.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/technology/publish.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>********************</div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><strong>It's starting: Some people only watch TV shows online</strong><br />By Laura M. Holson<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />I have been called many things in my life; never, though, an urban myth. But that is what Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC Universal, suggested when I told him I got rid of my television set last year and started watching "30 Rock" and "CSI" on my laptop instead.<br />"I hear about people like you," he said, a hint of skepticism in his voice. Then he hissed what sounded vaguely like an insult.<br />"You probably read."<br />Well, yes, I do. But just because I don't have a television set, doesn't mean I don't crave "Gossip Girl."<br />It's just that I don't have a large television in my living room and a monthly payment to make to my cable company. I don't need one: The major American networks and many other broadcasters have made it easy to find their shows free online.<br />Most Americans still primarily watch shows on their television sets. I'll concede that point to Wurtzel. But there is much to suggest that watching shows online is more than just passing fancy.<br />The Internet has proved to be an excellent promotional vehicle. NBC says 7 out of 10 viewers were spurred to watch some shows on television only after sampling them first online. At ABC, 8 percent of viewers they track - or about one out of every 12 people - watch network shows solely online.<br />My friend Louise uses a projector hooked up to her laptop to watch "Lost" on a white wall in her living room. My 24-year-old niece never owned a television set until I gave her mine. Now she uses it for DVDs and to watch "America's Next Top Model" online.<br />And it's not just for kids. A 40-something executive I know watched the last presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama on his home computer.<br />The funny thing is, despite not having a television set, I actually watch more network programming than I did when I had cable. The difference is I am selective about what I watch. No more flipping channels just to see what's on, the television equivalent of a one-night stand. Instead, I am in a committed relationship.<br />To save time, I usually stay away from the abundance of sites like Veoh.com, Joost.com, Bebo.com or AOL. Quite simply, there is little there to entice me.<br />Each has a similar syndicate of already-released movies and television shows and can be confusing if you are not sure what to look for. The exception is Sling.com, a new site that offers much of the same content but with a more user-friendly setup. All of these sites are available worldwide.<br />For American network television shows, the best places to start are their home Web sites, including abc.com, nbc.com, cbs.com and fox.com, where shows are posted usually within 24 hours of being aired on television. They can be viewed only in the United States, however.<br />Abc.com, in my experience, is one of the simplest to use. It was a pioneer in putting shows online, although stingy in the early days, as it didn't want to share its toys with other sites.<br />Abc.com also requires viewers be engaged, requiring them to click a button to continue watching the program after an ad ends. It is a deceptively smart strategy: Viewers must sit through a 30-second commercial - and click - to find out whether Mike Delfino actually died from smoke inhalation on "Desperate Housewives." It's only 30 seconds (and I can watch the countdown) that keep me in my seat.<br />Recently I was talking with Quincy Smith, the president of CBS Interactive, who wanted me to visit the CBS channel on YouTube. But it was so cumbersome to find that Smith had to guide me on the telephone as I sat in front of my laptop. MGM plans to offer movies there too, but the list is not comprehensive.<br />The one standout is hulu.com, a joint venture between NBC and Fox that, alas, is not available outside the United States. It is well organized and simple to use. (Even Smith called it "the gold standard.") It has not only new shows like "The Office," "The Simpsons," "24" and "Heroes" but also a treasure trove of classics like the original "Battlestar Galactica," "Married ... with Children" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."<br />Viewers outside the United States waiting for the right to view programs on hulu or the network sites should not hold their breath: a complicated thicket of laws is making that next to impossible for now.<br />But fans of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" can watch it on comedycentral.com, and if you're lucky, you can sometimes pick up snippets that add up to a real episode of a television show on YouTube.<br />Of course, it wouldn't be television without a blooper or two. So many online "Gossip Girl"-hungry fans showed up to watch last season's shows that they threatened to crash cwtv.com. As a result, the CW television network banned the show online, hoping that the viewers instead would watch it on their televisions. Fans protested, though, and the show reappeared online.<br />Then there's iTunes, Apple's media store. It has been selling television shows for years now, and buying shows is easy to do. The problem I have with iTunes is that you have to buy the shows to watch them. And while certain series like "Lost" may require multiple viewings to fully appreciate them, do I really need to own episodes of "Two and a Half Men"?<br />While watching television shows online works for me, I know it is not for everyone.<br />Shows don't appear until the next day, a deal killer for the truly obsessed. And it is hard to find live sports events (or delayed, for that matter) online, particularly if it is a big event like the Super Bowl or the pro basketball finals. Besides, movies and sports events have more appeal when viewed on a large screen - that's what they are made for. I recently watched David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" on hulu and ached to experience it on my brother-in-law's home-theater setup in his den.<br />Speaking of him, I asked him recently if he would ever watch his beloved San Francisco 49ers football team, or any show, for that matter, on a magazine-size laptop. He looked at me, incredulous.<br />"Does anybody really do that?" he asked.<br />Wurtzel is probably smiling somewhere.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/technology/ptbasics04.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/technology/ptbasics04.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>******************</div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><strong>Luxury prices are falling; the sky, too<br /></strong>By Guy Trebay<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />"THE world is a strange place right now," a salesman on the main floor at Bergdorf Goodman said as shoppers pawed through handbags piled on counters like discount merchandise at Century 21. "It's off its axis."<br />The handbags, like a lot else at the Fifth Avenue retailer, had been marked down 40 percent and are likely to go lower as seasonal sale days wear on. "Sixty percent off is the new black," as Patricia Marx wryly noted in the Dec. 8 issue of The New Yorker. Yet the discounts at Bergdorf are far from the deepest among luxury retailers around the city.<br />In a move that caused consternation among its high-toned competitors along Fifth Avenue, Saks slashed the bulk of its fall fashion and accessories up to 70 percent over Thanksgiving weekend — to what some termed limbo lows.<br />There is nothing new about retailers cutting prices at holiday time, and the discounts have been especially deep in this recessionary year. But few in the luxury goods trade can recall a time when the price-slashing started so soon or was so severe. By cutting prices radically, Saks's chief merchant, Ron Frasch, turned his chain's flagship emporium into a swank Fifth Avenue version of a discount outlet, moving merchandise in volume and spooking the competition as it struggled to hold on to a traditional mark-down sequence, and even to continue selling certain brands at full price. Frasch declined to comment on his corporate game plan. "It's not a conversation I want to get into," he said.<br />Even seasoned bargain hunters were startled to see Saks's wood-paneled main sales floor mobbed with consumers nosing like truffle hounds through shelves of marked-down cashmere sweaters and racks of designer clothes with prices seemingly too good to be true.<br />Could those columnar Valentino evening dresses in signature red really be 70 percent below the original price of $2,950?<br />Was one reading the $329 tag right on a cashmere men's blazer from the elite Italian woolen house Loro Piana, a jacket that typically costs $2,000 or more? What about the $129 price for a black satin skirt from Comme des Garçons? Was the tagged price a misprint? It was not.<br />"What I hear at every level of retail is that no one has ever experienced anything like this in their careers," said Ken Downing, the fashion director of Neiman Marcus. And, while Downing suggested that the 40 Neiman stores would not soon tumble to discount fever, much of their merchandise had already been marked down by 40 percent, a sure sign that the line on price reduction cannot be held by any single player in luxury goods.<br />Privately, most retailers admit to being frightened by the severity of the economic downturn and are looking not merely to save the current season but their commercial lives.<br />While it is true that early numbers suggest retailers across the country got a boost from Black Friday's bargain-hunting frenzy, the margins on optimism remain slim. A report released on Tuesday by MasterCard Advisors showed that sales of luxury goods fell 24.4 percent in November compared with the same month a year ago. When individual stores disclose their own figures for November sales on Thursday, they are expected to show the deep declines of early fall continuing.<br />On Wednesday, customers of Barneys New York received an e-mail message promoting a "designer freak-out sale." The savings of up to 50 percent encompassed goods like Christian Louboutin suede booties (marked down to $720 from $1,195) and coveted Marc Jacobs totes (reduced to $629 from $1,250). It should probably be noted that handbags and shoes are where luxury retailers turn to hear the music of cash registers going ka-ching, and so the event was a clear indication that somebody at Barneys must be freaking out.<br />"It's painful," Linda Fargo, the women's fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman, said referring to a landscape in which carriage-trade stores are struggling not only to hold on to their profits but also their ineffable luster.<br />What seems inevitable is that the pain will worsen as the price reductions provoke questions among consumers of how stratospheric profits must have been when the economy was riding high. How great, really, was the surcharge to consumers for participating in fashion fantasy?<br />"I was in Saks last week, and there were these staggering discounts and it's not even Jan. 1," Tim Gunn, the "Project Runway" host and chief creative officer of Liz Claiborne, said Tuesday, before a discussion on "Redefining the Rules of Fashion in Today's Economy," sponsored by the textile manufacturer Dow XLA. "I was told by easily half a dozen sales associates that if I opened a Saks credit card, I'd get another 15 percent off. What I wonder is, "What are the real margins?' "<br />That question gives rise to another: once consumers become acquainted with slash-and-burn prices, how can designer fashion regain its mystique? Will shoppers ever again want to buy luxury goods at full price? The depth of the challenge was suggested by the incongruity this week of seeing Prada wallets, usually kept under glass at Saks, dumped into display stands that at Wal-Mart are known as "end-caps"; lizard handbags at Bergdorf Goodman jumbled on counters as if that Fifth Avenue landmark were an outlet of Loehmann's; and Ralph Lauren dress shirts at Lord & Taylor thrown together and offered at prices roughly equivalent to the cost of two McDonald's Happy Meals.<br />The Saks strategy may be the first sign of a radical reconfiguration of the luxury goods landscape, said Beth Buccini, an owner of Kirna Zabête, the SoHo specialty store. "The intense and early discounting will negate the power of runway shows to drive fashion in both creative and commercial terms," Buccini said. "All anyone can afford to do anymore is to sell pre-collections," she added, referring to the commercial collections designers offer during transitional periods between their statement-making, twice yearly runway shows.<br />"Runway clothes next year will arrive in the store in April, and we will have three weeks to sell them at full price before the department stores have put them on sale," she said. "What I'm worried about is the creativity. Everybody is paralyzed wondering what people want, what they're willing to spend, what's going to dazzle us into not being able to live without certain items." It could be, as Zac Posen remarked on Tuesday, that we are headed into a period when designers and retailers are "either stimulated and excited and challenged," or else follow thousands of other failed American businesses into oblivion.<br />"It's all going to be very Darwinian," Buccini said.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/style/04shopping.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/style/04shopping.php</a></div><br /><div></div><br /><div>***************</div><br /><div></div><br /><div><strong>Zimbabwe declares cholera emergency<br /></strong>By Barry Bearak<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />JOHANNESBURG: The Zimbabwean health minister, David Parirenyatwa, has declared the nation's cholera outbreak a national emergency and appealed for outside help, the state-controlled Herald newspaper reported on Thursday. The epidemic has claimed more than 560 lives.<br />The news emerged a day after riot police officers brandishing batons charged into a group of 100 doctors and nurses on Wednesday in Harare, the capital, breaking up a demonstration for better pay and working conditions in a nation suffering from both the cholera outbreak and an economy in free fall.<br />The health workers, many dressed in uniform, fled as the police approached. Nearby, teachers and other union members tried to join the protest but were clubbed by yet more police officers, and at least 15 were arrested.<br />Earlier in the day, armed men identifying themselves as the police officers took a human rights activist, Jestina Mukoko, from her home in what Amnesty International called "part of an established pattern of harassment and intimidation of human rights defenders." Mukoko, whose whereabouts are unknown, is director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, an organization that has been documenting rights abuses.<br />The cholera epidemic and the new crackdown on dissent come in a country already mired in desperation. The government is paralyzed by a stalemated power-sharing deal, and the official inflation rate is 231 million percent. Grocery shelves are largely barren. Most public hospitals and schools are closed.<br />According to the Herald, Parirenyatwa, the health minister, said many hospitals were in urgent need of drugs, food and equipment. He also cited the critical shortage of staff in hospitals adding that those remaining had "no zeal" to work, the Herald said.<br />By declaring an emergency, the health minister was able to appeal for outside help which, he said, "will help us reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with the current socio-economic environment by December 2009."<br />The newspaper quoted the minister as telling potential donors: "Our central hospitals are literally not functioning. Our staff is demotivated and we need your support to ensure that they start coming to work and our health system is revived." He listed urgent requirements as including medicines, laboratory reagents, surgical sundries, renal and laundry equipment, X-ray films and boilers, the Herald said.<br />Since August, cholera deaths have risen to 565, according to the United Nations. More than 12,500 people are infected, and to make matters worse, in Harare water itself has become scarce as a dysfunctional government lacks the chemicals to purify the drinking supply. Many businesses have shut because of the sanitation problems.<br />To add to the chaos, soldiers, angered at the meagerness of their deflated pay, on Monday rampaged through central Harare, breaking windows, looting stores and robbing the money changers who deal in foreign currency. Armed police officers had to disperse the marauding troops with tear gas.<br />The demonstrations on Wednesday brought yet another macabre scene of violence. The police "assaulted several women, some of them pregnant," said Lovemore Matombo, president of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.<br />The protesters, upset about restrictions that kept them from reclaiming their increasingly worthless cash, had been marching with placards. One read, "We want all our money!" Another said, "People are dying of preventable disease!"<br />Many onlookers were standing in long lines at banks, and they watched with a contradictory set of anxieties, afraid of being shot but reluctant to risk losing their place.<br />"I don't want to die now," said one observer, Mary Muzanenhamo, a mother of two boys. "I have kids to look after. I just hope this crisis will soon be over and we can start on a new chapter."<br />Among the protesters who were arrested were Wellington Chibebe, secretary general of the Congress of Trade Unions, and Raymond Majongwe, secretary general of the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe, Matombo said. All those arrested were released.<br />More than 50 others were arrested in demonstrations throughout the country, according to a statement by the Congress of Trade Unions, and several of those protesters remained jailed.<br />Earlier, some union members had presented a petition to Gideon Gono, the powerful governor of the nation's Reserve Bank. The wages of many salaried workers are paid directly into bank accounts, and Gono had promised to raise the amount people can withdraw from 500,000 Zimbabwean dollars each day, which is now a paltry 20 cents, to 100 million Zimbabwean dollars, or about $40, each week.<br />The health care workers had their own particular complaints. "We are forced to work without basic health institutional needs like drugs, adequate water and sanitation, safe clothing gear, medical equipment and support services," read a protest letter from the Zimbabwe Doctors' Association.<br />Conditions in hospitals and clinics have been steadily deteriorating. Basic medicines are absent. There is no thread for suturing or needles for injections. The health system was already in collapse when the cholera epidemic struck.<br />This week, Unicef announced an emergency response to the worsening conditions. So did the European Commission and the International Red Cross.<br />"Cholera is a disease of destitution that used to be almost unknown in Zimbabwe," Louis Michel, the European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, told The Associated Press.<br />He was referring to a time when Zimbabwe was a breadbasket of the region. But during the past decade this nation has plunged into ruin, one reason being the confiscation of white-owned farms by the government of Robert Mugabe.<br />In elections last March, the 84-year-old Mugabe, who has headed the country for nearly 30 years, was outpolled by opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai. Forces loyal to the president then unleashed a campaign of violence before a runoff vote set for June. The brutality caused Tsvangirai to withdraw from the second election.<br />Regional leaders finally coaxed the two sides into a power-sharing deal with Mugabe's remaining as president and Tsvangirai's becoming prime minister. But though the agreement was hailed as a breakthrough, vital details have never been ironed out and the arrangement has been stymied by disputes over who will control central government ministries.</div><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/africa/05zimbabwe.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/africa/05zimbabwe.php</a></div><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>****************</div><br /><br /><div><strong>CBGB club at center of bitter family feud</strong><br />By Ben Sisario<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />At the opening party for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC on Tuesday night, fans and celebrities rubbed elbows while ogling an exhibition of artifacts from CBGB, the landmark Bowery club that closed in 2006.<br />Studying the club's tattered awning, cash register and flier-covered phone booth, Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band and Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators, a band that was one of CBGB's 1970s mainstays, nodded in approval. "O.K., we can go now," Manitoba said.<br />But just as CBGB is getting its due alongside John Lennon's piano and Jimi Hendrix's guitar, its ownership and legacy are being challenged by a lawsuit that has riven the family of its proprietor, Hilly Kristal, who died last year. Like the battle over the Brooke Astor estate — minus $100 million or so, but still worth plenty, thanks to the popularity of CBGB T-shirts — the case is filled with accusations of fraud and deception, and it adds a bitter coda to the story of a beloved New York institution.<br />In the suit, filed last year in Surrogate's Court in Manhattan but amended in a hearing last week, Kristal's 83-year-old former wife, Karen, says she is the rightful owner of the business, and that Kristal and their daughter, Lisa Kristal Burgman, 53 — who inherited the bulk of her father's estate of more than $3 million — systematically deceived her by hiding money from the sale of merchandise.<br />The elder Kristal received nothing in the will, and the couple's son, Dana, 49, who sides with his mother against his sister, will receive a maximum of $100,000, depending on taxes and other expenses of the estate, his lawyer said.<br />At the center of the case is an agreement the Kristals made before they opened CBGB in 1973. Although they had already divorced, Kristal became the sole owner of the company that operated the club because Kristal had declared bankruptcy in a previous business. She held various jobs there, and says she designed and painted the logo.<br />"I started CBGB," Kristal said in an interview at her lawyer's office in Midtown Manhattan. "I put up the money, spent my time in there. And then my daughter says that they get it all. And that's a lie."<br />Although Kristal was the public face of the club and essentially ran the business, Kristal was a fixture there for decades. She tended bar, cleaned up, checked IDs at the door and often acted as a disciplinarian, drawing a weekly salary of $100.<br />"We were all scared of her," said Danny Fields, a former manager of the Ramones. "She was like a witch. She was always carrying a broom."<br />Lisa Kristal Burgman declined to comment for this article, but in a statement lawyers for the estate called her mother's claims "specious," adding, "CBGB was, and is, synonymous with Hilly Kristal."<br />In court papers the estate says that Kristal voluntarily signed over ownership to her former husband in January 2005, just as CBGB was beginning to have troubles with its landlord over unpaid rent, which ultimately led to the club's closing.<br />Kristal said that she had no memory of signing this document, which is also signed by Kristal, but not by any lawyers or witnesses.<br />Kristal suffers from hydrocephalus, according to her lawyers, which can affect short-term memory, and in an interview she repeated many of the same anecdotes numerous times.<br />Her lawyers argue that even if Kristal did sign the document, she had been manipulated by her daughter and former husband. According to the suit, Kristal had been "crying poverty" to Kristal for years, and hid from her his establishment of CBGB Fashions, a company that handled merchandise. In March 2005 he told The New York Times that CBGB Fashions grossed about $2 million a year.<br />Complicating matters, shortly before he died of cancer Kristal agreed to sell CBGB's assets and trademarks for a total of $3.5 million. Their buyer, CBGB Holdings LLC, which has declined to comment, sells merchandise out of a storage space in Brooklyn, and lent much of the CBGB collection to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Last week's hearing added CBGB Holdings to the case as a third party.<br />When asked about the case, Michael Elkin, an intellectual-property lawyer in New York at Winston & Strawn, who is not involved in the lawsuit, said it would be up to Kristal to prove that she had been deceived and that the documents cited by the estate are invalid.<br />"A lot of this will turn on whether there is any corroborating documentary evidence," Elkin said, "and whether or not this 83-year-old woman can withstand a fierce cross-examination, because it's going to come at her like a bat out of hell."<br />Longtime members of the CBGB circle shook their heads at the ugliness of the dispute, but said that whatever happens, CBGB's symbolic place as the birthplace of punk rock would be untainted.<br />"It's sad, but it seems kind of inevitable," Arturo Vega, the Ramones' longtime artistic director, said of the suit. "But it shouldn't reflect what this place was about, not at all. CBGB was a beacon of freedom for young people, something to believe in."</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/arts/04cbgb.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/arts/04cbgb.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>****************</div><br /><br /><div><strong>'Ulysses' ponders the 'fragility of coherence'<br /></strong>By Michael Kimmelman<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />VENICE: By Monday the city was knee-deep under water, freakish winds pushing the high tide into the streets and piazzas, the worst flood here in two decades. Water buses couldn't dock because piers were submerged. A gray haze, the familiar Venetian mood music, shrouded everything. Someone rowed a boat across St. Mark's Square.<br />There followed the predictable finger pointing by local politicians, who have battled for years over Moses, a $5.5 billion tidal barrier system for the lagoon that is supposed to be finished in 2010 at the earliest.<br />By chance a watery hero arrived in town. Over the weekend, just before the city became nearly impassable, Monteverdi's "Return of Ulysses" had a short, magical run at the ancient Malibran Theater, near the Rialto Bridge, slightly off the beaten path.<br />The production, a taut 90-minute reduction of the original, is devised by William Kentridge, the South African artist, with the Handspring Puppet Company and the Ricercar Consort, a small period-instrument ensemble from Belgium. The show is a decade-old affair, touring irregularly since 1998. This was its debut here, a homecoming in the city where Monteverdi staged the opera's premiere almost four centuries ago.<br />Meanwhile a video that Kentridge devised for the fire curtain at Venice's main opera house, La Fenice, was unveiled. Made to be seen as audiences arrive and the orchestra tunes up, it will be shown over the coming weeks before various operas.<br />It's a Rube Goldberg sort of concept on film, sneakily poetic. A small, related exhibition opened at the same time at Palazzetto Tito. It remains on view through mid-January.<br />Shrugging off the dankness and the usual travails of dealing with Italian bureaucracy, Kentridge sat the other morning in the Fenice café, waiting for the video's trial run. "Even the ground you stand on isn't stable here," he said. He was responding to a question about whether his work, which dwells frequently on concepts like uncertainty and indirection, relates to this city, of all cities. He gestured toward the rain.<br />In a catalogue essay for the exhibition Kentridge put the same thought this way: "Insofar as there is a central logic behind the whole project," he wrote about the Fenice curtain video - although he could have been talking about "Ulysses" too - "it is the argument of the fragility of coherence, in which the coherence and disintegration of images refers also to other fragilities and breaks."<br />Other fragilities and breaks. Kentridge has made various works that allude to his native country's apartheid legacy. But fragilities and breaks could mean Venice too.<br />Kentridge, 53, is known in the art world for charcoal drawings, which he often animates in films whose melancholy humor is dry and temperature cool. Animated, the drawings mutate, assuming one shape, then another.<br />A video projected onto a screen behind the singers and puppets in "Ulysses" turns a highway into a hospital corridor. Flowers sprout on vines that transform into ancient Greek lovers. Antique temples and modern high-rises crumble, then reconstitute themselves, leaving ghostly palimpsests.<br />Jason Goodwin, who wrote "The Bellini Card," suggests that Venice gave English two words, innuendo and incognito. It's a nice thought. Ulysses is a bit like Venice, if you think about it. He was cunning; he liked disguises. Kentridge's version of the opera, on the other hand, stresses Ulysses' vulnerability.<br />And like Ulysses, Venice famously broods on the heavy toll of history; it suffers the humiliation of invaders, who these days never stop arriving. Convalescent but vainglorious, like the Homeric hero, the city dreams of its own bygone splendor while facing the prospect of a watery grave.<br />As it happens, the Ricercar Consort musicians, a half-dozen of them, sit enthroned on a semicircular platform, like the audience in an operating theater, with a puppet Ulysses, supine on a gurney, below. He reclines there throughout the opera: Ulysses, like Venice, the suffering lion.<br />Adrian Kohler, who with Basil Jones directs Handspring, said one evening after a dress rehearsal that working with a new cast (the exceptional one here includes Romina Basso, a heartbreaking Penelope, and Julian Podger as Ulysses) always takes some getting used to, for the puppeteers as well as the singers, who must learn to accustom themselves not just to handling but also to looking at the puppets, rather than at the audience. By contrast, Kentridge's video for the opera, from the moment the production was conceived, instantly opened up "a whole new world of possibilities," Kohler said.<br />Indeed it does. The audience scans the stage, turning from the video to the musicians to the puppeteers and singers, who seem, in the delicate way they support the slender hands of the puppets, like supplicants in a painted Deposition. Their tenderness can make you weep, every element relying on the other, altered by the allusive, multimedia mix - and save for the music itself, otherwise incomplete.<br />One senses Kentridge's "fragility of coherence." It is the idea also animating the Fenice curtain video, which began with the artist contemplating an orchestra tuning up: chaos, cohering around the oboe's A, then disintegrating again. Kentridge contrived black tissue-paper sculptures. Bits of the paper were attached to rough wire armatures on turntables like lazy susans.<br />These were purposefully crude devices. Inert, they look inchoate. Kentridge's art often comes to life, as it were, only when it moves. In this case, when the turntables revolve, the bits of paper - at one point, and only one - form faces and figures. One sculpture reveals itself to be a singer; another a conductor; yet another, a horse. The figures then dissolve once the turntables shift.<br />In the video Kentridge slowly rotates the sculptures, declining to hide the artifice. (You see a hand operating a little crank.) Until the shapes snap into focus, viewers struggle to figure out what they are; it's impossible not to try. But, as at the hands of fate, we find meaning imposed upon us. It's not our will that matters in the end. Imagination can't suffice. Fatalist Venetians might relate to these concepts as well in Kentridge's art.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/arts/abroad.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/arts/abroad.php</a></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div>****************</div><br /><div><strong>A passion for the authentic Tuscany</strong><br />By Andréa R. Vaucher<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />Fulvio Di Rosa does not agree with the recent trend of creating lavish, over-the-top projects for fractional ownership. "The cultural experience matters more than how many stars a place has," explained the Tuscan-based architect and developer, whose latest venture, Borgo di Vagli, has emerged from the ruins of a medieval hamlet near Cortona, Italy.<br />Buyers there pay from €60,000, or $76,200, for a one-tenth share of a one-bedroom apartment with a private outdoor area, which guarantees 21 days a year and additional time as it is available. A two-bedroom starts at €92,000.<br />Authenticity is the key to renovations, Di Rosa stressed, not luxury for luxury's sake. "I could not have made this into a super high-end project without compromising the land and the original architecture," he explained. Instead, he left the landscape of olive groves, fruit trees and mature oaks as pristine as possible and brought crumbling old structures back to their original forms.<br />Luckily, there are buyers who prefer authentic stone lintels that force you to duck rather than modern 8-foot-tall doorways. When Frances Mayes, best-selling author of "Under the Tuscan Sun," bought a ruin near Cortona a few years ago, she chose Di Rosa to restore it. And when the destination club Ultimate Escapes wanted to carve a Tuscan hideaway out of a dilapidated 17th-century farmhouse, Di Rosa was called in.<br />"My 12th-century mountain house was the first private residence Fulvio consented to restore," Mayes said in an e-mail interview. "It's a poem. This and all his ambitious projects - restoring whole villages - are marked by a fine aesthetic, a use of perfectly suited materials, and an attention to detail that makes his buildings works of art."<br />Di Rosa, originally from Turin, arrived in Tuscany a quarter century ago via a circuitous route that included eight years in Brazil working with Oscar Niemeyer.<br />"After working with Niemeyer, the great monster of architecture, and being responsible for a site in the middle of nowhere in Brazil, you cannot go back to an office in Turino," explained Di Rosa by phone from Tuscany. "I was looking for more challenges."<br />Until those came along, he spent weekends in Tuscany, where his mother was born, overseeing the restoration of a house in Lucignano that his parents had purchased.<br />"I went to Tuscany for one reason and discovered one thousand other reasons to be there," he recalled. "The good food, the congeniality of the people, the fantastic landscape, the cultural richness. It was a real physical attraction like you have for a woman."<br />As Tuscany became fetishized by Europeans and Americans, inspired by Mayes and others who romanticized their restoration projects, friends implored Di Rosa to find them ruins. In 1985, when he stumbled upon a 25,000-square-foot 17th-century farmhouse, "I started thinking in terms of co-ownership," he explained. "Subdividing a hamlet or huge farmhouse into several residences for more than one family." He divided that farmhouse, Renaiolo, into several units, each of which was sold outright.<br />Borgo is Di Rosa's fourth Tuscan development and his first foray into fractional ownership. "A detached vacation home with lots of land and a pool is something families are starting to feel is complicated economically," he said, especially if an owner ends up using the house only a handful of times a year.<br />Besides, there aren't many interesting ruins in Tuscany left to renovate. "It's a sad situation," he said. "After 25 years of doing this, I have become very experienced. But now, ruins are either extremely expensive or not very nice."<br />Perhaps he will develop the fractional model elsewhere, he mused. Norway. Lisbon. The Amazon. Or maybe, he will devote more energy to the Atopos Foundation, a nonprofit organization that he created with the renowned Italian futurist musician Daniele Lombardi to further awareness of contemporary music.<br />"It's another of my passions," Di Rosa confessed. "I was always the one listening to the weird modern music no one else would listen to."</div><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/properties/rerosa.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/properties/rerosa.php</a></div><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs4dAwUzzn_6NT1Isk0ArR5HOqqtc_GWicgtvyHavqvJXp_NSbQByS6kaTDiNK_vPT8dTt1VAktymyVHMLZB54z17EuBAoRdFK62Ffr-cySg8-IFF1Ba4qF3P43bpMkKd1w9_5d25fx0c/s1600-h/DSC02471.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276179141048547106" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs4dAwUzzn_6NT1Isk0ArR5HOqqtc_GWicgtvyHavqvJXp_NSbQByS6kaTDiNK_vPT8dTt1VAktymyVHMLZB54z17EuBAoRdFK62Ffr-cySg8-IFF1Ba4qF3P43bpMkKd1w9_5d25fx0c/s320/DSC02471.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><strong>The 10 best books of 2008<br /></strong>Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />The editors of the Book Review have selected these titles from the list of 100 Notable Books of 2008.<br />FICTION<br />DANGEROUS LAUGHTER Thirteen Stories By Steven Millhauser Alfred A. Knopf<br />In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of Poe and Nabo­kov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous opposites. Millhauser is especially attuned to the purgatory of adolescence. In the title story, teenagers attend sinister "laugh parties"; in another, a mysteriously afflicted girl hides in the darkness of her attic bedroom. Time and again these parables revive the possibility that "under this world there is another, waiting to be born."<br />A MERCY By Toni Morrison Alfred A. Knopf<br />The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates this allusive novel — part Faulknerian puzzle, part dream-song — about orphaned women who form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America. Morrison's farmers and rum traders, masters and slaves, indentured whites and captive Native Americans live side by side, often in violent conflict, in a lawless, ripe American Eden that is both a haven and a prison — an emerging nation whose identity is rooted equally in Old World superstitions and New World appetites and fears.<br />NETHERLAND By Joseph O'Neill Pantheon Books<br />O'Neill's seductive ode to New York — a city that even in bad times stubbornly clings to its belief "in its salvific worth" — is narrated by a Dutch financier whose privileged New York existence is upended by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. When his wife departs for London with their small son, he stays behind, finding camaraderie in the unexpectedly buoyant world of immigrant cricket players, most of them West Indians and South Asians, including an entrepreneur with Gatsby-size aspirations.<br />2666 By Roberto Bolaño Translated by Natasha Wimmer Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper<br />Bolaño, the prodigious Chilean writer who died at age 50 in 2003, has posthumously risen, like a figure in one of his own splendid creations, to the summit of modern fiction. This latest work, first published in Spanish in 2004, is a mega- and meta-detective novel with strong hints of apocalyptic foreboding. It contains five separate narratives, each pursuing a different story with a cast of beguiling characters — European literary scholars, an African-American journalist and more — whose lives converge in a Mexican border town where hundreds of young women have been brutally murdered.<br />UNACCUSTOMED EARTH By Jhumpa Lahiri Alfred A. Knopf<br />There is much cultural news in these precisely observed studies of modern-day Bengali-Americans — many of them Ivy-league strivers ensconced in prosperous suburbs who can't quite overcome the tug of traditions nurtured in Calcutta..With quiet artistry and tender sympathy, Lahiri creates an impressive range of vivid characters — young and old, male and female, self-knowing and self-deluding — in engrossing stories that replenish the classic themes of domestic realism: loneliness, estrangement and family discord.<br />NONFICTION<br />THE DARK SIDE The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals By Jane Mayer Doubleday<br />Mayer's meticulously reported descent into the depths of President George W. Bush's anti­terrorist policies peels away the layers of legal and bureaucratic maneuvering that gave us Guantánamo Bay, "extraordinary rendition," "enhanced" interrogation methods, "black sites," warrantless domestic surveillance and all the rest. But Mayer also describes the efforts ofunsung heroes, tucked deep inside the administration, who risked their careers in the struggle to balance the rule of law against the need to meet a threat unlike any other in the nation's history.<br />THE FOREVER WAR By Dexter Filkins Alfred A. Knopf<br />The New York Times correspondent, whose tours of duty have taken him from Afghanistan in 1998 to Iraq during the American intervention, captures a decade of armed struggle in harrowingly detailed vignettes. Whether interviewing jihadists in Kabul, accompanying marines on risky patrols in Falluja or visiting grieving families in Baghdad, Filkins makes us see, with almost hallucinogenic immediacy, the true human meaning and consequences of the "war on terror."<br />NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF By Julian Barnes Alfred A. Knopf<br />This absorbing memoir traces Barnes's progress from atheism (at age 20) to agnosticism (at 60) and examines the problem of religion not by rehashing the familiar quarrel between science and mystery, but rather by weighing the timeless questions of mortality and aging. Barnes distills his own experiences — and those of his parents and brother — in polished and wise sentences that recall the writing of Montaigne, Flaubert and the other French masters he includes in his discussion.<br />THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING Death and the American Civil War By Drew Gilpin Faust Alfred A. Knopf<br />In this powerful book, Faust, the president of Harvard, explores the legacy, or legacies, of the "harvest of death" sown and reaped by the Civil War. In the space of four years, 620,000 Americans died in uniform, roughly the same number as those lost in all the nation's combined wars from the Revolution through Korea. This doesn't include the thousands of civilians killed in epidemics, guerrilla raids and draft riots. The collective trauma created "a newly centralized nation-state," Faust writes, but it also established "sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite."<br />THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul By Patrick French Alfred A. Knopf<br />The most surprising word in this biography is "authorized." Naipaul, the greatest of all postcolonial authors, cooperated fully with French, opening up a huge cache of private letters and diaries and supplementing the revelations they disclosed with remarkably candid interviews. It was a brave, and wise, decision. French, a first-rate biographer, has a novelist's command of story and character, and he patiently connects his subject's brilliant oeuvre with the disturbing facts of an unruly life. </div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/arts/10bestt.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/arts/10bestt.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>********************</div><br /><br /><div><strong>Turner Prize reflects</strong><br />By Claudia Barbieri<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />PARIS: What is a group of Bangladeshi rickshaw drivers doing in London, staring impassively at their unseen observer? And what do they have in common with an ethereal young woman tentatively breaking pieces of china? For an answer, turn to Runa Islam, the Bangladeshi-born artist whose video works - "First Day of Spring," featuring the Dhaka rickshaw riders, and "Be the First to See What You See as You See It," a slow-motion study of smashing porcelain - helped propel her onto the short list for this year's Turner Prize.<br />Sometimes shocking and controversial, in other years more thought-provoking, the Turner Prize has become not just a barometer of the state and direction of British contemporary art but also a fixture on the social calendar.<br />Founded in 1984 by a group of contemporary art patrons linked to the Tate gallery, the prize is awarded to an artist under the age of 50, born or working in Britain, whose publicly exhibited work over the past year has seemed especially innovative or important. The winner is selected from a short list of four, chosen by a five-member jury; the first prize is worth £25,000, or about $37,500, and the three runners-up receive £5,000 each.<br />Past winners have included some of the most notorious enfants terribles of British Art - Gilbert and George in 1986; Damien Hirst in 1995; Chris Ofili, with his elephant dung paintings, in 1998; the transvestite potter Grayson Perry in 2003; Tracy Emin's unmade bed failed to win in 1999.<br />"In the 1990s, the Turner Prize became like the Grand National, in terms of it being a national event," said Virginia Button, curator of the prize from 1993 to 1998 and author of its regularly updated official history.<br />The notoriety of the prize wins envious recognition beyond sometimes insular confines of the British art world.<br />"The Turner Prize goes far beyond an art prize - it has become a national event with a global profile," said Gilles Fuchs, president of the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art, organizer of the Marcel Duchamp contemporary art prize, in Paris.<br />This year's jury, led by Stephen Deuchar, director of the Tate Britain gallery, included Suzanne Cotter, senior curator and deputy director of the Oxford-based gallery and publisher of the Modern Art Oxford; Jennifer Higgie, co-editor of Frieze magazine; Daniel Birnbaum, director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, in Frankfurt; and the architect David Adjaye.<br />Their short-listed contenders, whose works are on exhibit at the Tate Britain gallery until Jan. 18, included, alongside Islam, two other women - Goshka Macuga, who was born in Poland, and Cathy Wilkes, who was born in Northern Ireland - and Mark Leckey, a British-born professor of film studies in Frankfurt.<br />Leckey, the bookmaker's favorite and eventual winner - the jury's verdict was announced on Monday - uses a mix of media in his works including film, sculpture, performance and lecture, referencing fine art, music, clubbing and pop culture. His works on show at the Tate Britain engage their audience with images of cultural icons that include Felix the Cat, Jeff Koon's steely rabbit and the Simpsons.<br />"There is no hierarchy in his work - anything is up for grabs," said Carolyn Kerr , one of the show's curators.<br />To a casual observer all four short-listed artists share some fundamental stylistic traits. They work in installation film and multimedia genres. Paint, apparently, is out.<br />"Art today is no longer about pretty pictures," said Marc-Olivier Wahler, director of the Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary-art museum space in Paris. "The artist is free to express whatever he wants; artworks are more often than not frustrating, troubling and make the viewer re-examine his preconceptions."<br />That approach is perhaps most apparent in Wilkes's work. "Give you all my money" is a collection of found objects with a centerpiece of two stripped down checkout counters surrounded by an assortment of junk: leftover food in bowls; hair clippings, burned wood and other detritus, forming an extended personal iconography echoing Emin's bed. Into this meticulously dysfunctional installation two mannequins bring an abstractedly human counterpoint; one sits on a toilet, naked except for a nurse's hat and the other leans against a counter, her head in bird cage. Both have various domestic bits and pieces hanging by strings from their skulls. The whole work seems to add up to an expression of everyday feminine drudgery.<br />This year's short-listed artists were not especially easy to understand, said Deuchar, the jury chairman. But, he added in a interview broadcast by the BBC, "the public is not frightened by art that requires some investigation and whose meaning is not instantly clear."<br />No less enigmatic, Macuga's has been likened to cultural archeology, in which she constructs histories and explores conventions of archiving, exhibition making and museum display. In her Tate installation - described as an exploration of the professional and romantic relationships between the World War I artist Paul Nash and the surrealist painter Eileen Agar and the Bauhaus architects and designers Mies Van der Rohe and Lily Reich - she uses photos and archive material from the Tate in a set of photomontages and collages surrounding a minimalist sculpture of glass and steel. Drawings of rain adorn the walls. The relationship between these elements is, indeed, not instantly clear.<br />Leckey's offering, "Cinema in the Round," is a video of a 40-minute performance art lecture in which the artist talks of his fascination with the life of images on screen, mixing ideas about language and film with shots of filmed objects and images, in a looping exploration of the relation between self and image.<br />These works are the product of "a seismic shift in the appreciation of the visual arts in Britain," said Button, the historian of the prize. "They are polythemic; they can be appreciated on many different levels." This adds to their richness and complexity, she said. "No contemporary artist would say there is one way of looking at a work," Button said.<br />Kerr, the curator, agreed. Artists are engaging in a multilayered exploration of their universe, she said, "a sort of collaging in every sense."<br />"New media are available to artists," Kerr said. "Art is no longer confined to painting and sculpture. Art is taking on a whole new language, about testing and exploring, in a sense growing up, moving on from sensationalist statements to something more thoughtful and thought-provoking."<br />She added: "British art is heading into a different place. The work requires more attention; it's in a more thoughtful place. It's intriguing, challenging, deeply rooted in aesthetics. We're heading to redefining what it means to be modern - post-post-modernism."</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/arts/rcarturn.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/arts/rcarturn.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>***************</div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>100 notable books of 2008<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since Dec. 2, 2007, when we published our previous Notables list.<br />Fiction & Poetry<br />AMERICAN WIFE. By Curtis Sittenfeld. (Random House, $26.) The life of this novel's heroine — a first lady who comes to realize, at the height of the Iraq war, that she has compromised her youthful ideals — is conspicuously modeled on that of Laura Bush.<br />ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES. By Rivka Galchen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The psychiatrist-narrator of this brainy, whimsical first novel believes that his beautiful, much-younger Argentine wife has been replaced by an exact double.<br />BASS CATHEDRAL. By Nathaniel Mackey. (New Directions, paper, $16.95.) Mackey's fictive world is an insular one of musicians composing, playing and talking jazz in the private language of their art.<br />BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN. By Charles Bock. (Random House, $25.) This bravura first novel, set against a corruptly compelling Las Vegas landscape, revolves around the disappearance of a surly 12-year-old boy.<br />BEIJING COMA. By Ma Jian. Translated by Flora Drew. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.50.) Ma's novel, an important political statement, looks at China through the life of a dissident paralyzed at Tiananmen Square.<br />A BETTER ANGEL: Stories. By Chris Adrian. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) For Adrian — who is both a pediatrician and a divinity student — illness and a heightened spiritual state are closely related conditions.<br />BLACK FLIES. By Shannon Burke. (Soft Skull, paper, $14.95.) A rookie paramedic in New York City is overwhelmed by the horrors of his job in this arresting, confrontational novel, informed by Burke's five years of experience on city ambulances.<br />THE BLUE STAR. By Tony Earley. (Little, Brown, $23.99.) The caring, thoughtful hero of Earley's engrossing first novel, "Jim the Boy," is now 17 and confronting not only the eternal turmoil of love, but also venality and the frightening calls of duty and war.<br />THE BOAT. By Nam Le. (Knopf, $22.95.) In the opening story of Le's first collection, a blocked writer succumbs to the easy temptations of "ethnic lit."<br />BREATH. By Tim Winton. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Surfing offers this darkly exhilarating novel's protagonist an escape from a drab Australian town.<br />DANGEROUS LAUGHTER: Thirteen Stories. By Steven Millhauser. (Knopf, $24.) In his latest collection, Millhauser advances his chosen themes — the slippery self, the power of hysterical young people — with even more confidence and power than before.<br />DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES. By Jonathan Miles. (Houghton Mifflin, $22.) Miles's fine first novel takes the form of a letter from a stranded traveler, his life a compilation of regrets, who uses the time to digress on an impressive array of cultural issues, large and small.<br />DIARY OF A BAD YEAR. By J. M. Coet­zee. (Viking, $24.95.) Coetzee follows the late career of one Señor C, who, like Coetzee himself, is a South African writer transplanted to Australia and the author of a novel titled "Waiting for the Barbarians."<br />DICTATION: A Quartet. By Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) In the title story of this expertly turned collection, Henry James and Joseph Conrad embody Ozick's polarity of art and ardor.<br />ELEGY: Poems. By Mary Jo Bang. (Graywolf, $20.) Grief is converted into art in this bleak, forthright collection, centered on the death of the poet's son.<br />THE ENGLISH MAJOR. By Jim Harrison. (Grove, $24.) A 60-year-old cherry farmer and former English teacher — an inversion of the classic Harrison hero — sets out on a trip west after being dumped by his wife.<br />FANON. By John Edgar Wideman. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) Wideman's novel — raw and astringent, yet with a high literary polish — explores the life of the psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon.<br />THE FINDER. By Colin Harrison. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A New York thriller, played out against the nasty world of global capitalism.<br />FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS: Wyoming Stories 3 . By Annie Proulx. (Scribner, $25.) These rich, bleak stories offer an American West in which the natural elements are murderous and folks aren't much better.<br />THE GOOD THIEF . By Hannah Tinti. (Dial, $25.) In Tinti's first novel, set in mid-19th-century New England, a con man teaches an orphan the art of the lie.<br />HALF OF THE WORLD IN LIGHT: New and Selected Poems. By Juan Felipe Herrera. (University of Arizona, paper, $24.95.) Herrera, known for portrayals of Chicano life, is unpredictable and wildly inventive.<br />HIS ILLEGAL SELF. By Peter Carey. (Knopf, $25.) In this enthralling novel, a boy goes underground with a defiant hippie indulging her maternal urge.<br />HOME. By Marilynne Robinson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Revisiting the events of her novel "Gilead" from another perspective, Robinson has written an anguished pastoral, at once bitter and joyful.<br />INDIGNATION. By Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) Marcus Messner is a sophomore at a small, conservative Ohio college at the time of the Korean War. The novel he narrates, like Roth's last two, is ruthlessly economical and relentlessly deathbound.<br />THE LAZARUS PROJECT. By Aleksandar Hemon. (Riverhead, $24.95.) This novel's despairing immigrant protagonist becomes intrigued with the real-life killing of a presumed anarchist in Chicago in 1908.<br />LEGEND OF A SUICIDE. By David Vann. (University of Massachusetts, $24.95.) In his first story collection, Vann leads the reader to vital places while exorcizing demons born from the suicide of his father.<br />LIFE CLASS. By Pat Barker. (Doubleday, $23.95.) Barker's new novel, about a group of British artists overtaken by World War I, concentrates more on the turmoil of love than on the trauma of war.<br />LUSH LIFE. By Richard Price. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Chandler — and Bellow, too — peeps out from Price's novel, in which an aspiring writer cum restaurant manager, mugged in the gentrifying Lower East Side of Manhattan, himself becomes a suspect.<br />A MERCY. By Toni Morrison. (Knopf, $23.95.) Summoning voices from the 17th century, Morrison performs her deepest excavation yet into America's history and exhumes the country's twin original sins: the importation of African slaves and the near extermination of Native Americans.<br />MODERN LIFE: Poems . By Matthea Harvey. (Graywolf, paper, $14.) Harvey is willing to take risks, and her reward is that richest, rarest thing, genuine poetry.<br />A MOST WANTED MAN . By John le Carré. (Scribner, $28.) This powerful novel, centered on a half-Russian, half-Chechen, half-crazy fugitive in Germany, swims with operatives whose desperation to avert another 9/11 provokes a slow-­burning fire in every line.<br />MY REVOLUTIONS. By Hari Kunzru. (Dutton, $25.95.) Kunzru's third novel is an extraordinary autumnal depiction of a failed '60s radical.<br />NETHERLAND. By Joseph O'Neill. (Pantheon, $23.95.) In the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction yet about post-9/11 New York and London, the game of cricket provides solace to a man whose family disintegrates after the attacks.<br />OPAL SUNSET: Selected Poems, 1958-2008. By Clive James. (Norton, $25.95.) James, a staunch formalist, is firmly situated in the sociable, plain-spoken tradition that runs from Auden through Larkin.<br />THE OTHER. By David Guterson. (Knopf, $24.95.) In this novel from the author of "Snow Falling on Cedars," a schoolteacher nourishes a friendship with a privileged recluse.<br />OUR STORY BEGINS: New and Selected Stories. By Tobias Wolff. (Knopf, $26.95.) Some of Wolff's best work is concentrated here, revealing his gift for evoking the breadth of American experience.<br />THE ROAD HOME. By Rose Tremain. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) A widowed Russian emigrant, fearfully navigating the strange city of London, learns that his home village is about to be inundated.<br />THE SACRED BOOK OF THE WEREWOLF. By Victor Pelevin. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. (Viking, $25.95.) A supernatural call girl narrates Pelevin's satirical allegory of post-Soviet, post-9/11 Russia.<br />THE SCHOOL ON HEART'S CONTENT ROAD. By Carolyn Chute. (Atlantic Monthly, $24.) In Chute's first novel in nearly 10 years, disparate characters cluster around an off-the-grid communal settlement.<br />SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: A New Verse Translation. By Simon Armitage. (Norton, $25.95.) One of the eerie, exuberant joys of Middle English poetry, in an alliterative rendering that captures the original's drive, dialect and landscape.<br />SLEEPING IT OFF IN RAPID CITY: Poems, New and Selected. By August Kleinzahler. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Kleinzahler seeks the true heart of places, whether repellent, beautiful or both at once.<br />TELEX FROM CUBA. By Rachel Kushner. (Scribner, $25.) In this multilayered first novel, inter­national drifters try to bury pasts that include murder, adultery and neurotic meltdown, even as the Castro brothers gather revolutionaries in the hills.<br />2666. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.) The five autonomous sections of this posthumously published novel interlock to form an astonishing whole, a supreme capstone to Bolaño's vaulting ambition.<br />UNACCUSTOMED EARTH. By Jhumpa Lahiri. (Knopf, $25.) In eight sensitive stories, Lahiri evokes the anxiety, excitement and transformations felt by Bengali immigrants and their American children.<br />THE UNFORTUNATES. By B. S. Johnson. (New Directions, $24.95.) This novel, first published in 1969, dovetails theme (the accidents of memory) with eccentric form (unbound chapters to be read in any order).<br />WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS? By Kate Atkinson. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) Jackson Brodie, the hero of Atkinson's previous literary thrillers, takes the case of a mother and baby who suddenly disappear.<br />THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK. By John Updike. (Knopf, $24.95.) In this ingenious sequel to "The Witches of Eastwick," the three title characters, old ladies now, renew their sisterhood, return to their old hometown and contrive to atone for past crimes.<br />YESTERDAY'S WEATHER. By Anne Enright. (Grove, $24.) Working-class Irish characters grapple with love, marriage, confusion and yearning in Enright's varied, if somewhat disenchanted, stories.<br />Nonfiction<br />AMERICAN LION: Andrew Jackson in the White House . By Jon Meacham. (Random House, $30.) Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, discerns a democratic dignity in the seventh president's populism.<br />ANGLER: The Cheney Vice Presidency. By Barton Gellman. (Penguin Press, $27.95.) An engrossing portrait of Dick Cheney as a master political manipulator.<br />BACARDI AND THE LONG FIGHT FOR CUBA: The Biography of a Cause. By Tom Gjelten. (Viking, $27.95.) An NPR correspondent paints a vivid portrait of the anti-Castro clan behind the liquor empire.<br />THE BIG SORT: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. By Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing. (Houghton Mifflin, $25.) A journalist and a statistician see political dangers in the country's increasing tendency to separate into solipsistic blocs.<br />BLOOD MATTERS: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene. By Masha Gessen. (Harcourt, $25.) Hard choices followed Gessen's discovery that she carries a dangerous genetic mutation.<br />CAPITOL MEN: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen. By Philip Dray. (Houghton Mifflin, $30.) A collective biography of the pioneers of black political involvement.<br />THE CHALLENGE: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power. By Jonathan Mahler. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) An objective, thorough study of a landmark case for Guantánamo detainees.<br />CHAMPLAIN'S DREAM. By David Hackett Fischer. (Simon & Schuster, $40.) Fischer argues that France's North Ameri­can colonial success was attributable largely to one remarkable man, Samuel de Champlain.<br />CHASING THE FLAME: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. By Samantha Power. (Penguin Press, $32.95.) Vieira de Mello, who was killed in Iraq in 2003, embodied both the idealism and the limitations of the United Nations, which he served long and loyally.<br />CONDOLEEZZA RICE. An American Life: A Biography. By Elisabeth Bumiller. (Random House, $27.95.) A New York Times reporter casts a keen eye on Rice's tenure as a policy maker, her close ties to George Bush, and her personal and professional past.<br />THE DARK SIDE: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. By Jane Mayer. (Doubleday, $27.50.) A New Yorker writer recounts the emergence of the widespread use of torture as a central tool in the fight against terrorism.<br />DELTA BLUES: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. By Ted Gioia. (Norton, $27.95.) Gioia's survey balances the story of the music with that of its reception.<br />DESCARTES' BONES: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason. By Russell Shorto. (Doubleday, $26.) Shorto's smart, elegant study turns the early separation of Descartes's skull from the rest of his remains into an irresistible metaphor.<br />DREAMS AND SHADOWS: The Future of the Middle East. By Robin Wright. (Penguin Press, $26.95.) This fluent and intelligent book describes the struggles of people from Morocco to Iran to reform or replace long-entrenched national regimes.<br />THE DRUNKARD'S WALK: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. By Leonard Mlodinow. (Pantheon, $24.95.) This breezy crash course intersperses probabilistic mind-benders with profiles of theorists.<br />AN EXACT REPLICA OF A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION: A Memoir. By Elizabeth McCracken. (Little, Brown, $19.99.) An unstinting account of the novelist's emotions after the stillbirth of her first child.<br />FACTORY GIRLS: From Village to City in a Changing China. By Leslie T. Chang. (Spiegel & Grau, $26.) Chang's engrossing account delves deeply into the lives of young migrant workers in southern China.<br />THE FOREVER WAR. By Dexter Filkins. (Knopf, $25.) Filkins, a New York Times reporter who was embedded with American troops during the attack on Falluja, has written an account of the Iraq war in the tradition of Michael Herr's "Dispatches."<br />FREEDOM'S BATTLE: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention. By Gary J. Bass. (Knopf, $35.) Bass's book is both a history and an argument for military interventions as a tool of international justice today.<br />A GREAT IDEA AT THE TIME: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. By Alex Beam. (Public­Affairs, $24.95.) The minds behind a curious project that continues to exert a hold in some quarters.<br />HALLELUJAH JUNCTION: Composing an American Life. By John Adams. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Adams's wry, smart memoir stands with books by Hector Berlioz and Louis Armstrong among the most readably incisive autobiographies of major musical figures.<br />THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO: An American Family. By Annette Gordon-Reed. (Norton, $35.) Gordon-Reed continues her study of the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.<br />HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America. By Thomas L. Friedman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.95.) The Times columnist turns his attention to possible business-friendly solutions to global warming.<br />THE HOUSE AT SUGAR BEACH: In Search of a Lost African Childhood. By Helene Cooper. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Cooper, a New York Times reporter who fled a warring Liberia as a child, returned to confront the ghosts of her past — and to look for a lost sister.<br />HOW FICTION WORKS. By James Wood. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Concentrating on the art of the novel, the New Yorker critic presents a compact, erudite vade mecum with acute observations on individual passages and authors.<br />MORAL CLARITY: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists. By Susan Neiman. (Harcourt, $27.) Neiman champions Enlightenment values with no hint of over­simplification, dogmatism or misplaced piety.<br />THE NIGHT OF THE GUN: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own. By David Carr. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Carr, a New York Times culture reporter, sifts through his drug- and alcohol-­addicted past.<br />NIXONLAND: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. By Rick Perlstein. (Scribner, $37.50.) Perlstein's compulsively readable study holds that Nixon's divisive and enduring legacy is the "notion that there are two kinds of Americans."<br />NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF. By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $24.95.) With no faith in an afterlife, why should an agnostic fear death? On this simple question, Barnes hangs an elegant memoir and meditation, full of a novelist's affection for the characters who wander in and out.<br />NUREYEV: The Life. By Julie Kavanagh. (Pantheon, $37.50.) The son of Soviet Tatars could never get enough of anything — space, applause, money, sex — but he attracted an audience of millions to the art form he mastered.<br />PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. By Mark Harris. (Penguin Press, $27.95.) The best-picture nominees of 1967 were a collage of America's psyche, and more.<br />THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD. By Fareed Zakaria. (Norton, $25.95.) This relentlessly intelligent examination of power focuses less on American decline than on the rise of China, trailed by India.<br />PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. By Dan Ariely. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.95.) Moving comfortably from the lab to broad social questions to his own life, an MIT economist pokes holes in conventional market theory.<br />THE RACE CARD: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse. By Richard Thompson Ford. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Ford vivisects every sacred cow in "post-racist" America.<br />RETRIBUTION: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45. By Max Hastings. (Knopf, $35.) In this masterly account, Hastings describes Japanese madness eliciting American ruthlessness in the Pacific Theater.<br />A SECULAR AGE. By Charles Taylor. (Belknap/Harvard University, $39.95.) A philosophy professor thinks our era has been too quick to dismiss religious faith.<br />SHAKESPEARE'S WIFE. By Germaine Greer. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.95.) With a polemicist's vision and a scholar's patience, Greer sets out to rescue Ann Hathaway from layers of biographical fantasy.<br />THE SUPERORGANISM: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies. By Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson. (Norton, $55.) The central conceit of this astonishing study is that an insect colony is a single animal raised to a higher level.<br />TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq. By Linda Robinson. (Public­Affairs, $27.95.) A probing, conscientious account of strategy and tactics in post-surge Iraq.<br />THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. By David Hajdu. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A worthy history of the midcentury crusade against the comics industry.<br />THEY KNEW THEY WERE RIGHT: The Rise of the Neocons. By Jacob Heil­brunn. (Doubleday, $26.) A journalist traces the neoconservative movement from its origins at the City College of New York in the 1940s.<br />THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: Death and the American Civil War. By Drew Gilpin Faust. (Knopf, $27.95.) The lasting impact of the war's immense loss of life is the subject of this extraordinary account by Harvard's president.<br />THE THREE OF US: A Family Story. By Julia Blackburn. (Pantheon, $26.) Searingly and unflinchingly, Blackburn describes an appalling upbringing at the hands of her catastrophically unfit parents.<br />THRUMPTON HALL: A Memoir of Life in My Father's House. By Miranda Seymour. (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.95.) Seymour's odd and oddly affecting book instantly catapults her father into the front rank of impossible and eccentric English parents.<br />TRAFFIC: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us). By Tom Vanderbilt. (Knopf, $24.95.) A surprising, enlightening look at the psychology of the human beings behind the steering wheels.<br />THE TRILLION DOLLAR MELTDOWN: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash. By Charles R. Morris. (PublicAffairs, $22.95.) How we got into the mess we're in, explained briefly and brilliantly.<br />A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE: Rediscovering the New World. By Tony Horwitz. (Holt, $27.50.) An accessible popular history of early America, with plenty of self-tutoring and colorful reporting.<br />WAKING GIANT: America in the Age of Jackson. By David S. Reynolds. (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.95.) Reynolds excels at depicting the cultural, social and intellectual currents that buffeted the nation.<br />WHILE THEY SLEPT: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family. By Kathryn Harrison. (Random House, $25.) Harrison's account brings moral clarity to the dark fate of the family of Jody Gilley, who was 16 when she survived a rampage by her brother in 1984.<br />WHITE HEAT: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. By Brenda Wineapple. (Knopf, $27.95.) The hitherto elusive Higginson was the poet's chosen reader, admirer and advocate.<br />THE WILD PLACES. By Robert Macfarlane. (Penguin, paper, $15.) Macfarlane's unorthodox British landscapes are furrowed with human histories and haunted by literary prophets.<br />THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul. By Patrick French. (Knopf, $30.) French has created a monument fully worthy of its subject, elucidating the enduring but painfully asymmetrical love triangle at the core of Naipaul's life and work.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/arts/100notablet.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/arts/100notablet.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><br /><br /></div><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVTeL_10_ZkyiVwhCKwmaorDRrXFU2IHGBa1pslcfTTMshWIMA-VV08icRckgBOWpt1vi3rSMEMOX34BE3i6vXmp76DtLC4VDMsIp7iD0JTvELb2FUIC1XawORfq785qMBc41-A6bLePk/s1600-h/DSC02472.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276179138036712274" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVTeL_10_ZkyiVwhCKwmaorDRrXFU2IHGBa1pslcfTTMshWIMA-VV08icRckgBOWpt1vi3rSMEMOX34BE3i6vXmp76DtLC4VDMsIp7iD0JTvELb2FUIC1XawORfq785qMBc41-A6bLePk/s320/DSC02472.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrbJDHfA2Z3fpaY2DjtWNZBNcgH8emDe1Q093oz7jtnGfRkbi6ZGXNbynMKmfMk8dHukBndRrgXhfDjsMRtZVGqqaOgzR4yj0vYuoQqhlzCmzoZasjHcP0_c7H4apjGPeqivxlEsiP2A8/s1600-h/DSC02482.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276178734064265218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrbJDHfA2Z3fpaY2DjtWNZBNcgH8emDe1Q093oz7jtnGfRkbi6ZGXNbynMKmfMk8dHukBndRrgXhfDjsMRtZVGqqaOgzR4yj0vYuoQqhlzCmzoZasjHcP0_c7H4apjGPeqivxlEsiP2A8/s320/DSC02482.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYtq68UgzEJSpiTaY9GDAfsghmVgkjhoG4nMjIz944sXXbCtmw7py6_CA_gxyAT_2VagOSFo8hk2Hpld9TSY3N66E7bIfIR1mzFIw_kpJY7pQnNYcyQPPt2hsTlj53j3LXXtn3cMoqzEY/s1600-h/DSC02483.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276178725509405602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYtq68UgzEJSpiTaY9GDAfsghmVgkjhoG4nMjIz944sXXbCtmw7py6_CA_gxyAT_2VagOSFo8hk2Hpld9TSY3N66E7bIfIR1mzFIw_kpJY7pQnNYcyQPPt2hsTlj53j3LXXtn3cMoqzEY/s320/DSC02483.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxhnh8htsvk8Ewvw9NmxyaCTi3uXXTszl45B7Q5rmVXwR1Uyz8AtcpA0W1gQ0Un64wbgQLJZjH6kGMNepoIi1bkRJkzyJtcsEp9w6_r_4lGKYQzgtTSP1CKOhRQVLONqc2eUCFAtqjHDo/s1600-h/DSC02484.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276178723847912946" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxhnh8htsvk8Ewvw9NmxyaCTi3uXXTszl45B7Q5rmVXwR1Uyz8AtcpA0W1gQ0Un64wbgQLJZjH6kGMNepoIi1bkRJkzyJtcsEp9w6_r_4lGKYQzgtTSP1CKOhRQVLONqc2eUCFAtqjHDo/s320/DSC02484.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwhw7wOtqS_sctBVjhpKBL7DWdrA1KOxR684nLY_HTpH5juMv-Noel_-NPOC4vgy9At-UPl6QcNOikMLHkrHBQhdeXatkEtH0VzXIRZ4J3yTAy__OgXzANM9icSDXZeqJdmhBBp2rSiTQ/s1600-h/DSC02485.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276178718932770482" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwhw7wOtqS_sctBVjhpKBL7DWdrA1KOxR684nLY_HTpH5juMv-Noel_-NPOC4vgy9At-UPl6QcNOikMLHkrHBQhdeXatkEtH0VzXIRZ4J3yTAy__OgXzANM9icSDXZeqJdmhBBp2rSiTQ/s320/DSC02485.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5qyMjdWzHVxHIaeF9eFxctJsMK-h59NdrKoVNxHvntP0QuEHwIAk_ySmrngNvQNulZjtQ91TPFRzUIQeVpBYqVmqBppzKeO5pGSOSYk_hGmqRH6g5T9zD-QazK-Mem4KGSGKUuD0wV14/s1600-h/DSC02486.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276178714608115074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5qyMjdWzHVxHIaeF9eFxctJsMK-h59NdrKoVNxHvntP0QuEHwIAk_ySmrngNvQNulZjtQ91TPFRzUIQeVpBYqVmqBppzKeO5pGSOSYk_hGmqRH6g5T9zD-QazK-Mem4KGSGKUuD0wV14/s320/DSC02486.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPrGEBddMLhSD6rAF2tKv6fTFFan1hSSt3KFb2K7E5zwY7ahYymW7BpdTM-K_TLrvdeu1w6nw6ZN-WsnDg4o01pH18I0fLCCZpxC8ZwRaU9T1bvISvMqHSJtk-YDTSvoVCmxscGHljdrk/s1600-h/DSC02489.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276178387714853074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPrGEBddMLhSD6rAF2tKv6fTFFan1hSSt3KFb2K7E5zwY7ahYymW7BpdTM-K_TLrvdeu1w6nw6ZN-WsnDg4o01pH18I0fLCCZpxC8ZwRaU9T1bvISvMqHSJtk-YDTSvoVCmxscGHljdrk/s320/DSC02489.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE01oAiYUQ17GXpj9JQww9yVQyL4V7gEdSZaFE2nz40nSvukm_6RWtYPQdxjlCs_rhr6qL1w4bDo9tTDAkTZ3tXNUiHi5_bp-9hh8gQgzpUhULaonVfUI3SX8DMw-SCJIbtdmUcSl92tE/s1600-h/DSC02490.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276178383347674578" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE01oAiYUQ17GXpj9JQww9yVQyL4V7gEdSZaFE2nz40nSvukm_6RWtYPQdxjlCs_rhr6qL1w4bDo9tTDAkTZ3tXNUiHi5_bp-9hh8gQgzpUhULaonVfUI3SX8DMw-SCJIbtdmUcSl92tE/s320/DSC02490.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik-N20DyR9RuWms5MoZxXiYsK1ngMb1YWUZ4P05VB9_6GU1HlWbRukjbTZDRXTo09Xsrli_nAUI3c7zGw_psBcv7njQi1DLl7rYWvu1wYu6EG_SpWl2lM6uAWRBHGv0PeonfK_2eiYWJg/s1600-h/DSC02491.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276178379390037202" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik-N20DyR9RuWms5MoZxXiYsK1ngMb1YWUZ4P05VB9_6GU1HlWbRukjbTZDRXTo09Xsrli_nAUI3c7zGw_psBcv7njQi1DLl7rYWvu1wYu6EG_SpWl2lM6uAWRBHGv0PeonfK_2eiYWJg/s320/DSC02491.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdoqsOvEGLfxuE-mLJ55Dd9056Bnv4ycSaPHpoUT0tpVzqknvoKupqr6tx3Gs3wX1IvnS3OtOpcpnNDDCyIkXBcdPptubqSMT6s-uZiePExzdWPI57bPgoDDCIJVi_dpAD3Wl7egQRmCk/s1600-h/DSC02492.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276178378249118178" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdoqsOvEGLfxuE-mLJ55Dd9056Bnv4ycSaPHpoUT0tpVzqknvoKupqr6tx3Gs3wX1IvnS3OtOpcpnNDDCyIkXBcdPptubqSMT6s-uZiePExzdWPI57bPgoDDCIJVi_dpAD3Wl7egQRmCk/s320/DSC02492.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgco_917gPv5lkYAlOZjkhWAxc9-uV-9js35aIbk2tjTfnqcia6AEygfVdcl_T1Z3qTWMd2L_JsMr6dzdpcO2fXcbjTdj9TiielCE-uNPzWAb4OVORFDZWGN6N_OBN53PZUaxASZQNoRKc/s1600-h/DSC02493.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276178372196712162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgco_917gPv5lkYAlOZjkhWAxc9-uV-9js35aIbk2tjTfnqcia6AEygfVdcl_T1Z3qTWMd2L_JsMr6dzdpcO2fXcbjTdj9TiielCE-uNPzWAb4OVORFDZWGN6N_OBN53PZUaxASZQNoRKc/s320/DSC02493.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKaee6G-ynMDpMeJj8DWupZeKlMj5LytBCL9b6BdPKIyURTeYatVrSaj7dIWInhzlulENuFRCHZVOlAnd_064ILQQFV5VTynlpHfZBFENjMzckUjHCg4Yb5aJd87iFSFbTf4IxLhSyevQ/s1600-h/DSC02494.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177995033425490" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKaee6G-ynMDpMeJj8DWupZeKlMj5LytBCL9b6BdPKIyURTeYatVrSaj7dIWInhzlulENuFRCHZVOlAnd_064ILQQFV5VTynlpHfZBFENjMzckUjHCg4Yb5aJd87iFSFbTf4IxLhSyevQ/s320/DSC02494.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvohs3BtxSWRDo0ulq7GClbJQwGeKcvfOAr5Ev7gYeTibYbuXHLY1IIoSigi4xv-8YX0AZiiweFtZ5_yZimVbeIP9J8UuVv29YzCxmDjNq2twTvOODGEG62yHnyufv1kB3qwpMFHSqC0/s1600-h/DSC02495.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177992317962834" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvohs3BtxSWRDo0ulq7GClbJQwGeKcvfOAr5Ev7gYeTibYbuXHLY1IIoSigi4xv-8YX0AZiiweFtZ5_yZimVbeIP9J8UuVv29YzCxmDjNq2twTvOODGEG62yHnyufv1kB3qwpMFHSqC0/s320/DSC02495.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMH3EFsl1Jb_tYJ5TsOGK-op5gT1s3gDlbVLQr3hVJ6hyphenhyphen9w4vW2frCsVuyKXrnp7Lu9bLYAya6F9xVfgdheVpgrRx8sIJmyhD6xZ1KCdVOiSwP5moKtBdjuHHiFxN4g9QXqAmh-Gb3t2A/s1600-h/DSC02496.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177987039593154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMH3EFsl1Jb_tYJ5TsOGK-op5gT1s3gDlbVLQr3hVJ6hyphenhyphen9w4vW2frCsVuyKXrnp7Lu9bLYAya6F9xVfgdheVpgrRx8sIJmyhD6xZ1KCdVOiSwP5moKtBdjuHHiFxN4g9QXqAmh-Gb3t2A/s320/DSC02496.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><strong>Serb police search for Mladic</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />BELGRADE: Police searched several locations in Serbia on Thursday for its most wanted war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic but did not immediately find anything, government officials said.<br />Police searched his apartment in southern Belgrade, where his son Darko Mladic lives with his family, and the company where Darko's wife works, officials said.<br />"Police are searching several locations in Serbia in an effort to find war crimes fugitives wanted by The Hague Tribunal and to cut their financial support network," a source in the prosecutor's office said.<br />A security official said the raids had not immediately turned up any clues, although the source said efforts were continuing.<br />Reuters reporters at the scene saw two jeeps with special forces wearing balaclavas in front of the house.<br />The Balkan country has intensified the search in recent months to meet a key condition for progressing towards EU membership. The European Union says Serbia must extradite its two remaining fugitives.<br />Police have probed various firms to find helpers and cut finances to those suspected of aiding them.<br />Bosnian Serb wartime commander Mladic was indicted in 1995 on genocide charges for the siege of Sarajevo and for orchestrating the Srebrenica massacre. Also at large is Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic, wanted for crimes against humanity.<br />(Reporting Ivana Sekularac and Fedja Grulovic, Writing by Ljilja Cvekic, Editing by Adam Tanner/Elizabeth Piper)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/europe/OUKWD-UK-SERBIA-MLADIC.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/europe/OUKWD-UK-SERBIA-MLADIC.php</a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkA4etWdZ_MI-jUef3twvqcUSthf6mM1hanCr_Bk5ORmPkbWsLejJ4K70z-rH9ALsEeSuCoOVjNbMG2G1sopgMZOkr-2uqml35EI86BHH3M83MaGCelx5c3V5kq5jwHtBJVo7DmSmXnwI/s1600-h/DSC02497.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177979791029106" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkA4etWdZ_MI-jUef3twvqcUSthf6mM1hanCr_Bk5ORmPkbWsLejJ4K70z-rH9ALsEeSuCoOVjNbMG2G1sopgMZOkr-2uqml35EI86BHH3M83MaGCelx5c3V5kq5jwHtBJVo7DmSmXnwI/s320/DSC02497.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfQFA29Tz56mp5gysqdntlP0wK4OpJJp4YxoaUrL3yfgvGF4NPLtDjgLEJ3SABVPa7m4WDzwnA5x5ugvod_sGUPBNGHybgywRdvxxWMajCGD67MgJuVxmrlVsxGp74gLVX2IHFxlGVgGI/s1600-h/DSC02499.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177978106119746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfQFA29Tz56mp5gysqdntlP0wK4OpJJp4YxoaUrL3yfgvGF4NPLtDjgLEJ3SABVPa7m4WDzwnA5x5ugvod_sGUPBNGHybgywRdvxxWMajCGD67MgJuVxmrlVsxGp74gLVX2IHFxlGVgGI/s320/DSC02499.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh96NpfgSDOEhpqe3hJErgPGXJTC0XmqruQErmgKv267zMT31IaWs2fjDqVrwKFTL4TCg4nvd04sXHoRwpvFQbyGn8eS6AQ9EiPDxavS-wZza7K0H5hjNrtKJvCLaSjwSc__6uASVSs8yY/s1600-h/DSC02502.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177609084557138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh96NpfgSDOEhpqe3hJErgPGXJTC0XmqruQErmgKv267zMT31IaWs2fjDqVrwKFTL4TCg4nvd04sXHoRwpvFQbyGn8eS6AQ9EiPDxavS-wZza7K0H5hjNrtKJvCLaSjwSc__6uASVSs8yY/s320/DSC02502.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwsrL_G2KJRxvMGsOrUEcpntjXb8h00rZwLzSMrwwK9jGbp3K1RcYQ6wkBXBTmdqld1tLo8UakOiWykwKfrrlWJO2a0YWN1inqHIeaEaOfnM9BY6rxaCn0SwTR7hHEXYRjvp46U4QN0Ko/s1600-h/DSC02505.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177604366012514" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwsrL_G2KJRxvMGsOrUEcpntjXb8h00rZwLzSMrwwK9jGbp3K1RcYQ6wkBXBTmdqld1tLo8UakOiWykwKfrrlWJO2a0YWN1inqHIeaEaOfnM9BY6rxaCn0SwTR7hHEXYRjvp46U4QN0Ko/s320/DSC02505.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><br /><div><strong>Family and office roles mix<br /></strong>By Sarah Kershaw<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />The office joker. The mother hen. The king. The rebel. The gossip. The peacekeeper. The dude.<br />Anyone who has ever been part of a workplace culture can probably recognize at least one of those characters in the cubicle next door.<br />But workplace roles and the dynamics among colleagues can go much deeper than those somewhat superficial stereotypes, especially when people spend as much time with colleagues as they do with their families, and where the office so often mirrors the family.<br />A boss is not just a boss, in the view of some psychologists who study workplace roles; he can be a stand-in for a disapproving and distant father. An unpredictable, easily angered manager can be a thinly veiled rejecting mother. Colleagues competing for the boss's attention — or merit raises and bonuses — are siblings in rivalry.<br />The employees of a company acquired by another in a hostile merger? They can experience seething resentment toward what they feel is an unwelcome stepparent, according to psychologists working with companies to manage emotional fallout during a merger.<br />There is, too, the workplace spouse, a co-worker of the opposite sex who shares a kind of closeness achieved only through the intense experience of long weeks at the same office.<br />Given all the stress and uncertainty driven by the economic crisis, some companies, with the help of business and organizational psychologists, are plumbing the depths of these feelings and roles, trying to gauge their effects at a time when emotions are running high. A growing number of business psychologists and executive coaches are also looking at the influence of birth order and other family roles and niches on office behavior.<br />"Work is nothing more than an entirely complex set of relationships," said Michael Norris, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, who runs monthly leadership coaching groups and individual sessions with senior executives. "You have partners that are your equals, subordinates, superiors," Norris said. "It's parents and siblings. All of these dynamics that are exactly the same in the workplace, just the titles are different."<br />For example, said Laurence Stybel, a psychologist in the Boston area who specializes in organizational behavior, "Somebody who is successful at getting resources in the family environment approaches the corporate environment with a sense of confidence. Someone who was denied resources given to others approaches the corporate environment with the same concept."<br />The use of personality testing in the workplace to measure employees' "emotional intelligence" or, for example, how they handle conflict, has become increasingly common, said Benjamin Dattner, an organizational psychologist in New York who consults with companies on workplace issues and blogs for Psychology Today. Tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which measures how people perceive the world and make decisions, are given to millions of employees each year, Dattner said.<br />The idea is to help increase their effectiveness, say, by having a team of co-workers better understand their strengths and weaknesses — although the usefulness of such tests is debated.<br />There are also a number of character typology studies — some frivolous and some more serious — that have sought to define the roles office workers play. In one recent study that T-Mobile in Britain commissioned to gain insight into how its employees interact, a psychologist interviewed workers and came up with eight character types. When times are difficult economically, a workplace character identified as the "mother hen" — with a comforting voice of reason and empathy — may help raise the group's spirit, Honey Langcaster-James, a psychologist, concluded. The "office joker," by contrast, "may decide that wisecracking" is "no longer appropriate in such dire times."<br />The "dude," another character in the study, "T-Mobile Workplace Motivation Report," which is available online, is described as "laid back and relaxed," and this relaxed attitude "also means that he/she doesn't transfer pressure onto colleagues — a trait most workmates would be grateful for," the report says.<br />One New York company that has recently delved deeply into workplace roles and how family experiences and birth order affect relationships at the office is TAG Creative, a branding communication agency in New York that is owned by three women.<br />Last summer, the partners hired a team of consultants, including Dattner, who is also an adjunct professor of psychology at New York University, when they doubled their employees to 16. With twice as many personalities in the office, the three managers wanted to define more clearly their own roles. In the process, they uncovered how some of their childhood experiences and especially their birth order played out inside their sleek and small offices at 30th Street and Park Avenue.<br />"I sometimes have to tell myself, she is not your mother, she's your partner," said Amy Frankel, 53, the chief strategy officer, referring to her two co-owners.<br />Both Frankel and her partner Terry Rieser, 58, the chief operating officer, are eldest children, and for them, an important motive in starting the company in 2001 was to be their own bosses. Like many other firstborns, they said, they are dominant personalities and have trouble with authority.<br />The third partner, Gina Delio, 52, the chief creative officer, is the second of five children. Her two partners describe her as the peacemaker of the group, true to middle-child form.<br />Rieser, whom her partners described as the most direct of the three, is often asked to handle difficult conversations with clients or employees.<br />The women gained some of their insights about how birth order plays out in the workplace from Dattner, who has studied its impact in the workplace. He says it can provide useful insights to employees trying to navigate difficult office relationships.<br />Firstborns, he said, tend to be fearful of losing their position and rank, so they may be extremely anxious at a time of layoffs and downsizing. Second-born children tend to be most adventurous and open to change, he said. In fact, Dattner said that companies he had worked with found that when sending employees overseas, second-born children tended to fare better than older ones.<br />As the older of two daughters, Frankel said she sometimes feels competitive with Delio, which reminds her of competing with her sister for their parents' attention.<br />"I feel there are moments where you are sitting there and you can feel it in your body, you're having a reaction, something gets triggered," Frankel said. "It took on so much more import than it needed to."<br />She added, "And this is not really about Gina or Terry or what they are doing in this moment, this is reminding me of something that happened a long time ago that gets acted out there."<br />In the current recession, with corporate budgets shrinking, spending on psychological counseling at work is likely to be curtailed or eliminated, several business psychologists said. But other consultants said they are still receiving plenty of work from companies in crisis, particularly those facing the grim and emotional tasks of laying off employees or merging with other companies.<br />Heather Amber Anderson, a management consultant based in Stowe, Vermont, who speaks regularly to large groups of chief executives of small- and medium-size companies, said she has been telling these executives for the last few months that examining their own and their employees roles and behavior at work is especially important now.<br />"This is more critical than ever," she said she has advised. "People are watching you right now to set the emotional tenor of the organization. This is one of the most important conversations you need to have with yourself right now."<br />For the 50-something women who run TAG, where the employees are in their 20s, 30s and 40s, the possibility of having to lay off workers as the economic troubles squeeze their clients, feels very much like the specter of kicking their children out of the house.<br />"Having looked at what we may need to do to survive or how the trend in business is going, it's almost painful in that parental way," Rieser said, adding that one of the interns who worked for her called her "mother." "These are people who are dependent on you; these are people who depend on you for their livelihood."<br />One longtime company employee, Matthew Aldrich, who is the youngest of three brothers, feels very "taken care of" by the three partners, whom he calls "the ladies." "They look after me like a son," he said, adding that sometimes he even feels spoiled, reminding him somewhat of life in his family. "It's a nurturing role."</div><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/style/04roles.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/style/04roles.php</a></div><br /><div><br /></div><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHFoxSCr5yFdyNA8VGNkwkv2Db-INwXgwOuBxv2Oh_RSSciHYA6vXH1ncaItlxSEBHqO7pQV3uGI_LtVPhnn8DqIA899AI3y7yAFwR40LmcOA-38QNt58B8KAX1apb38MeKMXQEjRT9Ac/s1600-h/DSC02506.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177599550193570" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHFoxSCr5yFdyNA8VGNkwkv2Db-INwXgwOuBxv2Oh_RSSciHYA6vXH1ncaItlxSEBHqO7pQV3uGI_LtVPhnn8DqIA899AI3y7yAFwR40LmcOA-38QNt58B8KAX1apb38MeKMXQEjRT9Ac/s320/DSC02506.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivrLHfklCGGObnKwZAL4Fxv3jMpIjVwUuaI8WUqk5fJlfA23F2qgBO_Plcp7qWJ8KrtbScM3COLKjEHjg8QcTB7i3Jor2CHRKNLByfImUqxm4AbiSvCPPyzDD2iWJ77VkgdAF3oihNpCc/s1600-h/DSC02507.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177594099719922" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivrLHfklCGGObnKwZAL4Fxv3jMpIjVwUuaI8WUqk5fJlfA23F2qgBO_Plcp7qWJ8KrtbScM3COLKjEHjg8QcTB7i3Jor2CHRKNLByfImUqxm4AbiSvCPPyzDD2iWJ77VkgdAF3oihNpCc/s320/DSC02507.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXwQ0TBXTUMoxmobYS-rPvZfq34icLYz6r_nWnwARChYN3V78uxR-5235dZltEjU9ei43rnEsz7Rc6YDkEjtGP5-8v7_06HP2D8vJ4AthOQrXwICpqRn-IaEW1s9epKRETGcSM0sRWg1g/s1600-h/DSC02508.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177589878816594" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXwQ0TBXTUMoxmobYS-rPvZfq34icLYz6r_nWnwARChYN3V78uxR-5235dZltEjU9ei43rnEsz7Rc6YDkEjtGP5-8v7_06HP2D8vJ4AthOQrXwICpqRn-IaEW1s9epKRETGcSM0sRWg1g/s320/DSC02508.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiruJ0NtnYGEofMOJT9qZadxV555zszWv-4HOYcah1kAuzjFdTjSKeFQOvBCemuQRrD6FGEn3toGRW-a5CyisOIfhAcUTnpI_m4UvGlyUOHMcAQ-bwikAce2TbYK0-D92gnTOazkyKflYk/s1600-h/DSC02509.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177312048161602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiruJ0NtnYGEofMOJT9qZadxV555zszWv-4HOYcah1kAuzjFdTjSKeFQOvBCemuQRrD6FGEn3toGRW-a5CyisOIfhAcUTnpI_m4UvGlyUOHMcAQ-bwikAce2TbYK0-D92gnTOazkyKflYk/s320/DSC02509.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9nCkH3azVn0X2Qd30ybslzOxEjXfS4wg9jngxuygQG0UwiXXCl9jg5DSL5qch_ZKzeSSZiacV9rUVknAP4VQXZGC9mc4bAWUaaaTWbKhc_EEynCnrRSjJ9GR_J6_ZGquYJxCiOY6EN8I/s1600-h/DSC02511.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177313682225842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9nCkH3azVn0X2Qd30ybslzOxEjXfS4wg9jngxuygQG0UwiXXCl9jg5DSL5qch_ZKzeSSZiacV9rUVknAP4VQXZGC9mc4bAWUaaaTWbKhc_EEynCnrRSjJ9GR_J6_ZGquYJxCiOY6EN8I/s320/DSC02511.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCfVxUV9e5RgnkDsx4U5eKLHp3lELjzLELUN9yePIp8PE_ks1DGty_F_ex72hu5K-O9i29XYCz14hCHko24L1FnG_uhHQ9DpJBUUJ5qoXqErhVyENQM9RrnN7jZIOJvrwCutJAcwofDw8/s1600-h/DSC02512.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177310126936498" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCfVxUV9e5RgnkDsx4U5eKLHp3lELjzLELUN9yePIp8PE_ks1DGty_F_ex72hu5K-O9i29XYCz14hCHko24L1FnG_uhHQ9DpJBUUJ5qoXqErhVyENQM9RrnN7jZIOJvrwCutJAcwofDw8/s320/DSC02512.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbeUEZMdQL1T-BNfleHFd4Gu1rh8W0U-nSXiGXJubZfeD4mp5XtoU3TakYmthtxIyK0KF3JAC4saDubLVeqxYuL_dryXA-ackq62oCQWnTzrACdqGqAUIZJHSG2lni-qMkyxHRcm7t8Lg/s1600-h/DSC02515.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177308941676162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbeUEZMdQL1T-BNfleHFd4Gu1rh8W0U-nSXiGXJubZfeD4mp5XtoU3TakYmthtxIyK0KF3JAC4saDubLVeqxYuL_dryXA-ackq62oCQWnTzrACdqGqAUIZJHSG2lni-qMkyxHRcm7t8Lg/s320/DSC02515.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge5M78bZ_yMYEUn4kNGDLI2Z3Wq4gEMWcXsOoYs8bW6HKUHEnJM81qMeaOocXfIIvCmGKl8Jm0wKd8dDuQpcVAXYRNvDzOyys4LjVF5vEF_1pU5mgXrV2ZAJtA74_MsbAXWa1c7kX0x2s/s1600-h/DSC02518.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177304354964482" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge5M78bZ_yMYEUn4kNGDLI2Z3Wq4gEMWcXsOoYs8bW6HKUHEnJM81qMeaOocXfIIvCmGKl8Jm0wKd8dDuQpcVAXYRNvDzOyys4LjVF5vEF_1pU5mgXrV2ZAJtA74_MsbAXWa1c7kX0x2s/s320/DSC02518.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><strong>Congo and Rwanda agree plan to disband FDLR militia<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />By Joe Bavier<br />Congo and Rwanda have agreed a military plan to try to disband a Rwandan Hutu militia whose presence in eastern Congo is seen as a root cause of enduring conflict there, the Congolese Foreign Minister said on Thursday.<br />Alexis Thambwe Mwamba said the plan to tackle the FDLR armed group was drawn up by officers from the Great Lakes neighbours and agreed with his Rwandan counterpart Rosemary Museminali.<br />The two ministers met in Goma, capital of Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province, where weeks of fighting have displaced a quarter of a million people.<br />The conflict pits Tutsi rebels led by renegade General Laurent Nkunda against the Congolese army and Rwandan Hutu fighters from the rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).<br />Nkunda cites the presence in east Congo of the FDLR, which includes perpetrators of Rwanda's 1994 genocide of Tutsis by Hutus, as the main justification for his Tutsi rebellion, which has conquered fresh territory in recent weeks.<br />Mwamba said the joint plan, whose details he refused to reveal, would be signed on Friday.<br />"The FDLR must either go back to Rwanda or become non-combatant in Congolese territory," he told reporters.<br />The Congolese minister said implementation of the plan could involve friendly outside forces, such as the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo (MONUC) or soldiers from the southern African SADC bloc, which has offered troops to help pacify east Congo.<br />Nkunda has declared a cease-fire with the Congolese government army, but his Tutsi fighters are still battling the FDLR, whose existence many regional experts believe is at the heart of the persisting fighting in North Kivu.<br />"They (the FDLR) are actually the root cause of the insecurity that we see around," Museminali said.<br />United Nations peacekeepers in Congo fear that without a political settlement the violence could escalate into a repeat of the wider 1998-2003 regional war that devastated Congo.<br />DEMANDS FOR TALKS<br />Congo and Rwanda have accused each other of supporting rebels in east Congo hostile to their governments. Rwandan President Paul Kagame's Tutsi-led administration denies backing Nkunda, while Congolese President Joseph Kabila denies his army sides with the FDLR.<br />The neighbours were enemies in the 1998-2003 Congo war that sucked in four other African states and created a humanitarian crisis that has killed about 5.4 million people in a decade.<br />Congo pledged last year to disarm the FDLR by force if necessary, but Rwanda says little progress had been made.<br />The Goma talks are the latest of several meetings between the Congolese and Rwandan governments.<br />Nkunda's rebel National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) has made territorial gains in North Kivu since late August. He wants direct talks on Congo's future with Kabila's government, which Kabila has so far refused.<br />A spokesman for the FDLR, Lt.-Col. Edmond Ngarambe, said talks aimed at pacifying eastern Congo must include his movement's fighters. "They have a role to play too," he said.<br />The FDLR is demanding a deal which would allow its fighters to return home to Rwanda and operate as a political movement.<br />The U.N. plans to send reinforcements to east Congo to try to pacify North Kivu, but these could take months to arrive.<br />(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/)<br />(Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Giles Elgood)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC.php</a></div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTS3uuVm6Fz8vNXaNUcG6LxQF-XAfhVrEaxUEfOwdaByExsptm6FPkJJe1IB4tNVo_je3LKdNWM2T82_toD2P-TsPnz0GkIIOezXUWgtAYec4HsQtL7bZHBog_170haypDH-SEBCzxiI/s1600-h/DSC02519.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177036635008498" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTS3uuVm6Fz8vNXaNUcG6LxQF-XAfhVrEaxUEfOwdaByExsptm6FPkJJe1IB4tNVo_je3LKdNWM2T82_toD2P-TsPnz0GkIIOezXUWgtAYec4HsQtL7bZHBog_170haypDH-SEBCzxiI/s320/DSC02519.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><strong>Money to fight drug gangs is released to Mexico</strong><br />By Elisabeth Malkin<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />MEXICO CITY: The United States formally released on Wednesday the first part of a $400 million aid package to help Mexico fight drug trafficking, a sign of how much more involved the United States is becoming in Mexico's brutal drug war.<br />The agreement signed here makes almost $200 million available for different programs to strengthen Mexico's law enforcement agencies, treat drug addiction and upgrade the judiciary.<br />"It should be said: sometimes the narcotraffickers are better coordinated and integrated in their transnational activities than those that are confronting them," said United States Ambassador Antonio Garza.<br />The money is part of a three-year, $1.4 billion plan, called the Merida Initiative. Congress approved the first $400 million, plus an additional $65 million for Central America, Haiti and the Dominican Republic in June. The Bush administration has asked for an additional $550 million for 2009, with $450 million of that slated for Mexico.<br />About $136 million of this year's aid to Mexico is already in place through other agreements, including military cooperation, Garza said. The remaining amount, which includes money for helicopters and surveillance aircraft for the Mexican military, is still moving through the bureaucracy.<br />The list of projects announced Wednesday offered a view of the shortcomings of Mexican law enforcement, both in terms of technology and training. There is money for special X-ray equipment for containers, cargo and trucks, as well as for forensic equipment and a new police registry to ensure that police officers who are dismissed for corruption in one state are not then hired elsewhere. The money will also be used to purchase polygraph machines and computer technology to aid in tracking laundered cash.<br />Since President Felipe Calderon took office two years ago, he has made the crackdown on drug cartels the centerpiece of his administration, dispatching 30,000 soldiers to restore the government's authority in states where traffickers operated almost unhindered.<br />The campaign has brought some results, including the arrest of several cartel leaders and record seizures of drugs, arms and cash. But as the cartels have fought one another, as well as the police, the military and local officials, the death toll has increased.<br />The newspaper El Universal reported Wednesday that, by its count, there have already been more than 5,000 drug-related killings this year, almost double the number last year.<br />Over the past month, officials have made public a broad investigation of the senior ranks of federal police and prosecutors, dismissing three dozen officials. The former head of the anti-drug unit in the attorney general's office was arrested and charged with tipping off a drug cartel in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars.<br />Calderon said last week that half of state and local police officers, as well as new hires to the federal preventive police, were not qualified.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/04mexico.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/04mexico.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>First grader in $1 robbery may face expulsion</strong><br />By Yolanne Almanzar<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />MIAMI: A first-grade boy who took a table knife to his Pembroke Pines elementary school and used it to rob a classmate of $1 in lunch money faces possible expulsion and charges of armed robbery, officials said Wednesday.<br />"We have seen more incidents where students are bringing items that they shouldn't bring to school," a Broward County schools spokesman, Keith Bromery, said. "We're not sure exactly why that's happening."<br />In the last month, an 8-year-old boy took a gun to his elementary school classroom in Fort Lauderdale, and a sophomore at Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale was charged in the shooting death of a classmate in a school corridor.<br />In Pembroke Pines, the 7-year-old first grader approached a 6-year-old in the restroom of Pines Lakes Elementary School last week, threatened him with the knife and took his dollar, the police said. Bromery described the knife as having a rounded point, the kind that goes with a place setting.<br />The 6-year-old suffered a nosebleed during the encounter, but it was not clear whether the knife's blade drew the blood. His mother reported the incident to school officials on Monday, and they summoned the Pembroke Pines police, who were investigating. They will send their findings to the state attorney's office for review before any charges are filed.<br />"There's some difficulty in this case because you first have to determine if the child knew what he was doing," a police spokesman, David Golt, said.<br />If expelled, the boy would be sent to an alternative school where he would receive counseling and treatment, with the possibility of returning to Pines Lakes after an evaluation. Alternative schools, known as educational centers, are part of the Broward County school system and are for children with behavioral problems.<br />"We don't expel anyone to the street," Bromery said.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/04knife.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/04knife.php</a></div><div><br /><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD0Ky_rxhCF5iQbYGSos9lPsTBkeoZbYNH0yGAUuAg3EbuNQjtwPHRUmLVRm1i0VhcEVJfJ39sQ8mQ1JTdcOFvb1Hb3m91soIMJQ8BwWlR71JbkrUFZRmQzSWe4sCTIhYorTDUOzS2fZk/s1600-h/DSC02521.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177032818610562" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD0Ky_rxhCF5iQbYGSos9lPsTBkeoZbYNH0yGAUuAg3EbuNQjtwPHRUmLVRm1i0VhcEVJfJ39sQ8mQ1JTdcOFvb1Hb3m91soIMJQ8BwWlR71JbkrUFZRmQzSWe4sCTIhYorTDUOzS2fZk/s320/DSC02521.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><strong>Harvard endowment loses 22%</strong><br />By Geraldine Fabrikant<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />In a sign of the economic times, Harvard has sent a letter to its deans saying that the university's $36.9 billion endowment fund lost 22 percent of its value in the last four months and could decline as much as 30 percent by the end of the fiscal year on June 30.<br />Normally Harvard reports on the endowment's performance once a year, but the letter signed by the university's president, Drew Faust, and its executive vice president, Edward Forst, cited the "current extraordinary circumstances" as the rationale for providing an interim report.<br />Harvard depends on its endowment for about 35 percent of its operating budget, and some of its schools rely on endowment income to cover more than 50 percent of their expenses. As a result, the letter noted that the endowment's performance would have a significant impact on budgets. The decline, about $8 billion, does not capture the full extent of losses, the letter said, because some investments are harder to value and are valued only periodically.<br />For example, at the end of its fiscal 2008 year, Harvard said it had 11 percent of its holdings in private equity, 9 percent in timber and agriculture, and a comparable amount in real estate. Each sector has been hard hit in the current environment, but it is difficult to quantify the decline on a daily or monthly basis. Harvard noted that its private equity and real estate investments are managed externally. Experts say that those markdowns could prompt a decline of an additional three or four percentage points.<br />In addition, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index was down again in November. At the end of fiscal 2008 in June, Harvard had 12 percent in domestic stocks and a similar amount in foreign equities as well as 10 percent in emerging markets. Declines in those sectors could also have affected the endowment's results.<br />At the end of fiscal 2008, Harvard said it planned to increase its private equity holdings by 2 percent. Instead, because of market turmoil and problems in the private equity market, the endowment has put $1.5 billion, about 38 percent of its private equity holdings, up for sale. But as many foundations and endowments do the same, it is unclear what such sales will fetch.<br />Jane Mendillo, who formerly ran the Wellesley endowment, assumed the head of Harvard's endowment in July. She was appointed in March, succeeding Mohamed El-Erian, a former managing director at Pacific Investment Management Company, who stayed two years before deciding to return to Pimco as a member of its senior management team.<br />Private equity funds have been a particular problem for nonprofit entities. They return cash periodically and require new cash commitments to finance ventures. But while there have been few returns, demands for new commitments have continued, which has put pressure on schools to come up with cash for an array of needs, including the school budget and private equity.<br />In their letter, Faust and Forst said that to have the cash necessary to meet demands and minimize risk, the school would issue "a substantial amount of new taxable fixed-rate debt." Harvard also plans to convert a significant amount of short-term tax-exempt debt into bonds with longer maturities, so it can reduce its exposure to volatility and continue to finance operations and other priorities.<br />The letter did not discuss the impact of the decline on the school's ambitious financial aid program. In December 2007, for example, Harvard said that as part of its program to attract applicants from different income groups, it would charge students from homes with incomes of $120,000 to $180,000 about 10 percent of their family household income per year, thereby subsidizing the $45,600 annual cost of attending.<br />A little more than half of its undergraduates receive some form of financial aid. At the time, the school said that the new plan meant Harvard would increase financial aid spending by the university to $120 million, from $98 million, annually.<br />Harvard, like other schools, is expected to be hurt by declines in other revenue streams, as well as the endowment. As families of students find themselves increasingly in need of financial aid, the revenue from tuition could fall.<br />In addition, as the downturn puts strain on the government, federal grants and contracts for sponsored research are likely to encounter added stress.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04harvard.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04harvard.php</a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSRWemZe-5hdDdmJf_OlzICZqlkDrV-ynbXew6qRN3-u51Kx862KPnKPjJo2CNNk1k6QNChKjAi_ywkOrjeH06FhdPUXacpjko1DxfSpqymUGMSxumWDf2A4azApPb-DicEBJczpJqIcg/s1600-h/DSC02522.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177029189562370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSRWemZe-5hdDdmJf_OlzICZqlkDrV-ynbXew6qRN3-u51Kx862KPnKPjJo2CNNk1k6QNChKjAi_ywkOrjeH06FhdPUXacpjko1DxfSpqymUGMSxumWDf2A4azApPb-DicEBJczpJqIcg/s320/DSC02522.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimLSHQZfZaBLUCBi_v7Wu_IUsAnmPjZHCf0G82wM-0evO6vjOysywfTdR8gk_j9_mFEuctqelNaG35qlmwSuKyAI2wbqEoXSlfB0Mh2tb1JAPAiMKporqkLX1UpCm6MQ0rkTz989qcl_g/s1600-h/DSC02523.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177029434505042" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimLSHQZfZaBLUCBi_v7Wu_IUsAnmPjZHCf0G82wM-0evO6vjOysywfTdR8gk_j9_mFEuctqelNaG35qlmwSuKyAI2wbqEoXSlfB0Mh2tb1JAPAiMKporqkLX1UpCm6MQ0rkTz989qcl_g/s320/DSC02523.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCEJLJiCCcxLUEKKWQjEwBrNM8AWMjR_MJyV-IBvqthxPsIDLSLJv4kCKrevOLVxy1sG3FTIMF9mGI8eJIcB4WD4gFc1JFfY25baBlpBfUb4UAlRMxE3EW4vrXJNHIGZxTaupdXT8lp0E/s1600-h/DSC02525.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276177029374597362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCEJLJiCCcxLUEKKWQjEwBrNM8AWMjR_MJyV-IBvqthxPsIDLSLJv4kCKrevOLVxy1sG3FTIMF9mGI8eJIcB4WD4gFc1JFfY25baBlpBfUb4UAlRMxE3EW4vrXJNHIGZxTaupdXT8lp0E/s320/DSC02525.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjnpMgwF26g8qt6vAM3b6_tATZjNVE_eUL4nwpERax1P5zPq_ap91NEqYpqkG3Xml40yirYAXUnBk4nXIuuRZqbYgiWWedqD5_WvXrQzywLzZVdZvJJjW860q2lfgRqbd0o2GA9dJ-p1E/s1600-h/DSC02526.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176710801948882" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjnpMgwF26g8qt6vAM3b6_tATZjNVE_eUL4nwpERax1P5zPq_ap91NEqYpqkG3Xml40yirYAXUnBk4nXIuuRZqbYgiWWedqD5_WvXrQzywLzZVdZvJJjW860q2lfgRqbd0o2GA9dJ-p1E/s320/DSC02526.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1JGZoL5UAvNkqIa0w4bxdTpmdizEcuyD5ITedxtMOdcdUWCMjFdukXllk0YkyOCi-XLPX7gnwoTZzdDl_GvtNERub_lTMVszYUH7It4Eo7SjR5tpNWvetaUR8xGpZMUAkOajIt0Z8kF0/s1600-h/DSC02527.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176709230622066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1JGZoL5UAvNkqIa0w4bxdTpmdizEcuyD5ITedxtMOdcdUWCMjFdukXllk0YkyOCi-XLPX7gnwoTZzdDl_GvtNERub_lTMVszYUH7It4Eo7SjR5tpNWvetaUR8xGpZMUAkOajIt0Z8kF0/s320/DSC02527.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwSoEcbyndafMTrLRGWEU7FA_33mTqgokC-YzEvKWV-7Cj8-tF1E304GSke2_2cmgIQlGgTtrI4GYsKD-Nf_ZUNThfv3U_Xp7H6gPztHduVtR1VF6KZJcVLzO9rWYSMtoS_M0KM-VwdQw/s1600-h/DSC02528.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176705742824962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwSoEcbyndafMTrLRGWEU7FA_33mTqgokC-YzEvKWV-7Cj8-tF1E304GSke2_2cmgIQlGgTtrI4GYsKD-Nf_ZUNThfv3U_Xp7H6gPztHduVtR1VF6KZJcVLzO9rWYSMtoS_M0KM-VwdQw/s320/DSC02528.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTccaAz58wlgUWVSn7eo-6WtMYfedjI5dH25MOmLtgaFR9qxZnyMX-RAvK4dAbjxYApBCdj8QJtM-ALjlsrVaUn470meWhKwR1ppfE_TR_TndInxcH6OOoqqKYeu8lhpeDhqqCWTSci4E/s1600-h/DSC02529.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176703401062930" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTccaAz58wlgUWVSn7eo-6WtMYfedjI5dH25MOmLtgaFR9qxZnyMX-RAvK4dAbjxYApBCdj8QJtM-ALjlsrVaUn470meWhKwR1ppfE_TR_TndInxcH6OOoqqKYeu8lhpeDhqqCWTSci4E/s320/DSC02529.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF8gnzQ1xlegQn9cHlghZqgH2x2glkd473D8S9xSdTM2GdqyxPT4VeiAnCiOpt0U6gD1ZELtXeqFbbM8sbMmwoUNdXUl6_fN7rAw2D6vA-463QciZE-GKEM2VRmrV1RCR1dGdRMrWZ3Mg/s1600-h/DSC02530.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176696002648082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF8gnzQ1xlegQn9cHlghZqgH2x2glkd473D8S9xSdTM2GdqyxPT4VeiAnCiOpt0U6gD1ZELtXeqFbbM8sbMmwoUNdXUl6_fN7rAw2D6vA-463QciZE-GKEM2VRmrV1RCR1dGdRMrWZ3Mg/s320/DSC02530.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Back to Dallas for the Bush family</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush and the first lady Laura Bush have bought a home in an affluent, North Dallas neighborhood, where they will live after the president leaves office in January.<br />Laura Bush's press secretary, Sally McDonough, said Thursday that the Bushes purchased a home in the Preston Hollow area, which has some of the most expensive houses in Texas and is home to some of the state's wealthiest residents.<br />The Bushes previously lived in Dallas from December 1988 through January 1995, before moving to the Texas governor's mansion in Austin, Texas. The Bushes will continue to spend some time at their ranch in Crawford, Texas, a two-hour drive away, McDonough said.<br />The president and Laura Bush do not yet have occupancy of the house, so the White House offered no further details at this time, McDonough said. However, local property records indicate that Robert McCleskey, who has done accounting work for the Bush family, recently bought an 8,500-square-foot, or 790 square meter, house with a market value of $2.1 million on a cul-de-sac in a wealthy pocket of Dallas.<br />McCleskey is listed as a trustee on the property and he said the house was bought Oct. 1. He said he could not say for whom the home was purchased.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/05house.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/america/05house.php</a></div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrk6_ftmnVhMXZ3KjtJDcdWdypnXLgSiuVBdveqd182Xs_TyIDXyuezqrakvD3Fljr5mdH2oier2lt-KdY2Hs_52Lh0HBUItrZi1H_lZmQVQ1YjdD2XNRnOXY7TLVTJBb0TQhV_NzBWmk/s1600-h/DSC02532.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176399529112802" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrk6_ftmnVhMXZ3KjtJDcdWdypnXLgSiuVBdveqd182Xs_TyIDXyuezqrakvD3Fljr5mdH2oier2lt-KdY2Hs_52Lh0HBUItrZi1H_lZmQVQ1YjdD2XNRnOXY7TLVTJBb0TQhV_NzBWmk/s320/DSC02532.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div><br /><br /></div><div></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><strong>A boat on the cutting edge and perhaps a relic already</strong><br />By Christopher Clarey<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />SAN DIEGO, California: Already looking suspiciously like a relic of an age of excess, the massive trimaran sailboat belonging to BMW Oracle Racing was docked in San Diego harbor last week: its towering mast giving the high-rise hotels some competition.<br />"I'm staying on the 13th floor, and I'm not at the mast yet," said the skipper, Russell Coutts, gesturing at his hotel between bites of a sandwich. "I'm looking down from the hotel thinking, 'Wow, that's what it must look like from the top of that thing."'<br />That thing - dubbed "Dogzilla" by the sailing community - is the latest high-tech racing machine created at great if undisclosed expense with the America's Cup in mind. But with a long-running lawsuit continuing to generate much more drag than this trimaran's leviathan, computer-designed hulls, it is anybody's guess whether BMW Oracle's wind-powered monster will ever be used in the Cup.<br />Win an appeal in the New York courts sometime next year, and BMW Oracle might indeed race its trimaran against one currently being designed by Alinghi, the current defender of the Cup, in a one-on-one series adhering strictly to the rules outlined in the Cup's governing document, the Deed of Gift. In Cup parlance, that would be a Deed of Gift match, or DOG match (hence the trimaran's provocative nickname, which its crew and designers have yet to embrace).<br />But BMW Oracle and its owner, Larry Ellison could still decide to drop the lawsuit, which was filed last year in the belief that Alinghi had made an unseemly power grab when it picked a brand new Spanish yacht club as its official challenger and then published race rules widely viewed as one-sided.<br />If the lawsuit is withdrawn, Alinghi has already announced that the next Cup - scaled down for the new economic realities - will be staged in traditional monohull yachts in 2010 in Valencia, Spain. And even if BMW Oracle does not succumb to mounting peer pressure and end its legal action, it could still lose in court, which would mean that the trimaran in San Diego Harbor, 90 feet by 90 feet, or 27 meters square, with its 158-foot mast, would be reduced to a black elephant. Or would it?<br />"I think we'll try to set a few speed records with the boat if it doesn't get used," said Ellison, the software impresario, in a telephone interview. "We'll find something to do with it. Priority one is to get the America's Cup back on track. The reason this boat was built was for the Deed of Gift match, so if we win the America's Cup we can go back to a fair set of rules and a multichallenger event where the rules are the same for everybody. That's the primary purpose of this boat, and if we get there, however we get there, I'll be happy."<br />For the moment, however, happiness is an elusive emotion in Cup circles. Securing sponsorship, already a daunting challenge because of the uncertainty generated by the lawsuit, has become closer to impossible with the global economic downturn. The Cup community, which was basking in the sun and affluence in Valencia during the Cup that ended last year, is now in a much more precarious state.<br />Would-be challengers have scaled back their plans and payrolls radically, forcing sailors and support staff to search for other means of paying their mortgages. Alinghi, owned by Ernesto Bertarelli, has resorted to layoffs and cutbacks and is still negotiating to extend its deal with one of its primary sponsors, the Swiss bank UBS, which has been hit particularly hard by the financial crisis.<br />Even BMW Oracle, with its primary sponsors still on board and Ellison's billions for backup, is apparently now sparing expense. Its temporary base in San Diego was long on trimaran but short on creature comforts with the team operating out of several shipping containers in a converted, fenced-in lot in which no fewer than 20 parking spaces were occupied last week by a reserve mast laid flat on the pavement.<br />Though modern Cup teams traditionally prize security and secrecy, curiosity seekers in San Diego had no problem getting a close-up look at the trimaran. All they had to do was walk to the end of the terrace at Joe's Crab Shack, the restaurant that looks over the base, which is precisely what some of Alinghi's emissaries did this year when they came to spy in plain view.<br />What they saw, according to Coutts, should not have reassured them. The trimaran is not the largest multihull racing sailboat in the world. Banque Populaire V, launched in France earlier this year, is 40 meters long. But Coutts said it is "the fastest" and, while most big trimarans were built for offshore racing, this one was designed for inshore racing and has been clocked at speeds twice that of the wind.<br />"It's much lighter, more powerful with a much bigger mast, sails and so forth and much more extreme," Coutts said. "This boat is a no compromise lightweight flyer basically, so there's a huge difference."<br />Coutts, the New Zealander with the Dudley Do-Right jaw, is no multihull expert. He has made his name as a supreme helmsman of monohulls. He has already won the America's Cup three times, twice with Team New Zealand and once with Alinghi in 2003 before parting acrimoniously with the Swiss-based syndicate and its owner, Bertarelli.<br />After Coutts sat out last year's Cup, Ellison hired Coutts to run his team after BMW Oracle was eliminated early from the challenger series, known as the Vuitton Cup. Coutts's new role has only complicated matters in the legal duel with Bertarelli and Alinghi.<br />Ellison maintains that Bertarelli's attempts to strong-arm the Cup have been motivated by personal dislike for Coutts and competitive concern about the powerhouse team that Coutts and Ellison have assembled. But BMW Oracle has found itself increasingly isolated in recent weeks as Alinghi has pushed forward with planning for a conventional Cup in 2010, inviting would-be challengers to meet in Switzerland and work through the rules in concert.<br />"I can't really answer for them; I think there's a lot of them that are anxious just to get this event going and maybe regardless of the rules," Coutts said of the participating teams.<br />But Keith Mills, the head of the British challenger Team Origin, said on Thursday that there had been genuine and significant compromises made. He said he intended to contact Ellison and Coutts directly before the entry deadline of Dec. 15 for the prospective Cup in 2010 to provide them with details of the revised rules, called a protocol, and to urge BMW Oracle to drop its lawsuit and join the competition.<br />Both Coutts and Ellison said that they would not relent unless Alinghi formally commits to "fair rules" that are identical or very close in spirit to those used for last year's Cup and do not allow Alinghi to control, among other things, the selection of the majority of race officials.<br />"We don't trust Ernesto, and we think we have good reason not to trust him," Ellison said. "All you have to do is look at the first set of rules and realize he's been forced to make these compromises because of the lawsuit. He hasn't willingly made these, and he still has not made enough compromises."<br />Mills struck a different tone. "We want to give them every opportunity to be there and frankly so do all the other challengers," he said of Oracle. "But what isn't going to happen and what Russell called for is that we send the protocol to Russell for him to write a long critique for what he'd like changed. We're not going to have one team do that."<br />"It's not going to be exactly what they want, not going to be exactly what anybody wants. It's not exactly what Alinghi wants, but on balance is it fair? I think it's fair, and I hope Larry and Russell agree. But if they don't, they're big boys, and they can take their chances in court." Rapprochement is still hardly out of the question, but unlike Alinghi, which is still building its multihull, BMW Oracle's backup plan is already afloat and casting very long shadows across the Pacific.</div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/sports/ARENA.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/sports/ARENA.php</a></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7arO_h4P09HZ2tRPNT3knV8waCm2XAoRSQ6HxjhkomdE2FsYce0NbZlKqyMyM_2I_5CUpMcnEiyG4bV7YDWEOOn28xPNwTc5zHMa1JBeR11nZOVGZXcYtdswEkAByCP1tMFvfQWqesAY/s1600-h/DSC02534.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176401946629218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7arO_h4P09HZ2tRPNT3knV8waCm2XAoRSQ6HxjhkomdE2FsYce0NbZlKqyMyM_2I_5CUpMcnEiyG4bV7YDWEOOn28xPNwTc5zHMa1JBeR11nZOVGZXcYtdswEkAByCP1tMFvfQWqesAY/s320/DSC02534.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><br /></div><div><strong>Notable children's books of 2008<br /></strong>Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />WABI SABI By Mark Reibstein. Illustrated by Ed Young. Little, Brown & Company Books for Young Readers. $16.99. (Ages 3 to 6)<br />In this book of ingeniously layered text — both narrative and haiku — and gorgeous collage art, a cat named Wabi Sabi sets out to discover the meaning of her name. Chosen by The Times as a Best Illustrated Children's Book of 2008.<br />THE KINGDOM ON THE WAVES The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 2. By M. T. Anderson. Candlewick Press. $22.99. (Ages 14 and up)<br />This sequel completes the story of race and revolution told in "The Pox Party." As Octavian Nothing, escaped from slavery, joins up with British forces in Boston, his story encompasses both the comic and the tragic with sweeping ambition.<br />SUNRISE OVER FALLUJAH By Walter Dean Myers Scholastic Press. $17.99. (Ages 12 and up)<br />An idealistic young soldier lands in Iraq's deadly hall of mirrors, in a kind of sequel to Myers's 1988 Vietnam novel, "Fallen Angels." In this powerful new book, laced with violence but also warmth and humor, the narrator faces humanitarian missions that turn into deadly ambushes (a detonator is concealed in a tub of flour) and bears witness to the killing of friend and enemy alike.<br />THE HUNGER GAMES By Suzanne Collins Scholastic Press. $17.99. (Ages 12 and up)<br />A brilliantly plotted tale that begins after North American society has been decimated by climate change and war. In this world, children fight to the death in ritual games — a form of both repression and entertainment in the country of Panem. When her younger sister is picked to compete, Katniss Everdeen, a skilled hunter, makes the fateful choice to take her place.<br />LITTLE BROTHER By Cory Doctorow Tor/Tom Doherty Associates. $17.95. (Ages 13 and up)<br />A near-future terrorist attack hits San Francisco, and Marcus Yallow, 17, playing hooky from high school, is detained in the crackdown that follows. The experience leads him into an ingenious program of resistance and civil rights activism in a novel that is at once an entertaining thriller, a thoughtful polemic and a practical handbook of digital-age self-defense.<br />ABC3D By Marion Bataille Neal Porter/Roaring Brook Press. $19.95. (Ages 5 and up)<br />A simple but sophisticated idea animates this small, chunky pop-up book, which does wonders with the letters A through Z. In Bataille's paper engineering, B doubles as 3, C flips over to become a D, U is a perfect pa­rabola, and so on, all in bold black, white and red. This stylish and interactive work of art can be read again and again.<br />TEN LITTLE FINGERS AND TEN LITTLE TOES By Mem Fox. Illustrated by Helen Oxenbury Harcourt Children's Books. $16. (Ages 3 to 5)<br />A witty and winsome look at babies around the world that has a toe-tapping refrain: the words sound easy and familiar, as though they have been handed down to children forever. And the story ends with a pitch-perfect moment: one little baby who is "mine, all mine."<br />THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS By E. Lockhart Hyperion. $16.99. (Ages 12 and up)<br />A nominee for a National Book Award in young people's literature, E. Lockhart's latest concerns "a nice girl" who remakes herself as a "near-criminal mastermind," with pranks that upend her school's oppressive power structure (created by and for boys). It's a homage to girl power, with a protagonist who is fearless.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/arts/kidsnotablet.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/arts/kidsnotablet.php</a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb3WkjCfnwa5BxiQ4yWprbJDATOZGBl-I9EXEuInVV_DR-BwiWMJQQXpUpmUhXf63pVZUO1fql0rZJhtFVxEN4nBTztrDuN93amvJJq9hkxBL6K8lcTT_4netlKSK32aoqEaDxs2z_rBM/s1600-h/DSC02535.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176402210381298" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 255px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb3WkjCfnwa5BxiQ4yWprbJDATOZGBl-I9EXEuInVV_DR-BwiWMJQQXpUpmUhXf63pVZUO1fql0rZJhtFVxEN4nBTztrDuN93amvJJq9hkxBL6K8lcTT_4netlKSK32aoqEaDxs2z_rBM/s320/DSC02535.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwYjwG3rNaNijKVXaKvr4vYoLK3Z93RxGB7SEflRAytTbmIXcGXAo8B0LJh4-X6EIZDtgjElU5_RPpwluWf6sHU2WjhuM6cjkCUKrBbyvKKA-xkpWKAXZICMFafRhESXYxdKr2xGGagNk/s1600-h/DSC02536.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176396182937794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 189px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwYjwG3rNaNijKVXaKvr4vYoLK3Z93RxGB7SEflRAytTbmIXcGXAo8B0LJh4-X6EIZDtgjElU5_RPpwluWf6sHU2WjhuM6cjkCUKrBbyvKKA-xkpWKAXZICMFafRhESXYxdKr2xGGagNk/s320/DSC02536.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTnWWSNNoapCOghqNDdZ4hiLYcEk5Ky3cxYKrZqWeTaoEacq0ReTV-4aC23U3_jHKZTVR6dnNZ5hcoFL_YeL2Wb5XiuFTun5g2MxqNuQk5VnvLgmntmS7QAdk0Dt43Eoxh2TH0ObavBcM/s1600-h/DSC02537.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176395554548242" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 242px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTnWWSNNoapCOghqNDdZ4hiLYcEk5Ky3cxYKrZqWeTaoEacq0ReTV-4aC23U3_jHKZTVR6dnNZ5hcoFL_YeL2Wb5XiuFTun5g2MxqNuQk5VnvLgmntmS7QAdk0Dt43Eoxh2TH0ObavBcM/s320/DSC02537.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggJIDX9UKBZDw0Wi_mYhKAd8MrmuOk51wo06kz4lvoATX9Sk5wB1P-pfv1POXyF4yIjBHRXTyTgTWQ5jd5ekNfcWsGuuBXVXdgNln9MEVJfxaNQ4VtmsnV4fTkBwtfe_eLJq3GKF39o_8/s1600-h/DSC02538.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176115141953762" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 232px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggJIDX9UKBZDw0Wi_mYhKAd8MrmuOk51wo06kz4lvoATX9Sk5wB1P-pfv1POXyF4yIjBHRXTyTgTWQ5jd5ekNfcWsGuuBXVXdgNln9MEVJfxaNQ4VtmsnV4fTkBwtfe_eLJq3GKF39o_8/s320/DSC02538.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXk8OOcjkeBRidSIYK9noIjaGrs3vwkG8bfbOoJS4yUyAWv8yfGxR1oioLIINbf_p2AEs_TBluoL4vNmoQll0tf_f-xVJKB3-TodyFE9GwJoh9xr4vg04Y3ITsWN-dC8n5m1g3ZaPRMQI/s1600-h/DSC02539.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176109050851266" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 298px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXk8OOcjkeBRidSIYK9noIjaGrs3vwkG8bfbOoJS4yUyAWv8yfGxR1oioLIINbf_p2AEs_TBluoL4vNmoQll0tf_f-xVJKB3-TodyFE9GwJoh9xr4vg04Y3ITsWN-dC8n5m1g3ZaPRMQI/s320/DSC02539.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrB5MS7IiUfcn8x2Ts_9dK8CQ50X6T7cF_7JiwVRTvaTs3DNroipd11Q8HYLc0dhu1JiHPXIvwf3jTLNR3nnktHPEM8exDESp-zRptYLbE7C490Pssglz7NRLCimbjxC9SmuXBj1AWe4M/s1600-h/DSC02540.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176100104833426" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 236px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrB5MS7IiUfcn8x2Ts_9dK8CQ50X6T7cF_7JiwVRTvaTs3DNroipd11Q8HYLc0dhu1JiHPXIvwf3jTLNR3nnktHPEM8exDESp-zRptYLbE7C490Pssglz7NRLCimbjxC9SmuXBj1AWe4M/s320/DSC02540.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsT7AgMy6QicAFls3GVCetnqGwofaWvLaWSVr27en4yaXFohIzYlaosANB1YXIgTl8-dSsqqmNNvbOacPrdrmC7IZo3XN82I0FuaK8n88TOHA5_iuOkwYXuLSr38REN-2XflgnRYFtwTE/s1600-h/DSC02541.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176101506703826" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 220px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsT7AgMy6QicAFls3GVCetnqGwofaWvLaWSVr27en4yaXFohIzYlaosANB1YXIgTl8-dSsqqmNNvbOacPrdrmC7IZo3XN82I0FuaK8n88TOHA5_iuOkwYXuLSr38REN-2XflgnRYFtwTE/s320/DSC02541.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5nZiaV9JcpcL-zcpWP4n3slQ1_72HOXXAOxunMm25ESuzQvo7Tg3mBaDPgHVfbIG8tBXC-h3R0oRl6-LKNiqQJLVUFySasBbOdS-DHtPdaSd_9RerrhRGGyFS3ibA6AFPWnWr12NjAyc/s1600-h/DSC02542.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276176094180021890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 227px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5nZiaV9JcpcL-zcpWP4n3slQ1_72HOXXAOxunMm25ESuzQvo7Tg3mBaDPgHVfbIG8tBXC-h3R0oRl6-LKNiqQJLVUFySasBbOdS-DHtPdaSd_9RerrhRGGyFS3ibA6AFPWnWr12NjAyc/s320/DSC02542.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTFJjDnNMHdS-1ZcNwW_ocB_Cg7Vcwk0r51VhjCbWHE1c-o0KZMD3dQJK_o9DtoDFuL7LEbRtKoY7lD3doquC1NrEPKh9Ge4fHDL3pSfxqX5HyWsQrK2RS_bCXW0XRCOS0U28aBnAj2NM/s1600-h/DSC02543.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175861778996754" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 287px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTFJjDnNMHdS-1ZcNwW_ocB_Cg7Vcwk0r51VhjCbWHE1c-o0KZMD3dQJK_o9DtoDFuL7LEbRtKoY7lD3doquC1NrEPKh9Ge4fHDL3pSfxqX5HyWsQrK2RS_bCXW0XRCOS0U28aBnAj2NM/s320/DSC02543.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXWDtJJi22ATk4QQzYtjpps3fERZkLVGGvNHVfp8oe6XBdl41NdBCOaBcB_853MNijH57OwuHA6wodeKfDWW52ypmkiWzCHCx8mtrFqG1VTLISNUxoDMzJLPRE5DkVxKx-45Nr_pf7Mmc/s1600-h/DSC02544.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175854348483042" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 313px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXWDtJJi22ATk4QQzYtjpps3fERZkLVGGvNHVfp8oe6XBdl41NdBCOaBcB_853MNijH57OwuHA6wodeKfDWW52ypmkiWzCHCx8mtrFqG1VTLISNUxoDMzJLPRE5DkVxKx-45Nr_pf7Mmc/s320/DSC02544.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJSdPt3J6LqLh4N4c4lHoS14LQ1WD4RRLP0LAbhkXorBE-EPkSYJPtku9pscRp1H5uro-s4QrKE8LqzAaswhb1LJhhbo8ra0-QrvLHTa9GS55SGd5jK4cK3-HWJ_S8s9rjwGBTbkap_lQ/s1600-h/DSC02545.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175850869004786" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 316px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJSdPt3J6LqLh4N4c4lHoS14LQ1WD4RRLP0LAbhkXorBE-EPkSYJPtku9pscRp1H5uro-s4QrKE8LqzAaswhb1LJhhbo8ra0-QrvLHTa9GS55SGd5jK4cK3-HWJ_S8s9rjwGBTbkap_lQ/s320/DSC02545.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUNxv7CaLFj2FwhIk_jhxqi0kPxiPigTWUOtzqdWxwSabdnRlu_RFeILhv3GTKAQebq_4Upue-8jsVlJhapj0vMweaC8n3ENsPFKV2aXaJIs5Q65wNH6oy0HL4nhT5ltv5cI6T48Jd1aA/s1600-h/DSC02546.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175846116260866" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 298px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUNxv7CaLFj2FwhIk_jhxqi0kPxiPigTWUOtzqdWxwSabdnRlu_RFeILhv3GTKAQebq_4Upue-8jsVlJhapj0vMweaC8n3ENsPFKV2aXaJIs5Q65wNH6oy0HL4nhT5ltv5cI6T48Jd1aA/s320/DSC02546.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrwrY7i4cnHgFV8jNSlSuYi-jbWWCjiKRW8niQXZfaiW6NCfDmDujBLo6RVvZzkUTQ0uZi02hDlOcq_HKcj2tlepwD1fbS1oFuRZ-Zn8JJhj-Vn0HCfD-8BYxGSnZ6_9YK6WZc32Kd7X4/s1600-h/DSC02547.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175842334408482" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 270px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrwrY7i4cnHgFV8jNSlSuYi-jbWWCjiKRW8niQXZfaiW6NCfDmDujBLo6RVvZzkUTQ0uZi02hDlOcq_HKcj2tlepwD1fbS1oFuRZ-Zn8JJhj-Vn0HCfD-8BYxGSnZ6_9YK6WZc32Kd7X4/s320/DSC02547.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhluMvHXA1VAHaXEGZEZYxTJ8nrOP608i24yisL4i1OAmwGKeSe9bomRkGPCoiQsM8rZIgjXOD5PcIi5gsmZH1K0ZobasLBOmBglNauU5ub_evU-dITCYtrYMHvjMrRuMHq_0BjXH7VIPc/s1600-h/DSC02548.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175594455328050" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhluMvHXA1VAHaXEGZEZYxTJ8nrOP608i24yisL4i1OAmwGKeSe9bomRkGPCoiQsM8rZIgjXOD5PcIi5gsmZH1K0ZobasLBOmBglNauU5ub_evU-dITCYtrYMHvjMrRuMHq_0BjXH7VIPc/s320/DSC02548.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG2cHh9gair1H0_HDQoZZovg1T6GD1AQ1FpAbDMVMTgJhaJpkEwWckwqO1_oalX1LRv-CrI5D4VnI6zdwe7RnXv6_ZyXaxLYbVpbua31HyOBXZqPpI847sjCD-LJXX3e8Ez6bf2xqeRKQ/s1600-h/DSC02549.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175587965247522" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 173px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG2cHh9gair1H0_HDQoZZovg1T6GD1AQ1FpAbDMVMTgJhaJpkEwWckwqO1_oalX1LRv-CrI5D4VnI6zdwe7RnXv6_ZyXaxLYbVpbua31HyOBXZqPpI847sjCD-LJXX3e8Ez6bf2xqeRKQ/s320/DSC02549.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5Yr4VPshE7bV9jhdPsD0lgPEbSt-sigHs8cSncn1WMAzH66uk1GAptiGUTvoQuul3qunhg9DpeFuE_eGgGGkUMTltuzh6r4HYbb7kGxZTGKSVssbY9TwzJp_C-aVZTj3vGzZVwAHuyKI/s1600-h/DSC02550.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175585482852274" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 233px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5Yr4VPshE7bV9jhdPsD0lgPEbSt-sigHs8cSncn1WMAzH66uk1GAptiGUTvoQuul3qunhg9DpeFuE_eGgGGkUMTltuzh6r4HYbb7kGxZTGKSVssbY9TwzJp_C-aVZTj3vGzZVwAHuyKI/s320/DSC02550.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfdqYuW2lnxn5GupbIX3p0DjWaO4mbgFbWtGXgdotuKlOyx1z_d79EkaiSqyGhkmmKOsFPI3q0eMUkgSK4bPWjzGX2zu_WpdLpYvso1hA3IkUUMzULVht0ntsooDjdeSbCS9lA4jcWtPA/s1600-h/DSC02551.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175579586585074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 291px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfdqYuW2lnxn5GupbIX3p0DjWaO4mbgFbWtGXgdotuKlOyx1z_d79EkaiSqyGhkmmKOsFPI3q0eMUkgSK4bPWjzGX2zu_WpdLpYvso1hA3IkUUMzULVht0ntsooDjdeSbCS9lA4jcWtPA/s320/DSC02551.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-QcNOh124VjKb1JiGLez1SvOk62wG6svR683yCI6-eVqA1a3QlxspJxQ0Giq_VUDwsM-xKUMcCcbTF2hGND6R5RUBY2vhmhtc6NZRUnEWpxH8vyGBOjDFrEPUJw8Qdfo2z3x2Wt0hbvQ/s1600-h/DSC02552.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175578256331266" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 175px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-QcNOh124VjKb1JiGLez1SvOk62wG6svR683yCI6-eVqA1a3QlxspJxQ0Giq_VUDwsM-xKUMcCcbTF2hGND6R5RUBY2vhmhtc6NZRUnEWpxH8vyGBOjDFrEPUJw8Qdfo2z3x2Wt0hbvQ/s320/DSC02552.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDN01mq2bwJ3J2UFTI5xt78jTT1dAbGbF7SFg4qI6rgLo50wEgNW5HwSa0Erx2hZeG6z1TH0sqe1DhUk5c4E-p5s-e7HTW9_yydYYqyy8PK38vkRncam_eEyeTF4c7Z8iCiuPic2WpVa4/s1600-h/DSC02553.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175341781861826" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 243px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDN01mq2bwJ3J2UFTI5xt78jTT1dAbGbF7SFg4qI6rgLo50wEgNW5HwSa0Erx2hZeG6z1TH0sqe1DhUk5c4E-p5s-e7HTW9_yydYYqyy8PK38vkRncam_eEyeTF4c7Z8iCiuPic2WpVa4/s320/DSC02553.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWF4J0bP6xLiBFYXb4CW2AfBIt0jB0QctM-v0MFR_WNoDk-SBcrMYEsa6XH51SCkamLwg8RiYwuiMtRP0xWtBIbl6yOOG3EasGWqhoFiNeDNJkvxDFlr6zLV3okV2FkJQgQ5bAnMsiSPk/s1600-h/DSC02554.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175339027280754" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 217px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWF4J0bP6xLiBFYXb4CW2AfBIt0jB0QctM-v0MFR_WNoDk-SBcrMYEsa6XH51SCkamLwg8RiYwuiMtRP0xWtBIbl6yOOG3EasGWqhoFiNeDNJkvxDFlr6zLV3okV2FkJQgQ5bAnMsiSPk/s320/DSC02554.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVzzMRIhE6ge37duqpdmBj2s57Q7Fnex4QLNZFtMui97ZT1u8NL3ZR7sI4xvNaVUokFdDXNHahsXtiH7RM4gS7dZyYJCZue9yguz4Z9QeQPCLFTLrKbxBOgVsNvXbYfCBWZEnfPh64ULA/s1600-h/DSC02555.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175341277733666" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 252px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVzzMRIhE6ge37duqpdmBj2s57Q7Fnex4QLNZFtMui97ZT1u8NL3ZR7sI4xvNaVUokFdDXNHahsXtiH7RM4gS7dZyYJCZue9yguz4Z9QeQPCLFTLrKbxBOgVsNvXbYfCBWZEnfPh64ULA/s320/DSC02555.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlFPtjrzOH7RUHpVw_4nEBk5r79TWE9IfDojgL6h7MkyW2QBQDuZcx094ObOrdovlR_R22cOkdbxU7VjlWw-QYiqDgCyBj6Ny64WIZDzcrMAVrhaHSj2hxXlXVJO2jN8ArU-FHHmd5qbs/s1600-h/DSC02556.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175335886715090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlFPtjrzOH7RUHpVw_4nEBk5r79TWE9IfDojgL6h7MkyW2QBQDuZcx094ObOrdovlR_R22cOkdbxU7VjlWw-QYiqDgCyBj6Ny64WIZDzcrMAVrhaHSj2hxXlXVJO2jN8ArU-FHHmd5qbs/s320/DSC02556.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqJvbg4ZUHXbya-w6hvuGVRYAqwqnmrGaeaRKnkuFgOp4e3hdqcNtTm2nvX-cQp2F9KRiU42e76NuvhpmaH-f20TkcXxV8haUiLFUjFZh9pGxsxkJyXkiPKZHuaL2nSj-aMolQWVoozg/s1600-h/DSC02557.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175334757151714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 247px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqJvbg4ZUHXbya-w6hvuGVRYAqwqnmrGaeaRKnkuFgOp4e3hdqcNtTm2nvX-cQp2F9KRiU42e76NuvhpmaH-f20TkcXxV8haUiLFUjFZh9pGxsxkJyXkiPKZHuaL2nSj-aMolQWVoozg/s320/DSC02557.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKKoWLQBiRwkNL479yeZVZmfsXx2r1wwfRd_W99acifVx5ILhKNrJpL_Y7OIy17a55jZXK0PHKMTpgTzaz1dM0wpKR7yTn_ZsSkUWW3CakH5pHwweFli-Bs_CRqRNClzcoHExlDUlsU2w/s1600-h/DSC02558.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175078567350002" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 186px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKKoWLQBiRwkNL479yeZVZmfsXx2r1wwfRd_W99acifVx5ILhKNrJpL_Y7OIy17a55jZXK0PHKMTpgTzaz1dM0wpKR7yTn_ZsSkUWW3CakH5pHwweFli-Bs_CRqRNClzcoHExlDUlsU2w/s320/DSC02558.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJlZO0Wes5Elg-lQlx1OXLJuPWK9pZmVCK1gxAUTWDFi5sEcG8tNBZ7rEQ-h_hnR_lF7HxbAwWDNeXYkWsmTZsf8JgtleJcp81gUG8DybCglu3ETS0dOSWcbIN1dtk96bE2GI1GJ8VYRo/s1600-h/DSC02559.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175075659242258" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 263px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJlZO0Wes5Elg-lQlx1OXLJuPWK9pZmVCK1gxAUTWDFi5sEcG8tNBZ7rEQ-h_hnR_lF7HxbAwWDNeXYkWsmTZsf8JgtleJcp81gUG8DybCglu3ETS0dOSWcbIN1dtk96bE2GI1GJ8VYRo/s320/DSC02559.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_89HvznC4061_61qUNBlxAXUe9TDAoQQxOQ7PJxvEMF_puUHfw4zAuP6PRlofL3Vd2RJpluO2uF5WE-_l567YUZ8HYndUUOdYsufctSyvnUZhyphenhyphen8eyKt8zTocVRakwwS_Hy2e75JCt8Ws/s1600-h/DSC02560.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175072494621010" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_89HvznC4061_61qUNBlxAXUe9TDAoQQxOQ7PJxvEMF_puUHfw4zAuP6PRlofL3Vd2RJpluO2uF5WE-_l567YUZ8HYndUUOdYsufctSyvnUZhyphenhyphen8eyKt8zTocVRakwwS_Hy2e75JCt8Ws/s320/DSC02560.jpg" border="0" /></a> <img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175067746454818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 266px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmtBl-FEYGbj3kGVo-r2gqtL_BoeLixUwSKPshPMUbuPayDSsKQ-KEnVRD_kl1cOeBcKJj57p_Q-r09LFN8Z3SwQh5WnP4awaKCNrPI4TpYUqWGGRw4CQXs1rb2C7Cs1GgzI_U_LD95DI/s320/DSC02561.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><br /><div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276175060304857170" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2MxILDRy7sw8BtTCh_3yN92qSwd3habqy1XOnI6cdALWGnQH137h_DGRkvLGoRDLdVS6tJlZh3MikocVxKkIUJgQlUvwZUIgvBnnNl3saXA5GstzLv43iaSOOVQbxtB11jLbovzFHKUA/s320/DSC02562.jpg" border="0" /></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><br /><br /><div><strong>Gail Collins: One singular sensation<br /></strong>By Gail Collins<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />Ed Rendell can't believe that he's being asked about the fact that he said that Barack Obama's nominee for head of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, has "no life."<br />"We're facing the greatest crisis since the Depression, and you want to talk about this?" he complained.<br />This is exactly the kind of comment people used to make during the bad old days in New York, when cops ticketing cars for double-parking were always told that they should be out arresting murderous drug dealers. But what better time to have a diverting discussion about a governor's misadventure with an open microphone? Really, there's not much chance that we're going to forget the big picture.<br />Rendell, who is governor of Pennsylvania, was chatting about Napolitano, the governor of Arizona, at a governor's meeting (where else?) while lounging in the vicinity of a live mic. (They should put lights on those things that would flash red when they're turned on.) He was explaining that Napolitano was "perfect" for homeland security "because, for that job, you have to have no life. Janet has no family. Perfect. She can devote, literally, 19-20 hours a day to it."<br />This seemed to be the summation of Napolitano's qualifications. Rendell himself has been on the list of Cabinet Mentions, and this is a good example of the way people around the world explain why another person got the prize instead: It was all about some random characteristic I happen to lack. ("Ted's perfect for the job. Because for that job, you really have to speak Estonian.") Perhaps a rather undesirable characteristic. ("For that job, you have to be able to drink those salesmen under the table and Ted's an absolute lush.")<br />And it sure sounded as if he was saying that single people like Napolitano exist in a state so dark and barren that the empty hours can only be filled up by guarding the nation's borders against terrorists.<br />You will not be surprised that Rendell - reached by phone in Pennsylvania and game as ever for conversation - feels as though he's been completely misunderstood.<br />"It was meant to include all workaholics," said Rendell, who is married with a grown son. "I have no life. I'll give you a perfect example." He launched into a story about coming home late at night and watching a two-hour cable TV review of the Pennsylvania budget. Which actually, if you were a governor and it was your state's budget, might be kind of fascinating.<br />"I have no life either," he repeated. "But I couldn't run Homeland Security because I don't have the background." It was about here, when he reached the exact opposite analysis from the one he made into the wrong microphone, that Rendell pointed out we were facing the greatest crisis since the Depression.<br />All this was a real blow to Bella DePaulo, the author of "Singled Out," who had recently posted on her blog, celebrating the fact that after Napolitano's nomination was announced, "I haven't found any hints of singlism" in the articles about her.<br />"Oh, no!" she said, when reached by telephone Wednesday morning.<br />DePaulo says that "singlism" - a term she coined and for which we are prepared to forgive her - is not just aimed at unmarried women. She referred to an MSNBC interview that Chris Matthews had with the presidential candidate Ralph Nader in 2004, in which Matthews demanded to know how Nader could say George W. Bush was irresponsible: "He's raised two daughters; he's had a happy marriage. Isn't he more mature in his lifestyle than you are?"<br />This did seem strange, since there are so many excellent reasons unrelated to marital status why Ralph Nader would make a terrible president. (The list does not, however, include "likely to let the big financial firms ruin the economy due to lack of regulation.") To be fair, Matthews also asked Nader if the fact that he did not own a car meant that he had not "had an American experience."<br />But it's unmarried women at the top who often wind up portrayed as vestal virgins who live only to serve their chief executive. (Condoleezza Rice's public image is so extreme that people must be wondering if she plans to immolate herself on the White House lawn during the inauguration.) Instead of being celebrated for their achievements, they wind up regarded as slightly fanatic.<br />And single women comprise between 43 percent and 51 percent of the adult women in the country, depending on how you count. They are universally regarded as folks with time on their hands, and thus the most likely recruits for taking care of aged parents and adjusting their schedules to accommodate their married friends.<br />"Employers ask you to cover for everyone else," said DePaulo.<br />Which actually makes them sound busier than their married peers. So perhaps single Americans have too much life. It's a wonder they have time for anything.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edcollins.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/opinion/edcollins.php</a><br /><br /><br /><div><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpHWRs-zgj04_li2fR-3oIi8eRCHRrLzaOa9AOV8xjqZarfPSteDfo6UibGIMXRIicAhtBytX9wT1wlykSR5Q_LgRYqBEmj1NdB-lzdnohu5BLua5c1-ogNrcxKXZudt3VIkAz_cGmlNE/s1600-h/DSC02563.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276174860204592914" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpHWRs-zgj04_li2fR-3oIi8eRCHRrLzaOa9AOV8xjqZarfPSteDfo6UibGIMXRIicAhtBytX9wT1wlykSR5Q_LgRYqBEmj1NdB-lzdnohu5BLua5c1-ogNrcxKXZudt3VIkAz_cGmlNE/s320/DSC02563.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCGR18RL0PSgZ5JmCWfQmPHpgodMRSrrBw2BFfYbIoU_JBXU_PzcFl9WXPkqt3efKhV0yVaiWQTMJprjpu7IXSV-MPqPHMgBkAZyCQHYr7C3S8VJT5MreBLwl-aCCgOzn_dhjgCaPa20k/s1600-h/DSC02565.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276174855479226962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCGR18RL0PSgZ5JmCWfQmPHpgodMRSrrBw2BFfYbIoU_JBXU_PzcFl9WXPkqt3efKhV0yVaiWQTMJprjpu7IXSV-MPqPHMgBkAZyCQHYr7C3S8VJT5MreBLwl-aCCgOzn_dhjgCaPa20k/s320/DSC02565.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiglj0gIWFZJledX_CZSMT3ahtCI8uWdvcrr2YUCPDoyiW8dR6YwsMHmpKPgCJNsyo0Lx-UaA_byO08JXR4k-He49Jc1XM5f08NLlCRdl3MLXd9Ew1gyDfGYnizlY_bhrMx1IxVLOE-T3w/s1600-h/DSC02566.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276174854744898962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiglj0gIWFZJledX_CZSMT3ahtCI8uWdvcrr2YUCPDoyiW8dR6YwsMHmpKPgCJNsyo0Lx-UaA_byO08JXR4k-He49Jc1XM5f08NLlCRdl3MLXd9Ew1gyDfGYnizlY_bhrMx1IxVLOE-T3w/s320/DSC02566.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSElf7xYLyHInhAccpWGuSug45ln7OZ9MNUwKFPsuufrEtbecOpF8SnlZrKx_NTA5aEsU8-onjXJXfKlmFzuwM6AavhKT_l5hNUJBHUo5798enIwyCl82HdK6S8T40d-NUYwGwdfmXIRE/s1600-h/DSC02567.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276174845656698626" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSElf7xYLyHInhAccpWGuSug45ln7OZ9MNUwKFPsuufrEtbecOpF8SnlZrKx_NTA5aEsU8-onjXJXfKlmFzuwM6AavhKT_l5hNUJBHUo5798enIwyCl82HdK6S8T40d-NUYwGwdfmXIRE/s320/DSC02567.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilqk414boDNg_EaLbse4CzbQdJVAbqzip0wuqo6UyI6g55S-msZF5m_lGBNy0hiWrFIiwTPxSPZXmzfmfAm3RhnPPHjL-WMaXnYKhuvg4koE_BqV8IkijEtJl2Ta__Mm18eGSTJv8cW2g/s1600-h/DSC02568.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276174843960661890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilqk414boDNg_EaLbse4CzbQdJVAbqzip0wuqo6UyI6g55S-msZF5m_lGBNy0hiWrFIiwTPxSPZXmzfmfAm3RhnPPHjL-WMaXnYKhuvg4koE_BqV8IkijEtJl2Ta__Mm18eGSTJv8cW2g/s320/DSC02568.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><strong>European Court rules against British policy on suspects database</strong><br />By Sarah Lyall<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />LONDON: The European Court of Human Rights ruled unanimously Thursday that Britain's policy of gathering and storing the fingerprints and DNA of all criminal suspects - even those who turn out to be innocent - is a violation of the human right to privacy.<br />The ruling, handed down in Strasbourg, was a severe blow to the law-enforcement policies of the Labour government, which has led Europe in aggressively collecting and retaining personal information on its citizens. Using strong language, the court declared itself "struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature" of the police's policy of holding DNA material indefinitely in its database.<br />Britain's DNA Database contains the profiles of more than 4.6 million people, about 860,000 of whom do not have criminal records. Privacy experts say that represents a higher proportion of its population than do similar databases in other countries.<br />"They're in the vanguard of doing this, is the polite way of saying it," said Dan Cooper, a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case on behalf of Privacy International, an advocacy group. "They have the biggest database in Europe, and possibly globally, for law-enforcement purposes."<br />Human-rights groups applauded the court's decision as a welcome check on the powers of the state.<br />"Forty percent of Britain's criminals are not on this database, but hundreds of thousands of innocent people are," said Anna Fairclough, the legal officer of Liberty, a British group that advocates for human rights. The court, she said, "has protected the privacy of British people so poorly let down by our own government."<br />Britain now has several months to decide how to respond to the ruling. In a statement, the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she was "disappointed" by the court's decision. "I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice," she said.<br />The government argues that information on the database collected from suspects in past crimes has helped solve thousands of new cases in the past eight years, including at least 53 murders and 94 rapes.<br />Britain has a reputation for intruding in its citizens' private lives. It is said to have the most closed-circuit television cameras per capita in the world. A government plan to issue mandatory ID cards encoded with personal information has stirred fierce opposition.<br />"There have been a number of recent government initiatives which have been very worrying to privacy advocates," Cooper said. "And there have been so many massive data breaches and leaks of information that any time the government proposes something that would require collecting more data, people get very concerned."<br />The DNA case was brought by two Sheffield men who were arrested in separate cases in 2001, but were both ultimately cleared of committing crimes. One, identified as Mr. P., 19, was charged with armed robbery; he was later acquitted. The other, Michael Marper, now 45, was arrested and charged with harassment in 2001; the charges were eventually dropped.<br />In both cases, the suspects' fingerprints and DNA samples were taken by the police. Both men asked later that the samples be destroyed, but the police refused.<br />While most European countries allow the police to take fingerprints and DNA samples in some criminal cases, England and Wales are alone in Europe in allowing the samples to be taken as a matter of course, and in keeping them indefinitely, experts say. Scotland has separate, less sweeping, procedures.<br />The two men took their case to the European court after losing a series of battles in British courts, arguing that the police's decision to keep the samples violated their right to privacy as set out in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Having information on the DNA database was humiliating and stigmatizing, they said.<br />The court agreed, saying that Britain had "overstepped any acceptable margin of appreciation" in striking a balance between individual rights and public interests.<br />The current law, it said, "constitutes a disproportionate interference in the applicants' right for respect to private life and cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society."</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/europe/court.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/europe/court.php</a></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>**************</div><br /><br /><div><strong>House price fall biggest since 1990s</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />LONDON: House prices in November fell at their sharpest monthly rate since the housing market crash of the early 1990s, the nation's biggest mortgage lender Halifax said on Thursday.<br />House prices fell 2.6 percent on the month, the biggest decline since September 1992, when the housing market was still in deep decline as Britain was just emerging from a year-long recession. That took the three-month annual rate of decline down to 14.9 percent in November, a new low since records began in 1983, Halifax said.<br />The figures boosted expectations for the Bank of England to deliver another bold cut in interest rates when its monthly meeting concludes at 12 p.m., after last month's shock 1.5 percentage point reduction to 3 percent.<br />Most analysts reckon the central bank will slash borrowing costs by one percentage points after a raft of dismal data this week suggested the economy has taken a sharp turn for the worse.<br />"The very sharp fall in house prices reported by the Halifax adds extra late pressure on the Bank of England to deliver a very large interest rate cut today," said Howard Archer, economist at IHS Global Insight.<br />The Halifax data showed the average price of a home fell to 163,605 pounds, in November, a level not seen since July 2005 and a 18 percent fall from their peak in August 2007.<br />Last month, Halifax said house prices fell 2.2 percent on the month in October for an annual three-month decline of 13.7 percent.</div><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-ECONOMY-BRITAIN-HALIFAX.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/business/OUKBS-UK-ECONOMY-BRITAIN-HALIFAX.php</a></div><div></div><div>****************</div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>An uproar in Britain's House of Commons</strong><br />By John F. Burns<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br />LONDON: The annual ceremony at which Queen Elizabeth II formally opens Parliament was overshadowed by an uproar in the House of Commons over a police raid last week in which Scotland Yard's elite counterterrorism squad searched an opposition member's parliamentary office for evidence for a possible criminal case against the member of Parliament and a civil service whistleblower.<br />The queen's journey Wednesday in an ermine-trimmed gown and gilded carriage to the Palace of Westminster became almost a sideshow as a packed Commons chamber, meeting after the ceremony, erupted into angry dispute over the raid last Thursday. It was the Commons' first opportunity to respond, in formal session, to what many members have described as the most threatening assault on Britain's parliamentary sovereignty in memory.<br />Scotland Yard is investigating Damian Green, a 52-year-old Conservative who is his party's chief immigration spokesman. Seeking evidence against Green and Christopher Galley, a 26-year-old aide to Britain's home secretary who has acknowledged passing confidential information about Home Office immigration blunders to Green, the police seized a computer and files from Green's Commons office. The 20-member squad assigned to the case arrested Green elsewhere in London, seized his cellphone and BlackBerry, and raided his London apartment as well as his office and home in Kent.<br />Green strongly rebutted suggestions by the police and government that his actions, and Galley's, had put Britain's security at risk. One of Galley's leaks to Green last year enabled him to challenge the government over the Home Office's failure to admit publicly that it had discovered that 5,000 illegal immigrants had somehow passed vetting for work as security guards in public buildings.<br />"Let me make it absolutely clear that I believe that members of Parliament are not above the law," Green said, before adding, "and that those who have the real power in this country, ministers, senior civil servants and the police, are also not beyond the law."<br />To cries of "Hear, hear!" from almost every corner of the Commons, he said, "An MP endangering national security would be a disgrace; an MP exposing facts about Home Office policy which ministers are hiding is doing his job in the public interest."<br />The central figure in the Commons crossfire was the Commons speaker, Michael Martin, a 63-year-old Labour veteran and former sheet-metal worker from Scotland who has long been an opposition target. Long before the raid, critics charged that he had abandoned the traditional neutrality of the speaker's post to become a combative and often clumsy protector of Labour's political interests. Martin's response, in a nervous statement that he delivered flush-faced, was to lay much of the blame for the raid on an assistant, Jill Pay, whom he named this year as Commons sergeant at arms, in charge of parliamentary security.<br />Pay, the first woman to hold the job, sat stern-faced as Martin said he regretted that she had signed a police consent form for the raid on Green's Commons office without consulting the Clerk of the Commons, who oversees the Commons staff for Martin.<br />Martin also took aim at Scotland Yard, saying that Robert Quick, an assistant police commissioner who leads the counterterrorism squad, had failed to tell Pay that the police had no warrant for the Commons raid and that Pay had a right to refuse.<br />Martin said that he had been told by Pay on the morning of the raid that the police planned to arrest a Commons member but that he was given no name or details of the case. From now on, he said, no police raids on members' offices would be permitted without a warrant and without the speaker's personal consent.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/europe/britain.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/europe/britain.php</a></div><div></div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><br /></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008 </strong></div><strong><br /><br /><div><br /></strong>Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><br /><br /><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-80784010559027161962008-12-04T05:58:00.022+01:002008-12-04T08:19:19.440+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Wednesday, 3rd December 2008<div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong>U.S. says verifying North Korea nuclear claims is vital</strong></div><div align="justify"><strong></strong> </div><div align="justify"><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />By Jon Herskovitz and Melanie Lee<br />A top U.S. negotiator, arriving in Singapore on Thursday for talks with North Korea on the reclusive state's nuclear programme, said it was important to nail down ways of verifying Pyongyang's claims.<br />"What we need to do is to make sure that the verification protocol is one that clarifies issues so that there won't be any misunderstandings, " the diplomat, Christopher Hill, told reporters after arriving for talks with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan.<br />"We need some specificity on this protocol, we had a lot of discussions about it and I think we do have an understanding on how to go forward," he said.<br />The two days of talks are expected to set the tone for a broader meeting in Beijing next week of six regional powers that also include South Korea, China, Japan and Russia.<br />Analysts say North Korea, sensing U.S. President George W. Bush's team may want a diplomatic success before leaving office in January, may try to wring concessions in Beijing.<br />SAMPLING ISSUES<br />The most recent stumbling block in a disarmament-for-aid deal the North reached with the five other powers is Pyongyang's objection to allowing international inspectors to take nuclear samples out of the country for testing.<br />Hill has been criticised by conservatives in Washington for being too flexible with North Korea and not obtaining detailed information from Pyongyang about its suspected programme to enrich uranium for weapons, or for proliferating technology to countries such as Syria.<br />President-elect Barack Obama has mostly supported Bush's North Korea diplomacy. The one thing Obama appears willing to consider, and which analysts say North Korean leader Kim Jong-il dearly prizes, is the first direct talks with a U.S. president.<br />"Further discussion on verification would only be possible after Obama takes office and sets it as a priority. Until then, the U.S. will likely remain in limbo on North Korean issues," said Kim Seung-hwan, with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Seoul.<br />Impoverished North Korea has spent the best part of two decades goading U.S. presidents and regional powers into handing over billions of dollars to curtail, but never actually end, its nuclear weapons programme, which is considered one of Asia's biggest security threats.<br />The North has largely cut ties with South Korea, once a major aid donor, in anger at the tough policies of its conservative president who took office in February. In the meantime, it has won concessions in the nuclear talks that benefit its economy.<br />(Additional reporting by Isabel Reynolds in Tokyo and Kim Junghyun in Seoul)<br />(Editing by Richard Balmforth)</div><div align="justify"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/asia/OUKWD-UK-KOREA-NORTH.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/asia/OUKWD-UK-KOREA-NORTH.php</a><br /></div><p align="center"><br /><strong>0854</strong></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTj0Z8ivDrXw-DNJuBoBoF0Aldo4W9BlmgdVI9NrmrKn6HZ4mlSuaoma-Jjdkjw-HSuJ07OFSIx0fP8MkZYxE2Bmuv23MsuOXCYm3FqhXa5mM3-YB_c9qju5p4QSOqtBzSAtulN10Ylqw/s1600-h/DSC02414.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797977058512210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTj0Z8ivDrXw-DNJuBoBoF0Aldo4W9BlmgdVI9NrmrKn6HZ4mlSuaoma-Jjdkjw-HSuJ07OFSIx0fP8MkZYxE2Bmuv23MsuOXCYm3FqhXa5mM3-YB_c9qju5p4QSOqtBzSAtulN10Ylqw/s320/DSC02414.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>EU bans imports of Chinese soy-based foods for children<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: European Union regulators have banned imports of Chinese soy-based food products for infants and young children after an industrial chemical was found in Chinese soybean meal, the European Commission said Wednesday.<br />The chemical, melamine, is used in pesticides and plastics. It was recently the focus of a scandal over milk products that sickened nearly 300,000 children in China.<br />Rich in nitrogen, melamine is fairly inexpensive and can be added to substandard or watered-down milk to fool quality checks, which often use nitrogen to measure protein levels in milk.<br />"Competent authorities in the member states will have to test all other feed and food containing soya and soya products originating from China before allowing imports," said the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union.<br />Only feed and food containing less than 2.5 milligrams of melamine per kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, will be allowed into EU markets. The ban is expected to come into force by the end of this week.<br />All Chinese shipments of baking powder, or ammonium bicarbonate, will also be tested at EU points of entry after high levels of melamine were found, the commission added.<br />Last year, the EU imported around 68,000 tons of various soy products or products containing soy for a total value of some €34 million, or $43 million at current exchange rates. The imports include soybeans, soybean flour and meal, soya sauce and protein concentrates as well as textured protein substances.<br />The EU has already banned imports of milk and milk products from China, as well as all products originating from China for infants and young children that contain any proportion of milk.<br />Although the EU does not import milk or milk products from China, the commission is concerned that composite food products that enter EU markets might contain, or be made from, such items, like cookies and sweets, especially chocolate.<br />EU countries are also obliged to test processed food from China that contains powdered milk.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/food.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/food.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>Saudi Arabia finds chemical in milk from China</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />RIYADH, Saudi Arabia: The Saudi government has found excessive amounts of the industrial chemical melamine in powdered milk imported from China and lower concentrations in chocolate wafer cream made in Malaysia.<br />The kingdom's Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday it found melamine in five samples of milk and dairy products. The milk was produced by Nestle in China and the wafers by Apollo Industries in Malaysia.<br />China has been struggling to get melamine out of its food supply after the chemical was found in infant formula and other dairy products. Six babies died and nearly 300,000 were sickened by melamine-tainted formula.<br />Elsewhere in the Middle East, authorities in the United Arab Emirates have been monitoring imports closely and have not found any melamine-contaminated Chinese food products in that country.<br />The UAE's General Secretariat of Municipalities banned Chinese dairy and related products in October and ordered them to be withdrawn until tests ensured they are free from melamine.<br />In November, the UAE's government announced new requirements for imports of dairy products to address concerns about the possible presence of melamine.<br />The decree, which went into effect Nov. 10, requires food products with more than 15 percent of dairy content to be accompanied by a certificate stating that the presence of melamine in the product does not exceed 2.5 parts per million unless the exporting country has banned imports of Chinese dairy products.<br />In Jordan, Mohammed al-Rawashdeh, the director-general of the country's food and medicine department, has asked the customs department not to clear any milk and dairy product shipments from any country before ensuring they are melamine-free, the Petra news agency reported on Tuesday.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/news/ML-Saudi-Tainted-Milk.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/news/ML-Saudi-Tainted-Milk.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>Nigeria teething syrup death toll hits 34</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />By Camillus Eboh<br />Nigeria is flying in doses of antidote for hospitals after the number of infants killed by teething syrup tainted with a poisonous chemical rose to 34, health officials said Wednesday.<br />Five more children have died on top of 28 reported to have lost their lives last month in three locations after being given "My Pikin" teething syrup contaminated with diethylene glycol, blamed for causing kidney failure.<br />A 14-month-old infant died after taking the teething medicine on November 2, but the death was initially unreported.<br />"The children still died in spite of dialysis treatment because the kidneys were already damaged," the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) said.<br />The agency said it hoped to take delivery of some 100 doses of antidote from London Thursday.<br />The agency said it had so far retrieved 425 bottles of "My Pikin" syrup from the market and arrested a number of people involved in the distribution of the contaminating chemical.<br />More than 40 children aged between four months and three years have been hospitalised since the first case was discovered on November 3 with symptoms including diarrhoea, vomiting, fever and convulsions as well as an inability to pass urine for days.<br />Health officials believe the number of cases could be higher as many parents in Africa's most populous country do not have access to basic health care for their children.<br />NAFDAC started testing more children's drugs last week for fear that different brands of cough and teething medicine may also have been contaminated with the toxic chemical.<br />It has shut down Lagos-based Barewa Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of "My Pikin," as well as a company called Tranxell Ltd, an un-registered firm that supplied chemicals to Barewa and other local drugs and textile manufacturers.<br />No officials from either company have been available to comment on the case.<br />Tainted, fake and counterfeit drugs have long been a problem in Africa's most populous nation, although NAFDAC has been spearheading a crackdown.<br />In 1990, 109 children in Ibadan and in the central city of Jos died after taking paracetamol syrup which contained ethylene glycol solvent, a compound related to diethylene glycol which is also normally used in engine coolant.<br />(Writing Tume Ahemba; Editing by Nick Tattersall)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/africa/OUKWD-UK-NIGERIA-DRUGS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/africa/OUKWD-UK-NIGERIA-DRUGS.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275798442596515314" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYFeD8IFlp46__LSZImJLSI5xruxxHBfV_rkQkPoNMqqk-HjDqXvWK1hX5TqURG63vgNBBuFlTEMdP3qgk1z6B1VtgkurGX3lR9j19MRF64I3FnLczTY3iq2jCEviNtcKLWHO_nfllQ-8/s320/DSC02415.jpg" border="0" /><strong><br />Panel seeks changes in U.S. environmental reviews<br /></strong>By Cornelia Dean<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />The Environmental Protection Agency must revise its approach to assessing environmental health hazards and other risks, because current practices hinder useful and timely regulation, an expert panel of The National Research Council is reporting.<br />The council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, said the agency should scrap some of the assumptions on which its decisions have been based, reduce its focus on individual chemicals and other hazards to consider how they act in combination. And it should accept that uncertainty is always going to be an issue and aim to provide practical information to policy-makers as quickly as possible.<br />The report, which the panel produced at the behest of the EPA, is being made public Wednesday and is online at www.nas.edu.<br />Risk assessment determining whether something is a hazard and, if so, how great and to whom is a crucial step in devising appropriate environmental regulations and other decisions, the panel said, and the field is advancing as testing systems and other technology advance.<br />But assessing environmental risks is highly complex and full of uncertainty, it continued, and at the EPA "the regulatory risk assessment process is bogged down," with some assessments taking a decade or more. For example, the report cited an assessment of trichloroethylene, a commonly used solvent, that has been under way since the 1980s and is not expected before 2010.<br />The environmental agency's conclusions about risk are usually crucial in establishing regulatory goals. As a result, they are often subject to intense political or economic pressure. When the Bush administration proposed changes it said would streamline risk-assessment procedures, critics called the proposal an attempt to weaken environmental regulation. In a 2007 report, the academy dismissed the proposal as "fundamentally flawed" and the administration withdrew it.<br />Thomas Burke, an epidemiologist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, said the new report focused on the use of "defaults," assumptions that are made about one factor or another in the face of uncertainty.<br />"Many of them are founded on good science, but there are some hidden assumptions," he said. "Right now when we don't have information on a pollutant we treat it as if there's no risk. That's a so-called hidden default."<br />He added, "We really need to address these gaps."<br />Another issue the report cited was the effect of cumulative exposures to a variety of environmental hazards. Usually these hazards are studied one by one. But Dr. Burke said, "You have to consider not just the one compound but you have to ask broadly, because people are exposed to many, many thousands of substances." Even drinking water is "a rich mixture," he added.<br />A spokesman for the American Chemical Society said it would have no comment on the report until members had had time to read it.<br />Joel Tickner, a professor of environmental health at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who studies chemicals in the environment, said that while he had not seen the report, its focus on speeding environmental review and consideration of cumulative effects was overdue.<br />"We put a lot of effort into finding more complex ways to characterize the problems while we don't put nearly as much resources into studying solutions," he said. He too cited trichloroethylene. "Given that we know trichloroethylene is a neurotoxin and a carcinogen and that there are very good alternatives it makes no sense to put so much resources into studying it."<br />He said that by focusing on safer alternatives for processes like degreasing, industries in Massachusetts had reduced their use of the compound by 90 percent.<br />"But as long as we are uncertain we assume there is no problem," he said. "That provides almost an incentive to having scientific uncertainty."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/healthscience/04epa.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/healthscience/04epa.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdV0Ca-YO0O16o8qQfcwfP30Oyzw__wgmpKZBZELb4Mfh5wGqLoG84ug-Dz6-0yLR2sknwIUl410J2tofH5qQCcNmgZN0mgZwmQOzm19jXRyQwK-gAtNaPNmXlGFqrtrOwNEr3GmcvboI/s1600-h/DSC02416.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797973475945442" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdV0Ca-YO0O16o8qQfcwfP30Oyzw__wgmpKZBZELb4Mfh5wGqLoG84ug-Dz6-0yLR2sknwIUl410J2tofH5qQCcNmgZN0mgZwmQOzm19jXRyQwK-gAtNaPNmXlGFqrtrOwNEr3GmcvboI/s320/DSC02416.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>White House shift on coal-mining rules angers environmentalists</strong><br />By Robert Pear and Felicity Barringer<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The White House has approved a final rule that will make it easier for coal companies to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining operations into nearby streams and valleys.<br />The rule is one of the most contentious of all the regulations emerging from the White House in President George W. Bush's last weeks in office.<br />James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, confirmed in an interview Tuesday that the rule had been approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget. That clears the way for publication in the Federal Register, the last stage in the rule-making process.<br />Stephen Johnson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, concurred in the rule, first proposed nearly five years ago by the Interior Department, which regulates coal mining.<br />In a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, dated Tuesday, Johnson said the rule had been revised to protect fish, wildlife and streams. Mining activities must comply with water quality standards established by the federal government and the states, Johnson said.<br />But a coalition of environmental groups said the rule would accelerate "the destruction of mountains, forests and streams throughout Appalachia."<br />Edward Hopkins, a policy analyst at the Sierra Club, said: "The EPA's own scientists have concluded that dumping mining waste into streams devastates downstream water quality."<br />Bush has boasted of his efforts to cooperate with President-elect Barack Obama to ensure a smooth transition, but the administration is rushing to complete work on regulations to which Obama and his advisers object. The rules deal with air pollution, auto safety, abortion and workers' exposure to toxic chemicals, among other issues.<br />The National Mining Association, a trade group, welcomed the rule, saying it could end years of uncertainty that had put jobs and production in jeopardy.<br />"This is unmistakably a fire sale of epic size for coal and the entire fossil fuel industry, with flagrant disregard for human health, the environment or the rule of law," said Vickie Patton, deputy general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund.<br />The Environmental Protection Agency is trying to finish work on a rule that would make it easier for utilities to put coal-fired generating stations near national parks. It is working on another rule that would allow utility companies to modify coal-fired power plants and increase their emissions without installing new pollution-control equipment.<br />Joan Mulhern, a lawyer at Earthjustice, an environmental group, denounced the mining regulation.<br />"With less than two months left in power," Mulhern said, "the Bush administration is determined to cement its legacy as having the worst environmental record in history."<br />At issue, she said, is a type of mining in which "coal companies blast the tops off mountains to reach the seams of coal and then push the rubble into the adjacent valleys, burying miles of streams."<br />Administration officials rejected the criticism.<br />"This rule strengthens protections for streams," said Peter Mali, a spokesman for the Interior Department office that wrote the regulation. "Federal law allows coal mine waste to be placed in streams, and the rule tightens restrictions as to when, where and how those discharges can occur."<br />Governor Steven Beshear of Kentucky and Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, both Democrats, had urged the Bush administration not to approve the rule. Beshear said he feared that it would lead to an increase in pollution of "Kentucky's beautiful natural resources."<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/coal.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/coal.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Hawaii endorses electric vehicle grid<br /></strong>By John Markoff<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />SAN FRANCISCO: The state of Hawaii and Hawaiian Electric have endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with exchangeable batteries and an "intelligent" battery recharging network.<br />The plan, the brainchild of a former Silicon Valley software executive, Shai Agassi, and made official Tuesday, is designed to overcome one of the major hurdles to electric cars: the lengthy time it takes to recharge a battery.<br />By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with tens of thousands of recharging stations connected by the Internet, Agassi thinks his company, called Better Place, will make all-electric vehicles feasible.<br />The announcement Tuesday follows endorsements from Israel, Denmark, Australia, Renault-Nissan and an alliance of Northern California localities supporting the idea. The company plans to test the program in 2009 in anticipation of a widespread rollout in 2012.<br />Agassi has raised $200 million in private financing for his plan. In October, he obtained a commitment from the Macquarie Capital Group to raise an additional $1 billion for an Australian project.<br />On Tuesday, he said he was optimistic about his project despite the dismal investment and credit markets because his network could provide investors with an annuity. Users of his recharging network would subscribe to the service, paying for access and for the miles they drive.<br />Given the downturn in the mortgage market, he said that investors were looking for new classes of assets that will provide dependable revenue.<br />"I believe the new asset class is batteries," he said. "When you have a driver in a car using a battery, nobody is going to cut their subscription and stop driving."<br />Agassi has said that even if oil prices continued to decline, his electric recharging network - which ideally would use renewable sources like solar and wind power - could provide competitively priced energy for a new class of vehicles.<br />He noted that his network idea would be appropriate first for "island" economies that typically have significantly higher energy costs, and then will become more cost-competitive as it grows in scale.<br />"We always knew Hawaii would be the perfect model," he said by telephone. "The typical driving plan is low and leisurely, and people are smiling."<br />Hawaii is a relatively small market with high energy costs. The state has about 1.2 million cars and replaces 70,000 to 120,000 vehicles annually.<br />Drivers on the islands rarely make trips of more than 100 miles, meaning there would be less need for his proposed battery recharging stations.<br />Part of Agassi's model depends on quick-change service stations to swap batteries for drivers who need to use their cars before they have completely recharged their batteries.<br />Peter Rosegg, a spokesman for Hawaiian Electric, said that Better Place, based in Palo Alto, California, would become a major customer for electricity and was also planning to invest in renewable energy sources that would be connected to the electric grid.<br />"It's going to be a nonexclusive agreement, but so far they're the only one that has shown up," Rosegg said.<br />In late November, the mayors of San Francisco and nearby major cities endorsed Better Place to help create an electric recharging network by 2012. The company estimates that it will cost $1 billion to build a charging network of up to half a million stations in the San Francisco area.<br />Despite challenges, the Better Place model is promising, said Daniel Kammen, a professor in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. It could appeal to owners of fleets of vehicles and to customers who are willing to work through the difficulties that inevitably accompany a new transportation system.<br />"It has a lot of promising features," he said.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/technology/hawaii.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/technology/hawaii.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>Carmakers' bailout plea gaining support</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />By Kevin Krolicki and John Crawley<br />A top lawmaker predicted Washington would approve a bailout for U.S. automakers after they submitted survival plans, and General Motors and Chrysler said they needed an immediate infusion of cash to avoid failures.<br />U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said Washington had little choice about helping the automakers, who say they support one in 10 American jobs.<br />"I believe that an intervention will happen either legislatively or from the administration," Pelosi said. "I think it's pretty clear bankruptcy is not an option."<br />The Detroit automakers on Tuesday urged Congress to authorise $34 billion (22 billion pounds) in loans and credit lines, far more than the $25 billion they failed to secure in November when lawmakers demanded the companies offer plans showing they could be made "viable."<br />The development came on the same day that GM, Chrysler and Ford posted a drop in combined U.S. sales of nearly 40 percent for November and warned that the world's largest vehicle market showed signs of tumbling further in 2009.<br />GM asked for $18 billion in loans and credit lines from the federal government, saying it urgently needs $4 billion of the money by the end of December to pay its bills.<br />Ford told Congress it needed a $9 billion taxpayer-funded standby line of credit and said a further restructuring would push it back to profitability by 2011.<br />Ford and GM shares both gained almost 6 percent.<br />Chrysler, the smallest and most vulnerable of the Detroit automakers, requested $7 billion from the government by the end of this month, saying that without the aid it could run short of cash by early 2009.<br />The company, privately owned by Cerberus Capital Management, also said it was seeking partnerships, a strategic alliance or merger.<br />Democratic leaders have demanded a deep range of commitments from the automakers to cut costs and map a clear path to regain competitive footing.<br />Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said he would introduce a placeholder bill on Monday that could be used to help automakers. A Congressional bailout would extend the scope of the government's crisis intervention beyond the financial sector by making it a major stakeholder in a key industrial sector.<br />"We're looking to make sure we do everything we can to take care of the auto industry, if in fact it's viable," Reid said.<br />But Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, warned that the car companies would still face a skeptical Congress. "The mood of Congress candidly isn't supportive," Specter said after a meeting with auto executives, dealers and labour leaders.<br />FEW FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES<br />The Detroit CEOs met a hostile reception from lawmakers in hearings in November, capped by a controversy over their decision to fly private jets to Washington to plead for aid.<br />The three auto chief executives made alternate travel plans this time to get to hearings set for Thursday and Friday.<br />Ford Chief Executive Alan Mulally is driving a Ford Escape hybrid, GM CEO Rick Wagoner is taking a Chevrolet Malibu hybrid and Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli also plans to drive to Washington.<br />While the Democratic-led Congress faces pressure to help Detroit and prevent a further shock to the recession-bound U.S. economy, the industry has managed to alienate lawmakers from both parties over the years.<br />Many Democrats blame the automakers for resisting tougher fuel-economy and emission regulations, while Republicans are wary of extending another bailout after taking a political backlash for backing a $700 billion rescue for banks.<br />"If these companies are asking for taxpayer dollars, they must convince Congress that they are going to shape up and change their ways," said Christopher Dodd, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Banking Committee. "They must demonstrate a commitment to profitability and viability that includes raising fuel efficiency standards and reining in excessive compensation and perks like private jets."<br />GM, Ford and Chrysler failed two weeks ago to obtain a $25 billion bailout from lawmakers unconvinced that taxpayer money would be well-spent.<br />Democratic leaders had asked them to return this week with retooled plans focussing on viability. Although the chances for aid appear to have improved, statements from GM and Chrysler underscored the cost of another rejection.<br />"There is no Plan B," said GM Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson, who vowed the top U.S. automaker would cut brands, models, workers and dealers while negotiating new concessions from bondholders and the United Auto Workers union.<br />GM would also phase out its Pontiac brand, try to sell Saab and negotiate with its 400 Saturn dealers about scrapping that line of cars and crossovers despite investing heavily in an attempt to turn it around in recent years.<br />At its core, the GM plan represents an attempt to convince a range of stakeholders, including its union, bondholders and dealers, to accept the kinds of sweeping changes to contracts that are typically accomplished in bankruptcy.<br />But GM and Chrysler both said bankruptcy is not an option since it would cause consumers to shun their brands and risk spinning into a liquidation that would touch off a cascade of supplier bankruptcies and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.<br />Ford, considered the best-positioned of the three, has said a bankruptcy by either of its rivals could threaten it, as well, because they share most of the same parts suppliers.<br />"I'm not sure we have the ability to fix the problem. And I would not take bankruptcy off the table," Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, told CNBC television.<br />The political calculus remains uncertain for the automakers in Washington. Democrats hold a slim majority in the Senate and the Bush administration continued on Tuesday to back a plan not supported by many Democrats.<br />U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told Reuters the administration backs a Senate bill that would redirect $25 billion from a program already approved to help Detroit make more fuel-efficient vehicles. But that bill is opposed by many Democrats, who say the $700 billion bank bailout fund could be used to help the auto industry.<br />Another complication emerged on Tuesday when GM and Chrysler both said they were counting on loans from the $25 billion fund administered by the Department of Energy in addition to money from the still-pending rescue package.<br />A key barometer for the industry will be the hearings on Thursday and Friday at the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees, respectively. Both panels were sharply critical of the industry last month<br />Ford shares closed up 6 percent at $2.70 and GM shares gained 6 percent to $4.85. Shares of both companies have more than doubled since late November on increasing optimism that a bailout deal was coming.<br />(Writing by Julie Vorman in Washington, Martin Howell in New York. Additional reporting by Jui Chakravorty and Bill Rigby in New York; Doris Frankel in Chicago; and Richard Cowan, Thomas Ferraro in Washington; Editing by Bernard Orr, Gary Hill)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/america/OUKWD-UK-AUTOS-BAILOUT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/america/OUKWD-UK-AUTOS-BAILOUT.php</a><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Some in Michigan oppose auto bailout</strong><br />By Monica Davey and Susan Saulny<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />KALAMAZOO, Michigan: Wander Michigan's cities and towns, and many residents offer the same message about the prospect of a $34 billion bailout of U.S. automakers: Please provide the help, not just for the sake of the industry and its workers but for all the other people whose jobs are so intricately braided into the state's automobile-centric economy.<br />But the quiet truth in Michigan, home of the Big 3 manufacturers, is that the state is not of one voice on the matter. Other opinions are alive, and they can be just as passionate in opposition to a rescue.<br />This, even though neighbors or friends or parents may have once depended on the industry. This, though speaking for the bailout here is something akin to embracing the Great Lakes or apple pie, as evinced by the letter of support signed last month by all of Michigan's congressional delegation, Democrats and Republicans alike.<br />There have been no statewide opinion polls published on the bailout request, though with Michigan's economy so tied to the industry, those for it undoubtedly outweigh those against, political, economic and polling experts suggest. Still, "there are plenty of people who are rolling their eyes," said Bill Ballenger, editor of the closely followed newsletter Inside Michigan Politics.<br />"You keep your head down if you're one of them, but they're out there," Ballenger said. "There are a lot of them."<br />In interviews across the state over the past two weeks, criticism of the automakers' request surfaced again and again. Many people said they had long watched Michigan's economy strain and falter - in no few cases causing the collapse of their own employers and loss of their own jobs - and could no longer see why the Big 3 should be singled out for rescue.<br />"How many other, small companies would like a bailout?" said Heather Davison, who lives in Davisburg, less than an hour north of Detroit, and has been unemployed for a year. "It seems to me that the car companies saw the banks getting a bailout and said, 'Oh, let's go!"'<br />Davison, 34, lost her job as a graphic designer for a real estate publication when the company she worked for failed. She said General Motors, Ford and Chrysler should have made changes to their cars and work force years ago.<br />"They should have made a car that was more efficient," she said. "And how many GM vehicles are there out there? They should have thought of this, of the need to restructure, a long time ago."<br />Like some others interviewed, Davison was unsparing as well in her criticism of the United Automobile Workers. "I've watched that Ron Gettelfinger on TV," she said of the union's president. "He talks about the need to restructure, but they needed to look at that a long time ago."<br />John Raterink, a tool and machine maker who works at a small shop in Grand Rapids that supplies parts to the auto industry, opposes a bailout even though his livelihood is tethered to the carmakers. Raterink, 46, points a finger at the Big 3 for a lot of economic misery.<br />"I remember when GM shut down 11 plants, some of which were in the Great Lakes region," he said. "They said, 'We can't afford to keep doing business like this.' But do you know what happened at the upper echelon of GM? They got six-figure bonuses at the end of the year. It's really hard to feel sorry for a company that's lived so high on the hog." In fact, GM awarded seven-figure bonuses to many of its top executives last year in the form of stock.<br />Raterink said he had seen dozens of machine shops like his disappear across western Michigan because of the outsourcing of work to other countries.<br />"If we look at thousands of workers in counties around here, they got no sympathy," he said. "We got hurt, and we got hurt badly. As a result of their practices, I haven't seen a raise in six years, and I've seen my health benefits decline."<br />The Big 3's share of the American market has dropped 30 percentage points in the last 13 years, to some 44 percent. That plunge has had a ripple effect across the state, home to more than half the people employed nationwide by the Big 3.<br />Michigan can hardly afford it. The state's economy has been in recession for years, with some experts convinced that it never emerged from the last national recession, in 2001.<br />The unemployment rate is 9.3 percent - tied with Rhode Island's for the highest in the country - and the safety net of social services is stretched beyond ability to care for all of those in need. The number of Michigan residents who receive some form of public assistance, like food stamps or home heating credits, is now 1.82 million, or close to 20 percent of the population, a record for the state.<br />At the shop where Raterink makes tools and machinery, there used to be 15 workers. Now there are five.<br />"They weren't offered any bailout," he said of those who lost their jobs. Then, of the Big 3 and the mismanagement he perceives, he added, "The wolf you let loose is at your door."<br />Susan Saulny reported from Saugatuck, Michigan.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/michigan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/michigan.php</a><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><strong>Obama's stimulus package seeks to save jobs and energy</strong><br />By John M. Broder<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: President-elect Barack Obama and leaders in Congress are fashioning a plan to pour billions of dollars into a so-called green jobs program to give a jolt to the economy and lay the groundwork for a more energy-efficient country.<br />The details and cost of the evolving program are still unclear, but a senior Obama aide, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a work in progress, said it would probably include weatherizing hundreds of thousands of homes, installation of "smart meters" to monitor and reduce home energy use, and billions of dollars in grants to state and local governments for mass transit and infrastructure projects.<br />The "green" component of the stimulus plan will cost at least $15 billion a year, and perhaps considerably more, depending on how the projects are defined, aides working on the package said.<br />Obama said during the campaign that he supported a measure to address global warming by capping carbon emissions while allowing emitters to trade pollution permits. He said he would devote $150 billion of the revenue from the sale of those permits over 10 years to energy efficiency and alternative energy projects to wean the nation from the fuels that were the main causes of the heating the atmosphere.<br />But the adviser who discussed the green energy project said Obama would not await passage of a global warming bill before embarking on the new energy and infrastructure spending. House and Senate supporters of a climate bill said they would continue working on legislative language but did not expect quick action on a cap-and-trade law because of the economic emergency.<br />In effect, that means the cost of the green jobs program would not be paid for out of pollution credits purchased by power generators and other carbon emitters, but instead would be added to the overall budget deficit.<br />Officials in Congress who are working with the incoming Obama administration said the stimulus program would also probably involve tax breaks or direct government subsidies for a variety of clean energy projects, including solar arrays, wind farms, biofuels and technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants.<br />The programs will be a part of a larger economic stimulus package whose outlines remain faint, but which is expected to cost from $400 billion to $500 billion. Obama has said that his goal is to create or save 2.5 million jobs over the next two years. Obama has assigned his economic and environmental advisers the task of devising a proposal that is expected to combine a shot of new U.S. funds into existing national and state programs, and the possible creation of new agencies modeled on New Deal public works programs.<br />"We'll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead," Obama said in a radio address last month, echoing a campaign promise.<br />Although the political climate appears favorable to a costly plan to stimulate the economy, large sums of new money always touch off a lobbying frenzy and energy projects invariably spark debate between those who want to conserve energy and those who want to more fully exploit domestic sources of oil, natural gas and coal.<br />Some experts note that the record of government intervention into energy markets and favoring some new technologies over others is not promising, citing as a spectacular example the Carter-era Synthetic Fuels Corp., which spent more than $3 billion without producing any commercially usable amount of coal-based liquid fuel.<br />Ethanol and other nonoil-based fuels have also not yet fully proven their commercial value, in some cases yielding less energy than is required to produce it, or, in the case of ethanol, diverting crops and driving up food prices.<br />The plan may also face resistance from fiscal hawks. In 2004, Senator John McCain almost single-handedly blocked a $100 billion energy package, saying that the billions of dollars in subsidies for ethanol and other alternative fuels were little more than a special-interest boondoggle. The bill was revived a year later at half the cost, and much of the money in it has not yet been spent.<br />"Now they're talking about some large amount of money - what, $100 billion? - and spending it on windmills, job training, whatever," said David Kreutzer, who studies energy economics and climate change at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "But where do you get the $100 billion in the first place? Are you going to take $100 billion from some other part of the economy, are you going to tax some people to pay for it? Are you just going to print it or borrow it? The money has to come from somewhere."<br />Obama's team and lawmakers say they want a plan ready shortly after Congress reconvenes in January.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/green.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/green.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdY2j9WC1pQeEtSip5LBzjjUigJwMVXSAPNelRVwm1n9KQooS_LxrOC8pYz1Fx8R1MHD0KB2xD5o-iLlBvJnXRrCgvuapfaHBKmcIkd9WuW-a_BBteHVlw1wSOY0lA_1vlbeFa9_pj3k4/s1600-h/DSC02418.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797640392061378" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdY2j9WC1pQeEtSip5LBzjjUigJwMVXSAPNelRVwm1n9KQooS_LxrOC8pYz1Fx8R1MHD0KB2xD5o-iLlBvJnXRrCgvuapfaHBKmcIkd9WuW-a_BBteHVlw1wSOY0lA_1vlbeFa9_pj3k4/s320/DSC02418.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>French aid worker freed in Afghanistan</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />PARIS: A French aid worker kidnapped at gunpoint in the Afghan capital and later seen in an emotional hostage video was released by his captors Wednesday and is "doing well," President Nicolas Sarkozy announced.<br />Dany Egreteau, a 32-year-old worker for Solidarite Laique, or Secular Solidarity, was captured by gunmen in Kabul on Nov. 3 as he drove to work with another aid worker who managed to escape. An Afghan who tried to prevent the kidnapping was killed.<br />"I rejoice over his liberation, which happened several minutes ago," Sarkozy said in a surprise announcement while on a visit to Compiegne, north of Paris.<br />"He is doing well. His family is being notified," the president said, adding that medical exams were being conducted before he is returned to France on Thursday.<br />"We had been very concerned for him," Sarkozy added.<br />Egreteau has appeared in a video with a rifle pressed to each side of his head and chains around his legs. In the video, obtained by news agencies in Afghanistan on Nov. 26, Egreteau, streaked with dirt, pleaded for his release, barely seeming to open his eyes.<br />"I have been here for the last eight days, fully in the black," he said, his voice trembling at times.<br />He referred to a ransom demand, begging for someone to pay it.<br />Roland Biache, managing director of the Paris-based aid organization, said earlier that the kidnappers had made no immediate specific demands.<br />Sarkozy thanked the French military deployed in Afghanistan, French intelligence services and Afghan authorities "for their collaboration and their efficiency" in the case.<br />Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner expressed "joy" at Egreteau's release and stressed the need for humanitarian groups in Afghanistan.<br />"The work of humanitarian organizations, next to the Afghan people to help Afghanistan onto the path of peace and development is indispensable," Kouchner said in a statement. "To take these NGOs and their personnel as targets ... is unacceptable."<br />Security has deteriorated across Afghanistan over the last two years, with a recent spike in crimes against Westerners in the capital Kabul.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/europe/EU-France-Afghanistan-Hostage.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/europe/EU-France-Afghanistan-Hostage.php</a><br /><br />*********************<br /><strong>Black box found from French airbus crash, no leads</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />PARIS: Investigators have found the black box flight recorders of an Air New Zealand Airbus A320 which crashed in France last week, but they still cannot explain how the incident occurred, French authorities said on Wednesday.<br />The plane, which had been leased to a German carrier, was being refitted and tested before returning to Air New Zealand, when it plunged into the Mediterranean sea on an approach run into the southwestern city of Perpignan on November 28.<br />All seven people aboard are believed to have been killed.<br />France's BEA civil aviation security organisation said the aircraft's flight recorders have been found and their protective casing and memory cards appear to be intact, but investigators have so far been unable to extract information from them.<br />"Additional work is needed although it is not possible at the moment to predict results," the authority said in a statement.<br />"The crew had given no indication of any problem to air traffic control when it stopped responding to calls," the statement added.<br />"At this stage of the inquiry, nothing explains why the aircraft left its trajectory and crashed into the sea."<br />The A320 is a twin-engine, single-aisle airliner made by the Airbus unit of European aerospace group EADS that normally seats around 150 passengers. About 1,960 A320 aircraft are in service with airlines around the world.<br />(Reporting by James Mackenzie, editing by Nita Bhalla)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/europe/OUKWD-UK-FRANCE-AIRCRASH.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/europe/OUKWD-UK-FRANCE-AIRCRASH.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFYkBSv4lS-fKbs3wcvX76oKkEFtw9b8ym403PpeYZR82XITfeDz0kqTa9eh7QtQGwv9fg2Pbrl5Ia8JBTdPgo0VZtlrt1VkCpjdaTlEAzxXq3bUz1gl7hkhjibyKcb_QWHt_1J7QXHjI/s1600-h/DSC02419.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797634940881602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFYkBSv4lS-fKbs3wcvX76oKkEFtw9b8ym403PpeYZR82XITfeDz0kqTa9eh7QtQGwv9fg2Pbrl5Ia8JBTdPgo0VZtlrt1VkCpjdaTlEAzxXq3bUz1gl7hkhjibyKcb_QWHt_1J7QXHjI/s320/DSC02419.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Ex-U.S. official cites Pakistani training for India attackers<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta and Alan Cowell<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />MUMBAI: A former Defense Department official said Wednesday that American intelligence agencies had determined that former officers from Pakistan's army and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency helped train the Mumbai attackers.<br />But the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that no specific links had been uncovered yet between the terrorists and the Pakistani government.<br />His disclosure came as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held meetings with Indian leaders in New Delhi and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with their Pakistani counterparts in Islamabad, in a two-pronged effort to pressure Pakistan to cooperate fully in the effort to track down those responsible for the bloody attacks in Mumbai last week.<br />Also on Wednesday, a "fully functional" bomb was found and defused at a major Mumbai train station that had reopened days earlier, the Mumbai authorities announced. The discovery raised terrifying questions about why the authorities had failed to find it all this time.<br />Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people marched through Mumbai, both mourning the at least 173 dead and protesting the failures of Indian politicians and security services to protect citizens.<br />Rice strove to balance demands on both countries. She said that Pakistan had a "special responsibility" to cooperate with India and help prevent attacks in the future, here and elsewhere. At the same time, she warned India against hasty reaction that would yield what she called "unintended consequences."<br />"The response of the Pakistani government should be one of cooperation and of action," she said at an evening news conference in New Delhi with her Indian counterpart, Pranab Mukherjee. "Any response needs to be judged by its effectiveness in prevention and also by not creating other unintended consequences or difficulties."<br />Mukherjee said his government was convinced that the attackers and their "controllers" came from Pakistan. He said he had conveyed to Rice "the feeling of anger and deep outrage in India" and said that his government was prepared to act "with all the means at our disposal" to protect Indian territory and citizens.<br />Both American and Indian authorities have concluded that there was little doubt that the Mumbai attacks were directed by militants inside Pakistan, and Indian officials have said they have identified three or four masterminds of the attack, including a leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Yusuf Muzzamil.<br />But Rice said it was premature to comment on whether any particular organization was responsible for the attacks on India's financial and entertainment capital. She described the assault last week as distinct from others that had struck India since it targeted high-profile targets, including those frequented by foreigners, and appeared to be designed to "send a message."<br />Rice said Pakistan had assured her that it would cooperate with India in its search for those responsible for the slaughter in Mumbai. She said President Asif Ali Zardari "has told me he will follow leads wherever they go" but she made clear that Washington expected him to do so wholeheartedly.<br />"This is a time for everybody to cooperate and to do so transparently, and this is especially a time for Pakistan to do so," she said.<br />Lashkar-e-Taiba is officially banned in Pakistan, but it has been linked to the country's powerful intelligence service and is believed to have moved its militant networks to Pakistan's tribal areas.<br />For the moment, Zardari is playing down any links to Pakistan, including the Indian identification of the surviving attacker as a Pakistani. "We have not been given any tangible proof to say that he is definitely a Pakistani. I very much doubt that he's a Pakistani," Zardari told CNN's "Larry King Live," saying that his government would take action if India produced evidence to support the claim.<br />He also indicated that he would turn down an Indian demand, made on Monday night, to hand over about 20 fugitives, some of them linked to organized crime, said by India to be living in Pakistan. Rather, Zardari said, they would be tried in Pakistani courts if there were evidence to support a trial.<br />In Islamabad, Mullen met with President Zardari; the Pakistani national security adviser, Mahmud Ali Durrani; and several top military officials, including the army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani, and the new intelligence chief, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha.<br />Mullen pressed the Pakistani leaders to crack down on Lashkar-e-Taiba's network of training camps, including those in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, and the organization's guerrilla recruiting efforts, an American military official said.<br />In New Delhi, response to a question, Rice said that the sophistication and choice of targets in Mumbai distinguished it from previous attacks. Earlier in the day, also in response to a question, Rice was asked about any possible involvement by Al Qaeda. "Whether there is a direct Al Qaeda hand or not, this is clearly the kind of terror in which Al Qaeda participates," she said.<br />The bomb was found in a bag the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the old Victoria station, one of the sites singled out for attack last week. It held about 20 pounds of explosives and was rigged with a timer, the Indian authorities said, but it was not clear whether it had not been activated or had malfunctioned.<br />The bag, apparently left behind by the attackers a week ago, had been collected along with a large pile of luggage that passengers had abandoned as they fled. That is where the police found it on Wednesday.<br />The station has been open for days, with thousands of passengers streaming through, and the discovery raised new questions about the capability of Indian security services.<br />There were conflicting accounts about how the bomb were found. Some reports said that the police had been tipped off by the surviving attacker, but others said a sniffer dog found it during a routine sweep of the abandoned luggage ahead of an officials visit. It was rendered neutral on the spot, the authorities said, and then subsequently removed for analysis. Train service was not disrupted for the maneuvers.<br />Rice's diplomatic agenda takes place as Washington is seeking high-level cooperation in different spheres with both India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed neighbors. Washington wants Pakistan to help defeat Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents along the border with Afghanistan.<br />But Pakistani security officials have threatened to withdraw troops from the lawless border region to redeploy them if India and Pakistan slide toward their fourth war since independence from Britain in 1947, Reuters reported.<br />In October, Washington opened a new chapter of cooperation with India when Congress gave final approval to a breakthrough agreement permitting civilian nuclear trade between the two countries for the first time in three decades.<br />Under the terms of the deal, the United States will now be able to sell nuclear fuel, technology and reactors to India for peaceful energy although New Delhi tested bombs in 1974 and 1998 and never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In exchange, India agreed to open up 14 civilian nuclear facilities to international inspection, but would continue to shield eight military reactors from outside scrutiny.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/asia/04mumbai-cnd.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/asia/04mumbai-cnd.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Police say find explosives at Mumbai station</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />NEW DELHI: Police in Mumbai on Wednesday said they had found 8 kg (18 lb) of explosives in a bag left behind last week at the city's train station at the start of a three-day rampage by Islamist militants.<br />There was no bomb, an official at the train station's police control room told Reuters. The station was one of the sites attacked last week by militants.<br />(Reporting by Rina Chandran; Editing by Bryson Hull)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI-BOMB.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI-BOMB.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><strong>William Pfaff: What was the message?</strong><br />By William Pfaff<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />PARIS: What is the message of a terrorist attack that fails to deliver a message? Threats and warnings are being exchanged by India and Pakistan about the terrorist attack on Mumbai, carried out by presumed Muslim extremists. But acting for what purpose, and under whose instructions?<br />The attacks are presumed by the Indians to have to do with the Kashmiri Muslims fighting to force India to withdraw from their part of the disputed region in the north of the Indian subcontinent, bordering the two countries and also Tibet and China. Its Hindu ruler chose in 1947 to deliver its Muslim population to India during the frantic days of British India's partition. The UN ordered a referendum among the Muslims (believed today to favor independence). India has never accepted.<br />If Kashmir was the motive for the Mumbai attacks, why were the targets hotels and restaurants frequented by Western tourists, but also by residents of Mumbai and other prosperous Indians, and a Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish center - an outpost of mainly American and Israeli Jews? None of them have anything to do with Kashmir.<br />This makes the message seem like a Middle Eastern message, having to do with Iraq and Palestine. But the terrorist who was captured said he was a Pakistani, and the evidence thus far is that the group of terrorists left from Pakistan.<br />Could Samuel Huntington be right after all? Are we witnessing an indiscriminate war between civilizations? But we know that the modern conflict between Muslims and Europeans and Americans began with the Europeans' post-1918 partition and colonization of the Ottoman Empire's Arab possessions, and a quarter-century later, by Israel's European-supported installation in Palestine.<br />After that, there was the Suez attack, a fiasco for Britain and France, when Washington supported Egypt. A quarter-century after that, the Americans and the Muslim Pakistanis, together with the Saudi Arabians, organized the successful Muslim mujahideen resistance to the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.<br />In 1980, there was a terrible war between Muslim Iraqis and Muslim Iranians. Desert Storm followed that, caused by the invasion of Muslim Kuwait by Muslim Iraq, resisted by Muslim as well as European armies under American leadership. After that came the American refusal to remove the military bases it had built in Saudi Arabia, which was the main grievance that inspired Osama bin Laden's 9/11 attack on New York and Washington.<br />The Asian Muslim countries, including Indonesia, where more Muslims live than anywhere else, had nothing to do with any of this. So what actually is it all about?<br />Certainly not Huntington's fantasy of a war of civilizations, despite the American political and journalistic habit of forgetting the past and pinning everything that happens today on the Muslims and Osama bin Laden. .<br />There is great concern today that India will retaliate against Pakistan for the Mumbai attacks, even though there is no conclusive proof of official Pakistani responsibility. That the attack was by a militant offshoot of the Kashmir clash is more plausible.<br />It would be illogical for the new Pakistani civilian government to be involved with an action that embroiled it in further conflict with India while it has extremely difficult relations with the United States over American attacks on supposed Taliban and Al Qaeda centers inside the Pakistani frontier tribal zones, and while intense American and NATO pressure is on Pakistan to do more against the Taliban.<br />Der Spiegel Online carried an article on Nov. 27 entitled "Terror in India - Obama's First Test." Why a test for President-elect Barack Obama? Even if he were already president of the U.S., what would he be expected do about it?<br />It would be closer to the truth to suggest that this might have been influenced by conflicts in which the United States has directly or indirectly taken an irresponsible hand, without positive results for the United States and with tragic results for others. But the U.S. has never had anything to do with Kashmir.<br />The mind-set expressed in the Spiegel headline - that anything unpleasant that happens in the world is either the result of American actions or something for which the United States must take responsibility - is widespread, and the result of an American policy of global interventionism that Obama and his new national security team seem ready to continue. If they do so, they are likely to regret it.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/edpfaff.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/edpfaff.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Islamic extremists being coaxed toward YouTube</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Islamic extremists are being instructed on how to use the popular video-sharing site YouTube as a way to disseminate propaganda videos, a U.S.-based terrorism monitor said on Tuesday.<br />Militants are being encouraged to use the online site through postings on other Islamic forums on the Internet, according to the SITE Intelligence Group.<br />Last week, an extremist authored step-by-step instructions on posting video to YouTube, which he described as "one of the most famous and biggest international sites that publish sections of videos from all over the world."<br />The posting encourages readers to post scenes of Western forces coming under attack to, it says, "shame the Crusaders by publishing clips of videos showing their losses, which they hid for a long time."<br />Islamic extremists have long used the Internet as a tool to communicate with supporters and distribute propaganda but the latest posting specifically coaxes militants towards YouTube and touts it as a user-friendly tool.<br />"I say that the YouTube site is one of the easiest sites to record and upload the clips," the posting states, pointing readers to the software they might need to publish on the Internet.<br />"I ask you, by Allah, as soon as you read this subject, to start recording on YouTube, and to start cutting and uploading and posting clips on the jihadist, Islamic, and general forums," the posting states.<br />YouTube, a unit of Google, could not immediately be reached for comment on how it might respond to the types of postings described in the message.<br />The message author calls for a "YouTube Invasion" by militants and includes several screenshots showing step by step instructions on how to create a YouTube account and to upload material.<br />The video-sharing site has often been a chosen venue for users to post controversial clips and other material.<br />In March, Pakistani authorities ordered Internet service providers to block the website after it ran material deemed insulting to Islam.<br />(Reporting by Patrick Rucker; Editing by Eric Beech)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/america/OUKWD-UK-SECURITY-ISLAMIST-YOUTUBE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/america/OUKWD-UK-SECURITY-ISLAMIST-YOUTUBE.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><br /><br /><strong>Thomas L. Friedman: Calling all Pakistanis</strong><br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?<br />After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son - purely because they were Sunni Muslims - where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.<br />So what can we expect from Pakistan and the wider Muslim world after Mumbai? India says its interrogation of the surviving terrorist indicates that all 10 men come from the Pakistani port of Karachi, and at least one, if not all 10, were Pakistani nationals.<br />First of all, it seems to me that the Pakistani government, which is extremely weak to begin with, has been taking this mass murder very seriously, and, for now, no official connection between the terrorists and elements of the Pakistani security services has been uncovered.<br />At the same time, any reading of the Pakistani English-language press reveals Pakistani voices expressing real anguish and horror over this incident. Take for instance the Inter Press Service news agency article of Nov. 29 from Karachi: "'I feel a great fear that [the Mumbai violence] will adversely affect Pakistan and India relations,' the prominent Karachi-based feminist poet and writer Attiya Dawood told IPS. 'I can't say whether Pakistan is involved or not, but whoever is involved, it is not the ordinary people of Pakistan, like myself, or my daughters. We are with our Indian brothers and sisters in their pain and sorrow."'<br />But while the Pakistani government's sober response is important, and the sincere expressions of outrage by individual Pakistanis are critical, I am still hoping for more. I am still hoping - just once - for that mass demonstration of "ordinary people" against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India's sake, but for Pakistan's sake.<br />Why? Because it takes a village. The best defense against this kind of murderous violence is to limit the pool of recruits, and the only way to do that is for the home society to isolate, condemn and denounce publicly and repeatedly the murderers - and not amplify, ignore, glorify, justify or "explain" their activities.<br />Sure, better intelligence is important. And, yes, better SWAT teams are critical to defeating the perpetrators quickly before they can do much damage. But at the end of the day, terrorists often are just acting on what they sense the majority really wants but doesn't dare do or say. That is why the most powerful deterrent to their behavior is when the community as a whole says: "No more. What you have done in murdering defenseless men, women and children has brought shame on us and on you."<br />Why should Pakistanis do that? Because you can't have a healthy society that tolerates in any way its own sons going into a modern city, anywhere, and just murdering everyone in sight - including some 40 other Muslims - in a suicide-murder operation, without even bothering to leave a note. Because the act was their note, and destroying just to destroy was their goal. If you do that with enemies abroad, you will do that with enemies at home and destroy your own society in the process.<br />"I often make the comparison to Catholics during the pedophile priest scandal," a Muslim woman friend wrote me. "Those Catholics that left the church or spoke out against the church were not trying to prove to anyone that they are anti-pedophile. Nor were they apologizing for Catholics, or trying to make the point that this is not Catholicism to the non-Catholic world. They spoke out because they wanted to influence the church. They wanted to fix a terrible problem" in their own religious community.<br />We know from the Danish cartoons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobilize quickly to express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective. That is what is needed here.<br />Because, I repeat, this kind of murderous violence only stops when the village - all the good people in Pakistan, including the community elders and spiritual leaders who want a decent future for their country - declares, as a collective, that those who carry out such murders are shameful unbelievers who will not dance with virgins in heaven but burn in hell. And they do it with the same vehemence with which they denounce Danish cartoons.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/edfriedman.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/edfriedman.php</a><br /><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><strong>Pakistan kills up to 30 militants in airstrike<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Pakistan killed up to 30 Islamist militants in an air strike and three soldiers and a civilian were killed in a suicide attack in the northwest near the Afghan border Wednesday, officials said.<br />The air raid on a militant hideout in Mohmand tribal region came hours after a suicide bomber rammed an explosive-laden car into a military convoy in nearby Shabqadar town.<br />"We have reports that 25 to 30 militants were killed and many wounded in the air strike," a military official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.<br />Mohmand lies close to Bajaur, another tribal region, where security forces have launched a massive operation against the militants since August. The military says more than 1,500 militants have been killed in the Bajaur operation. There has been no independent verification of that casualty estimate.<br />Pakistani forces are battling al Qaeda and Taliban militants in the northwest. The militants have retaliated with a campaign of suicide bombings, particularly against security forces in the ethnic Pashtun tribal regions on the Afghan border.<br />The violence has raised concern about nuclear-armed Pakistan's prospects as its civilian government struggles with an economic downturn and with pressure from India which blames militants from Pakistan for last week's assault in Mumbai.<br />Abdul Qadeer, a shopkeeper in Shabqadar, said troops had opened fire after the suicide blast but caused no casualties.<br />"After the attack, the vehicle caught fire and we have reports of three security people and a civilian killed," said a police official who declined to be identified.<br />The attack in Shabqadar came two days after a suicide car-bomber killed eight people in an attack aimed at a military checkpoint in the Swat valley, to the northwest of Islamabad.<br />(Reporting by Izaz Mohmand; Writing by Augustine Anthony)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/asia/OUKWD-UK-PAKISTAN-VIOLENCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/asia/OUKWD-UK-PAKISTAN-VIOLENCE.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Afghans say they will sign treaty banning cluster munitions</strong><br />By Walter Gibbs and Kirk Semple<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />OSLO: In a surprising last-minute change of policy, the government of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan agreed Wednesday to join about 100 nations signing a treaty banning the use of cluster munitions, Afghan officials said.<br />The decision appeared to reflect Karzai's growing independence from the Bush administration, which has opposed the treaty and, according to a senior Afghan official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, had urged Karzai not to sign it.<br />"Until this morning, our position was that we were unable," Afghan's ambassador to Norway and the Nordic countries, Jawed Ludin, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "But given the persistent campaign by the various civil society organizations and victims," he said, Karzai gave his authorization.<br />The news was greeted by cheers and celebration in Oslo's City Hall, where the signing ceremony began Wednesday. Even though it is one of the nations that has most suffered the effects of cluster munitions, especially in terms of civilian casualties, Afghanistan had been a significant holdout from the treaty.<br />The decision appeared to be the latest effort by Karzai to distance himself from his American backers. In recent months, he has become more bold in his public criticisms of the American mission, including speaking out against aerial bombings and other operations by the U.S.-led forces that have caused many civilian casualties, offended cultural sensitivities and undermined popular support for the war that routed the Taliban in late 2001.<br />While several Afghan officials interviewed Wednesday said that the United States did not publicly pressure the Afghans to reject the treaty, an official in the Karzai administration said that throughout the process that led to the treaty, the Americans made it clear "that they would prefer that Afghanistan stay out of it."<br />Afghan officials said the government had been opposed to the treaty because of concern that it would hamper the fight against the insurgency.<br />But the Karzai administration realized that no cluster munitions were being used in Afghanistan and so would not bear on the government's fight.<br />Representatives of about 100 nations began signing the ambitious treaty Wednesday morning formally renouncing the use of the bombs, typically anti-personnel weapons that eject dozens of explosive bomblets when detonated.<br />But some of the world's biggest military powers, including the United States, China and Russia, reject the pact and many of the signatories expressed concern that the treaty they were signing fails to bind the countries most prone to military conflict.<br />As the sponsor of a drive to outlaw the use of the bombs, Norway was the first to sign the treaty, followed by Laos, Lebanon and Ireland.<br />But the United States has rejected the new treaty and therefore may legally continue to deploy its cluster-bomb arsenal.<br />Russia, China, India, Pakistan and most Middle Eastern states have also refused to give up their weapons.<br />The host of the signing conference, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere of Norway, said universal compliance was not necessary for the cluster-bomb treaty to work.<br />"What we've adopted today is going to create profound change," he said. "If you use or stockpile cluster weapons after today you will be breaking a new international norm."<br />The United States has defended its decision not to sign the treaty. James Lawrence, director of the State Department's Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, said in a telephone interview that the United States was "getting a bad rap" from treaty proponents despite developing cluster munitions that were less likely to harm civilians and despite providing nearly half of all global funding for the clearance of unexploded ordnance.<br />"The U.S. government and the U.S. military are aware of the humanitarian concern and are trying to do something about it in a reasonable way," he said. "We're actually doing more than a lot of the countries that are going to Norway to sign the treaty."<br />Whether dropped from aircraft or fired from artillery, cluster bombs can scatter dozens or even hundreds of smaller explosives across an area the size of a football field. Some bomblets fail to explode upon hitting the ground and, like landmines, can remain a deadly hazard to children, farmers and other civilians long after a conflict ends.<br />"This is the weapon that just can't stop killing," said Thomas Nash, coordinator of the Cluster Munition Coalition, a London-based group of organizations that would like to see cluster bombs outlawed.<br />Kirk Semple reported from Kabul.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/asia/cluster.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/asia/cluster.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Afghan refugees return home to a life of desperation<br /></strong>By Adam B. Ellick<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />CHAMTALA SETTLEMENT, Afghanistan: Only seven months ago, Allah Nazar, a 10-year-old paralyzed by polio, had a two-bedroom mud home and weekly appointments at a hospital in Pakistan, where he lived with his family of 13.<br />Now Nazar is homeless, living in the eastern Afghan desert 15 miles from Jalalabad, the provincial capital, sitting aimlessly in a wooden wheelbarrow, wondering if the imminent winter will be his last. Even his makeshift wheelchair is too wobbly for a simple joy ride along the rocky terrain.<br />"His condition is getting worse because of the cold weather and the lack of facilities and treatment," said Abdul Wahab, a village elder and close friend of the boy's family. "Are there any human rights here?"<br />An Afghan presidential decree guarantees refugees a "safe and dignified return." But seven years into Afghanistan's reconstruction effort, this is the reality playing out in and around Nangarhar Province. Here, 30,000 newly returned Afghans live on the brink of desperation in makeshift settlements like Chamtala.<br />Meanwhile, the government and international aid groups lack the capacity to shield them properly from the harsh Afghan winter that is swirling their way.<br />"Look at all these children," said Nazar's mother, Khwaga, cradling her newborn daughter. "They're all suffering from flu. We don't have a roof over our heads. We are tired of this hunger."<br />Nazar and his family, who returned to Afghanistan in May, are among 3.5 million Afghans who have been repatriated from Pakistan since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, one of the largest refugee movements in recent history, according to the United Nations.<br />The flow of returnees has slowed since 2006. But here in the eastern part of the country, which has absorbed more than 60 percent of this year's nearly 300,000 returnees, the situation is dire.<br />In a clear sign that life is untenable for many new arrivals, 40 percent of Afghan returnees left the nation again in 2007, citing insecurity and a lack of shelter and jobs, according to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.<br />The government of Afghanistan, where the population has surged by 20 percent since 2001, is already strained by deteriorating security, a national food crisis and a lack of basic services like electricity, even in urban centers like Kabul.<br />"This is indeed one of the worst we can find," said António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, who visited two camps in eastern Afghanistan in November. "These are the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable."<br />Since the late 1970s, when the Soviet Union invaded, millions of Afghans have fled because of war. New generations of Afghans were born and married abroad, mainly in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, having never known their ancestral homeland.<br />In Pakistan, they lived in poor but industrious refugee settlements. Men held down manual-labor jobs, and most Afghans had homes, however spartan. Pakistan played host for decades. Although it still maintains dozens of camps, Pakistan closed two large camps in North-West Frontier Province near the Afghan border during the past 18 months, saying they had become sanctuaries for militant groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban.<br />The nation's largest camp, Jalozai, was closed in May, forcing 110,000 Afghans to choose between two bleak options: relocate within Pakistan or return home.<br />With Pakistan suffering from a food and fuel crisis, and with rent prices soaring in nearby cities like Peshawar, the answer was easy enough for 70 percent of them.<br />Nazar, the boy with polio, watched as bulldozers razed his school and house. Then, with $100 stipends given to his and the other families by the United Nations refugee office, Nazar and his relatives boarded a truck and three days later found themselves at this makeshift settlement.<br />"The Pakistan government forced us to leave," said Wahab, the village elder.<br />And the Afghan government "has been stringing us along" with failed promises, he said.<br />International aid organizations, like the United Nations refugee office, Unicef and the World Food Program, have provided minimal services, like daily water tankers and plastic sheets for shelter. But the refugee office has already depleted its regional housing materials this year.<br />At an international refugee conference in Kabul in November, the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation requested $528 million from donor countries to support reintegration. If granted, the money will come from the $22 billion Afghanistan National Development Strategy fund that begins in the spring of 2009.<br />Along the sidelines, refugee experts voiced frustration with the annual scramble by governments to offer assistance "as if winter comes by surprise," as one refugee expert said.<br />With four ministers since 2001, the Afghan Refugee Ministry has hardly won the trust of international observers. Experts say it lacks the resources to put in place a crisis management plan. In the past year, two Afghan ministers were dismissed for the mishandling of refugee situations.<br />Guterres, the United Nations refugee official, said that inefficiency and corruption were partly to blame. In 2005, the government announced 100 locations to be given to returnees as part of its Land Allocation Scheme. Today, 15 are in operation.<br />Chamtala is an example of such chaos. In June, the provincial government demarcated the camp for land allocation, but to date, only 600 of its 4,000 families have been granted plots.<br />During his visit, Guterres listened as layers of village elders surrounded him pleading for intervention. They said that even refugees fortunate enough for selection could not afford the $120 fee imposed by the government.<br />"We would prefer a more generous policy, but we also have to recognize the limited resources of the country," Guterres said.<br />In most of the world, refugees in such desperate circumstances flock to urban slums, where job opportunities are more numerous, he said. But Afghans, who adhere to a strict brand of Islam, prefer secluded, walled-off homes that keep women out of public view.<br />Land is a delicate issue in decentralized Afghanistan. Tribes often maintain ownership of fertile land, especially amid the current drought.<br />At Chamtala, jobs are hard to find, and elders say the daily mobile health clinic is insufficient.<br />"There are 6,000 families here," a village elder told Guterres. "If even one of us has an emergency, what should we do?"<br />If there is any hope for Chamtala, it may be in the example of Sheik Mesri New Township, a mud-walled refugee complex 40 minutes away where nearly all of the 6,000 plots have been granted to refugees who began settling there in late 2005.<br />International aid organizations built 80 water wells and provided materials and a labor stipend for refugees who built their own homes.<br />In a sign of progress, when village elders here had a chance to talk to Guterres, they brought up less-pressing issues, like electricity and garbage removal.<br />But it took three years to erect the community, and experts are not sure it can be replicated before more desperate returnees give up and leave again.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/asia/03refugees.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/asia/03refugees.php</a><br /><br />********************<br /><strong>NATO scraps press and psy ops merger in Afghanistan<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />By Jon Hemming<br />The U.S. commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan has scrapped a plan to merge the office that releases news with "Psy Ops," which deals with propaganda, to comply with alliance policy, a spokesman said on Wednesday.<br />The original plan worried Washington's European NATO allies. Germany had threatened to pull out of media operations in Afghanistan, officials said last week, as it could have undermined the credibility of information released to the public.<br />"The new communications structure has started to be implemented now, but it is now completely within the framework of NATO policy regarding public affairs," said ISAF spokesman Brigadier General Richard Blanchette.<br />More than seven years after U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in the wake of the September 11 attacks, many Afghans are increasingly frustrated at the failure of their government and NATO troops to bring security and contain the Taliban insurgency.<br />The Taliban, through their website, telephone text messages and frequent calls to reporters, have been particularly successful in the information war, Britain's Chief of Defence Staff Jock Stirrup admitted last week.<br />"They've beaten us to the punch on numerous occasions, and by doing so they've magnified the sense of difficulty and diminished the sense of progress. This is down in part to their skill, and in part to our own failings," he said in a speech.<br />NATO POLICY<br />In an attempt to respond to those failings, U.S. General David McKiernan, the commander of 50,000 troops in NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), had ordered the combination of the Public Affairs Office, Information Operations and Psy Ops (Psychological Operations) from December 1, said three NATO officials with detailed knowledge of the move.<br />But that order went against policy agreed by the 26 nations within NATO which recognises there is an inherent clash of interests between its public affairs offices, whose job it is to issue press releases and answer media questions, and that of Information Operations and Psy Ops.<br />Information Operations advises on information designed to affect the will of the enemy, while Psy Ops includes so-called "black operations," or outright deception.<br />The move caused considerable concern at higher levels within NATO which had challenged the order by the U.S. general, said the three NATO officials who all declined to be named.<br />A one-star general will now head a new office of strategic communications, but that would remain separate from public affairs, Blanchette said.<br />Asked why McKiernan had changed his plan, Blanchette said: "Because the commander wanted to make sure he had something that was completely compliant with NATO policy."<br />(Editing by Bill Tarrant)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-NATO.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-NATO.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><strong>Croatian prime minister asks police to explain Facebook incident</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />ZAGREB, Croatia: Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader says the officers who detained two men who criticized him on Facebook should be punished if they made errors.<br />He says "no one should be detained" for expressing an opinion.<br />Sanader says he has asked police to explain to him the brief detentions of the two. One, a 22-year-old, started an anti-Sanader group on the social networking site and was questioned by police last week.<br />The second man, who joined another group, said he was detained overnight Tuesday for putting up posters calling for an anti-government protest.<br />In a statement Wednesday, Sanader asked police to punish the officers if they violated police procedure.<br />The detentions have triggered fierce criticism from opposition, media and civic groups.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/europe/EU-Croatia-Facebook-Arrests.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/europe/EU-Croatia-Facebook-Arrests.php</a><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Hamas security frees three reporters in Gaza</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />GAZA: Hamas security forces freed three Palestinian journalists Wednesday whom they had arrested last month and accused of fabricating news critical of the Islamist group, officials said.<br />The journalists worked in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip for the Palestine Press, a local news agency with ties to the group's main rival, President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction.<br />A Hamas internal security official said the three men were released after they confessed that they had "fabricated reports" critical of the Hamas cabinet and its security forces.<br />One of the journalists, speaking to reporters and human rights officials -- as Hamas security men stood nearby -- said after their release: "We made a mistake and it won't be repeated."<br />The Hamas security official said the release followed "intense intervention by fellow journalists" who appealed to the group's leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh.<br />Since Hamas routed Fatah forces in Gaza last year, activists had traded accusations of persecution. The Islamist group says several Hamas-affiliated journalists have been imprisoned by security forces loyal to Abbas in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.<br />(Writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi, Editing by Jeffrey Heller)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-JOURNALISTS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-JOURNALISTS.php</a><br /><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><strong>U.S.-led coalition in Iraq dwindles as allies leave<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />By Michael Christie<br />A string of departures by the U.S. military's allies in Iraq is turning into an exodus as violence subsides and the end of a U.N. mandate permitting their deployment to the country approaches.<br />Barely a day goes by without an end-of-mission ceremony in a dusty military camp somewhere in Iraq, with U.S., allied and Iraqi officials delivering grateful speeches to departing troops, and pinning medals on chests as military bands play.<br />On Wednesday, it was the turn of an Azerbaijani contingent to say goodbye at Camp Ripper in once volatile but now relatively tranquil Anbar province. On Thursday, Tongan marines will celebrate their departure at Camp Victory in Baghdad.<br />Troops from Bosnia-Herzegovina, South Korea, Poland, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Latvia and Macedonia have already bade their farewells in the past two months and Japan will end its air force mission flying supplies into Iraq this year.<br />"The fact that we have the ability to redeploy some of those elements is actually a good news story," said Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin, commander of U.S. combat forces in Iraq.<br />"It's a good news story because it means security has improved in a lot of places to the point that we can actually operate effectively despite the loss of some of that great capability," he told a news conference.<br />The tasks carried out by the partners would be taken on by an ever-more confident and capable Iraqi army, Austin added.<br />The sectarian bloodshed unleashed after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 has dropped significantly in the past year.<br />Once dominant Sunni Arabs who initially allied with al Qaeda in confronting the U.S. invaders switched their allegiance to the Shi'ite-led government, and the government cracked down on Shi'ite militias that had established violent fiefdoms.<br />Additional U.S. troops and a build-up of Iraqi army and police ranks helped to drive al Qaeda and others underground.<br />Car bombs and suicide bombings remain frequent and bloody -- at least 296 Iraqi civilians died violent deaths in November. But U.S. military deaths last month dropped to the lowest level since the war began more than five years ago, with six killed.<br />At its peak, the force that outgoing U.S. President George W. Bush called a "coalition of the willing" in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq included troops from 38 nations. But the overwhelming bulk consisted of U.S. soldiers.<br />There are 146,000 U.S. and 4,100 British troops in Iraq now. Other nations have no more than 1,000.<br />The number of allies would slip to a "handful" by the end of the year, a Bush administration official said in September.<br />This is not just down to a sharp decline in violence.<br />A U.N. mandate governing foreign troops in Iraq expires at the end of the year and Iraq does not want it to be renewed.<br />The Iraqi government has negotiated a security pact with the United States that paves the way for U.S. troops to pull out of Iraqi cities by the middle of next year and withdraw completely from the country by the end of 2011.<br />But the pact does not cover Washington's partners. Britain is seeking its own bilateral accord to allow its troops in Iraq to remain near the southern city of Basra into next year.<br />(Editing by Tim Cocks and Richard Balmforth)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-COALITION.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-COALITION.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGLzGiV8Ny8PZKS0rzSSxmXtIu0-2OE_Y4ougmEYGDQgpj2_5yCnLtzaA4VHQTAqKzB3uVoOcN-gDpOY9fisKpKxBhSf8wVWc-gSKxRjaEdFtpKdy0wGo7NhzDMj2rl6IYkLwp6-CdzaU/s1600-h/DSC02420.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797632140450770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGLzGiV8Ny8PZKS0rzSSxmXtIu0-2OE_Y4ougmEYGDQgpj2_5yCnLtzaA4VHQTAqKzB3uVoOcN-gDpOY9fisKpKxBhSf8wVWc-gSKxRjaEdFtpKdy0wGo7NhzDMj2rl6IYkLwp6-CdzaU/s320/DSC02420.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Rwanda stirs Congo's troubles<br /></strong>By Jeffrey Gettleman<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />KIGALI, Rwanda: There is a general rule in Africa, if not across the world: Behind any rebellion with legs is usually a meddling neighbor. And whether the rebellion in eastern Congo explodes into another full-fledged war, and drags a large chunk of central Africa with it, seems likely to depend on the involvement of Rwanda, Congo's tiny but disproportionately mighty neighbor.<br />There is a long and bloody history here, and this time around the evidence seems to be growing that Rwanda, or at a minimum, many Rwandans, are meddling again in Congo's troubles. As before, Rwanda's stake in Congo is a complex mix of strategic interest, business opportunity and the real fears of a nation that has heroically built itself after near obliteration by ethnic hatred.<br />The signs are ever-more obvious, if not yet entirely open. Several demobilized Rwandan soldiers, speaking in hushed tones in Kigali, Rwanda's tightly controlled capital, described a systematic effort by Rwanda's government-run demobilization commission to send hundreds if not thousands of fighters to the rebel front lines.<br />Former rebel soldiers in Congo said that they had seen Rwandan officers plucking off the Rwandan flags from the shoulders of their fatigues after they had arrived and that Rwandan officers served as the backbone of the rebel army. Congolese wildlife rangers in the gorilla park on the thickly forested Rwanda-Congo border said countless heavily armed men routinely crossed over from Rwanda into Congo.<br />A Rwandan government administrator said a military hospital in Kigali was treating many Rwandan soldiers who were recently wounded while fighting in Congo, but the administrator said he could get thrown in jail for talking about it.<br />There seems to be a reinvigorated sense of the longstanding brotherhood between the Congolese rebels, who are mostly ethnic Tutsi, and the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda, which has supported these same rebels in the past.<br />The brotherhood is relatively secret for now, just as it was in the late 1990s when Rwanda denied being involved in Congo, only to later admit that it was occupying a vast section of the country. Rwanda's leaders are vigilant about not endangering their carefully crafted reputation as responsible, development-oriented friends of the West.<br />Senior Rwandan officials do not deny that demobilized Rwandan soldiers are fighting in Congo, but they said the soldiers were doing it on their own, without any government backing.<br />"They are ordinary citizens, and if their travel documents are in order, they can go ahead and travel," said Joseph Mutaboba, Rwanda's special envoy for the Great Lakes region.<br />But according to several demobilized soldiers, Rwandan government officials are involved, providing bus fare for the men to travel to Congo and updating the rebel leadership each month on how many fighters from Rwanda are about to come over. Once they get to the rebel camps, the Rwandan veterans said they flashed their Rwandan army identification cards and then were assigned to a rebel unit.<br />"We usually get a promotion," said one fighter who was recently a corporal in the Rwandan army and served as a sergeant in the rebel forces last month. He said that he could be severely punished if identified and that Rwandan officials and rebel commanders told the fighters not to say anything about the cooperation.<br />Another cause for suspicion is Rwanda's past plundering of Congo's rich trove of minerals, going back to the late 1990s when the Rwandan army seized control of eastern Congo and pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of smuggled coltan, cassiterite and even diamonds back to Rwanda, according to United Nations documents.<br />Many current high-ranking Rwandan officials, including the minister of finance, the ambassador to China and the deputy director of the central bank, were executives at a holding company that a United Nations panel in 2002 implicated in the illicit mineral trade and called to be sanctioned. The officials say that they are no longer part of that company and that the company did nothing wrong. Nonetheless, eastern Congo's lucrative mineral business still seems to be heavily influenced by ethnic Rwandan businessmen with close ties to Kigali.<br />Some of the most powerful players Wednesday, like Modeste Makabuza Ngoga, who runs a small empire of coffee, tea, transport and mineral companies in eastern Congo, are part of a Tutsi-dominated triangle involving the Rwandan government, the conflict-driven mineral trade and a powerful rebel movement led by a renegade general, Laurent Nkunda, a former officer in Rwanda's army.<br />Several United Nations reports have accused Makabuza Ngoga of using strong-arm tactics to smuggle minerals from Congo to Rwanda and one report said that he enjoyed "close ties" to Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame. This week a rebel spokesman said that Makabuza Ngoga was on Nkunda's "College of Honorables," essentially a rebel advisory board. Nkunda's troops recently marched into areas known to be mineral rich — and areas where ethnic Rwandan businessmen are trying to gain a foothold.<br />Makabuza Ngoga said in an interview that he was not doing anything illegal.<br />"I'm just a businessman," he said. "I work with them all."<br />A Tale of Two Africas<br />Rwanda and Congo are polar opposites, a true David-and-Goliath matchup. Crossing the border from Gisenyi, Rwanda, to Goma, Congo, is a journey across two Africas, in the span of about 100 yards.<br />The two-minute walk takes you from one of the smallest, tidiest, most promising countries on the continent, where women in white rubber gloves sweep the streets every morning and government employees are at their desks by 7 a.m., to one of the biggest, messiest and most violent African states, home to a conflict that has killed more than five million people, more than any other since World War II.<br />While Congo is vast, Rwanda is packed. While the Congolese are often playful, known for outlandish dress and great music, Rwandans are reserved. While Congo is naturally rich, Rwanda is perennially poor. Yet Rwanda has emerged as a darling of the aid world, praised for strong, uncorrupt leadership and the strides it has made in fighting AIDS and poverty.<br />The fates of the two countries are inextricably linked. In 1994, Hutu militias in Rwanda killed 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, and then fled into eastern Congo. Rwanda responded by invading Congo in 1997 and 1998, denying it each time initially but later taking responsibility. Those invasions catalyzed years of war that drew in the armies of half a dozen African countries.<br />When the Rwandan military controlled eastern Congo from 1998 to 2002, it established a highly organized military-industrial network to illegally exploit Congo's riches, according to United Nations documents. A 2002 United Nations report said that top Rwandan military officers worked closely with some of the most notorious smugglers and arms traffickers in the world, including Viktor Bout, a former Soviet arms dealer nicknamed the Merchant of Death who was arrested this year.<br />"I used to see generals at the airport coming back from Congo with suitcases full of cash," said a former Rwandan government official who said that if he was identified, he could be killed.<br />Rwanda may have a lot going for it — a high economic growth rate, low corruption, a Parliament with a majority of seats held by women. But many people here say they do not feel free. When the former government official was interviewed at a Kigali hotel, he abruptly stopped talking whenever the maid walked by.<br />"You never know," he whispered, nodding toward the young woman who was smiling behind a plate-glass window smeared with soap suds. "She could be a lieutenant."<br />Scarred by a Genocide<br />Rwanda is tiny, tough and intensely patriotic. Like Israel, it is a postgenocidal state, built on an ethos of self-sacrifice. Its national motto is Never Again.<br />One oft-cited threat is the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, also known as the FDLR, a mostly Hutu militia that is based just across the border in the green folds of eastern Congo. The militia is thought to number 5,000 to 10,000 fighters. Some of its leaders are wanted "genocidaires" who fled Rwanda in 1994 after massacring Tutsi.<br />"These guys want to come back and finish the job," said Major Jill Rutaremara, a spokesman for Rwanda's military Forces.<br />Nkunda, the rebel leader, has used the presence of the Hutu militia and the Congo government's failure to disarm it as a rationale for his continued armed struggle. His forces have routed Congolese government troops in the past two months and pushed the region to the precipice of another regional war. United Nations officials say he has not acted entirely alone, either: they said they observed Rwandan tanks firing from Rwandan territory to support Nkunda's troops as they advanced in October. Rwandan officials denied this.<br />Rwandan military officers admit, when pressed, that the Hutu militia has little chance of destabilizing Rwanda. The last time it attacked inside Rwanda was 2001.<br />Some Western diplomats, Congolese officials and Rwandan dissidents now believe that the Rwandan government is simply using the FDLR as an excuse to prop up Nkunda and maintain a sphere of influence in the mineral-rich area across the border.<br />"These are people who want to make business, and they cover it up with politics," said Faustin Twagiramungu, a former Rwandan prime minister now in exile in Belgium.<br />Congolese officials say that that the Rwandan government is making no efforts to bring the Hutu militiamen back into Rwanda because Rwanda wants to make sure that any Hutu-Tutsi violence plays out in Congo.<br />"What's happening in eastern Congo is a Rwandese war is being fought on Congolese soil," said Kikaya bin Karubi, a member of Congo's Parliament.<br />Rwandan officials dismiss these claims with a confident chuckle.<br />"We want to deal with these guys here," Major Rutaremara said. "We want them back."<br />Mutaboba, the Rwandan government envoy, said the allegations were part of "an organized campaign to distort the whole problem and give it a regional dimension."<br />"It's not," he said. "It's a Congo problem."<br />Ethnic and Business Ties<br />But it may be hard drawing a fine line between Congo and Rwanda, despite the lines on a map. There is a long history of ethnic and business ties that seamlessly flow across the colonially imposed borders, especially among the minority Tutsi who dominate business on both sides, yet at the same time, feel threatened and a heightened sense of community as a result.<br />For example, several demobilized Rwandan soldiers in Kigali said the vast majority of volunteers who recently crossed the border to fight with Nkunda were Tutsi. Some of the soldiers said that they had relatives living in eastern Congo and that it was like a second home to them.<br />According to four soldiers and one employee at the Rwandan demobilization commission, at the end of their monthly meetings, officials at the commission ask for anyone fit and ready to fight to stand up. Sometimes the commission provides bus fare to the border, the soldiers said, and other travel costs. The soldiers usually travel unarmed, picking up weapons on the other side, they said.<br />One demobilized Rwandan lieutenant who just got back from fighting in Congo looked surprised when asked why he went.<br />"Why? I am Tutsi," he said. "One hundred percent Tutsi."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/africa/04congo.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/africa/04congo.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Higher education may become unaffordable for most Americans</strong><br />By Tamar Lewin<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />The rising cost of college - even before the recession - threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to an annual report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.<br />Over all, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, the study found, while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.<br />"If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won't have an affordable system of higher education," said Patrick Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education.<br />"When we come out of the recession," Callan added, "we're really going to be in jeopardy, because the educational gap between our work force and the rest of the world will make it very hard to be competitive. Already, we're one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers."<br />Although college enrollment has continued to rise in recent years, Callan said, it is not clear how long that can continue.<br />"The middle class has been financing it through debt," he said. "The scenario has been that families that have a history of sending kids to college will do whatever if takes, even if that means a huge amount of debt."<br />But low-income students, he said, will be less able to afford college. Already, he said, the strains are clear.<br />The report, "Measuring Up 2008," is one of the few to compare net college costs - that is, a year's tuition, fees, room and board, minus financial aid - against median family income. Those findings are stark. Last year, the net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of the median family income.<br />The share of income required to pay for college, even with financial aid, has been growing especially fast for lower-income families, the report found.<br />Among the poorest families - those with incomes in the lowest 20 percent - the net cost of a year at a public university was 55 percent of median income, up from 39 percent in 1999-2000. At community colleges, long seen as a safety net, that cost was 49 percent of the poorest families' median income last year, up from 40 percent in 1999-2000.<br />The likelihood of large tuition increases next year is especially worrying, Callan said. "Most governors' budgets don't come out until January, but what we're seeing so far is Florida talking about a 15 percent increase, Washington State talking about a 20 percent increase and California with a mixture of budget cuts and enrollment cuts," he said.<br />In a separate report released this week by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the public universities acknowledged the looming crisis but painted a different picture.<br />That report emphasized that families have many higher-education choices, from community colleges, where tuition and fees averaged about $3,200, to private research universities, where they cost more than $33,000.<br />"We think public higher education is affordable right now, but we're concerned that it won't be, if the changes we're seeing continue and family income doesn't go up," said David Shulenburger, the group's vice president for academic affairs and co-author of the report. "The public conversation is very often in terms of a $35,000 price tag, but what you get at major public research university is, for the most part, still affordable at 6,000 bucks a year."<br />Although tuition has risen at public universities, his report said, that has largely been to make up for declining state appropriations.<br />The report offered its own cost projections, not including room and board.<br />"Projecting out to 2036, tuition would go from 11 percent of the family budget to 24 percent of the family budget, and that's pretty huge," Shulenburger said. "We only looked at tuition and fees because those are the only things we can control."<br />Looking at total costs, as families must, he said, his group shared Callan's concerns.<br />Shulenburger's report suggested that public universities explore a variety of approaches to lower costs - distance learning, better use of the last year in high school, perhaps even shortening college from four years.<br />"There's an awful lot of experimentation going on right now, and that needs to go on," he said. "If you teach a course by distance with 1,000 students, does that affect learning? Till we know the answer, it's difficult to control costs in ways that don't affect quality."<br />Callan, for his part, urged a reversal in states' approach to financing higher education.<br />"When the economy is good, and state universities are somewhat better funded, we raise tuition as little as possible," he said. "When the economy is bad, we raise tuition and sock it to families, when people can least afford it. That's exactly the opposite of what we need."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/college.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/college.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><br /><strong>WITNESS - Counting Congo's bodies</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, December 4, 2008<br /><br />Finbarr O'Reilly, Reuters chief photographer for West and Central Africa, was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1971 and started as an arts correspondent. He joined Reuters in 2001, turning to photography in 2005 and winning the World Press Photo Award for picture of the year in 2006. In the following story he describes his latest reporting mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo.<br /><br />By Finbarr O'Reilly<br /><br />A Congolese refugee in a tattered baseball cap, worn clothes and blue flip-flops begged me for a cigarette at Kibati, a camp for 65,000 people displaced by fighting in eastern Congo.<br />I scolded him, saying smoking was bad for his health, as if anything could be worse for your health than living in this conflict-racked corner of Democratic Republic of Congo.<br />Machine gun fire erupted nearby and people dived for cover, ducking into rows of flimsy tents made from torn sheets of white plastic stretched over sticks.<br />"Mister, mister, come lie down in here," a voice called from one tent as bullets hummed nearby like an electrical current.<br />I snapped a few blurry pictures of people running before crawling through the curtain door of the tent, where a man and two children huddled on the ground. I kneeled above them and took a few more photographs.<br />"When you hear gunshots, if you lie flat, you can be OK, but if you stay up like that, paff!" said the man, Boniface Buhoro, a tailor who had fled weeks of combat further north in an area now controlled by anti-government Tutsi rebels.<br />Several people had already been killed by gunfire in this refugee camp in North Kivu province at the foot of Nyiragongo volcano on the front lines between Congo's army and advancing rebels. At least two more were killed in the next few days.<br />For 45 minutes, I lay with my legs intertwined with Buhoro's, his three-year-old son Sadiki wedged between us.<br />Army boots crunched past outside over black lava rock as soldiers fired their weapons at full stride.<br />At first we assumed rebels were attacking, but in fact drunken army troops were fighting each other, shooting randomly.<br />In the panic, soldiers went from tent to tent robbing refugees who had already lost almost everything, typical behaviour for the badly paid and poorly disciplined army.<br />"Every day, something like this happens. They rob and steal and kill us or rape the girls. We don't even have anything to eat, but they take what they want," said Buhoro.<br />I crawled outside as things calmed down.<br />The man who'd asked me for a cigarette lay face down.<br />"He's dead already -- stress," said someone in the small crowd around the body. He had apparently died of heart seizure.<br />This is how many Congolese go: if not by the gun, then from conflict-induced illnesses, preventable diseases or hunger in a resource-rich but shattered nation lacking infrastructure.<br />DEATH ALL AROUND<br />More than five million people have died, most from lack of access to food or basic health, during a decade of fighting and upheaval in Congo, according to aid agencies. This makes Congo's enduring conflict the deadliest since World War Two.<br />I spent two years in Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda from 2002 to 2004, covering the regional war that engulfed much of central Africa. The day I took shelter with Buhoro was the first on my latest trip to report again on Congo's seemingly unending cycle of violence.<br />Most of the victims perish far from sight, deep in the bush.<br />This time, death seemed all around.<br />Driving to the front line early one morning, mist hung over the road and smoke from Nyiragongo volcano darkened the sky.<br />Marking the first rebel position were the bodies of two government soldiers, a bullet through each of their skulls.<br />Travelling north later, I reached the hilltop village of Kirumba, where local Mai-Mai militiamen had clashed with government troops fleeing the Tutsi rebel advance.<br />The army quickly buried their dead, but the Mai-Mai corpses were set on fire by beer-drinking troops.<br />I found them the next morning, fat still bubbling on one charred corpse, its genitals cut off. Another body had an umbrella stabbed into its face. Soldiers joked and laughed.<br />Back near Kibati camp, I followed a funeral procession into a sun-dappled banana grove. A tiny purple casket containing the body of eight-month old Alexandrine Kabitsebangumi, who had died from cholera, was being lowered into the dark earth.<br />The grove was filled with graves. As women sang a haunting hymn, the mourners moved aside, allowing me to photograph.<br />There's no joy getting a good picture from a baby's funeral.<br />Another victim, another memory, another ghost.<br />After two weeks, I left Congo, crossing into Rwanda.<br />As my car climbed the steep hills, providing stunning scenic views back into Congo -- that beautiful, terrible place -- I passed another procession carrying a body on a bamboo stretcher.<br />I didn't stop. I just kept driving.<br />(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/)<br />(Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Sara Ledwith)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-WITNESS-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/04/africa/OUKWD-UK-WITNESS-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUAmJLtx09pFC0XYkrlasJxwzeYg57kITkhK8g0wJce4NII7VZWy6Jdb1hoUAvXLk5EA7NnLugSfDLRxos-giiPKcP7nInyEKyDp0PSUNPV4FkYEs26vNrdkJHqJ4SdNqDyIUaA66WmL8/s1600-h/DSC02421.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797627922937714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUAmJLtx09pFC0XYkrlasJxwzeYg57kITkhK8g0wJce4NII7VZWy6Jdb1hoUAvXLk5EA7NnLugSfDLRxos-giiPKcP7nInyEKyDp0PSUNPV4FkYEs26vNrdkJHqJ4SdNqDyIUaA66WmL8/s320/DSC02421.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Internet helps foster communication between Iran and U.S.</strong><br />By Farah Stockman<br /><br /><br />The Boston Globe<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />TEHRAN: U.S. officials took it as a quiet sign of good will: In October, the Iranian government gave permission to Iranian bloggers to travel to the United States to write about its presidential election. But minutes before the bloggers boarded the plane in Tehran, Iranian security officials reversed the decision, confiscating the bloggers' passports.<br />"It was like a dream," said Fariba Pajooh, a 28-year-old blogger who was slated to spend three weeks visiting American colleges and newspapers, including Harvard University and The Providence Journal.<br />The abruptly aborted trip illustrates an ongoing power struggle within the Iranian government over how to relate to the United States on the eve of a new - and perhaps more receptive - administration. One faction favors increased dialogue and exchanges with Americans, while another, apparently more powerful, group opposes such contact.<br />But the canceled blogger trip also illustrates the significant role that the Internet is already playing in fostering communication between Iran and the United States, even as the two governments remain embroiled in internal debates about whether or not to re-establish relations.<br />Three decades after the United States cut off diplomatic ties with Iran, blogs and e-mail have become crucial conduits for communication between the countries - and for often-lively debates among officials of both countries and average citizens.<br />"The Internet is our most significant ally," Goli Ameri, assistant secretary of state for Educational and Cultural Affairs, told Congress earlier this year in highlighting efforts to reach out to average Iranians.<br />With an estimated 60,000 active Farsi-speaking blogs, Iran has one of the most vibrant blogospheres in the world, outstripping the rest of the Middle East. In 2006 and 2007, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used a blog to address the American people, even as the Bush administration shunned him and American news outlets portrayed him as dangerous and unstable.<br />"Noble Americans," he wrote in 2006, "I consider it extremely unlikely that you, the American people, consent to the billions of dollars of annual expenditure from your treasury for this military misadventure" in Iraq.<br />Some Americans responded with sharp retorts, according to the blog.<br />"You're one of the most stupid presidents ever!" one writer - identified as an American named Nicholas - apparently wrote. "I'm sure about half of the comments posted on this blog are just totally fake and used as propaganda."<br />Last year, the U.S. State Department also began to use the blogosphere to engage the Iranian people, setting up a Farsi-speaking team to debate Iranian government officials on their blogs. There, representatives of the two governments argued over topics including Iran's nuclear program.<br />While prohibited from contacting Iranian officials in any formal way, U.S. officials seemed to relish their lengthy encounters on the Net, including one this summer with Ali Akbar Javanfekr, Ahmadinejad's media adviser.<br />Javanfekr had written that "the smart policies of Iranian government have strengthened the foundations of Iran's economy," which, he said, "Iran's enemies don't have the ability nor the intellect to understand."<br />"If by strengthening Iran's economic foundations you mean having double-digit unemployment rates, very high inflation, and the rationing of energy supplies then you are correct in saying it is hard for us to see and understand," the U.S. team responded, according to a transcript that was verified by the State Department.<br />Outside the realm of officialdom, many ordinary Iranians and Americans have their own stories of friendlier connections through chat rooms and on social-networking sites like YouTube and Facebook.<br />Farhad Ghorbani, a 24-year-old journalist with Irpana, the student arm of a state-owned news agency, searched the Internet for someone who could help him obtain a mold for shaping wood to make a violin. When he found such a person in the United States, his teacher helped him write a message in English. The American wrote back, and - despite the U.S. embargo on sending goods to Iran - sent Ghorbani the mold.<br />"People are relating to the Americans on the computer," he said.<br />"We can chat. Regardless of the political views and what the politicians do, we want to have this kind of cultural relationship with the United States."<br />Seeking to capitalize on such sentiments, the Bush administration recently decided to open a diplomatic office in Tehran to process visas, the first official U.S. presence in Tehran since 1979. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week that the administration ran out of time to open the office and would now leave the decision about opening it to the Obama administration.<br />Iranian officials, for their part, are deeply divided over whether to welcome such a move, with many arguing that a U.S. diplomatic presence would be meddlesome and could cause embarrassing long lines for visas. But some have pushed for greater engagement.<br />Thus, when the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a nongovernmental organization with offices in London and Washington, D.C., sought permission to set up a Tehran office to introduce a Web site featuring Iranian bloggers, Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance agreed.<br />And when the institute proposed bringing a group of bloggers to America to cover the presidential election, which drew enormous interest in Iran, the culture ministry sought to make it happen, vetoing just two of the bloggers.<br />At 4 a.m. on Oct. 15, ten bloggers arrived at the airport in Tehran ready for the trip to New York. But just before they boarded the plane, a security official arrived, asked them to step aside, and seized their luggage.<br />No explanation was given, Pajooh said. In the weeks that followed, at least 7 of the 10 bloggers were interrogated for hours by Iranian security officials. Their passports still have not been returned, Pajooh said.<br />Iran's Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Mohammad Reza Saffar-Harandi, declined to specify why the bloggers' trip was canceled.<br />"This is a new thing, and we had our advisers changed," he said through a translator, before criticizing the United States for its alleged ill-treatment of visiting Iranian journalists. "We have always witnessed bad conduct on the other side."<br />Trita Parsi, an analyst based in Washington who advocates greater engagement with Iran, likened the infighting between various Iranian factions to the jostling among U.S. policy makers over how to deal with Iran.<br />"You have a political system that is in some way at war with itself, and this is an outcome," he said. "Both Iran and the United States are having that problem right now."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/mideast/bloggers.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/mideast/bloggers.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-1v85mYfymQ7edeONmmynP8uKtgiy5498FDpregjqEvfGXBJrZlLht6PaiCBeyaobaL9Ee06FJiFA0AYCPw69x9e63qgB2To-ioJ7deOfzmj1rDpyt0Uzp3HcaYr2_Dx_j4woOpo-ln0/s1600-h/DSC02422.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797620025284370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-1v85mYfymQ7edeONmmynP8uKtgiy5498FDpregjqEvfGXBJrZlLht6PaiCBeyaobaL9Ee06FJiFA0AYCPw69x9e63qgB2To-ioJ7deOfzmj1rDpyt0Uzp3HcaYr2_Dx_j4woOpo-ln0/s320/DSC02422.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>N.Korean teen defectors get capitalist education<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />By Jon Herskovitz<br />North Korean teenager Han Jee-hee's journey to school in South Korea began by slipping past border guards into China where she went into hiding to avoid forcible repatriation home.<br />Han eventually made it to South Korea, leaving behind family, friends and a broken education system in the North where schools have a curriculum steeped in extolling the state's communist ideology.<br />The 19-year-old is among more than 200 North Koreans studying at the Hangyoreh Junior and Senior High School, set up by South Korea to prepare the young defectors for the huge changes they face living in a capitalist state. Lessons include academic courses as well as learning to use gadgets such as cell phones that other teenagers take for granted.<br />"Finding a way to live after they leave this school is nothing compared to the struggle it took for them to get here," said Principal Gwak Jong-moon, an expert in special education.<br />The students, wearing the school's stylish blue blazers, on average have missed nearly four years of school during their escape from the North. After reaching China, they typically went into hiding and then made their way to a third country from where they sought passage to South Korea.<br />The children at Hangyoreh mostly come from the poorest parts of impoverished North Korea. Most live in South Korea without one or both of their parents, few have had much formal education and almost all have emotional scars from their harrowing escapes.<br />"For me survival was far more important than studying," said a 19-year-old defector, who asked not to be named. He spent years in hiding in China before seeking passage to the South.<br />LIFE ON THE RUN<br />Up until the first 22 students came to the school when it opened in 2006, the government did not have any special curriculum for the defectors, who were usually so overwhelmed by schools in the South that they simply dropped out.<br />Besides academic courses, the students learn how to surf the Internet as well as how to use basic tools of the modern world such as credit cards.<br />Civic groups, many of them Christian-based, have also tried to help by setting up private schools for defectors.<br />Students stay from six months to two years at the Hangyoreh school before making the transition to a regular school, or starting a job.<br />Some critics say more should be done to prepare the young defectors for the country's gruelling education system and its cut-throat job market.<br />Hangyoreh has been pushed to its limits due to an ever increasing number of defectors. About half of the 14,000 North Koreans who have defected to the South since 1989 have arrived in the last three years.<br />The school, situated in hills overlooking farmland about an hour's drive from Seoul, has modern classrooms, a well-equipped gym, language labs and dorms where students live four-to-a-room.<br />The students usually take new names in the South because the North regularly sends relatives of defectors to prison to deter others from leaving the destitute state.<br />The escape route from North Korea is via China which regards these defectors as economic refugees and forcibly repatriates them home where rights groups say they are usually imprisoned in brutal conditions.<br />YANKEE IMPERIALISTS<br />Han left North Korea to join an aunt who had already made her way to the South. She reached South Korea via China and Vietnam.<br />"We were taught in the North that schools in the South were tightly controlled and sometimes students there were killed by Yankee imperialists," she said.<br />Han, who said she loves her new life, hopes to be an English teacher. But she is wary of the challenge of South Korea's intensely competitive education system.<br />"Competition can be good if it motivates me and challenges me to be better, but here you have to step on others to climb up the ladder," she said.<br />For most of the students, the time at Hangyoreh is a respite ahead of a new life in the South, where defectors are often treated like strangers who happen to speak the same language.<br />A few graduates have managed to obtain places at South Korea's top universities but many of the Hangyoreh students have scaled down their career dreams.<br />"I wanted to be a doctor back in the North, but I've come to realise after I got to the South that I might not be competent enough," said Hangyoreh student Jang Jung-sim. "Now I've set my sights on becoming a kindergarten teacher."<br />(Additional reporting by Kim Junghyun, editing by Megan Goldin)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/asia/OUKWD-UK-KOREA-DEFECTORS-SCHOOL.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/asia/OUKWD-UK-KOREA-DEFECTORS-SCHOOL.php</a><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>**************</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Europe's big stimulus plans don't quite add up</strong><br />By David Jolly<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />PARIS: As recession has swept across Europe, countries have been rushing to respond with impressive-sounding stimulus plans: €11 billion in Spain, €31 in Poland, €80 billion in Italy, €32 billion in Germany and £20 billion in Britain. France was set to follow Thursday with its own €20 billion plan.<br />There is just one problem, economists and analysts say: Behind the big headlines, the numbers are wispy, at best, and there is very little in the way of new spending.<br />Surveying the various European plans, Gilles Moëc, senior economist at Bank of America in London, said the total was far short of what was necessary. "The harvest is not so nice," he said.<br />But Dominique Barbet, an economist at BNP Paribas in Paris, said the main point of the dramatic announcements was "to reassure the public and to open the door so that the governments that want to do something big can do it."<br />Spain and Ireland, for example, have relatively healthy public finances, he said, so they have more scope for spending.<br />Italy and France, which have been skirting EU budget limits for years, "can announce plans to make sure small and medium companies can get credit, but that doesn't mean it will actually cost anything."<br />Europe, which fell into recession in the third quarter, clearly needs a lift. As if to underscore the dismal state of the economy, the EU statistics office reported Wednesday that retail sales in the 27-nation bloc fell 0.8 percent in October from a year earlier.<br />The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, last week proposed an economic stimulus plan for the bloc valued at about €200 billion, or $254 billion, 1.5 percent of EU gross domestic product, including the figures already announced. It called for the 27 member governments to provide €170 billion of the total.<br />The remaining €30 billion was to come from the EU budget and the European Investment Bank. In any event, European finance ministers vetoed €5 billion of that spending Tuesday.<br />The national plans are also coming up short. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's supposed €80 billion stimulus package, which cleared the Italian cabinet last Friday, contained virtually no new spending, economists said. Poland, citing its finances and its desire to join the euro currency bloc, said on Sunday that it would not use deficit spending to bolster growth.<br />So far, Britain's package, at about 1.1 percent of GDP, and Spain's which is considerably more, are the most serious moves. But analysts note that their economies also seem to be among the hardest hit by the global crisis.<br />In Spain, which is losing more than 40,000 jobs a week, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has announced a series of stimulus packages this year, including an €11 billion initiative last week. And Gordon Brown's government is cutting the sales tax in Britain by 2.5 percentage points.<br />The contrast with the United States is striking. The incoming Obama administration is expected to push for a stimulus package of $600 billion or more, 4 percent of GDP, which comes on top of the $168 billion the Bush administration sent out in tax rebate checks last summer.<br />By way of comparison, the UN Millennium Development Goals include a call for governments to spend 0.7 percent of gross national product as official development assistance - a target few countries meet.<br />Washington, of course, has much greater power to carry out economic policy than does Brussels.<br />Thomas Mayer, chief European economist, at Deutsche Bank in London, noted that with no central political or fiscal authority, the European Commission could only suggest action.<br />"The only country with the room for maneuver and the critical mass is Germany," Mayer said. "But the Germans don't want to move." Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has presented its crisis spending plans as being worth as much as €50 billion over two years, he said, but "it all boils down to €6 billion next year and €6 billion in 2010. All the rest is acrobatics."<br />Merkel said Monday that she was "keeping all options" open," and there is talk of a second stimulus package, but the chancellor has also stressed that Germany should not get into "a race for billions" with other countries.<br />"There's an ideological resistance in some European countries" to using deficit spending, Katinka Barysch, an economist at the Center for European Reform in London, said. "People are saying: 'It's borrowing and spending that got us into this mess, so why should we do more of it?"'<br />In fact, there is not as much need for deficit spending in Europe as in the United States, she said, because Europe has a more extensive social welfare system that automatically buffers the effects of a downturn. "We're also a little less Keynesian than they are in America," she added, referring to the economic theory that governments should seek to replace private demand with deficit spending during economic downturns.<br />Barbet at BNP Paribas also noted that demographics in Europe were different than in the United States.<br />"The U.S. population is growing faster than in Europe, so we have to be extremely cautious about the debt we leave for future generations," Barbet said<br />There is a certain irony in the fact that the European Commission, which has been harping for years on the need for states to keep their spending in check, should now be urging them so unsuccessfully to spend.<br />José Manuel Barroso, the EC president, said last week that the EU's tough budgetary rules - which restrict deficits to 3 percent of GDP in normal times - would be applied with maximum flexibility during the crisis.<br />President Nicolas Sarkozy was expected to announce Thursday the French government's stimulus plans. Economists estimate it will total about €20 billion, a little more than 1 percent of GDP, but once again, almost none of that would require additional spending.<br />Jean Pisani-Ferry, an economist at the Bruegel research institute in Brussels, wrote in a commentary published Thursday in Le Monde that the effort also risked undesired consequences, as national governments seek to aid national champions instead of focusing firepower on the best macro-economic targets.<br />The French plan, for example, is expected to include a €1,000 rebate for consumers who trade in their old cars for newer less-polluting models. Proponents of the plan are touting the "green" benefit, but it also stands to give the faltering French auto industry a shot in the arm.<br />With the lack of a coherent or coordinated fiscal policy response, EU governments may just end up leaving the economic stimulus to monetary policy. The European Central Bank and Bank of England were both expected to cut interest rates at their meetings Thursday.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/stimulus.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/stimulus.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Budgets behaving badly<br /></strong>By David Leonhardt<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Last week, on the same day the U.S. Treasury Department announced a brand new $800 billion program to stem the financial crisis, Barack Obama held a news conference to say that he was serious about getting the budget deficit under control.<br />To which a properly skeptical citizen might respond: Good luck with that.<br />The deficit in the current fiscal year could end up approaching $1 trillion, which is roughly equal to the combined budgets of the military and Medicare, a health insurance program for people aged 65 and over. Given the depth of the crisis, running a big deficit makes perfect sense. But the government also needs to have long-term plans to reduce it. And the sort of deficit we're now facing will require some pretty creative plans.<br />Fortunately, there is a group of economists who are almost ideally suited to help Obama with this task — to come up with budget cuts that can reduce government spending without harming the quality of government services. They're called behavioral economists.<br />Behavioral economics sprang up about three decades ago as a radical critique of the standard assumption that human beings behaved in economically rational ways. The behaviorialists, as they're known, pointed out that this assumption was ridiculous.<br />Would-be weight losers pay $100 a month to belong to a gym they rarely visit. Borrowers get fooled into taking out a loan with an appealing teaser rate. Patients fail to follow even a basic regimen of prescribed drugs — a failure that can leave them with serious medical complications and Medicare with big hospital bills.<br />Thanks to insights like these, behavioral economics has entered the mainstream. In this year's campaign, Obama signaled an interest in the field by surrounding himself with advisers who were quite sympathetic to it. Of course, this was before the financial crisis became so serious that it overwhelmed everything else. Today, it's reasonable to ask whether the Obama administration will still have time for behavioral economics.<br />That's why some economists are now talking about whether Obama should add a new kind of adviser to his team, one specifically charged with translating the lessons of the behavioral revolution into real-world policies. This person would work with Medicare officials to improve drug compliance. He or she would think about how mortgage regulations should be rewritten, how health insurance choices should be presented and how carbon emissions might be cut.<br />"The issues we struggle with today are inherently behavioral as never before," Sendhil Mullainathan, a behavioral economist at Harvard, told me. "It's impossible to think of the current mortgage crisis without thinking seriously about underlying consumer psychology. And it's impossible to think of future regulatory fixes without thinking seriously about that issue."<br />Behavioral economics may sound like an ivory tower subject, but it's really the opposite. It's the study of everyday life as it actually happens, not as some textbook says it should. It offers economic policy makers a new set of tools — a more subtle, psychological set — beyond tax rates, interest rates and other traditional tools.<br />And it can already claim one big policy success. In 2006, Congress passed a pension bill with a clause that came straight out of research on savings by Richard Thaler, a behavioral pioneer, and others. ( Thaler and Cass Sunstein recently wrote "Nudge," a book advocating behavioral policies, and both were informal advisers to the Obama campaign.)<br />The savings research had found that many more people saved money in a 401(k) retirement plan if they didn't have to take active steps to join the plan. In one study, only 45 percent of a company's new employees participated in the 401(k) when doing so required them to take some kind of action, like filling out a form. Eighty-six percent participated when doing so was the default option.<br />The new pension law gave companies a small incentive to make employees opt out of a 401(k), rather than opt in. The law doesn't restrict employees' choices in any way. It simply encourages a more sensible default. Peter Orszag, Obama's nominee for budget director, has called the law "a tangible example of how economic research can be rapidly translated into concrete policy changes that should improve people's lives."<br />Orszag's interest in behavioral work, together with the reach of the budget office, makes it the obvious place for a behavioral maven to be based. An outside committee of experts — a smaller-scale version of the financial crisis board that will be headed by Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman — may also make sense. Obama's aides have learned that they have a better chance of persuading him of an argument when they tell him that they've spoken with the top experts in a given field.<br />The group would have plenty of work. Take the current policies toward prescription drugs. Right now, Medicare separates hospital insurance and drug insurance into different programs. The insurers running the drug plans, Dana Goldman of the RAND Corporation points out, make more money when they have to cover fewer prescriptions.<br />The government, on the other hand, often loses money when people don't take medications for chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension. Later on, these people show up at the hospital, and Medicare foots the bill.<br />A more sensible policy would get rid of these perverse incentives and also take into account the reasons that patients fail to take their pills. Goldman suggests charging an annual fee for a drug, rather than the current system of charging people separately for each prescription refill, which gives them a reason not to get the refill.<br />To take another example, many laid-off workers remain unemployed for months at a time, out of a mistaken belief that they will be able to find a new job that pays as much as their old one. In the process, they often do permanent damage to their finances. Jeffrey Kling of the Brookings Institution says that the unemployment insurance system could help people get over this psychological barrier by temporarily subsidizing a new, lower-paying job.<br />A behaviorally savvy Social Security Administration, meanwhile, could help people make better choices about when to start receiving checks. (Many now do so at age 62, the earliest possible date, which is generally a mistake.) The Environmental Protection Agency could redesign fuel economy stickers so that they emphasized the long-term gasoline costs of driving the vehicle. Banking regulators could devise a standard, default mortgage that didn't involve a teaser rate or other gimmicks.<br />During the campaign, some liberals criticized the Obama team's interest in behavioral economics, saying that the field wasn't ambitious enough to solve today's biggest economic problems. And it certainly can't solve the current crisis — or the deficit — by itself. But no one is arguing that the Obama administration bury itself in behavioral research instead of working on the crisis.<br />The promise of behavioral economics is that it can help create a better government, one that wastes less money and does more to improve people's lives. That's hardly a modest goal.<br />"Everybody is preoccupied, as they should be, with preventing the next Great Depression," as Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago, says. "But it will be important for the administration to have people tasked with thinking long term — like, once it's not O.K. to spend $100 billion on a whim, how do you get our budget under control?"<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/03leonhardt.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/03leonhardt.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Bank of America-Merrill merger becomes a necessity</strong><br />By Elinor Comlay and Jonathan Stempel<br /><br /><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Bank of America and Merrill Lynch shareholders may vote "yes" on the companies' merger because of the consequences of voting "no."<br />Merrill was arguably saved from extinction when it agreed to merge on Sept. 15, an hour before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The fear was that Merrill could be next if shareholders and trading partners fled, as many did at Lehman and the former Bear Stearns.<br />The value of the all-stock merger had fallen by Monday to about $19 billion from an original $50 billion on concern that a deep economic recession would cause credit losses to soar and require Bank of America to raise plenty of dilutive capital.<br />Still, Bank of America and Merrill shareholders are expected to vote Friday morning for the merger. Bank of America shareholders will vote for it because of the potential long-term benefits, and Merrill's will vote for it because voting "no" could be a death sentence.<br />Bank of America and Merrill representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.<br />Merging "is more important for Merrill," said Cassandra Toroian, chief investment officer at Bell Rock Capital in Paoli, Pennsylvania, which owns Bank of America shares.<br />"Do I wish it wasn't at this price? Yes, but long-term shareholders recognize it's truly an opportunity."<br />Merrill may appear pricey after JPMorgan Chase paid $1.9 billion for Washington Mutual's bank assets, and Wells Fargo agreed to buy Wachovia, valued Monday at $10.1 billion.<br />But the merger has already won the blessings of the U.S. Federal Reserve and major shareholder advisers. Bank of America must hold a vote because Merrill shareholders would own close to one-fourth of the merged bank. A closing is expected later this month.<br />Adding Merrill would lift Bank of America, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, above JPMorgan and Citigroup as the largest U.S. bank by assets.<br />Bank of America would have the largest U.S. retail bank and brokerage, and become one of the world's largest wealth managers and investment banks. It expects $7 billion of annual cost savings, but has not said where. CNBC television said on Monday that the merged entity could cut 10,000 jobs, mostly from Merrill.<br />Both companies have declined to detail expected cost cuts.<br />Merrill shareholders would receive 0.8595 of a Bank of America share for each of their shares. As of the close Monday, Merrill shares traded at an 8.3 percent discount to the price implied by Bank of America's offer, suggesting that some investors still believe the merger will not happen. That spread, however, was more than twice as large two months ago.<br />Since becoming Bank of America's chief in 2001, Kenneth Lewis has integrated several purchases, including FleetBoston Financial, MBNA and LaSalle Bank.<br />Yet investors worry that with the U.S. economy in recession he is biting off too much, even with a $25 billion infusion from the government's financial industry bailout.<br />In July, Bank of America bought Countrywide Financial, adding exposure to a sinking housing market that is nowhere near a bottom. Merrill, meanwhile, as of Sept. 26 had more than $72 billion of mortgage exposure, including $39.6 billion to residential loans and $15.7 billion to commercial real estate.<br />Credit issues lurk elsewhere. Bank of America's credit card unit had a third-quarter loss, and Lewis said on Nov. 18 that the card industry may face its biggest losses ever.<br />Keeping Merrill's 17,000 brokers happy is critical, although Merrill said in November that it expected most will stay. Lewis called Merrill's brokerage "the crown jewel" in the merger. The chief executive of Merrill, John Thain, was named to run the combined company's investment banking and wealth-management businesses.<br />"The franchise is going to be very formidable," said Michael Nix, a portfolio manager at Greenwood Capital Associates in Greenwood, South Carolina.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/deal04.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/deal04.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Merrill reportedly plans to halve year-end bonuses</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />(Reuters) - Merrill Lynch, which is set to merge with Bank of America , plans to cut year-end bonuses in half, Bloomberg News said, citing two people with knowledge of the situation.<br />Bonuses on average will fall 50 percent, and some traders and investment bankers will face steeper cuts, the people, who declined to be identified because the plans are not officially public, told the news service.<br />The company could not be immediately reached for comment.<br />Merrill's revenue through September fell 96 percent from a year earlier, forcing Chief Executive John Thain to slash compensation, the firm's biggest expense, the Bloomberg report said.<br />Merrill agreed to merge with Bank of America on September 15, an hour before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc filed for bankruptcy. The fear was that Merrill could be next if shareholders and trading partners fled, as many did at Lehman and the former Bear Stearns.<br />Bank of America and Merrill shareholders are expected to vote on Friday morning for the merger.<br />(Reporting by Pratish Narayanan in Bangalore, editing by Will Waterman)<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-MERRILL-BONUS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-MERRILL-BONUS.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Charities no haven for laid-off bankers</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />By Rebekah Curtis<br />People dumped from finance jobs who hope to find employment in the voluntary sector may have to reconsider, because as Britain slips into recession, ailing charities are struggling to absorb the unemployed.<br />So far 180,000 financial professionals worldwide have lost their jobs as banks implode, prompting talented and financially astute people to seek work in other sectors.<br />Some of those job-hunters are turning to teaching maths and science at schools. But British charities are also seeing increased interest from the newly unemployed.<br />"In our shops people come and volunteer who have been made redundant. And in the head office too," said Rosie Shannon, spokeswoman for charity Save the Children.<br />But unless people are prepared to serve in shops or fulfil administrative roles for nothing, they may struggle to find the unpaid posts to fill gaps in both their time and their resumes.<br />And as a tighter-fisted public cuts down on donations and corporate partnerships fall by the wayside, charities are also beginning to lay employees off and turn away volunteers.<br />International development charity VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) said it received 2,572 enquiries for voluntary work between September and mid-November this year, more than double the 1,233 it received for the same period in 2007.<br />VSO said that unless applicants had management experience, it struggled to place them.<br />"We've had an increase in interest from people from that background but we haven't been able to accept applications because we actually have very few jobs for financial professionals," said VSO spokeswoman Catherine Raynor.<br />"It's a shame," she said. "People are keen to offer their time and commitment, so it's never easy to say they're not right. But it's our commitment to our partners to get the best people for the jobs," she added.<br />"If you've had management experience within your role ... rather than very specific financial skills, then we'd love to hear from you."<br />LUXURY OF CHARITY<br />The axe is heaviest on financial service jobs, but the slowdown is also hitting charities.<br />"Charitable giving is...a luxury good in economic terms. I would expect charities to have a relatively hard time," said Stephen Lea, an economic psychologist at the University of Exeter.<br />Three-quarters of charities believe income will remain stable or decrease in the next year, according to research from the Institute of Fundraising, the Charity Finance Directors' Group and PricewaterhouseCoopers.<br />The survey of 362 charities showed 32 percent putting capital projects on hold, while 71 percent expect either no growth or lower income from corporations in the coming 12 months.<br />Non-profit institutions serving households, the only available measure of charities in Britain, contributed about 3 percent of GDP in 2007, according to the Office for National Statistics.<br />JOB CUTS<br />Nearly one-third of British charities cut jobs between Sept 2007 and Sept 2008 and slightly more than half limited staff pay increases, according to a survey carried out by the Charities Aid Foundation and the Association of Chief Executives of the Voluntary Sector.<br />Cerebral palsy charity Scope said in October it was making five senior management posts redundant, from the executive management board to other back office departments.<br />Internationally focussed Oxfam is preparing to cut 5-7 percent of its UK-based staff or between 35 and 45 positions in 2009/2010.<br />The downturn is also hitting sales in some charity shops.<br />"When the (economic crisis) news hit the papers five or six weeks ago things took a big tumble," said Martin Penny, manager of an Oxfam shop on London's Marylebone High Street.<br />"We're 20 or 25 percent down (in sales) on this time last year, we should be building up for Christmas. It's a bit gloomy," he said, adding that he had seen an increase in graduate volunteers in recent weeks.<br />WEATHERING THE STORM<br />Scope is among charities that have been directly hit by this year's hefty stock market losses.<br />It said in October it had lost 800,000 pounds of reserves on the stock market in a year.<br />Save the Children also lost money on equity investments.<br />"Every time the FTSE drops 100 points, Save the Children loses 175,000 pounds from the value of those investments," chief executive Jasmine Whitbread said in written remarks for Reuters.<br />But experts say its focus on children may help Save the Children weather the storm.<br />The causes most likely to retain support are those focussed on children, followed by international emergency relief and medical research, according to a survey by consultants the Management Centre.<br />"There are some kinds of expenditure that people conserve at all costs as they get poorer, and one of them is expenditure on children," said Lea, the psychologist at Exeter.<br />Giles Pegram, director of fundraising at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, said children are "often more vulnerable to abuse and cruelty when there is an economic downturn because poverty increases family tensions."<br />Charities focussed on arts heritage and culture are likely to be the worst hit in the credit crisis, the survey showed.<br />Some animal welfare organizations are also feeling the pinch. Animal charity Blue Cross, which depends entirely on donations, has dropped its income forecast for the coming year by 10 percent because donations from legacies have fallen by half.<br />Animals in need of a new home after Christmas may also see the public turn a cold shoulder.<br />"Many animals are not being re-homed as quickly as in previous years, presumably because people are thinking twice before taking on another pet because of the cost implications," said RSPCA spokeswoman Katy Geary.<br />(Editing by Catherine Bosley and Sara Ledwith)<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-FINANCIAL-BRITAIN-CHARITIES.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-FINANCIAL-BRITAIN-CHARITIES.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />********************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Dollar buoyant in time of crisis</strong><br />By John KempReuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />LONDON: Perhaps the most surprising development during the past three months has been the surging value of the dollar, the currency at the heart of the crisis. It is almost as if investors have responded to a fire alarm by running toward the source of the fire.<br />From a recent low on July 15, the trade-weighted value of the dollar has risen 19 percent. The dollar has been broadly stable against the yuan (up 1 percent), while posting huge gains against the Swiss franc (up 20 percent), the euro (up 26 percent), the British pound (up 35 percent) and the Australian dollar (up 52 percent). Only against the yen has it slipped marginally (down 6 percent).<br />Since 1997, commentators and policy makers have openly worried about the gaping U.S. trade deficit, the resulting dependence on foreign capital inflows, and the risk of a sharp correction in the value of both U.S. government bonds and the dollar if investors started to balk at financing the resulting payments gap.<br />Expansion of the U.S. economy witnessed a large decline in the value of the dollar by almost 40 percent from February 2002 to March 2008. As the crisis intensified and the United States slipped toward recession, there was renewed alarm about a possible currency collapse.<br />Instead, the dollar has witnessed its most broad-based and sustained appreciation since the late 1990s. In the past month, the currency has traded at its highest level against the euro in two years.<br />For 10 years, the widening deficit in the current account of the U.S. balance of payments has been the main source of perceived dollar risk. The deficit ballooned from $125 billion in 1996 (1.6 percent of gross domestic product) to $788 billion by 2006 (6 percent of GDP).<br />Persistent deficits in the trade balance could not be covered by a moderately positive net inflow of profits, interest and dividend earnings from abroad. So the United States resorted to big sales of government and private debt, including U.S. Treasury notes and securitized mortgages, corporate equities, whole companies, and other forms of real property to foreigners to finance the import surge.<br />The financing requirement absorbed more than half of all funds that investors worldwide made available for investing outside their home country. The net external debt of the United States quintupled in just a decade from $456 billion in 1996 (5.8 percent of GDP) to a staggering $2.442 trillion in 2007 (18 percent of GDP).<br />It is a moot point whether the deficit in the current account spurred the issuance of record quantities of often poor-quality debt, as critics of the Federal Reserve have charged, or whether a global savings glut coupled with strong overseas appetite for U.S. assets created a capital account surplus and forced the United States to run a large trade deficit, as the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, has claimed.<br />In reality, the balance of payments is an integrated whole and part of the wider international flow of funds. China's willingness to lend found a ready willingness to borrow in the United States, mostly to fund consumption and a flood of new homes. The end result is that China has ended up owning a lot of U.S. government paper, and the United States has ended up owing a lot of money.<br />Policy makers have warned for more than a decade that these "global imbalances" were unsustainable and would eventually need to be reversed. The hope was adjustment would come about mainly through a significant but orderly devaluation of the dollar and rise in U.S. exports, rather than a deep recession in the United States that would cut import demand.<br />In the end, policy makers have been spared the choice.<br />The unfolding credit crisis is producing a deep recession, cutting U.S. demand for imports and forcing the long-overdue adjustment in the trade deficit. Because the recession is centered on the United States, U.S. import demand is falling more rapidly than the demand for the country's exports in Europe, Asia and the rest of the world, producing the necessary current-account adjustment.<br />It is a bitter irony that recession has removed one of the main sources of downward pressure on the dollar.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/col.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/col.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><br /><br /><strong>U.S. productivity rises by more than expected</strong><br />Bloomberg News<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: U.S. worker efficiency rose more than forecast in the third quarter and labor costs increased less than anticipated, a report showed Wednesday, signaling company efforts to rebuild profits are paying off.<br />Productivity, a measure of employee output per hour, rose at a 1.3 percent annual rate, compared with a 1.1 percent gain estimated last month, revised figures from the Labor Department showed. Labor costs climbed at a 2.8 percent rate, less than the 3.6 percent pace forecast.<br />Companies reduced expenses as the economy contracted by reducing employee hours at the fastest pace in six years. The drop in raw-material prices combined with the smaller-than- expected increase in labor costs indicates companies are moving to shore up profits as the economy heads for what may be the longest recession in seven decades.<br />"Businesses have been more proactive in their response to weakening growth, cutting labor quickly in response to weaker demand, as they attempt to preserve profitability," Aaron Smith, a senior economist at Moody's Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said before the report.<br />U.S. companies eliminated an estimated 250,000 jobs in November, the most since November 2001, ADP Employer Services said Wednesday in a report based on payroll data. The drop was larger than forecast.<br />Economists had forecast productivity would rise at a 0.9 percent annual pace, according to the median of 57 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates ranged from gains of 0.6 percent to 1.5 percent.<br />The gain in unit labor costs, which are adjusted for efficiency gains, followed a 2.6 percent drop from April through June that was larger than previously estimated.<br />Hours worked fell at a 3.1 percent pace, the biggest drop since the first three months of 2002. Non-farm output fell at a 1.9 percent rate, the most since the last recession.<br />Compared with the third quarter of 2007, productivity rose 2.1 percent, close to the 2.5 percent annual average since 1995. Labor costs were up 1.4 percent year-over-year.<br />The drop in commodity costs is another saving grace for companies dealing with a slowdown in demand, and may allow them to retain some of the staff they would otherwise have cut in incoming months, Brian Bethune, an economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts, said before the report.<br />"We are moving into the point where companies reduced hours as much as they can," Bethune said. "Cost management is still a major challenge, but there is still some scope to do more on the material-cost and supplier-costs side," Bethune said.<br />A Labor Department report Friday is projected to show the economy lost 325,000 jobs in November, the most since October 2001, according to the survey median. The decline would bring the total drop in payrolls to 1.5 million so far this year.<br />Gross domestic product contracted at a 0.5 percent annual pace last quarter.<br />The U.S. economy entered a recession in December 2007, according to a panel at the National Bureau of Economic Research that dates American business cycles. The last time the U.S. was in a recession was from March through November 2001.<br />Some economists are concerned that the productivity surge that began in 1996 is waning.<br />During the 1990s, the former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was one of the first to recognize productivity was accelerating because of the increased use of computers and the Internet, and that the improvement would contain inflation even as the economy gained strength and unemployment stayed low. The realization allowed the Fed to keep interest rates little changed from 1996 to 1999.<br />U.S. companies are cutting jobs to improve productivity and to counter a global slowdown in demand. Xerox, the world's largest maker of high-speed color printers, is eliminating 3,000 jobs and reducing manufacturing costs to save money next year.<br />"We're managing our operations with a close eye on the bottom line," the chief executive Anne Mulcahy said last month. "The restructuring actions we're taking this quarter are expected to deliver $200 million in savings next year, giving us greater flexibility to operate even more efficiently and effectively in an uncertain economic environment."<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/03usecon.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/03usecon.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />**********************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Global stocks rise on anti-recession plays<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />By Herbert lash<br />Global stock markets rose on Wednesday, spurred by companies that do well in a weak economy, as record contractions in U.S. and European service sector data sent European government bond yields to historic lows and revived a safe-haven bid for U.S. debt.<br />McDonald's and Coca-Cola were the top boosters to the Dow, while other large-cap stocks, such as Procter & Gamble , which are all seen as a defensive hedge against the weakening economy, were big gainers.<br />But dire economic data, including a U.S. private sector report that pointed to a worsening jobs outlook, kept an aversion to risk alive, helping the dollar and yen to rally against major currencies.<br />U.S. Treasury debt prices turned positive in the afternoon amid a revived safe-haven bid for government bonds.<br />Oil prices extended losses as U.S. fuel demand continued to crumble under the weight of the financial crisis, prompting the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries to sharpen the axe for another round of production cuts.<br />Wall Street rose, after a day of volatile trade, as investors bought stocks that will hold in an economic slump.<br />"Investors are trying to find stable (areas) -- consumer staples, health care and biotech," said John Schloegel, vice president of investment strategies for Capital Cities Asset Management in Austin, Texas. "They're asking, 'What might be the safest parts of the market?'"<br />Bleak services sector activity in November illustrated the recessions on both sides of the Atlantic while the ADP Employer Services report showed U.S. private employers cut 250,000 jobs last month. ADP's report suggests Friday's U.S. government jobs report will show losses of 300,000 jobs or more.<br />In the United States, the Institute for Supply Management's non-manufacturing index fell to a record low of 37.3 in November, from 44.4 in October. The level of 50 separates expansion from contraction.<br />In Europe, the Markit Eurozone Purchasing Managers Index for services companies fell to 42.5 in November from the prior month's 45.8 level, the lowest in the survey's 10-year history.<br />"The ADP report is part of the reason the market opened down and why people are moving towards defensive positions," said Peter Jankovskis, director of research at OakBrook Investments in Lisle, Illinois. "There are people bracing for the November payrolls report on Friday. We are in a very nervous market," he said.<br />The Dow Jones industrial average rose 172.60 points, or 2.05 percent, at 8,591.69. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index rose 21.93 points, or 2.58 percent, at 870.74. The Nasdaq Composite Index rose 42.58 points, or 2.94 percent, at 1,492.38.<br />MSCI world equity index rose 1.4 percent.<br />The FTSEurofirst 300 index of top European shares cut early losses to rise 4.02 points or 0.49 percent to close at 829.33. Britain's FTSE 100 index rose 47.10 points or 1.14 percent to close at 4169.96.<br />Gains were led by drug companies like Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline .<br />Earlier, Japan's Nikkei posted a 1.8 percent gain following a rebound on Wall Street on Tuesday, and MSCI's index of other Asian stock markets put on just 0.4 percent.<br />The 30-year euro zone government bond yield plumbed 3.319 percent earlier, a record low according to Calyon. In after-hours trade it fell even further, touching 3.28 percent.<br />The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note gained 9/32 in price to yield at 2.67 percent, just above Monday's five-decade low of about 2.65 percent. The 2-year U.S. Treasury note was little changed, yielding 0.89 percent.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-MARKETS-GLOBAL.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-MARKETS-GLOBAL.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/business/04uaw.php">U.S. autoworkers' union pledges to make concessions</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/cars.php">German automakers brace for downturn</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/auto.php">U.S. carmakers ready to deliver their next pleas to Congress</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/fund.php">Chinese state fund turns inward</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/property.php">More bad news expected for Chinese real estate</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/03euecon.php">Euro-zone service activity slides further</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/asia/03china.php">China's economy, in need of jump start, waits for citizens' fists to loosen</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/business/AS-Thailand-Economy-Interest-Rates.php">Thai central bank slashes interest rate</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/03ozecon.php">Australian economy grows at slowest pace in 8 years</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/lg.php">Downturn hits mobile phone makers</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/telitalia.php">Telecom Italia plans to sell assets to trim debt</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/03tycoon.php">2 Canadian phone giants in different struggles</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/04auto.php">Lead director pins GM's hopes on U.S. government rescue</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/hyundai.php">Auto slump seen lasting into 2010</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/03shop.php">In November, U.S. shoppers cut spending even more</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-JEFFERIES-LAYOFFS.php">Jefferies cutting jobs and closing offices</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-AUTOS-BAILOUT-sb.php">All options on table as Congress reviews autos bailout</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-MANDELSON.php">Mandelson calls for active industrial policy</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-RESEARCHINMOTION.php">BlackBerry-maker hit as subscriber growth slows</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-GLAXO-JOBS.php">Glaxo cuts further 200 manufacturing jobs</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-EUROZONE-ECONOMY-RETAIL.php">Euro-zone retail sales sink</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-FINANCIAL.php">South Korea steps up crisis fight</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO9k2E95nKgyAU57biJsk8haNskQwOAi5PYx5V-b3g3d1XJt0N4ORt_-AQmWh2cOJBj_lrZDULhu4y9L0tNNqrYYbKc6lu7_aGmFg-5foi4FS2pIRRBcsK7cWtB98uNsTheS4ksLy2Y5A/s1600-h/DSC02423.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797339672618434" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO9k2E95nKgyAU57biJsk8haNskQwOAi5PYx5V-b3g3d1XJt0N4ORt_-AQmWh2cOJBj_lrZDULhu4y9L0tNNqrYYbKc6lu7_aGmFg-5foi4FS2pIRRBcsK7cWtB98uNsTheS4ksLy2Y5A/s320/DSC02423.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>Spanish businessman murdered in ETA shooting</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />MADRID, Spain: A suspected Basque separatist gunman firing at close range killed a businessman Wednesday, two weeks after the arrest of the militant group ETA's leader, officials said.<br />The Basque entrepreneur was shot in the head in the Basque town of Azpeitia, near San Sebastian. Two young male attackers later fled in a car, Basque police said.<br />The victim was identified as Ignacio Uria Mendizabal, 71. He worked for a construction company involved in a project to build high-speed railways in the Basque region of northern Spain.<br />Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero described him as a hardworking man who was well known in the region and had spent decades providing jobs as he worked to develop it.<br />Zapatero vowed to hunt down his killers and said ETA is doomed in its quest to create an independent homeland through bombs and bullets.<br />"The terrorist group ETA will never impose its violent solutions on us," Zapatero told reporters.<br />The Basque regional president, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, called the shooting of a 71-year-old man at close range as he got out of a car to go have lunch an act of cowardice.<br />"Some act of bravery, some way to defend the Basque people," Ibarretxe said.<br />The shooting came two weeks after the arrest in France of ETA's leader, Mikel de Garikoitz Aspiazu. The Spanish Interior Ministry had said it expected ETA to retaliate for that arrest.<br />ETA declared what it called a permanent cease-fire in March 2006 and entered peace talks with Zapatero's government. But the talks went nowhere and ETA ended the truce in December 2006 with a car bombing that killed two people at Madrid's Barajas international airport.<br />Since then, it has staged several dozen attacks, most of them car bombings. Wednesday's shooting was the fourth death blamed on ETA this year.<br />Since his arrest, Aspiazu has been charged in the Madrid airport attack and separately for allegedly plotting an attack against the America's Cup sailing race last year in Valencia, Spain. He is wanted in connection with many other cases as well.<br />ETA has now killed 825 people since launching its campaign for an independent Basque homeland in the late 1960s, according to the Spanish Interior Ministry.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/europe/EU-Spain-Basque-Attack.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/europe/EU-Spain-Basque-Attack.php</a><br /><br />********************<br /><strong>British army defuses explosives found in Belfast<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />BELFAST, Northern Ireland: British army engineers defused four homemade grenades discovered in a bag in a hard-line Protestant part of Belfast, the Police Service of Northern Ireland said Wednesday.<br />Members of the public discovered the four devices, apparently abandoned, about 9 p.m. Tuesday in a backpack near a BMX bicycle track in the Donegall Road district of south-central Belfast. Engineers used a robot to blow apart the devices without detonating them, causing no injuries.<br />The area is a power base for the outlawed Ulster Defense Association, the largest British Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland. Its members have loosely observed a cease-fire since 1994 but have refused to disarm in support of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord, as its archenemies in the Irish Republican Army already have done.<br />The police commander for south Belfast, Chief Inspector Trevor O'Neill, said the weapons were "crude devices" constructed by anti-Catholic extremists, but he declined to specify whether any particular paramilitary group had been linked to the find.<br />"It was totally reckless for such devices to be left in a BMX track, widely used by members of the community. This is a busy area and just a short distance away from a nursery school and other community and youth facilities," O'Neill said. "It is fortunate that someone wasn't killed or seriously injured."<br />The homemade devices locally called "blast bombs" typically must be thrown because they cannot be detonated by timer or remote control.<br />Services on a nearby railway line were shut down Tuesday night as a precaution, and police planned more searches in the area for other potential explosive devices Wednesday. Police reported no arrests.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/europe/EU-NIreland-Bombs.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/europe/EU-NIreland-Bombs.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>Homemade bombs explode outside Greek AFP bureau<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />ATHENS: Two homemade gas-canister bombs exploded at the entrance of the Athens office of French news agency Agence-France Press (AFP) on Wednesday without causing any injuries, police and witnesses said.<br />A police official said no-one had claimed responsibility for the attack, which caused only minor damage. Small homemade bomb attacks by self-proclaimed anarchists are a regular occurrence in the Greek capital.<br />"We heard two small explosions at the office door," said AFP reporter Eleni Koliopoulou. "There were two of us in the office and we were evacuated by the fire department. We are both OK."<br />The police official said there was no warning given before the attack and the office was unguarded.<br />(Reporting by Dina Kyriakidou and Renee Maltezou; Editing by Richard Balmforth)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/europe/OUKWD-UK-GREECE-AFP.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/europe/OUKWD-UK-GREECE-AFP.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><strong>U.S. lets Mexico have drug war funds</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />MEXICO CITY: The U.S. government was finally releasing $400 million on Wednesday to support Mexican police and soldiers in their fight against drug cartels.<br />The money comes at a critical time: Mexico's death toll from drug violence has soared above 4,000 so far this year, and drug-related murders and kidnappings are spilling over the U.S. border as well.<br />But many questions remain about the direction of this drug war, and both Mexico and Colombia, where 90 percent of U.S.-bound cocaine is produced, worry they'll be handcuffed by concerns about human rights and corruption once Barack Obama is president.<br />"If the United States strips us of those resources, what will be done? Where will they come from?" Andres Pastrana asked in an Associated Press interview. The former Colombian president worked with U.S. President Bill Clinton to launch Plan Colombia, which has spent more than $6 billion in U.S. aid since 2000 to fight drug trafficking and leftist rebels.<br />The aid to Mexico - which includes no cash - includes helicopters and surveillance aircraft, airport inspection equipment and case-tracking software to help police share real-time intelligence. It also supports Mexican efforts to weed out corrupt police, improve the judicial system and protect witnesses.<br />Most of it, however, will go to notoriously corrupt police forces and the same military whose soldiers have tortured, raped and killed innocent civilians while battling the cartels, according to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission. President Felipe Calderon himself said more than half of state and local police can't be trusted, and federal ranks are rife with corrupt officers.<br />The U.S. government has stood by Calderon. But Anthony Placido, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's intelligence chief, acknowledged the dangers.<br />"Law enforcement work anywhere in the world, and certainly in Mexico, can be perilous," Placido said in October when asked whether Mexican corruption has imperiled U.S. agents. "Is it dangerous? Absolutely."<br />After both nation's lawmakers approved the money this summer, Mexico went public with Operation Clean House, which ensnared a dozen high-ranking police officials, including the former drug czar, on allegations of spying for the powerful Sinaloa cartel.<br />Colombia has been cleaning house as well: A week before Obama's election, President Alvaro Uribe fired 20 officers - including three generals and four colonels - for negligence in the biggest-ever purge of Colombia's military. On Nov. 4, the army commander resigned. Uribe also reversed his resistance to U.N. monitoring, saying he would assign a human rights ombudsman to every batallion.<br />"The United States is a supremely important ally," Colombian armed forces chief Gen. Freddy Padilla told the AP. "But it's an ally that doesn't provide aid and support blindly."<br />Colombia places almost no restrictions on U.S. support, allowing U.S. soldiers and drug agents to operate freely in its territory. But Mexicans have always chafed at U.S. military aid, and Calderon's administration objected to human rights restrictions proposed by U.S. lawmakers, who ultimately dropped most of the conditions.<br />The help still comes with some strings: The last 15 percent won't be released until the State Department confirms Mexico is meeting human rights and police corruption goals.<br />Washington has been unwavering in its support of Calderon's drug fight, even as top members of his security Cabinet fell in the corruption scandal. Obama also said Central America should get more than the $65 million in aid it is getting as part of the Merida Initiative. And while Obama has frequently criticized Colombia's human rights record, he pledged his full support for Uribe's fight against the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which sustains its rebellion with cocaine profits.<br />But the U.S. is taking a hard look at how it fights this drug war - starting with the U.S. money and guns that sustain the cartels. The Brookings Institution estimates that 2,000 guns enter Mexico from the United States every day, and many Latin American nations complain that U.S. drug consumption is ultimately responsible for the violence.<br />"The U.S. has to go after the flow of guns and bulk cash and stolen vehicles that go from north to south over our southern border," one of Obama's top Latin America advisors, Dan Restrepo, told The AP. "It's our responsibility to do far more than what we're doing to cut off those flows."<br />The mostly-military nature of the aid also is being examined after the U.S. Congress's research arm reported that Plan Colombia has failed to meet its goal of halving illegal drug production in Colombia, and coca cultivation increased 27 percent last year. Vice President-elect Joe Biden commissioned last month's report as Senate Foreign Relations chairman.<br />Democrats in Congress already shifted more than $100 million of Colombia's aid to nonmilitary purposes, such as strengthening the judicial system and responding to the world's worst internal refugee crisis after Sudan.<br />Colombia's military, which has nearly doubled in size under Uribe, worries of more cuts to come.<br />"It would be an error to deprive of aid a government with a clear democratic conviction and a military that is infinitely respected by the Colombian people," Padilla said.<br />Obama, however, has argued that only a regional, multilateral approach can discourage cartels from crippling governments through corruption and intimidation.<br />"It's time to work together to find the best practices that work across the hemisphere, and to tailor approaches to fit each country," Obama said in his main campaign address on Latin America.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/04mexico.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/04mexico.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPO6mEJhaHnBJs-FSJnzLLiBE3TO4HkgVM9pc2Z8CoWcs8ZCPj_vwcAl5XnTW0dc7zZUGRvR6cR6b82TJCAIbVg4XbNW1t-Tzl9N7xEMnNJSSgLQqzA_Nl3bhx7x-ydrViJFO7E_mLpm4/s1600-h/DSC02424.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797329813926738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPO6mEJhaHnBJs-FSJnzLLiBE3TO4HkgVM9pc2Z8CoWcs8ZCPj_vwcAl5XnTW0dc7zZUGRvR6cR6b82TJCAIbVg4XbNW1t-Tzl9N7xEMnNJSSgLQqzA_Nl3bhx7x-ydrViJFO7E_mLpm4/s320/DSC02424.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhci2REFkpadj_RvwcaUovwIGfzw5KY2eY4mUG5qehGwSu20KDhI1cjZPaZeSiDmxQtNpaRQfOqCQewjM6b-aqrwK5gi6qwyJ1LKjAzQMV77i0ORyjdgipFT4xXf-EUYTo_lVRc0OZT_0k/s1600-h/DSC02425.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797329457032530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhci2REFkpadj_RvwcaUovwIGfzw5KY2eY4mUG5qehGwSu20KDhI1cjZPaZeSiDmxQtNpaRQfOqCQewjM6b-aqrwK5gi6qwyJ1LKjAzQMV77i0ORyjdgipFT4xXf-EUYTo_lVRc0OZT_0k/s320/DSC02425.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijZU6uqGp8Hk9lOgDaWBC4H7zVncU0o4mhb6MwI_QFHBZn_Zyk2K1Xl7RptJh6y6Iy1ZzZ6e2Yq_eMK0dH_fZxDtCy58-tEIT5u6mlodzbmWKcIrxyYeCXi3pSHX4iaOkmNpi1tZAQfwo/s1600-h/DSC02426.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797328874940530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijZU6uqGp8Hk9lOgDaWBC4H7zVncU0o4mhb6MwI_QFHBZn_Zyk2K1Xl7RptJh6y6Iy1ZzZ6e2Yq_eMK0dH_fZxDtCy58-tEIT5u6mlodzbmWKcIrxyYeCXi3pSHX4iaOkmNpi1tZAQfwo/s320/DSC02426.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirIhjXti6ONnpYYqVVv5L2VI4b0fi-3Ckp_3rjRIo4jNn7KxnT_nnOz1e4SHwjqgch64wJq5ysGdG2Kl6e1xDPDZ7XSDgvcAjeyP6M69L1uOtzwuiL862bNLonILMHfXi9Fb6H5x9Suko/s1600-h/DSC02427.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275797324061957602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirIhjXti6ONnpYYqVVv5L2VI4b0fi-3Ckp_3rjRIo4jNn7KxnT_nnOz1e4SHwjqgch64wJq5ysGdG2Kl6e1xDPDZ7XSDgvcAjeyP6M69L1uOtzwuiL862bNLonILMHfXi9Fb6H5x9Suko/s320/DSC02427.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDEJM-0BrCarRhpEcmACwPwn5YDvt25X-4qFs1EudXokFTEnqMohFIwpow_o3XBLjXxFz0sHhRKi3ownwSKKaFfjEV2o_7V_Lo5DQR7NXE_fJLx_d9_yvEc7gfhXx3lQZnDRtriDwk7R0/s1600-h/DSC02428.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796926516893506" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDEJM-0BrCarRhpEcmACwPwn5YDvt25X-4qFs1EudXokFTEnqMohFIwpow_o3XBLjXxFz0sHhRKi3ownwSKKaFfjEV2o_7V_Lo5DQR7NXE_fJLx_d9_yvEc7gfhXx3lQZnDRtriDwk7R0/s320/DSC02428.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTO3fy3yLfGaIQqaLrZs9Zd-8tqNPDcke-uR2bt-i2e20Tlh0UVn8qhUzMqRF7En1Aa4CyHjwzgjX2sC7JvooxfovuJd3EZtkqybJxwWKdFu_DTq8tXEhJIFIK_DWNEVuXKMzINFuxXoc/s1600-h/DSC02429.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796921501756994" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTO3fy3yLfGaIQqaLrZs9Zd-8tqNPDcke-uR2bt-i2e20Tlh0UVn8qhUzMqRF7En1Aa4CyHjwzgjX2sC7JvooxfovuJd3EZtkqybJxwWKdFu_DTq8tXEhJIFIK_DWNEVuXKMzINFuxXoc/s320/DSC02429.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyXTLQ9YgUHgNU9xevZl0rjezAUv49NvRArBwzvF-fXw1tmO8pVnT2R47lv2jUIx0ZcmBCsy3LxgI8t1prEATVxErqhgOjrwYBSDEzvbwyaFY_Vb7720UKTjklAMuKsOhtw0lcJicTSXA/s1600-h/DSC02430.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796918751168034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyXTLQ9YgUHgNU9xevZl0rjezAUv49NvRArBwzvF-fXw1tmO8pVnT2R47lv2jUIx0ZcmBCsy3LxgI8t1prEATVxErqhgOjrwYBSDEzvbwyaFY_Vb7720UKTjklAMuKsOhtw0lcJicTSXA/s320/DSC02430.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTRuFON49ubfMfSZuBluiabMJhZ33wjnt70Ht2FeWO_45GMt6RumOwHKUB9y2noVmvw-5l2P7j0eHpOIs2GH0r9ZeBm9I1AYU5Lb9AWclW6IN6irRmQPSFVVG9jIfApFH7HvXqLvbxJTA/s1600-h/DSC02431.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796919467920402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTRuFON49ubfMfSZuBluiabMJhZ33wjnt70Ht2FeWO_45GMt6RumOwHKUB9y2noVmvw-5l2P7j0eHpOIs2GH0r9ZeBm9I1AYU5Lb9AWclW6IN6irRmQPSFVVG9jIfApFH7HvXqLvbxJTA/s320/DSC02431.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK-ppN5AIocIkwDUvVe-Lwd73InsxQuvzsrN59xu1YRUeyhKy8uCkm0rTH_PeaRxz9TOXNuc6TbRqsGq_z9wrhQCoV7ZFIxjzCz9jw9nS2smAfYg9zJ_Foboy_ZJHChc1cnt6RhpfgUBA/s1600-h/DSC02432.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796909428517442" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK-ppN5AIocIkwDUvVe-Lwd73InsxQuvzsrN59xu1YRUeyhKy8uCkm0rTH_PeaRxz9TOXNuc6TbRqsGq_z9wrhQCoV7ZFIxjzCz9jw9nS2smAfYg9zJ_Foboy_ZJHChc1cnt6RhpfgUBA/s320/DSC02432.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf-UqLF-Abky8ubILQbKgyvpGTcRqfuKBU33fFT7J2DfkwxVu5iui_3XEMudrCmmvd84UvWZlSTlPFm9JLRLrh6kN6LVr8Y1mt7MUM-APNd0CmQM3l2uveFbZfXW7GAaOH8zAU5aq8BP4/s1600-h/DSC02433.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796645848436402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf-UqLF-Abky8ubILQbKgyvpGTcRqfuKBU33fFT7J2DfkwxVu5iui_3XEMudrCmmvd84UvWZlSTlPFm9JLRLrh6kN6LVr8Y1mt7MUM-APNd0CmQM3l2uveFbZfXW7GAaOH8zAU5aq8BP4/s320/DSC02433.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU73uIvAkFt5dB0gH7voFm2PjD10liMl3t734bXfnfoRnACvc62XZHRnW9J6QI83TFB7GwDsCMAErzCDQJ4jsuYCOF32Hwx35CXmjAsJ4KwY0dezCUmhxz0YLOIyCVWO4YuOf_Sa1DTvI/s1600-h/DSC02435.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796636893134434" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU73uIvAkFt5dB0gH7voFm2PjD10liMl3t734bXfnfoRnACvc62XZHRnW9J6QI83TFB7GwDsCMAErzCDQJ4jsuYCOF32Hwx35CXmjAsJ4KwY0dezCUmhxz0YLOIyCVWO4YuOf_Sa1DTvI/s320/DSC02435.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpXILKJlf0iSkI8QUPNljCV_G_zSUajzFGy7R9mUomosClg9DQk1FycpYs2cGJH9a-_sPu5v9K1xjrDZUykDyKpy1c5o__QJZJNbCtrpJa1B-hElcUKUNXLntfW6u9u-oCkb11ybjUhV8/s1600-h/DSC02437.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796628216441186" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpXILKJlf0iSkI8QUPNljCV_G_zSUajzFGy7R9mUomosClg9DQk1FycpYs2cGJH9a-_sPu5v9K1xjrDZUykDyKpy1c5o__QJZJNbCtrpJa1B-hElcUKUNXLntfW6u9u-oCkb11ybjUhV8/s320/DSC02437.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFfItieALdctFkOg_KpJT_dD1zmrRycN_0oVm61GCsW7IZNld6R7pVccoHb8eRhpYrRPNRdhLZnMd6MgWnMOg0oMasxMaN2LUf-RdMTpsYboemzSWbeYHjm3U7TJtVqmkF5oBPCT1R-4M/s1600-h/DSC02439.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796629092376594" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFfItieALdctFkOg_KpJT_dD1zmrRycN_0oVm61GCsW7IZNld6R7pVccoHb8eRhpYrRPNRdhLZnMd6MgWnMOg0oMasxMaN2LUf-RdMTpsYboemzSWbeYHjm3U7TJtVqmkF5oBPCT1R-4M/s320/DSC02439.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9vcX9Twx87TRdEFXkxT9qZBEXAq3lQY1TdruwEkZVuXieCn23Igl-VOkMZjYQtRY9eV5ocgbwlnR7q3kRgapTXNthrQRwN0hNm4K4wLYK4BreKMMWVvytJ9jeKSLZKdFJxtsLuJrwA8E/s1600-h/DSC02441.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796618651454466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9vcX9Twx87TRdEFXkxT9qZBEXAq3lQY1TdruwEkZVuXieCn23Igl-VOkMZjYQtRY9eV5ocgbwlnR7q3kRgapTXNthrQRwN0hNm4K4wLYK4BreKMMWVvytJ9jeKSLZKdFJxtsLuJrwA8E/s320/DSC02441.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghl865b1-afEa-XP-7b8ipSTTpXElPXDxSvTQeYtBeZ591NZGT5BAq1Bq72EjRfV-qDZyQT-uYeW72B8KLuMyFUS1GUYPH1c6X22eymsYpUiUEAruAuOLI3jFtxY1s7WMXx5fGoa-yePo/s1600-h/DSC02442.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796015375010578" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghl865b1-afEa-XP-7b8ipSTTpXElPXDxSvTQeYtBeZ591NZGT5BAq1Bq72EjRfV-qDZyQT-uYeW72B8KLuMyFUS1GUYPH1c6X22eymsYpUiUEAruAuOLI3jFtxY1s7WMXx5fGoa-yePo/s320/DSC02442.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7uSqvrnU6_571YM8FesuG_dmqMVduQsTffOgEK8HIghwxnYJGav-ajbR4DIPDfaSKItShL1d3E3DomH02WpRaqb4NFzKmcAYd2F0xpYy4wcU25U9dxrRyPI7BDgQJqaAP-hFwcWPzoQE/s1600-h/DSC02444.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796011954409234" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7uSqvrnU6_571YM8FesuG_dmqMVduQsTffOgEK8HIghwxnYJGav-ajbR4DIPDfaSKItShL1d3E3DomH02WpRaqb4NFzKmcAYd2F0xpYy4wcU25U9dxrRyPI7BDgQJqaAP-hFwcWPzoQE/s320/DSC02444.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Regimens: For the best pick-me-up, lie down</strong><br />By Nicholas Bakalar<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />A cup of strong coffee might make you feel wide awake, but a small study suggests that for improved physical and mental performance, an afternoon nap works better.<br />Scientists spent a morning training 61 people in motor, perceptual and verbal tasks: tapping a keyboard in a specific sequence, discriminating between shapes on a computer screen and memorizing a list of words. Then the scientists randomly divided the subjects into three groups. The first took a nap from 1 to 3 p.m. At 3, the second group took a 200-milligram caffeine pill, and the third took a placebo. The subjects repeated the tasks they had been taught earlier and were scored by researchers who did not know which group they were in.<br />Those who had caffeine had worse motor skills than those who napped or had a placebo. In the perceptual task, the nappers did significantly better than either the caffeine or placebo group. On the verbal test, nappers were best by a wide margin, and the caffeine consumers did no better than those given a placebo. Despite their mediocre performance, caffeine takers consistently reported less sleepiness than the others.<br />"People think they're smarter on caffeine," said Sara Mednick, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and the lead author of the study, which appeared in the Nov. 3 issue of Behavioral Brain Research. "But this study is a strong argument for taking a nap instead of having a cup of coffee."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/healthscience/02regi.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/healthscience/02regi.php</a></div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7Sqyeb3Xoh9JwC1ejGlV4Ceu9bScpfVRAhhyphenhyphenJY-si7xFegE5CqoqDaS-belxUKULoAoGswcruJ3KqW0WixdGmxKL2Os-QJKJmjRGtqnb3Ga-uXlnasy7qR7A5tzTyZ5v4PC_-Grb-Dl8/s1600-h/DSC02451.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796007775981986" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7Sqyeb3Xoh9JwC1ejGlV4Ceu9bScpfVRAhhyphenhyphenJY-si7xFegE5CqoqDaS-belxUKULoAoGswcruJ3KqW0WixdGmxKL2Os-QJKJmjRGtqnb3Ga-uXlnasy7qR7A5tzTyZ5v4PC_-Grb-Dl8/s320/DSC02451.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjFUz4J78OB77jhbC-4sVqV7M5FGfsO0WdLvcEWqFsYSFgQSyp09OR9K75jgYPgPTTDl_caMYDD9C1fRbrV29SNprGoFOhPGbn6KtxLhfkezULWUaZgwmieaeKBOZlO3mDzPqqpHnH36I/s1600-h/DSC02452.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275796002367660322" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjFUz4J78OB77jhbC-4sVqV7M5FGfsO0WdLvcEWqFsYSFgQSyp09OR9K75jgYPgPTTDl_caMYDD9C1fRbrV29SNprGoFOhPGbn6KtxLhfkezULWUaZgwmieaeKBOZlO3mDzPqqpHnH36I/s320/DSC02452.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong></strong></div><br /><div><strong></strong></div><br /><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><br /><div><strong>Roger Cohen: A court for a new America</strong><br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />THE HAGUE: Of the many issues that have soured relations between Europe and the United States under the Bush administration, few have been as poisonous as America's refusal to join the world's first permanent war crimes court here. The snub has been seen as a symbol of U.S. contempt for the rule of law.<br />In one of his last acts, Bill Clinton signed the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court, but the signature never led to U.S. ratification. On the contrary, President Bush withdrew the signature.<br />This remarkable, and gleeful, "un-signing" was followed by an aggressive campaign to oblige countries to make a formal commitment, under threat of U.S. reprisals, never to surrender U.S. citizens to the court.<br />Former Republican Congressman Tom DeLay caught the snarling Bush-Cheney view of the institution when he referred to a "kangaroo court" that was a "clear and present danger" to Americans fighting the war on terror.<br />As a result, I can think of no better place for President-elect Barack Obama to start signaling a changed American approach to the world, and particularly its European allies, than the ICC. Even short of American membership, which would involve a tough battle in Congress, there is much he can do. But "re-signing" followed by ratification should be Obama's aim.<br />The effect of U.S. rejection of the court, combined with the trashing of habeas corpus at Guantánamo Bay, has been devastating. Allies from Canada to Germany that are court members have been dismayed by the U.S. dismissal of an institution they see doing evident good.<br />Other smaller nations from Latin America to Africa, browbeaten by the United States on the issue, have looked elsewhere for lost military or financial support. The American idea, grounded in legal principles, has been undermined.<br />It's time to look again at the ICC. Over the past six years, the court has achieved what Philippe Kirsch, its Canadian president, called "a great deal of acceptability." There are now 108 member countries, including every European Union nation except the Czech Republic, which appears set to join.<br />The United States stands alone among major Western industrial powers in rejecting the court: It has in effect deserted those powers' attempt to mark a new century with a new commitment to eradicating genocide and crimes against humanity by ensuring there is no impunity for them. Washington has broken ranks with the Western liberal tradition of which it should be a cornerstone.<br />Initial U.S. fears that the court would be politically motivated have proved groundless. The court's respect for the principle that it can exercise its jurisdiction only when national courts prove unwilling or unable to do so has proved unbending. Attempts to bring British forces in Iraq before the court for alleged crimes have been rejected by the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina.<br />Obama should now confront U.S. responsibility, and signal a new commitment to multilateralism, in his attitude toward the court. After the terrible decade of the 1990s, with its genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and the loss there of a million lives while the United States and its allies dithered, it is unconscionable that America not stand with the institution that constitutes the most effective legal deterrent to such crimes.<br />The ICC has filed charges against alleged war criminals in Congo, Central African Republic, Uganda and Sudan since it started work in 2002. The first trial, involving a Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga, is set to begin in January.<br />But it is in Sudan that the incoherence of American policy toward the ICC has been most evident. The United States is against impunity for the genocidal crimes in Darfur, yet it is not a member of the court seeking to prosecute those responsible.<br />The court has issued arrest warrants for a former Sudanese government minister, Ahmad Harun, and for Ali Kushayb, a leader of the government-backed janjaweed militia. In July, it requested an arrest warrant for Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, on charges of genocide, but judges are still reviewing whether to push ahead with the prosecution.<br />When I asked Brooke Anderson, Obama's chief national security spokeswoman, about policy toward the court, I received this e-mail response: "President-elect Obama strongly supports the ICC's efforts to investigate and prosecute those responsible for atrocities in Sudan."<br />That's a good start and a good signal.<br />Obama should follow up by making sure that, even if court membership is not quickly attainable, the United States plays a part in the ICC's 2010 review conference. This will address critical issues including how to define the crime of aggression, and may extend to whether the ICC can exercise jurisdiction in cases involving terrorism and drug-trafficking.<br />The new president should also ensure the United States cooperates with the court in providing information and assisting in making arrest warrants effective. Its influence on the court's credibility could be enormous.<br />Only by aligning America again with international law can the damage inflicted on America's image and appeal by the Bush Administration be undone.<br />Readers are invited to comment at my blog: www.iht.com/passages<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/edcohen.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/edcohen.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>Rape as genocide<br /></strong>By David Scheffer<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />'In this society if you rape one woman, you have raped the entire tribe" - so said one observer of the mass rape occurring in Darfur.<br />People hear the word genocide and think of six million victims of the Holocaust or an estimated 800,000 dead in Rwanda. They do not imagine that mass rape can be so well planned and targeted that it wipes out a substantial part of an ethnic group as thoroughly, though more slowly, than widespread killings. Yet three judges sitting on the International Criminal Court will decide soon whether to confirm an arrest warrant against a head of state, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, on grounds that he masterminded rape as genocide against three ethnic groups in Darfur that have challenged his power.<br />The ICC's prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has filed war crimes and crimes against humanity charges against Bashir. But the centerpiece of Moreno-Ocampo's application is the charge of rape as genocide "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group" and "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." Such acts of genocide arising from rape rather than from murder can be prosecuted as stand-alone crimes before the International Criminal Court.<br />Their complexity, despite helpful rulings from the Rwanda and Bosnia war crimes tribunals, may discourage the judges from affirming genocide charges while they opt for the more familiar terrain of other atrocity crimes charges. Hanging in the balance is whether the heinous strategy of mass rape in modern warfare will be condemned and prosecuted for what it truly is: genocide.<br />The judges have to find "reasonable grounds" to arrest Bashir on the rape-as-genocide charges. They need not establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt - that standard applies at trial. So far, the evidence presented by Moreno-Ocampo appears compelling under either standard.<br />The prosecutor's investigation reveals that Bashir's forces and agents forcibly drove approximately 2.5 million Sudanese, including substantial numbers of the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups, into camps of internally displaced persons. They then inflicted rape and other forms of severe sexual violence upon thousands of women and girls, and continue to do so. A common tactic is for the Janjaweed tribal militia and Sudan's armed forces and security agents to roam outside the camps raping and often gang-raping women and girls who must leave the camps to collect firewood, grass or water in order to survive. One witness said: "Maybe around 20 men rape one woman. ... These things are normal for us here in Darfur. ... They rape women in front of their mothers and fathers."<br />Babies born following the rapes are called "Janjaweed babies" who rarely have a future in the mother's ethnic group. Infanticides and abandonment of such babies are common. One victim explained, "They kill our males and dilute our blood with rape. [They] ... want to finish us as a people, end our history."<br />Imagine the collective horror if men and boys in these ethnic groups were raped and then castrated. Would anyone doubt that genocidal impulses were at work by depriving men of their ability to father babies within their own ethnic group? Raped women and girls are similarly crippled.<br />In the 1990's I met scores of rape victims from atrocities in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Uganda and eastern Congo. In most cases their experiences were so devastating to their character, their ethnic bonds and often to their health that the logic of how mass rape can destroy a substantial part of a group and thus constitute genocide seemed clear. These women typically were ostracized from their communities, could not marry their ethnic men, or were physically incapable of rearing children.<br />The fairly unique circumstances in Darfur enable Bashir to inflict conditions of life that are destroying the three ethnic groups. Of the estimated 80,000 to 265,000 "slow deaths" in the camps to date, the targeted groups have suffered grievously. The evidence shows a highly sophisticated strategy at work combining scorched-earth assaults on ethnic villages followed by isolation in camps where starvation, illness, and rape are used to achieve genocidal aims.<br />The judges also must find reasonable grounds that Bashir has had the specific criminal intent to commit genocide through a strategy of mass rape. The rules on establishing the mens rea, or guilty mind, have been highly developed in genocide cases prosecuted before other war crimes tribunals. The genocidal intent can be inferred from the factual circumstances of the crime. In Darfur, there is no shortage of actions, including repeated mass rapes, from which to infer genocidal intent. The prosecutor argues that the only reasonable inference available on the evidence is that Bashir intended to destroy in part the ethnic groups.<br />The wild card remains the United Nations Security Council, which may yet cave into political pressure and prevent approval or execution of an arrest warrant against the Sudanese leader. But if the judges can continue their review and find reasonable grounds to charge rape as genocide, thousands of women and girls attacked by rapists as a means of decimating their ethnic groups will share a small measure of justice and peace.<br />David Scheffer, the former U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues (1997-2001), is a law professor and director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/edscheffer.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/edscheffer.php</a></div><div> </div><br /><div></div><br /><div>*****************</div><br /><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><br /><div><strong>How not to run foreign policy<br /></strong>By Joseph R. Wood<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />President-elect Obama is preparing to govern from his platform of change. But the mistakes characteristic of American administrations defy change over time. Here are three things not to do when running American foreign policy:<br />-Do not personalize foreign policy. American presidents and top advisers rise through a sea of elites in highly competitive careers in politics and other fields. They are confident in their own charm (FDR and JFK spring to mind). They see others in comparable positions abroad as likely to have much in common. This produces a belief that the same skills that built coalitions in domestic politics or in the private sector will translate into foreign policy.<br />Personal relationships can ease awkward conversations. But, with both friends and adversaries, to believe that one's strength of personality or genuine graciousness will sway leaders of other nations from their own interests is to court failure. Respect for principles or power, or ideally both, is decisive. Charisma is not.<br />Allied leaders whose instincts seem to run alongside ours will be constrained by their own domestic politics and interests, frequent amiable phone calls notwithstanding. Chancellor Angela Merkel's determined opposition to beginning the NATO accession process for Ukraine and Georgia (a historic rejection of American leadership in the Alliance) and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's defense of the Russian invasion of Georgia are examples of avowedly pro-American leaders whose ready access to the U.S. president did not change their policies at pivotal moments. Prime Minister Tony Blair and President José María Aznar were both close to Washington, but their departure into the political wilderness brought governments seeking to distance themselves from the United States.<br />President Nicolas Sarkozy's vacation in the United States and meal at Kennebunkport, President Bush's family retreat, mutated into self-serving shots against Bush on missile defense and Georgia when relations with Moscow seemed to require it. And a fishing trip to Kennebunkport and reciprocal visit to Sochi, together with repeated offers of cooperation and engagement, failed to soften the words or actions of Vladimir Putin, the penultimate in the long series of Russian leaders whose welcome in the West as a reformer or Westernizer proved premature.<br />- Do not concoct a mismatch of rhetoric and policy. Especially, do not speak loudly and carry no stick. A rhetorical hard line on principles that is not matched by actions gains all the problems of confrontation and all the drawbacks of appeasement.<br />Red lines should be few and must be held to, not lightly tripped across as in the Six-Party talks on North Korea's nuclear program, or in agreeing to rules on commercial energy relationships with Russia in the G-8 and then ignoring violations, or in insisting that the Iraqi government respect human rights while doing little to help Christian and other religious minorities there.<br />The United States need not be always confrontational or always accommodating. But inconsistency between rhetoric and actions is read by friends and enemies as weakness (or at best distraction). It renders impossible the genuine assertion of strength.<br />- Do not expect others to do the work of American leadership for us. Retreating from Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War II or, after the Cold War, initially insisting that we had no significant interests in the Balkans were unsustainable policies. More recently, putting Europe in front in negotiations with Iran over nuclear weapons, or with Russia over Georgia, has not worked well, at least if the objectives were to slow the Iranian nuclear program or to convince Russia not to draw new borders in Europe.<br />Over the last two years, coordinating with Europe became the essence of much U.S. policy. The result, while avoiding the outward appearance of seams in the Atlantic relationship, was that the United States was steered by a lowest-common-denominator process of European policy-making, minimizing the contribution of those who agreed with us and maximizing the influence of those driven by commercial and energy interests in Iran and Russia.<br />Outsourcing leadership fails. Attempting to endow other countries with the imprimatur of American power does not impress leaders who threaten and invade neighbors with democratically elected governments or seek to destroy Israel and the West.<br />Gaining multilateral support for policies led by the United States is desirable and often essential.<br />These "do nots" don't fall into "realist" or "idealist" schools. They are lessons of human nature as it plays out across party lines, across international borders and over time. They are useful cautions for all American administrations.<br />Joseph R. Wood, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S., was deputy assistant to the vice president for national security from 2005 to 2008.</div><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/edwood.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/edwood.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></div><div><strong>Reducing U.S. reliance on security contractors</strong><br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />U.S. forces in Iraq have relied too heavily on private security contractors who have operated with no real legal accountability. The trigger-happy tactics of these armies for hire have alienated Iraqis.<br />The fact that they have been out of reach of Iraqi law has been an especially bitter pill to swallow.<br />For some of those contractors, that get-out-of-jail-free card is now being withdrawn. A new agreement with the Iraqi government that allows American troops to remain in Iraq stipulates that contractors working for the Pentagon who commit crimes will be subject to prosecution in Iraqi courts.<br />The Pentagon and State Department employ an estimated 10,500 private contractors to protect convoys, diplomats and other officials. They are infamous among Iraqis for their "spray and pray" approach to security: spraying bullets and praying they hit the enemy.<br />The Bush administration, meanwhile, has shown little interest in prosecuting contractors for crimes committed in Iraq. In a particularly horrifying incident, employees of the security firm Blackwater Worldwide working with the State Department mowed down at least 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad last year. The Justice Department has yet to formally indict anyone involved.<br />To date, the U.S. government has not completed a single criminal prosecution against a contractor for killing Iraqis in the field.<br />Adding to the sense of impunity, U.S. law is unclear on whether contractors working for agencies other than the Pentagon are even subject to American criminal law. (It is not clear whether the new agreement also applies to contractors working for other agencies.) The House has passed a bill that would make all contractors liable under American criminal law, regardless of what agency they work for. The Senate bill, sponsored by the now President-elect Barack Obama, got stuck. The incoming Congress should pass it quickly.<br />Companies warn that the agreement will make it much harder for them to hire Americans and others to provide security in Iraq. If true, it is still an acceptable price to pay to show this country's commitment to the rule of law. The next administration must quickly reduce its reliance on the private armies so favored - and so protected - by the Bush administration.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/ediraq.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/opinion/ediraq.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>A touchy path for Obama: Taking charge of the CIA</strong><br />By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: For two years on the presidential campaign trail, Barack Obama rallied crowds with strongly worded critiques of the Bush administration's most controversial counterterrorism programs, from hiding terrorism suspects in secret CIA jails to questioning them with methods he denounced as torture.<br />Now Obama must take charge of the CIA, in what is already proving to be one of the more treacherous patches of his transition to the White House.<br />Last week, John Brennan, a CIA veteran who was widely seen as Obama's likeliest choice to head the intelligence agency, withdrew his name from consideration after liberal critics attacked his alleged role in the agency's detention and interrogation program. Brennan protested that he had been a "strong opponent" within the agency of harsh interrogation tactics, yet Obama evidently decided that nominating Brennan was not worth a battle with some of his most ardent supporters on the left.<br />Obama's search for someone else and his future relationship with the agency are complicated by the tension between his apparent desire to make a clean break with Bush administration policies he has condemned and concern about alienating an agency with a central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda.<br />Mark Lowenthal, an intelligence veteran who left a senior post at the CIA in 2005, said Obama's decision to exclude Brennan from contention for the top job had sent a message that "if you worked in the CIA during the war on terror, you are now tainted," and had created anxiety in the ranks of the agency's clandestine service.<br />One of the first issues Obama must grapple with is the future of CIA detention: Will the agency continue to hold prisoners secretly, question them using more aggressive methods than allowed for military interrogators, and transfer terrorism suspects to countries with a history of using torture?<br />During the presidential campaign, a constant theme for Obama was the need to restore "American values" to the fight against terrorism. He pledged to banish secret CIA interrogation rules and require all American interrogators to follow military guidelines, set out in the Army Field Manual on interrogation.<br />In a speech last year, Obama cast the matter as a practical issue, as well as a moral one. "We cannot win a war unless we maintain the high ground and keep the people on our side," he said. "But because the administration decided to take the low road, our troops have more enemies."<br />On Wednesday, a dozen retired generals and admirals were to meet with senior Obama advisers to urge him to stand firm against any deviation from the military's noncoercive interrogation rules.<br />But even some senior Democratic lawmakers who are vehement critics of the Bush administration's interrogation policies seemed reluctant in recent interviews to commit the new administration to following the Army Field Manual in all cases.<br />Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who will take over as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, led the fight this year to force the CIA to follow military interrogation rules. Her bill was approved by Congress but vetoed by President George W. Bush.<br />But in an interview Tuesday, Feinstein indicated that extreme cases might call for flexibility. "I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible," she said, raising the possibility that an imminent terrorist threat might require special measures.<br />Afterward, however, Feinstein issued a statement saying: "The law must reflect a single clear standard across the government, and right now, the best choice appears to be the Army Field Manual. I recognize that there are other views, and I am willing to work with the new administration to consider them."<br />Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, another top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said that he would consult with the CIA and approve interrogation techniques that went beyond the Army Field Manual as long as they were "legal, humane and noncoercive." But Wyden declined to say whether CIA techniques ought to be made public.<br />CIA officials have long argued that publishing a list of interrogation techniques only allows Al Qaeda to train its operatives to resist them. But they say the secrecy has led to exaggeration and myth about the agency's detention program.<br />During the campaign, Obama's aides said he would consider allowing the CIA to continue holding prisoners in overseas jails but would insist that inspectors from the International Committee of the Red Cross be allowed to visit them. They also said he would end the practice of "rendering" terrorism suspects to countries that have used torture.<br />One of the retired generals meeting with the Obama team on Wednesday, Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi forces for the army in 2003 and 2004, said in an interview Tuesday that it was crucial for leaders to send the right message on the treatment of prisoners.<br />Eaton pointed out that Vice President Dick Cheney once dismissed waterboarding, the near-drowning procedure considered by many legal authorities to be torture, as a "dunk in the water" and said such statements influenced rank-and-file soldiers to believe that brutality was not really prohibited.<br />"This administration has set a tone problem for the military," Eaton said. "We've had eight years of undermining good order and discipline."<br />It is widely expected that Obama will replace Michael Hayden, the CIA director. Among those mentioned as possible candidates for the job are Stephen Kappes, a CIA veteran who is the deputy director; Tim Roemer, a former congressman from Indiana who was a member of the Sept. 11 Commission; Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, who is retiring from the Senate in January; and Jack Devine, a former head of the agency's clandestine service who left the CIA before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.<br />The flap over Brennan, who served as a chief of staff to George Tenet when he ran the CIA, was the biggest glitch so far in what has been an otherwise smooth transition for Obama. Some CIA veterans suggest that the president-elect may have difficulty finding a candidate who can be embraced by both veteran officials at the agency and the left flank of the Democratic Party.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/intel.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/intel.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Italian judge suspends trial of CIA agents<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />MILAN, Italy: An Italian judge on Wednesday suspended a kidnapping trial linked to the CIA's extraordinary rendition program after the government said testimony could be a threat to Italy's national security.<br />The Milan trial involves 26 Americans and five Italian intelligence agents charged in the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric. Most of the Americans are CIA agents.<br />It is the first trial to involve the CIA's program of secretly transferring terrorism suspects to third countries where, critics of the program contend, they risked torture.<br />Judge Oscar Magi suspended the trial until March 18 in the expectation that Italy's Constitutional Court would have resolved the national security issue by then. A ruling from the high court is due March 10.<br />Both Premier Silvio Berlusconi and his predecessor Romano Prodi have warned that testimony in the case could compromise operations between Italian spy services and the CIA.<br />Prosecutor Armando Spataro argued that the use of state secrecy was "blocking justice and the verification of the truth."<br />None of the CIA agents have appeared in court. From the outset, the CIA has declined to comment on the case.<br />The defendants are charged with abducting cleric and terror suspect Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where he claimed he was tortured in Egyptian custody.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/europe/EU-Italy-CIA-Trial.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/03/europe/EU-Italy-CIA-Trial.php</a></div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Obama aides talk torture with ex-generals</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: A dozen retired U.S. generals met with President-elect Barack Obama's top legal advisers Wednesday, pressing their case to overturn seven years of Bush administration policies on detention, interrogation and rendition in the war on terror.<br />"President-elect Obama has said that Americans do not engage in torture, that we must send a message to the world that America is a nation of laws, and that we as a nation should stand against torture. He believes that banning torture will actually save American lives and help restore America's moral stature in the world," said an official close to the transition who asked not to be named to discuss internal matters. "This meeting is timely and very helpful to advancing this work."<br />Among those who met with Eric Holder, Obama's pick to be attorney general, and Greg Craig, tapped to be White House counsel, were General Charles Krulak, a former Marine Corps commandant, and retired Marine General Joseph Hoar, former chief of the Central Command.<br />Hoar called the meeting "productive."<br />"It's important that the dialogue is going," Hoar said. "Part of the challenge here is big and philosophical. Part is nuts and bolts. How do you translate the rhetoric of the campaign and the transition period into action?"<br />The generals would like to see authority rescinded for the CIA to use harsh interrogation methods that go beyond those approved for use by the military, an end to the secret transfer of prisoners to other governments that have a history of torture, and the closing of the U.S. jail at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base.<br />President George W. Bush vetoed legislation championed by the retired officers that would have held the Central Intelligence Agency to the military's interrogation methods in March.<br />Obama has criticized the use of torture in interrogating detainees and promised to close Guantánamo Bay's military prison. The transition team official said no decisions about the detainee policies will be made until after the inauguration and Obama's full national security and legal teams are in place.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/04torture.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/04torture.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Guantánamo and China: A shared legal dead zone</strong><br />By Richard Bernstein<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />NEW YORK: The execution in China last week of Wo Weihan, accused in a secret trial of spying for Taiwan, brought with it the standard, requisite criticism from the Bush administration, and there's nothing wrong with that.<br />Indeed, China's dispatch of Wo despite global pleas for clemency came at the end of a judicial travesty complete with a bureaucratic cruelty all too familiar in China. Wo, a Taiwan native, educated in Europe, who ran a medical supply business in China, was arrested in 2005 and held for 10 months without access to a lawyer or to members of his family. He was said to have confessed - and after 10 months in the hands of China's Public Security Bureau, you would confess, too - but then recanted, on the ground that his confession was coerced.<br />The trial was held in total secrecy, with the evidence, if there was any, withheld on the grounds of national security. The charges were that Wo provided information about Chinese missile technology to Taiwan and also some personal information about the health of one of China's top leaders, a top secret in China.<br />Then, after allowing no contact with him for four years, Wo's two daughters were allowed to see him for half an hour Nov. 27.<br />According to one of them, who lives in Austria, the Chinese Foreign Ministry assured Austrian diplomats that there would be another opportunity for the family to visit the prisoner the next day, but before they could do so, he was brought to the execution ground and put to death with a bullet in his head.<br />"We are deeply disturbed and concerned that Wo Weihan was executed today," was the American government's official reaction, delivered by a press officer at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.<br />No doubt the concern is genuine. China's human rights record remains abysmal, but one price paid by the United States as it tries to bring pressure on Beijing is that some of the very things that China is accused of doing - preventing transparency, using national security to justify closed-door proceedings, bypassing the normal procedures in certain cases - are what the Bush administration has been doing at its detention center for alleged enemy combatants in Guantánamo Bay, and that certainly would seem to rob Washington of some of its moral authority.<br />"Guantánamo was all about trying to create a place that would be outside the jurisdiction of both American and international law, a dead legal zone," said Andrew Nathan, a political scientist at Columbia specializing both in China and in human rights law. "It was to deny the detainees any recourse to due process."<br />What makes Guantánamo similar to China, Nathan said, is that when it comes to matters deemed by the regime in Beijing to be of great importance, the entire country is a sort of dead legal zone, inside a closed system not subject to independent outside scrutiny by independent civilian courts.<br />Happily, there isn't much else in which China and the United States are comparable in this regard. Indeed, in the case of Guantánamo, as recent court rulings that have gone against the Bush administration demonstrate, the American system didn't fail to function. It all happened very slowly, but pro bono lawyers took up the cases of some detainees, journalists wrote about them, and independent judges, including judges appointed by Bush, have ordered that the Guantánamo detainees be allowed to appeal their incarceration to regular civilian courts.<br />Still, for all the important differences, what's striking is that both governments make the same basic argument to justify the policies they've pursued. In both instances, executive authority has found that certain situations are so immediate a threat to the national well-being that extrajudicial measures are justified in dealing with those situations.<br />That, after all, is how Guantánamo came into existence in the first place. It was a part of the effort following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to take unprecedented measures to prevent further attacks, and defenders of the administration's actions make just that point - there haven't been any terrorist attacks in this country since Sept. 11, and if we owe that fact to the extrajudicial measures being taken, then it's hard to argue that those measures weren't justified.<br />China's government of course makes the same argument - not in so many words but in so many actions.<br />Terrified of public disorder, and determined to ensure the absolute respect for their top leaders that, these leaders believe, public order requires, the country's ever-vigilant public security apparatus clamps down at the slightest sign of trouble. No doubt, those who administer justice in China genuinely believe that the threat of chaos in a country that, historically speaking, has had a lot of chaos, justifies their ruthlessness and their secrecy.<br />"The Chinese have created a simulacrum of a legal system," Nathan said, "and that's how they always respond to outside criticism on human rights. They say they are following their own rule of law. But not all rules of law are equal, and in China for any case that the party considers important, the courts do what the party tells them to do."<br />In the case of Guantánamo, the American courts have clearly not been following orders from the administration, and that's a very big difference with China. Guantánamo is a genuine exception in American history, not the rule, while in China, a kind of Guantánamo writ large is the system, and it works exactly the way the political leaders have designed it to operate.<br />"China is more decentralized than we think it is," Nathan said.<br />"Not all these things are decided at the level of the party central committee, but by the local party secretaries or the heads of public security. The role of the highest authorities is to tell the lower ones to just get it done, protect the state, do what you have to do, so we don't see any subversion."<br />Certainly in the case of Wo Weihan, somebody got it done, and it's hard to imagine anything getting done like that in the United States, thank God. Still, in the case of Guantánamo - and in the administration's early justification of torture - it does seem as if an American government took a page out of China's book.<br />Did we gain in security what we lost in moral authority as a result? History will tell eventually, but for the moment, I strongly doubt it.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/letter.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/letter.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Nixon's the one still preoccupied with enemies</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: In December 1972, when a less-complicated president might have been relishing a big re-election victory a month earlier, Richard Nixon had enemies on his mind.<br />One of them, North Vietnam, would soon be rained with bombs. Other foes of Nixon merely received his vitriol.<br />"Never forget," Nixon told his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, in a taped Oval Office conversation revealed Tuesday. "The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.<br />"Professors are the enemy," he repeated. "Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."<br />The conversation was on Dec. 14, 1972, four days before the U.S. unleashed a massive series of air attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong aimed at getting North Vietnam to negotiate more seriously in peace talks.<br />"We're going to bomb them," Nixon told Kissinger and an adviser, Alexander Haig, giving the go-ahead for one of the most controversial acts of the war. "We'll take the heat right over the Christmas period, then on January 3, it's Christmas withdrawal."<br />The Nixon Library, run by the National Archives, posted nearly 200 hours of White House tape recordings online and opened 90,000 pages of documents in its latest release of material from his administration.<br />The tapes include a conversation Nixon had with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin of the Soviet Union earlier in December. Nixon wanted the Soviets to lean on Hanoi to negotiate seriously in the lagging talks.<br />"Your government and I - we've got bigger fish to fry than this damn thing," Nixon said, meaning the war. "The main thing is to get this one out of the damn frying pan so that we can get busy, on with other things." He called Vietnam an "irritant."<br />Peace negotiations resumed in early January and quickly produced agreement, although largely on terms negotiated before the bombing.<br />Luke Nichter, a Nixon scholar, said the latest tapes show "President Nixon was more involved in the minutiae of the Vietnam War than we previously thought, at least during the Christmas bombing period." Nichter runs nixontapes.org, devoted to dissemination and analysis of taped meetings and phone calls involving Nixon.<br />More than 2,200 hours of tape recordings from the Nixon White House have been made available by the National Archives, with some 1,200 hours still to come. Paradoxically, said Nichter, "one of the most secretive presidential administrations in American history will over time become the best chronicled because of the tapes."<br />The latest documents underscore the degree to which Nixon's distrust of so much around him was reflected by his suspicious aides, who provided unflattering information on public figures and critics of the president, including their marital, mental and drinking problems.<br />In one memo, Governor George Wallace of Alabama was branded a "psychotic" who could be useful in making trouble for his fellow Democrats. The treatment for mental illness received by Senator Thomas Eagleton was reported to Nixon in other correspondence before that disclosure forced Eagleton to resign from the 1972 Democratic ticket headed by the anti-war presidential candidate George McGovern.<br />The records show that Nixon kept an exceptionally close eye on anti-war and civil rights protests, even the benign.<br />Mark Felt, a senior FBI official, regularly reported to Nixon and his national security team on events as minor as a high-school cafeteria fight in which seven students were arrested and a peaceful sit-in by 20 college students in Rhode Island.<br />Felt was up to much bigger things on the sly. He was Deep Throat, feeding revelations to The Washington Post about the Watergate scandal that ultimately would bring Nixon down.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/nixon.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/america/nixon.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><br /><div></div><br /><div><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw8IA8NrPPg4rSqwLA3sc5vgS8cSq-YzabQWzjuJLp7WnD7Rns5dAahUYAsh6gOlNwgns51vrNbUmFemBFiMpMs7CmDOHEeKQHnupdGzdgZprdu-pSkgl5-Ofg6devtpuntJxe58Zd5cU/s1600-h/DSC02458.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275795996133451186" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw8IA8NrPPg4rSqwLA3sc5vgS8cSq-YzabQWzjuJLp7WnD7Rns5dAahUYAsh6gOlNwgns51vrNbUmFemBFiMpMs7CmDOHEeKQHnupdGzdgZprdu-pSkgl5-Ofg6devtpuntJxe58Zd5cU/s320/DSC02458.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><br /><div><strong>British balance human gain versus the cost of drugs<br /></strong>By Gardiner Harris<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />RUISLIP, England: When Bruce Hardy's kidney cancer spread to his lung, his doctor recommended an expensive new pill from Pfizer. But Hardy is British, and the British health authorities refused to buy the medicine. His wife has been distraught.<br />"Everybody should be allowed to have as much life as they can," Joy Hardy said in the couple's modest home outside London.<br />If the Hardys lived in the United States or just about any European country other than Britain, Hardy would most likely get the drug, although he might have to pay part of the cost. A clinical trial showed that the pill, called Sutent, delays cancer progression for six months at an estimated treatment cost of $54,000.<br />But at that price, Bruce Hardy's life is not worth prolonging, according to a British government agency, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. The institute, known as NICE, has decided that Britain, except in rare cases, can afford only £15,000, or about $22,750, to save six months of a citizen's life.<br />The British authorities, after a storm of protest, are reconsidering their decision on the cancer drug and others.<br />For years, Britain was almost alone in using evidence of cost-effectiveness to decide what to pay for. But skyrocketing prices for drugs and medical devices have led a growing number of countries to ask the hardest of questions: How much is life worth? For many, NICE has the answer.<br />Top health officials in Austria, Brazil, Colombia and Thailand said in interviews that NICE now strongly influences their policies.<br />"All the middle-income countries - in Eastern Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East and all over Asia - are aware of NICE and are thinking about setting up something similar," said Dr. Andreas Seiter, a senior health specialist at the World Bank.<br />Even in the United States, rising costs have led some in Congress to propose an institute that compares the effectiveness of new medical technologies, although the proposals so far do not allow for price considerations. At the present rate of growth, medical costs will increase to 25 percent of the nation's gross domestic product in 2025 from 16 percent, with half of the increase coming from new drugs and devices, according to the Congressional Budget Office.<br />To arrest this trend, the United States needs to adopt at least some of NICE's methods, said Dr. Mark McClellan and Dr. Sean Tunis, who served earlier in the Bush administration as, respectively, administrator and chief medical officer of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Tunis said he spent a lot of time in government "learning about NICE and trying to adopt the processes and mechanisms they used, and we just couldn't."<br />That is because the idea of using price to determine which drugs or devices Medicare or Medicaid provides has provoked fierce protests.<br />But McClellan said the U.S. government would soon have no choice.<br />Drug and device makers, which once routinely denounced the British for questioning product prices, have begun quietly slashing prices in Britain to gain NICE's coveted approval, especially because other nations are following the institute's lead.<br />Companies have said that they will consult with NICE to help determine which experimental compounds enter the final stage of clinical trials, so the British agency's officials will soon influence which drugs enter the market in the United States.<br />The British government created NICE a decade ago to ensure that every pound spent buys as many years of good-quality life as possible, but the agency is increasingly rejecting expensive treatments. The denials have led to debate over what is to blame: company prices or the health institute's math.<br />Dr. Michael Rawlins, chairman of NICE, blames the industry, saying that some companies raise prices "to get profits up so their executives can get better bonuses." Dr. Karol Sikora, a prominent London oncologist, said that the institute's math was flawed and that Rawlins had a "personal vendetta" against cancer treatments.<br />Drug company executives who were interviewed uniformly promised to cooperate with NICE, but industry advocates were not so kind. Robert Goldberg, vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, an advocacy group financed by drug makers, likened Rawlins and his institute to terrorists and said their decisions were morally indefensible.<br />It all started with Viagra.<br />Pfizer's introduction of the drug in 1998 panicked British health officials, who feared it would wreck the government's health budget.<br />So they placed restrictions on its use. Pfizer sued, claiming the government's decision was arbitrary. To defend itself against similar claims, the government needed a standard method of rationing. The following year, NICE opened.<br />Asked whether he thought the institute would succeed, Frank Dobson, the Labour health minister at the time, famously said, "Probably not, but it's worth a bloody good try."<br />Britain's National Health Service provides 95 percent of the nation's care from an annual budget, so paying for pricey treatments means less money for, say, sick children. Before NICE, hospitals and clinics often came to different decisions about which drugs to buy, creating geographic disparities in care that led to outrage.<br />Now, any drug or device approved by the institute must be offered to patients. The institute has also written hundreds of treatment guidelines in hopes of improving, and making more consistent, basic medical care.<br />The institute has analyzed the cost-effectiveness of surgeries, cancer screening tests and medical devices. For example, it found that drug-coated cardiac stents were worth only $450 more than bare-metal ones.<br />Five years ago, the British health institute recommended more emergency room CT scans of patients suffering from head trauma - forcing hospitals to buy more machines.<br />But the decisions that get the most attention are those involving new drugs. Any drug that provides an extra six months of good-quality life for £10,000 - about $15,150 - or less is automatically approved, while those that give six months for $22,750 or less might get approved. More expensive medicines have been approved only rarely.<br />The spending limits represent the health institute's best guess for how much the nation can afford.<br />After consulting a citizens group, the institute decided that the nation should spend the same amount saving or improving the life of a 75-year-old smoker as it would a 5-year-old.<br />The academics got drug prices for the drug that Hardy, the kidney cancer patient, wanted, and the value of three other kidney cancer medicines, and calculated the costs of administering them and treating their side effects. Not one of the drugs came close to being worth their expense, the group suggested. In a preliminary ruling in August, a committee from NICE agreed.<br />The decision caused a firestorm. Twenty-six prominent British oncologists wrote a letter to The Sunday Times saying that the institute assessed cancer treatments poorly and that patients were remortgaging their homes to buy drugs freely available in other countries.<br />Flooded with anguished comments, the institute beat a hasty retreat. A preliminary consultation posted Nov. 5 said that the institute would instruct its appraisal committees to consider approving expensive life-saving drugs for terminal illnesses affecting fewer than 7,000 patients per year - a policy that seems tailor-made for Sutent and the three other kidney cancer drugs.<br />Negotiations with companies on possible discounts are continuing, and a committee is scheduled on Jan. 14 to make public this nascent compromise.<br />Agencies like NICE are popping up across the globe. Dr. Leonardo Cubillos, Colombia's national director of insurance, said that Colombia was using British methods to choose drugs for a national health insurance package.<br />Membership in an international group of drug and device assessment agencies has grown to 45 last year from 8 in 1992. The British institute has created a consulting group to advise foreign governments.<br />Much of the reason for this proliferation of agencies is that, while prescription drugs represent just 10.3 percent of overall medical spending in the United States, that share is 17 percent on average in industrialized countries.<br />As spending on drugs soared in many nations, often haphazardly, overall health often showed little improvement. So international aid agencies are advising governments to adopt British assessments and deliberations to improve their public's health while lowering costs, and officials are listening - a trend that is likely to accelerate during the present global economic slowdown.</div><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/europe/drug.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/europe/drug.php</a></div><br /><div></div><br /><div>******************</div><br /><div><strong>Britain takes more measures to stabilize housing<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />LONDON: The British government will guarantee interest payments worth up to £1 billion owed by homeowners struggling to keep up with mortgages, in an effort to prevent home repossessions, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday.<br />Brown's announcement to Parliament of the $1.5 billion plan came as a trio of British banks pledged to step up lending to small businesses or relax policies on home repossessions after repeated calls from the government and the Bank of England to increase lending in the face of recession.<br />The measures are the latest to cushion the economy from the effects of the global credit squeeze. The prime minister's efforts to bolster the banking industry has lifted the Labour government's popularity in opinion polls after Brown trailed the opposition Conservative Party for a year.<br />The Treasury will guarantee payments to banks, allowing homeowners to defer part of their payments by up to two years, Brown said. The eight largest lenders in Britain, accounting for 70 percent of outstanding mortgages, had agreed to the plan, he said.<br />"We will do everything in our power so no hardworking family who demonstrates to their bank a willingness to pay, that they can or should face the fear of repossession," Brown said. "We will make this possible by guaranteeing lenders against the risk of loss from those deferred interest payments."<br />HBOS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Nationwide Building Society, Lloyds TSB, HSBC Holdings and Barclays were among lenders who had agreed to the package. They have been reducing home loans because of the crisis.<br />"The government's recognition that it needs to offer increased support to help keep more people in their homes is welcome, and we will work with ministers to make sure the suggested scheme will help in practice," said Michael Coogan, director general of the Council of Mortgage Lenders.<br />Meanwhile, Lloyds TSB promised to pass on interest rate cuts by the Bank of England to small businesses. Its merger partner, HBOS, said it would provide more attractive loans to small and midsize companies. And Northern Rock, the nationalized British mortgage lender, said it would wait at least six months before moving to repossess homes when payments fall behind.<br />Two days ago, Royal Bank of Scotland, in which the British government has taken a majority stake, announced a similar grace period if owners fall behind on payments. Home repossessions by banks rose 12 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier as higher unemployment and a contraction in the economy left more Britons unable to pay off debt.<br />The government is also concerned that banks are refusing to increase lending even after a £37 billion rescue package. British banks approved 32,000 mortgages in October, the fewest since 1999 and a third of the 104,000 monthly average in 2007. Brown has said that returning lending to the levels of last year is one of the "strings attached" to his bank bailout plan.<br />Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, warned last week that banks must resume lending if Britain were to avoid a recession. But the government has so far shied away from requiring banks to increase lending. The Queen's speech on Wednesday, which outlined the government's agenda for the coming year, made no mention of any plans to compel an increase of bank loans.</div><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/ukbank.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/ukbank.php</a></div><br /><div></div><br /><div>*******************</div><br /><div><strong>Interest rate cut bets knock pound to 13-year low<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />By Jessica Mortimer and Christina Fincher<br />The pound hit its lowest level in almost 13 years on Wednesday as another batch of dire economic data convinced investors that the Bank of England would slash interest rates to prevent a recession turning into a slump.<br />The floundering pound fell to 80.4 on a trade-weighted basis, its weakest since January 1996, after data showed the dominant services sector contracted last month at its fastest pace since records began more than a decade ago.<br />Sterling has now fallen 17.5 percent on the trade-weighted index since the start of the year.<br />Wednesday's figures on the service sector followed surveys earlier this week showing the country's manufacturing and construction sectors are also in sharp decline.<br />Economists said the pace of deterioration in the economy and a sharp drop in price pressures gave the central bank ample room to follow up last month's stunning 150 basis point cut with another sharp reduction -- probably of 100 basis points on Thursday.<br />Such a move would take UK interest rates to 2 percent, their lowest level since 1951. Interest rates have never fallen below 2 percent since the Bank was created in 1694.<br />"A 100 basis point cut is now priced in across all markets," Deutsche Bank economist George Buckley said.<br />"There is a risk that they will do more and it would be very disappointing if they did less," he said, adding: "All these PMI figures are consistent with a sizeable drop in GDP."<br />Interbank markets suggest banks remain extremely reluctant to lend, despite a taxpayer-backed recapitalisation package.<br />By 3:37 p.m., the pound had fallen 0.8 percent on the day to $1.4783, while the euro strengthened to a session high of 86.07 pence -- closing in on last month's record high of 86.62 pence.<br />"The pound has been performing relatively poorly compared with other currencies, and the key to that is the Bank of England policy outlook," Standard Chartered currency strategist Rob Minikin said.<br />Markets believe that they will act aggressively and cut rates by 100 basis points on Thursday and probably take them down further after that," he added.<br />SHAKY OUTLOOK<br />Analysts say sterling is particularly vulnerable to deleveraging flows in the market that are boosting the low-yielding yen and weighing on currencies that previously had the attraction of higher yield.<br />Global recession worries and the prospect of a further round of monetary easing have left investors increasingly risk averse, weighing on riskier currencies such as the pound and sending UK stocks down three quarters of a percent.<br />Along with the Bank, central banks in the euro zone, New Zealand and Sweden are expected to cut rates substantially this week. The Australian central slashed borrowing costs by a full percentage point on Monday.<br />Evidence on Wednesday of easing UK inflationary pressures suggested the Bank has room for a sharp cut, with the British Retail Consortium reporting a drop in annual shop price inflation to 2.7 percent in November from October's 3.0 percent.<br />There was also more bad news overnight as a Nationwide survey showed UK consumer confidence tumbling six points in November to its lowest since the survey began in May 2004 as Britons fretted about impending recession.<br />"In short, conditions are dismal and are set to deteriorate further," RBS economist Ross Walker said in a note to clients.<br />A Reuters poll released on Monday showed 40 out of 62 economists expected UK interest rates to fall by 100 basis points to 2.00 percent on Thursday.<br />(editing by David Stamp/Victoria Main)</div><br /><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-STERLING.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/03/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-STERLING.php</a></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div><br /></div><br /><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong></div><br /><div><br />Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><br /><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-5545346710364339132008-12-03T09:47:00.019+01:002008-12-03T12:30:35.642+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Tuesday, 2nd December 2008<div align="center"><strong>Chances of WMD attack in big city greater</strong></div><div align="justify"><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The chances of a terror attack on a major city somewhere in the world using weapons of mass destruction are better than even, according to a task force mandated by the U.S. Congress, The Washington Post reported in its Tuesday edition.<br />A draft study by the panel warns of growing threats from rogue states, nuclear smuggling rings and the spread of atomic information in the developing world, the newspaper reported.<br />The panel, the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, singled out Pakistan as a grave concern because of its network of terror groups, history of instability and nuclear capabilities, according to the report.<br />"In our judgement, America's margin of safety is shrinking, not growing," the newspaper quoted from the draft report.<br />The panel said it is more likely that a terror attack, which could also include biological weapons, will take place by the end of 2013, according to the report.<br />Former Sen. Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat, chaired the commission with former Rep. James Talent, a Missouri Republican, as the vice chairman.<br />The commission recommended the overhaul of international non-proliferation treaties, including more robust inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the report said.<br />The panel also urged President-elect Barack Obama to take a tough line with Iran and North Korea.<br />(Reporting by John Poirier)</div><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-USA-ARMS-REPORT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-USA-ARMS-REPORT.php</a></div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong>1447</strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="left"><strong>IW: I woke at around 0500, made a cup of tea and foolishly tried to carry it down to my study with one crutch, in complete dark. It had snowed overnight, it was icy: slipped, banged my knee, couldn't reach my crutch, had my hand jammed between a gate post and a vertical fence post. Cursed.</strong></div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left"><strong>Returned to bed at around 0845hrs and there I remained. Bitten bad by the BD. </strong></div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left"><strong>Not a good day. Not a good day.</strong></div><div align="left"> </div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDcr9e0Xb-YMXzc_qEaNEg42rWYHt5ch2kB7Y7H0F1K1HKQ9oeGdSQYIdttoL4_f8Zjz0G8wPteQRP8NYE2sZ8bqpsPs2o5uS42VXTaJpaupql35ngudY8irT7ejYcWYfcgG9y_urrg2w/s1600-h/DSC02388.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275484160086164338" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDcr9e0Xb-YMXzc_qEaNEg42rWYHt5ch2kB7Y7H0F1K1HKQ9oeGdSQYIdttoL4_f8Zjz0G8wPteQRP8NYE2sZ8bqpsPs2o5uS42VXTaJpaupql35ngudY8irT7ejYcWYfcgG9y_urrg2w/s320/DSC02388.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Palm oil plantations available as prices drop</strong><br />By Niluksi Koswanage and Soo Ai PengReuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />KUALA LUMPUR: A slump in palm oil prices is giving Asia's cash-rich planters a chance to take over smaller companies that mushroomed in recent years as commodities boomed but are now struggling to survive.<br />Sime Darby of Malaysia, the world's biggest palm oil company in planted area, posted a 44 percent rise in quarterly earnings last week.<br />With a recovery in prices nowhere in sight, now may be the time to look for bargains, analysts said.<br />Well-established companies like Wilmar International in Singapore and Astra-Agro Lestari, which is listed on the Jakarta exchange, are in a strong position to buy land from what could be forced sales by newer plantations.<br />The newer estates are takeover targets "because when you first start out in this business, money only goes in one way and that is out," said Martin Bek-Nielson, executive director of the mid-sized United Plantations. "Takeover possibilities could appear if palm oil prices continue to stay at 1,400 to 1,500 ringgit for the next half year."<br />Palm oil prices have fallen by two-thirds after hitting a peak of 4,486 ringgit, or $1,239, in March, as commodities tumbled and demand waned. Prices are now near break-even for less efficient plantations.<br />Sime Darby's chief executive has said the global market turmoil provided a "once in a lifetime" opportunity to acquire undervalued assets. The company has a cash pile of about $1.5 billion.<br />Previous palm oil price slumps saw little industry consolidation, as there were fewer new estates and many more plantations were better established with mature oil palms.<br />Demand for palm oil had been bolstered by China's surging economy and record high crude oil prices, which lifted biofuels. Palm oil is used in a variety of products, from chocolate to makeup.<br />Sime Darby wants nearly to double its land bank to 1 million hectares, or almost 2.5 million acres, by 2011 from its current 522,363 hectares. It will probably do that by buying already planted land.<br />The two-year boom in prices saw new plantings in Indonesia and Malaysia rise by 1.1 million hectares to 11.4 million hectares, according to analysts and Reuters calculations.<br />Sime Darby has forecast palm oil prices to tick higher to 1,800 ringgit a ton in 2009. The break-even point for smaller planters is about 1,500 ringgit a ton, according to industry estimates.<br />"If the current downtrend protracts for a longer period, companies with high production costs will be the first to become distressed," said James Ratnam, plantation analyst at TA Securities in Kuala Lumpur.<br />The commodity is nine months into its latest downturn. Past troughs in the cycle have averaged 17 months, so some light at the end of the tunnel may enable companies to hold on, analysts said. Goldman Sachs said that, based on the past two cycles, when stock levels start falling, prices could soon bottom out.<br />Palm oil reserves stood at a record 2.09 million tons in October, according to data from the Malaysian Palm Oil Board.<br />Although palm prices are low, the cost of planted assets is still 50 percent higher than at the start of the boom. It costs 40,000 ringgit per hectare to buy land in Malaysia's Sabah and Sarawak States on Borneo island, the last frontier for the country's palm oil push, plantation officials said.<br />Kalimantan, the Indonesian side of Borneo, could be much cheaper, and more acquisitions are likely to happen there.<br />It is apparent that cash-strapped companies will not participate, "but the big boys that are cash-rich will have a lot to say and do," said Velayuthan Tan, chief executive of IJM Plantations, which bought 32,000 hectares of undeveloped land in Kalimantan.<br />While Wilmar and IOI, a Malaysian plantation operator, have indicated they will be cautious buyers, they also have large exposures to the downstream refining sector and have relatively high debt-to-equity ratios.<br />IOI shares have fallen 56 percent this year, while Sime Darby is down 45 percent compared with a 33 percent drop on the broader Malaysian stock index.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/deal03.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/deal03.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>One man's 3-year experiment in eating organic food - all the time</strong><br />By Tara Parker-Pope<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />Fruits, vegetables and animals can be 100 percent organic. What about people? In a fascinating experiment - on himself - Dr. Alan Greene, a pediatrician and author in Danville, California, decided to find out. For the last three years, Greene has eaten nothing but organic foods, whether he's cooking at home, dining out or snacking on the road.<br />He chose three years as a goal because that was the amount of time it took to have a breeding animal certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While food growers comply with organic regulations every day, Greene wondered whether a person could meet the same standards.<br />It hasn't been easy.<br />"This isn't a way of eating I could recommend to anybody else because it's so far off the beaten food grid," said Greene, 49, the founder of a popular Web site about children's health, drgreene.com. "It was much more challenging than I thought it would be, and I thought it would be tough. There were definitely days where there was nothing I could find that was organic."<br />Other writers have ventured off the traditional food grid, notably Barbara Kingsolver in "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral" and Michael Pollan in "The Omnivore's Dilemma." But what makes Greene's experiment remarkable is the length of time he devoted to it, and his effort to incorporate organic eating into the routines of everyday living. His findings offer new insight into the challenges facing the organic food industry and those who want to patronize it.<br />Organic farmers don't use conventional methods to fertilize the soil, control weeds and pests, or prevent disease in livestock.<br />Organic methods often lead to higher costs, and consumers can pay twice as much for organic foods as for conventional products.<br />To cut back on the cost of an organic diet, Greene said he had to cut back on meat. "Whenever you go up the food chain, the costs pile up," he said. "If you don't eat meat at every meal, if meat becomes more of a side dish than a centerpiece, you can fill the plate with healthy organic food for about the same price."<br />Questions remain about whether organic foods are really better for you. The data are mixed. In autumn, researchers from the University of Copenhagen reported on a two-year experiment in which they grew carrots, kale, peas, potatoes and apples using both organic and conventional growing methods. The researchers found that the growing methods made no difference in the nutrients in the crops or the levels of nutrients retained by rats that ate them, according to the study, published in The Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.<br />But other research suggests that organic foods do contain more of certain nutrients - almost twice as many, in the case of organic tomatoes studied for a 2007 report in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.<br />Greene said he was inspired to go all-organic after talking to a dairy farmer who noted that livestock got sick less after a switch to organic practices. He wondered if becoming 100 percent organic might improve his own health.<br />Three years later, he says he has more energy and wakes up earlier.<br />As a pediatrician regularly exposed to sick children, he was accustomed to several illnesses a year. Now, he says, he is rarely ill. His urine is a brighter yellow, a sign that he is ingesting more vitamins and nutrients.<br />At home, he said, the organic routine was relatively easy. Organic food is widely available, not just at natural and organic food stores but at traditional supermarkets. He also shopped at farmer's markets and joined a local community-supported agriculture group. Because he bought less meat, the costs tended to balance out. And his family (two of his four children still live at home) largely went along with the experiment.<br />On the road, though, life was more challenging. In corporate cafeterias and convenience stores, he looked for stickers that began with the number 9 to signify organic. When dining out, he called ahead; high-end restaurants were willing to accommodate his all-organic request.<br />Greene reached the three-year milestone in October, but his diet is still organic. He hasn't decided whether to keep going full tilt or to ease up in the interest of cost and convenience. In his latest book, "Raising Baby Green: The Earth-Friendly Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth and Baby Care" (Jossey-Bass), he advocates a "strategic" approach, urging parents to insist on organic versions of a few main foods, like milk, potatoes, apples and baby food.<br />The biggest surprise of the whole experience, he says, was that many people still don't know what "organic" means.<br />"It's surprising to me how few people know that organic means without pesticides, antibiotics or hormones," he said. "In stores or restaurants around the country, I would ask, 'Do you have anything organic?' Half the time they would say, 'Do you mean vegetarian?"'<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/healthscience/snparker.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/healthscience/snparker.php</a><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><strong>Infant death toll from Chinese tainted milk scandal raised to 6<br /></strong>By Andrew Jacobs<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />BEIJING: Chinese officials issued new figures Monday for the number of children affected by tainted dairy products, saying that as many as six babies might have been killed and nearly 300,000 sickened after consuming contaminated milk powder.<br />In its last update, in mid-September, the government set the death toll at three infants, with 50,000 others fallen ill after consuming milk laced with melamine, an industrial chemical used in plastics and fertilizers. The substance, which has also been found in eggs and animal feed, was added to thicken watered-down milk to fool tests that measure protein content.<br />The melamine scandal has devastated the Chinese dairy industry, leading scores of companies to order recalls and raising yet another round of questions about the safety of Chinese products. On Monday, the newspaper China Daily said milk exports had dropped by 92 percent since September, when news of the adulterated milk emerged.<br />The Ministry of Health issued a statement saying that 860 babies who drank tainted milk were still hospitalized with kidney or urinary tract problems; 154 of those were described as being in serious condition.<br />"Most of the sickened children received outpatient treatment only for small amounts of sandlike kidney stones found in their urinary systems, while a part of the patients had to be hospitalized for the illness," the ministry said.<br />In recent weeks, the government has announced a series of new measures intended to clean up the country's dairy industry, one of the largest in the world. In response to the surge of contaminated Chinese products, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month opened its first overseas inspection offices, with bureaus in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou.<br />The Chinese dairy industry may still be reeling from the scandal, but the landscape is not entirely bleak. On Tuesday, Bloomberg News said that the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Company would invest $100 million in a Chinese dairy-farm business. One of its partners would be China Mengniu Dairy, the largest liquid-milk producer in the country. Last year, the Chinese dairy industry was worth $18 billion.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/asia/milk.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/asia/milk.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3OXoIbVrAXWmvpev-vNPLUxeXVCn50iE0eQaIsaXNKlq_sZfmgpTty7UbKb7lvnjkVt8GqgjLKf8bJdvHdkvvqsLXc6QEJxYj_-Yq85xzfDtf_2a5FcdsOd7KanYKwOK0oVIYNtAR8Qk/s1600-h/DSC02389.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275484154597814066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3OXoIbVrAXWmvpev-vNPLUxeXVCn50iE0eQaIsaXNKlq_sZfmgpTty7UbKb7lvnjkVt8GqgjLKf8bJdvHdkvvqsLXc6QEJxYj_-Yq85xzfDtf_2a5FcdsOd7KanYKwOK0oVIYNtAR8Qk/s320/DSC02389.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Suspicious coffee shines light on spending in Brussels</strong><br />By James Kanter<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: Alexander Just, a European Union archivist, may not be a coffee connoisseur. But the espresso from a new, state-of-the-art Italian machine at his office tasted strange enough that he was willing to shell out 70 from his own pocket to have it tested.<br />The findings? Astronomically high levels of nickel and elevated amounts of lead. Enough for the European Commission to pull the plug on all 20 of the machines - installed in January at a cost of about 5,000, or $6,350, each.<br />Soon the machines may be removed from the upper floors of the iconic Berlaymont, the building in Brussels where top European Commission officials have their offices.<br />There has been no evidence of anyone getting sick, but the problem is likely to give ammunition to EU critics who complain about excessive spending in Brussels - and trouble the commissioners themselves, who now may have to line up in the cafeterias with thousands of less lofty bureaucrats to get a cup of coffee.<br />A commission spokesman said it was "premature" to comment on whether the EU would need to ask for its money back - a sum amounting to about 100,000. The brouhaha has already degenerated into a court battle involving the Belgian authorities, who issued a Europe-wide health alert in November, and the manufacturer, Cimbali, which said its machines were not to blame.<br />It was not clear whether the Belgian alert was prompted by problems at the European Commission, or by separate complaints. But a Belgian court lifted the order Friday, according to the company.<br />"We confirm that our products are in compliance with all the international required standards," said Luca Dussi, the operational marketing and communications director for Gruppo Cimbali. He declined to comment on whether machines made by Cimbali contained nickel or lead in their manufacture.<br />Still, since the problem came to light, everyone with access to the machines at the Berlaymont, including cabinet members in the office of José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, has been told in a flurry of internal e-mail messages that they will have to lay off the coffee.<br />The Cimbali coffee machines are so-called "superautomatics" that grind the beans, select the quantity of milk and discard the spent coffee grounds, all at the touch of a button.<br />Cimbali, based near Milan, has been producing espresso and cappuccino machines since 1912. Cimbali operates subsidiaries in France, Spain, Britain and the United States but operates through a network of direct distributors elsewhere.<br />The machines were meant to be a perk for the most senior European Union officials - saving them and their members of cabinet from having to line up in cafés on other floors.<br />Some officials grumble that the Cimbali models replaced perfectly good coffee makers, and there was no need to spend European taxpayers' money on such lavish devices.<br />The indulgence turned into a health scare when Just, who works for Danuta Hübner, the commissioner for regional policy, notified the building services department of his findings. Just, who has a background in biology, had sent water samples from the machine to his native Austria for tests that had revealed vastly elevated levels of nickel and high amounts of lead.<br />"The result was shocking," Just wrote in a letter on Nov. 13 to the Office of Infrastructure and Logistics at the European Commission.<br />"Two parameters of heavy metals are above the legally allowed limit for drinking water and therefore should not be used for drinking anymore."<br />Just said his tests turned up levels of nickel more than 17,000 percent above the legal threshold, and levels of lead that were 16 percent above the threshold.<br />A note circulated to staff members Thursday warned that over-exposure to nickel could affect people with allergic tendencies by prompting skin problems or gastrointestinal disorders. Nickel would be "eliminated from 7 to 40 days after absorption depending on the quantity absorbed and length of exposure to the metal," the note said.<br />A "relatively low amount of lead" was detected and it was "unlikely that effects on the human organism would be detected by specific analyses," the note said, giving the name and number of a doctor for any employees concerned about their health.<br />Dennis Abbott, a spokesman for the commission, said that SGS, a company hired by the commission, the EU's executive arm, to carry out a second series of tests, had confirmed some of Just's findings.<br />Since then, the building services department has disconnected about 20 Cimbali machines - some of them M1 tabletop models.<br />"SGS found levels of nickel and lead that are of concern in 17 of the machines," Abbott said. "We can't switch these machines on if we have these concerns."<br />Abbott said the lead and nickel had been found in the water in the reservoir of the machines that is used to make the coffee. He said the test by SGS ruled out problems with the water supply to the building and the pipes connecting to the machines.<br />All the machines had been shut down and they eventually could be removed but he said the commission still was in talks with the supplier, Cimbali France, about whether the problem could be resolved.<br />Abbott said that the likelihood of health problems was very low because the machines only had been in service since January.<br />On Friday, the Belgian Council of State, a court, issued an order to suspend Belgium's health alert, according to the company.<br />"All Cimbali machines, including the model which was covered by the alert, can be marketed and will not be withdrawn from the European market," said Christian Montana, a lawyer representing Cimbali.<br />A spokesman for the Belgian Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain, reached late Tuesday, said he did not have enough details about the case to comment.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/coffee.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/coffee.php</a><br /><br />*******************<br /><strong>Downturn hits Massachusetts biotechnology companies</strong><br />By Todd Wallack<br />The Boston Globe<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />BOSTON: The pain on Wall Street has spread to the biotechnology companies in the Boston region, one of the industry's U.S. hubs. Small and midsize firms are cutting jobs, reducing salaries and shrinking their offices as it becomes increasingly difficult to raise capital.<br />On a nationwide basis in the United States, biotechnology companies raised $8.2 billion through the first nine months of the year, down 54 percent from a year earlier, according to Burrill, a life sciences investment firm based in San Francisco.<br />Though venture capital funding has slipped only slightly, companies have been able to raise far less through stock offerings, partnerships and loans because of the turmoil roiling the financial markets.<br />"It's a horrific time," said Michael Greeley, a general partner with Flybridge Capital Partners, which is based in Boston and invests in early-stage companies. "It's pain unlike any other period" for biotech companies, he said.<br />To survive, Massachusetts biotechnology companies have taken dramatic steps. CombinatoRx, a biotechnology company in Cambridge that is years away from marketing its first drug, said recently that it would cut 80 jobs, or two-thirds of its work force, to enable it to operate for at least four more years without raising additional cash.<br />"Access to capital has completely dried up, and none of us are sure when it will be available again at a price that is acceptable," said the chief financial officer, Robert Forrester.<br />"If you are going to cut, you might as well cut to a level that makes a fundamental difference in the business strategy," he said.<br />In the Boston suburb of Woburn, Cambria Pharmaceuticals recently eliminated some development programs to focus on its most promising potential drugs. The company, which is looking to develop therapies for neurological ailments like Lou Gehrig's disease, cut 6 of its 14 jobs, sublet half of its office space to a clean-energy company and began working on raising additional cash from its existing investors.<br />"You can probably throw a stone in any direction and find a CEO who is doing the same thing." the chief executive, Leo Liu, said.<br />Biopure, also based in Cambridge, cut most of its staff last month and reduced salaries to keep the company alive while it tried to raise money. Pro-Pharmaceuticals, in Newton, has cut managers' salaries 75 percent. And in July, Acusphere cut a fourth of its staff, or 24 people, and asked managers to take a 10 percent pay cut. The company, based in Watertown, has since raised $20 million in a deal with another company, Cephalon.<br />Some may not survive. More than a third of the 370 publicly traded U.S. biotechnology companies worth less than $1 billion have less than one year's cash available, and 22 have less than six months' cash remaining, according to the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the main industry trade group.<br />Investors have pummeled some small biotechnology stocks, "turning micro-caps into nanocaps," as one observer put it. Of the more than 80 life sciences companies in Massachusetts, at least two dozen have stocks trading at or below $1, suggesting doubts about their ability to survive.<br />But biotechnology companies with drugs on the market, like Biogen Idec and Genzyme, both based in Cambridge, already have substantial revenue and do not need to raise outside cash.<br />In fact, Genzyme said third-quarter sales rose 21 percent, to $1.2 billion.<br />The company is moving ahead with plans to expand its drug manufacturing plant in Allston and is building a new one in Framingham. Genzyme has 4,400 employees in Massachusetts, including 225 it has added this year.<br />Even so, a Genzyme spokesman, Bo Piela, said the company had been more cautious in its hiring "because of the economic uncertainty."<br />Still, the region's biotechnology firms are often said to have nine lives. Advanced Cell Technology, an embryonic stem cell company based in Worcester, west of Boston, for instance, warned in mid-July that it would run out of money by the end of that month unless it curtailed its operations or raised additional funding. But it has been able to prolong its life by closing some offices, reducing its payroll and raising $1 million from an Irish investor, Transition Holdings. And NitroMed, a company in Lexington that struggled to turn a profit with a heart drug aimed at blacks, signed a deal a month ago to sell its old business and engineered a merger with Archemix, a Cambridge company. The deal also enabled Archemix to become a public company, after it was forced to scrap its initial public offering because of the stock market turmoil. "The folks in this industry are really smart," said Robert Coughlin, president of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. "They always figure out a way to survive."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/technology/biotech.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/technology/biotech.php</a><br /><br />********************<br /><strong>Carbon detectives are tracking gases in Colorado</strong><br />By Susan Moran<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />BOULDER, Colorado: As she squeezed herself into a telephone-booth-size elevator to ascend a 984-foot tower in Colorado's eastern plains, Dr. Arlyn Andrews said with a grin, "This makes me want to go rock climbing."<br />It's a good thing she loves climbing tall structures. Andrews, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, climbs the tower periodically to make sure the narrow tubes running from the tower to analyzers nearby are properly taking continuous samples of carbon dioxide, methane and a cocktail of other greenhouse gases.<br />The elevator grumbled to a halt about five minutes later at an 820-foot perch, where the tower's slender shadow stretched into a neighboring sunflower field in the early morning sunlight. "We're able to detect the whole mix of emissions here what comes from automobile traffic, from industry, from residential development and from agriculture," Andrews said.<br />She is one of many carbon sleuths, scientists who track and analyze where greenhouse gases come from and where they go over time. Think of it like personal finances. To plan for a sound financial future, it helps to create a budget and keep track of how one is spending money. Similarly, atmospheric scientists need to develop a "budget" for greenhouse gases.<br />But the atmosphere delivers no monthly statement on greenhouse gas dynamics, so scientists have to tease out the information from disparate and often contradictory sources. The key task is measuring the sources, or emissions, of these planet-warming gases, and the "sinks" forests, cropland and oceans that absorb carbon. This budget can then inform intelligent climate-control policy, whether it be managing one forest or shaping national emissions regulations.<br />The quest to track carbon began 50 years ago when an atmospheric scientist, David Keeling, cranked up an analyzer and started running the world's first carbon dioxide-measuring observatory, at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Now, thanks to an expanding combination of atmospheric and land-based measuring techniques, scientists can quantify more precisely the sources and sinks of CO2. They also better understand how heat-trapping gases vary over time and space, not just globally but on continental and even regional scales.<br />By applying the various methods and checking them against each other and against computer models, scientists are also more accurately distinguishing certain human-caused greenhouse gases from those that stem from natural fluctuations in terrestrial and ocean ecosystems.<br />The stakes are much higher now than they were 50 years ago. Globally, carbon sinks are being outpaced by rising emissions. Atmospheric instruments like the NOAA-financed network of eight tall towers offer climate scientists a window into processes that control greenhouse gas emissions and sinks.<br />But uncertainty remains high often as high as estimates themselves. For instance, researchers think about half of the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere gets absorbed by oceans and land, but they do not know precisely where the gases come from and where they end up. This knowledge gap has serious policy implications; until it becomes clear where emissions are going, it will remain difficult to have verifiable credits for sequestering carbon.<br />"We need to make sure that carbon markets are affecting climate change, not just putting money in the hands of some companies and people," said Lisa Dilling, an assistant professor of environmental science at the University of Colorado, Boulder.<br />A vexing challenge is that surface inventory assessments based on measuring forests, agricultural fields and smokestack emissions, for instance generally do not agree with atmospheric measurements.<br />"We've got to close the carbon budget to know precisely what's going where," said Dr. Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University in Indiana.<br />Toward that goal, last April, Gurney started the Vulcan Project. Named after the Roman god of fire, Vulcan is a massive database and a graphic map that shows hourly changes of CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in every locale by every source, including vehicles, power plants and factories.<br />Another carbon budget-mapping tool for atmospheric scientists is called CarbonTracker, a data analysis system begun last year by Dr. Pieter Tans, a senior scientist at NOAA's Earth Systems Research Laboratory and his colleagues at NOAA. The online system shows how CO2 ebbs and flows across continents and how that varies year to year.<br />Tans started the tall tower network in 1992. He hopes to expand it to 30 structures from the current eight. The most advanced instruments were introduced last year in California one in San Francisco and the other in the San Joaquin Valley, near Sacramento.<br />This summer, a continuing study at a tall tower located on corn and soybean fields in West Branch, Iowa, revealed that the crops sucked a surprisingly large amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere during the summer growing season as much as 55 parts per million out of a background CO2-equivalent level of 380 parts per million.<br />Any farmer knows that corn grows fast and soaks up lots of carbon in the process, and later respires CO2 when it is harvested or left to decay. But this was the first time that scientists detected such a large reduction of CO2 inventory over a specific region during growing season. The study also showed a large drop in CO2 concentration from the previous summer, probably because floods delayed the growing season this year, Andrews said.<br />The network of tall towers has drastically improved on air samples taken from small airplanes. And the towers cover a broader area than shorter, land-based instruments like so-called flux towers that measure how many tons of CO2 flow in and out of a specific plot of land, roughly within a square kilometer.<br />In January, the next frontier of atmospheric CO2 measuring instruments will begin when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launches the first carbon-scanning satellite, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory.<br />Each day, the satellite will orbit Earth 15 times, taking nearly 500,000 measurements of the "fingerprint" that CO2 leaves in the air between the satellite and Earth's surface. The data will be used to create a map of CO2 concentrations that will help scientists determine precisely where the sources and sinks are showing differences in trace gases down to a 1 part per million precision against a background of 380 parts per million CO2 equivalent.<br />Ultimately, many scientists hope their discoveries will inform climate policies, like mandatory limits on emissions that many expect Congress will eventually impose.<br />"It's a national priority to understand the carbon budget so people can make smart, good policy," said Gurney of Purdue, adding that many scientists feel pressured to push the boundaries of knowledge in this field in their effort to slow global warming. "It's what motivates us to wake up in the morning."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/healthscience/02carb.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/healthscience/02carb.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>Earthquake rattles Taiwan but no reports of damage</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />TAIPEI: An earthquake measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale shook southern Taiwan on Tuesday, but there were no immediate reports of casualties or damage, officials said.<br />The epicentre of the quake, which struck at 3:16 a.m. British time, was 31 km (19.2 miles) northeast of Chenggong on the east coast, at a depth of 30 km, the Central Weather Bureau said in a statement.<br />Earthquakes occur frequently in Taiwan, which lies on a seismically active stretch of the Pacific basin.<br />One of Taiwan's worst-recorded quakes occurred in September 1999. Measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale, it killed more than 2,400 people and destroyed or damaged 50,000 buildings.<br />(Reporting by Ralph Jennings; Editing by Nick Macfie)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-QUAKE-TAIWAN.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-QUAKE-TAIWAN.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Brazil leader offers plans for recovery from rains</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />SÃO PAULO, Brazil: Brazil's president asked God to halt the devastating rains that have killed at least 116 people in a southern state and offered new plans on Monday to help tens of thousands of people rebuild ruined homes and businesses.<br />Continuing rains have hindered rescuers' attempts to find bodies of more victims claimed by the mudslides and floods in Santa Catarina State while making it tough for survivors to return home, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said on his weekly radio show.<br />"We're only asking God to stop the rains soon so that we can start to rebuild the state of Santa Catarina," he said.<br />Thirty-one people are still missing, and some officials have estimated that the death count could rise to as many as 150.<br />About 80,000 people were forced from their homes by storms that dumped more water on the region during the weekend of Nov. 22-23 than it normally gets in months. An additional 8,000 people were displaced in neighboring Rio de Janeiro State.<br />Da Silva said that the government might let people take money from their mandatory unemployment accounts to rebuild homes and businesses destroyed by mudslides, and that the state-owned Banco do Brasil S.A. might offer special loans for farmers hit hard by the floods.<br />He also called for a study on the causes of the devastation, saying that heavy rains alone should not have been able to cause such damage.<br />The aid would come on top of programs announced last week for $830 million in government emergency aid and $650 million in loans from the government-owned bank Caixa Economica Federal for people and businesses in the disaster zone.<br />Da Silva did not specify how much Brazilians would be able to withdraw from their unemployment accounts, which receive contributions from workers and employers.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/02brazil.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/02brazil.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsR6sA6XptHvKWajEtD_8hudRQTXHWB6Gn9geqy9HzhEk-b74QQwi3ERRIBeqHIH3CnXvCT1fjX0T2A9sxLQdu2B7Zs0dB9zLR-gvHiiB9EyG48bp-tmajChqFEWo4Zn3WZ4LfOFL6aXc/s1600-h/DSC02390.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275484155113288818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsR6sA6XptHvKWajEtD_8hudRQTXHWB6Gn9geqy9HzhEk-b74QQwi3ERRIBeqHIH3CnXvCT1fjX0T2A9sxLQdu2B7Zs0dB9zLR-gvHiiB9EyG48bp-tmajChqFEWo4Zn3WZ4LfOFL6aXc/s320/DSC02390.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/air.php">BA in merger talks with Qantas</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/03auto.php">GM asks for $18 billion as it tries to avoid collapse</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>Stuffing brand sponsors hot air in bus shelters</strong><br />By Stuart Elliott<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Critics claim that advertising is just a lot of hot air. For the next month, at certain bus stops, they will have a point.<br />In the latest example of a trend that is becoming increasingly popular among advertisers, heated air will descend from the roofs of 10 bus shelters in Chicago, courtesy of the Stove Top brand of roast meat stuffing sold by Kraft Foods. From Tuesday through the end of this month, Kraft is arranging for the company that builds and maintains the bus shelters, JCDecaux North America, to heat them, trying to bring to life the warm feeling that consumers get when they eat stuffing, according to Kraft.<br />Such "experiential marketing" is intended to entice consumers to experience products or brands tangibly, rather than bombarding them with pitches.<br />It is a response to the growing ability of consumers to ignore or avoid traditional advertising, thanks to technology like digital video recorders. Experiential marketing is also an acknowledgment that products and brands must offer alternatives to the interruptive model of peddling, which disrupts what consumers want to watch, read or hear. That model has been the mainstay of advertising for more than a half-century.<br />"Stove Top as a brand has a great equity in the area of warmth," said Ellen Thompson, brand manager for the stuffing at Kraft Foods in Glenview, Illinois. "This is an opportunity to expand into a multisensory experience."<br />The 10 heated shelters, primarily in central Chicago locations, will feature special posters that read: "Cold, provided by winter. Warmth, provided by Stove Top." The posters will also appear on 40 other bus shelters that will not have heated roofs.<br />JCDecaux North America, a unit of the global outdoor-advertising specialist JCDecaux, says this will be the first time it is heating bus shelters in the United States. The company has installed such heaters in other countries for other advertisers' campaigns. Those sponsored by British Gas included simulated fireplaces.<br />"Advertisers are looking for new and unique ways of reaching, and reaching out to, consumers," said Jean-Luc Decaux, co-chief executive at JCDecaux North America in New York, adding that it costs "a few thousand dollars" to equip each shelter with heat.<br />The fourth quarter, when marketers are striving mightily to stimulate sales as the year ends, typically brings a wide variety of experiential marketing tactics.<br />For example, Procter & Gamble, the world's largest advertiser, is sponsoring a couple of projects this month in New York. One has become an annual sponsorship of restrooms in Times Square, on behalf of brands like Charmin toilet paper.<br />Other brands wooing consumers with experiential efforts during the holidays in major markets include the ABC Family cable channel, Burger King, Jameson Irish whiskey, Memorex audio products, Remy Martin Cognac and TD Bank.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/technology/adco.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/technology/adco.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Tough economy converts Egyptian drivers to gas<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />By Cynthia Johnston<br />With black smoke belching from battered vehicles on the congested streets of Cairo and the sickly smell of exhaust hanging in the air, Mohamed Daoud's taxi glides quietly along on cheap, clean fuel.<br />His black and white cab is part of a growing fleet of roughly 100,000 vehicles that have been converted to run on cheap natural gas after the Egyptian government pushed for more reliance on greener energy.<br />Compressed natural gas (CNG), which produces fewer harmful emissions than gasoline or diesel, is catching on in the smog-shrouded northern cities and demand may grow further as the fuel becomes more widely available across the country.<br />But it is the tough economy, not the environment, that is leading a growing number of drivers to make the switch as the cost of even heavily subsidised petrol rises beyond what many Egyptians can afford.<br />The most populous Arab country is one of the Middle East's least well-endowed in energy reserves. Egypt has 1.2 percent of the world's gas and 0.3 percent of its oil.<br />"I am interested in the environment. But it (CNG) is also cheaper," said Daoud, who switched his taxi to run on natural gas five years ago. "I can bring in more profit."<br />"In this atmosphere, we can't use petrol," he added as he waited for his taxi to be worked on at a bustling CNG service station, the first in Africa and the Arab world.<br />The Egyptian government, hit this year by inflation and a larger-than-ever bill for bread subsidies for the poor, slashed petrol subsidies in a lightning move in May to cover the cost of pay rises for civil servants.<br />Long accustomed to cheap petrol, Egyptian consumers woke to prices that had risen by up to 57 percent overnight for the highest grade of petrol. Popular 90-octane fuel surged 35 percent to 1.75 Egyptian pounds (0.21 pounds) per litre, expensive by local standards but still well below free-market prices.<br />An equivalent amount of compressed natural gas sells for a quarter of the price.<br />ENERGY CRUNCH<br />Worried about an energy crunch in coming decades, Egypt wants to diversify its resources. That includes developing renewable energy like wind and nuclear power.<br />Lending urgency to the drive for alternative energy is Egypt's limited supply of fossil fuels, especially crude oil. Experts say Egypt's proven oil and gas reserves will last for roughly three more decades.<br />Egypt wants to generate 20 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2020, according to the country's New and Renewable Energy Authority. It already gets significant hydroelectric power from the Aswan High Dam.<br />Cairo also wants to build several nuclear power stations and has secured U.S. backing for the project, for which it is seeking Russian expertise. But it is also encouraging other forms of greener energy.<br />Wind farms dot the country's Red Sea coast, and one of Egypt's largest industrial firms, El Sewedy Cables, launched a wind energy subsidiary in October to build turbines. It expects sales of 435 million euros by 2011.<br />Egypt has more gas than crude, with reserves of around 76 trillion cubic feet, making natural gas an attractive and somewhat greener alternative to petrol.<br />With the cost of energy subsidies eating up nearly a fifth of the budget, the government is expected to keep raising fuel prices on a regular basis, possibly annually, although recent falls in global oil have eased some pressure.<br />"I think they are logically going to wait until next year when inflation is down to single digits again ... possibly in the second half of 2009," said Reham el-Desoki, senior economist at investment bank Beltone Financial.<br />Cutting energy subsidies would free up government funds for public services or infrastructure and may also spur more vehicle conversions to natural gas.<br />EXPANSION PLANS<br />State-owned natural gas holding company Egas expects the number of natural gas vehicles in Egypt to rise sharply to 300,000 by mid-2012 as investors enter the market, although it calls that goal "ambitious."<br />The number of fuelling stations will more than treble in the same period to 390, and natural gas will be available up and down the populous Nile Valley and in the Sinai peninsula, Egas said in a written statement to Reuters.<br />Drivers rushed to natural gas after the cut in petrol subsidies, with the number of conversions per month surging to several thousand, according to Egypt's leading conversion and refuelling firm, Cargas.<br />Around 70 percent of Egyptians who have converted their vehicles are taxi drivers, many of whom ply the streets in battered fuel-guzzling vehicles for cross-town fares ranging from 5 to 10 pounds. They operate on razor-thin margins.<br />Conversion costs around $1,000 and takes less than half a day, and drivers can pay in instalments.<br />Private consumers are also making the switch, converting fuel-hungry sport utility vehicles and luxury sedans as well as older, less fuel-efficient vehicles. Private cars now account for more than 17 percent of CNG vehicles.<br />Cargas Managing Director Mahmoud Aly El Newehy said his firm was also planning to expand conversion of diesel vehicles, including minibuses, after a successful pilot program. Cargas would also offer know-how to other countries in the region seeking to follow Egypt's example.<br />"There is no country in the Middle East like Egypt. We are the pioneer," Newehy said. "We are not only ready to give the know-how ... We are ready to construct and build stations to operate in other countries."<br />($1 = 5.53 Egyptian pounds)<br />(Additional reporting by Simon Webb in Dubai; Editing by Peter Millership and Sara Ledwith)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-EGYPT-GAS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-EGYPT-GAS.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb-DQinODmP2OAo-_mICPfCo_jeuRzJE6julG-2vc4wgGcBJbkNVrtyoLMnTTqjOPWCBwJRKwSqEeLgk-U241IjT2pzJHpOpVUmf_LzHRo4LOT-bgkZ5o2YgyKs7NMIrMpECL9e_uIf0E/s1600-h/DSC02391.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275484154729087026" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb-DQinODmP2OAo-_mICPfCo_jeuRzJE6julG-2vc4wgGcBJbkNVrtyoLMnTTqjOPWCBwJRKwSqEeLgk-U241IjT2pzJHpOpVUmf_LzHRo4LOT-bgkZ5o2YgyKs7NMIrMpECL9e_uIf0E/s320/DSC02391.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Sarkozy warned of fallout from Dalai Lama meeting</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />BEIJING: China warned French President Nicolas Sarkozy to call off a planned meeting with the Dalai Lama, saying on Tuesday that it was up to Sarkozy to create the right conditions for putting China-EU relations back on track.<br />The French leader, who holds the rotating presidency of the European Union until the end of the year, has said he will meet the Dalai Lama in Poland on December 6.<br />China pulled out of a long-planned Monday summit with the EU over Sarkozy's scheduled meeting with the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader, whom Beijing reviles for demanding self-determination for his mountain homeland.<br />There now seems little chance that Sarkozy will abandon the meeting. But a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman nonetheless pressed that demand, warning that the dispute was clouding broader ties with the EU, China's biggest trade partner.<br />"France is clear about China's principled stance and major concerns," the spokesman, Liu Jianchao, told a news conference in Beijing.<br />"Now is the time for the French side to make an important decision on this issue, and we hope it will make the important choice to create a healthy atmosphere and conditions for advancing Chinese relations with Europe and France."<br />The 73-year-old Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in the region, occupied by People's Liberation Army troops from 1950. Beijing appears to be stepping up pressure to discourage Western leaders from meeting him.<br />Sarkozy was the focus of Chinese public anger earlier in the year after he suggested that he may not attend the Beijing Olympic Games in August over concern about policy in Tibet, where China cracked down after riots and protests against its rule.<br />Chinese citizens called for boycotts of French companies and goods after disruption to the Olympic torch relay in Paris. And now Chinese officials appear to be seeking to calibrate their words to brandish their anger but avoid fanning renewed boycotts and protests.<br />Asked about renewed boycott calls that have spread on the Chinese internet, Liu said: "China places much importance in relations with Europe and France...We also hope the public at home will view calmly China's ties with Europe and France."<br />But Liu also obliquely warned that Sino-French relations could suffer damaging reverberations if Sarkozy goes ahead with the meeting.<br />"The facts show that when both sides' major concerns are respected, Sino-French relations can develop in a rapid, healthy and stable way," Liu said. "Otherwise, major problems can arise."<br />(Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Nick Macfie)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-CHINA-FRANCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-CHINA-FRANCE.php</a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDmJzlMwClTi6Uqdkg0dFGUSC-qeozkQdzYUs9bzDmL2y61GVgB1K5J88Ds0LBSA55xCMRbeQPdyzvsGZ2NAZzrzw9R5Wq0pcm65ZC_PLFMB0ubW69-ejyD5Sk9WIqW0E4YKz6N1ZLCtM/s1600-h/DSC02392.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275484149825390258" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDmJzlMwClTi6Uqdkg0dFGUSC-qeozkQdzYUs9bzDmL2y61GVgB1K5J88Ds0LBSA55xCMRbeQPdyzvsGZ2NAZzrzw9R5Wq0pcm65ZC_PLFMB0ubW69-ejyD5Sk9WIqW0E4YKz6N1ZLCtM/s320/DSC02392.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><strong>India insists Pakistan hand over 'fugitives'<br /></strong>By Robert F. Worth<br />India insists Pakistan hand over 'fugitives'<br />By Robert F. Worth<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />MUMBAI: With tensions high between Islamabad and New Delhi after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the Indian foreign minister said Tuesday that his country had demanded that Pakistan arrest and hand over about 20 people wanted under Indian law as fugitives.<br />The demand was made when India summoned Pakistan's ambassador on Monday evening and told him that Pakistanis were responsible for the terrorist attacks here last week and that they must be punished.<br />"We have in our démarche asked for the arrest and handover of those persons who are settled in Pakistan and who are fugitive of Indian law," Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said in New Delhi on Tuesday. About 20 names were presented to the Pakistani envoy, he said.<br />The request was the first known concrete demand India has made to Pakistan since the bloody rampage last week that killed at least 173 people, not including the gunmen. The authorities revised the number downward Monday, saying that some names had been counted twice.<br />The fugitives are not believed to be linked directly to the latest attacks in Mumbai, and the request for their extradition - made by India before - may be a sign that it is trying to take advantage of the atmosphere since the attacks to gain concessions.<br />Facing anger directed against the Indian government and Pakistan, officials of the Indian Foreign Ministry suggested that those who planned the attacks were still roaming free in Pakistan and that they expected "strong action would be taken" by Pakistan, according to a statement released by the ministry.<br />In an initial response, Pakistan seemed eager to lower the levels of easily ignited passion that, in the past, have engulfed the two nuclear-armed neighbors to three wars. The Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, offered in a televised address to conduct a joint investigation with India into the Mumbai killings, Reuters reported, and said that now was not the time for a "blame game."<br />"Pakistan wants good relations with India," he said.<br />According to news reports Tuesday, many of the fugitives sought by India were people it has been trying to arrest for years. They include Dawood Ibrahim, described in news reports as a powerful gangster and India's most-wanted fugitive, who was accused of organizing bombings in Mumbai in 1993.<br />The list also includes Masood Azhar, a suspected terrorist freed from prison in India in exchange for the release of hostages aboard a hijacked Indian Airlines aircraft in December 1999, news reports said.<br />President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan said in a television interview Monday night that if India shared the results of its investigation, Pakistan would "do everything in our power to go after these militants."<br />U.S. and Indian intelligence officials said there was strong evidence tying the attacks to militants inside Pakistan. Senior U.S. officials said satellite intercepts of telephone calls made during the siege directly linked the attackers to operatives in Pakistan working for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant Islamist group accused of carrying out terrorist attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir and elsewhere.<br />The same group has been mentioned by European security officials as being linked to the attacks. The American officials said there was still no evidence that the Pakistani government had a hand in the operation.<br />Meanwhile, The Associated Press reported that an official in Washington said that the United States had warned India before the attacks that terrorists were plotting a mostly waterborne assault on Mumbai. The AP quoted a senior U.S. administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.<br />More details emerged about the identity of the attackers and the nature of their attacks. The chief of the Mumbai police, Hassan Gafoor, said he had evidence that the gunmen came from Karachi and had been on a "suicide mission," with no intention of returning, Bloomberg reported.<br />He added that the 10 attackers divided into five groups of two each, hailed five taxicabs and blew up two of the vehicles, the news agency quoted him as saying.<br />With elections just months away, the Indian government wants to be seen as acting decisively in the face of the atrocities. But it could be accused of raising a red herring if it does not furnish convincing evidence for its claims of Pakistani involvement.<br />There is also a groundswell of anger toward Pakistan here, and the attacks have raised tensions between the countries to a level not seen since 2001, when a suicide attack on the Indian Parliament pushed them to the brink of war.<br />The ominous atmosphere poses a particular challenge for the United States, a strong ally of India that also depends on Pakistan for cooperation in fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Renewed tensions could distract Pakistan from that project.<br />Bush has dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to India, where she is expected to arrive Wednesday.<br />Nine of the 10 men who India says carried out the attacks are now dead; the last is in custody.<br />India's assertion that the attackers were all Pakistanis echoes a claim by the one attacker who was captured, identified as Ajmal Amir Qasab, the joint commissioner of the Mumbai police, Rakesh Maria, said at a news conference. Qasab also said he was a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Maria said.<br />But no identification documents were found and some of the attackers had fake Indian papers, he added.<br />Maria also said there had been only 10 attackers total, denying earlier suggestions by public officials that there had been more. But it remains unclear whether the attackers had stationed some accomplices on the ground before the violence began Wednesday night.<br />Some new details have emerged about the difficulties faced by the Indian police commandos who responded to the killings. The attackers used grenades to booby-trap some of the bodies in the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower and the Oberoi hotel so that they would explode when they were moved, Maria said.<br />That tactic made fighting the attackers more difficult, and significantly delayed the cleanup after the violence ended, the inspector said.<br />The last militants were routed Saturday morning, but the Taj hotel was not returned to the control of its owners until Monday morning.<br />Those details seemed unlikely to blunt the rising public anger at the government's handling of the attacks, which have been widely described here as India's Sept. 11. The ease with which the small band of attackers mowed down civilians in downtown Mumbai, and then repelled police commandos for days in several different buildings, has exposed glaring weaknesses in India's intelligence and enforcement abilities.<br />Indian intelligence officials issued at least one warning about a possible attack on the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, but that was in September. Security was increased for a while and then relaxed, intelligence officials said.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/asia/mumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/asia/mumbai.php</a></div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Fear grows in Kashmir in aftermath of Mumbai attacks</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />GARKOT, Kashmir: When India blamed "elements" in Pakistan for the attacks in Mumbai last week, fear gripped Kashmir, the region that has been the front line of the two countries's rivalry and strife for over 60 years.<br />There has been no unusual activity or heightened troop movement in recent days along the Line of Control that divides the disputed region between the nuclear-armed rivals.<br />But Pakistan has said it may move forces from operations on the Afghan border, where it is fighting Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents, to the Indian border if relations worsen.<br />"They spit anger on Kashmir when something wrong goes between them," said Jabbar Khan, 80, in the village of Garkot, on the heavily militarized frontier.<br />"There's a sense of foreboding, as if war might at any minute break out," he said. "We thought the days of terror were over, but these two countries are hopeless."<br />Kashmir has a Muslim majority, but it is claimed by both Hindu-dominated India and Islamic Pakistan. The dispute has led to two of the three wars between the neighbors since they were born out of British India in 1947.<br />The two nations, both by then with nuclear weapons capabilities, were on the brink of a fourth war in 2002 after an attack on India's Parliament was blamed on Islamist militants based in Pakistan.<br />Approximately 47,000 people have died in two decades of insurgency in Indian-ruled Kashmir - an insurgency that New Delhi says is supported by Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denies.<br />Although a high turnout in state elections currently being held in Kashmir, including one phase last Sunday, would appear to indicate a sense of normalcy, the attacks in Mumbai have cast a long shadow.<br />India has said the attacks, in which 173 people were killed, were carried out by militants from Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the groups that has been fighting Indian rule in Kashmir.<br />At the height of the attacks, a militant holed up in a Jewish center in Mumbai called a television channel and said: "Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir? Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims? Are you aware how many of them have been killed in Kashmir this week?"<br />At the Line of Control, the two armies regularly exchange fire, although that has dropped considerably since a peace process began in 2004. When tensions rise in the two capitals, the clashes become more frequent.<br />Hundreds of civilians have been killed in the clashes, and with the Line of Control just about 100 meters, or 325 feet, from Garkot, the village has borne a share of the casualties.<br />"Fear has returned, I am scared, like any villager would be here," said one 45-year-old, housewife, Taja Jan. "I have asked my children to pay attention and be vigilant if shelling starts."<br />Around Garkot, located on the slopes of a pine tree-covered mountain, artillery guns are draped with wire netting. Both sides have scores of military posts in the area.<br />As the fear rises in Kashmir, some villagers are also getting angry.<br />"For the past 60 years we have been living in constant trouble and fear," said Basharat Qadri, a government employee. "Let there be a war, a decisive one, so that future generations live in peace."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/asia/kashmir.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/asia/kashmir.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div><strong>Ten wounded in train bomb blast in India Assam state</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />GUWAHATI, India: At least 10 people were wounded after a bomb ripped through a passenger coach of a train in India's troubled state of Assam, officials said on Tuesday.<br />"So far we have information of ten people wounded, two of them are in serious condition," Jayanta Sarma, spokesman for the railways in Assam, told Reuters.<br />No one has claimed responsibility yet.<br />Separatist rebels are often blamed for attacks in India's Assam state, a remote region riddled by insurgencies over the last few decades.<br />But coordinated bomb blasts in Assam in October, which killed at least 77 people, were blamed on Islamist militants from neighbouring Bangladesh in league with separatists.<br />(Reporting by Biswajyoti Das; Writing by Alistair Scrutton; Editing by)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-ASSAM-BLAST.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-ASSAM-BLAST.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Rice flies to India to help ease tension<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />By C. Bryson Hull<br />U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was flying to New Delhi on Tuesday to try to ease tension between India and Pakistan that has surged over the Mumbai attacks and put at risk U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the region.<br />The three-day rampage by 10 Islamist gunmen that turned India's financial capital into a televised war zone last week stoked longstanding Indian anger that Pakistan is unwilling or unable to stop militants on its soil from attacking India.<br />Rice cut short a European tour to go to New Delhi to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh whom is under election-year pressure to craft a muscular response to opposition criticism that his ruling Congress party is weak on security.<br />Rice played down reports that India had been warned by the United States: "The problem with terrorism is that information is useful but it is not always something that you can prevent," she told reporters in Brussels on Tuesday.<br />On Monday, India renewed a longstanding demand for about 20 fugitives it believes are hiding in Pakistan.<br />Officials said the list includes Dawood Ibrahim, a Mumbai underworld boss blamed for 1993 bombings in Mumbai that killed 250, and Maulana Masood Azhar, a Pakistani Muslim cleric freed from jail in India in exchange for passengers on a hijacked jet.<br />Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said military action was not being considered but later warned a peace process begun in 2004 was at risk if Pakistan did not act decisively.<br />His Pakistani counterpart offered a joint probe to find the militants responsible for the killing spree in Mumbai in which 183 people were killed.<br />"We don't want to do anything in haste. We don't want to do anything that fuels confrontation," Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told reporters after an all-party meeting on relations with India. "We want to defuse the situation."<br />Islamabad has yet to answer the demand for the fugitives.<br />Pakistan has warned that any military escalation by India would prompt it to shift troops to the Indian border, and away from its western frontier with Afghanistan where U.S. forces are carrying out an anti-militant campaign.<br />The United States, Britain and the European Union this week urged Pakistan's civilian government to cooperate with the probe. Islamabad denied involvement and condemned the attacks, and has said it is battling the same kind of enemy at home.<br />Mumbai's police chief Hasan Gafoor said the attackers had trained for a year or more in commando tactics.<br />Azam Amir Kasav, the only gunmen of the 10 not killed by commandos, told investigators he is a Pakistani citizen from Punjab, Gafoor said.<br />Investigators have said a former Pakistani army officer led the training, organised by the Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba group blamed for a 2001 attack on India's parliament. Ibrahim is said to be one of its financial backers.<br />The 2001 attack nearly set off the fourth war between the two countries since Muslim Pakistan was carved from Hindu-majority India in 1947 after independence from Britain.<br />U.S. officials say the attacks bear the hallmarks of operations by groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, both of which have fought Indian rule in Kashmir.<br />"I don't think we can rule out al Qaeda, I just don't think we know at this point," a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.<br />Many Indians have expressed anger at apparent intelligence lapses and a slow security reaction to the attacks against Mumbai's two best-known luxury hotels and other landmarks in the city of 18 million.<br />(Reporting by New Delhi, Mumbai, Islamabad and Washington bureaux, Sue Pleming in Brussels and Adrian Croft in London; Writing by Bryson Hull; Editing by Richard Balmforth)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>H.D.S. Greenway: The unhealed wound of Kashmir</strong><br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />If the twin towers of the World Trade Center seemed to symbolize New York, how much more does the storied Taj Mahal hotel, with its overwrought architecture and mock Mughal flourishes, symbolize the great, rambling city of Bombay, which the Indians now call Mumbai.<br />When it was built in 1903 - the dream of Jamsetji Tata, who named it after India's most enduring monument - it was the first building in Bombay to be lit by electric lights. Today the Tata Group is among India's greatest industrial conglomerates with a worldwide reach.<br />The triumphal arch between the hotel and the bay, The Gateway to India, was built to commemorate the 1911 landing of the king - Emperor George V - at the height of the British Empire, and through it marched the last British soldiers to leave India, the Somerset Light Infantry, in 1948, when the imperial sun was setting and India was newly free.<br />The maharajas in the Taj lobby were replaced by industrial moguls and high-end foreigners, and the hotel became the place where well-off Indians had their weddings and their grand occasions, just as much a symbol of the new India shouldering its way onto the world stage as of the colonial past.<br />The terrorists knew that, of course, as they slipped by the Gateway to attack the Taj. Terrorists are great ones for symbolism, and to strike Mumbai was the equivalent of striking New York with Hollywood thrown in.<br />India points the finger toward Pakistan, and it's becoming clear that the unhealed wound of Kashmir is spreading its gangrenous grievance yet again. The mostly Muslim region was assigned to India when the subcontinent was being partitioned, and the Muslim population remains unreconciled to Indian rule.<br />The terrorists seemed so familiar with their targets, including a hard-to-find Jewish center. One wonders if they had local help. How sad for India if local Muslims were involved. Although a minority, Muslims in India represent one of the world's biggest Muslim populations, after Indonesia and Pakistan, which was created as a Muslim homeland. Communal violence has always been the lethal gene in the Indian body politic, and Mumbai's Muslims were hunted down and massacred by angry Hindus as recently as 1993.<br />One terrorist screamed "Remember Babri Masjid!" - a mosque destroyed by Hindu nationalists in 1992. Another cried "Remember Godhra!" the scene of anti-Muslim riots in Gugarat six years ago.<br />Local elections have begun in India, leading up to a general election next year, and the Hindu nationalist opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, longs to paint the ruling Congress Party as soft on terrorism and national security.<br />The big question is to what degree will Pakistan be blamed? A similar attack on the Indian Parliament seven years ago brought the two countries to the brink of war. Pakistan wants no trouble with India while a consuming fire of Islamic militancy blazes in its own country. But elements of Pakistan's military and security forces have been known to give succor and support to militants just in order to bedevil India over Kashmir. The terrorists clearly hoped to worsen Indo-Pakistan relations.<br />India and Pakistan have fought several wars, most of them over Kashmir, and Pakistan feels threatened by India's growing influence in Afghanistan. India, in turn, fears becoming a war zone itself, with constant bombings and terrorist outrages, some of them traceable to Pakistan.<br />The British partition of India 60 years ago, which cost so many lives and so much anguish, was designed to resolve the problems between Hindus and Muslims. It did not. The grievances growing out of that partition live on to poison both successor states to the British Raj.<br />This is a nightmare for the incoming Obama administration, which, like its predecessor, wants peace between the two nuclear neighbors and Pakistan's attention focused on its own growing Islamic insurgency.<br />The danger is that an attack this spectacular can trigger an overreaction that will create more terrorists, to which the actions of the Bush administration after 9/11 so sadly attest. Hopefully, India will prove the wiser.<br />But most certainly, the Taj will rise again.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edgreenway.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edgreenway.php</a></div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>Fresh blood from an old wound</strong><br />By Pankaj Mishra<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />Midway through the murderous rampage in Mumbai, one of the suspected gunmen at the besieged Jewish center called a popular Indian TV channel. Speaking in Urdu (the primary language of Pakistan and many Indian Muslims), he ranted against the recent visit of an Israeli general to the Indian-ruled section of the Kashmir Valley. Referring to the Pakistan-backed insurgency in the valley, and the Indian military response to it, he asked, "Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir?"<br />In a separate phone call, another gunman invoked the oppression of Muslims by Hindu nationalists and the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. Such calls were the only occasions on which the militants, whom initial reports have tied to the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, offered a likely motive for their indiscriminate slaughter. Their rhetoric seems all too familiar. Nevertheless, it shows how older political conflicts in South Asia have been rendered more noxious by the fallout from the "war on terror" and the rise of international jihadism.<br />Pakistan, a nation-state founded on Islam, has long claimed Muslim-majority Kashmir, and has fought three wars with India over it since 1947. In the early 1990s, as an anti-India insurgency in Kashmir intensified, groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba became the Pakistani government's proxies in its war of attrition with India.<br />American pressure after 9/11 forced Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, to ban Lashkar-e-Taiba, which had developed links with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. With Musharraf's departure from office in September, it would be no surprise if this turned out to be the Muslim group's first major atrocity since 2001.<br />Pakistan's new civilian government is too weak to control either the extremist groups within the country or the various rogue elements within its military and intelligence. The American military was reported to have started bombing supposed terrorist hideouts inside Pakistan's borders even as Musharraf stumbled to the exit. As its increasingly desperate pleas to the Bush administration to stop the attacks go unheeded, Pakistan's government appears pathetically helpless to its own citizens.<br />The sense of humiliation and impotence that this loss of sovereignty creates in Pakistan, a country with a strong tradition of populist nationalism, cannot be underestimated.<br />Meanwhile, India's influence in Afghanistan has grown as it pours reconstruction money into the country, as have its military ties with Israel. Add to this the Bush administration's decision to reward India with a generous nuclear deal and to more or less ignore Kashmir, where in August Indian security forces brutally suppressed the biggest nonviolent demonstrations in the valley's history, and recent attacks against the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, and now in Mumbai begin to appear to be connected by more than chronology.<br />Meanwhile, Indian intelligence experts suspect that jihadists and disaffected members of Pakistan's armed forces and intelligence agencies have forged closer links and, as the string of recent bomb attacks on Indian cities reveals, are rapidly making new allies among the 13 percent of Indians who are Muslim.<br />It is very likely that Barack Obama will take a different tack from the Bush administration in antiterrorism efforts in South Asia. In an interview with MSNBC last month, he said that his administration would encourage India to solve the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan, so that Islamabad can cooperate with the United States in Afghanistan.<br />The idea that the road to stability in South Asia goes through Kashmir is as persuasive as the notion that the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem. It is also equally hard to realize. Obama could act quickly to stem growing extremism in Pakistan and strengthen civilian authority by ending American missile attacks within its borders and shifting the allied strategy in Afghanistan away from military force and toward political nation-building and economic reconstruction.<br />At the same time, he will have to find a solution in Kashmir that endows its Muslims with a measure of autonomy while pacifying extremists in both India and Pakistan.<br />The new president's moral and intellectual authority will be vital in negotiations with India, which, like China regarding Tibet, adamantly rejects third-party mediation in Kashmir. Obama could point out the obvious to Indian leaders: They have paid a huge price for their intransigence over Kashmir, with an estimated 80,000 dead in the valley in the last two decades and a resultant rise in terrorist attacks across India.<br />Indeed, the outrage in Mumbai is the latest and clearest sign that the price of India's uncompromising stance on Kashmir has become too high, imperiling its economy as well as its security. Indian anger over the fumbling response to the brazen attacks disguises the panicky realization that there can be no effective defense against terrorists in a country with a long coastline and densely populated cities. The best India can hope for is to improve what Ratan Tata - the country's leading industrialist and the owner of last week's main terrorist target, Mumbai's Taj hotel - calls "crisis management."<br />As the economy falters (Mumbai's stock market has lost nearly 60 percent of its value this year), India can barely cope with homegrown violent movements like the Maoist insurgency in its central states, which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described as the biggest internal security threat to India since independence.<br />Pointing to the Bush administration's vigorous response to 9/11, Indian commentators lament that India is a "soft state," unable to defend itself from internal and external enemies. But India cannot turn into a "hard" state without swiftly undermining its secular, multicultural democracy.<br />The government has already experimented with draconian laws like the Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act of 2002, which among other measures allowed the police to hold suspects without charge for six months. It was repealed in 2004 after many abuses against Muslims were revealed. While these attacks may lead to calls for more tough measures, Indians cannot lose sight of the peril that 150 million Muslims would lose their faith in India's political and legal system. And it is obviously dangerous to threaten Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state, with war.<br />As president, Obama could conceivably persuade India and Pakistan to see the virtue of a political solution to Kashmir. But he would first have to set an example by rejecting the false assumptions of a global war on terrorism based primarily on military force - assumptions that the elites of powerful countries with restive minorities like India, China and Russia have eagerly embraced since 9/11.<br />"The people of India deeply love you," Prime Minister Singh said to President Bush in September while thanking him for the nuclear deal.<br />Yet it is Obama who has the opportunity to create deeper and more enduring alliances for the United States in South Asia - and he should start with Kashmir.<br />Pankaj Mishra is the author of "Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edmishra.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edmishra.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Flowers for the Taj</strong><br />By Anosh Irani<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />MUMBAI: As I watched the Taj Mahal hotel breathe fire, I remembered my grandfather, Burjor. For more than 30 years, he was the florist at the hotel, ordering roses flown in daily from New Delhi.<br />Like the Taj, his black Fiat, a broken dinosaur of a car, was a landmark in itself. Filled with cane baskets for his flower shop, and home to several cockroaches, he parked it in the same spot every day - right in front of the hotel's main entrance.<br />I essentially grew up in the hotel. And I would have been there on Wednesday night, browsing in its bookshop, and at the Leopold Cafe nearby, if it were not for the last-minute distraction of a soccer match in my neighborhood.<br />My family lives about four miles from the Taj, in a Parsi colony called Rustom Baug. The colony was developed exclusively for members of the Zoroastrian religion - the same religion that J.N. Tata, the man who built the Taj, belonged to. It is one of the quietest and most picturesque locations in Mumbai. It can feel like it's a world away from the city. Except when it's not, like when the attacks started.<br />The morning after the siege began, I read the following story in one of the papers: Moments before the terrorists opened fire in the main lobby of the Taj, a 10-year-old boy had entered the hotel to use the washroom. When he heard the shooting, he stood paralyzed in the center of the lobby until a man whisked him away and they hid in Nalanda, the bookshop in the Taj. They switched off the lights and sat in the darkness for nearly three hours.<br />There was a time, not so very long ago, when I could have been that boy. Nalanda is my favorite bookshop in Mumbai. My grandfather took me there every Sunday when I was a boy. While he cajoled me into buying books on science - though he was a florist, nuclear physics was his passion, and he was also fluent in Japanese - I sheepishly picked up copies of the Tintin and Asterix series as well as Amar Chitra Katha comics, full of fables and magnificent illustrations of demons and celestial beings from Indian mythology. Thankfully, the boy's story, like the Amar Chitra Katha comics, had a fairy-tale ending. He was eventually reunited with his parents.<br />On Saturday, when the siege ended, I stepped outside our gates and took a taxi to the Taj. The driver let me off nearby at the Regal Cinema and I walked toward the Leopold Café. The smell of disinfectant was overpowering. The café was closed, but through the shutters I noticed that two ceiling fans were on. There was a flier on the outside wall with "Good News" written on it, an advertisement for plumbing and carpentry.<br />The makeshift stores selling old gramophones were empty. A store called R. Dadavji's Ladies and Gents Under Garments was open. Florists also were open because a tragedy like this always means business. But everything else was closed.<br />I came in view of the entrance to the Taj, and the spot where my grandfather's black Fiat was always parked. There was a police barricade flanked by fire engines. The hotel's windows had been smashed. Above, crows circled.<br />I thought of all the weekends when I would come to the Taj bookstore with my grandfather. I thought of how for so many years he bejeweled the hotel's rooms with flowers. Today, I thought, his store would be closed. The last thing he would have wanted would be to use his flowers to decorate the dead.<br />Anosh Irani is the author, most recently, of "The Song of Kahunsha."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edirani.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edirani.php</a></div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Four killed in ethnic clashes in Karachi<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />By Imtiaz Shah<br />Four people were killed in clashes between rival factions in Pakistan's Karachi city on Tuesday but police said they were hopeful violence was easing off after days of bloodshed in which dozens of people have been killed.<br />Karachi is Pakistan's biggest city and commercial hub and has a long history of political, ethnic and religious violence.<br />The latest clashes between ethnic-based factions have raised fears of a return to the chronic bloodshed that plagued the city in the 1990s.<br />The clashes broke out on Saturday between members of the city's majority community of Urdu-speakers, most of them descendents of migrants from India at the time of the partition of the India in 1947, and ethnic Pashtuns from northwest Pakistan.<br />City police chief Waseem Ahmed said four people were killed in different incidents in the early hours of Tuesday but the city had been mostly calm since then.<br />"There has been no major incident since the morning," Ahmed told Reuters.<br />At least 40 people have been killed since Saturday, according to a tally of reports from police and hospitals.<br />Rivals fought gun battles and burnt shops and cars in several parts of the city of 15 million people over the weekend and more disturbances erupted on Monday.<br />Police have been told to shoot trouble-makers on sight and have banned pillion riding on motor bikes.<br />SCHOOLS SHUT, PORT OPEN<br />Some commentators in Pakistan have raised the possibility of Indian instigation of the violence in Karachi as a response to last week's militant assault in Mumbai, which India has linked to Pakistan, although the government has not suggested any link.<br />Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif said he was surprised by the timing of the Karachi violence.<br />"The killings in Karachi erupted suddenly after the Mumbai incident," Sharif told reporters. "I'm surprised how it erupted all of a sudden ... I think this needs to be looked in to thoroughly, which forces are involved in it."<br />All schools and colleges in Karachi were shut for a second day on Tuesday and public transport was thin. But operations at the country's main port were normal, while financial markets and banks were open.<br />Ahmed said the violence had been confined to certain neighbourhoods where members of the rival factions lived in close proximity and police convoys were patrolling those hotspots.<br />Tension has been rising since leaders of the Urdu-speaking community began complaining that Taliban militants, most of whom are ethnic Pashtun, were gaining strength in the city.<br />A political party representing Urdu-speakers, who are known as mohajirs, or refugees, has been the dominant political force in the city since the 1980s.<br />A large number of Pashtuns and members of other Pakistani ethnic groups have flocked to Karachi over the years in search of work.<br />(Writing by Aftab Borka; Editing by Robert Birsel and Sanjeev Miglani)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-PAKISTAN-KARACHI.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-PAKISTAN-KARACHI.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Bombs kill 14 and wound many across Iraq<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: Bombs killed 14 people across Iraq on Tuesday, police said, including a child hit by a blast outside his primary school in the north of the country.<br />Pupils were leaving the school when the bomb placed in a cart in the northern city of Mosul was detonated, killing four people and wounding 12.<br />Some pupils were among the wounded. The blast also killed a two-year-old girl and two adults in an adjacent market.<br />The level of violence in Iraq has fallen, but militants frequently demonstrate their ability to carry out lethal attacks.<br />A spate of bombings in the past few days has come as Iraq prepares its security forces to take responsibility from U.S. troops, set to withdraw from towns by mid-2009 and from Iraq completely by the end of 2011, under a security pact approved by parliament last Thursday.<br />Many attacks are aimed at reigniting violence between minority Sunni Arabs and majority Shi'ites, disrupting preparations for provincial elections in January, or intended to signal rejection of the security pact, officials say.<br />"We read these bombings as messages," Interior Ministry Media Director Brigadier-General Alaa al-Taie said.<br />"The first message is: 'We are still here'. The second is: they reject the accord. They want to create an atmosphere of fear."<br />In a second attack, a roadside bomb targeting an army patrol killed five soldiers in Hilla, south of Baghdad, police and a witness said.<br />"It hit the first vehicle. The whole thing exploded and burnt to the ground," witness Ali al-Jubouri told Reuters.<br />In the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, a car bomb killed five men and wounded 30, including five children, Sabih Hussein, a senior doctor in the city's main hospital, told Reuters.<br />(Reporting by Ahmed Rasheed and Wisam Mohammed; Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Michael Christie and Michael Roddy)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-VIOLENCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-VIOLENCE.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Kurds issue sharp retort to Maliki<br /></strong>By Riyadh Mohammed and Alissa J. Rubin<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: The Kurdish regional government has released a pointed rebuttal to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's recent criticism of its policies, a sign of growing fault lines between the Kurds and Iraq's central government.<br />Maliki gave a speech on Nov. 20 in which he said Kurds in Iraq were pursuing several unconstitutional policies, including the development of an oil business independent of Baghdad and the opening of representative offices in foreign countries. His government has also criticized the activities of Kurdish defense forces, known as pesh merga, outside the region.<br />Over the past year, relations between Kurds and the government in Baghdad have worsened, with officials clashing on issues that reflect the region's growing power and autonomy.<br />Tensions between Kurds and Arabs are threatening again to become a serious political divide in the country. The Kurds, who predominate in Iraq's three northernmost provinces and speak Kurdish rather than Arabic, fought a long and bitter battle against Saddam Hussein, whose policy of ethnic cleansing is believed to have killed 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds.<br />Although the Kurds are part of Iraq's governing coalition, their increasingly public and acrimonious fight with the central government raises questions about whether the alliance will last much longer.<br />In addition to defending the Kurdish positions on oil contracts and relations with other countries, the document, made public Monday criticizes Maliki's formation across the country of groups known as support councils, or political organizations made up of local tribal leaders who back the prime minister. Maliki and others have said the groups help strengthen the central government.<br />The Kurds say that many of those whom Maliki, an Arab, has recruited in the Kurdish region had worked with Saddam. "Enlisting such pro-regime collaborators" in the Kurdistan region could lead to the creation of armed groups that could cause destabilization, the document says.<br />Strong condemnation of the councils has also come from a leading Shiite party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.<br />On Tuesday, an official statement quoted President Jalal Talabani as saying the federal court would be asked to rule on their legality, The Associated Press reported.<br />The backdrop to the concerns is that Maliki, who has become a stronger leader over the past eight months, has started using his position to cement his power and increase the influence of his Dawa Party. His most recent victory was the passage last week by Parliament of an Iraqi-U.S. security agreement.<br />Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurd in Parliament, said the Kurds, acting in the national interest, had waited until after the security agreement had been approved to reply to the prime minister's speech.<br />"Maliki has accused them, so they have to reply," he said. "Hopefully it's not the beginning of a political war."<br />Yassin Majid, a spokesman for Maliki, said the prime minister would reply to the document.'Chemical Ali' sentenced<br />Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam's who is known as Chemical Ali, was sentenced to death for a second time Tuesday for his part in crushing a Shiite uprising in 1991.<br />Mohammed Oraibi al-Khalifa, a judge for the Iraqi High Tribunal, sentenced Majid and other senior figures from Saddam's government.<br />Among them were Abdelghani Abdul Ghafor al-Ani, who headed Saddam's Baath Party in southern Iraq at the time of the uprising and who also received a death sentence Tuesday. The former defense minister, Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, received a 15-year prison sentence.<br />Majid already faces a death sentence for his role in a 1981 crackdown on Kurds in northern Iraq.<br />Judge Khalifa said Tuesday that Majid was guilty of crimes against humanity.<br />A lawyer for Majid's defense team said that they would not be able to comment until after an appeal is filed.<br />Majid remained calm, but his co-defendant Ani shouted: "I welcome death if it is for Iraq, for pan-Arabism and for the Baath. Down with the American and Persian occupation."<br />The judge told Ani to "shut up." In later remarks to his fellow judges, he was overheard saying: "All the Baathists are this way. Baathists live as Baathists and die as Baathists."<br />The judge appeared unaware that the microphone near him was still on.<br />In Basra, Shiite relatives of Majid's victims welcomed the verdict. A woman who gave her name as Umm Salah and who claimed to have lost three male relatives in the crackdown, said: "When I saw the trial, it took me back 20 years, but I feel there's a difference."<br />"The criminals get the fair trial that our sons didn't have. Now I feel that the previous regime is something from the past and in spite of the fair trial and sentence today I still feel pain inside."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/mideast/iraq.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/mideast/iraq.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>David Brooks: Nation-building, take two</strong><br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />The 2008 election results did not fundamentally change American foreign policy. The real change began a few years ago in Afghanistan and Iraq.<br />It began with colonels and captains fighting terror on the ground. They found that they could clear a town of the bad guys, but they had little capacity to establish rule of law or quality of life for the people they were trying to help. They quickly realized that the big challenge in this new era is not killing the enemy, it's repairing the zones of chaos where enemies grow and breed. They realized, too, that Washington wasn't providing them with the tools they needed to accomplish their missions.<br />Their observations and arguments filtered through military channels and back home, producing serious rethinking at the highest levels. On Jan. 18, 2006, Condoleezza Rice delivered a policy address at Georgetown University in which she argued that the fundamental threats now come from weak and failed states, not enemy powers.<br />In this new world, she continued, it is impossible to draw neat lines between security, democratization and development efforts. She called for a transformational diplomacy, in which State Department employees would do less negotiating and communiqué-writing. Instead, they'd be out in towns and villages doing broad campaign planning with military colleagues, strengthening local governments and implementing development projects.<br />Over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has delivered a series of remarkable speeches echoing and advancing Rice's themes. "In recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and development have become more blurred and no longer fit the neat organizational charts of the 20th century," he said in July.<br />Gates does not talk about spreading democracy, at least in the short run. He talks about using integrated U.S. agencies to help locals improve the quality and responsiveness of governments in trouble spots around the world. He has developed a way of talking about security and foreign policy that is now the lingua franca in government and think-tank circles. It owes a lot to the lessons of counterinsurgency and uses phrases like "full spectrum operations" to describe multidisciplinary security and development campaigns.<br />Gates has told West Point cadets that more regime change is unlikely but that they may spend parts of their careers training solders in allied nations. He has called for more spending on the State Department, foreign aid and a revitalized U.S. Information Agency. He's spawned a flow of think-tank reports on how to marry hard and soft pre-emption.<br />The Bush administration began to implement these ideas, but in small ways. President Bush called for a civilian corps to do nation building. National Security Presidential Directive 44 laid out a framework so different agencies could coordinate foreign reconstruction and stabilization. The Millennium Challenge Account program created a method for measuring effective governance.<br />Actual progress was slow, but the ideas developed during the second Bush term have taken hold.<br />Some theoreticians may still talk about Platonic concepts like realism and neoconservatism, but the actual foreign policy doctrine of the future will be hammered out in a bottom-up process as the U.S. and its allies use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond. Grand strategists may imagine a new global architecture built at high-level summit meetings, but the real global architecture of the future will emerge organically from these day-to-day nation-building operations.<br />During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama embraced Gates' language. During his news conference on Monday, he used all the right code words, speaking of integrating and rebalancing the nation's foreign policy capacities. He recruited Hillary Clinton and James Jones, who have been champions of this approach, and retained Gates. Their cooperation on an integrated strategy might prevent some of the perennial feuding between the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council.<br />As Stephen Flanagan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes, Obama's challenge will be to actually implement the change. That would include increasing the size of the State Department, building a civilian corps that can do development in dangerous parts of the world, creating interagency nation-building institutions, helping local reformers build governing capacity in fragile places like Pakistan and the Palestinian territories and exporting American universities while importing more foreign students.<br />Given the events of the past years, the U.S. is not about to begin another explicit crusade to spread democracy. But decent, effective and responsive government would be a start.<br />Obama and his team didn't invent this approach. But if they can put it into action, that would be continuity we can believe in.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edbrooks.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edbrooks.php</a></div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div> </div><div><strong>U.N. says rights abuses continue as violence falls in Iraq</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />By Aseel Kami<br />Human rights abuses in Iraq remain widespread despite a significant drop in overall violence, the United Nations said on Tuesday.<br />The situation in Iraqi prisons was particularly acute, the U.N. Assistance Mission to Iraq said in a report, released ahead of the transfer next year of possibly thousands of detainees from U.S. military control to Iraqi authorities.<br />Many detainees in Iraqi jails had been held for months or years without being charged, granted access to lawyers or even to a judge, the report said. Allegations of widespread torture and ill-treatment were of particular concern.<br />"They need to be charged, they need to have access to legal counsel and the cases need to be investigated," the head of the U.N. mission, Staffan de Mistura, said in a news conference.<br />Under a U.S.-Iraqi security pact that comes into force next year, the U.S. forces who invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein will have to hand over to Iraqi control more than 16,000 detainees currently held in U.S. camps.<br />Those facing Iraqi arrest warrants will likely end up in Iraqi prisons while the rest will have to be freed. Many were detained at the height of the mainly Sunni Arab insurgency and the sectarian violence between minority Sunni Arabs and now dominant Shi'ites.<br />Iraqi prisons are already crowded and in a precarious condition, the U.N. said.<br />"The release (of those detainees) will obviously be a major challenge for the Iraqi authorities, but the Iraqi authorities have the intention and the duty to (give) those detainees the best possible conditions," de Mistura said.<br />The U.N. report referred only to the first six months of 2008 because its author had to break off halfway through the year for personal reasons.<br />The U.N. said conditions in the justice system in the semi autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq were not much better.<br />There were cases of prolonged detention on vague accusations and long delays of up to four years in bringing people to trial.<br />In total, there were 50,595 detainees held in Iraqi prisons at the of June, the U.N. said.<br />"In one prison, 123 prisoners were found in a 50 sq metre cell," de Mistura said.<br />The U.N. report also highlighted the targeted killings of journalists, teachers, doctors, judges, government officials and minorities, such as Christians or Turkmen, as causes for concern.<br />In addition, it said women faced difficulties across Iraq as conservative groups tried to restrict their freedoms. Women's rights were also threatened in Kurdistan, where 50 women were murdered and 150 burnt in the first six months of this year as a result of so called "honour crimes."<br />(Editing by Michael Christie and Dominic Evans)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/america/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-UN-REPORT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/america/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-UN-REPORT.php</a></div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>Forget State vs. Treasury<br /></strong>By Robert Hormats and David M. Kennedy<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />Among the parallels between the present financial turmoil and the Great Depression of the 1930s, few are more important to understand than the implications of economic upheaval for America's national security. One lesson from the Depression bears repeating loudly: Economic policy and foreign policy are not two distinct domains. They constitute a strategic nexus whose interconnections we ignore at our peril.<br />The perception that the United States was too enfeebled by its domestic travails to defend its interests emboldened Japan to invade Manchuria in 1931. The spectacle of Depression-era America continued to feed Japanese aggression, leading eventually to the brazen gamble that a single blow at Pearl Harbor might so demoralize the economically enervated Americans that they would throw in the towel and leave Asia to Japan.<br />In the 1930s, as now, in the face of severe economic affliction the temptation was strong to turn inward, to "put our own house in order" and tend to the international neighborhood later. That was Franklin Roosevelt's policy in 1933. "Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy," he said in his first inaugural address.<br />Accordingly, Roosevelt left unchallenged the Smoot-Hawley Tariff passed during the Hoover administration, and he added some nationalist measures of his own. Perhaps his worst decision was to scuttle London's World Economic Conference in 1933, convened to discuss international debt rescheduling, exchange-rate stabilization and the restoration of the gold standard. The conference afforded the last, desperate chance to deliver a concerted international counterpunch to the worldwide depression. Yet Roosevelt effectively withdrew the American delegation in July by declaring that the United States would have no further truck with the "old fetishes of so-called international bankers."<br />Among those who drew malign conclusions was Hitler. Watching events from his Berlin chancellery, he calculated that the economic weakness of his adversaries opened vistas of opportunity for conquest. The inability of the democracies to cooperate economically portended their inability to cooperate militarily or diplomatically. And the ailing economy that was driving the United States inward removed America from Hitler's geopolitical calculus altogether.<br />On Nov. 5, 1937, having re-armed Germany in violation of its Versailles Treaty obligations, Hitler presented his senior political and military officials with an exhaustive blueprint for aggression. Over four hours, he analyzed in detail the probable reactions of other powers, including Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, Belgium and Czechoslovakia. He did not even mention the United States, which he deemed incapable of offering serious resistance. By going AWOL in London in 1933, Roosevelt emboldened the man whose armed forces he would have to confront on the beaches of Normandy a decade later.<br />Depression and war were harsh teachers, but the lesson was learned. Surveying the economic chaos that had helped precipitate the war, Harry Dexter White, a Treasury Department official who was the principal architect of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, warned in 1942 that "the absence of a high degree of economic collaboration among the leading nations will, during the coming decade, inevitably result in economic warfare that will be but the prelude and instigator of military warfare on an even vaster scale."<br />At war's end, American leaders started initiatives that replaced the discredited policies of economic nationalism with new rules and institutions to avert protectionism and exchange-rate turmoil, and to foster expanded international trade and investment. For more than two generations, the IMF, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later the World Trade Organization) did much to underwrite global political stability as well as America's and the world's prosperity.<br />To govern is to choose, but economic versus foreign policy is a false choice. The national security stakes are too high to allow aggressors or terrorists to conclude that America is too economically distracted to defend its interests. And global peace and prosperity, including economic growth in foreign markets and the flow of capital on which the United States is dependent, remain highly improbable without continued - indeed, renewed - American leadership, political as well as economic.<br />A crucial test of governing awaits the Obama administration. It must pursue economic recovery at home and around the globe and the reinvigoration of multilateral coordination abroad. Failure to revive the sagging domestic economy will make broader security and foreign policy goals more difficult to accomplish, as Americans seek refuge in economic nationalism and foreigners lose confidence in Washington's leadership. The political and economic cooperation needed to resolve the current crisis is as essential to America's domestic well-being as it is to the successful pursuit of America's worldwide strategic interests.<br />The Depression and World War II were not two distinct events. Depression incubated war. The war, in turn, gave birth to the array of multilateral institutions that long served to avert another global economic crisis. Keeping that relationship in mind now can help the U.S. to resist, and encourage others to resist, pressures for inward-looking trade and investment policies and withdrawal from international engagement.<br />It took a depression and a war to transform an older order. If we Americans act swiftly and smartly, ours may be a happier fate. We have what may well be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build an international economic architecture for a new century and in the process bolster U.S. security. If we don't seize it, we may be doomed to repeat some pretty nasty history.<br />Robert Hormats, a managing director of Goldman Sachs, is the author of "The Price of Liberty: Paying for America's Wars From the Revolution to the War on Terror." David M. Kennedy is a professor of history at Stanford and the author of "Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edhormatsweb.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edhormatsweb.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Pakistani Taliban bomb Afghan supply convoy<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />LANDI KOTAL, Pakistan: Militants set off a roadside bomb in northwest Pakistan on Tuesday as trucks supplying Western forces in Afghanistan were passing by, wounding three people, a government official and witnesses said.<br />It was the second attack in two days on supplies for Western forces heading through Pakistan's Khyber Pass, a vital supply route into landlocked Afghanistan.<br />The convoy was bombed in the Landi Kotal area, 30 km (18 miles) west of the main northwest Pakistani city of Peshawar.<br />"The bomb was placed under a bridge and went off when the first vehicle of the convoy was crossing, wounding three people," said a district government official.<br />A taxi driver in the area said two truck drivers and a driver's assistant had been wounded and the convoy was stuck because the bridge had been damaged.<br />Al Qaeda and Taliban militants have stepped up attacks in Pakistan, especially in the northwest where security forces are trying to eliminate militant strongholds from where they orchestrate violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.<br />On Monday, two truck drivers taking supplies to Afghanistan were killed in a grenade and gun attack near Peshawar.<br />The trucks were parked at a terminal on the outskirts of Peshawar when militants fired rocket-propelled grenades at them, setting several of them on fire.<br />The U.S. military sends 75 percent of supplies for the Afghan war through or over Pakistan, including 40 percent of the fuel for its troops, the U.S. Defence Department says.<br />There are only two major routes into Afghanistan from the Pakistani port of Karachi, one through the Khyber Pass and the other through the town of Chaman to the southwest, the gateway to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.<br />Pakistani authorities halted movement of supplies through the Khyber Pass for a week in November after militants hijacked 13 trucks carrying Western force supplies.<br />(Reporting by Ibrahim Shinwari; Writing by Augustine Anthony; Editing by Robert Birsel and Sanjeev Miglani)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-PAKISTAN-VIOLENCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/asia/OUKWD-UK-PAKISTAN-VIOLENCE.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Tribal politics key to building bridges in Afghanistan</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />By Golnar Motevalli<br />Building bridges in Afghanistan requires more than bricks-and-mortar.<br />It requires deft diplomacy and an appreciation of tribal politics, especially if the bridge in question is to survive sabotage attempts by the Taliban.<br />That is why the commander of NATO-led forces, Afghan military leaders and government officials traipsed up to this isolated town in northern Afghanistan at the weekend to meet men whose cooperation they sought; eleven bearded elders from Bala Morghab.<br />"That bridge is just one small bridge but it's a symbol to the people who live here that if security improves we can bring improvements to the people here," General David McKiernan, commander of 50,000 NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, told Reuters.<br />"You sit around and speak to scholars, village elders and leaders and that's the way business is done," he said. "We're going to sit down at a shura. It's certainly more effective than trying to impose a foreign way."<br />Afghanistan's tribal heartlands are administered by a traditional system where elders, respected senior male figures within communities, resolve disputes and make decisions by forming a "shura" -- a consultation.<br />It is a system which the coalition wants to work with to gain the trust of influential decision makers in remote areas where insurgents can find a foothold.<br />While pleasantries were exchanged between the turban-clad, elders and the Kabul-based officials dressed in military fatigues, the fate of 17 Afghan soldiers captured by Taliban militants nearby on Thursday, hung in the balance.<br />Thirteen more soldiers and police were killed in the ambush.<br />"The village leaders, they know what's happening in their communities, so hopefully they'll have a voice to those Taliban that have these soldiers and hopefully secure their release," McKiernan said.<br />A BRIDGE TOO FAR?<br />While most of northern Afghanistan is relatively peaceful compared to the volatile south and east, Bala Morghab and the neighbouring district of Ghormach have seen a rise in violence this year with Taliban militants finding fertile ground for their insurgency among minority Pashtuns, excluded from power locally.<br />Fighting in the area has held up completion of the northern section of a ring road that would provide an alternative route for goods coming from Iran to the capital, Kabul, without passing through the areas with the most fighting on the southern loop.<br />"Three times we have asked construction companies to help build the road here, but no companies want to come here for the lack of security. If you want to you can do it, you can stop the enemy," Afghanistan's Minister of Public Works, Sourab Ali Safari, told the elders at the shura.<br />Better roads are essential not only for the economy -- so that farmers and merchants can get produce to markets more easily and importers can bring vital foodstuffs into the landlocked country -- but also for security, since police and the army can get more quickly to remote unstable areas.<br />Paved roads also make it much harder for the Taliban to plant improvised explosive devices (IEDs) -- nearly 750 of which detonated across Afghanista in 2007, causing hundreds of deaths.<br />Of the 42,000 km (26,000 miles) of roads in Afghanistan, only 12,000 km of roads are paved, according to the CIA World Factbook.<br />"It (the bridge) will help with medical care, export and import of goods if the bridge was not there people's lives would be a lot more difficult especially in the Winter months," Safari said.<br />The 45-metre bridge was built by Afghan companies with support from NATO's Italian and Spanish contingent. On the surface at least, the elders of Badghis welcomed the help.<br />Sabri Abdul Khani, the deputy governor of the province, Badghis, and spokesman for the elders assured the government officials and military top brass "the people of Badghis are always ready to cooperate in the name of peace and prosperity for this province. Our people know we need the help of the international community."<br />With insecurity on the rise and forces thinly stretched over the large and mountainous country, NATO commanders know they need local communities to buy into such projects if they are to last bombing campaigns by the Taliban.<br />"That bridge today, which we will open, I will leave it here for as long as you need it, as long as you help protect it," General McKiernan told the elders.<br />(Editing by Megan Goldin)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-BRIDGE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-BRIDGE.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Thousands in Kosovo protest EU mission</strong><br />By Dan Bilefsky<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />SARAJEVO: Several thousand demonstrators took to the streets of Pristina, Kosovo's capital, on Tuesday to protest the planned deployment of a European Union judicial mission that many ethnic Albanians fear will partition the new country.<br />The protesters marched through the city center holding banners saying "No Partition" and "Kosovo Is Ours," witnesses said. Some chanted "Thaci is a traitor," referring to Kosovo's prime minister, Hashim Thaci.<br />Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leadership declared independence from Serbia in February after nine years of being administered by the United Nations.<br />At issue now is who will control the country. Under a six-point plan agreed to last week by the United Nations Security Council - and backed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Belgrade and the European Union - the 2,000-strong EU mission would be deployed under a UN mandate and would take a neutral position regarding Kosovo's independence.<br />Pristina has rejected that element of the plan, arguing that it is an infringement on its sovereignty and insisting that the independence of Kosovo be respected. But Thaci has nevertheless agreed to cooperate fully with the mission, on the grounds that it will help preserve peace and stability across the territory.<br />Albin Kurti, one of the organizers of the protest Tuesday, said that accepting the deployment of the EU mission was unacceptable because it would undermine Kosovo's hard-earned sovereignty. Opponents of the six-point plan say they are concerned that it calls for the creation of separate chains of command for Serbian and Albanian police forces operating in Kosovo; the police in the ethnic Albanian areas would report to the EU while Serb police officers in the Serb-dominated northern part of the country would report to the United Nations.<br />Critics say that such an arrangement would entrench a de facto partition of the country by splitting it along ethnic lines. Pristina also worries that Belgrade would use the plan as a pretext to expand its authority over Kosovo.<br />Since Kosovo declared independence, Belgrade has sought to broaden its influence in northern Kosovo by holding elections and by entrenching its sway over policies like education and health care.<br />A small explosive device was thrown last month at the International Civilian Office that housed the EU's special representative. The police initially believed the attack could have been motivated by discontent with the deployment of the new EU mission. But they then arrested three Germans, thought to be intelligence operatives, in connection with the explosion.<br />The three men - who media outlets in Germany describe as members of the German foreign intelligence agency, the BND - were later released by a UN panel of judges for lack of evidence.<br />Germany was one of the first countries to recognize the independence of Kosovo. Berlin has said that suggestions that it was involved in attacks in Kosovo were absurd.<br />Separately, Serbia indicated Tuesday that it was seeking changes to an agreement with NATO - signed on June 9, 1999 - that ended the Kosovo war. It called for the abolition of a no-flight buffer zone between Serbia and Kosovo created by NATO after Serbia's armed forces agreed to withdraw from the region.<br />The Serbian general Zdravko Ponos said the accord, which prevents Serbian military flights over the zone and requires Serbian troops to get special approval from NATO to enter the territory, was outdated because NATO and Serbia were now military partners. NATO said that it was aware of the proposal but that no decision had been made. Pristina rejected it.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/europe/kosovo.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/europe/kosovo.php</a></div><div> </div><div>**********************</div><div><strong>Belgium says no prospects of EU force in Congo</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />By David Brunnstrom<br />Belgium said on Tuesday it saw no prospect for now of a European peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, despite efforts by the former colonial power to rally backing for such a force.<br />U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon has led calls for Europe to provide a rapid reaction force to help overstretched U.N. peacekeepers halt violence in the North Kivu province where rebel attacks have displaced a quarter of a million people.<br />But Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht, whose country has pledged to contribute troops within any European force, acknowledged after talks with European counterparts in Brussels that there was little appetite for such a mission.<br />"My feeling at this time is that it is not possible to mount a European mission at the moment," De Gucht told a news briefing after consultations.<br />"No country is willing to take a lead. Secondly, most of the countries say they are overstretched, firstly in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, so they have no troops ... available," he added.<br />De Gucht noted that current EU President France -- whose foreign minister Bernard Kouchner initially appeared keen on a European intervention -- had indicated it would not be lead-nation for a deployment.<br />Belgian officials have said the country's colonial past in Congo ruled out it taking any lead role. Britain has also been reluctant to back any such operation, aimed to take the strain while the 17,000-strong U.N. force awaits reinforcements.<br />EU soldiers intervened in Congo in 2003 to halt militia violence in northeast Ituri district that grew out of a broader 1998-2003 war, and to protect successful 2006 elections that returned President Joseph Kabila to office.<br />But this time the EU has said its help for now extends to humanitarian aid, diplomatic backing for peace efforts and backing for MONUC via offers of equipment, intelligence and logistics.<br />(Writing by Mark John; Editing by Richard Balmforth)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC-EU.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC-EU.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div><strong>Two terrorism suspects arrested in Italy<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />MILAN: Italian police arrested on Tuesday two Moroccans suspected of plotting attacks against civilian and military targets on the outskirts of Milan, police and judicial sources said.<br />The sources, who declined to be named ahead of an official announcement, said possible targets ranged from immigration offices and police barracks to a supermarket parking lot and a cafe.<br />The men, who were monitored through eavesdropping devices during the police investigation, had downloaded bomb-making information from the Internet. The sources did not say how close the men may have been to carrying out an actual attack.<br />Judge Silvana Petromer issued arrest warrants after prosecutors said the men were "suspected of belonging to a terrorist cell" operating in Milan province, the sources said.<br />Police were due to give a news conference at 4 p.m. (3:00 p.m. British time).<br />Investigators were also carrying out checks into contacts of the Moroccans, who attended an Islamic cultural centre in the town of Macherio.<br />Italy has not suffered the kind of violence by Islamic militants seen in Spain and Britain, but Italian officials say the country remains on high alert and police have regularly apprehended suspects.<br />(Reporting by Sara Rossi; Writing by Phil Stewart; Editing by Charles Dick)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-SECURITY-ITALY-ARRESTS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-SECURITY-ITALY-ARRESTS.php</a></div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div><strong>Transcript: Obama's national security team announcement</strong><br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />The following is the transcript of President-Elect Barack Obama's National Security Team announcement as provided by CQ Transcriptions.<br />OBAMA: Good morning, everybody. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.<br />Last week, we announced our economic team which is working as we speak to craft an economic recovery program to create jobs and grow our struggling economy.<br />Today, Vice President-elect Biden and I are pleased to announce our national security team. The national security challenges we face are just as great and just as urgent as our economic crisis. We are fighting two wars. Our old conflicts remain unresolved. And newly- asserted powers have put strains on the international system.<br />The spread of nuclear weapons raises the peril that the world's deadliest technologies could fall into dangerous hands. Our dependence on foreign oil empowers authoritarian governments and endangers our planet.<br />America must also be strong at home to be strong abroad. We need to provide education and opportunity to all our citizens so every American can compete with anyone anywhere. And our economic power must sustain our military strength, our diplomatic leverage, and our global leadership.<br />The common thread linking these challenges is the fundamental reality that in the 21st century, our destiny is shared with the world's from our markets to our security. From our public health to our climate, we must act with that understanding that now more than ever, we have a stake in what happens across the globe. And as we learn so painfully on 9-11, terror cannot be contained by borders nor safely provided by oceans alone.<br />Last week, we were reminded of this threat once again when terrorists took the lives of six Americans among nearly 200 victims in Mumbai.<br />In the world we seek, there is no place for those who kill innocent civilians to advance hateful extremism. This weekend, I told Prime Minister Singh of India that Americans stand with the people of India in this dark time. And I am confident that India's great democracy is more resilient than killers who would tear it down.<br />OBAMA: And so in this uncertain world, the time has come for a new beginning, a new dawn of American leadership to overcome the challenges of the 21st century and to seize the opportunities embedded in these challenges.<br />We will strengthen our capacity to defeat our enemies and support our friends. We will renew old alliances and forge new and enduring partnerships. We will show the world once more that America is relentless in the defense of our people, steady in advancing our interests, and committed to the ideals that shine as a beacon to the world. Democracy and justice, opportunity and unyielding hope because American values are America's greatest export to the world.<br />To succeed, we must pursue a new strategy that skillfully using, balances, and integrates all elements of American power, our military, and diplomacy, our intelligence and law enforcement, our economy and the power of our moral example. The team that we've assembled here today is uniquely suited to do just that.<br />In their past service and plans for the future, these men and women represent all of the those elements of American power and the very best of the American example. They've served in you uniform and as diplomats. They have worked as legislators, law enforcement officials, and executives. They share my pragmatism about the use of power and my sense of purpose about America's role as a leader in the world.<br />I have known Hillary Clinton as a friend, a colleague, a source of counsel, and a tough campaign opponent. She possesses an extraordinary intelligence and a remarkable work ethic. I am proud that she will be our next secretary of state. She's an American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence, who know many of the world's leaders, who will command respect in every capital, and who will clearly have the ability to advance our interests around the world.<br />Hillary's appointment is a sign to friend and foe of the seriousness of my commitment to renew American diplomacy and restore our alliances. There's much to do from preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to Iran and North Korea, to seeking a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, to strengthening international institutions.<br />I think no doubt that Hillary Clinton is the right person to lead our State Department and to work with me in tackling this ambitious foreign policy agenda. At a time when we face unprecedented transition amidst two wars, I've asked Secretary Robert Gates to continue as secretary of defense. And I'm pleased that he's accepted. Two years ago, he took over the Pentagon at a difficult time. He restored accountability. He won the confidence of military commanders and the trust of our brave men and women in uniform as well as their families.<br />He earned the respect of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle for his pragmatism and competence. He knows that we need a sustainable national security strategy. And that includes a bipartisan consensus at home.<br />As I said throughout the campaign, I will be giving Secretary Gates and our military a new mission as soon as I take office -- responsibly ending the war in Iraq through a successful transition to Iraqi control.<br />We will ensure that we have the strategy and resources to succeed against Al Qaida and the Taliban. As Bob said not too long ago, Afghanistan is where the War on Terror began, and it is where it must end. Going forward, we will continue to make the investments necessary to strengthen our military and increase our ground forces to defeat the threats of the 21st century.<br />Eric Holder has the talent and commitment to succeed as attorney everyone from his first day on the job, which is even more important in a transition that demands vigilance. He has distinguished himself as a prosecutor, a judge, and a senior official. And he is deeply familiar with the law enforcement challenges we face from terrorism to counterintelligence, from white-collar crime to public corruption.<br />Eric also has the combination of toughness and independence that we need at the Justice Department. Let me be clear. The attorney general serves the American people. And I have every expectation that Eric will protect our people, uphold the public trust, and adhere to our Constitution.<br />Janet Napolitano offers of the experience and executive skills we need in the next secretary of homeland security. She has spent her career protecting people as a U.S. attorney, an attorney general, and as the governor of Arizona. She understands the need for a Department of Homeland Security that has the capacity to help prevent terrorist attacks and respond to catastrophe be it manmade or natural.<br />OBAMA: Janet assumes this critical role having learned the lessons, some of them painful, of the last several years from 9-11 to Katrina. She insists on competence and accountability. She knows firsthand the need to have a partner in Washington that works well with state and local governments.<br />She understands as well as anyone the danger of an unsecure border. And she will be a leader who can reform a sprawling department while safeguarding our homeland.<br />Susan Rice will take on the crucial task of serving as permanent representative of the United States to the United Nations. Susan has been a close and trusted adviser. As in previous administrations, the UN ambassador will serve as a member of my Cabinet and in integral member of my team.<br />Her background as a scholar on the National Security Council and assistant secretary of state will serve our nation well at the United Nations. Susan knows the global challenges we face demand global institutions that work.<br />She shares my belief that the UN is an indispensable and imperfect forum. She will carry the message that our commitment to multi-lateral action must be coupled with a commitment to reform.<br />We need the United Nations to be more effective as a venue for collective action against terror and proliferation, climate change and genocide, poverty and disease.<br />Finally, I am convinced that General James Jones is uniquely suited to be a strong and skilled national security adviser. Generations of Joneses have served heroically on the battlefield from the breech beaches of Tarawa in World War II to Fox Trot Ridge in Vietnam.<br />Jim's Silver Star is a proud part of that legacy. He will bring to the job the duel experience of serving in uniform and as a diplomat. He has commanded a platoon in battle, served as supreme allied commander in a time of war, and worked on behalf of peace in the Middle East.<br />Jim is focused on the threats of today and the future. He understands the connection between energy and natural security and has worked on the front lines of global instability from Kosovo to Northern Iraq to Afghanistan. He will advise me and work effectively to integrate our efforts across the government so that we are effectively using all elements of American power to defeat unconventional threats and promote our values.<br />I am confident that this team is what we need to make a new beginning for American national security. This morning, we met to discuss the situation in Mumbai and some of the challenges that we face in the months and years ahead.<br />In the coming weeks, I will be in close contact with these advisers who will be working with their counterparts in the Bush administration to make sure that we are ready to hit the ground running on January 20th. Given the range of threats that we face and the vulnerability that can be a part of every presidential transition, I hope that we can proceed swiftly for those natural security officials who demand confirmation.<br />We move forward with the humility that comes with knowing that there are brave men and women protecting us on our frontlines, diplomats and intelligence officers in dangerous corners of the world, troops serving their second, third, or fourth tours, FBI agents in the field, cops on the beat, prosecutors in our courts, and cargo inspectors at our ports.<br />These selfless Americans whose name are unknown to most of us, will form the backbone of our effort. If we serve as well as they are serving, we will protect our country and promote our values.<br />And as we move forward with respect for American's tradition of a bipartisan national security policy and a commitment to national unity, we have to recall that when it comes to keeping our nation and our people safe, we are not Republicans or Democrats. We are Americans. There's no monopoly of power of wisdom in either party.<br />Together, as one nation, as one people, we can shape our times instead of being shaped by them. Together, we will meet the challenges of the 21st century not with fear but with hope.<br />Now, before I take questions, I'd like to invite my team to say a few words. And I'm going to start with my dear friend, Hillary Clinton.<br />CLINTON: Mr. President-elect, thank you for this honor. If confirmed, I will give this assignment, your administration, and our country my all. I also want to thank my fellow New Yorkers who have, for eight years, given me the joy of a job I love with the opportunity to work on issues I care about deeply in a state that I cherish.<br />And you've also helped prepare me well for this new role. After all, New Yorkers aren't afraid to speak their minds and do so in every language. Leaving the Senate is very difficult for me. But during the last few weeks, I thought often of our troops serving bravely under difficult circumstances in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.<br />I thought of those other Americans in our foreign and civil services working hard to promote and protect our interests around the world. And I thought of the daunting tasks ahead for our country. An economy that is reeling, a climate that is warming. And as we saw with the horrible events in Mumbai, threats that are relentless.<br />The fate of our nation and the future of our children will be forged in the crucible of these global challenges. America cannot solve these crises without the world, and the world cannot solve them without America.<br />By electing Barack Obama our next president, the American people have demanded not just a new direction at home but a new effort to renew America's standing in the world as a force for positive change. We know our security, our values, and our interests cannot be protected and advanced by force alone nor, indeed, by Americans.<br />We must pursue vigorous diplomacy using all the tools we can muster to build a future with more partners and fewer adversaries, more opportunities and fewer dangers for all who seek freedom, peace, and prosperity.<br />America is a place founded on the idea that everyone should have the right to live up to his or her God-given potential. And it is that same ideal that must guide America's purpose in the world today. And while we are determined to defend our freedoms and liberties at all costs, we also reach out to the world again seeking common cause and higher ground.<br />And so I believe the best way to continue serving my country is to join President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden, the leaders here, and the dedicated public servants of the State Department on behalf of our nation at this defining moment. President Kennedy one said that engaging the world to meet the threats we face was the greatest adventure of our century.<br />Well, Mr. President-elect, I am proud to join you on what will be a difficult and exciting adventure in this new century. And may God bless you and all who serve with you and our great country.<br />GATES: I am deeply honored that the president-elect has asked me to continue as secretary of defense. Mindful that we are engaged in two wars and face other serious challenges at home and around the world, and with a profound sense of personal responsibility to and for our men and women in uniform and their families, I must do my duty as they do theirs. How could I do otherwise?<br />Serving in this position for nearly two years, and especially the opportunity to lead our brave and dedicated soldiers, sailor, airmen, Marines, and defense civilians has been the most gratifying experience of my life. I am honored to continue to serve them and our country. And I will be honored to serve President-elect Obama.<br />HOLDER: Thank you, President-elect Obama, for the honor that you have bestowed upon me. I look forward to working with you and the members of this national security team assembled here.<br />The Department of Justice plays a unique role on this team. It is incumbent those of us who lead the department to ensure not only that the nation is safe but also that our laws and traditions are respected. There is not a tangent (ph) between those two. We can and we must ensure that the American people remain secure and that the great constitutional guarantees that define us as a nation are truly valued.<br />For example, working with Republicans and Democrats in Congress, should I be confirmed, we look forward to actually structuring policies that are both protective and consistent with who we are as a nation.<br />HOLDER: I also look forward to working with the men and women of the Department of Justice to revitalize the department's efforts in those areas where the department that's unique capabilities and responsibilities in keeping our people safe and ensuring fairness and in protecting our environment.<br />This president-elect and the team you see before you are prepared to meet the challenges that we will confront. From my experience at the Department of Justice, I know that we cannot be successful if we act alone. We must never forget that in many ways those in state and local law enforcement are our first line of detection and protection against those from foreign shores who would do us harm.<br />We will need to interact with our state and local partners in new innovative ways to help them solve the other issues that they confront on a daily basis. National security concerns are not defined only by the challenges created by terrorists abroad but also by criminals in our midst, whether they be criminals located on the street or in a board room.<br />We must forge new ties and reestablish old bonds with our state and local partners. There is much that needs to be done in this new century. I am confident that working with our president-elect, the people on this stage and the departments that they represent, those of both parties who I know and respect on Capitol Hill, we can keep our nation safe, strong, and respected.<br />It is now my pleasure to introduce Janet Napolitano, a great governor and an old friend.<br />NAPOLITANO: Thank you, Eric.<br />President-elect Obama, I am honored by your confidence in me and your support. Your message of change has resonated with the American people as has the clarity and the confidence of our vision of a United States that is safe, secure, and effective in the world and at home.<br />The team you have assembled faces the challenge of protecting our homeland with constant vigilance and relentless work to prevent terrorist attacks. It also will plan carefully and thorough so that our domestic response to all hazards is fast, sound, levelheaded, and effective. Americans deserve no less.<br />To achieve this high level of performance, it will be my job and the job of this team to hold ourselves and our agencies accountable, to coordinate fully across the spectrum of government agencies and to ensure that we work hand in hand with state and local governments to share information, secure our borders, and keep our country safe.<br />We are a nation that will be proud, prepared, and resilient. Thank you for the opportunity to serve. And I would be remiss if I did not also thank the wonderful people of Arizona. Like Hillary, it is difficult to leave one job for another, but one must go where one can best serve.<br />It's now my privilege to introduce to you the nominee to be it the ambassador of the United Nations, Susan Rice.<br />RICE: Mr. President-elect, Mr. Vice President-elect, I am deeply honored and grateful for the opportunity to serve you and our great country as the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. I look forward to working with this outstanding bipartisan national security team to implement your visionary agenda, to strengthen our security, and renew American's leadership in the world.<br />I want to take this opportunity to thank my parents who taught me that no dream is too bold to embrace. My husband and our children, Jake and Maris (ph), for their patience, love, and sacrifice.<br />With your election, Mr. President-elect, the American people have signaled to the world that our nation is on the path to change. Now, we must fulfill that promise by joining with others to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of the 21st century to prevent conflict, to promote peace, combat terrorism, present the spread and use of nuclear weapons, tackle climate change, end genocide, fight poverty and disease.<br />All of these goals are vital to America's security but none can be accomplished by America alone. To enhance our common security, we must invest in our common humanity. And to do so, we need capable partners and far more effective international institutions.<br />The United Nations was, in major part, America's creation.<br />RICE: Mr. President-elect, I share your commitment to rededicate ourselves to the organization and its mission. If confirmed, as U.N. ambassador, I will work constructively within the organization to help strengthen its capacities and achieve needed reforms.<br />I can think of no more important time to represent the United States at the United Nations. Mr. President-elect, thank you for the confidence you've placed in me and for the opportunity to serve in this vital mission.<br />It's now my pleasure to introduce General James Jones.<br />JONES: Mr. President-elect, Mr. Vice President-elect, members of this tremendous team assembled this morning, I'm deeply humbled to have been asked by the president-elect to serve as national security adviser especially during the challenging times we currently face.<br />And Mr. President-elect, I deeply appreciate your mentions my family's contribution to our national security since 1939.<br />As has been previously mentioned, national security in the 21st century comprising a portfolio which includes all elements of our national power and influence working in coordination and harmony towards the desired goal of keeping our nation safe, helping to make our world a better place, and providing opportunity to live in peace and security for the generations to follow.<br />I am deeply humbled and deeply appreciative of this great opportunity, and I am very proud now to introduce a man who will play a key role in making this come to pass, the vice president-elect, Joe Biden.<br />BIDEN: Well, Mr. President, you've assembled quite a team. And I hope and believe that the American people will come to feel as I do that we brought together one of the most talented national security teams ever assembled. A team prepared to meet the serious challenges we face today and the emerging threats that will confront us tomorrow.<br />I have worked with and admired each of the members of the team some as far as back in days, Jim, when you were a Marine liaison to the United States Senate. And so we have a -- I have a long relationship, as the president does, and I do with each of these folks.<br />And each has a clear understanding of the forces that are shaping this new century and the lives of our fellow Americans. As was mentioned earlier, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the emergence of China, India, Russia, Brazil, and the unifying Europe as major powers, the spread of lethal weapons to dangerous countries as well as dangerous groups, the shortage of -- and scarcity of energy, water, and food, the impact of climate change, economic dislocations, persistent poverty. The technological revolution that sends people, ideas, and money around the planet as ever faster speeds. And, as was already mentioned, as we witnessed again last week with the terrible events in the India, the challenge to democratic nation states from radical ideologies.<br />That's just a short list of the forces that are shaping the 21st century. And it's been implied by all the comments thus far, no one country can control these forces. But more than any other country in the world, we have the ability to affect them if we use the totality of our strength.<br />And bringing together Senator Clinton, Secretary Gates, Eric Holder, Governor Napolitano, Susan Rice, and General Jones, the president-elect has assembled a national security team that is poised, in my view, to recapture the totality of America's strength. Each member of this team shares the goals and the principles that the president-elect and I have attempted to advance.<br />Each member shares our conviction that strength and wisdom must go hand in hand. Each member believes, as we do, that America's security is not a partisan issue. Witness the team. Each member understands that America's military might and economic strength must married to the power of our ideas and our ideals if we are to deal effectively with dealing with the forces of change, some of which I've mentioned, and if we're going keep this country we love so dearly prosperous and free.<br />These are extraordinary times. That's not in a flight of fancy or exaggeration. These are extraordinary times. We face extraordinary challenges.<br />BIDEN: But I am, as the president-elect is, optimistic, absolutely optimistic that this team, with the president-elect at our helm, will see to it that America leads not only by the example of our power but by the power of our example.<br />And now, President-elect Obama is prepared to take your questions. And, again, Mr. President-elect, congratulations on assembling what I believe will be a first-class team to lead us into this century.<br />Thank you.<br />OBAMA: OK. Let's start with Liz.<br />QUESTION: (Inaudible)?<br />OBAMA: Well, first of all, I think it's important to reiterate that our condolences, our thoughts, and our prayers go out to the people of India, the families that have been affected, and, obviously, we're heartbroken by the deaths of the six Americans that were caught up in this tragedy.<br />I've spoken to Prime Minister Singh and expressed these concerns to him. An investigation is taking place. I was briefed by Secretary Rice throughout the weekend. She's on her way to the region. We've sent FBI to help on the investigation.<br />And this is one of those time where I have to reiterate there's one president at a time. We're going to be engaged in some very delicate diplomacy in the next several days and weeks. So I think it would be inappropriate for me to comment.<br />But what I can say unequivocally is that both myself and the team that stands beside me are absolutely committed to eliminating the threat of terrorism. And that is true wherever it is found. We cannot have -- we cannot tolerate a world in which innocents are being killed by extremists based on twisted ideologies.<br />And we're going to have to bring the full force of our power, not only military but also diplomatic, economic, and political, to deal with those threats not only to keep America safe but also to ensure that peace and prosperity with exist around the world.<br />So I will be monitoring the situation closely. Thus far, I think the administration has done what's needed in trying to get the details of the situation. And my expectation is that President Zardari of Pakistan, who has already said that he will fully cooperate with the investigation, will follow through with that commitment.<br />All right. Karen?<br />QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. You've selected a number of high profile people for your national secure team. How can you ensure that the staff that you are assembling is going to be a smoothly- functioning team of rivals and not a clash of rivals?<br />OBAMA: Well, I think you heard Joe mention the fact that many of the people who are standing beside me are people who have worked together before, who have the utmost respect for each other. These are outstanding public servants and outstanding in their various fields of endeavor.<br />They would not have agreed to join my administration, and I would not have asked them to be part of this administration unless we shared a core vision of what's needed to keep the American people safe and to assure prosperity here at home and peace abroad.<br />I think all of us here share the belief that we have to maintain the strongest military on the planet, that we have to support our troops and make sure that they are properly trained, properly equipped, that they are provided with a mission that allows them to succeed. All of us here also agree that the strength of our military has to be combined with the wisdom and force of our diplomacy and that we are going to be committed to rebuilding and strengthening alliances around the world to advance American interests and American security.<br />And so in discussions with this entire team, what I am excited about is a consensus not only among those of us standing here today, but I think cross a broad section of the American people, that now is the time for us to regain American leadership in all its dimensions. And I am very confident that each of these individuals are not going to be leaving the outstanding work that they are currently doing if they weren't convinced that they could work as an effective team.<br />One last point I will make. I assembled this team because I'm a strong believer in strong personalities and strong opinions. I think that's how the best decisions are made. One of the dangers in the White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in group think and everybody agrees with everything and there's no discussion and there are no dissenting views. So I'm going to be welcoming a vigorous debate inside the White House.<br />But understand I will be setting policy as president. I will be responsible for the vision that this team carries out, and I expect them to implement that vision once decisions are made. So as Harry Truman said, the buck will stop with me. And nobody who's standing here, I think, would have agreed to join this administration unless they had confidence that, in fact, that vision was one that would help secure the American people and our interests.<br />Jake?<br />QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President-elect. During the campaign, you said that you thought the U.S. had a right to attack high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan if given actionable intelligence with or without the Pakistani government's permission. Two questions on that.<br />One, do you think India has that same right?<br />And, two, regarding what Karen just said, some people up there on the stage took issue with your saying that. They have strong opinions about issues ranging from Pakistan to the surge. And while they're all committed to have a successful United States, what private assurances have they given you that they will be able to carry out your vision even when they strongly disagree with that vision as some of them have been able to do in the past?<br />Thank you, sir.<br />OBAMA: I think that sovereign nations, obviously, have a right to protect themselves. Beyond that, I don't want to comment on the specific situation that's taking place in South Asia right now. I think it is important for us to let the investigators do their jobs and make a determination in terms of who was responsible for carrying out these heinous acts.<br />I can tell you that my administration will remain steadfast in support of India's efforts to catch the perpetrators of this terrible act and bring them to justice. And I expect that the world community will feel the same way.<br />Now, in terms of my team and carrying out my vision and my policies, as I've said, during campaigns or during the course of election season, differences get magnified. I did not ask for assurances from these individuals that they would agree with me at all times. I think they understand and would not be joining this team unless they understood and were prepared to carry out the decisions that have been made by me after full discussion.<br />And, you know, most of the people who are standing here are people who I've worked with, and on the broad core vision of where America needs to go, we are in almost complete agreement. There are going to be differences in tactics and different assessments and judgments made. That's what I expect. That's what I welcome. That's why I asked them to join the team.<br />Peter Baker?<br />QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President-elect.<br />You've talked about the importance just now of having different voices and robust debate within your administration. But, again, going back to the campaign, you were asked and talked about the qualifications of the -- your now, your nominee for secretary of state. And you belittled her travels around the word, equating it to having teas with foreign leaders. And your new White House council said that her resume was grossly exaggerated when it came to foreign policy. I'm wondering whether you can talk about the evolution of your views of her credentials since the spring.<br />OBAMA: Well, I mean, I think -- this is fun for the press to try to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign. No, I understand. And you're having fun.<br />But the -- and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not -- I'm not faulting it. But, look, I think if you look at the statements that Hillary Clinton and I have made outside of the heat of a campaign, we share a view that America has to be safe and secure. And in order to do that...<br />OBAMA: ... the statements that Hillary Clinton and I have made outside of the heat of a campaign, we share a view that America has to be safe and secure. And in order to do that we have to combine military power with strength and diplomacy. And we have to build and forge stronger alliances around the world so that we're not carrying the burdens and these challenges by ourselves.<br />I believe that there is no more effective advocate than Hillary Clinton for that well-rounded view of how we advance American interests. She has served on the Armed Services Committee in the Senate. She's knows world leaders around the world. I have it extensive discussions with her both pre-election and post-election about the strategic opportunities that exist out there to strengthen American's posture in the world.<br />And I think she is going to be an outstanding secretary of state. And if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't have offered her the job. And if she didn't believe that I was equipped to lead this nation in such a difficult time, she would not have accepted.<br />John McCormack. Where's John?<br />QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President-elect.<br />You're known as a pretty good storyteller. Can you tell us a little bit of a story about how Senator Clinton was selected for this job? Was there a seminal moment? How was the offered extended? Can you give us some detail on how it was accepted and kind of the negotiation process that was involved here?<br />And, also, does Secretary Gates meet the requirement for a Republican on the Cabinet, or should we be looking for others as well?<br />OBAMA: Well, I mean, I didn't -- I didn't -- I didn't check his voter registration. Secretary Gates, meets the qualification of being an outstanding current secretary of defense and somebody who is doing everything he can every single day to make sure that our troops are properly equipped and trained and organized in order to succeed at their missions and that their families are cared for.<br />So I have complete confidence in Secretary Gates being able to carry out his tasks. And I think the point here is that I didn't going around checking people's political registration. What I was most concerned with was whether or not they can serve the interests of the American people.<br />With respect to Senator and soon-to-be, Secretary of State Clinton, it was not a light bulb moment. I have always admired Senator Clinton. We have worked together extensively in the Senate. I have always believed that she is tough and smart and disciplined and that she shares my core values and the core values of the American people.<br />And so I was always interested after the primary was over in finding ways in which we could collaborate. After the election was over and I began to think about my team, it occurred to me that she could potentially be an outstanding secretary of state. I extended her the offer and she accepted.<br />I know that's not as juicy a story as you were hoping for, but that's all you're going to get, John. Thanks.<br />Where's Dean? There you are. Hey, Dean.<br />QUESTION: Sir, do you still intend to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq in 16 months after inauguration? And did you discuss that -- the possibility of that -- with Secretary Gates, before selecting him?<br />OBAMA: Well, keep in mind what I said during the campaign. And you were there most of the time.<br />I said that I would remove our combat troops from Iraq in 16 months with the understanding that it might be necessary, likely to be necessary, to maintain a residual force to provide potential training, logistical support to protect our civilians in Iraq.<br />The SOFA that has been now passed by the Iraqi legislature points us in the right direction. It indicates we are now on a glide path to reduce our forces in Iraq. I will be meeting be not only Secretary Gates but the joint chiefs of staff and commanders on the ground to make a determination as to how we move that pace -- how we proceed in that withdrawal process.<br />I believe that 16 months is the right timeframe. But as I have said consistently, I will listen to the recommendations of my commanders. And my number one priority is making sure that our troops remain safe in this transition phase and that the Iraqi people are well served by a government that is taking on increased responsibility for its own security.<br />It is a sovereign nation. What this signals is a transition period in which our mission will be changing. We will have to remain vigilant in making sure that any terrorist elements that remain in Iraq do not become strengthened as a consequence of our drawdown. But it's also critical that we recognize that the situation in Afghanistan has been worsening. The situation in South Asia, as a whole, and the safe havens for terrorist that have been established there represent the single most important threat against the American people.<br />And we're going to have to mobilize our resources and focus on attention on defeating Al Qaeda, bin Laden, and any other extremist groups that intend to target American citizens.<br />Thank you very much, everybody.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/01textobama.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/01textobama.php</a></div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div><strong>Israeli foreign minister faces EU criticism over settlers</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />BRUSSELS, Belgium: EU lawmakers told Israel's foreign minister on Tuesday that her country has to do more to stop the expansion of West Bank settlements.<br />Lawmakers at the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee said settlers' moves to defend their homes there were threatening Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.<br />Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in Brussels to seek closer EU ties, said it was no longer official Israeli policy to expand settlements in the West Bank and the government has been trying to reduce them since peace talks restarted last year.<br />"We are not trying to use or abuse the period of time in which we negotiate in order to have more land, or to get more land from the Palestinians," Livni told members of the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee.<br />Livni said "minor" efforts by some settler groups around the West Bank town of Hebron to expand their settlements would not derail peace talks or efforts to set up a Palestinian state.<br />Dozens of Jewish settlers rioted Tuesday in Hebron, clashing with the Israeli troops who guard them but who may also evict them from a disputed building they have occupied.<br />In two other West Bank villages, Palestinians said settlers burned animal feed and slashed tires to deter Israeli authorities from dismantling unauthorized settlements.<br />Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has urged the 27-nation EU not to upgrade ties with Israel as long as it expands West Bank settlements.<br />Livni sat through a barrage of criticism levied by several EU lawmakers.<br />"For us, the extension of settlers and colonists in the West Bank is not acceptable and does not allow negotiations to take place," said Belgian socialist Veronique De Keyser.<br />She also faced questions about what Israel was doing to alleviate the situation in Gaza, which is suffering from a shortage of fuel and basic items due to an Israeli security blockade imposed last year after Hamas, an Islamic group hostile to Israel, violently seized power in Gaza.<br />Livni said Israel was allowing in humanitarian aid to ease the crisis there.<br />Livni also met with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on including Israel in key EU projects. Israel is already involved in the EU's high-tech research programs but also wants a role in customs, environmental, health and other areas.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/02/europe/EU-EU-Israel.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/02/europe/EU-EU-Israel.php</a></div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div><strong>Israeli strike kills 2 in Gaza after mortars fired<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />GAZA: An Israeli air strike killed two Palestinian youths Tuesday in the southern Gaza Strip, where mortar bombs were earlier launched at Israel, local residents and hospital officials said.<br />The Israeli military confirmed an air strike had taken place on the town of Rafah, in which two other people were wounded. It said militants had fired six mortar bombs across the border.<br />Rafah residents and hospital officials said the two Palestinians killed were civilians who were related. One was aged 15 and the second was 17.<br />The Hamas Islamist faction that controls the Gaza Strip said one of its members was wounded in the strike.<br />Militants have fired dozens of rockets and mortar bombs at Israel in the past three weeks after Israeli raids that killed about a dozen gunmen. The violence has strained a cease-fire which was agreed last June.<br />Saying it was responding to rocket attacks, Israel has tightened its closure of Gaza's border crossings, stopping supplies into the territory and raising international concern.<br />Later Tuesday, leaders of Hamas and the less influential Islamic Jihad militant group met to discuss the fate of the six-month-old cease-fire and blamed Israel for weakening the chances it could be renewed.<br />The six-month cease-fire was set on June 19 and is due to expire later this month.<br />"If we ask our Palestinian people today we would not find many in favour of continuing the calm agreement the way it is now," senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya said before entering the meeting.<br />Hayya said Israel had also not abided by the agreement when it did not fully open the crossings it controls with Gaza to allow the transfer of goods and it had not stopped military strikes in the occupied West Bank and in the coastal territory.<br />Senior Islamic Jihad official Nafez Azzam said Tuesday's killing of the two teenagers in Rafah was a "proof the aggression was continuing."<br />The officials said their decision on the future of the truce would be relayed to Egyptian mediators.<br />(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi, Writing by Dan Williams; editing by Ori Lewis)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL-VIOLENCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL-VIOLENCE.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Iran holds naval war games in strategic waterway</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />TEHRAN: Iran said it began six days of naval war games on Tuesday in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic transport route for global oil supplies which the Islamic Republic has threatened to close if it is attacked.<br />Iran often stages exercises or tests weapons to show its determination to counter any attack by the United States or Israel against sites they believe are to make nuclear arms.<br />"The aim of this manoeuvre is to increase the level of readiness of Iran's naval forces and also to test and to use domestically-made naval weaponry," Admiral Qasem Rostamabadi told state radio.<br />The radio said the naval manoeuvres would cover an area of 50,000 square miles, including the Sea of Oman off Iran's southern coast.<br />"In this six-day long manoeuvre there will be more than 60 combat vessel units," Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, commander of the navy, was quoted as saying by the Kayhan daily.<br />They would include destroyers, missile-equipped battleships, submarines, special-operations teams, helicopters, and fighter planes, he said.<br />Iran, the world's fourth-largest crude oil producer, says its uranium enrichment activities are aimed at making fuel for electricity-generating nuclear power plants, not bombs.<br />The United States says it wants diplomacy to end the nuclear row, but neither Washington nor Israel have ruled out military action if that fails. Iran has vowed to retaliate if pushed.<br />Military analysts say Iran's real ability to respond could be with more unconventional tactics, such as deploying small hit-and-run craft to attack oil tankers, or using allies in the Middle East to strike at U.S. or Israeli interests.<br />Iran has previously said it could close the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, through which about 40 percent of the world's globally traded oil passes. The United States has pledged to protect shipping routes.<br />An Iranian naval commander was last week quoted as saying the country's navy could strike an enemy well beyond its shores and as far away as Bab al-Mandab, the southern entrance to the Red Sea that leads to the Suez Canal.<br />Iran's 1980s war with Iraq included a period that became known as the tanker war when oil carriers and other energy installations became targets by both sides. This led to the United States stepping in to protect oil shipping.<br />(Reporting by Parisa Hafezi and Hashem Kalantari; Writing by Fredrik Dahl; Editing by Katie Nguyen)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-WARGAMES.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-WARGAMES.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Bashir's Darfur peace promises seen empty<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />By Louis Charbonneau<br />The Sudanese government's continued attacks on civilians in Darfur show how empty Khartoum's promises of peace for the ravaged region are, 15 human rights organizations said in a report issued on Tuesday.<br />"Far from trying to improve the situation as it claims, the government of Sudan continues to conduct large-scale military attacks against populated areas, to harass aid workers and to allow impunity for the worst crimes committed in Darfur," Human Rights Watch, the Save Darfur Coalition, and 13 other rights organizations said in a highly unusual joint report.<br />In July, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague asked the court's judges to issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on suspicion of masterminding a campaign of genocide in Darfur, an accusation Khartoum rejects.<br />Since then, the groups say, Sudanese officials have been lobbying the 15 members of the U.N. Security Council to use their power to suspend the ICC investigation of Bashir, arguing that an indictment would destroy the fragile peace process in Darfur.<br />According to the rights groups' 22-page report, Khartoum has been working hard to convince the international community that it wants peace in Darfur in an attempt to pressure the Security Council into suspending the case against Bashir.<br />Bashir has announced a new peace initiative in western Sudan's Darfur, agreed to peace talks currently being mediated by Qatar and pledged to punish anyone guilty of crimes in Darfur.<br />But there are few signs of peace in Darfur and the policy of impunity for more than five years of mass murder in the region continue, making clear that the government's pledges are empty rhetoric, the report says.<br />The groups say that the only area of improvement has been in the deployment of the joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force for Darfur, known as UNAMID.<br />The humanitarian situation and security in Darfur have deteriorated significantly in recent months, the groups say.<br />Sudanese U.N. Ambassador Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem told Reuters that the activist groups were "warmongers" whose main objective was "to undermine peace in Sudan because they are beneficiaries of the war." He dismissed their accusations.<br />"The enemies of Sudan, including those organizations, will never be lacking in their negative campaign against chances and hopes for peace in Sudan," he said.<br />The United Nations estimates that as many as 300,000 people have died and some 2.7 million left homeless in the five years of fighting between rebels and the army and government-backed militia.<br />(Editing by Eric Beech)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-SUDAN-DARFUR-REPORT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-SUDAN-DARFUR-REPORT.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI2QKLFXV3kXz1vmvS0b-bmaW1CLckU0-rvv0lRYCrfO4gPaif_ey-Sw_ZgnDhGQOJ62mAWAsu4BuNjulD5ZAei_Kn8NcW5UD-lTEkj-X63NhHNPhqGlUm4OOo2JDuAKtKHqYS_VoRciE/s1600-h/DSC02393.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483912115729970" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI2QKLFXV3kXz1vmvS0b-bmaW1CLckU0-rvv0lRYCrfO4gPaif_ey-Sw_ZgnDhGQOJ62mAWAsu4BuNjulD5ZAei_Kn8NcW5UD-lTEkj-X63NhHNPhqGlUm4OOo2JDuAKtKHqYS_VoRciE/s320/DSC02393.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Zimbabwe reacts to cholera by turning off the taps</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />HARARE, Zimbabwe: As children play near cesspools, their parents shake their heads at a public service announcement that drifts over the radio urging people to boil water before drinking it. It sounds like a taunt in a country where water and electricity supplies are off more often than on.<br />This week, the authorities turned off the taps in the capital of Zimbabwe after the National Water Authority said it ran out of purifying chemicals and feared that contaminated water would spread a cholera epidemic that has claimed hundreds of lives since August.<br />The crisis is the latest chapter in the collapse of this once-vibrant nation under President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled for 28 years and refuses to leave office even though he and his party lost elections in March.<br />An agreement to form a unity government with the opposition has been deadlocked for weeks over how to share cabinet posts.<br />Harare is the center of the cholera epidemic, which has spread across the country and over its borders.<br />The government has reported 473 deaths since August and a total of 11,700 people infected by Monday, said Paul Garwood, spokesman for Health Action and Crises, the humanitarian arm of the UN World Health Organization.<br />Garwood said that according to the official toll, 4 percent of those infected were dying of a disease that usually claims fewer than one percent and is easily treated with rehydration salts or an intravenous drip.<br />Doctors said the toll was nearer 1,000 dead, or 10 percent of the victims, but there was no count of those dying at home and in the countryside without medical care. All the main hospitals of Zimbabwe have closed.<br />The smaller ones that are still operating can offer little care. They have no medicine and few staff, since monthly salaries no longer cover one day's bus fare to get to work.<br />The City Council, controlled by the opposition, is burying cholera victims for free because people cannot afford to buy graves.<br />The government, normally hostile to international aid agencies, is welcoming an initiative by several - including the UN Children's Fund, WHO and Médecins Sans Frontières - to provide emergency care and to try to assure safe water supplies.<br />Health officials, following the line of a government that is refusing to declare a national emergency, insisted that the cholera outbreak was under control until five days ago.<br />At the time, the best advice that Health Minister David Parirenyatwa could offer was to urge people to stop shaking hands. "I want to stress the issue of shaking hands," he told The Herald, a state newspaper. "Although it's part of our tradition to shake hands, it's high time people stopped shaking hands."<br />The collapse of all services, including garbage collection, has increased the number of rats that threaten to spread other, more deadly, diseases.<br />In Mabvuku, a suburb where residents have dug shallow wells in open ground, people say that they know unboiled water can make them ill, but that they have no choice.<br />"We are afraid, but there is no solution. Most of the time the electricity is not available so we just use the water," said Naison Chakwicha, a resident.<br />In another suburb, Mbare, Anna Marimbe traced the deaths of two children last week to stinking, open drains where she said the children played.<br />Residents of the densely populated town of Chitungwiza sued the National Water Authority in the High Court on Friday, saying they had been without running water for 13 months, causing cholera and leading to deaths.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/africa/zim.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/africa/zim.php</a></div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Forget Citigroup, a California puppet show needs a bailout<br /></strong>By Jennifer Steinhauer<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />LOS ANGELES: There are many ways to measure California's tanking economy: an 8.2 percent unemployment rate; a multibillion-dollar state budget gap; threatened endowments of the city's museums, causing some cultural institutions to nearly default on mortgages; and the continued weakening of the Hollywood studio system. But the meltdown of the marionettes may say it all.<br />Near a freeway overpass on a decidedly scrappy edge of downtown Los Angeles is a marionette puppet theater that has enchanted children over nearly five decades, several recessions, two riots, at least four failed urban renewal plans and an earthquake or two.<br />The Bob Baker Marionette Theater's shows, employing an eclectic selection of Baker's 3,000 handmade puppets prancing about a shoebox-size theater perpetually decked out in gold garlands, are a staple of a Los Angeleno childhood. It is the cultural equivalent of the annual march by the nation's third graders to the neighborhood firehouse.<br />But the struggling California economy and some bad business decisions by Baker have left the Bob Baker marionettes in a deep financial ditch, and Baker, a rather unheralded Hollywood legend, with an uncertain future. "We have all kinds of problems that have come up recently," Baker said. "But we're not going to close. We're going to fight this out to the very bitter end."<br />Over the last few months Baker, 84, has fallen $30,000 behind on his mortgage and lost a rent-paying tenant, while his two major sources of revenue have dried up. First, the public schools have reduced financing for field trips. And second, some of his lower-income parents, he said, unemployed and swimming in debt, are unable to come up with the $15-per-ticket admission.<br />"We've had quite a few people call who are losing their houses and have to cancel birthday parties," he said.<br />In addition, Baker said, a few years ago he refinanced the theater's mortgage to help pay for rising operating costs, and the mortgage payments have shot up. A business deal he made to improve his space went bad. He said he was negotiating with his lenders, and added ruefully, "I am more of an artist than a businessman."<br />In a city where children's movies are often screened in a Hollywood theater with white-glove popcorn service and the organic certifications of birthday cakes are debated at length on Web sites aimed at parents, Baker's theater is a charming throwback.<br />As they have for generations, children gather in a circle on the floor of the 200-person capacity auditorium as Baker's elaborately appointed marionettes scamper about to the sounds of old phonograph records, scratches and all. The theater is one of the few places in Los Angeles that routinely attracts racially and economically diverse groups of children.<br />A typical show requires about 15 workers, including 8 puppeteers, a lighting designer, a costume maker and ticket takers. There are usually two productions a year, one with a Christmas theme. The second show might be "Something to Crow About," a barnyard spectacular; the Latin-flavored "Fiesta"; or a revue like "Bob Baker's Musical World," which might evolve over the season and employ a rotation of 100 or more puppets. Baker also performs puppet shows around Southern California for birthday parties and other events. The annual budget, Baker said, is about $360,000.<br />Victoria Hurley, 42, grew up in Los Angeles going to the shows, and now takes her children, who are 5 and 3. "They still serve the exact kind of ice cream with the exact same wooden spoon I got 30 years ago," Hurley said. "The quality of the entertainment has certainly held up fantastically, but I think the building could use some sprucing. It is almost like they haven't even repainted. I personally think it is charming, but if I came from New York and brought my children I might feel otherwise."<br />At a recent performance of "The Nutcracker," an eclectic mix of Baker's handmade puppets appeared, ranging from a Mouse King, resplendent in velvet, to what is perhaps best described as selections from the "Soul Train" collection, white leisure suits and gold trim included.<br />The marionettes are handled by Baker's students, who spend a good year under his tutelage before they are allowed to don black clothing and work before an audience. As they moved through the room they occasionally dropped a puppet into the lap of a delighted toddler. As usual, the whole affair ended with a cup of vanilla ice cream handed to each child.<br />The shows are not exactly linear. The "Soul Train" marionettes, for example, are wedged into "The Nutcracker," and the story seems oddly lacking in the middle section. But the focus is really on the puppets, in their glorious velvet and gossamer.<br />"There is a magic thing about a live puppet show," Baker said recently. "I was watching the children just today and they were hugging the puppets, and then they always come up after me and ask me how they work. A lot of children who come here have never been to a live show and may never go to a live show again."<br />The number of people whose careers as puppeteers Baker started is "amazing, at least a dozen professionally," said Greg Williams, 51, a professional puppeteer who helps Baker with his road shows. "I started with him when I was 15, and was cleaning the party room. I went from there to doing the sets to the lights. One day a puppeteer wasn't available, and I got shoved on the floor," Williams said.<br />Baker "gets a lot of the neighborhood kids, and some of these kids who look like they would have no future are here entertaining and enjoying it," Williams said. Baker still does many private birthday parties personally. "You get those Beverly Hills parents and you need to keep those people happy," he added.<br />Baker, whose puppet passion began at an early age, has had an authentic Hollywood career something not immediately evident given his modest site downtown.<br />He grew up in what is now Koreatown, in a house often full of actors and others from the "theatrical world," Baker said, and graduated from Hollywood High School. When he was a little boy, his father took him to a holiday show at an area department store, which featured, as many store entertainments did in the early 20th century, puppets.<br />When he turned 7 he bought two puppets and soon started working the birthday party circuit. He said his first party was for Mervyn LeRoy, a producer and director for both Warner Brothers and MGM, which set off a word-of-mouth campaign. Years later he would perform at Liza Minnelli's fourth birthday party. (And, keeping it in the family, a few years after that, he appeared in the 1954 Judy Garland film, "A Star Is Born," conducting a marionette show.)<br />In the 1940s Baker worked as a puppet maker for George Pal, creator of the Puppetoons, whose movies and television credits include cult films like Edgar Ulmer's "Bluebeard" (1944), the original "Star Trek" series and "Bewitched."<br />Baker started his production company in 1949 with his business partner, Alton Wood (who died in 2001). It has remained one of the more well-known training grounds for puppet makers who have gone on to work in fantasy films.<br />But it is the theater, opened in 1960 in a warehouselike building, for which Baker is best known around town. The elaborate facade meant to suggest "Alice in Wonderland" is long gone, as are the evening performances, which Baker said faded after the 1965 Watts riots made people afraid to venture at night. Weekends and shows for school groups along with sales of puppets and movie work have sustained him, and he hopes the doors of his theater will stay open.<br />"My mother used to say, 'We can fall into a mud puddle and come up smelling like roses,' " Baker said. "We have gone through some pretty hard times, and I just have to see the light of day. We're just going to make it."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/arts/02pupp.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/arts/02pupp.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Wall St. claws back after massive sell-off<br /></strong>By Michael M. Grynbaum<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />Wall Street mounted a modest recovery on Tuesday, gaining back nearly half of the enormous collapse that had seemed to bode badly for this week.<br />The Dow Jones industrial average rose nearly 300 points after bouncing up and down the chart, even dipping into negative territory for a brief moment in the early afternoon. By the end of the session, the index was up 280 points.<br />The broader Standard & Poor's 500-stock index gained 4.1 percent, an encouraging performance after the benchmark index dropped nearly 9 percent on Monday. The Nasdaq jumped 3.7 percent.<br />The rally was led by some of the year's biggest market losers, with General Electric up more than 10 percent. Shares of Ford Motors and General Motors were higher in the morning but fell back after automakers released November sales. GM reported that sales fell more than 41 percent; Ford's sales were down 30.6 percent. Even foreign carmakers felt sharp declines in November Toyota's sales were off 33.9 percent.<br />Investors were also watching a new spate of earnings reports that have started to trickle in for the third quarter. Banking shares were higher on Tuesday, with Citigroup up 16 percent, a day after the financial sector suffered its worst daily decline in at least two decades.<br />Oil prices continued to fall, slipping $2.21 to settle at $47.07 a barrel.<br />While the modest market gains provide some sense of comfort after Monday's hair-raising decline, the size of the swings underscored the immense volatility and uncertainty that remain ingrained in the market. Investors are still not certain of anything, whether it's how long the recession will last or which company could be the next to teeter on collapse. Double-digit percentage point gains have become the norm for shares of some high-profile businesses, shifts that once took weeks to occur.<br />Investors are also looking ahead to Friday's unemployment report from the Labor Department, arguably the most important update on the health of the economy. Economists expect that businesses shed another 300,000 jobs last month, adding to the layoffs that have hit every month this year.<br />In Europe, shares moved higher in afternoon trading after a sharp decline in the morning session. Shares in Asia fell amid deeply bearish sentiment stoked by expectations of a protracted global recession, as Japan and Australia sought to ease credit market strains with monetary policy measures.<br />To nearly no one's surprise, investors were told this week that the United States economy is officially in a recession, according to the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, which is charged with dating business cycles.<br />The research organization dated the recession back to last December, meaning the economy is already in one of the worst downturns since the early 1980s.<br />"We've had a lot of very bad news," Francisco Salvador, director at Venture Finanzas in Madrid, said. He cited worldwide declines in the manufacturing industry and a worrisome rise in the cost of insuring corporate debt against default.<br />Salvador also cited concern that some investors were having trouble staying afloat after reports that several big funds were either reorganizing or halting redemptions. "There is panic among the hedge funds," he added.<br />In Spain, he noted, the government said on Tuesday that the number of jobless rose by more than 170,000 in November, the eighth consecutive monthly increase. The country's unemployment rate, at 12.8 percent in October, is the highest in the European Union. "The only good news," he said, "is that sentiment is so overwhelmingly negative that a contrarian reaction is possible."<br />The FTSE 100 index in London gained 1.4 percent; the CAC 40 in Paris was up 2.4 percent; and the DAX in Frankfurt gained 3.1 percent.<br />Japan led Asian markets lower. The benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average fell 6.4 percent after the Bank of Japan, which last month lowered its already low interest rates still further, said it would accept a wider range of corporate debt as collateral for lending, a move aimed at helping companies obtain cash from banks.<br />In Sydney, the S&P/ASX 200 index fell 4.2 percent, despite another sharp interest rate cut by the Reserve Bank of Australia. The central bank cut its benchmark rate target by a full percentage point to 4.25 percent. The bank has now cut the target rate by 3 percentage points since September.<br />The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong fell 5.0 percent, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange composite index was off 0.3 percent.<br />United States government bonds were little changed near record low yields as many investors fled to safety.<br />The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, said Monday that the central bank might begin buying government bonds to cut long-term borrowing costs.<br />That sent prices on government securities soaring, with the yield on the 30-year Treasury note, which moves in the opposite direction of the price, at 3.239 percent. The yield on the two-year note was at 0.893 percent.<br />Credit markets have been extremely tight since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, making banks less willing to lend to one another and leaving companies hard-pressed to fund their businesses. Although Japan's banks have generally been less exposed than their European and United States counterparts to the credit woes emanating from America since last year, the credit crunch and falling stock markets have now taken their toll.<br />The dollar was mixed against other major currencies. The euro rose to $1.2655 from $1.2609 late Monday in New York, while the British pound fell to $1.4910 from $1.4885. The dollar rose to 1.2073 Swiss francs from 1.2060 francs and rose to 93.27 yen from 93.19.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/03marketsB.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/03marketsB.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/euro.php">EU agrees to ease path for state aid to banks</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/yen.php">Bank of Japan acts to ease credit flow</a> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Banks to reduce staff in Europe and Asia</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />ZURICH: Credit Suisse, HSBC Holdings and Standard Chartered on Tuesday announced hundreds of job cuts, a day after JPMorgan Chase said it would eliminate 9,200 jobs at Washington Mutual, which it acquired Sept. 25.<br />The reductions are the latest in a wave of job losses. About 90,000 jobs have been cut at major global banks since September. Of these, more than 50,000 have been at Citigroup.<br />Credit Suisse said it was cutting 650 jobs, equivalent to about 3 percent of its investment banking work force, which comprises about 21,300.<br />"The cuts will be made mainly in investment banking," said Marc Dosc, a spokesman for Credit Suisse.<br />Credit Suisse, which employed about 50,000 people worldwide at the end of September, has already cut 1,800 jobs this year.<br />HSBC, the biggest bank in Europe, said it was cutting 500 jobs at its British banking business. HSBC employs 58,000 people in Britain.<br />Standard Chartered, a British bank that makes more than three-quarters of its profit in Asia, said it would trim 200 jobs in Hong Kong as it adapted to "difficult" market conditions.<br />"We hope that this is a one-off cut," said Gabriel Kwan, a Standard Chartered spokeswoman in Hong Kong.<br />The job losses will be across different departments and levels of seniority and take effect in a month, she added.<br />Standard Chartered, which made a quarter of its pretax income in Hong Kong in the first half of the year, said last month that it was eliminating 572 jobs at its main office in South Korea.<br />Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Macquarie Group and other international banks are eliminating a combined 260 jobs in Hong Kong, The South China Morning Post reported Tuesday, citing unidentified people.<br />At the former Washington Mutual, the 9,200 job cuts, announced Monday, amount to more than 21 percent of the work force, which comprised 43,198 employees at the end of June.<br />Washington Mutual's banking assets were bought by JPMorgan in September for $1.9 billion in a transaction arranged by U.S. regulators. The holding company for Washington Mutual, based in Seattle, later filed for bankruptcy protection.<br />About 4,000 of the jobs will be cut by the end of January, and 5,200 will be cut later, said Christine Holevas, a JPMorgan spokeswoman. The 5,200 employees will receive double their annual salaries retroactive to Oct. 1, payable in a lump sum when their employment ends, Holevas said.<br />Seattle will bear the brunt of the cuts, with 3,400 layoffs out of a total of 4,300 Washington Mutual employees in the city, JPMorgan said.<br />An additional 1,600 layoffs will be in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the remaining 4,200 will be elsewhere. Most branch workers will keep their jobs.<br />The combined company has about 5,400 branches, and JPMorgan has said that it plans to close no more than 10 percent of them.<br />Holevas said JPMorgan had not decided the fate of Washington Mutual's headquarters building in Seattle.<br />Washington Mutual collapsed under the weight of about $176 billion of home equity, adjustable-rate and subprime home loans on its books. It is one of 22 U.S. lenders to fail this year.<br />Bank of America, which is set to acquire Merrill Lynch before the end of the year, is also expected to cut about 10,000 investment banking jobs at the combined banks, CNBC, a business news channel in the United States, reported on Monday.<br />Scott Silvestri, a Bank of America spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement, "We are following the same review process to evaluate staffing levels used in every merger transition and we have nothing to announce."<br />Bank of America and Merrill shareholders are scheduled to vote on the merger on Friday.<br />Losses at Credit Suisse's investment banking division dragged it into a loss in the third quarter and analysts expect the fourth quarter to be another difficult one.<br />Credit Suisse had already cut 500 jobs in investment banking in October. A competitor, UBS, whose entry into risky U.S. assets has cost it $49 billion in write-downs, announced in October that it would cut nearly 2,000 jobs.<br />Dosc, the spokesman for Credit Suisse, did not comment on which jobs would be shed nor the time frame for the measures.<br />"However, usually these cuts are made very fast," he said.<br />Other leading banks have had to reduce staff in the last quarter as the global financial crisis deepened and major economies were expected to fall into recession.<br />In Germany, Commerzbank announced in September that it would cut 9,000 jobs.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/bank.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/bank.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>U.S. tax inquiry may include HSBC and Credit Suisse</strong><br />By Lynnley Browning<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />The U.S. Justice Department has expanded its criminal investigation into foreign banks that sell offshore private banking services to include Credit Suisse and HSBC, according to people briefed on the matter.<br />The widening of the investigation is an outgrowth of an inquiry by U.S. prosecutors and regulators of UBS, the Swiss banking giant, and its sales of offshore banking services to wealthy Americans. The prosecutors, who are focusing on senior and midlevel executives and bankers at UBS, contend that UBS illegally helped U.S. clients hide as much as $20 billion in secret offshore accounts, thereby evading $300 million a year in U.S. taxes from 2000 to 2007.<br />HSBC, which is based in London, is one of the largest European banks. It has large consumer, private, asset management and investment banking operations that extend across the United States and Asia.<br />Credit Suisse, which is based in Zurich, is also one of the world's largest banks, with significant operations globally.<br />The investigation into HSBC and Credit Suisse, which began about September, is focusing on whether the two banks helped wealthy Americans hide as much as $30 billion in offshore accounts that went undeclared to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, the people briefed on the matter said in recent days. Prosecutors are examining whether the two banks illegally helped those clients use accounts to evade U.S. taxes and whether the clients violated U.S. laws.<br />The investigations are at an early stage and have not focused on any executives, these people said, though they added that could change as the investigations unfolded. Last month, U.S. prosecutors indicted Raoul Weil, a senior UBS executive who is one of the world's top private bankers, on charges of conspiring to help wealthy Americans evade taxes through UBS. Weil denies the charge.<br />The indictment of Weil, who oversaw the lucrative cross-border private banking operations of UBS from 2002 to 2007, also referred to unindicted co-conspirators in "the highest level of management" within the bank.<br />The investigations into HSBC and Credit Suisse have emerged from information provided to prosecutors and are focused on the same kind of cross-border banking activities now under scrutiny at UBS, according to these people. The information has emerged, in part, from talks between senior executives at HSBC and Credit Suisse after the UBS inquiry. "UBS was not alone in this," said one of the people.<br />HSBC "has not received any contact from the U.S. authorities with regard to any such investigation," the bank said Tuesday. "HSBC complies with the letter and spirit of the laws and regulations in all the countries and territories it does business in around the world."<br />Jan Vonder Mühll, a spokesman in Zurich for Credit Suisse, said: "We are not aware of any investigation in that context. Credit Suisse adheres to the highest compliance standards, regulations and policies."<br />The investigation into UBS, the world's largest private bank, has peeled back layers of Swiss banking secrecy, whose tradition dates to the Middle Ages. The custom, the backbone of a multibillion-dollar industry, is coming under increased scrutiny from U.S. and European regulators, prosecutors and the private-sector tax authorities over whether it facilitates tax evasion. The scrutiny is also focusing attention on the question of whether Switzerland is effectively an offshore tax haven.<br />The investigation of European-based banks signals a shift by the Justice Department, which in recent years has focused on offshore banks operating in Bermuda, the Caribbean and Bahamas, all offshore tax havens.<br />The investigation of UBS began around 2007 and gained force last June, when a former senior private banker and U.S. citizen, Bradley Birkenfeld, pleaded guilty to conspiring to help a U.S. property developer, Igor Olenicoff, conceal $200 million through secret accounts set up by UBS and other entities in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.<br />Like the investigation into UBS, the scrutiny of HSBC and Credit Suisse is focused on potential crimes committed in the United States with U.S. clients.<br />Like UBS, Credit Suisse and HSBC are registered broker-dealers in the United States, but those licenses, which are overseen by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, do not apply to banking or investment services provided by their overseas affiliates or overseas subsidiaries.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/tax.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/tax.php</a></div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div><strong>Next U.S. crisis: Credit cards</strong><br />By James SaftReuters<br />LONDON: Government intervention or not, banks will be cutting up America's credit cards at an unprecedented rate, with grave implications for the economy and company profits.<br />The U.S. Federal Reserve added more nutrition to its alphabet soup of rescue programs last week when it announced the Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, under which, among other things, it will lend as much as $200 billion to investors in securities backed by credit-card, auto and student loans.<br />It did so for a very good reason: The securitization market's freeze now extends beyond mortgages, imperiling run-of-the-mill consumer financing and making it a certainty that many people who use credit to get past "cash flow" situations will be denied.<br />And even though the U.S. car industry may implode if starved of finance and many students will have to defer education, the real potential disaster is in credit-card funding, which could push lots of households over the brink and with them consumption and every business that depends on it.<br />Put simply, even with an apparent will to try anything to bring the wheels of finance back into motion, it will be very difficult for government to fill the hole quickly that private finance will leave.<br />Details of the plan are still sketchy, but let's assume that it works, even if the plan will give the Fed huge fears about how to get out of its positions after the end of 2009.<br />All other things being equal, the amount the Fed is putting into the TALF should take the asset-backed securities market back to about where it was in the first half of 2008, which itself was only a third of the volume we saw in 2007.<br />But all other things are not equal.<br />The banks that provide the bulk of credit-card funding generally want to cut back, pushed by their own troubles, a conservative reading of the economic situation and, potentially, regulatory changes that while intended to ward off the excesses of the last bubble, will magnify the impact of its bursting.<br />Meredith Whitney, the Oppenheimer analyst who has so far been ahead in identifying and explaining the weaknesses in the banking system, thinks that more than $2 trillion in credit lines, or 45 percent of all the lines available, will be pulled out from under American consumers in the next 18 months, a figure that puts the Fed's $200 billion for asset-backed finance in its proper perspective.<br />"We are now entering a new era within the financial landscape that will be characterized by expanded forced consumer deleveraging with a pronounced downshift in consumer spending," she wrote in a research note.<br />"We view the credit card as the second key source of consumer liquidity, the first being their jobs," the note said. "Pulling credit at a time when job losses are increasing by over 50 percent year-on-year in most key states is a dangerous and unprecedented combination, in our view."<br />Whitney notes that the three largest credit card lenders, Bank of America , Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, which together account for more than half of the amount outstanding on U.S. credit cards, have each discussed reducing card exposure or slowing growth. Capital One and American Express, with another 14.5 percent, have also talked about limiting lending.<br />That will set the tone for the rest of the financial industry, which will be grappling with new regulation that would impair the profitability of credit-card lending and push more off-balance-sheet securitizations back onto the banks' already strained books.<br />Cutting back on abusive lending and forcing banks to recognize and account for the risks they take are surely good things, but they will have the perverse effect of making the credit crunch worse, at least temporarily.<br />And looking at the balance sheets of individual Americans, there is good reason to think that the credit crunch should get worse: that they should consume and borrow less and save more.<br />I would argue that far from being nonfunctioning, financial markets are closer to pricing in the true risk of lending to consumers now - with credit cards charging about 10 percentage points more than five-year Treasury notes - than they were six months ago, when the gap was only about 7.65 percent.<br />But the mother of all unintended side effects is that the faster consumers cut back, the worse it will be. The kind of consumer cutback implied by the consumer credit crunch that now looks likely would blow a hole below the waterline in the U.S. economy.<br />The use of unconventional measures by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government is only beginning.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/col03.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/col03.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/ge.php">GE offers bleak outlook</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/regulate.php">Lawyers say new regulation could leave banks with fewer opportunities for growth</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/econ.php">Asia-Pacific policy makers move to bolster economies as markets fall in the region</a> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Refinance now, or possibly never<br /></strong>By Natalie Harrison</div><div>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />LONDON: European companies with debt maturing soon should refinance now despite punitive rates because there is worse on the way, according to analysts.<br />Issuers could be squeezed out in the years ahead as a result of competition from hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of government-backed bonds and from corporations with $1 trillion a year of loans that might be partly refinanced in the bond market. This situation would raise the specter of default for otherwise sound businesses.<br />Issuance has already soared in the past few weeks ahead of an expected crunch next year.<br />About 23 billion, or some $30 billion, was raised in the euro-denominated corporate bond market in November, making it the best month for supply since June 2003, according to data from credit strategists at the French bank Société Générale.<br />Of that amount, 9.6 billion came in the last week alone from about 25 companies, setting a fresh weekly record for this year, the bank said.<br />"Issue or be damned," said Suki Mann, an analyst with Société Générale. " Looks like no one wants to be damned."<br />The backlog of debt refinancing has expanded sharply after the bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in September slowed issuance.<br />Next year, about $801 billion of debt matures. Nearly three-quarters of that will be at financial companies and the rest at nonfinancial ones, according to Standard & Poor's, the rating company. S&P forecasts that $2.1 trillion of European company and bank debt will be maturing in the next three years.<br />The squeeze could raise the pressure on otherwise solid companies, not because their business has deteriorated, or because they have too much debt, but simply because of the maturity structure of their financing.<br />"Clearly it's a prudent thing for any corporate right now to extend their debt maturity profile if they can," said Karl Bergqwist, senior investment manager with Gartmore Investment Management.<br />Loan markets will also add huge pressure next year. More than $4 trillion out of a total $10.7 trillion in outstanding syndicated loans need to be refinanced in the next three years, and companies will be relying on the bond market to finance a large part of that.<br />There are $1.09 trillion global maturing loan volumes in 2009, $1.34 trillion in 2010 and $1.61 trillion in 2011, according to Reuters Loan Pricing.<br />In addition, credit strategists with the Dutch bank ING have forecast that the government-guaranteed debt market for banks could swell to 820 billion in 2009 after the bailouts of this year. But those companies that did manage to refinance their debt have done so at a high cost.<br />Metro, the German retailer, recently paid more than 9.5 percent interest costs on its 500 million, five-year bond. In May 2007, such costs were less than 5 percent for a bond issue of the same maturity and size.<br />"Investors are clearly being rewarded much more to take risks," said Eirik Winter, head of debt capital markets for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Citigroup.<br />Winter warned that companies should avoid too much negotiation over the price because they might risk missing out on the financing.<br />He said bond markets would be bombarded early next year by triple-A-rated agency and multinational borrowers like the European Investment Bank.<br />"Companies need to give investors the impression that they will pay what it takes in order to generate momentum," Winter said. "At this point, it's not about basis points, it's about access."<br />Using General Electric as an example, Bergqwist, the Gartmore investment manager, said no company was immune from liquidity fears. GE has a triple-A rating, meaning that rating agencies believe there is no chance that it will go bankrupt.<br />Yet concerns about rising delinquencies and financing costs at General Electric's financing arm, GE Capital, have sent the value of its shares down by half this year and GE Capital credit default swaps into below investment grade, or junk, status.<br />"When anyone mentions a credit," Bergqwist said, "the first question you get asked is when and by how much do they need to refinance and in what market."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/deal.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/deal.php</a></div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div> </div><div><strong>European banks going easy on corporate borrowers</strong><br />By Caroline HydeBloomberg News<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />LONDON: Reluctant to take more write-downs on debt, European lenders including Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Barclays Capital are instead easing the conditions of loans made to companies.<br />Banks including Barclays are negotiating a waiver of conditions for Ineos Group Holdings, the largest chemicals company in Britain, on 5.8 billion, or $7.3 billion, in debt. In July, Royal Bank of Scotland reached a similar deal on loans made to Cableuropa, which is based in Madrid.<br />Covenant waivers allow companies to breach the terms and conditions on their loan agreements with banks without going into default. Covenants set limits on a company's activities over the life of a loan, and may include the amount of debt it can borrow as a proportion of earnings, or the money it can spend.<br />Lenders typically charge a fee for covenant waivers. European lenders are permitting the waivers at a fraction of the price charged by banks in the United States, which hold less of the debt on their books.<br />European banks hold about 70 percent of such loans, with the rest sold to investors like hedge funds and pension managers, according to data compiled by Standard & Poor's LCD. In the United States, 20 percent of loans are distributed to banks.<br />"It's bank self-preservation," said Alex Moss, who oversees about $1.6 billion as head of high-yield bonds and leveraged loans at Insight Investment Management in London. "Banks are accepting waivers with as little fuss as possible to justify the high price they have their loans marked at."<br />Creditors write down loans according to their recovery rate, which could be as little as 30 percent, according to Bloomberg calculations based on secondary-market leveraged loan prices<br />U.S. companies paid an average 240 basis points on their loans' face value to waive conditions this year, Standard & Poor's LCD data show.<br />Sealy, which is the world's largest bedding manufacturer and is based in Trinity, North Carolina, paid a fee of 75 basis points plus a 300-basis-point increase to the interest margin in November for such waivers on $517 million of debt. European companies paid 30 basis points, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data compiled by Deutsche Bank. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.<br />"In Europe, where banks drive more relationship-based lending, fees for waivers are still way off" compared with the risk lenders take, said Chris Taggert, a senior loan strategist in New York at CreditSights, a debt research firm.<br />Ineos, which had net debt of 7.29 billion as of Sept. 30, offered to pay its 233 senior lenders 50 basis points upfront, plus a fee of as much as 125 basis points a year, according to the company's chief financial officer, John Reece.<br />The chemical maker, which is based in Lyndhurst, England, asked banks to waive loan conditions as sales slumped. Moody's cut the company's credit rating to eight levels below investment grade two weeks ago.<br />Barclays Capital and Merrill Lynch, which arranged 5.8 billion of outstanding loans for the 2005 purchase of BP's Innovene unit in November, agreed to the waiver request. Spokesmen for Barclays Capital and Merrill Lynch declined to comment.<br />Twenty-two covenant waivers were granted in Europe this year and only one was declined, according to Bloomberg data.<br />"Lending banks inherently want to remain just that, lenders, and will only very reluctantly become owners of stressed businesses," said Paul McKenna, head of leveraged syndicated finance in London at ING.<br />The European leveraged loan market is "more relationship driven" as "banks hold more of the paper" than in the United States, said Siobhan Pettit, head of structured credit strategy at Royal Bank of Scotland.<br />Cableuropa, the biggest cable TV operator in Spain, paid as much as 1 percentage point for a covenant waiver on 3.6 billion of loans from banks including Royal Bank of Scotland and Calyon in July, Standard & Poor's LCD data show. Moody's said in October it may downgrade the company.<br />Grupo Corporativo Ono, Cableuropa's parent, sought to "modify covenants for 2009 and 2010, while the company complies with covenants for this year, which is not the profile of a company in real trouble," said a spokesman for the company in Madrid, who declined to be named because the negotiations were private.<br />Lenders to the French auto-parts distributor Autodistribution changed conditions on 535 million of outstanding debt in August, while Virgin Media, the second biggest pay-TV company in Britain, said last month it was paying lenders to defer payments.<br />Virgin Media "proactively sought to address its amortization payments," and the waiver will give the company "significantly more time to seek a complete refinancing of the principal amounts," the company said in a statement.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/waiver.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/waiver.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>Book review: A Financial History of the World</strong><br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />A Financial History of the World </div><div>By Niall Ferguson </div><div>442 pages. The Penguin Press. $29.95.<br />Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World," went to press in May, but it shrewdly anticipates many aspects of the current financial crisis, which has toppled banks, precipitated gigantic government bailouts and upended global markets.<br />"Are we on the brink of a 'great dying' in the financial world," Ferguson asks, "one of those mass extinctions of species that have occurred periodically, like the end-Cambrian extinction that killed off 90 percent of Earth's species, or the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs? It is a scenario that many biologists have reason to fear, as man-made climate change wreaks havoc with natural habitats around the globe. But a great dying of financial institutions is also a scenario that we should worry about, as another man-made disaster works its way slowly and painfully through the global financial system."<br />In the course of this useful if somewhat lumpy volume, Ferguson looks at the roots of the current economic meltdown, examining how, in a globalized world that uses increasingly complex financial instruments, defaults on subprime mortgages in U.S. cities could unleash a fiscal tsunami that spans the planet.<br />But the book does not focus primarily on speculative manias and financial crises. Instead Ferguson discusses such cycles of euphoria and panic within a larger historical context: he traces the evolution of credit, debt and the idea of risk management over several centuries, and as he did in an earlier book, "The Cash Nexus," he examines the potent links between politics and economics.<br />Ferguson explains why money went from coinage to paper and the advantages and disadvantages of the gold standard. He argues that aging societies have "a huge and growing need for fixed income securities, and for low inflation to ensure that the interest they pay retains its purchasing power."<br />And he looks at how exotic financial innovations (like collateralized debt obligations) and wide support for adjustable rate and subprime mortgages (endorsed, he says, by proponents of wider home ownership as disparate as Alan Greenspan and President George W. Bush) pushed the snowball of the current financial crisis.<br />Noting the high savings rate of Chinese households and Chinese corporations (in sharp contrast to Americans' penchant for living on credit), he observes that the direction of capital flow is now from East to West.<br />"In 2007 the United States needed to borrow around $800 billion from the rest of the world; more than $4 billion every working day," he writes. "China, by contrast, ran a current account surplus of $262 billion, equivalent to more than a quarter of the U.S. deficit. And a remarkably large proportion of that surplus has ended up being lent to the United States. In effect, the People's Republic China has become banker to the United States of America."<br />Although "The Ascent of Money" is pockmarked by digressions that many lay readers will find arcane and difficult to understand, the book as a whole is animated by Ferguson's narrative gifts, among them his ability to discuss complex ideas in simpler terms.<br />He also has a knack for illustrating his larger hypotheses with colorful stories about people like Nathan Rothschild (the subject of one of his earlier books); the Scottish economist and gambler John Law (described as "the man who invented the stock market bubble"); and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and his so-called Chicago Boys.<br />It is Ferguson's belief that "behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret," and much of this volume aims to explicate that argument. He suggests that the Renaissance boom in art and architecture can be traced to Italian bankers' application of Eastern and Arabic mathematics to finance.<br />"The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire," he argues, "because having the world's first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world's biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust.<br />Ferguson is fond of making Darwinian comparisons in the book, writing that "financial history is essentially the result of institutional mutation and natural selection."<br />Also contributing to "the inherent instability of the financial system," he says, are the vagaries of human behavior: "our innate inclination to veer from euphoria to despondency" and "our perennial failure to learn from history."<br />"Those who put their faith in the 'wisdom of crowds' mean no more than that a large group of people is more likely to make a correct assessment than a small group of supposed experts," he writes.<br />"But that is not saying much. The old joke that 'Macroeconomists have successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions' is not so much a joke as a dispiriting truth about the difficulty of economic forecasting. Meanwhile, serious students of human psychology will expect as much madness as wisdom from large groups of people. A case in point must be the near-universal delusion among investors in the first half of 2007 that a major liquidity crisis could not occur."<br /></div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/arts/bookthu.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/04/arts/bookthu.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Goldman reportedly faces $2 billion quarterly loss<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />(Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group is likely to report a net loss of as much as $2 billion (1.35 billion pounds) for the fourth quarter, the Wall Street Journal said, citing industry insiders.<br />The quarterly loss, equivalent to about $5 a share, will be Goldman's first ever as a public company, as it faces writedowns on everything from private equity to commercial real estate, the paper said.<br />Analysts on average are expecting a loss of $1.27 a share, excluding items, for the quarter ended November 28, according to Reuters Estimates.<br />(Reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore ; Editing by Greg Mahlich)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/business/OUKBS-UK-GOLDMANSACHS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/business/OUKBS-UK-GOLDMANSACHS.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div><strong>Counting the bodies in the aftermath of clashes in Nigeria<br /></strong>By Will Connors<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />JOS, Nigeria: Neighborhood residents did not know on Monday whose charred body still lay in the living room of the burned-down house underneath rocks and piles of corrugated tin.<br />"They had just arrived," said Femi Olayinka, 32, whose small hotel next door had also been burned to the ground. "We didn't know them yet. We think they just got trapped in the house and then burned to death."<br />No one seemed to notice a dead pig festering beside the house either, hacked to death three days earlier with machetes.<br />At least 400 people were killed on Friday, and more than 7,000 were forced to flee their homes in this central Nigerian city after angry Christian and Muslim mobs protested what they said were rigged local election results. In what turned out to be a short-lived but brutal rampage, groups of young men killed residents and burned down homes churches, mosques and schools.<br />As an uneasy calm returned on Monday, the exact number of dead and injured was still unclear and residents continued to debate what set off the violence.<br />Heavily armed soldiers and police officers were operating dozens of checkpoints. Men and boys walked past them with arms raised to show they carried no weapons. One man who did not do so quickly enough was forced by soldiers to walk on his hands across jagged gravel, then dunked in a barrel of oil before being released.<br />Bodies were still being discovered, piled into military trucks and delivered to hospitals or picked up by relatives and taken to churches or mosques. Late in the afternoon, 10 bodies arrived at the central mosque. Medical attendants lifted blankets wrapped around two of them to reveal the body of a young woman, stabbed to death, and the body of a small child, burned beyond recognition.<br />Most businesses remained shuttered but by the afternoon residents slowly started to emerge from their homes or places of refuge to take stock of what they had lost and buy what necessities they could. Fuel remained scarce and was being sold for nearly four times its price just four days earlier.<br />Nigeria's population of 140 million people comprises roughly equal numbers of Muslims and Christians, and Jos is in the heart of what is known as the "middle belt," where people of both religions often live and worship side by side, usually in peace. But Jos has been the site of clashes before. In 2001, nearly 1,000 people were killed in religious violence, and in 2004 hundreds died in fighting in the nearby city of Yelwa.<br />Friday's explosion of violence affected Christians and Muslims, often on the same block. "They burned my house, all my property," said Ladi Musa, 50, a Muslim homemaker and mother of nine. "All I have left are the clothes I'm wearing."<br />Directly across the street stood the burned remains of a church and Christian clinic.<br />Joseph Atsen, 35, a civil servant and a Christian, was at home "trying to go to work when a group of boys came," he said from his bed at Jos University Teaching Hospital. "Some had sticks, some knives, some had guns. I heard a gunshot, then I was down. The next thing I knew, I was in the hospital."<br />X-rays showed that three bullets remained in his head, shoulder and leg. Still, he does not harbor ill will toward his neighbors. "I have Muslim friends," he said. "I saw some of them there. They saw me. When I see them next, I will greet them."<br />Christian and Muslim leaders in Jos, despite emotionally charged verbal sparring about who was more responsible for the violence, seemed to agree that the state government had done little to ease tensions between the groups.<br />"Our people are deeply, deeply religious," said Ignatius Kaigama, the archbishop of Jos, referring to all Nigerians. "They follow their religious leaders blindly, and politicians know this. These young men were used."<br />Sheik Khalid Adem, the imam of Jos, said: "There's too much lip service and not enough action from the government. The government should be seen as a parent, looking after and caring for its children, not raising one as a legitimate son and one as a bastard."<br />Both sides also said soldiers and police officers, sent in to quell the violence on Friday, fired at civilians.<br />Kabir Musa Sati, 56, a retired civil servant and adviser to the imam, said he saw one such shooting by the police. "My neighbor's boy and I were sitting next to each other outside our homes when police came, so I told him to run inside," he said. "I got in first but he got his shirt caught on something and was hit by a bullet. No one helped him. No cars came. We had to wheel him in a cart to the hospital."<br />Archbishop Kaigama said the soldiers might have overreacted. "Soldiers were given shoot on sight orders," he said, "so many of those killed certainly could have been shot by soldiers."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/africa/02nigeria.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/africa/02nigeria.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8AOISroRBff_uFMkBRhccX63XiWe8oNV-6Wczzrxj6JpPDsZWB1UsM7LIb_hfowiSU7b8zDXAeY5SCFDmWKMTyxo_5ERWKe7Mhr3l7tc6pSPRoGphndBGauSNQP6jD_KFB93Wwh0B1K0/s1600-h/DSC02394.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483911078549362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8AOISroRBff_uFMkBRhccX63XiWe8oNV-6Wczzrxj6JpPDsZWB1UsM7LIb_hfowiSU7b8zDXAeY5SCFDmWKMTyxo_5ERWKe7Mhr3l7tc6pSPRoGphndBGauSNQP6jD_KFB93Wwh0B1K0/s320/DSC02394.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Coping with a more globalized world</strong><br />By Daniel Altman<br />Wednesday, December 3, 2008<br />For almost three years, this column has devoted itself to exploring the challenges of globalization: how governments, businesses and individuals strive to reduce their risks and take advantage of new opportunities. One crucial question still remains: How should societies as a whole manage the transition to a more globalized world?<br />In essence, globalization is a process of integration. Markets for commodities, manufactured goods, services, labor, investment funds and even ideas are becoming more and more connected. Over the past couple of decades, these connections have formed at an unprecedented rate.<br />The process of connection and integration depends fundamentally on trade. Certain things can be stolen or obtained without a direct cost, but most things must be bought. Most transactions have a buyer and a seller who trade voluntarily, even though they may not be able to control the price.<br />According to economic theory, every voluntary transaction leaves both parties at least as well off as before. If it didn't, they wouldn't trade. But the benefits of the transaction aren't always equally distributed. And there are losses, too; by entering into one transaction, the buyer and seller may bypass other transactions, and that can hurt the people who are left out.<br />Yet the most basic economic models suggest that globalization should benefit the world as a whole, and even that everyone on the planet could be made better off, if only the gains of globalization were properly distributed.<br />Right now, the world does very little to distribute those gains. Consumers in rich countries who benefit from access to a wide variety of low-cost imports don't band together to aid local producers that go out of business. Exporters who open new markets in emerging economies often exploit lax regulation and weak competition rather than trying to ensure a brighter future for the citizenry.<br />There are some initiatives, like the Trade Adjustment Assistance program in the United States, that attempt to retool struggling businesses and retrain unneeded workers. They are few and not especially successful. Yet tinkering with them until they are successful could be very worthwhile, more so than the basic economic models might suggest.<br />The reason has to do with the concentration of the gains from globalization. In general, globalization has been a force for less inequality between countries and more inequality within countries. On the one hand, the opening of markets allows less-developed economies with reduce productions costs to catch up with more-developed ones with higher production costs. On the other hand, the gains from that catch-up process often accrue to the people with the most education and wealth in the less-developed economies, while the losses often fall upon the least educated, poorest people in the more-developed ones.<br />There are important exceptions, of course. Hundreds of millions of Chinese have been lifted out of poverty in the past two decades, a substantial number of them because of surging Chinese exports. Likewise, hundreds of millions of working-class people around the world have benefited from the inexpensiveness of those very same exports.<br />Still, in many countries the gains from globalization have been concentrated among the wealthy, while losses from globalization have been concentrated, if not among the poor, then at least among the relatively disadvantaged. And there is the magic of the thing: Each dollar of gain to a person of privilege might mean much more in the pocket of a less well-off person.<br />Distributing the gains from globalization could therefore be a more socially productive process than those basic models, which assume that a dollar is worth the same to everyone, might suggest. That doesn't mean it's easy, though.<br />Indeed, there is a dearth of holistic approaches to this problem. Should the United States enact a new GI Bill - which offered higher education to returning World War II veterans - to reincorporate the legions of workers displaced by globalization into the labor force? Should there be an international code of conduct, and an enforcement body, for businesses doing business outside their home countries? Should all countries contribute to a fund to identify and clean up the side effects of globalization?<br />These kinds of ideas could help the world to realize its full economic potential. I am putting down my pen for now, but I hope others will continue to discuss and pursue them.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/glob03.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/glob03.php</a></div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5YqCvkY-5g1vMs-Tv0n3CmHCCVk-SzcIr-IVblpJC-diN__CSov2jZYmQPGxhHk1iA-NeS-auTfNkC94dDIniK72sGpMLUM0mARvvXS2fHF0r5MYIjA2IV9oxE9rIvlGpvGs3zryVHvQ/s1600-h/DSC02395.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483907290639346" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5YqCvkY-5g1vMs-Tv0n3CmHCCVk-SzcIr-IVblpJC-diN__CSov2jZYmQPGxhHk1iA-NeS-auTfNkC94dDIniK72sGpMLUM0mARvvXS2fHF0r5MYIjA2IV9oxE9rIvlGpvGs3zryVHvQ/s320/DSC02395.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>Finding the Zen in airport travel</strong><br />By Joe Sharkey<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />Having planned poorly, I recently sat for more than four hours at the airport in San Diego. Christmas carols played over and over, punctuated by admonishments from that woman with the grating voice not to accept packages from strangers. I bought a soggy sub sandwich with a warm Coke for an outrageous $12.<br />It was, in other words, just another miserable airport experience. It never occurred to me, until I spoke with Jason Barger a week later, that it could have been something completely different: a learning experience on traveling with a degree of serenity and grace.<br />Earlier this year, Barger, a consultant who frequently traveled overseas as a poverty worker for a church in Columbus, Ohio, decided to try an experiment. He would spend seven straight days and nights in the air travel system. The idea was to observe how people, himself included, responded to the stress and angst of air travel, and to write a book drawing some lessons from it.<br />"There is such a heightened sense of frustration at airports," he said. "I started thinking, maybe the airport - with so many people going in literally different directions and so many different agendas - is where we could start to think about beginning a more civil and graceful society. We could start with evaluating those small moments of frustration in air travel."<br />With his wife's encouragement, Barger, 33, published the book himself. Its title is "Step Back From the Baggage Claim: Change the World, Start at the Airport."<br />His week of intense research took him from Columbus to Boston to Miami to Chicago to Minneapolis to Seattle to San Diego and back to Columbus. He kept a detailed diary, and slept only 26 hours and 45 minutes in the week.<br />The baggage claim was a major point of observation. "That annoying buzzer goes off and everybody runs up to put their shins against that metal carousel rim and forms that human wall of entitlement, with people who were not so fast trying to peek through the wall and jockey for position," he said. "All of that angst, and for what?"<br />Same thing with that bell that dings when the plane comes to the gate, and everybody jumps up as if there is nothing more important in the world than grabbing a bag from an overhead bin and crouching in a jammed aisle until the door opens.<br />Barger maintains that these odd moments can lead to reflection on "stepping back from the metaphorical baggage claim in life."<br />"I'm going to embrace the quiet moments an airplane seat offers us," he vows in his book. "When the ding sends most into a frenzy, I am going to sit still."<br />O.K., but please let me through. I am still going to hop up and grab my bag from the bin, because chances are that I have to hotfoot it across an airport the size of Cleveland to make a connection. But I concede his point.<br />Air travel occurs in a weird, stressful cocoon, and we respond differently in airports and airplanes than we would at home or at work. A survey by TripAdvisor.com said 83 percent of more than 1,100 respondents believed that air travelers had become ruder in the past 10 years. Among their top complaints were parents who failed to mind unruly children and travelers who smelled bad. One respondent cited a man picking scabs off his bald head. Another told of a guy clipping his toenails.<br />On the other hand, Barger says he believes that "graceful" travel can be contagious.<br />On his trip, he watched a woman burdened with a bag and a laptop, and obviously late for a flight, negotiate snarled security lines and dash for her plane in high heels, radiating savoir-faire. "No matter what was thrown in her path, she was traveling gracefully," he said. "Among people around her, the entire mood was changed."<br />His book argues that air travel offers a potential for greater self-awareness. "We just have to start small and start where we are. Why not start to change the world by the way we live at the airport?" he asks.<br />Serenity now! It's evidently contagious.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/road.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/business/road.php</a></div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6oFJD82zavPQ000rxEg7EL8i6siPGIUL6yjevN-9mGqqiw-lBgMYINcPMyhYocZkgxsLn-CtexurFtnAvCev9u4-JWlzqW8HReyWfAREP3xFQmcNEyA0mAtxpkhSURjX8aZotjELSYXo/s1600-h/DSC02396.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483900176606530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6oFJD82zavPQ000rxEg7EL8i6siPGIUL6yjevN-9mGqqiw-lBgMYINcPMyhYocZkgxsLn-CtexurFtnAvCev9u4-JWlzqW8HReyWfAREP3xFQmcNEyA0mAtxpkhSURjX8aZotjELSYXo/s320/DSC02396.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>A concession wrapped in an acceptance</strong><br />By Alessandra Stanley<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />Presentations of presidential appointees can be important, but they are rarely interesting. Usually, the men and women chosen for top cabinet roles are not well known to the public; if there is drama behind the scenes, most in the audience are blind to it.<br />That was hardly the case on Monday when President-elect Barack Obama introduced his national security team. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's speech was no ordinary public-service pledge; for plenty of viewers, it was the moment when Clinton finally conceded the election for real.<br />The occasion was solemn, but like a wedding where the parents are divorced, the ceremony was carefully choreographed to avert awkward moments and camouflage past unpleasantness.<br />When Obama unveiled his economic team last week, he alone made a speech. In this more delicate selection, it was decided that Clinton, his pick for secretary of state, should also speak. But that might look suspect or too political unless the five other appointees also said a word, and that, in turn, required a few words from Vice President-elect Joseph Biden Jr., who had yet to make public statements of any consequence since the election. (He spoke last, spiritedly, and at some length.)<br />Not all the staging was designed to address Clinton's sensibilities. She and the five other appointees walked out on stage and stood in line, almost as if at attention, waiting for the president-elect to walk in. He did so briskly, with Biden at his heels.<br />Obama introduced his former rival as "my dear friend," and promised that his new team would forge "a new dawn of American leadership."<br />Clinton, who has mostly stayed out of public view since the election, opened on a valedictory note, telling the audience that leaving the Senate would be "very difficult for me." She attributed her sense of loss, or surrender, to ending her service to her New York constituents, but those who watched her struggle for the Democratic nomination with such ferocity for the past two years were reminded that she was also forswearing her independent campaign identity.<br />And there was a fleeting flashback to her primary season gamesmanship when she listed representing New York as a foreign policy credential. "You've also helped prepare me well for this new role," she told her Senate constituents. "After all, New Yorkers aren't afraid to speak their minds and do so in every language."<br />Her husband certainly was not letting anyone forget the campaign: as the ceremony was taking place, former President Bill Clinton issued a long statement extolling his wife's qualifications ("as her husband, I am deeply proud") and briefly praised Obama, not for his vision, but for his good sense in choosing Hillary Clinton.<br />The topic at hand was national security, and five other appointments were announced, but reporters were mostly interested in exploring how secure Obama felt about his new secretary of state's loyalty. A reporter asked Obama whether there was any lingering internal disagreement given that "some people up there on the stage" had previously attacked his argument that the United States has a right to attack terrorist targets in Pakistan without Pakistani government permission.<br />"I did not ask for assurances from these individuals that they would agree with me at all times," Obama said calmly. "I think they understand and would not be joining this team unless they understood and were prepared to carry out the decisions that have been made by me after full discussion."<br />When another reporter asked Obama about the "evolution" of his views since those times in the campaign when he dismissed Hillary Clinton's foreign policy experience as a series of "teas" with foreign leaders, Obama took it lightly. "Well, I mean, I think this is fun for the press to try to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign." he said with a grin. "No, I understand. And you're having fun, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not I'm not faulting it."<br />Clinton had greeted the question somewhat grimly, but as Obama answered, she slowly unfurled a smile. By the end, she managed to look almost as amused by the question as her new boss was.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/02watch.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/02watch.php</a></div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs0k_sRUAtiogSL5oEWy5Y4zUlyOnRPCrCcQocUdo-3wlLjoF6rEisu_9-lLTtBueOAfyLkI6w_DBdR5LtDSsuoEqArqiA0CdGq3XH4qhyphenhyphenTGG_ycAoGccZu58oNB5ZmwoAie30IGy6dA0/s1600-h/DSC02397.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483900975538850" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs0k_sRUAtiogSL5oEWy5Y4zUlyOnRPCrCcQocUdo-3wlLjoF6rEisu_9-lLTtBueOAfyLkI6w_DBdR5LtDSsuoEqArqiA0CdGq3XH4qhyphenhyphenTGG_ycAoGccZu58oNB5ZmwoAie30IGy6dA0/s320/DSC02397.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Book review: 'The Man Who Invented Christmas'</strong><br />By Kathryn Harrison<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />The Man Who Invented Christmas </div><div>How Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits By Les Standiford </div><div>241 pages. Crown Publishers. $19.95. </div><div><br />Creamed turkey. Curried turkey. Turkey à la king. Turkey potpies. Turkey macaroni casserole. ... If only Ebenezer Scrooge had not, in the excitement of his transformation from miser to humanitarian, diverged from the traditional Christmas goose to surprise Bob Cratchit with a turkey "twice the size of Tiny Tim." But - alas - he did, and as "A Christmas Carol" approaches its 165th birthday, a Google search answers the plaint "leftover turkey" with more than 300,000 promises of recipes to dispatch it. As for England's goose-raising industry, it tanked.<br />Scrooge. Tiny Tim. Bah, Humbug! "A Christmas Carol" may no longer effect the "sledgehammer blow" its author intended to bring down "on behalf of the poor and unfortunate," but more than a century and a half after its publication in 1843, it remains one of the rare novels to have infiltrated popular culture, leaving the impress of its characters and language and choice of appropriately celebratory fowl even on those who have never read it or seen one of its countless stage and film adaptations. Scrooge and his edifying ghosts are so much a part of Christmas that the idea their creator might actually have "invented" the holiday as we know it is neither new nor original to Les Standiford.<br />"The Man Who Invented Christmas" is a good title, too catchy to resist, perhaps, as Standiford admits that the public's embrace of Dickens's short novel is but one evidence of the 19th century's changing attitude toward Christmas. In 1819, Washington Irving's popular "Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent" had "glorified" the "social rites" of the season. Clement Moore's 1823 poem "The Night Before Christmas" introduced a fat and jolly St. Nick whose obvious attractions eclipsed what had been a "foreboding figure of judgment" as likely to distribute canings as gifts.<br />Queen Victoria and her Bavarian husband, Albert, "great boosters of the season," had installed a Christmas tree in Windsor Castle each year since 1840, encouraging a fad that spread overseas to America by 1848. In "The Descent of Man" (1871), Charles Darwin announced that celebrants of the season had a more tangible relationship to apes than to annunciations, further secularizing what the Christian church hadn't conceived but poached (along with Yule logs and stockings to stuff) from German pagan practices.<br />A writer and his era's zeitgeist may be "animated by the same energy and faith," as Peter Ackroyd observes in his 1990 biography of Scrooge's creator, but the idea of Dickens's responsibility for what has become an orgy of spending is one he dismisses as humbuggery.<br />What is true is that Christmas, more than any other holiday, offered a means for the adult Dickens to redeem the despair and terrors of his childhood. In 1824, after a series of financial embarrassments drove his family to exchange what he remembered as a pleasant country existence for a "mean, small tenement" in London, the 12-year-old Dickens, his schooling interrupted, was sent to work 10-hour days at a shoe blacking factory in a quixotic attempt to remedy his family's insolvency. Not even a week later, his father was incarcerated in the infamous Marshalsea prison for a failure to pay a debt of £40 to a baker. At this, Dickens's "grief and humiliation" overwhelmed him so thoroughly that it retained the power to overshadow his adult accomplishments. And because Dickens's tribulations were not particular to him but emblematic of the Industrial Revolution the concerns that inform his fiction were shared by millions of potential readers.<br />A Dickens novel ("Oliver Twist," "Little Dorrit," "Bleak House") announces more than cloaks its agenda to reveal social injustice, especially the plight of those two "abject, frightful, hideous, miserable" children peering out from under the robe worn by the Ghost of Christmas Present.<br />"This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want," the Ghost tells the quaking Scrooge. "No perversion of humanity ... has monsters half so horrible and dread." Dickens intended to make the sufferings of the most vulnerable of the underclass so pungently real to his readers that they could not continue to ignore their need, not so much for charity as for the means to save themselves: education. At least this was his conscious purpose. The deeper truth is that even genius of the magnitude of Dickens's can't free an artist from his demons; it can only offer him an arena for engaging them.<br />The months leading up to the publication of "A Christmas Carol" in December 1843 were not happy ones for Dickens. The most popular writer in England was falling further into debt as he struggled to support a large family.<br />Having accepted an invitation to speak, on Oct. 5, at a fund-raiser for the Manchester Athenaeum, Dickens was obliged to return to the city that had, in 1838, "disgusted and astonished" him. Considered "the world's first modern industrial city," Manchester presented the kind of success that pricked even the most phlegmatic social consciousness, a portrait of such squalor among factory workers that the two years Friedrich Engels spent observing its citizens may well have altered history.<br />Dickens, galvanized by the response of his Athenaeum audience - "rapt" - and by a renewed vision of the cost of disdaining the plight of children, returned to London having conceived what would be the first project he completed as a whole rather than in serial parts. For six weeks he worked feverishly, delivering a manuscript to the printer in late November, for publication a few days before Christmas.<br />Standiford tidily explains the appeal of "A Christmas Carol," its readership "said at the turn of the 20th century to be second only to the Bible's." Replacing the slippery Holy Ghost with anthropomorphized spirits, the infant Christ with a crippled child whose salvation waits on man's - not God's - generosity, Dickens laid claim to a religious festival, handing it over to the gathering forces of secular humanism. If a single night's crash course in man's power to redress his mistakes and redeem his future without appealing to an invisible and silent deity could rehabilitate even so apparently lost a cause as Ebenezer Scrooge, imagine what it might do for the rest of us!<br />The popularity of "A Christmas Carol" inspired Dickens to commit himself to writing other holiday books, but "The Chimes," "The Cricket on the Hearth" and "The Battle of Life" couldn't reproduce the alchemy of their prototype. Too grim, too redux, too calculated.<br />It was tempting to recreate the success of their predecessor, but hardly necessary. "The Man Who Invented Christmas" may not be necessary, either, not with regard to the juggernaut of Dickens scholarship, but it's a sweet and sincere addition. A stocking stuffer for the bookish on your holiday list.<br />Kathryn Harrison's most recent book is "While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/arts/IDLEDE6.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/06/arts/IDLEDE6.php</a></div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjqoGXPzx-aLZLHff2wbVJhJsjeZ3qoVSRuIvzgjfqXe23hZ1qv7opQkomfVgu3LQjKqbWVS6-AO-DoXf3EUIO3RgSavL6rebQa8CO_jzh-loHuVTsTXbGQ6QlH5Z9XH__TFg9ud-GegA/s1600-h/DSC02398.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483678133257234" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjqoGXPzx-aLZLHff2wbVJhJsjeZ3qoVSRuIvzgjfqXe23hZ1qv7opQkomfVgu3LQjKqbWVS6-AO-DoXf3EUIO3RgSavL6rebQa8CO_jzh-loHuVTsTXbGQ6QlH5Z9XH__TFg9ud-GegA/s320/DSC02398.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>Arrogant, abusive and disruptive - and a doctor<br /></strong>By Laurie Tarkan<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />It was the middle of the night, and Laura Silverthorn, a nurse at a hospital in Washington, knew her patient was in danger.<br />The boy had a shunt in his brain to drain fluid, but he was vomiting and had an extreme headache, two signs that the shunt was blocked and fluid was building up. When she paged the on-call resident, who was asleep in the hospital, he told her not to worry.<br />After a second page, Silverthorn said, "he became arrogant and said, 'You don't know what to look for you're not a doctor.' "<br />He ignored her third page, and after another harrowing hour she called the attending physician at home. The child was rushed into surgery.<br />"He could have died or had serious brain injury," Silverthorn said, "but I was treated like a pest for calling in the middle of the night."<br />Her experience is borne out by surveys of hospital staff members, who blame badly behaved doctors for low morale, stress and high turnover. ( Silverthorn said she had been brought to tears so many times that she was trying to start her own business and leave nursing.)<br />Recent studies suggest that such behavior contributes to medical mistakes, preventable complications and even death.<br />"It is the health care equivalent of road rage," said Dr. Peter Angood, chief patient safety officer at the Joint Commission, the nation's leading independent hospital accreditation agency.<br />A survey of health care workers at 102 nonprofit hospitals from 2004 to 2007 found that 67 percent of respondents said they thought there was a link between disruptive behavior and medical mistakes, and 18 percent said they knew of a mistake that occurred because of an obnoxious doctor. (The author was Dr. Alan Rosenstein, medical director for the West Coast region of VHA Inc., an alliance of nonprofit hospitals.)<br />Another survey by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit organization, found that 40 percent of hospital staff members reported having been so intimidated by a doctor that they did not share their concerns about orders for medication that appeared to be incorrect. As a result, 7 percent said they contributed to a medication error.<br />There are signs, however, that such abusive behavior is less likely to be tolerated. Physicians and nurses say they have seen less of it in the past 5 or 10 years, though it is still a major problem, and the Joint Commission is requiring hospitals to have a written code of conduct and a process for enforcing it.<br />Still, every nurse has a story about obnoxious doctors. A few say they have ducked scalpels thrown across the operating room by angry surgeons. More frequently, though, they are belittled, insulted or yelled at often in front of patients and other staff members and made to feel like the bottom of the food chain. A third of the nurses in Rosenstein's study were aware of a nurse who had left a hospital because of a disruptive physician.<br />"The job is tough enough without having to prepare yourself psychologically for a call that you know could very well become abusive," said Diana Mason, editor in chief of The American Journal of Nursing.<br />Laura Sweet, deputy chief of enforcement at the Medical Board of California, described the case of a resident at a University of California hospital who noticed a problem with a fetal monitoring strip on a woman in labor, but didn't call anyone.<br />"He was afraid to contact the attending physician, who was notorious for yelling and ridiculing the residents," Sweet said. The baby died.<br />Of course, most doctors do not spew insults or intimidate nurses. "Most people are trying to do the best job they can under a high-pressure situation," said Dr. Joseph Heyman, chairman of the trustees of the American Medical Association.<br />Dr. William Norcross, director of a program at the University of California, San Diego, that offers anger management for physicians, agreed. But he added, "About 3 to 4 percent of doctors are disruptive, but that's a big number, and they really gum up the works." Experts say the leading offenders are specialists in high-pressure fields like neurosurgery, orthopedics and cardiology.<br />In one instance witnessed by Angood of the Joint Commission, a nurse called a surgeon to come and verify his next surgical patient and to mark the spot where the operation would be done. The harried surgeon yelled at the nurse to get the patient ready herself. When he showed up late to the operating room, he did not realize the surgery site was mismarked and operated on the wrong part.<br />"The surgeon then berated the entire team for their error and continued to denigrate them to others, when the error was the surgeon's because he failed to cooperate in the process," Angood said.<br />A hostile environment erodes cooperation and a sense of commitment to high-quality care, Angood said, and that increases the risk of medical errors.<br />"When the wrong surgery is done on patients," he said, "often there is somebody in that operating room who knew the event was going to occur who did not feel empowered enough to speak up about it."<br />Norcross blamed "the brutal training surgeons get, the long hours, being belittled and 'pimped' " a term for being bombarded with questions to the point of looking stupid. "That whole structure teaches a disruptive behavior," he said.<br />Norcross and other experts said staff members' understandable reluctance to challenge a physician, especially a popular surgeon who attracts patients to the hospital, created an atmosphere of tolerance and indifference. So did a tendency among doctors to form "old boy" networks and protect one another from criticism.<br />But things have begun to change. Today, good communication and leadership are two of the six core skills taught in medical schools and residency programs. More nurses are challenging doctors on their inappropriate behavior, and fewer hospitals are tolerating disruptive doctors. "Today they're getting rid of that doctor or sending them to anger management," said Dr. Thomas Russell, executive director of the American College of Surgeons.<br />Hospitals have also developed more formal and consistent ways of addressing disruptive behavior, Rosenstein said. They are also trying to improve relations and mutual respect between doctors and nurses.<br />At John Muir Health, a nonprofit group of two hospitals in Walnut Creek and Concord, California, a committee of physicians, nurses and other staff members was formed to focus on collaboration and communication between disciplines.<br />"When complaints are submitted, we try to be proactive early to let them know there is not going to be any tolerance for that," said Dr. Roy Kaplan, John Muir's medical director for quality.<br />Some physicians worry that hospital administrators will abuse the stricter codes of conduct by using them to get rid of doctors who speak out against hospital policies. And the Joint Commission rulings have spawned a cottage industry of anger management centers and law firms defending hospitals or physicians.<br />Professionals like Silverthorn, the nurse in Washington, said the change was overdue.<br />"We go to school, we have a very important job, but there's no respect," she said.<br />She recalled a particularly humiliating moment on Dec. 25, 2006. Working in the pediatric emergency room, she called a drug by its generic name rather than its brand name.<br />"I was quickly shouted out of the trauma room and humiliated in front of everyone," she said. But while "everyone knew the doctor was actually the one who didn't know what he was doing," she continued, no one said a word.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/healthscience/02rage.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/healthscience/02rage.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div><strong>The six habits of highly respectful physicians</strong><br />By Michael W. Kahn, M.d<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />Recently, I asked a colleague about the quality of care her hospitalized mother was getting. "Well, you can at least have a conversation with her doctor," she replied. Clearly this was a big relief.<br />High-level skills like reflectiveness and empathy are an important part of medical education these days. That is all to the good, of course. But as I noted last May in an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, medical schools may be underemphasizing a much simpler virtue: good manners.<br />In the article, I described a common-sense method for spreading clinical courtesy that I call "etiquette-based medicine," and I proposed a simple six-step checklist for doctors to follow when meeting a hospitalized patient for the first time:<br /> Ask permission to enter the room; wait for an answer.<br /> Introduce yourself; show your ID badge.<br /> Shake hands.<br /> Sit down. Smile if appropriate.<br /> Explain your role on the health care team.<br /> Ask how the patient feels about being in the hospital.<br />Do doctors really need to be told to do such obvious things? Unfortunately, anyone who has spent time in the hospital as a patient or a physician knows how haphazardly such actions are performed, and as Samuel Johnson wrote, "Man needs more to be reminded than instructed."<br />There is a useful analogy here to raising children. The British physician D. W. Winnicott coined the term "good enough mother" in part to help mothers who were overly anxious about their parenting skills. Rather than worry about trying to be perfect (whatever that meant), he urged them to relax, trust their intuition and realize that their children needed a mother who was caring, alert and reliable in other words, good enough.<br />Similarly, when medical schools try to turn out ideal doctors, they can miss the opportunity to help them be good enough: perhaps not perfectly attuned to the patient, but at least respectful and professional. An etiquette-based approach can promote such behavior.<br />Etiquette-based medicine rests on the fact that patients derive comfort from specific actions as opposed to attitudes or feelings that are independent of the doctor's emotional investment in the patient. My doctor may be tired, preoccupied or not that interested in me as a person; but I should still expect him or her to treat me with the kind of attentiveness and respect I recently received from a "genius" at the local Apple store.<br />The "genius" was skillful, efficient and professional, and solved my problem quickly without feeling my pain (which had been considerable). I don't necessarily want or need to have an exceptional healer, but I would like to have good service. Patients should command at least the same regard from their doctors.<br />Does this mean surrendering medicine's nobler values in the service of mere client satisfaction? Not at all. Consider one more analogy: A developing country may make a major investment in M.R.I. machines, an essential element of up-to-date medicine. But that money will be misspent if the country lacks enough antibiotics and doctors to prescribe them.<br />By the same token, trying to cultivate deeper human sensibility in doctors will be an inefficient use of scarce educational resources if those doctors cannot make the time to sit down, introduce themselves and make eye contact with their patients. Training good enough doctors should be like fluoridating the water supply or vaccinating children: uncomplicated, routine, relatively inexpensive but with widespread and long-lasting benefits.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/healthscience/02etiq.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/healthscience/02etiq.php</a></div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3cksZxYNNGg5C2fIJ3QmxX9fiu0AMpVCF2xUUmdyZDnVHjxYZyDKuozM6SnHLUFzMvgTleNVJ2OABNiIFkboJ3HrBBjE5v488Ls9cuUVGFpIqK2dy4ha8qBS4n0_lLkX-L1vzNZ9zdfY/s1600-h/DSC02399.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483675218468434" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3cksZxYNNGg5C2fIJ3QmxX9fiu0AMpVCF2xUUmdyZDnVHjxYZyDKuozM6SnHLUFzMvgTleNVJ2OABNiIFkboJ3HrBBjE5v488Ls9cuUVGFpIqK2dy4ha8qBS4n0_lLkX-L1vzNZ9zdfY/s320/DSC02399.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Standing in someone else's shoes, almost for real</strong><br />By Benedict Carey<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />From the outside, psychotherapy can look like an exercise in self-absorption. In fact, though, therapists often work to pull people out of themselves: to see their behavior from the perspective of a loved one, for example, or to observe their own thinking habits from a neutral distance.<br />Marriage counselors have couples role-play, each one taking the other spouse's part. Psychologists have rapists and other criminals describe their crime from the point of view of the victim. Like novelists or moviemakers, their purpose is to transport people, mentally, into the mind of another.<br />Now, neuroscientists have shown that they can make this experience physical, creating a "body swapping" illusion that could have a profound effect on a range of therapeutic techniques. At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last month, Swedish researchers presented evidence that the brain, when tricked by optical and sensory illusions, can quickly adopt any other human form, no matter how different, as its own.<br />"You can see the possibilities, putting a male in a female body, young in old, white in black and vice versa," said Dr. Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who with his colleague Valeria Petkova described the work to other scientists at the meeting. Their full study is to appear online this week in the journal PLoS One. .<br />The technique is simple. A subject stands or sits opposite the scientist, as if engaged in an interview.. Both are wearing headsets, with special goggles, the scientist's containing small film cameras. The goggles are rigged so the subject sees what the scientist sees: to the right and left are the scientist's arms, and below is the scientist's body.<br />To add a physical element, the researchers have each person squeeze the other's hand, as if in a handshake. Now the subject can see and "feel" the new body. In a matter of seconds, the illusion is complete. In a series of studies, using mannequins and stroking both bodies' bellies simultaneously, the Karolinska researchers have found that men and women say they not only feel they have taken on the new body, but also unconsciously cringe when it is poked or threatened.<br />In previous work, neuroscientists have induced various kinds of out-of-body experiences using similar techniques. The brain is so easily tricked, they say, precisely because it has spent a lifetime in its own body. It builds models of the world instantaneously, based on lived experience and using split-second assumptions namely, that the eyes are attached to the skull.<br />Therapists say the body-swapping effect is so odd that it could be risky for anyone in real mental distress. People suffering from the delusions of schizophrenia or the grandiose mania of bipolar disorder are not likely to benefit from more disorientation, no matter the intent.<br />But those who seek help for relationship problems, in particular, often begin to moderate their behavior only after they have worked to see the encounters in their daily life from others' point of view.<br />"This is especially true for adolescents, who are so self-involved, and also for people who come in with anger problems and are more interested in changing everyone else in their life than themselves," said Kristene Doyle, director of clinical services at the Albert Ellis Institute in New York.<br />One important goal of therapy in such cases, Doyle said, is to get people to generate alternative explanations for others' behavior before they themselves react.<br />The evidence that inhabiting another's perspective can change behavior comes in part from virtual-reality experiments. In these studies, researchers create avatars that mimic a person's every movement. After watching their "reflection" in a virtual mirror, people mentally inhabit this avatar at some level, regardless of its sex, race or appearance. In several studies, for instance, researchers have shown that white people who spend time interacting virtually as black avatars become less anxious about racial differences.<br />Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, and his colleague Nick Yee call this the Proteus effect, after the Greek god who can embody many different self-representations.<br />In one experiment, the Stanford team found that people inhabiting physically attractive avatars were far more socially intimate in virtual interactions than those who had less appealing ones. The effect was subconscious: the study participants were not aware that they were especially good-looking, or that in virtual conversations they moved three feet closer to virtual conversation partners and revealed more about themselves than others did. This confidence lingered even after the experiment was over, when the virtual lookers picked more attractive partners as matches for a date.<br />Similar studies have found that people agree to contribute more to retirement accounts when they are virtually "age-morphed" to look older; and that they will exercise more after inhabiting an avatar that works out and loses weight.<br />Adding a physical body-swapping element, as the Swedish team did, is likely to amplify such changes. "It has video quality, it looks and feels more realistic than what we can do in virtual environments, so is likely to be much more persuasive," Bailenson said in a telephone interview.<br />Perhaps too persuasive for some purposes. "It may be like the difference between a good book, where you can project yourself into a character by filling in with your imagination, and a movie, where the specific actor gets in the way of identifying strongly," he went on.<br />And above and beyond any therapeutic purposes, the sensation is downright strange. In the experiments, said Ehrsson, the Swedish researcher, "even the feeling from the squeezing hand is felt in the scientist's hand and not in your own; this is perhaps the strangest aspect of the experience."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/healthscience/02mind.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/healthscience/02mind.php</a></div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXOtWKZsTjW_n83J7keZCsl26ilnf4dV200VOQKFvdjK_PihzetTvz5IfS_PQRf6J2_HfESJx9qGLLyxA8wqiorENJ6V_E03d94Jmt4KRNlZ7hWr45DnqMdrjCJJQMzxz6TtCHuFCUdD0/s1600-h/DSC02400.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483674589555042" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXOtWKZsTjW_n83J7keZCsl26ilnf4dV200VOQKFvdjK_PihzetTvz5IfS_PQRf6J2_HfESJx9qGLLyxA8wqiorENJ6V_E03d94Jmt4KRNlZ7hWr45DnqMdrjCJJQMzxz6TtCHuFCUdD0/s320/DSC02400.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>Norway convicts Bosnian on 1992 war crimes</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />OSLO: A Bosnian muslim was jailed for five years on Tuesday for crimes against Serb civilians during the war in Bosnia in 1992 in the first war crimes case in Norway since the trials of Norwegians who collaborated with the Nazis.<br />The case was the first test of new Norwegian legislation on crimes against humanity and war crimes adopted in March.<br />Mirsad Repak, 42, who came to Norway in 1993 as an asylum-seeker and obtained Norwegian citizenship in 2001, has pleaded not guilty since the start of the trial on August 27.<br />The prosecutor had demanded 10 years in prison for the crimes that were said to have taken place in connection with the internment of civilians in Stolac and at the Dretelj prison camp in southern Bosnia-Herzegovina.<br />"The accused is found guilty of 11 cases of war crimes and deprivation of freedom of civilian, non-combatant Serbs followed by an internment in Dretelj," judge Finn Haugen told the court.<br />"The internment lasted for all 11 prisoners significantly longer than one month and/or the prisoners were exposed to unusual suffering," the judge said, adding that Repak was linked particularly to one incident of violence when he tortured a woman during questioning.<br />He was acquitted of the more wideranging charge of crimes against humanity, since that element of the law could not be applied to the alleged offence at that time.<br />The defence had argued that the state's entire case, including war crimes, should be thrown out as unconstitutional. But the court ruled the law encompassed the acts on which he was convicted.<br />Repak was also ordered to pay a total of 400,000 Norwegian crowns (37,503 pounds) to eight victims, but was acquitted on one rape charge. The defence has argued that he was a common soldier, but the court ruled that he had played a leadership role.<br />The prosecutor had argued that Repak played an important role in rape, torture, cruel treatment and violations of the laws or customs of war towards 18 Serbian non-combatants in the former Yugoslavia.<br />Norway's ambassador in Bosnia, Jan Braathu, told Norwegian TV channel TV2: "The immediate reaction is that the verdict is considered very mild."<br />(Reporting by Aasa Christine Stoltz; editing by Ralph Boulton)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-NORWAY-WARCRIMES.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-NORWAY-WARCRIMES.php</a></div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Puerto Rico pageant celebrates a vanished native culture </strong><br />By Damien Cave<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />JAYUYA, Puerto Rico: The seven girls posed, preened and smiled with all the energy of Miss Universe contestants, but this was no ordinary pageant.<br />The competitors, from about 6 years old to 16, had just paraded through a downpour to a small stage surrounded by mountains, where they displayed elaborate outfits handmade from wood, plants or, in one case, jingling shells. And the judges also sought a special kind of beauty: those who most resembled Puerto Rico's native Indian tribe, the Taino, received higher marks.<br />"It's different," said Felix González, president of the National Indigenous Festival of Jayuya, of which the pageant is a part. "It's not white culture and blue eyes; it says that the part of our blood that comes from indigenous culture is just as important."<br />Puerto Ricans have long considered themselves a mix of African, European and Native American influences. But since the 1960s, the Taino - a tribe wiped from the Antilles by European conquest, disease and assimilation - has come to occupy a special place in the island's cultural hierarchy.<br />The streets of Old San Juan are lined with museums and research centers dedicated to unearthing Taino artifacts and rituals. Children are taught from a young age that "hurricane" is Taino in origin, from the word "huracan," while no Latin pop music concert is complete without a shout out to Boricuas - those from Borinquen, the Taino name for Puerto Rico, which means "land of the brave noble lord."<br />The ties may be more than cultural. In 2003, Juan Martínez Cruzado, a geneticist at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, found that at least 61 percent of Puerto Ricans possess remnants of Taino DNA - and nearly all seem to believe they belong in that group.<br />"The Indian heritage is very important because it unites the Puerto Rican community," said Miguel Rodríguez López, an archaeologist with the Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, an independent graduate school in San Juan. "There is a feeling that it represents our primary roots." He added, "It is our symbolic identity."<br />In Jayuya, a town of a few thousand people in the mountains north of Ponce, Taino celebrations began decades ago. When local leaders discovered in the mid-1960s that the town was named for a Taino chief, they commissioned a sculpture to honor him. It was dedicated in November 1969 at the first indigenous festival, and every year since, the chief's stern eyes have looked out over the event from a perch above the central plaza.<br />At times, he has been forced to share space with the more modern forces that decimated his people. One of the city's major archaeological sites, discovered here two years ago, sits across from a Burger King. And before the pageant began Saturday night, a performance of traditional Taino dance competed with a pop song from Mana, Latin America's biggest rock band.<br />Mostly, though, the Taino influence in Jayuya seems to have merged with its surroundings. The standard Taino sun symbol, called a guanín, is now carved into the Spanish-style plaza. Many of the crafts being sold at the festival, like jewelry, purses and soap, also included Taino symbols.<br />And even the pageant is a hybrid. Actual Taino women wore only loincloths. But with the influence of local teenagers, the costumes have become exponentially more extravagant. A few years ago, organizers had to limit their size.<br />Even with those boundaries, which, of course, the teenagers tried to push, the costumes amounted to a mix of homecoming queen, Halloween, "Last of the Mohicans" and Las Vegas showgirl.<br />Rodríguez, the archaeologist and a former judge of the pageant, compared it to Brazil's carnival. "It's a sincretismo," he said. "They mix different cultures, different beliefs."<br />Some scholars have scoffed at the concept, saying it is more a reflection of the joke that Puerto Ricans love festivals enough to have one for every cause or crustacean. But Rodríguez defended the idea. "You have to enjoy it because it's for the people," he said.<br />The contestants clearly love it. Natalia Fernández, 16, said she had spent a month and half building her outfit, which required her to carry on her back a wooden Taino dancer weighing at least 25 pounds, or 11 kilograms, with a sprout above his head the size of a small coffee table.<br />Her bangs had been cut, her dark hair was straight (in a nod to what is considered Taino style) and her naturally copper-colored skin made her appear as Native American as Chief Jayuya. But she was also 100 percent teenager. Asked before the contest how she thought she would do, she fiddled with her cellphone and said, "I'm going to win."<br />The event started an hour late, and the rain and competition seemed to surprise Natalia. She frowned under the downpour, looking chilled with a bare midriff and no shoes, as she glanced nervously at the girl with shells and starfish netted in a high headdress.<br />But her fears were unfounded. After all the girls introduced themselves and explained their outfits, the judges called Natalia's name last, like all great pageant winners. Her friends and family cheered loudly from beneath umbrellas as she smiled and twirled for the digital cameras.<br />"It's about a beautiful culture," she said before taking the stage. "It's not about just beauty."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/puerto.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/puerto.php</a></div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>'Political archaeologists' find surprises during the transition</strong><br />By David E. Sanger<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: For the first time since they threw their old, boxy pagers over the White House fence on Jan. 20, 2001 the BlackBerry as we know it wasn't on the market yet the alumni of the Clinton Administration have returned to their old haunts.<br />This time, they are members of "transition teams," but several say they feel like more like political archaeologists. "The buildings look the same," one said over coffee, "but everything inside is unrecognizable." And as they dig, they have tripped across a few surprises.<br />None of these newly arrived archaeologists would allow their names to be used when discussing their findings; to preserve cooperation with the Bush White House in a handover-of-power that still has 49 days to go, President-elect Barack Obama's top aides have imposed a gag rule. But few can contain their amazement, chiefly at the sheer increase in the size of the defense and national-security apparatus.<br />"For a bunch of small-government Republicans," one former denizen of the White House who has now stepped back inside for the first time in eight years, "these guys built a hell of an empire."<br />Eight years ago, there were two deputy national security advisers; today there are a half-dozen, each with staff. In the downstairs suites of the West Wing and across the street in the Old Executive Office Building, the returnees tripped into the Homeland Security Council, created to keep order in the new, vast, often dysfunctional Homeland Security Department. In the Pentagon's deepest crevices, the Joint Special Operations Command has mushroomed in size and influence because of the demands of operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The list goes on.<br />But several say that their biggest surprise came when they learned more about how Bush spends his day, and how he gets his information.<br />It's not clear what they expected; perhaps after all those jokes on Letterman and Leno, they thought Bush spent the heart of his day on the stationary bicycle. Instead, they have been surprised to see the degree of tactical detail about two wars and a handful of insurgencies from the tribal areas of Pakistan to Sudan and the Congo that surrounds him. Partly this is because the high-tech makeover of the Situation Room, completed about two years ago, makes instantaneous conversation with field commanders easier than ever.<br />Both the transition officials and some White House insiders say it may make this communication too easy, sucking the commander-in-chief into a situation in which real-time, straight-from-the-battlefield discussions of tactics masquerade as a conversation about strategy.<br />Bush himself has talked about how the installation of secure video links has changed his presidency. In addition to the screens in the "Sit Room," he has links on Air Force One, at Camp David, and in a trailer across the dirt road from his ranch in Crawford, Texas At a barbecue for the press in Crawford a few years back, he waxed on about how the technology has created a window for sealed-off presidents, and urged reporters to get their own for when they are on the road. (No one had the heart to tell him that connectivity with editors is not always a reporter's greatest wish.)<br />But several veterans of the White House have noted in conversations over the past two years that the secure video does not lend itself to open, vigorous debate. Instead, it can squelch it. The picture is being piped into too many places; field commanders don't want to speak their mind to the president if their immediate superiors at the Pentagon or Central Command are tuned in, too. There may be recordings for posterity, or presidential libraries.<br />One recently departed National Security Council official noted earlier this year that in his view, the problem is that the system is largely in the hands of war-fighters; only on a rare day, and only toward the end of his presidency, did members of Provincial Reconstruction Teams and other aid workers involved in nation-building pop up on Bush's screen.<br />"The technology tends to skew the nature of the advice you hear," this former N.S.C. member said, declining to speak on the record because the sessions he witnessed were classified. "You spend a lot more time talking about hitting a house of full of bad guys in Waziristan than you do talking about why our effort to build schools and roads is moving so slowly."<br />It is not yet clear what Obama thinks of the high-tech toys he will soon have at his disposal, but at the announcement of his new national security team on Monday in Chicago, he was clearly aware of the problem they can accentuate. "One of the dangers in a White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in groupthink and everybody agrees with everything and there's no discussion and there are no dissenting views." He insisted he would be "welcoming a vigorous debate inside the White House."<br />A few hours later, ABC News broadcast an interview in which Bush told Charles Gibson that "the biggest regret" of his presidency arose from his administration's best-known group-think debacle. "A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," Bush said, according to the White House transcript. "And you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess."<br />Bush, once again, declined to be drawn into the great what-if of his presidency: Would history had been different if the Iraq intelligence had been accurate, or if someone on one of those screens had debated the implications if it turned out to be wrong?<br />He had designed the 2002 "Bush doctrine" the declaration that after 9/11, the United States could no longer take the risk of allowing imminent threats to the country gather for a world in which technology allowed near-perfect information flow, enabling the president to make accurate, black-and-white calls about whether that threat exists. Instead, in its first application to a real-life conflict, the debate turned into an endless feedback loop, reinforcing faulty assumptions. People talked about how many days would be required to get to Baghdad, not whether the evidence for invasion was good enough, or the possibility that the occupation would go awry.<br />Even the face-to-face discussions took on an element of virtual reality. More Articles in US »</div><div> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/02websanger.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/02websanger.php</a></div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div><strong>Rwandan singer gets 15 years for role in genocide</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />ARUSHA, Tanzania: A U.N. court sentenced a former pop star to 15 years in prison on Tuesday for his part in inciting Rwanda's 1994 genocide.<br />Presiding Judge Monica Weinberg de Roca said Tuesday that Simon Bikindi used a public address system to tell Hutus to exterminate Tutsi "snakes" and wrote hate-filled propaganda in his lyrics.<br />"You have abused your stature as a well-known and popular artist ... and an important figure in the Interahamwe movement by using your influence to incite genocide," she said. The Interahamwe were militants from the Hutu ethnic majority.<br />The singer will get credit for seven years already served in prison.<br />In 1994, more than 500,000 people were killed in 100 days after Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane was mysteriously shot down over Kigali as he returned home from peace talks with Tutsi-led rebels.<br />Hours after the crash, the Interahamwe set up roadblocks across Kigali and the next day began killing Tutsis and moderate Hutus.<br />They often used radio as a means of urging Hutu civilians to kill their Tutsi neighbors and direct the slaughter. Bikindi's songs called on Hutus to remember the suffering under the Tutsi monarchy and urged Hutus to remain united against the "Tutsi enemy."<br />The Tanzania-based war crimes tribunal has convicted 32 people and acquitted five since it was set up in 1994. Two more judgments are expected by the end of the year.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/02/africa/AF-UN-Rwanda-Singer-Sentenced.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/02/africa/AF-UN-Rwanda-Singer-Sentenced.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Iraq's "Chemical Ali" gets second death sentence</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />By Waleed Ibrahim<br />An Iraqi court sentenced Saddam Hussein's cousin "Chemical Ali" to death on Tuesday for the killing of thousands of Shi'ites in a ruthless crackdown on their uprising after the 1991 Gulf War.<br />It was the second death sentence to be handed down against Ali Hassan al-Majeed, who earned his nickname for his role in using poison gas against Kurdish villages.<br />Dressed in a traditional Arab chequered headdress and robe, Majeed stood quietly as the verdict was read, showing no emotion.<br />He was first condemned to be hanged last year for the killing of tens of thousands of Kurds in the 1980s, but that sentence was held up by political wrangling.<br />The judge did not say when this execution would be carried out, but Majeed can appeal the decision. It was unclear whether this sentence would also be delayed by the political dispute.<br />Judge Mohammad al-Uraibi also sentenced a former top Baath party official, Abdul Ghani Abdul Ghafour, to hang for his involvement in the crackdown on Shi'ites in the south, and 10 others to sentences ranging from 15 years to life in prison.<br />"The court has decided to execute by hanging the convicted Ali Hassan Majeed for committing ... wilful killings and crimes against humanity," the judge said.<br />Saddam's Sunni Arab-led government quelled a Shi'ite uprising in 1991. Investigators discovered dozens of mass graves containing thousands of decayed bodies after U.S. forces ousted his government in 2003.<br />As the verdict was read out, Ghafour became agitated and started shouting:<br />"I am a martyr for Iraq and the Arab nation. Down with the U.S. occupation! Down with the collaborators! Victory for jihad!"<br />NO REMORSE<br />Uraibi told journalists afterward that the sentences were agreed by four out of five judges deciding the cases.<br />Majeed's reputation for ruthless use of force to crush opponents won him widespread notoriety during Saddam's rule and led many Iraqis to fear him even more than the leader himself.<br />The judge said Majeed had showed no remorse.<br />"Most of them apologised and felt regret during the trial except Ali Hassan al-Majeed," he said, explaining why other Baath officials had softer sentences than Majeed.<br />The Iraqi High Tribunal was set up in 2003 to try former members of Saddam's government and was the same one that sentenced the former dictator to death.<br />New York-based Human Rights Watch estimates 290,000 people disappeared under Saddam, many killed then heaped in ditches.<br />Saddam was executed in December 2006 after being convicted of crimes against humanity for the killing of 148 Shi'ite men and boys after a 1982 assassination attempt.<br />His execution sparked anger among minority Sunni Arabs, who were outraged by a video showing the ousted leader being taunted by official observers of the Shi'ite-led governing coalition in the moments before he was hanged.<br />His half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti was executed two weeks later in a botched hanging that ripped off his head. Two other members of the former government have also been executed.<br />Also now on trial is former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, the public face of Saddam Hussein's regime, who is facing charges over the execution of dozens of merchants accused of breaking state price controls in 1992.<br />(Writing by Tim Cocks, editing by Myra MacDonald)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-TRIAL.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-TRIAL.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU8M2mGZtQq9hZj7WpVowyVntLehQ7OearXspa3t5Zcx7r8g6vISbNvZx7HU5JiHm2nnbZBOnQieF64YLzHmueRWFtGlqwNjUWp-BIR5x-sXn_3y3vdtc3w-MfzBFmimCAEwEsPoDHkc0/s1600-h/DSC02401.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483669628373042" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU8M2mGZtQq9hZj7WpVowyVntLehQ7OearXspa3t5Zcx7r8g6vISbNvZx7HU5JiHm2nnbZBOnQieF64YLzHmueRWFtGlqwNjUWp-BIR5x-sXn_3y3vdtc3w-MfzBFmimCAEwEsPoDHkc0/s320/DSC02401.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_0Lt6vcTXVTkVs0vIhUEX2t7YZmK2-OKfb8MPxEY9vXdK2AFaDfy_SujowQdTwgMIzxq7DPD3lO-azuf5qyRctQv71MZMI9l04GkKdwMSzNRK5K-rW7pEUdWKBtYRgXyFMvYlkai_xEQ/s1600-h/DSC02402.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483664700081762" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_0Lt6vcTXVTkVs0vIhUEX2t7YZmK2-OKfb8MPxEY9vXdK2AFaDfy_SujowQdTwgMIzxq7DPD3lO-azuf5qyRctQv71MZMI9l04GkKdwMSzNRK5K-rW7pEUdWKBtYRgXyFMvYlkai_xEQ/s320/DSC02402.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4NNXr7EAAIYTz2QlNZv673REZbnsxDw7_STPTucinfPwZ6bmk_zbN-6OGiFTcKZa5bmWFl7W-NwvhmNgflSffqNnOkfhVwCR5tIESUmGdnGWTuw3UBvmaQDVfb0ob-Hv4Ymt0uT75U4w/s1600-h/DSC02403.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483447334278290" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4NNXr7EAAIYTz2QlNZv673REZbnsxDw7_STPTucinfPwZ6bmk_zbN-6OGiFTcKZa5bmWFl7W-NwvhmNgflSffqNnOkfhVwCR5tIESUmGdnGWTuw3UBvmaQDVfb0ob-Hv4Ymt0uT75U4w/s320/DSC02403.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz9HqsFiNaBicQ8NgM1Sla2bHmFQneiEp9wWItdnPc5P2Nma6fnxDgRrjjH07HO0MDuCJU1TcyvcwT2b5TrLRhQi5hYmhksML_kaVCNYUzGegiOMmDhD8ohIRbYx43Oo2WuPL2vetszD4/s1600-h/DSC02405.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483441486687170" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz9HqsFiNaBicQ8NgM1Sla2bHmFQneiEp9wWItdnPc5P2Nma6fnxDgRrjjH07HO0MDuCJU1TcyvcwT2b5TrLRhQi5hYmhksML_kaVCNYUzGegiOMmDhD8ohIRbYx43Oo2WuPL2vetszD4/s320/DSC02405.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2kd-5-ioAN2kgwBEVcnl6VlHlVwvkKDfK-CEZP28th8hzyMn5gM7jnXqhvj9OBZ1qwYfSWG5T0yTypimC82cbNwIO9RvO2n4LTbYUYX12k-tJ2VBFIP4zht_yNG8LdQ6-1Am7r1T1aWw/s1600-h/DSC02406.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483443213517618" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2kd-5-ioAN2kgwBEVcnl6VlHlVwvkKDfK-CEZP28th8hzyMn5gM7jnXqhvj9OBZ1qwYfSWG5T0yTypimC82cbNwIO9RvO2n4LTbYUYX12k-tJ2VBFIP4zht_yNG8LdQ6-1Am7r1T1aWw/s320/DSC02406.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDiiGhZA5RUohaCYbpLBNFfYLVSReWznwxbNcSRphuIWTr5bps09zSMdsk3uGrj-fFT9vDjQZZVIb0tGJKcLUZoeoYvSiGxTzpKnbvMvtyOjiiCBtQDPvVh34su7_Ju3rx13hiqTRp38U/s1600-h/DSC02407.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483439151413778" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDiiGhZA5RUohaCYbpLBNFfYLVSReWznwxbNcSRphuIWTr5bps09zSMdsk3uGrj-fFT9vDjQZZVIb0tGJKcLUZoeoYvSiGxTzpKnbvMvtyOjiiCBtQDPvVh34su7_Ju3rx13hiqTRp38U/s320/DSC02407.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4VM1BoUI9jW5-n_w0XIcHPUEQamBcRdNBNWT9-iry-YALmVHHJiHLpf15qJ3wDQDoHwddHaXTRZZneobAl5JA7CamWUZcKieSUmBpbFPONA9xv-LSrRxtQfDF-4R4NmLldxhyphenhyphenn3XZL44/s1600-h/DSC02408.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483438732005410" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4VM1BoUI9jW5-n_w0XIcHPUEQamBcRdNBNWT9-iry-YALmVHHJiHLpf15qJ3wDQDoHwddHaXTRZZneobAl5JA7CamWUZcKieSUmBpbFPONA9xv-LSrRxtQfDF-4R4NmLldxhyphenhyphenn3XZL44/s320/DSC02408.jpg" border="0" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJRLzUrw_uWYB3vxJak1e73GSvhpOnNGPyi1ERdC7l4nKdqYxYIHT6EV7K0j32Vgo72jJf_5Fk4hJ_a7SrCzVPcVqkjNXMk7peAm99NQrBHY3QWV2sHnASCbfTVRPu7eUwQIly8j_5CXA/s1600-h/DSC02409.jpg"></a> <div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNy_fE-_5HFx4eQeG0eiBHIVaioyIomELyRkK8NKHlwHsmrSIpDuCFLTTiR3DZP9q62d6OeP1gIKKHZJL4I1OQy0U5N8YDKUo9cV8Sd6_VjQc1m7I1uLFgjvaNZzyW7s2yrm6awqHQ4DI/s1600-h/DSC02410.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483224285902850" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNy_fE-_5HFx4eQeG0eiBHIVaioyIomELyRkK8NKHlwHsmrSIpDuCFLTTiR3DZP9q62d6OeP1gIKKHZJL4I1OQy0U5N8YDKUo9cV8Sd6_VjQc1m7I1uLFgjvaNZzyW7s2yrm6awqHQ4DI/s320/DSC02410.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>Russia's road rage<br /></strong>By Mark Medish<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />You are millions. We are hordes And hordes and hordes. Try and take us on! Yes, we are Scythians!<br />Aleksandr Blok wrote these lines in January 1918, a few weeks after the Bolsheviks disbanded Russia's first freely elected Parliament, plunging the country into a bloody civil war. Of course Russia has changed significantly since then. And yet the famous poem seems uncannily relevant 90 years later.<br />Blok had a prophetic sense of Russia's national resurgence and an impending clash of civilizations. His reference to Scythians anchored Russia's proud roots in the myth of a lost Eurasian tribe fated to act as a "shield" between East and West.<br />Russia unleashed its ancient wrath when it struck back at Georgia militarily last August. As a veteran U.S. diplomat aptly observed, Moscow was exhibiting "road rage." The Kremlin felt it had been cut off one too many times and was lashing out. "Try and take us on!"<br />Russia's ensuing diplomatic script could be summarized by Blok's poem. Put in simpler terms, Moscow's new message was that the shoe is on the other foot. Tired of Western double-standards and riding high on oil wealth, Moscow wanted to show the world that anything the West could do, Russia could do too.<br />And, jeering, you merely counted the days Until your cannon could point at us! The time is come. Trouble beats its wing - and every day our grudges grow<br />NATO enlargement up to Russia's borders in Ukraine and Georgia? How about a small war in the Caucasus? Unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo? How about the same for Abkhazia and South Ossetia? A U.S. missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic? How about Iskander missile batteries on the Baltic coast and a military partnership with Venezuela?<br />Mission accomplished. Russia has gotten our attention. Russia is not a eunuch among nation states; it has legitimate interests too. It must be heeded, within reason, on issues affecting those interests.<br />But, tragically, Russia seems to have had little sense of purpose beyond venting. Instead it has indulged in a series of visceral responses to perceived slights, revealing atavism, not strength. Rage is not a strategy.<br />Most countries have had identity crises of one kind or another. This is particularly true of former empires, historically united by force rather than consent. Russia's case is especially acute due to the deformities of Communism. Russia still behaves like a deeply conflicted demiurge between East and West.<br />Russia is a Sphinx. Rejoicing, grieving, And drenched in black blood, It gazes, gazes, gazes at you, With hatred and with love!<br />The path back from the brink of conflict will be a difficult one for Russia and the West. It takes two to tango. It will require an ambivalent Russia to choose love over hatred, to purge its old demons and to rethink its global role. It will also require the self-absorbed West to adopt a long-term strategy for promoting peace and prosperity in Eurasia.<br />There is little doubt that the maximalist schemes of the Anglo-American neoconservatives aimed for too much too soon, with dangerous consequences for Europe. It is important to understand that when it comes to foreign policy the West has produced its own brand of Bolsheviks and its own arrogant pathologies.<br />Before it's too late - sheathe your old sword, Comrades! We shall be brothers!<br />Perhaps not brotherhood, but we can already see the rough outlines of a new approach in Moscow and Western capitals, most of which have toned down the truculent rhetoric. Missile defense, which is not an urgent issue, is an obvious area for compromise.<br />Ukraine and Georgia can be firmly embraced by trans-Atlantic structures, foremost the EU, in tandem with NATO partnership. For genuine Eurasian stability, Russia will ultimately need to join NATO, but this may be a discussion for another decade.<br />Longstanding territorial disputes should be returned to the negotiating table, recognizing that frozen conflicts are usually better than hot ones.<br />President-elect Barack Obama will have an important opportunity to change things and rebuild a foreign policy based on principled pragmatism. The majority of American voters expect him both to uphold U.S. values and avoid unnecessary confrontations.<br />In Russia's case, the key insight will have to come not from the electorate but from the entrenched leadership of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his protégé, President Dmitry Medvedev. If inspiration fails them, the decline of oil revenues might help bring them to their senses - and to move beyond road rage.<br />Mark Medish is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and the Weidenfeld Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edmedish.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/opinion/edmedish.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div><strong>As Russia rises, a test for Berlin</strong><br />By Nicholas Kulish<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />MOSCOW: In the heat of the Georgia crisis in August, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany flew to Russia to warn about the consequences of renewed militarism. Two days later she was in Georgia, voicing support for the country's eventual entry into NATO.<br />Autumn crept in and passions cooled. The beginning of October found Merkel back in Russia, looking on as the German utility E.ON and the Russian state energy giant Gazprom signed a significant deal in St. Petersburg, giving the German firm a stake in the enormous Yuzhno-Russkoye natural gas field in Siberia.<br />Merkel's shifting focus served as a reminder of the pivotal role played by Germany in shaping the West's relationship with Russia. It is Russia's largest trading partner, Europe's single biggest economy and one of America's closest allies. Moscow's aggressive posture has not only thrust Russia, a nuclear-armed energy power, back to the geopolitical spotlight. It has also dragged Germany there with it.<br />Just as the United States is struggling to redefine its relationship with a resurgent and at times antagonistic government in Moscow, Germany is scrambling to protect the close commercial, cultural and diplomatic ties with Russia it has forged since the end of the cold war and, in some areas, long before.<br />How broad that divide has grown will become clearer this week, when NATO foreign ministers gather in Brussels. Berlin and Washington are at odds over how to deal with NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine a tussle that at its heart is about how to deal with Russia.<br />As the United States aims mainly to counter Russia's newfound military assertiveness, Germany favors steps to develop Russia economically and ensure its political stability. Germany sees its responsibility to guide Russia, not contain it.<br />The incoming Obama administration, which has vowed to pursue a new path to curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions as well as achieving other foreign policy goals that involve Russia, may find that one road to Moscow runs through Berlin. At a minimum, it seems likely to have to address Germany's deeper interests in Russia.<br />"There are serious disagreements between Washington and Berlin from which Moscow can only benefit if there is not better coordination," said Angela Stent, who served as the top Russia officer at the United States government's National Intelligence Council from 2004 to 2006 and now directs Russian studies at Georgetown University. "The Obama administration should work with the Germans as it reassesses U.S. policy toward Russia."<br />Weary of American lectures about the fact that 36 percent of the natural gas that heats German homes comes from Russia, some German politicians wonder how Americans can worry more about this energy dependence than they themselves do.<br />"Many Germans believe Bush only invaded Iraq for oil, and many Americans believe Germany's Russia policy is determined by gas," said Karsten D. Voigt, who coordinates German-American relations in the German Foreign Ministry and who for years ran the German-Russian parliamentary group in the German Parliament. "Every German government since at least the 1970s has tried to bind Russia, and before that the Soviet Union, more closely with Europe."<br />Sergei Kupriyanov, a representative of Gazprom, said, "Our cooperation began during the cold war," referring to deals opposed by the United States that laid gas pipelines between Russia and Germany in the 1970s. "The Berlin Wall still existed," he said. "Compared to what we had then, Georgia is just peanuts."<br />Germans see not dependence on Russia, but interdependence. The European Union's 27 nations account for 80 percent of the cumulative foreign investment in Russia, a fact starkly exposed if the Kremlin ever forgot by the flight of capital after the Georgia crisis.<br />The Europeans, after Georgia, angrily froze negotiations with Russia over a new partnership agreement. Barely 10 weeks later, they decided to resume the talks. "We cannot build a European architecture against Russia or without Russia, only with Russia," said Alexander Rahr, director of the Russian/Eurasian program at the German Council on Foreign Relations.<br />While Germany needs Russia's raw materials and covets the significant market there for its precision machine tools, Russia is equally dependent on European investment to diversify its economy, a fact driven home all too clearly for Russians now that the financial crisis has sent energy prices plunging.<br />In the city of Yaroslavl, an automotive company, the GAZ Group, still makes diesel truck engines in a factory first built in the waning days of czarist rule in 1916. The production model evokes Soviet times, starting with iron in the foundry on the site, with workers building almost the entire engine from scratch.<br />A short drive away, past clusters of birch trees, is a field of concrete, metal trusses and corrugated iron roofing. It is the beginning of a state-of-the-art production plant for the company's new engine model, a project valued at $442 million.<br />The plant sits a few hours north of Moscow by car, but the names of the suppliers sound like a roll call of German industry, with most of the new machinery and production lines supplied by German companies like Grob-Werke and ThyssenKrupp Krause.<br />"Germany is, in terms of technology, expertise and know how in the automotive industry, I think the best in the world," said Ruslan Grekov, the project director for the new engine in Yaroslavl. "Of course, Germany is different from Russia. The difference is good."<br />Such sentiments might seem surprising, even jarring, in a country where, in Soviet times, Nazis were vilified in a daily diet of war movies.<br />But the bonds between Europe's two largest countries were forged over centuries, as German nobles like Catherine the Great became Russian royalty and German generals led the czar's armies. German craftsmen worked in Moscow while German farmers settled near the Volga River.<br />The relationship has been tempered on the German side with guilt over World War II and gratitude over German reunification.<br />But always the anchor has been business, with Germany's technical skill complementing Russia's vast resources. The German conglomerate Siemens laid the Russian state telegraph network in the 1850s. Stalin built Soviet industrial might in his first Five-Year Plan in large part with German machines.<br />The current global slowdown has sent ripples of fear across Russia about a possible repeat of the 1998 collapse of the ruble. The World Bank halved its expectation for Russian growth next year, but it was still 3 percent, whereas the German economy, already in recession, is expected to contract, making Russia all the more important as layoffs in Germany mount.<br />Trade between Russia and Germany grew 25 percent to $49.3 billion in the first half of the year. Russia is one of Germany's fastest-growing markets. Last year, German exports to Russia totaled $36 billion, more than five times the $6.7 billion exported from the United States to Russia.<br />German businessmen not only work out of sales offices in Moscow or invest in the country's rich oil and gas fields. They are all over from Siberia to Yekaterinburg to St. Petersburg, with some 4,600 companies in all investing $13.2 billion, building factories and delivering machinery to Russians who aspire to be more than the raw-goods store for European neighbors.<br />Today, Siemens is supplying Russia with its first high-speed trains, known as the Velaro RUS. The contract is worth $758 million for Siemens, half for the trains and half for servicing.<br />The oligarch Roman Abramovich's construction firm Infrastruktura announced this year that it had ordered the world's largest drill from the German company Herrenknecht to bore tunnels in Moscow and near Sochi in preparation for the 2014 Winter Olympics.<br />Igor Yurgens, executive board chairman at the Institute of Contemporary Development in Moscow, of which President Dimitri Medvedev is board chairman, said Germany was a strategic partner and the most patient investor in Russia's future.<br />"We do not have laws in this country, but we have a lot of friendships, and friendship is more important than laws," Yurgens said, in an interview in his Moscow office just off the city's Garden Ring Road, where sputtering old Ladas inch through jams alongside late-model Mercedes sedans. "That's historically so. And with Germans, this is the case."<br />"On the background of this economic very strong cooperation and involvement, their criticism is taken a bit more lightly than the criticism of some others who do nothing at all, but just keep criticizing," Yurgens added.<br />When Medvedev threatened after the American election to place new missiles in Kaliningrad, the location was a symbol of the painful, complex relationship between Russia and Germany. That island of Russian territory awkwardly perched between the NATO members Poland and Lithuania was the German city of Königsberg before it fell to the Soviets in the wake of World War II.<br />Yet in a sign of the opportunities presented by the Russian-German-American triangle, it was Germany's foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, from the usually Russia-friendly Social Democrats, who issued perhaps the sternest rebuff to Medvedev. It was "the wrong signal at the wrong time," Steinmeier said the next day.<br />The incoming Obama administration, German officials say quietly, should take note. As indicated by Medvedev's backpedaling since, the Russians apparently did.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/europe/02germany.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/europe/02germany.php</a></div><div> </div><div>**********************</div><div><strong>NATO agrees cautious re-warming of Russia ties</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />By David Brunnstrom and Mark John<br />NATO agreed on Tuesday to gradually resume contacts with Russia suspended after Moscow's intervention in Georgia, and put off a decision on putting Ukraine and Georgia on formal membership tracks.<br />Meeting in Brussels, the allies reaffirmed a pledge -- which had angered Russia -- that former Soviet states Georgia and Ukraine would one day join the alliance and agreed to step up help to them in that process.<br />But going into her last NATO meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dodged confrontation with allies by dropping previous U.S. resistance to restarting talks with Russia, and reached a compromise in a squabble with Germany over how to manage the entry ambitions of Ukraine and Georgia.<br />The outcome leaves any real decisions on closer alliance ties with Russia, Georgia and Ukraine to the incoming President-elect Barack Obama.<br />NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the 26 NATO states had asked him to see what political contacts would be possible with Moscow and said the suspended ambassador-level NATO-Russia Council would meet again on an informal basis.<br />"Allies agreed on what I would qualify as a conditional and graduated reengagement with Russia," he told a news conference.<br />He stressed though that this did not mean NATO had changed its view that Russia had used "disproportionate" force in invading Georgia in August, or that it was acceptable for Russia to threaten to station missiles near NATO borders.<br />Rice stressed the decision did not mean a return to "business as usual" with Russia.<br />EU RESTARTS TALKS<br />Russia's envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said Moscow would wait before reacting to NATO's announcement.<br />"It is natural that Moscow will analyse the results that we receive today and will receive tomorrow very carefully," he told Interfax news agency. "After that Russia's official reaction will be made public."<br />Georgian Foreign Minister Ekaterine Tkeshelashvili welcomed the outcome.<br />"We can very firmly say that from this decision on we are much closer to NATO membership than we have ever been because the main focus of discussions was in which way the alliance can assist Georgia so that we make progress towards membership," she told reporters.<br />The NATO decision came hours after the 27-member European Union resumed talks on a broad-ranging partnership pact with Moscow, reflecting European acceptance that any attempt to isolate a key energy partner could damage European interests.<br />The EU agreed last month that Russia had complied sufficiently with the terms of a Georgia cease-fire to permit this, while keeping the relationship under review.<br />European capitals had urged NATO to study resuming full contacts with Russia, but Washington had been reluctant to make any early move.<br />Rice said before the meeting she did not oppose "in principle" reviving contacts with Russia via the NATO-Russia Council. But referring to Russian troops still in Georgian breakaway regions, she said NATO should be very cautious about any move on military-to-military cooperation.<br />"I think the idea of working through an informal contact with the NATO-Russia Council is not a problem for us," she told a news conference on Tuesday.<br />Concern about Russia's reaction prompted Germany and France to block a U.S. push at an April NATO summit in Bucharest to give Ukraine and Georgia formal routes to join the alliance known as Membership Action Plans (MAPs).<br />That summit gave Georgia and Ukraine vague promises of eventual NATO entry and agreed to review their MAP requests by the year-end. But Georgia's August clash with Russia and Ukraine's political chaos fuelled European doubts.<br />Rice backed a compromise formula of seeking to further Ukrainian and Georgian entry ambitions through bilateral forums NATO has established with each country, which could render formal entry plans unnecessary.<br />This was resisted by Germany and its Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said MAPs would remain a requirement for NATO enlargement. "We have decided today that there will be no shortcut," he said.<br />De Hoop Scheffer said yearly programmes would be drawn up for Ukraine and Georgia to advance their reforms which would be reviewed annually by the allies.<br />(Additional reporting by Sue Pleming and Sabine Siebold; editing by Michael Roddy)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-NATO-ENLARGEMENT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/europe/OUKWD-UK-NATO-ENLARGEMENT.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW5fJ7CYWo5WXwBaqrZSkXmkUNLvS_GwiwL1Iwo3YVXmVLyladDDZCuHc9Qadb_myY85P-Y8kDk3R1V8B9Jv8uMybenDPWGXG5bx07ujulf0Fb-X_khDvppvFINF63GfKBe1csBgI0QJA/s1600-h/DSC02411.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483212822092370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW5fJ7CYWo5WXwBaqrZSkXmkUNLvS_GwiwL1Iwo3YVXmVLyladDDZCuHc9Qadb_myY85P-Y8kDk3R1V8B9Jv8uMybenDPWGXG5bx07ujulf0Fb-X_khDvppvFINF63GfKBe1csBgI0QJA/s320/DSC02411.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>The problem with piracy: it's just too easy</strong><br />By Bernd DebusmannReuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: As far as illicit businesses with low risk and high rewards go, it doesn't get much better than piracy on the high seas. The profit margins can easily surpass those of the cocaine trade. The risks?<br />"There is no reason not to be a pirate," according to Vice Admiral William Gortney, who commands the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet. "The vessel I'm trying to pirate, they won't shoot at me. I'm going to get my money." Even pirates who are intercepted have little to fear. "They won't arrest me because there's no place to try me."<br />Gortney's assessment of piracy's low risk came in a radio interview that focused on the Gulf of Aden, where Somali pirates have carried out a string of increasingly brazen hijackings. Last month they ventured as far as the high seas southeast of Kenya to seize a Saudi supertanker carrying $100 million worth of U.S.-bound crude.<br />But although attention is focused on the Horn of Africa, piracy is a global phenomenon, relative impunity applies in many places, and a thick legal fog hangs over effective action.<br />Among questions to keep lawyers busy: Can a naval vessel fire on a ship believed to be carrying pirates? It depends. Who would be held accountable for someone killed in an exchange of fire between pirates and private security personnel traveling aboard a merchant ship? Which country's jurisdiction applies, for example, to a Somali arrested on the high seas and taken aboard a Danish vessel?<br />One of the challenges in combating piracy "clearly is if you are intervening and you capture pirates, is there a path to prosecute them?" Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained at a recent Pentagon briefing.<br />A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the operation to hijack the Saudi tanker, the Sirius Star, cost no more than $25,000, assuming that the pirates bought new equipment and weapons ($450 apiece for an AK-47 Kalashnikov, $5,000 for an RPG-7 grenade launcher, $15,000 for a speedboat). That contrasts with an initial ransom demand to the tanker's owner, Saudi Aramco, of $25 million.<br />"Piracy is an excellent business model if you operate from an impoverished, lawless place like Somalia," said Patrick Cullen, a security expert at the London School of Economics who has been researching piracy. "The risk-reward ratio is just huge."<br />One way to shrink that ratio would be to place private security guards on vessels that ply shipping routes prone to pirate attack, from the waters off Nigeria to the Strait of Malacca and the Horn of Africa. That's the solution recommended by the commander of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, whose area of responsibility covers 7.5 million square miles, or 25.7 million square kilometers, including the waters off Somalia. Its warships can't be everywhere.<br />Even with the additional deployment of warships from France, Britain, Denmark, Russia, India, Japan, Korea and Malaysia, the navies are looking for needles in a haystack. The pirates launch speedboats from mother ships hundreds of miles off the coast.<br />Carrying armed guards aboard ships sounds like a simple, straightforward solution. They stand watch; they fire warning flares at an approaching speedboat manned by what looks like pirates. If the vessel doesn't turn away, they blow it out of the water. End of story.<br />Except if the incident somehow turned into a court case and the ship's crew and guards had to prove that the men in the approaching speedboat were driven by criminal intent. By some definitions, an act of piracy doesn't begin until the grappling hooks are thrown over the side and the pirates start clambering up.<br />In the past, shipping companies, by and large, have been reluctant to add armed personnel to their crews, partly for reasons of cost - a security team can add $30,000 to $60,000 and more to a voyage - and partly because the statistical chance of having their ships attacked or hijacked is relatively small.<br />The International Maritime Organization puts the world trading fleet at 50,525 ships. In the first nine months of this year, the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur recorded 199 attacks on ships, including 36 hijackings. In percentage terms, this is not much.<br />But the targets, and the ransom demands, have been getting bigger. The Sirius Star was taken less than two months after the hijacking of a Ukrainian freighter, the Fainu, which carried about 30 T-72 tanks, crates of rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. That capture made world headlines and raised fresh questions over existing anti-piracy tactics.<br />Private security firms see new markets and new opportunities. Several British firms have begun teaming up with insurance companies that offer lower rates for ships carrying security teams. Anti-pirate devices now coming into use range from razor wire strung along the side of ships to sound cannons: weapons that beam ear-splitting noise at would-be attackers.<br />One U.S. company, Blackwater Worldwide, is offering maritime escort services with a 183-foot, or 56-meter, vessel that carries two helicopters, a crew of 15 and 35 guards. Blackwater says 13 shipping companies have expressed interest.<br />To make pirates think twice about the risk-reward ratio, nothing is likely to be as effective as brute force. But those who warn that 18th-century methods can be problematic in the 21st can now point to the example set by the Indian frigate Tabar on Nov. 18.<br />According to the Indian Navy, the Tabar had come under fire from what appeared to be a pirate mother ship that had failed to obey a command to stop.<br />The Indian frigate returned fire, "in self-defense." The ship blew up in a ball of fire and sank.<br />A week later, it turned out that the supposed mother ship was a Thai freighter that had just been taken over by pirates when the frigate approached.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/letter.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/america/letter.php</a></div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div> </div><div><strong>U.S. cruise ship escapes pirates<br /></strong>Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />NAIROBI: Pirates chased and shot at a U.S. cruise ship with more than 1,000 people on board but failed to hijack the vessel as it sailed along a corridor patrolled by international warships, officials said Tuesday.<br />Jurica Brajcic, the captain of the ship, the M/S Nautica, ordered passengers inside and accelerated the engine, allowing the ship to outrun the pirates' speedboats in the Gulf of Aden on Sunday, a company spokesman said.<br />Noel Choong, head of the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center in Malaysia, said, "It is very fortunate that the liner managed to escape," and he urged ships to remain vigilant in the area.<br />In a statement on its Web site, Oceania Cruises, the owner of the ship, said that pirates fired eight rifle shots at the liner but that the ship's captain increased speed and managed to outrun the skiffs.<br />"When the pirates were sighted, the captain went on the public address system and asked passengers to remain in the interior spaces of the ship and wait until he gave further instructions," said Tim Rubacky, a spokesman for Oceania. "Within five minutes, it was over."<br />All passengers and crew members were safe and there was no damage to the vessel, the company statement said. Rubacky said the ship planned to return through the Gulf of Aden.<br />Brajcic has declined to speak to journalists about overseeing the Nautica's escape from two pirate boats, according to Oceania Cruises.<br />"He told me: 'I'm not a hero. Me and the crew, we just did what we were supposed to do,"' Rubacky said, adding that Brajcic, a Croatian in his 50s from a seafaring family, had declined interviews even with his local newspaper in Dubrovnik. "He is a modest guy and kind of shy," Rubacky added. "He is the epitome of the strong silent type."<br />Choong said the ship was carrying 656 international passengers and 399 crew members.<br />The International Maritime Bureau, which fights maritime crime, did not know how many cruise liners use the waters, where hijacking of freighters and tankers has become a constant threat in spite of patrols by an international flotilla.<br />In New York on Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council extended for another year its authorization for countries to enter Somalia's territorial waters with advance notice and to use "all necessary means" to stop piracy and armed robbery at sea. Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, called the pirates' goals "ever-expanding."<br />The U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain, said it was aware of the failed hijacking of the cruise ship - a sign of the pirates' growing ambition - but had no further details.<br />The Nautica was on a 32-day cruise from Rome to Singapore, with stops at ports in Italy, Egypt, Oman, Dubai, India, Malaysia and Thailand, the Oceania Cruises Web site said. Based on that schedule, the liner was headed from Egypt to Oman when it was attacked.<br />The liner arrived in the southern Oman port city of Salalah on Monday morning, and the passengers toured the city before leaving for the capital, Muscat, on Monday evening, an official of the Oman Tourism Ministry said. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity Tuesday because he was not authorized to speak to the media.<br />It was not the first time a cruise liner had been attacked. In 2005, pirates opened fire on the Seabourn Spirit about 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, off the Somali coast. The faster cruise ship managed to escape and used a long-range acoustic device - which blasts a painful wave of sound - to distract the pirates.<br />The International Maritime Bureau, in London, cited only the 2005 liner attack and a raid on the luxury yacht Le Ponant earlier this year as attacks on passenger vessels off Somalia.<br />International warships patrol the area and have created a security corridor in the region under a U.S.-led initiative, but attacks on shipping have not abated.<br />In about 100 attacks on ships off the Somali coast this year, 40 vessels have been hijacked, Choong said. Fourteen remain in the hands of pirates along with more than 250 crew members.<br />In two of the most daring attacks, pirates seized a Ukrainian freighter loaded with 33 battle tanks in September, and on Nov. 15 captured a Saudi oil tanker carrying $100 million worth of crude oil.<br />On Tuesday, a Somali pirate spokesman said his group would release the Ukrainian ship within two days.<br />The spokesman, Sugule Ali, told The Associated Press by satellite phone on Tuesday that a ransom agreement had been reached, but would not say how large it was. The pirates had originally asked for $20 million when they hijacked the ship, the MV Faina.<br />"Once we receive this payment, we will also make sure that all our colleagues on ship reach land safely," Ali said, "then the release will take place." He was not afraid of warships intervening, he said. "We know that the quantity of the equipment on the ship and the valuable lives we held hostage will help us remain onboard and get ransom."<br />NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday focused almost immediately on demands for the military alliance to act amid growing alarm over the attacks on shipping.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/mideast/pirates.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/mideast/pirates.php</a></div><div><br /> </div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTloxCsbCxof2SrLfEN8YMQSjTmvsHxxRFUelCY40HWmDEgwPPJDVT-OjqV1eKxlFbqM7HwD6efJAommmSX1Zu48Y3DH37_-0vDxaI6si7eLwDiyXREIj5ukKalhgb1FMWaHyPUpY2Hgw/s1600-h/DSC02412.jpg"></a><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhisvxdEuYMzeEG2RA990UyWsb9pXNkI1R8WVHo4JUrbC3bViXQDujM60abBExGnBHlSd4qwvCoHAVXgqYmKk_cWr4_VfBULSw6QP8xv7KF8hCfK9Mkx9DdmIUGOZk3LYGrdqbQYDJcaLk/s1600-h/DSC02413.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275483211208456466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhisvxdEuYMzeEG2RA990UyWsb9pXNkI1R8WVHo4JUrbC3bViXQDujM60abBExGnBHlSd4qwvCoHAVXgqYmKk_cWr4_VfBULSw6QP8xv7KF8hCfK9Mkx9DdmIUGOZk3LYGrdqbQYDJcaLk/s320/DSC02413.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong></strong></div><div><strong></strong> </div><div><strong>British court orders radical Islamic cleric back to prison<br /></strong>By John F. Burns<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />LONDON: A panel of immigration judges ordered the immediate return to prison on Tuesday of a radical Islamic preacher known as Abu Qatada, dubbed by Britain's tabloid newspapers as "Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe."<br />The judges accepted warnings from the Home Office, Britain's interior ministry, that the cleric, a 47-year-old Jordanian of Palestinian origin, might attempt to flee if he were allowed to remain on the bail granted to him five months ago.<br />The ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission was the latest development in a legal battle that goes back to 1993, when the preacher, whose real name is Omar Mahmoud Mohammed Othman, arrived in Britain on a forged United Arab Emirates passport. He won asylum for himself and his family nine months later, but attracted the attention of the counterterrorism police about seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by Al Qaeda in New York and Washington.<br />Courts have been told that tapes of his sermons in British mosques were found in a Hamburg flat used by some of the Sept. 11 hijackers. In February 2001, Othman was questioned by police on suspicion of links to radical Islamist cells in Germany. The courts have been told that officers found 170,000 pounds in cash, the equivalent then of about $300,000, with about $1,500 of it in an envelope labeled "for the mujahideen in Chechnya." He was not arrested, but became on Britain's most-wanted men when he went on the run after Sept. 11, seeking to evade arrest under new antiterror laws.<br />In October 2002, he was tracked down to a house in south London, setting off his battle to avoid deportation. With British courts reluctant to order deportations to countries that practice torture, the government reached an agreement with Jordan that included a commitment not to mistreat Othman. But the courts ruled that the commitment was not a sufficient guarantee of Othman's rights, and ordered him freed on bail pending further court hearings in June.<br />The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, issued a statement after Tuesday's court ruling welcoming his return to jail. "I'm pleased the court has agreed that Qatada should have his bail revoked," she said. "He poses a significant threat to our national security and I am pleased that he will be detained pending his deportation, which I'm working hard to secure." </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/europe/03terror.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/europe/03terror.php</a></div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div><strong>Wallabies ring in changes for Barbarians match</strong><br />Reuters<br />Tuesday, December 2, 2008<br />SYDNEY: Uncapped lock Peter Kimlin and teenage fullback James O'Connor have been named in a reshuffled Australia team for their final European tour match against the Barbarians in London.<br />Wallabies coach Robbie Deans entered into the best traditions of Barbarian rugby by picking a largely experimental side, selecting fringe players who had been given little game time in the test matches.<br />Kimlin, who was only called into the touring squad as a late replacement for the injured James Horwill, was named on the bench while scrumhalf Brett Sheehan was also chosen to make his first appearance of the tour in the run-on side.<br />The 18-year-old O'Connor made his test debut as a replacement against Italy last month and will earn his first run-on jersey against the Barbarians.<br />Wednesday's match at Wembley Stadium does not carry test status but was organised to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Australia's gold medal in rugby at the 1908 London Olympics.<br />George Smith takes over the captaincy from Stirling Mortlock, who joined a heavy casualty list that includes Matt Giteau and Nathan Sharpe after Australia's 21-18 loss to Wales last weekend.<br />Australia: 15-James O'Connor, 14-Lote Tuqiri, 13-Ryan Cross, 12-Adam Ashley-Cooper, 11-Digby Ioane, 10-Quade Cooper, 9-Brett Sheehan, 8-Richard Brown, 7-George Smith (captain), 6-Dean Mumm, 5-Hugh McMeniman, 4-Mark Chisholm, 3-Matt Dunning, 2-Tatafu Polota-Nau, 1-Sekope Kepu.<br />Replacements: 16-Adam Freier, 17-Ben Alexander, 18-Peter Kimlin, 19-David Pocock, 20-Luke Burgess, 21-Lachie Turner, 22-Drew Mitchell.<br />(Reporting by Julian Linden; Editing by Greg Stutchbury)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/sports/OUKSP-UK-RUGBY-WALLABIES-RING-IN-CHANGES-FOR-BARBA.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/02/sports/OUKSP-UK-RUGBY-WALLABIES-RING-IN-CHANGES-FOR-BARBA.php</a></div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008 </strong></div><strong><div><br /></strong>Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-37677330672107438742008-12-02T06:07:00.011+01:002008-12-03T09:46:43.876+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Monday, 1st December 2008<div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>Panel foresees unconventional terror threat </strong></div><strong><br /><br /><div align="justify"><br /></strong>By Eric Schmitt<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: An independent commission has concluded that terrorists will most likely carry out an attack with biological, nuclear or other unconventional weapons somewhere in the world in the next five years unless the United States and its allies act urgently to prevent that.<br />In a report to be released this week, the congressionally mandated panel found that with countries like Iran and North Korea pursuing nuclear weapons programs, and with the risk of poorly secured biological pathogens growing, unconventional threats are fast outpacing the defenses arrayed to confront them.<br />"America's margin of safety is shrinking, not growing," the bipartisan panel concluded.<br />Prepared before the deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai last week - which U.S. officials say were most likely carried out by Pakistani militant groups based in Kashmir - the report also singled out Pakistan as a top security priority for the coming Obama administration.<br />"Were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan," the report states, citing the country's terrorist haven along the border with Afghanistan and its tense relations with its nuclear rival, India.<br />"Pakistan is an ally, but there is a grave danger it could also be an unwitting source of a terrorist attack on the United States - possibly with weapons of mass destruction," the report said.<br />The report is the result of a six-month study by the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, which Congress created last spring in keeping with one of the recommendations of the Sept. 11 Commission.<br />The nine-member panel received classified briefings, conducted several site visits, including meetings in Russia, and interviewed more than 250 government and independent experts in several countries.<br />The New York Times obtained a copy of the report's 18-page executive summary. Details from draft chapters of the report on the threat of bioterrorism were published Sunday by The Washington Post.<br />The panel's 13 recommendations focus on fighting the threat of bioterrorism, including improved bioforensic capabilities, and strengthening international organizations, like the International Atomic Energy Agency, to address the nuclear threat. It also calls for a comprehensive approach for dealing with Pakistan.<br />Over all, the findings and recommendations seek to serve as a road map for the Obama administration.<br />"Unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013," the report states in the opening sentence of the executive summary.<br />Commission officials said that date is a judgment based on scores of interviews and classified briefings conducted by members of the panel - led by former Senators Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, and Jim Talent, Republican of Missouri, but does not represent a new formal assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies.<br />Several of the recommendations are not new and have been pursued with varying degrees of success by the Bush administration. On Pakistan, for example, the panel urges the Obama administration to work with Pakistan to eliminate that country's terrorist havens, secure its nuclear and biological materials, counter extremist ideologies and constrain a "nascent nuclear arms race in Asia."<br />But the panel is banking on the fact that some of its Democratic members - including Wendy Sherman, Graham Allison and Tim Roemer - have advised President-elect Barack Obama on national security issues and could serve in senior positions in his administration.<br />Sherman, for instance, is one of two former Clinton administration officials leading the transition team at the State Department for Obama.<br />In its wide-ranging findings, the panel faulted the Bush administration for failing to devote the same degree of high-level attention and resources to the threat of a bioterrorist attack as it has to prevent nuclear proliferation and a nuclear attack.<br />The report calls for conducting a major review of the program to secure dangerous pathogens and tighten oversight of high-containment laboratories.<br />The commission urges the Obama administration to work to halt the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs, backing up any diplomatic initiatives with "the credible threat of direct action" - code for military action, a commission official said.<br />Two weeks ago, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran had produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb.<br />The commission also criticized the administration and Congress for not organizing themselves more effectively to combat the threat of unconventional weapons. The report recommended a single White House-level office or individual responsible for directing the nation's policy to prevent the spread of unconventional weapons and their possible use by terrorists.<br />Like the Sept. 11 Commission, this panel called for overhauling the jurisdiction of the congressional committee that reviews the proliferation of unconventional weapons. "Congressional oversight is dysfunctional," the report concluded.</div><br /><br /><div align="justify"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/america/terror.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/america/terror.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="justify"></div><br /><br /><div align="justify">**************</div><br /><br /><div align="justify"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>Bush calls flawed Iraq intelligence biggest regret</strong><br /></div><br /><br /><div align="justify">Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush said the biggest regret of his presidency was flawed intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and told ABC "World News" in an interview airing on Monday that he was unprepared for war when he took office.<br />Bush leaves the White House on January 20 with public approval ratings near record lows partly due to the unpopular Iraq war that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. More than 4,200 U.S. troops have died in Iraq.<br />"The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," Bush said.<br />But he declined to speculate on whether he would have gone to war if the intelligence had said Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.<br />"That's an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can't do," Bush said, according to excerpts from the recent ABC interview at Camp David.<br />As he prepares to hand over wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to successor President-elect Barack Obama, Bush said the issue he was most unprepared for when he became president was war.<br />"I think I was unprepared for war. In other words, I didn't campaign and say, 'Please vote for me, I'll be able to handle an attack'," Bush said. "I didn't anticipate war."<br />Pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq before the appropriate time would have compromised his principles, he said.<br />"It was a tough call, particularly, since a lot of people were advising for me to get out of Iraq, or pull back in Iraq," he said.<br />There are 146,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 32,000 in Afghanistan.<br />In his final months at the White House, Bush said he was required to take bold action on the financial crisis to ward off another Great Depression.<br />He was asked whether it scared him that government actions to address the financial crisis amounted to about $7.5 trillion, equivalent to about half the U.S. economy.<br />"What scared me is not doing anything, which would have caused there to be a huge financial meltdown and the conceivable scenario that we'd have been in a depression greater than the Great Depression," Bush said.<br />He told ABC: "I will leave the presidency with my head held high."<br />(Reporting by Tabassum Zakaria; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)</div><br /><br /><div align="justify"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/africa/OUKWD-UK-BUSH.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/africa/OUKWD-UK-BUSH.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="justify"></div><br /><br /><div align="justify"></div><br /><br /><div align="center">******************</div><strong></strong><br /><strong>1st. December, 2008 and with just 31 days ahead of me to complete my one year only photo journal of life in the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Auvergne</span>, my camera has given up on me.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Or rather, the battery has, the charger for which I left behind in hospital last Tuesday. They rang me that day, to tell me this. </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Could they post it? No. We would have to send a S.A.E, which we did, on Wednesday. </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>I carefully conserved my battery, but today, with no charger in sight, I took two photos and the camera shut down.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Not a good day yesterday. </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Lightly falling snow, cold. I stayed in bed, the nurse came to change my dressings, the kine to work my knee. I have work to do but no desire.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>This temporary handicap is affecting me more than I care to admit and I am not in the best of humour.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><br /><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>0846</strong></div><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275481431007907458" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRYb-nATJBz2QYAIMexLpO6GehqL8jkqugno7KQ3tFSMB_7wz9NbMR04to-EKCDXLB6ae2pZFkLtC4K1HThMGWmgVlRoAb605kNZFR5aUQu1QFENYZ8a32WVQam8e-foZkGgV5zZy5HTQ/s320/DSC02386.jpg" border="0" /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>China lifts controls on food prices<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />BEIJING: China lifted its controls on food prices Monday, the latest sign of how drastically priorities have shifted from earlier this year, when the country was focused on fighting inflation.<br />In mid-January, when prices seemed to be soaring out of control, the government stepped in to limit price increases on a wide range of food, including meat, grain, cooking oil and milk products. But food prices and broader inflation have slowed markedly in recent months as the economy has cooled, prompting the government to shift its policies to prop up growth.<br />Consumer inflation in October fell to 4 percent from a 12-year high of 8.7 percent in February. Food prices, which make up a third of the consumer price index, rose 8.5 percent in October, down from a 23.3 percent increase in February.<br />The end of food price controls came the same day that data showed that China's manufacturing industry had slumped in November as new orders, especially from abroad, tumbled. It followed a warning by President Hu Jintao that the global financial crisis was threatening to undermine the booming Chinese economy and that China could lose its competitive edge as trade growth slowed.<br />Indexes released Monday, based on two surveys of hundreds of business executives across China, plumbed record lows, showing how China, one of the world's largest economies, was being pulled deeper into the global maelstrom, even though it had a relatively insular banking system.<br />The official purchasing managers' index, or PMI, produced by the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, fell to 38.8 in November from 44.6 in October. Another PMI, produced for CLSA, an Asia-focused broker, fell to 40.9 from 45.2. The readings Monday were the weakest since the surveys began in 2004 and 2005. The weakness was broad-based, with production, new orders and employment all falling sharply.<br />The indexes are designed to give a timely snapshot of manufacturing. A figure above 50 shows that business is expanding; a result below 50 shows deterioration.<br />Hu's comments, which were made at a government meeting over the weekend and published in the Communist Party's newspaper, People's Daily, offered few details. But they were the latest indication that Beijing was growing increasingly concerned about the significant slowdown in the country's growth.<br />Already, stock and real estate prices have fallen sharply.<br />Construction has slowed drastically, damaging steel, cement and glass makers. Export growth has declined for several quarters.<br />"Another grim month for China manufacturing and the first in which the weakness in overseas demand overtook what, until now, has been mainly a domestic slowdown," said Eric Fishwick, head of economic research at CLSA.<br />Zhang Liqun, a government economist who comments on the survey for the logistics federation, said: "November's PMI shows that the Chinese economy is slowing down at an accelerating rate. The signs of economic contraction are more evident."<br />On food pricing, companies would now be free to decide that for themselves, the National Development and Reform Commission said. Under the controls, manufacturers had to apply for approval for any substantial price increases.<br />Beijing will still keep an eye on prices, however, and work to ensure that no one manipulates them, the statement said.<br />"We must work further on plans about how to ensure market supply of important products such as grain, pork and cooking oil and how to address abnormal price movement," the commission said.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/yuan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/yuan.php</a></div><br /><div align="left">*************</div><br /><div align="left"><strong>Organic restaurants where only diners come from afar</strong><br />By Henry Shukman<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />Thoreau observed that humans are happily designed in such a way that the distance they can cover in a day's walking means that were they to spend every day hiking in a different direction from their homestead, it would take a lifetime to get to know every corner of their surroundings. There's something analogous in the distance that meat and vegetables can cover in an ox cart in the old formula of market towns gathering and redistributing the produce of a region. It's like concocting a meal with what you have in the kitchen, settling a craving for good economy.<br />Any region can use a patron saint, and in England's West Country, that saint is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (aka Hugh Fearlessly Eats-It-All). One of Britain's top TV chefs, Fearnley-Whittingstall is on a near-holy mission to return to the land. He had his first success with a show called "A Cook on the Wild Side," in which he traveled around cooking up game and wild plants on his camping stove.<br />Then he settled in Dorset and moved into growing his own food - saddleback pigs, old breeds of chicken - and reviving many old techniques for curing and preserving the food. His larder is permanently hung with sausages, salamis, hams and varieties of smoked fish.<br />What he advocates goes far beyond organic. His philosophy is "plow to plate": ideally, the consumer is the grower, or failing that, the grower's neighbor. He calls it "food integrity."<br />At his new restaurant, the River Cottage Canteen, in the market town of Axminster, even the wine is as local as possible, all of it from England except for a few French organic and biodynamic labels. Almost nothing solid comes from farther afield than the West Country. There's no bottled water - an abomination of wastefulness.<br />A truly organic restaurant today needs a field of local suppliers. What good is an organic carrot or blueberry with a giant carbon footprint? Just as farmers' markets are spreading, so too is local-mindedness in restaurants. It's not just about carbon, but a deeper connectedness between people and land.<br />It's a connectedness I fantasized about as a child: When I was 10, my favorite book was "Survival for Young People." It told you about bivouac bags and collecting rainwater with a plastic sheet. But what electrified me were the pages on eating wild - the leaves and roots you could get by on, how to trap a rabbit, how you should always have a fishing line in your pack.<br />The kind of self-reliance a household would have known before the advent of processed and packaged foods, when good husbandry included knowledge of how to process food oneself, is precisely what Fearnley-Whittingstall is trying to revive.<br />The Canteen's décor reflects this. I find myself eating at a table of reclaimed wood in a wood-rich, loftlike space.<br />The first thing I try is crispy pig's head. The plate consists of a fried slice of something like a pâté - in fact a version of headcheese, or brawn - with applesauce and Le Puy lentils. Not only do the sweet apple and rich brawn go together well, but there's an automatic burst of self-congratulation in even daring to take a mouthful.<br />There's an austerity about the place, but the food is stunning: sea bass in a lemon and herb sauce, with braised fennel and sautéed Highland Burgundy potatoes, ruddy and smothered in oil; and two kinds of lamb on one plate, slices of dense, melting, pink roast tenderloin and dark glistening shreds of braised shoulder.<br />My friend Dave Swann and I end with rhubarb jelly - a wobbly mound of luminous red jelly, a dab of whipped cream on a shortbread biscuit, and a heap of cooked rhubarb. Another British standard, rhubarb is a favorite of public and backyard vegetable patches.<br />According to his publicists, Fearnley-Whittingstall doesn't exactly think of himself as a great chef. His mission is changing peoples' relationship to food production. Even a window box of herbs in central London is better than nothing, he contends: food-blindness is part of our post-industrial alienation; we're alienated from our very plates.<br />At the River Cottage HQ, a roughly 65-acre, or 26-hectare, farm on the border with Dorset where Fearnley-Whittingstall's TV shows are filmed, all the tools to teach people how to become more involved in supplying their own larders have been set up. There are grazing pigs and chickens; clay ovens in different stages of construction; smokers made of old barrels and gas canisters; and hams, salamis and sausages hanging from rafters.<br />The clay ovens bake bread in five minutes, cook scallops on the shell in seconds, pizza in a minute. And as the heat dissipates over 24 hours, you can slow-cook whole shoulders of lamb, ending up with meat so tender you spoon it off the bone.<br />In a converted 16th-century barn with a gleaming professional kitchen, participants in Fearnley-Whittingstall's workshops are given a local banquet at the end of their day's education. Green Champagne bottles hang from the rafters, converted into lamps. Sixty guests can be seated at two long baronial tables. There's a Saxon feel to the whole venture.<br />Almost nothing goes to waste.<br />Local food has become a focus throughout the rural West Country, with its many small farms. At the Masons Arms in the seaside village of Branscombe on the South Devon coast, the soft and tasty Branoc Ale is brewed at the nearby Branscombe Vale Brewery. The spit in the fireplace - gently turned by customers seated with pints at the open fire - was forged at the blacksmith's half a short distance the other way.<br />The stonewalled bar has been there since 1350, when masons from the local quarry would stop in to ease their dusty throats. The bar top still has a brass slot where thirsty horsemen would (allegedly) ride right up to the counter and drop in a penny to have a pint of cider pulled.<br />At a small pub table, a plain white bowl of pea and ham soup is a soft green, like the turf above the cliffs. Slender sweet juliennes of pepper are just right against the smooth texture of the soup. The fresh beer-battered haddock caught off the coast is succulent and chunky, and the leek, salmon, mussel and haddock stew, in its own pot with a lid of Cheddar-smothered mashed potatoes, is as heartwarming as seafood can be.<br />Upstairs, above the original horsehair ceilings, which sag like an old mattress between black, octagonal ships' beams, there are 21 bedrooms with deeply uneven floors, where you can sleep off your time at the bar.<br />The other end of the West Country, southwest Gloucestershire, has its local food movement, too. Stroud has a history of independent-mindedness, being one of the first English towns to set up its own currency. It was also one of the first to have an active farmers' market (the 2008 National Farmers' Retail and Markets Association's Market of the Year), which spills out from Cornhill Market, a stone-columned square in the middle of town.<br />Just down the hill, the Star Anise Art Café specializes in vegetarian food with a local emphasis. It's a good place to hang out, and like so many buildings in this corner of the West Country, it's built of the lovely Cotswold stone, a soft yellow that blends into the rolling hills.<br />In nearby Nailsworth, the chef at Wild Garlic, Matthew Beardshall, will pull his car over on the way to work, and stroll into the woods to pick the restaurant's eponymous herb. It grows in abundance in the Cotswold hills.<br />"It likes shade," he says. "The sun brings out the smell, so it's easy to find." He likes to stuff the long dark-green leaves under the skin of chicken.<br />He buys some of his meat from Prince Charles's nearby Duchy of Cornwall farms. "I'll buy a whole piece of meat, not cuts," Beardshall says. "Then I can render down the fat for roasting potatoes, and use the trimmings for sauce. Or the butcher goes out shooting, and comes back with pigeon and rabbit. We'll take what he bags. Unprepped pigeons don't look pretty, but they taste great."<br />In his restaurant, which has spare wood floors and stone walls, the local poet Jay Ramsay and I start with ramekins of chicken liver parfait covered with a lid of pure butter - a traditional English method of sealing. The livers are from local chickens, mixed with rendered pork fat. With a shot glass of fig and honey compote on the side, the smooth pâté is superb.<br />As are his thick pappardelle with tender slow-braised rabbit in sage, and chicken with bok choy, potatoes and wild garlic leaves. Between courses, Beardshall serves a little granita of caramelized apple and thyme.<br />Over all, an evening at Wild Garlic is a perfect marriage of the modern and the old. It's as if the industrial era has been neatly leapfrogged. And you can stay the night, too, in the spacious 16th-century rooms of the Heavens Above guesthouse upstairs.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/arts/trengland.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/arts/trengland.php</a></div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">*************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Haute cuisine hits a fashion high</strong><br />By Ben Seidler<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />London: A design of lace painted in sugar on a Valrhona chocolate cream cake melts on the tongue. A fromage blanc and raspberry meringue reminiscent of an Alexander McQueen chiffon dress dances its way into one's mouth.<br />These are not a fashionista's fantasies. Pret-a-Portea at the Berkeley Hotel in the Knightsbridge section of London really does serve edible versions of designer collections, updated every six months for a fashionable high tea.<br />The hotel's pastry chefs visit fashion shows to be inspired by the colors and textures of the new collections and a team of fashion editors from various publications are consulted about the latest trends and most emblematic pieces of the season.<br />Tea is served in fine bone china designed by Paul Smith in collaboration with Thomas Goode of Mayfair. Plates, teapots, cups and saucers all feature Smith's rainbow stripes, with the plates acting as a kind of catwalk for the delicious confectionery.<br />Their version of the yellow Smythson "Maze Bag" is a banana sponge cake, iced with all the leather details and even a gold leaf clasp.<br />A chocolate biscuit version of a Valentino red coat is so exquisitely detailed with gold buttons that it will certainly make it onto every stylish gingerbread man's Christmas wish list.<br />The tailor-made tea is served so that, whenever a guest takes a cake or savoury nibble, it is quickly replaced on the cake stand. Over and over, one can relive the excitement of a Louis Vuitton dress selling out and being re-issued, simply by stuffing one's face. (The display refills within fashion friendly limits, though, this is not an all-you-can-eat buffet).<br />Conceived as a perfect foil to a frenzied afternoon of shopping in Knightsbridge, where non-edible versions of the latest fashions can be purchased at Harrods or Harvey Nichols, high tea at the Berkeley has developed into an area institution. It can even be delivered locally on a pistachio and baby pink Vespa to customers who feel this luxury is so necessary, they need it at home.<br />Dior's John Galliano, Naomi Campbell and Gwyneth Paltrow have all sipped tea for at least two hours (the recommended time) in the velvety darkness of the hotel's plush Caramel room, and one should book a month in advance to do the same. Tea begins at £35, or $53.80, per person and is served from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. daily. (Reservations, 44-(0)20-7201-1619)<br />Heading east (but not too far east) to the Burlington Gardens entrance of the Royal Academy, one discovers another fashion-frenzied dining hall, housed in a contemporary art gallery of the venerable art school and museum, a stiletto's stride away from Piccadilly Circus in elegant, if conservative, Mayfair.<br />This colorful room is Flash, a pop-up restaurant devised by Pablo Flack and David Waddington of Bistrotheque, an eatery in deepest darkest Bethnal Green.<br />For years Bistrotheque has been legendary for its flamboyant cabarets and stark décor. East London's lower rents and more multicultural environment has made the area the location of choice for London's new creative minds, and so it follows suit that their social hot spots should be located in the same place.<br />Sitting beneath the watchful eye of an octopus painted on the wall behind him, Flack described the reason behind the restaurant travelling to central London for a short time, "Bistrotheque is fundamentally a really great local restaurant that's driven by a local art scene. A lot of people that have heard about Bistrotheque but can't be bothered to go all the way to Bethnal Green will think, 'We'll go to Flash,' and will experience Flash as a way of experiencing Bistrotheque because it's easy."<br />Flash may be easier to access but the atmosphere is no less exhilarating thanks to the fact that, by eating in a gallery, the meal - and the diner - becomes the art.<br />The architect David Kohn has created a room-within-a-room, using art storage boxes that are painted over and decorated by different artists and designers.<br />Flack and Waddington acted as art directors, with an overall vision inspired by Chatsworth. Flack said he "looked at the proportions of formal rooms and the proportions of the wooden boxes are reminiscent of a panelled room, as are the 5 meter high walls. The view upon entrance with the chandeliers and the windows is taken from a Chatsworth dining room."<br />Flash actually is part of the academy's GSK Contemporary series of exhibitions. And the kitchen, under the direction of Bistrotheque's executive chef, Tom Collins, creates lunch and dinner menus inspired by French and Californian cuisine and using fresh ingredients.<br />The fare is based around good meat and fish, with classic-with-a-twist side dishes, like a pan-fried pollock with chilli, roast pepper and almond and caper quinoa.<br />Like the most highly coveted limited-edition fashions, a meal at Flash is available for a limited period, until Jan. 19, and almost all the reservations have been claimed, although some tables are held for walk-ins.<br />Meals are served on china designed by Will Broome, Marc Jacobs's illustrator, in association with Wedgwood - a partnership that also reflects the mix of rough-and-ready East London's art and fashion scene and Mayfair's old-school chic. The result is pristine white dinnerware doodled on with Broome's cutesy graffiti-style pandas-and-hearts designs.<br />"All the people we worked with are part of our social scene in a way," explains Flack, adding, "they have to be talented but we also have to have a social connection. We are socially connected to Will Broome, we liked his illustrations and we brought him to Wedgwood, telling them to work with him and driving that collaboration."<br />Rory Crichton, an artist and textile designer for Prada, Missoni, Gucci and Vuitton, designed graphics placed onto the art-storage boxes. Critchon's vegetables and sea creatures swim across the panels, giving the space a vivid, if psychedelic, landscape over which paintings and fashion accessories are hung, notably a Pac-man hat from Giles Deacon's Spring/Summer 2009 collection, made for him by the milliner Stephen Jones, and canvases by cool East London artists like Alexis Teplin.<br />After the restaurant closes, the paintings will be sold through the academy to benefit its art school.<br />Creating another twist on a grand English country house scene, Flack and Waddington got London fashion's favorite designer, Giles Deacon, to design a spiky black chandelier bleeding with Swarovski crystals. The fixture looms over the dining space like an enormous death star, sinister but captivating.<br />"I was thrilled to design the Swarovski chandelier; metal studs and spikes contrast with clustered pastel crystals, to create something brutal yet beautiful," Deacon said in an e-mail interview. "Flash is a great melting point of fashion and art, traditional and the modern."<br />Besides the chandelier, the lighting is low, like candle light. And Flack gestures extravagantly toward the roomful of creative and business types when he notes, "Everyone looks fabulous in a soft lighting."<br />"The décor, the food, the whole thing is thought of as one period of time, a snapshot," explains Flack, who used to be half of the design team behind the small but significant London clothing label House of Jazz.<br />"It's a bit like doing a collection;" he adds, "you think about every element and how it works together, the food and the décor are part of that."<br />Four days after its designer-heavy opening in the beginning of November, Flash hosted a lunch for the hedge-funders, gallerinas, tailors and locals of Mayfair, thereby establishing itself as an important intervention in the history of the area - when, even if for only an instance, the East End came to Mayfair.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/style/ffood.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/style/ffood.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left">****************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>BOOKS<br />Book review: 'Everything but the Squeal'<br /></strong>Published: December 1, 2008<br />Everything but the Squeal<br />Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain </div><br /><div align="left">By John Barlow 306 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.<br />In the last couple of years the pile of books about pork - let's call the genre Pig Lit - has grown tall enough that it's threatening to topple over and hurt someone.<br />In his memoir "Heat," Bill Buford sampled a slice of Mario Batali's precious lardo (pig fat) and quit his day job at The New Yorker to eat more things like it. The British chef Fergus Henderson, in his cookbooks, teaches home cooks to use Bic razors to depilate pigs' tails and ears before serving these toothsome bits to their friends. And in "Pig Perfect," Peter Kaminsky - he calls himself a (groan) "hamthropologist" - goes searching for "the lost taste of pork."<br />Pork is, definitively, no longer the other white meat. In the hands of today's chefs and committed eaters, it's dark, glistening, salty, fatty, soulful and sinful - closer to Howlin' Wolf's music than Pat Boone's. A little of it will make anything taste better. Try smearing some drippings on the cover of an old Harold Robbins paperback.<br />The volume on our plate this morning, John Barlow's "Everything but the Squeal," is a modest but enthusiastic addition to the Pig Lit canon. Barlow, a 39-year-old Cambridge-educated novelist, decides to spend a year in Galicia, in the rainy northwest corner of Spain, where he lives with his wife and young son, trying to eat every possible part of the pig.<br />This is decent work if you can get it. Galicia is a pork-obsessed culture, and Barlow suspects his quest won't be difficult. But there are obstacles. His wife, Susana, is essentially a vegetarian. Will he have to eat genitals? And then there's the moment when he's confronted with a dish he describes as "the insides of a pig's bone-stuffed bowels."<br />Barlow is a hard writer to get a handle on. He's not as crunchy and ecophilosophical as Michael Pollan. He's not dry and wily, like Calvin Trillin. He doesn't come on like a non-rehabbed member of the Psychedelic Furs, as does Anthony Bourdain. And he's not nostril-flaringly intense, like Buford.<br />Seventy-five pages into "Everything but the Squeal," it dawned on me whose prose Barlow's resembles: Bill Bryson's, in another genial quest book, "A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail" (1998).<br />Like Bryson, Barlow has canny comic timing. And like Bryson, Barlow is not into this whole completion thing. Bryson never did walk the entire Appalachian Trail. And it's not giving too much away to say that there are a few bits of the pig that Barlow simply cannot bring himself to ingest.<br />What both writers get by on is cerebral charm that can verge on slapstick. Defending the habits of pigs against their detractors, Barlow observes: "When they're starving, pigs will occasionally eat each other, but so do we when our airplanes crash in inhospitable places."<br />It's not much fun, over the course of a few hundred pages, to listen to a writer (unless that writer is A.J. Liebling) rhapsodize about what he is putting into his mouth. This is why the photographs and recipes in food magazines are, 9 times out of 10, more welcome than the feature articles.<br />Barlow does not manage to solve this problem. When he's writing about stuffing his face, he can sound like a hack in need of floss, wet naps and a very cross editor. Here's the best he can say about a plate of calf's cheek: "It blasts you away with taste." About a chorizo dish: "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven." At other times, he lapses into the kind of travel brochurese that reeks of cheap aftershave. ("Santiago is the home of one of Europe's great universities.")<br />You are willing to forgive him quite a lot, however, because of his great good humor - he's pleasant to be around. He is attending to reality when he writes, about being a novelist: "No one knows what to say when you tell them you're a writer. It's like shaking someone's hand and" passing gas "at the same time."<br />Describing one local specialty, he notes: "A plateful of chicharrones looks as if someone has run over a hedgehog, then tried his best to reassemble it." (The same dish can resemble an "unkempt toupee.")<br />Along the way in "Everything but the Squeal," you learn plenty of pig lore, and there is that requisite moment - no serious meat book is complete these days without it - when Barlow travels to watch animals be slaughtered.</div><div align="left">He does not take to this like Paul Bunyan. "If today's pigs have pet names," he frets, "I don't think I can watch." He steps away for nerve-calming cigarettes and worries about losing his "death virginity."<br />There have been plenty of macho, red-blooded books written about pork and barbecue, and Barlow's squeamishness about being near the killing ground is refreshingly honest in its way. But it also threatens to warp the meaning of his book's title.<br />O.K., we get it - he can eat almost everything but the squeal. But if Barlow can barely cope with the final, primal squeals themselves, it's possible he should have written about herring or polenta instead.</div><div align="left">h<a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/arts/bookwed.php">ttp://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/02/arts/bookwed.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left">****************</div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="left"><strong>U.S. FDA details its food safety campaign<br /></strong>By Andrew Martin<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />After years of being criticized for its response to food-sickness outbreaks and contaminated imports, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is stepping up efforts to convince the public and skeptical lawmakers that it is making progress in overhauling the nation's food defenses.<br />The agency will release a report Monday that summarizes what officials call a "hugely ambitious" campaign to reshape its food inspection arm to root out safety hazards through things like sophisticated software and certifiers from the private sector.<br />"The goal is to radically redesign the process," said Dr. David Acheson, the agency's associate commissioner for foods. For imported food, for instance, that means trying to detect tainted products during the production process rather than waiting until they enter the country.<br />"We cannot simply rely on picking the ball up at the point of entry," Dr. Acheson said.<br />The changes were first outlined in the agency's Food Protection Plan, which was released in November 2007. In June, the agency was criticized by the Government Accountability Office for failing to provide details on the costs or specific strategies for carrying out the plan. Some lawmakers have repeatedly called the agency's food protection efforts inadequate.<br />But in the agency's report, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times, and in an interview with Dr. Acheson, the FDA maintains that its overhaul is well under way.<br />For instance, the agency is hiring at least 130 employees to conduct inspections and collect samples. It has approved the use of irradiation for iceberg lettuce and spinach to reduce the risk from pathogens like E. coli O157:H7 and salmonella, and it is opening offices in other countries to improve the monitoring of food exported to the United States.<br />The first office opened in Beijing in mid-November, and more are planned in Europe, India, Latin America and the Middle East.<br />Dr. Acheson acknowledged that the agency did not have enough money to put in place all its plans. Some critics have expressed skepticism about the agency's commitment to an overhaul and are calling for more drastic changes when the Obama administration takes over in January.<br />"I've tried to be open about when they come in and say they are doing this and doing that," said Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut. "But at every step, they fail on just such a large scale."<br />DeLauro said the agency's recent reaction to the discovery of the toxic chemical melamine in infant formula was evidence of its continued dysfunction. This fall, the agency said that any amount of melamine in infant formula might be harmful. But the agency then said that trace amounts of melamine were acceptable after they were found in formula made in the United States.<br />"It's got to be so totally redone," DeLauro said of the agency. "It needs resources; it needs better management; it needs less influence from the industry and more influence on the science."<br />In addition to regulating drugs and medical devices, the agency oversees about 80 percent of the nation's food supply, which includes keeping tabs on tens of thousands of manufacturers in the United States and abroad.<br />Given the cost and logistics of inspecting each company, the agency is shifting toward a more risk-based approach that would use vast quantities of data to pinpoint areas of risk and deploy resources accordingly. The offices overseas will try to build relationships with foreign regulators and develop information on foreign manufacturers.<br />For instance, the agency hopes that companies will hire reliable third-party auditors to inspect facilities because it does not have the personnel to do so. In exchange, companies would be cleared to import their products to the United States with less chance of inspection or bureaucratic roadblocks.<br />In addition, the agency is hoping to deploy a sophisticated screening program, used successfully on seafood, to better identify high-risk foods at the border.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/america/01fda.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/america/01fda.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275481429759193666" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmNMhNua5kaH81-nlfbd39MubitCDJOQ3llQE4KsMlPzdfv4HPsh6NthK1oYxSktmT39lxJHYtf7OCh-MBm39erH26MOHZjQJjgl8VTzvK9_LR5Il5TCY47Lg46TUnWFrUUb9N_aDPYG8/s320/DSC02387.jpg" border="0" /> <div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Historic center of Venice flooded<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />VENICE, Italy: Venice could use a bailout. The city built on water has too much of it.<br />Residents and tourists waded through knee-deep water Monday as they navigated the city's narrow streets and alleys, and its historic St. Mark's Square was inundated. Boxes of tourist merchandise floated inside the flooded shops around the square and even the city's famed pigeons sought refuge on rooftops and windowsills.<br />One of the highest tides in its history brought Venice to a virtual halt, rekindling a debate over a plan to build moveable flood barriers in an effort to save the lagoon city from high tides.<br />City officials said the tide peaked at 61 inches (156 centimeters), well past the 40-inch (110-centimeter) flood mark, as strong winds pushed the sea into the city.<br />Alarms went off at 6:37 a.m. to alert citizens, but many residents were taken by surprise because authorities had initially not forecast such a high water level.<br />In St. Mark's Square, one of the city's lowest points, tourists tried to stay dry by hopping on cafe tables and chairs sticking out of the water. The water was so high that someone rowed a small speedboat across the wide square.<br />"It was quite an extraordinary experience," said Michel Gorski, visiting from Brussels with his wife. "We got stuck in the hotel for half a day but we didn't suffer. We were sorry for the restaurants and stores around, but there was no panic and everyone worked really hard to clean up quickly."<br />Workers were unable to install the traditional raised wooden walkways used during flooding because the water rose so high the platforms would have floated away too.<br />"There are very few streets that are water-free," admitted city spokesman Enzo Bon.<br />In an ironic twist, the flooding also idled the city's water buses because their boarding platforms were underwater.<br />Bon had no reports of damage to the city's architectural jewels, and the Culture Ministry was monitoring the situation.<br />It was the fourth highest tide since 1872, when the city started keeping records. The last time Venice saw such high waters was in 1986, while the all-time record was 76 inches (194 centimeters) in 1966.<br />That flood forced 3,000 people to evacuate and damaged many historic buildings, but largely spared the city's art — which had long ago been removed to upper floors because of frequent flooding by tides.<br />"In Venice, we know how to live with high water," said Bon. "Of course there are some problems, because today's was an exceptional event."<br />Giancarlo Galan, the conservative governor of the surrounding Veneto region, criticized Venice's center-left administration for failing to prepare for the flood and for allegedly stonewalling a long-planned system of barriers that would rise from the seabed to ease the effect of high tides.<br />The $5.5 billion project, called "Moses" after the Biblical figure who parted the Red Sea, has been under construction for years and is expected to be completed by 2011. The company building the barriers said, had the system been in place, the city would not have been flooded Monday.<br />Venice Mayor Massimo Cacciari insisted the city's experts had done a good job and had revised their forecasts well before the water came in. Cacciari, who has criticized the barriers, said the government-backed project would be completed.<br />With low tide setting in and waters receding Monday afternoon, some tourists were charmed by the water wonderland.<br />"The hotel had to turn off the gas and the electricity, but they made us a nice candlelit cold lunch," said Yacob Laurent, a visitor from Paris. "They gave us boots and my wife and I went for a walk. It was a lot of fun."</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/01/europe/EU-Italy-Venice-High-Water.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/01/europe/EU-Italy-Venice-High-Water.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Delegates at UN climate conference are urged to finalize treaty<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />POZNAN, Poland: The global financial crisis will pass, but global warming will be permanent unless nations can unite to contain emissions of greenhouse gases, political leaders and top scientists warned Monday at a United Nations climate conference.<br />Speaking to 10,000 delegates and environmental advocates, the UN climate chief said time was running out to meet the deadline on a new climate treaty.<br />"The clock is ticking. Work needs to shift into a higher gear," said Yvo de Boer, head of the UN climate change secretariat.<br />Delegates from about 190 countries opened a two-week conference aimed at nailing down the details of a climate change treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which required 37 countries to slash carbon emissions by an average 5 percent from 1990 levels by 2012.<br />Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of a Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel of UN climate scientists, reminded the conference of the consequences of failure. That included the possible extinction of nearly one-third of the earth's species, a threatened meltdown of the Greenland or western Antarctic ice sheets that could raise sea levels by several meters and a growing lack of water for millions of people within a few decades.<br />To avert those disasters, he said, emissions of greenhouse gases must level off by 2015 and then drop sharply.<br />Developed and Western countries have been haggling for the last year on new carbon emissions limits for industrial countries, on channeling financial and technical aid to poorer countries and on setting up the rules and institutions to govern a new international climate regime.<br />The credit crisis that struck financial markets full force this year has further complicated the process. As investment cash dries up and oil prices drop, fewer funds are available for green energy projects.<br />"All of us are today concerned with the financial crisis," Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland said. "But we must understand that financial crises happened in the past and will happen in the future, but our work for the environment should be timeless."<br />Poland, which is taking over chairmanship of the climate negotiations for the next year, was also trying to safeguard its coal-dependent economy as the European Union decides how it will meet its goal of cutting emissions by at least 20 percent by 2020.<br />The EU was holding a critical meeting next week to discuss what obligations each of its 27 members will face.<br />"We want to protect each weak country," Tusk said later. "But we are willing to create and adapt the package, not to reject it." He told the conference that Poland, which relies on coal for 93 percent of its power generation, is doing all it can to rein in its carbon emissions but cannot switch to other energy sources quickly.<br />"All of us must show understanding to each other, we must be patient with each other," Tusk said.<br />The history of climate talks has been burdened by a conflict pitting the United States, which denounced the Kyoto pact as imbalanced and harmful to its economy, against rapidly developing countries like China, India and Brazil, which objected to measures that could limit development and their ability to ease poverty for millions of their citizens.<br />The negotiations achieved a breakthrough last year when the developing countries agreed to help lower global emissions as long as they received the technology and finances to move toward lower carbon economies.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/healthscience/climate.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/healthscience/climate.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>****************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Beijing reaches clean air goal for 2008<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />BEIJING: Beijing said Monday that it had already reached its target number of 256 "blue-sky days" this year with the help of ambitious environmental measures the city imposed to cut emissions for the Olympic Games.<br />The notoriously polluted city of 17 million reached the clean-air day target on Sunday, 31 days ahead of schedule, Beijing's Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau said.<br />"Our quality of our city's air has shown constant improvement over the last 10 years," Du Shaozhong, deputy director of the bureau, said in a statement.<br />Beijing had only 100 blue-sky days in 1998, when it introduced a clean-air campaign and began investing more than $15 billion to improve air quality, according to Xinhua, the official news agency.<br />The long-term measures as well as more drastic efforts taken ahead of the Olympic Games in August helped the city reach the goal, the bureau said.<br />Beijing pulled half of the city's 3.3 million vehicles off the roads, halted most construction and closed some factories in the capital and surrounding provinces during the Games.<br />The Olympics proved that controlling emissions was the main way to reduce pollution, the bureau said. Car emissions, Beijing's main source of pollution, were reduced 60 percent from a year earlier because of the measures, it said.<br />So far this year levels of inhalable particulate matter - tiny dust particles that are among the worst pollutants - were reduced 16 percent from a year earlier, and other pollutants like carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide showed reductions of more than 20 percent, the bureau said.<br />China's air pollution index, which ranges from 1 to 500, uses a standard calculation derived from levels of major pollutants. A reading below 50 is considered good, and 51 to 100 is moderate. Below 100 is considered a blue-sky day.<br />Only 56 days have measured "good" so far this year, the bureau said. But environmentalists say a blue-sky day is still more polluted than what is considered healthy by the World Health Organization.<br />Steven Andrews, an independent environmental consultant based in Washington, said Beijing's assertions of improved air quality were not reliable because the city had moved monitoring stations to less-polluted areas and had varied the way it measured pollutants since 1998.<br />"They've measured different things during that time period, and it has a huge impact on the number of days that meet the national standard," Andrews said in an interview by telephone.<br />Such inconsistencies mean that the increase in the number of blue-sky days may be due to the change of monitoring locations, rather than a reduction in overall pollution levels, he said.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/asia/china.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/asia/china.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>*********************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>French police treatment of journalist raises free-speech issues</strong><br />By Katrin Bennhold<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />PARIS: The police treatment of a journalist accused of libel, who was dragged from his home in front of his young sons, has raised questions about freedom of speech in France and the tactics employed by the police and the judicial system here.<br />At 6:40 a.m. last Friday, Vittorio de Filippis, a writer and former publisher of the left-leaning newspaper Libération, opened the door to three armed police officers as his 14-year-old son watched and another son, aged 10, listened through the bedroom door.<br />In an interview Monday, Filippis said he was refused a telephone call to his lawyer, handcuffed on his way to the tribunal and strip-searched twice before being taken to see a judge and formally charged with libel against the founder of the French Internet provider Free, Xavier Niel.<br />By Monday, the affair had grown into a polarizing national debate. Opposition politicians and rights groups warned of an ever more repressive climate for journalists, while two ministers in President Nicolas Sarkozy's government defended the police and the judge who ordered the detention of Filippis.<br />Later in the day, however, Sarkozy's office issued a statement indicating that he wanted to downgrade libel from a criminal offense to a civil offense. A draft bill decriminalizing libel would be discussed in Parliament at the start of 2009, the statement said.<br />According to Justice Minister Rachida Dati, Filippis had ignored repeated court summonses before Justice Muriel Josié signed the warrant to bring him in by force. When someone "does not comply with summons, we send him a warrant to bring him in," Dati told lawmakers in the Senate, France's upper house of Parliament, on Monday, calling the action taken in the case of Filippis "completely normal."<br />There was some confusion as to whether Filippis ever received a summons. Officials in the prosecutor's office said three summonses had been sent, in June, July and August this year. Filippis said that he never received one, though he was careful not to entirely exclude the possibility of having missed "a letter or two" in the correspondence involving the Niel case.<br />But beyond the squabbles over legal procedure, the case has highlighted the larger question of how much freedom of speech exists here. France ranks 35th in press freedom in a list of countries established by Reporters Without Borders - just below Mali - and Sarkozy himself has not shied from suing a journalist perceived to be hostile.<br />One issue raised publicly by Filippis's lawyer and privately by judicial and police officials, was whether a forced summons and temporary detention was warranted in a libel case.<br />"This sort of treatment just does not exist in libel cases normally because they are not punishable by even one day in prison," said Libération's lawyer, Jean-Paul Lévy, adding that in 33 years of defending the newspaper in libel cases, he had never seen such violence.<br />"We have no memories of this type of method ever being used for a publisher," said an official in the prosecutor's office, where an administrative inquiry has been started to investigate whether the judge's warrant was inappropriate. A senior police official concurred: "It is bizarre that this warrant was ever signed in this case. It seems totally disproportionate."<br />The case dates to the evening of Oct. 27, 2006, when Libération ran an article about a two-year suspended prison sentence that had just been handed to Niel in an investigation linked to prostitution. One reader comment posted under the article on the newspaper's Web site under the pseudonym of Yves regretted that the sentence was not harsher, prompting Niel to sue Filippis, who was then publisher and under French law responsible for the content of the newspaper.<br />It wasn't Niel's first libel case against Libération: The newspaper has won four others Niel brought against it that are now under appeal, Lévy said.<br />Describing the events last Friday, Filippis asked, "Was it excess zeal of one judge, or is this a sign that life is going to become even tougher for journalists in France?"</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/europe/france.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/europe/france.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>**************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Training legionnaires to fight (and eat rodents)</strong><br />By Simon Romero<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />CAMP SZUTS, French Guiana: There was no other way to put it: Stiven Baird, an American in the French Foreign Legion, looked terrible.<br />A week into the legion's jungle warfare course here in the equatorial rain forest, he was famished after eating nothing for three days but some agouti, a rodent that resembles a large, tailless rat.<br />An obstacle course with Tarzanesque leaps from ropes depleted his stamina. A predawn swim in caiman-inhabited waters tested his nerves. Drinking dirty river water disgusted him.<br />"I am just exhausted," the gaunt Baird, 30, said, before faintly uttering in French, "Fatigué, fatigué." But when asked why he joined the legion a year ago, his eyes lighted up a bit as he described an apparently dreary past life as a truck driver in Virginia.<br />"I wanted to see the world and learn some French," he said, as the Russian overseer of the course, Sergeant Sergei Provpolski, barked at him to join other legionnaires on a trot through the jungle.<br />"There are easier ways to learn French," said Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Kopecky, an officer in the French Army who was observing Baird's predicament.<br />Yet that evening, Kopecky and other officers raised glasses of Esprit de Corps, a red Côtes de Provence vintage made from the legion's own vineyards near Marseille. At a dining hall overlooking the Approuague River, they boasted of taking recruits from 140 countries and turning them into mercenaries in the service of France.<br />"We don't accept the hardened criminals anymore, the murderers or rapists, so this makes our job easier," said Captain Samir Benykrelef, the commander of Camp Szuts.<br />Formed in the 19th century as a way for France to enforce its colonial empire with foreign adventurers, the legion has survived countless challenges, including the French loss of the legion's North African birthplace, Algeria.<br />But in this sparsely populated overseas French department, a former penal colony wedged between Suriname and Brazil, it has acquired a postcolonial mission protecting the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, some 110 miles to the northwest, which each year launches into orbit about half of the world's commercial satellite payloads.<br />As temperatures soar to 90 degrees in the shade of transplanted baobab trees, legionnaires patrol Kourou, a quiet town of 20,000, their shaved heads shielded from the sun under white pillbox-style hats known as képis blancs.<br />They guard the four-decade-old space complex from terrorists who could emerge from the surrounding jungle. (There is always a first time.)<br />On launch days, legionnaires swap their képis for green berets and man artillery stations on roads down which rolls the odd Peugeot or Renault.<br />One of the most action-packed scenes in Kourou can be glimpsed nightly at the Bar des Sports on the Avenue des Frères Kennedy. Legionnaires with aiguillettes, or braids, dangling from their starched uniforms pack bar stools next to scantily clad women from Brazilian cities like Macapá and Belém.<br />At this locale on a recent Friday evening, the legion seemed to have kept its rough edges. Instead of the wine preferred by their officers, legionnaires downed whiskey mixed with an energy drink called Long Horn. A band belted out forró, music from northeastern Brazil. Couples swarmed the dance floor.<br />"This is where we come to forget why we're stationed here," said Andrey Korivitsky, 28, a legionnaire from Belarus who resembles Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.<br />The boredom legionnaires complain about in Kourou contrasts with the scene back at Camp Szuts, where the barracks are named for distant battles of decades past, like Vauxaillon and Stuttgart.<br />Instructors at the camp operate one of the most grueling courses in jungle warfare and survival, opening it to Special Forces from around the world, like the Navy Seals. But its main purpose is preparing legionnaires for hardships in places where France still uses them for military intervention, like Chad, Djibouti or Ivory Coast.<br />"We are the grunts who are supposed to suffer, like your marines, at the hands of sadists," said Sergeant Ivan Grezdo, 33, a Slovakian forced to exit the course after cracking two ribs.<br />The course offers a window into the culture of the legion, long dominated by Germans who flooded its ranks after World War II. Now, enlistees from former Soviet bloc countries constitute most of the legion's 7,700 men (no women can join), with the number of Latin Americans, particularly Colombians and Brazilians, rising fast. Officers say Interpol background checks weed out most undesirables. Americans account for only about 1 percent of legionnaires.<br />"Americans in the legion tend to be the Beau Geste types, the idealists, making them easy pickings for the bullies and malcontents," said Jaime Salazar, 34, a man from Indiana who joined the legion, deserted, then recounted it all in a book, "Legion of the Lost."<br />Indeed, the Americans in the legion seem a bit less hard-boiled than other enlistees. "Pick an area on the map where there's been a recent crisis, and that area will be a good source of legionnaires," said Corporal Buys Francois, 43, a South African who joined 11 years ago.<br />At 11:45 a.m. on a recent Monday, Francois and a handful of other grisly legion elders from Hungary, Poland and China could be found on break at the camp's dimly lighted canteen, sipping Kronenbourg beers. Most agreed it was worth sticking it out for 15 years, when they are eligible for French pensions.<br />"We call the new entrants Generation PlayStation because they're so soft," said Francois, who claimed he joined the legion after seeing action in South Africa's army.<br />"Now we're taking the ex-husbands running from alimony," he chaffed, "and all these guys with university degrees."<br />Turning men on the lam, and some learned ones, into legionnaires has never been easy. When the legion's Third Infantry Regiment relocated here from Madagascar in the 1970s, officers ordered it to build an asphalt road by hacking its way through the jungle.<br />At a small zoo at Camp Szuts, new arrivals must get acquainted with a few captured animals, including an ocelot, a tarantula, a red caiman, an anaconda and a jaguar named Fred.<br />"Most of these beasts are no friend of humans, but I would especially not want to cross the fer-de-lance or a pack of peccaries," said Benykrelef, 33, the commander, as he petted an iguana. "At least the peccary is good to eat."<br />What makes someone want to kill a wild boar with his own hands, or suffer degradation from Slavic drillmasters, or risk fracturing his rib cage on a leap down a rain forest gorge?<br />"The money," said a Brazilian legionnaire who gave his full name as Roberto Luís.<br />As a fireman back in Recife in northeastern Brazil, Luís, 29, said he made the equivalent of 300 euros a month, about $384.<br />"Now I earn four times that amount and have the opportunity to become a French citizen," he said.<br />Of course, everyone entering the legion must hew to some unusual rules, like marching at 88 steps a minute, slower than the 120 steps a minute of other French military units.<br />And new legionnaires like Baird of Virginia must adopt pseudonyms, which often evoke their national origins, a tradition that seems to let them break free of the past, murky as it can be.<br />"I guess the spelling of Stiven is French," said Baird, mumbling, almost incoherently, that he had once studied engineering at Old Dominion University under the name Kevin Barnet.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/europe/01legion.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/europe/01legion.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">***************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>France must feed migrants say rights groups<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />By Pierre Savary<br />French human rights activists stopped feeding migrants on Monday in Calais, where hundreds are camped in the hope of illegally crossing into Britain, to force French authorities to take over.<br />About 200 migrants gathered at Calais port in northern France for the daily distribution of hot lunches provided by volunteers but instead were given only tea and bananas.<br />"The situation is becoming impossible. There are more and more migrants, we can't cope. The number of migrants goes up but not the number of volunteers," said Monique Delannoy, head of La Belle Etoile (Under the Stars), one of the groups involved.<br />Non-governmental groups have taken on the task of caring for migrants camping in and around Calais since a large Red Cross centre at nearby Sangatte was shut down in 2002.<br />Sangatte was opened in 1999 to cater for thousands of people who flocked to the area in the hope of hiding on ferries to Britain or in trucks crossing the Channel Tunnel.<br />Sangatte was closed in 2002 by then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, now France's president, under pressure from Britain which argued Sangatte was a magnet for illegal migrants.<br />Many of the migrants are trying to reach friends and families already in Britain while others believe they have a better chance of finding work there.<br />"We have been dealing with this problem for six years, since Sangatte was closed, but the French state and local authorities should be the ones taking charge of this humanitarian work," said Jean-Pierre Boutoille, a spokesman for the aid workers.<br />Calais city hall said it was searching for an alternative solution to the charity meals, but gave no details.<br />Volunteers said there had been a surge in migrants in recent months, particularly from Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sudan.<br />"Lots of Afghans have arrived recently, including some very young ones. There are more than 500 migrants in Calais," said Sylvie Copyans, a member of the Salam volunteer group.<br />Salam planned to continue evening food distribution, even though it might be hard to manage now the lunches were scrapped.<br />"We're likely to see more people in the evening, but we'll continue. Someone has to do something for these people, we have no choice," said Copyans.<br />In the town of Steenvorde, some 70 km (44 miles) inland from Calais, volunteers have pitched tents to host migrants who spend their time by the motorway, waiting for a chance to hide in a truck during a fuel or meal stop.<br />The volunteers said Eritreans had slept in the tents at the weekend, the first migrants to make use of the makeshift camp.<br />(Writing by Estelle Shirbon; editing by Michael Roddy)</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-FRANCE-MIGRANTS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-FRANCE-MIGRANTS.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">***************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Armstrong to make Tour de France comeback</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />By Simon Evans<br />Seven-times winner Lance Armstrong will make a Tour de France comeback next year, his spokesman told Reuters on Monday.<br />The 37-year-old rider announced in September he was coming out of retirement for the 2009 season.<br />A cancer survivor, Armstrong won the Tour for a record seven consecutive years from 1999-2005.<br />The American retired following his 2005 victory and has since devoted himself to the fight against cancer - raising funds and awareness through his foundation.<br />Armstrong, who will race for Astana, had already confirmed that he would race the Giro d'Italia, the Tour of Flanders and the Tour of California and several of the one-day classic races.<br />The Texas-born former road race world champion and bronze medallist from the Sydney Olympics in 2000, had said he would make his first race back in the Tour Down Under around Adelaide, Australia in January.<br />Armstrong has had a strained relationship with the Tour de France organisers, the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), who said in October that his return would be "embarrassing."<br />The French daily newspaper L'Equipe, owned by ASO's parent company EPA (Editions Philippe Amaury), claimed three years ago that samples of Armstrong's urine from 1999 showed traces of the banned blood-boosting substance erythropoietin.<br />Armstrong, however, never tested positive and was cleared by a Dutch investigator appointed by the International Cycling Union.<br />The American has also questioned how safe he would be in France, expressing concerns about being targeted by fans.<br />(Editing by Tony Jimenez and Padraic Halpin)</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/sports/OUKSP-UK-CYCLING-TOUR-ARMSTRONG.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/sports/OUKSP-UK-CYCLING-TOUR-ARMSTRONG.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">***************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>French first lady joins global fight against AIDS</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />PARIS: France's glamorous first lady threw her considerable star power behind the global fight against AIDS on Monday, as the world tallied the victims of the HIV virus that infects a new person every 15 seconds.<br />As ceremonies marked World AIDS Day, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy signed on to become a goodwill ambassador for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which said it has provided lifesaving treatment to two million people living with HIV worldwide.<br />"I think the world has become used to AIDS," the model-turned-singer told a news conference in Paris. "We no longer see it as a scandal or an emergency."<br />Bruni-Sarkozy, who lost her brother Virginio to AIDS two years ago, said her work will focus on helping women and children infected with HIV, the virus that causes the disease. She pledged to fight the stigma that is still attached to AIDS in many countries.<br />"There is no greater cruelty than to be excluded from your own family and your own community because you are infected with a deadly disease," she said.<br />Some 500,000 children are born each year infected with HIV and 290,000 of them died in 2007 as a result, the Global Fund said. With access to antiretroviral drugs, the risk of virus transmission from an HIV-positive mother to her baby can be slashed to less than five percent, it added.<br />Bruni-Sarkozy said she would divert the constant media attention she has attracted since her whirlwind wedding to President Nicolas Sarkozy this year toward the battle against AIDS. She also planned to tap her extensive contacts in the music and fashion industries for fundraising.<br />Irish singer and activist Bono called her appointment "a great coup" for the Global Fund.<br />An estimated 33 million people worldwide are infected with the HIV virus, the vast majority of them in Africa, but no country is spared.<br />In a rare government disclosure, Iran said Monday it has registered more than 18,000 HIV-positive citizens and estimated the true number of infected to be as high as 100,000.<br />China — which for years also covered up the disease — vowed to do more to tackle the stigma. The government promised to strengthen education about AIDS prevention, increase condom distribution and do more to reach high-risk groups. An estimated 700,000 Chinese have the virus.<br />The rate of HIV infection in Europe almost doubled between 2000 and 2007, reaching the highest level ever recorded in the region, the health agencies of the U.N. and European Union said in a report.<br />South Africa has an estimated 5.5 million people living with the HIV virus — the highest total of any country. About 1,000 South Africans die each day of the disease and complications like tuberculosis. Even more become infected because prevention messages have not worked.<br />Yet for years, the South African government of former President Thabo Mbeki played down the extent of the crisis. Mbeki himself doubted the link between HIV and AIDS. His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, openly mistrusted conventional AIDS drugs and instead promoted the value of lemons, garlic, beetroot and the African potato.<br />Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health last month calculated that government delays in introducing AIDS drugs between 2000 and 2005 cost more than 330,000 lives in South Africa.<br />"We have to mourn the lives of those we have not saved," said Barbara Hogan, the health minister who replaced Tshabalala-Msimang after Mbeki was ousted in October.<br />She promised to improve HIV treatment and prevention programs, and to increase the supply of drugs to HIV positive women to stop them from passing the virus on to their unborn children.<br />The top U.N. official dealing with the disease, Peter Piot, joined South African political leaders and hundreds of activists to show his support for the new administration. Church bells tolled and workers put down their tools as South Africa observed a minute of silence for AIDS victims.<br />The South African government wants to halve new infections by 2011 and ensure that 80 percent of those with the disease get treatment and care.<br />But it faces a mammoth task. The Global Fund has rejected a South African request for nearly $92 million over the next two years for AIDS projects and $68 million for TB prevention and treatment.<br />AIDS advocates accused the country's former health minister of failing to respect the fund's strict operating rules.<br />____<br />Associated Press correspondents Ali Akbar Dareini in Iran, Gillian Wong in China and Claire Nullis in South Africa contributed to this report.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/01/news/AIDS-Day-Carla-Bruni.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/01/news/AIDS-Day-Carla-Bruni.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>*********************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Tensions mount between India and Pakistan<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta and Robert F. Worth<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />MUMBAI: In a new sign of rising tensions between two nuclear-armed neighbors, Indian Foreign Ministry officials summoned Pakistan's ambassador on Monday evening and told him Pakistanis were responsible and must be punished for last week's terrorist attacks here, in which 188 people were killed over three days in the heart of India's commercial capital.<br />The Indian officials told the Pakistani ambassador, Shahid Malik, that they expected that "strong action would be taken" against those responsible for the attack, according to a statement released by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.<br />The statement added that Pakistan's actions "needed to match the sentiments expressed by its leadership that it wishes to have a qualitatively new relationship with India."<br />Pakistani officials say that they have not found links between the attackers and militant groups based in Pakistan, but that they would act swiftly if such links were found. The attacks have raised tensions between the two countries to a level not seen since 2001, when an attack on the Indian Parliament pushed them to the brink of war.<br />The United States sought Monday to calm hostilities between India and Pakistan, who have three wars behind them. As questions remained about whether more than 10 gunmen were involved in the conspiracy, the United States sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to India.<br />Speaking in London on her way there, Rice called on Pakistan in blunt terms "to follow the evidence wherever it leads."<br />"I don't want to jump to any conclusions myself on this, but I do think that this is a time for complete, absolute, total transparency and cooperation," Rice said, referring to Pakistan's help in the investigations.<br />Indian forces killed nine of the attackers and captured one gunman, but it is unclear if other attackers remain at large and whether the terrorists received assistance from accomplices positioned on the ground before the assaults began.<br />The lone captured gunman, who is said to have identified himself as Ajmal Amir Qasab and as a Pakistani citizen, told police officials that more than 10 people may have been involved in the attacks, though his testimony has been inconsistent.<br />Investigators with the Indian Antiterror Squad said they believed that accomplices may have left weapons at the hotels for the gunmen and that names and telephone numbers of five residents of Mumbai were found in the cellphones and wallets of the attackers.<br />Reuters and other news agencies reported Monday that Qasab had also said that he belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organization based in Pakistan that is blamed for attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir and elsewhere. Qasab was also reported to have said that he was trained at a camp in Pakistan by a former Pakistani military official.<br />Indian officials have confirmed that a satellite phone belonging to one of the attackers was used to call a phone number in the Pakistani city of Karachi during the assault.<br />Despite allegations that groups based in Pakistan had some involvement in the attacks, Indian officials have not explicitly accused the Pakistani government of responsibility or wrongdoing. Responses that are under consideration, officials and political analysts said, range from the suspension of diplomatic relations to the most extreme and least likely, a cross-border raid into Pakistan against suspected training camps for militants.<br />Pakistan has denied any role in the attacks, calling them a "barbaric act of terrorism." On Monday, the Pakistani prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said on television that the terrorists had no links to any government, and were "nonstate actors," The Associated Press reported.<br />Most of the killings took place in two luxury Mumbai hotels, the Taj Mahal hotel and the Oberoi. At least 28 of those killed were foreigners, including 6 Americans and 8 Israelis.<br />As the last bodies were finally pulled from the Taj Mahal hotel on Monday, the Indian public, angry and anguished over the bloody attack on their country's most glamorous and cosmopolitan city, pressed government officials to explain how a small band of terrorists could have unleashed such large-scale violence.<br />The questioning became pointed enough that Vilasrao Deshmukh, chief minister of Maharashtra State and a member of the governing Congress Party, offered Monday to resign.<br />"I accept moral responsibility for the terror attacks," Deshmukh said at a news conference.<br />Party leaders were considering the resignation offer Monday night.<br />Earlier in the day, Deshmukh's deputy, R.R. Patil, officially stepped down. Patil's departure, and Deshmukh's offer to leave, came a day after Home Minister Shivraj Patil resigned over the failure of his ministry to thwart or quickly contain the horrific attacks.<br />On Monday, Paliniappan Chidambaram, the finance minister who was appointed to succeed Patil as home minister, briefly addressed reporters, saying that India would "respond with determination" to the attacks.<br />"I want to assure the people of India, on behalf of the government, that we will respond with determination and resolve to the grave threat posed to the Indian nation," Patil said.<br />"This is the threat to the very idea of India, the very soul of India, the India that we know, the India that we love - namely a secular, plural, tolerant and open society. I have no doubt in my mind that ultimately the idea of India will triumph."<br />The chief of police in Maharashtra state, A.N. Roy, said Monday on the Indian television station NDTV that an investigative team from the Federal Bureau of Investigation had begun working in Mumbai.<br />The Indian government also announced several measures to bolster antiterrorism efforts while struggling to calibrate a response to what it viewed as complicity by Pakistan.<br />While there was no immediate suggestion of Pakistani-Indian hostilities, it is clear that India must carefully consider how to deal with its concerns about Pakistan.<br />On the one hand, public pressure compels the Singh administration to take a tough stance, at least publicly. On the other hand, his government may not want to squander a chance at negotiating peace with Pakistan's elected civilian government.<br />In any event, the mere idea of Indian-Pakistani hostilities cannot bring much comfort to Washington, which needs Pakistan to focus its attention on curbing radical groups on the Afghan border.<br />At the same time, particularly with Indian elections less than six months away, officials are keenly aware of the need to shore up confidence in the nation's security apparatus.<br />Reporting was contributed by Keith Bradsher, Jeremy Kahn and Ruth Fremson in Mumbai; Heather Timmons and Hari Kumar in New Delhi; Isabel Kershner in Jerusalem; Mark McDonald in Hong Kong; and Graham Bowley in New York.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/asia/mumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/asia/mumbai.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">*************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Calming the furies aroused in Mumbai</strong><br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />We share the horror, the pain and the disbelief that Indians are feeling as they absorb the appalling details of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that left nearly 200 dead. We also recognize and understand the questions Indians are asking themselves, and the anger they are feeling, about what some are calling their own 9/11.<br />How can their government have ignored the warning signs? A 2007 report to Parliament warned that the country's shores were poorly protected - and some or all of the attackers arrived by boat. Why weren't the police and the army better prepared to respond? Sharpshooters outside the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel did not have telescopic sights, so they could not get off a shot for fear of killing hostages rather than the terrorists.<br />Most of all, who is to blame for such cruelty?<br />Deccan Mujahedeen, the group that claimed responsibility is unknown. But Indian and U.S. intelligence officials saw signs pointing to Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamist group from the disputed region of Kashmir that is increasingly collaborating with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. What makes that especially frightening is that the group received training and support from Pakistan's intelligence services, before it was officially banned in 2002.<br />We fear that whoever was behind it, the carnage will unleash dangerous new furies between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. And we fear it will divert even more of Pakistan's attention and troops away from fighting extremists on its western border with Afghanistan.<br />India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has shown extraordinary forbearance. But there are already strong calls for him to retaliate - with or without proof of who was behind the attack. We urge him to consider the consequences.<br />India's leaders must be very careful not to ignite a religious war inside their own borders. Any military confrontation with Pakistan would be hugely costly in human life. The Bush administration must assure the Indians that it will bring all of the pressure it can on Pakistan to cooperate fully with the investigation.<br />We were heartened when Pakistan's civilian government immediately agreed to send the new chief of the country's powerful intelligence agency, the ISI, to India. We hoped that meant the government was confident that the ISI played no role in the attack. Or that it was finally prepared to purge its ranks of all those who have aided and abetted extremists.<br />Unfortunately, the offer was quickly withdrawn after the Pakistani army and opposition parties objected. The government then announced that a lower-level intelligence official would go at some point. By Saturday, Pakistani officials were blustering as if they were the victims. Despite all of the recent horrors Pakistan has suffered, its military and intelligence services still do not understand that the terrorists pose a mortal threat to their own country.<br />Washington's most important role will be to urge the Indians and Pakistanis to step back from the brink. The next administration will then have to move quickly to encourage serious negotiations over the future of Kashmir and genuine cooperation to defeat extremists.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/opinion/edmumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/opinion/edmumbai.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">*************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>FBI agents arrive in Mumbai<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />NEW DELHI: An FBI team visited a restaurant and luxury hotel in Mumbai on Monday where Islamist militants struck last week in an attack that killed 188 people, including six Americans.<br />"They are here to help with the investigation," a U.S. embassy spokesman in New Delhi said.<br />There is growing fury at intelligence lapses that many Indians believe let 10 Islamist gunmen attack Mumbai's two best-known luxury hotels and other landmarks in the city of 18 million.<br />Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to arrive in India on Wednesday in an effort to lower tensions with Pakistan.<br />She has urged India's nuclear-armed rival to give "absolute, total"' cooperation in finding those responsible for the attacks last week.<br />Indian officials have said the gunmen were from an anti-India group based in Pakistan.<br />"Our security people will cooperate in any way they can, including coming to India to offer assistance," David Mulford, the U.S. ambassador to New Delhi, said Saturday.<br />The FBI team was briefly detained at the city's airport Sunday due to an official "miscommunication," Indian newspapers reported.<br />They were held back because they did not have permission for the special forensic equipment they had brought, the Economic Times said, citing airport authorities.<br />"They had arrived by a commercial flight. We let them go in the evening after questioning them," a customs official told the Mumbai Mirror.<br />The U.S. embassy declined to comment on the incident.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/asia/agents.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/asia/agents.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Luxury hotels difficult to protect from terrorists<br /></strong>By Keith Bradsher<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />MUMBAI, India: For decades, luxury hotels have been oases for travelers in developing countries, places to mingle with the local elite, enjoy a lavish meal or a dip in the pool and sleep in a clean, safe room.<br />But last week's lethal attacks on two of India's most famous hotels — coming just two months after a huge truck bomb devastated the Marriott in Islamabad, Pakistan — have underlined the extent to which these hotels are becoming magnets for terrorists. Worse, hotel executives and security experts say that little can be done to stop extensively trained gunmen with military assault rifles and grenades who start attacks like the ones that left this city's Oberoi and Taj Mahal Palace & Tower strewn with bodies.<br />P.R.S. Oberoi, the chairman of the Oberoi Group, said at a news conference over the weekend that he had directed his company's hotels to step up security after the Islamabad bombing. The Oberoi banned anyone from parking in front of its hotel here for fear that a car bomb could destroy the glass wall at the front of the lobby, a risk at many hotels.<br />But those protections did not deter the attackers, who entered the Oberoi on foot.<br />Oberoi questioned whether any hotel could defend against such an assault.<br />"The authorities have to help us," he said, by preventing attacks from occurring at all.<br />The Taj, it turns out, had warning, according to both an Indian government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and Ratan Tata, the chairman of the company that owns the hotel. In an interview on CNN, Tata said the hotel had temporarily increased security after being warned of a possible terrorist attack. But he said those measures were eased shortly before last week's attacks and could not have prevented gunmen from entering the hotel.<br />American hotel chains have policies against discussing security precautions, but watched the Mumbai hotel sieges closely.<br />"We never talk about security measures in our hotels because to talk about what we do would compromise them, but I think it's fair to say what happened in Mumbai is going to re-energize them," said Vivian Deuschl, the spokeswoman for the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, a Marriott subsidiary.<br />Some hotels in Asia already take elaborate precautions, particularly in countries with histories of attacks on Western luxury hotels.<br />At the Grand Hyatt in Jakarta, Indonesia, for example, guards check the trunks of all vehicles and even use mirrors to check cars' underbodies for explosives before letting them drive to the entrance. Guests' baggage is opened and checked by hand for suspicious objects, and everyone must go through a metal detector before entering the building.<br />In Pakistan's major cities, where hotels have been targets before, already-tight security at some hotels has become even more intrusive since the Marriott bombing. Guests have to pass through at least one, and often, several security checkpoints on their way into the hotels; some are staffed by paramilitaries. At the luxury Serena Hotel in Islamabad, those who wish to enter are grilled about where they are going and whom they are meeting.<br />But security experts say such measures — and even some lesser ones — will be difficult to implement outside of war zones or countries where hotels have already been made targets, even after the attacks in Mumbai.<br />"It is incredibly difficult to have a quick-fix solution to what we saw," said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert with the Swedish National Defense College. "You are stuck with the dilemma of having a complete lockdown. Tourists don't want that. They want to participate in the culture, they want to experience it."<br />Hotels have some built-in design problems for those seeking to protect them from terrorists. Long hallways can turn into dangerous mazes during the type of attacks that occurred in Mumbai. And the Oberoi and the old wing of the Taj hotel, where most of the fighting took place, both have high, central atriums, as many hotels do. This proved to be a vulnerability.<br />After throwing grenades and directing automatic weapons fire at staff and diners in ground-floor lobbies and restaurants, the attackers at each hotel ascended the atriums. This allowed them to hunt down guests while dropping grenades and shooting at commandos below.<br />The Oberoi Group employs many plainclothes security officers in its hotels, but they are unarmed, Oberoi said.<br />J. K. Dutt, the director general of India's National Security Guards, the commando force that took the lead in the fighting, said Sunday in a televised news conference that the most difficult gunman to attack in the Taj hotel was one who ascended a spiral staircase and took up a position behind an extremely thick pillar that was part of the 105-year-old building's original structure.<br />Particularly at the Taj, the attackers seemed to have detailed knowledge of the building's layout, Dutt said. They kept moving among large halls with multiple entrances, not allowing themselves to be cornered in small rooms without other exits. By contrast, the commandos and the police had old blueprints of the massive, labyrinthine hotel that did not clearly show which passageways were connected and which were blocked by walls, and did not show recent construction, Dutt said.<br />The police and first-response agencies should be working with the hotel industry to devise crisis action plans that would include computer programs detailing all internal and external aspects of hotel building structure, said Michael Coldrick, a London-based security professional and a former explosives specialist with Scotland Yard. For example, a prerecorded DVD walk-through of a hotel could be used to brief special forces assault teams to make sure that they know what to expect.<br />Hotels may also ask staff to keep a closer eye on customers. At some point, Coldrick said, "We might see cleaning ladies with explosives detectors."<br />In the end, several security experts say, no system is foolproof.<br />The Marriott in Islamabad, which had been struck in the past, had layers of security in place on the night the truck bomber approached. The truck was stopped by security guards who check vehicles before allowing them through a hydraulic barrier.<br />Those precautions are credited with saving lives; the truck never made it past the barrier and closer to the hotel, where the blast would have been more devastating. Still, more than 50 people died and more than 250 were wounded.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/asia/01hotel.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/asia/01hotel.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">*************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>NATO trucks attacked in Pakistan; bomber kills 8<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Militants destroyed trucks ferrying Humvees to Western forces in Afghanistan on Monday in an attack that killed two people and underscored the vulnerability of the crucial supply line.<br />The raid on a terminal in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar came as the country faces rising tensions with its eastern neighbor India in the wake of the terror attacks in Mumbai.<br />New Delhi has said the attack was carried out by Pakistani gunmen. Islamabad has said the militants had no link to the government and has promised to cooperate with the inquiry, but the accusations have triggered fears of a flare-up between the nuclear-armed rivals that could severely affect the U.S.-led antiterror campaign in the region.<br />Peshawar, which sits along the supply route from Pakistan to Afghanistan, has seen a surge in violence in recent weeks, including the slaying of an American working on a U.S.-funded aid project.<br />The city lies close to the lawless, tribal regions along the Afghan border, where Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaida leaders are believed to be hiding.<br />Several gunmen fired rockets and automatic weapons at the Faisal terminal, a depot on the edge of the city for trucks that carry vehicles and other supplies. A driver and a clerk died in the attack, which also destroyed 12 trucks, said police officer Ahsanullah Khan, giving no more details.<br />An AP Television News reporter saw two Humvee military vehicles on board the trucks that were gutted by flames in the attack.<br />Up to 75 percent of the supplies for Western forces in landlocked Afghanistan pass through Pakistan after being unloaded from ships at the Arabian sea port of Karachi.<br />NATO says it is investigating alternative supply routes through Central Asian nations to reach its forces, which are fighting a resurgent Taliban seven years after the fall of the Taliban.<br />The alliance and U.S. officials say losses along the supply route are not affecting their operations in the country in any way, however.<br />In early November, suspected Taliban militants hijacked several trucks carrying Humvees near the Khyber Pass and paraded them for TV cameras, in what was seen as major propaganda boost for the insurgents.<br />Pakistan halted traffic along the road for several days while it arranged for armed troops to guard the slow-moving convoys.<br />Al-Qaida and Taliban militants in the northwestern border region are blamed for rising attacks in Pakistan and also in Afghanistan.<br />Pakistani troops are battling the insurgents in at least two regions, including the Swat Valley, the scene of a suicide attack Monday on a security checkpoint that killed 8 people and wounded 40, authorities said.<br />The bomber detonated his car while queuing up at the checkpoint, an officer at the Swat media center said on customary condition of anonymity. The identities of the dead were not known.<br />Meanwhile, fighting between rival political and ethnic gangs continued in parts of Karachi, raising the death toll to 32 in three days of violence, said city police chief Waseem Ahmed.<br />Gang fighting is common in Karachi, the largest city and commercial hub of Pakistan.<br />___<br />Associated Press writers Zarar Khan in Islamabad and Ashraf Khan in Karachi contributed to this report.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/01/asia/AS-Pakistan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/01/asia/AS-Pakistan.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">****************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>U.S. troops investigated for abuse of Afghans</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />KABUL: Two U.S. soldiers based in Afghanistan are being investigated for alleged abuse of Afghan detainees, the U.S. military said on Monday.<br />Captain Roger T. Hill and 1st Sergeant Tommy L. Scott, both of the 1st battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army will be investigated under Article 32, the military equivalent of a civilian grand jury hearing.<br />In 2005, two U.S. soldiers were charged with abusing Afghan detainees at a base in the Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan and media have alleged abuse of prisoners at Bagram, the U.S. army's main base in Afghanistan.<br />The investigation will take place at U.S. base Khost province, southeastern Afghanistan, a statement from the U.S. military said.<br />There are approximately 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, either under NATO command or in a separate U.S.-led coalition force.<br />(Reporting by Golnar Motevalli; Editing by Charles Dick)</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-ABUSE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-ABUSE.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">***************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Suicide blast kills 8 Afghan civilians</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />KANDAHAR, Afghanistan: A suicide bomber killed eight civilians and two policemen in a crowded bazaar in Afghanistan's southern province of Helmand on Monday, the provincial police chief said.<br />The attack in Musa Qala town was aimed at a police convoy, Assadullah told Reuters by phone. A spokeswoman for the British force which has troops in the area said there were no casualties among its soldiers.<br />(Writing by Sayed Salahuddin, Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-VIOLENCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-VIOLENCE.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">***************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>U.N. Human Rights Council condemns abuses in Congo</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />By Laura MacInnis<br />The U.N. Human Rights Council on Monday condemned abuses against civilians in Congo, especially sexual attacks, and called on government and rebel forces to allow humanitarian aid to reach those in need.<br />At an emergency session, the Council also backed a stronger mandate for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo "to increase its ability to address the dire security and humanitarian situation in the region."<br />The resolution, introduced by Egypt on behalf of African states, was adopted by consensus.<br />France, which on behalf of the European Union had requested the special session, withdrew its earlier text so the 47-nation body could speak in one voice on atrocities in the eastern province of North Kivu.<br />More than 250,000 people have been driven from their homes since fighting erupted between Congolese forces and Tutsi rebel General Laurent Nkunda in August and an unknown number have died in widespread violence and looting.<br />The Human Rights Council resolution "condemns the acts of violence, human rights violations, and abuses committed in Kivu, in particular sexual violence and the recruitment by the militia of child soldiers, and stresses the importance of bringing all perpetrators to justice."<br />It said that MONUC -- the U.N. peacekeeping force with 17,000 troops in eastern Congo -- needed more support to better protect bystanders to the conflict and restore stability.<br />The resolution "calls upon all states to immediately provide assistance to MONUC, to increase its ability to address the dire security and humanitarian situation in the region."<br />The Council also expressed "serious concern" about the conditions in which uprooted people are living in the midst of the conflict, and said warring parties needed to allow the safe passage of aid workers and supplies.<br />It called on all sides of the conflict "to allow access and free movement of people and goods as well as to enable humanitarian agencies to provide badly needed food, water, medication and shelter."<br />The Geneva-based Council was created in 2006 to replace the U.N. Human Rights Commission. It has previously held special sessions on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, on Myanmar, on Sudan's Darfur region, and on the global food crisis.<br />Its resolutions do not include legal or other sanctions, but are seen to carry diplomatic weight.<br />Not everyone was satisfied with the Council's Congo text. The Geneva-based UN Watch group said it was hoping to see a U.N. rights expert assigned to the region, and said abuses "making eastern Congo a living hell" needed to be properly investigated.<br />"Today's resolution is a major disappointment," it said.<br />(Editing by Myra MacDonald)</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-RIGHTS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-RIGHTS.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Iran says designs radar-evading military aircraft</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />By Fredrik Dahl<br />Iran has designed a radar-evading aircraft, the head of its air force said on Monday, the Islamic Republic's latest announcement of progress on military hardware amid persistent tension with the West over its nuclear plans.<br />Brigadier General Hassan Shahsafi was also quoted as saying the air force had test-fired a new, Iranian-made air-to-air heat-seeking missile with a range of 40 km (25 miles), saying there were plans to extend it to 100 km.<br />Iran often says it has made advances in its arms but Western analysts say it is tough to assess the claims as few details are usually released. One analyst said the country's technology was still no match for U.S., European, Russian or Chinese designs.<br />Shahsafi told state radio that Iranian aerospace experts had designed the aircraft and military researchers were now seeking to make a small prototype.<br />"I think we will finish its research part by the end of the year and then we will get on with the production phase," he said, referring to the Iranian year that ends in March.<br />On Monday's missile test, he said it pursued and took out a dummy target released from a second fighter jet, Iran's English-language Press TV said on its web site.<br />Iran often stages war games or tests weapons to show its determination to counter any attack by the United States or Israel against sites they believe are to make nuclear arms.<br />Iran, the world's fourth-largest crude oil producer, says its uranium enrichment activities are aimed at making fuel for a network of planned electricity-generating nuclear power plants.<br />NUCLEAR ROW<br />The United States says it wants diplomacy to end the nuclear row, but neither Washington or Israel have ruled out military action if that fails. Iran has vowed to retaliate if pushed.<br />Military analysts say Iran's real ability to respond could be with more unconventional tactics, such as deploying small hit-and-run craft to attack oil tankers, or using allies in the Middle East to strike at U.S. or Israeli interests.<br />Pieter Wezeman, a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), said he did not believe Iran had the technology to design a modern fighter plane.<br />"The Iranian military industry is significant in size but it has never been able to design or produce any modern weapon which is comparable to anything that is produced in western Europe, the United States, Russia or China," Wezeman said by telephone.<br />"They would be able to defend themselves with more guerrilla-style methods," he said.<br />Iran is estimated to have 280 combat aircraft, including Russian-made MiG 29 aircraft and old U.S.-built F-4 Phantoms, but serviceability may be 80 percent or lower, analysts say.<br />The United States, which has not had ties with Tehran since 1980, has imposed sanctions on Iran that make it difficult for Tehran to buy spare parts for military and civilian aircraft.<br />(Additional reporting by Hashem Kalantari; Editing by Dominic Evans)</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-AIRCRAFT-RADAR.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-AIRCRAFT-RADAR.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">*************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><br /><strong>2 attacks kill at least 30 Iraqis</strong> </div><br /><br /><div align="left">By Katherine Zoepf </div><br /><br /><div align="left">Monday, December 1, 2008 </div><br /><br /><div align="left">BAGHDAD: Suicide bombings in Baghdad and Mosul took the lives of at least 32 Iraqis on Monday in carnage that recalled the levels of violence before the American troop build-up last year. The Baghdad bombing occurred at a police training academy on the eastern side of the Tigris just as students were leaving their lectures for lunch. As they streamed out the gate, a car dropped off a youth — most witnesses say he looked to be 16 or 17 — who walked into the crowd and detonated his suicide vest, according to witnesses. Moments later the car he had arrived in, which had parked a down the road, exploded as well. It was unclear if the second attack was a suicide bomb or a stationary car bomb. At least 15 people were killed in the explosions, the Iraqi interior ministry reported. A witness who said he was about 300 feet away when the first bomb went off helped two men and a woman in one of the badly damaged cars near the gate of the academy. "They all had shrapnel in every part of their body, they were at their last breath," said the man, who gave his name as Hossam. About an hour after the attack, dense pools of blood lay coagulating on the pavement among scattered sandals and combat boots, one of which clearly still contained a blood-stained black sock enveloping a piece of foot. The display light from the top of a taxi lay on the ground, next to a hubcap, a few burnt strips of clothing, and some torn Iraqi dinar notes in small denominations. As police officers prepared to tow the damaged cars away, a young man with a blue and white plastic sack walked around gathering up scraps of skin and viscera with his gloved hands. A furious young policeman pointed at the sack and screamed, "See, this is Iraqi flesh! This is the flesh of Iraqi people, and it is all because of Maliki." In the northern city of Mosul, a suicide car bomber killed at least 17 people, mainly civilians, in an attack against a joint United States-Iraqi convoy, an Iraqi security official, who asked not to be named because the investigation was still ongoing, told the Times. The American military reported that nine people were killed in the attack, including the bomber; differing casualty figures in the immediate wake of a violent attack are not uncommon. The wave of violence follows the Iraqi Parliament's approval last week of a controversial security agreement that requires American troops to leave by the end of 2011, but in the meantime allows them to operate in close consultation with the Iraqi military. The agreement also gives American troops immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts when they are on duty. Provincial elections are scheduled to be held on Jan. 31, and many observers are predicting a new cycle of violence as they approach. The United Nations special representative to Iraq, Staffan de Mistura, said Sunday that he expected "spectacular attacks" before and after the polling. Iraqis at the Baghdad bombing, many of them angry and distraught, had different theories about who was to blame for the attack, with some laying it at the Americans door and others pointing to Iran. Both countries are frequently charged with conspiring to destroy Iraq. However, suicide bombings are often the work of insurgents linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia or other Sunni extremist groups. No one took credit for the attacks in the immediate aftermath. "If you dare to tell the truth, this is because of the American forces," said a man who refused to give his name. "Their convoy went to the end of the street and the suicide bomber came right then. All of our troubles are because of the Americans." In a separate episode early Monday, there was an assassination attempt on a convoy carrying Major General Mudher al-Mawla, an adviser to the Iraqi cabinet on the Awakening movement, made up mostly of Sunni former insurgents who are now working with the government. Three people were killed and 10 were injured, according to Iraq's Interior Ministry. The adviser survived with only minor injuries. Firas al-Samarrai, the head of the Awakening movement in Selikh, the Baghdad neighborhood where the assassination attempt took place, said that the explosion appeared to have come from a small bomb that was placed in a cavity in a lamp post near Mawla's home. On Monday evening, Kirkuk's director general of internal affairs, Major General Adnan al-Bayati announced that police had found 12 unidentified bodies in the village of Qara Hassan, about 22 miles south of Kirkuk. The bodies, which all had gunshot wounds and had been burned, are believed to be victims of terrorism, Bayati said.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/africa/02iraq.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/africa/02iraq.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>*********************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>A handful of patients remain to tell the story of Hawaii's leper colony<br /></strong>By Dan Barry<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />KALAUPAPA, Hawaii: The peace of morning comes to the small village of famous isolation called Kalaupapa. Breezes rustle the berry bushes.<br />Myna birds call from treetops to wild pigs below. Life stirs on this spit of land between the soaring Molokai cliffs and the stretching Pacific abyss.<br />The residents who call themselves patients move about in the hours before the day's few tourists arrive. Here is Danny, who first came here in 1942, lingering a moment in the peekaboo sun; Ivy, who arrived in 1956, standing outside the gas station she runs; Boogie, here since 1959, driving a clattering old van.<br />Boogie, whose given name is Clarence Kahilihiwa, gently explains why he considers himself a patient, not a resident. Some people, the state health employees and National Park Service workers, live here as part of their jobs. Others live here because this is where they were sent, against their will, long ago.<br />You see, he says, "We are - and you are not."<br />Those who are have Hansen's disease, also known as leprosy. Those who are represent the last few of 8,000 people who, over a century's span, were banished to Kalaupapa because of an illness once called the "separating sickness." Many never again felt the embrace of loved ones living somewhere beyond the volcanic formations that rise like stone sentries just offshore.<br />Hawaii effectively liberated Kalaupapa by abolishing its isolation laws in 1969 - more than 20 years after the development of medicine to control and cure the disease. Earlier this year, the state's Legislature formally apologized to the patients and their families for "any restrictions that caused them undue pain as the result of government policies surrounding leprosy."<br />Today, just 24 patients are left: 24 people who experienced the counterintuitive twinning of loneliness and community, of all that dying and all that living. Here, you may have grieved over the forced surrender of your newborn; you may also have rejoiced in finding a life partner who understood.<br />Ten live off island, including eight in a hospital in Honolulu, 53 miles, or 85 kilometers, away. The rest live in Kalaupapa, now a national historical park with restrictions befitting its almost sacred nature. When asked why he stays, Boogie provides an answer so easy it's complicated: "This is my home."<br />At 67, he is among the youngest patients, silver-haired and weather-beaten, quick to shake hands. When he was a young boy, a rosy spot appeared on his cheek, and his parents had no choice but to take him to a special hospital outside Honolulu. "When my parents left me," he says, "that is when I crossed the line."<br />Boogie moved nearly 50 years ago to Kalaupapa, where three siblings are now buried, including a sister who died at the age of 12. Although he has been off-island many times, visiting the mainland, shopping in Honolulu, his identity is here, where he has married twice and done everything from operate the theater's projector to preside over the Lion's Club.<br />He is also on the board of Ka'Ohana O Kalaupapa, an organization that advocates for patients and the preservation of the settlement, which was established in 1866 amid growing panic about leprosy's spread. We must remember the story of this place, he says, a story that began with the sorrowful arrival of nine men and three women.<br />His dust-covered van pulls up to the gas station, where his wife, Ivy, 72, aims a hose's lazy spray on the windshield. As a Kalaupapa patient, she has known both liberation's joy, with trips to the mainland and Europe, and confinement's anguish: Her two children from a previous marriage were taken away immediately after birth because that was the law.<br />Husband and wife of more than 30 years gaze at each other through the distortion of running water on glass. Then he continues on, past the post office, past the wharf where, once every summer, a barge pulls up with building supplies, furniture and the occasional new car.<br />"Christmas in July," they call it.<br />He turns onto a gravel stretch called Damien Road, past the overgrown spot where the famous patient Olivia Breitha - "Even if my skin is insensitive," she once wrote, "my heart and soul are not" - ran a chicken farm with her husband, John; past a tree-shrouded cemetery, where the rub of time has made tombstone almost indistinguishable from rock.<br />Farther on, Boogie points into a blur of dense green. "The picture of Damien, where he was kneeling down," he says, recalling a famous image. "It was here."<br />He reveres Father Damien, the strapping, strong-minded Roman Catholic missionary who came in 1873 to give hope and dignity to a place often called a "living tomb." With the help of patients, the priest improved St. Philomena Church, built houses, planted trees, created a water system, established a choir, nursed the living and gave proper burial to the dead.<br />After he contracted leprosy, Father Damien wrote that he was now "the happiest missionary in the world." He died in 1889 at the age of 49, and was buried a few yards from an open field that is believed to contain as many as 2,000 unmarked graves.<br />Father Damien's canonization is expected to take place late next year, and Boogie and Ivy plan to be there in Rome. For now, Boogie honors the man often called, simply, Damien, by pausing awhile at the priest's grave, hands clasped, head bowed.<br />The noon sun rises above Kalaupapa's lush solitude. Tourists, maybe two dozen in all, have traveled by mule down the cliff from "topside" Molokai, and are now lunching quietly in a grassy field.<br />Boogie remembers the Boy Scout camp that was near here; gone now. He greets a couple of the tourists and moves on.<br />Toward the end of the day, a stop is made at the care facility where there reside some patients who remember when visitors were required to don gowns and have police escorts. When patients lived in a swirl of don't touch this, don't go there. When there were dances, and musical shows, and lei-making contests, and extremely competitive softball games with bats especially adapted for hands that could no longer grip.<br />In one room, Makia Malo, a gifted storyteller of 74, sits in a wheelchair, sunglasses covering his compromised eyes. He so vividly recalls the morning he was sent as a boy to Kalaupapa that you share the child's excitement about boarding an airplane for the first time, even though you know the dreaded reason for the trip. In another room, Henry Nalaielua, 84, who wrote a memoir of his rich life in Kalaupapa, talks about the black-and-white photograph in his book, of a boy of 10, posed with hands across his chest to help document the state of his just-diagnosed disease. The boy glowers back at you from the harrowing past.<br />"I was scared and defiant," that boy as man says. "Or maybe I just didn't care to smile."<br />Who will tell the story of Kalaupapa after Henry has gone, and Makia and Ivy and Danny and Boogie? Boogie says he thinks about this all the time: "Every time one person dies, we get less and less."<br />Still, he believes he has had a good life, with a loving wife and a remote paradise to call home. He prays daily to Father Damien. And when sea breezes stir the whispers in the trees, he listens<strong>.</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/leper.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/leper.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">****************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>History repeats itself<br /></strong>By W. Scott Thompson<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />Thailand is facing its third and greatest crisis since World War II and by far the greatest test of its monarch's power. It is difficult for outsiders to comprehend how so revered but distant a leader can wield such extraordinary powers, despite his merely "constitutional" role and numerous other constraints on his action.<br />The secret is not in the innate role of the throne, but in the style of this particular king. Twice before, in 1974 and 1992, when mobs threatened state order in their demands for a more democratic polity, Rama IX, or Bhumibol Adulyadej, waited day upon day to test the resilience of those he sought to favor, and to see if those he opposed could be forced to fade.<br />In 1974, students demanded an end to a particularly third-rate triumvirate, who had nonetheless empowered enormous economic growth. After bloodshed reached an intolerable level, by Thai standards, the king sent all three packing - to Boston and Taipei. He'd known them well and worked through them but realized their time had passed. And the king's power grew immeasurably in that decisive move.<br />Similarly in 1992, students seized the high ground against a coup-installed military regime, and again only after several hundred deaths did the king summon the two contenders to the palace - and cause them literally to crawl on the carpet to the elevated place of the monarch, all but foretelling their agreement to his dispensation.<br />He waits anew. This time he has a bigger task: the damage to the economy and political system by two years of demonstrations is far greater, and his own goal is much bigger. He wishes to bury forever the prospects of the only political leader in his 50-year reign to stand up to him and attempt to supplant him - Thaksin Shinawatra, a self-made billionaire and former police general who developed a huge base in the Thai countryside through demagogic policies and increasingly strident opposition to the "forces of the status quo" - a direct jab at the throne itself.<br />In fact the current crisis is a bit more complicated, for there are three players, each a descendant of forces set in motion when the absolute monarchy was overthrown in 1932.<br />First, the monarchy. From 1932 until about 1963, 17 years after the present king's accession, the throne was a faint glimmer of past glory. A junta that had seized power in 1957 began to use Bhumibol, but he proved cannier in using them, and that has been the pattern. He is now old and frail but intends to stick around until he's won this final round.<br />Secondly, the direct descendant of a group of Mussolini-like semi-fascists who staged a coup in 1932 is not the army, but Thaksin himself.<br />From 1948 a third group of Thais emerged around a progressive promoter, Pridi Panomyong, who founded a great university and inspired young democrats, but who wasn't able to maintain power against the better-armed rightist group who restored themselves to power. Students abroad encouraged democratic roots in the kingdom, demanding reforms and elections in country-wide demonstrations late in 1973, forcing the king's hand to prevent chaos. They have matured - if we call it that - into the People's Alliance for Democracy, the PAD, which now occupies airports, government buildings and has brought business virtually to a standstill.<br />There was always, though, a permanent government of foreign-educated princes who, even today, keep a tight hold on power.<br />Thaksin overwhelmingly won the elections he contested. Why then are the "democrats" in such opposition to him? It would be tempting to say, with Lenin, that he is the "principal enemy." They suspect that if left to his own devices he would rule eternally. Tolerance has never been Thaksin's virtue.<br />His ability to elicit the animosity of the throne came naturally, given the enormous electoral mandate he acquired in the countryside. In a variety of ways he made known that the national adoration of the king was old-fashioned.<br />Bhumibol is a gentle man but he has never countenanced opposition gently. It was he who signaled the army to move in September 2006 to depose Thaksin. But the government all but placed in power by him failed to move in the way he desired.<br />Secondly, the "democrats" were never quite so pure. Of course there is a spectrum of views in the PAD, including some very virtuous professed democrats. But there are also unscrupulous party hacks that make the organization work. And most of the professedly "democratic" opposition haven't flinched at such trivial details as military coups, martial law, and whatever else needed to rid the country of Thaksin or his allies forever. Thaksin was seen as an illegitimate upstart.<br />Why and how have they been able to show such determination? It's simple. The army is taking its cue from the palace, not from the government that rules in Thaksin's name. So it all but openly permits the chaos that has for the present ruined the travel industry and slowed down the economy.<br />And the demonstrators know that the king is plainly on their side. This time, more than 1974 and 1992, it would be trivial to say that democracy is what is at issue. It's whether or not those others, "unworthy to bear the dust under his shoes," as the royal inflection goes, can finally be worn out. Just wait - the king will wave his magic wand and the crisis will be over. The army - or some other appropriate delegate - will take power, and the country will find the patience to wear out the endurance of an expiring Thaksin, who in exile loses wealth and legitimacy by the day.<br />Thailand is paying an enormous price for this crisis, but in the end the king's determination to ensure a legacy where his type of people will rule, and Thailand will return to rapid economic growth and the iconic smiles by which it is known - with a bit of democracy thrown in. The king's move in the next few days will be worth watching.<br />W. Scott Thompson is a national security expert who served four U.S. presidents and is a professor emeritus at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is the author or editor of 13 books on world political issues and resides in Washington, Bali and Manila.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/opinion/edthompson.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/opinion/edthompson.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">*****************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>How did that vase wind up in the museum?<br /></strong>By Sharon Waxman<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />LOS ANGELES:<br />The imminent arrival of Thomas Campbell as the director of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art is much more than a simple changing of the guard after the long tenure of his predecessor, Philippe de Montebello. Campbell, who will take over in January, is a 46-year-old curator from the Met's department of European sculpture and decorative arts, and he has a unique opportunity to shift the tone of an increasingly hostile debate in the world of art and museums: Who should own the treasures of antiquity?<br />Up to now, the parties on either side of this dispute have stood in opposing corners with their fingers in their ears. The governments of Italy and Turkey have filed lawsuits to force the return of looted artworks. Egypt has threatened to suspend excavation permits if iconic artifacts are not repatriated. Greece has built a new museum in Athens in large part to justify its renewed demands for the return of the Elgin Marbles from Britain.<br />For the most part, the world's great museums, like the Metropolitan, have responded only when under direct threat and, even then, they do not acknowledge wrongdoing.<br />Their willful silence has fostered a culture of distrust that has made the task of reconciliation and cultural exchange more difficult, as the public is treated to spectacles like the fight over the Euphronios krater. A stunningly beautiful vase by one of the greatest artists of ancient Greece, it came to the Met under dubious circumstances in 1972 - court records say it had been excavated by a gang of tomb robbers in Italy. After a long, embarrassing fight, the museum sent the krater back to Italy last January, which then displayed it as part of an exhibition called "Nostoi," a nod to the ancient Greek epic about the heroes' return from the Trojan War.<br />Campbell is young, British and unconnected to the traumas of past restitution battles. He may be able to move the museum world forward without also emptying the Met's halls of Greek amphorae, Egyptian sarcophagi or Etruscan chariots.<br />The Association of Art Museum Directors has already readied a path for Campbell. This past summer, the association finally issued new guidelines, which recognize that buying unprovenanced antiquities encourages their illicit trade and recommend that its members purchase only antiquities that can be proven to have been legally exported after 1970, or else removed from their country of origin before that date. (It was in 1970 that Unesco adopted an international convention barring the illegal export and transfer of cultural property.)<br />The British Museum has adopted this cutoff date, as has the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Met quietly followed suit, but has barely made that fact known.<br />By publicly embracing the 1970 protocol, Campbell would be breaking with the policies of his predecessor, de Montebello, who believes that orphaned antiquities should be rescued by museums, not ignored by them.<br />Campbell could also undertake a project more fundamental, and more profound. The Metropolitan needs to come clean about its past of appropriation of ancient art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it needs to tell a much fuller story about its more recent role in purchasing looted antiquities.<br />Most visitors have no idea how the treasures on display in the Greek and Roman rooms, the Egyptian antiquities department, or the Byzantine, African, Asian and Oceanic collections came to be housed in the museum.<br />Who among them knows that Louis Palma di Cesnola, the Italian-born collector and Civil War veteran who was the first director of the museum, appropriated a huge number of antiquities for more than a decade? As the American consul in Cyprus in the 1860s, Cesnola kept 100 diggers busy in Larnaca; his house became a kind of museum.<br />Cesnola smuggled out no fewer than 35,573 artifacts - passing them off as the property of the Russian consul - for which the Met paid $60,000.<br />The Met doesn't tell this story. Even many people who work at the Met don't seem to know it. Plunder is also the provenance of one of the museum's most imposing artifacts in the Greek and Roman collection - an Ionic capital from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis. Massive and graceful, it sits prominently in a gallery on the first floor of the Met.<br />How did it get here? In 1922, as the Greeks and Turks warred over the port of Izmir, the column was spirited away by American archaeologists along with hundreds of other pieces. When the hostilities ended, the Turks protested, and the theft (or rescue, depending on one's perspective) became an international incident, recorded in State Department archives. After much negotiation, the Turks ceded ownership of the column in exchange for the return of 53 cases of antiquities, also stolen from Sardis.<br />Today the label that hangs near the pillar blithely notes its acquisition by the "American Society for the Excavation of Sardis," as if a group of amateur aficionados simply got together and bought it.<br />For years, the Met also kept secret its purchase of the Lydian Hoard, a spectacular group of 363 gold and silver treasures from the time of King Croesus, bought from smugglers in 1966, 1967 and 1968. It was not until the Turkish government sued the museum and seemed likely to win in court that the Met gave in and returned the pieces, in 1993.<br />Such omissions are shameful for an institution dedicated to preserving history. But it is not unique to the Met. Most of the world's great museums, including the British Museum and the Louvre, tell lies of omission about the objects they display within their walls, too.<br />This state of affairs must not continue. Campbell can inaugurate a new era of transparency for all museums and recalibrate the Met's relations with countries that feel aggrieved.<br />By publicly acknowledging the controversial or otherwise dubious histories of some artifacts and by making the recent past as much a part of the artifacts' stories as the ancient past, Campbell can set an example for all museums and build new bridges of respect and cooperation.<br />Transparency may not end every demand for repatriation. But it will disarm those critics in source countries who know - but rarely acknowledge - that regardless of past transgressions, their treasures may be safer, better preserved and more widely adored in the world's great museums like the Met.<br />Sharon Waxman, a former New York Times reporter, is the author of "Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World."</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/opinion/edwaxman.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/opinion/edwaxman.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>*********************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>U.S. media thrive worldwide, but not U.S. image<br /></strong>By Tim Arango<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />Shortly after the attacks on 9/11, a delegation of high-level media executives, including the heads of every major studio, met several times with White House officials, including at least once with President George W. Bush's former top strategist, Karl Rove, to discuss ways that the entertainment industry could play a part in improving the image of the United States overseas.<br />One of the central ideas was using "soft power" by spreading American television and movies to foreign audiences, especially in the Muslim world, to help sway public opinion.<br />There were few tangible results from the meetings — lesser ways of supporting the war on terrorism like public service announcements and packages of free DVDs sent to American soldiers.<br />But since then, the media companies have gotten what they wanted, even if the White House has not. In the last eight years, American pop culture, already popular, has boomed around the globe while opinions of America itself have soured.<br />The television program "CSI" is now more popular in France than in the United States. Hollywood movies routinely sell far more tickets overseas than at home. A Russian remake of the TV show "Married With Children" has been so popular that Sony, the producer of the show, has hired back the original writers to produce new scripts for Russia. Even in the Muslim world, American pop culture has spread.<br />But so far, cultural popularity has not translated into new friends. The latest data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, released in June, shows that the image of the United States remained negative in the 24 countries in which Pew conducted surveys (although in 10 of those the favorability rating of the United States edged up slightly).<br />Joseph Nye Jr., the Harvard professor who coined the phrase "soft power" in 1989 to refer to the ways beyond military muscle that America influences the world, said that "what's interesting about the last eight years is that polls show a decline in American attractiveness."<br />He added: "But then you ask the follow-up questions and you see that American culture remains attractive, that American values remain attractive. Which is the opposite of what the president has said — that they hate us for who we are and what we believe in."<br />Jeffrey Schlesinger, the head of international television at Warner Brothers, had a simpler explanation for the popularity of American entertainment.<br />"Batman is Batman, regardless of if Bush is in the White House or not," he said.<br />And Batman will still be Batman with Barack Obama in the White House. The issue of America's image abroad was a campaign platform for the president-elect, who said in a foreign policy speech in April, "We all know that these are not the best of times for America's reputation in the world."<br />With the curtain closing on the Bush presidency, pollsters are left to wonder about the long-term effects on America's standing. Steven Kull, the director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, said that before the election, his data suggested a slight improvement in America's image abroad after a long decline. "It's turned a corner, but it's not anywhere near positive territory," he said.<br />Kull says he was surprised to find that in pre-election polling, less than half of those polled in 22 foreign countries — 46 percent — said relations between the United States and the world would improve under a President Obama.<br />"It's not just about not being Bush, and that there will be a clean slate," Kull said. "There were all these underlying issues that were amplified during the Bush era, and they are not simply going to go back in the trunk."<br />Bryce Zabel, a television producer who was chairman of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences at the time and a participant in the 2001 meetings with the White House, argued then that the United States needed to regard itself like a consumer brand.<br />"Products like Coca-Cola are far more effectively branded around the globe than the United States itself," he wrote in a memo that was circulated around Hollywood. "The American entertainment and communications industry has the technological and creative expertise to improve relations between our country and the rest of the world."<br />Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, who was also present at the post-9/11 meetings, said that Rove and other White House officials were looking for the kind of support Hollywood gave the United States during World War II.<br />"They wanted the music industry, the movie industry, the TV industry to produce propaganda," she said. "Rove was putting a lot of pressure on us."<br />For Hollywood, a much more important development was happening globally, as rising standards of living around the world resulted in more money spent on entertainment. Big, comfortable multiplexes being erected in countries like Russia and Mexico were helping draw moviegoers.<br />In 2003, the domestic box office brought in $9.2 billion for American studios, and foreign countries generated $10.9 billion, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. In 2007, domestic was $9.6 billion, while international rose to more than $17 billion.<br />The growth overseas has surprised even some American media executives. "It was something that, two or three years ago, was thought to have gone into a slower growth position," Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner's chief executive, said to a gathering of investors in June about the international appeal of American television. "And then it came roaring back over the last couple of years."<br />The foreign interest in American entertainment has been particularly pronounced in television. In many countries, particularly in Europe, American television shows, once relegated to late night, are being shown in prime time.<br />"Let's say, at the beginning of the decade, more or less all over Europe you saw on the big channels almost no U.S. series on prime time," says Gerhard Zeiler, the chief executive of the RTL Group, Europe's largest television broadcaster. "Now, all over Europe you have a lot of American series in prime time."<br />According to the European Audiovisual Observatory, part of the executive branch of the European Union, the number of hours of American programming on major European networks in 2000 was about 214,000. In 2006, the most recent year for which statistics are available, that figure grew by nearly 50,000 hours, to more than 266,000 hours.<br />"Increasingly a lot of that money is coming from television," said Barry Meyer, chairman and chief executive of Warner Brothers. "The demand for American-produced television shows is stronger than it has ever been."<br />American culture is blossoming even in the Middle East, where polls consistently show starkly negative views of the United States. Viacom started MTV Arabia last fall and introduced Nickelodeon Arabia in July on satellite services — endeavors that entail lessons in cultural sensitivity.<br />Much of America's programming is beamed to Middle Eastern audiences from two satellite channels, MBC2 and MBC4, owned by the Saudi-financed Middle East Broadcasting Center. In prime time recently on MBC4 was "8 Simple Rules," the ABC sitcom that starred the late John Ritter, and the gossip shows "The Insider" and "Inside Edition." Oprah Winfrey's show is also popular.<br />Amahl Bishara, an assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University who recently spent two years in the West Bank studying the media there, said she noticed that MBC2, which carries American movies, was particularly popular.<br />"There's an acute understanding of the difference between the U.S. government and the American people," she said. "And they look at U.S. entertainment as just that, entertainment."</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/01soft.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/01soft.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">***************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Tomorrow's Europe: Not necessarily influential<br /></strong>By John Vinocur<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />BERLIN: Way down at the bottom of the left-hand column on Page 32, the boldface type says: "Europe: Losing Clout in 2025."<br />The message is clear, and so is Europe's possible position not fully in the front row of the world arena projected by the U.S. National Intelligence Council in its report, Global Trends 2025.<br />When it appeared two weeks ago, the document was largely read for its notion of a United States that, while still militarily pre-eminent, would have diminished power and prerogatives in a changed world of multiple poles of influence. Now, the NIC report has a second resonance.<br />It follows a fortnight in which the European Union flailed and basically settled for to-each-his-own solutions in dealing with the crisis in the real global economy.<br />(And it comes after some European leaders sensed they could no longer hide from a deep recession by saying America's financial meltdowns represented creative destruction for the rest of the world - the dollar's demotion, and the end of New York as the world's financial center.)<br />Although its judgment is wadded by a cushion of conditional phrasing, the NIC points to a Europe that doesn't necessarily become one of the new poles of global power.<br />The report talks of an EU with citizens skeptical of deeper integration, distracted by internal bickering and competing national agendas and possibly, over the next two decades, "less able to translate its economic clout into global influence."<br />Sound familiar? It's in the moan of Europe's pre-winter winds. It's in the howl of a European paradox that wants more of a say as a global decider just when its own view of European cohesiveness is less convinced.<br />Examples: In France last week, Le Monde produced a banner headline that said: "Stimulus packages: American willfulness, European hesitations." At the same time, Germany's biggest financial newspaper, Handelsblatt, offered a Page 1 commentary comparing "Americans who are able to rise as a single man" in times of crisis to an EU "where everyone's own concerns are his priority."<br />The NIC piles it on: Shrinking populations will mean slower employment growth, taking 1 percent off Europe's gross domestic product. By 2025, non-European minorities could reach 15 percent or more in all Western Europe countries and "likely heighten tensions." If Europe fails to diversify its energy supply, its dependence on Russia will result in "constant attentiveness to Moscow's interests by key countries, including Germany and Italy."<br />At that point, you could easily say, this vision comes from folks who missed seeing (ahead of time, anyway) the fall of the Soviet Union or Indian nuclear tests.<br />But there's an unusual moment of frankness among Europeans about Europe's future these days. It's attached to the sense of crisis and drift here, and connects with Barack Obama's coming to power in America. The contrast with new optimism on the other side of the Atlantic is strong.<br />Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, has written, "At the end of this global crisis, Europe will simply have become less important."<br />This is because he believes, for its own reasons of power and economics, America will diminish its Atlantic orientation in favor of the Pacific while "Europeans, doing nothing, watch their own downfall in power politics." The United States, Fischer thinks, is renewing itself through Obama at the same time that Europe, rather than seeking greater unity, "is re-nationalizing during this crisis and turning itself back to the past."<br />"Where are the strong leaders in Europe who will move in the direction of unification?" Fischer asked in a conversation here. There was no reply.<br />In France, there's something of the same tone.<br />Hubert Védrine, who served as foreign minister under Jacques Chirac, has argued that Obama will continue to take American leadership in the world as a given.<br />"Today," he told a French reporter, "for the United States, Europe represents neither a problem, nor a threat, nor an answer to its problems."<br />So what does Europe do to set out a credible claim for a co-equal's role in a multipolar word? Védrine's answer: create a realistic foreign policy, which presupposes the EU members agree on "what's necessary to do on Russia and China."<br />You may titter here. Europe's assertion of "no business as usual with Russia," while resuming strategic partnership talks with a Moscow regime whose troops remain in Georgia, looks like very much business indeed.<br />At the same time, in what has the appearance of a targeted affront to both the EU, and the current EU president, Nicolas Sarkozy, China has called off their summit meeting - a rising great power dressing down a more marginal player - because of Sarkozy's plan to talk soon with the Dalai Lama.<br />Add this: If it comes to EU foreign policy unity on a really tough initiative like new sanctions involving oil against Iran, a European official now estimates 8 to 10 members would reject them.<br />It's not the shining hour of a new international big-leaguer.<br />A stopgap answer on how to make Europe look more of a piece lies in private conversations under way to set up a kind of European presidium, involving Germany, France and Britain, and meant to give the EU the allure of sure-handed direction.<br />In the process, it would also brutally split the EU between big and little guys because the directorate's immediate purpose would be to remove effective control from the Czechs and the Swedes, who follow one another into the EU's rotating presidency in 2009.<br />All this lends some credibility to the National Intelligence Council's uncertain claim to wisdom on Europe in 2025 - only "slow progress" toward becoming the global actor it envisions; and real issues, involving the choice of painful reforms, that could leave it "a hobbled giant."</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/europe/politicus.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/europe/politicus.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">***************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Florence, then and now</strong><br />By Adam Begley<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />HERE'S what you do first in Florence: Complain about the tourists. It's a time-honored tradition and there's no avoiding it — or them, as they squeeze down the narrow streets. They choke the majestic Piazza Signoria; they overwhelm the Uffizi Gallery — so go ahead and get the grumbling over with. Hordes of them! A year-round blight! Why can't they just stay home! Or, if you're like E. M. Forster's "clever" lady novelist in "A Room With a View," the one who exclaims in dismay over the bovine "Britisher abroad," admit that you'd like to administer an exam "and turn back every tourist who couldn't pass it."<br />Snobbery is part of the sophisticated traveler's baggage — that hasn't changed at all in the 100 years since Forster, in his charming novel, skewered the supercilious "good taste" of those who look down on the "ill-bred people whom one does meet abroad." Nowadays, when everyone in the ill-bred crowd is snapping photos of the Duomo with a cellphone, or swarming the Ponte Vecchio, plastic water bottle in hand, the urge to override touristic self-loathing by claiming for oneself a spurious superiority is pretty much irresistible; Forster, were he still around, would poke fun at that snobbish impulse with puckish glee. (But don't let that stop you from grousing about the sheer number of bodies blocking the view of the Arno.)<br />The next thing to do in Florence, according to Forster, is throw away your guidebook. Chapter II of "A Room With a View" is called "In Santa Croce With No Baedeker," and it's a gently comic interlude every honest visitor to that great Franciscan basilica will recognize as a mocking portrait of himself. Or herself, in the case of our young heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, who winds up alone in the vast interior of Santa Croce without her "Handbook to Northern Italy."<br />On the way in she noted "the black-and-white facade of surpassing ugliness" (the marble was added in the 19th century — paid for by an Englishman, by the way); now she's rattling around in the vast nave, wondering which of all the tombs was "the one that was really beautiful," the one most praised by Ruskin. With no cultural authority to tell her what to think, she thinks for herself: "Of course it must be a wonderful building. But how like a barn! And how very cold!" And then, just like that, her mood changes: "the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy." We all want to be happy tourists, so here's the question: Is Forster's early 20th-century advice — toss the guidebook aside and let the pernicious Florentine charm seduce you — still viable early in the 21st?<br />ENJOYING "A Room With a View" is easy. A love story that begins and ends in Florence, with complications in England sandwiched in between, it's short, cheerful and delightfully sly. Besides, there are two excellent and generally faithful film adaptations, the classic 1986 Merchant-Ivory production starring Helena Bonham Carter and Daniel Day-Lewis and a PBS version released just this year with enticing shots of Florence and a weird, unwarranted twist at the end. Once Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson have kissed in a field of violets in the hills above the city (near Fiesole, about which more later), you know (spoiler alert) you're going to hear wedding bells at the end, no matter how many plot twists the crafty author engineers.<br />Enjoying Florence — a hard, forbidding city ("a city of endurance," Mary McCarthy called it, "a city of stone"), handsome but not pretty, a challenge even if you could siphon off the tourists and replace them with picturesque Italians energetically engaged in producing local color — enjoying Florence takes more time and more effort. But if you have with you your copy of "A Room With a View," you'll find it easier to get along. Forster's supple, forgiving irony, his ability to satirize lovingly, combined with his firm but regretful insistence on not confusing art and life, is exactly what you need if you plan to share this intensely urban town with tens of thousands of sightseers for the five or six days it will take you to do just like them and see the sights.<br />Forster reminds us that though Florence is a capital of art (is it ever!), it's not just an overcrowded museum. When Lucy leans out of her window in the Pensione Bertolini and gazes out across the Arno at the marble churches on the hill opposite, and watches with dreamy curiosity as the world trips by, the author notes approvingly, with his usual mild irony, "Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveler who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it." He's not suggesting that you ignore Giotto or the magnificence of the city's turbulent history, but that the hours spent soaking up the dazzling Florentine sunshine with no cultural agenda may be valuable after all.<br />When Forster himself first came to Florence in October of 1901, he stayed as Lucy did in a pensione on the Lungarno delle Grazie, with a view over the Arno to the Basilica di San Miniato al Monte and the dark hills beyond. He was on a grand tour, traveling with his mother, and was a dutiful sightseer. He wrote to a friend back home, "the orthodox Baedeker-bestarred Italy — which is all I have yet seen — delights me so much that I can well afford to leave Italian Italy for another time." He was back the following year, at the same pensione, and by the time he'd finished "A Room With a View," he'd struck a happy balance.<br />In and around the Basilica di Santa Croce is everything that's delightful and appalling about Florence today. The neo-Gothic facade is still ugly, the long square in front of it dusty, bland, pigeon-infested and lousy with tourists. The interior is still cavernous, austere and chilly, impressive but somehow dispiriting. Even if you've ditched your guidebook, you're reminded at every step of the city's vast cultural riches: here are the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo and Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose bronze baptistery doors opposite the Duomo were so perfect, according to Michelangelo, they could have been the gates of paradise; here are the memorials to Dante and Machiavelli. Crowds are waiting to get into the small, high-ceilinged chapels to the right of the high altar — that's where you can admire the tactile values of Giotto, whose early 14th-century frescoes grace the walls. Just outside the basilica in the main cloister is the Pazzi Chapel, a perfectly proportioned Renaissance gem designed by the great Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi (who gave the Duomo its dome). The chapel, its white walls decorated with glazed terra-cotta medallions by Luca della Robbia (one of young Lucy's favorite artists), looks best when it's empty, filled to its noble height with nothing but chalky light from the lantern and the oculi in the dome. In other words, if a tour guide and his flock are in there, wait till they've gone.<br />The nature of those tours has changed dramatically since Forster's day. In 1901 — and until very recently, in fact — the tour guide pronounced on art and architecture in a booming or piercing voice, mostly in English but possibly also in German or French, while his flock huddled close to catch the echoing words of wisdom. In "A Room With a View," Forster had fun with the solemn pronouncements of the Rev. Cuthbert Eager, who steered an "earnest congregation" around Santa Croce, lecturing all the while on the fervor of medievalism ("Observe how Giotto is ... untroubled by the snares of anatomy and perspective"). Today, technology has shushed the tour guide: he or she whispers into a microphone, which broadcasts the lecture soundlessly, piping the flow of factoids into the earphones of the audience, who can now stray a little (and there are more languages represented: Spanish, Greek, Polish, Russian). Some familiar props remain — the retractable antenna with a ribbon tied at the tip, a rallying sign for the group as it migrates from one artistic treasure to the next — but the new quiet is disconcerting, as though these clumps of tourists with headphones and wireless receivers hung around their necks were part of some sinister silent conspiracy.<br />IF you stroll a few dozen yards past the Pazzi Chapel, you'll find yourself in a second cloister, also designed by Brunelleschi, in 1446, the last year of his life. It's a place of great beauty and calm, usually deserted, and you don't need to know a thing about it to fall in love. The simple, elegant two-story cloister with its slender columns shelters you from the rigors and confusions of Florence and gives you instead the tranquil harmony of the Renaissance without pomp or grandeur, washed by bright Tuscan sun. I like to imagine, though Forster doesn't suggest it, that Lucy loitered here without her Baedeker, and that's why she began to be happy. At the very least, a quiet moment in the cloisters will give you strength to confront the multitudes and the immortal works of art remaining on your list.<br />And so will loitering over lunch. And dinner. One eats very well in Florence, and in general the simpler the restaurant, the better the food. If you can visit one church and one museum before lunch and one more church or another museum after lunch (whatever you do, don't miss the wealth of paintings piled higgledy-piggledy in the Palatine Gallery of the Palazzo Pitti), and then take a nap (Tuscan wine is cheap and abundant), and then stroll to dinner, perhaps along the Via de' Tornabuoni, under the looming, illuminated facades of great, stern palazzos, and stroll some more after dinner when the crowds have thinned and Florence seems gentler and the multicolor Duomo seems less garish but just as huge and astonishing — you'll find that after a few days of this routine, all your complaints will be forgotten, replaced with amazement and gratitude.<br />Unless of course you stray into the Piazza Signoria, where the replica of Michelangelo's giant David attracts a sizable contingent of art lovers with camera phones night and day. This is where Lucy wanders one evening, unaccompanied:<br />" 'Nothing ever happens to me,' she reflected, as she entered the Piazza Signoria and looked nonchalantly at its marvels, now fairly familiar to her. The great square was in shadow; the sunshine had come too late to strike it. Neptune was already unsubstantial in the twilight, half god, half ghost, and his fountain plashed dreamily to the men and satyrs who idled together on its marge. The Loggia showed as the triple entrance of a cave, wherein dwelt many a deity, shadowy but immortal, looking forth upon the arrivals and departures of mankind. It was the hour of unreality — the hour, that is, when unfamiliar things are real. An older person at such an hour and in such a place might think that sufficient was happening to him, and rest content. Lucy desired more."<br />And then something does happen to her: two Italians quarrel, one stabs the other in the chest, and Lucy, who sees the blood come trickling out of the fatally wounded man's mouth, swoons — into the arms of George Emerson, as luck would have it.<br />Nothing so dramatic is likely to occur to the 21st-century visitor. But if it does, head for Fiesole, the little hill town no more than a few miles from the Piazza Signoria. Along with the far reaches of the Boboli Gardens, this is the city's escape hatch, a chance to breathe deeply and see some greenery, plant life being notably absent from the historic center. Forster sends his contingent to Fiesole by horse and carriage (it's nearby that Lucy and George first kiss); now it's a 15-minute ride on a boxy orange municipal bus. But once you've arrived you realize that the chief virtue of this modest town, aside from the fresh air, is the panoramic view of the Arno Valley and the extraordinary, maddening city you've just left, its Duomo vast and proud even at this distance. And the wisdom of the structure of "A Room With a View" is suddenly as clear as the bright Tuscan sky: you will return to Florence, and next time it will be a honeymoon.<br />BEAUTY, STONES AND HANGING HAMS<br />GETTING THERE<br />There are no nonstop flights from New York to Florence. A number of airlines offer daily flights with connections through various European capitals; of those, the easiest is Alitalia, which offers several daily flights via Rome for about $650. The small Florence airport is only a few miles from the city; a bus service runs to the train station in the center of town and there are taxis, too. Once you have reached Florence, everything is within easy walking distance except Fiesole, which can be reached by taxi or bus.<br />WHERE TO STAY<br />If you are staying in the center of Florence, what you want is an oasis, and despite the tacky name, Hotel Monna Lisa (Borgo Pinti, 27; 39-055-2479751; www.hotelmonnalisaflorence.com) provides exactly that. A converted 14th-century palazzo five minutes by foot from the Duomo, it's handsomely decorated and blessedly calm. A double room will currently cost you 125 euros ($160 at $1.28 to the euro).<br />If you must have a room with a view, go to Fiesole. Pensione Bencistà (Via Benedetto da Maiano, 4; 39-055-59163; www.bencista.com) is shambolic and charming — and affordable, at about 185 euros for a double room with breakfast and dinner included.<br />Also in Fiesole is the Villa San Michele (Via Doccia, 4, Fiesole; 39-055-59451; www.villasanmichele.com), which will bankrupt you — it's around 850 euros for a double room, but you will be coddled and cosseted in a gorgeous setting.<br />WHERE TO EAT<br />Meals are important in Florence, not just because the food is so good, but also because the rest of the time you're on your feet. Lunch for two, with wine of course, should cost you about 60 euros; dinner, with more wine, about 100 euros.<br />For lunch, especially Sunday lunch, Il Latini (Via de Palchetti, 6/r; 39-055-210916; www.illatini.com) is a must. Don't bother with a menu (the waiters don't like to give them out, and anyway they know better than you what's good). Help yourself to the big bottle of red wine you'll find at your table. Admire the hundreds of hams hanging overhead. Eat!<br />Quiet, relatively tourist-free, pleasantly traditional and equally delicious is Del Fagioli (Corso Tintori, 47/r; 39-055-244285), just a few blocks from Santa Croce.<br />If you want a little atmosphere at night and you're willing to pay a premium for the buzz and the funky décor, try Trattoria Garga (Via del Moro, 48/r; 39-055-2398898; www.garga.it).<br />And if you're in Fiesole at night and don't want to engage in the enforced sociability of the pensione, Trattoria i' Polpa (Piazza Mino, 21/22; 39-055-59485) is cozy and friendly and inexpensive.<br />WHAT TO READ<br />Fifty years after the publication of "A Room With a View," E. M. Forster wrote a short essay in The New York Times Book Review called "A View Without a Room," in which he speculated on the fate of the characters in his novel — not quite dessert, more like a tasty petit four. It has been printed as an afterward in the Penguin Modern Classics edition of "A Room With a View."<br />P. N. Furbank's massive two-volume biography of Forster was first published three decades ago; now available in a one-volume Faber paperback, it's still the best account of a long, remarkable life.<br />If you want a critic's perspective on "A Room With a View," see the chapter on it in Lionel Trilling's excellent "E. M. Forster: A Study," first published in 1943 but available in paperback from New Directions.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/travel/30florence.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/travel/30florence.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>*********************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/markets.php">Dow plunges 680 points as recession declared in U.S.</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">******************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Bankruptcy lawyer leaves Goldman for law firm<br /></strong>By Michael J. de la Merced<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />A prominent bankruptcy lawyer is returning to his roots.<br />The lawyer, James H. M. Sprayregen, who spent the last three years at Goldman Sachs, will return Dec. 12 to Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm where he spent 16 years advising companies on restructuring and bankruptcy matters. At Goldman Sachs, Sprayregen was co-chief of the Americas restructuring group.<br />"I missed the practice of law," Sprayregen, 48, said. "What I've learned from Goldman, the financial expertise I've gained, will hold me in good stead and will be extremely helpful on the lawyer side of restructuring."<br />At Kirkland & Ellis, Sprayregen will again partner with Richard Cieri to lead the firm's restructuring practice, which includes 41 partners.<br />Restructuring specialists are seeing an increase in business as the economy sours and the credit markets remain frozen.<br />Retailers like Linens 'n Things and Circuit City and restaurants like Bennigan's have already filed bankruptcy actions this year, and the Chapter 11 filing of the securities firm Lehman Brothers is the largest in corporate history.<br />Sprayregen made waves when he jumped to Goldman in 2006. He had worked on some of the most notable bankruptcy cases to date, including United Airlines, NRG Energy and TWA.<br />Sprayregen said his time at Goldman had taught him more about the financial side of bankruptcy, including a company's operations and balance sheets. "I was touching a different part of the elephant, dealing with lot of the different issues that lawyers don't necessarily have a lot of experience in," he said.<br />But he said he began to miss the practice of law, and a little more than a week ago reached out to Kirkland. The departure from Goldman was amicable, he said.<br />"We wish Jamie the best in his return to Kirkland & Ellis," a Goldman spokeswoman said in a statement.<br />With the tight credit markets making bankruptcy refinancing or loans expensive — if available at all — Sprayregen predicted that more ailing companies would need to seek legal solutions to their troubles. That may include negotiating with creditors to extend their debt or to swap that debt for a stake in the company.<br />Like many in the field, Sprayregen and Cieri say that their jobs will become busier as more companies are forced to grapple with the slowdown in consumer spending and the inability to find cheap financing. Sprayregen said the pain that began with home builders, retailers, restaurants and financial companies will probably spread to industries with even indirect exposure to consumer markets, like roofing and timber companies.<br />Kirkland has already handled 10 major bankruptcy filings in 2008, including Tropicana Entertainment, the casino operator; Tousa Inc., the Florida home builder; and Wellman, a plastics maker.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/01goldman.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/01goldman.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">**************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Media and retailers both built Black Friday</strong><br />By David Carr<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />This weekend, news reports were full of finger-wagging over the death by trampling of a temporary worker, Jdimypai Damour, at a Wal-Mart store in Long Island, New York, on Friday. His death, the coverage suggested, was a symbol of a broken culture of consumerism in which people would do anything for a bargain.<br />The willingness of people to walk over another human being to get at the right price tag raises the question of how they got that way in the first place. But in the search for the usual suspects and parceling of blame, the U.S. news media should include themselves.<br />Just a few days ago, the same newspaper writers and television anchors who are now wearily shaking their heads at the collective bankruptcy of our mass consumer culture were cheering all of it on.<br />In a day-before story, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution advised readers to leave the children at home, at least the ones not big enough to carry the loot, because they will just slow you down: "Strollers and crowds just don't mix, though we know a few shoppers willing to use four wheels and a child as a weapon. Younger children may also be seduced by the shopping mania and pitch a tantrum that slows your progress. That said, teens and young adults can be an asset to a divide-and-conquer shopping strategy. And you'll have someone to help carry the bags."<br />An article distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News sounded as if the writers were composing a sonnet for fishing or camping until they got to the punch line: "Nothing rivals the thrill of waking up before the sun, or that sprint through the store for the perfect present."<br />Another article distributed by the news service said that "some hard core shoppers will be up before the sun, banging on store windows as the official start of the holiday shopping season begins. Weak economy, pshaw! There are sales out there."<br />In the wake of death by shopper, Newsday, the daily paper on Long Island, wrung its hands in the opinion page blog: "Was this deadly rush to lower prices an illustration of the current economic malaise (people mobbing Wal-Mart because they fear they can't afford higher prices elsewhere) or just proof that even a recession can't suppress stuff-lust?" Then it added, rather unfortunately, "This awful death is another Joey Buttafuoco-like stain on the too-often sordid image of our island."<br />But on the run-up, Newsday offered a "Black Friday blueprint," with store openings listed so shoppers could plot strategy, including noting that at 5 a.m., the Green Acres Wal-Mart would open and customers could expect to buy a 42-inch LCD television for $598. Many continued to pursue that particular bargain even as Damour lay dying.<br />The New York Times had a "Black Friday Shopping Survival Guide" on its Gadgetwise blog, but the overall coverage was far from frantic, reflecting grim economic and retail circumstances.<br />It's convenient to point a crooked finger in the wake of the tragedy at some light coverage of some harmless family fun. Except the coverage is not so much trite as deeply cynical, an attempt to indoctrinate consumers into believing that they are what they buy and that they should be serious enough about it to leave the family at home.<br />Media and retail outfits are economic peas in a pod. Part of the reason that the Thanksgiving newspaper and local morning television show are stuffed with soft features about shopping frenzies is that they are stuffed in return with ads from retailers. Yes, Black Friday is a big day for retailers — stores did as much as 13 percent of their holiday business this last weekend — but it is also a huge day for newspapers and television.<br />In partnership with retail advertising clients, the news media have worked steadily and systematically to turn Black Friday into a broad cultural event. A decade ago, it was barely in the top 10 shopping days of the year. But once retailers hit on the formula of offering one or two very-low-priced items as loss leaders, media groups began to cover the post-Thanksgiving outing as a kind of consumer sporting event.<br />"Media outlets have been stride for stride with the retailers," said Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst for the NPD Group, a market research firm. Speaking on the phone on Friday evening after nearly 24 hours of working the malls, he suggested, "Something like this was bound to happen at some point. The man who died at Wal-Mart was, from what I understand, a temporary employee and had no idea what he was dealing with."<br />Given that early shoppers stomped him to death and later arrivals streamed past him as he was being treated, he could not be blamed for failing to understand the ungovernable mix of greed and thriftiness that was under way. Black Friday blows a whistle many of us cannot hear — I would rather spend some quality time with my dentist than stand in the dark chill waiting for a store to open.<br />Some people think of Black Friday as an abundance of holiday generosity, but in a survey conducted by the International Council of Shopping Centers and Goldman Sachs, 81 percent of the respondents said that they planned to shop for themselves, an army of self-seeking Santas.<br />News outlets that advised consumers to sharpen their elbows for the big day were selling something that has, in an online world, lost most of its value. If you want to define your self-worth as buying a $300 laptop, you can use the Web and a down cycle in the gadgets business to come out a winner. (Black Friday is now followed by Cyber Monday, another cynical construct that suggests that you can beat the system by buying things on the right day.)<br />"This is a tired American ritual that has had its day even before this happened," said Kalle Lasn, editor of AdBusters, a magazine and Web site that promotes the day after Thanksgiving as "Buy Nothing Day." "It accrues to the benefit of the media to somehow promote all of this craziness. There is something very sick about it."<br />Buying stuff in the teeth of recession represents a vulgar but far too common impulse. Consumption is a core American value, so much so that President George W. Bush suggested people head to the mall after the attacks of Sept. 11 as an expression of solidarity.<br />The message is persistent. After the current housing collapse turned a lot of the financial system to red mist, we're told we have a crisis of consumer confidence and need to stimulate spending. Again, there's something sensible, even vaguely patriotic, about buying stuff, even after people used cheap credit to spend themselves into a ditch.<br />Even consumption may have limits. Cohen said that in his 32 years interviewing consumers in malls during the holiday season, he had never heard what he did this year. "People really have no idea what they want," he said.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/01carr.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/01carr.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">**************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Finding reasons for optimism in the U.S. economy</strong><br />By Joshua ZumbrunForbes.com<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />Dwelling too much on the doldrums violates the holiday spirit. Yes, the economy is in bad shape, very likely entering or already in a painful recession. But it's not all bad. No, really.<a title="" href="http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/26/economy-recession-housing-biz-beltway-cx_jz_1126optimism_slide.html?partner=iht" target="_blank">In Pictures: Ten reasons for some economic optimism</a><br />At the pump, oil price deflation is also known as cheaper gas. For those who have been priced out of the housing market for a decade, the imploding market offers hope they'll someday be able to buy.<br />Still, after decades of a debt-fueled binge, the American consumer is fearful and grumpy. The Conference Board estimates that the average household is going to spend about 10 percent less for Christmas gifts this year, down to $418 from $471 in 2007. That means consumption, the biggest part of the country's gross domestic product, is likely to fall precipitously in the fourth quarter. But then what?<br />"You have to ask the question: How long will this total lack of confidence last?" says Joel Naroff, the chief economist for TD Bank. "Can consumers remain irrationally despondent for an extended period of time?"<br />Naroff, picked in October by Bloomberg News as the year's top economic forecaster, has been looking at consumer confidence since it started to slip in the summer, and he thinks it's too pessimistic and will snap back. It's the same intuition that had Naroff worried about how badly misaligned the housing markets were when he called the downturn before many others.<br />History suggests Americans just don't stay depressed for long, he says. Even with economists talking of unemployment rising to 8 percent or 9 percent from the current level of 6.5 percent, most people and businesses will muddle through.<br />"You go out eight months from now. You're in May, June, July. People discover they still have their jobs. Businesses have realized that while conditions aren't great, they're not going to fold," says Naroff, "They ask, 'Why am I behaving as if everything is going to collapse tomorrow?' And they come to the conclusion it's not, and that's when they start spending."<br />Note that Naroff talked to Forbes.com before his intuition proved correct. On Tuesday, the Conference Board's closely watched consumer confidence index surprised most economists by jumping up to 44.9 from its all-time low of 38.8 in October.<br />The economy's not out of the woods yet, by any stretch. Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board's Consumer Research Center says, "Consumers remain extremely pessimistic, and the possibility that economic growth will improve in the first half of 2009 remains highly unlikely."<br />But there are other reasons to believe all is not lost. The National Association of Realtors is optimistic that many prudent buyers are waiting out a bad housing market. But the buyers are there. The NAR has been overly optimistic before, but home sales are so low that if those buyers did come back en masse, they could buy up the stock of excess housing faster than many anticipate.<br />Falling home prices are sapping home owners of the wealth effect they once felt they had in their homes. But they're also bringing prices back into alignment with people's wages.<br />Take the city of Phoenix. According to the Case-Shiller Home Price Index released on Tuesday, it's the city where home prices are falling fastest. The 2006 median income is around $47,000. The National Association of Realtors said that in the third quarter, the median home in the region sold for $185,000. In 2006, that median price was $270,000. Assume that family is still earning $47,000 today, the median house now costs four times their income from two years ago (when it cost nearly six times as much). Before long, it gets awfully tempting to stop renting.<a title="" href="http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/26/economy-recession-housing-biz-beltway-cx_jz_1126optimism_slide.html?partner=iht" target="_blank">In Pictures: Ten reasons for some economic optimism</a><br />In September, Phoenix saw its unemployment rise to 5.4 percent from 3.3 percent a year ago. That number will continue to rise. But most people will stay in their jobs; in the spring, some of them will start buying homes. By the summer, if the financial crisis has quieted down, will there be any reason not to start buying furniture? By next Christmas, will there be any reason not to bring back the ribbons, tags, packages, boxes and bags? Naroff's optimistic.<br />"If you don't get into a deep recession where coming out of it almost seems impossible, you get into a more normal, maybe extended cycle on households. Get cautious, get worried, get depressed and then," he says with a pause, "they live through it."</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/01Forbes-optimism.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/01Forbes-optimism.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">************** </div><br /><br /><div align="left"><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/euro.php">Buffeted by financial crisis, countries seek euro's shelter</a> </div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>***************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Paul Krugman: Fiscal expansion<br /></strong>By Paul Krugman<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />Right now there's intense debate about how aggressive the U.S. government should be in its attempts to turn the economy around. Many economists, myself included, are calling for a very large fiscal expansion to keep the economy from going into free fall. Others, however, worry about the burden that large budget deficits will place on future generations.<br />But the deficit worriers have it all wrong. Under current conditions, there's no trade-off between what's good in the short run and what's good for the long run; strong fiscal expansion would actually enhance the economy's long-run prospects.<br />The claim that budget deficits make the economy poorer in the long run is based on the belief that government borrowing "crowds out" private investment - that the government, by issuing lots of debt, drives up interest rates, which makes businesses unwilling to spend on new plant and equipment, and that this in turn reduces the economy's long-run rate of growth. Under normal circumstances there's a lot to this argument.<br />But circumstances right now are anything but normal. Consider what would happen next year if the Obama administration gave in to the deficit hawks and scaled back its fiscal plans.<br />Would this lead to lower interest rates? It certainly wouldn't lead to a reduction in short-term interest rates, which are more or less controlled by the Federal Reserve. The Fed is already keeping those rates as low as it can - virtually at zero - and won't change that policy unless it sees signs that the economy is threatening to overheat. And that doesn't seem like a realistic prospect any time soon.<br />What about longer-term rates? These rates, which are already at a half-century low, mainly reflect expected future short-term rates.<br />Fiscal austerity could push them even lower - but only by creating expectations that the economy would remain deeply depressed for a long time, which would reduce, not increase, private investment.<br />The idea that tight fiscal policy when the economy is depressed actually reduces private investment isn't just a hypothetical argument: It's exactly what happened in two important episodes in history.<br />The first took place in 1937, when Franklin Roosevelt mistakenly heeded the advice of his own era's deficit worriers. He sharply reduced government spending, among other things cutting the Works Progress Administration in half, and also raised taxes. The result was a severe recession, and a steep fall in private investment.<br />The second episode took place 60 years later, in Japan. In 1996-97, the Japanese government tried to balance its budget, cutting spending and raising taxes. And again the recession that followed led to a steep fall in private investment.<br />Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that trying to reduce the budget deficit is always bad for private investment. You can make a reasonable case that Bill Clinton's fiscal restraint in the 1990s helped fuel the great U.S. investment boom of that decade, which in turn helped cause a resurgence in productivity growth.<br />What made fiscal austerity such a bad idea both in Roosevelt's America and in 1990s Japan were special circumstances: In both cases, the government pulled back in the face of a liquidity trap, a situation in which the monetary authority had cut interest rates as far as it could, yet the economy was still operating far below capacity.<br />And we're in the same kind of trap today - which is why deficit worries are misplaced.<br />One more thing: Fiscal expansion will be even better for America's future if a large part of the expansion takes the form of public investment - of building roads, repairing bridges and developing new technologies, all of which make the nation richer in the long run.<br />Should the government have a permanent policy of running large budget deficits? Of course not. Although public debt isn't as bad a thing as many people believe - it's basically money we owe to ourselves - in the long run the government, like private individuals, has to match its spending to its income.<br />But right now we have a fundamental shortfall in private spending: Consumers are rediscovering the virtues of saving at the same moment that businesses, burned by past excesses and hamstrung by the troubles of the financial system, are cutting back on investment. That gap will eventually close, but until it does, government spending must take up the slack. Otherwise, private investment, and the economy as a whole, will plunge even more.<br />The bottom line, then, is that people who think that fiscal expansion today is bad for future generations have got it exactly wrong. The best course of action, both for today's workers and for their children, is to do whatever it takes to get this economy on the road to recovery.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/opinion/edkrugman.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/opinion/edkrugman.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">*********************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>In fight to avert deflation, Fed could learn from Japan<br /></strong>By Eric Burroughs</div><br /><br /><div align="left">Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />NEW YORK: As the United States and other major countries prepare to combat the threat of deflation and recession with interest rates fast approaching zero, a five-year policy experiment in Japan shows how important it is to act quickly and boldly.<br />Japan fought its way out of deflation after a property and stock bubble burst in the 1990s with quantitative easing, a policy measure that involved flooding banks with far more cash than was needed to keep short-term rates at zero.<br />It was a groundbreaking experiment and took a long time to work because the Bank of Japan was slow to employ the entire gamut of policy options and spell out its goals in credible fashion.<br />These lessons are now acquiring a special relevance to the U.S. Federal Reserve, facing the risk of a Japan-style deflationary spiral after a mortgage market meltdown that battered the banking system and resulted in the worst bear market for stocks since the Great Depression.<br />What the Fed needs to do most of all is give investors a clear picture of what it is trying to accomplish with its version of quantitative easing and under what conditions it will declare victory, analysts said.<br />That kind of clear explanation has so far been missing during the Fed's seat-of-the-pants efforts to keep financial markets from breaking down.<br />Alan Ruskin, chief international strategist at Royal Bank of Scotland, said quantitative easing was unlikely to be adopted in a more measured fashion.<br />"It inevitably involves a heightened degree of desperation," he said, "which suggests that like most decisions of real gravity we have seen in recent weeks, this one will not be made without staring over the abyss to witness financial hell's fury."<br />Ruskin calls U.S. efforts to stabilize the financial system and revive bank lending "quant-lite" because they bear only some resemblance to the Bank of Japan's emergency policy moves during the decade of deflation.<br />Deflation gives households and companies the incentive to delay purchases in anticipation that prices will fall, hobbling economic growth, while making it more expensive for debtors to pay off their loans.<br />The Fed's $800 billion plan to buy mortgage- and consumer-related debt is one of the unconventional policy tools it is using to revive bank lending after the collapse of Wall Street banks paralyzed credit markets, which have largely shrugged off interest rate cuts.<br />The Fed has slashed its benchmark rate to 1 percent and analysts polled by Reuters expect it to fall to just 0.5 percent - the lowest since the 1950s.<br />"They are doing quantitative easing de facto at the moment," said Glenn Maguire, chief Asia economist at Société Générale in Hong Kong.<br />Quantitative easing alone may not be enough to extricate the United States from a vicious deflationary circle in which falling asset prices hurt banks and households, leading to tighter borrowing and spending.<br />If Japan's experience is any guide, the central bank needs to communicate its objective clearly and establish the credibility needed to win over banks and investors scarred by huge losses and defaults.<br />The Bank of Japan went beyond zero rates to quantitative easing in March 2001, just seven months after it raised rates.<br />By that time deflation had already established its grip on an economy battered by the property market crash that began in the mid-1990s.<br />Maguire said it was only when the central bank laid out its commitment of defeating deflation credibly that the quantitative easing policy become effective and brought down long-term interest rates.<br />When it became clear to investors and banks that the Bank of Japan would keep the policy in place until deflation was eradicated, they knew the spigots of cash would be open for a while.<br />Thus assured, long-term interest rates dropped sharply. Ten-year government bond yields fell as low as 0.43 percent.<br />Slowly, bank lending began to grow again and prices stopped falling, allowing the Bank of Japan to end quantitative easing in March 2006.<br />But with U.S. consumer price inflation falling at the fastest pace on record, the country may be headed for deflation and full-blown quantitative easing. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield has dropped to a 50-year low.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/col02.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/col02.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>*********************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Identically distinctive<br /></strong>By Kumiko Makihara<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />TOKYO:<br />I witnessed a bizarre scene at my son's primary school earlier this year. A dozen or so school mothers had encircled a teacher and were bowing deeply. They were apologizing after being scolded for chatting too noisily at a field day performance.<br />What impressed me even more than the unison bowing was how similar the women appeared: Backs ram-rod straight and waists bent at a 90 degree angle; foundation-polished faces and dark hair; semi-expensive, tasteful if bland outfits. The women looked like identical spokes in a wheel.<br />The school's professed goal is "to raise distinctive children," but the mothers pursue sameness with military precision. They dress in similar conservative styles and carry designer handbags.<br />They want to be included in all the coffees and play dates. They sign their children up for the same camps. Conformism assures parents that they won't stand out and risk offending someone in a society that values modesty. And banding together keeps them in the loop of goings-on at school.<br />Such valued particulars range from what might be on the next science test to where to get school supplies.<br />A few hours after the school distributed a packing list for a retreat last summer, I went to a department store to buy a fish net. Too late. There'd already been a run on nets by mothers who had decided that was the place to go for them.<br />The day after the art teacher asked the children to bring in paint sets, I ran into a group of mothers at a stationery store. "My daughter won't be happy unless she has the same one as everyone else," said one, squatting by a stack of them. Even though I already had some brushes and paints at home, I grabbed the same set everyone was buying.<br />To guide parents in the dark, Katayama Elementary School in Osaka distributes an instruction booklet every year for new students called "Katayama Navi" (short for navigation). "We didn't have enough personnel to field all the inquiries from parents who call with even minor questions," says Kuniko Sugimoto, the assistant principal.<br />The 30-page manual details necessary supplies down to the number of pencils and advice such as: "Please refrain from buying expensive items or items not needed urgently"; or "As much as possible, have a bowel movement before coming to school." The guide proved so popular that 36 schools in the area now produce such handbooks.<br />I am overwhelmed trying to stay in good standing with the other mothers, especially as I started out way behind the similarity curve. My fashion style, bred from many years living in the United States, is casual practical. I'm a single parent of a mixed-race child in a nearly completely homogenous and married school population. So I double my efforts to blend in, and grovel to find out about the must-buys and then sew subtle patches and attach charms onto the prized possessions so my son won't mix them up with all the other, identical ones.<br />How far do I want to smother our identities in order to assimilate? (A few mothers avoid the entire complicated scene by not socializing at all. But these are extremely confident women who can survive on their own.)<br />I can accept my son being thrilled at the prospects of taking an identical soccer bag or pencil case as his friends' to school. "We can say, 'we have the same one!"' he explains. But it saddens me to see him bemoaning his shimmering brown hair, just a shade lighter than everyone else. In English language class, he adjusts his native pronunciation to have a Japanese accent like his classmates.<br />In fact, the deftness of concealing one's achievements is another skill in the art of sameness. Many children, for example, attend after-school academic classes but keep it confidential to hide their efforts to race ahead of the crowd. Word went around recently that one girl was "outed" when spotted bearing the satchel of such a program.<br />The spokes-in-a-wheel mothers had agreed to write brief and simple apology notes to the teacher. But one of the letters was revealed to be rich in detail after it was quoted and praised in a daily report from the teacher to the class. The other apologizers immediately began sleuthing to find out the culprit.<br />I need to sharpen my skills far more before attempting to join any wheels. First on the agenda is to find out how crucial it is to attend the upcoming fourth-grade potato-roasting event.<br />Kumiko Makihara is a freelance writer based in Tokyo.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/opinion/edmakihara.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/opinion/edmakihara.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>*********************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>EU funds boats and aircraft for Spanish borders<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />BRUSSELS: Spain will receive 356 million euros (307 million pounds) in EU funds to buy more patrol boats and aircraft to keep illegal immigrants from reaching the wealthy 27-nation bloc, the EU executive said Monday.<br />Spain has long been a port of entry for immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa trying to reach Europe in a perilous journey on often rickety boats. Thousands are believed to drown in the attempt.<br />The cash will also finance other border security measures including helping Spain to bolster surveillance off the Canary Islands, Ibiza, Valencia and Alicante and to train border guards, the EU executive said.<br />Madrid has beefed up its border surveillance over the past few years, as the fight against illegal migration has become a priority for the EU as a whole, which wants to protect its largely border-free territory.<br />Spain's Interior Ministry has estimated that between January and August the number of illegal immigrants reaching its shores by boat fell by 8 percent compared with a year earlier.<br />The EU has earmarked over 1.80 billion euros for its 2007-2013 border protection fund, 825 million euros for the integration of migrants, 676 million euros for the expulsion or voluntary returns of refugees, and 628 million euros to help EU states take care of refugees.<br />The European Commission estimates that there are up to 8 million illegal migrants in the bloc.<br />(Reporting by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Mark John and Katie Nguyen)</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-EU-IMMIGRATION-SPAIN.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-EU-IMMIGRATION-SPAIN.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>*********************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Obama pick for UN ambassador known for tough stance on genocide<br /></strong>By Peter Baker<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />CHICAGO: President-elect Barack Obama has chosen his foreign policy adviser, Susan Rice, to be ambassador to the United Nations, picking an advocate of "dramatic action" against genocide as he rounds out his national security team, Democrats close to the transition said.<br />Obama was to announce Rice's selection at a news conference here Monday along with his previously reported decisions to nominate Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for secretary of state, keep Robert Gates as defense secretary and appoint General James Jones, a retired Marine commandant, his national security adviser, the Democrats said Sunday.<br />The choice of Rice to represent the United States before the United Nations will make her one of the most visible faces of the Obama administration to the outside world aside from Clinton. It will also send to the world organization a prominent and forceful advocate of stronger action, including military force if necessary, to stop mass killings like those in the Darfur region of Sudan in recent years.<br />To reinforce his intention to work more closely with the United Nations after the tensions of President George W. Bush's tenure, Obama plans to restore the ambassador's post to cabinet rank, as it was under President Bill Clinton, according to Democrats close to the transition.<br />While the cabinet consists of 15 department heads, a president can give other positions the same rank for the duration of his administration.<br />"She's obviously one of Obama's closest advisers, so it underscores how much of a priority he's making the position," said Nancy Soderberg, a senior U.S. diplomat at the United Nations under Bill Clinton. "If you look at the last eight years, we obviously need to be more engaged at the UN and realistic about what the UN can do."<br />At the announcement Monday, the president-elect was to also formally unveil his nominations of Eric Holder Jr. to be attorney general and Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona to be secretary of homeland security, the Democrats said. He will not announce any of the top intelligence appointments on Monday, but the Democrats said they expected him soon to name Admiral Dennis Blair, a retired Pacific Fleet commander, as director of national intelligence.<br />If confirmed, Rice, 44, would be the second-youngest U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. A Rhodes scholar who earned a doctorate in international relations at Oxford University, she joined Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff in 1993 before rising to assistant secretary of state for African affairs at age 32. When Obama decided to run for president, she signed on as one of his top advisers, much to the consternation of the Clinton camp, which resented what it saw as a defection.<br />As the ambassador at the United Nations, Rice will have to coordinate with Hillary Clinton but will not be in the White House or State Department headquarters on a daily basis as major policies are formulated. One person close to Clinton said the senator did not object to Rice serving at the United Nations.<br />Some colleagues from her Clinton and Obama days said Rice could be blunt and unafraid to "mix it up," as one put it, on behalf of issues she cares about. Rice herself acknowledges a certain impatience at times.<br />Admirers said she was a good listener and able to stand up to strong personalities, including foreign autocrats and militants in volatile regions of the world.<br />"Susan certainly is tough, and she's tough in exactly the right way," said Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, where Rice worked in recent years. "She's intellectually tough," said Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state. "She's tough in her approach to how the policy-making process should work, and she will be very effective as a diplomat."<br />John Bolton, one of Bush's ambassadors at the United Nations, would not discuss Rice's selection but said it was unwise to elevate the position to the cabinet again. "One, it overstates the role and importance the UN should have in U.S. foreign policy," Bolton said.<br />"Second, you shouldn't have two secretaries in the same department."<br />During her first run at the State Department, Rice was a point person in responding to the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by Al Qaeda. But her most searing experience was visiting Rwanda after the 1994 genocide when she was still on the NSC staff.<br />As she later described the scene, the hundreds, if not thousands, of decomposing, hacked-up bodies that she saw haunted her and fueled a desire to never let it happen again.<br />"I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required," she told the Atlantic Monthly in 2001. She eventually became a sharp critic of the Bush administration's handling of the Darfur killings and last year testified before Congress on behalf of a U.S.-led bombing campaign or naval blockade to force a recalcitrant Sudanese government to stop the slaughter.<br />Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition, praised the pending Rice nomination on Sunday, calling it a powerful sign of the new president's interest in the issue. The coalition is urging Obama to begin a "peace surge" of sustained diplomacy to address the continuing problems in Sudan.<br />"It sends a very strong signal about his approach to the issue of Sudan and Africa in general," Fowler said.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/america/rice.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/america/rice.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/africa/OUKWD-UK-USA-OBAMA.php">Obama names Clinton secretary of state</a> </div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>*********************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>RBS offers respite on repossessions</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />LONDON: The British lender Royal Bank of Scotland said Monday that it would not repossess the homes of mortgage customers who default until six months after they first fall into arrears.<br />RBS, owner of NatWest bank, said the move was designed to give overstretched borrowers a chance to resolve their financial problems as falling house prices and a flagging economy put households under pressure.<br />"We fully understand that one of the biggest worries facing homeowners in financial difficulty is the thought of losing their home, and this is especially true given the current economic climate," the RBS managing director of retail banking Craig Donaldson said in a statement.<br />The biggest British mortgage lenders have already committed to waiting three months before repossessing customers' homes, under an agreement announced last week by the chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling.<br />Mortgage arrears and repossessions have risen sharply this year, reflecting the economic slowdown as well as a sharp rise in borrowing costs in the wake of the credit crunch.<br />The Council of Mortgage Lenders said there were 168,000 households in arrears at end-September, up 8 percent from end-June.<br />A total 11,300 homes were repossessed in the three months to Sept. 30, an increase of 12 percent on the previous quarter.<br />The RBS move could force rival lenders to follow suit, potentially delaying the moment when the house price slump bottoms out, said an Evolution Securities analyst, Bruce Packard.<br />"This announcement does put pressure on the other banks, notably Lloyds and HBOS, which together have £348 billion of mortgages. The announcement may also delay when the UK housing market reaches a 'clearing price,"' Packard wrote in a note to clients.<br />RBS said its six-month grace period would remain in place until "at least" the end of 2009, and that it would also ensure customers in arrears were given the opportunity to get independent advice.<br />RBS is 58 percent owned by the British state after shareholders mostly shunned an equity fundraising underwritten by the government last month.<br />The government, which has spent a total of £37 billion, or $57.09 billion, of public money bailing out RBS, Lloyds TSB and HBOS, has been urging banks to keep lending to consumers and businesses in a bid to bolster the flagging economy.<br />On Friday, the Financial Services Authority wrote to the heads of Britain's leading mortgage lenders asking them to make sure their arrears polices are in line with FSA requirements, which stipulate that repossession should only be used as a last resort.<br />House prices in Britain have declined sharply during the credit crisis. In the latest data from the housing market, property consultancy Hometrack said on Monday that prices in England and Wales fell by 1.1 percent in November to take them 8.1 percent lower on a year ago.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/01rbs.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/business/01rbs.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">*****************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>Outrage in Britain over lawmaker's arrest</strong><br />By John F. Burns<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />LONDON: Until last week, many in Britain would have had trouble identifying Damian Green, a quiet-mannered, 52-year-old Conservative member of Parliament, much less imagining him as the central figure in a storm over the sovereignty of Parliament that has led to accusations of "Stalinist" behavior by the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.<br />But Green has been front-page news ever since Scotland Yard's counterterrorism squad arrested him Thursday, held him for nine hours of questioning and raided his House of Commons office, west London home, and another office and home in the town of Ashford.<br />British constitutional experts say that no serving parliamentarian in living memory, much less a front-bench member of the "shadow cabinet" like Green, has ever been subjected to such harsh treatment.<br />A team of 20 officers from what is officially known as Scotland Yard's "special operations" unit took Green's fingerprints and a DNA sample, seized his cellphone and BlackBerry, and froze his House of Commons e-mail account. They also carried off computers, documents and even personal letters exchanged by Green and his wife, Alicia, when they were dating at Oxford University 30 years ago.<br />Five days later, none of the seized materials has been returned.<br />Nobody at Scotland Yard suggests that Green is a terrorist or that he has done anything to undermine national security. His offense, if any, seems to lie in his relationship with a civil servant in the Home Office who is said to have offered himself to the Conservatives last year as a whistle-blower on immigration and other politically sensitive issues.<br />Christopher Galley, a 26-year-old assistant private secretary in the office of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, was also arrested in a dawn raid Thursday. Galley is believed to have helped Green become a trenchant critic of the Labour government's immigration policies, one of the most volatile issues in British politics.<br />The Conservative Party, which has been ahead of Labour for many months in opinion polls, says that it will make Labour's failure to control the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants arriving in Britain every year - and the resulting strain on health, education and other public services - an issue in a general election that Brown must call before June 2010.<br />Conservative Party officials have said that it was Galley who told Green that the Home Office was "covering up" information proving that 5,000 illegal immigrants had been given approval to work as security guards in Britain and that one of them was working as a guard at the Home Office itself. The disclosure caused a furor when Green asked Smith about it in November.<br />The Conservatives also say that Galley's leaks to Green included a list of 50 Labour lawmakers who were expected to vote against a controversial bill to extend to 42 days the length of time terrorism suspects can be detained before being charged.<br />Critics say that Green's plight has highlighted the range of potentially arbitrary powers available to the government and the police in Britain, an issue that has increasingly engaged civil libertarians.<br />Although Britain prides itself on being the "mother of all democracies" and the fount of the 18th-century liberal ideas that underpin freedoms around the world, there are many who fear that the modern British state is becoming increasingly invasive of personal liberties. They point in particular to the use of modern technologies like the closed-circuit television cameras that are ubiquitous in British city life.<br />For the moment, though, the central issue of debate here is the sovereignty of Parliament and its ability to hold accountable the government, features of the British political system that evolved over centuries and that were only settled with the Civil War of the 1640s and the execution of King Charles I.<br />Michael Howard, a former Conservative Party leader, compared Green's arrest to the moment in 1642 when King Charles burst into the House of Commons demanding the arrest of five of its members. "This is the sort of thing that led to the start of the civil war," Howard said.<br />Scotland Yard has said that Green, who was released on bail Thursday night - as was Galley - remains under investigation "on suspicion of conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office," a centuries-old offense most often used in cases of corruption.<br />Unidentified Scotland Yard officers were quoted in British newspapers on Monday as saying that Green was suspected of "grooming" Galley to be a whistle-blower. But spokesmen for the Conservatives have said that Galley was not paid, directed or induced in any way.<br />Meanwhile, the political storm mounts. Smith, the home secretary whose ministry oversees the police, has said that while she knew that Scotland Yard was conducting an inquiry into the leak of secret Home Office information - an inquiry officially requested by David Normington, the top Home Office civil servant, after a string of parliamentary embarrassments for Smith - the police did not give her advance notice of their plans to arrest Green.<br />Similar denials have been voiced from the office of the prime minister and other ministries that deal with law-and-order issues.<br />A House of Commons committee has vowed to investigate the events, while officials at 10 Downing Street have said that the prime minister is considering a wider public inquiry into the issue of civil servants leaking information to politicians and the point at which police action may be justified.</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/europe/britain.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/europe/britain.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left">*************</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><strong>2011 draw: South Africa faces Wales, New Zealand meets France</strong><br />Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />LONDON:<br />Defending champion South Africa must play Wales at the next rugby union World Cup in 2011 and host New Zealand will meet France in a repeat of their dramatic quarterfinal a year ago.<br />England and Scotland were also put into the same group when the draw was made in London on Monday, with Argentina as the top seed. Australia, the only team to win the trophy twice, is grouped with Ireland and Italy.<br />The competition will involve 20 teams and qualifying rounds to decide the other eight teams have already started.<br />New Zealand, France and Tonga will also play a qualifier from North or South America and one from Asia. Argentina, England and Scotland are grouped with a European qualifier and also the winner of a qualifying playoff.<br />Australia, Ireland and Italy also face qualifiers from Europe and the Americas and South Africa, Wales and Fiji meet qualifiers from Oceania - likely to be two-time quarterfinalist Samoa - and Africa.<br />South Africa, which beat England in the 2007 final, had a narrow 20-15 victory over Wales a month ago in Cardiff.<br />"Last time, we were drawn against the top team from Britain, which was then England, and this time we have been drawn against Wales, who are the current Six Nations champions," said South Africa captain John Smit. "We also played two teams from the Pacific Islands, and this time we have Fiji and an Oceania qualifier, which is very likely to be Samoa."<br />New Zealand's 20-18 loss to France in Cardiff was one of the big upsets of the last World Cup.<br />"I guess my first thought was 'that's what the talk will be about, what happened last time,"' New Zealand captain Richie McCaw said. "Because of that there'll be a bit more intrigue about the match."<br />England against Scotland is the oldest international matchup, first played in 1871.<br />"I'm excited by the draw," said Scotland captain Mike Blair, whose team has reached the quarterfinal of all six World Cups. "In England and Argentina we have two extremely tough sides in our pool who have a very proud record in the tournament."<br />The draw means that England, the 2003 winner and 2007 runner up, has a tough path just to get through to the semifinal.<br />Martin Johnson's team, which has lost to Australia, South Africa and New Zealand in the past three weeks, would meet either New Zealand or France in the quarterfinal as long as it finishes in the top two in its group.<br />"We've got Scotland which will be the first time we've played them for 20 years," Johnson said. "Argentina were third in the last tournament. A lot of people will think we've got a good draw but it will be tough.<br />"Looking at the other pools - France playing New Zealand in a pool, Australia in with Ireland and South Africa with Wales and Fiji - it's going to be a great World Cup even before the quarterfinals.<br />Current Six Nations champion Wales will likely meet Australia in the quarterfinals but could avoid that by beating South Africa and finishing top of their own group.<br />"Look at the World Cup last year. The winners of the competition came from the toughest pool," Wales coach Warren Gatland said. "If we come out of it, then we are in pretty good shape for the quarterfinals as we will have played some tough rugby, as long as we don't pick up too many injuries. I think this is the toughest pool."<br />2011 WORLD CUP DRAW<br />LONDON (AP) - Monday's draw for the first round of the 2011 Rugby World Cup in New Zealand:<br />First Round<br />Pool A<br />New Zealand<br />France<br />Tonga<br />Americas 1<br />Asia 1<br />Pool B<br />Argentina<br />England<br />Scotland<br />Europe 1<br />Play-off winner<br />Pool C<br />Australia<br />Ireland<br />Italy<br />Europe 2<br />Americas 2<br />Pool D<br />South Africa<br />Wales<br />Fiji<br />Oceania 1<br />Africa 1<br />Quarterfinals<br />Quarterfinal 1: Pool B Winner vs. Pool A Runnerup<br />Quarterfinal 2: Pool C Winner vs. Pool D Runnerup<br />Quarterfinal 3: Pool A Winner vs. Pool B Runnerup<br />Quarterfinal 4: Pool D Winner vs. Pool C Runnerup<br />Semifinals<br />Semifinal 1: Quarterfinal 1 winner vs. Quarterfinal 2 winner<br />Semifinal 2: Quarterfinal 3 winner vs. Quarterfinal 4 winner<br />Final<br />Semifinal 1 winner vs. Semifinal 2 winner</div><br /><br /><div align="left"><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/sports/rugbyu1.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/sports/rugbyu1.php</a></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>*********************</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">WALTHEW</span> 2008</strong> </div><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Auvergne</span><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Auvergnate</span><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Auvergnat</span><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Auvergnats</span><br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France<br /><br /><br /><br /><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Montmartre</span>/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment<br /></div></a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-33709501627206012312008-12-01T07:16:00.024+01:002008-12-01T08:43:35.737+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Sunday, 30 November 2008<div align="center"><strong>0741</strong></div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM8t7iwtpHk5VNwhjKeht5vjjjPyKNo3jlOCQ73sAWI2ur_rEuTrzcXXlb9XBvNP3t5WMvUrSPKdeV5GOQXC4AAlVPCwaQpD9LfEr5VrAlRCo9SenuexpxDni2djlSzSMaGIANnEajuh0/s1600-h/DSC02355.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274704133989129666" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM8t7iwtpHk5VNwhjKeht5vjjjPyKNo3jlOCQ73sAWI2ur_rEuTrzcXXlb9XBvNP3t5WMvUrSPKdeV5GOQXC4AAlVPCwaQpD9LfEr5VrAlRCo9SenuexpxDni2djlSzSMaGIANnEajuh0/s320/DSC02355.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3z1KtzKcMjB8LvewvulbzTnGKZLNKpZVVbsmOtFWcYWDQqGzBrJfqabQXMcRq8aCKfV_MeQh87TUwcc4dPCKZ4FJqTfVNGO61o3ubd35vDiZF-WFslRr60J-lpmhbOPaObhcoQDBQWrE/s1600-h/DSC02357.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274704126246385602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3z1KtzKcMjB8LvewvulbzTnGKZLNKpZVVbsmOtFWcYWDQqGzBrJfqabQXMcRq8aCKfV_MeQh87TUwcc4dPCKZ4FJqTfVNGO61o3ubd35vDiZF-WFslRr60J-lpmhbOPaObhcoQDBQWrE/s320/DSC02357.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8ZBMWKmzvZNi5_t41jLo1tRCk-sdDm2qCuaNNBGxvBQ-kvSpxD6vnt983yDZ5EcZr9bbBdjGmCmt6z4e4AQtrwm60Fa32lExKc94oeg90CYLmXWd2kTxhwMikaZrb4nFTYJAR8QC_Xwo/s1600-h/DSC02358.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274704122758290754" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8ZBMWKmzvZNi5_t41jLo1tRCk-sdDm2qCuaNNBGxvBQ-kvSpxD6vnt983yDZ5EcZr9bbBdjGmCmt6z4e4AQtrwm60Fa32lExKc94oeg90CYLmXWd2kTxhwMikaZrb4nFTYJAR8QC_Xwo/s320/DSC02358.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY1_GnbcB-Bx15mQS7lpPWs5eHFi3CtFCilULzbqyHegxk7Rs8uJLkTqg2yx_iewrR-_nirl6P6orba0g8a8SZfMGOycDFkT4ly0SmzmRvWz4skkcoA2Wec6cncm2pUPCW7zw6oXL9ye8/s1600-h/DSC02359.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274704112471302130" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY1_GnbcB-Bx15mQS7lpPWs5eHFi3CtFCilULzbqyHegxk7Rs8uJLkTqg2yx_iewrR-_nirl6P6orba0g8a8SZfMGOycDFkT4ly0SmzmRvWz4skkcoA2Wec6cncm2pUPCW7zw6oXL9ye8/s320/DSC02359.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>In Warsaw, eating at U Kucharzy<br /></strong>By Nicholas Kulish<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />The locally grown filet, a solid hunk of raw, red meat one moment, is teased apart with seeming ease by the hummingbird-quick dicing and mincing of the chef's hand the next. He plops in a bright yellow egg yolk and beats it into the mixture with such precision he might be preparing a tempera for a fine fresco.<br />The work of art in question, however, is Warsaw's most renowned steak tartare, disassembled and reassembled before your eyes, tableside at U Kucharzy. The name means simply "the chefs," and because the entire restaurant is in the converted former hotel kitchen of the Europejski Hotel, most of the plain-wood tables afford a view of the cooking process.<br />It remains a joy to watch kitchen masters straining, stirring and turning, all the more when you know the end result is coming your way. At U Kucharzy, that should prepare the diner for the fact that this is no low-calorie establishment.<br />If not, the spoonful of pure, liquid fat drizzled over the duck with cranberry sauce and red cabbage (68 zloty, about $23) will underscore the point. Yet as all but the crunchy skin dissolves in your mouth, you will think only of taste and texture. Supporting actors such as lane kluski, a Polish egg noodle similar to German spätzle, are divine simplicities.<br />Despite the pianist tickling Gershwin on a grand, the décor in the main restaurant is thematically shabby. Management probably saved a bundle on high-end lighting design, but the brightness makes it easier to see the food, which, to U Kucharzy's credit, is what it's all about.<br />The service in the restaurant is intentionally informal, even a little brusque - after all, everyone is hanging out in the service area together. Asked if the rabbit in cream sauce could be split in half, the waiter shrugged and replied, "Maybe with a chainsaw."<br />Yet the request was met. And casualness has its benefits. At a recent lunch, a waiter carved a few extra slices of ham for a curious patron on the way back from the neighboring table, just for a taste, the way Grandma might.<br />7 Ossolinskich Street (Europejski Hotel), 48-22-826-79-36, www.gessler.pl.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/travel/trbites.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/travel/trbites.php</a></div><div></div><div>**************</div><div></div><div><strong>China's rural migrants are new front in AIDS fight</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />By Lucy Hornby<br />The new face of AIDS in China is a shy man with a heavy provincial accent, a weathered face and the rough hands of a manual worker.<br />Zhang Xiaohu, a character in an educational film for migrant workers, is part of a trend that worries Chinese officials: the potential for AIDS to spread among the estimated 200 million rural migrants driving the country's rapid economic expansion.<br />AIDS in China has, to date, mostly been limited to drug users, gay men, prostitutes and the victims of reckless blood-buying schemes in the 1990s.<br />By the end of 2007, China had about 700,000 people with HIV/AIDS -- 0.05 percent of the total population -- health officials said on Sunday, ahead of World Aids Day the next day.<br />"The epidemic is lowly prevalent in general but it is highly prevalent among specific groups such as migrant workers, and in some regions particularly remote areas and the countryside," said Wang Weizhen, deputy director of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment at the Ministry of Health, according to state media.<br />Higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases and other risk factors among male migrants have spurred an intensified effort to reach them before HIV spreads faster among them, and into the broader population.<br />"Other at-risk groups are rather small, but this one is huge," said Sun Xinhua, head of an office to combat AIDS that reports directly to the State Council, China's cabinet.<br />China's construction workers, miners and casual labourers have all the ingredients for HIV to spread. Often far from home, bored, and with some spare cash in their pockets, few of them use condoms when they visit prostitutes as rootless as themselves.<br />"You must stay away from these women and keep yourself out of trouble, especially when you are working away from home," said Liu Guilin, 38, at a dusty construction site in eastern Beijing.<br />"There are many dark corners now in Beijing. There are always women coming up to you and trying to drag you away."<br />Sexually transmitted diseases are more common among the migrants than the general population, but they have less access to healthcare and information than permanent city dwellers.<br />Their fear of rejection from co-workers and of losing jobs make many reluctant to test for HIV, which if not held back by drugs, leads to full-blown AIDS and usually death.<br />"I heard that you are doomed if you get AIDS. So if we found out anyone had it, we would stay well away from him," said Zhang Shiliang, 35, a slight cement layer who has left his family behind in Sichuan for six years while he forages for work.<br />Zhang, who said he was not clear on how AIDS spread, doubted that any of the hundreds of workers sharing his makeshift dormitory could have contracted the disease.<br />BARRIERS<br />The stigma and fear surrounding AIDS and embarrassment about talking about sex compound the difficulty of reaching the migrant population, who often lack access to information and deeply distrust officialdom.<br />Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told AIDS workers and doctors on Sunday that more should be done to "strengthen prevention work in key areas and key populations," state radio news reported on Sunday. Wen also vowed more money for AIDS medicine, which has fallen short of needs.<br />The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the International Labour Organisation hope "Hometown Fellows," a short film with a Charlie Chaplin-like feel, will help break down barriers when it is shown at workplaces and mines.<br />In the film, shot partially in black and white, Chinese film star Wang Baoqiang, himself a former construction worker, shares toil, sweat and daily life with Zhang Xiaohu, a fellow worker ostracised because he has HIV.<br />Zhang is played by Wang Zhenting, a man who contracted HIV in 2002, and who knows what that rejection feels like.<br />"Some other workers had a lot of prejudice against us. But the government is working to raise awareness," he told reporters at the launch of the film.<br />"Now, some people are OK with me, but some are still not."<br />(Additional reporting by Phyllis Xu; Editing by Valerie Lee)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/asia/OUKWD-UK-CHINA-AIDS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/asia/OUKWD-UK-CHINA-AIDS.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Economy crashes a Montana playground for the rich<br /></strong>By Kirk Johnson<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />BIG SKY, Montana: Every town has its walls and gates — some visible, some not — for keeping things out or in.<br />Here some of the gates are world famous. The Yellowstone Club, a cloistered and cosseted mountain retreat for the super-rich, helped define a style and an era with its creation in 1999.<br />The club had 340 members with a private ski mountain only a schuss away from $20 million vacation homes. It was the corner office and the executive suite of gated communities all in one — an exemplar of exclusivity.<br />But the sense of refuge was an illusion. The global financial crises have stormed even these gilded confines: This month, the Yellowstone Club filed for bankruptcy protection.<br />"The economy caught up with them," said L. C. Sammons, a retired physician from Memphis who lives in Big Sky just down the road from the club.<br />Other corners of the resort-economy West are taking punches. The Tamarack Resort in Idaho, which opened in 2004 north of Boise, is operating in receivership after the owners defaulted on a $250 million loan. Home construction has halted but the ski area is scheduled to open on Dec. 12. In Utah, the Promontory Club, a 7,224-acre, or 2,900-hectare, ski and golf development near Park City, declared bankruptcy in March when the company defaulted on a $275 million loan.<br />Here in Big Sky, the Yellowstone Club's troubles have been complicated by domestic entanglement. Tim Blixseth, the club's founder, and his wife, Edra, divorced this year, putting the club in her control. Blixseth then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing the club's inability to restructure $399 million in debt.<br />"The freeze on the credit market put them in a bad place," said Bill Keegan, a spokesman for the club. "They need to restructure their debt, and they realized it wouldn't happen for the opening."<br />To open for the season, Blixseth asked for an expedited hearing to raise cash, and Judge Ralph Kirscher of U.S. Bankruptcy Court signed an order in mid-November allowing Credit Suisse to lend the club $4.5 million to pay its debtors.<br />Montana has a history as a sometimes brutal exurb of capitalism, with tensions between rich and poor and labor and capital a theme since the 1800s. Over the last decade, people with Yellowstone Club-size wallets bought vast swaths of land, spurring the leisure economy at the same time that wage stagnation — Montana sank to 39th in the nation in median family income, according to the most recent Census figures — took hold of much of the rest of the state's population.<br />Some residents, in interviews here and in Bozeman, an hour north of Big Sky, said they were not particularly upset about the club's plight, given its excesses and presumptions.<br />But most people also know someone whose fortunes are tied to the financial engines that made this corner of Montana's economy go in recent years — wealth, vacation housing and tourism.<br />"It's kind of like a double-edged sword for a lot of people around here," said Greg Thomas, a 31-year-old construction worker from Bozeman. "It's pretty grotesque and ridiculous, but at the same time, a lot of people depend on going up there for jobs."<br />Bill Hopkins was more to the point.<br />"I can kind of gloat on one hand, but I'm not really happy about it," said Hopkins, 51, who works at Yellowstone National Park, just south of here, coordinating volunteer trail maintenance crews. Hopkins said he disliked the club's environmental footprint — 13,500 acres of formerly pristine open-space backcountry, now sealed off and built on.<br />"The damage has been done, as far as development there," he said, "so as long as it's developed, I'd just as soon see it operational."<br />The reaction to the club's problems in Big Sky, population 2,500, has been filtered through an economic slowdown that was already well under way.<br />Mark Robin, owner of the Hungry Moose Deli, said the river of headlights that used to greet him at 6 a.m. each day when he opened the shop — cars and trucks full of construction and maintenance-crew commuters driving down from Bozeman, eager for coffee and breakfast — had already slowed to a trickle as housing construction slumped outside the club.<br />And the credit crisis had already struck home as well, at a Big Sky ski resort open to the public called Moonlight Basin, which received its financing from Lehman Brothers before it collapsed. Moonlight laid off much of its workforce this fall, then renegotiated its debt, rehired its workers and is planning to open for the season in December.<br />Residents of Big Sky say everybody knows how hard the day-to-day struggle can be in rural Montana. Scrambling and getting by is just part of the landscape in a seasonal economy, said Marne Hayes, the executive director of the Big Sky Chamber of Commerce.<br />"People work really hard to stay here, and it's not always an easy thing to do," said Hayes, who came here from Pennsylvania in the early 1990s and took odd jobs for years to make ends meet. As for economic cycles, she added, "people who live and work here never thought they were immune."<br />Some of the Yellowstone Club's members, who paid $18,000 in annual dues for years, on top of their $250,000 deposit to join, are not quite so understanding. About 120 of them filed a brief in bankruptcy court asking what became of all the fat checks.<br />"That money seems to be gone," the brief states, "and members want to know why."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/america/30gated.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/america/30gated.php</a></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYUP9RogcjnQKrb8GhHCJCCMy0xVKWnWVnwi1U8RaZbHaUDrHaK6__8giCkL006U-7I4MkVHVoElfgszIo_sZ-g3KaPxocwusYDMKbGi3D4t0CTx_Sh4BkbttM6Aq8wSnEU9ZUXvJpkZY/s1600-h/DSC02360.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274704099507090946" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYUP9RogcjnQKrb8GhHCJCCMy0xVKWnWVnwi1U8RaZbHaUDrHaK6__8giCkL006U-7I4MkVHVoElfgszIo_sZ-g3KaPxocwusYDMKbGi3D4t0CTx_Sh4BkbttM6Aq8wSnEU9ZUXvJpkZY/s320/DSC02360.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div></div><div><strong>Born to sprint? DNA tests could hold the answer<br /></strong>By Juliet Macur<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />BOULDER, Colorado: When Donna Campiglia learned recently that a genetic test might be able to determine which sports suit the talents of her 2½-year-old son, Noah, she instantly said, "Where can I get it, and how much does it cost?"<br />"I could see how some people might think the test would pigeonhole your child into doing fewer sports or being exposed to fewer things, but I still think it's good to match them with the right activity," Campiglia, 36, said as she watched a toddler class at Boulder Indoor Soccer, in which Noah struggled to take direction from the coach between juice and potty breaks.<br />"I think it would prevent a lot of parental frustration," she said.<br />In sports-oriented Boulder, Atlas Sports Genetics is playing into the obsessions of parents by offering a $149 test that aims to predict a child's natural athletic strengths. The process is simple. Swab inside the child's cheek and along the gums to collect the DNA and return it to a laboratory for analysis of ACTN3, one gene among more than 20,000 in the human genome.<br />The test's goal is to determine whether a person would be best at speed and power sports like sprinting or football, or endurance sports like distance running, or a combination of the two. A 2003 study discovered the link between ACTN3 and those athletic abilities.<br />In this era of genetic testing, DNA is being analyzed to determine predispositions to disease, but experts raise serious questions about marketing it as a first step in finding a child's sports niche, which some parents consider the road to a college scholarship or a career as a professional athlete.<br />Atlas executives acknowledge that their test has limitations but say that it could provide guidelines for placing youngsters up to age 8 in sports.<br />Some experts say ACTN3 testing is in its infancy and virtually useless. Dr. Theodore Friedmann, the director of the interdepartmental gene therapy program at the University of California, San Diego, Medical Center, called it "an opportunity to sell new versions of snake oil."<br />"This may or may not be quite that venal, but I would like to see a lot more research done before it is offered to the general public," he said. "I don't deny that these genes have a role in athletic success, but it's not that black and white."<br />Stephen Roth, director of the functional genomics laboratory at the University of Maryland's School of Public Health, has studied ACTN3. He said he believes the test will become popular. But he had reservations.<br />"The idea that it will be one or two genes that are contributing to the Michael Phelpses or the Usain Bolts of the world I think is shortsighted because it's much more complex than that," he said, adding that athletic performance has been found to be affected by at least 200 genes.<br />Roth called ACTN3 "one of the most exciting and eyebrow-raising genes out there in the sports-performance arena," but he said that tests for the gene would be best used only on top athletes looking to tailor workouts to their body types.<br />"It seems to be important at very elite levels of competition," Roth said. "But is it going to affect little Johnny when he participates in soccer, or Suzy's ability to perform sixth-grade track and field? There's very little evidence to suggest that."<br />The study that identified the connection between ACTN3 and elite performance was published in 2003 by researchers primarily based in Australia.<br />Those scientists looked at the gene's combinations, one copy provided by each parent. The R variant of ACTN3 instructs the body to produce a protein, alpha-actinin-3, found specifically in fast-twitch muscles. Those muscles are capable of the forceful, quick contractions necessary in speed and power sports. The X variant prevents production of the protein.<br />The ACTN3 study looked at 429 elite white athletes, including 50 Olympians, and found that 50 percent of the 107 sprint athletes had two copies of the R variant. Even more telling, no female elite sprinter had two copies of the X variant. All male Olympians in power sports had at least one copy of the R variant.<br />Conversely, nearly 25 percent of the elite endurance athletes had two copies of the X variant - only slightly higher than the control group at 18 percent. That means people with two X copies are more likely to be suited for endurance sports.<br />Still, some athletes prove science, and seemingly their genetics, wrong. Research on an Olympic long jumper from Spain showed that he had no copies of the R variant, demonstrating that athletic success is most likely affected by a combination of genes as well as factors like environment, work ethic, nutrition and luck.<br />"Just think if that Spanish kid's parents had done the test and said, 'No, your genes show that you are going to be a bad long jumper, so we are going to make you a golfer,"' said Carl Foster, a co-author of the study, who is the director of the human performance laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. "Now look at him. He's the springiest guy in Spain. He's Tigger. We don't yet understand what combination of genes creates that kind of explosiveness."<br />Foster suggested a better way to determine whether a child would be good at sprint and power sports. "Just line them up with their classmates for a race and see which ones are the fastest," he said.<br />Kevin Reilly, the president of Atlas Sports Genetics and a former weight-lifting coach, expected the test to be controversial. He said some people were concerned that it would cause "a rebirth of eugenics, similar to what Hitler did in trying to create this race of perfect athletes."<br />Reilly said he feared what he called misuse by parents who go overboard with the results and specialize their children too quickly and fervently.<br />"I'm nervous about people who get back results that don't match their expectations," he said. "What will they do if their son would not be good at football? How will they mentally and emotionally deal with that?"<br />If ACTN3 suggests a child may be a great athlete, he said, parents should take a step back and nurture that potential Olympian or NFL star with careful nutrition, coaching and planning. He also said they should hold off on placing a child in a competitive environment until about the age of 8 to avoid burnout.<br />"Based on the test of a 5-year-old or a newborn, you are not going to see if you have the next Michael Johnson; that's just not going to happen," Reilly said. "But if you wait until high school or college to find out if you have a good athlete on your hands, by then it will be too late. We need to identify these kids from 1 and up, so we can give the parents some guidelines on where to go from there."<br />Boyd Epley, the strength and conditioning coach at the University of Nebraska from 1969 to 2003, said the next step would be a physical test he devised. Atlas plans to direct children to Epic Athletic Performance, a talent identification company that uses Epley's index.<br />He founded the company; Reilly is its president.<br />China and Russia, Epley said, identify talent in the very young and whittle the pool of athletes until only the best remain for the national teams.<br />"This is how we could stay competitive with the rest of the world," Epley said of genetic and physical testing. "It could, at the very least, provide you with realistic goals for you and your children."<br />The ACTN3 test has been available through the Australian company Genetic Technologies since 2004. The company has marketed the test in Australia, Europe and Japan, but is now entering the United States through Atlas. The testing kit was scheduled to be available starting Monday through the Web site atlasgene.com.<br />The analysis takes two to three weeks, and the results arrive in the form of a certificate announcing Your Genetic Advantage, whether it is in sprint, power and strength sports; endurance sports; or activity sports (for those with one copy of each variant, and perhaps a combination of strengths). A packet of educational information suggests sports that are most appropriate and what paths to follow so the child reaches his or her potential.<br />"I find it worrisome because I don't think parents will be very clear-minded about this," said William Morgan, an expert on the philosophy of ethics and sport and author of "Why Sports Morally Matter." "This just contributes to the madness about sports because there are some parents who will just go nuts over the results."<br />"The problem here is that the kids are not old enough to make rational autonomous decisions about their own life," he said.<br />Some parents will steer clear of the test for that reason.<br />Dr. Ray Howe, a general practitioner in Denver, said he would rather see his 2-year-old, Joseph, find his own way in life and discover what sports he likes the best. Howe, a former professional cyclist, likened ACTN3 testing to gene testing for breast cancer or other diseases.<br />"You might be able to find those things out, but do you really want to know?" he said.<br />Others, like Lori Lacy, 36, said genetic testing would be inevitable. Lacy, who lives in Broomfield, Colorado, has three children ranging in age from 2 months to 5 years.<br />"Parents will start to say, 'I know one mom who's doing the test on her son, so maybe we should do the test too,"' she said. "Peer pressure and curiosity would send people over the edge. What if my son could be a pro football player and I don't know it?"</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/sports/DNA.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/sports/DNA.php</a></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6zXvoQYoCYx9UjhUuteaDAHvJRnXDQKGkcAq6sbAwBLfp4A13L0DvKhjjXrBOp-DtePk_SRidR6E-LvOvIgoUjJ-c7tbhFKG75bDrKAF2nfn5VxhVr2QmSP1QzeRZnI0P_VYDYIGppZM/s1600-h/DSC02361.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703841368559602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6zXvoQYoCYx9UjhUuteaDAHvJRnXDQKGkcAq6sbAwBLfp4A13L0DvKhjjXrBOp-DtePk_SRidR6E-LvOvIgoUjJ-c7tbhFKG75bDrKAF2nfn5VxhVr2QmSP1QzeRZnI0P_VYDYIGppZM/s320/DSC02361.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div><strong>With oil prices in retreat, OPEC struggles to maintain unity</strong><br />By Jad Mouawad<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />CAIRO: Over the summer, the OPEC cartel could not prevent oil prices from surging to record levels even when its members pumped full out. Now, the producers seem equally unable to stop prices from collapsing as the global economy cools down.<br />Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries left an informal meeting in Cairo this weekend without an agreement to reduce production, but with rising doubts about fraying discipline and tensions within the group that accounts for 40 percent of the world's oil exports.<br />So great uncertainty still looms over the market. Have producers managed to draw a line in the sand, or will oil prices keep falling in coming months?<br />After topping $147 a barrel in July, prices have slipped by more than $90 because of lower economic growth around the world. Prices could keep falling next year, analysts say, with some predicting new lows of around $30 a barrel.<br />On Friday, oil for January delivery closed at $54.43 a barrel in New York, having dropped below $50 a week earlier - the lowest level in more than three years. The cartel said it would consider reducing production at a meeting in Algeria on Dec. 17.<br />OPEC members need prices of $60 to $90 a barrel to balance their budgets, so the prospect of lower prices and crimped revenues is daunting. Even Saudi Arabia indicated over the weekend that it considered $75 a barrel to be a "fair price," a far higher figure than most analysts expected from the kingdom.<br />As the meeting in Cairo this weekend illustrates, there are unmistakable signs that the group is struggling to maintain its unity.<br />"It is at times when the organization is under pressure that its cohesion is tested," said Raad Alkadiri, an energy expert at PFC Energy, a consulting firm, who was in Cairo during the meeting. "Right now, there is a sense it's not in the driving seat."<br />The oil market has gone full circle at an astonishing speed. The factors that pushed up prices since 2003 - including surging demand, sluggish production and investors flocking to commodity markets - have mostly disappeared.<br />Global growth, the biggest factor for oil demand, is under severe stress, new supplies are coming on the market, oil inventories are brimming and investors are fleeing commodities.<br />In the United States alone, oil demand plunged by 2.6 million barrels a day in September, or nearly 13 percent, according to monthly data released in November by the U.S. Energy Department. Demand fell to 17.7 million barrels a day, the lowest monthly level since October 1995.<br />Overall global oil consumption could drop for the first time in 25 years this year and might not recover before 2011, according to analysts. Some analysts said OPEC needed to cut output by at least three million barrels a day to make up for declining demand in industrialized nations.<br />Meanwhile, the credit crisis is hurting the ability of producers to finance new developments, and crimping high-cost producers, like those developing tar sands or deep water offshore fields, who need prices of $60 to $80 a barrel to be viable. This means supplies could be affected as oil companies cut back their investment spending. If prices keep falling, some existing fields could also become uneconomical and might be shut down.<br />Behind its facade, the cartel is facing its toughest test in years. The meeting, which was billed as an informal consultation rather than an official event, failed to resolve deep-seated issues like how much each country was pumping and to what degree they should reduce production. Instead, producers tried to stay on message.<br />"OPEC is united," said Shokri Ghanem, the Libyan oil minister, as he sped out of the meeting Saturday without slowing down for questions, his words echoing through the vast lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel.<br />But there were signs of tensions. The Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, are unwilling to approve further supply reductions before other members of the cartel - particularly Iran and Venezuela - follow through on previous commitments to cut output.<br />Analysts said the Saudis wanted to show other members of the cartel just how serious they were about sharing the burden between all producers. But even as the Saudis appear ready to play hardball, with the risk of pushing down prices further, OPEC is also laying the grounds for a more coordinated approach with other producers.<br />The OPEC secretary general, Abdalla Salem el-Badri, has asked producers outside of the cartel, including Russia, Mexico and Norway, to restrain their own supplies to prop up prices, as some of them did in the late 1990s when prices slumped below $10 a barrel. These countries will attend the group's next meeting in Algeria.<br />"Our concern is about overproduction," said Abdullah al-Attiyah, Qatar's energy minister. "If you're producing oil and no one is buying it, this is the concern."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/business/oil.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/business/oil.php</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju-axnKDcVA-1LvXU4NPN5JCrZY5BBZocoqUZ8fuhNrWBnDpAB2NfSnBXRBVMonb626OXCbdRmuOO7XKDpa8PoriKY80rRf-YvDwsiR2QQzhIKhFY2QcvAgwYbL5ruYtMTPIjkg1a5lzU/s1600-h/DSC02362.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703836767495010" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju-axnKDcVA-1LvXU4NPN5JCrZY5BBZocoqUZ8fuhNrWBnDpAB2NfSnBXRBVMonb626OXCbdRmuOO7XKDpa8PoriKY80rRf-YvDwsiR2QQzhIKhFY2QcvAgwYbL5ruYtMTPIjkg1a5lzU/s320/DSC02362.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>LETTERS</strong></div><div><strong>France's faltering restaurants</strong><br />I could not agree more with Michael Johnson's article on the overall decline of restaurants in France ("Want a good French meal? Don't go to France," Meanwhile, Nov. 28).<br />I've lived in France for more than 20 years and I've seen both the quality of the food and the level of service at your average neighborhood bistro plummet in recent years. Half the servers could not care less about their work, which years ago was taken as an art. In Paris, you can probably still get a decent meal at Alain Ducasse's restaurants - provided you want to pay a fortune.<br />Philip Crawford, Paris<br />Michael Johnson has no idea what he is talking about and most of the opinions he expresses are absolute blather. Ever walk down the street in America and try to get a decent meal? It is tough going.<br />French cuisine has little competition in the world, whatever Michael Johnson may think. I find the permanent lambasting of the French increasingly difficult to digest.<br />Suzanne Weinberg, Paris<br />I heartily agree with Michael Johnson's article. Café food has become dismal and really good French food too expensive for everyday casual fare. Visitors to Paris should be introduced to the other great cuisines that one can find here - notably those linked to France's former colonies. Delicious North African tagines and couscous dishes, hearty Vietnamese salads, and mouth-watering Lebanese mezzé are just a few of the world cuisines that one can find in Paris. They are far better choices than the mediocre meals served in most mid-range priced French restaurants.<br />Charlotte Puckette, Paris</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edletters.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edletters.php</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEier6mtnVDQKDObCs4TaKqOE-_LcDYULtIP8sNez3mRItC-Br7etdBmP7__xbumh5CIXJFub6myzXlLSuGJd1QRfzLBgn0HkFZNy18CuMxmpeMGXfeTfdiRX0t4EojeS8dI6_LXfHHfXTU/s1600-h/DSC02363.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703836340187938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEier6mtnVDQKDObCs4TaKqOE-_LcDYULtIP8sNez3mRItC-Br7etdBmP7__xbumh5CIXJFub6myzXlLSuGJd1QRfzLBgn0HkFZNy18CuMxmpeMGXfeTfdiRX0t4EojeS8dI6_LXfHHfXTU/s320/DSC02363.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>Despite jobs scarce abroad South Africans move away<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />By Serena Chaudhry<br />Advertising executive Penny Holt loves her native South Africa but power cuts, a murky political climate and widespread violent crime made her think about leaving the nation she once viewed as a beacon of hope.<br />A robbery at her office was the last straw.<br />"There's a brutality, an anger that worries me," said the 32-year-old executive at Saatchi & Saatchi as she finished packing up her house in the well-heeled northern suburbs of Johannesburg ready to move to London.<br />Holt's decision reflects what appears to be an accelerating trend in Africa's biggest economy. Professionals, often young and in middle management but increasingly senior executives too, are leaving, adding to a skills shortage that is already acute.<br />Even though the global financial crisis is cutting job opportunities abroad -- prompting some South Africans to consider moving home to take them up -- at least eight top-level executives at listed companies have resigned this year to emigrate.<br />Clothing retailer Truworths said in October its financial director Wayne van der Merwe was relocating with his family to Australia, while wealth and asset management group Peregrine Holdings Ltd said in September its chief executive Keith Betty was moving to Australia.<br />The chief financial officer of chemical and explosives firm AECI emigrated after his 12-year-old daughter was shot in a robbery. And retail giant Massmart has reported a flight of senior management at the firm.<br />A property barometer by First National Bank released in October showed 18 percent of people selling their houses in the third quarter were doing so because they were emigrating, up from 9 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.<br />South Africa's department of Home Affairs said it did not keep a record of the number of people emigrating.<br />CRIME<br />For many, the main worry is South Africa's shockingly high crime levels. An average of 50 people are murdered every day, according to the 2008 government crime report, with robberies, break-ins and hold-ups at businesses up almost 50 percent.<br />"In most instances I think the fundamental reason for leaving is violent crime," said Azar Jammine, chief economist at Econometrix.<br />Peter Gent, chief operating officer of Rand Merchant Bank, said the investment firm is actively sourcing skilled labour overseas because of an exodus of investment bankers, accountants and information technology specialists.<br />"Certainly from the beginning of this year, one's seen an increase (in emigration)," Gent said. "I think it's a real issue for the country."<br />The skills exodus has hit the public sector too, and the government has been trying to recruit experienced artisans, particularly engineers, doctors and teachers, from abroad.<br />Those with the means to leave are still disproportionately white, but Gent said people of all races were emigrating.<br />"The 30-40 year range is where we've seen the bulk of the fallout, and typically it is people with specialist skills."<br />Analysts say power cuts in January and a wave of xenophobic attacks in May further clouded the mood.<br />And many middle class South Africans and foreign investors have been rattled by the worst political crisis since the end of apartheid, which saw the ousting of Thabo Mbeki as president by the ruling ANC party.<br />ANC leader Jacob Zuma, frontrunner to become president after an election next year, has strong ties to the left and there are worries he may veer away from Mbeki's pro-business policies.<br />A corruption case against Zuma, in which he denies wrongdoing, has also troubled some South Africans.<br />"The current political situation is a concern," said advertising executive Holt. "Zuma I feel is not a very moral, ethical person."<br />GLOBAL TURMOIL<br />The global recession might help reverse, or at least slow the trend, as jobs in London's City freeze up.<br />South Africa has been shielded from much of the turmoil, as strict regulation has helped local banks like Standard Bank and Absa limit exposure to toxic U.S. assets.<br />While the country's big four banks are likely to see slower growth as the slowdown hits exports and batters the rand, Standard Bank, Absa, Nedbank and FirstRand have all reported healthy liquidity profiles.<br />"The grass on the other side is looking a little less green than it was six months ago," said Guy Lundy, co-author of "South Africa: Reasons to Believe," a book that highlights the positive aspects of South Africa.<br />The Homecoming Revolution, a group which tries to persuade South Africans living abroad to move home, says it has seen an increase in people wanting to return this year.<br />Managing Director Martine Schaffer said of the 1,000 South Africans who attended the group's exhibition in London this month, four out of five were planning to return to South Africa.<br />"It's such a beautiful country and there is so much potential, we need to come home and bring the skills that we got here from London and make a difference," said Kathryn Hallock, 30, who is moving home after more than eight years in Britain.<br />RMB's Gent said the global freeze may well prompt young South Africans to scrap or delay their emigration plans.<br />"The slowdown in the global economy and specifically around investment banking will address that to some degree."<br />(Editing by Rebecca Harrison and Sara Ledwith)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/africa/OUKWD-UK-SAFRICA-SKILLS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/africa/OUKWD-UK-SAFRICA-SKILLS.php</a></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>****************</strong></div><div><strong></strong></div><div><strong>Californian finds new life in Cambodia</strong><br />By Seth Mydans<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />PHNOM PENH: It may be the only place in Cambodia where the children are nicknamed Homey, Frog, Floater, Fresh, Smiley, Bugs and Diamond.<br />And there are not many places like this small courtyard, thudding to the beat of a boom box, where dozens of boys in big T-shirts are spinning on their heads and doing one-hand hops, elbow tracks, flairs, halos, air tracks and windmills. Not to mention krumping.<br />It is a little slice of inner-city Long Beach, California, brought here by a former gang member by way of a federal penitentiary, an immigration jail and then expulsion from his homeland, the United States, to the homeland of his parents, Cambodia.<br />The former gang member is Tuy Sobil, 30, who goes by the street name K.K. The children with the funny names are Cambodian street children he has taken under his wing as he teaches them the art he brought with him, break dancing, as well as his hard lessons in life.<br />K.K. is not here because he wants to be. He is one of 189 Cambodian refugees who have been banished from the United States over the past six years under a law that mandates deportations for noncitizens who commit felonies. Hundreds more are still to be deported.<br />Like most of the others, K.K. is a noncitizen only by a technicality of paperwork. He is not an illegal alien. He is a refugee from Cambodia's Khmer Rouge "killing fields" who found a haven in America in 1980.<br />He was an infant when he arrived; in fact, he was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and had never seen Cambodia before he was deported here.<br />But like so many refugees, K.K.'s parents were unsophisticated farmers who failed to complete the citizenship process when they arrived.<br />Like some children of poor immigrants, K.K. drifted to the streets, where he became a member of the Crips gang and a champion break dancer. It was only after he was arrested for armed robbery at the age of 18 that he discovered that he was not a citizen.<br />Like many deportees, he arrived in Cambodia without possessions and without family contacts. He worked at first as a drug counselor and then founded his break dancing club, Tiny Toones Cambodia, which he said now works regularly with about 150 youngsters and reaches out to hundreds more.<br />With the help of international aid groups like Bridges Across Borders, based in Graham, Florida, he has expanded his center into a small school that teaches English and Khmer and computers in addition to back flips and head stands.<br />Some other deportees have found work that makes use of their English-language fluency, particularly in hotels. Some have reunited with families in the countryside. But many have slipped into unemployment, depression and sometimes drug use.<br />"Some were doing well initially but now over time have become unemployed or never did get employment, and just got discouraged," said Dimple Rana, who works with a group called Deported Diaspora, based in Revere, Massachusetts, that helps deportees to adjust.<br />"I know of a whole bunch of returnees whose mothers were sending money from their Social Security," she said. "Now with the economy in the United States it's very hard, and families are not able to send even $100 or $150."<br />K.K. stands out as a success, both in finding a calling and in embracing his fate.<br />"I think it was meant for me to be here," he said, "even though I lost my family. And my kid is there, Kayshawn. He's 8. Right now, you know, these kids are my family. I don't have a kid here, but I adopted one, a street kid; his mom and dad are on drugs."<br />The boys and girls leaping and spinning here on a hard linoleum floor are the children of Cambodia's underclass, like thousands who fill the slums and back streets of Phnom Penh - children who spend their evenings, as K.K. put it, "begging and digging through garbage to find food."<br />K.K., whose childhood was not so very different from theirs, says he teaches them to find pride in who they are.<br />One wall of his center is marked with small graffiti from his students: "I want to be a rapper," "I want to be a D.J.," "I want to be a doctor."<br />"I try to tell them not to judge people by the way they look," he said. "I still have a struggle here in Cambodia. People judge me. People see me with tattoos and think I'm a bad guy."<br />"Sometimes it's, 'Come on, we're going to kill some Americans,"' he said, describing his encounters with street toughs here. "I'm not American. I'm Khmer, man."<br />His journey between identities reached a point of strangeness when he was invited last December to perform with some of his students at a Christmas party at the U.S. Embassy.<br />"At the embassy the American ambassador gave me a handshake and a hug," K.K. recalled, "and asked me one day when his kid is a little older he wanted to put him in my school."<br />The ambassador at the time, Joseph Mussomeli, recalled the performance as "great fun," but he said the piquancy of the moment had not been lost on him.<br />"You are right that there is a certain wonderful irony to him being 'rejected' or at least 'ejected' from the U.S. and still landing on his feet - or shoulders and head - dancing," Mussomeli said in an e-mail message.<br />"While watching him I was reminded of that great patriotic speech by Bill Murray in 'Stripes,"' he added, "where he talks about Americans as being rejects from all the good, decent countries of the world! K.K. is/was an American in everything except in law, - and he has shown this by his creativity, tenacity, and undying optimism."<br />Now another wonderful irony is in store for K.K. His club has received several invitations to send a half-dozen dancers to perform in the United States, Cambodian boys who do not speak English and have never been outside their country.<br />The real American among them, K.K., deported and excluded from the United States for the rest of his life, will have to stay behind.<br />"I can't go," he said over the thump of the boom box, as his boys jumped and bounced around him like tiny springs. "I can understand that they deported me here. I'd like to go visit - only visit, because I live here now. I have a brand new life."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/dancer.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/dancer.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Pardoned: 'Accidental' felon wins Bush over<br /></strong>By Jim Rutenberg<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />For Leslie Collier, the operator of a 600-acre grain farm, it was not so much the felony conviction for killing two bald eagles that stung the most, and that stung plenty. It was the loss of his hunting rifles that went with it.<br />For his mother, June Collier, it was the pain of seeing her son's name sullied in their town of about 5,000 people in southeastern Missouri, where her family had lived, farmed and hunted for four generations.<br />And for Lanie Black, a former Missouri state representative and a close family friend, it was the perceived injustice of the felony branding that prompted him to help Collier and his mother as they began, about a decade ago, to seek the ultimate redemption: a presidential pardon.<br />The effort proved successful last week, when Collier, 50, became one of 14 people to receive pardons from President George W. Bush, one of the stingiest granters of them in modern history.<br />The presidential pardon - providing absolution to felons, often in the final days of a presidency - is as American a tradition as Thanksgiving. The framers of the Constitution established presidential pardon power to help a president spread goodwill, particularly at crucial moments after insurrection or rebellion.<br />Public attention has usually focused on the more celebrated or disputed cases, like George Washington's pardons for the participants of the armed Whiskey Rebellion against high liquor taxes in 1795; Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974; and Bill Clinton's pardon in 2001 of the fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose former wife was a major contributor to his presidential library.<br />Public speculation on the expected next round of pardons from Bush has mostly focused on Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., and other administration officials involved in disputed policies like the domestic wiretapping program, or the Republican members of Congress convicted of fraud in his second term, like Representative Randy Cunningham of California.<br />But, in recent history, the list of those who have received pardons has been dominated less by convicts with connections to the upper echelons of U.S. power than by people of modest means in the heartland - an odometer cheat from Mississippi; a bootlegger from Tennessee; and Collier - all of whose relatively minor crimes ultimately led them to be labeled felons.<br />For most of them, it is a leap of faith to file an application with the pardon attorney's office at the U.S. Department of Justice, which culls through thousands of requests before making recommendations to the president, which he is under no obligation to follow.<br />In the case of Collier, who had no high-level Washington connections of his own, and who had never given a U.S. political donation, it was a matter of "just plain folks pursuing the path," June Collier said in an interview last week.<br />"The goal for me was to have his name cleared," June Collier added, tearfully, days after the pardon was granted.<br />Collier's crime was unlikely and, he said in an interview, unintended. Hunting on the farmland he rents, he began noticing the reappearance of wild turkeys, decades after they were believed to have died away. But he feared that a pack of coyotes in the area would not give them a chance to breed.<br />"I got it in my head that if we got rid of the coyotes, the turkeys would get off to a better start," Collier said. So he laid a trap of ground beef laced with the pesticide Furadan, which, under U.S. law, may not be used as animal poison.<br />Seven coyotes died after eating the beef. But several other animals fed on their carcasses and died as well, including the bald eagles.<br />The dead eagles were found by a passerby, who alerted the U.S. authorities who, in turn, identified the poison that killed them and tracked its purchase to Collier. He pleaded guilty to two counts of violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, and to the misdemeanor charge of illegal use of a pesticide.<br />With no prior criminal history, he was sentenced to two years of probation and was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.<br />As a convicted felon, Collier would have to give up his collection of hunting guns, a blow to his lifestyle. "We kind of got a hunting heritage in this family," Collier said. "It's what we do."<br />A local Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms official told him that only a presidential pardon would get him his guns back, Collier said. "He said, 'Good luck with that' - like, 'Fat chance,"' he said.<br />Of the nearly 8,000 pardon petitions Bush has received during his presidency, he has granted 171. He has separately commuted eight prison sentences. At the end of his term, Clinton had granted 396 pardons and commuted 61 sentences.<br />Usually, the Justice Department goes through the submissions - guidelines call for an expression of contrition and the completion of any punishment - and sends the requests to the White House with recommendations.<br />The president is not bound to follow them. Neither the U.S. Justice Department nor the White House would comment on how Bush made his pardon decisions.<br />Collier initially began exploring the possibility of a pardon when Clinton was president, he said, and local Democrats hinted he would have to make some high-level political contributions. But, "we got to talking to some of the government officials, and they said, 'Oh no, it's not a pay deal,"' Collier said.<br />And the process can be a mystery even for those with high-level connections.<br />"All you can do is be familiar with the process, wait and hope," said Michael Nussbaum, a lawyer for the rapper John Forte, who was halfway through a 14-year sentence on cocaine charges when Bush commuted it last week. Among Forte's supporters were the singer Carly Simon and Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah.<br />After years of hesitation and a long wait to get the application, Collier said, he submitted his request in 2001 with no help from lawyers or contributions. He expressed contrition but argued that his punishment seemed overly severe.<br />Black, the former Republican state legislator who was at Collier's hospital bedside years earlier when he lost his foot in a grain elevator accident, counseled patience. "I said that if we went through all of the effort to get one, it would not come until very near the end of Bush's term," said Black, who was among those to provide a character reference.<br />Black asserted that Collier was unfairly coaxed into a confession after he was given the impression that he would not be prosecuted, making him all the more angry that Collier's felony conviction "became common knowledge" in their town of Charleston.<br />"We all know each other, we farm together, we eat breakfast together, we talk - it's vintage Hillary Clinton 'It takes a village to raise a child'-type of environment," he said. "Sometimes that's good, sometimes that isn't so good. That's just the way it is."<br />As the years passed, friends at Collier's church wrote letters and buttonholed local U.S. officials at farm bureau meetings for news.<br />In 2004, an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation came to town and interviewed Collier but was not heard from again.<br />Several months ago, Black said he was contacted by Catherine Hanaway, a former colleague in the Missouri House who was the executive director of Bush's campaign in her state in 2000, and, in 2005, was named as a U.S. attorney.<br />Telling Black that the White House had asked her to look into the matter of his friend, he said, "I told her the story and she said, 'O.K., that's what I need to know."'<br />Collier said he got the news of his pardon on Monday while working at a cattle auction. He was out hunting for deer by Tuesday with a "thirty-ought-six" - that is, he said, with "a real gun."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/america/pardon.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/america/pardon.php</a></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div><strong>Ethnic rifts pin Bosnia's sick convicts in jail<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Monday, December 1, 2008<br />By Daria Sito-Sucic<br />Daniel Marinic, a convicted murderer, is a victim of Bosnia's ethnic rivalries: he must remain in a prison unit for convicts with psychiatric disorders even though his imprisonment is against the law.<br />Convicted in 1999 of killing his parents, the prisoner in his 30s is one of two dozen patients still in Zenica jail's psychiatric unit in contravention of a new criminal code that requires him to be treated in a specialised medical institution.<br />They spend time crammed in dark, damp rooms on the second floor of a 19th-century building, cut off from the world by thick iron bars. In two rooms, 10 plain iron beds on bare concrete floors are covered with blankets reminiscent of the kind Bosnia received as humanitarian aid during the 1992-95 war.<br />"It's better now," said Marinic, standing in a tiny corridor crammed with prisoners excited by the arrival of visitors. "It was really bad when there were 30 of us in the room." Until a few years ago, there were 70 patients in the unit.<br />Marinic seems calm enough, but doctors have advised against his release, saying he could be dangerous for other patients if put in a civilian hospital.<br />"They should not be in the prison but in a hospital, but we have no other place for them," said Zenica prison warden Nihad Spahic. "We aim to get rid of such patients eventually."<br />The reason the prisoners are stuck here is that Bosnia's two post-war autonomous regions -- the Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb Republic -- have for two years failed to agree on building an institution for them.<br />Both are coping with a lack of facilities -- a consequence of the disintegration of Bosnia's once-unified prison system.<br />The 122-year-old prison complex in the central town of Zenica is the largest in Bosnia and the sole high-security facility in the Muslim-Croat federation.<br />Bosnia was ordered in 2006 by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights to build a state medical facility to accommodate convicts with psychiatric disorders.<br />The central cabinet had agreed with the Swiss government to use a 2.8 million Swiss franc (1.6 million pounds) donation to build an extra wing on a psychiatric hospital in eastern Bosnia.<br />But bickering between the regions over its ownership and use has delayed the process. The central government has a 2008 budget of $887 million (578 million pounds), and each region has its own budget.<br />"Unless there is an agreement between the regions, it's difficult to move things out of the dead end," said Justice Ministry spokeswoman Marina Bakic.<br />COMPENSATION<br />Half of the 70 patients originally kept in Zenica have been released, because they are not deemed dangerous and their families have vouched for them and their care. But Marinic has been in prison illegally since the new criminal code came into effect in 2003.<br />The European Court of Human Rights ordered Bosnia in October to compensate him and he will receive 25,000 euros, but must stay put until a new facility is built.<br />Three other convicts who also brought suits against the state were released, because they were not considered to be dangerous.<br />"I want to go to a civilian hospital with better conditions," said Marinic, wearing a woollen cap like most other patients in the unit.<br />Everyone in Zenica, from the prison warden to guards to convicts, agrees the ruined mental health department is inadequate for prisoners with psychiatric problems.<br />"Tell me if this is a madhouse or a prison!" yelled Himzo Memic, sentenced to indefinite medical treatment for attempting to stab his girlfriend. "What are they going to do about this?" he asked, surrounded by a crowd of inmates.<br />Memic's group shares two rooms, prisoners' clothes hanging all around the iron beds. It is cold and dark and looks like an improvised military camp.<br />In the mental unit, one psychiatrist treats the patients and therapists spend all day with them, administering sedatives and drugs. For recreation they can use a segregated garden.<br />The rest of Zenica's 830 or so inmates sat on benches in prison parks on a sunny autumn day, some playing table-tennis or football, others working in an iron foundry or a joiner's workshop producing decorative wooden boxes for sale.<br />Niset Ramic is one of them. An ethnic Muslim jailed for 30 years for war crimes against Serbs, he said he feels almost at home in Zenica, where he has spent the past 16 years.<br />"I came here in 1992, when the guards still wore five-pointed red stars on their caps," he said, referring to a symbol of former socialist Yugoslavia.<br />Even if ethnic tensions persist in denying Marinic and his fellows proper treatment, Ramic said there were no clashes between the 16 regular prisoners convicted of war crimes: Muslims, Serbs and Croats coexist in calm.<br />"The brotherhood and unity still works here," he said.<br />(Editing by Adam Tanner, Peter Millership and Sara Ledwith)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-BOSNIA-PRISON.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/12/01/europe/OUKWD-UK-BOSNIA-PRISON.php</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGn2Xobrxvj0rJhlFV_X6rHsvlJ_dLx8qC-z2uWaGTjJT6Gzed3yhr7nsG9J-fkLlGAOVBdHuXxfOR7CP98ETlCvrLIBUqhriP1EexHP7g7VOCuy7sWQv0uhD68dDF8iSSLcO9BoOgfV0/s1600-h/DSC02364.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703826609911698" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGn2Xobrxvj0rJhlFV_X6rHsvlJ_dLx8qC-z2uWaGTjJT6Gzed3yhr7nsG9J-fkLlGAOVBdHuXxfOR7CP98ETlCvrLIBUqhriP1EexHP7g7VOCuy7sWQv0uhD68dDF8iSSLcO9BoOgfV0/s320/DSC02364.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong>German Embassy vehicle attacked in Kabul</strong><br />By Kirk Semple<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />KABUL: A suicide bomber detonated his payload of explosives in clogged traffic near a German Embassy vehicle Sunday, killing two Afghan bystanders and wounding three, the authorities said.<br />The road where the attack occurred passes in front of the Parliament building and is frequently traveled by convoys of government officials, foreign diplomats and security forces.<br />The blast perforated one side of the embassy vehicle, a white SUV, with dozens of shrapnel holes and punctured its tires, but its sole occupant, an Afghan employee of the embassy, escaped unharmed, a spokesman for the German Foreign Service said.<br />All the casualties were Afghan civilians, either in cars or passing by on foot, Afghan officials said.<br />Zabiula Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, said in a telephone interview that the insurgency was responsibility for the attack and that the bomber was from the southern province of Kandahar.<br />It was the second suicide attack in the capital in three days. The Taliban also took responsibility for a suicide car bombing on Thursday that killed four and wounded 17.<br />Babur Shah Hassas, a Web site manager for Parliament, said he was strolling with a friend about 2:30 p.m. when the attack occurred. He remembered seeing out of the corner of his eye the white SUV and a man on a bicycle - by some eyewitness accounts, the bomber was on a bicycle or a motorbike.<br />"Suddenly there was a big blast, and me and my friend fell down and it was all dark and there was smoke coming out of the cars and I was so depressed," Hassas, 23, recalled in English. He said that he and his friend, who was not hurt, lay on the ground for a while. But when he tried to get up, he realized he could not move his left leg.<br />A stranger - Hassas never learned his name - lifted him into a car and drove him to a hospital.<br />As he told his story, Hassas was laying on a gurney at the hospital, an intravenous tube in his arm, and doctors were preparing him for surgery to repair two fractures in his left leg and to remove a piece of shrapnel.<br />"I can't determine whether the purpose of this attack was to destroy poor Afghans like me or to destroy foreigners," he said, as the hospital staff wheeled him to the operating room.<br />Also on Sunday, two Afghan journalists who were kidnapped by the Taliban last week were released, an Afghan official said.<br />The journalists - Dawa Khan Menapal of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Azizullah Popal, who worked for a local radio station in Zabul Province - were kidnapped by the Taliban on Wednesday in Ghazni Province, south of Kabul, said Gulab Shah Alikheil, deputy governor of Zabul.<br />"They were freed through an effort by the elders of Zabul Province, Alikheil said. "The government did not intervene and we let the elders negotiate." He said both journalists were in good health.<br />Khalid Fazly and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/30afghan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/30afghan.php</a></div><div>***************</div><div><strong>German general breaks silence on Afghanistan</strong><br />By Judy Dempsey<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />BERLIN: Breaking with a military tradition of keeping silent about policy, a top German general has branded his country's efforts in Afghanistan a failure, singling out its poor record in training the Afghan police and allocating development aid.<br />The comments came from General Hans-Christoph Ammon, head of the army's elite special commando unit, or KSK, whose officers are in Afghanistan fighting alongside U.S. forces against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.<br />Germany was responsible for training the Afghan police, but the German Interior Ministry, led by the conservative Wolfgang Schäuble, has come under repeated criticism from the United States and other NATO allies for providing too few experts and inappropriate training.<br />The training scheme was "a miserable failure," Ammon told DPA, the German press agency, after describing the German record in Afghanistan to a gathering last week of a reservists' association. The government had provided a mere €12 million for training the Afghan Army and police while the United States has already given more than $1 billion, he said.<br />"At that rate, it would take 82 years to have a properly trained police force," he said. More damaging for Germany's reputation, Ammon said, was that its police-training mission was considered such a "disaster" that the United States and EU had taken over responsibility.<br />The Defense Ministry said Ammon was expressing his personal views. Even so, because such views are rare, security experts said they showed the level of frustration building among senior military officers over German reluctance to provide adequate financing for Afghan mission or even explain to the public why Germany has 4,500 soldiers there.<br />Neither Chancellor Angela Merkel nor her conservative defense minister, Franz-Josef Jung, have been willing to debate the issue publicly.<br />For the first time since German soldiers were sent to Afghanistan six years ago, Jung referred in November to the "Gefallene," or fallen soldiers, who had died there.<br />Until now, any German soldiers killed in Afghanistan were referred to as casualties. In addition, the word "Krieg," or war, has been banned from use in any Defense Ministry public statements or speeches, say advisers to the ministry.<br />"I keep saying that it is time the public was told why we are in Afghanistan, what is happening there and what we are doing there," said Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, general secretary of the Christian Social Union, the allied party of the Christian Democrats led by Merkel.<br />Merkel, who has visited Afghanistan just once in three years in office, said in an interview with the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that she was prepared to defend the mission in Afghanistan in the national election campaign next year. That could be a high-risk strategy given that the mission is highly unpopular with the public.<br />The foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat who will run against Merkel to become chancellor, supports the mission.<br />But as foreign minister, he has to strike a balance between defending the war and taking account of the unpopularity of it. The pacifist wing in his party opposes keeping German troops there, particularly given the increasing attacks.<br />Two Afghan civilians were killed Sunday by a suicide bomber after he had strapped explosives to his body, targeting a vehicle used by German military attachés, the Afghan police said. No Germans were wounded.<br />Merkel, who will give a major speech Monday at the congress of her Christian Democratic Union party, is coming under pressure from a small group of defense and foreign policy advisers inside and outside her party to address the subject of Afghanistan.<br />The matter is considered urgent because President-elect Barack Obama has made Afghanistan a foreign policy priority. NATO officials said last week that they were expecting the incoming U.S. administration to ask NATO allies to contribute more troops and experts in order to beat back the Taliban and train up an Afghan Army and police force.<br />Only then, Obama has said, can the Afghan forces take responsibility for the security of their own country.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/europe/germany.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/europe/germany.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Text of Indian prime minister's remarks</strong><br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />Following is the text of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's opening remarks at the All Party Meeting in New Delhi, as released by his office.<br />Esteemed Chairperson UPA, respected colleagues and friends. I thank you all for being here at such short notice.<br />The ordeal at Mumbai, which occupied the attention of the entire nation, has finally come to an end. All of us share the grief of those who have lost their loved ones in this dastardly and brutal attack and also the pain and anguish of those grievously wounded. We cannot lessen their grief. But we will do all we can to alleviate their suffering. I give you my solemn assurance that we will look after the needs of those who survive this horrible tragedy.<br />We salute the bravery of our security forces who fought the terrorists in exceptionally difficult circumstances. They tried their utmost to save innocent lives at great personal risk. Twenty officers and men made the ultimate sacrifice by laying down their lives. The entire nation owes a debt of gratitude to these men that we can never repay.<br />We have had terrorist attacks before also. But this attack was different. It was an attack by highly trained and well-armed terrorists targeting our largest city. They came with the explicit aim of killing large numbers of innocent civilians, including foreign visitors. They sought to destroy some of the best known symbols of our commercial capital.<br />We share the hurt of the people and their sense of anger and outrage. Several measures are already in place to deal with the situation. But clearly much more needs to be done and we are determined to take all necessary measures to overhaul the system.<br />We are further strengthening maritime and air security for which measures have been initiated. This will involve the Navy, the Coast Guard and the coastal police, as well as the Air Force and the Civil Aviation Ministry.<br />The anti-terrorist forces of the country will be further strengthened and streamlined. The National Security Guard, which is the principal anti-terrorist force of the country, will be given additional facilities and the size of the force is being augmented. Steps have also been initiated to establish another 4 NSG hubs in different parts of the country. Additionally, the special forces at the disposal of the Centre would be appropriately utilized in counter insurgency operations.<br />We have finalized a set of legal measures based on the recommendations of the Administrative Reforms Commission which includes the setting up of a Federal Investigating Agency.<br />In the face of this national threat and in the aftermath of this national tragedy, all of us from different political parties must rise above narrow political considerations and stand united. We should work together in the interest of the country at this critical juncture.<br />We should build a consensus on what needs to be done to strengthen the ability of our system to meet these threats. The terrorists and enemies of our nation must know that their actions unite rather than divide us.<br />I do hope that at the end of our discussions today we will be able to give our collective assurance to the nation that, across the political spectrum, we stand together at this hour. I look forward to hearing the views of each one of you.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/30text-singh.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/30text-singh.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>What they hate about Mumbai</strong><br />By Suketu Mehta<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />My bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai? There's something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.<br />Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. "Mumbai is a golden songbird," he said. It flies quick and sly, and you'll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird.<br />Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia. Bollywood movies are the most popular form of entertainment across the subcontinent. Through them, every Pakistani and Bangladeshi is familiar with the wedding-cake architecture of the Taj and the arc of the Gateway of India, symbols of the city that gives the industry its name. It is no wonder that one of the first things the Taliban did upon entering Kabul was to shut down the Bollywood video rental stores. The Taliban also banned, wouldn't you know it, the keeping of songbirds.<br />Bollywood dream-makers are shaken. "I am ashamed to say this," Amitabh Bachchan, superstar of a hundred action movies, wrote on his blog. "As the events of the terror attack unfolded in front of me, I did something for the first time and one that I had hoped never ever to be in a situation to do. Before retiring for the night, I pulled out my licensed .32 revolver, loaded it and put it under my pillow."<br />Mumbai is a "soft target," the terrorism analysts say. Anybody can walk into the hotels, the hospitals, the train stations, and start spraying with a machine gun. Where are the metal detectors, the random bag checks? In Mumbai, it's impossible to control the crowd. In other cities, if there's an explosion, people run away from it. In Mumbai, people run toward it - to help. Greater Mumbai takes in a million new residents a year. This is the problem, say the nativists. The city is just too hospitable. You let them in, and they break your heart.<br />In the Bombay I grew up in, your religion was a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. In my school, you were denominated by which cricketer or Bollywood star you worshiped, not which prophet. In today's Mumbai, things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.<br />And now it looks as if the latest terrorists were our neighbors, young men dressed not in Afghan tunics but in blue jeans and designer T-shirts. Being South Asian, they would have grown up watching the painted lady that is Mumbai in the movies: a city of flashy cars and flashier women. A pleasure-loving city, a sensual city. Everything that preachers of every religion thunder against.<br />In 1993, Hindu mobs burned people alive in the streets - for the crime of being Muslim in Mumbai. Now these young Muslim men murdered people in front of their families - for the crime of visiting Mumbai.<br />They attacked the luxury businessmen's hotels. They attacked the open-air Cafe Leopold, where backpackers of the world refresh themselves with cheap beer out of three-foot-high towers before heading out into India. Their drunken revelry, their shameless flirting, must have offended the righteous believers in the jihad.<br />They attacked the train station everyone calls V.T., the terminus for runaways and dreamers from all across India. And in the attack on the Chabad house, for the first time ever, it became dangerous to be Jewish in India.<br />The terrorists' message was clear: Stay away from Mumbai or you will get killed. Cricket matches with visiting English and Australian teams have been shelved. Japanese and Western companies have closed their Mumbai offices and prohibited their employees from visiting the city. Tour groups are canceling trips.<br />But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good home for all Mumbaikars, not just the denizens of $500-a-night hotel rooms. Dream not just of Bollywood stars, but of clean running water, humane mass transit, better toilets, a responsive government. Make a killing not in God's name but in the stock market, and then turn up the forbidden music and dance; work hard and party harder.<br />If the rest of the world wants to help, it should run toward the explosion. It should fly to Mumbai, and spend money. Where else are you going to be safe? New York? London? Madrid?<br />So I'm booking flights to Mumbai. I'm going to go get a beer at the Leopold, stroll over to the Taj for samosas, and watch a Bollywood movie at the Metro. Stimulus doesn't have to be just economic.<br />Suketu Mehta, a professor of journalism at New York University, is the author of "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edmehta.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edmehta.php</a></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Hard questions emerge as India mourns<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta and Keith Bradsher<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />MUMBAI: The top domestic security official resigned in disgrace on Sunday for the failure to thwart or quickly contain the horrific terrorist attacks in Mumbai last week, as India's government announced a raft of measures to bolster antiterrorism efforts and struggled to calibrate a response to what it views as Pakistani complicity.<br />The Bush administration, hoping to defuse the possibility of hostilities, announced it was sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to India this week "to stand in solidarity with the people of India as we all work together to hold these extremists accountable."<br />Top officials have suggested that groups based in Pakistan had some involvement in the attacks, but the officials have not blamed the Pakistan government. Among the options on the table for responding, officials and analysts said, are the suspension of diplomatic relations and a cross-border raid into Pakistan against suspected training camps for militants.<br />The security official, Shivraj Patil, the home minister, became the first senior official in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's administration to leave office over the Mumbai attacks, which have traumatized the nation for their audacity and have laid bare glaring deficiencies in India's intelligence and enforcement abilities. The pressures on the government are especially acute with elections only six months away.<br />While Indian officials insisted publicly that the mayhem was carried out by only 10 heavily armed men, there were new indications that others had been involved and that the attackers had at least some accomplices pre-positioned on the ground.<br />The three-day siege of Mumbai, the country's financial capital, ended Saturday with a death toll of at least 188, hundreds wounded and two famous five-star hotels, the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower and the Oberoi, where most of the killing took place, partly in ruins.<br />At least 28 of the dead were foreigners, including at least six Americans and eight Israelis killed at a Jewish religious center that had been seized by the attackers. It was stormed by elite Indian commandos.<br />Despite repeated assertions by Pakistan's government that it bore no responsibility, the attacks have raised the pitch of India-Pakistan tensions to their most dangerous level in years. Not since the December 2001 suicide attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, which India blamed on Pakistani groups, have there been such blunt Indian accusations about outlaws based across the border; that episode prompted the two countries to send their armies to the border, sparking fears of war between the nuclear neighbors.<br />On Sunday, a senior government official said Singh's administration would have to consider a range of measures to show toughness toward Pakistan. "The government is under pressure; we are taking steps," the official said. "We're not trying to say we're going to attack them. Short of that everything will have to be pursued."<br />The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the situation, said, "Certainly we are not going to sit back with Pakistan unleashing this terror on India."<br />Reuters quoted a senior police official as saying Sunday that the sole gunman captured alive had told the police he was a member of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba organization, blamed for attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir and elsewhere.<br />The government has not allowed outside access to the captive, who is said to have identified himself as Ajmal Amir Qasab, a Pakistani citizen who was wounded in the leg and was being treated at a military hospital.<br />An officer of the Anti-Terror Squad branch in Mumbai, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said the man had given inconsistent answers to questioning, sometimes saying there were 10 attackers, sometimes more than 10.<br />The officer also said that Anti-Terror Squad investigators believed there were accomplices who may have left weapons at the hotels for the gunmen, and that names and telephone numbers of five Mumbai residents were found among the cellphones and wallets of the attackers.<br />He also confirmed reports in the Indian press that a satellite phone used by the attackers had been used to call a phone number in the Pakistani city of Karachi during the assault.<br />The officer also disputed assertions in the Indian press that the attackers were Pakistani, saying they were of many nationalities, including Malaysian.<br />While there was no immediate suggestion of Pakistani-Indian hostilities, it is clear that India must carefully consider how to deal with its concerns about Pakistan. On the one hand, public pressure compels Singh's administration to take a tough stance, at least publicly. On the other hand, his government may not want to squander a chance at negotiating peace with Pakistan's elected civilian government.<br />In any event, the mere idea of Indian-Pakistani hostilities cannot bring much comfort to Washington, which needs Pakistan's attention on curbing radical groups on the Afghan border and can hardly afford another crisis between Pakistan and India.<br />At the same time, particularly with elections looming, Indian officials are keenly aware of the need to shore up confidence in the domestic security apparatus.<br />On Sunday evening, Singh said his government would expand the National Security Guards, the elite antiterrorist unit that sent commandos to flush out the attackers from the two hotels and the headquarters of a Jewish religious organization.<br />Singh also said in a written statement that discussions were under way to establish a federal agency of investigation to streamline the work of state and national agencies, and fortify maritime and air security. The police have said the attackers came by boat. The Indian government had been warned as far back as March 2007 of infiltration by sea.<br />"Clearly, much more needs to be done," Singh said, "and we are determined to take all necessary measures to overhaul the system."<br />The chairman of the Tata Group, the conglomerate that owns the Taj hotel, asserted that it had been warned about the possibility of a terrorist attack and had taken some measures, but that the assailants knew exactly how to penetrate the hotel's security.<br />"They came from somewhere in the back; they planned everything," the chairman, Ratan Tata, said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN. "They went through the kitchen; they knew what they were doing."<br />In a telephone interview from the capital, the junior home minister, Shriprakash Jaiswal, said the government would double the size of the 7,400-strong National Security Guards. The force was created after the 1984 siege of the Golden Temple in Amritsar by Sikh separatist militants.<br />The guard's Black Cat commandos emerged as heroes last week, having slithered down ropes from helicopters and rescued trapped civilians as gunmen marauded through the hotels.<br />But uncomfortable questions have been raised about whether the guard could have begun its operations sooner and why it took its commandos so long to defeat the attackers.<br />In Israel, while leaders publicly praised India for its response to the attack, questions also were raised about whether the commando mission to rescue hostages in the Jewish center, Nariman House, had been botched.<br />Witnesses have compared the destruction inside the center to an earthquake, with floors, walls and stairwells blasted apart by two days of shooting, explosions and grenades.<br />The head of the guard, J. K. Dutt, confirmed on Sunday in a news conference that most of the civilians had been killed in the hotels before the guard's operation began. His troops' first obligation, he told reporters, was to make sure that there was "no loss of innocent lives."<br />One commando, Sunil Kumar Yadav, who was recovering at a hospital from bullet wounds in his leg, echoed that he was instructed to be extremely cautious inside the Taj hotel, because foreign guests were inside.<br />He said the commandos could not determine the exact locations of the gunmen, nor their total number, in such a large sprawling hotel — until they came out with guns blazing. It was dark and smoky from the countless explosions inside, he said, and visibility was poor.<br />Explaining the nearly 60 hours that passed before the Taj was cleared entirely, Dutt said that the terrorists were "well trained" and more familiar with the hotel than expected.<br />In addition, the Taj was littered with unexploded grenades, which had to be defused. He said the last three gunmen at the Taj eluded capture for so long by repeatedly setting fires.<br />On one side of the Taj, workers boarded up the sidewalk at one of the city's most exclusive shopping arcades, barricading the now-improbable row of luxury labels, from Zegna to Louis Vuitton.<br />Remu Javeri, owner of Joy Shoes, the only Indian boutique there, stood across the street. He had practically grown up at the Taj, he said, where his family opened the store before independence in 1947. "I know every single waiter in here," he said. "I've grown up with them. I've lost some very good friends."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/mumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/mumbai.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Can U.S. prevent an Indian military response to Mumbai attacks?<br /></strong>By Mark Mazzetti and Peter Baker<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: As evidence mounts that the Mumbai attacks may have originated on Pakistani soil, U.S. officials' aggressive campaign to strike at militants in Pakistan may complicate their efforts to prevent an Indian military response, which could lead to all-out war between the nuclear-armed enemies.<br />Pakistan insisted Saturday that it had not been involved in the attacks and pledged to take action against militants based in Pakistan if they were found to be implicated.<br />"Our hands are clean," the Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, said at a news conference. "We have nothing to be ashamed of. Any entity or group involved in the ghastly act, the Pakistan government will proceed against it."<br />The government called an emergency cabinet meeting Saturday, a day after Indian officials suggested that a militant group with Pakistani ties, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible for the attacks.<br />But while the civilian leaders, including President Asif Ali Zardari, called for calm Saturday, Pakistani security officials warned that the Pakistani Army might still send troops to the Indian border in short order.<br />In December 2001, when Pakistani militants attacked the Indian Parliament, and again last summer, when militants aided by Pakistani spies bombed the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan, the Bush administration used aggressive diplomacy to reduce anger in New Delhi.<br />But this time the Indian government might not be so receptive to the American message - and that could derail the coming Obama administration's hopes of creating a broader, regional response to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and the Taliban.<br />Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has already faced months of criticism from political rivals in India about his government's decision not to respond forcefully to past acts of terrorism, and domestic anger over the carnage in Mumbai has increased the pressure on his government to strike back.<br />Officials in New Delhi might also feel less compelled to follow calls for a controlled response from the Bush administration, which has steadily escalated a campaign of airstrikes on Pakistani soil using remotely piloted aircraft. The Pentagon has even sent Special Operations forces into Pakistan to attack what it believed were militant targets, partly in an attempt to stop the militants from crossing the border into Afghanistan, where they are helping fuel an increasingly robust Taliban insurgency.<br />The White House has adopted a clear position as it seeks to justify those attacks: If a country cannot deal with a terrorism problem on its own, the United States reserves the right to act unilaterally.<br />Should it become clear that the men who rampaged through Mumbai trained in Pakistan, even if the Pakistani government had no hand in the operation, what will stop the Indians from adopting the same position?<br />"In some ways, it doesn't even matter whether this attack was hatched in some office in Islamabad," said Paul Kapur, a South Asia expert at Stanford University. "The provocation in this case is orders of magnitude more than anything that's happened before."<br />Even if the Bush administration can keep the situation from escalating, President-elect Barack Obama will find his administration trying to broker cooperation between two angry and suspicious regional powers.<br />An important element of Obama's plan to reduce militancy in Pakistan and turn around the war in Afghanistan has been to push for a reconciliation between India and Pakistan, so that the Pakistani government could focus its energy on the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan that are controlled by Islamic extremists.<br />Obama's advisers have spent the past few days watching the unfolding crisis for hints about how the situation might look after Jan. 20. While they said they understood that the tensions unleashed by the Mumbai attacks might hobble the new president's aspirations, they held out hope that the attacks might, instead, open the door to increased cooperation between Pakistan and India to weed out militants intent on more attacks.<br />Some in the Bush administration, as well as outside experts, agree that an Indian military response is not a foregone conclusion. Singh's government has long believed that the instability caused by a conflict with Pakistan would act as a brake on the rapid economic growth India has enjoyed. Singh has also seen Pakistan's new civilian government as a hopeful departure from the militarism of former President Pervez Musharraf's government.<br />Washington could use Singh's past hopes for better relations to try to shape a modulated Indian response.<br />Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, said one possibility was that the Indian government could decide to strike Kashmiri militant training facilities in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, rather than facilities in the heart of the disputed territory of Kashmir, where the Pakistani government has a greater presence.<br />Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani author whose work has been studied by the Obama team, said that any hint of a military mobilization by the Indians would give the Pakistani military the excuse it wanted to shift forces away from its western border areas and back to its eastern border.<br />If that happens, he said, it could cause a repeat of 2002, when a standoff between the nations forced the United States to turn at least some of its attention away from fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda to work to avoid war between Pakistan and India.<br />That time, the impetus was an assault on Parliament in December 2001 that India said was the work of Kashmiri militants.<br />So far, Obama has tried to walk a careful line during the latest crisis, expressing support and concern without appearing to get in the way of President George W. Bush. Even as Obama was preparing to have several dozen guests for Thanksgiving dinner Thursday, a foreign policy adviser, Mark Lippert, and a CIA official arrived at his house in Chicago to brief him on the latest from Mumbai, according to an aide.<br />Obama also called Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice three times over the past few days seeking information. But he waited until after Bush called Singh to place his own call to the prime minister late Friday night. (The call was patched through the State Department operations center.)<br />Advisers to the president-elect said that while they were not aware of everything the Bush administration had done during the crisis, they knew of nothing that Obama would have necessarily done differently.<br />Given the disastrous implications of any armed conflict between India and Pakistan, it is not hard to envision the Obama administration following a similar playbook to the one the Bush administration followed during the two countries' previous flare-ups.<br />As some experts see it, though, there is a danger in the United States' continuing to intervene directly when tensions between India and Pakistan escalate.<br />"If both sides think they can afford to go closer to the edge because the U.S. is always going to keep them from going over," said Kapur of Stanford, "then they are more likely to edge up to the precipice."<br />Jane Perlez and Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/terror.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/terror.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>India and Pakistan and the aftermath of Mumbai<br /></strong>Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />It should not be hard to trace the assault on India's commercial center to the masterminds behind the operation. Indeed, Indian officials have already said they have evidence pointing to Pakistan as the place of origin.<br />Consequently, there is a grave danger that the carnage in Mumbai could provoke much higher levels of violence across a wide arc of South Asia. This is what will happen if Indian and Pakistani leaders allow the Mumbai atrocities to undo the recent rapprochement between their two governments.<br />Those leaders will come under intense pressure to stoke nationalist passions. They need to exercise restraint.<br />The terrorists' barely concealed ties to Pakistan suggest that a key objective of the Mumbai assault was to fan the dying flames of Indian-Pakistani conflict. Which is all the more reason for both governments to avoid falling into that treacherous trap.<br />For the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, the first priority should be to make a crucial distinction for the Indian public. Singh has blamed the murders in Mumbai on "external forces." What he ought to explain to his people is that even if there were Pakistanis among the terrorists, that does not mean they were acting on orders from Pakistan's elected civilian government.<br />India's leaders know that extremist Pakistani groups as well as Al Qaeda have a strong interest in provoking fresh hostilities between Pakistan and India. A revival of India-Pakistan tension could relieve much of the domestic pressure on those groups; it could justify a renewal of support for the Taliban on the part of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence; and it could return the domestic focus in Pakistan to the plight of Muslims in Indian-ruled Kashmir.<br />For their part, Pakistan's leaders need to cooperate unstintingly with India's investigation into the Mumbai attacks. The early signs from Pakistan's prime minister, Asif Ali Zardari, have been encouraging. But the key determinant of the effect that the terrorist attacks will have on India-Pakistan relations will be the extent of honest cooperation extended to Indian investigators by Pakistan's intelligence agency.<br />And if it turns out that the ISI - which sponsored the Taliban and other Islamist militants in the past - was implicated in the Mumbai savagery, Zardari's government will have to come clean and punish the criminals in its midst.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edmumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edmumbai.php</a></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Terrorism suddenly gets personal for many Indians</strong><br />By Anand Giridharadas<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />VERLA, India: This was not terror - not as Indians understood it.<br />This was war.<br />The killers stormed the streets of Mumbai, India's financial capital, with machine guns and bags of grenades. They did not strike with the terrorist's fleeting anonymity. Their work was fastidiously deliberate. It went into a second day, then a third. They took time to ask your nationality and vocation. Then they spared you, or herded you elsewhere, or shot you in the back of your skull.<br />As a surprise attack became a struggle over several days, the burden of responding transferred from the police to soldiers. The language was of war: television anchors spoke of buildings "sanitized" and "flushed out," of "final assaults" and "collateral damage." Helicopters hovered over Mumbai, and commandos dropped onto roofs. The grainy television imagery suggested not so much a terrorist attack as the shapeless, omnidirectional chaos of Iraq.<br />While the hostage situation endured, more was unknown than known.<br />Rumors flew, unconfirmed. Did you hear? They shot all the women at the hotel switchboard. Did you hear? They executed a young mother and her children. Did you hear? They sent a hostage out of the building to get food for their attackers. Truth was complicated; everything blurred.<br />But what slowly became clear was that this was an attack of especial barbarism, because it was so personal. It was unlike the many strikes of the last many months, bombs left in thronging markets or trains or cars: acts of shrinking cowardice. The new men were not cowards. They seemed to prolong the fight as long as they could. They killed face to face; they wanted to see and speak to their victims; they could taste the violence they made.<br />A good story has characters, and a terrorist attack without characters tempts a society to forget. A wave of recent Indian attacks, more anonymous and less dramatic, offered little focus for public opinion.<br />For better or worse, the public has its characters now. As the weekend arrived, it was not clear who the men were, even as the Indian government hinted at Pakistani connections. But even without learning their names, it was so easy to imagine them this time, combing the hallways, asking life-or-death questions, pulling women and children from their rooms at midnight.<br />For a country with no dearth of terrorism in its past, it is perhaps the fleshy immediacy of these men and their deeds that makes this a defining assault - one that separates all attacks of the past from those yet to come. In the television studios, on the roads, in the anguished phone calls of friends to friends, Indians said the words again and again: This is our 9/11.<br />"It is an Indian variant of 9/11, and today India needs to respond the way America did," Ravi Shankar Prasad, a member of Parliament from the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party, said on television.<br />But if this was India's 9/11, it seemed so only to certain citizens, and not, apparently, to their government.<br />It took 18 hours for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to come on television. He is a reflective, decent man. But he was emotionless, his mouth moving and nothing else. He knows all too well the history of blaming Pakistan and its militants for attacks, only to come up short on evidence. He said the attacks "probably" had a foreign hand. His most specific idea was "police reform" and the "tightening" of laws to close "loopholes." He called for "peace and harmony."<br />His temperateness helped to keep the ever-present threat of religious riots at bay. But it also seemed to misread the mood of a country that wanted it to be 9/11 - if not in the sense of war and conquest, then in the sense of instant clarity, of the simple feeling that an era had ended and that enough was, at last, enough.<br />When the video of Singh's address was posted on YouTube, many said online what others were saying on the ground. He was "expressionless," a "brilliant teacher but no leader," an "ineffective puppet." One user wrote: "He should have given a strong warning and threat to terrorists and those who support them. Unfortunately he is too soft."<br />Nor did the government's retaliation inspire. The commandos who came at long last and saved the day were heroic, working room by room to retake the two besieged hotels. But India learned thereby that Mumbai, with its 19 million people, lacks commandos of its own. They were flown in from New Delhi.<br />Meanwhile, "army sources" leaked to the press that they had warned the government of an impending attack days before, only to be ignored, as usual.<br />"The scale, intensity and level of orchestration of terror attacks in Mumbai put one thing beyond doubt: India is effectively at war and it has deadly enemies in its midst," The Times of India, a leading English-language daily, wrote in an editorial published Friday. "The question now," it added, "is whether the nation can show any serious degree of resolve and coordination in confronting terror."<br />The government, in its defense, walks a fine line. Show too little resolve, and attacks happen. Show too much, and you galvanize hatred domestically and exacerbate tensions abroad, notably with Pakistan.<br />"It is extremely important to understand that the criminal activities of a minuscule group, even if it turns out to have home-grown elements, say nothing about Indian Muslims in general, who are an integral part of the country's social fabric," Amartya Sen, the Harvard economist and Indian-born Nobel laureate, wrote in an e-mail message.<br />With their brutality, their sophistication, their links to the ideology of terrorism elsewhere, these attacks seemed to usher in a new day. Late in the week, as the gunfire crackle trailed off, many Indians appeared to long for a sign that this attack would muster new will.<br />A text message moving among Mumbaikars expressed the uniqueness of the now: "Brothers and sisters, it's time to wake up and do something for the country - however little - related to this or not - start today and continue it through the years - do not forget as easily as we are used to forgetting."<br />Anand Giridharadas, a Page Two columnist for the International Herald Tribune, recently completed three and a half years as a correspondent in Mumbai for that newspaper and The New York Times.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/scene.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/scene.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>Nicholas D. Kristof: Terrorism that's personal</strong><br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD Pakistan: Terrorism in this part of the world usually means bombs exploding or hotels burning, as the latest horrific scenes from Mumbai attest. Yet alongside the brutal public terrorism that fills the television screens, there is an equally cruel form of terrorism that gets almost no attention and thrives as a result: flinging acid on a woman's face to leave her hideously deformed.<br />Here in Pakistan, I've been investigating such acid attacks, which are commonly used to terrorize and subjugate women and girls in a swath of Asia from Afghanistan through Cambodia (men are almost never attacked with acid). Because women usually don't matter in this part of the world, their attackers are rarely prosecuted and acid sales are usually not controlled. It's a kind of terrorism that becomes accepted as part of the background noise in the region.<br />This month in Afghanistan, men on motorcycles threw acid on a group of girls who dared to attend school. One of the girls, a 17-year-old named Shamsia, told reporters from her hospital bed: "I will go to my school even if they kill me. My message for the enemies is that if they do this 100 times, I am still going to continue my studies."<br />When I met Naeema Azar, a Pakistani woman who had once been an attractive, self-confident real estate agent, she was wearing a black cloak that enveloped her head and face. Then she removed the covering, and I flinched.<br />Acid had burned away her left ear and most of her right ear. It had blinded her and burned away her eyelids and most of her face, leaving just bone.<br />Six skin grafts with flesh from her leg have helped, but she still cannot close her eyes or her mouth; she will not eat in front of others because it is too humiliating to have food slip out as she chews.<br />"Look at Naeema, she has lost her eyes," sighed Shahnaz Bukhari, a Pakistani activist who founded an organization to help such women, and who was beginning to tear up. "She makes me cry every time she comes in front of me."<br />Azar had earned a good income and was supporting her three small children when she decided to divorce her husband, Azar Jamsheed, a fruit seller who rarely brought money home. He agreed to end the (arranged) marriage because he had his eye on another woman.<br />After the divorce was final, Jamsheed came to say goodbye to the children, and then pulled out a bottle and poured acid on his wife's face, according to her account and that of their son.<br />"I screamed," Azar recalled. "The flesh of my cheeks was falling off. The bones on my face were showing, and all of my skin was falling off."<br />Neighbors came running, as smoke rose from her burning flesh and she ran about blindly, crashing into walls. Jamsheed was never arrested, and he has since disappeared. (I couldn't reach him for his side of the story.)<br />Azar has survived on the charity of friends and with support from Bukhari's group, the Progressive Women's Association (www.pwaisbd.org). Bukhari is raising money for a lawyer to push the police to prosecute Jamsheed, and to pay for eye surgery that - with a skilled surgeon - might be able to restore sight to one eye.<br />Bangladesh has imposed controls on acid sales to curb such attacks, but otherwise it is fairly easy in Asia to walk into a shop and buy sulfuric or hydrochloric acid suitable for destroying a human face.<br />Acid attacks and wife-burnings are common in parts of Asia because the victims are the most voiceless in these societies: They are poor and female. The first step is simply for the world to take note, to give voice to these women.<br />Since 1994, Bukhari has documented 7,800 cases of women who were deliberately burned, scalded or subjected to acid attacks, just in the Islamabad area. In only 2 percent of those cases was anyone convicted.<br />For the last two years, Senators Joe Biden and Richard Lugar have co-sponsored an International Violence Against Women Act, which would adopt a range of measures to spotlight such brutality and nudge foreign governments to pay heed to it. Let's hope that with Biden's new influence the bill will pass in the next Congress.<br />That might help end the silence and culture of impunity surrounding this kind of terrorism.<br />The most haunting part of my visit with Azar, aside from seeing her face, was a remark by her 12-year-old son, Ahsan Shah, who lovingly leads her around everywhere. He told me that in one house where they stayed for a time after the attack, a man upstairs used to beat his wife every day and taunt her, saying: "You see the woman downstairs who was burned by her husband? I'll burn you just the same way."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edkristof.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edkristof.php</a></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Twelve die in Iran from homemade liquor<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />TEHRAN: Twelve people in southern Iran have died after drinking homemade liquor and dozens more have been blinded or are in a serious condition, health workers in the Islamic Republic said in remarks published Sunday.<br />Alcohol is banned in the Islamic Republic, which has enforced Islamic sharia law since its 1979 Islamic revolution.<br />The tiny minority of Iran's Christians, who mainly live in northern Iran, are permitted to make alcohol for personal consumption.<br />"Out of 92 who were poisoned from drinking homemade alcohol and hospitalised, 12 people died," said Farshid Abedi, head of Hormuzgan medical school, according to Hambastegi newspaper. He added that the dead were aged between 29 and 42.<br />Hormuzgan province is in south Iran. Abedi did not identify the religion of the victims.<br />Other newspapers carried similar reports.<br />The first patient came to hospital Tuesday, Abedi said, adding that four had been blinded and 69 people aged between 29 and 45 were in a critical state, with nine in a coma.<br />At least some of the victims had been at a wedding party.<br />(Reporting by Parisa Hafezi; Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Louise Ireland)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-ALCOHOL.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-ALCOHOL.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Attackers expose luxury hotels' vulnerabilities</strong><br />By Keith Bradsher<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />MUMBAI: Just as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have had a lasting effect on aircraft cockpit security, with reinforced doors separating pilots from passengers, the deadly terrorist attacks that started Wednesday at the Oberoi and Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotels here could leave an enduring imprint on the design and procedures of luxury hotels.<br />With the death toll approaching 200, and with more bodies still being found at the Taj, the attacks have underlined the vulnerability of five-star hotels to determined attacks by determined gunmen armed with military assault rifles, as well as the attractiveness of such targets to terrorists.<br />P.R.S. Oberoi, chairman of the Oberoi Group, said that he had actually directed his company's hotels to step up security two months ago after a truck driver crashed into the Islamabad Marriott and detonated a bomb that killed more than 50 people and left a crater six meters, or 20 feet, wide. The Oberoi banned anyone from parking in front of its Mumbai hotel, for fear that a car bomb could destroy the glass wall at the front of the lobby - a risk at many hotels.<br />"I think all hotels are vulnerable - all hotels have glass doors when you enter," Oberoi said Saturday night at a news conference.<br />The Oberoi Group had no warning of the attack here, however, Oberoi said, questioning what any hotel operator could do to withstand such an assault. "The authorities have to help us," he said, by preventing such attacks from occurring at all.<br />The killings also come at a time of already declining demand for luxury accommodation because of the global economic downturn. Hotels in India are also suffering as many companies have slowed investments in the country and have even sold Indian real estate and shares.<br />Terrorist attacks in other cities have affected tourism, but the duration of the effect has depended mainly on public perceptions of the likelihood of another attack. London bounced back quickly from the public transport attacks on July 7, 2005, while Bali took several years to recover from the bombings there on Oct. 12, 2002.<br />Particularly in India, hotels are likely to become much more cautious about security policies, said S.S. Mukherji, vice chairman of EIH, an Oberoi Group subsidiary. "The concept of hospitality in this country is going to change," he said.<br />Michael Coldrick, a London security professional and a former explosives specialist with Scotland Yard, said hotels may need to start screening guests and monitoring their behavior during hotel visits, and to brief national and local security forces regularly on their layout.<br />"Security in the hotel business is a fine balance between effective security measures and the convenience of hotel customers, becoming more intrusive as the threat increases," Coldrick said.<br />The Oberoi and the old wing of the Taj hotel, where most of the fighting took place, both have high, central atriums. After throwing grenades and directing considerable automatic weapons fire at staff members and diners in ground-floor lobbies and restaurants, the attackers at each hotel ascended the atriums.<br />This allowed them to start hunting down guests while dropping grenades and shooting at commandos below who tried to engage them in combat.<br />The Oberoi Group employs many plainclothes security officers in its hotels, but these are unarmed, Oberoi said. Obtaining a license for even a single officer to carry a gun is extremely difficult in India, which has tight gun control laws.<br />Yet even security guards armed with handguns might hesitate to resist an assault by heavily armed terrorists who have a detailed knowledge of the hotel's layout, as was the case at the Oberoi and Taj.<br />J.K. Dutt, director general of the Indian National Security Guard, the commando force that took the lead in the fighting, said Sunday in a televised news conference that the hardest terrorist to attack in the Taj hotel was one who ascended a spiral staircase and took up a position behind an extremely thick pillar that was part of the 105-year-old building's original structure.<br />Particularly at the Taj, the attackers seemed to have a detailed knowledge of the building's layout, Dutt said. They kept moving among large halls with multiple entrances, not allowing themselves to be cornered in rooms with no other exit.<br />By contrast, the commandos and the police had old blueprints of the massive, labyrinthine hotel that did not clearly show how passageways were connected or blocked or recent construction, Dutt said.<br />Coldrick said that the police and first-response agencies should be working with the hotel industry to devise crisis action plans that would include computer programs detailing all internal and external aspects of the hotel building structure. For example, a pre-recorded DVD walk-through could be used to brief special forces' assault teams so that they would know what to expect.<br />Terrorism concerns could have one small benefit for hotel companies. Many hotels have the best views from the front rooms, and travelers often demand these.<br />But experienced travelers concerned about terrorism now ask for rooms on the back of buildings, where they could be farther from any explosion in the lobby. Car bombs and truck bombs are also likely to do more damage to the front of the building because that is where the driveways are typically located, as was the case in the Jakarta Marriott bombing on Aug. 5, 2003.<br />Customers who ask for rooms in the back of a building can help a hotel balance demand for different rooms and keep more travelers happy.<br />Hotels may also ask staff members to keep a closer eye on customers. At some point, Coldrick said, "we might see cleaning ladies with explosives detectors."<br />Heather Timmons contributed reporting from New Delhi.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/hotel.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/hotel.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>U.S.-Iraqi pact has many uncertainties</strong><br />By Steven Lee Myers<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The security agreements between Iraq and the United States mark the beginning of the end of the war. They are only the beginning, though, and the terms of the agreements create uncertainties that could disrupt the smooth withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.<br />The agreements - a broad "strategic framework" and a more detailed security pact that were approved Thursday by the Iraqi Parliament - set a deadline that critics of the war have long wanted. They require that all U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq no later than Dec. 31, 2011, but they offer no timetable for withdrawals and in theory could add three more years to a war that has already lasted five and a half.<br />The United States has also agreed to remove all combat forces from Iraqi cities and villages by the end of June, though the agreements remain silent on what constitutes "combat" troops and where exactly they will move. Those decisions have been left to a Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee, a body of Americans and Iraqis that could prove to be as ungainly as its acronym, Jmocc.<br />The committee will have the authority to approve U.S. military operations, the use of bases and facilities, the detention of Iraqis by U.S. forces and even - in rare cases, it would seem - the prosecution of U.S. troops accused of "grave premeditated felonies" committed while off duty and off base. Any number of circumstances could strain cooperation and even lead to conflict.<br />"Question marks remain in the agreement concerning freedom of action for U.S. soldiers, vague security commitments and protection of Iraqi assets," Travis Sharp, a defense analyst at the Council for a Livable World, an advocacy group, wrote in a statement after Parliament voted.<br />The council has long opposed the war, but tellingly, it expressed support for the agreements. The reason is that the vagueness of some of the terms and definitions also gives President-elect Barack Obama a fair amount of flexibility to carry out his campaign promises to end the war.<br />That opponents of the war support the agreements is a victory for President George W. Bush, albeit a mixed one. It is also a vindication of Obama's insistence on establishing a timetable to withdraw, forcing the Americans and the Iraqis to contemplate a time without foreign troops there.<br />Already U.S. commanders have begun considering how to accelerate withdrawals of combat brigades on a schedule much closer to Obama's than seemed possible a year ago. At the same time, the agreements leave room for keeping in place a larger contingent than Obama's supporters might have envisioned, with tens of thousands of U.S. troops remaining in roles including training and other support, at least for the time being.<br />Brooke Anderson, a policy adviser and spokeswoman for Obama's transition office, welcomed Iraq's approval of the agreements, saying that the Obama team was "encouraged to see progress" in establishing the conditions for a U.S. presence beyond the expiration of the UN mandate at the end of the year.<br />The reason the agreements are a victory for Bush is that his administration has effectively negotiated an end to a costly and widely unpopular war that was begun in 2003 with several rationales, the most alarming of which - eliminating unconventional weapons supposedly held by Saddam Hussein - has since been discredited.<br />In the waning months of his presidency, Bush had to drop his initial opposition to any firm deadlines for U.S. withdrawal - deadlines that Obama urged on the campaign trial - and agree to Iraqi demands to have a greater and greater say in the country's governance in the meantime.<br />"Given where we were in January 2007, we have seen an almost unthinkable pace of progress on political, economic and security issues," Bush's spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said in a statement, describing the agreements as evidence of the success of the president's strategy. "So much so that the improved conditions allowed us to come to this mutual agreement with a sovereign Iraq that is solving its problems in the political process, not with guns and bombs."<br />The concessions to Iraqi sovereignty that Bush accepted have raised concerns among prominent Democrats in the U.S. Congress, including Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Ike Skelton, his counterpart in the House of Representatives.<br />But any withdrawal from Iraq was inevitably going to accompany stronger assertions of Iraqi sovereignty and thus an uncertain period of transition in which real operational control passes from the military of the United States to that of Iraq.<br />Article 9 of the agreement governing security forces, for example, gives Iraq control of its airspace for the first time since the first Gulf war but goes on to say that Iraq may request "temporary support" from the United States.<br />Still unclear is how many U.S. forces are expected to remain between now and the deadline for withdrawal, and whether any could stay beyond then. What is clear is that beginning on Jan. 1, when the agreements go into effect, U.S.-led operations in Iraq will be conducted under far greater restraints.<br />The history of the war suggests that security gains are reversible, that whatever political reconciliation unfolds will be punctuated by eruptions of violence, that U.S. forces will continue for some time to oversee an ethnic and sectarian patchwork that could quickly devolve into civil war.<br />As part of the effort to win passage from Parliament, the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki also agreed to hold a national referendum next year on the agreements. A vote against them would put the U.S. forces then in Iraq - almost certainly more than 100,000 troops - in a legal limbo without the UN mandate the agreements are intended to replace at the end of this year.<br />"It is quite apparent that the Bush administration will be leaving the Obama administration with a messy, complicated and unstable situation in Iraq," said the National Security Network, a policy group made up mostly of Democrats who have sharply criticized Bush's policies.<br />It has also left Obama a way out.<br />Top cleric expresses concerns<br />Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shiite cleric, has expressed concern about the security pact with the United States, fearing it gives too much power to the Americans and does not protect Iraqi sovereignty, The Associated Press reported Saturday from Baghdad, citing an official at Sistani's office. He stopped short of outright rejection, however.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/news/pact.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/news/pact.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>Thomas L. Friedman: The Iraq Obama inherits</strong><br />By Thomas L. Friedman<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />Here's a story you don't see very often. Iraq's highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.<br />That's not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals, both Kurdish and Arab, defending al-Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and a lot of press freedom. I can't imagine any other Arab country today where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel - and intellectuals would openly defend him in the press.<br />In the case of Iraq, though, the federal high court, in a unanimous decision, vacated the Parliament's rescinding of Alusi's immunity, with the decision delivered personally by Chief Justice Medhat al-Mahmoud. The decision explained that although a 1950s-era law made traveling to Israel a crime punishable by death, Iraq's new Constitution establishes freedom to travel. Therefore the Parliament's move was "illegal and unconstitutional because the current constitution does not prevent citizens from traveling to any country in the world," Abdul-Sattar Bayrkdar, spokesman for the court, told The Associated Press. The judgment even made the Parliament speaker responsible for the expenses of the court and the defense counsel!<br />I don't think it's reasonable to expect Iraq to have relations with Israel anytime soon, but the fact that it may be developing an independent judiciary is good news. It's a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries. And it's a reminder that a decent outcome may still be possible in Iraq, especially now that the Parliament has endorsed the U.S.-Iraqi plan for a 2011 withdrawal of American troops.<br />Al Qaeda has not been fully defeated in Iraq; suicide bombings are still an almost daily reality. But it has been dealt a severe blow, which I believe is one reason the jihadists - those brave warriors who specialize in killing women and children and defenseless tourists - have turned their attention to softer targets like India.<br />Just as they tried to stoke a Shiite-Sunni civil war in Iraq, and failed, they are now trying to stoke a Hindu-Muslim civil war in India.<br />If Iraq can keep improving - still uncertain - and become a place where Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites can write their own social contract and live together with a modicum of stability, it could one day become a strategic asset for the United States in the post-9/11 effort to promote different politics in the Arab-Muslim world.<br />How so? Iraq is a geopolitical space that for the last three decades of the 20th century was dominated by a Baathist dictatorship, which, though it provided a bulwark against Iranian expansion, did so at the cost of a regime that murdered tens of thousands of its own people and attacked three of its neighbors.<br />In 2003, the United States, under President Bush, invaded Iraq to change the regime. Terrible postwar execution and unrelenting attempts by Al Qaeda to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war turned the Iraqi geopolitical space into a different problem - a maelstrom of violence. A huge price was paid by Iraqis and Americans. This was the Iraq that Barack Obama ran against.<br />In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from moderate Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda and Iraqi Shiites against pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability. There is now, for the first time, a chance that a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.<br />That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops - because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty - but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.<br />I'm sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did - that he'll wait forever for them to sort out their politics - while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.<br />If he can pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party's national security credentials than that.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edfriedman.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edfriedman.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>Roger Cohen: Olmert to Obama: Think again</strong><br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Imagine Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister, saying this to Barack Obama:<br />"The United States has been wrong to write Israel a blank check every year; wrong to turn a blind eye to the settlements in the West Bank; wrong not to be more explicit about the need to divide Jerusalem; wrong to equip us with weaponry so sophisticated we now believe military might is the answer to all our problems; and wrong in not helping us reach out to Syria. Your prospective secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said during the campaign that 'The United States stands with Israel, now and forever.' Well, that's not good enough. You need to stand against us sometimes so we can avoid the curse of eternal militarism."<br />Perhaps that seems unimaginable. But Olmert has already said something close to this. In a frank September interview with the Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, reprinted this month by The New York Review of Books, the Israeli leader chose to exit with a mea culpa for his country's policies.<br />Those policies have been encouraged by the Bush administration, whose war on terror was embraced by the Israeli government as a means to frame Israel's confrontation with the Palestinians as part of the same struggle. No matter that Al Qaeda and the Palestinian national movement are distinct. The facile conflation got Bush in lock step with whatever Israel did.<br />So, by saying Israel has been wrong, Olmert was also saying the United States has been wrong, even if he never mentioned America.<br />What Olmert, who appears on the verge of indictment for fraud, did say in his "soul-searching on behalf of the nation of Israel" was that he had made "mistakes" as a former right-wing hard-liner and that military power will not deliver his 60-year-old country from existential anguish.<br />"We could contend with any of our enemies or against all our enemies combined and win," Olmert said. "The question that I ask myself is, what happens when we win? First of all, we'd have to pay a painful price. And after we paid the price, what would we say to them? 'Let's talk."'<br />Olmert is now convinced of the need to settle with the Palestinians and Syria through giving up parts of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The fact such views come from a former Likudnik is a measure of how the political ground has shifted in Israel ahead of elections early next year.<br />I think Olmert's words should be emblazoned on the wall of Hillary Clinton's eighth-floor State Department office: "We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the territories. Some percentage of these territories would remain in our hands, but we must give the Palestinians the same percentage elsewhere - without this, there will be no peace."<br />Asked if this included a compromise on Jerusalem, Olmert said: "Including Jerusalem."<br />He also declared: "I'd like to know if there's a serious person in the State of Israel who believes that we can make peace with the Syrians without, in the end, giving up the Golan Heights." Those words should go up on Clinton's wall, too.<br />For Olmert, "holding this or that hill" is "worthless" and Israeli generals deluded in clinging to them.<br />These ideas will sit uneasily with the pro-Israel constituency that Clinton has dealt with as a Democratic senator for the state of New York. Nobody's been more solidly pro-Israel than she. But to be effective, she must become a tough taskmaster in the name of Olmert's compromises. That is in the best long-term interest of Israel.<br />Clinton noted during the campaign that the United States could "obliterate" Iran if it launched a nuclear attack on Israel. Olmert chose different language. He noted "a megalomania and a loss of proportion in the things said here about Iran." Once again, his words are instructive.<br />I am fiercely attached to Israel's security. Everything depends, however, on how that security is viewed. Israel can continue humiliating the Palestinians, flaunting its power with a bully's braggadocio. It will survive that way - and be desperately corroded from within. Neither domination nor demography favors Israel over time.<br />Its moral authority is already compromised by a 41-year occupation. The Diaspora Jew did not go to Zion to build the Jew among nations.<br />This is the reality behind Olmert's warning that "we have a window of opportunity - a short amount of time." This is the reality behind his appeal to "designate a final and exact borderline between us and the Palestinians."<br />For that, Palestinians must also compromise, especially on the right of return, and they must renounce terrorism. Return must essentially mean return to a new and viable Palestinian state.<br />Getting to such a two-state deal at, or close to, the 1967 borders will require concerted U.S. involvement from Day One of the Obama administration. Its tone should be one of tough love, with the emphasis on tough.<br />Readers are invited to comment at my blog: www.iht.com/passages</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edcohen.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edcohen.php</a></div><div></div><div>**************</div><div><strong>Gunmen kill 4 people in south Russia</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />MOSCOW: Gunmen killed three policemen and a passerby in Dagestan in southern Russia on Sunday, news agencies said, a region where increased violence could destabilise the whole country.<br />The attackers fired at a police checkpoint in Dagestan's capital Makhachkala at around 8.40 p.m. (1740 GMT) before fleeing. The policemen returned fired and killed one of the attackers, a police source told RIA Novosti news agency.<br />Over the last two years violence has spread across the north Caucasus from Chechnya, where Russian forces have fought two wars against rebels since 1994.<br />Bomb attacks and shootouts occur almost daily in Dagestan but a death toll of three policemen, one pedestrian and one of the attackers is higher than usual. In October, five policemen was killed and another nine were wounded in an attack.<br />A mixture of economic frustration and heavy-handed police tactics make Dagestan a fertile recruitment ground for radical Islamists looking for disenchanted young men, analysts have said.<br />This week Russian security forces said that intensifying violence in the region could destabilise the entire country.<br />(Writing by James Kilner)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/europe/OUKWD-UK-RUSSIA-DAGESTAN.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/europe/OUKWD-UK-RUSSIA-DAGESTAN.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBGBgoQmOlnPfLsDWm7mi_FW7nWiYbb2QgJMvTQWzxke4eezrd3Exp43NOiGIQMTFmpTFGfAJChfeZ-RALl5QiX2QsmjCVc-3ouwR3M_0Vt-LniS6AnEOqMkCksasFsI466VHj7t6QHUM/s1600-h/DSC02365.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703828581760674" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBGBgoQmOlnPfLsDWm7mi_FW7nWiYbb2QgJMvTQWzxke4eezrd3Exp43NOiGIQMTFmpTFGfAJChfeZ-RALl5QiX2QsmjCVc-3ouwR3M_0Vt-LniS6AnEOqMkCksasFsI466VHj7t6QHUM/s320/DSC02365.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>Tense calm in ravaged Nigerian city</strong><br />By Lydia Polgreen<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />DAKAR, Senegal: On Sunday morning, Sani ibn Salihu went to pray for the dead. Even as he arrived at the central mosque of the Nigerian city of Jos to join a throng mourning 364 bodies that he said had already been brought there, the battered corpses kept coming, 11 in the hour he spent praying.<br />"There were women and children, old men," among the bodies, Salihu, a peace activist and journalist, said in a telephone interview from Jos, the central Nigerian city where two days of ferocious violence between Christians and Muslims in the wake of a disputed local election has left hundreds of people dead.<br />A tense calm returned to Jos on Sunday as soldiers wrested control of the streets from armed Christian and Muslim gangs that had roamed the city, slaughtering people with guns and machetes and setting fire to houses, churches, shops and cars, according to residents. The sudden and vociferous explosion of religious violence was the worst Nigeria had seen in at least four years.<br />Religious and health officials gave varying accounts of the death toll but agreed that at least 400 bodies had already been recovered and that there were probably still more in the charred churches, homes, cars and alleyways that had been no-go zones until Sunday. The Red Cross said about 7,000 people had fled the most violent neighborhoods and were living in shelters.<br />The clashes began suddenly, taking the entire city by surprise in both the swiftness and ferocity of the bloodshed, despite a long history of religious violence in the region. The trouble began Friday as the results of elections trickled in for important local government posts that control hundreds of thousands of dollars in government funds.<br />Local elections have not been held here for years, in part because of fears that the political parties would split along religious lines, which is what happened. Even before the results were announced, gangs on both sides began rampaging, anticipating defeat.<br />Christian gangs claimed that the governing party, the PDP, was being cheated of victory, while Muslim gangs claimed that the opposition ANPP, which is identified largely with Muslims in the north, was being robbed of its victory.<br />Nigeria's 140 million people are evenly divided between the Muslim and Christian faiths. People of both religions live all across the country, often cheek by jowl, usually in relative peace.<br />But the religious divide in this polyglot nation of more than 250 ethnic groups mirrors a geographical one, between a historically Muslim north and a Christian and animist south, as well as deep political divisions that cross religious lines. Beyond that there are conflicts over land and political power, which are often intertwined as a result of traditional customs that hold the rights of indigenous people over those of migrants from other parts of the country. Religion is almost always a proxy for these grievances.<br />A dispute over a perceived insult to Islam during a beauty pageant in 2002 led to riots in which more hundreds died. In 2006, riots over the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad led to slaughter in several Nigerian cities, killing nearly 200 people, more than in any other country that experienced violence in the global backlash against the cartoons.<br />Nigeria's Middle Belt, a band of fertile land that straddles the largely Muslim north and Christian south, has always been a hotbed of ethnic and religious violence, and Plateau State, of which Jos is the capital, has borne the brunt.<br />The state's original inhabitants come from a handful of tribes that are almost entirely Christian and animist, but the farmland and grazing pasture have attracted migrants for centuries, especially Muslim Hausa and Fulani people from the more arid north. In Jos, a picturesque city set on a verdant plateau in central Nigeria, 1,000 people died in religious riots in 2001, and in 2004 hundreds more were killed in a nearby city of Yelwa. Jos became a balkanized city, with Muslims and Christians retreating to separate neighborhoods.<br />Despite this history of religious bloodshed in the region, residents, officials and activists said the city had come a long way toward healing divisions. Interfaith commissions set up to improve relations between the faiths and ethnic groups in the aftermath of the 2001 riots appeared to be helping cool tensions.<br />"Things had really improved in Jos," said Nankin Bagudu, a Christian and state government commissioner who had worked with the Human Rights League. "Nobody expected this kind of violence this time."<br />Salihu, a Muslim, said that the violence threatened to undo years of careful bridge-building between the communities.<br />"As someone who has been involved in a peace work between Christian and Muslims, this has set our work back 10 years," he said. "It will take us a very long time to rebuild the confidence."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/africa/nigeria.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/africa/nigeria.php</a></div><div></div><div>**************</div><div><strong>All is not 'lost'</strong><br />By William Safire<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />LANGUAGE<br />Welcome to the socio-literary parlor game of "Name That Generation."<br />It all began in a quotation Ernest Hemingway attributed to his Paris patron, the poet and salonkeeper Gertrude Stein. On the title page of his novel "The Sun Also Rises," published in 1926, he quoted her saying to her circle of creatively disaffected writers, artists and intellectuals in the aftermath of World War I, "You are all a lost generation."<br />In the cultural nomenclature after that, the noun generation was applied to those "coming of age" in an era. Anne Soukhanov, U.S. editor of the excellent Encarta dictionary, observes, "Young people's attitudes, behavior and contributions, while being shaped by the ethos of, and major events during, their time, came in turn to represent the tenor of the time."<br />Taking that complex sense of generation as insightful, we can focus on its modifier as the decisive word in the phrases built upon it. The group after the lost generation did not find its adjective until long after its members turned gray. Belatedly given a title in a 1998 book by Tom Brokaw, the Greatest Generation defined "those American men and women who came of age in the Great Depression, served at home and abroad during World War II and then built the nation we have today."<br />That period, remembered as one characterized by gallantry and sacrifice, was followed by another time that was described in a sharply critical sobriquet: In 1951, people in their 20s were put down as the Silent Generation. That adjective was chosen, according to Neil Howe, author of the 1991 book "Generations," because of "how quiescent they were during the McCarthy era ... they were famously risk-averse." Overlapping that pejorative label in time was the Beat Generation, so named by the writer Jack Kerouac in the '50s. Though the author later claimed his word was rooted in religious Beatitudes, it was described by a New York Times writer as "more than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw ... a sort of nakedness of mind."<br />Now we're up to the '70s, dubbed by Tom Wolfe in New York magazine in 1976 as the "me decade." That coinage led to the general castigation of young adults in that indulgent era as the Me Generation, preoccupied with material gain and "obsessed with self."<br />Then came the title denoting mystery of the demographically huge generation born from roughly 1946 to 1964 - begun as the Baby-Boom Generation, but in its later years its younger members took on a separate identity: Generation X. That is the title of a 1991 book by Douglas Coupland; "It is an identity-hiding label," the generationist Howe says, "of what is the generation with probably the weakest middle class of any of the other generations born in the 20th century." While most boomers proudly asserted their generational identity, "Xers" at first did not; now, however, most feel more comfortable with the label. It has been followed by Y and Z, but those are too obviously derivative, and the Millennial Generation - if narrowly defined as those beginning to come of age since 2000 - has members still in knee pants.<br />U.S. presidents like to identify themselves with the zeitgeist inspiriting their electorate. "This generation of Americans," FDR told the 1936 Democratic convention, "has a rendezvous with destiny," the final three words later evoked by both Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. John F. Kennedy, in his 1961 inaugural address, said, "The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage."<br />Speaking in March 2007 at a chapel in Selma, Alabama, in commemoration of a bloody march for voting rights, Senator Barack Obama put forward a name for a new generation of African-Americans. After acknowledging "a certain presumptuousness" in running for president after such a short time in Washington, Obama credited the Reverend Otis Moss Jr. for writing him "to look at the story of Joshua because you're part of the Joshua generation."<br />He noted that the "Moses generation" had led his people out of bondage but was not permitted by God to cross the river from the wilderness to the Promised Land. In the Hebrew Bible, it was Joshua, chosen by Moses to be his successor, who led the people across, won the battle of Jericho and established the nation. "It was left to the Joshuas to finish the journey Moses had begun," Obama said to the youthful successors to the aging leaders of the civil rights movement, "and today we're called to be the Joshuas of our time, to be the generation that finds our way across the river."<br />safireonlanguage@nytimes.com</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edsafire.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edsafire.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div><strong>Death at Wal-Mart: A sign of the times</strong><br />By Peter S. Goodman<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />From the Great Depression, we remember the bread lines. From the oil shocks of the 1970s, we recall lines of cars snaking from gasoline stations. And from our current moment, we may come to remember scenes like the one at a Wal-Mart in the New York suburbs in the dawn after Thanksgiving, when 2,000 frantic shoppers trampled to death an employee who stood between them and the bargains within.<br />If it was a tragedy, it did not feel like an accident. All those people were lined up in the cold and darkness, because of marketing forces that have produced this day called Black Friday. They were engaging in early-morning shopping as contact sport. American business has long excelled at creating a sense of shortage amid abundance, an anxiety that one must act now or miss out.<br />This year, that anxiety comes with special intensity for everyone involved - for shoppers, fully cognizant of the immense strains on the economy, which has made bargains more crucial than ever; for the stores, now grappling with what could be among the weakest holiday seasons on record; and for policy makers around the planet, grappling with what to substitute for the suddenly beleaguered American consumer, whose proclivities for new gadgets and clothing has long been the engine of economic growth from Guangzhou to Guatemala City.<br />For decades, Americans have been effectively programmed to shop. China, Japan and other foreign powers have provided the wherewithal to purchase their goods by buying staggering quantities of American debt.<br />After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush dispatched Americans to the malls as a patriotic act. When the economy faltered early this year, the government gave out tax rebate checks and told people to spend. In a sense, those Chinese-made flat-screen televisions sitting inside Wal-Mart have become American comfort food.<br />And yet the ability to spend is constricting rapidly. Credit card limits are getting cut. Millions of Americans now owe the bank more than the value of their homes, making further borrowing impossible. The banks themselves are hunkered down, just hoping to survive.<br />Live within our means and save: This new commandment has entered the U.S. conversation, colliding with the deeply embedded imperative to spend. And yet much of the distress is less the product of extravagance than the result of the fact that in many households the means are nowhere near enough for traditional middle-class lives.<br />Wages for most Americans have fallen in real terms over the past eight years. Private retirement plans have just relinquished half their value to an angry market. Health benefits have been downgraded or eliminated altogether. Working hours are being cut, and full-time workers are having to settle for jobs through temporary agencies.<br />Indeed, this was the situation for the unfortunate man working at the Wal-Mart at 5 a.m. Friday, a temp at a company emblematic of low wages and weak benefits, earning his dollars by trying to police an unruly crowd worried about missing out.<br />In a sense, the American economy has become a kind of piñata - lots of treats in there, but no guarantee that you will get any, making people prone to frenzy.<br />It seemed fitting then, in a tragic way, that the holiday season began with violence fueled by desperation; with a mob making a frantic reach for things its members wanted badly, knowing they might go home empty-handed.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/business/walmart.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/business/walmart.php</a></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div><strong>Is U.S. research funding badly spent?</strong><br />By Steve Lohr<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Barack Obama may have to surrender his BlackBerry when he moves into the White House, in the interests of presidential security and confidentiality. But there is every sign that his administration will pursue a pro-technology agenda.<br />In speeches and policy statements, Obama has repeatedly emphasized a need to maintain America's technology leadership in the world and to invest government funds to do so. His campaign platform declared that government policy must "foster home-grown innovation" and "help ensure the competitiveness of United States technology-based businesses." Two of his favorite proposals - roundly endorsed by technology industry leaders and university scientists - are to double federal funding for basic research over the next several years and to train many thousands more scientists and engineers.<br />But such steps would probably amount to well-intentioned but misguided policies that risk doing more harm than good, according to Amar Bhidé, a professor at the Columbia Business School. In a new book, "The Venturesome Economy," Bhidé makes a detailed argument that contradicts the prevailing view of expert panels and authors who contend that U.S. prosperity is threatened by the technological rise of China and India, and that America's capacity for innovation is eroding. To arrest the decline, they insist that more scientists and engineers, and more government spending on research, are sorely needed.<br />Bhidé derides the conventional view in science and technology circles as "techno-nationalism," needlessly alarmist and based on a widely held misunderstanding of how technological innovation yields economic growth. In his view, many analysts put too much emphasis on the production of new technological ideas. Instead, he observes, the real economic payoff lies in innovations in how technologies are used.<br />America's competitive advantage, Bhidé explains, resides mainly in its creative use of information technology, especially in the large and growing services sector, led by companies like Wal-Mart. "Wal-Mart and its followers are as much a part of the technological success of America as Silicon Valley," he said.<br />The globalization of science and technology research, Bhidé added, should actually work to the advantage of the U.S. economy, as long as America remains the best place to commercialize inventions. As the rest of the world becomes a richer source of inventions, there is less need for the United States to come up with such a large share itself - and policy, he says, should reflect that reality.<br />"I'm not arguing for reductions in research spending in the United States," he said. "But in a world where investment in high-level science and technology is increasing, there is no compelling reason to invest a lot more."<br />The flaw in Bhidé's thesis is that it amounts to a "false choice," said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. Most of the economic gains from technology, Atkinson agrees, do come from its innovative use. "But that doesn't mean that the basic research is not critical," he said.<br />In fast-moving fields, Atkinson said, there are immense benefits when the knowledge produced in research projects quickly spills over into ventures that become powerhouses in new industries. Google, which grew out of a digital library project funded by the National Science Foundation, is among a host of such examples. Where the invention is done, Atkinson notes, is often vital.<br />Bhidé argues, however, that policy choices and tradeoffs have to be made, and that they should be guided by a deeper understanding of how innovation contributes to economic growth. That analysis is the basis of his 508-page book, which adds to the emerging field of "innovation economics."<br />His research builds on, but is also critical of, the doctrine of "new growth theory," developed in the 1980s and '90s. That theory holds that new ideas are the crucial engine of growth and presents mathematical models, created by economists like Paul Romer of Stanford, to simulate the process. The models have been used to justify increasing government subsidies for research.<br />What gets short shrift in the math models, Bhidé said, is "midlevel innovation." The category, by his definition, is broad, ranging from a venture capitalist who tweaks a business model to trim costs by a few percent to a technician who fine-tunes his company's software to save the accounting department a few data-entry steps.<br />These midlevel innovations, Bhidé said, do not show up in patent counts, and individually they are small steps indeed. But they add up, especially because there is so much of that kind of unsung innovation across the American economy.<br />While others bemoan the state of American education, Bhidé, who graduated from the elite Indian Institute of Technology before he earned advanced degrees at Harvard, is impressed with the general level of creativity and practical skills in the U.S. work force.<br />So instead of tilting policy toward the apex of the education system, Bhidé suggests, it may make more sense to invest scarce government resources further down the educational ladder. "The modern information technology economy is going to need a lot of foot soldiers," he said.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/technology/digi01.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/technology/digi01.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/business/iceland.php">Iceland considers adopting the euro</a> </div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div><strong>What would Keynes do?<br /></strong>By N. Gregory Mankiw<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />If you were going to turn to only one economist to understand the problems facing the U.S. economy, there is little doubt that the economist would be John Maynard Keynes. Although Keynes died more than a half-century ago, his diagnosis of recessions and depressions remains the foundation of modern macroeconomics. His insights go a long way toward explaining the challenges we now confront.<br />According to Keynes, the root cause of economic downturns is insufficient aggregate demand. When the total demand for goods and services declines, businesses throughout the economy see their sales fall off. Lower sales induce companies to cut back production and to lay off workers. Rising unemployment and declining profits further depress demand, leading to a feedback loop with a very unhappy ending.<br />The situation reverses, Keynesian theory says, only when some event or policy increases aggregate demand. The problem right now is that it is hard to see where that demand might come from.<br />The economy's output of goods and services is traditionally divided into four components: consumption, investment, net exports and government purchases. Any expansion in demand has to come from one of these four. But in each case, strong forces are working to keep spending down.<br />Consumption: The Conference Board reports that U.S. consumer confidence is near its record low. It is easy to understand why consumers are so scared. House values have declined, retirement-account balances have shrunk and unemployment is up. For many people, the sense of economic uncertainty is greater than they've ever experienced. When it comes to discretionary purchases, like a new home, a car, or a washing machine, wait-and-see is the most rational course.<br />A bit more saving is not entirely unwelcome. Many economists have long lamented the U.S. saving rate, which is low by international and historical standards.<br />For the overall economy, however, a recession is not the best time for households to start saving. Keynesian theory suggests a "paradox of thrift." If all households try to save more, a short-run result could be lower aggregate demand and thus lower national income. Reduced incomes, in turn, could prevent households from reaching their new saving goals.<br />Investment: In normal times, a decline in consumption could be met by an increase in investment, which includes spending by businesses on plant and equipment and by households on new homes. But several factors are keeping investment spending at bay.<br />The most obvious is the state of the housing market. Over the past three years, residential investment has fallen 42 percent. With house prices continuing to decline, increased building of new homes is not likely to be a source of robust demand over the next few years.<br />Business investment has lately been stronger than residential investment, but it is unlikely to pick up the slack in the near future. With the stock market down, interest rates on corporate bonds up and the banking system teetering on the edge, financing new business projects will not be easy.<br />Net exports: Not long ago, it looked as if the rest of the world would save the U.S. economy from a deep downturn. From March 2004 to March 2008, the dollar fell 19 percent against an average of other major currencies. By increasing the price of foreign goods in the United States and reducing the price of American goods abroad, this depreciation discouraged imports and bolstered exports. Over the past three years, real net U.S. exports have increased by about $250 billion.<br />In the coming months, however, the situation may well go into reverse. As the U.S. financial crisis has spread to the rest of the world, fast-moving international capital has been looking for a haven. Paradoxically, that haven is the United States. Since March, the dollar has appreciated 19 percent, a move that will put a crimp in the export boom.<br />Government purchases: That leaves the government as the demander of last resort. Calls for increased infrastructure spending fit well with Keynesian theory. In principle, every dollar spent by the government could cause national income to increase by more than a dollar if it leads to a more vibrant economy and stimulates spending by consumers and companies. By all reports, that is precisely the plan that the incoming administration of Barack Obama has in mind.<br />The fly in the ointment - or perhaps it is more an elephant - is the long-term fiscal picture. Increased government spending might be a good short-run fix, but it would add to the budget deficit. The baby boomers are now starting to retire and claim Social Security and Medicare benefits. Any increase in the national debt will make fulfilling those unfunded promises harder in coming years.<br />Keynesian economists often dismiss these long-run concerns when the economy has short-run problems. "In the long run we are all dead," Keynes said.<br />The longer-term problem we now face, however, may be more serious than any that Keynes ever envisioned. Passing a larger national debt to the next generation may look attractive to those without children. (Keynes himself was childless.) But the rest of us cannot feel much comfort knowing that in the long run, when we are dead, our children and grandchildren will be dealing with our fiscal legacy.<br />So what is to be done? Many economists still hope that the Federal Reserve will save the day.<br />In normal times, the Fed can bolster aggregate demand by reducing interest rates. Lower interest rates encourage households and companies to borrow and spend. They also bolster equity values and, by encouraging international capital to look elsewhere, reduce the value of the dollar in foreign-exchange markets. Spending on consumption, investment and net exports all increase.<br />But these are not normal times. The Fed has already cut the federal funds rate, the interest on overnight loans between banks, to 1 percent, close to its lower bound of zero. Some fear that the central bank is almost out of ammunition.<br />Fortunately, the Fed has a few secret weapons. It can set a target for longer-term interest rates. It can commit itself to keeping interest rates low for a sustained period. Most important, it can try to manage expectations and assure markets that it will do whatever it takes to avoid prolonged deflation. The Fed's decision this past week to start buying mortgage debt shows its willingness to act creatively.<br />It is hard to say how successful monetary and fiscal policy will be in avoiding a deep downturn. But as events unfold, you can be sure that policy makers in the Fed and Treasury will be looking at them through a Keynesian lens.<br />In 1936, Keynes wrote, "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist." In 2008, no defunct economist is more prominent than Keynes himself.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/yourmoney/wbview29.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/yourmoney/wbview29.php</a></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Stimulus all the rage, bar Germany</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />By Brian Love<br />As recession extends its tentacles across the globe, it is getting hard just to track the hundreds of billions of dollars governments are throwing or promising to throw at the problem.<br />With unemployment surging and the car industry screaming for survival aid, governments in Washington, Beijing, Tokyo and the bulk of Europe appear to agree one thing -- that urgent fiscal stimulus is needed to support demand and limit the damage.<br />What is striking is that Germany, Europe's largest economy, appears unconvinced so far, or is at least reluctant to follow the rest of the pack into a spending splurge after years devoted to bringing the country's public finances back into balance.<br />However, the fact that the European Central Bank is expected to cut interest rates heavily again on Thursday, as is the Bank of England, demonstrates the seriousness of the deterioration in the economic climate.<br />But with much of the industrialized world now in or sliding into recession, economists believe it is time to deploy the fiscal guns alongside the monetary weaponry, and not just in the slower-growing industrialized world.<br />"It is clear that significant fiscal stimulus is needed both in the OECD countries and in emerging markets," said Torsten Slok, New York based economist for Deutsche Bank.<br />China has announced a stimulus package worth 4 trillion yuan, or roughly $586 billion (381 bilion pounds). And Tokyo plans a stimulus worth 5 trillion yen (34.5 billion pounds), though it plans only to submit the extra budget to parliament in the new year.<br />Washington has spent or committed trillions of dollars and is expected to come up with another big package -- some economists believe it may be worth upwards of $400 billion -- as soon as President-elect Barack Obama takes over in January.<br />And the European Commission has proposed that the 27-country European Union come up with an EU-wide package worth 200 billion euros, or 1.5 percent of EU gross domestic product.<br />While economists believe the announced plans mix new and old money in some cases, Germany's reticence is a more vexing question and one which casts a shadow on the EU-wide package to be discussed by finance ministers this week and which will be put to EU leaders for approval mid-December.<br />German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she does not want to get into a "race for billions", which is worrying some other governments in Europe, according to officials in other capitals. And it is troubling economists too.<br />"Germany's reluctance to pull its weight in fighting the global recession betrays lack of vision, lack of leadership, and a temptation to free-ride that, if widely mimicked, would truly condemn the world economy to a new great depression," says Marco Annunziata, chief economist at UniCredit bank.<br />Jim O'Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, notes that domestic consumption in export-dependent Germany has barely budged in what will soon be 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And that is something that should change.<br />Europe's largest economy should do itself and the rest of the world a favour by raising wages, reducing sales tax, and thereby supporting higher levels of consumption, O'Neill argued in an article in the London Financial Times.<br />Berlin will get a chance to explain its stand when European Union finance ministers meet on Monday and Tuesday to discuss how they might deliver on the proposal for an EU-wide stimulus package worth 200 billion euros (169 billion pounds).<br />France is preparing its contribution, due to be announced by President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday, and Italy Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced a package on Friday which he says is worth 80 billion euros. London has already announced a plan it says is worth 20 billion pounds.<br />Many economists believe a lot of the figures being announced involved a mixture of truly new money and recycling of existing commitments, so it remains hard to evaluate the impact.<br />Something must be done in any case, they say, at a time when unemployment is back on the rise and could surge.<br />European data last week showed that the unemployment rate ticked upwards to 7.7 percent in October from 7.6 percent the previous month, and more ugly numbers are expected this coming Friday in the United States.<br />Bank of America economists highlighted in a research note that employment as measured by the monthly non-farm payrolls data fell 77,000 a month on average in the first half of 2008, but by three to four times that amount in September and October.<br />For the November data due on Friday, the prediction is that the fall will be 316,000, according to a poll conducted by Reuters, after a drop of 240,000 in October.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/business/OUKBS-UK-ECONOMY-WEEKAHEAD-OUTLOOK.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/business/OUKBS-UK-ECONOMY-WEEKAHEAD-OUTLOOK.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div></div><div><strong>Bailing away and forgetting the future</strong><br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />The U.S. government is going for broke in an attempt to avert the type of calamitous financial collapse that led to the Great Depression. No one would fault the objective, but throwing money at the problem is becoming an end in itself.<br />Last week alone, while everyone was still arguing whether a $25 billion loan to the Big Three carmakers would be money down a sinkhole, the government committed more than $1 trillion to prop up Citigroup and to try to spur lending to consumers and home buyers.<br />Moves to stabilize the system have put Americans in harm's way from possible losses on nearly $8 trillion pledged in loans, guarantees and investments to financial firms.<br />This page has consistently held that the government must intervene in markets when failure to do so would cause even greater economic harm. The impending collapse of Citi or an unrelenting credit freeze demand intervention. But good crisis management also requires that the calamity of the moment not be allowed to overwhelm good governing. Unfortunately, that is not the case now.<br />As the rescue tab rises, taxpayers are not being adequately informed or protected. There is as yet no effort to deal effectively with the underlying causes of the problem, especially mass mortgage defaults that feed bank losses.<br />In the Citi bailout, as in the bailout of American International Group and other financial interventions, the government has taken shares in the rescued firm in exchange for its investment. That is sensible, as far as it goes. But the upside for taxpayers has been overstated, because the risk in many of the investments may well outweigh the potential return. These gambles are the reason the government should attach more strings to its help, including a say in how the money is used and in major investments and management decisions. But the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have balked at taking greater charge, leaving taxpayers more exposed to losses than they probably realize.<br />Last week's plan from the Federal Reserve to jump-start mortgage lending also falls short. Even if it loosens credit, it will do little to stem foreclosures, because most of the defaults that are destabilizing the system do not result from the loans that the Fed has targeted. It is as if the Fed, fixated on the flames of a fire, is ignoring the fire's fuel source.<br />Another danger is that in fighting today's crises, the government is teeing up the next one. To finance the bailouts, the Treasury is borrowing money and the Fed is printing it. That bodes ill for a heavily indebted nation, presaging higher interest rates and higher prices - perhaps sharply higher. That is not an argument for inaction.<br />But frank acknowledgment of the dangers would put a premium on getting the rescues right today. As it is, the reckoning is postponed.<br />Fed and Treasury officials are locked in full emergency mode, reacting and defending. And they probably have neither the inclination nor the time to improve their responses. By selecting Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, to head a team to oversee the financial crisis, President-elect Barack Obama seems committed to a different way, one that combines the ability to respond quickly with the resolve to act wisely.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edbailout.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edbailout.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Another Wall Street problem that's hard to fix<br /></strong>Gretchen Morgenson<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />Life is unfair, as the saying goes, but for investors still stuck in auction-rate securities, the inequities keep on coming.<br />Auction-rate securities, you may recall, are preferred shares or debt instruments with rates that reset regularly, usually every week, in auctions overseen by the brokerage firms that originally sold them.<br />They have long-term maturities or, in the case of the preferred shares, no maturity dates at all. The securities are issued by municipalities, student-loan companies, closed-end funds and tax-exempt institutions like hospitals and museums.<br />Brokers who peddled these securities told buyers that they were cash equivalents, easy to get out of and relatively safe.<br />But the promises of liquidity turned false in February when buyers for the securities disappeared and the auctions began failing. The $300 billion market for auction-rates ground to a halt, entrapping thousands of investors both large and small, sophisticated and novice.<br />Officials in Massachusetts, New York and other states came to the rescue earlier this year, striking settlements with some of the bigger brokerage firms in the arena.<br />But while some of the larger firms agreed to redeem the securities, not everyone is covered by those agreements. A group of people, size unknown, has fallen through the cracks in the settlements, and for several quirky reasons. They remain frozen in the securities and understandably upset.<br />Irene Scharf, a professor of immigration law at the Southern New England School of Law, in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, is one of them. Back in 2005, she invested $75,000 in several auction-rate securities backed by municipalities. The money was earmarked to pay college tuition bills for her two sons.<br />Scharf says she bought the auction-rate securities at the suggestion of her UBS broker. When that broker joined Smith Barney last year, she moved her account with him to the new firm.<br />Unfortunately, that sequence of events disqualifies her from participating in the redemption of her securities as dictated by the various state settlements.<br />The terms of the Massachusetts settlement with UBS, for example, require it to redeem auction-rate securities of only those clients who bought them from the firm between Oct. 1, 2007, and Feb. 13, 2008, and who still hold them at UBS. The settlement covers $19 billion in securities; UBS neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.<br />The agreement struck by Smith Barney states that it will redeem auction-rate securities that were bought by its customers directly from the firm before Feb. 11, 2008. The deal, in which the firm neither admits nor denies wrongdoing, covers $7.3 billion in securities.<br />That leaves Scharf, however, out in the cold. Making matters worse, the college bills that her securities were supposed to cover are coming due.<br />"We lived very frugally for years so I would not have to take out loans when my kids went to college," Scharf said. "I was not informed of any risk; my broker kept assuring me nothing was safer. When I asked about redeeming them, he said I'd only need to give him two or three days' notice to redeem."<br />She said she has tried to get help from the authorities in her home state - Massachusetts - in Texas and also at the Securities and Exchange Commission. She has received sympathy but little else.<br />A spokeswoman for UBS confirmed that former clients were not all covered by the settlement agreement it had struck with regulators.<br />"Investors who moved their relationships away from UBS while liquidity for auction-rate securities was still available through the auction process are not eligible for our settlement offering, as they were no longer using a UBS financial adviser for investment advisory or brokerage services at the time that auctions failed," said Karina Byrne, the spokeswoman. "We believe our settlement covers more auction-rate securities holders because it covers all UBS clients who were holding the securities, regardless of where they purchased them, and our settlement is the only one that covers retail, corporate and institutional holders."<br />Another victim of the auction-rate morass is Jeff Stier, associate director of the American Council on Science and Health, a nonprofit organization in New York. He, too, invested in auction-rate securities through UBS. The investments were to help fund his organization's $2 million budget.<br />Stier said he grew unhappy with the service at the firm and moved his account to a new financial adviser who used Fidelity Investments as a custodian. As was the situation for Scharf, the timing of his account shift means that he does not qualify for redemption by either firm, in his case UBS or Fidelity.<br />An offer made by Fidelity to redeem its clients' securities is limited to customers who bought the securities there before Feb. 13, 2008, explained Adam Banker, a spokesman for Fidelity. The buyback offer does not extend to customers who bought the securities through other firms or advisers, he said.<br />The result is that $250,000 of the nonprofit council's money overseen by Stier is frozen.<br />"These were marketed to us explicitly as an alternative to money markets for money that UBS knew we needed to have relatively liquid," Stier said. "We are getting to the point where we may soon need additional funds. We are at the verge of having a material loss as a result of lack of liquidity."<br />Why did securities regulators agree to settlement terms with UBS and other firms that wound up shutting some investors out? William Galvin, the secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the regulator who secured the deal with UBS, said that the Oct. 1, 2007, redemption starting point was based on the date that officials concluded UBS knew the auctions were beginning to fail.<br />"If we could have proved that they knew two years beforehand, we would have attached liability to that period," Galvin said. "Our goal was to get people out, and out as promptly as possible."<br />Still, he said that he was interested in trying to help investors who were stuck in the securities. "I recognize the fact that this problem is not completely solved," Galvin said, "and we need to keep working on it until we free up everybody."<br />This predicament is like so many of the messes created by Wall Street in recent years: Easy to make. Hard to fix.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/business/morg01.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/business/morg01.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUitZ-enNKT83KsytAAJtCyIxsI0jIjT6xYIxwLpkPH_9qdeK8G7y7KWNG7CX-iSl2wmdxjMwlLWG47nSoodJizyh-y96M2CpusKOhcQFKFlvv9hTif8rUiad77jBTZl8CFrnLKGZdgHM/s1600-h/DSC02366.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703573146439362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUitZ-enNKT83KsytAAJtCyIxsI0jIjT6xYIxwLpkPH_9qdeK8G7y7KWNG7CX-iSl2wmdxjMwlLWG47nSoodJizyh-y96M2CpusKOhcQFKFlvv9hTif8rUiad77jBTZl8CFrnLKGZdgHM/s320/DSC02366.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>Georgia and Ukraine split NATO members<br /></strong>By Steven Erlanger<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />PARIS: NATO foreign ministers gather this week in Brussels, with the United States and Germany quarreling over just how much distance to keep from Georgia and Ukraine.<br />The debate is ostensibly over the mechanisms through which Georgia and Ukraine will, at some point, become members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But the real debate is over relations with Russia, especially in the aftermath of its conflict last summer with Georgia. And those ties with Moscow are wrapped up in domestic politics, both in Germany and the United States.<br />The administration of President George W. Bush, which has maintained close ties with Georgia and with pro-Western politicians in Ukraine, wants to give no concessions to what it sees as a newly aggressive Russia. It wants NATO to send a clear message that Moscow cannot intimidate the alliance and that it does not get to veto NATO membership.<br />At her last NATO ministerial meeting, the main task for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be to give substance to a vague promise by NATO last April that Georgia and Ukraine would some day become members.<br />After this week, the next NATO summit meeting will be held in April, when the organization marks its 60th anniversary and when France is scheduled to reintegrate fully into the military wing of the alliance. But by then, U.S. relations with NATO will be the responsibility of President-elect Barack Obama and his intended secretary of state, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.<br />In a possible indication of her views on Georgia and Ukraine, Clinton - alongside Senator John McCain of Arizona - nominated Presidents Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia and Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine for the Nobel Peace Prize in January 2005 for their roles "in leading freedom movements" and "their extraordinary commitment to peace."<br />Not all NATO members are so enthusiastic. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing a strong challenge from her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who will lead the Social Democratic Party into elections next year that will openly pit the parties of the divided coalition government against each other. Merkel, a Christian Democrat, has been relatively tough with Russia in the softer German context; Steinmeier is considered friendly to Russia, a powerful neighbor on which Germany depends for much of its energy supply.<br />Germany, according to both German and U.S. diplomats, wants to send an accommodating message to Moscow, both by slowing down NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine and by welcoming a call by President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia for talks on a new "security architecture" for Europe.<br />For now, Germany insists that Georgia and Ukraine go through what is called a Membership Action Plan, or MAP, before NATO enlargement is considered.<br />At the NATO summit meeting in Bucharest last April, Germany and France blocked a last-minute push by Bush and some newer NATO members - those with experience under Soviet rule - to give Georgia and Ukraine immediate membership action plans. Berlin and Paris argued that Ukraine was politically divided and that neither it nor Georgia was ready.<br />They also argued that a membership action plan for Ukraine would outrage Russia, which regards Ukraine as a crucial part of its mental and physical landscape, and that a plan for Georgia could destabilize the Caucasus.<br />Bush fought hard but lost, after annoying Merkel, who thought she had received a promise from Bush not to press for membership plans.<br />Paris and Berlin compromised by agreeing that Ukraine and Georgia could become members, but they did not say when. They agreed with Washington that the membership action plans would be reconsidered at the meeting this week.<br />But that was before fighting in Georgia in August, when Russia ended up taking over the enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia - within the sovereign borders of Georgia - and then recognizing their independence. In doing so, Russia cited Washington's recognition of independence for Kosovo, wrested from Serbia militarily without a UN resolution.<br />Realizing that many Europeans are convinced that Saakashvili either started the Russian-Georgian conflict or fell rashly into a Russian trap, Washington now says that having a Membership Action Plan is not important. U.S. diplomats say that "MAP has been fetishized" by the Europeans, who see it as a step too far; by the Russians, who see it as an offensive move; and by the Georgians, who see it as a form of deterrence, a commitment of NATO aid even before membership.<br />Knowing that it would probably lose another fight for a plan now, Washington is instead arguing that NATO can work to make Ukraine and Georgia ready for membership through other means, in particular the NATO-Ukraine Commission, established 11 years ago, and the NATO-Georgia Commission, which was created after the August war.<br />Daniel Fried, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, said in Washington last week that "MAP was never an end in itself" and that it "is not the only way to get there." He emphasized that such plans were only created after the first former Soviet bloc nations joined in 1999.<br />France seems content with the U.S. formulation, which raises no new flags with Moscow and does little to hasten membership for Georgia and Ukraine.<br />But Berlin was angered, seeing the U.S. position as "MAP without MAP," or the substance without the label, according to one German official who spoke anonymously because of diplomatic practice.<br />Germany insists that MAP remain a condition of NATO membership and has accused Washington of making an "end run" around the Bucharest compromise.<br />A senior U.S. official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said that everyone now accepted it would take "years and years" before Georgia and Ukraine are ready; even then, every NATO country must ratify enlargement. "I don't really understand what the Germans want," he said.<br />"They're clinging to MAP, but they refuse to use it. They will use it only when a country is already ready to become a NATO member, so why insist on it? They say they want to preserve it as a final hurdle. We say, 'Let's get out of this hamster ring, since everyone really is in agreement, and get on with it."'<br />As for Russia, the U.S. official said, Washington is telling Berlin that "if you make MAP such a big political deal, then it is more of an issue for Russia." But the official also conceded that Merkel remained angry about Bucharest and that "standing up to the United States," especially to a disliked, lame-duck Bush administration, may be good domestic politics.<br />The French are being constructive, the U.S. official said. "We want to get out of this conflict and move on, and they don't want it to be a big issue" for the April meeting, Obama's first and a big anniversary for the alliance.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/europe/nato.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/europe/nato.php</a></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div><strong>How a Russian-Norwegian partnership turned frosty<br /></strong>By Kevin J. O'Brien<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />BERLIN: When a dispute between two cellphone companies, Telenor of Norway and Altimo of Russia, returned to court recently, it seemed fitting that one of the settings was the Siberian city of Omsk, home of a Soviet-era labor camp.<br />For the feud, which began in 2004 over a disagreement about how to invest in Ukraine, has grown into a standoff of Cold War proportions, with accusations of corporate espionage and legal skullduggery being exchanged in courtrooms and arbitration panels on three continents.<br />Like other relationships between Russian investors and outside partners, the Altimo-Telenor alliance has soured at a time when Russia has grown increasingly assertive in business and other matters.<br />In 2001, when Altimo and Telenor agreed to joint management of Russian and Ukrainian mobile operators in which they both held stakes, the partnership seemed tailor-made for both sides. Telenor, one of the first Western telecommunications investors in the former Soviet Union, needed a local partner. Altimo wanted an experienced international operator with financial clout and technological know-how.<br />"Telenor had everything that Altimo needed," said Kresimir Alic, an analyst at International Data Corp. in Zagreb, Croatia.<br />The trouble started in 2004, when Telenor opposed Altimo's plan for VimpelCom, their partnership in Russia, to buy a Ukrainian mobile operator, Ukrainian Radio Systems. Telenor worried about damage to its partnership with Altimo in Ukraine, called Kyivstar.<br />With powerful business and political interests involved on both sides, the dispute broadened. Telenor is 54 percent owned by the Norwegian government. Altimo is controlled by Mikhail Fridman, a Kremlin ally and the chairman of Alfa Group, one of the largest telecommunications investors in Russia.<br />Analysts say the dispute has not had any direct effects on day-to-day operations of Kyivstar, which is the largest mobile operator in Ukraine, or VimpelCom, which is the second-biggest operator in Russia, after MTS. But they say the raw tone of the conflict is raising diplomatic tensions between Norway and Russia, which have cooperated on a number of business projects.<br />In Ukraine, Altimo prevailed, with VimpelCom taking over Ukrainian Radio Systems, or URS, in April 2006. In a series of rulings, the Ukrainian Supreme Court has sided with Altimo.<br />But that did not end matters. Telenor has contested the decisions, saying the companies had agreed under their partnership to settle disputes by arbitration in Geneva and New York, rather than Russia and Ukraine.<br />Telenor has sued Altimo in New York; Altimo has countered with its own lawsuit against Telenor in Geneva.<br />Over the past year, the companies have hurled increasingly bitter accusations at each other, and the dispute has been marked by bizarre twists.<br />In Omsk, Telenor is appealing the ruling of a Russian trial court judge in the Siberian town of Khanty-Mansiysk, who ordered Telenor in August to pay $2.8 billion for trying to obstruct VimpelCom's takeover of URS. The judge, E.A. Karankevich, made his ruling at 2 a.m., said Jan Edvard Thygesen, Telenor's head of central and Eastern Europe.<br />Before announcing the fine, Thygesen said, Karankevich openly discussed the level of the penalty - at one point considering $5.7 billion - before lawyers began arguing the case.<br />"This case has been a judicial farce," Thygesen said in an interview. "We are confident we will get this overturned when the Russian Supreme Court in Moscow hears our appeal."<br />Kirill Babaev, a senior vice president at Altimo in Moscow, disputed Thygesen's assertion that the Russian trial judge had improperly set fines before hearing the case.<br />"The judge was not doing this," Babaev said. "He was simply following Russian court procedure. Telenor has never respected our court system."<br />On Nov. 12, Altimo said in a news release that it had been offered documents suggesting that Telenor was behind the tapping of private phone conversations and e-mail messages of Alfa managers and investors traveling in the United States.<br />But Thygesen, of Telenor, said the documents were fabrications. Dag Melgaard, another Telenor spokesman, said that Telenor had hired investigators, but that they had done no wire-tapping.<br />Telenor, in turn, questions the origins of the lawsuit in Khanty-Mansiysk, which was filed in April by a company registered in the British Virgin Islands called Farimex Products, which said it owned a 0.002 percent stake in VimpelCom. It is not clear why the suit was filed in Khanty-Mansiysk, though that is the home of another Altimo partner, a company called CT-Mobile.<br />Farimex, in a class-action suit on behalf of VimpelCom shareholders, sued both Telenor and Altimo for $3.8 billion in damages allegedly caused by the dispute over Kyivstar.<br />Copies of Farimex's incorporation papers provided to the International Herald Tribune by Telenor appear to show a Russian citizen, Dmitry Fridman, as a registered officer of the company.<br />But Dmitry Fridman has never appeared in the Siberian court proceedings, Thygesen said. Telenor said it believed that Altimo had been added as a defendant to give Farimex the appearance of neutrality. The judge threw out the claims against Altimo.<br />Both Altimo and Telenor say they have no way of locating Dmitry Fridman. Thygesen said Dmitry Fridman was related to Mikhail Fridman, but Altimo denies any connection between the two men.<br />"Dmitry Fridman is not a relative of Mikhail Fridman," Babaev said.<br />Efforts to locate Dmitry Fridman and Farimex were unsuccessful.<br />Telenor has also questioned actions by the court in Omsk. In October, it froze Altimo and Telenor shares in VimpelCom. Altimo's owner, Alfa, had pledged the shares as collateral toward a loan from Deutsche Bank. At the time, Deutsche Bank was poised to seize the shares as security, after a decline in VimpelCom's share price. While the stock was frozen, Alfa secured a letter of credit from a Russian state development bank, avoiding seizure of the shares.<br />On Oct. 25, the Telenor chief executive, Jon Fredrik Baksaas, called Mikhail Fridman and offered to buy Altimo's Kyivstar stake, Thygesen said. Fridman rejected the offer, Thygesen said. Babaev said he was aware of the conversation, but he declined to comment on what had been discussed.<br />On Nov. 19, a U.S. federal judge in New York, acting at Telenor's request, found Altimo in contempt for violating a November 2007 arbitration ruling that faulted Altimo for skipping Kviystar board meetings and for owning stakes in Kyivstar competitors.<br />Babaev said Altimo was considering an appeal. In the meantime, analysts say, the fallout from the prolonged legal battle has deepened tensions between Norway and Russia, whose relationship has already been strained over fishing and energy development in the Barents Sea.<br />"The relationship between the two countries is in crisis at the moment," said Danila Bochkarev, an analyst in Brussels at The EastWest Institute, a think tank. "Telenor-Altimo is a part of that."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/technology/altimo01.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/technology/altimo01.php</a></div><div></div><div>*********************</div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>We're ready if you are<br /></strong>By Viktor Yushchenko<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />This week, Brussels will host a meeting of NATO foreign ministers which will give a comprehensive assessment of Ukraine's progress in conducting reforms. Among other things, the meeting will discuss NATO's Membership Action Plan for Ukraine.<br />I shall be straightforward: We are interested in the MAP and we are expecting a positive signal from the alliance. We believe we are ready for deeper cooperation. Taking it to a qualitatively new level will undoubtedly be mutually beneficial.<br />Ukraine has more than once proved the effectiveness of its participation in the system of European and Euro-Atlantic security. At the NATO summit in Bucharest, the allies gave a high assessment of Ukraine's contribution to all peacekeeping operations and missions conducted under the aegis of NATO and the United Nations. We are ready and able to bear joint responsibility. This has been manifested in peacekeeping operations in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan and other "hot spots."<br />I should recall that Ukraine voluntarily gave up one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world. At the present time, Ukraine guarantees the security of energy transit across its territory.<br />We have every reason to state that Ukraine's membership in NATO will strengthen the role and security capabilities of the alliance. That is why the conclusion made by the allies in Bucharest sounded unambiguous: Ukraine will be a NATO member.<br />Why does Ukraine aspire to join NATO? To us this is an issue of sovereign choice, a strategic course and civilization progress. Ukraine is striving to join NATO not for defense purposes only. After all, we do not regard a single country as one that could afford real threats against us.<br />However, Ukraine is part of a globalized world that is developing dynamically. Ukraine's desire to join NATO is an aspiration to become part of the most effective system of collective security and to share joint responsibility for common space.<br />We also clearly realize that Ukraine's success on the path towards NATO hinges on the implementation of key reforms in this country. We are not walking away from this course even though sometimes we have to overcome not only objective, but also subjective, artificial and at times aggressive obstacles.<br />I am convinced that NATO is interested in Ukraine no less than Ukraine is interested in NATO. We understand the discussions going on inside the organization: The main concern is Russia's negative reaction to Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic aspirations. In this respect I should note that the alliance has always emphasized an open-door policy.<br />The dissatisfaction of third countries cannot be a signal for the alliance to give up its declared principles. The position of the Russian Federation on NATO enlargement has been known for a long time and did not emerge yesterday.<br />We remember the first and second waves of NATO enlargement in 1999 and 2004. Back then we also heard angry rhetoric and calls "not to interfere in the sphere of Russian interests." But this did not stop the alliance from gaining new members.<br />We are not so much worried about Russia's attempts to control the alliance's cooperation with Ukraine as we are about the policy of double standards in our northern neighbor's security approaches. The rhetoric gets particularly tough when it comes to the right of sovereign Ukraine to independently determine its own security policy. We keep trying to persuade our Russian partners to change their categorical stance, taking present-day realities into account. It is no secret that at the moment Russia is gaining far more in practical terms from cooperation with NATO than Ukraine is. In addition, Russia declares interest in continued, deeper cooperation.<br />Therefore, there is no need for, or sense in, blocking natural processes, which have already reached a point of no return. Let's negotiate and develop beneficial, open and sincere dialogue on security issues.<br />NATO is currently looking for ways to adapt to new realities and conditions. The development of a new strategy blueprint for the alliance is aimed precisely at that. We welcome these efforts, and we are convinced that the new strategy should envisage all future realities, including Ukraine's membership of NATO and the development of collaboration with Russia.<br />We actively continue diplomatic consultations with all our partners in the alliance, and we see that some NATO member states still have doubts about the advisability of Ukraine gaining membership in the alliance or even being granted a MAP.<br />I would like to advise them not to form their opinion on Ukraine on the basis of stereotypes of the past, much less under the influence of external pressure.<br />It is very easy to dispel the doubts: It is enough to compare the Ukraine 15 years ago with the present-day Ukraine and to make a fair assessment of our progress and our bilateral cooperation with NATO.<br />We have in effect been functioning under a MAP for quite a long time. Ukraine completely fulfills annual target cooperation plans. Most of the basic criteria of reform and getting closer to NATO standards have been met, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine are ready for full-fledged integration into the alliance's unified system. Practice shows that this is even more important than the formal presence or absence of a MAP.<br />I would not like the ongoing political developments in Ukraine to be used as a pretext. Democracy is always a complicated political process. A consensus emerges in society as a result of people being informed and making a conscious choice. These processes are continuing. A national consensus is, meanwhile, reflected in legislation. Ukrainian legislation, which has been approved jointly by the authorities and the opposition, sets the goal of attaining NATO membership.<br />The MAP is just one of the rungs of a ladder. It can either be included in the itinerary or be omitted. This is not a decision on membership in the alliance. A decision will not be made until both Ukraine and NATO are ready. It is the forward outlook, political will and strategic action that are topical today. New, enlarged Europe has got a chance to finally do away with the division lines and zones of influence that have lingered on since the times of the Cold War.<br />Do we see Europe as strong, secure and united? If so, there are no obstacles to Ukraine being granted NATO's MAP and membership.<br />Viktor Yushchenko is the president of Ukraine.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edyushchenko.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edyushchenko.php</a></div><div></div><div>***************</div><div></div><div><strong>Ukraine opposition alleges improper arms sales</strong><br />By Michael Schwirtz<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />KIEV: With the Ukrainian government reeling from a financial crisis and internal power struggles, the country's pro-Russian opposition has been leveling potentially damaging allegations of improper arms sales to Georgia during that country's brief war with Russia.<br />And Russia's leaders, furious with Ukraine's president over his pro-Western leanings and vocal support of Georgia, have personally weighed in, making accusations of their own.<br />It may not matter that the opposition has provided no conclusive evidence of the claims, despite weeks of pronouncements that the evidence - once released - will be explosive. The claims alone, which have made headlines, have nonetheless helped to further undermine the government's authority at a time of heightened political instability, while also roiling Ukraine's already tense relationship with Russia.<br />At issue are accusations that the government of President Viktor Yushchenko, who supported Georgia during the crisis, covertly supplied it with weapons before and soon after the fighting broke out in August, and sold tanks and an antiaircraft system to the Georgians at reduced prices.<br />A parliamentary commission set up by Ukraine's opposition parties has been investigating the claims, which also include allegations that the president decommissioned equipment sorely needed by Ukraine's military and gave it to Georgia.<br />Yushchenko has flatly denied any wrongdoing, describing the investigation as nothing more than a political show. He has indicated that Ukraine has every right to sell weapons to any country, including Georgia, that is not under international sanctions.<br />The opposition lawmakers say the point is not whether Ukraine had a right to sell weapons to Georgia. They say the government secretly sent the arms, bypassing disclosure rules to avoid antagonizing Russia. They also say that some of the proceeds of the sales have gone not to the treasury, but to people in Yushchenko's circle, even as Ukraine's military is in dire need of cash.<br />"We are on the verge of a huge political scandal that could have immense political repercussions," said Vitaly Konovalyuk, a member of Parliament who leads the commission. Konovalyuk is from the leading opposition party, the Party of Regions, which seeks closer ties with the Kremlin.<br />The charges come at a time of a deep economic downturn and political discord in Ukraine, with a seemingly intractable power struggle between Yushchenko and his main pro-Western rival, Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko. The Parliament has often been stalemated, and Yushchenko's popularity has plunged.<br />Russia's senior officials have been fueling the dispute. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called the alleged weapons sales a "crime against the Russian and Ukrainian people" in a meeting with Timoshenko in October.<br />The Kremlin has long opposed Yushchenko because of his pro-Western bent and was infuriated by his vocal backing of Georgia during the crisis. The leadership of both Ukraine and Georgia took power in the so-called color revolutions, and both want to join NATO. Russia has vociferously opposed such steps.<br />Russia's president, Dmitri Medvedev, last month accused countries that supplied Georgia with weapons of helping to provoke the August conflict.<br />"Unfortunately, several countries close to us participated in this," he said. "We will never forget this, and, for sure, we will consider this when formulating policy."<br />Last week, Gazprom, the state-owned natural gas monopoly once headed by Medvedev, announced that it might double the price of gas for Ukraine if it failed to pay off $2.4 billion in debt by Jan. 1.<br />Two years ago, in a similar dispute, Gazprom turned off the gas to Ukraine. (Gazprom has said it will try to refrain from doing so again this time.)<br />Ukraine was left with huge stockpiles of weapons and military equipment after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, and has relied on arms exports as a key source of income.<br />In 2007, Ukraine sold Georgia 74 T-72 tanks, some armored combat vehicles, a BUK M1 surface-to-air missile system, and two 2S7 self-propelled artillery guns, among other weapons, according to the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms.<br />Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council said in a statement that the country's last shipment of military hardware arrived at the Georgian Black Sea port in Poti on Aug. 8, the day the war started, but that the cargo "did not include weaponry." Rather, the statement said, "pyrotechnical equipment" for aircraft emergency and fire prevention systems were delivered.<br />Although Ukraine's weapons export regime has been criticized for lack of oversight, most analysts say controls over weapons sales have improved since the 1990s, when the country was a main source of weapons sent to conflict zones around the world.<br />Yushchenko has said Ukraine's arms shipments did not violate any laws, and has indicated that Ukraine will continue to sell weapons to Georgia. Ukraine also sells military hardware to Russia.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/europe/ukraine.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/europe/ukraine.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Owners of pirated Ukrainian freighter reach deal on ransom</strong><br />By Jeffrey Gettleman<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />NAIROBI: The saga over the pirated Ukrainian freighter stuffed with weapons may be coming to an end.<br />Andrew Mwangura, head of a Kenyan maritime association, said the Somali pirates who captured the freighter more than two months ago have reached an agreement with the ship's owners on a ransom, though he would not reveal the amount. The only thing left to figure out, he said, is how to get the ransom to the pirates and regain the ship - no simple feat with a half-dozen American and European vessels circling the freighter and a band of jumpy pirates aboard.<br />"There is some good news," Mwangura said Sunday. "Both sides have agreed. They are now working on modalities of transferring the money."<br />Mwangura, who has helped several times before in the delicate negotiations over hijacked ships and has a network of seamen in Kenya and Somalia, said he expected the situation to be resolved peacefully in the coming days.<br />A businessman in Xarardheere, the sun-baked pirate den on the Somali coast near where the freighter is anchored, said that he spoke to the pirates Sunday via radio and that they said the ship would be freed in "the next day or so." The businessman, who declined to be identified, helps supply the pirates with milk, water, goats and cartons of cigarettes.<br />But this is not the first time there have been such hopes. The Ukrainian ship was hijacked Sept. 25, hundreds of kilometers off Somalia's coast, and several times a deal has seemed tantalizingly close only to implode in recriminations and disputes over money.<br />On Sunday night, a Western diplomat in Kenya with knowledge of the negotiations said he had heard there might be a deal, but he could not confirm it. Although the pirates first demanded an astronomical ransom - $35 million - maritime officials in Kenya said the ultimate price would most likely be around $3 million to $5 million.<br />Somalia has been plagued by pirates for years. But the hijacking of the Ukrainian ship rang alarm bells around the world because of its cargo: 33 Soviet-era battle tanks, 150 grenade launchers, 6 antiaircraft guns and heaps of ammunition. Western powers, including the United States and Russia, fear that the weapons could fall into the hands of Islamist insurgents who are gobbling up territory across Somalia and who are widely believed to be providing sanctuary to terrorists from Al Qaeda. Somalia has not had a functioning central government for nearly 18 years.<br />The United States, Russia, India, NATO and the European Union have all sent warships to Somalia's waters, but the piracy problem still rages. An enormous Saudi supertanker carrying $100 million of oil was hijacked last month, and that ship, along with about a dozen others, is still being held.<br />Mohammed Ibrahim contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/africa/pirates.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/africa/pirates.php</a></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM8avdTrzgGaYSGEa7X0FEqgsm3FqahSBRbq3GFn5FPVDD494BrSdqGYWOra_hyOsrPnxELTEw_zUqi9AfOgyb_mJ5AzCS5GxY2TL-Pek22rk_wtMDpJzv4kA7X01whrtTiK14A76qoik/s1600-h/DSC02367.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703576409693122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM8avdTrzgGaYSGEa7X0FEqgsm3FqahSBRbq3GFn5FPVDD494BrSdqGYWOra_hyOsrPnxELTEw_zUqi9AfOgyb_mJ5AzCS5GxY2TL-Pek22rk_wtMDpJzv4kA7X01whrtTiK14A76qoik/s320/DSC02367.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Sydney Opera House's designer dies</strong><br />By Fred A. Bernstein<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />Jorn Utzon, a Danish architect who designed one of the world's most recognizable buildings, the Sydney Opera House, but never saw it finished, died in Copenhagen on Saturday. He was 90.<br />He died of heart failure in his sleep, according to his son Kim.<br />Floodlights that illuminate the Opera House were dimmed for one hour Sunday night to mark Utzon's death, The Associated Press reported from Sydney, and the New South Wales government said flags on the city's other landmark, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, would be lowered to half-staff Monday.<br />Utzon left Australia amid controversy seven years before the Opera House was completed. He lived out most of his final decades on the Spanish island of Majorca while his gull-roofed building came to symbolize Australia, half a world away.<br />As a young architect Utzon worked for Gunnar Asplund in Sweden and Alvar Aalto in Finland before establishing his own practice in Copenhagen in 1950. In 1956, he read about the Sydney Opera House competition in a Swedish architecture magazine. He spent six months designing a building with sail-like roofs, their geometry, he said, derived from the sections of an orange. Utzon's plan was championed by Eero Saarinen, the Finnish architect who was one of the judges in the competition.<br />In 1957, Utzon - who until then was hardly known outside his native country - was declared the winner, and for the next five years he worked on the project from his office in Denmark. In 1962, he moved with his wife, Lis, sons Jan and Kim, and daughter, Lin, to Sydney.<br />When only the shell of the opera house was complete, the architect found himself at odds with Davis Hughes, the New South Wales minister for public works, over cost overruns and delays. When Hughes stopped payments to Utzon in 1966, the architect packed up his family and left the country.<br />Supporters of Utzon said that an unreasonably low construction estimate made it seem as though costs had escalated far more than they had, and that Utzon had been treated unfairly.<br />Writing in Harvard Design Magazine in 2005, Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor of planning at Aalborg University in Denmark, argued: "The real loss in the Sydney Opera House project is not the huge cost overrun in itself. It is that the overrun and the controversy it created kept Utzon from building more masterpieces."<br />In recent years, Australian organizations tried to heal the breach. In 2002, Utzon was commissioned to design interior renovations that would bring the building closer to his original vision; his son Jan, who is also an architect, traveled to Australia to carry out the work. And in 2003, Utzon received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney. (Jan took his place at the ceremony.)<br />The same year, Utzon won the Pritzker Prize, considered architecture's highest honor. Frank Gehry, who was a Pritzker juror at the time, said that Utzon "made a building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available technology, and he persevered through extraordinary malicious publicity and negative criticism to build a building that changed the image of an entire country."<br />Jorn Utzon, the son of a naval architect, was born in Aalborg, Denmark, on April 9, 1918. He studied architecture at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. After leaving Australia, he worked in Hawaii, Switzerland and Spain before settling in Majorca in the mid-1970s. In addition to the Sydney Opera House, he designed the National Assembly of Kuwait, a church at Bagsvaerd, Denmark, and many private homes, including two in Majorca for himself and his wife. He chose the spot for the first house, he said, because it reminded him of the Australian beachfront he had hurriedly departed.<br />Though he suffered from failing eyesight in his final years, he continued to discuss architecture and could visualize plans the way a chess player can visualize a board, Jan Utzon said.<br />When he was accepting the honorary doctorate in 2003, Jan Utzon said the fact that his father had never visited the Opera House did not mean he had not experienced the building. "As its creator, he just has to close his eyes to see it," he said.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/europe/obit.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/europe/obit.php</a></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj78W6eV8MtOc8IKrrZTmrBSyVArlWF6-BECOYVc9ObmH-o0DSqnEKmOcJTIryg3NR0DSXZczU930mH3yRm8P55T00uXGRbCmgrgtYMm19y36UoKc5LzxxwsY3WdBH9dO5XMt4fEnpcxJs/s1600-h/DSC02368.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703572746751314" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj78W6eV8MtOc8IKrrZTmrBSyVArlWF6-BECOYVc9ObmH-o0DSqnEKmOcJTIryg3NR0DSXZczU930mH3yRm8P55T00uXGRbCmgrgtYMm19y36UoKc5LzxxwsY3WdBH9dO5XMt4fEnpcxJs/s320/DSC02368.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>Google's gatekeepers</strong><br />By Jeffrey Rosen<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />NEW YORK: In March 2007, Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google, was notified that there had been a precipitous drop in activity on YouTube in Turkey, and that the press was reporting that the Turkish government was blocking access to the video-sharing site. Apparently unaware that Google owns YouTube, Turkish officials did not tell Google that a judge had ordered telecommunications providers to block access to the site in response to videos that insulted the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which is a crime under Turkish law.<br />Wong scrambled to figure out which videos had provoked the court order and made the first in a series of tense telephone calls to Google's legal advisers in London and Turkey as angry protesters gathered in Istanbul. Eventually, Wong and several colleagues concluded that the video that had sparked the controversy was a parody news broadcast that declared that Ataturk was gay. The clip was posted by Greek soccer fans looking to taunt their Turkish rivals.<br />Wong and her colleagues asked the Turkish authorities to reconsider their decision, pointing out that the original offending video had already been voluntarily removed by YouTube users. But after the video was taken down, Turkish prosecutors objected to dozens of other YouTube videos that they claimed insulted either Ataturk or "Turkishness." These clips ranged from Kurdish-militia recruitment videos and Kurdish morality plays to additional videos speculating about the sexual orientation of Ataturk, including one superimposing his image on characters from the television series "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."<br />After having many of the videos translated into English, Wong and her colleagues set out to determine which ones were, in fact, illegal in Turkey; which ones violated YouTube's terms of service prohibiting hate speech but allowing political speech; and which constituted expression that Google and YouTube would try to protect.<br />There was a vigorous internal debate among Wong and her colleagues at the top of Google's legal pyramid. Andrew McLaughlin, Google's director of global public policy, took an aggressive civil-libertarian position, arguing that the company should protect as much speech as possible. Kent Walker, Google's general counsel, took a more pragmatic approach, expressing concern for the safety of the dozen or so employees at Google's Turkish office. The responsibility for balancing these and other competing concerns about the controversial content fell to Wong, whose colleagues jokingly call her "the Decider," after President George W. Bush's folksy self-description.<br />Wong decided that Google, by using a technique called IP blocking, would prevent access to videos that clearly violated Turkish law, but only in Turkey. For a time, her solution seemed to satisfy the Turkish judges, who restored YouTube access.<br />But last June, as part of a campaign against threats to symbols of Turkish secularism, a Turkish prosecutor made a sweeping demand: that Google block access to the offending videos throughout the world, to protect the rights and sensitivities of Turks living outside the country. Google refused, arguing that one nation's government should not be able to set the limits of speech for Internet users worldwide. Unmoved, the Turkish government today continues to block access to YouTube in Turkey.<br />The Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: It has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.<br />The most powerful and protean of these Internet gatekeepers is, of course, Google. With control of 63 percent of the world's Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, Google has enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world.<br />As an acknowledgment of its power, Google has given Wong a central role in the company's decision-making process about what controversial user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa, the photo-sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site.<br />Wong and her colleagues also oversee Google's search engine. They decide what controversial material does and does not appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on google.com. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.<br />For the past two years, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, along with other international Internet companies, have been meeting regularly with human rights and civil-liberties advocacy groups to agree on voluntary standards for resisting worldwide censorship requests. At the end of October, the Internet companies and the advocacy groups announced the Global Network Initiative, a series of principles for protecting global free expression and privacy.<br />Voluntary self-regulation means that, for the foreseeable future, Wong and her colleagues will continue to exercise extraordinary power over global speech online. Which raises a perennial but increasingly urgent question: Can we trust a corporation to be good - even a corporation whose informal motto is "Don't be evil"?<br />Recently, I spent several days talking with Wong and her colleagues at Google's headquarters, the so-called Googleplex in Mountain View, California. As we sat around a conference table, they told me about their debates as they wrestled with hard cases like the dispute in Turkey, as well as the experiences that have informed their thinking about free speech.<br />I asked Wong what the best analogy was for her role at Google. Was she acting like a judge? An editor? "I don't think it's either of those," she said. "I definitely am not trying to pass judgment on anything. I'm taking my best guess at what will allow our products to move forward in a country, and that's not a judge role, more an enabling role."<br />When Google was founded 10 years ago, it was not at all obvious whether the proprietors of search engines would obey the local laws of the countries in which they did business, or whether they would remove links from search results in response to requests from foreign governments. This began to change in 2000, when a French Jew surfed a Yahoo auction site to look for collections of Nazi memorabilia, which violated a French law banning the sale and display of anything that incites racism.<br />After a French judge determined that it was feasible for Yahoo to identify 90 percent of its French users by analyzing their IP addresses and to screen the material from the users, he ordered Yahoo to make reasonable efforts to block French users from gaining access to the prohibited content or else to face fines and the seizure of income from Yahoo's French subsidiary. In January 2001, Yahoo banned the sale of Nazi memorabilia on its Web sites.<br />The Yahoo case was a landmark. It made clear that search engines based in the United States, like Google and Yahoo, could be held liable outside America for indexing or directing users to content after having been notified that it was illegal in a foreign country.<br />In the wake of the Yahoo decision, Google decided to comply with governmental requests to take down links on its national search engines to material that clearly violated national laws. (In the interest of disclosure, however, Google has agreed to report all the links it takes down in response to government demands to a Web site, chillingeffects.com, run by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, that keeps a record of censored online materials.)<br />Over the past couple of years, Google and its various applications have been blocked, to different degrees, by 24 countries. Blogger is blocked in Pakistan, for example, and Orkut in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, governments are increasingly pressing telecommunications companies to block controversial speech at the network level. Europe and the United States recently agreed to require Internet service providers to identify and block child pornography, and in Europe there are growing demands for networkwide blocking of terrorist-incitement videos.<br />As a result, Wong and her colleagues said, they worried that Google's ability to make case-by-case decisions about what links and videos are accessible through Google's sites might be slowly circumvented, as countries were requiring the companies that gave people access to the Internet to build top-down censorship into the network pipes.<br />I asked Wong whether she thought the "Decider" model was feasible in the long term, and to my surprise, she said no. "I think the Decider model is an inconsistent model because the Internet is big and Google isn't the only one making the decisions," she told me.<br />When I pressed Wong and her colleagues about who they thought should make these decisions, they said they would be happiest, of course, if more countries would adopt U.S.-style free-speech protections. Knowing that that was unlikely, they said they would prefer that countries around the world set up accountable bodies that provided direct guidance about what controversial content to restrict.<br />As an example of his preferred alternative, McLaughlin pointed to Germany, which has established a state agency that gathers the URLs of sites hosting Nazi and violent content illegal under German law and gives the list to an industry body, which then passes it on to Google so that it can block the material on its German site. (Whenever Google blocks material there or on its other foreign sites, it indicates in the search results that it has done so.)<br />Those review boards might protect far less free speech than Google's lawyers have. When I raised this concern, McLaughlin said he hoped that the growing trends to censor speech, at the network level and elsewhere, would be resisted by millions of individual users who would agitate against censorship as they experienced the benefits of free speech. But what is left out of McLaughlin's vision is uncertainty about one question: the future ethics and behavior of gatekeepers like Google itself.<br />Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and former scholar in residence at Google, said, "Right now, we're trusting Google because it's good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad." In his view, that day might come when Google would allow its automated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security purposes.<br />"Under pressure to fight terrorism or to pacify repressive governments, Google could track everything we've searched for, everything we're writing on Gmail, everything we're writing on Google docs, to figure out who we are and what we do," he said. "It would make the Internet a much scarier place for free expression."<br />Wu's fears that violations of privacy could chill free speech are grounded in recent history: in 2005, Yahoo turned over to the Chinese government the e-mail address of Shi Tao, a Chinese dissident who was imprisoned as a result. Yahoo has since come to realize that the best way of resisting government subpoenas is to ensure that private data cannot be turned over, even if a government demands it. In some repressive countries, I was told by Michael Samway, who heads Yahoo's human rights efforts, Yahoo now stores personal data offshore and limits access to local employees; in the most repressive countries, Yahoo has an instant purge system for search queries so that it cannot turn them over even when ordered to do so.<br />Purging data is the best way of protecting privacy and free expression in the Internet age: It is the only way of ensuring that government officials cannot force companies like Google and Yahoo to turn over information that allows individuals to be identified. Google, which refused to discuss its data-purging policies on the record, has raised the suspicion of advocacy groups like Privacy International. It announced in September that it would retain all the IP addresses on its server logs for only nine months. Until that time, however, it stores a wealth of personal information about people's search results and viewing habits that - in large part for the purpose of improving its customizing of advertising and thus remaining profitable. As Wu suggested, it would be a catastrophe for privacy and free speech if this information fell into the wrong hands.<br />Google is, after all, a company in the advertising and media business. In the future, Wu said, it might slant its search results to favor its own media applications or to bury its competitors.<br />If Google allowed its search results to be biased for economic reasons, it would transform the way people think about Google as a neutral free-speech tool. The only editor is supposed to be a neutral algorithm. But that would make it all the more insidious if the search algorithm were to become biased.<br />"They have enormous control over a platform of all the world's data, and everything they do is designed to improve their control of the underlying data," says the Internet scholar Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School. "If your whole game is to increase market share, it's hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content."<br />Wong and her colleagues at Google seem to be working impressively to put the company's long-term commitment to free expression above its short-term financial interests. But they won't be at Google forever.<br />Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/technology/google01.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/technology/google01.php</a></div><div></div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>In a world of digital trails, what about privacy?<br /></strong>By John Markoff<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harrison Brown, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, didn't need to do complex calculations to figure out he liked this deal: in exchange for letting researchers track his every move, he receives a free smartphone.<br />Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who is nearby.<br />Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at MIT have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm's social network.<br />The students' data are but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data are the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.<br />Propelled by new technologies and the Internet's steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.<br />But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.<br />Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. "There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can't imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years," says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.<br />In a widely read Web posting, he argued that there were significant chances that it would be misused, "This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious."<br />For the last 50 years, Americans have worried about the privacy of the individual in the computer age. But new technologies have become so powerful that protecting individual privacy may no longer be the only issue. Now, with the Internet, wireless sensors, and the capability to analyze an avalanche of data, a person's profile can be drawn without monitoring him or her directly.<br />"Some have argued that with new technology there is a diminished expectation of privacy," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington. "But the opposite may also be true. New techniques may require us to expand our understanding of privacy and to address the impact that data collection has on groups of individuals and not simply a single person."<br />Brown, for one, isn't concerned about losing his privacy. The MIT researchers have convinced him that they have gone to great lengths to protect any information generated by the experiment that would reveal his identity.<br />Besides, he says, "the way I see it, we all have Facebook pages, we all have e-mail and Web sites and blogs."<br />"This is a drop in the bucket in terms of privacy," he adds.<br />Google and its vast farm of more than a million search engine servers spread around the globe remain the best example of the power and wealth-building potential of collective intelligence. Google's fabled PageRank algorithm, which was originally responsible for the quality of Google's search results, drew its precision from the inherent wisdom in the billions of individual Web links that people create.<br />The company introduced a speech-recognition service in early November, initially for the Apple iPhone, that gains its accuracy in large part from a statistical model built from several trillion search terms that its users have entered in the last decade. In the future, Google will take advantage of spoken queries to predict even more accurately the questions its users will ask.<br />And, a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.<br />The success of Google, along with the rapid spread of the wireless Internet and sensors — like location trackers in cellphones and GPS units in cars — has touched off a race to cash in on collective intelligence technologies.<br />In 2006, Sense Networks, based in New York, proved that there was a wealth of useful information hidden in a digital archive of GPS data generated by tens of thousands of taxi rides in San Francisco. It could see, for example, that people who worked in the city's financial district would tend to go to work early when the market was booming, but later when it was down.<br />It also noticed that middle-income people — as determined by ZIP code data — tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.<br />Sense has developed two applications, one for consumers to use on smartphones like the BlackBerry and the iPhone, and the other for companies interested in forecasting social trends and financial behavior. The consumer application, Citysense, identifies entertainment hot spots in a city. It connects information from Yelp and Google about nightclubs and music clubs with data generated by tracking locations of anonymous cellphone users.<br />The second application, Macrosense, is intended to give businesses insight into human activities. It uses a vast database that merges GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, radio frequency identification chips and other sensors.<br />"There is a whole new set of metrics that no one has ever measured," said Greg Skibiski, chief executive of Sense. "We were able to look at people moving around stores" and other locations. Such travel patterns, coupled with data on incomes, can give retailers early insights into sales levels and who is shopping at competitors' stores.<br />Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at MIT who is leading the dormitory research project, was a co-founder of Sense Networks. He is part of a new generation of researchers who have relatively effortless access to data that in the past was either painstakingly assembled by hand or acquired from questionnaires or interviews that relied on the memories and honesty of the subjects.<br />The Media Lab researchers have worked with Hitachi Data Systems, the Japanese technology company, to use some of the lab's technologies to improve businesses' efficiency. For example, by equipping employees with sensor badges that generate the same kinds of data provided by the students' smartphones, the researchers determined that face-to-face communication was far more important to an organization's work than was generally believed.<br />Productivity improved 30 percent with an incremental increase in face-to-face communication, Pentland said. The results were so promising that Hitachi has established a consulting business that overhauls organizations via the researchers' techniques.<br />Pentland calls his research "reality mining" to differentiate it from an earlier generation of data mining conducted through more traditional methods.<br />Pentland "is the emperor of networked sensor research," said Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell who studies communications networks and their role as social networks. People and organizations, he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another through digital means that record traces of those interactions. "This allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could do," he said.<br />Once based on networked personal computers, collective intelligence systems are increasingly being created to leverage wireless networks of digital sensors and smartphones. In one application, groups of scientists and political and environmental activists are developing "participatory sensing" networks.<br />At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, researchers are developing a Web service they call a Personal Environmental Impact Report to build a community map of air quality in Los Angeles. It is intended to let people assess how their activities affect the environment and to make decisions about their health. Users may decide to change their jogging route, or run at a different time of day, depending on air quality at the time.<br />"Our mantra is to make it possible to observe what was previously unobservable," said Deborah Estrin, director of the center and a computer scientist at UCLA<br />But Estrin said the project still faced a host of challenges, both with the accuracy of tiny sensors and with the researchers' ability to be certain that personal information remains private. She is skeptical about technical efforts to obscure the identity of individual contributors to databases of information collected by network sensors.<br />Attempts to blur the identity of individuals have only a limited capability, she said. The researchers encrypt the data to protect against identifying particular people, but that has limits.<br />"Even though we are protecting the information, it is still subject to subpoena and subject to bullying bosses or spouses," she said.<br />She says that there may still be ways to protect privacy. "I can imagine a system where the data will disappear," she said.<br />Already, activist groups have seized on the technology to improve the effectiveness of their organizing. A service called MobileActive helps nonprofit organizations around the world use mobile phones to harness the expertise and the energy of their participants, by sending out action alerts, for instance.<br />Pachube (pronounced "PATCH-bay") is a Web service that lets people share real-time sensor data from anywhere in the world. With Pachube, one can combine and display sensor data, from the cost of energy in one location, to temperature and pollution monitoring, to data flowing from a buoy off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, all creating an information-laden snapshot of the world.<br />Such a complete and constantly updated picture will undoubtedly redefine traditional notions of privacy.<br />Pentland says there are ways to avoid surveillance-society pitfalls that lurk in the technology. For the commercial use of such information, he has proposed a set of principles derived from English common law to guarantee that people have ownership rights to data about their behavior. The idea revolves around three principles: that you have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or redeploy your data as you wish.<br />At the same time, he argued that individual privacy rights must also be weighed against the public good.<br />Citing the epidemic involving severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in recent years, he said technology would have helped health officials watch the movement of infected people as it happened, providing an opportunity to limit the spread of the disease.<br />"If I could have looked at the cellphone records, it could have been stopped that morning rather than a couple of weeks later," he said. "I'm sorry, that trumps minute concerns about privacy."<br />Indeed, some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history.<br />"The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts," said Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.<br />"For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew," Malone said. "In some sense we're becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.php</a></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieHza8mFKA6sMShK_X2N74M-jChVldbQZ-qVjkkby_qN57xhJyXWMe4QSA5Z_cKRI-PMJs_8j6WTAMLbW9Z1v046YZnl19MZYq2uJECIK0IpQce-zgMjeRP0Raz-KZuIV4Jpmc3rUP2AY/s1600-h/DSC02369.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703563770483570" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieHza8mFKA6sMShK_X2N74M-jChVldbQZ-qVjkkby_qN57xhJyXWMe4QSA5Z_cKRI-PMJs_8j6WTAMLbW9Z1v046YZnl19MZYq2uJECIK0IpQce-zgMjeRP0Raz-KZuIV4Jpmc3rUP2AY/s320/DSC02369.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>Nine headless bodies found in Mexican border town</strong><br />Reuters<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />TIJUANA, Mexico: Nine decapitated bodies were discovered on Sunday in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, a hot spot in an increasingly gruesome war between drug cartels.<br />The bodies, along with their removed heads, had been left in a vacant lot beside a factory, witnesses and police told reporters.<br />Mexico is facing spiralling drug violence, especially along its border with the United States. Cities like Tijuana, south of San Diego, are seeing horrendous levels of crime, with bodies set on fire, cut up and dumped in acid and strung over highways.<br />Beheadings, kidnappings and daylight shootings have become common as vicious drug cartels fight over smuggling routes into the United States.<br />President Felipe Calderon has sent some 40,000 troops and federal police across Mexico to try to stop the killings. But despite major drug seizures and arrests, the killings continue.<br />(Reporting by Lizbeth Diaz; editing by Mohammad Zargham)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/america/OUKWD-UK-MEXICO-DRUGS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/america/OUKWD-UK-MEXICO-DRUGS.php</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihrEXwdiXGP1IW8ZhhXPh_HkfCJHpRG5rMt1CZZYEST2cWUpPeMjZWkpgtIhwfJhazNKqYnf30HprFVhm2z5sw_0NxS5ilYpwUUi_L0B5yxREnyF8M-d0OpQWXUUMlb5f_IMmD1b2cNuQ/s1600-h/DSC02370.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703558206235986" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihrEXwdiXGP1IW8ZhhXPh_HkfCJHpRG5rMt1CZZYEST2cWUpPeMjZWkpgtIhwfJhazNKqYnf30HprFVhm2z5sw_0NxS5ilYpwUUi_L0B5yxREnyF8M-d0OpQWXUUMlb5f_IMmD1b2cNuQ/s320/DSC02370.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div></div><div><strong>Iraq and Iran resume swaps of 1980s war dead<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />By Aref Mohammed<br />Iran and Iraq on Sunday exchanged the remains of a total of 241 soldiers killed in their 1980-88 war, resuming a swap that had been suspended since shortly after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.<br />The bodies of 41 Iranians and 200 Iraqis, most of them unidentified, were handed over at the border crossing point of Shalamcha in southern Iraq, while Iraqi and Iranian military bands played martial music and national anthems.<br />The bodies came from border areas that witnessed major battles in a war estimated to have killed one million people.<br />Iranian naval personnel carried the coffins of Iraqi soldiers, wrapped in Iraqi flags, to the border and then crossed into Iraq where they placed the coffins in rows.<br />Iraqi soldiers then did the same with the coffins of Iranians draped in Iranian flags. Iranian women veiled and shrouded in black threw themselves over some coffins and wailed.<br />The coffins of the Iranian remains were numbered. Most were marked with "Unidentified," and the place where they were found.<br />"Families on both sides have been waiting for this moment," said Bruno Husquinet, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross's Basra office, which supervised Sunday's exchange.<br />It was the first such handover since May 2003, two months after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.<br />Although the Iran-Iraq war ended 20 years ago, the fate of many soldiers on both sides remains unknown.<br />"We want to pursue this long unresolved humanitarian case until it is totally closed," said Mohammed Baghban, the Iranian Consul in Basra.<br />"There will be more remains to be handed over because there are still people missing," he said.<br />(Writing by Aseel Kami; editing by Michael Christie)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-IRAN-REMAINS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/30/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-IRAN-REMAINS.php</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXXackCsVax7HQYEhfZY47lwwLLTeONFp0BrWPleaSyOHOZXWGT6doylGH39foUA0Q1qpzS2eA5GdrL4MgTJAK0B9marxOMHFcDhwu6UbF_LDajuBF7bCz69g4NV0L25G8TyA4AoXzwhM/s1600-h/DSC02371.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703289755143090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXXackCsVax7HQYEhfZY47lwwLLTeONFp0BrWPleaSyOHOZXWGT6doylGH39foUA0Q1qpzS2eA5GdrL4MgTJAK0B9marxOMHFcDhwu6UbF_LDajuBF7bCz69g4NV0L25G8TyA4AoXzwhM/s320/DSC02371.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ5gLH4jVViNUzE0nBqBeF9gl9yi0rl4zi_pLhX2Sz-FowEd-zj0SZTVf0qW_PthLvGPjMVgR7eE4XhxP3cXVW81aTqmKDadGy_VsaU4pquFieQB1EUtOCT9oCqnhGCAw4oUJNIo2ohOM/s1600-h/DSC02372.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703278400947938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ5gLH4jVViNUzE0nBqBeF9gl9yi0rl4zi_pLhX2Sz-FowEd-zj0SZTVf0qW_PthLvGPjMVgR7eE4XhxP3cXVW81aTqmKDadGy_VsaU4pquFieQB1EUtOCT9oCqnhGCAw4oUJNIo2ohOM/s320/DSC02372.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhvyhz_2nu3ybVBV66C5oShiFHmrk9IigkG_UR2SVUMINMBSFMafYLS09o0mvO4npT4OUYrAJbhCmWnO2qd4rv-rPWu4XGnsN9aaVbHb1lm9ZHgmVQ89efMCpc3K79wlWW1qN6aeq3SjE/s1600-h/DSC02373.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703280370211410" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhvyhz_2nu3ybVBV66C5oShiFHmrk9IigkG_UR2SVUMINMBSFMafYLS09o0mvO4npT4OUYrAJbhCmWnO2qd4rv-rPWu4XGnsN9aaVbHb1lm9ZHgmVQ89efMCpc3K79wlWW1qN6aeq3SjE/s320/DSC02373.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgcO4kLJ8odNEZf6q5l28bsB7cP3u2UYPhl5O_t-IlSdzgOUk7eJrggHkXYrZTZ5cnJuDaI8p1MF9ABD4pWhA4sL5NWAXylERRZfu67Gj4PLktfhGg7SSgbyLXPYWYGi5ItvBfCLxKLFU/s1600-h/DSC02374.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703275972316994" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgcO4kLJ8odNEZf6q5l28bsB7cP3u2UYPhl5O_t-IlSdzgOUk7eJrggHkXYrZTZ5cnJuDaI8p1MF9ABD4pWhA4sL5NWAXylERRZfu67Gj4PLktfhGg7SSgbyLXPYWYGi5ItvBfCLxKLFU/s320/DSC02374.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglfHGZGUgXMM2npj3GsNGXjDgz8CPboGEmuOu0p42qgdY2RC9G5Nb7ZCExAzLG_VqDOt14JBuaBpTann5CKX0ZflTc4n5zx7UorOAbm0f6T8-JCGlLhI6yPdnpG9GPOvj3vkf3pArl1Us/s1600-h/DSC02375.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703270125978818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglfHGZGUgXMM2npj3GsNGXjDgz8CPboGEmuOu0p42qgdY2RC9G5Nb7ZCExAzLG_VqDOt14JBuaBpTann5CKX0ZflTc4n5zx7UorOAbm0f6T8-JCGlLhI6yPdnpG9GPOvj3vkf3pArl1Us/s320/DSC02375.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPVYFgqknPm3RHeaL4DwFoy6WLf4Rv1r39_ny_vhHRE0zaQhKZ4rRyFpf9KuaW0hqjIhgqdtoOJk-EtIA-SvFT7F16tAVvHMXjaJLoEziBjM19pk-QqZPp644ulH5cxZqY3QkDOhBxogQ/s1600-h/DSC02376.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703037248267682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPVYFgqknPm3RHeaL4DwFoy6WLf4Rv1r39_ny_vhHRE0zaQhKZ4rRyFpf9KuaW0hqjIhgqdtoOJk-EtIA-SvFT7F16tAVvHMXjaJLoEziBjM19pk-QqZPp644ulH5cxZqY3QkDOhBxogQ/s320/DSC02376.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwxDl-oBZfUGKL1G0fLGGUjHYjTecPXx-cayDiNTzx_l1dGi0-avJpSZC_bpHPac8gR5SCDiTrqHUgqMMyIErooD-kiw1T5AwV63cwadR8UMKZhkUzx9VpNXm0JfVEoMkpLBliCXrwPNY/s1600-h/DSC02377.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703035347996194" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwxDl-oBZfUGKL1G0fLGGUjHYjTecPXx-cayDiNTzx_l1dGi0-avJpSZC_bpHPac8gR5SCDiTrqHUgqMMyIErooD-kiw1T5AwV63cwadR8UMKZhkUzx9VpNXm0JfVEoMkpLBliCXrwPNY/s320/DSC02377.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWSX_Cj0u9iwLEVh00w4ZsdQIBgs_dworGf4fFkmAaJrnzdU6k8BuLQeZQPzo2Tc4hrt0AKxZKDfJsrXQr3Ru4ZQj5Y003Q08KIG7Iu7afnYexf8x6Je4woiKTAsem-3HRd48aAH7W3-w/s1600-h/DSC02378.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703034454415026" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWSX_Cj0u9iwLEVh00w4ZsdQIBgs_dworGf4fFkmAaJrnzdU6k8BuLQeZQPzo2Tc4hrt0AKxZKDfJsrXQr3Ru4ZQj5Y003Q08KIG7Iu7afnYexf8x6Je4woiKTAsem-3HRd48aAH7W3-w/s320/DSC02378.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNq61TARvP2n-ohWPiDwpCqSSnB2So0P44Zyqf6yHb9Sv8MISsAa6v1EABfJSQBi0mh5QeDPlqbx6V-lmtc185tqkukkIncLamUSqLRqazQTW31mh0OKABbTcik5S1oojnoqRoJoUNCI8/s1600-h/DSC02379.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703028103269122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNq61TARvP2n-ohWPiDwpCqSSnB2So0P44Zyqf6yHb9Sv8MISsAa6v1EABfJSQBi0mh5QeDPlqbx6V-lmtc185tqkukkIncLamUSqLRqazQTW31mh0OKABbTcik5S1oojnoqRoJoUNCI8/s320/DSC02379.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYzOgMEerqmrTGEKmh-OT0wzkbgGBt4X_SP5QuArkAuVZkEu98kA8bJK0N__kvgLePLNKOEZfJv53sccVERhxVATF97Ct2B0VsV_6mRRg-ElgeEE20mduCH7Yltn1nHLNA_rMOEJC_KOc/s1600-h/DSC02380.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274703031786162178" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYzOgMEerqmrTGEKmh-OT0wzkbgGBt4X_SP5QuArkAuVZkEu98kA8bJK0N__kvgLePLNKOEZfJv53sccVERhxVATF97Ct2B0VsV_6mRRg-ElgeEE20mduCH7Yltn1nHLNA_rMOEJC_KOc/s320/DSC02380.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-0qe2TNnq6SKA18FK9rZWm6cqXUKWu0fL3R0VYULpCppxLkCEEmDUMkqyoDZDUdicIHCCf_W8g7qQGxx_pOLJBtR7pcx5JBx484uVxjFWcPrTeunppXQn-0DczCrNSkqCA8O4s0qHQqY/s1600-h/DSC02381.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274702743764474146" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-0qe2TNnq6SKA18FK9rZWm6cqXUKWu0fL3R0VYULpCppxLkCEEmDUMkqyoDZDUdicIHCCf_W8g7qQGxx_pOLJBtR7pcx5JBx484uVxjFWcPrTeunppXQn-0DczCrNSkqCA8O4s0qHQqY/s320/DSC02381.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUVJlBNKToRBHcbIhFXy9Y134cNcSvrJaAnHbuDYWMIBwTU_bAwBJCgnIXSCY62kS-5lggecLg504Jf4C286C3kCZXi2Q0Qv8huqK1TCywK8BI1qQ-h1VmnS6lK3IHfJ_IaaJZxGZE75U/s1600-h/DSC02382.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274702737940125906" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUVJlBNKToRBHcbIhFXy9Y134cNcSvrJaAnHbuDYWMIBwTU_bAwBJCgnIXSCY62kS-5lggecLg504Jf4C286C3kCZXi2Q0Qv8huqK1TCywK8BI1qQ-h1VmnS6lK3IHfJ_IaaJZxGZE75U/s320/DSC02382.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYhFlG1xxj41goDRm4d_7pmmGh7d3oqpm-GxvbQk9ajO5l1lylQFH_VwTU0c23KcQqNT4NXq_LCX5Ts_bzWXZ4e15Gmm8tEkqAdbgA9xvV8LlSYbrZEYQNzWwlOZmp7g2XL0YawhImOPs/s1600-h/DSC02383.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274702731828492082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYhFlG1xxj41goDRm4d_7pmmGh7d3oqpm-GxvbQk9ajO5l1lylQFH_VwTU0c23KcQqNT4NXq_LCX5Ts_bzWXZ4e15Gmm8tEkqAdbgA9xvV8LlSYbrZEYQNzWwlOZmp7g2XL0YawhImOPs/s320/DSC02383.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiVJ5qkpvbGZKcTDH6bPtNcZdbogsxmTb3-TZwS1U7pFTdUtLvqO590_FKKNpReUFyES8hsNrfstpx0K6D2NZgZxrjCDNWabHGxvTPBYjGxvrtqFNtirzzTDhJSjL_kGqdBRoyDS-h6tw/s1600-h/DSC02384.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274702720291654866" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiVJ5qkpvbGZKcTDH6bPtNcZdbogsxmTb3-TZwS1U7pFTdUtLvqO590_FKKNpReUFyES8hsNrfstpx0K6D2NZgZxrjCDNWabHGxvTPBYjGxvrtqFNtirzzTDhJSjL_kGqdBRoyDS-h6tw/s320/DSC02384.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxBsHE6hdQJqu1xMFSOP06qogPITegT1hyphenhyphen23wh_T9NqnSYWj5sw0BFMFIRWoypYWXnJ24cDZ1PoXFL0Rg2egBOWh8c9P2TnUyT-_u_HOTf1zcLF4i8MbV7JV8UKDE2LaAm4u6pfr2hfgg/s1600-h/DSC02385.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274702718761788274" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxBsHE6hdQJqu1xMFSOP06qogPITegT1hyphenhyphen23wh_T9NqnSYWj5sw0BFMFIRWoypYWXnJ24cDZ1PoXFL0Rg2egBOWh8c9P2TnUyT-_u_HOTf1zcLF4i8MbV7JV8UKDE2LaAm4u6pfr2hfgg/s320/DSC02385.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong><br />Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France<br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-74979800807712623902008-11-30T08:04:00.016+01:002008-11-30T09:21:12.209+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Saturday, 29th November 2008<div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><div align="center"><strong>0622</strong></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYJeL6nhSFk5HJFyce05XlsR32nTIOxBDSDm3Xr6KnzXnFZIfH14NiBDNtcp_LXu0jbSeKHLaMOnxy63hh1Lai1ZWQ2bfoH4cM9-uqWcywq2f0QhBc6xzGrnRu1oYp2Dgx3nyPtQH0_NQ/s1600-h/DSC02288.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274346597678119890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYJeL6nhSFk5HJFyce05XlsR32nTIOxBDSDm3Xr6KnzXnFZIfH14NiBDNtcp_LXu0jbSeKHLaMOnxy63hh1Lai1ZWQ2bfoH4cM9-uqWcywq2f0QhBc6xzGrnRu1oYp2Dgx3nyPtQH0_NQ/s320/DSC02288.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2wcwgZg2fiQH_kR40OTcRtQgU71f5wvt2WkphqcP5H_qxnswfpoQDdznUo6hyphenhyphen7_54LT-TTfRAYDrx1bzCDlQPxeGrDMkIJPQkOj71PbwBhHypNRiI6rmL0u8XKvrGCKR9iy-RbjnslMo/s1600-h/DSC02289.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274346598762996482" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2wcwgZg2fiQH_kR40OTcRtQgU71f5wvt2WkphqcP5H_qxnswfpoQDdznUo6hyphenhyphen7_54LT-TTfRAYDrx1bzCDlQPxeGrDMkIJPQkOj71PbwBhHypNRiI6rmL0u8XKvrGCKR9iy-RbjnslMo/s320/DSC02289.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQnG3WfC3SNdLMFmQpk8DaN2-sAMbP2XAZr3K66VMi3sj7Ytcegxs1hflCWgVrHskSjI1FeOXweiS-dLoD_VQg-0clnoaCP1Ps2fAvoKb9o7pmyYmtte0snXVwbjx9yP-cgQJELESdm1k/s1600-h/DSC02290.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274346594991571042" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQnG3WfC3SNdLMFmQpk8DaN2-sAMbP2XAZr3K66VMi3sj7Ytcegxs1hflCWgVrHskSjI1FeOXweiS-dLoD_VQg-0clnoaCP1Ps2fAvoKb9o7pmyYmtte0snXVwbjx9yP-cgQJELESdm1k/s320/DSC02290.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-ezJ8x4VCeAL30dSxPDU0JZpqgRzUS684efUHRrUD7Ev07tYys9QMsd4tMeikGYSKDR9ERaV8Fo2IRETu1FYc3SrWL-5KHzEm5dNJLAUx8xSa6WfjxiSG97TNUE_du6BCYhPT8fie4T8/s1600-h/DSC02294.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274346587470626738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-ezJ8x4VCeAL30dSxPDU0JZpqgRzUS684efUHRrUD7Ev07tYys9QMsd4tMeikGYSKDR9ERaV8Fo2IRETu1FYc3SrWL-5KHzEm5dNJLAUx8xSa6WfjxiSG97TNUE_du6BCYhPT8fie4T8/s320/DSC02294.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg586ez-JMnSEfzmd9pA_Cg9pt9xWebkEgvfjedXEW8EHjRTL253CxkXO7m03GecXtft3PkljzUd4lfgEhlOHqtUWNBroNaSA1ZDuf056e7bEMN335z6h8Z2YLwmkxovfqj4BX8EaphFG0/s1600-h/DSC02296.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274346582659761538" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg586ez-JMnSEfzmd9pA_Cg9pt9xWebkEgvfjedXEW8EHjRTL253CxkXO7m03GecXtft3PkljzUd4lfgEhlOHqtUWNBroNaSA1ZDuf056e7bEMN335z6h8Z2YLwmkxovfqj4BX8EaphFG0/s320/DSC02296.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgheevFfScgn-FNYFzKl2IJbZJZt-EfpIVoXO8Gz5LfywxS37bSrcfXensfXDvr6XGQlrARaTrr1n87VtuD5nEQcYziXXJJ58K_1MZY_erALvW2jHmKPdXOQ9viMKzION7RIl1iQy1Zzzo/s1600-h/DSC02299.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274346058654486306" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgheevFfScgn-FNYFzKl2IJbZJZt-EfpIVoXO8Gz5LfywxS37bSrcfXensfXDvr6XGQlrARaTrr1n87VtuD5nEQcYziXXJJ58K_1MZY_erALvW2jHmKPdXOQ9viMKzION7RIl1iQy1Zzzo/s320/DSC02299.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhppYO7fNnPRlmGN1S1UIUZNZ245xhnmEJoCB-f4nAiKOS8Lmc4N8zfL_Yg8ybWWFCvpgm5-xOII_2xnU49G5TRz0Pr4fwPP1v10Rar1SCuDFdAJ669Vu_HxqASHukEPSMJ7RErHDjcvXU/s1600-h/DSC02307.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274346054767544706" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhppYO7fNnPRlmGN1S1UIUZNZ245xhnmEJoCB-f4nAiKOS8Lmc4N8zfL_Yg8ybWWFCvpgm5-xOII_2xnU49G5TRz0Pr4fwPP1v10Rar1SCuDFdAJ669Vu_HxqASHukEPSMJ7RErHDjcvXU/s320/DSC02307.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>WTO chief says expects ministerial decision next week</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />By Amran Abocar<br />World Trade Organisation (WTO) chief Pascal Lamy said on Saturday he was increasingly inclined to call ministers to Geneva next month to pursue a global trade treaty that could mitigate the world's economic turmoil.<br />U.S. President George W. Bush and other leaders have been pushing for a breakthrough this year in the global free trade talks, known as the Doha round, as a way to bolster the troubled world economy.<br />Lamy said it would be risky to convene a ministerial meeting unless the WTO's 153 member governments are ready to make the compromises needed to finally clinch agreement in the delicate negotiations.<br />"Convening a meeting that will fail is a risk. Not convening a meeting, waiting for some time ... is also taking a risk," he told reporters on the sidelines of a United Nations aid summit.<br />"I have not yet made a determination but the answer should be reasonably clear by the end of next week," Lamy added.<br />The WTO's Doha round is named after the Qatari capital because trade officials launched the negotiations during a summit there in November 2001.<br />A Doha-round agreement would cut subsidies and tariffs on thousands of exported goods and cross-border services, prying open food, fuel, transportation and other markets and therefore encouraging global economic activity.<br />But previous efforts to wrap up the deal -- which requires full consensus among all the negotiating parties -- have gotten stuck on many countries' resistance to exposing their farmers and key industrial sectors to more competition.<br />A July ministerial meeting collapsed over the workings of a safeguard to shield poor-country farmers during times of crisis.<br />Lamy said the financial and economic turmoil that has rocked global markets in the past few months had cast the WTO talks in a new light, making it more likely countries would compromise.<br />"They want this done, not least because of the huge change in the macreconomic environment which has happened since July," he said, relaying what he called encouraging signs from world leaders in recent bilateral and other talks.<br />"I am more inclined to call a meeting now ... I am hesitating less now than a week ago," he said.<br />European Union Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said on Friday there needed to be "a certain certainty" about the prospects of a deal before a ministerial meeting occurs.<br />But she said December may be the last chance for some time to nudge the long-sought accord to a conclusion. "If we don't get a positive deal in December, it would be very difficult to imagine ministers coming back in the first six months of 2009," she told reporters in Brussels<br />The Bush administration leaves the White House in January and U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has not yet signalled whether he would alter his country's negotiating stance in the WTO talks, casting a long shadow over the Doha round.<br />Lamy will meet with ambassadors at the WTO's headquarters on Sunday to gauge their sentiment and take the pulse of technical talks that have intensified in Geneva over the past two weeks.<br />Participants in those talks have said advances were made in some areas but countries remained at odds in others, raising questions about whether a deal is actually within reach. Any move to invite ministers to Geneva would need backing from the WTO's full membership before being official.<br />(Writing by Laura MacInnis; Editing by Michael Roddy)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/business/OUKBS-UK-TRADE-WTO-LAMY.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/business/OUKBS-UK-TRADE-WTO-LAMY.php</a></div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnQnmq9TRH_5KbZQHeHs3bTsM2rJBT5Qmjg8gdiB00noCVyhtQbb1IqCPAvm0n5dnfrV0sU_4i7HMrDsvgto-M4P_arVYJrje9LyDoXbSDussqBtOKY3PjouYzQOSmz9Vv2utjSP4S_4E/s1600-h/DSC02308.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274346053844642930" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnQnmq9TRH_5KbZQHeHs3bTsM2rJBT5Qmjg8gdiB00noCVyhtQbb1IqCPAvm0n5dnfrV0sU_4i7HMrDsvgto-M4P_arVYJrje9LyDoXbSDussqBtOKY3PjouYzQOSmz9Vv2utjSP4S_4E/s320/DSC02308.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><strong>Bush aides rush to enact a safety rule Obama opposes</strong><br />By Robert Pear<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: The Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job.<br />The rule, which has strong support from business groups, says that in assessing the risk from a particular substance, U.S. government agencies should gather and analyze "industry-by-industry evidence" of employees' exposure to it during their working lives. The proposal would, in many cases, add a step to the lengthy process of developing standards to protect workers' health.<br />Public health officials and labor unions said the rule would delay needed protections for workers, resulting in additional deaths and illnesses.<br />With the economy tumbling and American troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, President George W. Bush has promised to cooperate with Obama to make the transition "as smooth as possible." But that has not stopped his administration from trying, in its final days, to cement in place a diverse array of new regulations.<br />The Labor Department proposal is one of about 20 highly contentious rules the Bush administration is planning to issue in its final weeks. The rules deal with issues as diverse as abortion, auto safety and the environment. One rule would make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas. Another would reduce the role of U.S. government wildlife scientists in deciding whether dams, highways and other projects pose a threat to endangered species.<br />Obama and his advisers have already signaled their wariness of last-minute efforts by the Bush administration to embed its policies into the Code of Federal Regulations, a collection of rules having the force of law. The advisers have also said that Obama plans to look at a number of executive orders issued by Bush.<br />A new president can unilaterally reverse executive orders issued by his predecessors, as Bush and President Bill Clinton did in selected cases. But it is much more difficult for a new president to revoke or alter final regulations put in place by a predecessor. A new administration must solicit public comment and supply "a reasoned analysis" for such changes, as if it were issuing a new rule, the Supreme Court has said.<br />As a senator and a presidential candidate, Obama sharply criticized the regulation of workplace hazards by the Bush administration.<br />In September, Obama and four other senators introduced a bill that would prohibit the Labor Department from issuing the rule it is now rushing to complete. He also signed a letter urging the department to scrap the proposal, saying it would "create serious obstacles to protecting workers from health hazards on the job."<br />Administration officials said such concerns were based on a misunderstanding of the proposal.<br />"This proposal does not affect the substance or methodology of risk assessments, and it does not weaken any health standard," said Leon Sequeira, the assistant secretary of labor for policy. The proposal, Sequeira said, would allow the department to "cast a wide net for the best available data before proposing a health standard."<br />The Labor Department regulates occupational health hazards posed by a wide variety of substances like asbestos, benzene, cotton dust, formaldehyde, lead, vinyl chloride and blood-borne pathogens, including the virus that causes AIDS.<br />The department is constantly considering whether to take steps to protect workers against hazardous substances. Currently, it is assessing substances like silica, beryllium and diacetyl, a chemical that adds the buttery flavor to some types of microwave popcorn.<br />The proposal applies to two agencies in the Labor Department, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Under the proposal, they would have to publish "advance notice of proposed rule-making," soliciting public comment on studies, scientific information and data to be used in drafting a new rule. In some cases, OSHA has done that, but it is not required to do so.<br />The Bush administration and business groups said the rule would codify "best practices," ensuring that health standards were based on the best available data and scientific information.<br />Randel Johnson, a vice president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, said his group "unequivocally supports" the proposal because it would give the public a better opportunity to comment on the science and data used by the government.<br />After a regulation is drafted and formally proposed, Johnson said, it is "all but impossible" to get OSHA to make significant changes.<br />"Risk assessment drives the entire process of regulation," he said, and "courts almost always defer" to the agency's assessments.<br />But critics say the additional step does nothing to protect workers.<br />"This rule is being pushed through by an administration that, for the last seven and a half years, has failed to set any new OSHA health rules to protect workers, except for one issued pursuant to a court order," said Margaret Seminario, director of occupational safety and health for the AFL-CIO<br />Now, Seminario said, "the administration is rushing to lock in place requirements that would make it more difficult for the next administration to protect workers."<br />She said the proposal could add two years to a rule-making process that often took eight years or more.<br />Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who is chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, said the proposal would "weaken future workplace safety regulations and slow their adoption."<br />The proposal says that risk assessments should include industry-by-industry data on exposure to workplace substances. Administration officials acknowledged that such data did not always exist.<br />In their letter, Obama and other lawmakers said the Labor Department, instead of tinkering with risk-assessment procedures, should issue standards to protect workers against known hazards like silica and beryllium. The government has been working on a silica standard since 1997 and has listed it as a priority since 2002.<br />The timing of the proposal appears to violate a memorandum issued in early May by Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff.<br />"Except in extraordinary circumstances," Bolten wrote, "regulations to be finalized in this administration should be proposed no later than June 1, 2008, and final regulations should be issued no later than Nov. 1, 2008."<br />The Labor Department has not cited any extraordinary circumstances for its proposal, which was published in the Federal Register on Aug. 29. Administration officials confirmed last week that the proposal was still on their regulatory agenda.<br />The Labor Department said the proposal affected "only internal agency procedures" for developing health standards. It cited one source of authority for the proposal: a general "housekeeping statute" that allows the head of a department to prescribe rules for the performance of its business.<br />The statute is derived from a law passed in 1789 to help George Washington get the government up and running.<br />The Labor Department rule is among many that U.S. government agencies are poised to issue before Bush turns over the White House to Obama.<br />One rule would allow coal companies to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining operations into nearby streams and valleys. Another, issued last week by the Health and Human Services Department, gives states sweeping authority to charge higher co-payments for doctor's visits, hospital care and prescription drugs provided to low-income people under Medicaid. The department is working on another rule to protect health care workers who refuse to perform abortions or other procedures on religious or moral grounds.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/america/30labor.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/america/30labor.php</a></div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhieW0_BvPXq8ttg0Wr8fL2h9580HTLXFsXyQ7UPBXP53_ojKyW1Q4wZfkWd7UEVsIxsoJbXcZY8vMV2TqggaSrM9lTUCIkIa7yLltDV_AvQtD0OBWLoeZKRTbNVyspvqB7FiFFo88S79g/s1600-h/DSC02309.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274346040075125314" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhieW0_BvPXq8ttg0Wr8fL2h9580HTLXFsXyQ7UPBXP53_ojKyW1Q4wZfkWd7UEVsIxsoJbXcZY8vMV2TqggaSrM9lTUCIkIa7yLltDV_AvQtD0OBWLoeZKRTbNVyspvqB7FiFFo88S79g/s320/DSC02309.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Thai security forces clash with protesters at airport<br /></strong>By Thomas Fuller<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />BANGKOK: Antigovernment protesters occupying Bangkok's two commercial airports clashed at least twice with security forces on Saturday, raising tensions in the four-day standoff.<br />The Thai police said they would continue their efforts to negotiate with protesters and called the first clash a misunderstanding.<br />"We are ready to talk," Lieutenant General Chalong Somjai of the Thai police said in a news conference at a police station near Suvarnabhumi Airport, a giant complex that has served as a transportation and commercial hub for Southeast Asia. "We are trying to bring this to a peaceful conclusion."<br />The Thai airport authority said Suvarnabhumi would be closed until at least Monday evening, dashing hopes for a quick resolution of the national crisis.<br />Early in the day, protesters attacked a police checkpoint outside Suvarnabhumi Airport, disabling 10 police vehicles and forcing security forces to retreat. A similar confrontation occurred after dark on Saturday.<br />Self-appointed security guards in the besieged airport have blocked access roads with stacks of luggage trolleys, razor wire and a fire truck.<br />Police officials and military leaders appear reluctant to remove the protesters forcibly, both because of the physical challenge of confronting thousands of determined demonstrators and because the protesters appear to have powerful support among the Thai elite.<br />The prolonged shutdown of the airport, Thailand's main international gateway for passengers and air cargo, highlights the government's paralysis and the deep polarization within Thai society.<br />The Thai prime minister, Somchai Wongsawat, has remained in the northern city of Chiang Mai since Wednesday, possibly because he fears a military coup.<br />The protesters, who on Saturday repeated their refusal to negotiate with the police unless Somchai steps down, have also shut down Bangkok's domestic airport, and have occupied the prime minister's office in Bangkok for the past three months. An explosion on the grounds of the prime minister's office just after midnight on Sunday wounded 33 people, Thai television reported.<br />The protesters have ignored the prime minister's imposition of a state of emergency at the airports. Many demonstrators continued Saturday to stream into Suvarnabhumi Airport to join the sit-in, which is well organized and well provisioned with water, food, medical supplies and blankets.<br />The threat of violence remained high as government supporters, who have formed an auxiliary group known as the Red Shirts, scheduled a rally for Sunday. Clashes between supporters of the government and detractors have left at least two people dead and dozens injured since August, when protesters seized the prime minister's office.<br />Some protesters carried metal rods or golf clubs as they guarded the entrances to Suvarnabhumi Airport on Saturday. Sondhi Limthongkul, a protest leader who addressed his followers early in the day, also appeared to confirm that the group had firearms when he threatened to shoot at the police if fired upon.<br />"If they come, we will not open the door," he said. "If they shoot us, we will shoot back."<br />Television reports last week showed protesters firing handguns at government supporters in another part of Bangkok.<br />Tens of thousands of foreign visitors remain stranded in Thailand despite the government's efforts to ferry them to other countries from a military airport outside Bangkok. Dozens of aircraft are also stranded on the tarmacs at both Bangkok airports, Suvarnabhumi and Don Muang.<br />"I am most concerned about the aircraft, especially the foreign ones," said Sereerat Prasutanon, director of airport authority. He said the protesters should allow security guards into the airport so the guards could protect the aircraft.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/asia/30thai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/asia/30thai.php</a></div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div><strong>Local pillars, U.S. auto dealerships teeter as Big Three decline</strong><br />By Clifford Krauss<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />QUINCY, Florida: Bruce Thomas washed cars at his father's General Motors dealership here at age 12, changed oil in high school, and sold his first Pontiac during college.<br />His commitment to a famed American industry, part business and part romance, never waned. He took over his family's two dealerships, building a small fortune. In turn, he showered generosity on local churches, school athletic teams, charity golf tournaments and a group that helps women find jobs out of prison.<br />But suddenly, all of Thomas's success appears to be melting away.<br />Days go by without a sale. His debts are mounting. His friends offer him cash to get by. "I'm trying to survive as a car dealer," said Thomas, now 59, "and I don't know if I can."<br />Top executives of the Big Three automakers are preparing to return to Washington this week with business plans they hope will lead to a U.S. government bailout. But any government help will probably come too late for thousands of dealers like Thomas who sell American brands.<br />They have been struggling for years, as Detroit's fortunes waned, but what remains of their sales is evaporating along with consumer confidence and credit.<br />The National Automobile Dealers Association predicts that roughly 900 of the nation's 20,770 new-car dealers will go out of business this year, and automobile analysts say the number of failed dealerships could rise into the thousands next year.<br />Even if Ford, Chrysler and GM survive, many believe a comeuppance is inevitable among dealerships; indeed, for years the nation has had more dealers for domestic brands than warranted by the sales volume of the Detroit automakers.<br />The economic toll of a mass failure of dealerships around the country has already begun to harm the broader economy. In October alone, 20,000 employees of auto dealerships lost their jobs nationwide, more than half of those who were newly unemployed in the retail trade, according to the Labor Department.<br />The auto dealers association estimates that new-car dealers produce a $54 billion annual payroll for 1.1 million workers and nearly 20 percent of the retail sales and sales taxes in small and large communities alike.<br />The auto dealers are not just businesses, of course. Most of them are deeply rooted in their communities, and each is a slice of Americana their big flags flying, their radio advertisements compelling attention and their Little League sponsorships and other charity helping to improve the lives of local people.<br />In this small town outside Tallahassee, Thomas had 50 employees only two years ago when his two dealerships sold an average of 24 new vehicles a month. But now Thomas is lucky if he sells three new vehicles a week, and he has had to dismiss 10 of his remaining 40 employees in recent days.<br />Salesmen at Thomas's two dealerships one selling Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep cars and the other General Motors models are so idle, they spend their time doing Sudoku puzzles, reading sports magazines and calling and writing old clients. They repeatedly implore the mail carrier to buy a car on mornings when he is the only one to come in the door.<br />Calmly resolute, Thomas spends his days talking to lawyers and bankers, trying to keep his business alive. Thomas has lost a lot of money in an investment in a cousin's Georgia dealership, but many of his problems appear to be not of his making.<br />The last couple of years of rising gasoline prices took the steam out of the market for his Dodge Ram 2500 heavy pickup trucks and GMC Yukon sport utilities. In recent months, gasoline prices came down, but unemployment began rising here. The weak economy has hurt farmers, government workers and others. Quincy's middle class is hurting because of plummeting values for homes and stocks.<br />And now the credit market the lifeblood of any car dealership is frozen. Finance companies have tightened credit both for car buyers and for dealerships like Thomas's that stock their showrooms with vehicles bought on credit. The car companies are delaying some payments to dealers because of their own problems.<br />Thomas has gotten behind in payments to GMAC, GM's financing arm, so the company sent a representative to his dealerships two weeks ago to take control of the keys of new cars on his lots to guarantee that GMAC is paid when any vehicles are sold.<br />Thomas has stopped ordering new vehicles, and he is relentlessly cutting costs, including his own salary. He is slashing medical benefits and matching funds for the retirement accounts of his remaining employees. He has stopped giving free oil changes and tires to charities, stopped offering coffee to customers and even canceled janitorial services for the bathrooms.<br />Gathering workers for a pep talk in the service garage of his GM dealership the other day, Thomas said, "We are going to fight hard to keep everything going we can, but there are things that could go out of control." As the employees fidgeted, he added, "Let's try our best to sell a car today."<br />Salesmen are passing out their résumés to visitors, and they say they are not sure they will get paid from one week to the next.<br />"You have to laugh to keep from crying these days," Lynn Mayo, the office manager at the GM dealership, said as she wiped away tears. "The whole mess is hard."<br />The downturn has been years in the making. Thomas's total sales, including repairs and used cars, fell to $26 million in 2007 from $32 million in 2005. This year he hopes sales will reach $20 million based largely on stronger business during the first half. During the last two months, sales and repairs hit a wall.<br />It is a big comedown for a business that began with Thomas's father, Howard, who came to Quincy after World War II to start a used-car business across the street from a Chevrolet dealer. Howard Thomas was so successful, the Chevrolet dealer bought him out and brought him into the new-car business as a manager.<br />In 1967 Howard Thomas bought half of the local Pontiac-GMC store, and 12 years later it became a Thomas family operation run by him and his son. The business expanded to two dealerships and became a major benefactor to the local Little League team, theater and other charities. More than 400 people attended Howard Thomas's funeral in February. The business has long been the biggest retail employer in the town after Wal-Mart, and has produced $1 million in sales taxes annually in recent years.<br />Local officials say they know Thomas is in trouble, and they fear the consequences of his going out of business. "It would be a huge tragedy for us," said Quincy's mayor, Andy Gay, whose first job after getting married was selling cars at a Thomas dealership.<br />Thomas's business is a microcosm for the whole industry. At least 70 percent of the dealerships that have closed so far this year sell American cars, and better than 60 percent of the remaining dealerships sell the troubled Detroit brands. "A lot of them will go out of business," predicted Rex Henderson, an auto analyst at Raymond James & Associates.<br />"We have never seen anything like this," said Denny Fitzpatrick, owner of a Chevrolet-Hummer dealership outside Oakland and chairman of the California New Car Dealers Association. Having already dismissed 56 of his 114 employees, Fitzpatrick added, "You lay awake at night trying to figure out how to keep these doors open."<br />Car dealers are not entirely blameless for their fate. Auto analysts say they did not push Detroit hard enough to build better-quality, more efficient cars. They note that the dealers lobbied hard in state capitals for laws to protect their franchises from the Detroit manufacturers who wanted to limit their numbers and determine their locations.<br />Thomas lays some blame on the unions that drove hard bargains with the automakers, some on a news media that "glorified" imports, and some on the Big Three for being "slow to react to the market and what the public wanted," especially when gas prices rose in recent years.<br />To compensate, Thomas said he had changed his inventory the last couple of years to include fewer trucks and sport utilities, adding more fuel-efficient vehicles like the Pontiac G6. He shifted his advertising away from newspapers to the Internet. He gradually reduced his business' charitable giving, once $30,000 a year, to $1,900 this year.<br />He has begun a radio campaign offering zero percent financing on all his 2008 Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep vehicles for 36 months, and savings of up to $12,000 on Yukon XLs.<br />But sales have not budged.<br />Speaking in an office decorated with antique golf clubs, autographed baseballs and a photograph of his grandfather posing beside a 1952 Buick Roadmaster, Thomas said he had no major regrets.<br />"As a kid I dreamed about cars," he said. "The business has changed and the cars have changed, and it's been fun to be part of that."<br />But he said he saw more trouble ahead.<br />"At this point, I see no light at the end of the tunnel," he said, closing his eyes for a moment to think. "I only see it getting worse. Any bailout to Detroit will take a while to get to Main Street."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/business/30dealer.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/business/30dealer.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Egypt willing to fight Somali pirates</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />CAIRO: Egypt is willing to intervene militarily against piracy in the Gulf of Aden and off the Somali coast, alone or as part of an international force, a minister said in remarks published on Saturday.<br />"Egypt is prepared for military intervention if necessary, to protect shipping and tackle the pirates, who can be fought under international law," state newspaper al-Ahram quoted Moufid Shehab, minister of state for legal and parliamentary affairs, as saying.<br />Egypt is also ready to take part in an international force, he added.<br />The Somali-based pirates threaten to cut into Egypt's Suez Canal revenue by pushing ships into using the Cape of Good Hope route around Africa instead of using the canal to travel between Asia and Europe or America.<br />At least three major shipping companies have said in the past few days that their ships would avoid the canal, fearing pirates would capture their ships and hold them for ransom.<br />Many countries have sent warships to the Gulf of Aden to deter piracy but the area is vast and they cannot prevent every attack. Once the pirates take a ship and hold the crew hostage, any rescue attempt endangers the lives of the crew.<br />Shehab's remarks was the first official sign that Egypt is considering a military response. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has said that tackling piracy is the responsibility of the "international community."<br />Naval experts say the Egyptian navy has enough suitable ships to make an effective contribution to an anti-piracy operation.<br />(Writing by Jonathan Wright, editing by Tim Pearce)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-EGYPT-PIRACY.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-EGYPT-PIRACY.php</a></div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>OPEC defers new oil supply cut</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />By Rania El Gamal and Alex Lawler<br />OPEC on Saturday deferred a decision on a new oil supply cut amid signs that Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies are demanding tighter adherence to restraints put in place over the past two months.<br />Gulf producers want to see strict compliance with recent output curbs of 2 million barrels a day before considering further reductions when the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meets in Algeria on December 17.<br />"Compliance I think is OK," said Kuwaiti Oil Minister Mohammad al-Olaim. "But the market conditions require us to be 100 percent compliant."<br />Delegates said that ministers discussed how much more they needed to cut in December. Most, including Gulf producers led by Saudi Arabia, saw a requirement to slice another 1 to 1.5 million bpd. But for that to happen, delegates said, Riyadh wants proof that all fellow members are meeting their part of existing curbs.<br />"We are very concerned about overproduction," said Qatari Oil Minister Abdullah al-Attiyah.<br />While OPEC's first priority is to put a floor under a $90-collapse in oil prices to $55, Saudi Arabia for the first time in years identified a "fair" price -- $75 a barrel.<br />That target will serve as a reference point for traders when world oil demand starts to emerge from the current recessionary slump.<br />But for now, the oil market is focussed on whether OPEC can prevent prices falling further by avoiding the sort of divisions that have undermined its response to falling prices during previous economic downturns.<br />"$75 a barrel doesn't look doable in the short term," said Raja Kiwan of consultancy PFC Energy. "Given the fractious nature of OPEC on quota compliance, they may have some problems."<br />LEAKS?<br />Delegates identified Iran and Venezuela, perennial price hawks who have urged quicker cuts, as particular sources of concern on quota compliance. Venezuela denied the charge. Iran made no comment.<br />But consultants Petrologistics estimated last week that, based on shipping data, Iran's production would fall by 80,000 bpd this month, much less than the 199,000 bpd it is due to cut.<br />OPEC will want to keep any bickering under wraps.<br />Secretary General Abdullah El-Badri said compliance already was "100 percent" and OPEC President Chakib Khelil said in an official statement that members were "fulfilling their commitments."<br />Early industry estimates show Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours making good their share of OPEC's 2 million bpd of cuts since September.<br />Petrologistics data estimated OPEC output falling by 1.22 million bpd in November, with nearly half of that reduction shouldered by Saudi -- Riyadh is only responsible for about a third of OPEC output.<br />OPEC may need to make larger cuts to balance the rapid decline in demand among Western economies that has caused inventories to swell. World oil demand is set to contract this year for the first time in 25 years.<br />"The bottom line is that they need to cut again and they need to cut substantially," said Gary Ross, CEO of consultancy PIRA Energy. "Demand is falling out from beneath them."<br />Naimi said he would like to see inventory cover among OECD industrialised nations down to 52 days from current levels of 55-56 days of forward demand, the top of the seasonal norm.<br />OPEC has a mixed record of dealing with downturns in the economy that curb energy demand.<br />In 2001 it successfully defended prices by removing 5 million bpd in four stages, 19 pct of its supply, laying the foundation for a 6-year boom in oil prices that culminated this summer in a record $147 a barrel.<br />But in 1997 in Jakarta, at the start of the Asian financial crisis, Saudi pushed through an OPEC increase after Venezuela openly flouted its cartel supply quota by a large margin.<br />Prices went into a tailspin and U.S. crude hit a low of $10.35 at the end of 1998.<br />(additional reporting Peg Mackey, Luke Pachymuthu and Will Rasmussen, writing by Richard Mably, editing by Jonathan Leff)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/business/OUKBS-UK-OPEC.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/business/OUKBS-UK-OPEC.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisQZwm92UB9PFro5zYhVDwRI-6XGNmOVzdtVogqBrQRVHdkYTZzRbvWa8T932dATtsx5bwCF5PrsIOGiOodSNypOznMRt-mDpV0yJn_UaTjVPyXrsAioRqzeQurpiJU5oZOyr2Rnk7Z8s/s1600-h/DSC02310.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274346041978288722" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisQZwm92UB9PFro5zYhVDwRI-6XGNmOVzdtVogqBrQRVHdkYTZzRbvWa8T932dATtsx5bwCF5PrsIOGiOodSNypOznMRt-mDpV0yJn_UaTjVPyXrsAioRqzeQurpiJU5oZOyr2Rnk7Z8s/s320/DSC02310.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVXtyT3SV_kZwPOEZWZm3QAkiuXdxTbeGljARwxk9JP0XGd1KIe66ElEDYmyjGDnkTGj6Y-OCkObRNmi2YNvnovj1WR2VNamrZVrwYCQhFJyxwmL4dLRIB8FYHfscxuIO5Ci_nx0752rU/s1600-h/DSC02311.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274345543992032082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVXtyT3SV_kZwPOEZWZm3QAkiuXdxTbeGljARwxk9JP0XGd1KIe66ElEDYmyjGDnkTGj6Y-OCkObRNmi2YNvnovj1WR2VNamrZVrwYCQhFJyxwmL4dLRIB8FYHfscxuIO5Ci_nx0752rU/s320/DSC02311.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZQ2L5T4lIPYGKcYMAsXYmpyFgrzuhPlA8Vxc-f-l-eAl__Q2BcR6prvaJq2kZX2-nuL-FfHOVCoqokx5OE1R89wVtgeEuUYWU8h8HwyuzC3APmB26PS3-UpfzlbBzE2nw8GmHaI7CzsY/s1600-h/DSC02312.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274345540463261826" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZQ2L5T4lIPYGKcYMAsXYmpyFgrzuhPlA8Vxc-f-l-eAl__Q2BcR6prvaJq2kZX2-nuL-FfHOVCoqokx5OE1R89wVtgeEuUYWU8h8HwyuzC3APmB26PS3-UpfzlbBzE2nw8GmHaI7CzsY/s320/DSC02312.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>A day of reckoning as India toll tops 170<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta and Keith Bradsher<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />MUMBAI, India: Death hung over Mumbai on Saturday.<br />Bodies were extracted from the ruins of the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel in the hours after the standoff with militants there ended on Saturday in a gunfight and fire. At the main city hospital morgue, relatives came, clutching one another in grief, to identify their dead. By midafternoon, the morgue was running out of body bags, and by evening the death toll had risen to at least 172. Funerals, among them ceremonies for two policemen and a lawyer, went on throughout the day.<br />As the reckoning began after the three-day siege here, troubling questions arose about the apparent failure of the Indian authorities to anticipate the attack or respond to it more swiftly.<br />And tensions were high, as well, between India and Pakistan, where officials insisted that their government had nothing to do with assisting the attackers and promised that they would act swiftly if any connection was found within their country.<br />Perhaps the most troubling question to emerge Saturday for the Indian authorities was how, if official estimates are accurate, just 10 gunmen could have caused so much carnage and repelled Indian police officers, paramilitary forces and soldiers for more than three days in three different buildings.<br />As the investigation continued, it was unclear whether the attackers had collaborators already in the city, or whether others in their group had escaped. All told, the gunmen struck 10 sites in bustling south Mumbai.<br />Amid the cleanup effort in this stricken city, the brutality of the gunmen became plain to see, as accounts from investigators and survivors portrayed a wide trail of destruction and indiscriminate killing wherever the terrorists went.<br />At a gas station near the Taj hotel, attackers opened fire on two waiting cars on Wednesday, critically injuring two occupants. When a married couple in their 70s went to their third-floor window to see what was happening, the terrorists blazed away with assault rifles, killing both and leaving shards of glass that still hung in the window on Saturday.<br />Down the road, when the gunmen seized Nariman House, the headquarters here of a Jewish religious organization, neighbors mistook the initial shots on Wednesday night for firecrackers to celebrate India's cricket victory over England.<br />But when drunken revelers in a nearby alley began throwing bottles and stones, two attackers stepped onto a balcony of Nariman House and opened fire on passers-by, killing a 22-year-old call center worker who was the sole support of his widowed mother; five others were injured. A teenage boy who stepped out onto his balcony and came within firing range was swiftly shot and killed, a witness said.<br />"We still don't know why they did this," said Rony Dass, a cable television installer who lives across the street from the gas station. He lost a lifelong friend, a tailor who was locking up his store for the night on Wednesday, only to be killed by a gunman.<br />At the Oberoi hotel, the second luxury hotel to be assaulted, the gunmen called guests on hotel phones; some of those who picked up were then attacked, their doors smashed open and the guests shot. At the Taj, terrorists broke in room by room and shot occupants at point blank range. Some were shot in the back.<br />"I think their intention was to kill as many people as possible and do as much physical damage as possible," said PRS Oberoi, the chairman of the Oberoi Group, which manages the adjacent Oberoi and Trident Hotels, both of which were attacked.<br />Evidence unfolded that the gunmen killed their victims early on in the siege and left the bodies, apparently fooling Indian security forces into thinking that they were still holding hostages. At the Sir J.J. Hospital morgue, an official in charge of the post-mortems, not authorized to speak to the press, said that of the 87 bodies he had examined, all but a handful had been killed Wednesday night and early Thursday. By Saturday night, 239 people had been reported injured.<br />Contrary to earlier reports, it appeared that Westerners were not the gunmen's main targets: they killed whoever they could. By Saturday evening, 18 of the dead were confirmed as foreigners; an additional 22 foreigners were injured, said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is located.<br />The State Department has said at least five Americans died in the attacks. Consular officials from Britain, the Netherlands and Israel went to morgues on Saturday to see if their missing citizens had turned up there.<br />There were reports on the first night of the attacks that gunmen had rounded up holders of American and British passports at the Oberoi and herded them upstairs. But Rattan Keswani, the president of Trident Hotels, said he had found no basis for such reports.<br />"Nothing seems to suggest that," he said, noting that a range of nationalities was represented among the 22 hotel guests who died, in addition to the 10 staff members, all Indian.<br />The city's police chief, Hasan Gafoor, said nine gunmen were killed, the last of whom fell out of the terrace of the Taj hotel on Saturday morning as the siege ended. His body was charred beyond recognition when it was taken to the hospital. A 10th suspected terrorist was arrested; the police say he is a 21-year-old Pakistani, Ajmal Amir Kasab.<br />A senior Mumbai police inspector, Nagappa Mali, said the suspect and one of his collaborators, who was slain by the police, had killed three top police officials, including the head of the antiterrorist squad, Hemant Karkare.<br />Karkare was cremated Saturday morning in a crowded and emotional farewell.<br />The bodies of four other suspected terrorists were at the morgue at the Sir J.J. Hospital in Mumbai. Officials there put their ages between 20 and 25. All four were men.<br />Around dawn on Saturday, gunfire began to rattle inside the Taj Mahal hotel, one of about a dozen sites that the militants attacked beginning Wednesday night. They never issued any manifestoes or made any demands, and it seemed clear from their stubborn resistance at the Taj that they intended to fight to the last.<br />It was not long before flames were roaring through a ground-floor ballroom and the first floor of the Taj, a majestic 105-year-old hotel in the heart of southern Mumbai.<br />But by midmorning, after commandos had finished working their way through the 565-room hotel, the head of the elite National Security Guards, J. K. Dutt, said the siege at the Taj was over. Three terrorists, he said, had been killed inside.<br />By afternoon, busloads of elite commandos, fresh from the siege of the hotel, sat outside the nearby Gateway of India and shook hands with elated spectators.<br />"There were so many people and we wanted to avoid any civilian casualties," one of the commandos told a private television station, CNN-IBN. He said they were firing from various parts of the hotel. By the end of the siege, he said, the gunmen had holed up in one room and barricaded the door with explosives.<br />The siege may have been over, but new tensions within the region were on the rise, particularly after India's foreign minister on Friday blamed "elements" within Pakistan for the attack.<br />In an attempt to defuse the situation on Saturday, the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, told an Indian television channel in a live telephone interview that he supported a thorough investigation "no matter where it may lead."<br />"My heard bleeds for India," Zardari said. "As president of Pakistan, if any evidence points to anyone in my country," Pakistan will take action, he said.<br />Zardari said he did not rule out the possibility of the top official of the Pakistani intelligence agency working with Indian officials on the case. But it was too early in the investigation for the top official to meet with his Indian counterpart to share information, Zardari said.<br />Soon after Zardari's interview on Indian television, the Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, said the Pakistani government was not involved in the attack.<br />"Our hands are clean," Qureshi told a news conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, after a lengthy cabinet meeting called to discuss the rising tensions between the two rival countries. "We have nothing to be ashamed of."<br />Qureshi also stressed that the Indian government had not blamed the Pakistani government for the attacks.<br />"They are suspecting, perhaps suspecting, groups or organizations that could have a presence here," he said. "We have said if they have evidence they should share it with us."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/asia/30mumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/asia/30mumbai.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong>WITNESS - In the wreckage of Mumbai's Trident hotel</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />Gregory Beitchman is the Consumer Editor, Asia and Emerging Markets, for Thomson Reuters. Based in Mumbai, he is a frequent visitor to the Trident-Oberoi Hotel, one of three sites besieged by Islamist gunmen who launched coordinated attacks on the city late on Wednesday. In the following story, he describes his impressions on returning to the hotel after the siege was lifted<br />By Gregory Beitchman<br />Standing outside the jammed office door of Mumbai's battered Trident-Oberoi Hotel, the thought hits us at about the same time: what if it's blocked by a booby trap?<br />Simon Hartley, a Briton working in the construction industry, and I have come back to retrieve our belongings from the Trident, a home-away-from-home for us both, after elite troops ended a harrowing siege by Islamist militants.<br />A concierge has escorted us up to the 12th floor. The door to Simon's office looks as if it has been forced. The concierge and a guest services manager assure us the floor has been cleared, but we're not convinced. We want them to check again.<br />"I think it's a good idea," Simon agrees.<br />The guest manager calls downstairs. "Room 1208 has been opened and checked, please confirm," he asks. "National Security Guard officers have inspected every room," comes the reply.<br />"There were no terrorists on the 12th floor," offers the concierge. Satisfied, we stand back as locksmiths arrive.<br />Simon has been working and living in the Trident-Oberoi hotel for about six months.<br />"I had gone out with a friend and was coming back when I heard what happened. I was lucky ... a lot of people and staff I know have lost their lives," he says.<br />Well-armed gunmen struck at the heart of India's financial centre late on Wednesday, laying siege to the Trident-Oberoi, the historic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and a Jewish centre.<br />The death toll stood at 195 after Indian commandos killed the last of the gunmen holed up inside the Taj on Saturday.<br />BROKEN GLASS, BULLET HOLES<br />Soon after the last shots were fired at the Taj, I was sitting back in the lobby of the Trident-Oberoi after receiving a call from the hotel to come and get our belongings.<br />About 12 hours earlier, hundreds of people had been trapped inside but now immaculately dressed staff are cleaning up broken glass. Bullet holes pepper the walls and the sea-facing windows have been blown out.<br />I passed through the same lobby on Wednesday on the way for a haircut, just two hours before the attacks began.<br />Uniformed staff stand at the checkout counter. Some guests pull out credit cards to pay room bills.<br />In the lobby, heavily armed police with National Security Guard badges speak with hotel officials in hushed voices.<br />The concierge takes Simon and me to the elevators. Surprisingly, they work. A thick bloodstain greets us in the 12th floor elevator lobby.<br />"One guest was shot and then came to the 12th floor. One of our staff then brought him out through the staff entrance," the concierge says.<br />Once the doors are open we find papers strewn around a room next door, but Simon's room is untouched. Wednesday's newspaper lies neatly on a table.<br />Simon gathers up documents and a printer.<br />"Wow. Everything looks intact and I have to get back to work," Simon says. "This won't be good for general confidence but things weren't too good for the economy here anyway."<br />Simon packs up his things and calls an assistant. They still have to get ready for a presentation, he says.<br />Back in the lobby, a guest relations manager wearing a sari guides us towards the main entrance. Soldiers in helmets stand on a balcony scanning the area.<br />Shattered glass has been swept up, broken windows and doors replaced by large white boards. Off to the side is a lonely looking metal detector. I ask the guest relations manager if new security measures will be put in place.<br />"Rest assured they will," she answers.<br />(Editing by Paul Tait and John Chalmers)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI-TRIDENT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI-TRIDENT.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Indian politicians face repercussions<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />MUMBAI: At midmorning on Friday, as Indian troops continued to comb through the devastated Oberoi Hotel, an unexpected guest appeared on the sidewalk: Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and arguably India's most incendiary politician.<br />Speaking before a row of television cameras, he said the central government had failed to tackle a growing terrorism threat, and he found fault with a speech by India's prime minister a day earlier. "The country expected a lot from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh," he said, "but his address to the nation was disappointing."<br />The appearance of Modi - who has been barred from entering the United States for violations of religious freedom - signaled how the siege of Mumbai had instantly turned into political flint for coming national elections. After a string of attacks across Indian cities earlier this year, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, pledged to make national security its main campaign issue. The latest audacious attacks on the country's commercial capital, and their timing, gave it an additional lift.<br />Five state elections are under way, with the city-state of Delhi going to the polls on Saturday. National balloting is expected to be held next spring.<br />It was only four years ago that the Bharatiya Janata Party, then leading a coalition government, was routed in national elections, partly because of at least two high-profile terrorist episodes during its tenure: a suicide attack on the Indian Parliament building in 2001 and the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1999.<br />Singh and his Congress Party hoped to ride a booming economy and rising prosperity to victory next year despite a steady series of bombings and other violence in recent months. And that had seemed a sensible course: Studies of previous national elections have shown economic issues to be the most important concern for the average voter, said Yogendra Yadav, a political analyst with the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi.<br />But Yadav said he doubted that pattern would stand up after this latest assault. In an intensely competitive political landscape, small margins can make a big difference, which is why he argued that the terrorist threat would inevitably figure more centrally in the next national polls.<br />Singh's administration would have to be seen as doing "something fast, something visible," he said, to shrug off the perception that it is weak on national security. The Congress Party "has to be seen to be doing something which directly addresses the widely shared popular perception that the country is being attacked from outside, that it is under aggression," Yadav said.<br />On Friday, front-page advertisements appeared in several newspapers in Delhi showing blood splattered against a black background and the slogan "Brutal Terror Strikes At Will" in bold capital letters. The ads signed off with a simple message: "Fight Terror. Vote BJP."<br />There were also advertisements that were cast as an appeal from Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a prime minister in the last BJP-led coalition government. They cited the loss of lives in Mumbai and concluded, "We must elect a government that can fight terror tooth and nail."<br />Nor did the party's president, Lal Krishna Advani, lose any time in pointing fingers at the coalition government of Singh, accusing it of a "nonserious approach" that allowed suspected terrorists to land on the shores of Mumbai this week.<br />Kapil Sibal, a veteran of the Congress Party, swiftly hit back, accusing Modi of placing his party's interests above those of the nation and calling the BJP advertisements "a matter of national shame." In a telephone interview on Friday night, Sibal would not say whether recent terrorist attacks - including this week's, the most spectacular and the scariest - would have any bearing on his party's election prospects. He called it "not relevant."<br />That now may be wishful thinking. Terrorism may be grievously relevant to the fortunes of the ruling party, under whose watch Indian cities have suffered a string of attacks - six in as many months, killing roughly 375 in all. After each one, the prime minister has issued a sobering statement calling for calm. After each one, the BJP has pounced on the government as being soft on terrorism.<br />Singh's government had lately hit back at the Bharatiya Janata Party with evidence that its supporters, belonging to a range of radical Hindu organizations, had also been implicated in terrorist attacks. Indeed, in a bizarre twist, the head of the police anti-terrorism unit, Hemant Karkare, killed in the Mumbai strikes, had been in the midst of a high-profile investigation of a suspected Hindu terrorist cell. Karkare's inquiry had netted nine suspects in connection with a bombing in September of a Muslim-majority area in Malegaon, a small town not far from Mumbai.<br />Several BJP leaders, including Modi, had criticized the crackdown as a political vendetta. On Friday Modi, the chief minister of neighboring Gujarat state, announced financial rewards for the families of police officers killed this week in the anti-terror operations, including Karkare.<br />On Friday, Advani went so far as to say that intelligence agencies had been "diverted to nail so-called Hindu terror," allowing the gunmen who struck Mumbai to "plot away undetected."<br />The political fencing hides more fundamental problems: a feeble, often corrupt criminal justice system, in which suspects, whether of terrorism or common crimes, are regularly killed in skirmishes with law enforcement authorities rather than tried in courts of law. Faith and democracy also complicate the Indian battle against terrorism, as political parties compete for the loyalty of Hindu and Muslim voters.<br />The BJP has pressed for the resurrection of a tougher anti-terrorism law that was in place during its administration. That measure allowed for longer periods of preventive detention and enabled confessions extracted by the police to be used in court. Its critics said it was an unfair and ineffective tool used too often to round up innocent people, largely Muslims, and it was repealed in 2004 by Singh's administration.<br />In a nationally televised address on Thursday, the day after the siege on Mumbai began, Singh clearly sought to convey that his government was in charge and capable of acting swiftly. He promised to "strengthen the hands of our police and intelligence authorities," restrict financing to suspect organizations, check the "entry of suspects into the country" and get tough on Pakistan, which the Indian government has accused of providing sanctuary to militants who attack on Indian soil. It was not clear how he would do any of these things, nor whether his words would persuade voters to trust his party with another five-year term.<br />Friday's newspapers scolded politicians as failing to act together in the interests of national security. "It is time we stop our political parties from using terror - Hindu or Muslim - to fuel their popularity when they are fueling a fire that can consume India," read a front-page editorial in The Hindustan Times.<br />The Indian Express, in its front-page editorial, suggested that "if a tragedy like this cannot make both sides - in fact the entire political class - make amends, we have no right to call ourselves a great nation, democracy, civilization."<br />Yadav's 2005 public opinion poll on sources of insecurity in India found that terrorism ranked far lower than common crimes and communal riots. Moreover, his studies showed that terrorism resonated far more with urban voters than rural ones.<br />That is another reason the siege of Mumbai could give Singh cause for concern. Political redistricting this year has made the urban voter far more important nationally than ever before.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/asia/india.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/asia/india.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div>Terrorists attacked with precision<br />By Keith Bradsher<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />MUMBAI: As Prasan Dhanur prepared his 13-foot boat on Wednesday evening for a hard night of fishing, he saw something strange.<br />A black inflatable lifeboat equipped with a brand new Yamaha outboard motor threaded its way among the small, wooden fishing boats at anchor and pulled up to the slum's concrete pier.<br />Ten men, all apparently in their early 20s, jumped out. They stripped off orange windbreakers to reveal T-shirts and blue jeans. Then they began hoisting large, heavy backpacks out of the boat and onto their shoulders, each taking care to claim the pack assigned to him.<br />Dhanur flipped his boat light toward the men, and Kashinath Patil, a 72-year-old harbor official on duty nearby, asked the men what they were doing.<br />"I said: 'Where are you going? What's in your bags?"' Patil recalled. "They said: 'We don't want any attention. Don't bother us."'<br />Thus began a crucial phase of one of the deadliest terrorist assaults in Indian history, one that seemed from the start to be coordinated meticulously to cause maximum fear and chaos.<br />The details are still fragmentary; Indian officials are saying little publicly. But from interviews with witnesses and survivors, it seems clear that the men on the boat were joining a larger terrorist force, which included some attackers who, unconfirmed local news reports say, had embedded themselves in Mumbai days before the attacks. Their synchronized assaults suggested a high level of training and preparation.<br />Dhanur and Patil said in interviews that they did not see the guns hidden in the backpacks, and did not call the police as they watched the 10 men walk into town on Wednesday, leaving their boat and windbreakers at the dock. Not long afterward, fanning out across South Mumbai, as other attackers spread out after landing in other boats, the men began unleashing deadly assaults everywhere they went.<br />At the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the train station that appears to have been the first location hit, a fusillade of bullets left the floor of the main hall quickly littered with bodies and pools of blood. At the Leopold Café, a chic restaurant popular with Westerners and wealthy Indians and famous for sidewalk dining, a cluster of gunmen mowed down diners.<br />At the opulent Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, the assailants poured heavy fire into restaurant-goers on the ground floors, then moved upstairs to round up guests as hostages. And at a range of other locations, from a movie theater to a hospital to a police station, the attackers opened fire remorselessly on anyone in their path, frequently throwing grenades as well.<br />With proximity to Pakistan and visibility as the hub of India's financial sector, Mumbai has suffered many terrorist attacks over the years. But the killings this week, played out so publicly and prolonged over so many days, have shaken many as never before.<br />"In 51 years, I have never seen this kind of thing," said Dev Gohil, a tailor and lifelong Mumbai resident. "We're scared for ourselves and for our families."<br />One reason for the nervousness is it seems likely not nearly all the terrorists were caught or killed - and so far the whereabouts of the rest are a mystery. At least eight were confirmed dead on Friday, although more might be found as soldiers and the police comb through the two hotels. Security officials declared that they had taken control of the Taj on Saturday morning, killing three militants.<br />Estimates of the number of attackers have ranged from 20 to 40, with the number depending to a considerable extent on the number of boats involved. As security forces seek to reconstruct how the gunmen managed to inflict so much carnage so quickly, they have been turning their attention to how so many assailants managed to reach the heart of Mumbai undetected and with such a large collection of guns, ammunition and explosives.<br />Fishermen here said that the police removed and impounded the boat that came ashore here at the Fishermen's Colony pier where Dhanur lives. Various local news media have reported the impoundment of at least one - and as many as four - other boats at other nearby locations on the coast of South Mumbai, one of the city's oldest neighborhoods.<br />The Times of India newspaper reported on Friday that the Coast Guard had found an Indian fishing trawler, the Kuber, that disappeared on Nov. 14. The Kuber may have been used as a so-called mother ship to transport inflatable rafts within range of South Mumbai, much as pirate mother ships from Somalia, across the Arabian Sea from Mumbai, have used smaller boats to hijack tankers and other vessels in recent weeks.<br />The Kuber's 30-year-old captain was found dead on the boat, and his four crew members were missing, The Times of India said.<br />Not all of the terrorists may have entered Mumbai on the night of the attack. Local news media, citing anonymous law enforcement officials, are reporting that one captured terrorist has said during interrogation that some of his group had stayed in hotels for four days before the attacks to prepare for them and even to store ammunition in the rooms.<br />When the terrorists landed in front of Dhanur's boat, they were just three blocks straight down a narrow lane from Nariman House, a five-story building housing a Jewish center run by a young rabbi, Gavriel Holtzberg, and his wife, Rivka, who had moved from New York.<br />But the attack does not appear to have started there. According to India's Home Affairs Ministry, the first shots were fired at the train station, and soon after that at the Leopold Café.<br />Popular with tourists, the café is about eight blocks from the dock where Dhanur was surprised by the arrival of the inflatable raft. It is just a block behind a top target for the terrorists: the luxurious Taj hotel, Mumbai's most famous place for maharajahs and wealthy businesspeople to stay.<br />A large red sign over the two double-width entrances to the Leopold Café still boasts that the restaurant has been in business "since 1871." But the steel shutters of the Leopold Café were pulled down over the entrances on Friday afternoon, sealing the site of a deadly assault.<br />The attackers stood at the entrances and raked the diners with heavy fire from assault rifles. The power of the rounds is still visible from three shots that missed the diners. They struck the thick concrete columns on either side of an entrance and penetrated more than an inch deep, leaving red stains.<br />Through a gap at the top of the shutters, the darkened restaurant could still be seen. Half-eaten meals still sat on tables, and napkins lay on tables and chairs, as though the diners had disappeared suddenly into thin air.<br />Few signs of the fallen remained visible on Friday afternoon, and no official tally of casualties from this attack has been released.<br />After the train station and the Leopold Café, at least some of the terrorists attacked and occupied three buildings from which the police would find it very difficult to dislodge them: the two hotels and Nariman House.<br />At the hotels, the attackers managed to hide in a maze of rooms, especially at the Taj, and so avoided easy capture. The smaller Oberoi proved more difficult for the assailants, and they were defeated there first, with the police leading out dozens of hostages at midday on Friday.<br />Nariman House took a full day on Friday for the army to capture, as the attackers holed themselves up in the middle floors of the building, where they could not easily be reached from the ground or from above. Only on Friday evening were the assailants finally overwhelmed.<br />The most complex building, the Taj Hotel, with its many passageways, took the longest to clear. The National Security Guard announced Saturday morning that it believed the last three gunmen had been killed, and declared the siege over.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/asia/tock.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/asia/tock.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>WITNESS: Black Cats prowl Taj as gunfight ends Mumbai siege<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />Phil Smith has been the Reuters Editor for South Asia since 2005. Previously he worked for Reuters in Sydney, Singapore and London. Phil was out on the streets of Mumbai with a reporter's notebook throughout the militant attacks on India's financial capital. In the following story, he describes his vigil outside the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.<br />By Phil Smith<br />The gunbattle at Mumbai's famous Taj Mahal Palace Hotel was finally over after three bloody days, but the dull thud of explosions still vibrated up through the shoes of those standing nearby.<br />India's crack NSG "Black Cat" commandos went from room to room to secure the battle-scarred old building, mopping up after brazen, coordinated attacks that killed at least 155 people at three sites in the heart of India's financial hub.<br />The bodycount rose as one last gunfight in the Taj marked the end of the drama, during which scores of foreigners hid terrified in their rooms and many more were taken hostage.<br />Live television images were jolted by explosions, either from stun grenades or controlled detonations used to destroy ordnance found by the Black Cats as they prowled through the hotel.<br />The gunbattle ended just after dawn on Saturday.<br />In the early hours I made my way around to the back of the Taj, where a crack Sikh regiment was stationed.<br />Stray bullets fizzed as they passed overhead in light rain.<br />By that stage the story had become a little surreal as tiredness and fear set in, like watching a televised news report with me in it unfold before my own eyes.<br />After 30 years in journalism I knew it was my job to be there but it was still hard to put aside fears for my own safety.<br />I couldn't help but be struck by the futility of ducking each time I heard a bullet pass overhead, knowing full well that the bullet was long gone by the time I heard it.<br />BULLETS, GRENADES AND RATS<br />It was very quiet and very dark at the back of the Taj. Rats scurried around our ankles as we chatted to the soldiers, who were stretching tired, cramped legs and easing stiff backs.<br />The language barrier meant it was hard to communicate but it was clear the Sikhs had been on duty for many hours. Unlike them, at least I had been able to enjoy some nap breaks since the drama began to unfold late on Wednesday.<br />Through the quiet at the back of the building I could hear a lot of gunfire from the front. It seemed to range widely along the length of the corridors at the front rather than from the area around the pool at the back of the complex.<br />The Taj is U-shaped, with the pool spanning the open end. I could see clearly palm trees in the gardens surrounding the cool waters I had swum in occasionally when visiting friends had found enough money to stay at the swanky hotel.<br />At the front of the Taj, bleary-eyed journalists who had earlier mobbed National Security Guards chief J.K. Dutt when he announced the end of the siege were pushed back roughly behind a rope that had marked an unofficial boundary for them.<br />But that was still only 100 meters from the lobby and the smashed and blackened windows of the hotel.<br />Hundreds of media workers dived for cover as stray bullets whistled above them during the final stages of a firefight.<br />Live pieces-to-camera, or PTCs as they are know in the trade, were delivered by local journalists lying prone, adding to the drama of the scene.<br />On Friday at least two journalists were wounded by grenade debris which hit the 100-metre long phalanx of cameras and journalists working behind their rope border.<br />It was hard not to think that prying reporters and cameras would have been kept back much further from the action if a hotel siege such as this had happened somewhere like Britain, rather than this teeming, chaotic, unforgettable city.<br />A few reporters, including me, wore flak jackets. They were often derided amid an air of bravado, until bullets and debris began flying and blood-stained journalists were carted off to hospital.<br />Even wearing the jacket I still felt genuine fear as bullets whizzed overhead, knowing it was useless if I was hit in the head.<br />"When I was doing my stand-upper (piece to camera) I felt like a bullet might hit the back of my neck at any moment," one Western reporter told me.<br />"I stopped then, it just wasn't worth it."<br />(Editing by Paul Tait and John Chalmers)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI-witness.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI-witness.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>India and Pakistan simmer over Mumbai attacks</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />By Rina Chandran<br />Indian accusations of a Pakistani link to the attacks on Mumbai that killed nearly 200 people threaten to damage attempts to improve ties between the rivals.<br />Indian officials have said most, perhaps all, of the 10 attackers who held Mumbai hostage with frenzied attacks using assault rifles and grenades came from Pakistan, a Muslim nation carved out of Hindu-majority India in 1947.<br />An official in Islamabad said the next one to two days would be crucial for relations between the nuclear-armed neighbours. Pakistan has condemned the assaults and denied any involvement by state agencies.<br />After a final battle between militants and security forces inside the Taj Mahal, Mumbai's best-known hotel, a crowd of protesters outside pumped their fists and shouted "Our soldiers came and Pakistan ran away."<br />A senior Pakistani security official said Islamabad would divert troops to its border with India and away from fighting militants on the Afghan frontier if the tension spilt over.<br />"If something happens on that front, the war on terror won't be our priority," the official told reporters at a briefing.<br />"We'll take out everything from the western border. We won't leave anything there."<br />Elite Black Cat commandos killed the last of the gunmen on Saturday after three days of room-to-room battling inside the Taj Mahal, one of several landmarks struck in co-ordinated attacks on Wednesday night.<br />Hundreds of people, many of them Westerners, were trapped or taken hostage as the gunmen hurled grenades and fired indiscriminately. At least 22 of those killed were foreigners, including businessmen and tourists.<br />Nine gunmen and 20 police and soldiers were also killed.<br />A tenth militant caught alive told interrogators they wanted to be remembered for an Indian version of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Times Now TV said, quoting an unidentified Defence Ministry official.<br />"SENSITIVE MOMENTS"<br />Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said "elements" in Pakistan may have been responsible for the attacks.<br />"The Congress calls upon Pakistan to honour its commitment and prevent the use of its territory for commission of acts of terrorism against India," his ruling Congress party coalition said after an all-party meeting late on Saturday.<br />India and Pakistan have fought three wars since independence and went to the brink of a fourth after a December 2001 attack on India's parliament that India also linked to Pakistan.<br />They embarked on a peace process in 2004 that has ground on for the past four years.<br />"These are sensitive moments," Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told a news conference. "The situation is serious, let us not fool ourselves ... when the people in India feel this is 9/11 for India."<br />A high ranking security officer in Pakistan said tension with India was escalating rapidly. "They'll have clarity of thought and we'll have clarity of the situation in next 24-48 hours," he said.<br />India's internal politics are integral to the fallout from the attacks too. Singh is facing an election by May and renewed accusations from India's main opposition, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, that Congress is weak on security.<br />"Brutal terror strikes at will. Weak government. Unwilling and incapable. Fight terror -- Vote BJP," said one election ad, written over a blood-red stain on a black background.<br />India said evidence was mounting to suggest the men who attacked Mumbai came by sea from Karachi, Pakistan's main port.<br />"Investigation carried out so far has revealed the hand of Pakistan-based groups in the Mumbai attack," Sriprakash Jaiswal, India's minister of state for home affairs, told Reuters.<br />Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, battling Islamic radicals in his own nation, told CNN-IBN television he would cooperate with the investigations.<br />"If any evidence comes of any individual or group in any part of my country, I shall take the swiftest of action in the light of evidence and in front of the world," he said.<br />India's Home Ministry said the official toll was 183 killed. Earlier, Mumbai disaster authorities said at least 195 people had been killed and 295 wounded.<br />The attacks struck at the heart of Mumbai, the engine of an economic boom that has made India a favourite emerging market.<br />The city of 18 million is also home to the "Bollywood" film industry, the epitome of glamour in a country blighted by poverty.<br />(Reporting by New Delhi, Mumbai and Islamabad bureaux; Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Bryson Hull; Editing by Alison Williams)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/europe/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI-SHOOTINGS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/europe/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-MUMBAI-SHOOTINGS.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Pakistan batsman Yousuf says India tour must go on<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />KARACHI: India must tour Pakistan in January despite this week's bloodshed in Mumbai, senior batsman Mohammad Yousuf said on Saturday.<br />Yousuf and nine other Pakistanis who were playing in the rebel Indian Cricket League have returned home after their matches were cancelled in the wake of the Mumbai attacks in which nearly 200 people died.<br />"Cricket is a big thing and a binding force for the people of Pakistan and India. The Indian team must play in Pakistan or it will only encourage the terrorist elements," Yousuf told reporters at Karachi airport.<br />"It is also important to continue cricket activities," added the veteran of 79 tests. "What happened in Mumbai was horrifying but authorities must not allow terrorists to derail cricket activities."<br />On Friday, Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Ejaz Butt said he was uncertain over India's 2009 visit.<br />England have cut short their one-day series in India and captain Kevin Pietersen said there was doubt whether they would return to play two tests before Christmas.<br />Former Pakistan captain Moin Khan expressed fears the Mumbai attacks could mar relations between India and his country.<br />"Cricket has always played its role in normalising relations between the two countries and I feel it is now all the more necessary for India to tour Pakistan and vice versa," Khan said.<br />(Editing by Tony Jimenez)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/sports/OUKSP-UK-CRICKET-PAKISTAN-YOUSUF.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/sports/OUKSP-UK-CRICKET-PAKISTAN-YOUSUF.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Ex-Taliban spokesman killed in Afghanistan</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />KABUL: A former Taliban spokesman was shot dead in his home late on Friday evening by unknown gunmen in the southeastern province of Nangarhar, a provincial official said on Saturday.<br />Mohammad Hanif, who became a Taliban spokesman in October 2005 and was recently released from prison, was killed along with three members of his family when gunmen broke into his home in Chaparhar district, about 400 km (215 miles) southwest of Kandahar.<br />"Dr. Hanif and two of his cousins and one niece were killed when the unidentified armed men stormed his residence on Friday late evening," Ahmadzia Abdulzai, spokesman for the provincial governor said, adding it was too early to say who had killed Hanif and his relatives.<br />Afghan news agency Pajhwok News quoted Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid denying any Taliban involvement in the shootings.<br />Hanif said in a press conference four days before his death that certain elements in Pakistan were targeting him and he had obtained a gun licence for personal protection.<br />(Reporting by Hamid Shalizi; Editing by Valerie Lee)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/asia/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-HANIF.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/asia/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-HANIF.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div><strong>Suspected U.S. strike kills 2 in Pakistan<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD: A suspected U.S. drone aircraft fired a missile at a house in the militancy-plagued Pakistani region of North Waziristan on the Afghan border on Saturday, killing two people, security agency officials said.<br />U.S. forces in Afghanistan have carried out at least 27 air strikes by unmanned aircraft on militant targets in northwest Pakistan this year, according to a Reuters tally, more than half of them since the beginning of September.<br />"A missile was fired at a house owned by one Taj Mohammad, and we have reports of two men killed," said an intelligence agency official.<br />Another security agent and a Taliban militant confirmed the strike and the death toll at the house in the village of Chashma, 2 km (1 mile) north of the region's main town of Miranshah.<br />There was no immediate information about the identity of those killed.<br />Security has deteriorated sharply in both Pakistan and Afghanistan recently, seven years after U.S. soldiers and their Afghan allies drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan in the weeks following the September 11 attacks on the United States.<br />Apparently frustrated by Pakistan's inability to tackle the militants, and alarmed by the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, the United States has ramped up attacks with missile-firing pilotless drones on militants in Pakistan.<br />Pakistan has complained to the United States over the strikes, saying they undermine its efforts to combat militants, but Washington has shrugged off the protests.<br />(Editing by Robert Birsel and John Chalmers)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/asia/OUKWD-UK-PAKISTAN-VIOLENCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/asia/OUKWD-UK-PAKISTAN-VIOLENCE.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div>Press and "Psy Ops" to merge at NATO Afghan HQ<br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />By Jon Hemming<br />The U.S. general commanding NATO forces in Afghanistan has ordered a merger of the office that releases news with "Psy Ops," which deals with propaganda, a move that goes against the alliance's policy, three officials said.<br />The move has worried Washington's European NATO allies -- Germany has already threatened to pull out of media operations in Afghanistan -- and the officials said it could undermine the credibility of information released to the public.<br />Seven years into the war against the Taliban, insurgent influence is spreading closer to the capital and Afghans are becoming increasingly disenchanted at the presence of some 65,000 foreign troops and the government of President Hamid Karzai.<br />Taliban militants, through their website, telephone text messages and frequent calls to reporters, are also gaining ground in the information war, analysts say.<br />U.S. General David McKiernan, the commander of 50,000 troops from more than 40 nations in NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), ordered the combination of the Public Affairs Office (PAO), Information Operations and Psy Ops (Psychological Operations) from December 1, said a NATO official with detailed knowledge of the move.<br />"This will totally undermine the credibility of the information released to the press and the public," said the official, who declined to be named.<br />ISAF spokesman Brigadier General Richard Blanchette said McKiernan had issued a staff order to implement a command restructure from December 1 which was being reviewed by NATO headquarters in Brussels, but he declined to go into details of the reorganisation.<br />"This is very much an internal matter," he said. "This is up with higher headquarters right now and we're waiting to get the basic approval. Once we have the approval we will be going into implementation."<br />But another ISAF official confirmed that the amalgamation of public affairs with Information Operations and Psy Ops was part of the planned command restructure. This official, who also declined to be named, said the merger had caused considerable concern at higher levels within NATO which had challenged the order by the U.S. general.<br />"DECEPTION ACTIVITIES"<br />NATO policy recognises there is an inherent clash of interests between its public affairs offices, whose job it is to issue press releases and answer media questions, and that of Information Operations and Psy Ops.<br />Information Operations advises on information designed to affect the will of the enemy, while Psy Ops includes so-called "black operations," or outright deception.<br />While Public Affairs and Information Operations, PA and Info Ops in military jargon, "are separate, but related functions," according to the official NATO policy document on public affairs, "PA is not an Info Ops discipline."<br />The new combined ISAF department will come under the command of an American one-star general reporting directly to McKiernan, an arrangement that is also against NATO policy, the NATO official said.<br />"While coordination is essential, the lines of authority will remain separate, the PA reporting directly to the commander. This is to maintain credibility of PA and to avoid creating a media or public perception that PA activities are coordinated by, or are directed by, Info Ops," the NATO policy document says.<br />"PA will have no role in planning or executing Info Ops, Psy Ops, or deception activities," it states.<br />The United States has 35,000 of the 65,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, operating both under ISAF and a separate U.S.-led coalition operation, but both come under McKiernan's command.<br />Washington is already scheduled to send another 3,000 troops to arrive in the country in January and is now considering sending 20,000 more troops in the next 12 to 18 months, further tipping the numerical balance among ISAF forces.<br />"What we are seeing is a gradual increase of American influence in all areas of the war," the NATO official said. "Seeking to gain total control of the information flow from the campaign is just part of that."<br />(Editing by John Chalmers)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/asia/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-NATO.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/asia/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-NATO.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Death toll over 300 in Nigerian sectarian violence<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />JOS, Nigeria: Mobs burned homes, churches and mosques Saturday in a second day of riots, as the death toll rose to more than 300 in the worst sectarian violence in Africa's most populous nation in years.<br />Sheikh Khalid Abubakar, the imam at the city's main mosque, said more than 300 dead bodies were brought there on Saturday alone and 183 could be seen laying near the building waiting to be interred.<br />Those killed in the Christian community would not likely be taken to the city mosque, raising the possibility that the total death toll could be much higher. The city morgue wasn't immediately accessible Saturday.<br />Police spokesman Bala Kassim said there were "many dead," but couldn't cite a firm number.<br />The hostilities mark the worst clashes in the restive West African nation since 2004, when as many as 700 people died in Plateau State during Christian-Muslim clashes.<br />Jos, the capital of Plateau State, has a long history of community violence that has made it difficult to organize voting. Rioting in September 2001 killed more than 1,000 people.<br />The city is situated in Nigeria's "middle belt," where members of hundreds of ethnic groups commingle in a band of fertile and hotly contested land separating the Muslim north from the predominantly Christian south.<br />Authorities imposed an around-the-clock curfew in the hardest-hit areas of the central Nigerian city, where traditionally pastoralist Hausa Muslims live in tense, close quarters with Christians from other ethnic groups.<br />The fighting began as clashes between supporters of the region's two main political parties following the first local election in the town of Jos in more than a decade. But the violence expanded along ethnic and religious fault lines, with Hausas and members of Christian ethnic groups doing battle.<br />Angry mobs gathered Thursday in Jos after electoral workers failed to publicly post results in ballot collation centers, prompting many onlookers to assume the vote was the latest in a long line of fraudulent Nigerian elections.<br />Riots flared Friday morning and at least 15 people were killed. Local ethnic and religious leaders made radio appeals for calm on Saturday, and streets were mostly empty by early afternoon. Troops were given orders to shoot rioters on sight.<br />The violence is the worst since the May 2007 inauguration of President Umaru Yar'Adua, who came to power in a vote that international observers dismissed as not credible.<br />Few Nigerian elections have been deemed free and fair since independence from Britain in 1960, and military takeovers have periodically interrupted civilian rule.<br />More than 10,000 Nigerians have died in sectarian violence since civilian leaders took over from a former military junta in 1999. Political strife over local issues is common in Nigeria, where government offices control massive budgets stemming from the country's oil industry.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/29/africa/AF-Nigeria-Clashes.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/29/africa/AF-Nigeria-Clashes.php</a></div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjia8ZDbYPjbVvxR-XJLbHRen5kx8bl1vpOt0i5TRMF8YEqxJk_BZmBB4U4vjHNQck_kcOxRFCc2bYjkyjJ9dehCY2EdBpHamI5frOsyU_AaRVZFQcZu5EyzVhzHUUYW6aB9fqKMfcCSuo/s1600-h/DSC02313.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274345536939918370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjia8ZDbYPjbVvxR-XJLbHRen5kx8bl1vpOt0i5TRMF8YEqxJk_BZmBB4U4vjHNQck_kcOxRFCc2bYjkyjJ9dehCY2EdBpHamI5frOsyU_AaRVZFQcZu5EyzVhzHUUYW6aB9fqKMfcCSuo/s320/DSC02313.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1VQc7jez0vw9qGZzkirXQQxDeRlx_9ja1k8kwTikJEIyJ9gm6q91xwVpGoLJM9EcsPXUAj77uTjhIdtqXXDSFOhRDD3kzfv17j4bTbYK4nhAsfnxUyUvouiiV0SlAFnAPZe6xTnAgQAc/s1600-h/DSC02314.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274345534903632962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1VQc7jez0vw9qGZzkirXQQxDeRlx_9ja1k8kwTikJEIyJ9gm6q91xwVpGoLJM9EcsPXUAj77uTjhIdtqXXDSFOhRDD3kzfv17j4bTbYK4nhAsfnxUyUvouiiV0SlAFnAPZe6xTnAgQAc/s320/DSC02314.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJxOu-wxtZRc2UKa95M-vjIuSttHEeesT-HJfD5eGGbc5EG1JNhgtWiHD5_WEg2JGd_B0d8YYsbunp7oHZ4aHBzkBzvQt5V3aQjiHS5ZQ1IFJ4Kg-THZeVHSgULByeHHGJij1y5rpngUU/s1600-h/DSC02315.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274345535182625058" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJxOu-wxtZRc2UKa95M-vjIuSttHEeesT-HJfD5eGGbc5EG1JNhgtWiHD5_WEg2JGd_B0d8YYsbunp7oHZ4aHBzkBzvQt5V3aQjiHS5ZQ1IFJ4Kg-THZeVHSgULByeHHGJij1y5rpngUU/s320/DSC02315.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAnHP87c_P8_GCSPYd9aivn56hwIxDcil8EPLGbSgk2aXe7pgCfdBKtV0sQ3fOqX1G6KRy-5Zhdi2pNj-kfv8HSEq5ROIC3U-kZ4OIoL3a-y0lWWTwXtlUEoh9UQ4eBQ5QRUIYD-qbPCU/s1600-h/DSC02316.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274345232527792674" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAnHP87c_P8_GCSPYd9aivn56hwIxDcil8EPLGbSgk2aXe7pgCfdBKtV0sQ3fOqX1G6KRy-5Zhdi2pNj-kfv8HSEq5ROIC3U-kZ4OIoL3a-y0lWWTwXtlUEoh9UQ4eBQ5QRUIYD-qbPCU/s320/DSC02316.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDmhQ4cy1Xug3GBoMMFAQ8F1JXvwZUlUs-Y4CT7mgOgLhdVYnOvopzfDw0a2SiBjV1azQeDgAsNcgeESo8XSNgcaTyNk7i6mSUoRuTOPl-JZ154gYdjollse5ghzH5syTAOb9OHU9TbqA/s1600-h/DSC02317.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274345230203563890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDmhQ4cy1Xug3GBoMMFAQ8F1JXvwZUlUs-Y4CT7mgOgLhdVYnOvopzfDw0a2SiBjV1azQeDgAsNcgeESo8XSNgcaTyNk7i6mSUoRuTOPl-JZ154gYdjollse5ghzH5syTAOb9OHU9TbqA/s320/DSC02317.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJxUhpQPkmagQKFnm-5NVBqjZ7486IwYQIT2xC4XjhJvZIa0TD3k9R5uJ_36MmFFhH2-K9JwnDmmAvCEvHZj9OPrB9_6S79XFJ84xYfCQx6mmK5Qx7c5bypPJ0UdZ3aYI2xMPVWs_PuDU/s1600-h/DSC02318.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274345223439123682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJxUhpQPkmagQKFnm-5NVBqjZ7486IwYQIT2xC4XjhJvZIa0TD3k9R5uJ_36MmFFhH2-K9JwnDmmAvCEvHZj9OPrB9_6S79XFJ84xYfCQx6mmK5Qx7c5bypPJ0UdZ3aYI2xMPVWs_PuDU/s320/DSC02318.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>The crisis that touches everyone</strong><br />By Joe Nocera<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />When you live and work in New York, it is easy to succumb to the fallacy that the financial crisis is all about us. It's about giant, New York-based institutions failing or coming close to failing. It's about high-stakes weekends in the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. It's about credit-default swaps and mortgage-backed securities and the wild swings of the New York stock exchange. It's about Jamie Dimon and Richard Fuld.<br />But of course it's not just about us. It is not even primarily about Washington, where so much of the response to the crisis -$700 billion bailouts! Front-page congressional hearings! Economic summit meetings! - has taken place.<br />No, it is about everybody, in every part of the country: Neighborhoods awash in foreclosures and For Sale signs. Layoffs at the worst possible time. Small companies struggling to stay alive. Credit card companies raising rates unconscionably. People with perfectly fine credit scores finding it all but impossible to get loans.<br />The credit crisis is rippling up and down the economy in ways that may not create obvious headlines but that affect the way people do their business and live their lives. People, for instance, who sell and drive trucks.<br />"Even in good times, the trucking community works on razor-thin, single-digit margins," said G. David Gerrard, who runs a Chicago-area business that is the largest truck dealership in the United States. "If somebody bumps your lending costs by three basis points" - that is three hundredths of a percent - "it is a big deal. There is no price elasticity."<br />He continued: "We have a customer here in Chicago, a 50-year-old company, that just shut down. It had all of its eggs in one basket - 80 percent of its revenues came from an auto parts company that just liquidated. I have another customer with 280 drivers to 290 drivers that had its first layoffs in 40 years. They laid off 20 drivers. One truck deal blew up when we discovered the guy was four months late on his mortgage payments. I have guys who buy 25 trucks a year from us who aren't buying anything this year. We sold 38 percent fewer units in 2008 than we did in 2007."<br />I had gone to Chicago to learn about the effects of the credit crisis on a large, industrial, somewhat under-the-radar company called Navistar, the sole independent manufacturer of trucks and buses in the United States. Founded at the turn of the last century as a maker of agricultural equipment, it was known as International Harvester until the mid-1980s (truckers still call it "International"). The company has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, a near-death experience in the early 1990s, and, most recently, an accounting problem severe enough to cause it to be delisted for almost a year and a half from the New York Stock Exchange.<br />Because it is conservatively managed - no fancy financial engineering, no excessive debt, no risky loans to customers - Navistar is going to survive this crisis as well. But that doesn't mean it isn't feeling any pain, or that it doesn't see the effects of the crisis all around it. On the contrary, companies like Navistar see the effects of the financial crisis far more clearly than most policymakers do. Because trucks haul 70 percent to 80 percent of everything we buy, truck drivers and trucking companies feel even the slightest economic downturn. They're on the front lines of the crisis.<br />Gerrard, a garrulous, animated, 50-year-old executive who looks like a retired middle linebacker, runs a huge Navistar dealership that generates around $200 million in annual sales. Outside, in the company's lot, stood rows of trucks of all sorts, from basic city delivery trucks to spacious truck cabs priced at more than $100,000. Gerrard took over the dealership several years ago, when Navistar concluded it needed to bring in new management, and he's been whipping the place into shape ever since. He employs 400 people in and around the Chicago area.<br />Thanks to cost controls and other measures Gerrard put in place, the dealership still expects to make a profit this year, despite the drastic drop in sales and revenue. He is managing his receivables very tightly, he told me - even going to the homes of customers who are in arrears on their payments. Since the financial crisis began, he hasn't had to lay anyone off. But he is consolidating two shifts into one, and getting rid of a lot of overtime pay. His employees aren't complaining, though, not in this environment. They still have jobs.<br />Like most companies in America right now, a crucial issue for Gerrard is credit - in his case, credit for his customers. Navistar has a captive finance company, Navistar Financial, which is the trucking equivalent of GMAC. But its cost of capital has risen sharply, thanks to the crisis. That means Gerrard's costs have risen as well, because Navistar Financial supplies much of his financing needs.<br />Perhaps more important, it means that it costs his customers more when they need loans to buy a truck. What's more, other lenders, like GE Capital, have ceased making truck loans in the Chicago area. When I suggested to Gerrard that this must be good for Navistar's business, he shook his head vigorously. It is impossible for Navistar Financial to make 100 percent of the truck loans, so the withdrawal of other lenders means that trucking companies will not be able to get loans to buy vehicles.<br />"We have situations where customers need or want trucks but they can't get financing," he said. "They are really, really struggling."<br />The next morning I drove out to Warrenville, in the Chicago suburbs, to visit Navistar's headquarters. The company's chief executive, Dan C. Ustian, had just returned from Washington, where he had attended a big executive conference conducted by The Wall Street Journal. He had originally been put on a panel to tackle energy and environment - a natural spot for a truck executive - but he had asked to be moved to the finance panel instead.<br />As I quickly discovered, the state of lending in the financial crisis is his most pressing concern, far more than, say, the new emissions requirements on diesel engines that are mandated for 2010. No sooner had he shaken my hand than he launched into a passionate speech about the failure of the banking industry to do what it was supposed to be doing to help get us out of this crisis.<br />"It appears that money is being loaned by the government to the banks at a very attractive rate, and that money is not getting down to consumers or businesses," he said. "We have had 2,500 bankruptcies in our industry in a nine-month period. You can't believe how many of those trucking companies have been in business a long time, and they're profitable, but they can't get working capital. And when they can get it, they have to pay an arm and a leg. Some of the midsized customers we do business with are paying 14 and 15 percent for money, with a lot of onerous covenants. So that is what is happening to our customers."<br />Like Gerrard at the dealership, Ustian was fairly sanguine about Navistar's own prospects. The company, he explained, had happily negotiated a five-year financing in January 2007, at very favorable rates, which was helping keep its own capital costs low even as everyone else's were soaring. But that didn't mean there wasn't going to be pain.<br />When I asked him about layoffs, he sighed.<br />"Yeah, for sure, they're coming," he said. He also explained that in a normal economy, this should be a time when truck sales increase. The truck business is highly cyclical, and the industry was just coming out of a low point in the cycle. What's more, there is usually a big uptick in sales in the year before new emissions standards take effect, because the new engines required to meet the standards push up the cost of a truck by thousands of dollars.<br />But that wasn't happening this time. "We were gaining in market share and overall sales" earlier in the year, Ustian said. But then came the traumatic events of September - Fannie and Freddie, Lehman Brothers, American International Group, the bailout bill and all the rest of it - and "it just stalled," he said. "You could see it starting to get better, and then it just collapsed."<br />Something else happened to Navistar in September. Its stock price went into free fall. After working through its accounting issues, the company was relisted on the New York Stock Exchange in July, with its stock in the 60s. (It had traded over the counter during the delisting.) But in a two-month span between mid-September and mid-November, it dropped from $62 a share to $15.<br />Ustian found this bewildering - and more than a little frustrating. On the one hand, other trucking companies were suffering similar declines, and truck sales were certainly down. On the other hand, his company's fundamentals hadn't really changed all that much between September and November.<br />So what was going on? When Navistar was delisted in February 2007, large institutional investors like pension funds had to get rid of the stock. The shares were picked up by hedge funds, which at the peak owned well over half of Navistar's stock.<br />Though no one at Navistar can prove it, they strongly suspect that the stock has been hammered because hedge funds, badly hurt during this phase of the financial crisis, have been forced to sell some of their more liquid positions to return money to exiting shareholders. I suspect this theory is correct, and it would be yet another way that fallout from the financial crisis has spread from New York to the rest of the country.<br />"My opinion is that it is going to get worse before it gets better," Ustian said, as I prepared to leave. He wasn't talking about Navistar anymore, but about the American economy. "Unemployment is going to get worse. We have to free up money so that people have confidence again to spend. It's psychological. We have to get some confidence back."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/wbjoe29.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/wbjoe29.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Iran blames West for global crisis</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />DOHA: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the West for the global financial crisis on Saturday, saying other countries were being dragged in to help resolve Western problems.<br />"Leaders of the Western bloc ... are trying to extend their own crisis to the rest of the globe to portray it as global," Ahmadinejad told a U.N. aid conference in the Qatar's capital Doha.<br />"They dispatch different delegations to other countries and hold regional meetings and conferences in order to force other governments to get involved in this crisis to cover a part of their loss."<br />The credit crunch has frozen lending markets, forced trillions in government bailouts and sent a raft of nations into recession with many others hovering on the cusp of a severe economic downturn. The crisis has taken a heavy toll on poorer nations through trade and an inability to access credit markets.<br />According to World Bank estimates, 40 million people will be dragged into poverty in 2009 as a result of the global financial crisis and related economic meltdown.<br />The Iranian president, who often rails against the West, said the capitalist era had come to an end and said the world should adopt a new system based on "religious, spiritual and non-usury" principles.<br />"The capitalist bloc imposes its standards unilaterally on others," he said. "While it prices its goods by itself, it determines the prices for the commodities of other nations to secure its own interests by using deceptive economic ploys.<br />"The situation of the oil market and the commodities market come into play.<br />Iran faces U.N. and Western sanctions over its disputed atomic ambitions. The country does not recognise Israel and its hardline president has often predicted the imminent demise of the Jewish state.<br />Ahmadinejad reiterated his views on the Jewish state on Saturday, and condemned Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by the Palestinian militant Islamic group Hamas.<br />The U.N. aid meeting runs until December 2 and is unrelated to the World Trade Organization's Doha round.<br />Officials hope the conference will harden up general commitments by donors in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2002. The meeting was to have marked a big step towards goals of reducing extreme poverty but has been overshadowed by the global financial crisis.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-UN-DEVELOPMENT-IRAN.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-UN-DEVELOPMENT-IRAN.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong>U.S. holiday sales get off to slow start</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />By Nicole Maestri<br />The U.S. holiday shopping season got off to a slow start as consumers, squeezed by the economic crisis, bought carefully and said they would wait for better deals closer to Christmas.<br />Early results from the Black Friday weekend, which kicks off holiday sales one day after U.S. Thanksgiving, bolstered forecasts by some analysts that total holiday sales could contract for the first time since that data started being collected in the early 1990s.<br />ShopperTrak, which measures customer traffic, said on Saturday that Black Friday sales rose 3 percent to $10.6 billion (6.9 billion pounds). That was slower than an 8.3 percent rise in 2007.<br />"The initial response by many people may be positive," said Telsey Advisory Group analyst Joseph Feldman of the increase.<br />But, Feldman said, excluding inflation the sales figures are roughly flat year over year. His firm still expects overall holiday sales will be flat to slightly down.<br />Shoppers interviewed on Saturday said they were disappointed by the deals this weekend and bet stores would offer even steeper discounts in the weeks to come -- a worrisome sign for retailers struggling with weak profits.<br />"I'm not happy with the prices," said Rose Fernandez, shopping at a Macy's in Jersey City, New Jersey. "If it's worth the money, I would pick it up... If I can wait, I wait and watch. I can wait even till the day after Christmas."<br />ShopperTrak noted that stores would have a shorter holiday season, with 27 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, compared with 32 days in 2007.<br />"(That) may catch some procrastinating consumers off guard, leading to lower sales levels," said Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak.<br />PENDING LAYOFFS PUT PURCHASES ON HOLD<br />Retailers are facing what could be the weakest sales season in nearly two decades as shoppers contend with falling home values, reduced access to credit and a weak job market.<br />The three-day Thanksgiving weekend can account for 10 percent of overall holiday sales and has taken on added importance this year as the country seeks a way out of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.<br />Heidi Hickman, a marketing manager, was browsing at a J.C. Penney in Jersey City on Saturday, but gifts were not on her mind.<br />"I got a notice there are going to be layoffs in my department," she said. "It's making me stop right now and not do anything until I find out."<br />If sales for November and December decline, it would mark the first contraction since the National Retail Federation began tracking holiday sales in 1992.<br />"I have very little confidence that the sales number will be up year-over-year," for the season, said Stacey Widlitz, retail analyst with Pali Capital.<br />In a highly competitive battle to attract shoppers, some retailers, including Kmart, opened on Thanksgiving day, while others began sales on Friday right after midnight.<br />In Chicago, Gap Inc's Old Navy chain opened at 7 a.m. (1 p.m. British time) on Saturday but an employee said there was little to do until 9 a.m. (3 p.m. British time), when shoppers finally began to arrive.<br />A nearby Sears had cut prices on holiday decorations by 60 percent, while clothing retailer Charlotte Russe tried to entice shoppers with a deal to buy one item and get another item for 50 percent off.<br />Penney said Black Friday shopping was strong as consumers sought deals on practical gifts, like sweaters. But it did not release sales figures for the weekend, saying the economic environment was too volatile.<br />Amazon.com Inc said Apple's iPod touch, which has a touch-sensitive screen, was its top-selling electronics item on Black Friday morning, while the Wii Fit, for Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii video game console, was its most popular video game.<br />SHOPPERS EXPECT PRICES WILL FALL<br />As shoppers sought low prices online, eBay's Web payments service PayPal saw 34 percent more transactions on Black Friday than in 2007 and showed a 26 percent increase in online payment volume.<br />In Los Angeles, Jenipher Park, 36, and Keri Yang, 34, bought boots at Nordstrom on Saturday, but both were expecting bigger discounts.<br />They said they will delay more purchases to get better deals closer to Christmas, and this year the two moms are planning to only get gifts for their children.<br />Many shoppers echoed those sentiments, saying they would find other ways to celebrate with adult relatives and friends. Some were already turned off to the very idea of shopping.<br />"I'm not into shopping this year like I was the year before," said Rolando Ramos, 29, on a visit to Chevy Chase, Maryland. "It's very depressing. Go to the malls, just looking around, it's deserted."<br />Widlitz said she expected discount behemoth Wal-Mart to win shoppers this holiday because of its low prices.<br />At a Wal-Mart store in Columbia, Maryland, on Friday, the parking lot was full at 7:30 a.m. and customers stood in line 10 shopping carts deep to make purchases.<br />(Reporting by Nicole Maestri; Additional reporting by Jessica Wohl, Ben Klayman, Lisa Baertlein and Aarthi Sivaraman; Editing by Vicki Allen)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/business/OUKBS-UK-USA-HOLIDAYSALES.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/business/OUKBS-UK-USA-HOLIDAYSALES.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div><strong>Zimbabweans offered free graves as cholera spreads</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />By Cris Chinaka<br />The Zimbabwean capital, Harare, is offering free graves for victims of a cholera outbreak sweeping the southern African state, which a United Nations agency says is only the tip of a health crisis.<br />Nearly 400 people have died from the disease, preventable and treatable under normal conditions, which has infected more than 9,400 in the country and spread to some of its neighbours.<br />Harare City Council has decided to waive fees for burying victims of the water-borne disease as residents are already under pressure from an economic crisis, including shortages of food and banknotes, the state Herald newspaper said on Saturday.<br />"Council has since resolved to offer free graves to those who have died of cholera since most people are finding it hard to get cash to pay for the graves," it quoted the town clerk as saying.<br />A grave in Harare costs an average of $30, a teacher's monthly salary at the current exchange rate.<br />The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday a lack of clean drinking water and adequate toilets were the main triggers for Zimbabwe's epidemic of cholera, a diarrhoeal disease that is especially fatal for children.<br />WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said there are very few places where people infected with cholera in Zimbabwe can seek medical care, and the clinics that are open have far too few health workers to contain the outbreak.<br />HYGIENE KITS<br />International aid groups are building latrines, distributing medicine and hygiene kits, delivering truckloads of water, and repairing blocked sewers across Zimbabwe to combat the cholera outbreak, which has moved into South Africa and Botswana.<br />Zimbabwe state media reported on Saturday that a residents association in a town near Harare had taken the state-run water authority to court for failing to provide clean water.<br />President Robert Mugabe's government says the health system and the economy are collapsing because of sanctions imposed by Western powers it says are trying to oust him for seizing white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks.<br />His critics say Mugabe, 84 and in power since independence from Britain in 1980, has ruined one of Africa's most promising economies through reckless policies and gross mismanagement.<br />The economy is in virtual meltdown, with unemployment over 90 percent, inflation officially at 230 million percent, and people scrounging daily for food and cash.<br />On Saturday, the Herald said six soldiers had been arrested in the last week for assaulting bank staff and commuters after failing to get cash at a bank.<br />Analysts hope a power-sharing deal being negotiated between Mugabe and the opposition MDC after disputed elections early this year may help turn around the economy.<br />A meeting in Kenya of the African Union's "panel of the wise" advisory forum said on Saturday Zimbabwe's humanitarian situation was deteriorating and urged the AU to help speed the establishment of a national unity government in Harare.<br />"The panel expressed deep concern at the prevailing humanitarian and socio-economic situation in Zimbabwe and the ever escalating suffering of the civilian population," it said in a statement at the end of a two-day conference.<br />It called on the AU and the Southern African Development Community, a regional grouping, "to instil a new sense of urgency in their efforts to overcome the current obstacles in the implementation of the power-sharing agreement and to take all actions required to this end."<br />(Additional reporting by David Clarke in Nairobi; editing by Mark Trevelyan and Gugulakhe Lourie)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/europe/OUKWD-UK-ZIMBABWE-CHOLERA.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/europe/OUKWD-UK-ZIMBABWE-CHOLERA.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div><strong>Surging shoppers kill New York Wal-Mart worker</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />NEW YORK: A man working for discount retailer Wal-Mart was killed on Friday in a stampede by frenzied shoppers who broke down doors and surged into a Long Island, New York store, a police spokesman said.<br />The 34-year-old man was at the entrance of the Valley Stream Wal-Mart store just after it opened at 5 a.m. and was knocked to the ground, the police report said.<br />The exact cause of death was still to be determined by a medical examiner.<br />Four shoppers, including a 28-year-old pregnant woman, were also taken to local hospitals for injuries sustained in the incident, police said.<br />Wal-Mart said it was saddened by the death of the man, who was working for a temporary employment agency serving the retailer, and by the injuries suffered by shoppers.<br />"The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority," the world's largest retailer said in a statement. It said the incident was still under investigation and referred any other inquiries to local police.<br />New York's largest grocery workers union on Friday urged federal, state and local authorities to investigate what it called "Wal-Mart's failure to provide a safe workplace."<br />"This incident was avoidable," said Bruce Both, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 1500. "Where were the safety barriers? Where was security? ... This is not just tragic; it rises to a level of blatant irresponsibility by Wal-Mart."<br />Wal-Mart said it had added additional internal security, third party security, more store associates and had worked closely with local police.<br />"We also erected barricades. Despite all of our precautions, this unfortunate event occurred," Hank Mullany, a Wal-Mart senior vice president, said in a statement.<br />The Friday after America's Thanksgiving holiday is known as Black Friday and is traditionally the busiest retail day of the year, kicking off the Christmas shopping season.<br />U.S. stores across the country opened early to offer discounts to consumers hit by a contracting economy. Hundreds of shoppers waited in line before dawn at some locations to secure deals on holiday gifts.<br />(Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa in Washington)<br />(Reporting by Michele Gershberg; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Anthony Boadle)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/america/OUKWD-UK-USA-HOLIDAYSALES-DEATH.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/america/OUKWD-UK-USA-HOLIDAYSALES-DEATH.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div><strong>Mandelson says banks overreacting</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />LONDON: Business Secretary Peter Mandelson accused banks on Saturday of overreacting to a liquidity crisis and said they had now become too conservative with their lending policies.<br />He said banks risked further damage to their balance sheets and profits by not providing cash to small businesses. There was a "disjunction" between what he was hearing from firms around the country and bankers in London.<br />"The banks have experienced a sharp liquidity crisis. They have lent too much at too cheap a price for too long. But they are now overreacting to that, in my opinion, in too conservative and restrictive a way," he told the Guardian newspaper.<br />"They are in danger of substituting one set of problems for another, and in the process doing themselves further damage by underlending and not strengthening their balance sheets and profits in the longer term. They are close to cutting off their noses to spite their faces."<br />Mandelson, a surprise recall to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government this year, said he did not know how long the recession would last, appearing to contradict official government forecasts last week that the economy would move out of recession in the second half of 2009.<br />"No one can foretell how short or long, how painful or painless, the recession is going to be.<br />"The recession will determine our borrowing our taxing and spending. All I know is that the deeper we get into the recession, the higher the costs of climbing out will be," he said.<br />His comments come as the latest ICM opinion poll showed Brown had slipped further behind the Conservatives, with the gap widening to 15 points, suggesting voters have doubts about the government's tax-cutting and borrowing plans to ease the pain of the economic downturn.<br />The poll placed the Conservatives on 45 percent, a jump of three percentage points, compared to just 30 percent for Labour.<br />The government announced plans on Monday for a 20 billion pound stimulus package to support the flagging economy that include a temporary cut in Value Added Tax to 15 percent and a new 45 percent tax band for higher earners.<br />Mandelson also said he was looking at a draft plan to identify sectors of businesses that may need government help if the recession deepens.<br />He said he believed industry wanted more activism from the government. This week major retail chains Woolworths group and furniture chain MFI went into administration as retail sales plunged in November at their fastest pace since records began 25 years ago.<br />"They don't want us to pick winners, but they do want a route map," he said.<br />However, he told a conference of the centre-left Progress think tank that the government would not embark on "futile" bailouts.<br />"The one thing we are not going to do is to embark on a rather futile journey to bail out every company in trouble, to prop up companies that aren't viable or frankly to extend the life of companies or businesses that are not any more competitive," the Press Association reported.<br />"That is not the job of government.<br />"What we do need to do is to look at how companies and sectors of industry which are, and will continue to make a very, very important contribution to our manufacturing and industrial wealth producing future, to see what the appropriate role of government would be in helping them through the current recession so that they can take advantage of the upturn on the other side."<br />"We are at the beginning of a preliminary conversation about that; I do not have a blueprint or a list of companies or sectors that we are suddenly going to intervene in."<br />(Reporting by Frank Prenesti; editing by Michael Roddy)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/business/OUKBS-UK-FINANCIAL-BRITAIN-MANDELSON.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/business/OUKBS-UK-FINANCIAL-BRITAIN-MANDELSON.php</a></div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div><strong>Congo rebel chief says "war" if no talks</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />By Hereward Holland<br />Congolese Tutsi rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda threatened war on Saturday unless Congo's government entered a new round of talks with him.<br />Nkunda, whose forces have routed government troops and gained swathes of territory in North Kivu province in the east of Democratic Republic of Congo since launching a new offensive in August, has repeatedly demanded negotiations.<br />Nkunda said he had been told by the U.N. special envoy, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, that Kinshasa had accepted the principle of talks.<br />"If there is no negotiation, let us say then there is war," Nkunda told reporters after meeting Obasanjo in the rebel commander's native village, Jomba.<br />"I know that (the government) has no capacity to fight, so they have only one choice: negotiations," he said.<br />"We asked for a response as to where, when, and with whom we are going to do these talks. For us, we propose Nairobi and for the mediator we proposed chief Obasanjo."<br />Video footage of the meeting provided by the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, MONUC, showed Obasanjo criticising Nkunda for recent hostilities, including Thursday's capture of the town of Ishasha, on the border with Uganda.<br />"What has happened in the last 14 days has not made me happy," Obasanjo said, rising to his feet to address Nkunda, who remained seated at a low table.<br />"I tried to build a relationship of trust, but I don't receive the same from you."<br />Obasanjo said Nkunda should have informed him he was planning fresh offensives.<br />"You are making me a laughing stock," he said.<br />Nkunda, who wore a white robe with matching shoes and scarf, wrung his hands said the cease-fire he had declared applied only to fighting against the Congolese army, not against what he described as "foreign negative forces."<br />That cease-fire has brought nearly two weeks of relative calm. But his men have continued attacking Congolese and Rwandan militia allies of the government.<br />CLASHES<br />Obasanjo was in Congo on his second mission in two weeks to try to end fighting in North Kivu that has displaced some 250,000 civilians and at one point brought Nkunda's troops to within 10 km (6 miles) of the provincial capital, Goma.<br />The envoy, who met President Joseph Kabila in the mineral-rich African country on Friday, has pressed for talks.<br />Government ministers this week rebuffed the possibility of direct negotiations with Nkunda, calling for him to return to a earlier peace pact signed in January.<br />Emerging from his one-hour meeting with the rebel leader, Obasanjo avoided questions.<br />"We have advanced the course of peace," he said.<br />MONUC said clashes between Nkunda's National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) and armed groups erupted for a second day near Masisi town on Saturday.<br />The roots of the North Kivu conflict stem from Rwanda's 1994 genocide, when extremist Hutu militias killed some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus before fleeing into Congo.<br />That led to two wars and a humanitarian crisis that killed more than 5 million people, mostly from hunger and disease.<br />Nkunda accuses Kabila of arming Rwandan Hutu rebels, including some perpetrators of the 1994 genocide, to fight alongside the weak and chaotic Congolese army.<br />Around 1 million civilians have been displaced by clashes between the CNDP, the army, local Mai Mai militias, and Rwandan rebels since Nkunda relaunched his insurgency in late 2006.<br />The U.N. Security Council agreed this month to send 3,000 troops to boost Congo's beleaguered mission, the world's largest peacekeeping force with around 17,000 soldiers and police.<br />(Additional reporting by Yves Boussen in Jomba and Joe Bavier in Kinshasa; Editing by Daniel Magnowski and Angus MacSwan)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC.php</a></div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRrinZ4t8nlXXp-8ZZOho3Zc7Xfel-4QTHBHM8idtH7gs6CQRVN46XAWI117b1qIbw0HnMiR9fZ5dQcpsYUyZFLoMCQVcgHcznBxOUww-MP_LhTIHMErj-A3Su1-EN809JsEd4ocSMKwc/s1600-h/DSC02319.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274345226416141650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRrinZ4t8nlXXp-8ZZOho3Zc7Xfel-4QTHBHM8idtH7gs6CQRVN46XAWI117b1qIbw0HnMiR9fZ5dQcpsYUyZFLoMCQVcgHcznBxOUww-MP_LhTIHMErj-A3Su1-EN809JsEd4ocSMKwc/s320/DSC02319.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUWIKMFZ6AzvrCZvEtlXbskxqfJcvdnk2Ycz1Z26hIdoScrMjfGPWKShfiCnd6IFAPEgrsydCODPlj-DoZk6fNHcSxP20XMgTVMvKE26AxC_IxOSSq0WBqUfV-3qHHYBMutxVyu4WfXoo/s1600-h/DSC02321.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274345222467121794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUWIKMFZ6AzvrCZvEtlXbskxqfJcvdnk2Ycz1Z26hIdoScrMjfGPWKShfiCnd6IFAPEgrsydCODPlj-DoZk6fNHcSxP20XMgTVMvKE26AxC_IxOSSq0WBqUfV-3qHHYBMutxVyu4WfXoo/s320/DSC02321.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg0R32cmHNvdmsttzYuofXV1p3ugxItYhxnYJuLsiTTwTYp8IUVmvdmYW_B3_rxbNRxARBNKaEipa2VZkku6RFTr8ZXbTNgetQQKVADAo9Uwb7qVgZp23qzphbpYzAhvjFuF3Pt1qVChY/s1600-h/DSC02322.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344923308053954" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg0R32cmHNvdmsttzYuofXV1p3ugxItYhxnYJuLsiTTwTYp8IUVmvdmYW_B3_rxbNRxARBNKaEipa2VZkku6RFTr8ZXbTNgetQQKVADAo9Uwb7qVgZp23qzphbpYzAhvjFuF3Pt1qVChY/s320/DSC02322.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjG05ewsofQtQxIl5LlOI09rET33QeLeQXzia6r6thLL9pNXaiHXHS6XJcZAU9-zdUXoKBkxX8AulKDdTIPZxvc69gGELqXNtmMlig4IoYI0IhsVUM_ncvnl7psFp1b5DVh9MH8VJ8Z4w/s1600-h/DSC02323.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344920874009298" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjG05ewsofQtQxIl5LlOI09rET33QeLeQXzia6r6thLL9pNXaiHXHS6XJcZAU9-zdUXoKBkxX8AulKDdTIPZxvc69gGELqXNtmMlig4IoYI0IhsVUM_ncvnl7psFp1b5DVh9MH8VJ8Z4w/s320/DSC02323.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq2riYSfZcvccHTLMVzoKPq4pLlJuNGY7Sng_JKxictwTOb0kTH-csApg_hT7Jt4ixsW_DYk2aoUfdr1HhqTR5aTmePVFR8x__E5UwiDbpJj5dJsTrwRZK_UHBqLYqxfBUbqFWSKY1XIU/s1600-h/DSC02324.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344917523820834" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq2riYSfZcvccHTLMVzoKPq4pLlJuNGY7Sng_JKxictwTOb0kTH-csApg_hT7Jt4ixsW_DYk2aoUfdr1HhqTR5aTmePVFR8x__E5UwiDbpJj5dJsTrwRZK_UHBqLYqxfBUbqFWSKY1XIU/s320/DSC02324.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilEv7oNdz3YntDPw4jPWUBbDhhN3NxDyzGoUNa2tAYu-UPUUPoqtBC2JWbCSUYjZlouufNGv4hnt6_4J1GRM_XppI9t_qygWEJvcHQ29Ph0oQqAExjSfSudjFhjaIfggi77hJiP9Uwnlg/s1600-h/DSC02326.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344908809868274" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilEv7oNdz3YntDPw4jPWUBbDhhN3NxDyzGoUNa2tAYu-UPUUPoqtBC2JWbCSUYjZlouufNGv4hnt6_4J1GRM_XppI9t_qygWEJvcHQ29Ph0oQqAExjSfSudjFhjaIfggi77hJiP9Uwnlg/s320/DSC02326.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj32hzKzLS2J63f9hDoSrh2Sr5jD8_g2lw_fz5hEfzpP2-lFIF8oI918_-1S70aAHG1jQh_XoZAvpO2gUdt2Y7-QqY33KGN1VxUPlBBL3CaZeQDJQb-JTkPxn0KL0jnseQGcm_d0t-0UEc/s1600-h/DSC02327.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344903776566914" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj32hzKzLS2J63f9hDoSrh2Sr5jD8_g2lw_fz5hEfzpP2-lFIF8oI918_-1S70aAHG1jQh_XoZAvpO2gUdt2Y7-QqY33KGN1VxUPlBBL3CaZeQDJQb-JTkPxn0KL0jnseQGcm_d0t-0UEc/s320/DSC02327.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoaCMGl5BT5OFcREyoDapMTD-64fs759MKJMX-tyERRW_xDbyZG1-JG7VPs-UhQDwUTmZw84Sv1w8ac-ysFcheU79ZE8kdSJEsmYhALbIO3q6Rbpsdl6J5RmRiDBlLaXgL-rIvxGqO7-o/s1600-h/DSC02328.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344526127569506" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoaCMGl5BT5OFcREyoDapMTD-64fs759MKJMX-tyERRW_xDbyZG1-JG7VPs-UhQDwUTmZw84Sv1w8ac-ysFcheU79ZE8kdSJEsmYhALbIO3q6Rbpsdl6J5RmRiDBlLaXgL-rIvxGqO7-o/s320/DSC02328.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8toFbjuAC3OESGO59ge7KKdd9peZv73qN17Uf8rObm325WgEsceZVVLBBZKf6YL3k_Ovq73GEOSGhR3L5mRfX2ljxzaVTtoYjjCixB7EqUU5e1nCC0eZrOxVon4l6Wo8fEpWeF8EdYIo/s1600-h/DSC02329.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344521270924722" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8toFbjuAC3OESGO59ge7KKdd9peZv73qN17Uf8rObm325WgEsceZVVLBBZKf6YL3k_Ovq73GEOSGhR3L5mRfX2ljxzaVTtoYjjCixB7EqUU5e1nCC0eZrOxVon4l6Wo8fEpWeF8EdYIo/s320/DSC02329.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjynaejHEeNyOkjCkRocTIN9tfgcCggYhkRXSIcAPQF5mA1tpmax4jfWveYvWgHtHPTD2g0lw5ivDzWtbpDrNVivk9y9VfC4NOnATrdY_hZKYA0i3zysq2MIlcu8BBR2CDwly29ObdbN6s/s1600-h/DSC02330.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344514121818466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjynaejHEeNyOkjCkRocTIN9tfgcCggYhkRXSIcAPQF5mA1tpmax4jfWveYvWgHtHPTD2g0lw5ivDzWtbpDrNVivk9y9VfC4NOnATrdY_hZKYA0i3zysq2MIlcu8BBR2CDwly29ObdbN6s/s320/DSC02330.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-l_E6pI4iJe9JK0QAPgjCmd2YQPI-AAtdBoXv83tbRfXv59Y7oB2F4uRJR_fUEe2vp40UpQAHw5MRU5RtdsHkNJXvcJzSkqVQCHgOR0hFDzei-TLJz9NOrjMuYLU7Abu014cpfvXqQ0U/s1600-h/DSC02331.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344511502652850" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-l_E6pI4iJe9JK0QAPgjCmd2YQPI-AAtdBoXv83tbRfXv59Y7oB2F4uRJR_fUEe2vp40UpQAHw5MRU5RtdsHkNJXvcJzSkqVQCHgOR0hFDzei-TLJz9NOrjMuYLU7Abu014cpfvXqQ0U/s320/DSC02331.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinMjL2ZOB4sqBnyKdYJ-whLCGFkodzwJX110n0UHzaHG2nxF8t5RmeAcyg-PWLLjjRlgKvyBksJipJaX5lOdXArhLx5duuY8nlso8U-uKgItRUcYxYGTA99hhEIxENPX6Bk6ehEoayIB8/s1600-h/DSC02332.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344484668038722" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinMjL2ZOB4sqBnyKdYJ-whLCGFkodzwJX110n0UHzaHG2nxF8t5RmeAcyg-PWLLjjRlgKvyBksJipJaX5lOdXArhLx5duuY8nlso8U-uKgItRUcYxYGTA99hhEIxENPX6Bk6ehEoayIB8/s320/DSC02332.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Iraqi army finds 30 bodies in shallow graves<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: The Iraqi army unearthed 30 decomposed bodies in a series of shallow graves in northern Iraq's volatile Diyala province, the army said on Saturday.<br />The bodies were found over three days in the predominantly Shi'ite village of Albu-Toma, north of Baghdad, where Sunni Islamist al Qaeda militants once ruled and carried out frequent mass sectarian killings against Shi'ites.<br />"We know this area contains many graves. We may find more bodies in the future," an army officer on the scene, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak, told Reuters.<br />Iraqi security forces regularly uncover mass graves, most of them left over from a 2006/7 sectarian conflict that brought Iraq to the brink of all-out civil war. Police found 23 bodies in a mass grave near the northern city of Samarra on Wednesday. (Reporting by Khalid al-Ansary; Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Michael Roddy)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-GRAVES.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAQ-GRAVES.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div><strong>One man's military-industrial-media complex<br /></strong>By David Barstow<br />Sunday, November 30, 2008<br />In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity.<br />The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.<br />Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007.<br />Four days later the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. "No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed," he said.<br />Thus, within days of hiring McCaffrey, the Defense Solutions sales pitch was in the hands of the American commander with the greatest influence over Iraq's expanding military.<br />"That's what I pay him for," Timothy Ringgold, chief executive of Defense Solutions, said in an interview.<br />McCaffrey did not mention his new contract with Defense Solutions in his letter to Petraeus. Nor did he disclose it when he went on CNBC that same week and praised the commander Defense Solutions was now counting on for help "He's got the heart of a lion" or when he told Congress the next month that it should immediately supply Iraq with large numbers of armored vehicles and other equipment.<br />He had made similar arguments before he was hired by Defense Solutions, but this time he went further. In his testimony to Congress, McCaffrey criticized a Pentagon plan to supply Iraq with several hundred armored vehicles made in the United States by a competitor of Defense Solutions. He called the plan "not in the right ballpark" and urged Congress to instead equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.<br />"We've got Iraqi army battalions driving around in Toyota trucks," he said, echoing an argument made to Petraeus in the Defense Solutions briefing packet.<br />Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.<br />Few illustrate the submerged complexities of this world better than Barry McCaffrey.<br />McCaffrey, 66, has long been a force in Washington's power elite. A consummate networker, he cultivated politicians and journalists of all stripes as drug czar in the Clinton cabinet, and his ties run deep to a new generation of generals, some of whom he taught at West Point or commanded in the Persian Gulf war, when he rose to fame leading the "left hook" assault on Iraqi forces.<br />But it was 9/11 that thrust McCaffrey to the forefront of the national security debate. In the years since he has made nearly 1,000 appearances on NBC and its cable sisters, delivering crisp sound bites in a blunt, hyperbolic style. He commands up to $25,000 for speeches, his commentary regularly turns up in The Wall Street Journal, and he has been quoted or cited in thousands of news articles, including dozens in The New York Times.<br />His influence is such that President George W. Bush and congressional leaders from both parties have invited him for war consultations. His access is such that, despite a contentious relationship with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon has arranged numerous trips to Iraq, Afghanistan and other hotspots solely for his benefit.<br />At the same time, McCaffrey has immersed himself in businesses that have grown with the fight against terrorism.<br />The consulting company he started after leaving the government in 2001, BR McCaffrey Associates, promises to "build linkages" between government officials and contractors like Defense Solutions for up to $10,000 a month. He has also earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a military industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, he is the chairman of HNTB Federal Services, an engineering and construction management company that often competes for national security contracts.<br />Many retired officers hold a perch in the world of military contracting, but McCaffrey is among a select few who also command platforms in the news media and as government advisers on military matters. These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives. But with their business ties left undisclosed, it can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.<br />On NBC and in other public forums, McCaffrey has consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests. But those interests are not described to NBC's viewers. He is held out as a dispassionate expert, not someone who helps companies win contracts related to the wars he discusses on television.<br />The president of NBC News, Steve Capus, said in an interview that McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis for NBC. He described McCaffrey as an "independent voice" who had courageously challenged Rumsfeld, adding, "There's no open microphone that begins with the Pentagon and ends with him going out over our airwaves."<br />McCaffrey is not required to abide by NBC's formal conflict-of-interest rules, Capus said, because he is a consultant, not a news employee. Nor is he required to disclose his business interests periodically. But Capus said that the network had conversations with its military analysts about the need to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, and that McCaffrey had been "incredibly forthcoming" about his ties to military contractors.<br />McCaffrey declined to be interviewed but released a brief statement.<br />"My public media commentary on the war labeled me as an early and serious critic of Rumsfeld's arrogance and mismanagement of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan," the statement said. "The New York Times noted my strong on-air criticism as an NBC commentator. My op-ed objections to the execution of the war were published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The LA Times, USA Today and other media. Hardly the stuff of someone shilling a war for the administration or privately pushing his business interests with the Pentagon. Thirty-seven years of public service. Four combat tours. Wounded three times. The country knows me as a nonpartisan and objective national security expert with solid integrity."<br />In earlier e-mail messages, McCaffrey played down his involvement in lobbying for contracts, suggesting he mainly gave companies "strategic counsel." His business responsibilities, he wrote, simply do not conflict with his duty to provide objective analysis on NBC. "Never has been a problem," he wrote. "Period."<br />McCaffrey did in fact emerge as a tough critic of Rumsfeld, describing him as reckless and incompetent. His central criticism that Rumsfeld fought the Iraq war "on the cheap" reflected his long-stated views on waging war. But it also dovetailed with his business interests. And his clashes with Rumsfeld were but one facet of a more complex and symbiotic relationship with the Bush administration and the military's uniformed leaders, records and interviews show.<br />With a few exceptions McCaffrey has consistently supported Bush's major national security policies, especially the war in Iraq. He advocated invasion, urged building up the military to sustain the occupation and warned that premature withdrawal would invite catastrophe.<br />In an article earlier this year, The New York Times identified McCaffrey as one of some 75 military analysts who were the focus of a Pentagon public relations campaign that is now being examined by the Pentagon's inspector general, the Government Accountability Office and the Federal Communications Commission. The campaign, begun in 2002 but suspended after the article's publication, sought to transform the analysts into "surrogates" and "message force multipliers" for the Bush administration, records show. The analysts, many with military industry ties, were wooed in private briefings, showered with talking points and escorted on tours of Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.<br />The Pentagon inspector general is investigating whether special access gave any of these analysts an improper edge in the competition for contracts.<br />McCaffrey offers a case study of the benefits that can flow from favored access: an inside track to sensitive information about strategy and tactics; insight into the priorities of ground commanders; a private channel to officials who oversaw war spending, as the Defense Solutions example shows. In that case the company has yet to win the contract it hired McCaffrey to champion.<br />More broadly, though, his example reveals the myriad and often undisclosed connections between the business of war and the business of covering it.<br />A Move to Television<br />McCaffrey made his debut as a military analyst in the weeks after 9/11. NBC anchors typically introduced him by describing his medals or his exploits in the Gulf war. Or they noted he was a West Point professor, or the youngest four-star general in the history of the army.<br />They did not mention his work for military contractors, including a lucrative new role with Veritas Capital.<br />Veritas was a relatively small player in 2001, looking to grow through acquisitions and Pentagon contracts. Competing for contracts is a complex and subtle sport, governed by highly bureaucratic bidding rules and the old-fashioned arts of access and influence.<br />Veritas would compete on both fronts.<br />Just days before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 6, 2001 Veritas had announced the formation of an "advisory council" of well-connected retired generals and admirals, including McCaffrey. "They can really pick up the phone and call someone," Robert McKeon, the president of Veritas, would later tell The Times.<br />Access was also part of what drew NBC to McCaffrey. Capus said McCaffrey "opens doors with generals and others who we would not otherwise be able to talk to."<br />Veritas gave its advisers board seats on its military companies, along with profit sharing and equity stakes that were all the more attractive because Veritas intended to turn quick profits through initial public offerings. On Sept. 6, this might have been considered a gamble. Revenue growth a key to successful IPO's required sustained increases in military spending. But after Sept. 11, the only question was just how big those increases would be.<br />From his first months on the air, McCaffrey called for huge, sustained increases in military spending for a global campaign against terrorism. He also advocated spending for high-tech weapons, including some like precision-guided munitions and unmanned aerial vehicles that were important to the Veritas portfolio. He called the C-17 cargo plane also a source of Veritas contracts a "national treasure."<br />In a statement, Veritas said it had gained no "discernible benefit" from McCaffrey's television appearances and called his TV work "completely independent" from his role with Veritas.<br />In their corporate filings, Veritas military companies told investors they were well positioned to benefit from a widening global struggle against terrorism. The approaching conflict with Iraq, though, would create new areas of tension between McCaffrey's fiduciary obligations to Veritas and his duties to NBC.<br />McCaffrey harbored significant doubts about the invasion plan. An informal participant in the war planning, he was troubled by Rumsfeld's resistance to an invasion force of several hundred thousand, he acknowledged months and years later in interviews. Rumsfeld's team, he said, was bent on making an "ideological" point that wars could be fought "on the cheap." There were not enough tanks, artillery or troops, he would say, and the result was a "grossly anemic" force that unnecessarily put troops at risk.<br />That is not what McCaffrey said when asked on NBC outlets to assess the risks of war. As planning for a possible invasion received intense news coverage in 2002, he repeatedly assured viewers that the war would be brief, the occupation lengthy but benign.<br />"These people are going to come apart in 21 days or less," he told Brian Williams on MSNBC.<br />In the fall of 2002 McCaffrey joined the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group formed with White House encouragement to fan support for regime change. He also participated in private Pentagon briefings in which network military analysts were armed with talking points that made the case for war, records show.<br />In early 2003 Forrest Sawyer asked McCaffrey on CNBC what could go wrong after an invasion. Anticipating this very question, the Pentagon had invited McCaffrey and other analysts to a special briefing. Years later McCaffrey would say he knew that the post-invasion planning was a disaster. "They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war," he said.<br />Given a chance by Sawyer to raise an alarm, the general reiterated Pentagon talking points about the "astonishing amount" of postwar planning.<br />And when Tom Brokaw asked him, days before the invasion, "What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?" he replied, "Well, I don't think I have any real serious ones."<br />Only when the invasion met unexpected resistance did McCaffrey give a glimpse of his misgivings. "We've placed ourselves in a risky proposition, 400 miles into Iraq with no flank or rear area security," he told Katie Couric on "Today."<br />Rumsfeld struck back. He abruptly cut off McCaffrey's access to the Pentagon's special briefings and conference calls.<br />McCaffrey was stunned. "I've never heard his voice like that," recalled one close associate who asked not to be identified. He added, "They showed him what life was like on the outside."<br />Robert Weiner, a longtime publicist for McCaffrey, said the general came to see that if he continued his criticism, he risked being shut out not only by Rumsfeld but also by his network of friends and contacts among the uniformed leadership.<br />"There is a time when you have to punt," said Weiner, emphasizing that he spoke as McCaffrey's friend, not as his spokesman.<br />Within days McCaffrey began to backpedal, professing his "great respect" for Rumsfeld to Tim Russert. "Is this man O.K.?" the Fox News anchor Brit Hume asked, taking note of the about-face.<br />For months to come, as an insurgency took root, McCaffrey defended the Bush administration. "I am 100 percent behind what the administration, what the president of the United States, is doing in Iraq," he told Williams that June.<br />A Corporate Troubleshooter<br />Rumsfeld's swift reaction underscored the administration's appreciation of McCaffrey's influence. His comments were catalogued and circulated at the White House and Pentagon.<br />Other network analysts were monitored, too, but not the way McCaffrey was. He was different. He was one of the few retired four-star generals on television, and his well-known friendships with men like Petraeus and General John Abizaid gave him added currency.<br />As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, McCaffrey increasingly gave public expression to the private frustrations of generals pressing their civilian bosses for more troops, weapons and reconstruction money. The army, he repeatedly warned, could break under the strain.<br />These were politically charged topics, and so the administration worked to influence his commentary, using carrots and sticks alike. In 2005, for example, Rumsfeld took umbrage at remarks McCaffrey made to The Washington Times about the impact of unchecked poppy production in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld wrote to General Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, demanding to know where McCaffrey "got his information," records show. No less than an assistant secretary of defense was dispatched to speak with McCaffrey, who said he had been misquoted.<br />In a letter to The Times, McCaffrey's lawyer, Thomas Clare, said the general's recurring criticisms had cost him "business opportunities with defense contractors." NBC executives said they, too, fielded high-level complaints, and McCaffrey was not invited back to the Pentagon's analyst briefings.<br />On the other hand, when Pentagon officials noticed that McCaffrey was scheduled to appear on programs like "Meet the Press," they asked generals close to him to suggest themes, records show. The Pentagon also began paying for McCaffrey to travel to Iraq and Afghanistan. Other military analysts were invited on trips, but only in groups. McCaffrey went by himself under the sponsorship of Central Command's generals.<br />The stated purpose was for McCaffrey to provide an outside assessment in his role as a part-time professor at West Point. But his trips were also an important public relations tool, meticulously planned to arm him with anecdotes of progress. Records show that Central Command's generals expected him to "publicly support their efforts" upon his return home and solicited his advice on how to "reverse the perception" in Washington of a lost war.<br />After each trip McCaffrey embarked on a news media campaign, writing opinion articles, granting interviews, publishing "after action" reports on his firm's Web site. Each time he extolled Central Command's generals and called for a renewed national commitment of money and support.<br />At the same time, McCaffrey used his access to further business interests, as he did during the summer of 2005, when Americans were turning against the Iraq war in droves.<br />Veritas had been on a shopping spree, buying military contractors deeply enmeshed in the war. Its biggest acquisition was of DynCorp International, best known for training foreign security forces for the United States government. By 2005 operations in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for 37 percent of DynCorp's revenues.<br />The crumbling public support, though, posed a threat to Veritas's prize acquisition. The changing political climate and unrelenting violence, DynCorp warned investors, could force a withdrawal from Iraq.<br />What is more, some of DynCorp's Iraq contracts were in trouble, plagued by cost overruns, inept work by subcontractors and ineffective training programs. So when DynCorp executives learned that McCaffrey was planning to travel to Iraq that June, they asked him to sound out American commanders and reassure them of DynCorp's determination to make things right.<br />"It is useful both ways," Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said in an interview. "If there were problems, and there were, then we could get an independent judgment and fix them."<br />Lagana said McCaffrey had been a troubleshooter for DynCorp on other trips. "He'll say: 'I'm going over. Is there anyone you want me to see?' " Lagana said. "And then he'd go in and say, 'I'm on the board. What can you tell me?' "<br />The Pentagon had its own agenda. For eight days, McCaffrey was given red-carpet treatment. Iraqi commandos even staged a live-fire demonstration for him. But McCaffrey also was given access to officials whose decisions were important to his business interests, including DynCorp, which was planning an IPO He met with Petraeus, who was then in charge of training Iraqi security forces and responsible for supervising DynCorp's 500 police trainers. He also met with officials responsible for billions of dollars' worth of contracts in Iraq.<br />McCaffrey would not discuss these sessions, and Petraeus said in an e-mail message to The Times that he had no reason to discuss DynCorp with McCaffrey because he would have gone directly to DynCorp's executives in Iraq.<br />Back home, McCaffrey undertook a one-man news media blitz in which he contradicted the dire assessments of many journalists in Iraq. He bore witness to progress on all fronts, but most of all he vouched for Iraq's security forces. A year earlier, before joining DynCorp's board, he had described these forces as "badly equipped, badly trained, politically unreliable." Just months before, Gary Luck, a retired four-star army general sent to assess progress in Iraq, had reported to Bush that security training was going poorly. Yet McCaffrey now emphasized his "surprising" conclusion that the training was succeeding.<br />After Bush gave a speech praising Iraq's new security forces, Brian Williams asked McCaffrey for an independent assessment. "The Iraqi security forces are real," McCaffrey replied, without noting the concerns about DynCorp.<br />His financial stake in the policy debates over Iraq was not mentioned. He did not disclose that he owned special stock that allowed him to share in DynCorp's profits, up 87 percent that year largely because of the Iraq war.<br />"I took as objective a look at it as I could," he told David Gregory, the NBC correspondent.<br />A Contract in Iraq<br />In his written statements to The Times, McCaffrey said his role with Veritas was "governance, not marketing," and Veritas insisted that he never "solicited new or existing government contracts."<br />McCaffrey did, however, play an indirect role in helping Veritas win one of its largest contracts, to supply more than 8,000 translators to the war in Iraq. The contract had been held by L-3 Communications, but when McCaffrey got wind that the army was considering seeking new bidders, he called his friend James Marks, a major general in the army who was approaching retirement and was versed in the uses of translators, having served as intelligence chief for land forces during the Iraq invasion.<br />As Marks recalls it, McCaffrey asked him to lead an effort to win the contract for Veritas.<br />Marks, who became a CNN military analyst after his retirement in 2004, would be named president of a new DynCorp subsidiary, Global Linguist Solutions, created in July 2006 to bid for the translation contract. In August 2006 Veritas designated McCaffrey as chairman of Global Linguist. According to a 2007 corporate filing, McCaffrey was promised $10,000 a month plus expenses once Global Linguist secured the contract. He would also be eligible to share in profits, which could potentially be significant: the contract was worth $4.6 billion over five years, but only if the United States did not pull out of Iraq first.<br />In the fall of 2006, that was hardly a sure thing. With casualties rising, the nation's discontent had been laid bare by the November elections. Then, in December, the Iraq Study Group recommended withdrawing all combat brigades by early 2008.<br />That month, in a flurry of appearances for NBC, McCaffrey repeatedly ridiculed this recommendation, warning that it would turn Iraq into "Pol Pot's Cambodia."<br />The United States, he said, should keep at least 100,000 troops in Iraq for many years. He disputed depictions of an isolated and deluded White House. After meeting with the president and vice president on Dec. 11 in the Oval Office, he went on television and described them as "very sober-minded."<br />McCaffrey was hardly alone in criticizing the Iraq Study Group, and in his e-mail messages to The Times he said his objections reflected his judgment that it was folly to leave American trainers behind with no combat force protection. But in none of those appearances did NBC disclose McCaffrey's ties to Global Linguist.<br />NBC executives asserted that the general's relationships with military contractors are indirectly disclosed through NBC's Web site, where McCaffrey's biography now features a link to his consulting firm's Web site. That site, they said, lists McCaffrey's clients.<br />While the general's Web site lists his board memberships, it does not name his clients, nor does it mention Veritas Capital, by one measure the second-largest military contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, after KBR. In any event, Capus, the NBC News president, said he was unaware of McCaffrey's connection to the translation contract. Capus declined to comment on whether this information should have been disclosed.<br />CNN officials said they, too, were unaware of Marks's role in the contract. When they learned of it in 2007, they said, they were so concerned about what they considered an obvious conflict of interest that they severed ties with him. ( Marks, who also spoke out against the withdrawal plan on CNN, said business considerations did not influence his comments.)<br />On Dec. 18, 2006, the Pentagon stunned Wall Street by awarding the translation contract to Global Linguist. DynCorp's stock jumped 15 percent.<br />Hiring a General<br />After touring Iraq in March 2007 and meeting with American officials responsible for equipping Iraq's military, McCaffrey published a trip report recommending that the United States equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.<br />This kind of access had strong appeal to Ringgold, Defense Solutions' chief, who had a plan to rebuild Iraq's decimated fleets of armored vehicles by culling "leftovers" from depots across Eastern Europe. "I was looking for an advocate," Ringgold recalled.<br />McCaffrey soon arrived for an audition at the Defense Solutions headquarters outside Philadelphia. "Frankly," Ringgold recalled, "I had to get over the sticker shock of what he was going to cost me."<br />McCaffrey liked his basic concept but told him to think bigger, Ringgold said. Instead of minimally refurbished equipment, he urged Ringgold to sell "Americanized" armored vehicles upgraded with thermal sights and other expensive extras. And why not also team up with DynCorp and others to supply the maintenance, logistics and training to keep them running?<br />The suggestions vastly increased the proposal's scale and price tag, but the general seemed to have a read on the complex interplay between the Iraqi government and the American military leadership, Ringgold recalled. For a retainer and an undisclosed equity stake, McCaffrey signed on weeks later, then promptly wrote to Petraeus.<br />His letter, drafted with help from Defense Solutions, explained that in the three months since his trip to Iraq, he had found just one feasible way to equip Iraq with enough armored vehicles to permit a "phased redeployment" of American combat forces the proposal by Defense Solutions. He urged Petraeus to act quickly but did not disclose that he had just been hired by Defense Solutions.<br />In his e-mail message to The Times, Petraeus said he received "innumerable" letters from "would be" contractors. In this case, he wrote, he simply sent McCaffrey's material "without any endorsement" to James Dubik, the general then responsible for training Iraq's security forces.<br />General Dubik, now retired, said in an interview that he, too, received a letter and information packet, and as a result briefed Iraq's defense minister. "Quite frankly," he said, "I thought it was a good idea."<br />Dubik emphasized that although he used Defense Solutions briefing materials, he first "sanitized" them of any mention of the company. He said he presented the idea as his own, intending to ask Defense Solutions to bid if the Iraqis liked the concept. But the defense minister reacted coolly, he said, arguing that Iraq deserved advanced American-made vehicles.<br />McCaffrey also sent letters to top lawmakers and approached contacts inside the Defense Department bureaucracy that oversees foreign military sales. His influence was immediately apparent. For example, McCaffrey reached out to Major General Timothy F. Ghormley, chief of staff at Central Command, who promptly invited Ringgold to a meeting in Tampa, Florida Ringgold recalled General Ghormley's first words: "Why aren't we doing this already?"<br />Nevertheless, by late 2007, Defense Solutions still had no deal. McCaffrey, Ringgold recalled, said the company needed to get to Baghdad and meet directly with Iraqi leaders and important Americans.<br />On Oct. 26, 2007, McCaffrey wrote an e-mail message to Petraeus proposing to return to Iraq. He said his "principal interest would be to document progress in standing up Iraqi security forces," and he proposed traveling soon, before the presidential primaries, so he could "speak objectively before politics goes to roar level."<br />In early December McCaffrey arrived in Baghdad, where he met with Generals Petraeus and Dubik, among others.<br />Petraeus said he did not recall them discussing Defense Solutions. Dubik recalled giving McCaffrey a detailed briefing on the effort to equip Iraq's army, including the plans for armored vehicles. He said it was a measure of McCaffrey's integrity that he did not raise Defense Solutions. "He's not going to cross the line," Dubik said.<br />Ringgold said McCaffrey "made it perfectly clear" that he would not discuss their proposal with the two generals and even sent instructions that he was not to be contacted in Iraq "to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest."<br />But Defense Solutions used information McCaffrey gleaned from his meetings to refine its proposal. Ringgold followed McCaffrey to Baghdad in February 2008 and then made plans to return in the spring to meet with Generals Dubik and Petraeus. "General McCaffrey insisted that I see you," Ringgold wrote to Petraeus in a March 20 e-mail message.<br />Petraeus forwarded Ringgold's message to Dubik, who warned Ringgold that while he was happy to meet, Iraq's defense minister was still hesitant. "They've gone back and forth on the refurbished stuff," Dubik wrote.<br />Defense Solutions turned to the White House. On May 9, Ringgold and Tom Korologos, a Republican lobbyist, met with a military aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and two National Security Council officials.<br />The next day, in an e-mail memorandum to his staff, Ringgold discussed other ways to press Iraqi and American officials, including generating news media coverage to suggest that Iraq's "failure to ready its army" was prolonging the occupation. McCaffrey had been making a similar argument for months on NBC and elsewhere. "The end of the game is that the Iraqis got to maintain internal order," he told Ann Curry, the NBC journalist.<br />Ringgold said he had never asked the general to take positions supporting Defense Solutions in his news media appearances. On the other hand, he added, "I hope he was thinking of us."<br />Weiner, the general's longtime publicist, said McCaffrey worked with clients "to get your mission achieved in the media." McCaffrey, he said, often speaks out with the twin goals of shaping policy and generating favorable coverage for clients with worthy products or ideas.<br />"His motive is pure," Weiner said. "It is national interest."<br />Despite Defense Solutions' efforts, Iraq recently placed orders for billions of dollars' worth of American-made armored vehicles. But the company is not giving up, and it continues to rely on the advice of McCaffrey, who returned to Iraq on Oct. 31 for another visit sponsored by the Pentagon.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/america/30general.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/america/30general.php</a></div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgurHTPZnu8gg59U1eVAVW2GrMJ7kcVd70ccxtRihAsN7vrSgqg0tZx-4UhCBp-Yy6PuHpumpU1rucY37-aUOctiy1mfqD9Bsq6sBuBIPp2TsQIobD6sDgXXjWtyO9NU8mC3CCG8aYbuUU/s1600-h/DSC02333.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344229433264898" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgurHTPZnu8gg59U1eVAVW2GrMJ7kcVd70ccxtRihAsN7vrSgqg0tZx-4UhCBp-Yy6PuHpumpU1rucY37-aUOctiy1mfqD9Bsq6sBuBIPp2TsQIobD6sDgXXjWtyO9NU8mC3CCG8aYbuUU/s320/DSC02333.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg854wNFaPpRWcphBHpiliXeHAscqu_6QD8k7hELik2MYYleJNufSOER3x2nSGoL3_2NIHbC7lxysR1JSrJ2SzkccaXXUVu-5ZOGGeuuGIykLCxJYiiCeFpksSkcJq7EnVF1_Bfo90NZsY/s1600-h/DSC02334.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344228927015970" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg854wNFaPpRWcphBHpiliXeHAscqu_6QD8k7hELik2MYYleJNufSOER3x2nSGoL3_2NIHbC7lxysR1JSrJ2SzkccaXXUVu-5ZOGGeuuGIykLCxJYiiCeFpksSkcJq7EnVF1_Bfo90NZsY/s320/DSC02334.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUIw3LibL-4Cpa4_2Gf58ysMAJzXOQJVUAcDZDqEejP8XkV-tCUgVg-UdPW7b2W-IMhkYGOS-Ci_OzjJojOn7S-hQl2nfeZZ7nVWejpwlecQysCYmV8nx_0HHk4aJ3fXQTRaAY4KILEL0/s1600-h/DSC02335.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344219720214946" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUIw3LibL-4Cpa4_2Gf58ysMAJzXOQJVUAcDZDqEejP8XkV-tCUgVg-UdPW7b2W-IMhkYGOS-Ci_OzjJojOn7S-hQl2nfeZZ7nVWejpwlecQysCYmV8nx_0HHk4aJ3fXQTRaAY4KILEL0/s320/DSC02335.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO6qrKDwKXhIk1bgeVqLo0aizOUqoGoM3R3Pu7pY3awgBi5tDaiwCkYqiNT7oObia7Rv0rOOtfh5a07KsQPJp006PlEWjNvR0-ddc1SMxVWE7Zv_rAwB6z81G3-rL8fbyUNZ5tjRsRPL8/s1600-h/DSC02336.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344216075922626" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 188px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO6qrKDwKXhIk1bgeVqLo0aizOUqoGoM3R3Pu7pY3awgBi5tDaiwCkYqiNT7oObia7Rv0rOOtfh5a07KsQPJp006PlEWjNvR0-ddc1SMxVWE7Zv_rAwB6z81G3-rL8fbyUNZ5tjRsRPL8/s320/DSC02336.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjqVGQfigd7G6gFEmMl5LtCkCYNxYUllas1YxFlrf1QfD5Y_6DijPv1CUkdxeR7S6wUctOwWEL5ejBNVQYNda8BMFhpmea4V73pXZuiuAw4k9t8-6n4Yn8lC2PVsA26gwIDYRN3_CsviY/s1600-h/DSC02337.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274344206771267298" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjqVGQfigd7G6gFEmMl5LtCkCYNxYUllas1YxFlrf1QfD5Y_6DijPv1CUkdxeR7S6wUctOwWEL5ejBNVQYNda8BMFhpmea4V73pXZuiuAw4k9t8-6n4Yn8lC2PVsA26gwIDYRN3_CsviY/s320/DSC02337.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Mecca pilgrims blocked from leaving Gaza</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />By Nidal al-Mughrabi<br />Palestinian pilgrims bound for Mecca were prevented from leaving the Gaza Strip via Egypt Saturday as the enclave's Hamas Islamist rulers and the rival leadership in the West Bank traded blame for the hold-up.<br />The pilgrims, hoping to reach Saudi Arabia next week for the annual haj pilgrimage, told Reuters that Hamas police set up checkpoints 300 metres (yards) from the Rafah border post with Egypt and turned them away. Hamas security also barred journalists from the border area of the town of Rafah.<br />Hamas officials blamed Egypt, saying it had not opened the border as agreed. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry and witnesses in Rafah said Egypt opened the crossing point for the pilgrims on Saturday but none came.<br />The root of the problem appeared to lie in disputes between the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, which each controls one of the two Palestinian territories, and also involves Saudi Arabia's policy on issuing visas to Palestinians.<br />At Rafah, a 60-year-old pilgrim who gave his name as Abu Abdullah said: "I am not with Fatah and not with Hamas. I wanted to worship God and to go on the haj before I die.<br />"Sadly, the schism has now spilt into our religion."<br />Every Muslim who has the means should complete the haj at least once in his or her lifetime.<br />Saudi Arabia says it has granted visas only to Palestinians who registered for the haj through the Palestinian Authority, controlled by President Mahmoud Abbas's secular Fatah faction in the West Bank. Some 3,000 people in Gaza have done so.<br />A further 3,000 Gazans have tried to arrange visas through Hamas, which seized control of the enclave last year. Hamas is appealing to Saudi Arabia to relent and give them visas. Some Hamas leaders have said that unless it does so, they will prevent anyone leaving Gaza for the pilgrimage to Mecca.<br />CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS<br />At the Hamas-run Interior Ministry in Gaza, spokesman Ehad al-Ghsain denied halting pilgrims. "We are not sending people back. The Egyptians are keeping the crossing closed," he said.<br />An Egyptian official insisted the crossing was open to pilgrims and would remain so until Monday. Egypt has mostly kept Rafah closed since Hamas routed Fatah in Gaza last year.<br />Jamal Bawatma, minister of religious affairs for the Palestinian Authority, speaking by telephone from Mecca, accused Hamas of a "crime" against the pilgrimage. "Saudi Arabia only recognizes the Palestinian Authority which represents all Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank," he said.<br />Both Saudi Arabia and Egypt have worked to promote an accord between the Palestinians to end a schism that has hamstrung Abbas's efforts to secure a peace settlement with Israel.<br />Mohammed Eid said he and other pilgrims who registered with the Hamas-run Ministry of Religious Affairs in Gaza had not been granted visas by Saudi Arabia. "We urge the Saudi king to give us visas, so that all pilgrims in Gaza can go on haj," Eid said.<br />"Why should my neighbour be allowed to leave and I stay here? I am not against my neighbour but this is political discrimination manifesting itself in religious matters."<br />(Additional reporting by Cairo newsroom; Writing by Joseph Nasr, Editing by Alastair Macdonald)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-HAJ.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-HAJ.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Settlers clash with Palestinians in WBank city</strong><br />Reuters<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />HEBRON, West Bank: Jewish settlers and Palestinians hurled stones at each other in the West Bank city of Hebron on Saturday before Israeli soldiers separated the two sides, the army and Palestinian witnesses said.<br />Two Palestinians and two settlers were injured in the clashes, they said. One of the Palestinians is a researcher with the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.<br />An Israeli army spokeswoman said the clashes erupted near a building whose ownership is disputed. Jewish settlers have been defying a November 16 ruling by Israel's High Court that they must leave what they dubbed the "House of Peace" or face eviction.<br />About 150 settlers, some armed, moved into the building, on the boundary line of Palestinian neighbourhoods, in March 2007, saying they had bought it from its Palestinian owner. The man denies having sold the building.<br />The Israeli Defence Ministry said it was negotiating with the settlers to leave the building voluntarily within a 30-day period allowed under Israeli law.<br />Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has been a flashpoint of Israeli-Palestinian violence. Some 650 settlers live in fortified enclaves guarded by Israeli troops in the heart of the city of 180,000 Palestinians.<br />(Reporting by Mustafa Abu Ghaniya; Writing by Joseph Nasr, editing by Tim Pearce)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL-HEBRON.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/29/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL-HEBRON.php</a></div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBKhT-wuLQ6MbxI7bejMdkOx6S9uvhSwbhgKHV5fz4eopA97JkgjLAuemwlv3VmEclWYhP3Iqc8aulG4BUfMfK5iX2AfaBuyeoG2WJF1AfP1C4TavwP9lh2R_7mLvV3NT3Ah_obWcYpts/s1600-h/DSC02339.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274343991869095154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBKhT-wuLQ6MbxI7bejMdkOx6S9uvhSwbhgKHV5fz4eopA97JkgjLAuemwlv3VmEclWYhP3Iqc8aulG4BUfMfK5iX2AfaBuyeoG2WJF1AfP1C4TavwP9lh2R_7mLvV3NT3Ah_obWcYpts/s320/DSC02339.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7JS7HhyphenhyphenTZk_Um8ql8SayOxRWRQeLaqshJH4_kj6oXrtRbU8GWGXSKF73cql8RpS7ciCrUVN09Ndt8gMxWHRXu2b3rqg6Sxh_1t7-CBRqSKgqYWHbuW5aHlHAY3u5rU19GoAMBd6Pad84/s1600-h/DSC02340.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274343982308003362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7JS7HhyphenhyphenTZk_Um8ql8SayOxRWRQeLaqshJH4_kj6oXrtRbU8GWGXSKF73cql8RpS7ciCrUVN09Ndt8gMxWHRXu2b3rqg6Sxh_1t7-CBRqSKgqYWHbuW5aHlHAY3u5rU19GoAMBd6Pad84/s320/DSC02340.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0_zTN0TfDBrOxScDM8ocRqut4IeUaZj-xwCsL20YnVUm3BUMt-FTlkm8dyc2tcSX0KD6zrvKlLs9mfFlVEZ1Ayvv9NPm1Yeh0LeN2LVJvXVj3YqVm3CaOdn1EKdbhD5uD41mn-c2Gm2w/s1600-h/DSC02341.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274343980247194418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0_zTN0TfDBrOxScDM8ocRqut4IeUaZj-xwCsL20YnVUm3BUMt-FTlkm8dyc2tcSX0KD6zrvKlLs9mfFlVEZ1Ayvv9NPm1Yeh0LeN2LVJvXVj3YqVm3CaOdn1EKdbhD5uD41mn-c2Gm2w/s320/DSC02341.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpAToyhSviFxb5fz5lS66ZqAiLOvCARGQFajsmvhyzjTDoJfr0QzkAFZR1Thc82Ac2bjN5yaqNItpzPEjn7t-h886_76rkV_tu0hqSE_JnAkdHbt_KUZRmTdmeIB0Tnqesc8o7OSecTN0/s1600-h/DSC02343.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274343973147072994" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpAToyhSviFxb5fz5lS66ZqAiLOvCARGQFajsmvhyzjTDoJfr0QzkAFZR1Thc82Ac2bjN5yaqNItpzPEjn7t-h886_76rkV_tu0hqSE_JnAkdHbt_KUZRmTdmeIB0Tnqesc8o7OSecTN0/s320/DSC02343.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIy__ZPWyPouOcLQDC6KuByKXUj5opbUR0ZU6NR6q_dR3iaKP25ABTHWa1mTqtkGTGvn94Ub7XgHI4-mnHx_3Y-HQMeHllR2czaJs7cAX7Zm3WSkiGI23ojrT89Nt5F3uDwQyIPusVxdg/s1600-h/DSC02347.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274343967230652386" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIy__ZPWyPouOcLQDC6KuByKXUj5opbUR0ZU6NR6q_dR3iaKP25ABTHWa1mTqtkGTGvn94Ub7XgHI4-mnHx_3Y-HQMeHllR2czaJs7cAX7Zm3WSkiGI23ojrT89Nt5F3uDwQyIPusVxdg/s320/DSC02347.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRFNgI-OOHpjMUG1BRUSMalm3AdFTzitLanDkuw6jVSzGHjasgmq_vl5HwWzpY26f-LZ_UK1LPNQW-8S6LkqeWjttQcEljqIR4BVWwlgimT5ZW8QNa1Brutx_nuCHXdODsg7-G7BdiI5A/s1600-h/DSC02348.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274343582002541554" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRFNgI-OOHpjMUG1BRUSMalm3AdFTzitLanDkuw6jVSzGHjasgmq_vl5HwWzpY26f-LZ_UK1LPNQW-8S6LkqeWjttQcEljqIR4BVWwlgimT5ZW8QNa1Brutx_nuCHXdODsg7-G7BdiI5A/s320/DSC02348.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc1tG3_JOph4L2i89WSbhWsEc1wPvNpvR9R6yGgYGQVX0zq4tulOLJxagjfjcQZZTeUrrd83Kg_fqcbOwd7cUQJrIYP82CLbv2cljV8hRD-iDeB3nwzr06md6yAyX5y1Rme-XjjClA_lc/s1600-h/DSC02354.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274343575093370690" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc1tG3_JOph4L2i89WSbhWsEc1wPvNpvR9R6yGgYGQVX0zq4tulOLJxagjfjcQZZTeUrrd83Kg_fqcbOwd7cUQJrIYP82CLbv2cljV8hRD-iDeB3nwzr06md6yAyX5y1Rme-XjjClA_lc/s320/DSC02354.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>All Blacks wrap up slam with win over England<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />TWICKENHAM, England: New Zealand beat an improved but still undisciplined England side 32-6 on Saturday to complete its third grand slam of the home unions and first without conceding a try.<br />The All Blacks patiently withstood early pressure from a side that initially appeared to have learned its lessons from last week's record 42-6 loss to South Africa, before taking advantage of needless penalties and scoring two tries in the last 22 minutes by Mils Muliaina. Ma'a Nonu then charged from inside his own half to wrap up the win.<br />"If someone said we'd win 13 out of 15 test matches this year, I'd have grabbed it," New Zealand coach Graham Henry said. "You don't go into a season saying you want to win this, this and this. You want to build a rugby side."<br />Both Muliaina's tries were in the same right-hand corner, with the second set up by an audacious piece of skill by Dan Carter. The No. 10 shaped as though he was set to spin the ball out wide but instead chipped it almost flat across the line without breaking stride straight into the hands of his fullback, who dived over to score.<br />Carter missed the conversion and it was mostly his unusually inaccurate kicking that had left England within three points of the All Blacks until indiscipline started to take a toll three minutes before halftime. Lee Mears and James Haskell were the first of four England players sent to the sin bin and referee Alain Rolland threatened to do the same to more of them for a string of offsides and handling of the ball on the ground.<br />Toby Flood, playing at flyhalf following Danny Cipriani's poor showings in losses to Australia and South Africa, became the third player to get a yellow card at the start of the second half. Tom Rees followed him late on, meaning that England effectively played almost half the match a man short, but it was the full 15-man side that New Zealand got its tries against.<br />The first came from a flowing move sparked by Jimmy Cowon's smart reverse pass and the second from Carter's quick wits. Nonu then rounded off a slick counter for a New Zealand side that has also beaten Scotland, Ireland and Wales in the past month.<br />But England, which has now missed out on fourth place in the rankings and a top seeding at the 2011 World Cup, showed enough of an improvement to suggest that if it can remedy its disastrous discipline and produce more quick ball it could again trouble the best sides.<br />"People say at least you turned up and played, but that's an absolute minimum for us," England manager Martin Johnson said. "It only takes little things at the wrong time and it makes a big difference."<br />If Nick Easter had spotted Jamie Noon on his shoulder instead of going for the line himself at the start of the second half, England would probably have been within two points of New Zealand with 38 minutes to play. Instead he was brought down five meters (yards) out and the All Blacks took full advantage.<br />"Today epitomized what we did all year," Henry said. "We hung in and in the last 20 minutes pulled away."<br />Although the defeat could have been heavier if Carter had scored more than six kicks from his 11 attempts, Johnson can take comfort from the fact that the All Blacks never threatened England's line until Muliaina touched down in the corner in the 58th minute.<br />"We made a very good attacking team look average," Johnson said. "As a group we need to improve our second-half performance."<br />With their team a 12-1 underdog to win odds unheard of in recent times for England at Twickenham and fearing a loss as ugly as the record 64-22 decision in Dunedin 10 years ago, England's fans met the All Blacks' traditional pre-match haka with a defiantly sung rendition of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."<br />Both teams made early mistakes, New Zealand conceding an early penalty for using hands in a ruck but Flood then missed touch with his kick and Delon Armitage sliced a clearance to put the home side under early pressure.<br />Rather than crumbling, England responded by driving the All Blacks back from the lineout and forcing its way upfield aided by a huge hit on Rodney So'oialo by Phil Vickery. England strung together eight phases of possession, with Easter and Vickery powering through tackles until, typically, the move broke down when Riki Flutey was penalized for not releasing.<br />That marked the start of England conceding the sort of penalties that blighted its recent performances. Mears was carded for coming in around the side, Danny Care was whistled for diving over a ruck, Haskell went off for tackling So'oialo without the ball, and Paul Sackey was penalized for holding onto the ball on the floor.<br />"If I have to put another four in the bin, I'll put four in the bin," Rolland warned England captain Steve Borthwick as Carter made it 12-3 halftime.<br />And Henry acknowledged that his players benefited from Rolland's tough stance.<br />"He was very strict and unless you have that playing in the Premiership or Super 14 consistently, it's difficult," Henry said. "If there's a consistently high standard like that, you're going to get a better game of rugby.<br />"I think it's possible in the long term. I just hope everybody learns from it."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/29/sports/RGU-England-New-Zealand.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/29/sports/RGU-England-New-Zealand.php</a></div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div><strong>Wales holds on to defeat Australia</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Saturday, November 29, 2008<br />CARDIFF, Wales: Wales held off a frenzied assault in the second half to beat Australia 21-18 Saturday and finally claim a win over the Southern Hemisphere powerhouse.<br />Although Australia enjoyed 63 percent of possession in the second half and was virtually encamped in the Welsh 22 for much of the final quarter, the Six Nations champions hung on at the Millennium Stadium to record their 10th win in 101 years of playing the Wallabies.<br />It was Australia's first loss in Europe this month, having beaten Italy, England and France. Wales threatened both South Africa and New Zealand earlier in November, before ultimately losing.<br />Wales, which failed to cross the line against the Springboks and All Blacks, scored two tries through winger Shane Williams and fullback Lee Byrne, while Stephen Jones kicked two penalties, a drop goal and a conversion.<br />Australia scored two tries through Mark Chisholm and Digby Ioane. Matt Giteau kicked a penalty, a drop goal and a conversion.<br />"I'm so proud," said New Zealand-born Wales coach Warren Gatland. "Somebody had to fly the flag for the Northern Hemisphere. ... It didn't really matter how we got the result, we just really needed that win. It gives us a real boost as we look ahead to next year's Six Nations."<br />In the second minute of the match, Australia lost captain Stirling Mortlock when the inside center crashed into his Welsh opposite, Jamie Roberts, and had to be helped off the field.<br />Roberts, however, recovered from the clash and two minutes later split the Australian defense through the middle before shuffling the ball out to Williams for the opening try.<br />"Considering Stirling is such an influential skipper who has played every minute of this tour, I think the boys responded well," said Phil Waugh, who took over as Australia captain. "We had a couple of chances to win this game but we failed to convert pressure into points."<br />For the first 14 minutes the Wallabies had barely mounted a challenge when Wales failed to secure the ball having won the line-out. Chisholm pounced on the loose ball and sprinted 60 meters for the tourists' opening try.<br />Giteau gave Australia a 10-5 lead with a calmly taken drop goal but a short time later Wallabies hooker Stephen Moore was sin-binned for 10 minutes for killing the ball. Jones scored the resulting penalty and, with Australia a man down, Byrne burst through to retake the lead.<br />Wales should have extended its 15-10 lead but flanker Martyn Williams fumbled the ball with the tryline within reach just before halftime.<br />After the break, Giteau narrowed the gap to 15-13 while Jones twice missed relatively easy penalties for the home side, though he atoned for those misses somewhat by scoring a quick drop goal to restore the margin to six points.<br />"It wasn't a great spectacle," said Australia coach Robbie Deans. "But I'm sure there's thousands of Welshman who disagree with me."<br />In the final 20 minutes, the Wallabies hammered the Welsh defense. In a rare break-out from their half, Wales was awarded a penalty that Jones converted.<br />From the restart, Australia surged upfield and Ioane finally found a way through in the 80th minute but Wales managed to hang on to its slim lead for the rest of the game.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/29/sports/RGU-Wales-Australia.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/29/sports/RGU-Wales-Australia.php</a></div><div> </div><div><br /><br /> </div><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008 </strong></div><strong><div><br /></div><div><br /></strong>Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France</div><div><br /></div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-31517619989848150722008-11-29T08:48:00.024+01:002008-11-29T10:35:56.561+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, 28th November 2008<div align="center"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBQJwLgNe9VTTkgSjO-OUxDWoPDqrgmYIBlS6hvCpffRyPkDBDwG1BnQ_iCJBbv4Yzmaw3I3DXQPhlDYrCM1tHHR6JmFt7trtzJepBRZGjgOVRa34lr3RH5Ekk0YOgjLsgTfba6tfDBlE/s1600-h/DSC02231.jpg"></a><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>0933</strong></div><br /><br /><p><strong></strong></p><br /><br /><p><strong></p><br /><br /><div align="center"><br /></div></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid0Zqf9SyHfuOt53nLb3LDuDZxutX1Rkk7Dp_Da3d0qqdFn5QutA_BPzpDDAE3HUhheSJoPf_XDNlUZA_veflf99NiKPe4TKV5sk7KQnLvBAaT-AqY0BC1ejgza6j3QJRRPN8M0j5skxA/s1600-h/DSC02231.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273986372100231954" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid0Zqf9SyHfuOt53nLb3LDuDZxutX1Rkk7Dp_Da3d0qqdFn5QutA_BPzpDDAE3HUhheSJoPf_XDNlUZA_veflf99NiKPe4TKV5sk7KQnLvBAaT-AqY0BC1ejgza6j3QJRRPN8M0j5skxA/s320/DSC02231.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Tesco to report slowest growth since early 90s<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />By Mark Potter<br />Tesco is set to report its worst underlying sales performance since the early 1990s recession next week, underscoring the challenges facing the country's store groups.<br />The supermarket group will report third-quarter like-for-like sales growth excluding fuel -- a key industry measure of performance -- of just 1.9 percent, according to the average forecast of 11 analysts polled by Reuters.<br />That would be the worst like-for-like sales performance for any reporting period since its annual results in 1992 to 1993, although it is only in recent years that the group has posted quarterly numbers and a sales figure stripping out fuel.<br />Forecasts range from 1.1 percent to 2.5 percent, and compare with 4 percent growth in the second quarter.<br />The slowdown is likely to add to jitters about consumer spending in the run-up to Christmas.<br />Store groups, including Tesco, have been slashing prices in a bid to attract shoppers hit by sliding house prices and fears of unemployment. The pain has been too much for some, with the retail chain of sweets-to-DVDs group Woolworths and furniture group MFI both calling in administrators this week.<br />The Confederation of British Industry said on Thursday that retail sales plunged in November at their joint-fastest pace since records began 25 years ago.<br />Tesco, the world's third-biggest retailer, has been losing market share to rivals for several months, partly because of its greater exposure to non-food sales, which have suffered more than groceries in the downturn.<br />But some of the recent slowdown in sales growth is self -inflicted, as Tesco introduced a range of discount brands in September in a bid to head off strong competition from hard discounters like privately-owned German groups Aldi and Lidl.<br />Data from market researchers Nielsen suggests the new brands have attracted customers, but with many existing shoppers also trading down to the cheaper products this has hit sales growth.<br />Analysts will be keen to hear whether Tesco expects this to continue, with many of them now forecasting like-for-like sales growth for next financial year below the group's usual forecast range of 3 percent to 4 percent.<br />RIVAL MORRISON<br />Tesco also faces challenges in its international markets.<br />The group, which employs about 440,000 people in almost 4,000 stores across 14 countries, said earlier this month that underlying sales in its second-biggest market, South Korea, had fallen, and that it was slowing down its expansion in the United States because of an economic downturn there.<br />Weak number from Tesco are likely to contrast with a strong performance from rival Wm Morrison on Thursday.<br />The country's fourth-biggest grocer is expected to report like-for-like sales of 7.2 percent, according to the average forecast of six analysts polled by Reuters, with estimates ranging from 6.5 percent to 7.8 percent.<br />Tesco shares have fallen about 40 percent over the past year, hitting a four-year low of 283.80 pence earlier this month. They have underperformed the DJ Stoxx European Retail Index by 3 percent this year, compared with Morrison, which has outperformed the same index by 18 percent.<br />Tesco shares trade at 11 times forecast earnings, below Morrison on 14.6 times and J. Sainsbury, the third biggest grocer, on 14 times.<br />At 4:25 p.m., Tesco shares were down 3 percent at 292.8 pence, valuing the business at about 23 billion pounds. Morrison was down 0.3 percent at 241 pence, giving a market value of around 6.5 billion pounds.<br />(Editing by Sharon Lindores)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/business/OUKBS-UK-TESCO.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/business/OUKBS-UK-TESCO.php</a><br /><br /><strong>***************</strong><br /><strong>UK set for surge in discount grocers</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />LONDON: The economic downturn provides an opportunity for discount grocers to extend their influence in European retailing and in particular make headway in the UK and France, a report said on Friday.<br />Verdict Research said discounters like privately-owned German groups Aldi and Lidl should raise as much finance as possible to aggressively expand in markets where they are under-represented.<br />"Now is the time for the likes of Aldi and Lidl to pounce in the UK," said analyst Daniel Lucht and co-author of the report.<br />Discounters currently account for an average of 16 percent of total grocery sales across the European Union, the report said, adding there were huge variations, with Germany on 43.8 percent and the UK on just 3.7 percent.<br />It said France, on 14.6 percent, was another opportunity for strong growth as the Loi Raffarin, which has tightly regulated retail space, is relaxed in January 2009.<br />(Reporting by Mark Potter; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/business/OUKBS-UK-RETAIL-DISCOUNTERS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/business/OUKBS-UK-RETAIL-DISCOUNTERS.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><strong>OPINION</strong><br /><strong>Where the wild things were<br /></strong>By Andrew Beahrs<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />BERKELEY, California: In 1879, a homesick Mark Twain sat in an Italian hotel room and wrote a long fantasy menu of all his favorite American foods. The menu began as a joke, with Twain describing the 80-dish spread as a "modest, private affair" that he wanted all to himself.<br />But it reads today as a window into a great change in American life - the gradual, widespread disappearance of wild foods from the nation's tables.<br />Twain listed cranberry sauce, "Thanksgiving style" roast turkey and the celery essential to poultry stuffing. But he surrounded these traditional holiday dishes with roast wild turkey, frogs and woodcock.<br />Along with hot biscuits, broiled chicken and stewed tomatoes, Twain wanted turtle soup, possum and canvasback ducks fattened by Chesapeake Bay wild celery. In Twain's day, New York City markets still sold raccoon, a profusion of wild ducks and bear. From Delmonico's restaurant to hunters' homes, the nation's tables held an easy blend of wild and cultivated foods.<br />So it was natural for Twain's wonderful menu to include the best of America's forests and waters, as well as its orchards and plowed fields. But for that very reason, it was as different from the first Thanksgiving feast at Plymouth in 1621 as from our own intensively domesticated holiday meals.<br />The first Thanksgiving was a wild affair. Though a version of traditional English "Harvest Home" festivals, and intended as a celebration of the Pilgrims' first successful crop of corn, squash and beans, the meal was largely built around foods taken from the woods and waters around the struggling Plymouth Colony.<br />The two early accounts of the meal tell us that the Wampanoag guests (who outnumbered the English settlers two to one) brought several deer, and that a party of Pilgrims returned from "fowling" with a good take. The latter almost certainly referred to ducks and geese, which migrate in autumn and could be taken much more easily than wary wild turkeys.<br />Gooseberries, wild plums and lobsters, as well as eels "trod" from the nearby salt marsh, completed a meal intimately bound to the surrounding land and water. Though corn prompted the celebration, and was doubtless included in pottages and stews, the centerpieces were all products of the bountiful yet intensely threatening natural world.<br />Twain's Thanksgiving meals were separated from the Plymouth settlers by more than two centuries. Still, his menu suggests that wild foods continued to give American cuisine its unmistakable character. On Thanksgiving, Twain wanted a domestic turkey, with cranberry sauce and stuffing. But every Christmas, he delighted in the gift of a brace of prairie hens a dear friend sent him by rail from the Illinois tall grass.<br />Even some farmed foods had recent wild roots, such as the cranberries first cultivated a mere half-century earlier. Though the majority of foods in Twain's day were domestic, the wild ones were distinct and wonderful, rooting meals in the natural world as cultivated things never could.<br />His menu celebrated the amazingly varied landscapes of an entire nation. Shad from Connecticut, mussels from San Francisco, brook trout from the Sierras and partridges from Missouri all found their place alongside apple dumplings, Southern-style egg bread, and strawberries, which were "not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way."<br />In a sense, Twain's menu was a biographical sketch, for during a lifetime of travel he had eaten each and every one of the wild foods near its source. But it was also a portrait of what American food could be at its best: a cuisine with a deep sense of place, reflecting a splendid jumble of national landscapes and the people who lived in and off them.<br />But with the exception of fish, today it is rare to find wild foods in our marketplaces. The 10 million prairie hens in the Illinois of Twain's day have diminished to a mere 300 birds; his terrapin struggle to survive amid wounded Eastern wetlands; his titanic Lahontan cutthroat "lake trout, from Tahoe" were killed off by over-fishing and the introduction of invasive species. Tasting some of Twain's wild things is impossible or illegal, or limited to dedicated hunters and fishermen.<br />Preserving or restoring the wild foods that remain begins with appreciating what they have to offer - extraordinary taste and smell, certainly, but also the joy of experiencing the marshes and mountains and lakes these plants and birds and animals rely upon.<br />Andrew Beahrs is the author of the novel "The Sin Eaters" and the forthcoming "Twain's Feast."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/edbeahrs.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/edbeahrs.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>Wine investing 2009: End of the madness</strong><br />By Holly Hubbard Preston<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />ST. HELENA, California: When John Kapon, president of the New York wine merchants Acker Merrall & Condit, touched down in Hong Kong this month for his firm's autumn auction, he said he had no idea what to expect.<br />Would his Asian clients, known for their insatiable demand for rare Bordeaux and Burgundy, buy big or hold back? Having recently displaced Americans as the leading purchasers of fine wine, wealthy Asian buyers are an important indicator of trends in prices.<br />The worsening global economy did not derail the autumn sale, but it did throw it off. While the auction did bring in $6.7 million, some 13 percent of the lots went unsold, compared with only 8 percent at the previous Hong Kong auction - held in May before the meltdown on Wall Street. Many of the lots that did sell in November, according to Kapon, were purchased at or below preauction estimates.<br />Among the unsold lots were 12 bottles of vintage 2000 Château Haut-Brion valued before the sale at 60,000 Hong Kong dollars, or $7,735, and three bottles of vintage 2005 Romanée-Conti, a sparely produced grand cru classé Burgundy whose preauction value was set at 200,000 dollars.<br />That no one raised a paddle for these two lots says more about collectors than the wines themselves. The fact is, after nearly three years of frenzied buying, fine wine collectors are pushing back, snubbing that which looks overly inflated and only buying when the price seems right.<br />"The estimates were a bit aggressive and based on a bull market in the spring," Kapon acknowledged. At the May auction, Kapon's firm had hauled in a record $8.2 million, including a hard-to-find case of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 1990 that sold for an unprecedented $242,308.<br />By this month, however, wine buyers had found their bearings and were ready to make only the most judicious purchases. "Most lots still found eager buyers, even though bidding was more 'civilized' over all, and prices were relatively solid," Kapon said.<br />The autumn sale suggests a certain financial fortitude among Asian fine wine collectors less evident among their counterparts in Europe and the United States. At its fine wine auction in New York on Nov. 2, Sotheby's sold only 65 percent of its offering. Its rival auction house Christie's, meanwhile, sold 75 percent of its lots at a fine wine sale in Geneva on Nov. 18.<br />While Bordeaux and Burgundy blue-chips are still seen as havens, bidders at the Acker Merrall & Condit auction snapped up plenty of Champagne, Rhônes, and California cabernets, sometimes at a premium.<br />Among the sale's top sellers in Hong Kong was a lot containing 12 bottles of 1992 Screaming Eagle, a coveted cult wine from the Napa Valley of California that sold for 871,200 dollars. Meanwhile, a four-bottle lot of 2000 Châteauneuf du Pape Cuvée de Capo from Domaine du Pégaü in the Rhône Valley sold for 15,488 dollars, above its presale estimate.<br />The push-back by collectors is being felt not only at auctions but in the retail sector, too. Simon Staples, sales director at Berry Bros. & Rudd in London, quoted a case of 2000 Château Lafite Rothschild, priced at £10,000 in June, before a steep drop in the pound against the dollar, now selling for £7,800, or $12,000. A case of 2005 Château Mouton Rothschild, priced at £6,500 in June, is now available for £5,400. Staples deemed both "best buys" at the reduced prices, adding to that list the 2005 Château Palmer, currently listed at £2,400 a case.<br />Would-be collectors encouraged by such prices might be less so when they understand that such declines, while sharp, only put these wines back at their 2006 levels.<br />"You are only seeing the insanity stop at the top," said Serena Sutcliffe, wine director at Sotheby's in London.<br />In particular, Sutcliffe is referring to the three-year run-up in prices for coveted "investment wines," including first-growth Bordeaux from the 2000, 2005, 1990 and 1982 vintages, as well as always hard-to-find Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, among them La Tâche and Romanée-Conti.<br />Having attracted the most speculative attention from investors - including professionally managed wine investment funds - investment wines are the most subject to price volatility.<br />Liv-ex, a British fine wine exchange that tracks pricing around the globe, provides telling evidence of this trend. Its Liv-ex 100 fine wine index, which tracks the price of top-tier investment-grade wines primarily from Bordeaux and Burgundy, was down by 7.4 percent at the end of October.<br />In contrast, the Liv-ex 500 fine wine index, a more broad-based benchmark featuring collectible wines from around the world, showed a 12.3 percent gain over the 12-month period ended in October.<br />The index, which is based on best list price for each component wine it tracks, supports what many in the industry contend: that the bulk of fine wine collectors buy to hold and enjoy over long periods, as opposed to flipping their stock when times get tough.<br />While Liv-ex has yet to post its November figures, most industry observers are expecting relatively moderate declines in the broader fine wine sector for the period: As their gains over the past few years have been less steep, so will be their downward adjustments.<br />Sutcliffe suggested that collectors look for values among the 2000 and 2005 second-, third- and fourth-growth Bordeaux wines from St. Émilion and Pomerol. Not subject to the same level of investment speculation as their first-growth and Romanée-Conti counterparts, these wines probably will not experience the same drastic price corrections, either. Still, given their association with two truly prized Bordeaux vintages, they are a good value, particularly as their prices soften.<br />Exactly how much softening will take place is "hard to call," said Alun Griffiths, wine director at Berry Bros. & Rudd. While customer buying throughout the wine merchant's global network has slowed down, Griffiths said he had not yet seen any significant supply being returned to market, either by collectors or the trade.<br />This could change come January when, as Griffiths pointed out, small to midsize wine traders, needing to free up cash to buy 2007 Bordeaux vintages and other new releases, will be required by their bankers to liquidate inventory. While not outright fire sales, such developments could lead to real bargains, he said, particularly for previously supply-restrained 2000 and 2005 Bordeaux and Burgundy vintages.<br />"They are both great outstanding vintages and they will repay long-term collectors," he said.<br />A 32-year industry veteran, Griffiths saw it happen during the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis. He recalled seeing a case of 1982 Château Mouton Rothschild - "the best wine of that great vintage" - drop to £2,800 from £4,000 in just a few months. That same case today - its contents considered at peak maturity - recently sold for £11,000 at auction.<br />To hunt down rereleased stock, Griffiths advised keeping a close eye on the Web sites of wine merchants. "That's the fastest way you will hear about inventory becoming available," he said.<br />As for the likelihood of a forced sell-off that could send prices tanking, Stephen Williams, proprietor of the Antique Wine Co. in London, said don't count on it. He brokers wines to some 17,000 clients in 67 countries. As Williams wrote in an e-mail message, "Fine wine is rarely leveraged or funded by debt, and therefore forced sale disposals rarely arise, even in the current market."<br />Tumultuous as times are, truly great vintages - for example those that came from Bordeaux in 1945, 1959 and 1961 - do have a track record for holding their value, which could explain why collectors aren't rushing to market to dump their stock.<br />Whether a collector buys now or in a few months, veteran industry observers like Williams say they believe wine values will resume their upward trajectory once the current financial crisis sorts itself out. So while prices might fall further, collectors who buy now, rather than wait for further fallout, are not necessarily leaving money on the table.<br />Clive Coates, a master of wine and the author of many books on Burgundy and Bordeaux, explained by telephone that since end of 1960s, there has been "an enormous increase in the market for fine wines and an enormous increase in the people who have oodles of boodles to spend on them."<br />While Coates says he thinks prices could fall an additional 15 percent to 20 percent, he does not think they will stay there for long. "We are still stuck with the basic fundamentals, which is a finite supply and increasing demand. At the moment prices are inflated, but the market, long term, is still going to be one where there are more and more buyers from places like Russia and China and India."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/mwine.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/mwine.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv5g4Q4spxft_H-eHHywN-pLaQJ1e6EDZz-Qy3wI9EYgh8NPKjf7JK9NtBaxQOp3y1p6tHMvtI0tvER-jqSLr-bHpm_CE4VBpKhZg-splpPv-P2MrypcnvRddFGc8zDCIxA4plgdCc1No/s1600-h/DSC02232.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273986366721681234" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv5g4Q4spxft_H-eHHywN-pLaQJ1e6EDZz-Qy3wI9EYgh8NPKjf7JK9NtBaxQOp3y1p6tHMvtI0tvER-jqSLr-bHpm_CE4VBpKhZg-splpPv-P2MrypcnvRddFGc8zDCIxA4plgdCc1No/s320/DSC02232.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Resurrection science<br /></strong>By Olivia Judson<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />Last week, the woolly mammoth came back. Into the news, that is. For it has had its genome sequenced, and is the first extinct animal to have done so.<br />The sequence is a draft - for technical reasons, parts of it are likely to be inaccurate - and it is not yet complete. But that didn't stop joyous speculations about the prospects for the mammoth's resurrection.<br />And I have to say, I love this stuff. I adore thinking about the science that would need to be done to bring back an extinct species, be it a mammoth or a glyptodon, a dodo or a Neanderthal. (Glyptodons were boulder-sized mammals related to armadillos, and are a particular favorite of mine. )<br />The outline of how to stage a resurrection is clear. In essence, it's a matter of cross-species cloning - using an egg from one species to host the genome of the other. The procedure is more or less the same as for regular cloning. First, you make a "blank" egg by removing the egg's nucleus - this contains the egg's genome. You then insert the genome of the animal you want to clone.<br />In regular cloning, the genome is from the same species as the egg. In cross-species cloning, the genome and egg are from different species. So, for mammoths, you'd put mammoth DNA into a blank elephant egg, and transplant the egg into an elephant surrogate mother. For Neanderthals, you'd put Neanderthal DNA into a blank human egg, and have a human surrogate mother. For a bird like a dodo, you'd put dodo DNA into a blank pigeon egg, and pop the egg into an incubator. Easy peasy.<br />Or not. In the decade since Dolly the Sheep was cloned, enormous progress has been made on regular cloning. To date, more than 10 different species of mammal have been cloned, including ferrets, rabbits, horses, cows and pigs. Nonetheless, success rates are still low. Even for cows, the animals that have been cloned the most, fewer than 5 percent of embryos transferred to surrogate mothers result in offspring.<br />The reasons for the failures are many and various. Sometimes the embryos don't grow. Sometimes the placenta goes wrong. Many clones are stillborn, or born with gross abnormalities. In short, despite the successes, cloning is still far from being reliable.<br />Given the difficulties of normal cloning, it's surprising that cross-species cloning has been tried, let alone had any successes. But it has. For example, two African wildcat kitten clones have been born from domestic cats, and three gray wolf clones have been born from domestic dogs. Again, though, the failure rates have been high. To get the three wolves, 372 embryos were transferred into surrogate mothers. The wildcats were even worse: 1,552 embryos were transferred, but only two healthy kittens were born.<br />Cloning a mammoth would be even more difficult. For one thing, elephants and mammoths are less closely related to each other than cats and wildcats or dogs and wolves, so the difficulties would likely be greater in any case. And elephants have a 22-month pregnancy - so you'd have to wait a long time to find out whether the experiment had worked.<br />But there's a far more profound problem, as well. The normal way to get a new genome into a blank egg is to take a single cell from the animal you want to clone, and fuse it with the egg. The nucleus of that single cell then becomes the nucleus of the egg. But with a mammoth, this almost certainly won't work. Because mammoth carcasses have been lying around for 10,000 years or more, their cells aren't in good shape. Instead of being neatly arranged in chromosomes, as ours are, mammoth genomes are in tiny pieces. So before we could put a mammoth genome into an egg, we would have to build one - something we are nowhere close to being able to do. Woolly mammoths will not be coming soon to a zoo near you.<br />All the same, research in this direction would surely yield astonishing discoveries. Our efforts to clone have opened up immense vistas of new research questions, and advances in the field have already shed light on aspects of how an embryo grows. During growth, cells become committed to being one type of tissue or another - heart muscle, say, or skin cells. Through cloning, we are learning how to reverse those commitments, something that may, one day, lead to revolutionary medical treatments. Likewise, learning to build a genome, whether of a mammoth or anything else, will certainly be interesting, and will probably be important in ways that we can't foresee.<br />And yet. No matter how much I enjoy thinking about the science of resurrection, I have to admit that the absence of mammoths isn't exactly a pressing problem. What is pressing is the number of species we are currently in danger of losing. It would be a shame if, in 200 years, our descendants were wondering whether to try and resurrect the elephant or the polar bear, the albatross or the mourning dove.<br />Let's get our act together. Let's prevent that first.<br />Olivia Judson writes "The Wild Side" column at nytimes.com/opinion.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/edjudson.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/edjudson.php</a><br /><br />*******************<br /><strong>Magnitude 6.0 quake hits Indonesia's Sumatra</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />JAKARTA: A magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck off Indonesia's Sumatra island on Friday, the U.S. Geological Survey said, although there was no tsunami warning or reports of damage or casualties.<br />The quake was centred 141 km (88 miles) south southwest of Bengkulu city at a depth of 35 km, the agency said in a bulletin on its website.<br />An official at Indonesia's meteorology agency said the quake could be felt in Bengkulu and Lampung provinces in southern Sumatra, but there was no report of damage or casualties.<br />Indonesia suffers frequent earthquakes lying in an extremely active seismic area where several tectonic plates collide.<br />Last week, several strong earthquakes also struck off Bengkulu and a more powerful earthquake hit northern Sulawesi, killing at least six people.<br />The sprawling archipelago of more than 17,000 islands was hit by a devastating tsunami four years ago that left an estimated 170,000 people dead or missing in Aceh province.<br />(Reporting by Telly Nathalia and Sanjeev Miglani in Singapore, Writing by Ed Davies)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDONESIA-QUAKE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDONESIA-QUAKE.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiuoP-wJnj92ZQwifc9hVIXnpY8jMDvYSWGjUwrYwfyN96CVA5Dhi07VDbcTqyN3Twcs_eoCTf6auBgaFFaKD0Qv89Bc6UuephSO-AtryOO1lJzhbB5VCAuE67QkMrioIoxzsv6Q5p1gI/s1600-h/DSC02233.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273986366662713986" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiuoP-wJnj92ZQwifc9hVIXnpY8jMDvYSWGjUwrYwfyN96CVA5Dhi07VDbcTqyN3Twcs_eoCTf6auBgaFFaKD0Qv89Bc6UuephSO-AtryOO1lJzhbB5VCAuE67QkMrioIoxzsv6Q5p1gI/s320/DSC02233.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Portugal leads way in electric cars</strong><br />By Patrick Blum<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />LISBON: António Pereira Joaquim is Nissan Motor's representative in Portugal, which has been chosen for rolling out the company's "zero-emission" electric car, to be marketed globally in 2010.<br />"The challenge is to make people believe it can work," Joaquim says.<br />The Japanese automaker and its French strategic partner, Renault, chose Portugal as one of several small markets to gauge the technology and consumer response under market conditions. There are similar plans in Denmark and Israel.Installation of a battery charging network will start next year and Nissan says the cars, made in Japan, will go on sale here starting in 2011.<br />The Portuguese government will oversee installation of the network of charging stations, which will offer a fast 20-minute battery top-up in the country's two major cities, Lisbon and Porto, and along some motorways. A recharge at home using the standard grid will take about six hours.<br />The infrastructure needs to be in place before the cars go on sale, and this could be a challenge for a country that has often seen deadlines slip and costs escalate on major projects.<br />But the government is enthusiastic and believes that success will burnish the country's image as a modern, environment-friendly location. It has assembled a consortium of some of the country's leading utilities and retail chains whose task will be to deliver a functioning network on time.<br />Analysts say motorists' confidence that they will have easy access to power is an important factor in deciding to switch to an electric car. A fully charged battery is expected to provide around 160 kilometers, or 100 miles of motoring - adequate for inner-city journeys, but potentially limiting for longer trips across the country.<br />"It's a chicken and egg situation. We need the infrastructure in place for people to buy the car. The question is, if I buy an electric car, how do I fuel it," said Nick Gill, automotive industry leader at the consultancy and services company Capgemini.<br />"People are afraid they'll be left stranded without a battery, but it's the same as with petrol. When the gauge shows you're low on gas you know it's time to look for the next petrol station," says Joaquim, using the British term for gasoline.<br />The price of the cars and the cost of leasing and recharging batteries will also be crucial factors.<br />Joaquim says electric cars should be tax free to help establish the market. Car tax is high in Portugal at around 3,000 to 4,000, or $4,000 to $5,000, for a conventional vehicle with a 1.5 litre engine.<br />"The government needs to guarantee that the network will happen and provide incentives so that we can offer the car at the right price," said Joaquim.<br />Nissan's electric car will be priced at around 25,000 in Portugal, which is roughly in line with a comparable 1.6 liter model running on conventional gasoline.<br />"People don't want to pay more for being green. The car cannot be more expensive" than a conventional gasoline powered model, Joaquim said. "If it's more expensive, it will be a failure, we will not do it."<br />"The challenge for the industry is how do you do this without loading back the costs on the consumer," said Gill.<br />Portuguese motorists may enjoy the feel-good factor of being among the first in Europe to opt for a "clean," zero-emission car, but they are likely to be even more enthusiastic about cutting their fuel bills, which are among the highest in the European Union.<br />Not only buying the car, but also driving it "has to be cheaper than using petrol," reiterated Joaquim.<br />That would be fine for consumers; but it could result in a loss of revenue for the government.<br />So, the key to success will be establishing a network pricing formula that encourages use, but "is not too expensive for the government," Gill said.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/rbogel.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/rbogel.php</a><br /><br />*******************<br /><br /> land rush in Wyoming spurred by wind power<br />By Felicity Barringer<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />WHEATLAND, Wyoming: The man who came to Elsie Bacon's ranch house door in July asked the 71-year-old widow to grant access to a right of way across the dry hills and short grasses of her land here. Bacon remembered his insistence on a quick, secret deal.<br />The man, a representative of the Little Rose Wind Farm of Boulder, Colorado, sought an easement for a transmission line to carry his company's wind-generated electricity to market. His offer: a fraction of the value of similar deals in the area. As Bacon, 71, recalled it: "He said, 'You sure I can't write you out a check?' He was really pushy."<br />A quiet land rush is under way among the buttes of southeastern Wyoming, and it is changing the local rancher culture. The whipping winds cursed by descendants of the original homesteaders now have real value for out-of-state developers who dream of wind farms or of selling the rights to bigger companies.<br />But as developers descend upon the area, drawing comparisons to the oil patch "land men" in the movie "There Will Be Blood," the ranchers of Albany, Converse and Platte Counties are rewriting the old script.<br />Bacon did not agree to the deal from the Little Rose representative, Ed Ahlstrand Jr. Instead, she joined her neighbors in forming the Bordeaux Wind Energy Association among the new cooperative associations whose members, in a departure from the local culture of privacy and self-reliance, are pooling their wind-rich land.<br />This allows them to bargain collectively for a better price and ensures that as few as possible succumb to high-pressure tactics or accept low offers. Ranchers share information about the potential value of their wind.<br />The development of eight Wyoming wind associations (with three more waiting in the wings) and similar groups in Colorado, Montana and New Mexico has not always been a simple matter. While ranchers have always been ready to help their neighbors, they have been less willing to discuss their financial affairs.<br />That has made it easier for wind developers to make individual deals and insist that the terms be kept secret. The developers' cause has not been hurt by a 10-year drought's impact on agricultural families' finances.<br />Gregor Goertz heads the Slater Wind Energy Association, one of the oldest although less than two years old, formed by dozens of independent-minded men and women. "Maybe they wouldn't talk to each other often about other issues," he said, "but here they could see a common goal."<br />Goertz added that, of the 45 or more landowners who came to his first meeting, just one declined to join. The group's land holdings, which total about 30,000 acres, are centered on a row of buttes where the wind routinely blows at 25 miles per hour.<br />Goertz said that because of the changes a forest of turbines would make in the serrated, far-flung vistas here, "everybody in the community is going to be affected." The association, he said, would "assure that everybody will have some income whether they have a turbine placed on their property or not."<br />The developers hope to supply Wyoming wind power to markets like California, which intends to have one-third of its power from renewable sources by 2020.<br />"This is the best wind in North America, we think," said Ronald Lehr, a representative of the American Wind Energy Association, the developers' trade group.<br />Of course, the decline in oil prices and the constraints on the capital markets are most likely to slow the development of wind energy. But for ranchers, the calculations remain the same about whether to deal with developers individually or as a group.<br />Bob Grant, 82, a rancher who sleeps in the bed his Scottish grandfather brought across the ocean and the prairie a century ago, has never liked the wind here. Grant has seen it hurl gravel off ridges and into a friend's face like shrapnel.<br />He said he warmed to the idea of wind associations after long, individual negotiations with enXco, a French-owned developer.<br />In early 2007, the centerpiece of the price discussed was a per-acre payment of about $2.50, Grant and an enXco representative said. Discussions broke off, then resumed a year later; the suggested price per acre has nearly doubled.<br />The doubling of the offer made Grant and his sons wonder how they could assess, and trust, any offer, they said.<br />Greg Probst, a representative of enXco, said the first offer had not been an effort to drive a hard bargain. It was, Probst said, a realistic appraisal, given the difficulties of transporting wind power to market when there was little transmission capacity to spare.<br />From early 2007 to late 2008, he said, the potential marketability of wind power in southeastern Wyoming was enhanced as plans for construction of the Wyoming-Colorado Intertie, a privately financed transmission line, became firmer and Xcel Energy showed an interest in buying the renewable energy.<br />"There's a better chance that there's a market for the power, and a way to get the power to market, than there was 18 months or two years ago," Probst said. "So we're definitely willing to pay more at this point."<br />But the experience made the Grant family look harder at the possibility of joining their lands with those of their neighbors in a new group, the Bordeaux Wind Energy Association, which sent its incorporation papers to the state just before Thanksgiving.<br />The godfather of such associations is a federal official, Grant Stumbough, whose work for the Resource Conservation and Development office of the Agriculture Department was focused on ways to keep ranchers on the land. Revenue from wind farms, he believed, could mean the difference between success and failure for some ranchers.<br />Stumbough felt the ranchers were at a disadvantage when dealing individually with wind developers. The developers, in most cases, know more than landowners about the value of the wind and the transmission lines that will carry it.<br />For instance, the deal that Ahlstrand offered Elsie Bacon was valued, yard for yard, at as little as a quarter of the amount that the largest local electrical cooperative had paid for a large transmission right of way. And it included a nondisclosure clause to prevent her from comparing notes with neighbors.<br />Ahlstrand did not respond to repeated telephone calls and e-mail messages seeking his version of these events.<br />Stumbough said: "I thought we could use collective bargaining strategies to maybe have a little more leverage in negotiating with wind developers. If we could all get together and work together cooperatively and do some cost sharing and maybe share some of the profits, I think it's going to be a benefit to everybody."<br />The idea has quickly spread. Aside from the promise of economic dividends, which may make it easier to stay on the land, ranchers are finding other less tangible benefits to the groups.<br />Larry Cundall, a rancher in Glendo who heads the Glendo Wind Energy Association, said the organizational meeting in April attracted 126 people, some from 60 miles away. It had, Cundall said, "the feeling of an old country dance."<br />"Afterward," he went on, "everyone stood around and visited like we did before we had TV."<br />The initial reaction, Cundall said, had been "90 percent positive," although he admitted there was skepticism. "Everyone takes everything with a grain of salt around here," he said.<br />The associations send out requests to wind developers who may be interested in constructing a wind farm; Goertz's Slater Association, the first one formed, gave tours of their lands to at least a dozen different developers, Goertz said, and are in the final stages of making a deal.<br />Asked if the terms of the impending deal were better than those offered to some of the ranchers originally, Goertz said simply, "Yes."<br />The financial arrangements of each association are unique, but in the case of the Slater Wind Energy Association, 55 percent of the total annual royalties is to be distributed among the landowners who have turbines on their properties. The rest is to be distributed among all association members, both those with turbines and those without.<br />Jim Anderson, the state senator whose district covers the windy acres of this region, welcomes the rise of these associations as vehicles to market their wind and as bargainers with the leverage to get ranchers a good deal. "I think the word is kind of out," Anderson said, "that Wyoming is probably ahead of the curve in regard to those people who might be opportunist and want to come in and take advantage" of local ranchers.<br />"I think that we've positioned ourselves well to be prudent and intelligent negotiators."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/america/28wind.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/america/28wind.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDONESIA-QUAKE.php"></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWtxQZi2DPpwDeTbhP7Nl6xlNs1DOT0lMFFj3Hf-wfZn_fwSuseUPWYolQq5-7_aTHYXeRuQqJYHcZP9R_7bUl08-DnPLOqhRo7d5ugwQTAFN2dgnAz-x6liHTHoZDq5eU9DbQ7084TzQ/s1600-h/DSC02234.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273986365331562402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWtxQZi2DPpwDeTbhP7Nl6xlNs1DOT0lMFFj3Hf-wfZn_fwSuseUPWYolQq5-7_aTHYXeRuQqJYHcZP9R_7bUl08-DnPLOqhRo7d5ugwQTAFN2dgnAz-x6liHTHoZDq5eU9DbQ7084TzQ/s320/DSC02234.jpg" border="0" /></a> <strong>Lévi-Strauss, a French icon, turns 100<br /></strong>By Steven Erlanger<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />PARIS: Claude Lévi-Strauss, who altered the way the West looks at other civilizations, turned 100 on Friday, and France celebrated with films, lectures and free admission to the museum he inspired, the Musée du Quai Branly.<br />Lévi-Strauss is one of France's icons, another reminder of cultural significance in the year a Frenchman, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, won the Nobel Prize in Literature for work that also, in a different way, explores the otherworldly nature of other civilizations.<br />Lévi-Strauss shot to prominence early, but with his 1955 book "Tristes Tropiques," a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930s, he became a national treasure of a special French kind. The jury of the Prix Goncourt, France's most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to "Tristes Tropiques" had it been fiction.<br />But there was an element of guilt, there, too. Lévi-Strauss, a Brussels-born and Paris-raised Jew, fled France after its capitulation to the Nazis in 1940. He spent the next eight years based in the United States, where he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and was influenced by noted anthropologists like Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia University and died in Lévi-Strauss's arms.<br />There were no false notes Friday, the culmination of several days of celebration. At the Quai Branly, to which admission was free from 11 in the morning to 9 at night, 100 scholars and writers read from or lectured on the work of Lévi-Strauss, while documentaries about him were screened and guided visits were provided to the collections, which include some of Lévi-Strauss's favorite artifacts.<br />Stéphane Martin, president of the museum, said in an interview that Lévi-Strauss was himself a major collector, and as the anthropologist first toured the new museum, in 2006, "he remembered various pieces and complained that he had to sell them to pay for a divorce."<br />Martin, with Culture Minister Christine Albanel and the minister of higher education and research, Valérie Pécresse, presided over the unveiling of a plaque outside the museum's theater, which was already named after Lévi-Strauss. Pécresse announced a new annual prize of 100,000, or nearly $127,000, in Lévi-Strauss name for a researcher in "human sciences" working in France, and said that President Nicolas Sarkozy would visit Lévi-Strauss at his home.<br />Roger-Pol Droit, a philosopher who read from "Tristes Tropiques" on Friday, said that he "would have loved a text from Lévi-Strauss today saying, 'I hate birthdays and commemorations,' just as he began 'Tristes Tropiques' saying, 'I hate traveling and explorers.' This is all about the effort of making him into a myth, because that is what we do in our time."<br />The museum was the grand project of former President Jacques Chirac, who loved anthropology and embraced the idea of a colloquy of civilizations, as opposed to the academic quality of the old Musée de l'Homme in Paris, which Descola described as "an empty shell - full of artifacts but dead to themselves."<br />The Branly museum, which has 1.3 million visitors a year, was a sort of homage to Lévi-Strauss, who "blessed it from the beginning," giving an important voice of support for a much criticized and politicized idea, Descola said.<br />In 1996, when asked his opinion of the project, Lévi-Strauss wrote to Chirac: "It takes into account the evolution of the world since the Musée de l'Homme was created. An ethnographic museum can no longer, as at that time, offer an authentic vision of life in these societies so different from ours. With perhaps a few exceptions that will not last, these societies are progressively integrated into world politics and economy.<br />"When I see the objects that I collected in the field between 1935 and 1938 again - and it's also true of others - I know that their relevance has become either documentary, and also, or mostly, aesthetic. Under the first aspect, they suggest the laboratory and the study hall, under the second, the big museum of the arts and civilizations that the Museums of France wish for."<br />The building is striking and controversial, imposing the ideas of the star architect Jean Nouvel on the organization of the spaces. But Martin says it is working well for the museum, whose marvelous objects - "fragile flowers of difference," as Lévi-Strauss once called them - can be seen on varying levels of aesthetics and serious study. They are presented as artifacts of great beauty but also with defining context, telling visitors not only what they are, but what they were meant to be when they were created.<br />"This museum is a forum for different points of view," Martin said, an effort to get away from Western ethnocentrism. "We won't be a museum with a big statement to say, 'Let us show you the world,' so Lévi-Strauss was friendly to us."<br />On Thursday, from noon to midnight, the television channel ARTE showed nothing but Lévi-Strauss, with documentaries, films and interviews with him and those inspired or influenced by his work, including the novelist Michel Tournier.<br />The Académie Française, which governs the French language and elected Lévi-Strauss in 1973 to the chair of the writer Henri de Montherlant, honored him in what its permanent secretary, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, called "a huge event and perhaps above all 'a family celebration."'<br />On Tuesday, there was a daylong colloquium at the Collège de France, a research institute where Lévi-Strauss once taught. The anthropology chair there, Philippe Descola, said that centenary celebrations were being held in at least 25 countries. "People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century," Descola said in an interview.<br />"His thought is among the most complex of the 20th century, and it's hard to convey his prose and his thinking in English," Descola said. "But he gave a proper object to anthropology: not simply as a study of human nature, but a systematic study of how cultural practices vary - how cultural differences are systematically organized."<br />Lévi-Strauss took difference as the basis for his study, not the search of commonality, which defined 19th-century anthropology, Descola said.<br />Rather than generalize from field work, Lévi-Strauss "built models with hypotheses drawn from field work, to ask," for example, what is important in kinship and why it matters, before collecting data on forms of descent, Descola explained.<br />He was 17 years old when he read "Tristes Tropiques," said Descola, now 59, and "it left a lasting mark," he said. "I can't say I decided on the spot to become an anthropologist, but rather to become a man like that."<br />One of the most remarkable aspects of the Quai Branly museum is its landscaping, designed by Gilles Clément to reflect the questing spirit of Lévi-Strauss. Clément tried to create a non-Western garden, he said in an interview, "with more the spirit of the savannah," where most of the animist civilizations whose artifacts fill the museum live.<br />Clément said he tried to think through the symbols of the cosmology of these civilizations, their systems of gods and beliefs that also animate their agriculture and their gardens. The garden here uses the symbol of the tortoise, not reflected literally, "but in an oval form that recurs," Clément said. "We find the tortoise everywhere - it's an animal that lives a long time, so it represents a sort of reassurance, or the eternal, perhaps."<br />Lévi-Strauss "is very important to me," Clément said. "He represents an extremely subversive vision with his interest in populations that were disdained. He brought a precise attention, not touristic but profound, to the human beings on the earth who think differently from us.<br />"It's a respect for others, which is very strong and very moving. He knew that cultural diversity is necessary for cultural creativity, for the future."<br />Basil Katz contributed reporting.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/europe/france.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/europe/france.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Sarkozy voodoo doll wins 'right to humor' in court<br /></strong>By Katrin Bennhold<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />PARIS: Amid deepening economic gloom, the tale of the voodoo doll of Nicolas Sarkozy has provided some needed light relief for the French.<br />Twice, the French president asked the courts to ban the sale of a figurine made in his image. On Friday, an appeals court dealt him the latest rebuff: not only can the doll remain on sale, but the judges ordered that it be sold with a bright-red banner on the packaging entitled "Judicial Injunction" and a warning that sticking needles into the doll affronts Sarkozy's dignity.<br />So far, Sarkozy's actions in court have had the apparently unintended consequence of turning the voodoo doll into something of a cult item. The actions Friday may give another boost to its popularity.<br />The doll's light-blue body, which comes with a set of 12 needles and a manual explaining how to put a curse on the president, also features some of Sarkozy's best-known quotes and gaffes: "Work more to earn more" reads one quote, a slogan from Sarkozy's presidential campaign. "Get lost, you poor jerk," reads another, a swipe Sarkozy took at a bystander at a farm fair who refused to shake his hand.<br />In keeping with the often meticulous nature of French officialdom, the ruling Friday was very specific. The distributor of the dolls, K&B Editions, was ordered to write the notice that will be distributed with the doll in black block-lettering and it must say exactly this: "It was ruled that the encouragement of the reader to poke the doll that comes with the needles in the kit, an activity whose subtext is physical harm, even if it is symbolic, constitutes an attack on the dignity of the person of Mr. Sarkozy."<br />The court also awarded the president a symbolic euro in damages and ordered K&B Editions to pay the equivalent of about $2,000 in legal costs.<br />But the court also stuck to the initial ruling by a lower court last month: "The demanded ban is disproportionate," the judges ruled, "in that it is a measure that would compromise freedom of expression." The earlier ruling had already argued that the case fell under what it dubbed "the right to humor."<br />Thierry Herzog, a lawyer for Sarkozy, appeared to indicate on Friday that the president was satisfied with the ruling and that he would not appeal a second time. "The important thing is that consistent principles and jurisprudence should be applied," Herzog said.<br />In asking for a ban, Herzog had argued that the president owns the right to his image and that the doll could provoke violence against him. It was Sarkozy's sixth lawsuit this year, and the first time that a sitting French president has lost a court case dealing with the country's strict privacy laws.<br />Sarkozy is not the only public person whose voodoo doll is on sale. K&B Editions has sold similar figurines in the image of Ségolène Royal, Sarkozy's Socialist rival for the presidency last year. Other dolls represent President George W. Bush and Senator Hillary Clinton.<br />According to K&B Editions, the initial 20,000 Sarkozy dolls that went on sale on Oct. 9 sold out by Oct. 28. Another 20,000 will be delivered to newsagents from mid-December, this time with the court-ordered label.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/africa/sarko.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/africa/sarko.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaMK55B7Oqb7q7xdwZMDQmcPHYlADsGaaUvftdFt5ykKo_8WXoka2KnFwum7ismxnWyFRZUcCs_kKLiCstp7tqXMVQJNOdh-dmfwH52_5Bmm1JvZqV_8bhBu1etE0uzawwMfhKlIG460I/s1600-h/DSC02235.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273986061591690578" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaMK55B7Oqb7q7xdwZMDQmcPHYlADsGaaUvftdFt5ykKo_8WXoka2KnFwum7ismxnWyFRZUcCs_kKLiCstp7tqXMVQJNOdh-dmfwH52_5Bmm1JvZqV_8bhBu1etE0uzawwMfhKlIG460I/s320/DSC02235.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Standoff in Mumbai down to one hotel</strong><br />By Keith Bradsher and Somini Sengupta<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />MUMBAI, India: The standoff in the Indian commercial capital of Mumbai narrowed to a final running battle between commandos and at least one gunman who was still roaming the charred corridors of a luxury hotel, the Taj Mahal, but the murderous assault on this city continued to shake the nation and ratcheted up tensions with neighboring Pakistan.<br />American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Friday there was mounting evidence that a Pakistani militant group based in Kashmir, most likely Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible for the deadly attacks on Mumbai.<br />After two days of fighting, Indian security forces killed the attackers in one luxury hotel in the city known as the Oberoi Trident, freeing civilians trapped inside, as well as gunmen occupying the headquarters of an Orthodox Jewish organization nearby, ending the conflicts there.<br />All told, police said, more than 150 people, including at least 22 foreigners, were killed in the attacks across the city, which began on Wednesday night, as more bodies were carried out from the two hotels and the community center.<br />A rabbi from Brooklyn, New York, Gavriel Holtzberg, who held dual American and Israeli citizenship, and his wife, Rivka, an Israeli citizen, were among five hostages who were killed by attackers at the Jewish center, Nariman House.<br />Two French nationals, the founder of a French lingerie line and her husband, were also among those killed in the violence in the city, according to Agence France-Presse. Among other foreigners who died in the attacks were two other Americans, two Australians, an Israeli, an Italian, a Canadian, one Japanese, a British-Cypriot, a German and a Singaporean, The Associated Press reported.<br />Nine gunmen were slain, the police said. One was arrested; he was identified as a Pakistani national.<br />At Nariman House, the militants had executed the hostages in the center most of whom were believed to be Israeli citizens as Indian commando units stormed the attackers inside the building, the Indian military said, adding that two attackers had also been killed. Two French nationals, the founder of a French lingerie line and her husband, were also among those killed in the violence in the city, according to Agence France-Presse.<br />Shortly before night settled over Mumbai, the police said 30 bodies were discovered in the Oberoi hotel, where the police had finally taken control and many guests and employees were evacuated earlier on Friday. The national security guard said it found two AK-47's, a 9 millimeter pistol and some grenades inside the hotel; two gunmen were killed inside.<br />But the army's operation at the second luxury hotel, the Taj, was only entering its "final phase," according to the Indian military, with commandos battling at least one terrorist left inside who the army said was moving between two floors of the hotel, including an area that had been a dance floor for weddings and other parties. The army said two other militants had been killed overnight in the Taj. Later, commandos were seen rushing through the front door of the hotel, in what appeared to be another major assault to dislodge the militants.<br />Loud explosions and gun battles raged inside the Taj for most of the afternoon and evening. Shortly after 1 a.m. Saturday, a sniper positioned on a cherry-picker used by firefighters was seen advancing toward the building.<br />Indian commandos involved in the fighting in the hotels said the attackers were well-trained and remorseless, with one attacker carrying a backpack packed with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and they seemed to know the hotel layout better than the security forces, indicating a high degree of preparation and sophistication.<br />With the situation seeming to come gradually under the authorities' control, attention was shifting to the identities of the attackers, several of whom were reported to be seized during the onslaught.<br />The Indian media focused on the possible involvement of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani guerrilla group run by Pakistani intelligence in the conflict with India in the disputed territory of Kashmir.<br />As the State Department reported that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had called President-elect Obama twice to brief him on the attacks, American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Friday there was mounting evidence pointing to the involvement of Lashkar- e-Taiba, or possibly another Pakistani group based in Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad.<br />The American officials cautioned that they had reached no hard conclusions about who was responsible for the operation, as well as how it was planned and carried out. An FBI team has been sent to Mumbai to assist with the forensic investigation of the attacks.<br />In a statement, President George W. Bush said he was saddened by the American deaths.<br />Amid an atmosphere of recrimination between political parties within India, a senior Hindu nationalist leader, L.K. Advani, said the Indian security services had become "preoccupied" with Hindu terrorists and missed threats from Islamists. The Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, said early evidence explicitly pointed to Pakistan's involvement. "Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved," Mukherjee told reporters in New Delhi.<br />An Indian official said one assailant had been captured alive and was a Pakistani citizen. The assertion, by R.R. Patil, the home affairs minister of Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is located, could further increase tension between India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed states which have fought wars in the past.<br />In London, officials said they were unable to confirm reports in a British newspaper that some of the attackers held British passports, which are relatively common among people with ties to former British colonies, but other officials said such a link was unlikely.<br />While the situation was gradually being brought under control by the Indian army and police, there were still pockets of resistance. In the Oberoi, some guests were still barricaded in their rooms Friday afternoon as security forces reasserted control of the hotel, and they were watching events outside on television news channels. But police and military officers did not explain why the operation to flush out a handful of assailants in the Taj hotel and the Jewish community center had taken so long.<br />At the Jewish center, commandos slid down ropes from a hovering army helicopter on Friday morning as they stormed the building. The blue-uniformed troopers landed on the roof and soon made their way inside the center, home to the Hasidic Jewish group Chabad-Lubavitch.<br />Throughout Friday, a gun battle raged inside the Jewish center, which echoed to the thump of explosions and the rattle of automatic fire. Later, Reuters reported that the commandos had blown up the outer wall of the center, and that the bodies of five hostages were discovered, quoting an Israeli diplomat speaking on Israeli television.<br />Late in the day, commandos in black uniform wearing heavy body armor moved into buildings around Nariman House, relieving commandos in blue or black uniforms who had been in action all day. For the first time, a van with six medics in surgical gowns and masks parked close to Nariman House, apparently in anticipation of casualties.<br />The main success of the day for the authorities came at the Oberoi hotel where police said that 93 foreigners some of them wearing Air France and Lufthansa uniforms had been rescued on Friday. Exhausted survivors offered harrowing accounts of their ordeal, trapped on the upper floors of the high-rise hotel occupied on lower floors by gunmen.<br />Troopers appeared to be starting an assault on the Taj hotel, where an army official said at least one militant was still holding hostages. Throughout Friday, explosions and small arms fire were heard from the hotel as security forces sought to free hostages. But progress seemed cautious and slow. By late afternoon, smoke had again begun to billow from the roof of the hotel, parts of which were gutted by a huge blaze after the gunmen first moved into the hotel on Wednesday. By nightfall, explosions and gunfire continued to shake the building.<br />The leader of a commando unit involved in a gun battle Thursday morning inside the Taj said during a news conference on Friday that he had seen a dozen dead bodies in one of the rooms.<br />His team also discovered a gunman's backpack, which contained dried fruit, 400 rounds of AK-47 ammunition, four grenades, Indian and American money, and seven credit cards from some of the world's leading banks. They pack also had a national identity card from the island of Mauritius, off Africa's southeastern coast.<br />The attackers were "very, very familiar with the layout of the hotel," said the commander, who disguised his face with a scarf and tinted glasses. He said the militants, who appeared to be under 30 years old, were "determined" and "remorseless."<br />On Thursday, the police said 14 police officers had been killed in the city, along with nine gunmen. Nine suspects were taken into custody, they said.<br />In a televised speech Thursday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blamed forces "based outside this country" in a thinly veiled accusation that Pakistan was involved. A day later, India's foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee was quoted by the Press Trust of India as saying that, according to preliminary reports, "some elements in Pakistan are responsible."<br />But Pakistan seemed anxious to defuse the mounting crisis in relations with its neighbor. Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said India and Pakistan should join hands to defeat a common enemy, and urged New Delhi not to play politics over the attacks in Mumbai, Reuters reported.<br />"Do not bring politics into this issue," the Pakistani foreign minister told reporters in the Indian town of Ajmer during a four-day visit to India. "This is a collective issue. We are facing a common enemy and we should join hands to defeat the enemy."<br />President Asif Ali Zardari called Singh, Reuters reported, to say he was "appalled and shocked" by the terrorist attacks. "Non-state actors wanted to force upon the governments their own agenda, but they must not be allowed to succeed," he said.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/29mumbai.5.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/29mumbai.5.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>Trident-Oberoi Hotel survivors tell a tale of panic, then relief</strong><br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />MUMBAI:<br />Most of the scores of victims of Mumbai's 48 hours of terror were Indians: diners, waiters, business folk, police officers who fought the assailants.<br />But an outside world riveted for two days by images of burning luxury hotels and streets crackling with gunfire and explosions also had eyes for its own: the British entrepreneur in his 70s who spoke to the BBC while cowering under a table in his hotel, only to die hours later of gunshot wounds; the young Japanese businessman felled while checking in to his hotel; the German who apparently plunged to his death.<br />Among the most closely followed fates were those of a young rabbi and his wife, both Israeli-born Americans who moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Mumbai in 2003 to run a Jewish center there.<br />Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, headed a Chabad center known as the Nariman House, one of 3,500 outposts of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement around the world. They managed a synagogue, led religious classes and reached out to a community.<br />On Friday, they were declared dead after commandos stormed the center, which had been seized by gunmen in the coordinated assault on at least 10 locations Wednesday night. "Gabi and Rivky Holtzberg made the ultimate sacrifice," the Chabad-Lubavitch movement said in a statement. "Their selfless love will live on with all the people they touched."<br />Firing grenades and automatic weapons, the gunmen took the Holtzbergs and at least six other people hostage Wednesday night, according to friends of the couple. Moshe, their 2-year-old son, and a cook, managed to escape about 12 hours into the siege, the friends said, and the boy was in the care of grandparents who flew in from Israel.<br />The dramatic end to the siege of the Chabad center began Friday morning. Commandos slid down ropes from a hovering Army helicopter, landed on the roof and made their way inside.<br />Throughout the day, a gun battle raged inside the center, echoing the thump of explosions and the rattle of automatic fire. Later, Reuters reported that the commandos had blown up the outer wall of the center, and that it was then that the bodies of five hostages were discovered.<br />It was not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen or if it was an accidental hostage scene. But if the center lacked the size and prominence of the attackers' other targets, the news of its fate reverberated among Chabad homes from Australia to Tunisia.<br />Israeli officials said Friday that three other bodies were removed from the Jewish center. Defense Minister Ehud Barak said two men who supervised Jewish dietary laws were apparently among the dead. The third corpse was that of an unidentified woman.<br />Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni of Israel depicted the Israelis and others as victims of terror. "Our world is under attack, it doesn't matter whether it happens in India or somewhere else," she said. "There are Islamic extremists who don't accept our existence or Western values."<br />The Foreign Ministry reported that four Israelis were among captives freed from another attacked site, the Oberoi Hotel.<br />Survivors of the siege at the Oberoi, exhausted but safe Friday afternoon, told how they had barricaded themselves in a room and endured 36 hours of terror after attackers invaded the luxurious seaside hotel Wednesday night.<br />James Benson, 36, an Australian lawyer based in London, was one of six foreigners escorted from the Oberoi and herded onto a bus through a crush of journalists and Indians searching for family members.<br />Speaking to a reporter aboard the bus, Benson explained how an ordinary night was overwhelmed by desperate fear. On Wednesday, he said, he was trying to find out why his room-service order had not arrived.<br />"I rang up and they said, 'No, there's no room service, there's been an emergency,"' he said. "But they wouldn't say what it was. So I decided I would go downstairs."<br />Benson left his room on the 27th floor around 10:15 p.m. When he reached the 14th floor, he said, other people were running back up, and an Indian man named Ravi said that there had been a terrorist attack and that there was a lot of blood on the 14th floor. "I got very scared," Benson said.<br />As they climbed the stairs together, there were two large blasts that rattled windows in the hotel.<br />Sebastian Gonzalez, an information-technology specialist from Toronto, said he was in his room on the 23rd floor when he heard blasts. He rushed to the stairs and ran into Benson and Ravi on their way up. Gonzalez told them to take shelter in his room, along with two other terrified guests - an American flight attendant for Northwest Airlines who identified himself as Daryll, and a Frenchman who identified himself as Philippe.<br />The five men piled into Room 2324, locked the door and barricaded themselves inside using furniture and a mattress, which they hoped would block any shrapnel from grenades set off by the terrorists inside the hotel.<br />"When I first felt the explosions I had no idea what was going on," Gonzalez said. "Once all five of us were inside, we started trying to calm down. I stopped panicking and became just worried."<br />Then the wait began. The men turned on the television and watched the BBC and CNN. They found that they could use the hotel phone; the land line was working. And they used cellphones to contact relatives abroad, who in turn called back with information.<br />They grew very concerned when the BBC reported that U.S. and British citizens were being singled out by the terrorists. From that point on, they had Ravi answer all telephone calls.<br />Because they had an oceanfront room, they could not really see what was going on, they said. They heard grenades and occasional gunfire but could only judge where the explosions were coming from by watching birds, they said, imagining that birds startled by a blast would fly off in the opposite direction.<br />The men lost television reception at about 10 a.m. Thursday, more than 24 hours before finally leaving the hotel. On Thursday evening, they were phoned by someone from the hotel who told them that they would eventually be rescued.<br />As the hours wore on, the men grew hungry and thirsty. They went to the minibar and shared a packet of cookies. They drank the bottled water first, then the soda pop. When they heard they were to be evacuated, they shifted to the beer and hard liquor. Around 11 a.m. Friday, help finally arrived.<br />Keith Bradsher and Jeremy Kahn reported from Mumbai, and Meg Bortin from Paris.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/scene.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/scene.php</a><br /><br />*******************<br />Intelligence aides in U.S. point to Kashmiri militants<br />By Mark Mazzetti<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Friday there was mounting evidence that a Pakistani militant group based in Kashmir, most likely Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible for the deadly attacks in Mumbai.<br />The American officials cautioned that they had reached no hard conclusions about who was responsible for the operation, nor on how it had been planned and carried out. Nevertheless, they said that evidence gathered over the past two days has pointed to a role for Lashkar-e-Taiba, or possibly another Pakistani group focused on Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad.<br />The American officials insisted on anonymity in describing their current thinking and declined to discuss the intelligence information that they said pointed to Kashmiri militants.<br />Lashkar-e-Taiba on Thursday denied any responsibility for the terrorist strikes. The group is thought by American intelligence agencies to have received some training and logistical support in the past from Pakistan's powerful spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, but American officials said Friday that there was no evidence that the Pakistani government had any role in the Mumbai attacks.<br />American and Indian officials for years have blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for a campaign of violence against high-profile targets throughout India, including the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi and an August 2007 strike at an amusement park in Hyderabad.<br />At times, Indian officials have also said that Jaish-e-Muhammad was responsible for the 2001 attack on the Parliament building.<br />A State Department report issued this year called Lashkar-e-Taiba "one of the largest and most proficient of the Kashmiri-focused militant groups." The report said that the group drew funding in part from Pakistani expatriate communities in the Middle East, despite the freezing of its assets by the United States and Pakistan in 2002, after the attack on the Indian Parliament.<br />The report said that the actual size of the group was unknown, but estimated its strength at "several thousand" members.<br />Pakistani officials announced Friday that the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, would travel to India to assist the Indian government with its investigation of the attacks. If it occurred, the visit would mark a first for an ISI chief.<br />But by Friday evening, Pakistani officials were suggesting that a lower-level representative of the ISI would make the trop.<br />An FBI team has also been dispatched to Mumbai to assist with the forensic investigation of the attacks.<br />Lashkar-e-Taiba has, for the most part, not targeted Westerners in past attacks, as some reports said the attackers in Mumbai did. But one counterterrorism official said Friday that the group "has not pursued an exclusively Kashmiri agenda" and that the group might certainly go after Westerners to advance a broader goals.<br />The official said that there was also strong evidence that Lashkar-e-Taiba had a "maritime capability" and would definitely have been capable of mounting the sophisticated operation in Mumbai, which intelligence officials say they believe began when the attackers arrived in the city in small boats.<br />American and Indian officials are pursuing the possibility that the attackers arrived off the coast of Mumbai in a larger merchant ship, and then boarded the smaller boats before they launched the attack.<br />Even as a Kashmiri connection to the attacks began to emerge Friday, American officials said there were puzzled by some developments of the past two days. For instance, they said they still know next to nothing about a group called the Deccan Mujahedeen that has reportedly taken responsibility for the attacks.<br />Terrorism experts have said there is no evidence that the group was involved in past strikes, and speculated that the name was made up by another militant group to mask responsibility for the attacks.<br />Pakistan, meanwhile, seemed anxious to defuse the mounting crisis in relations with its neighbor.<br />The Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said that India and his country should join hands to defeat a common enemy, and urged New Delhi not to play politics over the attacks in Mumbai, Reuters reported.<br />"Do not bring politics into this issue," the Pakistani foreign minister told reporters in the Indian town of Ajmer during a four-day visit to India. "This is a collective issue. We are facing a common enemy and we should join hands to defeat the enemy."<br />President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, Reuters reported, to say he was "appalled and shocked" by the terrorist attacks. "Non-state actors wanted to force upon the governments their own agenda, but they must not be allowed to succeed," he said.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/pakistan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/pakistan.php</a><br /><br />*******************<br /><strong>2 from U.S. meditation group killed</strong><br />By Ginger Thompson<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />The two Americans killed in Mumbai were on a meditation retreat with a Virginia ashram making its first collective visit to India, according to the ashram's managing director.<br />The ashram official, Bobbie Garvey, said those killed were Alan Scherr, 58, and his daughter Naomi, 13. Two other Americans and two Canadians on the retreat were injured.<br />According to Garvey, Scherr was an artist and astrologer. His daughter had grown up at the ashram, Synchronicity, which is based in Virginia.<br />Most of the group, a total of 25 people, were in their rooms at the Oberoi when gunmen burst into the hotel, Garvey said. Six, however, were having dinner in a hotel café, when the gunmen arrived.<br />The ashram was been established in 1985, but this was the first time the ashram's leader, Charles Cannon, had taken a group from Virginia with him to India.<br />Garvey said Naomi wanted to travel to India to learn about the ashram's roots, and she planned to write about her experiences as part of her application to a boarding school.<br />Garvey said the two injured Americans were Rudrani Devi of Nashville, who was shot in the leg and arm, and Linda Ragsdale, also of Nashville, who was shot once in the back. The injured Canadians, she said, were Michael Rudder of Montreal, and Helen Connolly, of Toronto.<br />Garvey said she had been in touch with most of the group during the two-day siege by cell phone. They had barricaded themselves in their hotel rooms, until authorities rescued them from the hotel.<br />"I don't think the whole event has sunk into this community yet," Garvey said. "We are joyous that so many of our people made it out of this okay, and that they are able to come home. But at the same time, we are heavily grieving the loss of Alan and Naomi. They were very valued members of our community."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/29victims.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/29victims.php</a><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><strong>OPINION</strong><br /><strong>The reaction of the state</strong><br />By Dileep Padgaonkar<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />NEW DELHI:<br />Terrorist attacks have shattered the peace in over half a dozen Indian cities during the past year alone. Yet none was fraught with so much risk for India's secular and democratic polity as the ones that jolted Mumbai on Wednesday night.<br />Mumbai is India's financial and commercial capital. It is also arguably the most cosmopolitan metropolis in the country. By targeting, among other establishments, two of the city's most opulent hotels, the Taj and the Trident, where the rich, famous and influential congregate, the terrorists struck at the very heart of a resurgent nation.<br />The timing of the assault was equally significant: It came on the eve of elections to five provincial assemblies. The campaign rhetoric has polarized opinion along sharply antagonistic lines. It has essentially pitted the ruling Congress Party, which swears by secularism, against the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.<br />After every terrorist attack in the past, the BJP denounced the Congress, which sought to mobilize the substantial Muslim vote its favor, for being soft on terrorism. Congress in turn debunked the BJP and its affiliates for Muslim-bashing. Indians have a peculiar word to describe this state of affairs - communalism - which denotes a determined bid to exploit religious sentiments for electoral gain.<br />The result of this competitive demagoguery has been disastrous on many counts. Suspects in a terrorist attack have been picked up at random and denied their rights under the law. Allegations of torture by the police are routine. The suspects have been kept behind bars for years as court cases have dragged on. Convictions have been few and far between.<br />Commissions set up to investigate certain particularly gory incidents of religious violence have taken their own time to produce their reports. Few are opened for public debate. The recommendations contained in these reports have been routinely ignored or implemented in a highly selective way. Muslims convicted in a case often have been punished while Hindus have been let off lightly or not punished at all.<br />As a consequence, India's Muslim community has begun to lose faith in the Indian state. This has led to the radicalization of Muslim youth. Religious extremism has pushed them on the path of violence. Increasing evidence suggests that some of them have joined the ranks of the international jihadi movements.<br />To complicate matters further, a Hindu holy woman, a Hindu holy man, a serving officer of the Indian armed forces and some other Hindu extremists are under arrest for their alleged involvement in certain terrorist attacks. Now the BJP is charging that the police, at the behest of their "secular" masters, are failing to observe the due process of law. Indeed, they charge that the Hindus have been framed in order to "appease" the Muslims in time for the elections to the provincial assemblies.<br />In plain words, after the Muslims, it is the Hindus who have now started to question the credibility of the police and, by extension, of the Indian state. The Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai can only compound fears in both communities that law enforcement authorities cannot be trusted to bring the guilty to book. Such fears set the stage for bloody confrontations.<br />These fears cannot be calmed unless the Indian state cracks down on terrorism regardless of the religion of the suspects. That some Muslim youth are engaged in a war against the "infidels" can not be denied. That the approach of the secular parties to terrorism has been pusillanimous is also clear. But the refrain of the Hindu nationalists - "all Muslims are not terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims" - is no less wrong and dangerous.<br />The pan-Islamist character of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai needs to be stressed. At the Taj Hotel the terrorists asked for the numbers of the rooms occupied by foreign, and especially American and British, guests. Another building they attacked housed Israeli guests. Overnight Mumbai has been turned into a stage for "civilizations" to clash.<br />Over the next few days and weeks many questions that have been raised regarding the murderous assault in Mumbai will need to be answered.<br />Who are these terrorists? Who are their mentors and their accomplices? Where did they acquire their arms and their organizational skills? Why did the intelligence agencies fail to keep track of them?<br />In the meantime, it is necessary to draw comfort from certain developments. At the time of writing, the attacks in Mumbai have not led to an outbreak of Hindu-Muslim violence in other parts of India. Politicians have chosen to be remarkably discreet. Members of both communities have condemned the terror attacks without indulging in a blame-game.<br />Even more remarkable, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and the leader of the opposition, L. K Advani of the BJP, have agreed to visit Mumbai together to comfort family members who lost their kin in the carnage. The victims include senior-most officers of the Mumbai police. This single gesture by Singh and Advani will go some way to reassure a dazed and nervous India that the political establishment can still be trusted to rise above partisan passion.<br />Dileep Padgaonkar, a former editor of The Times of India, edits the bimonthly magazine India & Global Affairs. This Global Viewpoint article was distributed by Tribune Media Services.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/eddileep.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/eddileep.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>U.S. strategy on India and Pakistan clouded<br /></strong>By Jane Perlez<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />ISLAMABAD: The terrorist attack in Mumbai occurred as India and Pakistan, two huge, hostile and nuclear-armed nations, were delicately moving toward improved relations with the encouragement of the United States and in particular the incoming Obama administration.<br />Those steps could quickly be derailed, seriously so and with deep consequences for the United States, if India finds Pakistani fingerprints on the well-planned operation. India has raised suspicions. Pakistan has vehemently denied them.<br />As part of its effort to forestall such accusations, Pakistan said Friday that it would send Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, head of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, to India to help with the inquiry into the terrorist attacks.<br />No matter who turns out to be responsible for the Mumbai attacks, their scale and the choice of international targets will make the agenda of the incoming U.S. administration harder.<br />Reconciliation between India and Pakistan has emerged as a basic tenet in the approaches to foreign policy of President-elect Barack Obama and the new leader of the U.S. Central Command, General David Petraeus.<br />The point is to persuade Pakistan to focus less of its military effort on India and more on the militants in its tribal regions.<br />A strategic pivot by Pakistan's military away from a focus on India to an all-out effort against the Taliban and their associates in Al Qaeda, the thinking goes, would serve to weaken the militants who are battling U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.<br />But attacks as devastating as those that unfolded in Mumbai - whether ultimately traced to homegrown Indian militants or to others from abroad, or a combination - seem likely to sour relations, fuel distrust and hamper, at least for now, America's ambitions for reconciliation in the region.<br />The early sign was that India, where state elections are scheduled next week, would take a tough stand and blame its neighbor.<br />In his statement to the nation, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, who in the past has been relatively moderate in his approach to Pakistan, sounded a harsh tone.<br />He said the attacks probably had "external linkages," and were carried out by a group "based outside the country." There would be a "cost" to "our neighbors," he said, if their territory was found to have been used as a launching pad.<br />He did not name Pakistan. But everyone - certainly on Pakistani television news programs Thursday night - knew that is what he meant, and that the long history of Pakistani-Indian finger-pointing had returned.<br />The Hindustan Times, an Indian newspaper, reported Thursday that India's security agencies believed that the attacks in Mumbai were carried out by an Islamic militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, operating out of Pakistan.<br />The newspaper reported that the special secretary at the Home Affairs Ministry, M.L. Kumawat, said that Lashkar-e-Taiba was a "distinct possibility."<br />The newspaper stopped short of saying that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency had helped Lashkar-e-Taiba plan and execute the Mumbai operation, a role the Indian government has ascribed to the Pakistani intelligence agency in past terror attacks.<br />But if India discovers that the intelligence agency was connected to the Mumbai attacks - even rogue elements of the agency - the slightly warmer relationship that has been fostered between the neighbors would no doubt return to a deep freeze. That may have partly been the motivation of whoever carried out the attacks.<br />"If the Indians believe this was Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al Qaeda as they are suggesting, we could see a crisis like 2002 with enormous pressure to do something," said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter. "The key will be if the Indians see an ISI hand."<br />After a dozen people died in an assault on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi in December 2001, India blamed an extreme Islamist group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, and said Inter-Services Intelligence had backed the operation. For the next year, the neighbors remained on the brink of war with forces massed along their 2,900-kilometer, or 1,800-mile, border.<br />According to a new book, "The Search for Al Qaeda," by Bruce Riedel, an adviser on South Asia to Obama, Osama bin Laden worked with the Pakistani intelligence agency in the late 1980s to create Lashkar-e-Taiba as a jihadist group intended to challenge Indian rule in Kashmir.<br />But the new president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, appears to be acting according to America's playbook for better relations with India.<br />A businessman at heart, Zardari understands the benefit of strong trade between India and Pakistan. Pakistan, which is struggling economically, would profit immensely from the normalization of relations.<br />Zardari has called for visa-free travel, a huge step from a situation in which there are not even scheduled flights between the nation's capitals. Speaking to an Indian audience over a video link from Islamabad last weekend, Zardari proposed a "no first nuclear strike" policy with India. The idea came as a shock to the Pakistani Army, which has always refused to commit to a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons.<br />Going even further, Zardari said South Asia should be a nuclear-weapon-free zone, which could be achieved by a "nonnuclear treaty."<br />Pakistani officials said that the president's sentiments might be admirable, but they did not reflect the policies of Pakistan's powerful security establishment, whose existence has been predicated since partition of the subcontinent 61 years ago on viewing India as the enemy.<br />It would take more than off-the-cuff remarks intended to please a dinner audience to change those longstanding policies, Pakistani newspaper editorials said.<br />"He wants improved relations with India," said Sajjan Gohel, director for international security of the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London. "But Zardari needs the full support of the Pakistani security apparatus, and he doesn't have it."<br />The Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, on a four-day trip to India, had just finished discussions with the Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, on terrorism, trade and the loosening of visa restrictions when the terrorists struck.<br />Visibly moved by the attacks, Qureshi appeared on Indian television on Thursday calling the attacks "barbaric." He appealed to both sides not to resort to "knee jerk" reactions and to drop the usual "blame game." Across the board, senior Pakistani officials condemned the attack.<br />But there was also immediate anxiety among Pakistanis about the Indian prime minister's unequivocal tone.<br />"It is unfair to blame Pakistan or Pakistanis for these acts of terrorism even before an investigation is undertaken," said the Pakistani ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani. "Instead of scoring political points at the expense of a neighboring country that is itself a victim of terrorism, it is time for India's leaders to work together with Pakistan's elected leaders in putting up a joint front against terrorism."<br />Unless care is exercised, one of the apparent goals of the Mumbai attack will be achieved, said Moonis Ahma, a lecturer in international relations at Karachi University. And the new American agenda of reconciliation between India and Pakistan will be sacrificed.<br />"It's a well-thought-out conspiracy to destabilize relations between the two countries," Ahma said.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/assess.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/assess.php</a><br /><br /><br />*******************<br /><strong>Taliban kill 13 in ambush of Afghan truck convoy</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />KABUL: Taliban insurgents killed 13 Afghan soldiers in an ambush of a convoy in northwestern Afghanistan, while NATO-led troops fired on insurgents inside Pakistan, officials said Friday.<br />More than 300 militants attacked the Afghan forces' convoy, which was transporting 47 vehicles for their units in the Bala Murghab district of Badghis Province late Thursday, said Naeem Khan, a border police official.<br />In a several-hour battle, 13 Afghan soldiers and policemen were killed and 11 were wounded, said Abdul Ghani Sabri, the deputy provincial governor. Seven Taliban fighters were killed, Sabri said.<br />In addition, he said, 16 Afghan soldiers were captured by the militants, who also took most of the 47 vehicles being transported in the convoy.<br />After the ambush, helicopters were dispatched to the area and fired at the militants, Khan said.<br />Insurgent attacks in Afghanistan have increased by 40 percent since 2007, military officials say. Their figures show that more than 5,400 people have died in insurgency-related violence this year. Most of the casualties were suspected militants, the officials assert.<br />In eastern Afghanistan, meanwhile, NATO troops fired more than 20 artillery rounds into Pakistan on Thursday. They said insurgents had been attacking their bases in Paktika Province, an alliance official said.<br />The artillery attacks killed several insurgents and caused several secondary explosions, the official said, which he said indicated that ammunition was being stored at the locations.<br />There have been a number of artillery attacks by NATO-led troops inside Pakistan's tribal region, which the alliance said were launched in coordination with the Pakistani authorities.<br />The strikes Thursday came as NATO and Pakistani forces have been cooperating in a series of complementary operations that involve the army and the Frontier Corps in Pakistan and NATO forces in Afghanistan, U.S. military officials said.<br />Afghan militants have been using Pakistan's tribal areas as havens from which to attack U.S. and NATO military installations and convoys in Afghanistan.<br />Separately from NATO operations, the U.S. military has launched several airstrikes on militants in the tribal areas since August, deepening already widespread anger among Pakistanis toward the presence of Western forces in the region.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/afghan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/asia/afghan.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>10-year sentence for British army spy</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />LONDON: A former British army interpreter in Afghanistan who was convicted of espionage was sentenced to 10 years in prison Friday.<br />Iranian-born Daniel James, who translated for NATO's commander in Afghanistan, was sentenced after the Crown Prosecution Service said it would not seek a retrial on two other charges on which a jury deadlocked.<br />James was stationed in Afghanistan in 2006 as an interpreter for Gen. David Richards, then-NATO commander in the country. Richards has since been appointed as the next head of the British army.<br />Prosecutors said James began sending coded e-mails after meeting Col. Mohammad Hossein Heydari, military attache at the Iranian Embassy in Kabul, in late August 2006. One allegedly read, "I am at your service."<br />Justice Roderick Evans said James should never have been in such a sensitive position because of his nationality, his disenchantment with the army and his narcissistic personality.<br />"The gravest part of your offending and what made this case unique was that you engaged in this activity when you were actually serving in a war zone," Evans said.<br />There was no evidence that James had damaged any British or NATO operations, the judge said, but "the potential for serious harm, had this relationship between you and the Iranian authorities developed, was immense."<br />A jury convicted James earlier this month on the espionage charge, but the jury could not decide on a charge related to a memory stick containing secret documents that was found in his possession, and a charge of misconduct in public office.<br />Prosecutors said James had debts of 25,000 pounds (US$38,000) and mortgages on four properties in Britain's south coastal city of Brighton.<br />Born Esmail Gamasai in Tehran, James came to Britain at age 15 and became a British citizen.<br />After leaving college without qualifications, he worked as a casino croupier and became a dedicated bodybuilder, once competing in a Mr. Universe contest. He joined the Territorial Army, a reserve force, in 1987.<br />In Brighton, James was caught up in the dance scene, billing himself as "Danny James, king of salsa."<br />His fluency in English, Farsi, Dari and Spanish led to his appointment as Richards' translator.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/28/europe/EU-Britain-Spying-Trial.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/28/europe/EU-Britain-Spying-Trial.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiajqqYhj7OPDJ4j35m2QkWEAJU8Yyq6myc2zFgN7OmhtI0OvU9ueLYq2FLhEm2fJyVqFuSFqcykxihiRBG-LBFk-6457dq129CftRtxs7ENA300fKH-Uu36k2ta2tzcYNc8dJ5gzF9vs/s1600-h/DSC02236.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273986061836915522" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiajqqYhj7OPDJ4j35m2QkWEAJU8Yyq6myc2zFgN7OmhtI0OvU9ueLYq2FLhEm2fJyVqFuSFqcykxihiRBG-LBFk-6457dq129CftRtxs7ENA300fKH-Uu36k2ta2tzcYNc8dJ5gzF9vs/s320/DSC02236.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Feelings are mixed as Iraqis ponder U.S. security agreement</strong><br />By Campbell Robertson<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: In the 36 hours after the Iraqi Parliament's decision to ratify a security agreement that sets a 2011 deadline for the presence of U.S. troops, Iraqis across the country were still trying to absorb the meaning of the ratification, for the country and their own near future.<br />Some were elated that a date for the American departure had officially been set; others were angered that the Iraqi government had been, in their view, bullied into an deal by an occupying force; others worried that the agreement would leave the central government with too much power, and still others were not at all convinced that a superpower would voluntarily withdraw from a much weaker country.<br />Opposition to the pact was most virulent from senior leaders loyal to the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who issued a statement Friday declaring three days of mourning to mark the pact's ratification.<br />At Friday prayers in Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite district in northeastern Baghdad, Sayyid Hassan al-Husseini thundered against the pact's supporters, delivering specific critiques of the agreement's provisions and criticizing the fact that it was made with the Bush administration rather than with President-elect Barack Obama, who has proposed a shorter timetable than the one outlined in the agreement.<br />"Obama might change his opinion because of the signing of the agreement," Husseini said. "But now the Iraqi Parliament has signed on; they want the American forces to stay, to give them three more years."<br />But in interviews with Iraqis in cities around the country, there was less concern about the agreement itself than a widespread skepticism that the Americans would actually adhere to it.<br />Iraq has a long history of foreign occupation, by the Persians, Ottomans and British, all of which lasted for decades if not centuries. To many in Iraq, a country where the past is durably present, it is simply unimaginable that a foreign occupation would last only eight years.<br />"In the security agreement much has been achieved," said Khadum al-Quraishi, 40, a teacher from Diyala Province. "But as to ending the occupation in three years, that's implausible. America occupied Iraq for its interests, and it would not leave Iraq after so many enormous losses."<br />Far more important than Sadr's opinion on the pact is the view of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the enormously influential Shiite cleric who has conditioned his support for the agreement on several issues, including support across sectarian lines.<br />A number of Sunni lawmakers voted for the so-called status of forces agreement in Parliament on Thursday, but one of the most pressing questions being asked by the pact's mostly Shiite and Kurdish supporters has been exactly how much Sunni support was needed for the ayatollah's approval. That remained unclear on Friday, as a representative of Sistani's offered only vague statements.<br />"Iraq's sovereignty remains incomplete with the presence of the foreign forces," said Ahmed Saafi in a sermon in Karbala. "But supporters of the agreement are optimistic that it will give Iraq eventually the full sovereignty. Some are pessimistic, for our previous experience proves the opposite."<br />Opposition to the agreement was by no means universal. Even among the inhabitants of Sadr City opinion was mixed, with some quietly celebrating what they saw as a display of Iraq's strength in the face of American pressure.<br />"God willing it will be good for Iraq and Maliki," said Ayad Mohammed, 27, a grocer in Sadr City, referring to President Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. "We are not interested in politics; we are simple people, and that's why we are counting on him and the representatives to make decisions."<br />More surprising were the words of approval from Iran, which many lawmakers said had interfered in Parliament deliberations and almost derailed the pact's ratification the night before the vote.<br />"This was a very good decision by the Iraqi Parliament," said Ahmad Jannati, a senior Iranian official, during Friday prayers at Tehran University, specifically citing the Parliament's decision to put the agreement up for a nationwide referendum in July.<br />"Then the ball would be in the court of the Americans who claim that they are after democracy," he said.<br />But some Iraqis who support the pact were so disillusioned by the spectacle of lawmakers brawling, shouting and grandstanding during the 10 days of deliberations that they were beginning to have second thoughts.<br />"Frankly speaking, the agreement is very clear," Alaa Mohammed, a 29-year-old journalist from the southern city of Basra, said Thursday, shortly after seeing the ratification vote on television. "But some members of Parliament disagreed with it just to attract attention. They have no idea about what benefits the people. What I saw today made me feel I want the forces to stay longer, because without these forces we will eat each other."<br />Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran, Tariq Mahir, Anwar J. Ali and Mohammed Hussein from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Basra, Karbala and Diyala.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/mideast/security.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/mideast/security.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>12 killed in bombing near Baghdad<br /></strong>By Alissa J. Rubin<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />BAGHDAD: A suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest blew himself up just inside the courtyard of a Shiite mosque in a town south of Baghdad on Friday, killing 12 people and wounding 19, according to eyewitnesses and officials.<br />The attack took place in Mussayib, a town about 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, south of Baghdad, as about 700 people were attending Friday prayers and preparing to hold a peaceful march in protest at the ratification in the Iraqi Parliament on Thursday of a new security agreement with the United States.<br />Mussayib, a predominantly Shiite town, has many Sunni villages nearby and has been struck several times in the past by suicide bombings and attacks on local government officials.<br />The mosque, the Sadrist Hussainiya, was a Sunni mosque under Saddam Hussein. But after he was ousted supporters of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr took it over and turned it into a Shiite mosque and an office for the local Sadrists.<br />The bomber made it past the main checkpoints where worshipers were searched, said an Iraqi Army officer, who said he could not be quoted because he was not authorized to speak to the media.<br />"I was standing inside the Hussainiya and do not remember anything except feeling something like the blast of a storm," said Nema Adnan, 18, a day laborer.<br />On Thursday, Parliament ratified a sweeping security agreement that sets the course for an end to the United States' role in the war and marks the beginning of a new relationship between the countries.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/mideast/iraq.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/mideast/iraq.php</a><br /><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims live peacefully together in Tatarstan<br /></strong>By Sophia Kishkovsky<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />KAZAN, Russia: There are few spots on earth these days where religions mingle without rancor, or worse. But the Russian republic of Tatarstan has turned religious tolerance into its post-Soviet brand - a place where Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics mix and respect each other's traditions.<br />For the outside world, the latest proof of Tatarstan's multifaceted religious identity came during an extraordinary appearance last month by the Muslim president of Tatarstan and a leading Russian Orthodox churchman at a conference in Jidda.<br />Just weeks before, the consecration of an important Catholic church in Kazan was celebrated as an example of the Volga River region's special harmony.<br />"Tatarstan has already become an example - not only in the Russian Federation - of tolerance and friendship between different religions and cultures," Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the Vatican's College of Cardinals, said in his invocation at the church, according to the Tatar-inform news agency.<br />In Jidda, the Tatarstan president, Mintimir Shaimiyev, who steered his republic past separatist sentiment in the 1990s toward broad autonomy within the Russian Federation, read a greeting from President Dmitri Medvedev that stressed: "Russia intends to stick firmly to its course to expand active interaction with the Islamic world."<br />The Reverend Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy chairman of the Department of External Church Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church, spoke of Russia's deep ties to Islam.<br />"We are intermingled: Russia is inseparable from the Islamic world, as many millions of Muslims live there, and the Islamic world is inseparable from the Russian and Orthodox world, whose members live in so many Muslim countries," Chaplin told the forum, the Interfax news agency reported.<br />None of this surprises inhabitants of Kazan, a 1,000-year-old city in the heart of Russia, where Muslim minarets and Russian Orthodox onion domes rise in seemingly equal proportion.<br />The huge Kul-Sharif Mosque, which in symbolism and glitziness evokes a Muslim version of Moscow's vast, re-created Cathedral of Christ the Savior, was built within the city's UNESCO-listed, white-walled Kremlin to mark Kazan's millennium. It stands next to the 16th-century Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation and is meant to evoke a mosque destroyed by Ivan the Terrible when his forces sacked Kazan in 1552.<br />Although the sacking still rankles over 500 years later, Russian-Tatar relations are notable for equanimity. According to Russia's 2002 census, ethnic Tatars accounted for just over half of Tatarstan's population. The census does not record religious adherence, but various estimates place the number of Muslims in Russia at 14 to 23 million out of a population of about 140 million.<br />"This place is unique in the world," said Dmitry Khafizov, a historian and adviser to the city government who was instrumental in the return to Kazan by Pope John Paul II of a famous 18th-century copy of a revered icon. The original icon is attached to a firm belief that the Virgin Mary appeared in Kazan in 1579, and directed a 10-year-old girl toward the image.<br />Khafizov's evident pride in the Virgin legend was reflected by Reverend Sergei Titov of the Kazan diocese of the Orthodox church. "This is a multinational region," he said. "It is essential to live together and be tolerant enough of each other's values."<br />Muslims and Orthodox clergy are present at all official events and official buildings are blessed by both, said Titov.<br />The local bishop, Anastasy, is "able to have relations with Muslims and Catholics and the authorities," he said. "He is able to speak of his problems peacefully, with Christian love."<br />The post-Soviet era has fostered a resurgent Tatar identity, but has not resulted in religious fundamentalism. Young women in miniskirts and skinny jeans mingle in the streets of Kazan with veiled women, and far outnumber the latter.<br />Moscow, has, in turn, "played the 'Tatar card"' and used Tatarstan as "a kind of showcase of Russian Islam," writes Aleksey Malashenko, a Russian expert on Islam with the Carnegie Moscow Center in a recent paper, "Russia and the Muslim World."<br />The peaceful mingling is not confined to officialdom. Earlier this year, foreign visitors searching outside Kazan for the Raifsky Mother of God Monastery, a spiritual center, were eagerly shown the way by a Tatar Muslim woman. In Soviet times too, said the woman, who gave her name only as Roza, she preferred Orthodox shrines to Soviet ones. Visiting Moscow back then, she said, she skipped Lenin's tomb to visit the Dormition Cathedral.<br />On a bench outside the monastery, Father Sergius, an 85-year-old monk, sat reading a book by Pope John Paul II - scarcely typical for Russian Orthodox churchmen, who often in the post-Soviet era have come to resent what they see as Roman Catholic proselytizing on Orthodox territory.<br />"This is a very interesting book," said the monk. "Pope John Paul says the right things."<br />Kazan's pre-revolutionary Catholic church was turned into a wind tunnel by a Soviet research institute. Kazan officials offered to help finance construction of the new church to serve the Catholic community of several hundred.<br />The August consecration was a duly official occasion, with local notables and Russian Orthodox and Muslim clerics joining Cardinal Sodano, and all exulting over the new home for the returned icon. The mayors of Czestochowa in Poland, Fatima in Portugal and Mariazell in Austria, towns in Europe famous for their shrines to the Virgin Mary, attended.<br />Russian Orthodox critics accused the Pope, who died in 2005, of using the icon to try to fulfill his unrealized dream of visiting Russia. The image is especially credited here with saving Russia in 1612 from invaders from Poland, the late Pope's native land.<br />Kazan appears free of Catholic-Orthodox frictions.<br />"We don't have any problems with the Orthodox in Kazan," the Reverend Diogenes Urquiza, an Argentine who has served the Catholic community in Kazan since 1995, said while the church was still under construction. "I know how it is in other cities and dioceses. To this day they can't develop any relations."<br />In Kazan, he said, there is even a joint church summer camp for Orthodox and Catholic children.<br />The Muslim-Orthodox rapprochement, meanwhile, seems fashioned as part of a larger Kremlin design to ease tensions with the Muslim world.<br />"Since Putin came to power, there has been an attempt to position Russia separately from Europe in its foreign relations," said Rafik Mukhametshin, rector of the Russian Islamic University in Kazan, referring to Vladimir Putin, now prime minister.<br />"The attitude to the West is not always positive," the rector said of the Orthodox church. "Here, I think to strengthen status, the Islamic factor is beneficial.<br />"That's why recently these kinds of thoughts have been expressed about Islam," he continued. "I don't think it's a strengthening of tolerance, of interfaith dialogue. I think there are other goals."<br />In Kazan, said Titov, the reality of daily coexistence tempers politics and extremism. "Moscow's thinking is ambitious," he said. "Here it's real life, an opportunity to live in peace."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/europe/kazan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/europe/kazan.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Clashes kill at least 20 in Nigerian city of Jos</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />By Shuaibu Mohammed<br />Clashes between rival ethnic and religious groups in the central Nigerian city of Jos killed at least 20 people on Friday, injured hundreds more and forces thousands from their homes, the Red Cross said.<br />Authorities imposed a night-time curfew on the capital of the central Plateau state and soldiers deployed on the streets after rival gangs burnt churches, mosques and homes in a dispute triggered by a local election.<br />The unrest is the most serious of its kind in Africa's most populous nation, roughly equally split between Christians and Muslims, since President Umaru Yar'Adua took power in May 2007.<br />"Over 20 people died. Churches and mosques and 100 houses were burnt down," a senior Red Cross official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. He said more than 300 people were injured.<br />Youths with machetes hacked to death a policeman and burnt tyres in one part of the city, sending plumes of thick black smoke into the air, witnesses said.<br />"All law-abiding citizens are assured that government is on top of the situation and should go about their normal lives," Jonah Jang, governor of Plateau state of which Jos is the capital, said in a broadcast.<br />"Government is imposing a curfew in Jos ... and the environs from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. (5 p.m.-5 a.m. GMT). Government wishes to advise against any further attempt to test its will to maintain peace on the Plateau," he said.<br />ELECTION RUMOUR<br />The violence was triggered by a disputed vote for a new local government chairman in Jos North, the commercial centre of Plateau state.<br />Residents said demonstrators from the Hausa ethnic group began protesting in the early hours of Friday after a rumour spread that their ANPP party candidate had lost the race to the ruling PDP party.<br />"The group said they were not fighting people but fighting government because of their action," said one witness, who asked not to be named.<br />Christians and Muslims generally live peacefully side by side in Africa's top oil producer, a country of 140 million people. But hostility has simmered in the past in Plateau state.<br />Hundreds were killed in ethnic-religious street fighting in Jos in 2001. Three years later, hundreds more died in clashes in the town of Yelwa, leading then-President Olusegun Obasanjo to declare a state of emergency and impose a curfew.<br />The tensions in Plateau state have their roots in decades of resentment by indigenous minority groups, who are mostly Christian or animist, towards migrants and settlers from Nigeria's Hausa-speaking Muslim north.<br />The official results of Thursday's vote have not yet been announced but ANPP observers at polling stations had forecast a clear win for their candidate.<br />(Additional reporting by Tume Ahemba in Lagos; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/africa/OUKWD-UK-NIGERIA-PROTEST.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/africa/OUKWD-UK-NIGERIA-PROTEST.php</a><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>OPINION</strong><br /><strong>Reclaiming my religion</strong><br />By Nadira Artyk<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />My relationship with Islam has never been straightforward. I grew up in Soviet Uzbekistan, hearing my grandfather recite the Koran on a daily basis. Sometimes he would translate a few verses for us. I was drawn to the beauty of the prose. I sensed a strong connection and especially admired the values of social justice, equality and generosity of human spirit.<br />On the other hand, I was a Soviet Young Pioneer and later a Komsomol activist. Despite all my respect and love for my pious grandfather, I saw a mismatch between his words and my reality, at least in one area - there was no equality or justice to be found in Muslim families. The superiority of men over women was deeply entrenched and never questioned.<br />In Soviet Uzbekistan, women were emancipated in the public sphere, but that emancipation usually ended at the doorstep to their homes. Society remained deeply patriarchal and the principal roles for women were still those of wife and mother. Any aspirations of women that went beyond the "classical" female jobs of teacher and medic were discouraged.<br />I came to believe that gender inequality was part and parcel of Islamic teachings. As this didn't fit with my world view, I distanced myself from my religion and embraced secular feminism.<br />My return to Islam began four years ago when I started a blog for women in Uzbekistan. Together with a couple of girlfriends, we raised some highly contentious and even taboo issues - domestic violence, family vs. career, child abuse, divorce, virginity, sexuality. At one point, the blog was taken hostage by some Islamist men who left highly restrictive and extremely conservative views on every topic.<br />I then decided to educate myself on the original sources - the Koran and the Hadith (the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad). That's how I discovered progressive Islam and Islamic feminism. I came to understand that my faith had strong egalitarian messages within it; that the Koran and the Hadith, having been interpreted for 14 centuries by men, had layers of patriarchal bias stuck on them like layers of dust.<br />Fast forward to late October. I am attending the International Congress of Islamic Feminism in Barcelona, organized by the Islamic Council of Catalonia, and I hear stories of Muslim women from around the world who have faced similar challenges.<br />With the global rise of political Islam, the traditional messages of secular, Western-style feminism based on the concepts of democracy and human rights seem not to work any longer.<br />Feminists from Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Morocco, Senegal and elsewhere confided that when they tried to educate women about their rights based on the Western human rights agenda, they were often regarded with suspicion and asked whether those principles were compatible with Islam. Women responded with far greater enthusiasm to arguments based on the Islamic teachings, to solutions to their social problems that originated from within their own faith.<br />Islamic feminism is a fledgling movement, but it is fast spreading its wings. Its aim is to recuperate the egalitarian voice of the Koran. Its main struggle is to uphold gender equality within families. That's where the Muslim feminists differ from classical feminists - they say a woman will only be capable of practicing all her rights in the public sphere if her rights within her family are respected.<br />The Muslim feminists point out that the Koran always describes marriage as a sacred and serious pact between two equal parties. The verse about marriage, "They are your garments / And you are their garments" implies closeness, mutuality and equality.<br />They go to the Koran and the Hadith to demonstrate that Islam does not inherently discriminate against women, that the Islamic scriptures grant women rights to inheritance, divorce, choosing a husband, respectful treatment by the husband, and even for being fulfilled professionally outside of the family.<br />The concept of equality of men and women is best illustrated in the Koranic rendition of the Adam and Eve story: "Oh mankind! Be conscious of your Lord, who has created you out of one living entity, and from it created its mate, and from the two of them spread abroad the multitude of men and women."<br />A woman is recognized in the Koran as an equal partner in procreation. She is equal to man in the pursuit of education and knowledge; she has equal rights to make a contract, to earn and to own independently: "To men is allotted what they earn, and to women what they earn."<br />With conservative Islam on the rise, the small and underfunded groups of feminists in Islamic societies are perceived as more radical than their secular Western counterparts.<br />One of the most impressive Muslim women I met in Barcelona was Siti Musdah Mulia, a soft-spoken and veiled scholar from Indonesia. She is a respected authority in her country, and she is behind a new draft of an Islamic marital law that has been accepted for consideration by the Indonesian government.<br />The country's male clergy becomes nervous each time Mrs. Mulia appears on national television to talk about family matters. On a recent program about polygamy - which is legal in a small number of Muslim countries - she cited a hadith in which the Prophet spoke out against the practice. "Where do you find those hadith?" the clergy demanded to know. Mrs. Mulia has received death threats.<br />When Koranic verses appear to discriminate against women, Mrs. Mulia and other Muslim feminist scholars stress the need to read the Koran within the socio-historical context of 7th century Arabia. It was not God's intent to discriminate and spread injustice, they say.<br />One of the Koranic verses they point to implies that women can be leaders: "And the believers, both men and women - they are friends and protectors of one another; they enjoin the doing of what is right and forbid the doing of what is wrong."<br />Islamic feminism faces many serious challenges. The greatest is a broad societal resistance to non-traditional interpretations of the Koran. A lack of progressive Islamic scholars has created a great imbalance in Islamic discourse in general and Islamic law in particular by giving far more weight to extremely restrictive opinions on the role of women.<br />It took me two decades to find my Koran. When I did, I found messages that were deeply empowering, just and true for me.<br />Today the conditions of the Muslim world and of Muslim women stand in sharp contrast with the original Islamic vision. Islamic feminism has the potential to change this.<br />Nadira Artyk is a women's-rights advocate and journalist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/edartyk.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/edartyk.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><strong>U.S. and EU fear Syria "sanitised" alleged nuclear sites</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />By Mark Heinrich<br />The United States and the European Union said Friday they were disturbed by apparent Syrian efforts to "sanitise" sites U.N. inspectors want to examine in a probe into alleged covert nuclear activity.<br />Washington accused Damascus of adopting Iranian tactics to impede a nuclear watchdog investigation into what U.S. officials say was a secret atomic reactor that could have made plutonium for atom bombs if Israel had not bombed the site last year.<br />A November 19 International Atomic Energy Agency report said satellite imagery of the site revealed a layout resembling that of a reactor. Traces of uranium, or nuclear fuel, were found by inspectors allowed to scour the Al-Kibar site in June.<br />The IAEA's director urged Syria Thursday to heed multiple agency requests for a return trip to Al-Kibar and to three military sites, as well as documentation about their uses, to help inspectors draw conclusions about what they were.<br />U.S. and EU envoys told a meeting of the IAEA's 35-nation Board of Governors that Syria needed to clarify why Syria had landscaped all four sites and removed objects after inspectors asked to see them, as revealed by satellite pictures.<br />U.S. Ambassador Gregory Schulte said the pictures, which inspectors screened last week for governors, offered "dramatic evidence that Syria took immediate steps to sanitise" the locations in question.<br />Syria has dismissed the intelligence as fabrications and ruled out more inspection visits on national security grounds.<br />"So far Syria seems to be testing the tactics of hindrance and unhelpfulness that Iran has so finely honed," U.S. Ambassador Gregory Schulte told the closed-door gathering.<br />The IAEA says Iran is stonewalling a longer-running probe into intelligence material that Washington says shows Tehran illicitly studied how to design atom bombs. Iran denies this but has not provided back-up evidence, the U.N. watchdog says.<br />SYRIA STANDS GROUND<br />Syria's top envoy reiterated to the meeting that the site Israel hit was a conventional military building. He also ruled expanded IAEA inspections on national security grounds.<br />Still, a diplomat close to the IAEA said it had resumed contacts with Syria about follow-up steps in the investigation and the next agency report would be issued in February.<br />An official summary of the meeting said some members -- an allusion to developing nations who comprise half the board -- complained that tardy sharing of intelligence and Israel's "unilateral use of force" had severely hampered the inquiry.<br />Western delegations said that, given Syria's assertion that the uranium traces came with missiles used to destroy Al-Kibar, the only way to verify their origin was to let the IAEA examine debris and equipment whisked away from the desert site.<br />Schulte said the case underlined the IAEA's limitations in a country that has not ratified the Additional Protocol, a crucial tool in detecting clandestine nuclear behaviour since it permits short-notice inspections beyond declared nuclear sites.<br />"Syria is one state that declined to adopt the protocol. Perhaps we now understand why," he said.<br />Schulte and French Ambassador Francois-Xavier Deniaud, speaking for the European Union, urged Syria to embrace the protocol to help rebuild confidence in its intentions.<br />Syria has ruled this out as long as Israel refuses to do so as well as join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and give up its undeclared nuclear arsenal, the only one in the Middle East.<br />(Editing by Richard Williams)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/africa/OUKWD-UK-NUCLEAR-IAEA-SYRIA.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/africa/OUKWD-UK-NUCLEAR-IAEA-SYRIA.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh57SxPnfjstu7mtsS8hJtByMyzTzFJrbFPPA-EuEOu0Dk6L6TjrNw3xfK0pvh8IchTd2IXfwLNpFXDzcI7QeMg-91561aTkhFkSgrqQX2lnK3bogmZoTxloHq4c4wD_W2WZpePfYOW8vo/s1600-h/DSC02237.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273986054260176290" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh57SxPnfjstu7mtsS8hJtByMyzTzFJrbFPPA-EuEOu0Dk6L6TjrNw3xfK0pvh8IchTd2IXfwLNpFXDzcI7QeMg-91561aTkhFkSgrqQX2lnK3bogmZoTxloHq4c4wD_W2WZpePfYOW8vo/s320/DSC02237.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Qaeda says U.S. wars behind financial crisis</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />DUBAI: Al Qaeda's second-in-command said in an Internet video the U.S. financial crisis was caused by Washington's military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and taxpayers were paying the price.<br />"This crisis is one of ... the series of American economic haemorrhages after the strikes of September 11... And these ... will continue as long as the foolish American policy of wading in Muslim blood continues," Ayman al-Zawahri said on the video, posted on Islamist websites on Friday.<br />"The ones shouldering the burden are taxpayers, whose money was spent to rescue senior capitalists and to protect the fraudulent interest-based system from collapse," Zawahri said.<br />Asked by an off-camera interviewer whether Washington would be able to resolve the crisis, Zawahri said: "They might be able to lighten their losses if they were to stop the insane haemorrhaging of funds which they are spending on wars against Muslims."<br />Zawahri said U.S. military action against militant tribal forces in Pakistan, who are allied with al Qaeda, would fail despite more troops being sent by President George W. Bush to neighbouring Afghanistan.<br />"I challenge you (Bush), if you are really a man, to send the entire American army to Pakistan and the tribal regions for it to end up in hell," Zawahri said on the video, which carried English subtitles.<br />Calls for talks to end the war in Afghanistan showed the failure of U.S.-led forces in defeating the Taliban, he said.<br />"All this is proof of the failure of their crusade," Zawahri said on the 80-minute video, referring to efforts to start a dialogue between the Afghan government and some moderate figures from among Taliban insurgents.<br />With the Taliban insurgency spreading seven years after the hardline Islamists were forced from power, the possibility of talks with more moderate Taliban leaders is increasingly being considered, both in Afghanistan and among its allies.<br />Zawahri called for a general strike in Egypt to pressure the government to open the Gaza border to defeat an Israeli siege of the area ruled by militant Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.<br />"What is the problem if students, employees and workers were to refuse to study and work until the siege is lifted on Gaza?" the Egyptian militant leader said. "Are we unable to carry out such a peaceful strike?"<br />The video appeared to have been made earlier than an audio recording issued on November 19, in which Zawahri criticised U.S. president-elect Barack Obama for vowing to back Israel during his campaign, and warned he would fail if he follows the policies of Bush.<br />(Reporting by Firouz Sedarat; Editing by Samia Nakhoul)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/asia/OUKWD-UK-QAEDA-ZAWAHRI-CRISIS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/asia/OUKWD-UK-QAEDA-ZAWAHRI-CRISIS.php</a><br />***************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/euro.php">European inflation falls, while jobless rate rises</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/rbs.php">U.K. takes over Royal Bank of Scotland</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>Congo rebels say they've taken more territory<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />GOMA, Congo: Rebels have captured two border posts and another town in eastern Congo, increasing their hold over the region as thousands of refugees fled into Uganda, officials said Friday.<br />A Ugandan Army spokesman, Tabaro Kiconco, said the rebels seized control of the border post of Ishasha on Friday morning after capturing a town with the same name about two kilometers, or one mile, away.<br />A spokesman for the rebels, Bertrand Bisimwa, confirmed that his forces had taken the town but did not mention the border post. "We took this area of Ishasha peacefully," Bisimwa said. "There wasn't a fight."<br />Kiconco said the rebels also had taken the Nyakokoma landing site on Lake Edward, which acts as a border post for people traveling to Uganda by boat.<br />At least 13,000 civilians have fled into Uganda in the last two days, said Robert Rosso, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "Some of the stories told by the refugees are terrifying," he said. "They talk of passing many dead bodies as they walked for several days into Uganda."<br />The town and border posts are the latest to fall into rebel hands as the army of a renegade general, Laurent Nkunda, consolidates its hold over a lawless stretch of Congo's eastern hills.<br />Nkunda, an ethnic Tutsi, says his rebels are fighting to protect Congo's minority Tutsis from elements of the Hutu militia that fled here after perpetrating the genocide that killed more than half a million Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.<br />His critics contend that he is really interested in gaining power over eastern Congo's mineral wealth.<br />Bisimwa, the rebel spokesman, asserted that the Rwandan Hutu militia known as the FDLR was trying to attract international attention, and stop the progress of Nkunda's forces, by telling people to flee.<br />"If people cross the border, they think they can use the international community to force us to stop our initiative," Bisimwa said. "This is the propaganda of the FDLR."<br />Some refugees have already fled three or four times since years of low-level fighting in eastern Congo intensified with the rebel offensive that began Aug. 28. More than 250,000 people have abandoned their homes since then.<br />As the fighting continued, the health situation in the region grew worse. Médecins Sans Frontières said 4 of 10 children suffering from measles had died in the village of Birundule, which they reached Thursday with a mobile clinic.<br />Doctors are trying to get care to tens of thousands of people hiding in forests or running from village to village as they try to stay ahead of the fighting.<br />The militia, the rebels and soldiers serving the government have all been accused of grave atrocities.<br />On Friday, Navi Pillay, UN high commissioner for human rights, called for urgent action to stop the killing, raping and looting. Pillay said UN investigators should be given unhindered access to investigate abuses and that perpetrators must be held accountable.<br />The UN Security Council has agreed to reinforce its mission in Congo with 3,000 more soldiers and police officers because the current mission of 17,000 is spread too thin. It is not known when additional troops could arrive.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/africa/congo.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/africa/congo.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>Should child care be at mercy of market?</strong><br />By Meraiah Foley<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />SYDNEY: The global credit crisis has claimed an unlikely victim in Australia with the fall of the world's largest child care company, leaving thousands of parents to wonder who will look after their children and raising questions about whether community services should be left to the marketplace.<br />The company, ABC Learning Centers, was placed in the hands of administrators on Nov. 6 when it revealed that it could no longer repay more than 1 billion Australian dollars, or $1.54 billion, racked up during a debt-fueled expansion into the United States and Britain.<br />Chris Honey, a spokesman for ABC's receiver, McGrathNicol, said Wednesday that 656 of the 1,042 centers across Australia would continue to operate through next year under a revised business plan. But the future of the remaining 386 centers, covering about 30,000 children, is still in doubt.<br />The collapse of the company, which looks after about 120,000 Australian children, or 25 percent of the day care population, has sent the government scrambling to avoid the economic and political fallout of leaving tens of thousands of working parents stranded without child care services.<br />Critics say the rise and fall of ABC Learning will become a textbook case highlighting the dangers of allowing the private sector to dominate essential services like education, care for the elderly and utilities.<br />"This is not just an Australian story," said Deborah Brennan, a social policy expert at the University of New South Wales, who has been studying ABC for the past 18 months.<br />"It is a story about where a rather blind belief in market forces can get you in the area of community services."<br />ABC opened in 1988 as a single kindergarten run by Eddy Groves, an entrepreneur based in Brisbane. The company grew slowly until the late-1990s, when the conservative government at the time stopped subsidizing nonprofit child care centers and introduced a market-based approach that gave parents tax rebates they could spend on whatever form of day care they chose.<br />Flush with these government payments, ABC embarked on an aggressive strategy of buying up smaller, independently run centers across Australia. The company stock was listed in 2001 with just 43 centers. By 2006, ABC had claimed more than a quarter of all day care places nationwide; in some regions, it controlled up to half of the market.<br />The government's rebate strategy made the child care sector a more attractive place for private companies, which could count on a stream of public money to fill their coffers. It also gave them a green light to raise their prices, knowing the rebates would cover the difference, Brennan said.<br />About 70 percent of Australia's child care market is now controlled by private companies. What makes Australia unique, however, is the degree to which one company has been allowed to dominate the market. The largest child care providers in the United States and Britain control only about 2 percent or 3 percent of all day care places, compared to ABC's 25 percent in Australia.<br />Brennan and other critics say it is no coincidence that the cost of child care rose by 65 percent from 2001 to 2006, while household incomes grew by 17 percent, according to figures compiled by the Task Force on Care Costs, an independent monitor of the price of social services.<br />And quality may have suffered as well, according to a survey of 600 child care workers at 217 long-stay day care centers conducted in late 2005 by the Australia Institute, an independent research organization. One in five corporate child care employees who answered the survey said they would not send their children younger than 2 to the centers where they worked, citing poor staff-to-child ratios, lack of equipment and overly rigid routines.<br />Only one in 25 workers at smaller, community-run centers said the same.<br />"What was held out to the Australian public was that the market would bring choice, competition, higher quality and lower prices, and in fact it did none of those things," Brennan said. "There's never been another decade where the price of child care has increased so rapidly."<br />By the middle of 2006, ABC was being hailed as a stock market success story, valued at 4.8 billion dollars. Groves, a former milkman who turned his delivery run into a multimillion-dollar dairy distribution business before turning to child care, was named one of Australia's richest men under 40 by BRW, a monthly business magazine that publishes a closely watched annual "rich list." At the height of his fortune, Groves bought a basketball franchise, traveled by private jet and drove a red Ferrari, according to media reports chronicling his career. His professional success and love of fast cars also earned him the nickname "Fast Eddy" among business journalists and colleagues.<br />Also in 2006, ABC borrowed millions of dollars to buy a U.S. child care chain, La Petite Holdings, for $330 million, and the British chain Busy Bees Group for £71 million, or $109 million. By June 30, 2007, ABC owned more than 2,200 centers in four countries, making it the world's largest publicly listed child care company by the company's calculation. It had total liabilities of 2.16 billion dollars, up from 111 million dollars in 2004.<br />The ABC house of cards began to collapse in February, when auditors discovered accounting irregularities that, once addressed, caused a 42 percent decline in recorded profits for the six months to Dec. 31, 2007. The news led to a 70 percent slump in ABC shares, sending investors fleeing.<br />By mid-2008, ABC was struggling to repay its debts as a result of rising interest rates. But analysts say reckless management and a shaky balance sheet propped up by intangible, or nonmonetary, assets were also responsible for the company's failure.<br />The plunge in ABC's share price led to margin calls for Groves, who was forced to sell his stake of 40 million dollars stake in the company, leaving him with a minor holding, according to Stephen Mayne, an independent shareholder activist who tracks Australia's major corporations in his online newsletter, The Mayne Report. Groves stepped down from the ABC board and management altogether on Sept. 30.<br />Calls to ABC were referred to McGrathNicol, the receiver, which said it could not comment on past decisions by ABC management.<br />In an Oct. 14 speech to the Ipswich Chamber of Commerce in his home state, Queensland, Groves said the company's rapid expansion into the United States, coupled with sharp falls in the Australian dollar - which made ABC's U.S. debts more expensive, was partly responsible for the company's decline. He also blamed a climate of fear among investors and short-selling hedge fund managers for undermining debt-heavy companies like ABC, sending share prices into free fall<br />"We went down a pathway that we probably shouldn't have gone down when we headed to the U.S.," Groves said at the luncheon. But he blamed the imperative to please investors, rather than poor judgment, for the decision. "The enormous amount of pressure that the public market can put on a company to continue to grow is astounding," he said.<br />The Australian stock exchange halted trading in ABC shares on Aug. 21, when the company failed to release its latest financial figures. By then, shares had fallen 94 percent to 54 cents from their 2006 peak of 8.80 dollars a share.<br />The company has sold 60 percent of its U.S. operations to Morgan Stanley Private Equity and has also sold down its holdings in Britain. But Ferrier Hodgson, ABC's bankruptcy administrator, has said that the company still owes 1.6 billion dollars to creditors, including Australia's big four banks and Temasek, the investment arm of the Singapore government.<br />Now Australia must decide how to fill the hole left by ABC's collapse. Officials are searching for parties to purchase all or part of ABC. But finding a buyer may be difficult in the current credit market, especially since up to 40 percent of ABC centers are unprofitable in their current state, according to Deputy Prime Minister Julia Guillard.<br />Child care is already in short supply in parts of Australia, especially cities, where parents can wait for months to secure a place.<br />The government has pledged 22 million dollars to keep all of ABC's 1,042 Australian centers running until the end of the year, but it has ruled out nationalizing the chain.<br />Children's advocacy groups across the board have called on the government to rethink its market-based approach to child care.<br />"The government now needs to think about how we are going to change the competition and regulatory environment to make sure this doesn't happen again," said Helen Kenneally, executive director of Childcare Associations Australia, which represents independent operators. "We think that there needs to be a limit on the number of services that any one person can own or manage nationally, or manage in a regional area."<br />Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has signaled that he may do just that. In a speech to Parliament on Nov. 21, he said the government was considering introducing tougher "creeping acquisitions" laws to stop corporations from establishing monopolies by gobbling up smaller players.<br />"That is the problem we face - it is a problem of market concentration," Rudd said. "When you have a company like that, with 25 percent of market share for long-day places in Australia, there is a problem for mums and dads right across the nation if something goes wrong."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/yourmoney/wbchild.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/yourmoney/wbchild.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><strong>David Brooks: Stimulus for skeptics </strong><br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />Over the past year, the U.S. federal government has poured money into the economy hundreds of billions of dollars at a time. It has also guaranteed investments, loans and deposits worth about $8 trillion. Barry Ritholtz, the author of "Bailout Nation," points out that this project constitutes the largest infusion in American history.<br />If you add up just the funds that have already been committed by the U.S. government, you get a figure, according to Jim Bianco of Bianco Research, that is larger in today's dollars than the costs of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the New Deal, the Korean War, Vietnam and the S&L crisis combined.<br />Is all this money doing any good?<br />The financial system seems to have stabilized, but bank lending is minimal, home prices keep falling, consumer spending is plummeting, and the economy continues to dive.<br />It could be we just have to endure some fundamental adjustments. Housing prices have to reach a new level. Consumption has to settle on a new trajectory. Until those fundamental shifts are made, no federal sugar rush is going to restore economic health.<br />That's not a recipe for doing nothing. It's a recipe for skepticism. And it leads to some guiding principles for those designing the $500 billion stimulus plan the next administration seems set on: Don't just throw more money into the sugar rush. Spend money on projects that will enhance the long-term economic health of the country even without a crisis. Do what you would do anyway, just do it faster.<br />To understand how the short-term response might serve America's long-term economic interest, I called up Michael Porter, the competitiveness guru at Harvard Business School. Porter wrote an outstanding overview of America's long-term economic challenges in the Oct. 30 issue of BusinessWeek.<br />Porter wrote that the U.S. economy has historically benefited from several great assets: an unparalleled environment for entrepreneurialism, a tremendous infrastructure for scientific research, the world's best universities, a strong commitment to competition and free markets, decentralized regional economies, and efficient capital markets.<br />But, Porter continued, these advantages are starting to erode. The United States has an inadequate rate of reinvestment in science and technology. America's confidence in free markets is waning. Lack of regulatory oversight has undermined capital markets. Universities have not sufficiently increased graduation rates. American workers do not have a credible safety net. Regulations and litigation have inflated the cost of business. Most important, there is no long-term economic strategy to organize responses to these problems.<br />I asked Porter how this short-term crisis might serve as an opportunity to address those long-term problems. First, he said, the Obama team will have to avoid a few temptations: Don't just try to throw out money as fast as possible to stimulate demand. Don't spread the spending around too thinly. Don't try to save jobs that are going to disappear anyway.<br />Then he threw out a bunch of ideas that could be part of a stimulus package:<br />Send federal money to the states, but make sure a lot of it goes to state universities. There's going to be increased demand for their services at the same time their budgets are cut. We can't weaken that link in the social mobility chain.<br />Extend unemployment insurance, but also create vouchers and loans so workers can get the skills they need to move on.<br />Extend the Cobra period another 12 months to head off a rise in the uninsured during the recession.<br />Adjust the capital gains rate to give people the incentive to become long-term investors. Right now there's a tension between the real economy, which is gradual, and the financial system, which is manic. Low rates shouldn't kick in until an investment is held three to five years.<br />Accelerate depreciation on energy efficient goods and services. Increase tax credits for energy efficient buildings and appliances.<br />Porter's basic message was that President-elect Barack Obama should do nothing in the short term that doesn't serve a long-term goal.<br />To which I would add just one idea: Create a network of social entrepreneurship investment banks. These regionally operated semi-public funds would invest in the best local community organizations, so they could bring their ideas to scale.<br />These funds, first proposed by the group America Forward, would supplement the safety net and employ college grads entering a miserable job market. They'd have a powerful psychological effect on a country that desperately wants to feel mobilized and united.<br />This is a mental recession as well as an economic one. Solving it means getting more and more people involved in a fundamental rebirth.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/edbrooks.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/edbrooks.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><strong>COLUMNIST</strong><br /><strong>Paul Krugman: Lest we forget</strong><br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />PRINCETON, New Jersey: A few months ago I found myself at a meeting of economists and finance officials, discussing - what else? - the crisis. There was a lot of soul-searching going on. One senior policymaker asked, "Why didn't we see this coming?"<br />There was, of course, only one thing to say in reply, so I said it: "What do you mean 'we,' white man?"<br />Seriously, though, the official had a point. Some people say that the current crisis is unprecedented, but the truth is that there were plenty of precedents, some of them of very recent vintage. Yet these precedents were ignored. And the story of how "we" failed to see this coming has a clear policy implication - namely, that financial market reform should be pressed quickly, that it shouldn't wait until the crisis is resolved.<br />About those precedents: Why did so many observers dismiss the obvious signs of a housing bubble, even though the 1990s dot-com bubble was fresh in our memories?<br />Why did so many people insist that our financial system was "resilient," as Alan Greenspan put it, when in 1998 the collapse of a single hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, temporarily paralyzed credit markets around the world?<br />Why did almost everyone believe in the omnipotence of the Federal Reserve when its counterpart, the Bank of Japan, spent a decade trying and failing to jump-start a stalled economy?<br />One answer to these questions is that nobody likes a party pooper. While the housing bubble was still inflating, lenders were making lots of money issuing mortgages to anyone who walked in the door; investment banks were making even more money repackaging those mortgages into shiny new securities; and money managers who booked big paper profits by buying those securities with borrowed funds looked like geniuses, and were paid accordingly. Who wanted to hear from dismal economists warning that the whole thing was, in effect, a giant Ponzi scheme?<br />There's also another reason the economic policy establishment failed to see the current crisis coming. The crises of the 1990s and the early years of this decade should have been seen as dire omens, as intimations of still worse troubles to come. But everyone was too busy celebrating success in getting through those crises to notice.<br />Consider, in particular, what happened after the crisis of 1997-98. This crisis showed that the modern financial system, with its deregulated markets, highly leveraged players and global capital flows, was becoming dangerously fragile. But when the crisis abated, the order of the day was triumphalism, not soul-searching.<br />Time magazine famously named Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers "The Committee to Save the World" - the "Three Marketeers" who "prevented a global meltdown." In effect, everyone declared a victory party over our pullback from the brink, while forgetting to ask how we got so close to the brink in the first place.<br />In fact, both the crisis of 1997-98 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble probably had the perverse effect of making both investors and public officials more, not less, complacent. Because neither crisis quite lived up to our worst fears, because neither brought about another Great Depression, investors came to believe that Greenspan had the magical power to solve all problems - and so, one suspects, did Greenspan himself, who opposed all proposals for prudential regulation of the financial system.<br />Now we're in the midst of another crisis, the worst since the 1930s. For the moment, all eyes are on the immediate response to that crisis. Will the Fed's ever more aggressive efforts to unfreeze the credit markets finally start getting somewhere? Will the Obama administration's fiscal stimulus turn output and employment around? (I'm still not sure, by the way, whether the economic team is thinking big enough.)<br />And because we're all so worried about the current crisis, it's hard to focus on the longer-term issues - on reining in the out-of-control financial system, so as to prevent or at least limit the next crisis. Yet the experience of the last decade suggests that we should be worrying about financial reform, above all regulating the "shadow banking system" at the heart of the current mess, sooner rather than later.<br />For once the economy is on the road to recovery, the wheeler-dealers will be making easy money again - and will lobby hard against anyone who tries to limit their bottom lines. Moreover, the success of recovery efforts will come to seem preordained, even though it wasn't, and the urgency of action will be lost.<br />So here's my plea: Even though the incoming administration's agenda is already very full, it should not put off financial reform. The time to start preventing the next crisis is now.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/edkrugman.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/edkrugman.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/lira.php">Italy to freeze tolls and restrict mortgage rates as part of economic stimulus plan</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/cathay.php">Cathay takes steps to address slowdown</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/28japan.php">Japanese manufacturers sharply cut back production</a><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><strong>Economy tones down U.S. sport of bargain shopping<br /></strong>By Michael M. Grynbaum<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />Nikki Nicely, 19, wanted a television - a Samsung flat-screen, to be exact, on sale for $798, marked down from $1,000 and available for a limited time in the wee hours of Friday morning at the Wal-Mart store in Columbus, Ohio.<br />So, at 4:40 a.m., when a fellow shopper tried to pry away the box she had been guarding for an hour, Nicely did not play nice. She jumped onto the man's back and began to pound his shoulders, screaming, "That's my TV! That's my TV!"<br />A police officer and security guard intervened, but not before Nicely took an elbow in the face. Still, when the dust settled, she had her hand on the box. "That's right," she cried as the man walked away. "This here is my TV!"<br />Welcome to Black Friday.<br />A quintessentially American ritual of self-sacrifice at the altar of consumerism, the Friday after the Thanksgiving holiday marks a day of 5 a.m. openings, 50 percent discounts and the occasionally lurid spectacle of shopping as competitive sport. It is also, historically, the day that many major retail outlets became profitable for the year. But caught by the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, retailers are facing weak sales, reluctant customers and the prospect of the worst holiday shopping season in decades.<br />In Long Island, New York, early Friday, the shopping turned tragic. A 34-year-old Wal-Mart employee was killed, the police said, after being knocked down and trampled by a wave of shoppers who broke down the doors of the store at the Green Acres Mall. Several other shoppers were hurt, including a 28-year-old pregnant woman who was taken to the hospital, the police said.<br />"The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority," Wal-Mart said in a statement, which identified the man as a temporary worker. "At this point, facts are still being assembled, and we are working closely with the Nassau County police as they investigate what occurred."<br />Retail outlets across the United States reported that the crowds were more mellow than usual, with more room to move in the aisles and fewer shoppers lined up outside before dawn.<br />"I've been doing this for 17 years. This year, it feels smaller," said Tracey Darwish, 37, who was waiting in line at the Wal-Mart in Columbus to buy "Madden NFL '09," the football video game for PlayStation 2, for $39, marked down from $59.<br />"Here we are, standing right in front of the 'Guitar Hero' and 'Rock Band' games," she said. "These are the hottest toys this year, and look, I have room to move my arms. Nobody's crushing me. I have room to move. I don't think I've ever seen that."<br />November and December sales usually make up 25 percent to 40 percent of annual sales, according to industry groups. But this month, sales are down by double digits for clothing, luxury goods, electronics and appliances. A survey by the National Retail Federation survey said that 128 million Americans planned to shop this weekend, compared with about 135 million last year. Shoppers seeking bargains on Friday morning said they were aware of the leaner turnout.<br />Darwish said that in the past she would "spend thousands of dollars on Black Friday" - even withdrawing money from her retirement account. But after losing her job as a medical assistant in August, her routine has changed. "My son told me this year all he wanted was 'Madden '09,"' she said. "Other than that, 'Save your money, Mom,' he told me."<br />At the same store, Charisma Booker, 31, stood with a pair of flat-screen televisions, one for each brother, and her reward after arriving at the store at 2:30 a.m. The store is open 24 hours, but sale items could not be purchased until 5 a.m.<br />"This year feels different," said Booker, a 10-year veteran of the early morning Black Friday rush. "There were a lot more people here last year. You could hardly move in this aisle. There are fewer people here this year, but they're more aggressive. I've never seen anybody fight like this. This is crazy."<br />At some stores, smaller items appeared to be more popular, reflecting the tough times many shoppers find themselves in. At a Best Buy in Beaverton, Oregon, a bin of $4.99 DVDs was almost empty after a crowd of about 200 rushed in at 5 a.m. Mike Papp, a manager, said bargain bins were moving faster than flat-screen televisions, which were the big seller last year.<br />Some customers decided that they could resist the urge to buy entirely - not a trend that brings a smile to a retailer's face.<br />"I've been doing this for four years. This time, I said, there isn't anything I really need," said Susan Koslovsky of Miami, who was shopping at the Manhattan flagship store of Saks Fifth Avenue. "Tonight, I'll go to sleep and say, 'That was good.' Every year I come here and buy two pocketbooks, but this year there aren't any good ones."<br />Randye Abrams, riding an escalator at Saks, complained that the selections had "all been picked over."<br />"They put everything on sale before the holiday so it's nothing different," said Abrams, who was visiting Manhattan from Los Angeles.<br />In Niles, Illinois, Wal-Mart shoppers said the economy had cast a shadow on holiday shopping, prompting them to look for bargains.<br />But Michael Owolagi, 23, of Chicago, said the hard times had the opposite effect on his consumer habits.<br />"The fact that the economy is down has actually led me to spend a little more this holiday season, because there are so many good sales out there today," said Owolagi, a nurse, who spent more than $1,000 at three retailers by 8:30 a.m. Armed with fliers from Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart, Owolagi bought two televisions, two cameras, two printers and a GPS device. Back in New York, Rosemary O'Brien, 55, of Newport, Rhode Island, glanced over the selection of silver-wrapped electronic corkscrews at Bloomingdale's, selling for $39.99. She said that she was trying to cut back after her business, Freedom Yachts, recently closed.<br />"I am paying a lot with credit cards, and I'm hoping the banks go out of business and I won't have to pay them back," O'Brien said.<br />Ken Hicks, president and chief merchandising officer for J.C. Penney, said the day "probably will not be as big as it has been recently, but it's still going to be a huge day."<br />But the only real winners this season may be bargain-hunters with money to spend.<br />For weeks, name-brand department stores have been trying to outdo one another to capture the attention of consumers who have become numb to normal discounts. With more deals on the way after Friday, shoppers can get impressive savings without necessarily having to brave the crowds or the cold on the day after Thanksgiving.<br />"There's no reason to suspect this will end," said Dan de Grandpre, editor in chief of Dealnews.com, which has been tracking Black Friday deals for about a decade. "This kind of heavy discounting will continue until we see some retailers start to fail, until they start to go out of business."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/usecon.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/usecon.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><strong>Wal-Mart worker dies in apparent shopping stampede</strong><br />By Jack Healy and Angela Macropoulos<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York was trampled to death by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.<br />At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, New York, Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee who had been waiting with other workers in the store's entryway.<br />People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid the man. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.<br />"They were like a stampede," said Nassau Det. Lieutenant Michael Fleming. "Hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him."<br />The employee, who was not identified, was taken from the Wal-Mart to nearby Franklin Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m., the police said. His exact cause of death has not been determined. The police said that three other shoppers were injured and a 28-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was taken to the hospital for observation.<br />One shopper, Kimberly Cribbs, said she was standing near the back of the crowd at around 5 a.m. on Friday when people started rushing into the store. She said several people were knocked to the ground, and parents had to grab their children by the hand to keep them from being caught in the crush.<br />"They were falling all over each other," she said. "It was terrible."<br />Crowds began building outside the Wal-Mart at 9 p.m. Thursday and grew throughout the night, as eager shoppers queued up in a line that filled the sidewalk and stretched toward the boundary fence of the Green Acres Mall.<br />At 3:30 a.m., store employees called the Nassau police to report that the crowd was growing quickly, the police said. Officers came by to try to organize the line, but were called away to a Circuit City, a Best Buy and a B.J.'s Wholesale Club nearby, to deal with crowds there.<br />A half-dozen Wal-Mart employees lined up in the entryway trying to hold back the crowd by pushing against the locked sliding doors, but they were overwhelmed by the force of the crowd, Lieutenant Fleming said.<br />As the doors snapped open and people streamed in, several people fell on top of one another. The 34-year-old employee who died was at the bottom of the pile, the police said.<br />On Friday, Wal-Mart released a statement saying that the man who was killed had been working for Wal-Mart through a temp agency. The company called the death "a tragic situation," and said it was working with police.<br />"The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority," Wal-Mart said in a statement.<br />Lieutenant Fleming said that the store "could have done more" to prevent the melee.<br />"I've heard other people call this an accident, but it's not," he said. "This certainly was foreseeable."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/29walmart.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/29walmart.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><strong>Burundi albinos live in fear of killers</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />By Jean Pierre Harerimana<br />On an inky night earlier this month, a gun-wielding gang burst into Generose Nizigiyimana's mud hut in Burundi and dragged her sleeping six-year old albino boy into the bushes.<br />The widow and her other dark-skinned children fled into the night and heard a gunshot a few moments later. They found the dismembered body of the little boy lying behind their home when they returned.<br />"After shooting him, they cut him into pieces and took his tongue, arms and legs," Nizigiyimana told Reuters Television. "They went away with the body parts."<br />Burundian officials say the young boy was the fourth albino murdered this year in the tiny east African country by criminals seeking body parts for witchcraft.<br />Albinos lack pigment in their eyes, skin or hair. Their killers believe their arms, legs, hair, skin and genitals can be used in rites to bring clients success in love, life and business, according to police and albino support groups.<br />Campaigners say about 30 albinos have been killed in neighbouring Tanzania in recent months.<br />Inside Burundi, near the border, 25 albinos have fled village homes to the small town of Ruyigi in fear for their lives. They are under police protection around the clock.<br />"We can't even go outside during the day because people could run after us and kill us," said Godefroid Hakizimana, a 26-year-old albino farmer.<br />"People say we have a good market, that they can make a lot of money with our body parts. Our lives are in danger, that is why we are not ready to go back to our villages."<br />He said Burundi's government had done little to protect people with his condition -- who already have a hard life living in region where there is plenty of sunshine. Albinos are more susceptible to skin cancer and sun burns.<br />Remy Nsengiyumva, a local administrator, said the security forces were doing all they could, but that it was clear why albinos in the area were being hunted.<br />"We have been told that there are people in Tanzania using albino body parts to improve their mining and fishing businesses," she said.<br />"I think the authorities in both our countries should sit down together and take joint measures to eradicate those killings."<br />Responding to the attacks in his country last month, Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete denounced the superstition surrounding albinos as a "stupid belief."<br />(Writing by Patrick Nduwimana in Bujumbura; Editing by Helen Nyambura-Mwaura)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/africa/OUKWD-UK-BURUNDI-ALBINOS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/africa/OUKWD-UK-BURUNDI-ALBINOS.php</a><br /><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>EU says clear evidence of war crimes in Congo<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />By Stephanie Nebehay<br />The European Union said Friday there was clear evidence of war crimes being committed in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and called on both sides to stop the violence.<br />Jean-Baptiste Mattei, France's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva who spoke on behalf of the EU, said both sides were carrying out executions and torture in North Kivu province.<br />"There is clear evidence that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been perpetrated," he told an emergency session of the U.N. Human Rights Council about Congo. "We must react firmly to put an end to the violence."<br />The European Union is under pressure from aid agencies and a group of world dignitaries to send troops to protect civilians and aid workers in eastern Congo until U.N. reinforcements arrive, but EU diplomats say the chances are slim.<br />More than 250,000 people have been driven from their homes since fighting erupted between Congolese forces and Tutsi rebel General Laurent Nkunda in August.<br />U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay told the 47-member Council that perpetrators needed to be held to account for killings, kidnappings, rapes and other atrocities.<br />"My office has documented a steady deterioration of the human rights situation," she said, noting that sexual violence by Congolese soldiers seemed to be escalating in its "most brutal forms."<br />She called for unhindered access for the U.N. force MONUC to conduct investigations into serious abuses.<br />The Human Rights Council convened its special session at the request of the EU, which submitted a draft resolution calling on the government in Kinshasa to shield civilians and investigate and bring to justice perpetrators of crimes.<br />A text submitted by Egypt on behalf of African states also calls for attention to the causes of the conflict, "including illicit exploitation of natural resources and the establishment of militia that are the basis of human rights violations."<br />A cease-fire declared by rebel leader Nkunda has halted battles with government troops, but his fighters have kept attacking the government's Congolese and Rwandan militia allies.<br />Congo's delegation to the session in Geneva, due to continue Monday, called for a halt to the support it said Nkunda was receiving from other countries and arms makers.<br />"The population in North Kivu needs peace above all through putting an end to the rebellion. One must tell those countries now providing military support to stop," its envoy said.<br />(Editing by Laura MacInnis and Matthew Tostevin)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC-RIGHTS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC-RIGHTS.php</a><br /><br />*******************<br /><strong>New U.S. relief plan may take time</strong><br />By Ron Lieber and Tara Siegel Bernard<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />For U.S. consumers buying homes, refinancing mortgages or seeking auto or student loans, the new government plans to make borrowing cheaper and easier sound like a gift.<br />One problem, however, is that whole categories of people may be ineligible. Those refinancing could be out of luck if their mortgage balances exceed what their houses are worth. And for all kinds of new loans, lenders have raised their standards even as their customers' credit records have deteriorated because of late payments and other problems.<br />And then there is the issue that the government's efforts may take a while to start working - if they do at all. Once again, the government hopes that the benefits to consumers will trickle down. It is not simply lending to them directly.<br />So while U.S. mortgage rates fell by at least a quarter of a percentage point Tuesday, the day of the government announcement, and stayed there Wednesday, it could take months for provisions that involve credit card and small-business loans to take effect.<br />"It's not going to be like flipping a light switch," said Joe Belew, president of the Consumer Bankers Association. "You're not going to see an avalanche of new loans. But the system is under a lot of stress, and anything that can lubricate the markets is a good thing."<br />And so it goes across the world. As China cuts interest rates and Europe introduces its own stimulus measures, consumers around the globe may not feel immediate relief: The benefits of the measures will take time to trickle down.<br />The U.S. federal government made two big moves on Tuesday. The first, already known as TALF, for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, is a $200 billion program to lend money to private investors who buy securities backed by student and auto loans, credit card debt and small-business loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration.<br />The goal of the plan is to fix the mechanism that keeps credit flowing freely from lenders to borrowers. Lenders typically package consumer loans into securities and sell them to investors. Then the lenders use the proceeds to issue more loans to consumers. But over the past two months, those investors have stopped buying.<br />To encourage those investors to start buying again, the Federal Reserve has agreed to lend them money at attractive interest rates to buy the securities backed by consumer debt, as well as to provide an insurance policy should the loans underlying those securities default.<br />In the second part of the program, the Fed has agreed to purchase $500 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae.<br />"This brings a major buyer into the marketplace with very deep pockets to snap up available securities - and a sizable number of them at that," said Keith Gumbinger, vice president of the market research firm HSH Associates in Pompton Plains, New Jersey. "With new demand for both debt- and mortgage-backed securities coming into the market, the dollar value of those investments can rise, helping to lower their yields. Mortgage rates track those yields, and decline right along with them."<br />Lower mortgage rates will certainly help some consumers qualify for mortgages; lower rates translate into lower payments. The move downward will also move some borrowers to try to refinance their mortgages. But that does not necessarily mean banks will be any more likely to oblige.<br />Another complication is that the value of many homes - even those owned by people with stellar credit - has declined, making refinancing difficult.<br />"At the end of the day, it still comes down, not to just a rate discussion, but a discussion about qualifications as well," said Cameron Findlay, chief economist at LendingTree. "There are fundamental elements of qualifications for loans that will inhibit the ability of this program to have any meaningful, significant impact."<br />Lower mortgage rates also do little when unemployment is rising and wages are stagnating, he added.<br />To qualify for the best rates, a borrower will need to have a credit score of at least 720, close to the U.S. median of reliability, and a down payment of at least 10 percent and probably closer to 20 percent. Borrowers seeking to refinance will need to have the same amounts in home equity.<br />Still, lower rates may lure some potential home buyers back to the market. Some brokers have already started fielding calls.<br />"The phones are ringing," said Joseph Taglivia, chief operating officer of Manhattan Mortgage. "There were certainly people who called to lock in a refinancing or to find out what they qualified for to purchase."<br />The efforts to loosen the purse strings in other areas of consumer lending may take longer, however, if they work at all. Most of the big credit card companies are parts of banks with billions on deposit. They can already use those deposits as a ready source for new credit card loans.<br />"Banks may want to fund fewer of these loans out of their deposits," said Odysseas Papadimitriou, who worked in the card industry at Capital One before starting Evolution Finance, parent company of Cardhub.com, a consumer card selection site. It is possible, he said, that they will simply swap one source of financing for another and not increase the total amount of the loans they are willing to make.<br />American Express is unique in that it does not have a big deposit-gathering apparatus. Joanna Lambert, a company spokeswoman, said that the company was still working through the details of the TALF program but would take advantage of it if it were eligible.<br />It is not yet clear how much the government program will help grease the wheels for small-business bank loans, but there is already a potential bright spot that business borrowers may not have considered.<br />"Credit unions have been seeing so many opportunities in the marketplace," said Christine Barry, research director at Aite Group, a financial services research and consulting firm. About 40 percent of credit unions are either lending to small businesses now or expect to start doing so soon, she said.<br />With auto and student loans, there may be more reason for optimism, given that many lenders in these areas are specialists who may not have access to consumer deposits to use for financing loans. The renewed opportunity to sell more loans to investors could help those consumers.<br />But none of the government's moves alters some unfortunate facts.<br />U.S. lenders want better credit scores from consumers in every category. At the same time, millions of people are much less credit-worthy than they used to be, because of the damage they have done to their credit scores through late or missed payments.<br />Lenders themselves have contributed to the downturn in credit-worthiness by lowering the credit limits on huge numbers of customers' credit cards. This has the effect of raising the percentage of available credit that a consumer is using, which usually causes their credit scores to fall.<br />Clearly, the banks do not have the confidence in how consumers will handle credit that they might have had six months ago. It is not clear whether a new source of funds will cure this skittishness.<br />Nor is it certain how much untapped desire to borrow exists. The fact that consumer spending fell an entire percentage point in October, as the Commerce Department reported Wednesday, may reflect something other than a lack of capital.<br />"If consumers are afraid to make purchases, it doesn't really matter how much available credit you have," said Papadimitriou of Evolution Finance.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/consumer.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/consumer.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>Crisis takes shine off Russia's Millionaire Fair</strong><br />Reuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />By Simon Shuster<br />The global financial crisis cast such a pall over Moscow's Millionaire Fair this week that even the yachts were two-for-the-price-of-one. And nobody was buying.<br />Instead, members of the crisis-hit Russian elite congratulated each other on simply finding the courage to attend what is usually a glittering show of ostentation.<br />"We're going through a murky and complicated period," socialite Ksenia Sobchak, the master of ceremonies, told the guests at the opening of the fair.<br />"Everyone is a superhero for finding it in themselves to come here tonight, to try to bask in the luxury."<br />With a helicopter and two dazzling sports cars greeting the guests at the door, there was plenty of luxury up for sale. But the main attraction seemed to be the central bar, where free champagne was served until around midnight.<br />As it began to run out, a Reuters reporter saw scuffles among the fur-clad ladies vying for a final glass.<br />"These are desperate times," said Irina Ivanova, a manager at Premium Yachts.<br />Moscow boasts more billionaires than any other city after a decade-long economic boom fuelled by soaring domestic consumption and high prices for raw materials.<br />But many fortunes have been clipped by the crisis, which has hammered investor confidence, wiped off more than a $1 trillion (653 billion pounds) from domestic stock values and pushed even Oleg Deripaska -- once ranked as Russia's richest man -- to turn to the state for financial help.<br />CRISIS, CRISIS, CRISIS<br />The first Millionaire Fair was held in 2002 in Amsterdam and organised by Dutch-based magazine publisher Gijrath Media Groep BV. The event has since been rolled out to other cities enjoying the fruits of growing affluence.<br />However, the current financial crisis, which many think could stall the boom and undermine Russia stability, was on everyone's lips on opening night this year.<br />Local celebrities at the event -- none had been flown in from Hollywood -- attributed the crabby mood of many guests to the state of the economy.<br />Some saw the crisis as a challenge which only the Russian soul can overcome, while others said the rich have no reason to worry as the crisis would only be bad for the poor people.<br />"These financial problems don't touch this stratum of society," said prima ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, who is a member of the ruling United Russia party.<br />But moustachioed crooner Villi Tokarev, dressed in a canary yellow suit and matching shoes, took a more geopolitical stance.<br />Asked if he was enjoying the event, he said: "The crisis will teach us discipline, to cherish what we forget to cherish. When its over, Russia will be the most powerful country in the world, with higher traditions and morals."<br />TWO-FOR-ONE YACHTS<br />This summer, Russia's wealthy fuelled a yacht craze in Moscow attracting some of the biggest international dealers to the capital.<br />That seems like a long time ago.<br />"But now it's all over," said Ivanova of Premier Yachts, standing beside the 18-metre Princess, which was guarded by men in ninja outfits.<br />A customer of hers in the Russian town of Samara, she said, had recently sold a boat worth 1.5 million euros (1.2 million pounds) for less than one third that price. "He had to cover a debt in a hurry."<br />Demand has become so bad, she added, that her company is selling the boats two-for-one. "You buy an 18-metre and you get a 10-metre yacht free... Nobody has taken us up on it yet, but at least it keeps people calling."<br />And by the looks of the parking lot, it is not only on the high seas that Russians are turning to modest vehicles.<br />"I only saw one Bentley outside, and I think that one was Sobchak's. It looks like everyone else came on their Toyotas," said singer Anna Sedakova, formerly of the pop group Viagra.<br />(Editing by Keith Weir)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/europe/OUKWD-UK-RUSSIA-MILLIONAIRE-feature.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/europe/OUKWD-UK-RUSSIA-MILLIONAIRE-feature.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Expecting the unexpected<br /></strong>By Conrad de Aenlle<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />After such a rotten year, investors may not be eager to contemplate the next one. Thinking ahead is part of the job description for people who work in the financial markets, though, so when fund managers and strategists were asked to foretell surprising developments for 2009, they bravely accepted the challenge.<br />Most of their predictions are upbeat, as they almost have to be. With the past and present so bleak, what could be more surprising than a rosy outlook?<br />A recovery of the financial system, the black hole of the global economy and stock market, might seem especially improbable. No surprise, then, that banks figure in the prognostications.<br />"The first thing that you just wouldn't expect is for the U.S. financial sector to come back in a big way," said Komal Sri-Kumar, chief global strategist at TCW Group, a subsidiary of the French bank Société Générale.<br />Sri-Kumar said he expected such an outcome in part because he thought that the U.S. economy, after a "pretty severe" recession in this quarter and the next, would rebound more swiftly than many of his peers were forecasting. One way for investors to benefit if he is right, he said, is to buy high-yield corporate bonds, which have been among the worst-performing assets this year.<br />"High-yield bonds are yielding upwards of 20 percent on the expectation that the default rate is going to increase exponentially in the next six months," Sri-Kumar said. "If the recession is a short one, they will come back and yields will narrow."<br />The life span of the downturn may hinge on Barack Obama's actions after he is sworn in as president. Tobias Levkovich, chief U.S. equity strategist at Citigroup, is looking for Obama to provide a much stronger jolt to the economy in the form of tax cuts and spending programs than is widely foreseen on Wall Street and in Washington.<br />"The Obama stimulus package could end up being much larger than anyone anticipates, given the needs generated by the credit crisis," Levkovich said. "A lot of people are talking about a couple hundred billion dollars. What if it's two or three times that?"<br />In that case, anxiety over deflation should abate, Levkovich predicted, and "the markets can get out of their funk."<br />Some economic and financial question marks are bound to linger whatever the people in charge do, but Max King, a strategist at Investec Asset Management, believes that the public is underestimating the potential for a rally in an investment that thrives on such uncertainty. "Gold will break well north of $1,000 an ounce," he said. That would be a gain of more than 20 percent from recent levels, and he suggested capturing it by buying one of the exchange-traded funds around the world that hold physical gold.<br />And now the bad news: Robert Arnott, chairman of the asset-management firm Research Affiliates, says he expects a development so grim that even investors accustomed to a whole new benchmark of awfulness would be shocked: a recession in China.<br />He does not mean a slowing in the pace of growth from breakneck to exhausting, but a genuine decline in economic output, perhaps 2 percent for the year.<br />"The credit and real estate bubble is, relative to the size of the banking sector and GDP, larger in China than the United States," Arnott said.<br />The investment strategy would be to resist bottom-fishing in emerging-market stocks, although he thinks that bonds there are a safe bet. "Bonds are cheap and priced to reflect a risk that's not in stocks yet," he said. "I think emerging-market stocks could suffer another leg down."<br />Kevin Landis, a portfolio manager for Firsthand, a firm specializing in technology industries, used his forecast to mock the pervasive gloom gripping the markets.<br />"Most companies will still be in business" at the end of 2009, he said. "That's my No.1 counter-trend argument."<br />As investors begin once more to tolerate, and then seek out, risk, they will shift out of government bonds into blue-chip stocks, he said. In his universe, that means companies like Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Intel.<br />And what if he is wrong? What if 2009 is even more rotten than 2008 and the public turns out to have been miserable with good reason?<br />"Then it doesn't matter what you do with your money," Landis said. "Then it's canned goods, bottled water and flashlight batteries."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/yourmoney/minvest29.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/yourmoney/minvest29.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Isolated Indonesia tribe immune to global crisis<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />By Ed Davies<br />High in the lush hills of far western Java, an animist tribe lives a peaceful existence, untouched by the turmoil of the financial crisis.<br />The Baduy, who are estimated to number somewhere between 5,000-8,000 people, are an anomaly surviving in tribal lands only 120 km (75 miles) from the teeming megacity of Jakarta.<br />Yet despite their proximity to the Indonesian capital, the Baduy might as well be a world away as they live in almost complete seclusion, observing customs that forbid using soap, riding vehicles and even wearing shoes.<br />Villagers stare blankly when asked about events in the outside world. Salina, a young mother, plays with her son on the steps of a thatched-roof hut in this small river-side village.<br />"I don't understand about any crisis," she says when asked about the economic turmoil that has taken its toll on the rupiah which has lost almost 25 percent of its value this year.<br />Within a 50 sq km (20 sq mile) area in the shadow of Mount Kendeng, the Baduy people cling to their reclusive way of life despite the temptations of the modern world.<br />No one is certain of their origin. Some anthropologists think they are the priestly descendents of the West Java Hindu kingdom of Pajajaran and took refuge in the limestone hills where they now live after resisting conversion to Islam in the 16th century.<br />They speak an archaic version of Sundanese, a language spoken by many in this part of western Java.<br />Blending ancient Hinduism and animism, the Baduy believe their homeland -- Pancer Bumi -- is the centre of the world and that they were the first people on earth who must follow a strict set of rules to prevent disaster striking.<br />Renowned for their mystical powers, Baduy leaders, known as pu'un, conduct rituals in a secret spot called Arca Domas surrounded by megaliths to appease ancestral spirits and gods.<br />TABOOS<br />On the surface at least their way of life appears primitive, but experts who have studied their farming techniques say they are well attuned to their environment.<br />For example, they are forbidden to use metal hoes, helping to prevent soil erosion, when cultivating a dry variety of rice.<br />Nonetheless, the long list of taboos often appear to make their lives unreasonably tough.<br />School education, glass, alcohol, nails, footwear, diverting the course of water and rearing four-legged animals are among some of the long list of things forbidden to the Baduy.<br />"There is no education. Going to the field is an education for them," said Boedhihartono, an anthropologist at the University of Indonesia, who has studied the Baduy for years.<br />Their society is divided into an outer zone of villages and an inner heartland of just three villages. Baduy who break the rules are banished to the outer zone.<br />Members of the inner zone of about 800 people, or 40 families, dress in white, as opposed to the black attire in the outer zone, and follow the Baduy traditions much more strictly.<br />Visiting the Baduy requires tough trekking along slippery paths in plunging valleys. Foreigners are allowed to visit the outer zone, but are limited to a few nights, sleeping on bamboo mats in villages pitch black at night due to a lack of power.<br />It is, however, nearly impossible for non-Indonesians to visit the sacred inner villages.<br />MONEY SEEPING IN<br />The outer area acts as a sort of buffer zone and the leaders from the inner Baduy sometimes pay surprise visits to make sure their outer zone compatriots are not breaking too many taboos.<br />They sometimes confiscate radios and other things deemed as pollutants from the modern world.<br />With none of the motorbikes and smoke-belching buses common in most of Indonesia, the villages are tranquil spots where the gentle clacking sound of weaving looms is one of the few noises.<br />But it is difficult to keep all things at bay from the modern world. On a recent trip some Baduy children had forsaken traditional wear, one wearing a blue Italian soccer shirt, while the use of formally taboo money has replaced bartering with the outside world.<br />The outer Baduy sell sarongs they make and also travel to nearby towns to sell honey and palm sugar. The cash is used to buy salted fish and other things they can't produce themselves.<br />"Even in the centre they already know money," said anthropologist Boedhihartono, who has over years developed what he describes as "a sort of friendship" with the Baduy.<br />He keeps a room free at his Jakarta home for when the Baduy sometimes make unannounced visits after a three-day bare-foot trek since they are not allowed to use transport.<br />Asked about whether they had much knowledge of the outside world, he said: "Of course not really, except if they come to my house they watch the TV."<br />While the Baduy are supposed to shun modern medicine, he said the use of antibiotics had helped sharply increase their numbers.<br />The main threats they faced, he said, are from outsiders trying to plunder their land and proselytising by some groups in the majority Muslim community surrounding them.<br />The Baduy have taken on some outside influences such as circumcision, which is in line with local Muslim practices.<br />Although generally left to their own devices by colonisers ranging from the Dutch to the Japanese, authorities have at times sought to include the Baduy in mainstream society.<br />When the government of Indonesia's long-time strongman president Suharto tried to foist development on the Baduy in the 1980s they sent an emissary to plead to be left alone.<br />Suharto, a deeply superstitious man with a weakness for Javanese mysticism, conceded and arranged for the Baduy to mark out their territory with poles to protect them from outside influence.<br />(Editing by Megan Goldin)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDONESIA-TRIBE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/28/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDONESIA-TRIBE.php</a><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv_zis3sISTM4YcA52pa8zmmy0AVuV6pEyCi_rY_s4vemWQ9VsCUayVne-FXQKN_414rh0PXupJVL6tIE10yMjP-278C9yj71gbThyMya9AOtJ1n6tudw9VmZbjsdXJHjciZfXXDcjaOQ/s1600-h/DSC02238.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273986052085219570" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv_zis3sISTM4YcA52pa8zmmy0AVuV6pEyCi_rY_s4vemWQ9VsCUayVne-FXQKN_414rh0PXupJVL6tIE10yMjP-278C9yj71gbThyMya9AOtJ1n6tudw9VmZbjsdXJHjciZfXXDcjaOQ/s320/DSC02238.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/drug.php">EU accuses drug companies of gouging consumers</a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr2t87YOmvd8_ifXacNwJ1vtKoIDdOO3JeOPApFc6lCuXxh09LCgRNNg2SmRdrKR2q0dfHKyp0OvuPIA7Io4bkBvj0qNtlrv6VIn0HqH26kxMlTPR4BgrShAArSIzCx-9bSS8eiKt8an4/s1600-h/DSC02240.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273986051065305410" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 227px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr2t87YOmvd8_ifXacNwJ1vtKoIDdOO3JeOPApFc6lCuXxh09LCgRNNg2SmRdrKR2q0dfHKyp0OvuPIA7Io4bkBvj0qNtlrv6VIn0HqH26kxMlTPR4BgrShAArSIzCx-9bSS8eiKt8an4/s320/DSC02240.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Transforming art into a cash</strong><br />By Marci Alboher<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />Some artists have begun to figure out ways to make money and make art - aiming to end the notion that "starving" and "artist" are necessarily linked.<br />Rather than seeing art as something to pursue in the hours when they are not earning a living, these artists are developing businesses around their talents. These artists are part of a growing movement that has caught the attention of business experts and is being nudged along by both art and business schools.<br />Living in the Internet era has certainly helped.<br />Claudine Hellmuth, for example, said that when she graduated from the Corcoran College of Art in Washington in 1997, career options for artists were limited. "You could teach, or do outdoor festivals, maybe get into a gallery," she said.<br />At the encouragement of her mother, she took an intensive summer course in Web programming and design at George Washington University and then returned home to Florida, where she found work as an online designer. All along, she continued to paint on the side, thinking that her day jobs would support her. A layoff in 2001 proved to be a turning point.<br />"I now had the skills to use the Internet to my advantage," she said. "I am so thankful that I left the art world for a little while." With a little Web savvy, she says, it is relatively easy for artists to reach a global marketplace for their work.<br />In a blog post on the American Express Open Forum, Steve King, a small business expert with Emergent Research, cited Hellmuth as an example of trends that are creating new opportunities for artist entrepreneurs.<br />King said he discovered Hellmuth after her name kept coming up in interviews with artists for research his firm was conducting on artist entrepreneurs. Hellmuth's success stems in part from the way she has created multiple revenue streams.<br />She has an online store on Etsy.com, a Web portal where artists sell their work. She does custom illustrations for customers using photographs they provide. She licenses her artwork for greeting cards, calendars and other products. She has written two books about her techniques and has a third one coming out. She tours the country teaching both business and art workshops. And last summer she partnered with Ranger Industries to manufacture a line of products including paintbrushes, paints and canvases.<br />"When I am making the custom artwork for people, there are only so many pieces I can make in a week, so it really limits the amount of income I can make," she said. By expanding into books and licensing deals for products, "then you have the potential to make a living."<br />Through her business, Hellmuth said, she contributes an equal share of the household income as her husband, who works on the technology side of newspaper publishing.<br />Art schools, too, are starting to step in. At the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla., students can now major or minor in a program called "The Business of Art and Design." Larry Thompson, the school's dean, said he was inspired to create the program when he read about Dan Pink's book, "A Whole New Mind," which popularized the notion that artists, especially those who can marry left and right brain skills, the analytical and the creative, will be in high demand in the coming years.<br />"I am committed to destroying the myth of the starving artist," Thompson said.<br />Alexander Niles, 14, a high school freshman in Miami with dreams of making it big as a musician, is young to be focused on making a living. But he has already become an entrepreneur.<br />It all began by accident, he said. He was late in handing in his choices for elective classes and landed in a course on business. For an assignment to write a business plan, he turned to his passion, guitars, and decided to create a business building custom guitars for other people, something he had already done for himself.<br />After refining his idea in class, Niles entered his business plan into a local competition sponsored by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship and captured the grand prize for South Florida, which allowed him to compete in a national competition in New York this fall.<br />The price for his guitars starts at about $2,000, and he expects to make a profit of around $700 a guitar. So far, he has made four, including one for a former instructor, Alex Fox, a flamenco guitarist who has endorsed Niles's company. Niles has set up a Web site, but he does not plan to start filling orders until he has lined up other endorsements, finished his YouTube video and started establishing his brand through an advertising campaign.<br />Though Niles has years of school ahead of him, he said he planned to tend to both his music and his business along the way.<br />"If I make it as a musician, then my guitars will go for way higher than I planned," he said, citing the example of Brian May of the band Queen who built his own guitar out of firewood with his father.<br />Niles and Hellmuth have learned on their own what Elliot McGucken teaches in his course, Artist Entrepreneurs, which he developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a grant from the Kauffman Foundation. McGucken's course, now taught at Pepperdine University, rests on the principle that those who create art should have the skills to own it, profit from it and protect it.<br />"It's about how to make your passion your profession, your avocation your vocation, and to make this long-term sustainable," he said.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/art.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/art.php</a></div><div><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb-gaxjJvTAgEja0KVZko0SHr3rD6WS7UwhogNnb-72e4HrUYgRbrBpuSSvT0ejwtsUQzhjq3ocU7gJfDctKQmkUsf_qAeKtZBC_4pARIRalKGviqdeoipOcuYGytocW8_bwjM9kfeRXs/s1600-h/DSC02241.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985768484133986" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb-gaxjJvTAgEja0KVZko0SHr3rD6WS7UwhogNnb-72e4HrUYgRbrBpuSSvT0ejwtsUQzhjq3ocU7gJfDctKQmkUsf_qAeKtZBC_4pARIRalKGviqdeoipOcuYGytocW8_bwjM9kfeRXs/s320/DSC02241.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_aI4KLpcqqr920ANNsYX0Ue6GOoZqWkTyOk16sz4gFYQXxrO3PDVeQr_AFowCxGF6GQhQr0eloaTNZy955N_8o1zIxw9Ii-YleKzxL517ApgH6WuWm9b_oHYzfijLOr-VtKQ9smgOabA/s1600-h/DSC02242.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985771237500850" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_aI4KLpcqqr920ANNsYX0Ue6GOoZqWkTyOk16sz4gFYQXxrO3PDVeQr_AFowCxGF6GQhQr0eloaTNZy955N_8o1zIxw9Ii-YleKzxL517ApgH6WuWm9b_oHYzfijLOr-VtKQ9smgOabA/s320/DSC02242.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><strong>New defense of attack offered by Georgia<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />TBILISI, Georgia: President Mikheil Saakashvili on Friday offered a new defense of Georgia's assault on South Ossetia in August, denying assertions that Tbilisi was the aggressor in the war with Russia that ensued.<br />Speaking before a bipartisan parliamentary commission on the war, Saakashvili dismissed as "utter nonsense" testimony this week by Erosi Kitsmarishvili, a former ambassador to Russia who said Tbilisi had convinced itself that it had the blessing of the United States.<br />The Georgian government, Saakashvili said, undertook "a military operation in order to offer resistance to a large-scale Russian intervention, a widescale assault on a peaceful population."<br />On Thursday, DefenE Minister David Kezerashvili told the commission that Georgia had attacked the rebel capital Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 and Aug. 8 because Russian forces were crossing the border and because it was a matter of time before they started attacking villages inhabited by Georgians.<br />But the Georgian leadership made no public statement at that time about Russian forces invading. The shelling of Tskhinvali after a cease-fire of several hours and the subsequent ground assault was justified as a response to rebel shelling of Georgian villages.<br />Saakashvili repeated a later assertion that Russia had already invaded and that his hand had been forced. He recalled the moment as "the most difficult choice of my life."<br />Russia refutes the and says that it only intervened in the region to defend South Ossetian civilians.<br />"Our answer to the question whether we have undertaken military action is 'Yes"' Saakashvili told the commission. "It was a difficult decision, but it was an inevitable one."<br />"It's the responsibility of any democratically elected leader to defend his country, borders and peaceful population," he said. " I couldn't believe they would be first to take this step."<br />The war that ensued piled pressure on already strained relations between the West and Russia and deepened concern over the security of the Caucasus as a transit route to Western markets for oil and natural gas.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/europe/georgia.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/europe/georgia.php</a></div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpQjsBwAdbeV5hPDwnahyphenhyphen4nsrTsfU-_L4YaOL_9hsZiQc5ZMcj7W_yAIglyB8XSM4s2gzminheG4Fhd1tW76g3-M05_qwKX1d5M6K_e6P44VyX9eThr_Ahjb_DilBTGh3VnRB1KKjE3qQ/s1600-h/DSC02243.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985765938681810" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpQjsBwAdbeV5hPDwnahyphenhyphen4nsrTsfU-_L4YaOL_9hsZiQc5ZMcj7W_yAIglyB8XSM4s2gzminheG4Fhd1tW76g3-M05_qwKX1d5M6K_e6P44VyX9eThr_Ahjb_DilBTGh3VnRB1KKjE3qQ/s320/DSC02243.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbIwrSGz-KgwX5Cp8RcM_HfbYt_AEWH9P_CQiEem433NFE_OmHR6JTMzUVtUdWKP8Y75-2YznJrtyi-h6ZgitAzS7_qtl1GIC9Tfg5XZTdX5UQQH5OUCt3CdphrZDhgFEX8UFRmiGD_88/s1600-h/DSC02244.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985767205114786" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbIwrSGz-KgwX5Cp8RcM_HfbYt_AEWH9P_CQiEem433NFE_OmHR6JTMzUVtUdWKP8Y75-2YznJrtyi-h6ZgitAzS7_qtl1GIC9Tfg5XZTdX5UQQH5OUCt3CdphrZDhgFEX8UFRmiGD_88/s320/DSC02244.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig9KFrVxSNUxxFKt60Ouj-wJ2Fj6_qIiNahNU6vutMyn7aqhnH3EvCCxV5SBXsywkNTdlaTrd-y3_y_ZBb-LAJDZ5La9B8FLGIaAhc-XITGOzKa6DCJP5yKnFQfVwlIkhLZt8iRbRn8I8/s1600-h/DSC02245.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985764914085778" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig9KFrVxSNUxxFKt60Ouj-wJ2Fj6_qIiNahNU6vutMyn7aqhnH3EvCCxV5SBXsywkNTdlaTrd-y3_y_ZBb-LAJDZ5La9B8FLGIaAhc-XITGOzKa6DCJP5yKnFQfVwlIkhLZt8iRbRn8I8/s320/DSC02245.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpjvUzF8nT9a8ajTwr6S0XjJEELTDCN3nzVLOButMTBSs3ZfP4BuoOHJYv-TO-tNzWw2ZWoVxXq1tfdamMufzkoFYFvTYBEKJeeYZ-bJm1lDw3fN0IkjQUOqQLDyfLOSE5R71VVm3cavQ/s1600-h/DSC02246.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985493913794962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpjvUzF8nT9a8ajTwr6S0XjJEELTDCN3nzVLOButMTBSs3ZfP4BuoOHJYv-TO-tNzWw2ZWoVxXq1tfdamMufzkoFYFvTYBEKJeeYZ-bJm1lDw3fN0IkjQUOqQLDyfLOSE5R71VVm3cavQ/s320/DSC02246.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT_MEAffhb2e25y_EpZa0cltvGv-aBiegpGeRrk1Zi8JyFBQRe0dfTD4i4WFVkBo6vlS1ctvRz_vtbXj28YDl_I-n7k3NMy0C9VqqCGc3uIWQB2puGAiYb7yUMe6pZ4zHGaXNnCqzMld8/s1600-h/DSC02247.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985493804897090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT_MEAffhb2e25y_EpZa0cltvGv-aBiegpGeRrk1Zi8JyFBQRe0dfTD4i4WFVkBo6vlS1ctvRz_vtbXj28YDl_I-n7k3NMy0C9VqqCGc3uIWQB2puGAiYb7yUMe6pZ4zHGaXNnCqzMld8/s320/DSC02247.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC5PBba6yUiA7T-JYMEfan5EQQDavaes9gVuwZwzNP0On_pZSBlUVFlFu806p_i4sh_NPBMRFPS2ZGmOkjq-j1Dily5ohQnnmGdBLOBTgAMRGPuTmyXsI2M__xe5eT1sBvUzMztw0UCHM/s1600-h/DSC02248.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985491885854130" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC5PBba6yUiA7T-JYMEfan5EQQDavaes9gVuwZwzNP0On_pZSBlUVFlFu806p_i4sh_NPBMRFPS2ZGmOkjq-j1Dily5ohQnnmGdBLOBTgAMRGPuTmyXsI2M__xe5eT1sBvUzMztw0UCHM/s320/DSC02248.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2sGga48fvyAurzt_3ZEN3rUa9W0sHZoKbI4IaE2cCe7t_Ve8I1P9_Pi7iti6ORxkT22uUrLCrQvE__0pWOOApn4sWtHO18fUjW-V2fkNHhfn58D44CSvK-tqbeibWq6h6sgtDqxlIWL4/s1600-h/DSC02249.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985491549785458" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 199px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2sGga48fvyAurzt_3ZEN3rUa9W0sHZoKbI4IaE2cCe7t_Ve8I1P9_Pi7iti6ORxkT22uUrLCrQvE__0pWOOApn4sWtHO18fUjW-V2fkNHhfn58D44CSvK-tqbeibWq6h6sgtDqxlIWL4/s320/DSC02249.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6PmlM9c9wQn6ks-_qEBmw1GQ4Pf1AFunzYZJazZvYfCPnnChamKq_GgLXcxQ5Vdr422fok0V84uD8ewcQBECWGhu7DumMQ6zufAmrmQaeG78A6aZiNhVArC3soPBx88i9hrOLlWR5Gxg/s1600-h/DSC02250.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985489931903330" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6PmlM9c9wQn6ks-_qEBmw1GQ4Pf1AFunzYZJazZvYfCPnnChamKq_GgLXcxQ5Vdr422fok0V84uD8ewcQBECWGhu7DumMQ6zufAmrmQaeG78A6aZiNhVArC3soPBx88i9hrOLlWR5Gxg/s320/DSC02250.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2ZrCZ6iFKX_gqlSLlOvyQIx6Bxpu7jOoMDmgBseO8eGpYkESih7YopNSaf0l9wSLTREVFjae__wGWGiD6aEXHK8vkcBwWlMxrnF4EfEW78zHnC_EyX6CPpeaiiHzdKIKIRPlZJewNJDA/s1600-h/DSC02251.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985250052400434" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 194px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2ZrCZ6iFKX_gqlSLlOvyQIx6Bxpu7jOoMDmgBseO8eGpYkESih7YopNSaf0l9wSLTREVFjae__wGWGiD6aEXHK8vkcBwWlMxrnF4EfEW78zHnC_EyX6CPpeaiiHzdKIKIRPlZJewNJDA/s320/DSC02251.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdYDkA2EvZQyQVev5UaL-nQzd7N_aHFMI-MhCCk9OaaS9L8NfQ2vWGDP5AJQnKTw4W8NY0fYRcoD_4bmLM7B_-VhYqnSiMYWbfWwOYrVIfrD0pHVBm12Jzo7P5_WAX_5vd_wAYNgW9IVs/s1600-h/DSC02252.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985250964443362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdYDkA2EvZQyQVev5UaL-nQzd7N_aHFMI-MhCCk9OaaS9L8NfQ2vWGDP5AJQnKTw4W8NY0fYRcoD_4bmLM7B_-VhYqnSiMYWbfWwOYrVIfrD0pHVBm12Jzo7P5_WAX_5vd_wAYNgW9IVs/s320/DSC02252.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYmksbc1dCfIly5djGxQgcb-UEbwiL5nHrHYJ6o4WkUnv2xnN8JwCIZEldIiywygDxLMZQGl0XUkAIl_uSqegDI6BGpleYtnZy1bzhd7MKz_7ujFqxlV0Diidco9gCC_bzL3dEE-e5hx4/s1600-h/DSC02253.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985242147292850" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYmksbc1dCfIly5djGxQgcb-UEbwiL5nHrHYJ6o4WkUnv2xnN8JwCIZEldIiywygDxLMZQGl0XUkAIl_uSqegDI6BGpleYtnZy1bzhd7MKz_7ujFqxlV0Diidco9gCC_bzL3dEE-e5hx4/s320/DSC02253.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMGuF4WIachsAW-UoeFcPZbQdYv6xIDOhlEyWr-xQ4ZuQ9jHWFFZyd7XtU-S0e-9izrcP5PCTi-F-bApQoeT5ysl_nV8snPdODQu7o984L2knbKS8cxAs82DjfH_cDVps3jXFmVhDbxBA/s1600-h/DSC02254.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985239365141426" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMGuF4WIachsAW-UoeFcPZbQdYv6xIDOhlEyWr-xQ4ZuQ9jHWFFZyd7XtU-S0e-9izrcP5PCTi-F-bApQoeT5ysl_nV8snPdODQu7o984L2knbKS8cxAs82DjfH_cDVps3jXFmVhDbxBA/s320/DSC02254.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja6EHVIDhI_lClT_jMn0xMEYUzDZ8bKCQ8aofZhOnw_efZoIbXn_F6jtf5QUtrBdbbJvB0B4DsSetFb7Dlvn72zSlSowSGoaY15uRb8uFseauQ4BISz1xyIt14fisLtEbC9TIFl948Vb0/s1600-h/DSC02255.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273985236650018786" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja6EHVIDhI_lClT_jMn0xMEYUzDZ8bKCQ8aofZhOnw_efZoIbXn_F6jtf5QUtrBdbbJvB0B4DsSetFb7Dlvn72zSlSowSGoaY15uRb8uFseauQ4BISz1xyIt14fisLtEbC9TIFl948Vb0/s320/DSC02255.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi79rBQge3DQBa9wh5mlsvyBdesjY1hNw4JvDNEV49CTZD3xVvr_c7wIqoo_JW9JA1zfKz2Kpl095FHYKQIMEUqnKGL0qYxdwTsgsTzxyrMA5zG4PmJ2IoS83Gu8TWpU0xA15nqaxKJA98/s1600-h/DSC02258.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984973705128962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi79rBQge3DQBa9wh5mlsvyBdesjY1hNw4JvDNEV49CTZD3xVvr_c7wIqoo_JW9JA1zfKz2Kpl095FHYKQIMEUqnKGL0qYxdwTsgsTzxyrMA5zG4PmJ2IoS83Gu8TWpU0xA15nqaxKJA98/s320/DSC02258.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigji0OKyRfN4HNxiXlMyvFlpTq3-zamydIMlBorWLqqOdfITY1HYNYohFkRWOCemPJqAzwScTSCbenhaOpPTuCsctmzoTDDBqpqUR0guQKoiW35qPqZP44MT7BahOShYrKHmby7sdnNaM/s1600-h/DSC02259.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984974175013122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigji0OKyRfN4HNxiXlMyvFlpTq3-zamydIMlBorWLqqOdfITY1HYNYohFkRWOCemPJqAzwScTSCbenhaOpPTuCsctmzoTDDBqpqUR0guQKoiW35qPqZP44MT7BahOShYrKHmby7sdnNaM/s320/DSC02259.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrTPf5dTSTFpuyae1yVU6LxwZXyYjQ-WclHnn8yXvoy_j4kILm91fbFSUiaeL0TmfAlxKgiEyHSjt_oOSUwRnV4aHFexUTaDwfSlCr949Ngpjc-vYsWd8Pnbw3RM4xbi0znuB8RFPo3VY/s1600-h/DSC02260.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984973553744354" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrTPf5dTSTFpuyae1yVU6LxwZXyYjQ-WclHnn8yXvoy_j4kILm91fbFSUiaeL0TmfAlxKgiEyHSjt_oOSUwRnV4aHFexUTaDwfSlCr949Ngpjc-vYsWd8Pnbw3RM4xbi0znuB8RFPo3VY/s320/DSC02260.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT4hWJPUn8zZM8IFEr4UHox9umsN7ghePnbJOHUlkQCxn8z6nleDhNTrA9Zx8PTK6xhQGjDHDJs0bgdBvK63qsg6F65wKB1Ls7dvMMQCFIu6RKewQN_X-WxH8upec9O83JOXJyEA-7yiM/s1600-h/DSC02261.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984965952435138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT4hWJPUn8zZM8IFEr4UHox9umsN7ghePnbJOHUlkQCxn8z6nleDhNTrA9Zx8PTK6xhQGjDHDJs0bgdBvK63qsg6F65wKB1Ls7dvMMQCFIu6RKewQN_X-WxH8upec9O83JOXJyEA-7yiM/s320/DSC02261.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvql0VdLDwaL7rHQZWaKMuNTx41dJ6xsSscIYi4VoNsrs5bS2ueXO3MhaCDIif-QghVC9VVr-BPQ9BPMWw1SG-I8rPdnmiTJySRSZpz4XJ1aUYnwH7JvVLCMycVVciCpUCbgaq1wEzHoI/s1600-h/DSC02262.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984965585120994" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvql0VdLDwaL7rHQZWaKMuNTx41dJ6xsSscIYi4VoNsrs5bS2ueXO3MhaCDIif-QghVC9VVr-BPQ9BPMWw1SG-I8rPdnmiTJySRSZpz4XJ1aUYnwH7JvVLCMycVVciCpUCbgaq1wEzHoI/s320/DSC02262.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK59WbIUqdk-Do2JGWi0HFyFhfUCPmEjkUkd21UPDVbIqpYiQGrboEj5w2CA0jeBVwssu68ElMoKr6nIquamnAEsgxQGbfBc2VbSsMk2sYfzfrNOyR7BxQRWP7L1N2dYs0pNxfeulOPwk/s1600-h/DSC02263.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984706872616178" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK59WbIUqdk-Do2JGWi0HFyFhfUCPmEjkUkd21UPDVbIqpYiQGrboEj5w2CA0jeBVwssu68ElMoKr6nIquamnAEsgxQGbfBc2VbSsMk2sYfzfrNOyR7BxQRWP7L1N2dYs0pNxfeulOPwk/s320/DSC02263.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJZeLivhVOor3HcJ4x_thG-CTPhnRMmbELSf1BRNFgABykn3UU-xs6a3f47QnCjQCncUoMCpXisoLgc2TtOqCzNevqvU6gc-nXEpKEzxJfdQnZoRP425fKuGBcYL0o7bI5D_UMxuh6AIg/s1600-h/DSC02264.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984698146365778" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJZeLivhVOor3HcJ4x_thG-CTPhnRMmbELSf1BRNFgABykn3UU-xs6a3f47QnCjQCncUoMCpXisoLgc2TtOqCzNevqvU6gc-nXEpKEzxJfdQnZoRP425fKuGBcYL0o7bI5D_UMxuh6AIg/s320/DSC02264.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKkQZdr0aO6oCiXSTPlzoMzHGFzooyJnNpj5D_GIdiGJcgfJ9A2N_BarVJVIA-QkQL7MeXJ8LU9tVzb4JDydwSmEV3ExDjpTjhu9rYwGvhu1e_ii4JUi_vOxnAhr1QtuZlecspxeFIVhU/s1600-h/DSC02265.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984696056854242" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKkQZdr0aO6oCiXSTPlzoMzHGFzooyJnNpj5D_GIdiGJcgfJ9A2N_BarVJVIA-QkQL7MeXJ8LU9tVzb4JDydwSmEV3ExDjpTjhu9rYwGvhu1e_ii4JUi_vOxnAhr1QtuZlecspxeFIVhU/s320/DSC02265.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaUdnGl3QiNP5NTLzNnfKqRXmU_0uiNV-2xt6bUXf56y9HzAj3bVzcYULG5O0sITqtLDK0xWtIGDZ21R4e6SlUJlqayB3B_ZOEXu9ROFs4l5xuxKkI7nZgNI-EiObV8t8M5KtJMAs4ZfY/s1600-h/DSC02266.jpg"></a><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuc8cxjfV4oHEKaqBMDihF59UQq1-TQRqW7EHL0OISLJNDI0JwGGW7Z6U46DiB_yocJaBI153ofkvjLxcE-z6xSGHJ5CX-GjRaGam_7uVuSpYg520gVsYLzharFLuULxsN4Y8JtPOWCAE/s1600-h/DSC02267.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984689530163954" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuc8cxjfV4oHEKaqBMDihF59UQq1-TQRqW7EHL0OISLJNDI0JwGGW7Z6U46DiB_yocJaBI153ofkvjLxcE-z6xSGHJ5CX-GjRaGam_7uVuSpYg520gVsYLzharFLuULxsN4Y8JtPOWCAE/s320/DSC02267.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOf8cfRfbNANu_cIySZeu6h9GEgllzXZyBlERTdGDC25GOm5oHv1ZdRbdDr7bA5njE5bM_pDQLojMo-mKpFTU-l0nMM5BgXELytw_BG7SPIAYzPhOOpRY1oufzOQDGAM8qwx8bBhwMQqA/s1600-h/DSC02268.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984469079206450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOf8cfRfbNANu_cIySZeu6h9GEgllzXZyBlERTdGDC25GOm5oHv1ZdRbdDr7bA5njE5bM_pDQLojMo-mKpFTU-l0nMM5BgXELytw_BG7SPIAYzPhOOpRY1oufzOQDGAM8qwx8bBhwMQqA/s320/DSC02268.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz2SCer50UapeZ_c1IrFaBdrGk4xg_OjuHLWqkKXMPPRMtFxu_aj2zc4nJ1JAatg2f8MT1jD9R5P4jicC4wYg1K-ZrX40ZcnBSTwyhkYnA8Nc_3txu16II7d3KEpfQFNHS0FbzmfbbTyw/s1600-h/DSC02269.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984467694792770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz2SCer50UapeZ_c1IrFaBdrGk4xg_OjuHLWqkKXMPPRMtFxu_aj2zc4nJ1JAatg2f8MT1jD9R5P4jicC4wYg1K-ZrX40ZcnBSTwyhkYnA8Nc_3txu16II7d3KEpfQFNHS0FbzmfbbTyw/s320/DSC02269.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA9gR6gHJc_ppE2UJAid4lyHeHW-NA7ow1QbbLPrebdyPXEvAm4D6-5TNvrmuWRYg8xsmcUBftQxzgQBnUiiF-FNdV_PVUYz7T-t_NUDU0NsdMNwwxauFecct72qnnArhdVE0zki334Pc/s1600-h/DSC02270.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984465217008386" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA9gR6gHJc_ppE2UJAid4lyHeHW-NA7ow1QbbLPrebdyPXEvAm4D6-5TNvrmuWRYg8xsmcUBftQxzgQBnUiiF-FNdV_PVUYz7T-t_NUDU0NsdMNwwxauFecct72qnnArhdVE0zki334Pc/s320/DSC02270.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUl7adx8YHFRqfHX5pqnMNL9MntSRNSt0qUGIFgYVYF6D3DoutAhyphenhyphenDtxCWYp6dE7kP6q2gdKgXpAYZwqT3CaJGBpYV6b-VwGuaeLId99gne2G6dy7EftgMeRPheOC3PFMVgEuMjgEDllU/s1600-h/DSC02271.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984464352119954" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUl7adx8YHFRqfHX5pqnMNL9MntSRNSt0qUGIFgYVYF6D3DoutAhyphenhyphenDtxCWYp6dE7kP6q2gdKgXpAYZwqT3CaJGBpYV6b-VwGuaeLId99gne2G6dy7EftgMeRPheOC3PFMVgEuMjgEDllU/s320/DSC02271.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_iCOCSoQHjmxVz9ZQRrxIfeY2_-Bhyphenhyphenri3fvHQgSR4yGXXShM8CXmfxxFoQN7RijMRBME6nJQRxifjAWIUsRnI0wxh5zAZp8jTtz4UUKLUk-bmJmjrvgZfz1vRiLClFhAXhU5Oi8xwq24/s1600-h/DSC02272.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984465539634706" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_iCOCSoQHjmxVz9ZQRrxIfeY2_-Bhyphenhyphenri3fvHQgSR4yGXXShM8CXmfxxFoQN7RijMRBME6nJQRxifjAWIUsRnI0wxh5zAZp8jTtz4UUKLUk-bmJmjrvgZfz1vRiLClFhAXhU5Oi8xwq24/s320/DSC02272.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-XD9yHmwYpOuOm3R5WEqopvQbL5BGEs6qkJREe43uD1x1zRIE1d7VoQKu1xcHQt7_dJirWhPSpaIYn3DnIkAGqFzqVTCd29TritqK00Pll_Ky9bF0qS1SO2oEJIgCXLaQEZJwB5r1uKc/s1600-h/DSC02273.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984230963320818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-XD9yHmwYpOuOm3R5WEqopvQbL5BGEs6qkJREe43uD1x1zRIE1d7VoQKu1xcHQt7_dJirWhPSpaIYn3DnIkAGqFzqVTCd29TritqK00Pll_Ky9bF0qS1SO2oEJIgCXLaQEZJwB5r1uKc/s320/DSC02273.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-t7E35flzabnEWTJ2wB5H7XiXTg5T2Yj5LqEi7Gs0PqcFL-FqK0XDazKGa8hMu4I4tvjjKOHHaukjvBUSBxL-sEwQWR-EHLAHykveVqk2S7gzEOZDwowoHes6J6k90XMWFmgAAx7eyvU/s1600-h/DSC02274.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984233374824210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-t7E35flzabnEWTJ2wB5H7XiXTg5T2Yj5LqEi7Gs0PqcFL-FqK0XDazKGa8hMu4I4tvjjKOHHaukjvBUSBxL-sEwQWR-EHLAHykveVqk2S7gzEOZDwowoHes6J6k90XMWFmgAAx7eyvU/s320/DSC02274.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-B_xzMD013trfJUke0RJBOKqKp1uspRbknggwMeQyct4EiQeBpaeq4Oe1GyqiDd5JyU-5R8OOsOLoCGnNJdep5TO4T6bBbkBEV7NuM6MM5oof53O_C9f5yWaRkQWFvG-RJhVZx_JYPRA/s1600-h/DSC02275.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984228423417218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-B_xzMD013trfJUke0RJBOKqKp1uspRbknggwMeQyct4EiQeBpaeq4Oe1GyqiDd5JyU-5R8OOsOLoCGnNJdep5TO4T6bBbkBEV7NuM6MM5oof53O_C9f5yWaRkQWFvG-RJhVZx_JYPRA/s320/DSC02275.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQIO4kduY6DQNo_-1Wp7_12tHPU4c7I2ZzV73b0j7_DNKS_ZRvnLm77cmzfJimU83ScYmxL1fEIK4-H10vzlOqgV0OVy_bhst3b-nrP2H_huDbB6PxwlOOI0HQnKoRZ65tEBHh1p9mFHg/s1600-h/DSC02276.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984229970338418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQIO4kduY6DQNo_-1Wp7_12tHPU4c7I2ZzV73b0j7_DNKS_ZRvnLm77cmzfJimU83ScYmxL1fEIK4-H10vzlOqgV0OVy_bhst3b-nrP2H_huDbB6PxwlOOI0HQnKoRZ65tEBHh1p9mFHg/s320/DSC02276.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVlOd4xjADugNMVtD-somtsQH_SPXwmgIE0AgHeRSu7x9DDIMBMghh2XC5OZrARmLFxrLB_7bHdCC_9oo_7VYpo39c7W4erW6Cqp2RNPVEunWGV3upWgU-cUtlSKGc3x0we0Evg0BOY0w/s1600-h/DSC02277.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273984226656365442" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVlOd4xjADugNMVtD-somtsQH_SPXwmgIE0AgHeRSu7x9DDIMBMghh2XC5OZrARmLFxrLB_7bHdCC_9oo_7VYpo39c7W4erW6Cqp2RNPVEunWGV3upWgU-cUtlSKGc3x0we0Evg0BOY0w/s320/DSC02277.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEw7x8kh7_TNz4zLLqc_L2L7vtBJ8QC4s5Z3rygxcyv2T50z4EIb1zF17vV0CYoKHPBF3l5zLSOX8vHMBgxpKe0LevEA1N-4nCRBtbf2fN-Plj6kxh7g8DXpxaSaiuzwcXNXJwmihJDLA/s1600-h/DSC02278.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273983967880630274" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEw7x8kh7_TNz4zLLqc_L2L7vtBJ8QC4s5Z3rygxcyv2T50z4EIb1zF17vV0CYoKHPBF3l5zLSOX8vHMBgxpKe0LevEA1N-4nCRBtbf2fN-Plj6kxh7g8DXpxaSaiuzwcXNXJwmihJDLA/s320/DSC02278.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-VChbIflH3kvWgMHmc-9Rci9zvQLMs75BAC75W3l2SsSqYUWcv1gNBvf42lqpgPgfPWHipNk-BxXiaZkkwOKwfnlOr7fB2WG6-BpdWWXBL4VzOUuiArgvsLNDHntRdYGrjIU_H_Z09uA/s1600-h/DSC02279.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273983964097625378" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-VChbIflH3kvWgMHmc-9Rci9zvQLMs75BAC75W3l2SsSqYUWcv1gNBvf42lqpgPgfPWHipNk-BxXiaZkkwOKwfnlOr7fB2WG6-BpdWWXBL4VzOUuiArgvsLNDHntRdYGrjIU_H_Z09uA/s320/DSC02279.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZMP0akpYdDKXFHDo2hXW4k_-qI9IfQKeMdJ8GSkxz80S3K44zbcD2chhr_u7nebmRnroVpsNQ0opOtXtuWMVHOHi6UYbBdkRWLR0qupZItgCnKGOJUgUSGypqamG1epZP-XdyjdYYjtU/s1600-h/DSC02280.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273983956959270338" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZMP0akpYdDKXFHDo2hXW4k_-qI9IfQKeMdJ8GSkxz80S3K44zbcD2chhr_u7nebmRnroVpsNQ0opOtXtuWMVHOHi6UYbBdkRWLR0qupZItgCnKGOJUgUSGypqamG1epZP-XdyjdYYjtU/s320/DSC02280.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1nLPKvhQ0EC49UtWAiwPHaYU3vnDstzVCxzg5Hs26j0hXjXvhxSpNbKGv2zXlox5xFFLx9DHoox7t44SUtTXAGJ6rwhm0mqF37buo4NMO-yiTD5Jecy7nIJ0HkHIx1RU7c7HkeD4BO5k/s1600-h/DSC02281.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273983956794880466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1nLPKvhQ0EC49UtWAiwPHaYU3vnDstzVCxzg5Hs26j0hXjXvhxSpNbKGv2zXlox5xFFLx9DHoox7t44SUtTXAGJ6rwhm0mqF37buo4NMO-yiTD5Jecy7nIJ0HkHIx1RU7c7HkeD4BO5k/s320/DSC02281.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVzzJt1yMZDYvJylBEkb4GaL25x8mGEfoV-Y0CTE0uS-0rPNr12QWpHwV4SuM3RXdVnzi2INazUJAz1CUcKLg_Bnaf6caaPkcpIauIVDknUUWbjdlZrSv9QAhEnd3Fg7jkYYvSGqHKYxw/s1600-h/DSC02282.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273983951361973442" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVzzJt1yMZDYvJylBEkb4GaL25x8mGEfoV-Y0CTE0uS-0rPNr12QWpHwV4SuM3RXdVnzi2INazUJAz1CUcKLg_Bnaf6caaPkcpIauIVDknUUWbjdlZrSv9QAhEnd3Fg7jkYYvSGqHKYxw/s320/DSC02282.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0G1nWbXccA0NThFHvdEpGG3qJVkq1ekjr0NfeKoJleeEvPNFcoOfAojpC62zXTwNmI2iVNYjzEXMnP4DPb2wbCQwKcpbrdgoWcRy2vSyTwU2DG1noWnvdXODYUqZ82zkERIFJuOLtpMg/s1600-h/DSC02283.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273983720569391938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0G1nWbXccA0NThFHvdEpGG3qJVkq1ekjr0NfeKoJleeEvPNFcoOfAojpC62zXTwNmI2iVNYjzEXMnP4DPb2wbCQwKcpbrdgoWcRy2vSyTwU2DG1noWnvdXODYUqZ82zkERIFJuOLtpMg/s320/DSC02283.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVp1D4yG0h6vMLBaHaJqev7mD8quiStGjFT_KKHLqTc6pO2uP6RufaGaf5XLlOwDFJIp57jPzJXregDFAL5QYEKaYJAkdW9SDJbw151sQ_EXMAU6AQ7ZT6nTZ1cMpp_VITXun9MeeEn4M/s1600-h/DSC02284.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273983723645381410" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVp1D4yG0h6vMLBaHaJqev7mD8quiStGjFT_KKHLqTc6pO2uP6RufaGaf5XLlOwDFJIp57jPzJXregDFAL5QYEKaYJAkdW9SDJbw151sQ_EXMAU6AQ7ZT6nTZ1cMpp_VITXun9MeeEn4M/s320/DSC02284.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7PE2Gmxw3CbTj_itD6CUdh_DaMNDJ778DY8uIJsllMN7AySTd8d0PG0RYA2Q-sNgUN1X5rY6UvMRnBa7lkbTkRGXqFwLNMltRUctbEI5P7IH5m709cebr_12MfK_nMtG_IdLsqDgSVwg/s1600-h/DSC02285.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273983712011085458" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7PE2Gmxw3CbTj_itD6CUdh_DaMNDJ778DY8uIJsllMN7AySTd8d0PG0RYA2Q-sNgUN1X5rY6UvMRnBa7lkbTkRGXqFwLNMltRUctbEI5P7IH5m709cebr_12MfK_nMtG_IdLsqDgSVwg/s320/DSC02285.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273987927519936690" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5if81NQjxpRTWXf-a3APGkqT5cNtkavg4DfMKrSaALDlfr1nebBsJVEgE3EcUX_6QH8Cd8mvRQ6RavX4dIzK0mLB_UADChbGcMIpiRtebWZnt0FVSdSVeEW2w3MOsFZOSHehlfoCS0Fg/s320/DSC02286.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO6o4ZfpvTpOIfGz7VwgdQGyeWx7SDJoGxcjax3mqcZe5UJEUjNLz_zyMhQiZapaGPnenrfNFwnZk-z4aoIgINwIR6pbZuBy4S0VLPPEywO1g_ilClFc9uZVeBVhcmMFLuFYrkuF0xJfI/s1600-h/DSC02287.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273983706538247714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO6o4ZfpvTpOIfGz7VwgdQGyeWx7SDJoGxcjax3mqcZe5UJEUjNLz_zyMhQiZapaGPnenrfNFwnZk-z4aoIgINwIR6pbZuBy4S0VLPPEywO1g_ilClFc9uZVeBVhcmMFLuFYrkuF0xJfI/s320/DSC02287.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>For sale: Prime London real estate, underground</strong><br />By Julia Werdigier<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />LONDON: For sale: a vast tunnel complex in London. Former tenants include the British secret service, the hot line between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and 400 tons of government documents. The asking price is $7.4 million.<br />After years of lying unused beneath the traffic-jammed streets of the city, the tunnel complex - 1.6 kilometers, or one mile, of underground corridors and adjacent rooms - is for sale by the BT Group, the largest British phone company. BT hopes the site's special features will attract buyers even as the property market above ground goes through its biggest downturn in decades.<br />Looking more like the set of a James Bond movie than prime real estate, the complex has a bar and two canteens, not in use, and a billiard room, not to mention functioning water and electricity supplies.<br />The tunnels were built during World War II as bomb shelters for about 8,000 people and were designed to allow them to survive for five weeks, shut off from the outside world.<br />An eclectic range of would-be buyers has asked about the space, including an overseas billionaire seeking a spot to hold his board meetings. Others who have expressed interest include buyers looking for a location for a wine collection, the London police and local electricity companies, said Niall Gallagher, the realty agent at Farebrother Chartered Surveyors, which is in charge of finding a suitable buyer.<br />"It's a weird and wonderful space," Gallagher said. "It really captured people's imagination. There were many inquiries, and we received one or two interesting offers."<br />The tunnels were built in 1940 during the blitz, when Britain came under sustained air attack from Nazi Germany. The government decided to create eight underground bomb shelters in London, as the Underground stations were not big enough to accommodate all those seeking refuge.<br />But the BT tunnels, and one other, were never used by the public because the government needed them for its operations. The BT tunnels became a temporary base for troops before D-Day while another tunnel was turned into the headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower.<br />In 1944, the tunnels became a base from which the Allies helped resistance movements in Nazi-occupied countries. Members of the secret service, in offices equipped with telephones and teleprinters hidden beneath the war-torn streets, helped coordinate as many as 10,000 men and women gathering support against the Nazi regime across Europe.<br />After the war, the tunnel network became an important operations center for the company once known as British Telecommunications. In recent years, though, BT has used the space mostly for storage. The company decided to put the tunnels up for sale a few weeks ago.<br />Though some may fantasize about buying the space and living a secret life in a cavernous underground world filled with gadgets suitable for the Bat Cave, the reality would most likely be harsher.<br />The air is dry, hot and stale. The constant rattling of London Underground trains rushing through a separate tunnel system just above and the sound of giant ventilation fans make the tunnels a noisy environment.<br />Turning the tunnels into a nightclub or hotel is out of the question because only two elevators link them to the outside world; even a small fire would be difficult to contain.<br />The tunnels are closed to the public. People who still work there, mostly for maintenance, enter through an inconspicuous iron door on Furnival Street, a quiet path behind busy Chancery Lane, close to the Royal Courts of Justice and not far from the River Thames.<br />Apart from an old industrial crane attached to the facade of the windowless building, nothing hints at the vast underground labyrinth below it.<br />The tunnels' history gives them an aura of mystery, kept alive by the handful of BT employees still working there.<br />David Hay, a BT historian, said legend had it that the government wanted to keep the location of the tunnels so secret that it hired foreign workers with no knowledge of the London streets to build them.<br />BT staff members are still under strict orders not to disclose the exact location of the system, though incomplete maps have surfaced on the Internet.<br />"We just don't know what the future owner will want to use it for, so we can't disclose more information," said David Hembra, one of the maintenance workers who visits the tunnels several times a week to check for gas leaks and other problems.<br />When Hembra started to work in the tunnels 10 years ago, their pivotal years were behind them, and little remained from the turbulent days of World War II. The offices were removed after the war ended, when new tenants moved in. Britain's public records office needed the space to store more than 400 tons of documents.<br />But it was not long before the documents had to be moved again to make room for a secure international telephone center that the government deemed necessary as relations between Washington and Moscow grew tense. During the Cold War, the British government instructed its telephone department, which later became BT, to set up a secret communications system based on the latest technology that would be able to survive a nuclear attack.<br />It was the beginning of the busiest period for the tunnels, with almost 200 workers spending their days and nights underground to route as many as two million calls a week across 6,600 phone lines. In 1963, the hot line established between Moscow and Washington after the Cuban missile crisis ran through the London tunnels.<br />The buzzing complex soon became known as "underground town," with a recreation room complete with dartboards and billiard tables, a movie theater and two dining halls. Workers often spent the night in sleeping rooms.<br />By the early 1980s, technology had advanced so much that the tunnels' telephone center had become obsolete, and BT's technicians moved back above ground.<br />Today, anyone wandering the vast corridors is still reminded of their place in history.<br />A bank of telephone cables stands next to colossal electricity generators from the 1960s. Remnants of that life are visible amid the brown-and-orange wall decoration in the old bar, color photographs of the world above in the restaurant and a canteen kitchen equipped with potato-peeling machine, dishwasher and a menu board offering sausages and peas.<br />"In the winter months, if you didn't come up at lunchtime, you never saw the light of day," John Warrick, a former worker, wrote on the Web site Subterranea Britannica, remembering his days in the tunnels. "Life down there was a little like living in a submarine."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/tunnel.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/business/tunnel.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Pound may be in peril<br /></strong>By Landon Thomas Jr.<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />LONDON: Could Britain's plan to borrow and spend its way out of a recession result in a run on the pound?<br />George Osborne, the Conservative Party's spokesman on such matters, warned of just such an outcome this month. Peter Mandelson, the Labour government's new business secretary, promptly accused him of being "reckless and irresponsible."<br />This week, Osborne again accused Prime Minister Gordon Brown of driving Britain toward bankruptcy but carefully avoided any mention of what one of the biggest borrowing surges in British history might do to its already fragile currency.<br />All the same, a feeling is building that Osborne may have had a point: The pound, already down more than 26 percent from its high of $2.11 a year ago, could have further to fall once the economy begins to feel the strain from the increased debt.<br />"Any economy with our level of borrowing and our deficit of trade should have one of the world's weakest currencies, not the strongest," said Peter Hargreaves, chief executive of Hargreaves Lansdown, an independent brokerage firm based in Bristol. "We don't make anything any more and our biggest export was the City of London, which is in disarray. We are in a very poor state."<br />Hargreaves sees the pound going to $1.25 from Thursday's level of $1.54, and he has recently moved £20 million of his liquid assets from sterling into U.S. Treasury bills and instruments denominated in, among other currencies, the Norwegian krone.<br />He says that other brokers he has spoken to in London's financial district are following suit by reducing their pound positions. "I just don't think this country understands how serious the problem is," he concluded.<br />Britain has a deep, emotional connection to its currency - the world's oldest still in use. Crashes, when they come - as they did in 1967, 1976 and 1992 - have been seen as moments of wrenching national shame.<br />The pound's buoyant decade under Brown's predecessor, Tony Blair, came to be seen as a lush emblem of Britain's financial as well as popular resurgence. Middle Eastern and Russian billionaires accumulated British assets and American investment bankers, once happy to be paid in dollars, schemed to see how they might manage to secure their bonuses in pounds.<br />Now, unemployment is rising, house prices are falling and economic growth is a far-away hope. Britain is seen as having been too reliant on volatile sectors like housing, finance and retail. The numbers paint a stark picture: Britain's public debt is expected to double to more than £1 trillion by 2012 - or about 60 percent of gross domestic product.<br />Still, when it comes to the currency - the ultimate barometer of an economy's heath and future prospects - few forecasters have predicted an outright collapse. In fact, after touching a recent low of $1.48, the pound has rallied in recent days on the back of the government's stimulus plan, which includes cuts in the sales tax and £3 billion in capital spending. Government officials said this week that the steep income tax increases built into the program, were aimed at high earners, were there to assure currency markets that these high debt levels would not be permanent.<br />According to Bloomberg, the average forecast by City economists for the pound at end of 2009 is $1.62 and $1.66 for 2010.<br />Of course, currency forecasting in the midst of a historic financial crisis is an imprecise art. And such estimates do not square with a growing pessimism about the pound's future that can be readily heard from the salons of West London to the trading desks of investments banks, where a popular bet has become when, as opposed to if, the pound might hit parity with the dollar.<br />The last time sterling came close to parity was February 1985, when the currency dipped below $1.10 as Britain was hobbled by labor unrest and a deep recession and investors abandoned the pound in droves.<br />"Parity is not impossible," said Theo Casey, an investment strategist at The Fleet Street Letter, a financial newsletter that has been forecasting a pound collapse since August. "We are this tiny island dependent on finance and housing. We are crashing and it will continue."<br />His newsletter foresees a return to past sterling crises, most notoriously the one in 1976, when Britain had to go to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. According to Casey, such dire prognostications have a hit a chord, as subscriptions for the newsletter have increased by over 30 percent since he and his team made their call on sterling.<br />Willem Buiter, a political economist at the London School of Economics, points out in his widely read blog, Maverecon, that there are two factors unique to this crisis that were missing during previous sterling reversions.<br />First, is that the pound now floats freely, making it more vulnerable to the whims of speculators. And second is the added burden of a devastated banking sector.<br />These two elements are joined by the one common cause of past currency panics: a bet made by currency speculators that the highly leveraged British state would become insolvent.<br />"A sterling crisis would not be something highly unusual, if your idea of the distant past is not the market trader's last month," Buiter wrote recently, voicing sympathy for Osborne's warning that Labour's plan might ruin the pound.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/pound.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/pound.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div><strong>British opposition party outraged over arrest of lawmaker in leak affair</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />LONDON: The opposition Conservative Party expressed outrage Friday over the arrest of a key lawmaker as part of an investigation into the leak of secret government information.<br />Damian Green, the party's spokesman on immigration issues, was taken into custody Thursday and released nine hours later in an operation that involved the anti-terrorism police. Conservatives said the arrest was related to the publication of news articles about the Home Office, which is responsible for immigration and for managing Britain's borders.<br />Mayor Boris Johnson of London, a Conservative, said it was "hard to believe that on the day when terrorists have gone on the rampage in India that anti-terror police in Britain have apparently targeted an elected representative of Parliament for no greater crime than allegedly receiving leaked documents."<br />The case is unusual because opposition politicians frequently exploit information leaked by civil servants without becoming subjects of police investigations. The Home Office has suffered a string of embarrassing leaks over the past year - including the revelations that an illegal immigrant had been employed as a cleaner in Parliament and that 5,000 illegal immigrants were working as security guards and bouncers in Britain.<br />A 26-year-old Home Office official was arrested on Nov. 19 on suspicion of misconduct in public office in connection with the same investigation into the leaks, the police said in a statement. The official, whose name was not disclosed, was released pending further questioning in January.<br />Asked about Green, the London police force issued a statement saying that a 52-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of "conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office." The police said he was released on bail without being charged, pending further questioning in February.<br />The Metropolitan Police department said that it was investigating an "alleged leak of confidential government material" and that the decision to carry out the arrest was made "without any ministerial knowledge or approval."<br />The police said that there was no suspicion of any terrorist offense, but that the investigation fell within the miscellaneous responsibilities of the Counter Terrorism Command.<br />Prime Minister Gordon Brown's office said he had no prior knowledge of the move. His Labour Party described the arrest as a police matter.<br />The Conservative Party's leader, David Cameron, described the police operation as "heavy handed."<br />A former financial journalist, Green was elected to Parliament in 1997 and re-elected in 2001 and 2005. He was recruited to serve as the Conservatives' spokesman on immigration in 2005.<br />He argued that opposition politicians have a duty to hold the government accountable. "I have many times made public information that the government wanted to keep secret, information that the public has a right to know," he said.<br />British law protects whistle-blowers under certain conditions, like in cases of reporting crimes or threats to public health and safety. Four years ago, Katharine Gun, a translator at the secret Government Communications Headquarters, leaked a confidential memo from U.S. intelligence officers asking their British counterparts to spy on members of the United Nations Security Council before the Iraq war. The prosecution dropped the case when it went to trial.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/europe/britain.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/europe/britain.php</a></div><div><br /><br /> </div><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong></div><div><br />Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/"><strong>Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment</strong> </a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-78000248129592893422008-11-28T13:10:00.025+01:002008-11-30T08:28:12.695+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Thursday, 27th November 2008<div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><div align="center"><strong>0820</strong></div><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><div align="center"><strong></strong></div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZw0xFV6Y-eAanIO0JAFXi89lkkm1bAfSpbDku0t4QsAO2khIPRA12V_ICa-CT_hJgl40mKwWM_YJN92E_Dbf_50HgMQH4neISvzVTwrrlW9k4y7XJ8sbuKeB5fGUFomxFN32EBYOBEy4/s1600-h/DSC02180.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682770132532418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZw0xFV6Y-eAanIO0JAFXi89lkkm1bAfSpbDku0t4QsAO2khIPRA12V_ICa-CT_hJgl40mKwWM_YJN92E_Dbf_50HgMQH4neISvzVTwrrlW9k4y7XJ8sbuKeB5fGUFomxFN32EBYOBEy4/s320/DSC02180.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>U.S. food prices expected to keep going up</strong><br />By Andrew Martin<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />For more than a year, U.S. food manufacturers have been shaving package sizes and raising prices, declaring that they had little choice because of unprecedented increases in the cost of raw ingredients like corn, soybeans and wheat.<br />Now, with the price of grains and other commodities plunging, it may seem logical that grocery prices will follow. But while some grocery items like milk and fresh produce are dropping, the prices of most packaged items and meat are holding firm or even increasing. Experts warn that consumers should not expect lower prices anytime soon on most items at the grocery store or in restaurants.<br />U.S. government and industry economists project that the overall cost of food will continue to climb in 2009, led by increases for meat and poultry. A big reason, they say, is that food companies still have not caught up with the prolonged run-up in commodity prices, which remain above historical averages despite coming down from their highs early this year.<br />The Agriculture Department is forecasting that food prices will increase 3.5 to 4.5 percent in 2009, compared with an estimated 5 to 6 percent increase by the end of this year.<br />Some economists project even steeper increases next year. For instance, Bill Lapp, principal at Advanced Economic Solutions in Omaha, Nebraska, said he expected food prices to jump 7 to 9 percent next year.<br />"For the last 21 months, food manufacturers, restaurants and livestock producers have been absorbing significant costs that in my view are likely to be passed on to consumers in 2009 and beyond," said Lapp, a former chief economist at ConAgra Foods.<br />While predicting future food prices is an inexact science, data released by the Labor Department last week suggested the forecasters might be right.<br />Overall consumer prices recorded the biggest drop in the history of the Consumer Price Index, but food prices continued to inch upward, albeit at a slower pace than in previous months. The CPI showed that grocery prices rose 0.1 percent in October.<br />Some of the more visible items on grocery shelves, including produce and dairy products, dropped sharply in recent weeks, but not enough to offset the general trend of rising prices. Restaurant prices rose 0.5 percent in October.<br />Commodity prices began climbing rapidly in the fall of 2007, and food companies were hit hard by the increases. They tried to slow eroding profit margins by cutting operating costs, making packages smaller and raising prices.<br />Some companies, like Kellogg's and Heinz, have managed to offset the higher ingredient costs and post robust profits by using shrewd commodity hedges and by raising prices without losing many customers. They also benefited from a trend of consumers eating out less and buying more groceries.<br />But other food companies have struggled. Hershey's, for instance, locked in high cocoa prices this year only to see prices drop this fall, analysts say. And meat and poultry companies have been hit by higher feed costs and a limited ability to charge higher prices, at least in the short term.<br />Now, even though ingredient costs like corn and wheat have dropped, meat and poultry providers say they still have not raised prices enough to cover their increased costs. And packaged food manufacturers are unlikely to lower prices because commodity costs remain relatively high and they are still trying to rebuild eroded margins.<br />Michael Mitchell, a spokesman for Kraft Foods, said the company's food ingredient costs this year were running $2 billion higher than in 2007, a 13 percent increase, but that the company had raised its overall prices by only 7 percent.<br />William Roenigk, senior vice president and chief economist for the National Chicken Council, said his industry had been losing money for more than a year. Chicken producers are now trying to recover those costs by reducing production, which will eventually alter the balance between supply and demand. "The time is coming when we're going to see a very significant increase in the retail price of chicken," he said.<br />The restaurant industry, which has been battered by a sharp drop in customers, also says it has not been able to raise prices enough to keep pace with the cost of ingredients.<br />People in the restaurant business said they did not like raising prices during an economic downturn. "If anything in this environment, one would be looking at the ability to offer much greater emphasis on value pricing in restaurant menus," said Hudson Riehle, chief economist of the National Restaurant Association. "In contrast, exactly the opposite is happening. Our operators are being forced to raise menu prices at the highest rate since 1990."<br />Many economists acknowledge that predictions about food prices over the next couple of years are guesses, because commodity prices are unpredictable. Ephraim Leibtag, an economist for the Agriculture Department, said food inflation would slow by the middle of next year if commodity prices remained low. "Right now the forecast is about 4 percent, but that would be lowered if we do not see any surge in commodity costs over the next few months," he said.<br />A reason that overall food prices are expected to continue increasing is the lag between price increases for basic commodities and for finished food products in the grocery store, particularly for meat and processed foods. Consider the price of corn, an ingredient in things like cereal and breaded shrimp. It was not too long ago that corn hovered around $2 or $3 a bushel.<br />But corn prices began climbing last fall and peaked around $8 a bushel in June. They have since dropped to about $3.50 a bushel, still above the historical norm. Some food manufacturers locked in prices for corn and other commodities in the spring and summer, fearing that prices could go even higher. But prices fell instead, and they are now stuck with the higher prices until their contracts expire.<br />When costs go up for livestock producers, they are often unable to immediately raise prices because those prices are set on the open market, which is dictated by supply and demand. Instead, they begin reducing the size of their herds or flocks, which eventually leads to less meat on the market and higher prices. But reducing livestock production can take months to years, and in the interim it can actually suppress prices as breeding animals are slaughtered to reduce production.<br />The prospect of more food inflation is inflaming a debate over its causes. Many food manufacturers and economists maintain that one culprit is government policies promoting the use of ethanol fuel made from corn.<br />About a third of the corn crop is used for ethanol, putting ethanol producers in competition with livestock farmers and food manufacturers. The result, they contend, is that prices for corn are now higher and more volatile.<br />"The connection of oil prices to agricultural commodities is new as of 2007, and it's a major game changer for those in the food production business," said Thomas Elam, president of FarmEcon, a consultancy.<br />But ethanol advocates counter that the food industry's arguments have been proved false, saying that corn prices have declined as ethanol production is increasing. Matt Hartwig, spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol industry group, said food companies were "very quick to tell the American public that they had to raise food prices because corn was so expensive, and that the reason corn was so expensive was corn-based ethanol."<br />Hartwig added: "Now, clearly, we know that relationship doesn't exist. If ethanol isn't the reason, what is the real reason for food prices going up?"<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/27food.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/27food.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>Expect commodities to come back<br /></strong>By Pratima Desai<br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />LONDON: Commodities' fall from grace in recent months has been fast and furious, and further losses cannot be ruled out as the economic and demand landscape deteriorates over coming months.<br />This will add to deflation fears, but not for long, because many commodities are expected to hit a floor soon as cuts in output curb supplies. The notable exceptions could be copper and oil.<br />"Just as the market was irrational on the way up, it will be irrational on the way down," said Ian Morley, a director at Quantum, a fund manager in Britain. "We're probably not too far from the bottom, but it doesn't mean oil can't fall further - another 20 percent is possible."<br />That could take crude to about $40 a barrel, a drop of about 70 percent since a record above $147 a barrel in July.<br />Some analysts say strong talk and production cuts from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the oil producing group that controls about 40 percent of the world's supplies, could slow the descent to that level or even drive a swift rally if OPEC cuts output too deeply.<br />But Michael Lewis, global head of commodities research at Deutsche Bank, said cuts by OPEC could take about a year to have an effect.<br />"We're looking for a low of about $30-$35 a barrel by the end of next year," he said.<br />So for now, with prices falling, central banks slashing interest rates and recession being a reality in major economies from Japan to Germany, deflation remains a danger. After hitting high levels just a few months ago, inflation is falling in all industrialized economies as growth falters.<br />"We all know headline inflation rates will probably touch the zero line by the middle of next year," Klaus Wiener, head of research at Generali Investments, said. "Raw material prices will start rising again, but it won't happen in 2009."<br />The mood in the grains market is also somber. Prices of the benchmark U.S. corn futures contract for December have dropped by more than half to about 350 cents a bushel since July.<br />"Demand for meat appears to be waning," the Swiss bank UBS said in a recent note. "This will weigh on corn demand with over 65 percent of corn being used as feed in an average year." UBS expects to see corn prices average 450 cents a bushel this year and 400 cents in 2009.<br />Some industrial metals could also fall further, even though prices of copper, for example, at $3,600 a ton, are near the marginal cost of production for the most expensive processes, estimated at more than $3,500 a ton.<br />Average costs of production for copper, used in power and construction, are estimated at $2,000 to $3,000 a ton, depending partly on whether they include the revenue from byproducts like molybdenum, which is used in making steel.<br />Analysts expect the copper market to show a surplus of 100,000 tons this year and as much as one million tons next year. Some expect to see copper hit $2,800 a ton, a drop of nearly 70 percent since an all-time high of $8,940 in July.<br />"Prices are well above costs for many producers," said Catherine Virga, analyst at CPM Group. "We have not had significant enough cuts in copper production to move the market out of being in a surplus next year."<br />But in the long term, fund managers say that infrastructure spending plans and demand for commodities from fast-growing countries like China could mean the next upswing after 2009 could be sharper and much more inflationary.<br />They say the world could be facing a shortage of raw materials more acute than previously thought, partly because many companies are shelving expansion plans.<br />"We have growing scarcity of natural resources with fast-growing countries like China and India demanding more," said Wiener of Generali.<br />A series of government stimulus packages around the world could help stimulate demand. In China, the state media have reported that provincial governments' plans would add an extra 10 trillion yuan, or $1.5 trillion, to a plan costing 4 trillion yuan announced by central government earlier in the month.<br />Barack Obama has talked about a two-year plan to revive the U.S. economy after he becomes president. In October, he called for a $175 billion stimulus measure.<br />"New bridges, new roads and new power stations will all require more in the way of resources," said Andrew Cole, director of asset allocation at Baring Asset Management. "We're worrying more about long-run inflationary pressures then we are about short-term deflationary pressures."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/col27.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/col27.php</a><br /><br />*************<br /><strong>New smokeless tobacco worries experts</strong><br />By Roni Caryn Rabin<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />Camel Snus, the latest smokeless tobacco product to hit the American market, is not your grandfather's chaw.<br />Available in three flavors and packaged in attractive tins, Snus does not have to be spit out and therefore can be used just about anywhere -- "at a concert, right in front of security guards," "on a jet from Miami to L.A.," or at an "overpriced tapas restaurant," a promotional brochure suggests.<br />And Snus delivers a powerful dose of nicotine: eight milligrams in each pouch, a spokesman for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which manufacturers Snus, acknowledged on Wednesday. A pouch amounts to a single dose.<br />That's far more nicotine per gram than is present other popular chewing tobacco products, according to some researchers, who are concerned that Snus may turn out to be both carcinogenic and highly addictive.<br />Chewing tobacco regularly increases the risk of developing oral cancers; recent studies have associated heavy use with increased odds of pancreatic cancer, as well. The European Union banned sales of an earlier formulation of Snus in 1992 after a World Health Organization study determined the product could cause cancer. Snus is still sold in Sweden, where it originated, and in Norway.<br />Health officials in West Virginia analyzed a version of Snus marketed earlier this year in parts of the United States and found it contained five milligrams of nicotine per gram of tobacco, or about two milligrams per pouch serving, said Robert Anderson, deputy director of the prevention research center at West Virginia University.<br />Since then, he said, the amount of tobacco and the concentration of nicotine in each pouch appear to have increased. "The nicotine in these products doesn't happen by accident," Anderson said.<br />The latest packaging does contain more tobacco, 0.6 grams per pouch instead of 0.4 grams, and therefore more nicotine, according to R.J. Reynolds spokesman David Howard.<br />The disclosure dismayed some public health officials.<br />"It's so high in nicotine that the probability of becoming addicted to it with utilization of just one tin is going to be very high," said Bruce Adkins, director of the division of tobacco prevention of the West Virginia Bureau for Public Health in Charleston, West Virginia<br />R.J. Reynolds is hoping Snus will appeal to adult tobacco users because it "meets societal expectations as well," Howard said. "There is no second-hand smoke, no spitting."<br />But by providing users a nicotine fix without lighting up, Snus may tempt consumers to ignore initiatives designed to reduce tobacco use, such as indoor smoking bans, experts said.<br />Since Snus can be used discreetly, it may also appeal to teenagers, Anderson said. "The surreptitious aspects of it will be very obvious to them." More Articles in Health »<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/healthscience/27nicotine.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/healthscience/27nicotine.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>Study hints at health benefit of red wine<br /></strong>By Nicholas Wade<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />A new insight into the reason for aging has been gained by scientists trying to understand how resveratrol, a minor ingredient of red wine, improves the health and lifespan of laboratory mice. They believe that the integrity of chromosomes is compromised as people age, and that resveratrol works by activating proteins known as sirtuins that restore the chromosomes to health.<br />The finding, published online on Wednesday in the journal Cell, is from a group led by David Sinclair of the Harvard Medical School. It is part of a growing effort by biologists to understand the sirtuins and other powerful agents that control the settings on the living cell's metabolism, like its handling of fats and response to insulin.<br />Researchers are just beginning to figure out how these agents work and how to manipulate them, hoping that they can develop drugs to enhance resistance to disease and to retard aging.<br />Sirtris, a company Sinclair helped found, has developed a number of chemicals that mimic resveratrol and are potentially more suitable as drugs since they activate sirtuin at much lower doses than resveratrol. This month, one of these chemicals was reported in the journal Cell Metabolism to protect mice on fatty diets from getting obese and to enhance their endurance in treadmills, just as resveratrol does.<br />Though the sirtuin field holds considerable promise, the dust has far from settled. Resveratrol is a powerful agent with many different effects, only some of which are exerted through sirtuin. So drugs that activate sirtuin may not be as splendid a tonic for people as resveratrol certainly seems to be for mice.<br />The new finding concerns maintenance of the chromosomes, the giant molecules of DNA that make up the genome.<br />Each cell has six feet, or 1.8 meters, of DNA packed into its nucleus, carrying the 20,000 or so genetic instructions needed to operate the human body.<br />Each cell must provide instant access to the handful of these genes needed by its cell type, but also keep the rest firmly switched off to avoid chaos.<br />Sirtuin's normal role is to help gag all the genes that a cell needs to keep suppressed. It does so by keeping the chromatin, the stuff that wraps around the DNA, packed so tightly that the cell cannot get access to the underlying genes.<br />But sirtuin has another critical role, one that is triggered by emergencies like a break in both DNA strands of a chromosome. After a double strand break, sirtuin rushes to the site to help knit the two parts of the chromosome back together. But in this salvage operation, it leaves its post, and the genes it was repressing are liable to come back into action, causing mayhem.<br />This, Sinclair and his colleagues suggest, may be a fundamental cause of aging in mice and probably people, too.<br />The gene-gagging role of sirtuin was discovered in the 1980s by biologists studying yeast, a standard laboratory organism. Sinclair and Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in 1997 that sirtuin could also repair a certain kind of genomic damage in yeast, and in doing so extended the yeast cell's lifespan.<br />But this particular kind of damage does not occur in mammalian cells, raising the puzzle of why extra sirtuin should be good for them.<br />Sinclair's new report, if verified, resolves this problem by showing that sirtuin has retained its genomic repair role in higher organisms but that the repair is focused on a different kind of genomic damage - that of breaks in a chromosome.<br />These experiments "elegantly demonstrate" that sirtuin works in much the same way in mammals as in yeast, Jan Vijg of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine wrote in a commentary in Cell. The question now is whether sirtuin is a pro-longevity factor in mammals, he said in an e-mail message.<br />Ronald Evans, a biologist at the Salk Institute, said the new report was provocative but did not prove the case that the relocation of sirtuin was a cause of aging. Tests with mice genetically engineered to lack the sirtuin gene could show if the mice suffered from premature aging, as Sinclair's idea would predict.<br />Sinclair said he agreed that the case for sirtuin's role in aging had not been proved. "We are careful not to say this is the cause of aging, but based on everything we know it's not a bad hypothesis," he said.<br />It would be nice to test aging in mice that lack the sirtuin gene, as Evans proposed, but they die too young, Sinclair said.<br />Sinclair has been taking large daily doses of resveratrol since he and others discovered five years ago that it activated sirtuin. "I'm still taking it, and I feel great," he said, "but it's too early to say if I'm young for my age."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/healthscience/health.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/healthscience/health.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqz-Fp-Td9Cyc7yfvXZHgCX2s1vFaisKTRBUGrhLNgKlMngTtXxPXGlDVlud9P8blZVJkm8We58bzIik6iRbm8c_DDIlhe6AHk1e4APmL1MxA2t7q0DOCNC1pBpN3ccK2pv9dGlPkSH1s/s1600-h/DSC02181.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682769507842818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqz-Fp-Td9Cyc7yfvXZHgCX2s1vFaisKTRBUGrhLNgKlMngTtXxPXGlDVlud9P8blZVJkm8We58bzIik6iRbm8c_DDIlhe6AHk1e4APmL1MxA2t7q0DOCNC1pBpN3ccK2pv9dGlPkSH1s/s320/DSC02181.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>EDITORIAL</strong><br /><strong>Save the economy, and the planet</strong><br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />Environment ministers preparing for next week's talks on global warming in Poznan, Poland, have been sounding decidedly downbeat. From Paris to Beijing, the refrain is the same: This is no time to pursue ambitious plans to stop global warming. We can't deal with a financial crisis and reduce emissions at the same time.<br />There is a very different message coming from the United States. President-elect Barack Obama is arguing that there is no better time than the present to invest heavily in clean energy technologies. Such investment, he says, would confront the threat of climate change, reduce dependence on foreign oil and help revive the American economy.<br />Call it what you will: a climate policy wrapped inside an energy policy wrapped inside an economic policy. By any name, it is a radical shift from the defeatism and denial that marked President Bush's eight years in office. If Obama follows through on his commitments, America will at last provide the global leadership that is essential for addressing the dangers of climate change.<br />Still two months from the White House, Obama has convincingly reaffirmed his main climate related promises. One is to impose (Congress willing) a mandatory cap on emissions aimed at reducing America's output of greenhouses gas by 80 percent by midcentury. According to mainstream scientists, that is the minimum necessary to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Obama's second pledge is to invest $15 billion a year to build a clean economy that cuts fuel costs and creates thousands of green jobs. That includes investments in solar power, wind power, clean coal (plants capable of capturing and storing carbon emissions) and, as part of any bailout, helping Detroit retool assembly lines to build a new generation of more fuel-efficient vehicles.<br />Obama has surrounded himself with like-minded people who have spent years immersed in the complexities of climate change. His transition chief, John Podesta, was an early advocate of assisting the automakers and of finding low-carbon alternatives to gasoline. Peter Orszag, his choice to run the Office of Management and Budget (where environmental initiatives went to die during the Bush years) is an expert on cap-and-trade programs to limit industrial emissions of greenhouse gases.<br />Success is not guaranteed. At least on the surface, it seems counterintuitive to impose new regulations (and, in the short term anyway, higher energy costs) on a struggling economy. Obama will need all his oratorical power to make the opposite case.<br />The historical landscape from Richard Nixon onward is littered with bold and unfulfilled promises to wean the nation from fossil fuels, especially imported oil. What is different now is the need to deal with the clear and present threat of global warming. What is also different is that the country has elected a president who believes that meeting the challenge of climate change is essential to the health of the planet and to America's economic future.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/opinion/edplanet.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/opinion/edplanet.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>Scientists crack iceberg mystery<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent<br />U.S. scientists have figured out how icebergs break off Antarctica and Greenland, a finding that may help predict rising sea levels as the climate warms.<br />Writing in Friday's edition of the journal Science, they said icebergs formed fast when parent ice sheets spread out quickly over the sea.<br />"It won't help the Titanic, but a newly derived, simple law may help scientists improve their climate models" and predict ice sheet break-up, they said in a statement. The Titanic sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, killing 1,500 people.<br />Ice cracking off into the ocean from Antarctica and Greenland could be the main contributor to global sea level rises in the future. If all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica melted, seas would rise by more than 60 metres (196 ft).<br />The formation rate of icebergs was less linked to factors such as ice thickness, width of the ice flow, distance from land or waves, the scientists said.<br />Ice sheets are giant frozen rivers, caused by snowfall, that slowly flow to the sea and then break up.<br />In Antarctica, the Ross Ice Shelf extends 500 miles (800 km) over the ocean before the edges snap off and form icebergs. Many other ice sheets stretch just a mile or two.<br />Computer models that predict how ice sheets behave in warmer weather generally gloss over exactly how icebergs break off because researchers have failed to understand the mechanism, known as calving.<br />"For iceberg calving, the important variable -- the one that accounts for the largest portion of when the iceberg breaks -- is the rate at which ice shelves spread," the study said.<br />A fast spread means cracks form throughout the shelf and make it crack up. A slower spread means that deep cracks do not form as fast and the ice sticks together.<br />"The problem of when things break is a really hard problem because there is so much variability," lead author Richard Alley, of Pennsylvania State University, said.<br />"Anyone who has dropped a coffee cup knows this. Sometimes the coffee cup breaks and sometimes it bounces," he said of the problems of understanding cracking.<br />The U.N. Climate Panel predicts seas will rise by 18 to 59 cm (7-23 inches) this century because of warming stoked by human use of fossil fuels.<br />(Editing by Catherine Bosley)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/europe/OUKWD-UK-CLIMATE-ICE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/europe/OUKWD-UK-CLIMATE-ICE.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMXXguzCkakRcwAFn2zhizservhGuBENRefcMd9Zm2JSvkjnBIs2sIuL4m-lmo6gToaLmgNQ4N_beL32FMvFKFAUb_nq9k0ByJJLB0mImfo0Yrh6ZV7hTxw6-vd6_bnmHjTcr_HdyxyFs/s1600-h/DSC02182.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682768793085858" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMXXguzCkakRcwAFn2zhizservhGuBENRefcMd9Zm2JSvkjnBIs2sIuL4m-lmo6gToaLmgNQ4N_beL32FMvFKFAUb_nq9k0ByJJLB0mImfo0Yrh6ZV7hTxw6-vd6_bnmHjTcr_HdyxyFs/s320/DSC02182.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong>China dampers growth in airline industry</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />SHANGHAI: China, the biggest air-travel market in Asia, will stop approving plane orders and the establishment of new carriers to avoid overcapacity during an economic slowdown, a regulatory official said Thursday.<br />Airlines will be able to buy planes that have already been approved, said the official, Liu Shaocheng, head of policy and research at the Civil Aviation Administration of China. Some orders would also be signed next month, he added, without saying when the ban would take effect.<br />Slowing capacity growth may help the nation's airlines cope with the global recession, which is expected to hold down air travel in China for as many as three years, according to the regulator. The government may also lower fuel prices and cut taxes after granting a 3 billion yuan, or $439 million, bailout to the parent of China Southern Airlines, the biggest carrier in the country.<br />The move to aid China Southern Airlines appears to be the first step in a government rescue of state-controlled airlines, including Air China and China Eastern, hit hard by weak air traffic demand and hefty losses on fuel price hedging.<br />"There is no doubt that Air China and China Eastern will both get similar aid packages soon," said Li Lei, an industry analyst with China Securities. "But they will probably all end up in the red this year as the cash injection is too late to bolster their bottom lines."<br />The regulator has applied to reduce domestic jet fuel prices to close a gap with international prices, Liu said. The proposal is awaiting approval from the National Development and Reform Commission. China controls fuel prices for domestic routes only.<br />The government is working on cutting taxes for airlines and on lowering tariffs imposed on imported plane parts, Liu said. Taxes account for 8.3 percent of Chinese airlines' operating costs, compared with an average 2 percent worldwide, he added.<br />Fewer orders in China may curb sales for Boeing and Airbus, which are counting on emerging markets to offset waning demand for aircraft in the United States and Europe. Airbus expects to conclude deals with China for 150 to 200 planes before the Chinese New Year in January, the chief commercial officer of the company, John Leahy, said this month.<br />China's economy, the biggest contributor to global growth, will expand at the slowest pace in almost two decades next year, the World Bank forecast this week.<br />The economic slowdown has cooled demand for air travel. China's air passenger numbers rose 2.4 percent in the first 10 months of 2008 from a year earlier, trailing the regulator's forecast of 14 percent for the full year. Chinese airlines had a combined 4.2 billion yuan loss in the period, according to the regulator.<br />China had a fleet of 1,256 aircraft as of Oct. 31. That is expected to rise to 1,550 in 2010, according to the aviation regulator's long-term plan.<br />Chinese airlines, which began to boom after the end of the 2003 SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, crisis as China's brisk economic growth spurred business and leisure travel, saw a sudden reversal of fortune early this year with a series of natural disasters and a sudden economic slowdown.<br />With high levels of debt as they aggressively built up their fleets, and with notoriously low levels of service and efficiency after years in a stodgy state-run system, they had been especially vulnerable and were seeking partners to bolster their finances and operations even before the downturn.<br />China Southern said Wednesday it was considering transferring shares to its state parent in return for some government funds, although such a move would require government approval.<br />China Eastern's shares were suspended from trade Thursday as it announced that its parent company was also applying for state aid, while Air China's Hong Kong-listed shares rose 16 cents, a surge of 9.4 percent, to 1.86 Hong Kong dollars, or 24 U.S. cents, in anticipation that it would benefit as well.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/air.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/air.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><strong>As oil prices fall, tensions among OPEC members seem to deepen</strong><br />By Jad Mouawad<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />For the first time in a decade, oil producers are facing a real test of their unity.<br />As the OPEC cartel meets in Cairo on Saturday, exporters are being pummeled by a triple whammy of lower prices, falling demand and declining revenue. The group, whose members account for more than 40 percent of global oil exports, is desperately seeking ways to stop the drop in prices, which have fallen from their summer peaks at a record pace.<br />But the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is increasingly torn between its moderate members, led by Saudi Arabia, which can afford a period of lower oil prices, and countries with high government spending, like Iran and Venezuela, which have become much more dependent on high prices.<br />These two groups have often clashed in the past, and as prices plummet the tensions are once again bubbling to the surface.<br />When oil prices collapsed to $10 a barrel in 1998, OPEC producers managed to set aside their squabbles to push prices back up. Thanks mostly to a growing global economy and tightening supplies, producers saw a sharp rally in oil prices over the last 10 years.<br />But as the global economy sputters, the recent decline in oil prices has been staggering, and producers have been incapable of slowing the slide.<br />After rising above $145 a barrel this summer, oil prices have fallen below $55 a barrel, their lowest level in more than three years. Instead of coasting on growing demand, producers are confronted with a significantly different environment, and must adapt to a world of slowing consumption and overflowing oil supplies. They must also contend with hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue.<br />In the last two months, OPEC agreed to cut its output by two million barrels a day. While analysts say members of the cartel are generally abiding by their pledge, the effect on the market has failed to materialize so far.<br />Since the group's last meeting a month ago, OPEC's reference basket price — an average of oil grades sold by producers of the cartel, including Saudi Arab Light and Sahara Blend from Algeria — has fallen by more than half, reaching a low of $42 a barrel last week.<br />The cartel's traditional hawks have been pushing for a more aggressive cut in production this week, and there is talk of trying to rally non-OPEC producers to help stabilize the market. The oil minister of Venezuela, Rafael Ramirez, suggested the cartel should reduce its production by an additional one million barrels a day, a position that was endorsed by Iran.<br />But a decision is far from certain, and on Thursday the Ecuador Oil Minister Derlis Palacios said OPEC members will not decide to cut output at their Cairo meeting on Saturday, reported Reuters. He said members will instead leave any decision for the cartel's next gathering in December.<br />Cairo "is a preparatory meeting for the one in Algeria," Palacios told a local radio station. Other producers are dragging their feet. The president of OPEC, Chakib Khelil, said the group needed to see how well producers were complying with their prior commitments to pare supplies before agreeing to a new cut. The group is scheduled to meet again in Algeria next month.<br />"There are disagreements between producers," said Greg Priddy, an oil analyst at Eurasia, a political consulting group in Washington. "Some members are below their pain threshold, especially Iran. But the Saudis will not allow themselves to be strong-armed. They want to see how everyone is complying before agreeing to another round of cuts."<br />Guy Caruso, the former administrator of the Energy Information Administration, said the Saudis have been cautious so far, trying to balance their budget requirements with concerns about the global economy. Even if OPEC agreed to a new cut in production, analysts doubt that all the countries would abide by their quotas, and it would fall to Saudi Arabia to shoulder the brunt of the cutbacks.<br />"The Saudis have the longer-term view," Caruso said. "They don't want to be in the situation they were in the 1980s when almost all the burden fell on them to defend the price."<br />The drop in prices is threatening the economic and political foundations of many oil producers. Iran's populist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is expected to run for re-election next year while Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is being contested in local elections at home. Both countries need oil above $90 a barrel to balance their budgets, according to various estimates.<br />"The Iranians, the Russians and the Venezuelans, who had benefited the most from the rise in price, are the ones paying dearly now with the collapse," said Lawrence Goldstein, a veteran energy analyst.<br />But while different producers have competing agendas, the drop in prices has been so rapid that even moderates are feeling the sting.<br />"Prices have gotten to a point that they are hurting everybody now," Goldstein said. "A world of $50 oil or less is in no one's interest within the organization."<br />This weekend's meeting may include proposals to open consultations with producers outside of the cartel, the Iranian envoy has indicated, and could set the contours for a coordinated response between OPEC and non-OPEC producers like Mexico and Russia. In the late 1990s, Norway and Mexico trimmed their production to bolster oil prices after the Asian economic crisis.<br />The Russian energy minister, Sergei Shmatko, on Tuesday suggested that his country might reduce its output in tandem with OPEC. He said that Russia required $95 a barrel next year, otherwise its budget would be strained and its currency would suffer.<br />But with its production already declining this year because of a lack of investments, it is unlikely that Russia will follow through, analysts said.<br />Over the last decade, OPEC has stepped in three times with large production cuts to stop prices from falling — in 2001, 2003 and 2006. Only once, however, did producers fully comply with their pledges to trim their output, according to analysts at Barclays Capital.<br />When prices last fell toward $50 a barrel, at the end of 2006, members of the cartel agreed to cuts totaling 1.7 million barrels a day but they cut only 900,000 barrels a day, according to Barclays.<br />Yet prices rebounded because oil production from non-OPEC producers, like Mexico and Norway, was disappointing and consumption kept rising.<br />Now, even if OPEC agrees to reduce its output further, it is doubtful that oil will rebound soon. In the past, it has typically taken three to six months for oil prices to rise after OPEC trims supplies, according to Deutsche Bank.<br />"In terms of crude oil, we believe downward pressure on prices is likely to persist throughout next year," according to a report by Deutsche Bank. "OPEC will struggle to cut production as fast as world growth is slowing over the next 12 months."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/27opec.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/27opec.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>Sharp plans joint solar venture with Enel</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />TOKYO: Sharp of Japan, Enel of Italy and a third manufacturer will invest more than $2.6 billion in Italian solar power ventures to tap growing demand for cleaner energy.<br />Top solar power firms are hurrying to expand capacity even as the sector smarts from a worsening global economy, which is drying up financing for new ventures and forcing smaller solar power firms to push back investment.<br />Sharp, the world's No.2 maker of solar cells after the German company Q-Cells, said it and Enel planned to spend about ¥100 billion, or $1.05 billion, to set up solar power generating plants in Italy with a total generating capacity of 189 megawatts by the end of 2012.<br />Sharp and Enel, with an unnamed third manufacturer, also plan to build a factory in Italy to produce thin-film solar cells, aiming for initial output of 480 megawatts in 2010 and ultimately raising output to about 1 gigawatt.<br />Sharp said total initial investment for the factory is likely to be at least ¥72 billion, and analysts expect that investment to more than double to more than ¥150 billion when the factory reaches full capacity.<br />Sharp is stepping up investment in an effort to retake market share from Q-Cells, whose aggressive capital spending plans outstrip those of its rivals.<br />The consumer electronics maker is reinventing itself as a device maker, supplying or planning to supply liquid crystal display panels to Japanese TV makers like Sony, Pioneer and Toshiba.<br />Sharp will now sell equipment to the joint venture and charge fees for its technology and solar operations know-how in an effort to position itself in the solar power industry, its executive vice president, Toshishige Hamano, said Thursday. Sharp, which cut its annual profit outlook by one-third in October, could increase its sales in the short term by selling its technology and any equipment it develops in a joint venture with the semiconductor equipment maker Tokyo Electron.<br />But that could hurt its brand and deplete its technological edge in the long run, one analyst said. "With LCD prices sliding, Sharp is under more pressure to recover its initial investment quickly, and the temptation for a quick fix is understandable," said Yoshihisa Toyosaki, president of J-Star Global, an information technology consulting firm in Japan.<br />"But this raises the cost performance of rivals with lower personnel costs and government backing," he said. "It is not a strategy for a company with decades of experience and an established brand."<br />In the future, Sharp also plans to step up production of silicon wafers and join with a major U.S. polysilicon supplier to help it secure a steady supply of silicon starting in 2010.<br />Sharp first said it would take a 34 percent share in the solar power generating venture, with Enel holding the rest, but it later retracted the statement, saying that nothing has been decided, other than that Sharp will take a minority stake. Sharp will also take a minority stake in the solar cell venture.<br />Capital expenditure at Sharp, which also plans a solar plant in Japan at a cost of ¥72 billion with an initial output of 480 megawatts by March 2010, still lags that of Q-Cells, which has said it plans to raise capacity to 1,000 megawatts in 2009 and 2,500 megawatts in 2010.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/sharp.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/sharp.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Toyota credit ratings cut</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />TOKYO: The top-notch credit ratings for Toyota Motor were cut Wednesday for the first time in a decade, affecting its shares and raising borrowing costs as an unprecedented slowdown reshaped the global auto industry.<br />Fitch Ratings downgraded Toyota's long-term foreign and local debt ratings to AA from AAA, with a negative outlook, saying the company needed to review its global investments, product mix and speed of expansion to address the challenges it faced.<br />"The negative developments in the industry are so substantial and fundamental that even the strongest player, Toyota, can no longer support an AAA rating," said Fitch director Tatsuya Mizuno.<br />Sales in the United States and Europe have plunged as access to credit has dried up, with the slowdown spreading to China, India, Russia and other markets on which automakers had placed their last hopes for near-term growth.<br />"It's impossible to tell where demand will go next year and beyond," Osamu Suzuki, chief executive of Suzuki Motor, said in Tokyo on Wednesday. "If there's a market that's not being affected by the United States, it's not on this planet."<br />In the latest evidence of slowing demand in emerging markets, Toyota is expecting vehicle sales next year in Russia to fall below the level this year, the Japanese news agency Kyodo reported, citing Tadashi Arashima, the head of Toyota's European operations.<br />The yen's strength against the dollar and most other currencies is dealing a double blow to Japanese carmakers, which have cut their profit forecasts in the past month.<br />Toyota, the world's largest automaker, had consolidated debt of ¥12.2 trillion, or $128 billion, as of March, according to Fitch. It remains the only automaker with the top Triple-A rating from Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service. Moody's was the last ratings firm to cut Toyota, in 1998.<br />The cost of protection against a default in Toyota's debt rose after the Fitch downgrade, with five-year credit default swaps widening by 10 basis points to 180. That means an investor would pay $180,000 a year for protection against a default in $10 million of Toyota's underlying debt.<br />Shares in Toyota fell 4.6 percent in Tokyo on Wednesday.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/toyota.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/toyota.php</a><br /><br />*************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/business/OUKBS-UK-DAIMLER.php">Daimler may cut work week at four German sites</a><br /><br />*************<br /><strong>E.ON sees energy bill cuts next year if prices fall</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />LONDON: German energy group E.ON said on Thursday it hopes to cut bills for its UK customers in 2009 if wholesale gas and electricity prices carry on falling.<br />"If we continue to see falling wholesale electricity and gas prices, we'd hope to reduce customers' prices as soon as we are able next year," E.ON UK Chief Executive Paul Golby said in a statement.<br />"We're obviously very aware of the difficulties our customers are experiencing, especially considering the current economic problems, and we're monitoring wholesale prices closely in the hope of making this move."<br />E.ON employs about 17,000 people in the UK and its British retail business has 5.5 million electricity and gas customers.<br />It said it was also introducing more measures to help customers struggling to pay their bills.<br />(Reporting by Philip Waller; Editing by David Cowell)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/business/OUKBS-UK-EON-PRICES.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/business/OUKBS-UK-EON-PRICES.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5q3A3_6M0erXNz05Ti5p5UB5tasTAwOxNx4WXWLRSizW3vWpSy1FRoVolsFlSU3gc3trVH3T9wwqyUisnmvxBwfUtyWN28Z9TYWsZb1tCmMcXZLGqX0OhTjgN7xkTur5fQJauTzusccI/s1600-h/DSC02183.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682562098418610" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5q3A3_6M0erXNz05Ti5p5UB5tasTAwOxNx4WXWLRSizW3vWpSy1FRoVolsFlSU3gc3trVH3T9wwqyUisnmvxBwfUtyWN28Z9TYWsZb1tCmMcXZLGqX0OhTjgN7xkTur5fQJauTzusccI/s320/DSC02183.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>British brawn thwarts French élan in Champions League</strong><br />By Rob Hughes<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />The French and the English, not always the most cordial of neighbors, managed to settle some of their sporting differences in the stadiums rather than in the European corridors of power this week.<br />On Wednesday, while the politicians bickered in Biarritz, the real combatants played on either side of the English Channel. In Bordeaux, the home team drew, 1-1, against Chelsea. In Liverpool a solitary goal from the head of Steven Gerrard was just enough to see off the challenge from a Marseille team that at times looked superior.<br />Both contests were feisty. Both were disputatious to the end. Both results and performances were far closer than the current European Union debate would have us believe.<br />The nub of the politicking in Biarritz, where the 27 sports ministers of the EU were dining on Wednesday, is that France accuses England of buying unfair advantage by using unsecured bank loans to import the world's finest talents. Not only does Michel Platini, the head of Europe's soccer confederation, UEFA, believe this, his nation's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is throwing state support behind the argument.<br />Maybe to prove a point it would have been better had Bordeaux and Marseille lain down and let the English teams roll over them. Not a bit of it. Indeed had either of the French clubs started the way they finished the matches they would have been victorious.<br />The most memorable cameo of the night was an absolutely breathtaking few seconds by Hatem Ben Arfa, Marseille's 21-year-old winger, who, surrounded by three Liverpool opponents, took them all on. With a shimmy to the right, a feint to the left, and sweet, instinctive variations of pace and direction, he emerged with the ball.<br />Two of the dumbfounded Liverpool trio were Fabio Aurelio and Javier Mascherano, talented men hired from Brazil and Argentina. Such was the blur of Liverpool confusion and the hypnotic attraction of Ben Arfa's movement, it was difficult to identify the third.<br />But another Spanish migrant to the English game, Liverpool's coach, Rafael Benítez, knew what he was seeing.<br />"Marseille have good players," he said after the game. "They have ability and pace, and some players who were technically better than us."<br />He gives thanks for Liverpool's irrepressible Englishness, for the redoubtable spirit of Gerrard. The captain's pulsating header midway through the first half won the match and ensured Liverpool will qualify as one of the 16 clubs that contest the next round.<br />That goal caught Marseille in a momentary lapse of concentration as its Ivorian forward Bakari Koné left Gerrard unmarked in a scoring position.<br />Gerrard was later abused by Marseille supporters, one of whom hit him with a cigarette lighter thrown from the stands. This is the downside to Marseille's soccer passion. Its fanatics were involved in crowd violence last month in Madrid, where Marseille fans fought with the local police.<br />UEFA blamed the home club, Atlético Madrid, for lack of preparation to prevent that violence. So Atlético had to play PSV Eindhoven this Wednesday in an empty stadium in Madrid.<br />Atlético scored two early goals, through its Portuguese winger Simão Sabrosa and its Argentine midfielder Maxi Rodríguez. Each goal was greeted by noise and passion, as the giant stadium screen and booming sound system replayed the support of fans locked out in the street but reacting to a radio commentary.<br />Atlético won this surreal encounter, 2-1, and joins Liverpool in the next phase of the Champions League.<br />Other things, some of them bordering on the unimaginable, were happening this night.<br />Inter Milan lost in its own San Siro Stadium to Panathinaikos as José Sarriegi scored the only goal.<br />"Panathinaikos's win was absolutely deserved," José Mourinho, the Inter coach, said. "People may say they were lucky, but I don't. After that, we don't deserve to go through, and after the joy of last Saturday, Inter fans have a sad moment and I am sorry."<br />Last Saturday, Inter beat Juventus in the Italian league. On Wednesday, it lost but qualified anyway for the knockout round of the Champions League.<br />This was because the Cypriot side Anorthosis Famagusta, which could have overtaken Inter, let slip a two-goal home lead over Werder Bremen. Famagusta could yet qualify, if it beats Panathinaikos in the final group match.<br />It sometimes takes a mathematician to work out the European differentials - but none were needed in another group which Barcelona so dominated that it had already secured first place with two matches to spare before Wednesday. Still, Barça scored another handful of goals, winning, 5-2, at Sporting Lisbon.<br />Lionel Messi, of course, scored and set up a goal. Thierry Henry scored his 46th goal in the Champions League on the night when he became the first Frenchman to play 100 matches in Europe's top competition.<br />So the French do have their talents and their triumphs on the Continent, even if it galls them that the likes of Henry make their fortunes and lend their fame to foreign teams like Arsenal and Barcelona.<br />Yet another of their exports, Nicolas Anelka, returned to France wearing the shirt of Chelsea. Just on the hour, knowing he was about to be replaced by the Ivorian Didier Drogba, Anelka broke the deadlock to put Chelsea ahead in Bordeaux.<br />That reverse stung Bordeaux into magnificent attack. Forward charged the French, onwards and upwards through tackles that, rightly, earned yellow cards from the referee, Frank De Bleeckere of Belgium, against all four Englishmen in the Chelsea ranks. The referee identified rash and punishable fouls by John Terry, Ashley Cole, Joe Cole and Frank Lampard as the "Rosbifs" responded with meaty effort to the French resistance.<br />In the 83rd minute, Bordeaux got what its efforts deserved, an equalizing goal. Yoann Gourcuff, the most creative player on the field and one lent back to Bordeaux from AC Milan, which owns a surplus of foreign riches, took a corner kick, and Alou Diarra, French of Malian descent, headed the goal.<br />Chelsea was furious. That manifested itself in Lampard's making another lunging, late tackle, which obliged the referee to send him off. It provoked Luiz Felipe Scolari, Chelsea's coach, to say: "The main problem was that they were better than us. I'm disappointed we didn't defend the corner properly, and if we fail to qualify in the last match, maybe I will have to go home to Brazil."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/sports/SOCCER.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/sports/SOCCER.php</a><br /><br />*************<br /><strong>BOOK REVIEW</strong><br /><strong>Susan Pinkard's 'A Revolution In Taste'<br /></strong>By Caroline Weber<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />A Revolution In Taste<br />The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650-1800.<br />By Susan Pinkard.<br />Illustrated. 317 pages. Cambridge University Press. $32; £20.00.<br />In the 1660s, discussing the culinary innovations that had recently taken root in Louis XIV's France, an English chef named Robert May bemoaned his French counterparts' newfound focus on "Sauce rather than Diet." To calorie counters who recoil in horror at the butter and cream that abound in French haute cuisine to this day, May's lament will strike a familiar chord. (Once, in the naïveté of youth, I was almost thrown out of a venerable Parisian restaurant for asking if the chef could prepare a "low fat" version of his lobster bisque.) But in fact, when discussing the meals served across the channel, the Englishman was distressed by something other than their high fat content. He was referring instead to a distinct change in the way the French had come to view and practice cooking. Historically, European cuisine had promoted the pseudomedical belief that particular seasonings and modes of preparation could - and should - eliminate imbalances in the human constitution. In the middle of the 17th century, however, leading French gastronomes let go of this idea and undertook the refinement of flavor for its own sake. Butter and cream sauces, whose value was gustatory (enhancing the taste of underlying ingredients) as opposed to medicinal (recalibrating the body's four "humors," as set forth by Hippocratic physicians), thus came to the fore, and an elegant, toothsome new brand of cooking was born.<br />In "A Revolution in Taste," Susan Pinkard, a historian at Georgetown University, explores the striking technical, material and philosophical shifts that profoundly altered French cooking between the second half of the 17th century and the revolution of 1789. Before this period in history, Hippocratic dietetics had maintained that disease was caused by excess humors (moist, hot, cold or dry) for which food could correct.<br />Seasonings, in particular, were thought to adjust a dish's elemental properties in crucial, therapeutic ways. For example, "dangerously cold and moist fish, such as lamprey eel (a surfeit of which was said to have killed Henry I of England), could be transformed by a sauce of pepper, garlic and marjoram into a delicious and healthy dish." Guided by these curative principles, ancient and premodern chefs relied heavily on spices, which masked underlying tastes and aromas. This practice gave rise to the conviction that fine cooking "fused many layers of flavor into a single, unitary whole, rendering individual ingredients unidentifiable to even sensitive palates." As Pinkard astutely points out, this culinary aesthetic persists today in regions ranging from Mexico to the Middle East.<br />"Mexican kitchen lore," she writes, "claims that if one can identify a recipe's ingredients by smelling the steam rising from the pot, the mixture must cook longer to achieve a perfect blend of flavors." This perspective held sway in French kitchens until the 17th century, when a population boom led to the expansion of suburbs outside Paris, thereby driving the moneyed families who had once spent summers in the city's immediate environs to seek bucolic escapes in the countryside proper.<br />Owning farms and vineyards soon became commonplace for rich Parisians, who thereby metamorphosed - intentionally or otherwise - into part-time farmers and vintners. A profusion of newly available garden-fresh ingredients in turn inspired techniques that enhanced the foods' intrinsic qualities instead of submerging them in spice. The result was a cuisine that one of its founding fathers, Nicolas de Bonnefons, called le goût naturel (the natural taste). "A cabbage soup should taste entirely of cabbage, a leek soup entirely of leeks, a turnip soup of turnips and thus for others," Bonnefons decreed in "Les Délices de la Campagne" ("The Delicacies of the Countryside"), his seminal 1654 cookbook. "Food should taste like what it is." While it might sound self-evident in the age of Chez Panisse and Whole Foods, this promotion of culinary simplicity and purity revolutionized the way the French thought about food. For starters, as Bonnefons's list of examples suggests, it sparked a new appreciation for vegetables. In the days before le goût naturel, vegetables had been unwanted guests at the sophisticated French table; even the great 14th-century chef Taillevent - who prepared dishes for the Valois kings and from whom one of Paris's most superb restaurants today takes its name - mostly excluded them from his repertoire. (The single exception was his recipe for stewed cress, which Taillevent recommended as a cure for gallstones.) With Bonnefons and his confrere La Varenne, whose influential work "Le Cuisinier François" ("The French Cook") appeared in 1651, vegetables assumed pride of place in French cooking, served only with mild seasonings and smooth, emulsified sauces that allowed for their essential flavors to shine through. Meat, fowl and fish soon received the same treatment, most notably with the development of "basic preparations" like roux, jus, coulis and marinade, as well as sauce blanche and sauce veloutée. Still essential to countless canonical French recipes, these enhancements represented a move away from old culinary practices in that they served "to accent the natural characteristics of principal ingredients, not to transform them chemically, nutritionally or aesthetically." During the Enlightenment, this emphasis on culinary naturalness took on a strong political dimension, as philosophes like Denis Diderot, the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt and Jean-Jacques Rousseau railed against the aristocracy's inauthentic social posturing and wasteful spending habits. These practices, which functioned to maintain or improve people's standing in an unequal, prestige-obsessed social order, prompted Rousseau to champion a return to a simpler, more natural way of life. For him as for many of his contemporaries food prepared plainly and with an eye to its innate characteristics thus formed part of a broader social program: that of restoring dignity to man as he was born, not as an unjust, artificial society had made him. Although concerned with the rites of cooking and not the rights of man, Pinkard's lucidly argued and carefully researched account is, in this respect, more than just a story about food. It is the story of a society that broke with the past - and became modern.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/arts/idbriefs29C.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/arts/idbriefs29C.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>Want a good French meal? Don't go to France<br /></strong>By Michael Johnson<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />BORDEAUX: Only a few years ago you could be pretty sure to get an above-average meal at most any restaurant in France, priced right and served by people proud of their profession.<br />Ah, those were the days. John Mariani, food and wine critic of Esquire magazine, told me recently that he would never forget the aroma billowing from a plate of blanquette de veau he had ordered in a modest Paris establishment some years ago. "I can still smell it," he said. "Wonderful."<br />And I recall the taste of my first boudin noir and baked apples in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Paris in the 1970s. Combined with a red Burgundy, it set off my taste buds very nicely.<br />These happy encounters are becoming rare, however, as France appears to be losing its leadership in simple, honest cooking. Mariani says he would love to be able to "parachute in" and find fabulous food at random, as he once did, but it's "just not possible today".<br />My experience exactly. Mid-range restaurants are suffering from a bad case of what the French call "J'm'en foutisme" (I don't care-ism), which leads to indifference and finally déresponsibilsation (not my fault-ism).<br />Everyone seems to have a favorite restaurant disaster story, but a couple of recent experiences have really upped my dander. At the appropriately named Café de l'Esperance (Café of Hope) near Bordeaux, hope is just what you need when all the bustle is happening at the other tables. "Oops, I forgot to process your order," the waiter finally said. And at La Winery in the Médoc I counted seven dead flies on the window sill while waiting an hour between courses. In both cases, the cooking was a disappointment.<br />Traveling in New England recently, I got the feeling that it's easier to find good French food abroad. In Boston, after a fine meal of traditional French cooking, I asked to speak with the chef. Jacky Robert, owner of three moderately priced Petit Robert restaurants in the area, came out of the kitchen clad in his apron. I asked him about American trends. "It's very competitive here so we work hard to keep our standards up," he said. "Americans have become a lot more demanding."<br />Young French chefs gravitate to the United States, he said, where money flows more freely. "Americans are not afraid of being rich." The biggest problems for the new chefs are getting a U.S. visa and avoiding having their personal sets of knives confiscated by with Homeland Security officers.<br />French chefs also are heading for London, Tokyo and other major cities to make their careers. And it's not just the three star restaurants that are hiring them. Many are recruited for mid-range restaurants. Figures are hard to come by but in Paris an employment agency called International Services is actively recruiting for French restaurants abroad. "We recruit hundreds of chefs, pastry chefs and kitchen helpers every year," says its president, Marc Chetrit. "Some go to the U.S. but lots of them are taken up by the Emirates, Australia, East Europe and luxury cruise ships."<br />I recently sought out Pascal Rémy, a former Michelin inspector, and he was unequivocal. "We French used to be the strongest in good everyday cuisine in our own market," he said. "Now we're the weakest."<br />Rémy created a stir a few years ago with his book "L'inspecteur se met à table" (The inspector sits down to eat), in which he tells of bad habits creeping into the cuisine culture. Chefs in France are under pressure to find cheaper ingredients and achieve better financial results. He quotes one as telling a seafood supplier to provide lower-grade fish because "the public doesn't know the difference."<br />Rémy believes he has found the source of the problem. First, the culinary professions have lost their luster. Kitchen work and waiting tables has been "totally devalued" as a career. The French 35-hour work week has helped undermine pride in the profession.<br />Second, he says, even cooking schools have let standards slide. "The training of our young people is lamentable," he said.<br />I think another problem is that French chef have forsaken tradition for "creativity." "I have to control a lot of my young chefs who are too eager to be creative," Robert says.<br />At Petit Robert in Boston, my French companion went traditional and ordered the Hachi Parmentier, a country staple of mashed potatoes and ground beef. "This is excellent," she said, digging in. "Not like that horror we get in France."<br />Michael Johnson is a journalist based in Bordeaux.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/opinion/edjohnson.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/opinion/edjohnson.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>Air New Zealand plane crashes off France with 7 aboard</strong><br />By Caroline Brothers<br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />PARIS: At least one person was killed when an Airbus A320 jet operated by XL Airways Germany but owned by Air New Zealand crashed into the Mediterranean Sea on Thursday after setting off with seven crew members on a maintenance flight from the southern French town of Perpignan, officials said.<br />"A total of seven people are involved. One person has been fished out of the sea and six others have disappeared," said Christine Petit, a spokeswoman for the Perpignan prefecture. A spokesman for the Pyrénées-Orientales prefecture said one body had been recovered.<br />Florence Legrin, an official at the French air transport regulator GDAC, said the plane was heading for Frankfurt when the accident took place. Apart from the crew, no one else was on board, she said. Airbus said it delivered the jet in 2005. Air New Zealand was not available to comment.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/europe/27airbus.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/europe/27airbus.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>China blames Sarkozy for EU summit withdrawal</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />BEIJING: China on Thursday blamed French President Nicolas Sarkozy's planned meeting with the Dalai Lama for pulling out of a China-EU summit which may have forged a joint response to the global economic crisis.<br />France confirmed Sarkozy would meet the Tibetan spiritual leader, whom China brands a separatist, at a December 6 ceremony in Poland to mark the 25th anniversary of the award of the Nobel Prize to former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.<br />China this month warned France, which holds the rotating EU presidency, that the European Union risked losing "hard-won" gains in ties with Beijing if Sarkozy met the Dalai Lama.<br />The decision could make it harder for the EU and China to cooperate on a host of pressing global issues and spill over into an often tricky bilateral trade relationship.<br />"It's a shame because China is a fundamental partner for Europe and Europe is a fundamental partner for China," EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, who would have taken part in the summit, told French television channel Canal+.<br />Asked whether Sarkozy should have declined to meet the Dalai Lama, Almunia said: "It's important to have a clean and clear policy on human rights. We can't accept prohibitions or restrictions from our partners on which individuals, which leaders, which parties, which interlocutors we host in Europe."<br />At a meeting between Asian and EU leaders in Beijing last month the EU side backed a greater say for China in global financial bodies but urged China to use its clout to help to resolve the global economic crisis.<br />"To maintain good relations with France and the European Union, China has told France time and again to properly handle the Tibet issue so as to create necessary conditions for the China-EU summit," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement posted on the ministry's website (www.fmprc.gov.cn).<br />"Regrettably, the French side has not actively responded to (these) efforts, so that the summit cannot be held in a good atmosphere, nor achieve its expected goals. Under such circumstances, China has no choice but to postpone the summit."<br />TRADE DISPUTES<br />Trade disputes between Brussels and Beijing have been on the rise as the EU trade deficit with China has ballooned, hitting 160 billion euros ($207.4 billion) last year.<br />This month Brussels imposed anti-dumping duties and raised tariffs on certain Chinese goods. China routinely accuses Europe of resorting to protectionism against its low-cost advantage.<br />The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in the mountainous region, occupied by Chinese troops from 1950. China calls him a "splittist," but the Dalai Lama says he is merely seeking autonomy.<br />A senior European diplomat in Beijing said Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, at a dinner with former Commission President Romano Prodi on Tuesday, passed on the message that China wanted to remain on good terms with Europe despite the cancellation.<br />He said China took umbrage not at the meeting itself but the fact that Sarkozy had announced it publicly. They had been "explicit and open" on that point, he said.<br />By penalising the EU, not just France, China was administering collective punishment, the diplomat added, saying France in no way was signalling support for Tibetan independence.<br />The diplomat said the EU had been told that the new "permanent dialogue" with the bloc would continue.<br />(Reporting by Ian Ransom and Alan Wheatley, additional reporting by Estelle Shirbon in Paris; editing by Michael Roddy)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/europe/OUKWD-UK-CHINA-EU-TIBET.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/europe/OUKWD-UK-CHINA-EU-TIBET.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikhOOZNl4Hh7DMplELdhW6KGoffomt12_0vb1SjoLViP16GcHulP_vFSQEudFCgaFGGs3Oz5KAIiB0Ls7EMjUJm56JKBHnkriVesaTbytLpmL8DDZAR_uuAzl6DsEd9IcdIbBEmjtYYQw/s1600-h/DSC02184.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682558907759762" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikhOOZNl4Hh7DMplELdhW6KGoffomt12_0vb1SjoLViP16GcHulP_vFSQEudFCgaFGGs3Oz5KAIiB0Ls7EMjUJm56JKBHnkriVesaTbytLpmL8DDZAR_uuAzl6DsEd9IcdIbBEmjtYYQw/s320/DSC02184.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>Standoff continues in Mumbai<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta and Keith Bradsher<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />MUMBAI: Indian commandos scoured through the flame and wreckage of two luxury hotels Thursday, searching for survivors and battling bands of gunmen who unleashed two days of chaos here in India's commercial capital.<br />A third group of gunmen, the remnants of well-organized squads of attackers, remained holed up in a Jewish community center.<br />By midnight, amid early indications that the sieges were ending, fears were growing that the death toll would rise past the more than 100 known. Smoke was still rising from one of the hotels; people who escaped reported stepping around corpses. Dozens had been trapped or held hostage by the heavily armed assailants; it was not known Thursday whether they had survived.<br />There remained much mystery around the group behind the attack, which was unusual in its scale and its targets: Westerners and tourist locales.<br />Two men who claimed to be among the gunmen called local television stations Thursday, demanding to speak with the government and complaining about the treatment of Muslims in India and about Kashmir, the disputed territory over which India and Pakistan have fought two wars.<br />"Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir?" a caller who identified himself as Imran asked. "Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims?"<br />The men claimed to be Indian, but the attacks appeared to ratchet up tensions in an already volatile region. The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, in a televised speech, blamed forces "based outside this country" for the attacks, a thinly veiled accusation that Pakistan was involved.<br />The attacks thus risked threatening recent American efforts to reduce the overall enmity between Pakistan and India, so that Pakistan has more military resources against the rising threat of the Taliban in the nation's lawless tribal areas.<br />Singh issued a warning that seemed clearly aimed at Pakistan, which India has often blamed for allowing terrorist groups to plot anti-Indian attacks.<br />"The group which carried out these attacks, based outside the country, had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the commercial capital of the country," he said. "We will take up strongly with our neighbors that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated, and that there would be a cost if suitable measures are not taken by them."<br />Security officials and experts agreed that the assaults represented a marked departure in scope and ambition from other recent terrorist attacks in India.<br />The Mumbai assault was "uniquely disturbing," said Sajjan Gohel, a security expert in London, because it seemed directed at foreigners, involved hostage-taking and was aimed at multiple "soft, symbolic targets." The attacks "aimed to create maximum terror and human carnage and damage the economy," he said in a telephone interview.<br />An e-mail message to Indian media outlets taking responsibility for the attacks in Mumbai on Wednesday night said the militants were from a group called Deccan Mujahedeen. Almost universally, experts and intelligence officials said the name was unknown.<br />Deccan is a neighborhood of the Indian city of Hyderabad. The word also describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahedeen is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters. But the combination of the two, said Gohel in London, is a "front name. This group is non-existent."<br />Bruce Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the author of the book "Inside Terrorism," said: "It's even unclear whether it's a real group or not."<br />An Indian security official, who spoke in return for anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified, said the name suggested ties to a group called Indian Mujahedeen, which has been implicated in a string of bombing attacks in India killing about 200 people this year alone.<br />On Sept. 15, an e-mail published in Indian newspapers and said to have been sent by representatives of Indian Muhajedeen threatened potential "deadly attacks" in Mumbai.<br />The message warned counterterrorism officials in the city that "you are already on our hit-list and this time very, very seriously."<br />Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the anti-terrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were, indeed, reported killed in the attacks in Mumbai.<br />Christine Fair of the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identities of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were probably Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.<br />"There's absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it," she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don't do hostage-taking and they don't do grenades." By contrast, Gohel in London said "the fingerprints point to an Islamic Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group."<br />Hoffman said the attacks, which he called "tactical, sophisticated and coordinated," perhaps pointed to a broader organization behind the perpetrators.<br />An Indian official suggested the foot soldiers in the attack might have emerged from an outlawed militant group of Islamic students.<br />"There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," Fair said. "The economic disparities are startling, and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem."<br />While many of the targets seemed to indicate a focus on tourists and Westerners, most of the victims were native Indians, who had packed into the hotels' banquet halls and restaurants, according to witnesses and officials; even street vendors in the main train station were sprayed with bullets.<br />The Maharashtra state chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, told CNN-IBN, a private television station, that six foreigners were killed and seven wounded. The dead included a Japanese, a German and a British national, according to their respective governments.<br />A spokeswoman for the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin said it was impossible to know how many Germans had been wounded because some were still believed to be trapped in the hotels. A British High Commission spokesman in Delhi said seven Britons were among the wounded. The U.S. Embassy said it was unaware of any American casualties, though at Bombay Hospital, one of several hospitals where the wounded were being taken, there were at least three wounded Americans.<br />Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the anti-terrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were reported killed.<br />Throughout Thursday, Indian soldiers and paramilitary forces fanned out across the normally bustling but now deserted southern tip of the city, where two hotels and the Jewish center are located. Stores were shuttered. Cars sailed along the empty streets. Most offices were closed, along with the Bombay Stock Exchange.<br />For most of the day, smoke billowed out of one of the besieged hotels, the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, one of the city's most famous landmarks.<br />Throughout the afternoon, loud explosions could be heard from inside the Trident Hotel, also known as the Oberoi, also in South Mumbai near the Arabian Sea, and after sundown, a fire broke out on its fourth floor.<br />It was impossible to know precisely what was going on inside the two hotels, except that there were intense firefights between security forces and an apparently audacious band of gunmen.<br />Occasionally, a curtain would part, a window would open, and the figure of a guest would emerge.<br />Hospitals were mobbed with men and women searching for their kin. Doctors said the wounded bore bullet wounds. Morgues saw a steady stream of corpses. On the shaded steps of the Regal Cinema nearby sat a handful of dazed spectators. The cinema was closed; "A Quantum of Solace" would not be playing Thursday.<br />The Leopold was one of the first sites targeted by a group of gunmen who appear to have come ashore at the Sassoon Docks, not far from there. They moved onto the Chhatrapati Shivaji train station, the old Victoria Terminus, and then opened fire on Cama Hospital, where some of the wounded had been taken. At one point, they hijacked a police vehicle and opened fire at journalists and spectators gathered near a famous cinema, called Metro.<br />Security camera footage of the gunmen, along with the testimonies of witnesses, show that they are young men, dressed in jeans and trendy T-shirts, bearing rucksacks and guns. It is not clear who they are, what they want, nor how many still survive.<br />Early Thursday, several guests and workers managed to leave the Taj, but gunmen opened fire on their pre-dawn exodus, and some remained behind. In the late afternoon, about 10 hostages left the Oberoi, waving and looking relieved, but answering no questions.<br />The Chabad-Lubavitch center, a Jewish community hall located in a densely crowded residential area roughly between the two hotels, was also singled out for attack. The whereabouts of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, who runs the center, remained unknown, according to the organization. Puran Doshi, a local developer and ex-city councilman, said the rabbi and his wife and child had been evacuated earlier in the day.<br />Air France issued a statement saying that 15 of its crew members, due to work on a Paris-bound flight, had been unable to get out of an unspecified hotel in Mumbai. The company spokeswoman said she could not provide any more details, except to say that the flight was canceled. Many international flight crews stay at the Trident-Oberoi.<br />The state's highest ranking police official, A.N. Roy, told NDTV, a private news channel, that paramilitary National Security Guards, aided by police and army and navy troops, had scoured the Taj hotel room by room for remaining civilians and moving cautiously through the Oberoi Hotel because of the likelihood of hostages. He said 14 police officers had been killed, along with 5 gunmen.<br />"We are not negotiating at all. We will get them and get them soon," he told the station. "We have some definite clues and leads. It was a very well-planned and very well-executed operation."<br />Reporting was contributed by Jeremy Kahn from Mumbai, Heather Timmons and Hari Kumar from New Delhi, Alan Cowell from Paris and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/mumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/mumbai.php</a><br /><p><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>OPINION</strong><br /><strong>Eyewitness to terror</strong><br />By Rahul Singh<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />MUMBAI:<br />I was attending a Parsi wedding on Wednesday night, not very far from the Taj Mahal Hotel, when, just before 10 p.m., cellphones began ringing and the sound of gunfire broke out.<br />First reports seemed to indicate that a gunman had gone berserk. It was only later that the full extent of the operation - which is continuing even as I write - became evident. Clearly, this was a carefully coordinated and intricately planned terrorist attack carried out by professionals and aimed at hurting tourism and undermining the Indian economy.<br />Mumbai is no stranger to terrorism. In 1993, in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Mosque by Hindu nationalists in north India and a wave of communal riots, a series of blasts took place all over the city, killing more than 200 people. Then, just two years ago, bombs planted in the city's commuter trains killed more than 150.<br />India has also witnessed terror attacks in its major cities - Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad and New Delhi - which have killed another 500. Indeed, apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, more people have died from terrorist attacks in India in recent years than in any other country in the world.<br />Nevertheless, the terrorist attack that broke out on Wednesday night in Mumbai, India's financial capital, is unprecedented. Several terrorists (their exact number is still not known), heavily armed with AK-47 assault rifles, hand grenades and explosives landed in rubber boats near the Gateway of India, a British era building near the southern tip of the city and next to the Taj Mahal Hotel, one of India's most famous and iconic hotels.<br />Indian intelligence officials said they believe the terrorists came in a larger boat from nearby Karachi in Pakistan and then moved into the smaller rubber boats at the entrance of Mumbai harbor. A hitherto unknown group calling itself "Deccan Mujahedeen" is claiming responsibility for the attack, though accusing fingers are being pointed at the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the largest and most active Islamist militant organizations in South Asia. The Lashkar-e-Taiba has denied responsibility, according to Reuters. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the attack came from "outside India."<br />From the Gateway, the terrorists fanned out. One group went to the Leopold Café, which is just five minutes walk from their landing place and a popular hangout for foreign tourists. There they opened indiscriminate fire, killing several people. They then moved to the Taj Mahal Hotel, entered the lobby, and began shooting. According to one of the guests who escaped, they asked people with British and American passports to come to one side, taking some hostage.<br />In all, 10 places were apparently targeted for attack, including another five-star hotel, the Trident, as well as the city's biggest railroad station and a hospital. Over 100 people have died, but with bodies being taken out of the Taj Hotel at the time of this writing and several hundred guests and staff members still holed up in the Trident - at least 30 of them being held hostage - the final toll is bound to be higher. Five of the terrorists have been killed, according to the Mumbai police commissioner, A.N. Roy. He added that at least 14 policemen were also killed, including the highly decorated head of the state's anti-terrorism squad, Heman Karkare. (One of my fellow guests at the Parsi wedding was Julio Ribeiro, one of India's most prominent police officers, who was largely responsible for tackling Punjab terrorism in the 1980s and who has himself survived two assassination attempts by Sikh terrorists.)<br />In all, at least 300 commandos and 800 Indian troops have been deployed to neutralize the terrorists.<br />Terrorists were also targeting the Nariman House - which contains the city headquarters of the ultra-orthodox Jewish outreach group Chabad Lubavitch - which happens to be less than 100 yards from where I reside in the Colaba area of south Mumbai. The terrorists were reported to be holding at least two Israeli hostages - three others had managed to escape. The attackers apparently lobbed a grenade at a Bharat Petroleum gasoline pump just below the building, setting it afire.<br />When I went there Thursday morning, a mangled motorcycle lay in the road, along with two shattered cars. Across the road, broken glass was scattered all over the pavement. A baby was carried out of the building as commandos were inching their way forward.<br />The terrorists must have known that Nariman House, where several of the city's Jewish families live, is a popular spot for visiting Israelis and foreign Jewish tourists.<br />Last night, I also heard a loud explosion coming from the direction of the Taj Mahal Hotel, which is close to my residence. I later learned that the explosion had taken place near the dome of the hotel, setting part of the top floor on fire. That fire is still burning.<br />This is the first time that south Mumbai, a favorite of foreign tourists and the city's financial center, has been targeted in such a big way. Clearly, the terrorists wanted to hit India where it hurts, scaring off investors and tourists.<br />Meanwhile, hard questions are being asked of the Indian security agencies and the military: How were the terrorists able to enter Mumbai harbor, an area crawling with Indian warships? Why did the country's intelligence services fail to detect the threat of an operation involving so many terrorists that must have taken several months to plan?<br />Whatever the answers, there is no question that Mumbai, indeed the entire Indian nation, faces its sternest test.<br />Rahul Singh is a former editor of "Reader's Digest" and "Indian Express."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/opinion/edsingh.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/opinion/edsingh.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>For hotel guests, celebrations became a night of horror</strong><br />By Somini Sengupta<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />MUMBAI: For Amit and Varsha Thadani, Wednesday night in the Crystal Ballroom of the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel was supposed to be a night they would treasure forever: It was the lavish start of their life together, with a wedding reception for more than 200 family members and friends.<br />It turned out to be a night they may well dread forever.<br />It was about 9:45 pm, they had just finished dressing for their party, in a second floor room in the heritage wing of the hotel, when they heard the first crackle of gunfire, followed by commotion outside their room and instructions from the hotel front desk to stay put.<br />They did stay put, for more than seven hours, much of it huddling on the floor of their bathroom, trying to keep themselves calm. Their phones rang constantly, with updates and questions. At one point, Varsha confessed, she stopped answering. She did not want to talk to anyone.<br />There was more gunfire, along with two loud explosions, one of which flung open their door and windows. Next door, they heard gunmen shoot a female guest, and then her screams. "We could sense she was being dragged around," Varsha recalled.<br />In the Crystal Ballroom, friends had begun trickling in. They, too, were startled by gunfire. A window shattered, sending everyone scampering under tables. Eventually, they were led by hotel staff into a private, more inaccessible set of rooms. Ballroom by ballroom, restaurant by restaurant, guests were ushered into what was thought to be a safer cavity of the hotel, a private club called The Chambers.<br />At the Golden Dragon Restaurant on the ground floor, a woman peering through the frosted glass could see the gunmen parade through the lobby of the hotel and open fire, any which way. She had come to celebrate her husband's birthday, along with both sets of parents.<br />They were also led through kitchens and staff stairwells into safer quarters, where they huddled until nearly 4 a.m. She and her parents slipped out through the back staff exit, but with so many cellphones trilling, they drew the attention of the gunmen inside the hotel. They began firing at those who were trying to flee.<br />Her husband and his parents were left behind. Eight hours later, in the shadow of the hotel, she stood waiting for them to come out. Her husband's cellphone wasn't answering. She was still dressed in her black dinner blouse.<br />Gary Samore, director for studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, was staying at the Taj with his wife and daughter, squeezing in a family holiday in Mumbai alongside a lecture that he delivered Wednesday evening on the nuclear challenges facing the next president of the United States.<br />The Samores stayed in their room and tried to remain calm. The television was not working. He had no local phone. Friends kept him apprised of developments by sending e-mails to his BlackBerry. At 3:30 am, Samore recalled, came very heavy gunfire. The American consulate called to say the hotel was on fire.<br />The family collected their passports, made a set of wet towels to help them get through a smoke corridor and found their way to a service stairwell and then a second floor terrace, from where they could summon Indian soldiers.<br />"My BlackBerry," he said, "may have saved our lives."<br />In the kitchen of the Chambers, Raghu Deora, the chef, hid under a table. Four gunmen came before dawn and found him. "What do you do?" they asked in Hindi, and then they ordered him to stand up and turn around. They shot him from behind, his wife, Nandita, said this afternoon. A bullet entered through one side and came out of the other. There were four gunmen, he told her, all in their mid-20s, well dressed.<br />Close to dawn Thursday, the newlyweds, the Thadanis, crept out of the window of their room, and with the help of firefighters, climbed down a ladder and touched ground. This afternoon, they counted their blessings - and ate a home cooked meal.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/scene.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/scene.php</a><br /><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>In hotel attack, terrorists target India's growing global class</strong><br />By Anand Giridharadas<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />On an evening not long ago at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel in Mumbai, a Bollywood star named Preity Zinta rushed up the stairs and into Wasabi, a Japanese restaurant. She joined long-waiting friends at their table and apologized for being late.<br />But before long, she had risen again. She had seen at a nearby table Adi and Parmeshwar Godrej, billionaires, socialites and fellow jet-setters. A good amount of air-kissing ensued. Then she was introduced to Imran Khan, the Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician, who just happened to be in town.<br />Before long, a bottle of imported red wine arrived and was poured into a silver-tipped glass decanter, as platters of miso-encrusted sea bass and rock-shrimp tempura floated through the restaurant on upraised hands.<br />When violent attackers besieged the Taj, as it is universally known, and embarked on a murderous rampage Wednesday night, they targeted one of the city's best known landmarks.<br />But they also went after something larger: a hulking, physical embodiment of India's deepening involvement with the world.<br />The Taj is where privileged Indians come when they want a world-class meal. It is where pinstriped foreign executives come when deciding whether to invest in India or outsource jobs here. It is where Mick Jagger, Liz Hurley, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt stay when they are in town.<br />And it is owned by a conglomerate, the Tata Group, that appears to buy another foreign company every few months in its quest to be a multinational: hotels in Sydney, New York and London; a truck producer in South Korea; the British steel maker Corus; the storied automotive brands Jaguar and Land Rover.<br />Overnight Wednesday, the Indian writer Suketu Mehta, who wrote a defining book on Mumbai called "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found," said that an attack on the Taj was "as if terrorists had taken over the Four Seasons and the Waldorf-Astoria and then were running around shooting people in Times Square."<br />The Four Seasons and the Waldorf-Astoria, however, could never claim the pivotal role in New York life that the Taj could claim in Mumbai.<br />It is not another Hilton or Sheraton in another Asian city. Its cash cow may be foreign guests, but it is equally a fixture of local Mumbai life, the aorta through which anything glamorous, sentimental, confidential or profitable passes in the city.<br />The hotel stands across from the Gateway of India, in the historic Colaba quarter. Those who would not dream of paying $3 - a good daily wage here - for one of its fresh-lime sodas sit outside the hotel, leaning against the stone wall above the Arabian Sea. They take in the scene, admire the finely dressed people breezing in and out.<br />It may not be their time for the Taj right now; but should a fortune ever bless them, into the Taj they will saunter.<br />The Taj, like many productive endeavors, was born out of spite.<br />Legend has it that Jamsetji Tata, a 19th-century Indian industrialist of Persian descent, was turned away from a hotel in British-era Mumbai. His crime was being Indian. He decided, in an inventive vision of revenge, to build the best hotel in the country, outfitted with German elevators, French bathtubs and other refinements from around the world.<br />Those refinements come with a price: at least $300 a night for one of the hotel's simplest rooms, or much more for better accommodation or in times of peak demand. And yet to pay that price and stay in that room is to enter a world that in India is hard to match.<br />The honking, scorching chaos of Mumbai fades away. A certain quiet comes. You can breathe again. The rooms come with all the latest gadgets. But there are also those indelible aspects of colonial life that refuse to wash away: The turbaned bodyguards, the grown men in the restrooms who refuse to let you twist the tap or squeeze the soap yourself, insisting on doing it for you.<br />For wealthy visitors, as well as many of the city's elite, the hotel had become so etched into their routine that it was like a second home, taken almost for granted - until its placid calm was broken when terrorism entered its halls.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/hotel.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/hotel.php</a><br />***************<br /><strong>Indian forces tighten grip on Mumbai<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta and Keith Bradsher<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />MUMBAI: The crisis in Mumbai appeared to ease early Friday as Indian commandos scoured through two charred luxury hotels, searching for survivors of the bands of gunmen who unleashed two days of chaos here. A third group of gunmen, the remnants of well-organized squads of attackers, apparently remained holed up in a Jewish community center.<br />Amid early indications that the sieges were ending, fears were growing that the death toll would rise past the 119 known. Late Thursday, smoke was still rising from one of the hotels; people who escaped reported stepping around bodies. Dozens of people, perhaps many more, remained trapped in the hotels, though it remained uncertain if any were being held hostage by the heavily armed assailants. The injured numbered some 300.<br />There remained much mystery around the group behind the attack, unusual in its scale, its almost theatrical boldness and its targeting of locales frequented by wealthy Indians and foreigners.<br />Two men who claimed to be among the gunmen called local television stations, demanding to speak with the government and complaining about the treatment of Muslims in India and about Kashmir, the disputed territory over which India and Pakistan have fought two wars.<br />"Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir?" a caller who identified himself as Imran asked. "Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims?"<br />The men said they were Indian, but the attacks appeared to ratchet up tensions in an already volatile region: The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, in a televised speech, blamed forces "based outside this country" for the attacks in a thinly veiled accusation that Pakistan was involved.<br />The attacks thus risked threatening recent American efforts to reduce the overall enmity between Pakistan and India, meant to enable Pakistan to focus more military resources against the rising threat of the Taliban in its lawless tribal areas.<br />Singh issued a warning that seemed clearly aimed at Pakistan, which India has often accused of allowing terrorist groups to plot anti-Indian attacks. "The group which carried out these attacks, based outside the country, had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the commercial capital of the country," he said. "We will take up strongly with our neighbors that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated, and that there would be a cost if suitable measures are not taken by them."<br />While many of the targets seemed to indicate a focus on tourists and Westerners, most of the victims were native Indians, who had packed into the banquet halls and restaurants in the hotels, according to witnesses and officials; even street vendors in Mumbai's main train station were sprayed with bullets.<br />The chief minister of Maharashtra State, Vilasrao Deshmukh, told CNN-IBN, a private television station, that six foreigners had been killed and seven injured<br />Hisashi Tsuda, 38, a businessman and father of two from Tokyo, was killed in the attacks, his company announced on Thursday.<br />A German, Ralph Burkei, 51, suffered fatal injuries when he jumped out of the front of the Taj. According to several reports citing the Munich newspaper, Abendzeitung, Burkei, a co-owner of an independent television production company in Munich, called a friend from his cellphone and said: "I have broken every bone in my body. If no one helps me now, I'm finished." He died on the way to the hospital.<br />A spokeswoman for the German Foreign Office in Berlin said it was impossible to know how many Germans had been injured because some were still believed to be trapped in the hotels. The British authorities said one Briton had been killed and seven injured.<br />The American Embassy said it was unaware of any American casualties, though at least three wounded Americans were at Bombay Hospital, one of several hospitals where the injured were being taken.<br />Several high-ranking law enforcement officials were reported killed, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police.<br />Throughout Thursday, Indian soldiers and paramilitary forces fanned out across the normally bustling, now deserted southern tip of the city, where the attacks were focused. Stores were shuttered. Cars sailed along the empty streets. Most offices were closed, along with the Bombay Stock Exchange.<br />Near the Café Leopold, a popular restaurant that was among the first places struck Wednesday night, a bloodied shoe lay on the ground beneath a car with smashed windows.<br />For most of the day, smoke billowed out of one of the besieged hotels, the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, one of the city's most famous landmarks. Loud explosions could be heard throughout the afternoon from inside the Trident Hotel, also known as the Oberoi, also in South Mumbai near the Arabian Sea. After sundown, a fire broke out on its fourth floor.<br />The state's highest-ranking police official, A. N. Roy, told NDTV, a private news channel, that National Security Guards, aided by the police and army and navy troops, had scoured the Taj hotel, room by room, for remaining civilians and were moving cautiously through the Oberoi because of the likelihood of hostages. He said 14 police officers had been killed, along with five gunmen.<br />"We are not negotiating at all" Roy told the station. "We will get them and get them soon. We have some definite clues and leads. It was a very well-planned and very well-executed operation."<br />It was impossible to know precisely what was going on inside the two hotels, except that there were intense firefights between security forces and an apparently audacious band of gunmen.<br />Occasionally, a curtain would part, a window would open and the figure of a guest would emerge.<br />Hospitals were mobbed with men and women searching for their kin. Doctors said the wounded had been shot. Morgues received a steady stream of bodies. On the shaded steps of the Regal Cinema nearby sat a handful of dazed spectators. The cinema was closed; "A Quantum of Solace" would not be playing.<br />The gunmen appear to have come ashore at the Sassoon Docks, not far from the Leopold. They moved onto the Chhatrapati Shivaji train station, the old Victoria Terminus, and then opened fire on Cama Hospital — where some of their earlier victims suffered a second round of gunfire. At one point, they hijacked a police vehicle and opened fire on journalists and spectators gathered near a famous cinema, called the Metro.<br />Witnesses and security camera video of the gunmen built a portrait of them: young men, dressed in jeans and trendy T-shirts, bearing rucksacks and guns. It remained unclear who they are, what they want, or how many survive.<br />Earlier on Thursday, Indian news channels received a claim of responsibility from a group called Deccan Mujahedeen; the name may refer to the Deccan Plateau, which dominates the middle and south of India. But security experts said the group might not exist.<br />The casualties ran the gamut of Mumbai society. A street vendor was shot and killed near the train station, where he sold a famous snack known as bhel puri. A manager at the Oberoi survived a bullet wound to his leg, but was taken to the Cama Hospital, where a shootout broke out; he died after being transferred to a second hospital. A chef at the Taj who had been hiding under a kitchen table for most of the night was discovered by four gunmen, made to stand up and shot from behind.<br />Escape attempts took place sporadically at the hotels. Before dawn on Thursday, several guests and workers managed to leave the Taj, but gunmen opened fire on them, some remained behind.<br />In the late afternoon, about 10 hostages left the Oberoi, waving and looking relieved, but answering no questions.<br />The director general of the paramilitary National Security Guard, J. K. Dutt, told television that troops were trying to coax frightened people out of the Oberoi. "They are in their rooms. They are not prepared to open their doors," he told the station. "As far as terrorists are concerned, we know exactly where they are."<br />Reuters quoted the state's deputy chief minister, R. R. Patil, as saying 100 to 200 people could be inside the Oberoi. "We cannot give you the exact figure, as many people have locked themselves inside their rooms," he said.<br />The Chabad-Lubavitch center, a Jewish community hall in a crowded residential area roughly between the two hotels, was also singled out for attack. The whereabouts of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, who runs the center, remained unknown, according to the organization. Puran Doshi, a local developer and former city councilman, said the rabbi and his wife and child had been evacuated earlier in the day.<br />By then, the gunmen inside had killed several locals, apparently shooting anyone they could find. Around 10 p.m., the lights were turned out in and around the building, known as Nariman House. It was not clear whether, or when, security forces might advance into the building.<br />Shortly after 11 p.m., television showed as many as a half-dozen people, including several elderly ones, being escorted out of Nariman House by security forces. The authorities said they believed gunmen might still be holed up there.<br />Air France issued a statement saying that 15 of its flight crew members had been unable to get out of a hotel in Mumbai. The company spokeswoman did not name the hotel or provide any more details, except to say that the Paris-bound flight they were due to work on was canceled. Many international flight crews stay at the Trident-Oberoi.<br />The suspicions raised by the attack seemed a blow to relations between India and Pakistan, which had been recovering from a low earlier this year after India blamed the Pakistani intelligence agency for abetting the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan. India has frequently accused Pakistan-based militant groups of fueling terrorist attacks on Indian soil, though lately it has also acknowledged the presence of home-grown Muslim and Hindu militant organizations.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/28mumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/28mumbai.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Blogs feed information frenzy on Mumbai attacks</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />SINGAPORE: Bloggers across Mumbai fed live updates of the action after Islamist gunmen attacked the heart of the Indian financial capital, highlighting the emergence of citizen journalists in news coverage.<br />Some, including a blogger named Vinu, were furiously uploading photos of damage from the attacks that killed at least 101 people and injured at least 314. Scores of foreigners, including Westerners, were trapped in luxury hotels.<br />Images of the attacks also surfaced on the photo-sharing Web site Flickr. Some bloggers provided running descriptions and commentaries from near the action, while others vented emotions.<br />"I've been tweeting almost all night, too, from Mumbai. Upset and angry and bereft," a businesswoman, Dina Mehta, wrote on her blog.<br />Twitter, the popular "micro-blogging" site where users communicate with short "tweets" of 140 characters or less, saw intense activity on Thursday.<br />Several hours after the attack, 80 messages were posted within five seconds. Posts included offers of help for the news media and updates on the situation. Several local news channels were reported to have carried a live feed of Twitter updates.<br />"One terrorist has jumped from Nariman house building to Chabad house - group of police commandos have arrived on scene," one person wrote.<br />But some said Twitter was giving too many details that possibly help the gunmen who may have been monitoring blog sites.<br />"It's a terrorist strike. Not entertainment. So tweeters, please be responsible with your tweets," said a blogger identified as primaveron@mumbai.<br />Trying to aid weak Indian public services, Mumbai Metblog posted the telephone numbers of hospitals on its Web site, encouraging readers to donate blood. The blog Mumbai Help offered advice to those with loved ones in the city: "Suggest you avoid calling. Lines are bound to be screwed."<br />Cherian George, a new media analyst, said the events have spotlighted the emergence of citizen journalism.<br />"If the event is highly dispersed and affects very large numbers of people, it would be physically impossible for a very large news organization to keep track of every development," George said.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/bloggers.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/bloggers.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><strong>Amid the horror: Who are the attackers?</strong><br />By Alan Cowell and Mark McDonald<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />A day after the terror attacks in Mumbai that killed more than 100 people, one question remained as impenetrable as the smoke that still billowed from one of the city's landmark hotels: Who carried out the attack?<br />Security officials and experts agreed that the assaults represented a marked departure in scope and ambition from other recent terrorist attacks in India, which targeted local people rather than foreigners and hit single rather than multiple targets.<br />The Mumbai assault, by contrast, was "uniquely disturbing," said Sajjan Gohel, a security expert in London, because it seemed directed at foreigners, involved hostage-taking and was aimed at multiple "soft, symbolic targets." The attacks "aimed to create maximum terror and human carnage and damage the economy," he said in a telephone interview.<br />But the central riddle was the extent to which local assailants had outside support. The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said the attacks probably had "external linkages," reflecting calculations among Indian officials that the level of planning, preparation and coordination could not have been achieved without help from experienced terrorists, particularly groups affiliated to Al Qaeda.<br />The planning of the attack has profound political implications for both India and its neighbor, Pakistan. But the identities of the Mumbai attackers remained a mystery.<br />An e-mail message to Indian media outlets taking responsibility for the attacks in Mumbai on Wednesday night said the militants were from a group called Deccan Mujahedeen. Almost universally, experts and intelligence officials said the name was unknown.<br />Deccan is a neighborhood of the Indian city of Hyderabad. The word also describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahedeen is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters. But the combination of the two, said Gohel in London, is a "front name. This group is non-existent."<br />"It's even unclear whether it's a real group or not," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the author of the book "Inside Terrorism."<br />An Indian security official, who spoke in return for anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified, said the name suggested ties to a group called Indian Mujahedeen, which has been implicated in a string of bombing attacks in India killing about 200 people this year alone.<br />On Sept. 15, an e-mail published in Indian newspapers and said to have been sent by representatives of Indian Muhajedeen threatened potential "deadly attacks" in Mumbai.<br />The message warned counter-terrorism officials in the city that "you are already on our hit-list and this time very, very seriously."<br />Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the anti-terrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were, indeed, reported killed in the attacks in Mumbai.<br />Christine Fair of the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identities of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were probably Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.<br />"There's absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it," she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don't do hostage-taking and they don't do grenades." By contrast, Gohel in London said "the fingerprints point to an Islamic Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group."<br />Hoffman said the attacks, which he called "tactical, sophisticated and coordinated," perhaps pointed to a broader organization behind the perpetrators.<br />The Indian security official said the attackers probably had ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group run by Pakistani intelligence in the conflict with India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. On Thursday, the group denied involved in the Mumbai attacks. India blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for a suicide assault on its Parliament by gunmen in December, 2001 that led to a perilous military standoff with Pakistan.<br />Gohel said the Mumbai assaults seemed to blend the tactics of the attack on Parliament and an event two years earlier - the 1999 hijacking of an Air India flight to Afghanistan that affected foreigners and involved hostage-taking.<br />The Indian official also suggested the foot soldiers in the attack might have emerged from an outlawed militant group of Islamic students. Photographs from security cameras showed some youthful attackers carrying assault rifles and smiling as they conducted the operation.<br />"There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," Fair said. "The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem."<br />Reflecting a widespread assessment in Pakistan, Moonis Ahmar, a professor of international relations at Karachi University, called the attacks a well-thought out conspiracy designed to destabilize relations between India and Pakistan and sabotage efforts at reconciliation.<br />Hindus make up about 80 percent of India's 1.13 billion population and Muslims 13.4 percent.<br />Experts disputed the complexity of the operation. "These aren't just a bunch of radical guys coming together to cause mayhem," Hoffman said. "This takes a different skill set. It doesn't take much skill to make a bomb. This is not just pressing a button as a suicide bomber and dying. You don't learn this over the Internet."<br />But Fair did not agree that the attacks Wednesday necessarily required deep planning and training.<br />"This wasn't something that required a logistical mastermind," she said. "These were not hardened targets."<br />Alan Cowell reported from Paris and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong. Reporting was contributed by Souad Mekhennet in Frankfurt and Salman Masood in Islamabad.<br /><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Breakingviews.com: India must regain executives' confidence</strong><br />breakingviews.com<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />The terrorist attacks on India are a watershed moment in the subcontinent's fragile history, and perhaps for global markets. It doesn't look as if the Mumbai massacre, in which more than 100 people were killed and nearly 300 wounded, will cause the Indian stock market to collapse; but for the first time, Islamic extremists have singled out tourists and the financial district. Both are critical to India's growth and international standing.<br />Investors have long played down geopolitical risk. Stocks plummeted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. But since then politics have hardly shaken the market march to global prosperity. Even the assassination of the Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 barely moved stocks in a traditionally volatile market.<br />But security is often a weak point in developing countries, and the fear of violence can derail otherwise sound economies.<br />The Mumbai attacks add more than political instability to the investment equation. They will make foreigners think four or five times before visiting India. Traders can work from anywhere, but international banks and businesses need people on the ground. Visiting bigwigs will now be less willing to stay at high-end business hotels like the Trident-Oberoi and Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, which were at the heart of the attacks.<br />Worse, the turmoil comes just as friendly overtures from Pakistan had raised hopes that one of the subcontinent's main fault lines might be healing. The Indian government is being careful not to blame its Muslim neighbor for the latest atrocity, but relations are still at the mercy of a potential flaring in Hindu-Muslim communal tensions.<br />International investors and business executives cannot expect the Indian government to create perfect religious harmony, but they will want to see that the authorities are fighting back with some success. India has its work cut out to demonstrate that it is still an attractive place to do business. - Una Galani<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/views28.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/views28.php</a> </p><p> </p><p>***************</p><p><strong>IHT conference postponed</strong><br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />The International Herald Tribune has decided to postpone its annual luxury conference, which was to have taken place at the Imperial Hotel, New Delhi, from Dec. 2-4.<br />"Following the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, we felt it was inappropriate to hold the conference at such a difficult time for India," said Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, publisher of the IHT. "We plan to be back as soon as the situation is stabilized," he added, noting also the sensitivity to safety concerns for all participants.<br />Speakers who were to have participated on the subject of "Sustainable Luxury" included Kamal Nath, minister of commerce and industry in India, and François-Henri Pinault, chairman and CEO of PPR, as well as leading fashion designers and Indian CEOs.</p><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/style/luxury.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/style/luxury.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>A rare glimpse into a forgotten Hindu world</strong><br />By Souren Melikian<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Immense and infinitely diverse, India remains the great repository of hidden cultural secrets in South Asia. "Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur," at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery until Jan. 4 before reopening at the Seattle Art Museum on Jan. 29, reveals for the first time a virtually unknown school of monumental Hindu painting on paper that thrived from the 1720s to the mid-19th century.<br />Not even specialized scholars had set eyes on the 60 works from the Marwar area, now part of the state of Rajasthan, that are preserved in the Mehrangarh Museum in the Fort of Jodhpur.<br />The loan of important unpublished works of art by an Indian institution to a Western museum is a first in international museum relations. This sensational coup was pulled off by Debra Diamond, a curator at the Sackler Gallery, with the generous help of the maharajah of Jodhpur, Gaj Singh II, a direct descendant of the Rathore maharajahs under whom the school flourished, and of his spouse the Maharani Hemata Rajye. The curator of the Mehrangarh Museum, Karni Singh Jasol, gave his whole-hearted support to this unique undertaking, which will culminate in Delhi when the exhibition reopens on its last leg in November 2009.<br />Another equally important coup was achieved by Diamond and Catherine Glynn, an independent researcher, in displaying paintings from a Hindu court, not as a succession of quaint images but as the expression of a culture, both in its literature written in Hindi and in its metaphysical aspects.<br />The result is a fascinating lesson in the avatars of Hindu life and history that comes together with the art.<br />Some early Jodhpur paintings show that the blending of elements taken over from the distant heritage of late-15th-century Iranian manuscript painting and of stylistic conventions rooted in the Indian past was already under way by the mid-17th century. A remarkable example of this artistic syncretism is illustrated in the important exhibition book edited by Diamond, but unfortunately did not make it to the show. The painted page, preserved in the San Diego Museum of Art, formed part of a series of ragmalas, or musical pieces, accompanied by poetical texts. The simplified figures and the naïve handling of the architecture have a kind of folkloric pithiness that was carried over in more polished form into 18th-century Jodhpur painting.<br />Another source of influence on Jodhpur art was court painting from the Moghul empire of which Marwar was part. A page from a dispersed album loaned by the British Museum portrays a character in Moghul garb, identified by Diamond as Gaj Singh I, one of the first Rajput princes on whom the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan bestowed the title maharajah. The carefully observed features bear witness to the impact that European figural art had on Moghul painting, but the return to the timeless stylization of the East is otherwise already manifest.<br />The rejection of naturalism was consummated when a new school of Hindu painting took off at Nagaur under the reign of Maharajah Bakhat Singh (1725-1751).<br />In a series of paintings from the 1730s, which relate to royal pastimes, any attempts at rendering perspective in Moghul fashion have been given up. No effort is made to convey depth or volume in essentially linear compositions.<br />Stylization and symbolism prevail in a scene where Maharajah Bakhat Singh and Prince Vijay Singh watch singers and dancers perform in the palace courtyard. The maharajah seated on his heel is twice the size of the young prince and the female performers, thereby signifying his exalted status, and the clouds in the sky are done like scrolling bands borrowed from Chinese decorative art.<br />In a large outdoor scene relating to the celebration of Holi, the great Hindu festival, the Moghul legacy survives in the importance given to the architectural setting that defines the composition, but the handling of detail is radically different. Oversimplification was setting in. The stereotyped faces are handled in quasi-cartoon like fashion.<br />The trend affected even scenes dealing with religious subjects. The "Maharajah Bakhat Singh Worshiping Krishna," hands raised in prayer, has a comical look. Yet, here too memories of Moghul tradition linger. Krishna is seated on a gold throne studded with green and red stones, probably emeralds and rubies or spinels, in the manner of Shah Jahan's throne described in the chronicle of his reign, the Shah Jahan-Nama.<br />A Moghul-style triangular banner is stuck on the dome of the open pavilion in which the god is seated and the Hindi inscription hailing the maharajah paraphrases the titulature of Moghul emperors that itself echoed the Iranian protocol. Add the golden vessels in wall niches following a Moghul custom that imitated the Iranian palatial style and the persistent admiration for past Moghul court fashion is not in doubt in this painting for a Hindu ruler.<br />Faint traces of this taste subsisted in the religious paintings produced in Jodhpur 10 or 20 years later. In "Vishnu and Lakshmi in their Heavenly Palace," painted around 1755-1760, the architectural setting is a throwback to the palatial courtyard in which Maharajah Bakhat Singh and Prince Vijay Singh are entertained by dancers and singers. But rhythmical stylization changes everything. Gone is the empty white ground. Instead, a scrolling pattern swirls around a lobed rosette borrowed from the Iranian art of the book via its Moghul derivations.<br />While the dainty white marble construction with red and green stone inlay may immortalize the memory of an actual palace, it looks more like an elevation produced in an architect's studio than a real monument. A powerful rhythm is created through repetition wherever feasible - in the flower beds, in the trees beyond the arcade, even in the peacocks perched in trees and the white geese flying across the sky.<br />Soon, rhythmical repetition became the painter's overriding preoccupation, leading to some of the most striking creations of the Jodhpur school of royal painting. Its most extraordinary works were inspired by the Ramayana, the ancient epic originally composed in Sanskrit. Recast in late-16th-century verse by the poet Tulsidas, who wrote in vernacular Hindi, the epic which recounts the story of the heroic god Rama gained a renewed popularity. By the second half of the 18th century, Diamond notes, the Hindi version of Tulsidas spread by itinerant ascetics had traveled from Varanasi in eastern India, where it was composed, to Rajasthan in the western part of the country. It was recited at court and selected scenes from it were re-enacted.<br />A series of monumental folios painted around 1775 deal with it, projecting visions of an enchanted fairy-tale world.<br />In a landscape representing the forest of the monkey kingdom Kishkindha, pink peaks shoot up above low turquoise-green hills where groups of seated monkeys deliberate. In the lower area, bears stand talking to one another. Right at the top, white geese perched in trees fly off into the sky. Colors and motifs achieve a rhythm in tune with the rhythm of chanted verse.<br />While the paintings are rather coarse, betraying the decadence that hit Indian art in the 18th century, the poetic feeling remains remarkable.<br />Not much of that spirit survived a quarter of a century later when Man Singh (1803-1843) redefined the royal regime in Marwar and made the cult of the immortal ascetic Jallandharnath an essential part of religious observance. In a painting that shows Man Singh worshipping the ascetic on Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, the maharajah is seen bowing deeply as Jallandharnath places a ceremonial shawl on his shoulders.<br />Diamond provides an illuminating analysis of the image and its meaning. The flame pattern on Man Singh's red robe, the candelabra and the many oil lamps all refer to Diwali. Jallandharnath is depicted with detailed precision in his personal appearance and his attributes. The ash pale skin, the saffron garment, the dreadlocks all identify him as a Shaiva ascetic while the conical hat and the deer horn whistle more specifically designate him as a Nath or member of a yogic order. The iconography is as rigorous as the art is dry. The spirit had ceased to blow in the art of India whether Hindu, Islamic or Sikh.<br />Yet the exhibition is gripping right through the end. The display is superb in an elegantly restrained manner. The concise labels like the book relate the images to their concepts. There is as much to think about as to gaze at. This is the great Asian show of the year.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/arts/melik29.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/arts/melik29.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><strong>Former Prime Minister V.P. Singh of India dies<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />NEW DELHI: Former Prime Minister V.P. Singh of India, remembered for his policy of reserving a larger share of jobs for the country's disadvantaged castes, died Thursday after a long battle with cancer.<br />Singh, 77, who was suffering from blood cancer and chronic renal failure, died Thursday afternoon in the Apollo hospital of New Delhi, a hospital spokesman said.<br />Singh served as finance and defense minister in Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's cabinet, but parted ways with Gandhi and led a coalition that defeated him in the 1989 elections.<br />He is best known for his policy of reserving government jobs for India's disadvantaged castes, which sparked widespread protests from the upper classes. Singh's policy, aimed at empowering the oppressed poorer castes, fragmented the country's politics and led to the emergence of strong caste-based parties.<br />Hugh Mulligan, who in a half-century with The Associated Press covered everyone from presidents and popes to astronauts and combat soldiers, died Wednesday. He was 83.<br />Mulligan died at Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, his brother John Mulligan said. He had been recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, according to his family.<br />Mulligan roamed the globe, visiting nearly 150 countries from Europe to equatorial Africa to Tibet. He covered more than half a dozen wars, including three reporting tours in Vietnam.<br />In 1970 stories about war's sudden impact on Cambodia, he described a novice army that "rode to war on Pepsi-Cola trucks."<br />In Mulligan's words, the Delta Queen wasn't just plying the Mississippi, she was "spinning rainbows from her stern wheel." The streets of Saigon before the war were "a whisper of bicycles."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/news/obits.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/news/obits.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />****************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Even for Taliban, too much opium</strong><br />By Kirk Kraeutler<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />UNITED NATIONS, New York: Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years that the Taliban are cutting back poppy cultivation and stockpiling raw opium in an effort to support prices and preserve a major source of financing for the insurgency, says the head of the United Nations drug office, Antonio Maria Costa.<br />Costa made his remarks last week as his office prepared to release its latest survey of Afghanistan's opium crop. Issued Thursday, it showed that poppy cultivation had retreated in much of the country and was now overwhelmingly concentrated in the 7 of 34 provinces where the insurgency remains strong, most of those in the south.<br />The result was a 19 percent reduction in the amount of land devoted to opium in Afghanistan, the United Nations found, even though the total tonnage of opium produced dropped by just 6 percent.<br />The high output per acre was attributed to a good growing season in the south, a heavily irrigated area where the Taliban maintain a strong presence in five provinces and have for several years "systematically encouraged" opium cultivation as a way to finance their insurgency, the study said.<br />Last year, the insurgents made as much as $300 million from the opium trade, by United Nations estimates. "With two to three hundred million dollars a lot of war effort can be funded," said Costa, an Italian diplomat who has served at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for six years.<br />But after three years of bumper crops, including this one, the Taliban have succeeded almost too well, producing opium in amounts far in excess of world demand. The result, Costa said, was a glut that was putting downward pressure on the price, which had dropped by about 20 percent.<br />The fact that prices had not collapsed, he said, was evidence that the Taliban, drug lords and even some farmers have stockpiled the opium, more and more of which is also being processed in Afghanistan. "Insurgents have been holding significant amounts of opium," Costa said.<br />The surplus - as much as 11,000 tons, or more than twice world demand in the last three years - now threatened to devalue even those stockpiles, Costa said. In 2008, Afghanistan produced 8,500 tons of opium, the United Nations found. World demand was estimated at about 4,400 tons a year.<br />This year, the Taliban are taking a "passive stance" toward cultivation, apparently putting less pressure on Afghan farmers to plant opium poppy. "They have called a moratorium of sorts as a way of keeping the stocks stable and supporting the price," Costa said.<br />He said the information came from undercover surveyors in Afghanistan who closely observed the autumn planting season and the buzz around markets where opium is traded.<br />The dynamics of the opium market pointed up the problems American and NATO forces face as they try to tamp down the narcotics trade. Eradication itself can drive up the price and put more money into the hands of the Taliban, while alienating poor Afghans who depend on the crop for their livelihoods.<br />He has suggested an emphasis not on eradication of poppy crops once they are planted, but on disrupting the trade by hitting the open-air markets where opium is bought and sold, the convoys that transport it and the labs where it is processed into more potent drugs.<br />NATO countries agreed to the logic of such an approach at a meeting in Budapest in October, Costa said, but he added that for many years, "The international community has undervalued the role of narcotics in creating the conditions for insurgency in Afghanistan."<br />Despite the still-high opium output, he was encouraged that an estimated one million fewer Afghans were involved in opium cultivation this year. The reasons varied, and included drought in some provinces beyond the south. But it also appeared to reflect some progress among provincial governors and shuras, or local councils, in persuading farmers not to plant poppy, Costa said.<br />Part of the incentive for farmers was the expectation of government assistance if they planted legal crops, he said. But higher prices for food crops also helped. The revenue from wheat, for instance, has tripled since 2007, the United Nations said.<br />But without better economic opportunities, poppy will remain an attractive alternative for many in Afghanistan, the source of more than 90 percent of the world's opium. Growth has lagged so badly, Costa noted, that the drug trade still accounts for a third of the Afghan economy. Other estimates put it at as much as one-half.<br />Any progress this year remained vulnerable, he warned. The biggest threat was if insecurity continued to spread to previously stable parts of Afghanistan, as it has in recent months. Could the United Nations, NATO and U.S. forces keep up the declines in opium cultivation in the face of decreased security? "The answer is no," Costa said.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/opium.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/opium.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>Taliban seen earning up to 304 mln pounds from opium<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />By Luke Baker<br />The Taliban has earned up to $470 million (304 million pounds) from the Afghan opium trade this year alone, the United Nations said Thursday, money that is being used to finance the insurgency against U.S. and Afghan forces.<br />As well as the income earned from directly taxing farmers' output and from levies on opium processing and on trafficking the drug, there is evidence the Taliban is hoarding opium stocks to prop up prices, the U.N. said in a report.<br />This suggests the Taliban may not be overly worried in the short-term by U.S-led efforts to eradicate poppy fields because lower supply may end up lifting prices, potentially allowing the militant movement to increase its earnings.<br />"Despite the drop in opium cultivation, production and prices, the Taliban and other anti-government forces are making massive amounts of money from the drug business," the U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime said in its 2008 Afghan opium survey.<br />This revenue rise comes at a time when the Taliban is stepping up attacks throughout Afghanistan, especially in the south and east, across the border from Pakistan, where the U.S. military says al Qaeda and Taliban cells are now based.<br />The U.N. report estimated the Taliban earned $50-$70 million from imposing a 10 percent charge, called ushr, on economic activities such as opium farming this year, as well as $200-$400 million from levies on opium processing and heroin trafficking.<br />"With so much drug-related revenue, it is not surprising that the insurgents' war machine has proved so resilient, despite the heavy pounding by Afghan and allied forces," Antonio Maria Costa, UNODC executive director, said in the report.<br />The income -- the first time the United Nations has put such a high figure on the Taliban's revenue stream -- does not include money the Taliban is believed to be making from exports of cannabis, another widely produced Afghan crop.<br />In its report, the U.N. said opium poppy production -- the raw material for heroin that is exported to Europe, the Middle East and the United States -- had actually fallen substantially in 2008 following a U.S. and Afghan government crackdown.<br />It said opium cultivation declined by 19 percent to 157,000 hectares countrywide, almost all in the south, with production down by six percent and prices falling by around 20 percent.<br />"As a result, the value of opium to farmers dropped by more than a quarter between 2007 and 2008, from $1 billion to $730 million," the report said.<br />"The export value of opium, morphine and heroin (at border prices in neighbouring countries) for Afghan traffickers is also down, from $4 billion in 2007 to $3.4 billion this year."<br />As a result of that revenue decline, and the fall in international prices, Costa said there was evidence the Taliban and its associates were hoarding opium stocks in order to manipulate market prices.<br />"Since they are hoarding opium, they have the most to gain from lower cultivation," he said. "This would drive up prices, and result in a re-evaluation of their stocks."<br />At the same time, he emphasised that the strategy of tackling opium production and encouraging farmers to grow alternative crops was the right one and should be reinforced.<br />"If the Taliban can disrupt the market, so can NATO. Drug production and trafficking would be slowed by destroying high value targets like drug markets, labs and convoys -- which the Afghan army, backed by NATO, are starting to do," Costa said.<br />"The downward trend in Afghanistan's opium economy would gain speed with more honest government and more development assistance."<br />(Reporting by Luke Baker; Editing by Sophie Hares)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-DRUGS-REPORT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/europe/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-DRUGS-REPORT.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />**************<br /><br /><br /><strong>Kabul car bombing kills at least 4 and wounds 17<br /></strong>By Kirk Semple<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />KABUL: A suicide car bomber plowed into rush-hour traffic on a commercial boulevard in Kabul on Thursday, killing at least four people and wounding up to 17, the police and hospital authorities said.<br />The bomber seemed to have been aiming at a passing convoy of NATO troops, the Interior Ministry said in a statement, but several witnesses said there were no security forces, either Afghan or foreign, in the immediate vicinity.<br />The explosion occurred about 135 meters, or 450 feet, from a major traffic circle and a heavily guarded entrance to an access road leading to the American Embassy, raising speculation that the bomber may have intended to blow himself up there but detonated prematurely.<br />Within minutes of the attack, the victims had been evacuated, and government investigators had begun sifting through the wreckage. But more than an hour later, the bloodied, twisted body of the suicide bomber still lay in the street, about 45 meters from the blast site where only the mangled front end of his car remained.<br />According to witnesses, the bomber have been weaving through traffic and then hit a pedestrian and a series of cars before exploding. "I thought he was drunk," said Salih Muhammad, 35, a street cleaner who was part of a nine-man crew working that stretch of road when the attack occurred. "Then there was this huge explosion."<br />Qari Ayob, 37, the owner of a small store near the blast site, said he was in his shop at the time. "At first I felt a huge flame and then heard a very big explosion," he said. "I felt as if the flame came into my shop. Then a darkness came and it blinded me for a while." Two of the cleaning crew members were wounded in the blast and their co-workers rushed them to a nearby hospital. Muhammad stood with another street cleaner outside the emergency room waiting for news. His hands and orange work clothes were covered in blood.<br />Noor Agah Akramzada, director of the hospital, said it had received 10 wounded and one body. A handwritten notice taped to the wall of the hospital listed the names and ages of the wounded. Officials at a military hospital in the neighborhood said they were treating at least seven other victims.<br />Ayob, the shopkeeper, said he felt lucky because at that time of day he usually stood outside his shop warming up in the sunshine. But Thursday morning he did not, he said. As he spoke, workers were cleaning up glass from his shattered shop window. The store would remain open for business, Ayob said, "There is no alternative."<br />Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/afghan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/afghan.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>Book reviews: 'American Lightning'</strong><br />Reviewed by David Oshinsky<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />American Lightning<br />Terror, Mystery, Movie-Making, and the Crime of the Century<br />By Howard Blum<br />339 pages. Crown Publishers. $24.95.<br />In the early morning hours of Oct. 1, 1910, a huge explosion rocked the headquarters of The Los Angeles Times, killing 21 people and leaving the building in ruins. It soon became apparent that this was the work of a bomber, not the result of a match struck carelessly near leaking gas, and a national manhunt began. What followed - the arrests, the trial, the confessions - would grab headlines intermittently before sliding into the memory hole of history.<br />The more sensational press accounts from that era portrayed the bombing as "the crime of the century," even though the century still had 90 years to run. Since that time, authors and headline writers have claimed this title for a host of other crimes (and trials): Leopold and Loeb, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro boys, the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, the Manson family, the Watergate crowd and O. J. Simpson.<br />Howard Blum, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, isn't shy about stretching the relevance of his story. The 1910 bombing was a watershed event in U.S. history, he insists, with dire consequences for the 20th century and a dark warning for the 21st.<br />Blum tells the story through the intersecting lives of three characters: Billy Burns, the detective who tracked down the bombers; Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who defended them; and D. W. Griffith, the filmmaker who had assisted the detective on an earlier murder case.<br />The motive for the bombing seemed apparent from the start. The Los Angeles Times was a "fiercely conservative" newspaper, Blum says, and its publisher, Harrison Gray Otis, had vowed to turn Los Angeles into "a bustling, nonunion metropolis." Employing his army of detectives, Burns traced the conspiracy, as well as other terrorist acts, to the Indianapolis headquarters of the Structural Iron Workers union and its secretary-treasurer, John J. McNamara, whose accomplices included his brother Jim.<br />Business leaders praised Burns for saving capitalism from the clutches of working-class thuggery. But the union movement rushed to the McNamara brothers' defense. "I have investigated the whole case," said Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor. "Burns has lied!" With aid from the growing Socialist Party, organized labor raised the war chest needed to give the McNamara brothers the finest defense. Enter Clarence Darrow.<br />Blum spends more time on Darrow's romantic failings than on his courtroom successes, though he does note that Darrow had previously defended labor leaders accused of violent acts. What made the Los Angeles case different, he adds, was the prosecution's airtight case: the evidence against the McNamaras was overwhelming. So Darrow seems to have taken part in a conspiracy to pay off a potential juror. In the end, the brothers pleaded guilty to murder in return for long sentences that spared their lives. Burns emerged as the hero, Darrow the beaten man.<br />And what of D. W. Griffith? He remains a transient figure, shoehorned into the story, one suspects, to tie the McNamara trial to the sexy culture of Hollywood. We learn a bit about Griffith's moviemaking skills, his sympathy for the downtrodden and his influence on an awful film about the McNamara case, "A Martyr to His Cause."<br />Although Blum makes repeated claims for the importance of the Los Angeles Times bombing and casually compares it to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he adds no historical bedrock to support either assertion. What's missing is both a feeling for the pulse of everyday life in Los Angeles in 1910 and an understanding of the enormous industrial, technological and demographic changes that had ignited the violent impasse between labor and capital in California, and beyond.<br />For Americans a century ago, the bombing offered a brief whiff of Armageddon, a society on the brink. This alone makes it a memorable story, one that still begs to be told. - Reviewed by David Oshinsky<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/arts/bookven.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/arts/bookven.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>Gordon Goldstein's 'Lessons in Disaster'<br /></strong>By Richard Holbrooke<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />Lessons in Disaster<br />McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam.<br />By Gordon M. Goldstein.<br />300 pages. Times Books/Henry Holt & Company. $25; £16.81.<br />In 1961, John Fitzgerald Kennedy brought to Washington a new generation of pragmatic young activists who came to be known as the New Frontiersmen. When the journalist Theodore White later wrote a memorable photo essay about them for Life magazine, he called them the "action-intellectuals." The most celebrated were Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, whose title - modest by today's standards - was special assistant to the president for national security affairs, but whose importance was great (today the position has a more grandiose title - national security adviser). McNamara, of course, became one of the most controversial public servants in modern times, while Bundy got less attention, except for Kai Bird's excellent 1998 dual biography of him and his brother William (who had served as assistant secretary of state for East Asia).<br />But in "Lessons in Disaster," Gordon Goldstein's highly unusual book, Bundy emerges as the most interesting figure in the Vietnam tragedy - less for his unfortunate part in prosecuting the war than for his agonized search 30 years later to understand himself.<br />Bundy was the quintessential Eastern Establishment Republican, a member of a family that traced its Boston roots back to 1639. His ties to Groton (where he graduated first in his class), Yale and then Harvard were deep. At the age of 27, he wrote, to national acclaim, the "memoirs" of former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. In 1953, Bundy became dean of the faculty at Harvard - an astonishing responsibility for someone still only 34. Even David Halberstam, who would play so important a role in the public demolition of Bundy's reputation in his classic, "The Best and the Brightest," admitted that "Bundy was a magnificent dean" who played with the faculty "like a cat with mice.? As he chose his team, Kennedy was untroubled by Bundy's Republican roots -the style, the cool and analytical mind, and the Harvard credentials were more important. "I don't care if the man is a Democrat or an Igorot," he told the head of his transition team, Clark Clifford. "I just want the best fellow I can get for the particular job." And so McGeorge Bundy entered into history - the man with the glittering résumé for whom nothing seemed impossible.<br />Everyone knows how this story ends: Kennedy assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson trapped in a war he chose to escalate, Nixon and Kissinger negotiating a peace agreement and, finally, the disastrous end on April 30, 1975, as American helicopters lifted the last Americans off the roof of the embassy. (Well, actually it was a nearby rooftop, but the myth is somehow more accurate than the literal truth.) Bundy had left the Johnson administration a decade earlier, after a dispute with Lyndon Johnson over process, not policy, and he went on to serve as president of the Ford Foundation. But for five years, he had been present at the most critical moments of the escalation, and he had supported all of them; he was one of the primary architects and defenders of the war.<br />The columnist Joseph Kraft, a friend of Bundy's, once described him as "a figure of true consequence" and "perhaps the only candidate for the statesman's mantle to emerge in the generation that is coming to power." When Bundy died in 1996, another friend, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., said, "a single tragic error prevented him from achieving his full promise as a statesman." Bundy spoke only occasionally about Vietnam after he left government, but when he did, he supported the war. Yet it haunted him. He knew his own performance in the White House had fallen far short of his own exacting standards, and Halberstam's devastating portrait of him disturbed him far more deeply than most people realized. After remaining largely silent, - except for an occasional defense of the two presidents he had served - for 30 years, Bundy finally began, in 1995, to write about Vietnam.<br />He chose as his collaborator Gordon Goldstein, a young scholar of international affairs. Together they began mining the archives, and Goldstein conducted a series of probing interviews. Bundy began writing tortured notes to himself, often in the margins of his old memos - a sort of private dialogue with the man he had been 30 years earlier - something out of a Pirandello play.<br />Bundy would scribble notes: "the doves were right"; "a war we should not have fought"; "I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution." "What are my worst mistakes?" For those of us who had known the self-confident, arrogant Brahmin from Harvard, these astonishing, even touching, efforts to understand his own mistakes are far more persuasive than the shallow analysis McNamara offers in his own memoir, "In Retrospect." In the middle of the research for the book, Bundy died, five days after his last session with Goldstein. Left with fragments of a work that would never be written, Goldstein spent years piecing them together and finished a manuscript, based on the interviews, which was approved for publication by Yale University Press. But Mary Bundy, who had at first encouraged Goldstein in his project, withdrew her consent for the book, and its publication was permanently shelved.<br />Goldstein then produced a different book with no involvement from the Bundy family, using his interviews and Bundy's notes to himself, which are now in the public collection of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Goldstein thus writes from a unique perspective)not quite inside Bundy's head but not an outside observer. As he says, "In no way is this a book by McGeorge Bundy but rather it is a book about him." The result is a compelling portrait of a man once serenely confident, searching decades later for self-understanding. Did he sense that his time was running out? From the evidence in this book, it seems possible.<br />For today's readers, what's most important about "Lessons in Disaster" is not the details of how the United States stumbled into a war without knowing where it was going; that story has been told in hundreds of other books. Goldstein's achievement is quite different: it offers insight into how Bundy, a man of surpassing skill and reputation, could have advised two presidents so badly. On the long shelf of Vietnam books, I know of nothing quite like it. The unfinished quality of Bundy's self-inquest only enhances its power, authenticity and, yes, poignancy.<br />Goldstein has organized the book chronologically, giving each chapter the title of a "lesson" Bundy derived from his career. This is a sly tribute to one of Bundy's most notable qualities - his wry, ironic sense of humor, which often distanced him from the real-life human consequences of policy.<br />From the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, for example, Bundy concludes, "Never Trust the Bureaucracy to Get It Right" - a trivial lesson compared with the human and political costs, but characteristic of Bundy's obsession with process rather than underlying causes. Similarly, the all-important decisions by Johnson that turned Vietnam irrevocably into an American war in 1965 are summarized under the title "Never Deploy Military Means in Pursuit of Indeterminate Ends." Even as he searches for truth, Bundy remains Bundy. It is striking how little interest he shows in Vietnam itself, and how little concern he shows for the huge death toll of the war. At one point, he coolly tells Johnson that we should send ground troops even though the chances for success "are between 25 percent to 75 percent" because it would be better for America to lose after sending troops than not to send troops at all! War, to Bundy, seems more an abstraction than a horrible reality.<br />The one exception - the only time Bundy seemed moved by something real and tangible on the ground - came in February 1965, when Johnson sent Bundy to Vietnam for his only firsthand look.<br />While he was in Saigon, the Vietcong attacked the American air base outside the central highlands town of Pleiku, killing nine American soldiers and wounding 137. Although it was later learned that the Communists did not even realize Bundy was in Saigon, and hardly knew who he was, Johnson and Bundy both assumed Pleiku was a direct answer to Bundy's visit. Bundy was annoyed that the reaction to his hurried visit to Pleiku the next morning was later characterized by others as emotional. But the evidence is strong that his visit to the wreckage at Pleiku, apparently the closest he ever came to the awful waste of war - moved him greatly, and prompted him even more strongly to advocate bombing North Vietnam.<br />As it happens, I was part of a small group that dined with Bundy the night before Pleiku at the home of Deputy Ambassador William J. Porter, for whom I then worked. Bundy quizzed us in his quick, detached style for several hours, not once betraying emotion. I do not remember the details of that evening - how I wish I had kept a diary! - but by then I no longer regarded Bundy as a role model for public service. There was no question he was brilliant, but his detachment from the realities of Vietnam disturbed me. In Ambassador Porter's dining room that night were people far less intelligent than Bundy, but they lived in Vietnam, and they knew things he did not. Yet if they could not present their views in quick and clever ways, Bundy either cut them off or ignored them. A decade later, after I had left the government, I wrote a short essay for Harper's Magazine titled "The Smartest Man in the Room Is Not Always Right." I had Bundy - and that evening - in mind.<br />One of the most important conclusions Bundy reached before he died is in Goldstein's final chapter, "Intervention is a Presidential Choice, Not an Inevitability." For 40 years there has been a debate over whether Kennedy, had he lived, would have followed the same course as Johnson in Vietnam. In "Counsel to the President," the book I wrote with Clark Clifford, Kennedy's lawyer and McNamara's successor as secretary of defense, Clifford concluded that Kennedy "would have initiated a search for either a negotiated settlement or a phased withdrawal." Bundy comes to the same conclusion, and carries the thought further. Having watched the two presidents up close as they grappled with Vietnam, Bundy concluded that we must "better understand the indispensable centrality of the commander in chief's leadership." A re-elected Kennedy, he says, would "not have to prove himself in Vietnam." Bundy never believed in negotiations with the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese. This, coupled with his enduring faith in the value of military force in almost any terrain or circumstance, were his greatest errors. They contributed to a tragic failure. With the nation now about to inaugurate a new president committed to withdraw combat troops from Iraq and succeed in Afghanistan, the lessons of Vietnam are still relevant. McGeorge Bundy's story, of early brilliance and a late-in-life search for the truth about himself and the war, is an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/arts/idbriefs29D.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/arts/idbriefs29D.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>In Vietnam, a haven overlooks hills and history</strong><br />By Martha Ann Overland<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />TAM DAO, Vietnam: At the turn of the last century, Vietnam's colonial rulers chose the lush hilltop town of Tam Dao to build their summer homes and resorts. When Hanoi's temperatures soared, the French came here to enjoy the cool mountain air, walk in the pine forests and gaze at the dramatic vistas.<br />The American writer Nguyen Qui Duc has settled in Tam Dao for many of the same reasons. "I get a sense like I did when I was 8 years old, before the fighting got bad," Duc said, referring to the war in Vietnam. "I come here and the memories of that terrible time are all gone."<br />Duc is one of a growing number of returning Vietnamese-Americans. He was a teenager when he fled the country as Communist forces swept into Saigon. (It would be 16 years until he was reunited with his father, who was imprisoned.)<br />Eventually he made his way to the United States but began coming to Vietnam as a reporter in the late 1980s, when the country began to open up to Westerners again.<br />Then, in 2006, he quit his job as the host of the public radio program "Pacific Time," packed up his San Francisco apartment, sold his car and moved to Hanoi. He opened a café and art gallery there.<br />Like the French, Duc longed to find a peaceful retreat outside the steamy capital. Today's expatriates usually head for the beach but he wanted something more authentic, somewhere more like the Vietnam he grew up in. He made an intensive search and, in the summer of 2007, he bought a 500-square-meter, or 5,400-square-foot, parcel in the mist-filled mountains of Tam Dao, a two-hour drive from Hanoi.<br />When planning the house, Duc decided to work mostly with glass and stone, easily available materials that local workers were familiar with. Yet rather than following his neighbors' lead by building several stories high to squeeze more living space onto the narrow plot, he anchored the single-story modernist structure into the cliff. From town, all that is visible is a stone wall on the edge of the mountain.<br />"The locals ask me all the time," Duc said with a grin, "'when are you going to finish building your house?"<br />The neighbors' confusion doesn't end there. The house has no front door, at least not in the traditional sense.<br />Steps from the main road into town lead to a traditional wooden Vietnamese house, used as a guest room, and Duc's fishponds. From there, paths of stone and wooden planks diverge. One dead-ends in a sunken Japanese rock garden; another seems to lead across a foundation wall with an unforgiving edge. Once across it, the visitor can see that a glass pyramid-shaped skylight is really a sliding trap door, leading into an open living space of about 100 square meters.<br />Duc is quick to concede that he is no architect. A pyramid just seemed the most interesting way to climb down into the house, he said.<br />He did get professional advice but, in the end, the design - a New York City loft cantilevered over the jungle - was largely his.<br />"All I wanted was to capture the view," Duc said, watching the mist turn and twist up the side of the mountain. "I wanted to feel I was floating in the clouds."<br />It was a challenge to install the soaring eight-meter, or 25-foot, floor-to-ceiling windows to capture this feeling. "I wanted to use local craftsman but build a Western design," he said. And, as he fought to budge the sliding glass door that leads to an infinity pool, Duc concedes that his design ideas weren't always successful.<br />Later, as rain lashed the house, he shrugged as water trickled down the entryway stairs into the sunken living room and out a well-placed drain. "It's a work in progress," he said.<br />Duc, who came up on weekends from Hanoi to oversee the work, conceded that he wasn't always able to communicate what he wanted. But it wasn't a language problem. "I went out and found these beautiful old tiles and I came back to find that someone scrubbed them clean," Duc moaned. Nor did the workers think much of his rustic, open-plan kitchen. When he was away they put up a wall and hung faux French cornices. He had them all taken down.<br />Watching the house take shape, oddities and all, has been part of the adventure, he said.<br />"The day they were to pour the concrete, the chicken was boiled, I did the prayers and then they started drinking, and it was only seven in the morning!" said Duc, referring to the ceremony that asks the local gods for their blessing to build. "It's a difficult house to maneuver around. Especially if you are drunk."<br />Rooftop walkways and steep drop-offs into a stone courtyard are not the only things Duc has to navigate deftly.<br />Vietnam does not permit most foreigners to own private property, though exceptions recently were made for long-term expatriates and returning Vietnamese. Duc knows that the laws could change again and he could lose the $100,000 that he spent to buy the land and build the house.<br />He said he believed that the land has doubled in value since he bought it, noting that adjacent lots are on the market for $220 a square meter. It is hard to quantify values in Vietnam as houses tend to be handed down within a family, even the three-story, concrete-block structures in Duc's neighborhood, and land sales comparisons are not readily available.<br />Duc says he has enough confidence in the future that he plans to add an extra bedroom to the house. He envisions the property as a meeting place for Vietnamese and American artists. Eventually he hopes to offer the house to writers who need a quiet place to work.<br />But above all, it is his retreat. For much of his life, he was unable to return to Vietnam. Now, having just turned 50, he says he is finally home.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/properties/reviet.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/properties/reviet.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>David Vann's 'Legend of a Suicide'<br /></strong>By Tom Bissell<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />Legend of a Suicide<br />By David Vann.<br />172 pages. University of Massachusetts Press. $24.95<br />Suicide is an exploded bridge that can never be repaired. All its secondary victims can do is stare across the chasm and hope the other side is more peaceful than this one. In his first book, "A Mile Down," David Vann wrote of his attempt to surpass the modest seafaring efforts of his father, who killed himself when Vann was a boy. In search of answers, Vann built a ship and set out for the watery depths - only to come close to reuniting with his father in the void. This was an exorcism that wound up needing an exorcism. One hopes, for Vann's sake, that the novella and five stories in his second book, "Legend of a Suicide," helped provide it. An author more haunted by paternal amputation would be difficult to imagine. A sadder book about fathers and sons would be impossible to imagine.<br />The book's central character is a boy named Roy. The novella and four of the five stories take place in Alaska, where Vann himself grew up, and only the novella steps outside Roy's first-person narration. While the father's suicide is dramatized explicitly just once, it exerts its gravitational pull on every page.<br />From the shores of Vann's Alaska one can see the Russia of Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons." One can also see Richard Ford's "Rock Springs" and Tobias Wolff's archipelago of perpetual struggle.<br />Structurally dependent on epiphany and defiantly plainspoken, "Legend of a Suicide" is about as unfashionable as fiction published in 2008 can possibly be. Its language ranges from the undeniably evocative ("I slipped out into the soft, watery world of Alaskan rain-forest night") to the iffier register of quasi-Hemingway. Thankfully, examples of the former vastly outnumber the latter.<br />A few passages nevertheless have a confession-booth, vaguely essayistic feel. In "Ketchikan," a 30-year-old Roy returns to his Alaskan hometown and, after listing its many eccentricities, notes, "This was overwrought, but it seemed in keeping with the indulgence of this trip, with the extravagance of an attempted return to childhood." At the story's end, Roy tells us that "the divorce and suicide that I had let shape my life so permanently had been something else altogether. . . . And what, then, of what I had become?"<br />It is hard to know who, exactly, is speaking: the art or the artist? In his acknowledgments, Vann writes, a little inelegantly, that his stories are "fictional, but based on a lot that's true." Fifty years ago, when writers were romanticized differently, it was less problematic to imagine an author and his narrator as an essentially Siamese-twin phenomenon. Today, such a determined blurring may strike some readers as self-consciously therapeutic or, worse yet, self-serving. Vann's narrator speaks of the "last beautiful, desperate, far-ranging circlings" of his father's life, but he may as well be describing the overall method of these stories.<br />In "Ichthyology," Roy watches two "slick and merciless" silver-dollar fish, recently introduced to his aquarium, attack a "lazy, boggle-eyed" tankmate, sucking out both its eyes. The story returns, stunningly, to this image in its final lines. Much of Vann's book works this way. The smallest moments of unease are placed on the narrative scale as if they were lead bars. Suicide gives everything it has not destroyed a dreadful, unfamiliar weight.<br />In the novella, "Sukkwan Island," the powerful and supremely vexing centerpiece of the collection, Roy and his father make a final attempt at reconciliation. The father has bought a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness with the intent of spending a year there with his son, homesteading and living off the land. The first half of the novella is narrated from Roy's close third-person perspective, the second half from the father's. In the first few pages Vann shows the reader an unassuming set of rustic implements: some rope, a few screws, a battery. By the story's end the rope has become a noose, the screws have been driven into the reader's fingernails, and the battery is wired someplace unspeakable.<br />The father, a dentist who has quit his practice in Fairbanks, imagines himself as a high-north survivalist. He is, in fact, woefully unprepared. He does not know the name of the nearest inhabited island or how to build a cache for winter food or how to repair the cabin's damaged roof or how to keep the bears away. (Not everyone who lives in places like Alaska is born knowing how to MacGyver a water filter out of bark.) The father does not even have the sense to prevent his increasingly terrified son from overhearing his hopeless nighttime sobs.<br />"Sukkwan Island" is about the love of a powerless boy for a weak father. While his father goes to pieces, Roy busies himself with fishing and chores, activities that showcase Vann's grimly observant facility with natural-world detail. When Roy bashes in the head of a Dolly Varden trout, he hunches down "to look at it and watch its colors fade." An early pink salmon lies "gasping and wild-eyed" after the boy scoops it up by the gills and heaves it onto the beach. (Warning: the fish-trauma-per-page ratio here makes "The Old Man and the Sea" seem like a paean to ichthyophilia.)<br />Every night, Roy goes to bed to the sound of his father's weeping. "I'm sorry, Roy," he eventually tells his son. "I'm really trying. I just don't know if I can hold on." Later, after he confesses that he once got crab lice from a prostitute and passed them along to the boy's stepmother, he asks, "Do you think I'm a monster?" Soon enough, a bit of dialogue as innocent as "Maybe we should go for a hike" becomes a portent of doom.<br />And yet this man is never hateful. You'd have to go back to books like "The Mayor of Casterbridge" or "The Great Santini" to find a father capable of such loathsome deeds brought to life with such empathy. After one bit of appalling fatherly negligence, Vann writes, "There were no good times after this." And there are 50 pages to go.<br />The central event of "Sukkwan Island," shocking for several reasons, appears to take place in a parallel universe. The Roy and the father of the other stories cannot be the Roy and the father of this story. Vann does not choose to explain this, and he should not have to. But it is strange, like encountering Borges, in waders, within "A River Runs Through It."<br />The reportorial relentlessness of Vann's imagination often makes his fiction seem less written than chiseled. One cannot say that Vann does not do humor well because - here, at least - he does not do humor at all. What he does do well is despair and desperation. In spite (or maybe because) of this, he leads the reader to vital places. A small, lovely book has been written out of his large and evident pain. "A father, after all," Vann writes, "is a lot for a thing to be." A son is also a lot for a thing to be; so is an artist. With "Legend of a Suicide," David Vann proves himself a fine example of both.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/arts/idbriefs29A.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/29/arts/idbriefs29A.php</a><br /><br /><br />*************<br /><strong>ElBaradei prods Syria on atom probe<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />By Mark Heinrich<br />The U.N. nuclear watchdog chief prodded Syria on Thursday to open up military sites to investigators and said he would soon show Damascus satellite images which Washington says indicate covert atomic activity.<br />A November 19 International Atomic Energy Agency report said a Syrian building bombed to rubble by Israel in 2007 bore similarities to a nuclear reactor. Uranium traces, possibly remnants of pre-enriched atomic fuel, had been found nearby.<br />The findings, based on U.S. satellite intelligence and one on-site IAEA inspection, were preliminary, the report said, but further, broader IAEA access and Syrian documentation to prove its denials of illicit work were crucial to draw conclusions.<br />"For the agency to complete its assessment, maximum transparency by Syria and the full sharing with the agency of all relevant information which other states may have are essential," IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei said.<br />He was alluding in particular to Israel, which has never commented on the nature of the site its air force took out.<br />"Syria should also agree, as a transparency measure, to let the agency visit other locations. I am confident modalities can be developed which will protect the confidentiality of military information," he told a meeting of the IAEA governing board.<br />Last week, a senior Syrian official dismissed the notion of further IAEA visits as these would involve checks at three military bases Damascus deems off-limits on national security grounds, citing its state of war with Israel.<br />"BAFFLING" LACK OF KEY SATELLITE PICTURES<br />Inspectors believe these sites could harbour items, possibly for fabricating nuclear fuel, linked to the bombed site, or which may have been whisked away from it soon after the attack -- and after the IAEA asked for access to examine it.<br />ElBaradei said it was "regrettable, indeed baffling" why there was no high-resolution satellite imagery of the site available for the period right after the bombing.<br />That would have been before Syria carted away potentially relevant evidence like rubble and equipment, diplomats say.<br />Diplomats close to the inquiry said it was possible that the seven states with commercial satellite networks pulled pictures for that period from circulation for undetermined security reasons, or Syria had bought them up to impede investigators.<br />The seven countries are the United States, Israel, France, Russia, China, India and Japan, said a senior diplomat, who like others, asked for anonymity because they were discussing restricted information.<br />ElBaradei said the IAEA recently won permission to show Syria some pictures from member state satellites taken of the site "shortly after the bombing" to elicit a response. He did not say what they showed or how sharp the images were.<br />One diplomat said the IAEA recently had found some pictures from the attack aftermath but they were not high-resolution.<br />ElBaradei cautioned that satellite pictures were no panacea in difficult nuclear investigations. "Because the agency cannot verify the authenticity of such imagery, we rely on it only as an auxiliary source to corroborate other information ... It is never the sole basis of our assessments," he told the governors.<br />Syria has said Israel's target was a conventional military building, the U.S. intelligence was forged and the uranium particles came with munitions used in Israel's air raid.<br />The U.S. intelligence report asserts that Syria was close to completing an illicitly undeclared reactor with North Korean technical help, designed to produce plutonium for atom bombs, when Israeli warplanes struck in September 2007.<br />Separately, ElBaradei urged Iran to stop impeding an agency probe into intelligence material that Washington says shows Tehran illicitly studied how to design atom bombs. Iran denies this but has not provided back-up evidence, the IAEA says.<br />(Additional reporting by Sylvia Westall; editing by Philippa Fletcher)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/africa/OUKWD-UK-NUCLEAR-IAEA.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/africa/OUKWD-UK-NUCLEAR-IAEA.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Iran says navy can strike well beyond its coast<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />TEHRAN: Iran's navy can strike an enemy well beyond its shores and as far away as Bab al-Mandab, the southern entrance to the Red Sea that leads to the Suez Canal, an Iranian naval commander said on Thursday.<br />Naval Commander Mahmoud Mousavi also repeated Iran's assertion that it could control the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the strategic Gulf waterway that is on Iran's coast, Fars News Agency reported.<br />The United States, Iran's arch-foe which has a naval base in Bahrain on the Arab side of the Gulf, has not ruled out military action if diplomacy fails to end a row over Iran's nuclear plans which Washington says is to make bombs. Tehran denies this.<br />"We have now attained the capacity to take our defence capability to the depth of the seas, oceans and the Red Sea and face the enemy at the Bab al-Mandab strait if the enemy should have an evil intention," Mousavi said.<br />Bab al-Mandab is also close to the Gulf of Aden, where Somali pirates have been hijacking commercial ships. Two ships operated by Iran have been seized in that region and one is still being held.<br />Several foreign warships are already operating in the area against the pirates and Iran has also said it could use force against the hijackers.<br />"One of the world's most sensitive and strategic spots is the Strait of Hormuz. Any country which holds sovereignty and control over the Strait of Hormuz will be the field's victor as happened in the war with the Iraqi regime," Mousavi added.<br />Iran's 1980s war with Iraq included a period that became known as the tanker war when oil carriers and other energy installations became targets by both sides. This led to the United States stepping in to protect oil shipping.<br />The Iran-Iraq war ended with a cease-fire in 1988.<br />Iran has previously said it could close the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, through which about 40 percent of the world's globally traded oil passes. The United States has pledged to protect shipping routes.<br />(Reporting by Hashem Kalantari, writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Dominic Evans)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-NAVY.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-NAVY.php</a><br /><br />**************<br /><strong>Israel's Lebanon war showcased cluster bomb horrors<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent<br />Israel inadvertently galvanised an international campaign to ban cluster munitions by hastily raining bomblets over south Lebanon before a U.N.-agreed halt to its 2006 war with Hezbollah fighters could take effect.<br />"It was the massive use of cluster munitions in the last 72 hours of that conflict that outraged the world," Mary Wareham of the New York-based Human Rights Watch group told Reuters.<br />Norway initiated negotiations on a treaty outlawing cluster munitions which about 100 nations -- but not Israel, the United States, Russia or China -- are due to sign in Oslo next week.<br />The Beirut government pushed hard for the treaty and Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh says he will be in Norway to sign it.<br />Cluster bombs are still killing and maiming people in south Lebanon, a hilly region of towns and farming villages where nearly all the land is used for crops or grazing.<br />Rasha Zayoun was at home sorting through a bag of thyme gathered by her father last year when her hand snagged on the ribbon of a cluster bomblet. The blast blew off her left leg.<br />"There was a power cut, I didn't see it was a cluster bomb," said the shy 18-year-old in a headscarf, sitting at a sewing machine in a school for disabled people in Sarafand, near Tyre.<br />With a prosthetic limb under her jeans, she has learned to walk again and hopes one day to open a tailor's shop.<br />Zayoun is among more than 270 people wounded by cluster munitions in Lebanon since the war. About 40 have been killed.<br />Lamis Zein, site supervisor for an all-woman battle area clearance team in the south, recalled how villagers returned after the conflict to find their homes infested with bomblets.<br />LETHAL LEFTOVERS<br />"They were in backyards, on rooftops, in the fields," said the feisty mother of two, who trained in January to join clearance efforts run by Norwegian People's Aid (NPA).<br />"People couldn't enter their houses or even pick their fruit and vegetables. They had to keep children inside."<br />Zein, who will go to Oslo to encourage more nations to sign the treaty, said her biggest reward was to see children playing in their gardens after her team had cleared them of bomblets.<br />Israel, which attacked Lebanon after Hezbollah seized two of its soldiers in a cross-border raid, says it uses cluster bombs in line with international law, which doesn't bar them outright.<br />Human Rights Watch, which has reported that Hezbollah also used some rockets with cluster components indiscriminately, says Israel violated prohibitions on targeting civilian areas when it sprayed the munitions from planes, rockets and artillery.<br />"If you know there are civilians in the area, you don't deploy cluster bombs," Wareham said. "Many fail to detonate on impact. They become de facto anti-personnel landmines posing clearance risks and risks to civilians for years to come."<br />More than two years on, clearance teams have cleared 48 million square metres of cluster bombs and other unexploded weaponry in the south, according to Dalya Farran, spokeswoman for the U.N Mine Action Coordination Centre in Lebanon.<br />Large areas still need to be cleared beneath the surface. Some lower-priority places have yet to be searched properly.<br />"Every inch of the suspected hazardous area has to be checked," said Knut Furunes, a Norwegian ex-soldier who manages NPA's mine action programme. "It's a massive task."<br />Lebanon and the United Nations say Israel's refusal to disclose targeting data on cluster strikes complicates the task of finding bomblets in the south's rugged hills and valleys.<br />"The sub-munitions are delivered in great numbers -- fired by rocket they come 640 at a time," Furunes said. "We just have to look and keep looking until we don't find any more."<br />CHILDREN AT RISK<br />Children are particularly at risk from the bomblets, many of which have white ribbons as part of their detonation mechanism. "Kids play with everything and they tend to have more severe (blast) injuries," said Furunes, displaying various types of bomblets, along with a bird's nest made mostly with the ribbons.<br />Campaigners for the treaty, adopted by 107 states in Dublin in May, say they are mostly delighted by its terms, requiring signatories to renounce the use, production, stockpiling and trade in cluster munitions. It also requires states to assist victims and family members and communities affected.<br />Some countries had argued for cluster munitions with self-destruct mechanisms to be exempted, but the agreed text of the convention exempts only a much narrower category.<br />"The Lebanon conflict provided us with some of our strongest evidence to go into the treaty discussions and say we don't want an exemption for cluster bombs that 'self-destruct', because in our experience, they don't, they fail," HRW's Wareham said.<br />At least 10 percent of sub-munitions dropped by Israel failed to explode, according to an NPA study. But the study included only cluster bombs that released their load perfectly. The actual failure rate was closer to 40 percent, Furunes said.<br />Wareham predicted that the Oslo convention would stigmatise cluster munitions and deter even non-signatory countries. "It would be very damaging for Israel if it used them again."<br />Mirna Ashour, 21, a woman cluster bomb searcher who will also go to Oslo, said she had a simple message for Israel, its main ally the United States, and other users of the weapons.<br />"I would tell them it's enough, stop war. Let us live in peace and safety. We are tired of war."<br />(Editing by Dominic Evans)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/africa/OUKWD-UK-CLUSTERBOMBS-LEBANON.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/africa/OUKWD-UK-CLUSTERBOMBS-LEBANON.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW3tK9JKgX3cImLhzSS-5fnEE-uEeZqy3t22tohKWCtwF1udTDvOeOUTfIs7Fg7kdeulgbdFj9YhWy76i-8v1ZyPptxdM8aok19kBoOd9IZWy4El1PYs-BzH4e7QnVtN1FyQNN60TO5W0/s1600-h/DSC02185.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682557597081874" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW3tK9JKgX3cImLhzSS-5fnEE-uEeZqy3t22tohKWCtwF1udTDvOeOUTfIs7Fg7kdeulgbdFj9YhWy76i-8v1ZyPptxdM8aok19kBoOd9IZWy4El1PYs-BzH4e7QnVtN1FyQNN60TO5W0/s320/DSC02185.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Happiness conference convenes in San Francisco<br /></strong>By Patricia Leigh Brown<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />SAN FRANCISCO: The stock market has been on a roller coaster, banks are going under, unemployment is skyrocketing and foreclosed homes pepper the landscape. What better time for a happiness conference?<br />In this dopamine-laden city, where the pursuit of well-being is something of a high art, a motley array of scientists, philosophers, doctors, psychologists, navel-gazing Googlers and Tibetan Buddhists addressed the latest findings on the science of human happiness - or eudaemonia, the classical Greek term for human flourishing.<br />Planned before the current crises, the first American "Happiness and Its Causes" conference was equal parts Aristotle and Oprah. It brought together heavy hitters like Paul Ekman, the psychologist known for deciphering facial "microexpressions" that reveal feelings, and Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford biologist. They considered topics like "Compassion and the Pursuit of Happiness" and "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers."<br />The conference is the latest manifestation of the booming happiness industry, subject of a growing number of books, scholarly research papers and academic courses. The concept began in Sydney in 2006 and has since expanded, its profile raised by the Dalai Lama's participation in Sydney in 2007.<br />The two-day gathering in San Francisco this week, which cost $545, benefited a nonprofit group offering Buddhist teachings to prisoners.<br />It knitted together many currents in the cultural ether: positive psychology, neuroplasticity, mindfulness-based stress reduction, the role of emotional support in cancer and the yogic ideal of "being in the present moment."<br />"We know more about gloominess than cheerfulness," Ekman said before exploring cross-cultural definitions of happiness, including nachas, the Yiddish expression of pride in the achievements of one's offspring.<br />Fortunately, given recent events, a growing number of studies over the past decade have suggested that money does not equal happiness, among them one concluding that the Inuit of northern Greenland and the Masai in Kenya were just as happy as members of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans.<br />The latest word on happiness from the front lines of medicine and science was condensed, à la SparkNotes, into user-friendly, 15-minute nuggets.<br />Dr. David Spiegel, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine and the director of its Center on Stress and Health, discussed the positive effects of group therapy on metastatic breast cancer patients and his belief that people can live longer if they face their illnesses directly with proper emotional support. "I've never lost a patient to terminal crying," Spiegel said. "Suppressing sadness is the devil's bargain."<br />Sapolsky made a similar point about humans and baboons.<br />Modern stress disorders contributing to hypertension, heart disease and other illnesses are the result of a disjuncture between primitive conditions and our own - or, as he put it, "running for your life in the savannah versus 30-year mortgages."<br />The relatively new field of behavioral neurogenetics is exploring a handful of genes that seem to be related to depression, anxiety, addictive personality, sensation seeking and other traits. But, Sapolsky said in a follow-up e-mail message, a person's risk seems not predetermined but rather the result of interactions of genes and the environment, especially stressors in childhood.<br />Social support is vital, no matter how healthy you are, he told the crowd. "How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you."<br />The audience, composed largely of the helping professions, also included a senior vice president of a large mortgage company, who would not give her name. She said she had laid off more than 500 people in the last six months and was there to learn how to bolster the morale of employees working weekends and holidays and making do with bonuses cut in half.<br />"What truly makes people happy is a higher calling," she said, adding that companies like hers were not totally at fault for the mortgage crisis. "Western society is too focused on blame," she said. "In order for our customers to be happy, they have to understand that they're accountable."<br />"Happiness entrepreneurs" promoted themselves in the tea break that ended with the ting of a Tibetan prayer bell. Aymee Coget, who wants to be the Suze Orman of happiness, handed out fliers for her "Happiness Makeover," a three-month route to "sustainable eudaemonia." Coget said, "I guarantee happiness in three months."<br />In California's Bay Area, the happiness business has been in full flower.<br />James Baraz, a revered meditation teacher, has a 10-month course in Berkeley on "Awakening Joy." Among the exercises and meditations are suggestions for improving your life, including singing every day, making lists of things that made you happy and getting a "joy buddy."<br />The course has become a bona fide phenomenon since an article about it appeared in O, Oprah Winfrey's magazine, with 300 people taking it in Berkeley and 2,500 taking it online.<br />"Neuroscience and spirituality are coming together," Baraz said by telephone. "It's not airy-fairy stuff."<br />Nevertheless, a few renegades at the conference suggested that happiness was overrated. "Unhappiness about not being happy is a modern condition," said Darrin McMahon, a professor of history at Florida State University. "We cannot feel good all the time, nor should we."<br />Yet the national embrace of "Yes We Can" hung in the air.<br />"We've had a period of borrowing money, personal gratification, consumption and self-interest," said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a director of the Greater Good Science Center. "Now we will have a president who is talking about sacrifice."<br />"Human beings are wired to care and give," Keltner added, "and it's probably our best route to happiness."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/america/letter.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/america/letter.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>OPINION</strong><br /><strong>Ellen Goodman: The new longevity<br /></strong>Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />The new longevity<br />Did you miss this in the post-election news? Senator Robert Byrd, 91, announced that he will give up the chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee to Senator Daniel Inouye, 84. The torch has passed to a new generation.<br />I don't say this snidely, although I was charmed at Inouye's hope that he was "sufficiently prepared to succeed my mentor." I say it, rather, because this year, the air has been filled with talk of generational change. Ted Kennedy, the ailing elder of Democratic politics, set the tone when he took his brother's torch and passed it verbally to Barack Obama. Since then, torches have illuminated the conversation.<br />In 1961, the transition from 70-year-old Ike to 43-year-old JFK symbolized the arrival of the postwar, post-Depression New Frontier. Now the election of Obama is alternately described as the arrival of the Twitter age, the Jon Stewart era, or the ascendancy of the post-racial and post-partisan generation.<br />Of course, Obama took that mantle of change on his own shoulders last year when he addressed his civil rights elders at the 42nd anniversary of the Selma march. Expressing gratitude to the "Moses generation," he identified himself as part of the "Joshua generation." If Moses led the people through the desert years, Joshua was anointed to lead them into the promised land. Obama both praised and put the "Moses generation" in its place: history.<br />Generational change was not without tension this year. In the black community, Jesse Jackson bristled at his minor role. The man who had stood with Martin Luther King Jr. and won more than a dozen presidential primaries was heard on an open mike slamming the new kid on his turf.<br />In turn, 67-year-old Jesse was upbraided by his 42-year-old son, Jesse Jr., for his "ugly rhetoric." Yet on election night, one of the most emotional images was of the tears trailing down the senior Jackson's face.<br />There was generational tension as well among women during the primary when many second-wave feminist mothers supporting Hillary split with daughters supporting Obama. Mothers felt daughters had "sold out." Daughters bristled at mothers patronizing or, should I say, matronizing them. It was, perversely, their joint opposition to Sarah Palin that healed this rift.<br />Still, it does seem odd that the imagery of generational change would be in the forefront right now when the most profound social change may be from something else: longevity.<br />When the torch was passed to JFK, the average life expectancy was 74. As Obama becomes president, it is 78. Today, there are 16 million Americans in their 70s, and 9 million in their 80s.<br />We are not just living longer, but also healthier. Age itself is undergoing a vast transition like those magazine covers that boast 60 is the new 50 or even the new 40. Twenty years ago, one in 10 seniors worked; now it's one in six. About 70 percent of boomers expect to work after 65. Even before the economic meltdown, older workers were postponing retirement. At 55 and 65, many are thinking more about renewing than retiring.<br />Indeed in the real world of politics, the torch of vice president has been passed to Joe Biden, age 66. Hillary Clinton is being considered as the new secretary of state at age 61. In the Senate, the average age is 62.<br />There are, to be sure, still fault lines along the old generational borders. Aging baby boomers are blamed if they stay at work, blocking access to the next rung up the ladder. Boomers are also blamed if they retire, devouring the incomes of their children, who are paying for Medicare and Social Security.<br />But it seems to me that one of the great challenges of our time is not going to be passing or wresting torches. It will be easing these generational struggles. We will need older Americans - is Joe Biden their mentor? - who can elevate and work for younger leaders without feeling dissed or threatened. We'll need younger people to accept elders as their experienced peers. We'll need an economy and psychology that accommodate the new longevity.<br />As for the Joshua generation? Have we forgotten that Moses lived to be 120?<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/opinion/edgoodman.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/opinion/edgoodman.php</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><strong>Americans celebrate Thanksgiving at St. Paul's Cathedral in London</strong><br />By John F. Burns<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />LONDON: As they have for 50 years, Americans in London packed St. Paul's Cathedral on Thursday for an annual Thanksgiving service that, as evocatively as any event on the calendar, nurtures the home thoughts from abroad that are a staple of expatriate life.<br />Four marines from the detachment at the U.S. Embassy in London, three of them veterans of the Iraq war, carried the Stars and Stripes and the Marine Corps colors across the marbled floor beneath the cathedral's dome and laid them before the altar. As the banners were borne out again at the service's end, the congregation of 3,500, many of them families with small children, raised a moving crescendo for the last verse of "America the Beautiful."<br />"America! America!" they sang, to the accompaniment of the cathedral's great organ, "God shed his grace on thee."<br />For the 220,000 Americans living in Britain, the annual gathering at St. Paul's, the great masterpiece of Sir Christopher Wren, provides an opportunity to celebrate the two nations that are the pillars of their lives. A centerpiece of the occasion every year is the invocation of the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States, which the U.S. ambassador, Robert Tuttle, described in remarks to the congregation Thursday as "working together, and marching together, as we have sung together, for decades, if not for centuries."<br />But this year, more than most, the occasion was tinged with shades of light and dark.<br />Light, literally, because the cathedral is in the midst of celebrating overlapping anniversaries: the 300th anniversary of the laying of its last stone in 1708, and the 50th anniversary this week of the dedication of the American memorial chapel, situated behind the great altar, that honors the 28,000 U.S. servicemen based in Britain who died in World War II.<br />On Wednesday, another service celebrated the completion of a $60 million, six-year renovation that has restored light and color to a cathedral whose great stone walls and magnificent frescoes had grown dark with age.<br />Dark, at least figuratively, because many Americans in London have had their lives thrown into turmoil by the financial crisis gripping much of the world. Between 20,000 and 30,000 Americans are said to work in London's financial district, many of them within walking distance of St. Paul's.<br />Several thousand of those, according to reports in the financial pages of Britain's leading newspapers, have either lost their jobs already or face losing them as banks and investment companies and hedge funds grapple with the worst market conditions in decades.<br />"I'd guess there are some here today who don't much feel like giving thanks," the Reverend Barry Gaeddert, an American pastor from the International Community Church in London, told the congregation in his sermon. "It's been a wild ride this fall, and it's by no means over."<br />He offered words of comfort to those attending the service who, he said, "are going through things that nobody else knows about" as they struggle to regain stability in lives upended by events like the sudden collapse in September of Lehman Brothers, which had 5,200 employees in London, many of them Americans.<br />As the congregation headed out into a chill, blustery English winter morning, some of those working in the financial industry paused to discuss what the crisis meant for Americans here. Brian Tipple, a 50-year-old investment manager, said that for many Americans he knew working in London the uncertainties were mounting.<br />"It's just beginning to take hold," he said, as U.S. companies faced with the high cost of supporting expatriate Americans in London - eased in recent weeks by a sharp fall in the value of the pound against the dollar, but still punitive because of living costs in Britain, which are among the highest in the western world - began notifying them that they would be transferred back to the United States.<br />His wife, Traci, said one sign of the growing exodus was visible on the notice boards of the American schools, one in the London neighborhood of St. John's Wood and the other in Surrey, south of London, where the couple's two teenage daughters are being educated. "People want to sell their TVs and other appliances," she said, since the 220-volt equipment required in Britain will not work back home in the United States, with its 110-volt electrical system.<br />For the service Thursday, organizers had laid the memorial book listing the names of the British-based American servicemen who lost their lives in World War II open to a page with a dedication written in 1946 by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander who oversaw the D-Day landings and the drive on Berlin.<br />A short distance away, a copy of the memorial book lay open to the page giving the name of perhaps the most famous of all the American servicemen honored by the chapel: Major A.G. Miller of the United States Army Air Force, better known as the band leader Glenn Miller, killed when the aircraft carrying him across the English Channel to France disappeared on Dec. 15, 1944.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/europe/london.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/europe/london.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>A chatterer's guide to easing anxiety</strong><br />By Tim Sanders<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />I AM a man on a mission. My job, or some say calling, is spreading the word about corporate social responsibility.<br />I'm constantly flying somewhere. And when people ask me where I live, I often say, "On a good day, that would be seat 5A."<br />So I figure that if I have to create a huge carbon footprint from all my travels, I better have a sense of purpose to make it all worthwhile.<br />In one of my favorite books, "Man's Search for Meaning," the author and Nazi war camp survivor Viktor Frankl argues that when you have a sense of purpose in an effort, you don't suffer as much from its ups and downs.<br />In the psychology field, he's known to be a logotherapist — one who prescribes meaning to alleviate mental anguish or anxiety. In my experience, logotherapy works like a charm when it comes to travel and life.<br />I'm a relentless chatterer, one who actually enjoys talking to my seatmates. I want to find out why my seatmates are traveling. I want to find their purpose.<br />When someone doesn't want to talk to me, I almost take it as a personal challenge. Fortunately, that doesn't happen often.<br />As we talk, it's almost inevitable that a seatmate will reveal something that can lead to some great conversations.<br />On a recent flight to New York, I sat next to a man who works for a small start-up in California. He looked very tired.<br />When we first started talking, he was full of complaints about his day on the road.<br />But when I asked him about the purpose of his trip, he started to tell me about his big sales presentation.<br />If it was successful, his small company would receive precious funding to finally launch its product line.<br />Once he started talking about why he was traveling, his attitude actually improved. By the time the plane landed, he was happy and looked a lot less weary. He even called his wife to tell her how great he felt.<br />I also recently met a woman who was on her way to Russia to see her granddaughter for the first time.<br />In the gate area at the Copenhagen Airport, she seemed absolutely miserable. After boarding, I realized that she was right across the aisle from me. The first thing she did was scowl at the flight attendant while demanding a drink.<br />As we sat on the runway, waiting almost two hours for a storm to pass, we finally got to talking. She explained how nervous she was when she flew and how awful travel has become over the last few years.<br />Her whole demeanor changed when I asked her why she was headed to Russia. Instead of being nervous, she turned into a proud and confident grandmother. She even showed me pictures of her granddaughter and told me how this trip was one of the highlights of her year.<br />Although our flight was very turbulent, this woman, who was a nervous flier, remained happy. She even gave me a thumbs-up sign.<br />That made me feel great.<br />And when I fly, I may not give people a thumbs-up sign, but I do try and make it a point to say thanks. Especially to the security people. I am one of those rare individuals who doesn't hate TSA<br />I was in New York at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. I ran down the street and got knocked down. I was scared, and it changed me.<br />So when the security lines are long, I just go with it. These people are just trying their best to keep us safe. That is their purpose.<br />Take some time to think about yours during your next flight. You might be surprised at how it changes your day. And maybe your life.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/travel/25flier.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/travel/25flier.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1pSsIjlhBLF3bg6YZcl0czuV-wW7hQVncU1JjwX84ac7vkZfG6uIsqa2tDg2QZ64Y-uW1feoBwPgyeTSYCkC50tgkBFd4GkCJZ0fuvebMNRObREoaXi8FfSPsA4lBW4qKUwjSs3e7nXE/s1600-h/DSC02186.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682554999265682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1pSsIjlhBLF3bg6YZcl0czuV-wW7hQVncU1JjwX84ac7vkZfG6uIsqa2tDg2QZ64Y-uW1feoBwPgyeTSYCkC50tgkBFd4GkCJZ0fuvebMNRObREoaXi8FfSPsA4lBW4qKUwjSs3e7nXE/s320/DSC02186.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/peseta.php">Spain unveils €11 billion economic stimulus package</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/won.php">South Korea to inject billions into banks through U.S. credit line</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/steel.php">ArcelorMittal to cut 9,000 jobs as steel demand slips</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>UBS finds 'limited' cases of tax fraud</strong><br />By Julia Werdigier<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />LONDON: UBS discovered a small number of tax-fraud cases as part of an investigation into whether the Swiss bank helped clients dodge American taxes, the bank chairman, Peter Kurer, said Thursday.<br />"Our investigations have uncovered a limited number of cases of tax fraud under both U.S. and Swiss law," Kurer told shareholders at a special meeting in Lucerne, Switzerland. He asserted that Swiss bank-client confidentiality agreements had not been broken during an unfolding investigation of the bank's activities, adding that the rules were not "there to protect cases of tax fraud."<br />The U.S. Justice Department has argued that UBS, which is based in Zurich and has large operations in the United States, helped as many as 17,000 of its American clients evade $300 million a year in taxes through hidden offshore accounts. Kurer's remarks contained no specifics about whether he disputed the American estimate, nor did he clarify what number of fraud cases he would regard as "limited."<br />Raoul Weil, who oversaw UBS's cross-border private banking operations until 2007, was indicted this month by a U.S. grand jury on a charge of conspiracy.<br />Kurer asked for the support of the shareholders, of whom about 2,400 gathered at a conference center on Thursday to approve his a recapitalization program for UBS.<br />Shareholders applauded when Kurer said former executives and other managers had agreed to repay the bank a total of 70 million Swiss francs, or about $58 million, in bonuses. He added that UBS was still in discussions about getting more money back. Marcel Ospel, who was chairman when UBS accumulated more than $40 billion in write-downs on assets linked to the U.S. subprime market, surrendered about 22 million francs of pay. Peter Wuffli, former chief executive, and Marco Suter, former finance chief, also gave up part of their compensation.<br />Kurer reaffirmed a decision that none of the bank's current managers would receive a bonus for 2008 and that UBS was going ahead with plans for a new remuneration system, which was announced this month. The new system includes lower bonuses, which will not be fully paid upfront.<br />Some shareholders still expressed dissatisfaction with management and criticized UBS for seeking help from the Swiss government shortly after saying it would not need extra funds to weather the crisis.<br />The bank agreed earlier to transfer $60 billion worth of toxic assets tied to the U.S. subprime market into a separate entity backed by the Swiss central bank and to issue 6 billion francs in mandatory convertible notes to the government, which could leave UBS partly state-owned. Shareholders approved the steps by an overwhelming majority at the meeting.<br />Kurer called on shareholders to support management despite a 66 percent decline of the bank's share price over the last year and said he "understands the disappointment and anger" among them. But he added: "Fear and anger are bad advisers. To solve problems, we have to keep a clear head and work together and not against each other."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/ubs.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/ubs.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>Sharing the pain, but not equally<br /></strong>Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />NEW YORK: It was as badly timed a takeover as there was during the private equity boom.<br />At the end of 2006 Apollo Management, the private equity firm headed by Leon Black, agreed to buy Realogy, a conglomerate with a number of franchised real estate businesses, among them Century 21 and Coldwell Banker, for $7 billion in cash.<br />That was a few months after house prices peaked. By the next spring, when the deal closed, subprime mortgage lenders were starting to go broke. The great housing bubble was bursting, and that was very bad news for a company whose revenue was based on how many homes it could sell, and on how high the prices were.<br />Now a struggle is emerging over how the unfortunate lenders should be treated. Realogy, under the direction of Apollo, is using a classic divide and conquer strategy. Bondholders are screaming that the tactics are illegal.<br />The tactic is simple. Tell one group of bondholders that they could move up in the capital structure and be more likely to get paid if your company went broke. That sounds attractive. But to get there, they would have to agree to forget about collecting most of the money they are owed. They are being asked to trade in old bonds for new loans with much smaller face values.<br />Overindebted consumers can only look on with jealousy, wishing they could pull off something similar, perhaps by telling one credit card company that they would pay another one first unless the first company agreed to forgive most of what it was owed.<br />No owner of Realogy bonds has to make the exchange, of course. But if a bondholder turns it down, and others do make the exchange, that bondholder may find that he is much farther back in line, with even less probability of being paid anything.<br />One thing that makes this tactic irritating is that it is planned by the people who are supposed to be at the rear of the line in case of bankruptcy - the people who own the equity. In theory, they should not get anything if all the creditors are not paid in full. In reality, they often can get away with changing the rules.<br />Realogy wants to make as much as $650 million in debt disappear, trading $500 million in new loans for $1.15 billion in old bonds.<br />Not, however, that the new loans have any guarantee of being paid off. But not only are they senior to the old ones, they mature a few months earlier. There is a possibility that the bondholders who refuse the deal get nothing in the end.<br />All this is possible because companies, in most cases, do not owe fiduciary duties to their bondholders, as they do to their creditors. Realogy claims that it has the approval of senior creditors to issue more debt and says that is all that is needed. The debtor-creditor transaction is a contractual one, and if a tactic is allowed by the contract, the courts generally will not stop it.<br />Of course, those creditors have no reason to care. Their claims will remain senior to everyone else's. It is sort of like getting Jimmy's permission to hit Bobby. Bobby may not think Jimmy was the appropriate person to ask.<br />Realogy has yet to violate the covenants on its bonds, but its business is suffering and it is reasonable to think it might. Revenue is down 21 percent so far this year, and Realogy has not been able to cut costs that fast. Losses are rising.<br />There is one part of Realogy's business that is faring well. Revenue is soaring at a subsidiary that sells foreclosed homes. It reports that in the third quarter, business in the area around Sacramento, California, was up 91 percent from a year earlier. But that is not enough to offset the growing problems in other operations.<br />The bonds trade as if disaster were almost certain, all at prices of less than 20 cents on the dollar. Some of them go for prices where a profit would be assured if the bond simply paid interest for the next 18 months, before becoming totally worthless.<br />Realogy disclosed this week that a lawyer, claiming to represent owners of a majority of one class of bonds, had threatened to sue, claiming the offering violated bond indentures. The company did not identify the lawyer, but one person involved in the case said Carl Icahn, the financier, owned the bonds. Icahn declined to comment.<br />Realogy became an independent company in July 2006, just a few months before Apollo swooped in to buy it.<br />Realogy began trading when Cendant, a franchising conglomerate that had fought back from what was, before Enron, the largest accounting fraud in U.S. history, split into four pieces.<br />Realogy was the only one of the four that worked out for shareholders, selling to Apollo for 19 percent more than the shares were worth just after the split-up. The other three - PHH, a mortgage services company; Wyndham Worldwide, which franchises hotel brands like Days Inn and Ramada; and Avis Budget, the car rental company - have all cratered in the recession. PHH, with a 72 percent decline, is the best performer of the three. Avis Budget, down 97 percent, is the worst.<br />As it turned out, Cendant split up not long before bad times arrived at virtually all of its businesses. Apollo, which did not see what was coming, now wants those who lent money to it to share the pain.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/norris28.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/norris28.php</a><br /><br />***************<br /><strong>Arizona towns rise and fall with price of copper</strong><br />By John Collins Rudolf<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />MORENCI, Arizona: Night was falling, and Ed Morin was headed to work. He bought an extra-large can of energy drink and a tin of snuff at the company store. Then he drove up the hill and through the gates of the Morenci copper mine, to spend the next 13 hours running a front-end loader in the pit.<br />It was a familiar routine to Morin, 32, who worked at the mine for almost a year. "The sun goes down. The sun comes up. Call it a day," he said. "That's money in your pocket."<br />Morin was but one of thousands of new workers who have flocked to the small towns of Arizona's copper belt in recent years, to take part in a major revival of the state's once-battered mining industry. This year, even as the dire housing market contributed to widespread job losses and other economic woes in Arizona, the mines remained a bright spot.<br />But the arrival of the credit crisis this autumn has stalled the mining boom. Reeling financial markets stripped copper of 60 percent of its value in only a few months, and expansion projects in Arizona, the leading copper-producing state in the United States, are being postponed.<br />"The end has come just incredibly abruptly," said Nyal Niemuth, chief mining engineer for the Arizona Department of Mines and Mineral Resources. "There weren't many of us predicting this collapse."<br />In late October, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, the copper industry's largest employer in Arizona, announced plans to lay off 600 mine workers in the state. Those layoffs come in addition to hundreds of independent contractors already let go by the company.<br />"Most of those employees were recently hired, many in anticipation of expansions, which have been deferred," Eric Kinneberg, a Freeport-McMoRan spokesman, said in an e-mail message.<br />Demand for copper - a component in construction, industrial and manufacturing uses - has long been closely associated with the overall health of the world economy. After a steep slide this autumn, prices stabilized in recent days. Another decline could signal that a more prolonged global recession is on its way.<br />At today's price of about $1.68 a pound, copper remains marginally profitable to produce at many Arizona mines, giving some mining communities hope they may avoid more sweeping layoffs.<br />"Right now we're taking a deep breath and hoping that everything's going to be O.K.," said Mayor Fernando Shipley, of Globe, Arizona, home of several mines and one of the country's last operating smelters.<br />A collapse in copper production - and a return to the mass layoffs and mine closings of the past - would mark a major reversal for Arizona's copper industry, which has only just recovered from one of its worst slumps in decades.<br />That era of relentless downsizing, driven by a sustained period of copper prices lower than at any point since the 1930s, reversed course sharply in late 2003, as prices surged in response to turbocharged demand from China.<br />The mining industry responded by increasing employment and initiating a wave of exploration and new development not seen in a generation. For long-depressed mining towns like Morenci, the thousands of new jobs meant a new lease on life. The Morenci mine - owned by Freeport McMoRan, which acquired the site in its merger with Phelps Dodge last year - doubled its work force over the last five years, to 4,000 employees. Production at the mine has risen by 55 percent since 2003, to an average of one million tons of ore a day.<br />This autumn, despite the gathering economic storm, an almost frenetic energy pulsed through Morenci, a remote hamlet tucked in a mountain valley in southeast Arizona, evidence of the intense effort that has been required to increase the mine's production.<br />Hundreds of new homes, many still under construction, lined steep hillsides dotted with sagebrush and creosote. Day and night, mud-streaked pickups and tanker trucks loaded with diesel fuel and with sulfuric acid, used in copper extraction, rumbled continuously along the two-lane highway that cuts through the center of town.<br />Despite the new construction, the town's limited housing stock - all still company-owned - has been badly overwhelmed, leading Freeport-McMoRan to haul in several dozen corrugated steel trailers to fill the gap. The trailers, assembled in an expansive gravel lot, form a makeshift community the miners call Man Camp. There, $20 a day secures a tiny room, breakfast, lunch and dinner in a company mess hall.<br />"Three hots and cot," said Morin, who lived at the camp for almost a year before leaving this month because of family obligations. "It's not a bad deal."<br />Earning about $28 an hour, he saved more than $60,000 in less than a year by working hundreds of hours of overtime. His work ethic was motivated in part by the experiences of his father and grandfather, both miners who lived through copper crashes in their day.<br />With the drastic fall in copper prices, the atmosphere in the town has shifted sharply since this summer, said Hector Ruedas, a member of the Morenci School Board. "The mood is not good," said Ruedas, himself a former mine employee. "You go downtown and there aren't smiling faces anymore."<br />The surge in exploration and development swept across the West, from Alaska to New Mexico. But the epicenter of the boom was Arizona, the source of 62 percent of U.S. copper and about 5 percent of world supply.<br />Alongside Chile, the state continues to rank as one of the two richest copper-producing regions in the world because of the proliferation of rich, near-surface deposits, a remnant of severe volcanic events in the distant past.<br />Over the past five years, the world's largest mining interests - BHP Billiton, Freeport McMoRan, Rio Tinto and Sumitomo - poured billions of dollars into reopening long-shuttered operations and expanding production at existing mines in the state. For the first time in more than 30 years, they also opened new mines, bringing a promise of prosperity to struggling rural areas, along with challenges.<br />Among the first to be touched by the expansion was Safford, Arizona, a small agricultural community about 150 miles southeast of Phoenix, where Freeport McMoRan recently opened a $550 million open-pit copper mine. When work on the mine began in July 2006, 1,500 construction workers flooded into the Safford valley with money to burn.<br />"If you had a pulse, you could get a job," said Jim Palmer, chairman of the Graham County Board of Supervisors.<br />Not all, however, are pleased by the arrival of the mine. Among them is Bud Smith, 84, a cotton farmer whose grandfather settled in the Safford Valley well over a hundred years ago, traveling there from Utah in a covered wagon.<br />"Now, you pull out on the road and it's just a solid string of cars, coming and going at shift change," Smith said. "I don't care for it, but that's progress, I guess."<br />For old timers, the price swings of recent months cannot help but evoke searing memories of strikes and layoffs, buyouts and bankruptcies - and the hard times that invariably follow a copper crash. "It goes up and down, the copper industry," said Richard Perez, 68, a retired miner who runs a diner in town. "Being with the copper mines is like being with a wife for 25 years. You argue and you fight sometimes, but when it's over and done with, you're happy to have them around."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/copper.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/copper.php</a><br /><br /><br />*****************<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/rupiah.php">Indonesia seeks credit lines as $4.4 billion deficit looms</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/babcock.php">Babcock & Brown's dispute with bank puts its future in jeopardy</a><br /><br />*****************<br /><strong>New details about Reserve Primary fund breaking the buck<br /></strong>By Diana B. Henriques<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />The Reserve Primary Fund did break the buck, just not when everyone thought it did.<br />The fund, whose announcement on Sept. 16 that its per-share value had fallen below a dollar touched off a panic in the money market, corrected its timeline of events on Wednesday.<br />Initially, the $62 billion fund said its per-share value had fallen to 97 cents at 4 p.m. on Sept. 16, after its Lehman Brothers investments were written down to zero.<br />The latest version now goes like this: On Monday, Sept. 15, the Lehman notes were written down to 80 cents on the dollar, which did not immediately cause the fund to break the buck. The fund correctly reported a per-share value of $1 all that day, the fund said in a statement.<br />But the next day, the employees who calculated the fund's share prices did not reflect the new Lehman values in their equations. If they had, given a sharp jump in redemptions, they would have realized that the fund broke the buck at 11 a.m. with a share price of 99 cents, not the $1 quoted most of the day. Then at 4 p.m., after the Lehman assets were cut to zero from 80 cents, the per-share price was accurately reported as 97 cents.<br />This means that those who submitted redemption orders between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Sept. 16 expected a penny a share more than they were entitled to. That adds a fresh knot to the legal macramé already entangling the fund but poses no practical problems because redemptions have been suspended for more than two months and no one has actually received the undeserved penny.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/27fund.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/27fund.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Mining deal's collapse bodes ill for investment banks</strong><br />By Douwe MiedemaReuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />LONDON: The collapse of BHP Billiton's $66 billion takeover of Rio Tinto robs bankers of one of the few chunky deals left as their business crumbles in the credit crisis.<br />Moribund markets offer plenty of excuses for buyers to get out of mergers that were often agreed to long ago, and few new deals are popping up because debt is hard to get and the value of any asset is almost impossible to determine.<br />A recovery may take years, bankers said.<br />"It's not next year; it's going to take a long time," said one investment banker, asking not to be named for lack of authorization to speak about clients in public. "We see a gradual slowdown of anything that is driven purely by strategy rather than either opportunism or financial necessity."<br />Failed deals have hit a record high, and one-third of the deals announced this year in the United States were terminated, according to a UBS study.<br />A squeeze is hitting the syndicated loan market, the first liquidity resource for financing deals.<br />Banks are making money from bailing out less fortunate rivals, with Bank of America's purchase of Merrill Lynch and Lloyds TSB Group's merger with HBOS among the 10 largest deals still open.<br />The Swiss drug maker Roche Holding hastened to say Tuesday that it was still committed to a $43.7 billion bid to buy the biotech group Genentech, the third-largest deal in the works, according to Thomson Reuters data.<br />But speculation has long surrounded the buyout of the Canadian telecom giant BCE - the second-largest deal still around - with investors fretting that the deal could be repriced, delayed or even abandoned.<br />The credit crisis initially stoked expectations that companies would return to the fore and drive consolidation, as private equity firms suddenly lacked access to debt markets and leveraged buyouts ground to a halt.<br />When that did not happen, investment bankers said prospective sellers just needed time to get used to the idea that their share prices had dropped so much and a deal would yield less than they had first thought.<br />But with the volume of mergers and acquisitions down roughly a quarter this year, that hope has also evaporated. Bankers are focusing on restructuring deals to shore up financially weak companies, because the sale of any company remains cumbersome.<br />BHP Billiton, the Anglo-Australian mining giant, said the sale of some of its units would have been hard. Analysts said such a sale would have been mandatory for the deal to be approved by the Europe Union's antitrust watchdog.<br />Debt markets reacted with relief when the deal was called off, and the cost of protecting BHP Billiton's debt against default fell sharply. Syndicated loans markets also cheered the fact that they no longer had to find buyers for the huge financing.<br />Credit markets are bracing for a surge in demand next year, when a wave of companies will need to renew maturing bonds while the loan market also needs to offload huge financing of mergers and acquisitions, by refinancing loans into bonds.<br />BHP mentioned concerns about its debt levels to explain why it opted out of the mega-merger, the valuation of which at one stage amounted to a whopping $193 billion.<br />The advisers of Rio Tinto, itself an Anglo-Australian mining giant, though smaller than BHP, will gain most from the collapse of BHP's attempt to buy it, but it is a big disappointment for the suitor's investment bankers, who stood to reap a pile of extra fees if the deal succeeded.<br />For the investment bankers at the losing end of the takeover, it comes at about the worst possible time, as the investment banking industry continues to get hammered by the credit market turmoil.<br />According to joint estimates by Thomson Reuters and Freeman, based on the peak offer, BHP Billiton's advisers were in line to receive a total of $140 million in fees, an estimate that includes both upfront and closing fees. They are now likely to have pocketed only $10 million to $15 million. The advisers were Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Gresham Investment House, HSBC and Merrill Lynch as a corporate broker.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/deal27.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/deal27.php</a><br /><br /><br />***************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/ukecon.php">Woolworths in hands of administrators as British retailers warn of fresh trouble</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>Merrill banker picked to sell bank stakes</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />LONDON: A top banker has been recruited from Merrill Lynch to handle the sale of the government's investment of up to 28 billion pounds in a trio of banks, the company set up to manage the holdings said on Thursday.<br />UK Financial Investments (UKFI), set up to manage the government's shareholding in Royal Bank of Scotland , Lloyds TSB and HBOS , named John Crompton as head of market investments.<br />Crompton will be responsible for devising and executing a strategy for selling the stakes when appropriate. He joins from Merrill , which he joined last year as managing director and head of equity capital markets for EMEA. He has 20 years' experience of capital markets and was previously at Morgan Stanley, and spent two years on secondment to the UK Treasury from 2005 to 2007.<br />Britain last month underwrote share offers as part of last month's 37 billion pound bank rescue plan. It is likely to see the state buy 15 billion pounds of RBS shares, giving it a 58 percent stake, and buy up to 13 billion pounds of shares in the combined Lloyds/HBOS, or a 43 percent holding.<br />(Reporting by Steve Slater; Editing by David Cowell)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-BANKS-STAKES.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-BANKS-STAKES.php</a><br /><br />******************<br /><strong>Bank should have "acted earlier" on rate cut</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />LONDON: Policymakers should have started cutting interest rates much sooner to help prevent an economic crisis in Britain, Bank of England policymaker David Blanchflower was quoted as saying on Thursday.<br />"This is not something I wanted to get right," Blanchflower told the Guardian in an interview.<br />"That's why I warned that this was going to happen unless we acted -- I wanted to prevent the crisis. I'm not saying everything would have been wonderful, but at least if we'd acted earlier we would be ahead of events and not reacting to them."<br />The Bank slashed interest rates by 1.5 percentage points this month to shore up the economy against a deep recession.<br />Blanchflower, who has voted to cut interest rates every month since last October, said the bank was now "doing the things we should be doing."<br />"All hands are to the pump and I get the sense that people have absolutely got it right."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-BANK.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-BANK.php</a><br />******************<br /><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/business/OUKBS-UK-FSA-BUILDINGSOCIETY.php">FSA raises deposit protection in building society mergers</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/gcon.php">German jobless rate hit 16-year low in November</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/bond.php">Bailouts increase cost of insuring rich countries' bonds</a><br />Ma<a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/ozbank.php">cquarie is said to be cutting as much as 15% of its staff in Asia</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>Isolation shields frontier stock markets from crash<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />By Peter Apps<br />Trading with whiteboards and paper slips, a handful of fledgling stock markets such as Iraq and Ghana have escaped the crash of their more developed rivals -- benefiting in large part from isolation and lack of liquidity.<br />Ghana's stock exchange is up 60 percent this year according to the official indicator, in sharp contrast to other emerging markets which are down more than 60 percent on the year to date, savaged by recent market turmoil.<br />The official indicator for Baghdad's Iraqi stock exchange showed it soaring 40 percent in September alone -- the same month Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and other markets nosedived.<br />Some distrust that figure, but say that overall, Iraqi stocks remain in positive territory this year.<br />Neither market is electronically traded -- although both aim to become so. Both have been largely overlooked by foreign investors even during the recent boom in frontier markets that preceded the crash.<br />Godvig Capital fund manager Bjorn Englund -- whose $22 million (14.3 millionpounds) Babylon fund is the only substantial foreign portfolio investor in the Iraqi bourse -- says the moral for investing in a downturn is clear.<br />"The lesson is that you shouldn't follow the herd," he told Reuters by telephone from his office in Sweden. "You have to go somewhere where other people are not, where you have the first- mover advantage."<br />Other markets still up by mid-November included Tunisia and Ecuador, again small markets with little foreign involvement. By contrast, according to index provider MSCI Barra, more mainstream frontier markets from Nigeria to the Middle East have broadly tracked the standard emerging markets index.<br />VIOLENCE DOWN, STOCKS UP<br />The Iraqi stock exchange lost well over half its value after it opened in 2004 following the U.S. invasion the previous year, but has benefited this year from a dramatic fall in sectarian violence and, until recently, from high oil prices.<br />As world markets tumbled last month, sweaty investors waved and made hand signals at the brokers working behind a low partition. Hotels and banks are the hottest picks among the exchange's 95 listed companies, as investors eye a reconstruction bonanza and the need to house expatriate workers.<br />Englund said Iraq's isolation from global markets was also key. International investors are often highly leveraged and liable to sudden margin calls, prompting them to pull money from emerging markets across the board regardless of fundamentals.<br />"There is very little foreign money in the (Iraqi) market so it has not seen the sort of outflows you have had elsewhere," he said. "The exchange has been immune to what has happened in the outside world."<br />But the market is far from transparent, he warned. He is sceptical of the official main index figures, saying its calculation is opaque and does not always correspond to movements in the main stocks.<br />The more liquid ISX banking index, which makes up more than 80 percent of turnover, was flat in September and has risen 6.2 percent this year in local currency or 9.6 percent in U.S. dollar terms as the dinar strengthened.<br />HARD TO SELL<br />"That is still pretty good when you compare it to what has happened elsewhere," Englund said.<br />Ghana too has benefited from good local fundamentals, based around recent oil discoveries, good prices for its main gold and cocoa exports, political stability and economic growth, although the market has retreated from its peaks of early October.<br />The IMF expects Ghana's economic growth to slow to 5.8 percent in 2009 from a projected 6.5 percent this year as the global slowdown hits. But those rates are still well ahead of advanced economies, where 2009 growth is seen below 0.5 percent.<br />And crude oil production, scheduled for late 2010, should give a boost to what is already one of Africa's more attractive and stable economies for outside investors.<br />But again, Ghana's relative isolation is key to recent gains.<br />"There is not the foreign investment here that you get in some markets, and that is why we have not seen the falls you saw in South Africa or Kenya," said Databank analyst Dorothy L. Ametefe from the capital Accra.<br />She said lack of liquidity in the market was itself limiting the speed of the correction lower, with both foreign and local investors who were trying to sell out finding it almost impossible.<br />"The problem is that volumes have dried up and it is very difficult to find buyers at these prices," she said. Some days the market is effectively untraded.<br />But if foreign investors are trying to exit Ghana, they are still coming into Iraq. Englund said they made up almost 18 percent of overall trading volume since August, more than triple the average during the December-February period.<br />Both markets' transition to electronic trading should deliver greater volatility and ease of access for foreign investors in the hope of facilitating long-term investment -- but that may end the isolation that has protected them.<br />"There are clear advantages to electronic trade," said Databank's Ametefe. "But it will increase the vulnerability to external events."<br />(Additional reporting by Kwasi Kpodo in Accra and Mohammed Abbas in Baghdad; Editing by Ruth Pitchford and Sara Ledwith)<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/business/OUKBS-UK-FINANCIAL-FRONTIER.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/business/OUKBS-UK-FINANCIAL-FRONTIER.php</a><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Uvtjtll1NRJlAI2RzWvKdXVmButP2KaayM4fnDM7Uj6mpzp30pbUSu-odpMVECN-a-Gv49SusWeH-5idcU7WVgfZuyT-rz2FA6tjDWpRbBMzugF89Dl4nlvteUCWz6n7sjpMIS0M950/s1600-h/DSC02187.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682549660169346" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Uvtjtll1NRJlAI2RzWvKdXVmButP2KaayM4fnDM7Uj6mpzp30pbUSu-odpMVECN-a-Gv49SusWeH-5idcU7WVgfZuyT-rz2FA6tjDWpRbBMzugF89Dl4nlvteUCWz6n7sjpMIS0M950/s320/DSC02187.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Nokia will sell only luxury cellphones in Japan</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />TOKYO: Nokia, the biggest cellphone maker in the world, said Thursday that it would stop selling mobile phones in Japan, except for the luxury Vertu line, after struggling to expand there.<br />Nokia, based in Finland, previously said it would cut costs "decisively," expecting global mobile phone sales to fall next year in the economic downturn.<br />Japan is the fourth-largest cellphone market after the United States, China and India. But it makes up only a tiny part of sales at Nokia, whose products have failed to compete with the more sophisticated Japanese phones.<br />Mobile phone companies expect limited growth in Japan, where 109 million subscribers, or some 85 percent of the population, already own a mobile phone. In addition, a new sales plan based on higher telephone prices is expected to reduce annual cellphone sales in Japan by about 20 percent.<br />Nokia's executive vice president, Timo Ihamuotila, said Nokia's business in Japan would concentrate on research, development and sourcing for the global market as well as specific projects like Vertu.<br />The quirks of the mobile phone market in Japan have prevented foreign companies, including Nokia's rivals like Samsung Electronics and LG, from being successful. Most of the cellphones used in Japan are part of third-generation networks and have features like television broadcasting and electronic payment functions. This makes it tough for outside manufacturers to compete with phones made in Japan.<br />Overseas companies, excluding Sony Ericsson, only have about 5 percent of Japan's cellphone market, according to IDC Japan, a research company. In turn, Japanese manufacturers have only a small presence outside of their home market.<br />"Nokia is facing global earnings problems and many other issues, and this shows Japan was a low-priority market at a time when they are shoring up global operations, even though it may still be attractive," IDC Japan's analyst, Michito Kimura, said.<br />The move was still rather abrupt as NTT DoCoMo, the biggest mobile phone operator in Japan, said this month that it would sell a new Nokia smartphone for the winter season.<br />The third-ranked Japanese operator, Softbank, also sells Nokia phones.<br />Nokia, which has a nearly 40 percent share of the global market, had originally planned to increase its market percentage in Japan to the double digits. It had only about 0.3 percent of the Japanese market last business year, according to the Nikkei newspaper.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/nokia.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/nokia.php</a><br /><br />*******************<br /><strong>Webcams keeping far-flung families virtually within touch<br /></strong>By Amy Harmon<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />DEER PARK, New York: Her grandfather wanted to play tea party, but Alexandra Geosits, 2½, insisted she only had apple juice.<br />She held out a plastic cup, giggling as she waited to see if he would accept the substitute.<br />That they were a thousand miles apart, their weekly visit unfolding over computer screens in their respective homes, did not faze either one. Like many other grandchildren and grandparents who live far apart, Alex and Joe Geosits, 69, have become fluent in the ways of the webcam.<br />"Delicious," Joe Geosits pronounced from Florida, pretending to take a sip from the cup, which remained clasped here in Alex's small hand.<br />Video calling, long anticipated by science fiction, is filtering into everyday use. And demographic groups not particularly known for being high-tech are among the earliest adopters.<br />In a way that e-mailed photos and postcards never could, the webcam promises to transcend both distance and the inability of toddlers to hold up their end of a phone conversation.<br />Some grandparent enthusiasts say this virtual form of communication makes the actual separation even harder. Others are so sustained by webcam visits with services like Skype and iChat that they visit less in person. And no one quite knows what it means to a generation of 2-year-olds to have slightly pixelated versions of their grandparents as regular fixtures on their screens.<br />But at a time when millions of people around the world are beginning to beam themselves across the ether, the webcam adventures of the nursery school set and their grandparents offer a glimpse at what can be gained - and what may be lost - by almost-being there.<br />"We would be strangers to them if we didn't have the webcam," said Susan Pierce, 61, of Shreveport, Louisiana, who was to be a virtual attendee at Thanksgiving dinner with her grandchildren in Jersey City, New Jersey, this year.<br />Over the last year, Pierce and her husband, Joe, watched Dylan, 17 months, learn to walk and talk over the webcam, and witnessed his 4-year-old sister Kelsie's drawings of people evolve from indeterminate blobs to figures with arms and fingers and toes.<br />But the powerful illusion of physical proximity also sharpens their ache for the real thing. "You just wish you could reach out and cuddle them," said Pierce, a nursing professor. "Seeing them makes you miss them more."<br />In the United States, nearly half of grandparents live more than 200 miles, or about 320 kilometers, from at least one of their grandchildren, according to AARP, a U.S.-based organization for people 50 or older. Professor Merril Silverstein, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, has found that about two-thirds of grandchildren see one set of grandparents only a few times a year, if that.<br />But many grandparents find the webcam eases the transition during in-person visits, when grandchildren may refuse to sit on their laps or reject their hugs because they don't recognize them. As one webcam evangelist wrote on her blog, www.nanascorner.com: "You'll be able to pick up where you left off without those warming up to you, awkward moments."<br />On Pierce's most recent visit to New Jersey last month, for instance, Dylan called out the nickname he uses for her over the webcam, "Buffy!" and jumped into her arms. "It melted my heart," Pierce said.<br />Urged on by strong word-of-mouth, grandparents are often the ones to buy webcams for their grandchildren, or, technically, their own children. But the youngsters, who spend much of their time playing games of pretend, may shuttle more easily between the virtual and the real.<br />The recent inclusion of webcams in most laptops helps account for a surge in video calling over the last year, said Rebecca Swensen, an analyst at the technology research firm IDC.<br />Internet companies are also promoting "video chat" as an enhancement to standard instant-messaging and Internet phone services.<br />About 20 million people around the world have made a video call for personal communication in the last month, Swensen said. American soldiers in Iraq beam themselves home over webcams; parents on business trips (including President-elect Barack Obama) bid goodnight to their children, face-to-onscreen face.<br />Grandparents and grandchildren are already working on ways to nudge the medium a little closer to actual teleportation.<br />When Deborah Lafferty, 55, and her granddaughter Natalie, 2, want to hug, for instance, Natalie comes to the screen in Seattle and squeezes her own face, just as her grandmother does to her when she visits from England. Lafferty then squeezes her face, a proxy.<br />"Grammy loves you so much," she says, echoing the phrase she uses in person.<br />Grandparents use their own children as surrogates to close the tactile gap. Barbara Turner once sang her fussing newborn grandson to sleep from Ottawa, watching as her son rocked him in Indiana. She could almost feel the baby against her shoulder.<br />But this week Turner and her husband rushed to Indiana for the birth of her second grandchild. "Some things you just can't do over the webcam," she said. "You make the trip."<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/america/webcam.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/america/webcam.php</a><br /><br />****************<br /><strong>U.S. woman convicted in MySpace suicide case<br /></strong>By Jennifer Steinhauer<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />LOS ANGELES: A federal jury here has handed down what legal experts said was the country's first cyber-bullying verdict, convicting a Missouri woman of three misdemeanor charges of computer fraud for her involvement in creating a phony account on MySpace to trick a teenager who later committed suicide.<br />The jury deadlocked Wednesday on a fourth count of conspiracy against the woman, Lori Drew, 49, and the judge, George Wu of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, declared a mistrial on that charge.<br />While it was unclear how severely Drew will be punished - the jury reduced the charges to misdemeanors from felonies, and no sentencing date was set - the conviction was highly significant, computer fraud experts said, because it was the first time that a federal statute designed to combat computer crimes was used to prosecute what were essentially abuses of a user agreement on a social-networking site.<br />Under federal sentencing guidelines, Drew could face up to three years in prison and $300,000 in fines, though she has no previous criminal record.<br />In a highly unusual move, Thomas O'Brien, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, prosecuted the case himself with two subordinates after law enforcement officials in Missouri determined Drew had broken no local laws.<br />O'Brien, who asserted jurisdiction on the theory that MySpace is based in Los Angeles, where its servers are housed, said the verdict sent an "overwhelming message" to Internet users.<br />During the trial, prosecutors portrayed Drew as working with her daughter, Sarah, and Ashley Grills, a family friend in Dardenne Prairie, Missouri.<br />Testimony showed that they created a fake MySpace account to communicate with Megan Meier, who was 13 and had a history of depression and suicidal impulses. Megan hanged herself in October 2006, after, according to testimony, receiving cruel messages.<br />Legal and computer fraud experts said that the application of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, passed in 1986 and amended multiple times, appeared to be expanding with technology and the growth of social networking on the Internet. More typically, prosecutions under the act have involved cases involving people who hack into computer systems.<br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/america/myspace.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/america/myspace.php</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Uo20O3gChl8WM2CSE2f1veI7xGu0LgowxebscneNz0dc45fK0ozwjzk53OgTlY68S6RlUGJLvi4hyJamJ-Tk-pfoO9RyhhGo7cHYQcXAcBtdFlh5meulq1yV0sXniyPCSzFfIk2XLV0/s1600-h/DSC02188.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682191736070146" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Uo20O3gChl8WM2CSE2f1veI7xGu0LgowxebscneNz0dc45fK0ozwjzk53OgTlY68S6RlUGJLvi4hyJamJ-Tk-pfoO9RyhhGo7cHYQcXAcBtdFlh5meulq1yV0sXniyPCSzFfIk2XLV0/s320/DSC02188.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1x7aKWl_l5L0j1DnMZ66gubWHmYoCMroUMDbUv_YjHfCJJaTDacmI28OZNrrzAnICN0xewwfXHNuzdPcwfBnTMYzihRDcQRR3vd1sR8l6DrrzcISIBBBfyqP5yy66Z3fcQskdBa7QQbM/s1600-h/DSC02189.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682191635564050" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1x7aKWl_l5L0j1DnMZ66gubWHmYoCMroUMDbUv_YjHfCJJaTDacmI28OZNrrzAnICN0xewwfXHNuzdPcwfBnTMYzihRDcQRR3vd1sR8l6DrrzcISIBBBfyqP5yy66Z3fcQskdBa7QQbM/s320/DSC02189.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiPHKjMMpPnwxwW3jq3-0h9vAPGopioeL47KXQVCOUyDIOL9UBWKyARIOSNU3SMKn3w_Z2f7kxr51mFeqhdagKaXDI4bqG7kj8TIjqQUobstpMWUsAVb8wdGy5e7IyH51Qjmb2KIVX63E/s1600-h/DSC02190.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682187736472226" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiPHKjMMpPnwxwW3jq3-0h9vAPGopioeL47KXQVCOUyDIOL9UBWKyARIOSNU3SMKn3w_Z2f7kxr51mFeqhdagKaXDI4bqG7kj8TIjqQUobstpMWUsAVb8wdGy5e7IyH51Qjmb2KIVX63E/s320/DSC02190.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilIfZwN-omI9z2NngFwEo6zh0eTG-2d2sDBBu_QF5c6AvcwC13kl5FcA82yJwxTECCe6ehpxk5YooJxZ54cbvj7ZNcLMJmgZ_jnw2W8g6WTfTLHncYWltbQU1krWu651Y3tH8NBhIXzv8/s1600-h/DSC02191.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682189566952002" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilIfZwN-omI9z2NngFwEo6zh0eTG-2d2sDBBu_QF5c6AvcwC13kl5FcA82yJwxTECCe6ehpxk5YooJxZ54cbvj7ZNcLMJmgZ_jnw2W8g6WTfTLHncYWltbQU1krWu651Y3tH8NBhIXzv8/s320/DSC02191.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Randy Scandinavia? Calm down, boys, you're misinformed<br /></strong>By Michael Kimmelman<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />OSLO: Despite the come-on of its irresistible title, the show here called "Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?" turns out to be not quite as advertised. It's as erotic as pickled herring. Two 30-something men looked crestfallen recently at the sight of so many documents and so much high-minded art. Noticing a lone naked young woman in a video across the room, they positioned themselves discreetly before it, full of hope, then realized it was a German documentary about the making of a Playboy photo shoot, meant to deflate all erotic illusions.<br />Dreaming of the young Britt Ekland but encountering instead yellowing editions of Herbert Marcuse and fabric knit into Rorschach patterns by the Conceptualist Rosemarie Trockel, they retreated, forlorn, into the gray autumn.<br />It's a good question, though. What did happen to the image of Scandinavia as the frigid tundra of hot sex?<br />The show is organized by the Office for Contemporary Art. Call it a virtuous mess, really an essay masquerading as an exhibition, unearthing a wealth of historic information. It tracks the roots of sexual liberation in Scandinavia to longstanding state-sponsored social movements, like women's rights, sex education, health care and freedom of expression. Naturally, when the cold war arrived, the United States began casting an increasingly wary eye on this calm, liberal, peace-loving region of saunas, socialism and smorgasbord, neighboring the Soviet Union.<br />A "lack of moderation discernible on all fronts" is how Dwight D. Eisenhower assessed Sweden in 1960, seeing Scandinavia in general as a cautionary tale about extended social welfare. "We don't sin any more than other people, but we probably sin more openly," responded an irate Swedish baker, when approached by a journalist. Other Swedes noted that the Kinsey Report and tales of wife swapping exposed an America no less fixated on sex than Scandinavia, only more furtive and hypocritical about it. True enough.<br />As the columnist C. L. Sulzberger observed in The New York Times after Denmark, the most libertine of the Scandinavian constellation, legalized pornography, "There is nothing in the least bit either unwholesome or immoral about the Danes who simply share with Benjamin Franklin, an American never renowned for excessive Puritanism, a belief that honesty is the best policy."<br />But calling out American criticism of Scandinavia for its hypocrisy missed one point: to many Americans, procreation aside, sex was supposed to be naughty. Making it wholesome spoiled the fun. Anyone who has had to acclimate to the obligatory nakedness (supposedly for health reasons) of saunas in this part of the world knows that to be true. There is nothing sexy, believe me, I know, about sweating in a small, dark sauna with a half dozen large, middle-aged Germans.<br />But I digress. While Eisenhower was taking his swipe at Scandinavia, Federico Fellini was casting Anita Ekberg as the wet wench in the Trevi Fountain in "La Dolce Vita." Even Bob Hope, in the mid-1960s, flirted with Scandinavian free love. In "I'll Take Sweden" the eternally square Hope played a single father who brings his daughter (Tuesday Weld) on a trip to Europe to separate her from her boyfriend (Frankie Avalon), only to decide that marriage is better than time in swinging Sweden.<br />Too bad the show doesn't slum a bit in sexploitation films like "The Seduction of Inga," "Maid in Sweden" and "My Swedish Cousins," which flooded the American marketplace, alongside pornographic movies, like "The Language of Love," presenting themselves as sex educational. Now dimly recalled for the censorship ruckus caused by its full-frontal male nudity, "I Am Curious (Yellow)" became the ultimate Scandinavian sex film. Its naked couplings, involving notably ordinary lovers, were punctuated by ponderous disquisitions on Swedish labor law, interviews with Olaf Palme, the Swedish labor minister, and a section with the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Norman Mailer championed it as "one of the most important pictures." There you go. Even "Bonanza" was sexier, in retrospect.<br />How did Scandinavia turn from "Maid in Sweden" to Ikea, from the purveyor of earnest free love into the purveyor of affordable love seats, from the home of Christina Lindberg (the maid) into the home of Abba?<br />Marta Kuzma, who organized the exhibition, kindly rounded up a few local experts the other day to mull over an answer at lunch. Berge Ragnar Furre, a Norwegian historian, theologian and a politician in the Socialist Left Party, now on the Nobel Committee, offered this thought: "You have to remember that here in Norway we have also had a strong tradition of liberal democracy that is against sexuality, so we are historically divided as a liberal society." In other words, Norwegians have long split between being sexually liberated and puritanical, while remaining politically liberal in both cases.<br />Havard Nilsen, a fellow historian specializing in Wilhelm Reich, the psychiatrist and sexologist, nodded. "There has always been a moral high-mindedness here about sexuality, connected, like the labor movement and teetotaling, with issues of reform and salvation," he said. "It used to be that even prominent actors in Scandinavia acted in pornographic movies because it was socially acceptable here, being linked to liberal politics."<br />But already by the late 1970s, as Wencke Mühleisen, who teaches women's studies at the University of Oslo, pointed out, "feminism in Norway turned against sexuality and toward the family, the winning political line cooperating with the state in looking for equality laws that meant a gradual cleansing of sexual promiscuity." Culture generally became more globalized in the following years, along with patterns of social behavior, meaning that "while it was normal to see women here in the '70s on the beach without a bikini top, now it is very seldom," Mühleisen added. "The commercial ideal body has replaced the desexualized healthy body."<br />Scandinavian parents today think twice about bathing nude with their children. And at the same time the role of the blue-eyed blond in the sexual pantheon of pornographic commerce has been diluted by the Web and multiculturalism.<br />Which is to say that Scandinavia has become more like everywhere else. As further proof there has been a fuss here lately over the influx of Nigerian prostitutes. They fill the main street in Oslo at night. Sexual freedom today is bound up with immigration and nationalism, the big issues across Europe.<br />"Suddenly we are very proud of our native prostitutes," Mühleisen said, shaking her head. "They're supposedly cleaner, more law-abiding, they stay out of the tourist center in Oslo. So a whole new discussion about good Norwegian sexuality — which, this being Scandinavia, includes equal rights for women — has arisen in contrast to bad sexuality, which is now the sexuality of the 'other.' "<br />Lunch over, the sun already had started to set by midafternoon. Bjorn Blumenthal, a founder of the European Association for Body Psychotherapy, said, "You should go to Vigeland Park before it gets dark." He had a wry smile and a shock of white hair.<br />Vigeland was Gustav Vigeland, who filled a park in the middle of Oslo during the early decades of the last century with hundreds of his sculptures of naked men and women, young and old. They're vaguely Aryan, cartoonish blimps, muscled and smooth.<br />In America just the idea of showing naked sculptures in public would invite a scandal. Here Vigeland thought nothing of installing 58 of his figures atop granite pedestals along a bridge at the heart of the park. Cuddling, waving their arms, tossing their hair, suckling babies, they assume elastic poses just shy of the Kama Sutra, always in the altogether, all Scandinavian metaphors for good health and social welfare.<br />There they stood against the orange-purple sky before a silhouette of barren trees, oblivious to the cold. A busker played a doleful tune on his accordion. The park was empty. Then a mother pushing a baby carriage and few joggers crossed the bridge. Nobody gave the naked sculptures a second glance.<br />Some things, it turns out, never change.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/arts/27abro.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/arts/27abro.php</a></div><div></div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Swine into pearls</strong><br />By Claudia Barbieri<br />Friday, November 21, 2008<br />ROCCALANZONA, Italy: pearls<br />FOR SENSUALISTS IN SEARCH OF THE FINEST HAM, ITALY AND SPAIN OFFER VERY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES<br />Dusk is falling when Gemino Cenci makes his evening round, collecting milk from the farms surrounding this hamlet nestled beneath a ruined castle on the flanks of the Apennine hills, southwest of Parma.<br />Curds from the milk go to make great wheels of Parmesan cheese in Cenci's dairy plant. The whey feeds the White Landrance and Duroc pigs from which, in neighboring villages in this small region on the southern edge of the Po Valley, the sweetly delicate air-dried ham known as prosciutto di Parma is made.<br />People drive from miles around to dine on the ham, cheese and other local delicacies in the Cenci family's trattoria across the church square from the dairy.<br />Some like it sweet, some like it strong.<br />For sensualists who like their ham delicate, rose pink, shaved translucently thin so that it melts in the mouth, nothing beats a fine prosciutto from the Parma hills.<br />But gourmets in search of richer, deeper sensations will look elsewhere for their pleasure.<br />George Scott, a Briton born and raised in Spain, runs a family business between the two countries, exporting to London the luxury-quality Spanish ham known as pata negra, or jamón ibérico de Bellota, from his home in the Sierra de Huelva region of Andalucia.<br />Pata negra, named for the long-legged, black-hoofed Iberian pig, has a smoothness, a succulent richness and a deep, almost crimson color. The taste is nutty, almost spicy, a legacy of the herbs, and above all, the acorns - bellotas in Spanish - on which the pigs, close descendants of wild boar, feed as they roam freely in the Mediterranean oak and cork forests of southeastern Andalucia and Estremadura.<br />For four months, in the fall, each pig grazes at least an acre, or two-fifths of a hectare, of oak forest pasture, a fattening diet that produces a ham not only rich in taste, but in iron, magnesium, zinc, calcium, phosphorus, vitamins, niacin - and so much oleic acid that in Spain the pigs are known as four-legged olive trees.<br />Scott's parents bought the Trasierra estate, near the town of Cazalla de la Sierra, 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, northeast of Seville, as an uninhabitable ruin in 1979. A cluster of outbuildings surrounding olive and wine presses and abandoned dwellings, it had not been lived in or worked for 20 years.<br />Today, 29 years later, Trasierra has been restored and converted into an elegant 18-room country house hotel, run by his mother, Charlotte Scott, with gardens and terraces enclosed behind a thick encircling wall, in classic Spanish hacienda style.<br />For his export business, Scott buys whole hams from Jabugo, a small town about 700 meters, or 2,300 feet, high in the hills east of Trasierra with a microclimate that has made its curing cellars famous for the quality of their products.<br />To cure, the hams are first marinated in natural sea salt to draw out moisture through osmosis - a process that takes two days for each kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of meat.<br />Then they are hung in special rooms, the curing cellars, where ventilation and light are carefully controlled, for two to three years, to complete the air-drying process.<br />For the festive season Scott sells Christmas hampers at prices ranging from £40, or $60, to £190. The £190 hamper contains 400 grams of sliced jamón ibérico de Bellota, a Manchego cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, organic olive oil, a pot of truffle-flavored honey (great with Manchego cheese), various other Spanish delicacies and a bottle of dry manzanilla sherry - the perfect drinking companion for the acorn-fed ham.<br />Bellota Bellota, a fine épicerie and restaurant group, is a larger-scale distributor, with outlets in Paris, Lyon and Berlin.<br />Luis Isern, manager of one of its Paris shops, at 18 Rue Nicot in the tony Seventh Arrondissement, said he sells hams from four distinct production regions, each with its own recognizable flavor.<br />Climate, he said, plays an important role: the colder the production region, the sweeter the ham; warmer regions produce a meat with a coarser, stronger flavor.<br />Guijuelo de Salamanca produces the sweetest of the four; the Estremadura region of Spain and Portugal produces a more rustic meat; Jabugo, in Andalucia - Scott's region - is known for stronger flavor; while Valle de Los Pedroches, near Córdoba, produces ham that is rich and fruity.<br />Back in Italy, the Parma ham producers might just recognize some aspects of the curing process - the hams are first salted and then hung to dry; but just about everything else is different.<br />The pigs, for a start, are different - white Landrance and black Iberian; the living is different - Parma's pigs stay in, while the half-wild Iberians roam; and the diet is different - Parma's pigs are fattened on a blend of cereals and whey from the milk of cows that have themselves been fed on grass and hay from the local hillside meadows.<br />Langhirano, a small town nestled in the foothills of the Apennines, a couple valleys east of the Cencis' dairy farm, is blessed with a perfect geography and climate for producing prosciutto. The town houses a local prosciutto museum and for the past 11 years has held a festival in September to celebrate its signature delicacy.<br />The small area covering the Parma hillsides has 167 establishments producing Parma ham. Parmesans say that no Parma ham is better than from pigs fattened on their own hillsides.<br />Ferrari Barazzoni, a family business, is one of the oldest seasoning factories in the region, located in Langhirano and dating from 1860.<br />Nino Barazzoni, the current owner, runs a modernistic, super-streamlined establishment that combines the most up-to-date industrial equipment with traditional artisanal methods.<br />"There is a rigorous selection process in choosing the hams," Barazzoni said. "Only the best are chosen. They have to have perfect color, rose, and perfect weight."<br />"Quality control is of the utmost importance during the curing process," he added. "The pig is slaughtered at 9 months and is cured for anything between 18 and 22 months in a highly controlled environment of airing and drying."<br />The small towns of Langhirano, Felino, Sala Baganza, Noceto and Moderno are the top locations for the curing business, and the quality-control procedures and products of their curing houses are strictly monitored by the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma, a self-regulating consortium that delivers its prized quality seal - a five-pointed ducal crown - only to hams that meet its rigorous standards.<br />Patrizio Codispoti, a specialist artisan, carries out one of the key processes, known as the "sugnatura," or greasing. Codispoti, with expert hands, lards and massages the ham's surface, using a special paste of pig fat, rice flour, salt and pepper to soften the meat after it has cured for six or seven months, a first airing stage that is crucial to the ham's ultimate flavor but that hardens it slightly as it dries.<br />The open windows of the curing house let in aromatic breezes that both dry and penetrate the hams.<br />"It is the sea breezes, coming across the Apennines, their chestnut, olive and pine forests, that give this ham its special sweet and slightly savory aromas," Codispoti said in an interview.<br />A leg of about seven kilograms sells for about €700, or $875, to €800.<br />The ham is best eaten sliced translucently thin, with ripe melon or figs, and accompanied by the local malvasia, a light, fragrant, summery white wine.<br />So, in the end, which is better, the delicate product of Italy, or the richer product of Spain? The white pig, or the black?<br />It comes down to a question of personal preference, of course.<br />To misquote the late Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping: It doesn't matter whether the pig is black or white, as long as the ham is nice.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/20/style/rluxham.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/20/style/rluxham.php</a></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaGP1JS4gMryMaGCuotVFhsYgovwpjsH7BeLlyan2iHVzYsDnRQyvLBA3zaYEy1uBcqFPavAelOaijFWqi_F45gTiwL6z2ezR19toaIpQcNBaUOKUgMpY6v1XQp2rb6v7aWaDqD-tPVF4/s1600-h/DSC02192.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273682184124828738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaGP1JS4gMryMaGCuotVFhsYgovwpjsH7BeLlyan2iHVzYsDnRQyvLBA3zaYEy1uBcqFPavAelOaijFWqi_F45gTiwL6z2ezR19toaIpQcNBaUOKUgMpY6v1XQp2rb6v7aWaDqD-tPVF4/s320/DSC02192.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkZj7hgHi79lHFVpqMheQPBxOizE94gvZCMO0WjtUnAl3u1Cl5Hd3fCXJzI05j6JRR9_aRg9pMwHrhOX1Jiib2vzVdHPh7nTs2P1cvkLVNSUdom27iaYF7fu5RzLhSZ1KZXHFUlQpsvzM/s1600-h/DSC02193.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681910521344882" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkZj7hgHi79lHFVpqMheQPBxOizE94gvZCMO0WjtUnAl3u1Cl5Hd3fCXJzI05j6JRR9_aRg9pMwHrhOX1Jiib2vzVdHPh7nTs2P1cvkLVNSUdom27iaYF7fu5RzLhSZ1KZXHFUlQpsvzM/s320/DSC02193.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqCPVZfGofx-jMArFIMd6-RhyqavWgwm6v0FCdpUxSaVooT8ZgHXqCPiipmDY9x92iydCWjMy05ROzFwGIl8DHdHhbaEhLFDk88jFKIW4MTRLlxCqzCwoGQ_yVgo6wfQ_j_7eVJExhX8g/s1600-h/DSC02194.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681911219013634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqCPVZfGofx-jMArFIMd6-RhyqavWgwm6v0FCdpUxSaVooT8ZgHXqCPiipmDY9x92iydCWjMy05ROzFwGIl8DHdHhbaEhLFDk88jFKIW4MTRLlxCqzCwoGQ_yVgo6wfQ_j_7eVJExhX8g/s320/DSC02194.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>Spanish novelist Juan Marse wins Cervantes Prize</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />MADRID, Spain: Novelst Juan Marse, known for his descriptions of hardship in his native Catalonia region after Spain's civil war, has won the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor — the Cervantes Prize.<br />Culture Minister Cesar Antonio Molina announced the award Thursday for the 75-year-old writer from Barcelona.<br />The prize, created by Spain in 1975 and carrying a €125,000 ($160,000) cash stipend, is likened to a Nobel for literature in Spanish and honors a writer's body of work.<br />Marse is best known for his novels about people enduring tough times in Catalonia after the 1936-1939 civil war, which ended with fascist dictator Francisco Franco's victory and was followed by years of repression against his foes.<br />Many of Marse's books have been made into movies including "Ultimas Tardes con Teresa," or "Last Evenings with Teresa," in 1983. It is the story of an ill-fated romance between a rich young woman and working-class man.<br />Last year the Cervantes prize went to Argentine poet Juan Gelman.<br />The prize is presented each April by King Juan Carlos in Alcala de Henares, the birthplace of "Don Quixote" author Miguel de Cervantes.<br />Previous winners include Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina, Peruvian-born Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico.<br />The prize tends to alternate each year between Spanish and Latin American writers.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/27/arts/EU-Spain-Cervantes-Prize.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/27/arts/EU-Spain-Cervantes-Prize.php</a></div><div></div><div></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjOm4tvl5Hk4hJKGBgHNR76oH14ipwlB42ZwoP11CVPgiKrfwA_xrKi4KUZlfC5RC_sJ8udHFv6Q-GuHYHXTHBVpp2y0he9fu-yyw6aX0VzWZYqa35wgYqB73WcoA7c7YgvpAJnvqYbH0/s1600-h/DSC02195.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681899803019250" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjOm4tvl5Hk4hJKGBgHNR76oH14ipwlB42ZwoP11CVPgiKrfwA_xrKi4KUZlfC5RC_sJ8udHFv6Q-GuHYHXTHBVpp2y0he9fu-yyw6aX0VzWZYqa35wgYqB73WcoA7c7YgvpAJnvqYbH0/s320/DSC02195.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix2qtdlJzaUnZXlAPmr8s1o3EaOHJ5-vuDZrv_IJf_se7eVp9ZCEbpdpkc4FJs1wt4DT0rYQ0i6bw54sOSab3hAlGH_VaPDML-syD6a705TMzznr6Lqaskygx3pXHri69Fqmh6NMCHI3w/s1600-h/DSC02196.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681903080455330" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix2qtdlJzaUnZXlAPmr8s1o3EaOHJ5-vuDZrv_IJf_se7eVp9ZCEbpdpkc4FJs1wt4DT0rYQ0i6bw54sOSab3hAlGH_VaPDML-syD6a705TMzznr6Lqaskygx3pXHri69Fqmh6NMCHI3w/s320/DSC02196.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxzCAbo-IpVMcfrEuwU-tTnoZDKCcYkjDGd-Z2XHJdmcmfDCBv3K50vig_W9Xp5wY2H54Pg7pne7idt3wIxxJ5dyJ4gvYbWsMkNg2rMhXDC13qDC6X9PlfVaP9iUpJlSU4Hz7TOZxi5Cg/s1600-h/DSC02197.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681898879839282" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxzCAbo-IpVMcfrEuwU-tTnoZDKCcYkjDGd-Z2XHJdmcmfDCBv3K50vig_W9Xp5wY2H54Pg7pne7idt3wIxxJ5dyJ4gvYbWsMkNg2rMhXDC13qDC6X9PlfVaP9iUpJlSU4Hz7TOZxi5Cg/s320/DSC02197.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN0s0M2nqqLhaPMZv5eXQYDqTnwSU8AJJN9VEqa2JtHwZYsvVKhI_4GXPt5ntVS8k6likwyKtpLNmqhnbqVnU55Sr9rMWQpvC0YKIRQEFrV_8Ire8jIYm-Q607m_kIHCg2D65_q-kWd-o/s1600-h/DSC02198.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681624045310066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN0s0M2nqqLhaPMZv5eXQYDqTnwSU8AJJN9VEqa2JtHwZYsvVKhI_4GXPt5ntVS8k6likwyKtpLNmqhnbqVnU55Sr9rMWQpvC0YKIRQEFrV_8Ire8jIYm-Q607m_kIHCg2D65_q-kWd-o/s320/DSC02198.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz9scDHXuCTf-BYRETa-pBptyO4Y3WpokVNtZIT7uJtjqA4FJhOzWzyoUWVhf390mZnl_kE7Z_GEZu7dGsokAP2Ygt2cMufyNxD7ut7_nVidQlu45PXZBRdhylVtb_31ozvBeXU95c-oo/s1600-h/DSC02199.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681623135570194" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz9scDHXuCTf-BYRETa-pBptyO4Y3WpokVNtZIT7uJtjqA4FJhOzWzyoUWVhf390mZnl_kE7Z_GEZu7dGsokAP2Ygt2cMufyNxD7ut7_nVidQlu45PXZBRdhylVtb_31ozvBeXU95c-oo/s320/DSC02199.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQdzzdOr8h8zF-IFQqxFluMKiA2t1Mv0MNEb963lZYYcZomNO3jpzQ27KjTJF22VPf24_8gi7JXSIVMj8QnNrE1MVFgSDEnYNTQozuIyUIH5rA6YpmCVaO7fTRK01DTktA75TIwy9cIhw/s1600-h/DSC02200.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681618696820530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQdzzdOr8h8zF-IFQqxFluMKiA2t1Mv0MNEb963lZYYcZomNO3jpzQ27KjTJF22VPf24_8gi7JXSIVMj8QnNrE1MVFgSDEnYNTQozuIyUIH5rA6YpmCVaO7fTRK01DTktA75TIwy9cIhw/s320/DSC02200.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>Lawmaker says Germans arrested in Kosovo are spies</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />BERLIN: The German government has told deputies that three Germans arrested in Kosovo on suspicion of throwing explosives at an EU office are intelligence operatives, the head of a parliamentary committee said Thursday.<br />Thomas Oppermann, who chairs the German parliamentary committee overseeing intelligence operations, said the government had informed the committee the three were working for Germany's BND intelligence agency in Kosovo.<br />"They were operating there for the BND," he told reporters after the committee met in Berlin. He declined to say what their assignment had been.<br />The explosive charge was thrown on November 14 at the International Civilian Office (ICO), the office of EU Special Representative Pieter Feith, who oversees Kosovo's governance, but caused only minor damage.<br />"We don't have any indication that the three German officials in Kosovo had any connection to the attack," said Oppermann, a member of the Social Democrats, the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government.<br />He called for their immediate release.<br />The men were detained last Thursday.<br />The three were questioned Saturday by a Pristina district court judge who ordered them to be detained until December 22.<br />Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February after nine years under U.N. stewardship and is recognized by more than 50 countries, including Germany.<br />Four days before the bomb attack, its leaders rejected a plan by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's for the deployment of an EU police and justice mission, EULEX.<br />(Reporting by Sabine Siebold, writing by Paul Carrel)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/europe/OUKWD-UK-GERMANY-KOSOVO-ARRESTS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/europe/OUKWD-UK-GERMANY-KOSOVO-ARRESTS.php</a></div><div></div><div>****************</div><div><strong>U.N. council clears way for EU mission in Kosovo</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />By Patrick Worsnip<br />The U.N. Security Council cleared the way on Wednesday for a European Union police and justice mission to deploy in Kosovo, in a statement welcoming agreement by Serbia and Kosovo to the move.<br />The EU mission is intended ultimately to take over from a U.N. mission that has administered the former Serbian province from 1999. Kosovo, 90 percent of whose people are ethnically Albanian, declared independence from Belgrade in February.<br />Many Western countries have recognized Kosovo but Serbia, backed by Russia, has refused to do so. The Security Council has long been divided over the future of Kosovo and Wednesday's statement was the first time the 15-nation body had been able to agree on it since the independence declaration.<br />In speeches to the council, Serbian and Kosovo ministers clashed over details of future operations of the EU mission, known as EULEX, but made clear they accepted the deployment.<br />"The Security Council ... taking into account the positions of Belgrade and Pristina ... which were reflected in their respective statements, welcomes their intentions to cooperate with the international community," said a formal statement agreed upon by all council members.<br />"This will create the conditions for a quick deployment of EULEX," the U.N. special envoy to Kosovo, Lamberto Zannier, told reporters. All parties had seen Security Council backing as a precondition for the EU to move in.<br />EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said last week he hoped EULEX would deploy in Kosovo in early December. The move has long been supported by Western countries, which see it as part of a gradual normalization of Kosovo.<br />The United Nations began running Kosovo after NATO bombing drove out Serb forces accused of mass killings of civilians.<br />SIX-POINT AGREEMENT<br />In February, the EU agreed to send EULEX to take over from the world body and oversee the police, judiciary and customs, but its deployment was delayed first by opposition from Serbia and later by objections from Kosovo.<br />U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon won over Serbia with a six-point plan whereby police, customs officers and judges in Serb-run areas of Kosovo would remain under the U.N. umbrella, while their Albanian counterparts would work with EULEX.<br />Kosovo, even though it had pledged to cooperate with EULEX, said the plan violated its constitution and would result in a de facto partition of the fledgling state. Many of the remaining 120,000 Serbs in Kosovo live in the north.<br />The eventual council statement got round the problem by failing to mention the six-point plan, despite earlier pressure from Russia to do so. But Serbia and Kosovo remained divided over the plan.<br />"The Republic of Serbia gives its full consent to the six points agreement and conditions laid out to the deployment of EULEX," Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said.<br />Kosovo Foreign Minister Skender Hyseni said Pristina continued to reject the plan. But he said the council's statement "did bring a clear support of the council for the EULEX deployment throughout Kosovo."<br />The council agreement on Kosovo is significant after what appeared to be an unbreakable deadlock on the issue and the deterioration of Russia's ties with the West after it invaded its neighbour Georgia in August.<br />Western diplomats admitted the statement papered over differences on Ban's plan and details of how EULEX would operate and take over U.N. functions remained to be negotiated. They said the important thing was to get the EU mission on the ground and leave the details for later.<br />"EULEX's deployment is an important step forward in the integration of the region into the European Union," British envoy Karen Pierce told reporters.<br />(Editing by Todd Eastham)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/europe/OUKWD-UK-KOSOVO-UN.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/europe/OUKWD-UK-KOSOVO-UN.php</a></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBEt8xuZGGmCDdrrx8rJtXAttfsfPbcyX4L-3p14wqOrX5MWkw8z2GOnLJJnoR5aiN17EQ-VKlRu2fHH3awexPNexbRq9sPqbCNsmAZvWVnaxP-WLZbbV7YxktZgRPmgxlPzjGcaKilEo/s1600-h/DSC02201.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681619854412082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBEt8xuZGGmCDdrrx8rJtXAttfsfPbcyX4L-3p14wqOrX5MWkw8z2GOnLJJnoR5aiN17EQ-VKlRu2fHH3awexPNexbRq9sPqbCNsmAZvWVnaxP-WLZbbV7YxktZgRPmgxlPzjGcaKilEo/s320/DSC02201.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaNoloWI7OzLb2SBaFFtx3NV24leM1W_iaDBzeXejdnaFxjl6qexMOIdjHIBAph46HQu7ZOTiXsD3ZpW3N-JirgCT-YCcouQeqkIKoewpU3_iZrdP83RAWwn2gHcHqjYqv4zS6uzwWqnw/s1600-h/DSC02202.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681616830963058" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaNoloWI7OzLb2SBaFFtx3NV24leM1W_iaDBzeXejdnaFxjl6qexMOIdjHIBAph46HQu7ZOTiXsD3ZpW3N-JirgCT-YCcouQeqkIKoewpU3_iZrdP83RAWwn2gHcHqjYqv4zS6uzwWqnw/s320/DSC02202.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqeAcaCr1S39-DH9rsndWdmdthux24cpIANSpKi9_1RvxgHJNBqJlA1_DbhKdT8gHKqmHvlqkrxc73BpQBI0YSDGCEo6GEak12ibeQMHim14qbEEutCBdkSjAk6F7llGCgt-_iNy5O538/s1600-h/DSC02203.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681311033806914" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqeAcaCr1S39-DH9rsndWdmdthux24cpIANSpKi9_1RvxgHJNBqJlA1_DbhKdT8gHKqmHvlqkrxc73BpQBI0YSDGCEo6GEak12ibeQMHim14qbEEutCBdkSjAk6F7llGCgt-_iNy5O538/s320/DSC02203.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJVhlVr9HWM-Ec-uq9-XPQAoqrb23eWQYc7u3dGyVKRr2do_h6sEM3pGhSsazV6Sekgt0cSgwtJNfetzl7974lXuNkyIu-EHJqftWN-7ynWOtIKRxkSVKWQaxyz81zbXk2zySYhMLnHGM/s1600-h/DSC02204.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681306851757570" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJVhlVr9HWM-Ec-uq9-XPQAoqrb23eWQYc7u3dGyVKRr2do_h6sEM3pGhSsazV6Sekgt0cSgwtJNfetzl7974lXuNkyIu-EHJqftWN-7ynWOtIKRxkSVKWQaxyz81zbXk2zySYhMLnHGM/s320/DSC02204.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_lohpQvUv3MKtTEf2qWIyp6nckjHrGoIpgIJu10rkY6m3L20SV71Eg2MNNj9XPpy54dghE_ADYM96osQ_oOyz6eWiCqXuzU9vYyf-1c5J-2xnFxmsNDX1ca-uZtKXfwtIPxkRSghqCEA/s1600-h/DSC02205.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681309844794370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_lohpQvUv3MKtTEf2qWIyp6nckjHrGoIpgIJu10rkY6m3L20SV71Eg2MNNj9XPpy54dghE_ADYM96osQ_oOyz6eWiCqXuzU9vYyf-1c5J-2xnFxmsNDX1ca-uZtKXfwtIPxkRSghqCEA/s320/DSC02205.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieqWNm75Y2gxOZ8VINdS8zRUgo8JECAjAtDXVQK0k0aDHtYwIM-1UpJSdZbhKzbi6FtcFqfKrs45Y3gCCabj2f3t5e2TDOxJFSUCPNgfu_sm8bAl0OcgXGG9tD3iQT63VhhS6GMSdGTQ4/s1600-h/DSC02206.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681119629103602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieqWNm75Y2gxOZ8VINdS8zRUgo8JECAjAtDXVQK0k0aDHtYwIM-1UpJSdZbhKzbi6FtcFqfKrs45Y3gCCabj2f3t5e2TDOxJFSUCPNgfu_sm8bAl0OcgXGG9tD3iQT63VhhS6GMSdGTQ4/s320/DSC02206.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAxJ9HRHVj0BUM_FXESQkdQzZgtSZtLsiPyp-hZpvpDy9OQPKrZB_iXZgnlhx-bBeXlpjlHSg0tioLZ7wejgGuHXe5TJOwt1Ehzou7Qh9Bb4FoVrS61r1yMfOGjGrYgSY7Tt0lgRXod17q/s1600-h/DSC02207.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681114338263730" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAxJ9HRHVj0BUM_FXESQkdQzZgtSZtLsiPyp-hZpvpDy9OQPKrZB_iXZgnlhx-bBeXlpjlHSg0tioLZ7wejgGuHXe5TJOwt1Ehzou7Qh9Bb4FoVrS61r1yMfOGjGrYgSY7Tt0lgRXod17q/s320/DSC02207.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmRrah6PoPdqp-Du5L2AlLXSje54phgjNEDMuL-o5e1QmvX7jesOi0vaJI7bZz0KBePuRuzbgykU0Q-vA-Kp81pR78wBwjqBfmc9w5nTtqLDot4tneoocFpBI6K5259LVlbuvrFFvCGns/s1600-h/DSC02208.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681108998243410" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmRrah6PoPdqp-Du5L2AlLXSje54phgjNEDMuL-o5e1QmvX7jesOi0vaJI7bZz0KBePuRuzbgykU0Q-vA-Kp81pR78wBwjqBfmc9w5nTtqLDot4tneoocFpBI6K5259LVlbuvrFFvCGns/s320/DSC02208.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8yZ6c4oW4eqp_cgdT89VA1UxWydu8XRUbNWQRn0J1JwdiFXuYbJsxfKA_N1K-NpkcNQjyX0Nk3xrXnl0bPw8U9bOXwuZC12HYKfToNaZEcFsXXIJ1gWFv2vVNoZv2E_WxDqTpoVp1pB3G/s1600-h/DSC02209.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681104591941730" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8yZ6c4oW4eqp_cgdT89VA1UxWydu8XRUbNWQRn0J1JwdiFXuYbJsxfKA_N1K-NpkcNQjyX0Nk3xrXnl0bPw8U9bOXwuZC12HYKfToNaZEcFsXXIJ1gWFv2vVNoZv2E_WxDqTpoVp1pB3G/s320/DSC02209.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfvkXUBX84YpIu_ky-stBUIoU3zhMF4ExFvDaISzD5mGowoFpjF3voUrlg-AilYiVKDbd_ZBGnNh3kl1SA83qoxg2Y6JglZjP1lr4FfgPA5g-OEXdM9Pfnk-3KLvO2osDezCIqGzxANw4/s1600-h/DSC02210.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273681105297593298" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfvkXUBX84YpIu_ky-stBUIoU3zhMF4ExFvDaISzD5mGowoFpjF3voUrlg-AilYiVKDbd_ZBGnNh3kl1SA83qoxg2Y6JglZjP1lr4FfgPA5g-OEXdM9Pfnk-3KLvO2osDezCIqGzxANw4/s320/DSC02210.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFa1xXqQz1V-GcVM6qfQh7yHAzJfyPvZ1HOB6mU8HVYDYeaO8C6M4hcjnKtj8C9znWcVQha6zIERSxo-b8Y_gmuSj8PbNB6mvfdeij0sPseSM7vnST6AnylxAFuPFacMHzPjviMjiLcsU/s1600-h/DSC02211.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680866782498162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 246px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFa1xXqQz1V-GcVM6qfQh7yHAzJfyPvZ1HOB6mU8HVYDYeaO8C6M4hcjnKtj8C9znWcVQha6zIERSxo-b8Y_gmuSj8PbNB6mvfdeij0sPseSM7vnST6AnylxAFuPFacMHzPjviMjiLcsU/s320/DSC02211.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXhKmTgnqiZxGcNuvVsklEskXG31So7egaKUgN4kGPiBV4YgO53epleaz_Qdyke9py2eb2XsL_Bv0r78ruqnxRUSVN_nXTiMC7HPvufXolAcCT7E6Yqq9mfSJPiBUcLS-_LIjxAdCn6Bc/s1600-h/DSC02212.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680864893293250" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXhKmTgnqiZxGcNuvVsklEskXG31So7egaKUgN4kGPiBV4YgO53epleaz_Qdyke9py2eb2XsL_Bv0r78ruqnxRUSVN_nXTiMC7HPvufXolAcCT7E6Yqq9mfSJPiBUcLS-_LIjxAdCn6Bc/s320/DSC02212.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div></div><div><strong>Mexico's unsuccessful drug war, painfully preserved and hidden<br /></strong>By Marc Lacey<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />MEXICO CITY: At their best, museums are glorious cultural repositories, reflecting the highest flowering of human creativity, ingenuity and art. But not everything in every culture is glorious, and there are museums for those aspects, too, which is why, hidden from the public, there is an institution here devoted to Mexico's dark side, the Museum of Drugs.<br />It is a place that leaves those who manage to get inside shaking their heads and lamenting the long, spirited but largely unsuccessful war this country has waged to control illegal narcotics.<br />Run by the Mexican military and open only to graduating cadets and select guests, the Museo de los Enervantes presents the drug war in all its ugliness and complexity. There is a room devoted to the ancient roots of drug use in Mesoamerica, like the use of hallucinogenic peyote and mushrooms by the Maya and Aztecs, and displays that show all the military does to try to stem the tide, uprooting marijuana plants and uncovering hidden caches of cocaine and heroin.<br />"You eradicate in one place and you continue on, and when you go back they're growing it again," said Major Mario Ayala López, who insisted that his face not be shown in any photographs, an atypical request for a museum curator but a reality in present-day Mexico, where the drug violence knows no bounds.<br />To give young cadets a sense of what they will be hunting for once deployed into the field, drugs themselves are on display, real-life samples under glass of everything from methamphetamines, which are manufactured in huge quantities in Mexican laboratories, to heroin, to marijuana, which is grown in fields hidden away in the countryside. The museum itself could not be more secure, located on the top floor of the Defense Ministry.<br />Along the halls, there is a farmworker mannequin propped up under a tree with a rifle in his hands, guarding a field of poppies and marijuana. Around his neck is a pendant of Jesús Malverde, considered the patron saint of outlaws. Nearby is a board with nails sticking into it, a makeshift trap set to injure anyone, but especially soldiers, who might creep near.<br />In a display case are actual notes that soldiers have recovered in raids on fields growing the precursors for the drugs that will be smoked, snorted or injected. The handwritten messages are pleas from the farmers to the soldiers to leave their fields alone in exchange for a little cash.<br />Getting the drugs to the biggest market on Earth, the United States, requires ingenuity, and there is an entire room devoted to that. Drug-filled shoes, beer crates and even a drug-filled surfboard are on display. There is a doughnut sprinkled with poppy seeds that were to be used to make heroin, and a doll that was stuffed with drugs and then handed to a child to carry.<br />A model of a woman who was apprehended in Tijuana shows her with a protruding stomach, which was caused not by pregnancy but by a package containing several pounds of tightly wrapped cocaine. A photograph features another female trafficker, this one with cocaine surgically implanted in her buttocks. She died after one of the packages burst upon her arrival at Mexico City's airport.<br />Toward the end of the tour the museum, which opened in 1985, introduces the people who have turned Mexico into the prime trafficking country in the hemisphere. There is a model of a stereotypical trafficker wearing fancy cowboy boots, a big belt buckle imprinted with a marijuana plant and plenty of jewelry.<br />On the wall is a photograph of a trafficker's child, a baby dressed in camouflage surrounded by dozens of shotguns. "There are generations that grow up in this culture," Major Ayala said. "For them it's normal."<br />Farther on are some of the vestments recovered during drug raids, like a bulletproof trench coat and a protective polo shirt, both designed by Miguel Caballero, a Colombian clothing designer who runs a pricey boutique not far away.<br />Traffickers have plenty of money to spend, and this museum gives a taste of some of their buying habits. There is a gold-encrusted cellphone recovered from Daniel Pérez Rojas, a founder of the Zetas, a paramilitary group, and plenty of weaponry decorated with precious metals and stones. A Colt pistol recovered from Alfredo Beltra Leyva, a leader of the feared Sinaloa cartel who was arrested in January, bears the oft-repeated revolutionary quotation, "I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees."<br />There is another Colt pistol encrusted with emeralds that once belonged to Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel and probably the most wanted trafficker of all. It was marked with the initials ACF, for Armado Carrillo Fuentes, who once led the Juárez Cartel but died while undergoing plastic surgery in 1997. The gun was probably a gift from Carrillo to Guzmán, the curator speculated, and thus a sign of an alliance between their rival cartels.<br />Nowhere is the word "guerra," or war, featured in the museum, because the Mexican military considers its counternarcotics mission to be something different from that. "We don't use that term," said Major Ayala, who was wearing his dress uniform as he strode formally through the museum.<br />At the museum entrance, though, is a shrine that features the names of 570 Mexican soldiers who have died fighting illegal drugs as far back as 1976. In the last two years, since President Felipe Calderón has sent soldiers on more antidrug missions than any of his predecessors, 67 names have been added to the list.<br />And, sadly, there is plenty of room on the wall for more. More Articles in World » A version of this article appeared in print on November 27, 2008, on page A6 of the New York edition.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/america/27mexico-museum.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/america/27mexico-museum.php</a><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGq6E7-LXovHyf53ShgVMS7E-09rKr68eMzLu8c9Pn4enj0eDlMCzU3qFo1aLZR8ohs3pvXNOz1z_mTPm9mBGXUBosBKybQSq8eoaK17GmDSAjI4JEcXjScHwGhWEfzstLwsi6pgcMTd8/s1600-h/DSC02213.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680863194521234" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGq6E7-LXovHyf53ShgVMS7E-09rKr68eMzLu8c9Pn4enj0eDlMCzU3qFo1aLZR8ohs3pvXNOz1z_mTPm9mBGXUBosBKybQSq8eoaK17GmDSAjI4JEcXjScHwGhWEfzstLwsi6pgcMTd8/s320/DSC02213.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1FbgBYMYOCc1d1K65f8-PYltkZbaRSitM_h0YsiP7wtdSlGyGlnKiJMv_-1GJ2GDhpz5K5Awo4CeO30kg0HTer3EicjRqD9osOr3DxWR0N3NDeB5U7TVzfaN7j91J67H-zu5GfkBw0Mg/s1600-h/DSC02214.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680861542869250" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 271px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1FbgBYMYOCc1d1K65f8-PYltkZbaRSitM_h0YsiP7wtdSlGyGlnKiJMv_-1GJ2GDhpz5K5Awo4CeO30kg0HTer3EicjRqD9osOr3DxWR0N3NDeB5U7TVzfaN7j91J67H-zu5GfkBw0Mg/s320/DSC02214.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitKI5hmRc7N3lYrmR5NEctatCSLkwZRtM-fRf7RPpj52DU_oBtxp-WPtjqHX_ZsE6ofSUmGyeiaaHvwm9uzzC4XQhCrhqIrnZeBjzM_G0t_QucPJi7nHAZ0iHI8FrPCBl8NWSVOINwWmY/s1600-h/DSC02215.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680860916139250" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitKI5hmRc7N3lYrmR5NEctatCSLkwZRtM-fRf7RPpj52DU_oBtxp-WPtjqHX_ZsE6ofSUmGyeiaaHvwm9uzzC4XQhCrhqIrnZeBjzM_G0t_QucPJi7nHAZ0iHI8FrPCBl8NWSVOINwWmY/s320/DSC02215.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGX3SFKErRst-ydC1tu6yfawv0AkA5uEjtO5p26IgR9kaoO_ZXMXuFQrvhDxNAdcp1FpYtopYdWxuGjbed7V7ay9FLgYxTGQZQwfO-5n3inziQ97ddf4c1tU40riqEekR4RBHjyh0nnMY/s1600-h/DSC02216.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680638421231042" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGX3SFKErRst-ydC1tu6yfawv0AkA5uEjtO5p26IgR9kaoO_ZXMXuFQrvhDxNAdcp1FpYtopYdWxuGjbed7V7ay9FLgYxTGQZQwfO-5n3inziQ97ddf4c1tU40riqEekR4RBHjyh0nnMY/s320/DSC02216.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLbBsVIWKBJI23T7EP52VM_6GL3PMxixxsK8wY24AWsfoggnRb_m8E4PPMaU3KNjpWyNSlLwBrVAN3HRvJZpPdyaarLgy80g0guX_DeURW79rOVySmhtO2IZX_NBFtFnbYGq4sK783d24/s1600-h/DSC02217.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680640026939506" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLbBsVIWKBJI23T7EP52VM_6GL3PMxixxsK8wY24AWsfoggnRb_m8E4PPMaU3KNjpWyNSlLwBrVAN3HRvJZpPdyaarLgy80g0guX_DeURW79rOVySmhtO2IZX_NBFtFnbYGq4sK783d24/s320/DSC02217.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeJDmfODnD-g8swyCTo4Xoc5U7GNZgSgvhN5cfEcn4OoFfB_b1SEvwszvMtNOUvyrr8jh0_w2N7MkBV6eMxy_PEzE4LW6hKBHpvAof5NqFRE8VFV0v87PehOmiARPhJkrasKadij5g5Ho/s1600-h/DSC02218.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680633870784834" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 283px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeJDmfODnD-g8swyCTo4Xoc5U7GNZgSgvhN5cfEcn4OoFfB_b1SEvwszvMtNOUvyrr8jh0_w2N7MkBV6eMxy_PEzE4LW6hKBHpvAof5NqFRE8VFV0v87PehOmiARPhJkrasKadij5g5Ho/s320/DSC02218.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikZM4EKL1ZWbnNofRFr2LL9r3VDXcujRGqa9ZOG5cachJa47Wt-Sn5aMnLH_P94iQsUzaVjENsx8kJATlypwlIMGZW6UashTrGtM9DPVvsFNZw7H6JUU00Gb0Mx-BDVPCHLWfp4N0emU8/s1600-h/DSC02219.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680633834853090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikZM4EKL1ZWbnNofRFr2LL9r3VDXcujRGqa9ZOG5cachJa47Wt-Sn5aMnLH_P94iQsUzaVjENsx8kJATlypwlIMGZW6UashTrGtM9DPVvsFNZw7H6JUU00Gb0Mx-BDVPCHLWfp4N0emU8/s320/DSC02219.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIrlhaKGpLPPKTynX_jJuu_DI_yKm40QcdguY3Fx57UJKH7UMKa0raf9XZ2TzFaHO2dk5z9UmnG1ewqM_gN95D_pz0UnHxqMyELgeUG1S_daWuu1hn5KduIi9Ys770r-nNQdFjRfCiGXQ/s1600-h/DSC02220.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680631532742034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIrlhaKGpLPPKTynX_jJuu_DI_yKm40QcdguY3Fx57UJKH7UMKa0raf9XZ2TzFaHO2dk5z9UmnG1ewqM_gN95D_pz0UnHxqMyELgeUG1S_daWuu1hn5KduIi9Ys770r-nNQdFjRfCiGXQ/s320/DSC02220.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBECAZ2G5SiLnmmf6w3q7l82dG152bbwrkKtCLFdYeqsPtUl0gHmC4z_6Tbn_scvIXfDA1AQYLp7XbbmyVCcs3rJDHbZ2WW4WbK5oTiPfUVc8saS_2jx-uQs1ao_9SCMNLM_DhoK4vwvY/s1600-h/DSC02221.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680397905455394" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBECAZ2G5SiLnmmf6w3q7l82dG152bbwrkKtCLFdYeqsPtUl0gHmC4z_6Tbn_scvIXfDA1AQYLp7XbbmyVCcs3rJDHbZ2WW4WbK5oTiPfUVc8saS_2jx-uQs1ao_9SCMNLM_DhoK4vwvY/s320/DSC02221.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7VEhjbkU3Ma6FcsRsL5x4f_nYIZCv4UbKV_87QqpqDJWHpBvOARdczRf-_O8g5nrxaXOIe3zEzjQOGS3M0M2v1NjXXm3ZM2wVmD6DQZwYcUpaCuM6dhKAfKG18xSNb9RrojhAPKVR6Lw/s1600-h/DSC02222.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680392448526018" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7VEhjbkU3Ma6FcsRsL5x4f_nYIZCv4UbKV_87QqpqDJWHpBvOARdczRf-_O8g5nrxaXOIe3zEzjQOGS3M0M2v1NjXXm3ZM2wVmD6DQZwYcUpaCuM6dhKAfKG18xSNb9RrojhAPKVR6Lw/s320/DSC02222.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrXd62mYVHUBanlm_xpRBbLW1q3Mw5IwtpHpsRhXKkDxSHMuzwYXDs2JV1AHLKoK5jmH6cpcMHotOIN6PxgApLVaK6lSbQec8q4QlvsKQHxmUpamk_LbQIKI8Qkab_hrojxXOoP5xioxc/s1600-h/DSC02223.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680393862979074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrXd62mYVHUBanlm_xpRBbLW1q3Mw5IwtpHpsRhXKkDxSHMuzwYXDs2JV1AHLKoK5jmH6cpcMHotOIN6PxgApLVaK6lSbQec8q4QlvsKQHxmUpamk_LbQIKI8Qkab_hrojxXOoP5xioxc/s320/DSC02223.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim8WPBG_eCy3xqCLh7ezyOGtexTMlDQLr0rOIWfvGnGsf9BgCAJrFSH8wTBduwcMi-HJ8JWuSQt1JIqXSu-NGPnp3ff4FzQOnM3-0971CnizUIlhhHZJ05uuenIwHTlTj2w6nTAtTN4oc/s1600-h/DSC02224.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680388706203730" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim8WPBG_eCy3xqCLh7ezyOGtexTMlDQLr0rOIWfvGnGsf9BgCAJrFSH8wTBduwcMi-HJ8JWuSQt1JIqXSu-NGPnp3ff4FzQOnM3-0971CnizUIlhhHZJ05uuenIwHTlTj2w6nTAtTN4oc/s320/DSC02224.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtmoKgl2k4-WdG8TVMBCfsNXMrisa3laofbgvs0ImWIsyJzb9uWKrrsR_D1BXQjGWoEAcIULlj8suSFPWnCc53Zvf46vbyf1yrbiFJH-g8N7vh7EGb6AD493Q-eUWsc6zMYJRikZXFaOM/s1600-h/DSC02225.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680391276680466" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtmoKgl2k4-WdG8TVMBCfsNXMrisa3laofbgvs0ImWIsyJzb9uWKrrsR_D1BXQjGWoEAcIULlj8suSFPWnCc53Zvf46vbyf1yrbiFJH-g8N7vh7EGb6AD493Q-eUWsc6zMYJRikZXFaOM/s320/DSC02225.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMDHgLJ4IanQWvhk6vsHCsd3iM0jizlfirn_HopKWPaUt0H-ujqzBZ5aQWoIxgMIkKHlxK8y41nXqJHaiNPo20psqEb8SWKXCnpfbMjFcAnTXaP0Bd-sFx3WZ_TDDZLsy7ZUcRuP08nyY/s1600-h/DSC02226.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680155501143106" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 250px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMDHgLJ4IanQWvhk6vsHCsd3iM0jizlfirn_HopKWPaUt0H-ujqzBZ5aQWoIxgMIkKHlxK8y41nXqJHaiNPo20psqEb8SWKXCnpfbMjFcAnTXaP0Bd-sFx3WZ_TDDZLsy7ZUcRuP08nyY/s320/DSC02226.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCFvpenmY4NsCP7dhTfANcOP62ohx6DqXX4K8519rWxk1C5MG5cvDeNrQ75eshscGq6W0Ym-fM6kkeLjT4KfiJv8sZDoMrltEGZkbcqWlTBhPdv7K5s8D6JepLVOJ9xFW3ESUZYK0HxB0/s1600-h/DSC02227.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680155047509458" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCFvpenmY4NsCP7dhTfANcOP62ohx6DqXX4K8519rWxk1C5MG5cvDeNrQ75eshscGq6W0Ym-fM6kkeLjT4KfiJv8sZDoMrltEGZkbcqWlTBhPdv7K5s8D6JepLVOJ9xFW3ESUZYK0HxB0/s320/DSC02227.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEvRzwl1tRHclj7kKbauA0fnGsL0Yo21HG_INLg_o3wyIfzjgxtjSZ2RgzGY3w_yEVWtdk3KjzyiAfTSIFxHEFiBLnaRIiF3mF5iXoRdKQjdEjvE5lusG-gT6CrcM1PiQNU39VZu0v02w/s1600-h/DSC02229.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680149107923746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEvRzwl1tRHclj7kKbauA0fnGsL0Yo21HG_INLg_o3wyIfzjgxtjSZ2RgzGY3w_yEVWtdk3KjzyiAfTSIFxHEFiBLnaRIiF3mF5iXoRdKQjdEjvE5lusG-gT6CrcM1PiQNU39VZu0v02w/s320/DSC02229.jpg" border="0" /></a> <img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680150143184066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR0QGwKAAFSDBSwZveQEdSi-q6O17lN28FPOgGKYGXc3HBKUjtSHbcYhOSAWF_IprvQ3z8Ekg9wC6EVJUKDmAxqRPWlxJPMxHIjEbBtw7hVBW516B9H3SKIuiT7eO3XzHgIfRUwcxCZsI/s320/DSC02228.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0x7GyuSagidkzFxq5Odhje-Mj5zsxpl8wPZAOaaoNxxycFjk_FuxzOPF-URAx_lgM3Ssa_FHq84nDSZqNVjnTUkLvdfZBDqAc2YgVG1NBxdzznz62dCvMdNk6R0C5xujOkuWRUt3YzM8/s1600-h/DSC02230.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273680148804615362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0x7GyuSagidkzFxq5Odhje-Mj5zsxpl8wPZAOaaoNxxycFjk_FuxzOPF-URAx_lgM3Ssa_FHq84nDSZqNVjnTUkLvdfZBDqAc2YgVG1NBxdzznz62dCvMdNk6R0C5xujOkuWRUt3YzM8/s320/DSC02230.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>The pound is down, but foreign shoppers are not flocking</strong><br />By Julia Werdigier<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />LONDON: Last Christmas, American stores were flooded with British tourists hunting for bargains as the dollar fell to its weakest level against the pound in 26 years.<br />This year, with the pound worth $1.50, the lowest level in almost six years, British retailers are waiting for a wave of U.S. shoppers to bolster their business. Their bet is that a lower pound would not only attract more American tourists, but also lead those Britons who shopped abroad last year to spend their money at home instead.<br />But so far an influx of American shoppers - or a spending spree by visitors from the 15 countries that share the euro, which rose to a record against the pound in November - has failed to materialize. Some British retailers have noticed a rise in visitor numbers, but their impact on the economy is negligible. With many developed economies heading into a recession and fears about rising unemployment weighing on consumers, the weak pound is not enough to encourage Americans to travel across the Atlantic to help prop up the British economy and offset a drop in consumer spending.<br />"Consumers are a fragile beast," said Geoffrey Dicks, an economist at Royal Bank of Scotland. "Americans aren't traveling, or spending either, if they're scared to lose their jobs."<br />To attract those who might, British shops and travel companies are using the exchange rate as a marketing tool. Visit Britain, the national tourism agency, tells visitors to its Web site that "It's not 2:1 any more! Britain is now 20 percent cheaper for Americans than it was in the summer. If you're planning a trip, now is the time." The agency's London branch said it was flooding American travel agencies with marketing material and encouraging them to alert customers to the favorable exchange rate.<br />Selfridges, the upmarket department store, is presenting itself as a discount designer store for those paying in dollars or euros. "This is a very good time for customers from the euro zone, but also from America, to take advantage of the current exchange rates and buy the best fashion at lower prices," said the chief executive, Paul Kelly.<br />The store even published a list of items comparing prices at its flagship store on Oxford Street in London to those in the United States. A pair of leopard print Dolce & Gabbana shoes, for example, would cost London shoppers 38 percent less than in New York and a Prada handbag would be 23 percent cheaper, according to Selfridges.<br />Richard Dickinson, chief executive of New West End, which is promoting London's theater and shopping district, said he expected 10 million overseas shoppers to come to London for Christmas, lured by the favorable exchange rate. Virgin Atlantic said demand for flights to London, especially from New York, Boston and Los Angeles, is up 3 percent from last year.<br />The Liberty department store in London has recorded a 30 percent increase in American visitors compared with last year and said it also expected more British shoppers this year, since people can no longer afford to do their Christmas shopping abroad. Maureen Hinton, a retail analyst at Verdict Research in London, said the British economy might benefit from visitors attracted by the exchange rate but it will not be enough to compensate for falling sales over all.<br />Doug and Beth Feldman from Milwaukee came to London to visit their son Michael, who started studying at a university here this year, and said the exchange rate was a pleasant surprise but would not encourage them to spend more.<br />"We heard how expensive London was but now it's actually quite affordable," Doug Feldman said. He paid £150 a night, or $230, for a hotel room and bought tickets to the musical "Chicago" for £30 each - more or less what he would have paid at home. A year ago, the hotel room would have cost him $309 and a theater ticket $62, at the exchange rates prevailing at the time.<br />At a corner on busy Oxford Street, three women from Italy stood in front of a window displaying iPods and compared prices. "It's definitely much cheaper than in Rome," said Anna Illiano, a human resources manager who traveled to London for three days to work but added a day of shopping. "The discounts are fantastic. I'll be doing some of my Christmas shopping here."<br />Illiano and the Feldmans are benefiting from a drop of around 25 percent in the pound against the dollar and a 15 percent slump against the euro this year. The decline came as Britain entered its first recession in 17 years and investors grew increasingly concerned about the prospects of a recovery amid a widening budget deficit. To revive consumer spending, the government earlier this month cut value-added tax and announced some support for smaller businesses, but the measures will make Britain the most indebted economy among the Group of Seven industrialized nations.<br />Normally, a weak currency can help support an economy because it makes the price of the country's exports more competitive in world markets. But such effects diminish in a widespread downturn, as demand for exports declines.<br />In the British economy, whose past growth was fueled by consumers who borrowed more in order to spend more, the credit crisis is hitting hard. Consumer spending fell 0.2 percent in the third quarter, the most since 1995, and British retailers are suffering. Woolworths, a retailer of household goods and children's clothing, sought bankruptcy administration on Wednesday after 99 years in business. The furniture chain MFI entered administration the same day. (Page 16)<br />Those that survive are trying to attract customers with the types of offers common for the days after Christmas but unheard of 10 weeks before the holiday - including discounts of 25 percent. Some stores are offering their customers breakfast. Marks & Spencer has extended its opening hours.<br />While the falling pound has not resulted in an influx of shoppers for British retailers, it has increased the cost of the goods they import.<br />"A year ago retailers here got a huge boost on their margins because of the dollar as they sourced a lot of their materials from the Far East, but now it's snapped back," said Nick Coulter, a retail analyst at Numis Securities in London. "That combined with the recession, they are worried they won't get the stock out."<br />To save costs, many clothing retailers moved part of their production to Asian countries whose currencies are tied to the dollar. Argos, a shopping chain whose wares range from furniture to jewelry, told analysts that for every cent the dollar increases against the pound, the company loses about £4 million in gross profit. Other companies face higher debt payments if they - like the house builder Taylor Wimpey - have large operations in the United States and borrowed money there to fund themselves.<br />Many retailers are hedged against currency swings, but those hedges are likely to expire next year, exposing companies to a double whammy of falling sales and falling margins.<br />"The biggest issue is import costs," said Nick Bubb, an analyst at Pali International. "They are hedged out fairly well into next spring and summer, but after that there's a lot of pain."<br />But the weak pound is not all bad news, according to Dicks, the economist at Royal Bank of Scotland, who said that the drop in the pound helps to even out some economic imbalances.<br />"The weakness of the pound is part of the solution, not the problem," Dicks said. "We are coming out of a decade where we had constant GDP growth but that trend was not sustainable. We are a much cheaper economy than we used to be and that is a good thing."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/shop.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/shop.php</a></div><div></div><div>**************</div><div><strong>A dilemma in British housing</strong><br />By James SaftReuters<br />Friday, November 28, 2008<br />LONDON: Britain needs to reinvigorate its mortgage markets to save its economy and its banks. The problem is, few want to borrow and there is precious little money to lend.<br />British property prices are down about 15 percent in a year and mortgage approvals are down 52 percent. Given the freeze in the securitization market and the scarcity of savings in Britain, new net mortgage lending may even fall below zero in 2009, according to James Crosby, former head of the British mortgage bank HBOS, who wrote a government report on the mortgage market.<br />While the Crosby report rightly points out the damage that such an unprecedented fall would do to employment and the economy, it is also worth pointing out that it would be bad for another segment - the banks, which would suffer losses as borrowers fell into negative equity and defaulted, or lost their jobs and defaulted.<br />Britons simply do not save enough to supply their banks with enough to lend to fund the debt requirement implied by their housing prices. That circle was squared in the old days by borrowing money from abroad, either through banks borrowing and relending or via securitization.<br />The solution to this advocated by Britain, as laid out in the Crosby report and endorsed by Finance Minister Alistair Darling, is to plaster a government guarantee on mortgage securities totaling as much as £100 billion, or $154 billion. The securities would contain only house purchase loans and would be highly rated by the same agencies that rated the old, now discredited stuff. The securities would also exclude nasty high-loan-to-value mortgages, or loans made to people who had already demonstrated they were not that good at paying back money.<br />The theory is that investors, including central banks, may not want to buy mortgage-backed securities - investments that look a bit dubious, given the expected fall in house prices - or lend to British banks - which look a bit dubious for the same reason and several others - but will be very happy to buy bonds backed by the government and that pay more than government debt.<br />There are some problems with this approach.<br />"I'm all in favor of finding ways of encouraging a sustainable rate of mortgage lending, but I'm not entirely confident that the best way to do this is to resurrect a form of lending that for rather good reason has fallen out of favor," the Bank of England's governor, Mervyn King, told the British Parliament this week.<br />And even if we all agree to forget the recent experience with securitization, there is the issue of who, exactly, is going to buy these guaranteed bonds, and who will buy all the houses these loans will fund.<br />The idea that there are investors out there who will pay a great price for these bonds is not supported by the evidence. Look at the United States, where the government has been slapping government guarantees, or - wink, wink - "implicit" guarantees on all sorts of financial paper.<br />Goldman Sachs, which used to borrow on its name, sold $5 billion worth of bonds under a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. guarantee this week. The bonds paid about 2 percentage points more than equivalent government bonds, reflecting the dislocation in credit markets.<br />That's crazy, I hear you say. To paraphrase the economist John Maynard Keynes, the markets can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent.<br />Or look at paper issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are under government conservatorship and enjoy an "implicit" guarantee. Their bonds have done so stunningly badly in recent weeks, as central banks outside the United States deserted them in droves, that the U.S. government was forced to go in and buy them up.<br />My best guess is that even with a fat premium, the world will have more than it can handle of pound-denominated British government risk in the coming years.<br />On the other side of the equation, you have to wonder which buy-to-rent investor or potential home buyer is out there who a) is a good risk, b) possesses a 20 percent down payment and c) is willing to buy an asset that is losing 2 percent of its value a month.<br />So, it's looking as if the fall in British house prices will be further than expected.<br />If you look at the U.S. experience where a higher percentage of loans was securitized and thus tended not to end up on bank balance sheets, that is bad news for the banks.<br />Bank liabilities in the United States are about 20 percent of the size of the economy. In Britain, the figure is 285 percent.<br />Ask yourself then what might happen to Britain.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/col28.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/business/col28.php</a></div><div></div><div><br /><br /></div><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong></div><div><br /></div><div><strong><br /></strong>Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div><br /></div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment<br /></div></a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-90002721074443594082008-11-27T08:53:00.027+01:002008-11-27T10:56:18.288+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Wednesday, 26th November 2008<div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong>0930</strong></div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilacLg80YlBlMclFCNWh5-yjVUjt2C1qax0yEnYOKqG2AWqjRscOp4vZjn4FRpWfR5imrV_T39kvCtfS2Zmm9wt3T-pHNHmkAw25E37nwyi10pY1KHojYvoQUUFxieh2yJXmV84Ea_44k/s1600-h/DSC02115.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245804643144130" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilacLg80YlBlMclFCNWh5-yjVUjt2C1qax0yEnYOKqG2AWqjRscOp4vZjn4FRpWfR5imrV_T39kvCtfS2Zmm9wt3T-pHNHmkAw25E37nwyi10pY1KHojYvoQUUFxieh2yJXmV84Ea_44k/s320/DSC02115.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie6c-82_tSz8oOikC3wIaa5iAoEEd7NVTZwaxfwEILTtJiiX8hrmFPkvVV7Mjea4o7llD-smXk_kcN7dS7nd0jvgJl5iExs7QWMydrJXuBJ4PXbMYkXVbuyT32TMFP_85U_mZUIuzi5OA/s1600-h/DSC02116.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245796507320450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie6c-82_tSz8oOikC3wIaa5iAoEEd7NVTZwaxfwEILTtJiiX8hrmFPkvVV7Mjea4o7llD-smXk_kcN7dS7nd0jvgJl5iExs7QWMydrJXuBJ4PXbMYkXVbuyT32TMFP_85U_mZUIuzi5OA/s320/DSC02116.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></div><div><strong>Bring back the woolly mammoth?</strong><br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />A new research report suggests that scientists may be able to recreate an extinct woolly mammoth from its long-frozen DNA. The most gung-ho scientists think it could be done in a decade or two for as little as $10 million. The deeper question is, should we try?<br />Michael Crichton warned us in his novel "Jurassic Park" about the dangers of tinkering with extinct species (and populating a theme park with dinosaurs). That sort of improbable disaster is not what gives us pause. There is little doubt that it would be fun to see a living, breathing woolly mammoth - a shaggy, elephantine creature with long curved tusks who reminds us more of a very large, cuddly stuffed animal than of a T. rex. We're just not sure that it would be all that much fun for the mammoth.<br />The first mammoth would be a lonely zoo freak, vulnerable to diseases unknown to its ancestors. To live a full and rewarding life, it would need other mammoths to hang out with, a mate to produce a family and a suitable place to live. The sort of environment it is used to - the frigid wastes of Siberia and North America - are disappearing all too fast.<br />No one is quite sure why the woolly mammoths died out toward the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago. Theories include warmer temperatures that gradually displaced the plants on which they fed, overhunting by primitive man, widespread disease or an asteroid or comet colliding with Earth and disrupting the climate.<br />If scientists do bring back a few mammoths, we suspect our warming world won't look any more hospitable than the one that did them in.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edwoolly.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edwoolly.php</a></div><div><br /><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg59BBa9BR1jlffreffCfNz67ct6MaLgmpp1NkjAKWmzRxi5ia11xZDi3woYXHfl5ck18fvnRZOxbIpeC4LXFOavixT83vO1k-ZRVKPhvtqP8thnBwCHIe8LimTj6djJEg2zZqRE9aQp8M/s1600-h/DSC02117.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245790222538114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg59BBa9BR1jlffreffCfNz67ct6MaLgmpp1NkjAKWmzRxi5ia11xZDi3woYXHfl5ck18fvnRZOxbIpeC4LXFOavixT83vO1k-ZRVKPhvtqP8thnBwCHIe8LimTj6djJEg2zZqRE9aQp8M/s320/DSC02117.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div> </div><div><strong>Gazprom threatens Ukraine with price rise</strong><br />By Sophia Kishkovsky<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />MOSCOW: Gazprom said Wednesday that if Ukraine did not pay a $2.4 billion debt, the company might more than double the price of natural gas, a move that would deal a harsh blow to Ukraine's economy.<br />The Russian state-controlled natural gas monopoly said it would try to "avoid" cutting off supplies to Ukraine. Gazprom briefly cut off the flow of gas in 2006 in a dispute that disrupted supplies throughout Europe. Most of the gas Russia sends to Europe is piped through Ukraine.<br />"We will certainly try to take into account all the lessons of that situation and make every effort to avoid events developing according to this scenario," Sergei Kupriyanov, a Gazprom spokesman, told reporters during a conference call Wednesday.<br />Gazprom has said that an Oct. 2 memorandum signed by Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko of Ukraine and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia would lead to a long-term agreement on supplies and a transition to market prices over a three-year period, beginning Jan. 1, provided Ukraine pays its debt.<br />Ukraine now pays $179.50 per 1,000 cubic meters, or 35,000 cubic feet, of gas. The market price would be more than $400, Gazprom said.<br />Naftogaz, the Ukraine state energy company, estimates its debt at $2 billion for the past three months of gas supplies. Oleg Dubina, chief executive of the company, said Wednesday that due to a spike in demand for dollars, Naftogaz was having some difficulty acquiring the currency necessary to make payment.<br />The $2.4 billion Gazprom has demanded includes penalties for late payment.<br />During Wednesday's conference call, Kupriyanov of Gazprom reiterated that the debt must be paid in order for the agreement on a gradual transition to market prices to hold.<br />"If the transition to market prices is not gradual, but as of January 1 of next year, then based on current European prices for gas, the price for Ukraine might be more than $400," said Kupriyanov, adding Ukraine had been warned about the situation last summer.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/gazprom.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/gazprom.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>A caravan of auto company backers hopes to win over Washington</strong><br />By Nick Bunkley<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />DETROIT: This city does not normally embrace the idea of carpooling. But these are not normal times in Detroit.<br />Car dealers, parts makers, union leaders and others hoping to convince lawmakers that the industry is an indispensable piece of the economy are planning a caravan to Washington in early December. The 525-mile drive will occur as auto executives make a second plea for U.S. government assistance. The caravan participants are not asking for money directly, but are among those who would suffer if the industry collapsed.<br />As of now, the three executives Rick Wagoner of General Motors, Alan Mulally of Ford Motor and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler are not planning to join the carpool, though they are trying to burnish their image on Capitol Hill. The three executives were chastised for traveling to Washington last week by corporate jets. ("Couldn't you have downgraded to first class or something, or jet-pooled or something to get here?" asked Representative Gary Ackerman, Democrat of New York.)<br />It is unclear how the executives might get to Washington when Congress reconvenes Dec. 8 to consider an aid package, but "it can be safely assumed it will not be by company plane," a GM spokesman, Greg Martin, said.<br />The automakers, which are seeking a $25 billion bridge loan to help weather the downturn and the tight credit markets, have expressed support for the caravan, though they are not organizing it. Both Chrysler and General Motors have said that they are rapidly running out of cash.<br />"We think it's a very important opportunity to tell the story of the role that dealers and suppliers play in the auto industry and the U.S. economy," a Ford spokesman, Mike Moran, said. Moran noted that no congressional committees had specifically asked the executives to offer more testimony.<br />The idea for a giant carpool to drive home Detroit's importance, so to speak, came from discussions involving Timothy Leuliette, the head of Dura Automotive Systems, a parts supplier; Jason Vines, a former public relations executive with Chrysler and Ford; and dealers like Carl Galeana, who sells domestic and foreign brands at showrooms in Florida, Michigan and South Carolina.<br />Galeana said the browbeating that the executives received in Washington last week indicated to him that Congress did not comprehend the auto industry's true breadth and had an outdated perception of Detroit.<br />"There was a groundswell of frustration after the hearings, not just here in Detroit but from dealers all over the country," Galeana said. "We're not saying this is going to be some explosive 'Walk on Washington.' It's nothing radical, just a quiet show of support just to say we're here and this is who we are, and to put a face on the automotive industry. It's more than so-called Rust Belt factories."<br />Initially, organizers intended to assemble a convoy of numerous fuel-efficient, American-made vehicles to demonstrate the innovation coming from Detroit, but it might end up being more about the people involved than the products.<br />"From an efficiency standpoint, getting a bus or two would probably be the best way to go," Galeana said.<br />The group is planning a quick trip, perhaps leaving Dec. 7 and heading back late the next day, with no stops for rallies or demonstrations. During the approximately nine-hour drive, they will undoubtedly pass much evidence of the industry's troubles foreclosed homes in Michigan, vacant lots where dealerships recently closed and GM's Lordstown assembly plant along the Ohio Turnpike. GM is laying off more than 1,000 workers at Lordstown and doubling the length of its annual holiday shutdown to four weeks because of slow sales.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/26auto.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/26auto.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Paradigm shift gives new momentum to electric cars</strong><br />By Malachy Tuohy<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />PARIS: Five years ago, the claim that electric cars would one day be a serious contender in the automobile market would have been laughable. But times have changed.<br />Serge Yoccoz, electric-vehicle project director at Renault, said he expected electric vehicles to represent as much as 20 percent of the European market in 10 years. Renault, he said, is committed to developing a whole range of electric vehicles, which are to be available starting 2011.<br />Renault is not alone: Some of the world's largest manufacturers have announced plans to produce electric vehicles within the next five years. So what has led to this change?<br />With the prospect of a medium to long-term rise in gasoline prices, a growing fear of dependence on foreign oil and the threat of global warming, all signs point to a shift in consumer demand. Gasoline-inefficient cars are piling up on lots in the United States, for example, and sales have fallen sharply for automakers worldwide.<br />"The century we are living in will see the end of oil - there is no doubt about that," said Gildo Pastor, president of Venturi, an electric-vehicle producer based in Monaco. "Automakers will have to evolve or they will disappear."<br />At the same time, technological advances have meant that newer electric vehicles can match the performance of their gasoline-powered contemporaries in many domains and are capable of meeting the needs of an increasing number of motorists. The greatest leaps have been made in the field of battery technology.<br />"The previous generation of electric vehicles, based on nickel-cadmium batteries, in which we were very committed, was a commercial failure," said Cédric Lewandowski, director of transport and electric vehicles at EDF, the French electricity provider. "Today, thanks to the arrival of lithium-ion technology, the question of electric vehicles and mobility has resurfaced."<br />Performance has been further improved by the development of lightweight, high-performance electric motors, intelligent management of auxiliary electrical systems, and regenerative breaking systems, which recover energy lost in slowing down.<br />According to Yoccoz, the Renault executive, 80 percent of people who live in suburban areas travel fewer than 60 kilometers, or 37 miles, a day. The electric vehicles envisioned by Renault would, therefore, amply meet their needs. Using current lithium-ion battery technology, Renault's electric cars could travel 180 to 200 kilometers per charge and reach top speeds of 120 to 140 kilometers per hour; and the technology has great potential for further development, Yoccoz said, with distances of as much as 300 kilometers between charges possible in the future.<br />Renault's models are typical examples of what consumers can expect of electric cars, and other manufacturers are working on vehicles with similar capabilities.<br />For those skeptics who might not be impressed, and who still crave the thrills of a real driver's car, there are the high-performance roadsters manufactured by smaller companies like Tesla Motors or Venturi. They rely on battery technology similar to that in standard small next-generation electric cars but combine it with far more powerful motors and lightweight body shells, which make them capable of rivaling high-performance gas-driven machines.<br />"Electric vehicles needed to be designed in a different way, integrating concepts of lightness and dynamic quality, i.e., road holding - the essential elements of what an automobile should be - as we would have done for a race car," said Pastor, the Venturi president.<br />With that underlying philosophy, it is no surprise that Venturi's flagship sports coupé, the Fetish, offers impressive performance. It can accelerate from zero to 100 kilometers an hour in four seconds, has a top speed of 180 kilometers an hour and can travel nearly 300 kilometers on a single charge.<br />Its successor, the Volage, introduced at the Paris motor show this year, is even more advanced, with miniaturized components, lower weight and improved aerodynamics.<br />These are cars intended for an exclusive niche market. But, Pastor said, they serve a wider purpose in the development of advanced auto technologies. Venturi's compact electric motor technology has already made its way to electric vans that it is developing in cooperation with PSA Peugeot-Citroën for the French post service.<br />They also play an important role as technological ambassadors.<br />"What we did four years ago, presenting the Fetish," Pastor said, "was to show that an electric vehicle could be glamorous, sexy, sporty and, in certain conditions, superior to gas-driven vehicles."<br />Still, despite the vastly improved capabilities of electric vehicles, and growing consumer acceptance, major hurdles remain. In the long term, electric cars may be less costly to operate than cars that run on gasoline or diesel; but the cost of the batteries risks puts electric vehicles at a disadvantage in the showroom, and recharging is an issue: it could take as long as eight hours.<br />Also crucial for their overall impact on the environment, and their technical viability, are the development of renewable energy sources for generating the electricity and the installation of battery charging networks, both of which are major infrastructure projects.<br />Automakers, national governments, electricity providers and ambitious start-ups are working together to address these issues. EDF has recently started partnerships with PSA Peugeot-Citroën and the Renault-Nissan alliance that Lewandowski, the EDF executive, said would advance along three main axes: battery technology, charging systems and business models.<br />EDF, he said, could offer automakers one of the best services in Europe for testing next-generation battery technology. And consumers would benefit from EDF plans to develop an infrastructure integrating three types of charging systems: one for individual homes; one for public and private parking lots and one for Main Street.<br />A key feature of these charging systems will be their incorporation of "smart" interactive technology.<br />"We have patented a system of communication between the vehicle and the charging point," Lewandowski said.<br />The system, now being tested, is based on a technology called "power-line communication," in which drivers use a small card that allows the charging point to recognize their vehicle, allows them to program the amount of charge they want and warns them of any danger if a charging point is malfunctioning.<br />And "why not a whole series of complementary services?" asked Lewandowski, who sees distance-billing and systems that locate charging points as future possibilities.<br />EDF is not alone in planning electric vehicle infrastructure. Better Place, a Silicon Valley start-up founded by a former software executive, Shai Agassi, has reached agreements to develop electric vehicle infrastructure and business models in Israel, Denmark, Australia and California.<br />Mike Granoff, a senior executive at Better Place, said it would develop infrastructure that offered consumers "ubiquity of charge." A country the size of Israel, for example, would have a network of hundreds of thousands of charging points for drivers to plug into, Granoff said.<br />"Every time you get in your car," he said, "you come back with the full range of the battery."<br />Better Place will draw on its software expertise, Granoff says, to ensure that the charging networks are capable of recognizing individual vehicles and optimizing their charge according to the individual driver's needs and the level of demand on the electricity grid. The network will be powered by renewable sources of energy: wind power in Denmark and solar power in Israel.<br />The network would be designed to meet 95 percent of its users' travel requirements and, Granoff said, "it was really when Shai was thinking of how to solve the other 5 percent that he unlocked the secret of the electric car, in our mind, which is the separation of the car and the battery."<br />The batteries powering the vehicles would be considered part of the infrastructure, he said, rather than part of the vehicle. Better Place is developing battery exchange stations, where drivers can have their old batteries replaced, in less than five minutes.<br />With such a battery-exchange network in place, electric vehicles would be able to entirely replace gas-driven ones, including for use on long journeys. Once a comprehensive battery exchange infrastructure has been installed along major routes, "then you have limitless range," Granoff said.<br />Separating battery and vehicle lies at the heart of Better Place's business model. A good analogy is that of a mobile communications provider that owns airwaves and sells talk time to its users. In the same way, Better Place would own the batteries and charging infrastructure and sell distances of driving to its users, offering different plans tailored to individual needs.<br />Consumers would pay no more than they currently pay to operate their gas-driven vehicles, and in some cases possibly less.<br />"The bottom line," Granoff said, "is that what we do is make the efficient car, the electric car, not a premium car but a discount car."<br />Better Place is optimistic about the future of electric vehicles. Granoff foresees that when motorists understand that they can have a better and cleaner vehicle that costs less to drive, very few will opt for a traditional gas-driven vehicle. Better Place says it believes that it can achieve 100 percent market penetration in Israel within 10 years, Granoff said, and his personal belief is that "after 2020, you won't see cars with tailpipes sold anywhere in the world."<br />That is an extreme view. Probably most transport experts say they believe that electric vehicles, while catering to a significant portion of the market, will be unable to completely replace gasoline-driven cars.<br />Major automakers in particular tend to see electric power as only part of an environmentally friendly road transport future, alongside other technologies such as hybridization, hydrogen fuel cell technology, alternative fuels like bio-ethanol, and even advanced, high-efficiency conventional gasoline motors.<br />Still, nobody at this point, whether pessimist, pragmatist or cynic is denying that electric cars an increasingly significant role in the future of auto transport.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/rbogcar.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/rbogcar.php</a></div><div> </div><div>***********************</div><div><strong>Wind project hits a hurdle in Scotland<br /></strong>By Simon Marks<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />EDINBURGH: On the Isle of Lewis, a blustery wedge of highland and bog at the northern tip of the Outer Scottish Hebrides, a battle over a planned wind farm holds lessons for investors and industrialists seeking to meet alternative energy targets for Europe.<br />The island's 859 square miles, or 2,225 square kilometers, are home to about 20,000 people and 12 protected bird species that include black-throated divers, golden plovers and white-tailed sea eagles. Under plans submitted in 2004 by Lewis Wind Power, a joint venture between British Energy Group and the energy engineering services company Amec, it would also become home to one of the world's biggest wind farms.<br />A rambling complex of 181 turbines, connecting cables and support facilities, the proposed farm could contribute the equivalent of 6 percent of the British renewable energy target for 2010: And follow-up proposals for a further 64 turbines could turn Lewis and neighboring islands into a major power-generating hub.<br />Despite fierce opposition from local campaigners, the project received approval from the local authority, the Western Isles Council, early in 2007.<br />But in a surprising reversal, the Scottish government rejected the project in April this year on the ground that enough planning applications already existed to meet Scottish renewable energy targets and that the project would do serious damage to peat marshes that are designated as a Special Protection Area under European Union bird and habitat directives.<br />The government is now compiling a study of renewable energy resources in the Western Isles, to be published early next year. The study aims to clarify the role of renewable energy in sustaining Scottish economic growth and what else Scotland needs to do to achieve its target of supplying 50 percent of its gross electricity consumption from renewable sources by 2020.<br />Lewis Wind Power, meanwhile, is drafting another proposal to put forward after the study is published.<br />The company "believes that the government's assessment of the scheme is flawed," said David Hodkinson, a project manager. In addition to the energy benefits, "the proposals would have enhanced tourism" on the island, he said. "Currently there are a very limited number of hotels on Lewis, which are reliant on a very short tourist season. The wind farm would have potentially helped create a more sustainable tourist industry."<br />The British Wind Energy Association say that a more robust planning policy is needed if Britain is to meet its 2010 renewable energy targets. The average time for applications to be processed is now 11 months, despite government guidelines stating that major proposals should be decided within 16 weeks.<br />So far this year, Britain has seen 32 proposals refused, 50 approved and 24 built, according to the association. Even after approval, energy companies have to overcome multiple barriers including turbine-order backlogs, compliance with British aviation radar regulations, and connection to the national electricity grid. These can stretch construction and commissioning delays up to two years for large wind farms, the association said.<br />The global wind market is growing fast: from $30.1 billion in revenues last year, it is likely to reach $83.4 billion in 2017, according to a report published this year by the research firm Clean Edge, based in San Francisco. But as the industry grows, so does opposition from local communities and environmentalists.<br />The Lewis project is a case in point. Nearly 11,000 Scots signed a petition against it, arguing that the proposal would have created a development zone of turbines, roads, quarries, transmission lines and other forms of infrastructure stretching almost continuously for 40 miles, or 65 kilometers across the Lewis moorland, threatening internationally recognized populations of protected species and peat lands.<br />Martin Scott, the Western Isles officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said areas of natural beauty should not be destroyed in the name of cutting carbon emissions.<br />"Developers seem to be going for remoter areas where there are less people," Scott said. "Obviously, if they were built near to big cities, there would be far more complaints." A wind farm on the Smola Islands, off the coast of Norway, kills four or five white-tailed eagles every year, a potentially devastating toll considering their "incredibly slow rate of reproduction," he warned.<br />On Lewis, bird-watching is one of the major attractions for the thousands of visitors who come to the island every year.<br />According to Moorland Without Turbines, a local protest group, 143,402 recreational visitors came to the Western Isles in 2006 - the equivalent of five times the permanent population - supporting around 1,000 jobs and injecting more than £36 million, or $54 million, to the islands' economy.<br />But Hodkinson, the project manager, said that "recent Scottish government-commissioned research demonstrated that there is minimal impact on tourism from on-shore wind farms."<br />"The number of visits to the island would have increased due to the construction and maintenance of the wind farm," he said.<br />Meanwhile, the Scottish Tourist Board, also known as VisitScotland, says it supports the drive for renewable energy and recognizes the potential of Scotland's vast resources. Still, the increasing number of planning applications worries some board members.<br />"VisitScotland is becoming increasingly concerned over the proliferation of speculative development proposals, many of them in areas of high landscape or scenic value or in locations which directly impact on tourism," it said.<br />Neil MaCauthur, owner of the Eshcol Guest House on Lewis said the islanders "are generally split down the middle" on the issue.<br />"There is no doubt that wind farms would boost the island's economy, but whether there is a spin-off effect on the tourism industry is unknown," he said. "It really is an unknown quantity."<br />Still, wind industry advocates argue that sacrifices must be made if countries are to meet government targets on reduced carbon emissions - in Britain the European Union target is to supply 15 percent of total energy demand with renewable sources by 2020 - and help fight global warming. According to Greenpeace, Britain generates 5 percent of its electricity from renewable sources.<br />Ditlev Engel, the chief executive of Vestas Wind Systems, the world's largest wind turbine manufacturer, expresses deep concern about the lack of energy resources to serve adequately the needs and expectations of a growing global population.<br />"If people don't want turbines in their own back yard, we should be asking people what we should do instead," he said. "Would you prefer that we build a new coal plant?"<br />The question will not go away: For now, the eagles still soar over Lewis, to the relief of many islanders and environmentalists.<br />"The government has made it clear, in repeated statements on this issue, that renewables must be delivered, but not at any price," the bird protection society said.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/rbogwind.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/rbogwind.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWfxO6ibjxg9xFwWWeTJGR7nY95Huthmw3LhMf7lP_ligVkUucdVQnY-sz-EVjXhvcpVidD4rgok3HXIVaTPQ8PBp32Oou-0QqP2T4uuGKH8zKjZnenlNYz8MmNnbrVFWEwEoor8F-qWs/s1600-h/DSC02119.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245539963051122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWfxO6ibjxg9xFwWWeTJGR7nY95Huthmw3LhMf7lP_ligVkUucdVQnY-sz-EVjXhvcpVidD4rgok3HXIVaTPQ8PBp32Oou-0QqP2T4uuGKH8zKjZnenlNYz8MmNnbrVFWEwEoor8F-qWs/s320/DSC02119.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>Slowdown and sterling nix French homes for Brits</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />By Elizabeth Pineau<br />A sagging economy on both sides of the Channel and a slump in sterling have put a hex on Britons' love affair with French real estate, and their disenchantment underlines a broader trend among foreigners.<br />From western Brittany to the southern Cote d'Azur, real estate agents contacted by Reuters said sales to cross-channel clients have slumped by up to 50 percent.<br />In 2005, official statistics showed Britons held 29 percent of the 260,000 foreign-owned secondary residences in France, ahead of Italians with 14 percent, Swiss with 12 percent, and Germans with 11 percent.<br />As overall real estate sales fell from 10 to 15 percent over the first nine months of this year, according to estate agent association Fnaim, regions favoured by the British have been particularly hard hit.<br />"The main reason is the fall of the pound against the euro. Plus the financial crisis, which has hit Britain stronger than France. On top of that, there's difficulty in securing loans," said British-born Charles Gillooley.<br />The pound has fallen around 15 percent against the euro over the past 12 months, sapping the spending power of buyers who may already have been hit by dwindling share portfolios or worries about their jobs.<br />As head of Fnaim's regional office in Dordogne, a mini-Mecca within France for some 20,000 Britons, Gillooley saw sales to British clients fall by half in over a year.<br />In a region with around 600 British-owned businesses and where some UK-born residents have even joined local government, there could soon be an impact on the estimated 206 million euros (174 million pounds) they contribute to the economy.<br />Two real estate agencies have already closed shop.<br />HOMESICK<br />Elsewhere in France, the trend is similar. In Brittany, where British buyers were major market players between 2000 and 2005, the drop in transactions has been stark.<br />"The market has been more difficult since January 2007, but since early 2008 it's really dropped, with around 50 percent fewer transactions with the British," said estate agent Charles Regnauld, who works in the Morbihan district.<br />"Many are selling their property for diverse reasons -- homesickness, problems with employment or finances, family reasons, etc.," he said.<br />The slowing economy has even left its mark on the Norman countryside, traditionally a British bastion and home to the D-Day beaches of World War Two.<br />In some villages among the bocage -- fields divided by earth and brush mounds fiercely fought over in 1944 -- the British make up a quarter of the population, but that could be changing.<br />"We're seeing many fewer transactions," said notary Patrick Durel from the town of Vire.<br />The drop has even been felt in Paris, where a legion of monuments, restaurants and museums usually drive a timeless demand among high-end buyers.<br />Estate agent Leo Attias said he's seen a 20 percent drop since September, mainly among the British and their "Anglo-Saxon" American cousins.<br />"Since late 2007, Anglo-Saxon bankers and notaries seeking properties over 500,000 euros have been in "wait-and-see" mode."<br />But for those Britons who manage to sell at a time of buyer hesitation, there may be a silver lining in getting out of the French market just as it starts to head down.<br />A euro was buying 0.84 pounds on Wednesday, and with economists expecting house prices in Britain to fall another 10 percent next year, a lucky Briton could sell up in France and, cash-rich, might snap up a bargain back in his home country.<br />(Writing by Brian Rohan; Editing by Richard Balmforth)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/business/OUKBS-UK-FRANCE-HOUSING-BRITONS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/business/OUKBS-UK-FRANCE-HOUSING-BRITONS.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Newfound respect for Pouilly-Fuissé<br /></strong>By Eric Asimov<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />When I was first learning about wine in the late 1970s, people had a word for Pouilly-Fuissé. It was "joke." It was the go-to wine of the ignorant and the pseudo-sophisticated, attractive for its mellifluous, if not-easy-to-say French name, and little else. As white wines were ascendant, Pouilly-Fuissé was a proto-pinot grigio, in demand for every reason except for what was in the bottle.<br />Pouilly-Fuissé's problem was not its popularity. While the area around the towns of Pouilly and Fuissé, in the southern Mâconnais region of Burgundy, was blessed with great chardonnay vineyards, the 1970s were a nadir in French winemaking. The industry latched on to the notion of better winemaking through chemistry and technology.<br />The result was a profusion of herbicides and fertilizers, which produced overly abundant grapes, harvested early by mechanical pickers because growers feared the risk of waiting for optimal ripeness. It was a formula for diluted, acidic wines, which were also overpriced. Not every Pouilly-Fuissé fell into the sinkhole, but the reputation stuck.<br />While that reputation has been hard for Pouilly-Fuissé to live down, things have been looking up. A new generation of growers and producers is treating the land and the winemaking with more respect, and the wines have improved greatly. It is still easy to find insipid, overpriced wines besmirching the name, but nowadays it is just as easy to find delicious wines that speak of their terroir and do the region proud.<br />For a sense of what is available from Pouilly-Fuissé, the wine panel recently sampled 25 bottles. For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by two guests, Laura Maniec, director of wine and spirits for B.R. Guest Restaurants; and Olivier Flosse, the wine director for the MARC U.S. restaurant group, which includes A Voce, near Madison Square Park.<br />First, we had no qualms about the quality. The standard was high, with none of the thin, acidic wines of yore. This was true even with some of the top Pouilly-Fuissé producers unrepresented.<br />As with many chardonnay wines of Burgundy, our favorites did not emphasize the pronounced fruit flavors more common in American chardonnays. Instead, they tended to show off a mouthwatering "drink me" texture and mineral flavors that Burgundy lovers prize.<br />That said, the wines divided into two main styles. One was the crisp, somewhat steely style associated with Mâconnais wines, with added depth and substance in the better versions. The other was a richer, more concentrated barrel-fermented style, like the whites of the Côte de Beaune.<br />Some of these were very well done. Others Florence scorned as Burgundy pretenders, while Laura was disturbed by an extravagance in a few that reminded her of California viogniers.<br />Olivier thought the main stylistic differences were better explained by geography. Wines from the northern Pouilly-Fuissé territory, around the town of Vergisson, which has a longer growing season, tend to be richer and more succulent, while those from the south, closer to the town of Chaintré, are usually leaner with more minerality. Incidentally, a small percentage of the wines known collectively as Pouilly-Fuissé may be called Pouilly-Vinzelles or Pouilly-Loché, after two other towns in the area.<br />What kind of value do the Pouilly-Fuissés offer? Well, in a rare case of price being related to quality, the six most expensive wines in the tasting, from $37 to $65, made our top 10, while none of the six least expensive wines, from $14 to $22, made the list. This suggests that higher prices reflect greater pains in the viticulture and the winemaking.<br />Nonetheless, our No.1 wine and the best value in the tasting was a $26 bottle, the deliciously focused and refreshing 2006 Marie-Antoinette from Jean-Jacques Vincent & Fils. Vincent is the négociant arm of Château Fuissé, a longtime leader in the appellation. The 2004 Château Fuissé Vieilles Vignes, from estate-grown grapes, also made our list, at No.9. It was more expensive at $47, and richer and more complex, but had less energy and drive than the younger wine.<br />Our No.2, the 2006 Vieilles Vignes from Denis Jeandeau, was an excellent combination of precision and juicy richness, and should continue to evolve. I would love to taste this wine in a few years. Our No.3, the 2005 Guffens-Heynen, is from Jean-Marie Guffens, a visionary who has helped lead the striking improvement in the Mâconnais in the last 15 years. His wine, the most expensive in the tasting at $65, combined the minerality of a Chablis with a spicy richness, and had me longing for oysters.<br />Among the rest of our favorites, the 2006 Domaine des Vieilles Pierres Cuvée Tradition, from Jean-Jacques Litaud, the 2006 from Christophe Cordier and the 2006 La Roche from Daniel et Martine Barraud all tended to be on the more concentrated end, while the 2005 Domaine Chataigneraie-Laborier from Gilles Morat, the 2006 Vieilles Vignes from J. Pierre & Michel Auvigue and the 2007 Joseph Drouhin were leaner and more minerally.<br />We liked several wines that narrowly missed our top 10. Olivier in particular liked a 2006 Les Scélés from J.A. Ferret, while Florence and Olivier both liked a 2006 Clos Varambon from Château des Rontets. Both were on the richer side. I very much liked the 2007 Louis Jadot, lively, refreshing, and a good buy at $25.<br />Just as they have everywhere else in France, producers in Pouilly-Fuissé have learned that what sells internationally is quality.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/arts/trwine.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/arts/trwine.php</a></div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div><strong>OPINION</strong></div><div><strong>A French connection<br /></strong>By Kenneth C. Davis<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />To commemorate the arrival of the first pilgrims to America's shores, a June date would be far more appropriate, accompanied perhaps by coq au vin and a nice Bordeaux. After all, the first European arrivals seeking religious freedom in the "New World" were French.<br />And they beat their English counterparts by 50 years. That French settlers bested the Mayflower Pilgrims may surprise Americans raised on our foundational myth, but the record is clear.<br />Long before the Pilgrims sailed in 1620, another group of dissident Christians sought a haven in which to worship freely. These French Calvinists, or Huguenots, hoped to escape the sectarian fighting between Roman Catholics and Protestants that had bloodied France since 1560.<br />Landing in balmy Florida in June of 1564, at what a French explorer had earlier named the River of May (now the St. Johns River near Jacksonville), the French émigrés promptly held a service of "thanksgiving." Carrying the seeds of a new colony, they also brought cannons to fortify the small, wooden enclosure they named Fort Caroline, in honor of their king, Charles IX.<br />In short order, these French pilgrims built houses, a mill and bakery, and apparently even managed to press some grapes into a few casks of wine. At first, relationships with the local Timucuans were friendly, and some of the French settlers took native wives and soon acquired the habit of smoking a certain local "herb." Food, wine, women - and tobacco by the sea, no less. A veritable Gallic paradise.<br />Except, that is, to the Spanish, who had other visions for the New World. In 1565, King Philip II of Spain issued orders to "hang and burn the Lutherans" (then a Spanish catchall term for Protestants) and dispatched Admiral Pedro Menéndez to wipe out these French heretics who had taken up residence on land claimed by the Spanish - and who also had an annoying habit of attacking Spanish treasure ships as they sailed by.<br />Leading this holy war with a crusader's fervor, Menéndez established St. Augustine and ordered what local boosters claim is the first parish Mass celebrated in the future United States. Then he engineered a murderous assault on Fort Caroline, in which most of the French settlers were massacred.<br />Menéndez had many of the survivors strung up under a sign that read, "I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to heretics." A few weeks later, he ordered the execution of more than 300 French shipwreck survivors at a site just south of St. Augustine, now marked by an inconspicuous national monument called Fort Matanzas, from the Spanish word for "slaughters."<br />With this, America's first pilgrims disappeared from the pages of history. Casualties of Europe's murderous religious wars, they fell victim to Anglophile historians who erased their existence as readily as they demoted the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine to second-class status behind the later English colonies in Jamestown and Plymouth.<br />But the truth cannot be so easily buried. Although overlooked, a brutal first chapter had been written in the most untidy history of a "Christian nation." And the sectarian violence and hatred that ended with the deaths of a few hundred Huguenots in 1565 would be replayed often in early America, the supposed haven for religious dissent, which in fact tolerated next to none.<br />Starting with those massacred French pilgrims, the saga of the nation's birth and growth is often a bloodstained one, filled with religious animosities. In Boston, for instance, the Puritan fathers banned Catholic priests and executed several Quakers between 1659 and 1661.<br />Cotton Mather, the famed Puritan cleric, led the war cries against New England's Abenaki "savages" who had learned their prayers from the French Jesuits. The colony of Georgia was established in 1732 as a buffer between the Protestant English colonies and the Spanish missions of Florida; its original charter banned Catholics.<br />The bitter rivalry between Catholic France and Protestant England carried on for most of a century, giving rise to anti-Catholic laws, while a mistrust of Canada's French Catholics helped fire many patriots' passion for independence. As late as 1844, Philadelphia's anti-Catholic "Bible Riots" took the lives of more than a dozen people.<br />The list goes on. Our history is littered with bleak tableaus that show what happens when righteous certitude is mixed with fearful ignorance. Which is why this Thanksgiving, as we express gratitude for America's bounty and promise, we would do well to reflect on all our histories, including a forgotten French one that began on Florida's shores so many years ago.<br />Kenneth C. Davis is the author of "America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edavis.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edavis.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244891268305714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU_cvS8YgNtUtmg36djYKwj8puE2kbiTNHLdHuN_xr9KzujAsPmNQidKHJJotCHh2uiODtjekdJdaGaANNCpNkbjRP98tFAjQY7OFsV5u2uausJFurLLDMxdfpR0SPF60cdNoDds-X_EQ/s320/DSC02132.jpg" border="0" /></div><div> </div><div><strong>At least 100 dead in India terror attacks<br /></strong>By Somini Sengupta<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />MUMBAI, India: Coordinated terrorist attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India's commercial capital, on Wednesday night, killing dozens in machine-gun and grenade assaults on at least two five-star hotels, the city's largest train station, a movie theater and a hospital.<br />Even by the standards of terrorism in India, which has suffered a rising number of attacks this year, the assaults were particularly brazen in scale and execution. The attackers used boats to reach the urban peninsula where they hit, and their targets were sites popular with tourists.<br />The Mumbai police said Thursday that the attacks killed at least 101 people and wounded at least 250. Guests who had escaped the hotels told television stations that the attackers were taking hostages, singling out Americans and Britons.<br />A previously unknown group claimed responsibility, though that claim could not be confirmed. It remained unclear whether there was any link to outside terrorist groups.<br />Gunfire and explosions rang out into the morning.<br />Hours after the assaults began, the landmark Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, next to the famed waterfront monument the Gateway of India, was in flames.<br />Guests banged on the windows of the upper floors as firefighters worked to rescue them.<br />Fire also raged inside the luxurious Oberoi Hotel, according to the police. A militant hidden in the Oberoi told India TV on Thursday morning that seven attackers were holding hostages there.<br />"We want all mujahedeen held in India released, and only after that we will release the people," he said.Some guests, including two members of the European Parliament who were visiting as part of a trade delegation, remained in hiding in the hotels, making desperate cellphone calls, some of them to television stations, describing their ordeal.<br />Alex Chamberlain, a British citizen who was dining at the Oberoi, told Sky News television that a gunman had ushered 30 or 40 people from the restaurant into a stairway and, speaking in Hindi or Urdu, ordered them to put up their hands.<br />"They were talking about British and Americans specifically," he said. "There was an Italian guy, who, you know, they said, 'Where are you from?' and he said he's from Italy, and they said, 'Fine,' and they left him alone."<br />Sajjad Karim, 38, a British member of the European Parliament, told Sky News: "A gunman just stood there spraying bullets around, right next to me."<br />Before his phone went dead, Karim added: "I managed to turn away and I ran into the hotel kitchen and then we were shunted into a restaurant in the basement. We are now in the dark in this room, and we have barricaded all the doors. It's really bad."<br />Attackers had also entered Cama and Albless Hospital, according to Indian television reports, and struck at or near Nariman House, which is home to the city's Chabad-Lubavitch center.<br />The police told Reuters that an Israeli family was being held hostage. Israel's Foreign Ministry said it was trying to locate an unspecified number of Israelis missing in Mumbai, according to Haaretz.com, the Web site of an Israeli newspaper.<br />Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were reported killed.<br />The military was quickly called in to assist the police.<br />Hospitals in Mumbai, a city of more than 12 million that was formerly called Bombay, have appealed for blood donations. As a sense of crisis gripped much of the city, schools, colleges and the stock exchange were closed Thursday.<br />Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister for Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is, told the CNN-IBN station that the attacks hit five to seven targets, concentrated in the southern tip of the city, known as Colaba and Nariman Point. But even hours after the attacks began, the full scope of the assaults was unclear.<br />Unlike previous attacks in India this year, which consisted of anonymously planted bombs, the assailants on Wednesday night were spectacularly well-armed and very confrontational. In some cases, said the state's highest-ranking police official, A. N. Roy, the attackers opened fire and disappeared.<br />Indian officials said the police had killed six of the suspected attackers and captured nine.<br />A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedeen said it had carried out the attacks. It was not known who the group is or whether the claim was real.<br />Around midnight, more than two hours after the series of attacks began, television images from near the historic Metro Cinema showed journalists and bystanders ducking for cover as gunshots rang out. The charred shell of a car lay in front of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, formerly Victoria Terminus, the mammoth railway station. A nearby gas station was blown up.<br />The landmark Leopold , a favorite tourist spot, was also hit.<br />Reached by phone, some guests who had been trapped in the Taj said about 1 a.m. that they had heard an explosion and gunfire in the old wing of the hotel.<br />A 31-year-old man who was in the Taj attending a friend's wedding reception said he was getting a drink around 9:45 p.m. when he heard something like firecrackers "loud bursts" interspersed with what sounded like machine-gun fire.<br />A window of the banquet hall shattered, and guests scattered under tables and were quickly escorted to another room, he said. No one was allowed to leave.<br />Just before 1 a.m., another loud explosion rang out, and then another about a half-hour later, the man said.<br />At 6 a.m., he said that when the guests tried to leave the room early Thursday, gunmen opened fire. One person was shot.<br />The man's friend, the groom, was two floors above him, in the old wing of the hotel, trapped in a room with his bride. One of the explosions, he said, took the door off its hinges. He blocked it with a table.<br />Then came another blast, and gunfire rang out throughout the night. He did not want to be identified, for fear of being tracked down.<br />Rakesh Patel, a British businessman who escaped the Taj, told a television station that two young men armed with a rifle and a machine gun took 15 hostages, forcing them to the roof.<br />The gunmen, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, "were saying they wanted anyone with British or American passports," Patel said.<br />He and four others managed to slip away in the confusion and smoke of the upper floors, he said. He said he did not know the fate of the remaining hostages.<br />Clarence Rich Diffenderffer, of Wilmington, Delaware, said after dinner at the hotel he headed to the business center on the fifth floor.<br />"A man in a hood with an AK-47 came running down the hall," shooting and throwing four grenades, Diffenderffer said. "I, needless to say, beat it back to my room and locked it, and double-locked it, and put the bureau up against the door."<br />Diffenderffer said he was rescued hours later, at 6:30 a.m., by a cherrypicker. "That was pretty hairy," he said. "I don't like heights."<br />Among those apparently trapped at the Oberoi were executives and board members of Hindustan Unilever, part of the multinational corporate giant, The Times of India reported.<br />Indian military forces arrived outside the Oberoi at 2 a.m., and some 100 officers from the central government's Rapid Action Force, an elite police unit, entered later.<br />CNN-IBN reported the sounds of gunfire from the hotel just after the police contingent went in.<br />In Washington, the Bush administration condemned the attacks, as did President-elect Barack Obama's transition team. The State Department said there were no known American casualties, but the White House said it was still "assessing the hostage situation."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/27mumbai.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/27mumbai.php</a></div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/america/transition.php">Gates to stay on as Pentagon chief, aides say</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/asia/thai.php">Thai Army chief calls on leader to quit</a> </div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div><strong>Afghan president wishes he could down U.S. planes</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />KABUL: Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Wednesday he would bring down U.S. planes bombing villages if he could, in a sign of growing tension between Afghanistan and its Western backers as the Taliban insurgency grows in strength.<br />As Western dissatisfaction with Karzai has grown over his failure to crack down on corruption and govern effectively, the Afghan president, facing elections next year, has hit back over the killing of dozens of civilians in foreign air strikes.<br />In recent weeks, Karzai has repeatedly blamed the West for the worsening security in Afghanistan, saying NATO failed to target Taliban and al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan and calling for the war to be taken out of Afghan villages.<br />"We have no other choice, we have no power to stop the planes, if we could, if I could ... we would stop them and bring them down," Karzai told a news conference.<br />He said that if he had something like the rock attached to a piece of string, known as a chelak in Dari, used to bring down kites in Afghanistan, he would use it.<br />"If we had a chelak, we would throw it and stop the American aircraft. We have no radar to stop them in the sky, we have no planes," he said. "I wish I could intercept the planes that are going to bomb Afghan villages, but that's not in my hands."<br />Afghanistan has suffered its worst violence this year since U.S.-led and Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001, with at least 4,000 people killed, around a third of them civilians.<br />Despite the presence of 65,000 foreign troops backing 130,000 Afghan security forces, Taliban insurgents have grown increasingly confident in their traditional heartland in the south and east and have also extended their influence close to the capital, Kabul.<br />(Reporting by Sayed Salahuddin; Writing by Jon Hemming; Editing by Giles Elgood)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/asia/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-KARZAI.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/asia/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-KARZAI.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>U.S. says troops kill 32 militants in Afghanistan</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />KABUL: U.S.-led coalition troops and Afghan security forces killed 32 militants in a series of raids against Taliban commanders in Afghanistan, the U.S. military said Wednesday.<br />Violence has sharply escalated in Afghanistan this year, the bloodiest period since the Taliban's removal in 2001, and has raised doubts about the prospects for security in the country despite an increasing number of foreign troops.<br />Afghan security forces and coalition forces killed seven militants late Wednesday, and uncovered three caches containing drugs and materials for making improvised explosive devices in the Nahr Surkh district of Helmand.<br />In one of the raids early Wednesday, coalition troops killed 15 militants and detained six suspected insurgents outside the southern city of Kandahar, the U.S. military said.<br />The soldiers were clearing "a compound known to be an IED command and control node" when fired upon. There were no casualties among civilians or coalition forces.<br />The other two attacks occurred Tuesday in southeastern Afghanistan. One targeted a senior Taliban commander believed to be a liaison between al Qaeda and Taliban networks and who had helped foreign fighters enter Afghanistan, the U.S. military said.<br />Five armed militants were killed during the operation, but the U.S. military did not name the commander or say whether he was among the casualties.<br />In Paktika province, coalition forces killed five armed militants and detained four more in another operation that targeted a pro-Taliban sub-commander, The U.S. military said.<br />The Taliban could not immediately be reached for comment and Reuters had no independent verification of the U.S. military's accounts.<br />More than 4,000 people, over a quarter of them civilians, have been killed in Afghanistan this year alone.<br />Separately, the Taliban kidnapped three engineers of a foreign-funded construction company in the northwestern province of Badghis overnight, a provincial official said.<br />In Helmand, five police were killed and five more went missing in an attack on their post late Tuesday, a provincial spokesman said. The attack may have been carried out by an officer with links to the insurgents.<br />(Writing by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing by Giles Elgood)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/asia/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-VIOLENCE.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/asia/OUKWD-UK-AFGHAN-VIOLENCE.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong>10 arrested for Afghan acid attack<br /></strong>By Abdul Waheed Wafa<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />KABUL, Afghanistan: The police in Kandahar Province arrested 10 Taliban militants they said were involved in an attack this month on a group of Afghan schoolgirls whose faces were doused with acid, officials in Kandahar said Tuesday.<br />The officials said that the militants, who were Afghan citizens, had confessed to their involvement in the attack on the schoolgirls and their teachers on Nov. 12 and that a high-ranking member of the Taliban had paid the militants 100,000 Pakistani rupees ($1,275) for each girl they managed to burn.<br />The girls were assaulted by two men on a motorcycle who were apparently irate that the girls had been attending high school. The men drove up beside them and splashed their faces with what appeared to be battery acid.<br />Zalmay Ayobi, the spokesman for General Rahmatullah Raufi, the governor of Kandahar, said the orders to carry out the attack had been given from a foreign country, although he did not identify it.<br />The militants were arrested by the police last week. Ayobi said a joint delegation from the Interior Ministry and the office of the attorney general in the capital, Kabul, had arrived in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, on Monday to evaluate the cases of the suspects.<br />The delegation, led by the deputy interior minister along with the governor of Kandahar, announced today that the suspects confessed their involvement in the attack, Ayobi said.<br />He said Afghanistan's courts would decide the attackers' fate after the investigation was completed.<br />At least two of the girls were hospitalized by the attack, their faces blackened and burned.<br />The attack was condemned at the time by Laura Bush, who described the Taliban as "cowardly and shameful" for carrying out the attack.<br />"The Taliban's continued terror attacks threaten the progress that has been made in Afghanistan," the first lady said in a statement, adding, "These cowardly and shameful acts are condemned by honorable people in the United States and around the world."<br />Mrs. Bush has been an advocate for the women of Afghanistan during her husband's tenure. She has visited Afghanistan three times to put a spotlight on development and women's issues, most recently in June, a trip cloaked in secrecy so she would not become a target of terrorists.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/asia/26afghan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/asia/26afghan.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244886828703666" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoAsMCXhVuJSFnHufFcFxG6DlS8ViGJPvY76hXhxI0EWOfNRYYonO50Fytu5KPh8q_Yt3P6M6nWnhhi5UYMRur9Ax7P8cw834iFGYjmcU4-_riPlnmBpo1IoGu3g6yGRXByaZdVuB7AFI/s320/DSC02133.jpg" border="0" /></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244580686677634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-MFyDJ__dC22XCoAXJN0j8FvoA3d6q0f0topkiO_E2OT5b1di0RMOMih02B7eDydLzvpyhG5lpjUJWOaF_lD9cxq9LaRAXv7HKCe1SCq1HSLzjP-ZpKTuXogfdrdjpLcM6LgkmkNm2hk/s320/DSC02134.jpg" border="0" /></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244576169264066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE5sqNhMwxN58jzHuHGuWo2V-gEJl6DoXBonnV7G6oCRLsa5Kh1KPQ-k0pjY9sVdxfAqQdcDJq8cRBOP7jlGDprTJPwO1-I0nUsLJI_wcvP4pp-3sXd0PLUSO-Kv3EQ4boNyQyqWJ-th0/s320/DSC02135.jpg" border="0" /></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><strong>Purging history of Stalin's terror<br /></strong>By Clifford J. Levy<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />TOMSK, Russia: For years, the earth in this Siberian city had been giving up clues: a scrap of clothing, a fragment of bone, a skull with a bullet hole.<br />And so a historian named Boris Trenin made a plea to officials. Would they let him examine secret archives to confirm that there was a mass grave here from Stalin's purges? Would they help him tell the story of the thousands of innocent people who were said to have been carted from a prison to a ravine, shot in the head and tossed over?<br />The answer was no, and Trenin understood what many historians in Russia have come to realize: Under Vladimir Putin, the attitude toward the past has changed. The archives that Trenin was seeking, stored on the fourth floor of a building in Tomsk, in boxes stamped "KGB of the U.S.S.R.," would remain sealed.<br />The Kremlin in the Putin era has often sought to maintain as much sway over the portrayal of history as over the governance of the country. In seeking to restore Russia's standing, Putin and other officials have stoked a nationalism that glorifies Soviet triumphs while playing down or even whitewashing the system's horrors.<br />As a result, throughout Russia, many archives detailing killings, persecution and other such acts committed by the Soviet authorities have become increasingly off-limits. The role of the security services seems especially delicate, perhaps because Putin is a former KGB agent who headed the agency's successor, the FSB, in the late 1990s.<br />To historians like Trenin, the closing of these archives reflects a larger truth. The country, they say, has never fully grappled with and exposed the sins of communism, never embarked on the kind of truth and reconciliation process pursued by other countries, like South Africa, after regimes were overthrown.<br />There are undoubtedly many reasons for this. For one, after the Soviet Union fell, Russia underwent a tremendous economic upheaval, and people were focused on just surviving. Still, now that the country is more stable, the Kremlin, if anything, is moving toward more secrecy. It tends to be hostile toward those who want to study the grimmest aspects of Soviet rule, as if attempts to diminish the Soviet image will discredit the current leadership.<br />"They say Russia has gotten up off its knees, and this is why we should be proud of our past," Trenin said. "The theme of Stalin's repressions is harsh and gloomy and far from heroic. So they say that this is why it should be gradually pushed aside. They say the less we know about it, the better we will live."<br />His comments were echoed in interviews with more than a dozen historians across Russia, all of whom said they had had far greater access in the 1990s to archives of the KGB and other security services. They spoke of the years immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union as a time when scholarship flowered, saying that they had a chance to delve into historical episodes that had long been concealed.<br />"There was a period when we could go to the archives as if we were going to our workplace," Trenin said.<br />Under Putin, the historians said, these records have usually been out of reach. Putin, who served two terms as president, is now prime minister, after installing his protégé Dmitri Medvedev as his successor in May.<br />Officials at the security archives, which are now mostly controlled by the FSB and the Interior Ministry, typically reject requests for access by citing a need to protect state secrets and personal privacy. (Though a vast majority of people mentioned in records from Stalin's time are obviously dead.)<br />The head of the FSB archives in Moscow, Vasili Khristoforov, has said all records related to "ways and methods of operational investigative activity" will never be declassified.<br />The chill over the Soviet security archives has not only thwarted inquiries into events of the 1930s, when millions were executed or died in prison camps. It also has prevented historians from gaining a better understanding of other aspects of Soviet persecution, like the hounding and the deportation of dissidents through the 1980s.<br />It also has aggravated tensions between Russia and its neighbors. The Kremlin, for example, has recently rebuffed requests from Poland to release documents related to the World War II massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and others at the Katyn Forest and elsewhere in Russia. For decades, the Soviets blamed the Nazis for the killings; Mikhail Gorbachev was the first leader to admit that Soviet security services had carried them out.<br />The restrictions have also frustrated Russians who are seeking the truth about their families and want future generations to be aware of what once happened here.<br />In 1937, at the height of Stalin's purges, a man named Cheslav Yasinski was summarily executed in Tomsk after being accused of counterrevolutionary activities. For years, his wife was told that he was alive and cutting trees at one of the prison camps known as gulags, and she continued sending him food packages. She later received an official letter asserting, falsely, that he had died of a heart attack.<br />Seventy years later, his great-grandson Yuri Kultamakov sought Yasinski's file from the FSB, hoping that the information would help him make peace with his family's past in Siberia.<br />While barring historians, the government says it will make an exception and allow individuals access to their relatives' files from the security archives. But this policy is not as open as it seems, as Kultamakov discovered.<br />The FSB offered him a heavily redacted file, with many pages removed. Officials said their policy was to withhold documents that include the names of any other people, including those who carried out persecution or were informers.<br />"I would like to know everything, but received little," Kultamakov said.Trying to unearth the past<br />Here in Tomsk, 3,000 kilometers, or 1,900 miles, east of Moscow, Trenin had long been drawn to an area called Kashtak.<br />It was once an empty expanse with a large ravine, but in recent decades, the city had filled it in and settled it. Yet rumors of a mass grave had persisted, and in 1989, before the Soviet collapse, Trenin and a colleague, Vasili Khanevich, conducted a small, unauthorized dig there and found two skulls with bullet holes.<br />Like so many people in Siberia, Trenin, 62, and Khanevich, 52, have a personal connection to the sorrows of Stalin's reign. Trenin's family was deported to the region, and Khanevich's grandfathers were executed by the secret police.<br />Throughout the 1990s, when ground was broken on construction projects in Kashtak, laborers repeatedly uncovered remains. Sometimes people tending gardens came across bones.<br />By the end of the decade, Trenin said, some retired KGB officers were acknowledging what had happened. They said that twice a week, during the purges of the late 1930s, prisoners were executed and thrown into the ravine.<br />Trenin said he believed he had enough information to make the case that he should receive access to the secret documents. He lobbied officials for permission to conduct a full investigation into the events there, and to establish a memorial.<br />But it was too late. Putin had become president. The FSB would not allow access to the records, and at subsequent meetings in 2002 and 2003, city officials, who had close connections to the security services, would not help Trenin either.<br />"He had an absolute absence of interest," Trenin said of one city official, a former KGB agent. "There was this sense of: It happened, it was there, no need to look any further."<br />The former KGB agent, Aleksandr Melnikov, who is a deputy mayor, said in an interview that Kashtak represented an enormous calamity, but that "it had been studied in-depth."<br />Melnikov said he was surprised to hear of Trenin's difficulties.<br />"Today, there is no problem obtaining access to the archives of that period, absolutely not," Melnikov said. "If they encounter a problem, they can appeal to me. I will provide every assistance to them to get the material that they are interested in."<br />Told of Melnikov's comments, Trenin sighed.<br />"That's absurd," he said.<br />Trenin and Khanevich are active in Memorial, a human rights group, and operate a small museum dedicated to 23,000 people killed under Stalin in Tomsk. The museum is in a former jail used by the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, the predecessor to the KGB.<br />Exhibits are displayed in a gloomy warren of small cells where people were tortured and crowded 20 at a time. But there is little about Kashtak. Trenin says he believes that more than 15,000 people were executed there, but without access to records, it is impossible to be certain.<br />A few years ago, officials erected a large cross at Kashtak as a memorial. But it is in an isolated spot overlooking a major road, and is rarely visited.<br />To Khanevich, whose grandfathers were rounded up and executed one day in 1938 in a Siberian village, this indifference stings.<br />"Russia positions itself as a completely different democratic country with democratic values, but at the same time, it does not reject, it does not disassociate itself and does not condemn the regime that preceded it," he said. "On the contrary, it defends it."Officials toe the line<br />Trenin and others emphasized that it was not as if the security archives had been thrown open in the 1990s. They said officials had to be persuaded to provide access, but that there was a spirit of cooperation that no longer exists.<br />Archives from Stalin's secret police have become a flash point because of the rise of a movement that has sought to idolize Stalin as a leader who defeated the Nazis, spurred industrialization and made the Soviet Union a superpower.<br />Last year, the Kremlin promoted a study guide for high school teachers that deems Stalin "one of the most successful leaders of the U.S.S.R.," while describing his "cruel exploitation" of the population. Putin himself has acknowledged the losses under Stalin, but has said Russians should not be made to feel ashamed of them.<br />"We do have bleak chapters in our history; just look at events starting from 1937," Putin said at a meeting where the guide was presented. "And we should not forget these moments in our past."<br />"But other countries have also known their bleak and terrible moments," he said. "In any event, we have never used nuclear weapons against civilians, and we have never dumped chemicals on thousands of kilometers of land or dropped more bombs on a tiny country than were dropped during the entire Second World War, as was the case in Vietnam."<br />In interviews, officials of the FSB and other security agencies said they had in fact declassified many documents. Asked about complaints from historians, Oleg Matveyev, a senior official at the FSB archives in Moscow, said some people wanted to depict Soviet rule only negatively.<br />"To draw the line at 1991 and say, everything before was black, and now has come white, as is done in many countries and regions in the former republics of the Soviet Union, we have nothing like that here," he said. "We are more careful about our past."<br />Matveyev added that it was vital that the FSB protect the personal privacy of people mentioned in the records.<br />It is a particular concept of privacy. The FSB does not keep names secret; in fact, it has provided nonprofit groups like Memorial with lists of those persecuted, which have been published in so-called memory books. But it will not allow access to the files, preventing historians from gaining insight into the security services.<br />The FSB also has promised that many records will be declassified after 75 years. But historians said the regulation was often ignored, adding that the FSB tends to declassify documents that do not present the security services in a bad light.<br />A prominent historian, Sergei Krasilnikov of Novosibirsk State University in Siberia, said officials routinely cited personal privacy and other regulations to block access. But it is a ruse, he said.<br />"The order has been given to rehabilitate Russian and Soviet statehood in all epochs and in all times - for all the czars and general secretaries," he said. "This is why we have all these restrictions on access to the archives, because the archives allow us to show more profoundly the mechanisms of power, the mechanisms of decision-making, the consequences of these decisions, which were very often tragic for society."<br />Unable to obtain records from the security archives, Trenin and Khanevich gather them from relatives and researchers who acquired them in the 1990s. They scrounge information from more open Soviet archives, such as those covering industry or local government.<br />Sometimes, they feel despondent, as when they hear of polls that reveal that a majority of young people believe that Stalin did "more right than wrong." Yet they also find signs to be hopeful.<br />Khanevich convinced the Interior Ministry to have employees visit the museum as part of their training, and recently 15 lawyers and investigators came by. Some appeared moved, saying they had not realized the scope of the killing.<br />"These are people with epaulets, and they have to carry out orders, but the orders are not always humane and sometimes they are criminal," Khanevich said. "They need to think about whether it's the right thing to do to carry them out. Of course, they may lose their epaulets. But they will remain human beings, with their dignity intact."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/europe/26archives.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/europe/26archives.php</a></div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div><strong>Laos still paying the price of Vietnam war</strong><br />Reuters<br />Thursday, November 27, 2008<br />By Thin Lei Win<br />Imagine growing up in a country where the equivalent of a B52 planeload of cluster bombs was dropped every eight minutes for nine years.<br />Then imagine seeing your children and grandchildren being killed and maimed by the same bombs, three decades after the war is over.<br />Welcome to Laos, a country with the unwanted claim of being the most bombed nation per capita in the world.<br />Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military dropped more than 2 million tons of explosive ordnance, including an estimated 260 million cluster munitions -- also known as bombie in Laos.<br />To put this into perspective, this is more bombs than fell on Europe during World War Two.<br />The U.S. bombing was largely aimed at destroying enemy supply lines during the Vietnam war that passed through Laos. The war ended 35 years ago, yet the civilian casualties continue. According to aid agency Handicap International, as many as 12,000 civilians have been killed or maimed since, and there are hundreds of new casualties every year.<br />On December 3 this year, over 100 nations will sign an international treaty to ban the use of cluster bombs to prevent further tragedies like Ta's, a father of seven who lives in a remote village in Khammoune Province in southern Laos.<br />One morning four years ago, he saw something that looked like a bombie. He knew it was dangerous, but he had also heard that the explosive inside could be used for catching fish, so he decided to touch it with a stick.<br />That one small tap cost him both arms and an eye. Ta had to travel nine hours to get medical help. He sold his livestock to pay hospital bills, and when he ran out of things to sell, he went home.<br />Ta says he had to 'eat like a dog' for four years, before non-governmental organisation COPE provided him with prosthetic arms. Now he is able to help with small domestic chores.<br />EXPENSIVE AT $50<br />Then there is 31-year-old Yee Lee. He was digging around in his garden in August when suddenly his hoe came down hard on a bombie. He lost both legs and two fingers.<br />"I have five very young children, and my wife is six months pregnant," Lee said at Xieng Khouang provincial hospital where he was having a moulding done for prosthetic legs. He was unsure and worried about what the future held.<br />For now, his elderly parents and younger brother help his family. "I hope, with the prosthetic leg, to get back to work either in the field or around the house."<br />Unfortunately, most survivors are unable to continue physical work, even if, like Lee, they receive free treatment and prosthetic limbs from agencies such as COPE and World Education.<br />A prosthetic leg that can last up to two years costs as little as $50 (32.6 pounds), yet in a country consistently ranked one of the region's poorest and where almost 30 percent of the population live on less than $1 a day, this is more than most families can afford. Worse, loss of a breadwinner means loss of income and increased poverty.<br />Cluster bombs are dropped by planes or fired by mortars. They open mid-air releasing multiple explosive sub-munitions that scatter over a large area. These bomblets are usually the size of tennis balls.<br />Aid agencies say the indiscriminate nature of these weapons and the fact many bomblets fail to go off mean they have a devastating humanitarian impact.<br />HALF OF VICTIMS IN LAOS<br />In Laos, it's thought that around 30 per cent of bombies failed to explode on impact, leaving about 80 million live munitions lying on or under the soil which has posed a serious threat to people's lives and livelihood.<br />So far, fewer than 400,000 bombies have been cleared, a meagre 0.47 per cent. The United Nations estimates almost half of all cluster munition victims are from Laos.<br />Even with community awareness programmes run by national authority UXO Laos, with support from numerous aid agencies, the injuries and deaths continue. Sometimes people touch the bombies out of ignorance, other times it's out of curiosity (children) or for economic reasons (adults).<br />With scrap metal going at $1 to $3 a kilogramme, some people collect war remnants to sell, and this includes unexploded ordnance.<br />In a private foundry on the outskirts of Phonsavanh, the capital of Xieng Khouang, the humanitarian organisation Mines Advisory Group (MAG) sorted through five years' worth of scrap metal, and discovered over 24,000 live items, including 500 cluster munitions.<br />Xieng Khouang, in northern Laos, is one of the most affected areas. More than 500,000 tons of bombs were dropped here. The mountainous and beautiful terrain is marred by craters of all sizes -- locals liken it to the surface of the moon - and littered with metal shrapnel.<br />Children are at constant risk. In a small village school 20 minutes from the provincial capital, 248 bombies were found in a 4,200 sq metre area.<br />The province is also famous for the Plain of Jars, a vast plateau of ancient stone jars whose origins remain a mystery. But the amount of war debris scattered between the giant jars has seriously hampered archaeologists' efforts to find out more about them.<br />David Hayter, country director of MAG, says the sad truth is that Laos will never be 100 percent rid of cluster bombs.<br />"The priority is in clearing the land where people are living and working," he said. "We are teaching them to learn to live safely within the environment. It's a mixture of education and clearance."<br />(For more information on humanitarian crises and issues visit www.alertnet.org)<br />(Editing by Bill Tarrant)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/asia/OUKWD-UK-LAOS-CLUSTERBOMBS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/27/asia/OUKWD-UK-LAOS-CLUSTERBOMBS.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245788454169634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUWkgTAPHZyWxRfwyZYQMseh6R9RM0cnLdkdXdDtCUJ1_qkT-5bMfbTVTJrqXsNFAAzG0C1JZjTdIeCE7nG6KP7ghGCuf5nI5ggxbl3uLF9fF5NpalI0R6CUl4tNVIW8WPXITgX2NaC8E/s320/DSC02118.jpg" border="0" /></div><div> </div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/euecon.php">EU calls for €200 billion in spending to bolster growth</a><br /><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/27yuan.php">China cuts key lending rate</a> </div><div> </div><div>*******************</div><div><strong>U.S. consumer spending declines again<br /></strong>By Michael M. Grynbaum<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />NEW YORK: The consequences of financial meltdown in October continued to roll across the U.S. economy Wednesday.<br />Consumer spending, traditionally the engine of U.S. economic growth, dropped a full percentage point last month, the biggest monthly decline since after the terrorist attacks in September 2001, the U.S. Commerce Department reported.<br />The grim news is particularly painful for retailers, who are starting a holiday shopping season that, in good years, can provide up to 40 percent of their yearly revenue. This year, sellers are bracing for low demand and overstocked inventories.<br />The decline in spending could also drag U.S. economic growth down further, already in negative territory in the July-to-September quarter. The significant spending decline in October signals that the fourth quarter could be far worse.<br />It marked the fourth consecutive month that U.S. consumers have reversed the free-spending habits that dominated for much of the last decade. But the decline also represented an acceleration of this worrisome trend: spending was down 0.3 percent in September, and 0.1 percent in August.<br />U.S. consumers are cutting their spending for many reasons, but high on the list is the weakening employment picture. Even people who still have jobs are pinching pennies as a result of the constant news of cutbacks and layoffs. Consumer confidence ticked down again this month, according to a University of Michigan survey released Wednesday.<br />"We could well be seeing the first signs of households altering their behavior in the face of large capital losses in their investment and real estate portfolios, a deteriorating labor market, and tight credit," Joshua Shapiro, chief domestic economist at the research firm MFR, wrote in a note to clients.<br />The market collapse in October seemed to frighten many people into canceling or delaying major purchases, a reaction that wreaked havoc in both the consumer and business sectors. Orders for durable goods, a crucial measure of spending by businesses, plunged 6.2 percent in October, twice what economists had expected, the U.S. Commerce Department said in a separate report.<br />Orders for metals, factory equipment, computers and transportation equipment all dropped sharply. While the durable goods report is considered volatile from month to month, the overall decline in October was much worse than the 0.2 percent dip in September.<br />Most striking to economists was the 4 percent drop in civilian capital goods orders that exclude aircraft. This is a widely watched gauge for core spending by businesses, which has seen three negative months in a row.<br />"The previously shallow downturn in the factory sector has now escalated into something worse," Cliff Waldman, an economist for the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, a trade group, wrote in a note.<br />Only communications equipment saw an increase in demand for the month.<br />Evidence also emerged that could feed fears of deflation: prices fell 0.6 percent in October after rising 0.1 percent in September, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Personal income rose 0.3 percent, and prices that exclude food and fuel were unchanged.<br />The housing market has also taken its lumps during the market turmoil. A small sales increase reversed itself in October, with sales of new homes dropping 5.3 percent to an annual rate of 433,000, more than erasing a 0.7 percent rise in September, the U.S. Commerce Department said.<br />The median price of a new home sold in October was $218,000, down 7 percent from a year ago. Home prices are falling at the fastest pace in decades and have reached levels not seen since 2004.<br />Inventories remain high, as well, which contributes to the decline in prices. At the current sales rate, it would take 11.1 months to sell off the backlog of newly constructed homes. New homes account for about 10 percent of the overall housing market.<br />In a separate report Wednesday, the U.S. Labor Department said that new applications for unemployment benefits fell last week to 529,000, a bigger drop than economists had expected.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/usecon.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/usecon.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div><strong>Co-presidents steer makeover at Morgan Stanley<br /></strong>By Louise Story<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Call it Morgan Stanley 2.0.<br />Two months ago, Morgan Stanley, one of the grandest names on Wall Street, transformed itself into an old-fashioned bank holding company in a desperate bid to survive the financial crisis.<br />But now this new Morgan Stanley faces an even bigger challenge: figuring out where to go from here. Goldman Sachs, its perennial rival, is in the midst of a similar metamorphosis, and both firms face a somewhat uncertain future.<br />Drawing up the road map at Morgan Stanley are Walid Chammah and James Gorman, who are not only co-presidents but also potential rivals to succeed John Mack as chief executive.<br />Chammah is trying to re-engineer Morgan Stanley's vaunted investment banking operation for leaner times, which means cutting jobs - lots of them. Since July the firm has announced plans to eliminate 16 percent of its work force.<br />Gorman, meantime, is urgently hunting for a bank to buy to build a base of customer deposits that would provide a crucial cushion and new types of earnings. So far, he has not sealed any deals.<br />Morgan Stanley has had some good news in the past few days. Its share price rose three days in a row, along with those of other financial stocks, and Fitch Ratings upgraded its outlook for the bank's credit rating to stable from negative. The company plans to sell more than $2 billion in new debt that will be backed by a U.S. government program.<br />Still, neither Mack, 64, nor the co-presidents have fully persuaded investors that Morgan Stanley can recapture its past glory or past profits. Morgan's stock is worth only a fraction of what it was a year ago and the company's next quarterly results, due in mid-December, do not look promising.<br />The transformation under way at Morgan Stanley is emblematic of the tectonic shifts reshaping American finance. Given the faltering economy and the wild ride in the markets, few think the changes will be smooth for Morgan Stanley or any other bank.<br />"Morgan Stanley, in particular, has explicitly recognized that the reality has changed," said Guy Moszkowski, an analyst at Merrill Lynch. "They are actually going to build a banking business."<br />Along with their boss, Chammah, 54, and Gorman, 50, are trying one of the most radical makeovers in Wall Street history in the middle of their industry's darkest moment since the Depression. Many Americans are outraged that banks like Morgan Stanley have gotten multibillion-dollar lifelines from Washington, particularly when the Detroit automakers are being turned away.<br />It is hardly surprisingly, then, that neither Chammah nor Gorman is eager to talk about compensation or the annual bonuses that Morgan Stanley is expected to pay its employees next month. Last year, Morgan Stanley paid out $4 billion in bonuses to its then 48,000 workers.<br />Mack did not take a bonus because of the bank's mortgage losses. It is widely expected that the bank's top executives, like their counterparts at Goldman Sachs, will forgo bonuses this year.<br />During an interview last week, Gorman and Chammah acknowledged that Morgan Stanley would probably have to build its consumer banking operation piecemeal. Wells Fargo recently scooped up Wachovia, the last easy target for Morgan Stanley. Now that Citigroup has been stabilized, it seems unlikely that Morgan Stanley could pick off that bank's consumer banking business. (Morgan Stanley and Citigroup discussed a possible merger in September, but the talks went nowhere.)<br />But as a commercial bank, Morgan Stanley can no longer operate with the level of risk or borrowed money that made it so profitable in the past. Big money-printing businesses like mergers and acquisitions and securities underwriting have all but vanished. The bank's real estate and hedge fund investments are under water. And its wealth management advisory businesses are not making many people wealthier.<br />While Morgan Stanley has a long history of political infighting, the two co-presidents paint a friendly picture of their relationship.<br />Their predecessors disliked each other, and one of them, Zoe Cruz, was fired last year because some blamed her for Morgan Stanley's ill-fated expansion in mortgage investments.<br />When asked how Morgan Stanley had changed in the year since they became co-presidents, Chammah instead proclaimed his fondness for Gorman.<br />"Let's put this issue to bed: I don't think you could ask to have a better relationship with two partners," he said. "We like each other."<br />In September, as Morgan Stanley came under siege in the markets, the two worked side by side, ate dinner together and then crashed on couches in neighboring offices, the two said. Now, two months later, they lavish praise on each other, with Gorman spontaneously calling Chammah, "Mr. Charmer."<br />Things looked a lot different when they were promoted last year.<br />Chammah, who shares Mack's Lebanese heritage, got the part of Morgan Stanley that long defined the firm and provided most of its revenue: mergers, capital raising, sales and trading, research and advisory services. Gorman got the job of overseeing what then looked to outsiders like a relative backwater: retail brokerage and asset management.<br />But now the roles have somewhat reversed, with many of Chammah's businesses suffering, and Gorman's becoming more vital to the firm because they provide steady, stable earnings.<br />It is a shifting of roles that they acknowledge, but they say it does not bother them.<br />"We don't think of it as decrease and increase between us," said Chammah, whose businesses still account for nearly 70 percent of the bank's revenue. "I'm a very big proponent of James's retail and asset management."<br />Gorman is making cuts in some of his businesses, like the money market fund area. And he pointed to bright spots in Chammah's businesses like commodities and currency trading. He said clients had told him they still needed Chammah's investment bankers.<br />"All these things that Walid's business has managed will be a growth business," Gorman said.<br />Their relative success over the next year will probably contribute to Mack's thinking about his heir. The chief has no plans to retire any time soon, according to a spokeswoman.<br />The growth most investors are focused on at the moment is Morgan Stanley's deposit base, which will be overseen by Gorman, a lanky Australian who moved to the United States in the 1980s. When he was a consultant for McKinsey, Merrill Lynch was one of his main clients, and in 1999, he joined that investment bank as chief marketing officer. While there, he oversaw the bank's brokers and the creation of a Merrill Lynch credit card, which is still offered. He joined Morgan Stanley two years ago and turned around its band of brokers, inherited from the merger with Dean Witter.<br />But Gorman has never worked at a commercial bank, and there is quite a lot of work ahead of him at Morgan Stanley. Commercial banks typically have deposits worth 25 to 45 percent of their assets. Morgan has about $1 trillion in assets, so even while reducing assets, the bank would want to reach about $200 billion in deposits - or six times its current $36 billion. That kind of growth will only come with acquisitions of banks in the United States and possibly abroad, which Gorman said Morgan Stanley had the capital to pursue.<br />To some extent the field of competitors for bank buyouts is narrowed by rules that limit how much of the national deposit base can be owned by a single company. Bank of America and Wells Fargo are brushing up against that limit.<br />"This country of 8,000 banks is going to go through enormous consolidation in the next few years, and we want to be one of the players," Gorman said.<br />In the long run, it will probably be Chammah's units - the old Morgan Stanley - that will restore the firm's luster. Until then, Gorman's businesses must carry a heavy load.<br />"The sooner Morgan Stanley can build a deposit base, the more quickly confidence will come back, and Gorman is carrying the ball on that one," said Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein and the former treasurer at Morgan Stanley. "But the future of Morgan Stanley really belongs to Walid because he manages what drives the value of Morgan Stanley - the trading and the investment banking."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/morgan.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/morgan.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Goldman takes the lead ... with a bailout</strong><br />breakingviews.com<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />For once, rivals might be pleased Goldman Sachs took the lead. The Wall Street firm is the first bank to sell debt backed by the U.S. government under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s debt guarantee program. The $5 billion deal - around twice what Goldman initially expected to raise - looks like a crowd pleaser. That's just what the market needs, even if it is still effectively a bailout.<br />Goldman wasn't facing a liquidity crisis any time soon, but should be glad to be able to tap the public bond market for the first time in seven months - and at a decent price, as the guarantee means the debt is rated triple-A. After adding in the one percentage point fee for using the program, Goldman is paying 4.25 percent - roughly half the yield its existing bonds are trading at in the secondary market. That's a better deal than British banks are getting. They have to pay the British government their median credit default swap premium for the past year, plus a 50-basis-point fee for their guarantees.<br />True, most of Goldman's regular bondholders won't touch the new paper with such a low coupon. But the deal should give them some comfort that their debt is safe, and may even convince them to buy more of the older bonds. Over time, that may bring those spreads down.<br />But the new debt certainly looks to be a boon to investors who usually buy U.S. mortgage agency and government debt. Goldman priced the deal to yield more than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds, even though the FDIC program offers participants the explicit backing of the U.S. government.<br />Goldman appears to be overpaying by another metric, too: The deal is priced to yield 0.85 percentage points over mid-swaps, or the median rate at which double-A-rated banks lend to each other. Of course, it's not unusual to offer a sweetener for a new deal from a new program. That it succeeded should encourage other banks to follow suit, and potentially at better rates - and then start lending the money to get the economy moving. U.S. banks shouldn't get too cocky, though. After all, any success is up to Uncle Sam. Without U.S. taxpayers propping them up, most would be in bond market hell. - Antony Currie</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/views27.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/views27.php</a></div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Citigroup "went wrong" with real estate</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />NEW YORK: Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram Pandit on Tuesday blamed prior management for diving too deeply into real estate, causing losses that led to this week's massive government bailout of the second-largest U.S. bank by assets.<br />"What went wrong is we had tremendous concentration in the sense we put a lot of our money to work against U.S. real estate," Pandit said in an interview on PBS' Charlie Rose show. "We got here by lending money, and putting money to work in the U.S. real estate market, in a size that was probably larger than what we ought to have done on a diversification basis."<br />The government late Sunday rescued Citigroup by agreeing to shoulder most potential losses from a $306 billion (200 billion pound) portfolio of risky assets, and by injecting $20 billion of new capital, in its biggest effort to prevent a large U.S. bank from failing.<br />Citigroup has lost $20.3 billion in the last year, and many expect further losses from credit cards and other areas tied to the global economic crisis to pile up.<br />Since closing Friday at $3.77, Citigroup shares have risen 61 percent, and closed Tuesday up 13 cents at $6.08 on Monday. They have nevertheless tumbled 79 percent this year, after closing last year at $29.44.<br />Pandit said in the interview that short-sellers, as well as investors worried about Citigroup's asset quality, were among those who drove the bank's shares down in recent sessions, and that it was important "that we got control of the situation."<br />"I can completely understand how people on Main Street, people who are not close to this industry, would be furious at what's happened," he said.<br />Some wealthy investors have begun or pledged to begin buying Citigroup shares.<br />A Mexican brokerage controlled by Carlos Slim, one of the world's wealthiest people, spent about $150 million to buy nearly 29 million Citigroup shares between Nov 19 and Nov 25.<br />Meanwhile, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal last week said he plans to boost his stake in the bank to 5 percent from less than 4 percent.<br />(Additional reporting by Noel Randewich and Armando Tovar in Mexico City)<br />(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Bernard Orr)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/business/OUKBS-UK-CITIGROUP-PANDIT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/business/OUKBS-UK-CITIGROUP-PANDIT.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>First audit of U.S. bailout to cite some snags<br /></strong>By Diana B. Henriques<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />The first operational audit of the $700 billion financial rescue plan, to be delivered to the U.S. Congress next Tuesday, is expected to be critical of the Treasury Department's failure to set up ways to track how its bailout money is being used in the marketplace, according to people briefed on a draft of the report.<br />The audit, done by the Government Accountability Office, is also likely to call for tighter controls over the conflicts of interest that are arising as financial specialists, institutions and law firms are hired for Treasury work that could later aid their private-sector clients, said these people, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because the briefings were confidential.<br />But the overall assessment was "a mixed bag," as one person put it. It was clear, he said, that the auditors took into account how quickly the program was carried out, how much its focus shifted over time and how little feedback Treasury has had from oversight agencies so far.<br />The pending audit is a milestone for the rescue program because the GAO is, in effect, the "first responder" in the oversight effort. Within days of the plan's enactment on Oct. 3, the agency had assembled a 20-member team of lawyers, accountants, contracting experts, ethics monitors and market regulation specialists to start tracking the Treasury Department's work.<br />The two other elements of the oversight machinery created by the law are still works in progress. A U.S. prosecutor from New York, Neil Barofsky, has been nominated as the special inspector general for the program, but he is still awaiting Senate confirmation. And the last two appointments to the five-member congressional oversight panel set up under the law were made only last week.<br />"This is the first of the reports we are directed by law to provide," said Richard Hillman, managing director of the accountability office's financial markets and community investment team. Hillman confirmed that he and members of his team visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday to discuss the report's principal findings with staff members of "the appropriate committees." But he declined to discuss the report's contents, which are still subject to review.<br />The Treasury Department has been criticized already in Congress for not tying more strings to its investments in banks and other financial institutions.<br />Through its Capital Purchase Program, it has injected $160 billion into the banking system through the purchase of preferred shares. But auditors found that no plan had been put in place to track how, or whether, that money is being put to use by the first eight institutions that received it.<br />The personnel consequences of the Treasury's unexpected shift in strategy in the rescue plan from the purchase of so-called troubled assets on financial balance sheets to the injection of capital directly into financial institutions also drew attention from the auditors, those briefed on the study said.<br />The audit team noted that Treasury already had hired staff members for the initial mission, some of whom were not necessary or best suited for the work required under the new strategy.<br />The GAO's report will be the first of a series it is required to submit to congressional committees every 60 days; its next audit will be due at the end of January.<br />Besides those reports, it will also produce a separate study by mid-January that will document the existing financial regulatory scheme, describe the events that have overtaken it and provide a framework for assessing proposals for a new arrangement, Hillman said.<br />The new congressional oversight panel is required by law to produce a similar report before the end of this year, but Hillman said he expected that deadline to be extended because the panel was just now going to work.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/26tarp.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/26tarp.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*********************</div><div><strong>'Recovery' is in; 'stimulus' is so seven months ago</strong><br />By Carl Hulse<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: Democrats are bailing out on the word "stimulus."<br />In a notable shift, congressional leaders and officials of the incoming Obama administration are actively trying to retire that term and use the more marketable "economic recovery program" as the descriptor for the multibillion-dollar economic initiative to be considered early next year.<br />The change in emphasis reflects a realization that words matter. Architects of the $700 billion Treasury Department program concluded too late that something unabashedly promoted as a Wall Street "bailout" conjured images of well-heeled suspects sprung from jail or water feverishly tossed from a rapidly filling boat. By the time officials tried to rebrand it as a Wall Street "rescue," the bailout's reputation was sunk.<br />And "stimulus" a buzzword from earlier this year combines bureaucratic wonkiness with the concept of shock therapy, Democrats worried.<br />But "economic recovery," they figured, somehow sounds more substantial and optimistic We can lick this thing and stirs thoughts of successful New Deal initiatives.<br />" 'Stimulus' is Washington talk, and 'economic recovery' is how the American people think of it," said Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff for the incoming White House team.<br />For Democrats like Emanuel, there is a serious purpose behind the semantic stagecraft: they want the public to get accustomed to the idea that turning the economy around is going to take some doing and that the money coming down the congressional pike is not just a short-term, one-shot burst intended to produce instant results.<br />President-elect Barack Obama hit the economic recovery theme hard in his recent public pronouncements as did his top advisers. Speaker Nancy Pelosi caught herself last week just as she was about to let the S-word slip. "We're not using the word 'stimulus,' " Pelosi confided at a news conference.<br />Apparently with good reason. Public opinion researchers have found that voters do not consider the term particularly reassuring, perhaps because past stimuli have not proved to be personally rewarding or maybe because the phrase is just too Pavlovian in trying to elicit a predetermined economic response.<br />Republicans, who note that they have been talking about their own "economic recovery" proposals for quite a while, are skeptical that the Democrats are doing anything more than changing a few lines in the talking points.<br />"They have consistently said they are for more Washington spending, and they have been trying to outbid each other day after day," said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Representative John Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader. "New rhetoric, same old Washington spending plan."<br />Yet Democrats say the program will go far beyond a simple stimulus to a comprehensive approach that mixes tax policy, road and bridge building, alternative-energy projects and technological improvements that will have far-reaching consequences. It should not be equated, they say, with a program that provides eligible taxpayers with a check to cover a quick trip to the electronics store.<br />Still, they are well aware that imagery has proved powerful in the economic crisis. Besides the ill-fated labeling of the bailout, executives of the nation's automakers learned the hard way last week that flying to Washington on corporate jets to plead for U.S. government aid was not the most effective message for car manufacturers to send.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/america/26words.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/america/26words.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>********************</div><div><strong>Remorseful ex-officials decline pay from UBS</strong><br />By Jonathan D. Glater<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />As a number of American banks resist calls to rein in executive pay, the unthinkable is happening at least in Switzerland, where three former officials of UBS, the troubled Swiss financial giant, said on Tuesday that they would forgo more than $27 million in compensation.<br />Marcel Ospel, the former chairman of the board at the Swiss bank, and Stephan Haeringer and Marco Suter, two former directors, said they would give up pay promised them after the bank reported nearly $50 billion in losses and received even more than that in financial support from the Swiss government.<br />"With the involvement of the Swiss government, I realized that decisive action was required on my part," Ospel said in a statement. "I hope that my action will help to resolve a situation that was inconceivable to me until a short time ago," he said.<br />Ospel will contribute more than two-thirds of the total; the balance will be paid by Haeringer and Suter.<br />In response, UBS issued a very brief statement: "We welcome the decision."<br />As indeed UBS might. The former UBS executives had been the focus of intense public criticism after the bank reported stunning losses on devastating subprime-related investments. This month, the bank announced that its chairman, Peter Kurer; its chief executive, Marcel Rohner; and members of its executive board would also have a bonus-free 2008.<br />In the United States, lawmakers and regulators have expressed profound frustration over a perceived lack of remorse among executives who made millions while peddling investments in securities whose plummeting value has pushed the financial system to the brink of collapse. Executives have resisted cuts.<br />Regulators in the United States have called on companies to slash bonuses this year and, in at least one case, to figure out ways to get back bonuses and severance payments already given to executives a difficult and potentially embarrassing exercise. The former UBS executives have eliminated the need for such action, at least in their case.<br />"That is almost unheard of," Dirk Jenter, an assistant professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said of the move by the executives. "They've clearly been shamed into doing that."<br />But shame has been much less effective on this side of the Atlantic, where companies have resisted cutting bonuses and salaries even as their businesses crater. Only in recent weeks have companies receiving taxpayer assistance, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, agreed to reduce or eliminate bonus payments to current executives.<br />On Tuesday, under pressure from the New York attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, American International Group, the troubled insurance conglomerate now reliant on support from the U.S. government, said the company would not pay any bonuses to its top seven executives this year and that the top 60 executives would not receive any raises through 2009.<br />Those limits are a "positive step," Cuomo said in a statement. "It is only fair that top executives, who benefit the most when firms do well, should also bear the burden of the difficult economic consequences their firms now face."<br />Perhaps of more long-term significance are changes in compensation structure now under consideration in corporate boardrooms. AIG, for example, also announced that its chief executive would receive no severance payments and that such payments to senior management would be limited.<br />Last week, UBS announced that under its new regime, as of 2009 a maximum of one-third of an annual bonus would actually be paid at year's end, with the rest held in escrow. The amount in escrow could be reduced if UBS subsequently had poor results, if regulations were violated or unnecessary risks were taken.<br />In their press release, the three former UBS board members noted that their decision should not be considered an admission of guilt "in a legal sense."<br />Asked whether he thought executives at Wall Street firms might follow the example of their counterparts in Switzerland, Jenter was skeptical.<br />"I would not put my money on it not that I have much left after what the market has been doing," Jenter said. "But it certainly seems unlikely."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/26pay.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/26pay.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Credit card firms agree to give customers help</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />LONDON: Britain's credit card companies have agreed to give some "breathing space" to customers struggling to pay off their debts after talks with government ministers on Wednesday.<br />This agreement will help debt-laden consumers organise their finances at a time when the latest official data released on Wednesday showed that in the third quarter, Britain's economy shrank at its fastest rate since 1990. The economic figures reinforced concerns that Britain's economy is falling into a deep recession.<br />Representatives of the credit card sector were called in for a summit with Business Secretary Peter Mandelson and Consumer Affairs Minister Gareth Thomas to hear government concerns about the high level of interest rates charged on credit cards and store cards despite official rates plunging in recent weeks as the global financial crisis unfolds.<br />"It was agreed that the credit card industry would report back in two weeks' time on a set of fair principles to help card borrowers to manage their debts," the industry and government said in a joint statement.<br />The Department for Business said customers in difficulty would now get 30 days' grace from card companies if a debt advice agency was helping a consumer with a repayment plan.<br />This could be extended for a further 30 days "subject to demonstrable progress being made but not yet concluded," the two sides added.<br />The industry also agreed to look at its practice of risk-based repricing -- where card companies increase interest rates when they think there is a risk of default by the customer -- and report back in two weeks.<br />"It's these sorts of repricing decisions that have led to the sorts of cases we're unhappy about, where people have faced very significant increases in their interest rate, sometimes of 10 percentage points or more," a government spokesman said.<br />Stephen Sklaroff, director general of the Finance and Leasing Association, said the industry was "very keen indeed to ensure that our customers are given the best and fairest deal."<br />"We have agreed that it is entirely sensible to ensure that customers who are in difficulties and in the process of coming to a sensible arrangement with companies to deal with their debt, should be given a breathing space in which to do that," he told the BBC.<br />"We have also agreed to do some further work on the principles that should be applied when the companies are thinking about repricing the product and communicating that to customers."<br />(Reporting by Frank Prenesti; Editing by Jan Paschal)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-CREDIT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/business/OUKBS-UK-BRITAIN-CREDIT.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div> </div><div><strong>As India's stock markets plunge, so do middle-class dreams<br /></strong>By Bappa Majumdar and Biman MukherjiReuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />NEW DELHI: Sunil Kapadia regularly borrowed from banks to invest in Indian stock markets, seeing them as a one-way ticket up the economic ladder as growth in the nation hummed along at near double-digit rates.<br />But his dream of easy riches was wrecked as the main Indian stock index tumbled to three-year lows last month, taking its losses in 2008 to more than 50 percent and forcing him to move his family to a cramped suburban apartment.<br />"In the quest for jam, I have lost my bread and butter," said Kapadia, a 48-year-old Mumbai resident who lost 20 million rupees, or about $400,000, in share trading this year.<br />Thousands of small investors were lured into booming stock and commodity markets as the economy soared at growth rates of 9 percent or higher in the past three fiscal years.<br />Now, with the vicious collapse of the market, their savings are lost and many are unable and unwilling to invest again.<br />It is a hard blow to the confidence of India's aspiring middle classes, and their curtailed spending has also unsettled the foreign companies and investors who were lining up to do business in India's $1 trillion economy.<br />"At the moment, investors are scared of their own shadows, and it will take some time for them to be back," said Vikram Bhatt, head of the brokerage firm Ajmera Associates of Mumbai.<br />Most small investors were lured by a seemingly unstoppable bull run in the stock market.<br />The main 30-share index on the Bombay Stock Exchange rose from 6,000 in 2000 to 20,000 by the end of 2007, bolstered by foreign funds.<br />Foreign institutional investors, having bought a record net $17.4 billion of stocks last year as the market rose 47 percent, have sold more than $13.5 billion net of stocks in 2008. The crash has also hit commodities, with prices of goods from edible oils to metals dropping 40 to 50 percent over the past four to five months.<br />Brash traders became a symbol of India's modernizing economy, and stocks were so popular among retail investors that some could eke out meager livings on the sidewalks by selling IPO and mutual fund applications for a few rupees.<br />But small investors have largely disappeared as the market imploded. From a record high just above 21,200 points in January, the BSE index crashed to just below 7,700 last month.<br />Although statistics show only 2.5 percent of India's 1.1 billion people invest in stocks, experts say the number of investors was growing steadily before the market nosedived.<br />"I want to sell off my apartment to pay off my loans, but word has spread that I have fallen on bad times and the offers are not good," said Abhijit Choudhury, a stock investor from Calcutta, who lost two million rupees in a month. "I am ruined and not coming back to the stock market."<br />Risk-averse investors now favor the safety of fixed deposits. Annual bank deposit rates have risen to more than 10 percent in the past two to three months.<br />"The market will continue to downslide as most of the money was flowing in from FIIs and the insurance sector all this while," said Vinod Kumar Sharma, head of research at Anagram Capital, using the abbreviation for foreign investors. "The impact on stocks have been huge."<br />"Until the markets revive again to a level where people are comfortable," said Sharma, "investors will keep away from the markets and will opt for fixed income and fixed deposits."<br />Analysts have downgraded forecasts for India's economy, although growth is still expected to be around 7 percent in the fiscal year ending next March.<br />As a result, many traders and investors in the once-booming sector, who had bought luxury cars and plush apartments with bank loans, are now struggling to meet the expense of their children's education or monthly grocery bills.<br />"I used to drive a Toyota Innova car, but nowadays I prefer to take a three-wheeler scooter to work," said Dharmesh Dave, a copper and brass trader.<br />"I wanted to buy a house, but my capital has now been held up in business. In any case, the way stocks markets have crashed, it is quite likely that property prices would follow."<br />Some experts say stock markets may rise after a year or so, if global markets stabilize, but only 20 to 30 percent over the main index's current level of around 9,000 points.<br />"It is not likely to climb to the record level of 20,000 to 21,000 points reached in January," said Chandra Mohan Mukherjee, director of Ace Financial Services in Calcutta, "as the impact of the global financial turmoil is expected to linger even after a year until the FIIs return."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/rupee.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/rupee.php</a></div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div><strong>For holidays, it's toys for the children, not clothes for mom<br /></strong>By Stephanie Rosenbloom<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />Come Christmas, McKenna Hunt, a gregarious little girl from Safety Harbor, Florida, will receive the play kitchen and the Elmo doll she wants. But her mother, Kristen Hunt, will go without the designer jeans she covets this season.<br />For Kristen Hunt and for millions of mothers across America, the holiday season is turning into a time of sacrifice. Weathering the first severe economic downturn of their adult lives, these women are discovering that a practice they once indulged without thinking about it, shopping a bit for themselves at the holidays, has to give way to their children's wish lists.<br />"I want her to be able to look back," Hunt declared, "and say, 'Even though they were tough times, my mom was still able to give me stuff."'<br />In this economy, nearly everyone is forgoing indulgences, and many fathers will no doubt sacrifice this year to put toys under the tree. But figures suggest the burden is falling most heavily on women, particularly mothers.<br />In September and October, sales of women's apparel fell precipitously compared with the same months the year before. They were down 18.2 percent in October, for instance, compared with a decrease of 8.3 percent for men's apparel, according to SpendingPulse, a report by MasterCard Advisers.<br />And a survey of shoppers' intentions by the NPD Group, a consulting firm, suggests that such cutbacks may continue through the holiday season. About 61 percent of mothers surveyed said they would shop less for themselves this year, compared with 56 percent of all women and 45 percent of men.<br />The survey suggested that mothers, more than any other group, would also spend less money over all and postpone big-ticket purchases, like the dishwasher that Hunt wants to buy.<br />It may be noble sacrifice for women to spend less on themselves to benefit their families, but it is bad news for the troubled retail industry, which relies heavily on sales of women's apparel.<br />"As we go into the holiday, it's not going to be 'One for my sister and one for me,"' said Marie Driscoll, an analyst for Standard & Poor's Equity Research Services. "You might not even get one for your sister so you can buy great gifts for her kids."<br />Reyne Rice, who studies toy trends for the Toy Industry Association, said mothers do at least 80 percent of the holiday shopping in a family, and in past recessions, they have been the first to do without. They tend not to get a new coat for themselves, Rice said, so they can provide for their children.<br />Analysts say the pullback by women in this downturn is among the most drastic they have seen.<br />"You just keep hearing, 'We've stopped shopping altogether,"' said John Morris, a retail analyst with Wachovia, adding that the typical woman was "finding fashion in the back of her closet."<br />The downturn, analysts said, is being exacerbated by unexciting fashions in stores. And the lack of pressure to conform to one particular style these days means women do not feel they have to update their work wardrobes.<br />As they scale back their self-indulgences, mothers are looking for additional ways to cut the cost of the holidays. Some are using online tools to organize meetings with other mothers to swap clothing, toys, video games and books. Others are buying DVDs and video games in bulk from warehouse stores like BJ's Wholesale Club, then taking the sets apart to create multiple gifts.<br />Matriarchs of big families are bringing back the old practice of pulling names out of a hat to decide who will buy a gift for whom. Some mothers have made pacts, with their spouses or other family members, not to buy gifts for anyone but the children.<br />Despite all these efforts, many mothers will nonetheless end up cutting back, at least a bit, on spending for their children. Historically, the toy industry has been more immune to economic downturns than other industries, but this year, analysts expect it to feel the pinch.<br />That could translate into fewer presents for children over all, even though many parents will go to great lengths to buy the one or two gifts a child wants most.<br />"While times are difficult, the last thing parents are going to cut from their budget is the Christmas present for their child," said Gerald Storch, chairman and chief executive of Toys "R" Us. "We are not seeing price resistance for the hot toys."</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/moms.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/moms.php</a></div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>Hundreds flee as Congo Tutsi rebels hunt Hutu foes<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />By Hereward Holland<br />Hundreds of Congolese civilians fled east into neighbouring Uganda on Wednesday to escape reported attacks on villages by Tutsi rebels who said they were hunting their Rwandan Hutu militia enemies.<br />A U.N. refugee official in Uganda said families were streaming across the border at Ishasha from Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province, where a Tutsi rebel spokesman said rebel forces had launched "policing" operations.<br />The rebel activities and related refugee exodus signalled recurring violence and unrest in North Kivu despite a week-long relative lull in combat between rebels loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda and the Congolese army.<br />A U.N. envoy, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, was preparing to begin another peace mission to try to prevent the North Kivu conflict from escalating into a repeat of the wider 1998-2003 war that devastated Congo.<br />Fighting in North Kivu since late August has driven a quarter of a million people from their homes, creating what aid workers say is a humanitarian catastrophe.<br />Roberta Russo, spokesperson for the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR in the Ugandan capital Kampala, told Reuters that 1,300 Congolese refugees had crossed through Ishasha on the Congo/Uganda border since Tuesday afternoon.<br />"My colleagues at the border say there is just a stream of people coming," she said.<br />Some of the newcomers, joining more than 13,000 Congolese who had already fled into Uganda since August, reported their villages between Rutshuru and Ishasha had been attacked two days ago by Nkunda's fighters, she said.<br />"We have some people who said their villages were directly attacked, and family members killed, by what they said were Nkunda rebels," Russo said.<br />Rebel-held Rutshuru was calm on Wednesday and U.N. agencies distributed aid supplies to civilians there.<br />A spokesman for Nkunda, Bertrand Bisimwe, said rebel forces had since Saturday launched operations north of Rutshuru against locations occupied by Rwandan Hutu fighters of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).<br />Nkunda's Tutsi fighters are sworn enemies of the FDLR, which includes perpetrators of Rwanda's 1994 genocide in which Hutu soldiers and militia slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.<br />"We've launched policing operations to force them (the FDLR) to withdraw. They are fleeing, but they're taking the population hostage, using them as shields," Bisimwe told Reuters.<br />"SMALL SKIRMISHES"<br />He said the rebel actions involved no clashes with Congo's government army and did not affect a cease-fire declared by Nkunda. "This has got nothing to do with the cease-fire."<br />"But there's no cease-fire for the FDLR because every Congolese has the right to chase them out of the national territory, because they are foreigners," Bisimwe said.<br />A spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo (MONUC), Lt.-Col. Jean-Paul Dietrich, described the latest incidents as "some small skirmishes, but not really fighting."<br />Uganda's army said it had deployed soldiers on the border to prevent any spillover of violence from Congo.<br />The U.N., which is preparing to send 3,000 extra troops and police to bolster its 17,000-strong peacekeeping force in Congo, has accused both Nkunda's rebels and government forces of carrying out mass killings, rape and torture.<br />Nkunda, from Congo's minority Tutsi community, cites the presence of the FDLR in the east as the justification for his four-year-old rebellion, which he says aims to defend Tutsis.<br />Tutsi-led Rwanda denies repeated Congolese government allegations that it supports Nkunda.<br />Nkunda is demanding direct talks with President Joseph Kabila's government, protection for minorities like the Tutsis and integration of his fighters into the ranks of the army and the administration.<br />But the government says it will only talk to Nkunda within the framework of a January peace pact signed with several armed groups including his National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP). Nkunda has repudiated this deal as one-sided.<br />(Reporting by Frank Nyakairu in Kigali, Joe Bavier in Kinshasa and Pascal Fletcher in Dakar; writing by Pascal Fletcher, editing by Tim Pearce)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/europe/OUKWD-UK-CONGO-DEMOCRATIC.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>2 mass graves found in eastern Congo</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />KINSHASA, Congo: Two mass graves containing as many as 2,000 bodies have been discovered in eastern Congo, government officials said Wednesday.<br />Justice Minister Luzolo Bambi told reporters the graves were found Saturday in the town of Bukavu in a plot of land formerly owned by a member of the Congolese Rally for Democracy, or RCD, a Rwandan-backed rebel group. At one point, the RCD controlled much of eastern Congo, but it became a political party in 2003. Many of its top leaders were integrated into the government, taking jobs as vice presidents and army chiefs.<br />Constantin Charhondangwa, the head of civil society in the Bukavu region, said the parcel of land owned by the ex-rebel was sold to a resident. The new landowner discovered the remains when he dug up the land put in a septic tank, Charhondangwa said.<br />Bambi and state-run TV said as many as 2,000 people are buried in the twin graves.<br />UN officials visited the site and confirmed the presence of the mass graves but did not offer an estimate of the number of dead.<br />Madnodje Mounoubai, a spokesman for the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo, said the world body is calling for authorities to undertake "a serious investigation."<br />The discovery comes as eastern Congo has once again come to the brink of war, with a different rebel group fighting government forces.<br />Bukavu has not been touched by the latest round of violence, but has been a frequent theater of war. It is located 100 kilometers, or 60 miles, southeast of Goma, the epicenter of the latest fighting.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/africa/26congo.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/africa/26congo.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Six women shot dead in Chechnya<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />GROZNY, Russia: Six young women were found shot dead in Russia's restive Chechnya region on Wednesday, prosecutors said.<br />Three of the dead were found in the regional capital, Grozny, while another three were discovered on roadsides outside the city, said Mariam Nalayeva, spokeswoman for the investigative arm of the local prosecutor's office.<br />The women, aged between 25 and 35, had all suffered gunshots to the head and chest, leading investigators to believe the deaths may be related, RIA news agency reported, citing an investigator on the case.<br />Interfax news agency reported that a Kalashnikov assault rifle had been used in several of the killings.<br />There are sporadic flare-ups of violence in Chechnya, which is now relatively peaceful after two wars fought by separatist rebels and Islamist militants against Moscow's rule starting in 1994.<br />The region is run by Ramzan Kadyrov, a former rebel who declares loyalty to the Kremlin.<br />Earlier this week, three police officers and one passer-y were killed by a bomb explosion near an apartment building in Chechnya after police went to investigate a report of gunfire.<br />(Writing by Simon Shuster; Editing by Matthew Jones)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/europe/OUKWD-UK-CHECHNYA-SHOOTINGS.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/europe/OUKWD-UK-CHECHNYA-SHOOTINGS.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Woolworths on brink of failure</strong><br />The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />LONDON: The board of Woolworths Group met late Wednesday to approve plans to put its two principal operating businesses into administration after failed attempts to sell the group.<br />A person familiar with the talks, who insisted on anonymity because the meeting was in progress, said the board had decided to put the company's 800-store retail business and its EUK subsidiary, which distributes music and videos to retailers, in the hands of administrators.<br />"The board of Woolworths retail and EUK have resolved to take the necessary steps to enter administration," the person said.<br />The decision would leave the company with 2 Entertain DVD, a publishing joint venture with BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of BBC, and the Bertram book wholesale business.<br />Going into administration is similar to filing for bankruptcy, something that does not apply to companies in Britain. Administrators are appointed to salvage as much of the company as possible for the benefit of its creditors, a process that can involve trying to keep the business in operation or breaking it up and selling it off.<br />Woolworths shares were suspended earlier Wednesday at a price of little more than a penny as the discussions continued with potential buyers for both the retail business and 2 Entertain.<br />Hilco UK, which buys underperforming retail businesses and turns them around for profit, had been interested in the retail arm, but there was speculation that the company's lenders were blocking the sale of the division in favor of selling off the company's assets.<br />Separately, the company said it was in talks with BBC Worldwide about the sale of its 40 percent interest in the 2 Entertain joint venture.<br />Woolworths' current debt-laden predicament is a long way from the clamor that greeted its first store opening, in Liverpool, in 1909 under the FW Woolworths brand, a subsidiary of its U.S. parent.<br />The British company has outlasted its original U.S. parent, which closed its final Woolworths stores in 1997.<br />But in recent years the company has struggled to remain relevant as supermarket chains expanded aggressively into its traditional business, selling everything from bed linen to toys and underwear.<br />"Every year supermarkets take more and more business away in confectionery, kids' clothing, music," said Nick Bubb, a retail industry analyst with Pali International. "The convenience of one-stop shopping at the supermarket is very powerful."<br />Shares in Woolworths, which came under British ownership in 1982, have plummeted 90 percent over the past year to just 1.22 pence, or 2 U.S. cents, before the suspension Wednesday as fears grew about its future.<br />In August, Woolworths rejected an offer of £50 million, or $75 million, for its retail stores from Iceland Foods.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/wool.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/business/wool.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo3-OrOKzNqjTxP-KSXSwLJpi0qUpdgyy_-yx0Lb_lzQuMI3HJtS8BagPTZOAHHr5RtTTfshE_MwoyJvgPxGwdNbe_dNUo-5lkU0Rjf8rC7ErdxWe_mXQPSfeZ_T-6rWiKOAPukRS2Zvs/s1600-h/DSC02120.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245536190498418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo3-OrOKzNqjTxP-KSXSwLJpi0qUpdgyy_-yx0Lb_lzQuMI3HJtS8BagPTZOAHHr5RtTTfshE_MwoyJvgPxGwdNbe_dNUo-5lkU0Rjf8rC7ErdxWe_mXQPSfeZ_T-6rWiKOAPukRS2Zvs/s320/DSC02120.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/europe/nato.php">Rice denies U.S. alters stance on Ukraine and Georgia's NATO membership</a> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Mayor killed in North Ossetian capital<br /></strong>By Michael Schwirtz<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />MOSCOW: The mayor of Vladikavkaz, a southern city in Russia's conflict-prone North Caucasus region, was assassinated on Wednesday near his home, law enforcement officials said.<br />Gunmen opened fire on the mayor, Vitaly Karayev, at about 9 a.m. Moscow time, said a statement on the Web site of the Prosecutor General's Investigative Committee. The mayor died at the hospital.<br />A Russian law enforcement source told the official Ria Novosti news agency that only one shot was fired "from afar" at Karayev, 46, who was in his car at the time of the attack.<br />Vladikavkaz is the capital of North Ossetia, a Russian republic that borders Ingushetia and Chechnya, where shootings and bomb attacks occur almost daily.<br />Last week, a 12th person died from injuries following a suicide bombing attack earlier this month outside a minibus close to the central market in Vladikavkaz. The city is not far from Beslan, where in 2004 gunmen from Chechnya raided a local school, sparking a fight with Russian law enforcement officials that killed more that 300 people, many of them children.<br />North Ossetia also borders South Ossetia, where Georgia and Russia fought a brief war in August. More Articles in World »</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/europe/27russia.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/europe/27russia.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Former Georgian envoy to Moscow puts blame for war on his own country<br /></strong>By Olesya Vartanyan and Ellen Barry<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />TBILISI, Georgia: A parliamentary hearing on the origins of the war between Georgia and Russia in August ended in tumult after a former Georgian diplomat testified that the Georgian authorities were responsible for starting the conflict.<br />Erosi Kitsmarishvili, Tbilisi's former ambassador to Moscow, testified Tuesday for three hours before he was shouted down by members of Parliament.<br />A former confidant of President Mikheil Saakashvili, Kitsmarishvili said Georgian officials had told him in April that they planned to start a war in Abkhazia, one of two breakaway regions at issue in the war, and had received a green light from the U.S. government to do so. He said the Georgian government later decided to start the war in South Ossetia, the other region, and continue into Abkhazia.<br />He would not identify the officials who he said had told him about the planned actions in Abkhazia, saying that identifying them would endanger their lives.<br />American officials have consistently said that they had warned Saakashvili against taking action in the two enclaves, where Russian peacekeepers were stationed.<br />Kitsmarishvili's testimony in front of a parliamentary commission, shown live on Georgian television, met with forceful and immediate denials. One commission member, Givi Targamadze, threw a pen and then lunged toward Kitsmarishvili, but was restrained by his colleagues.<br />The chairman of the commission, Paata Davitaia, said he would initiate a criminal case against Kitsmarishvili for "professional negligence."<br />Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria, who appeared on short notice to comment on Kitsmarishvili's testimony, called the allegations "irresponsible and shameless fabrication," and said they were "either the result of a lack of information or the personal resentment of a man who has lost his job and wants to get involved in politics." Kitsmarishvili was fired in September by the president.<br />Kitsmarishvili walked out amid the furor Tuesday.<br />"They don't want to listen to the truth," he said.<br />The hearings are part of an official Georgian inquiry, whose full name is the Temporary Commission to Study Russia's Military Aggression and Other Actions Undertaken With the Aim to Infringe Georgia's Territorial Integrity. Many senior Georgian officials have already testified, and the president is scheduled to appear Friday.<br />Kitsmarishvili had petitioned to appear, saying a refusal to hear him would show that the inquiry was hollow.<br />In his comments, the former diplomat said that Saakashvili was responding to Russian provocation, but that he had long been planning to take control of the enclaves, which won de facto independence from Georgia in fighting in the early 1990s.<br />Kitsmarishvili said the president aimed to start an offensive in 2004, but met with resistance from Western and other Georgian officials.<br />Among the catalysts for the offensive, Kitsmarishvili said, was the belief that U.S. officials had given their approval. When he tried to verify that information with the American diplomats in Tbilisi, Kitsmarishvili said, he was told no such approval had been given.<br />Olesya Vartanyan reported from Tbilisi and Ellen Barry from Moscow.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/europe/georgia.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/europe/georgia.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Russian senators pass extended presidency</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />MOSCOW: Russia's upper house of parliament gave its assent on Wednesday to constitutional amendments extending the presidential term from four to six years.<br />Critics of the Kremlin say the change could be part of a plan for ex-president Vladimir Putin, now prime minister, to return to his old job, although officials deny this.<br />The legislation has been rushed through the parliamentary process in less than four weeks with little dissent, except from opposition Communists who do not have enough votes to block it.<br />The law was nodded through the Federation Council with 144 votes in favour and one against. The Council comprises senators representing Russia's regions.<br />The amendments have now been passed by both chambers. The State Duma, the lower house, approved the amendments on final reading last Friday.<br />They now only need to be ratified by two-thirds of regional parliaments -- which are almost all dominated by Kremlin loyalists -- before they can take effect.<br />Police detained a lone anti-Kremlin protester outside the Federation Council building after he tried to unfurl a banner criticising the plans, a Reuters reporter said.<br />The proposal was first raised by President Dmitry Medvedev in his state of the nation address on November 5.<br />The longer Kremlin term will not apply to Medvedev's present mandate, and Putin's spokesman has said there is no plan for him to make a comeback in an early presidential election.<br />(Reporting by Aydar Buribaev; Writing by Conor Sweeney; Editing by Kevin Liffey)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/europe/OUKWD-UK-RUSSIA-PRESIDENT-TERM.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/europe/OUKWD-UK-RUSSIA-PRESIDENT-TERM.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXIeye12WmYeP33neQuauM486nVttbIIzwK6UHT0JTpupp0uDbw7NMZ5tOXgkopuGw5qpZzdooIHmAKVI-3L1Sx4OgjB9aMurlt-Cf8NitDAdlAEZrZ25xhGb6xdUMr1gjLV1NGxHsM4c/s1600-h/DSC02121.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245538206028418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXIeye12WmYeP33neQuauM486nVttbIIzwK6UHT0JTpupp0uDbw7NMZ5tOXgkopuGw5qpZzdooIHmAKVI-3L1Sx4OgjB9aMurlt-Cf8NitDAdlAEZrZ25xhGb6xdUMr1gjLV1NGxHsM4c/s320/DSC02121.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm9K1M9DHX4wa0TmYz5zzJBrGrSGBd66uxPGi-NMUDbvRmOx758qb__iRQEZdmU3fUpI1jSpDqZj0jMi6PS8VVNlTWTGYVB71jZ3WfdCqV3yZzjlc4Ai_asgNBCrLALvFmN6cXf14vLPM/s1600-h/DSC02122.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245535554737090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm9K1M9DHX4wa0TmYz5zzJBrGrSGBd66uxPGi-NMUDbvRmOx758qb__iRQEZdmU3fUpI1jSpDqZj0jMi6PS8VVNlTWTGYVB71jZ3WfdCqV3yZzjlc4Ai_asgNBCrLALvFmN6cXf14vLPM/s320/DSC02122.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVmIcr-HmcxKi9BMgXSZCEDEFgA8gl0CzF_5_mWxoqCf3KLdQxDMyfwIVijzziL5aBwzInTL2dosXUWyre1hVb4Z8R5wNMrR7PgLTKqfFLmdnDJDQdVRSyfMCXAMgqlhWXlKuPtOr71AU/s1600-h/DSC02123.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245533284369330" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVmIcr-HmcxKi9BMgXSZCEDEFgA8gl0CzF_5_mWxoqCf3KLdQxDMyfwIVijzziL5aBwzInTL2dosXUWyre1hVb4Z8R5wNMrR7PgLTKqfFLmdnDJDQdVRSyfMCXAMgqlhWXlKuPtOr71AU/s320/DSC02123.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq0WSx4Uhk4g5ULgYBwUJEV1hxNgse4AXW-2Ckg3QI1LFq6NPzALA6Hoy0kTI9nvw7hw6cYrN-R7eYCZy7rgaeWNr3EkZeW9R9G39CLseGOoZ1-DzlC13tdxCgdO1R0THnesQW3X1C6qA/s1600-h/DSC02124.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245206869133954" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq0WSx4Uhk4g5ULgYBwUJEV1hxNgse4AXW-2Ckg3QI1LFq6NPzALA6Hoy0kTI9nvw7hw6cYrN-R7eYCZy7rgaeWNr3EkZeW9R9G39CLseGOoZ1-DzlC13tdxCgdO1R0THnesQW3X1C6qA/s320/DSC02124.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0RtZHCwokIEbecAI2k-vmCrBNA-xDGUWS2DWWXPUe-XNztjT8m3eOvAoZW9RPPBLWvOtKIADOFd1pRkngNzZhyphenhyphen4wC4O2WJ4tzF55E7_AZR_Q1oQYxbIKJaJnnEkeEurtPBXyNWnhyphenhyphenMlc/s1600-h/DSC02125.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245207929998546" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0RtZHCwokIEbecAI2k-vmCrBNA-xDGUWS2DWWXPUe-XNztjT8m3eOvAoZW9RPPBLWvOtKIADOFd1pRkngNzZhyphenhyphen4wC4O2WJ4tzF55E7_AZR_Q1oQYxbIKJaJnnEkeEurtPBXyNWnhyphenhyphenMlc/s320/DSC02125.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLgwRdT5mba2HJWGmHfVer90faaW14Mqm_u02F_5tNaIRfyULAY-AwlmZnkrFkAtmTDEWNgU_c0ExnCeCFP8UwiNKxsKmMemr7FjOaBSggpgGfFhyphenhyphenfCv7GpJdwSJf3gXxeshUyTZwfBIQ/s1600-h/DSC02126.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245201810973634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLgwRdT5mba2HJWGmHfVer90faaW14Mqm_u02F_5tNaIRfyULAY-AwlmZnkrFkAtmTDEWNgU_c0ExnCeCFP8UwiNKxsKmMemr7FjOaBSggpgGfFhyphenhyphenfCv7GpJdwSJf3gXxeshUyTZwfBIQ/s320/DSC02126.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg58mcseYMm2gM7eqFQaA-r3HlbH-bRoICGzMy2X5VqOvceK6H2dgKtXVMXwx0JEgJ1mMlcjPRJCwqPyGju1KIJqtRrBqKMrE24cRpfVVQ49mF9Zx-Vfqb7qFYxV9I8eWNOednHICyW0zQ/s1600-h/DSC02127.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245203632650050" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg58mcseYMm2gM7eqFQaA-r3HlbH-bRoICGzMy2X5VqOvceK6H2dgKtXVMXwx0JEgJ1mMlcjPRJCwqPyGju1KIJqtRrBqKMrE24cRpfVVQ49mF9Zx-Vfqb7qFYxV9I8eWNOednHICyW0zQ/s320/DSC02127.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEWOg6p8HV-yWxX4CrwEnQXVWzxdoa1xS3Z8-VTJ3h_HHJFdCIT_YwfsB_JdVel3k4yNICjIdrHjFJztMvY0tg6TuoutNTUNngsgzXvLFEqNffxyqm8gdwFXxx9g03KF7Gh4pQZPANXOM/s1600-h/DSC02128.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273245198329390066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEWOg6p8HV-yWxX4CrwEnQXVWzxdoa1xS3Z8-VTJ3h_HHJFdCIT_YwfsB_JdVel3k4yNICjIdrHjFJztMvY0tg6TuoutNTUNngsgzXvLFEqNffxyqm8gdwFXxx9g03KF7Gh4pQZPANXOM/s320/DSC02128.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaAP2UIf3fdUjb4uTxnrJ6j1LXfJPEQ3R3VyyBuU5bR6EKA2LvXoIY_XUB_k_fTapDDbTFVz4x3gp0iN54Z3uD2ANmnRyOgB3MkczdLFsZ0v-0LGEqV68CJOxAKF2nqRhtoMNvWcGpdhs/s1600-h/DSC02129.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244896901773778" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaAP2UIf3fdUjb4uTxnrJ6j1LXfJPEQ3R3VyyBuU5bR6EKA2LvXoIY_XUB_k_fTapDDbTFVz4x3gp0iN54Z3uD2ANmnRyOgB3MkczdLFsZ0v-0LGEqV68CJOxAKF2nqRhtoMNvWcGpdhs/s320/DSC02129.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgenCUcR5rrTPtSV8zAxib3QVoRqTG7WejAkSC8xJempsrN6UgeuK-Nnaw0xObe7i6fvt4fyugFg46fS956zweFduKw-6gLlYTVenZ36NQuocOczJBRZC4x9R9xuHiJhSBD6y_pdVLLdr4/s1600-h/DSC02130.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244892376247698" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgenCUcR5rrTPtSV8zAxib3QVoRqTG7WejAkSC8xJempsrN6UgeuK-Nnaw0xObe7i6fvt4fyugFg46fS956zweFduKw-6gLlYTVenZ36NQuocOczJBRZC4x9R9xuHiJhSBD6y_pdVLLdr4/s320/DSC02130.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTqGJxhyphenhyphenGCiSZd9H8CcNCSE5-pzefX_QoCSWcKj6Z6PD4_t_7XqX2B7iyHk2cuD35Zl_Ss-c6NmLrTvDeUKAXf3SJiuoaBRim1BcQwQbq6DgWQaF78Yt2ihvKG13wc_suElDr0oAwHdQ4/s1600-h/DSC02131.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244892597622370" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTqGJxhyphenhyphenGCiSZd9H8CcNCSE5-pzefX_QoCSWcKj6Z6PD4_t_7XqX2B7iyHk2cuD35Zl_Ss-c6NmLrTvDeUKAXf3SJiuoaBRim1BcQwQbq6DgWQaF78Yt2ihvKG13wc_suElDr0oAwHdQ4/s320/DSC02131.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdLZ9-cQuoU0Y_PVxNrjtludZgh6b5OhMr5J2RYKk_BfBFvaqrLolFS7YA2jmKxIJCY8huiLhpQENXKMI_Z3FPC4_NN3IOX6lqd_CUCGnzS5YfcAnHvCYIwVuCH2m8OM8JmFQA9yIyHac/s1600-h/DSC02136.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244565327507490" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdLZ9-cQuoU0Y_PVxNrjtludZgh6b5OhMr5J2RYKk_BfBFvaqrLolFS7YA2jmKxIJCY8huiLhpQENXKMI_Z3FPC4_NN3IOX6lqd_CUCGnzS5YfcAnHvCYIwVuCH2m8OM8JmFQA9yIyHac/s320/DSC02136.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>'Australia': A love story steeped in kitsch, and sincerity<br /></strong>By Manohla Dargis<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />Baz Luhrmann's continent-size epic, "Australia," isn't the greatest story ever it's several dozen of the greatest stories ever told, "The African Queen," "Gone With the Wind" and "Once Upon a Time in the West" included. A pastiche of genres and references wrapped up though, more often than not, whipped up into one demented and generally diverting horse-galloping, cattle-stampeding, camera-swooping, music-swelling, mood-altering widescreen package, this creation story about modern Australia is a testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion.<br />Luhrmann's use of culturally degraded forms both here and in earlier films like "Moulin Rouge" doesn't register as either a conceptual strategy or a cynical commercial ploy or some combination of the two, as it can with art world jesters like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, who have appropriated kitsch as a (more or less) legitimate postmodern strategy. Instead it feels feeling being paramount in all of Luhrmann's films like a sincere cry from the swelling, throbbing heart, a true expression of self. And while that self and its gaudy work may be stitched together from the bits and pieces of pop culture the son of a movie-theater owner, Luhrmann grew up worshiping at the altar of Hollywood they are also wholly sincere.<br />Sincere, if also sometimes confused and confusing: though there is no denying the scope and towering ambition of "Australia," which was largely shot on location in the outback, it can be difficult to gauge Luhrmann's intentions, or rather his level of self-awareness. The film begins with some text that scrolls importantly across the screen, immediately setting the uncertain tone with some (serious?) twaddle about Australia as a land of "adventure and romance." Before you have a chance to harrumph indignantly about the oppression of the Aborigines (or sneer at the country's early imported criminal population), the text has skipped to the topic of "the stolen generations," the children of indigenous peoples who, from the 19th century well into the 20th, were forcibly separated from their cultures by white Australians in the name of God and civilization.<br />But no worries! Though "Australia" is narrated by a young boy of mixed race, Nullah (the newcomer Brandon Walters), the illegitimate son of an Aboriginal mother and a white father, who is trying to escape the authorities, and while it opens in 1939, shortly before World War II blasted Australian shores, the film isn't a bummer. Like every other weighty or would-be weighty moment that passes through Luhrmann's soft-filtering lens a man being trampled to death by rampaging cattle or a city being annihilated by bombing Japanese warplanes the calamities of history are merely colorful grist for his main interest, the romance between a wilted English rose, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), and an itinerant Australian cattleman, the Drover (Hugh Jackman).<br />The lady and the tramp meet soon after she lands in Australia to track down her cattleman husband, whose early murder sets all the narrative pieces in place. Initially intent on selling her property, including 1,500 head of cattle, Sarah soon transforms into a frontierswoman, seduced by Nullah's smile and the majestic valleys and peaks of both the land and of the Drover's musculature. Although Kidman and Jackman are initially riffing on Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart's prickly courtship in "The African Queen" later, as they heat up, they slip into a sexier Scarlett-and-Rhett dynamic only Kidman really embraces the more comic and potentially embarrassing aspects of her role, giving herself over to Luhrmann and his occasionally cruel camera with a pronounced lack of vanity.<br />Though looking bad (or at least less than perfect) on camera is a particular form of vanity for actors, Kidman has in recent years generally erred on the side of physical perfection, sometimes to the detriment of her performances. But she's wonderfully and fully expressive here, from wince-worthy start to heartbreaking finish, whether she's wrinkling her nose in mock disgust or rushing across a dusty field, her arms pumping so wildly that it's a wonder well water doesn't spring from her mouth. It's a ludicrous role not long after priming her pump, the barren widow turns into a veritable fertility goddess but she rides Sarah's and the story's ups and downs with ease. Jackman gives the movie oomph; Kidman gives it a performance.<br />More than anything else in the film, Nullah included, Kidman tethers "Australia" to the world of human feeling and brings Luhrmann's outrageous flights of fancy down to earth. That may not be where he prefers to make movies, but it's a necessary place for even a fantasist to visit. Although many of his Western contemporaries like to root around in down-and-dirty realism, Luhrmann maintains a full-throttle commitment to cinematic illusion and what he characterizes as the "heightened artifice" of his so-called Red Curtain trilogy, "Strictly Ballroom," "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" and "Moulin Rouge." You may not always see the people for the production design in these, but when you do as in "Romeo + Juliet" and sometimes here they spring forth from their fantastical milieus like fists.<br />A maximalist, Luhrmann doesn't simply want to rouse your laughter and tears: he wants to rouse you out of a sensory-overloaded stupor with jolts of passion and fabulous visions. That may make him sound a wee bit Brechtian, but he's really just an old-fashioned movie man, the kind who never lets good taste get in the way of rip-roaring entertainment. The usual line about kitsch is that it's an affront, a cheapening of the culture, a danger. "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession," Milan Kundera wrote. "The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch."<br />True, but it doesn't make the second tear any less wet.<br />"Australia" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some bloody violence, many stampeding hooves.<br />AUSTRALIA<br />Opens on Wednesday nationwide.<br />Directed by Baz Luhrmann; written by Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan; director of photography, Mandy Walker; edited by Dody Dorn and Michael McCusker; music by David Hirschfelder; production designer, Catherine Martin; produced by Luhrmann, G. Mac Brown and Catherine Knapman; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.<br />WITH: Nicole Kidman (Lady Sarah Ashley), Hugh Jackman (the Drover), David Wenham (Neil Fletcher), Bryan Brown (King Carney), Jack Thompson (Kipling Flynn), David Gulpilil (King George) and Brandon Walters (Nullah).</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/arts/26aust.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/arts/26aust.php</a></div><div> </div><div>**************</div><div> </div><div>Australia to let doctor with disabled son stay<br />By Meraiah Foley<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />SYDNEY: A German doctor whose family was twice denied permanent residency in Australia because his son has Down syndrome has been allowed to stay after the immigration minister intervened on his behalf.<br />Bernhard Moeller moved to Australia with his wife and three children nearly three years ago when he was hired to work as a specialist at a rural hospital in the southern state of Victoria.<br />The family decided to apply for permanent residency, but its application was rejected earlier this month because Moeller's 13-year-old son, Lukas, has Down syndrome.<br />Australia has a longstanding policy of weighing medical conditions in its residency decisions. Immigration law stipulates that any applicant who is deemed to have a condition that would incur significant costs to the state-run health care system will be rejected.<br />The Moellers appealed the ruling to the Migration Review Tribunal, the appellate court of the Immigration Department, but it upheld the decision. As a final resort, the family took their case to the federal immigration minister, Senator Chris Evans. The immigration minister has the power to overturn decisions by the department if he deems there are special circumstances.<br />"I received a request this morning from Dr. Moeller to intervene, and I have granted permanent visas," Evans told Parliament on Wednesday, according to the national broadcaster. "As minister, I can take into account all the circumstances, and it was clear to me Dr. Moeller was making a very valuable contribution to their local community."<br />Moeller told local media the decision was "a great relief" and called on Australia to make its immigration rules more flexible.<br />The case involving the Moellers provoked outrage in Australia, where doctors serving rural areas are in short supply. International disability rights groups also expressed anger, calling the decision discriminatory.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/asia/doctor.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/asia/doctor.php</a></div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiQrLFfemJfSGiLqnrdFhp76mNcAj-2lIPqmKISsJ2uUlKRpZVmP72qUEuSqqqzBoFprCKFU-P_Hi5Pxb_oU1H44f7OxG9bDNklP1WmSLfDrfrEP8ILTceFkv4_KouzmT6oMVg8t10H0Q/s1600-h/DSC02137.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244563571759074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiQrLFfemJfSGiLqnrdFhp76mNcAj-2lIPqmKISsJ2uUlKRpZVmP72qUEuSqqqzBoFprCKFU-P_Hi5Pxb_oU1H44f7OxG9bDNklP1WmSLfDrfrEP8ILTceFkv4_KouzmT6oMVg8t10H0Q/s320/DSC02137.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFoOwzotI7cHoENet_1TvT12N2EbH9Fo-4cXETyrJwtt7ONSr5OqNMLqwQaC-AMmNN3ie1kYDbCcJ8rzW76bsiVGmNcpJw7slmV4i0yrOrlqQs9XWMuHU3pdmoAvNmS0QSCzGpoTXsE7g/s1600-h/DSC02138.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244563210639330" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFoOwzotI7cHoENet_1TvT12N2EbH9Fo-4cXETyrJwtt7ONSr5OqNMLqwQaC-AMmNN3ie1kYDbCcJ8rzW76bsiVGmNcpJw7slmV4i0yrOrlqQs9XWMuHU3pdmoAvNmS0QSCzGpoTXsE7g/s320/DSC02138.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRGTIXZZj7wrG-OyNAcLKnMYbm5VesWzyWKisIuRaxPY3a4J5sDpfx-KMOnlbyUe5y5dmt-EHfzKeSVpd-xQDt75_ZE4bxP_9Bb8CMADlJ64QGDkjYqCkc0LcEnpXr9twPiWjrl-Dau0g/s1600-h/DSC02139.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244284289269234" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRGTIXZZj7wrG-OyNAcLKnMYbm5VesWzyWKisIuRaxPY3a4J5sDpfx-KMOnlbyUe5y5dmt-EHfzKeSVpd-xQDt75_ZE4bxP_9Bb8CMADlJ64QGDkjYqCkc0LcEnpXr9twPiWjrl-Dau0g/s320/DSC02139.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiicTdxREGQZ-eHr_V1NUqKrCOoap4PI6fkfwogFV_YFQZo2H1XWO2wLDpb14WdEDtFQj22s-B80Li7i97GkD-gRIto17qQVs-J6ZyyBTmRNEU8UELW73SE5LnzUN7ek7b53ZYFMrYSJZQ/s1600-h/DSC02140.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244278100680962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiicTdxREGQZ-eHr_V1NUqKrCOoap4PI6fkfwogFV_YFQZo2H1XWO2wLDpb14WdEDtFQj22s-B80Li7i97GkD-gRIto17qQVs-J6ZyyBTmRNEU8UELW73SE5LnzUN7ek7b53ZYFMrYSJZQ/s320/DSC02140.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div> </div><div><strong>EDITORIAL</strong></div><div><strong>Eight years is more than enough</strong><br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />As the sun sets on the Bush administration, the survival rite known as burrowing is under way. Burrowing is when favored political appointees are transformed into civil servants and granted instant tenure on the federal payroll.<br />There is, of course, nothing new in this cynical practice. Dozens of political loyalists were burrowed in the final months of the Clinton administration. But the score of Bush burrowers who have so far come to light bring with them the worst pro-industry, anti-regulatory biases of this administration.<br />At the Interior Department, six senior managers were burrowed as a package. One of the protected appointees was earlier criticized by the agency's inspector general for overriding career experts in the field to deliver a posh grazing agreement to a Wyoming rancher. Another has survived in a management position affording clout to continue the scandalous mining industry bias of the Bush years.<br />As a candidate, Barack Obama appealed to demoralized federal workers, writing campaign letters promising to reverse many of the Bush administration's worst practices. Obama went on record for more mine-safety workers, tougher regulation of workplace safety, an end to censorship of research by government scientists and a rollback of the Bush administration's outsourcing to favored private contractors.<br />The promises extend to such trouble spots as staff shortages that have created a backlog in Social Security disability claims, and the push to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency's library system. Obama also took care to warn that some agencies may face pruning because of merit or fiscal pressures.<br />It's encouraging that the president-elect recognizes that to make the changes he's promising - and deliver a government that will protect and help its citizens - he will need energized, rather than alienated, federal workers. His aides will have to circumvent or dump any Bush burrowers intent on sabotaging that effort.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edbush.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edbush.php</a></div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div><strong>Blackberry vs. the bubble<br /></strong>Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />American presidents have profound influence from Washington to Timbuktu, so it would be ironic if the next one lacks the basic tools that even minimally tech-savvy people now use to keep up with the world. Yet such is the fate of Barack Obama, who was the most wired presidential candidate ever but is expected to give up his beloved BlackBerry come Jan. 20.<br />The alternative - letting White House insiders control the flow of information to the president - didn't work out so well during the current administration. Then again, Obama may have practical reasons to avoid e-mail, regardless of the device. Much of his correspondence, after all, will become public record.<br />Moreover, by staying off the Internet altogether, Obama would immunize himself against information overload, perhaps the greatest productivity-killer of our age. Most of us can waste hours just on Web sites related to our jobs. Similarly, the new president could wear out his thumbs Googling missile systems and public health threats.<br />The possibility that Obama will drop off the grid should give other CrackBerry addicts cause to reflect. Is it really a necessity to be reachable, and to reach others, at all times? Or is it vanity? Or is it merely a bad habit? Perhaps 24-7 connectedness, like skinny ties, will keep coming in and going out of style. People with cell phones clipped to their belts once looked like early adopters; now they evoke sympathy, as if sentenced to the corporate version of an electronic-monitoring ankle bracelet.<br />By giving up his BlackBerry, Obama may only isolate himself within the White House bubble. Or maybe his example will persuade others to put down their handhelds and pay attention to the people around them.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edblackberry.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edblackberry.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*************</div><div><strong>COLUMNIST</strong></div><div><strong>Roger Cohen: A command of the law<br /></strong>Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />NEW YORK: It's Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for many things right now, despite the stock market, and first among them is the fact that the next U.S. commander-in-chief is a constitutional law expert and former law professor.<br />Before I get to why, allow me to add two other reasons for thankfulness. The first is that Barack Obama is a man of sufficient self-confidence to entrust the critical job of Secretary of State to his former rival, Hillary Clinton. She has the strength and focus to produce results.<br />The second is that he's a man of sufficient good sense to retain the remarkable Robert Gates as Defense Secretary.<br />President Bush had one overriding criterion in choosing his inner circle: loyalty. The result was nobody would pull the plug on stupidity. Obama wants the kind of competence and brainpower that challenge him. The God-gut decision-making of The Decider got us in this mess. Getting out of it will require an Oval Office where smart dissent is prized.<br />But back to the law, which is what defines the United States, for it is a nation of laws. Or was until Bush, in the aftermath of 9/11, unfurled what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called "the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history."<br />There is no need to rehash here the whole sordid history of the Bush administration's work on Vice President Dick Cheney's "dark side": the "enhanced" interrogation techniques in "black sites" outside the United States justified by invocation of a "New Paradigm" that rendered the Geneva Conventions "quaint."<br />When governments veer onto the dark side, language always goes murky. Direct speech makes dirty deeds too clear. A new paradigm sounds bland enough. What it meant was trashing habeas corpus.<br />The facts speak for themselves. This month, almost seven years after detainees began arriving at Guantánamo Bay on Jan. 11, 2002, a verdict was handed down in the first hearing on the government's evidence for holding so-called "unlawful enemy combatants" at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.<br />Yes, this was the first hearing in a habeas corpus case, so long has the legal battle been to get to this point, and so stubborn has the administration been in seeking to keep Guantánamo detainees out of reach of civilian courts.<br />Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in Washington ruled that five Algerian men had been unlawfully held at Guanatánamo and ordered their release. He said, "Seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer to a question so important is, in my judgment, more than plenty."<br />Of the 770 detainees grabbed here and there and flown to Guantánamo, only 23 have ever been charged with a crime. Of the more than 500 so far released, many traumatized by those "enhanced" techniques, not one has received an apology or compensation for their season in hell.<br />What they got on release was a single piece of paper from the U.S. government. A U.S. official met one of the dozens of Afghans now released from Guantánamo and was so appalled by this document that he forwarded me a copy.<br />Dated Oct. 7, 2006, it reads as follows:<br />"An Administrative Review Board has reviewed the information about you that was talked about at the meeting on 02 December 2005 and the deciding official in the United States has made a decision about what will happen to you. You will be sent to the country of Afghanistan. Your departure will occur as soon as possible."<br />That's it, the one and only record on paper of protracted U.S. incarceration: three sentences for four years of a young Afghan's life, written in language Orwell would have recognized.<br />We have "the deciding official," not an officer, or a judge. We have "the information about you," not allegations, or accusations, let alone charges. We have "a decision about what will happen to you," not a judgment, ruling or verdict. This is the lexicon of totalitarianism. It is acutely embarrassing to the United States.<br />That is why I am thankful above all that the next U.S. commander-in-chief is a constitutional lawyer. Nothing has been more damaging to the United States than debasing the legal principles at the heart of the American idea.<br />As well as closing Guantánamo, Obama should set up an independent commission to investigate what happened there, as suggested in a fine recent report, "Guantánamo and its Aftermath," from the University of California, Berkeley. Only then will "deciding officials" become identifiable human beings who can, if necessary be judged.<br />Obama should also ensure that former detainees receive an apology and compensation. An American official showing up, envelope in hand, at some dusty Afghan compound, and delivering U.S. contrition and cash to a man whose life has been ravaged by U.S. abuse will in the long term make the United States safer.<br />Give thanks on this day for the law. It's what stands between the shining city on a hill and the dark side.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edcohen.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edcohen.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Getting right with Israel<br /></strong>By Aaron David Miller<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />Of all the foreign policy issues confronting President Barack Obama, one of the most challenging will be how to deal with Israel. Will the new president maintain a special relationship with Israel (which serves American interests) or permit that relationship to continue to be exclusive (which doesn't)?<br />The answer may well determine how successful the United States will be in Arab-Israeli peacemaking and in protecting its interests in the Middle East.<br />America has a special relationship with the state of Israel which is not likely to change. Sixty years on, that bond remains more resilient than ever, nurtured by a powerful pro-Israeli community that has made Israel a survival issue.<br />Israel figures prominently in the mind of America, in its politics, culture and foreign policy. For millions of Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, a strong tie with Israel, driven by shared values, sympathy for Jewish victims of historic anti-Semitism and support for Israel's perilous security predicament, has become an integral part of the American story.<br />But President Obama will inherit more than just a special relationship that is good for American interests and values. He will also inherit an exclusive relationship with Israel that is not.<br />Over the past 16 years (eight under Bill Clinton and eight under George W. Bush), we have, perhaps with the best of intentions, allowed our relationship with Israel to get out of whack and out of balance. This has hurt America credibility, particularly in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, and Israeli interests.<br />Several factors drive this exclusiveness. First is our tendency to let the Israelis have too much influence over our tactics and strategy when it comes to Arab-Israeli peacemaking. What I call the "Jewish lobby of one" - the impact that a compelling Israeli prime minister can have on an American president - can be decisive.<br />Whether it was Ehud Barak's success in convincing Clinton to go for a make-or-break Camp David summit or Ariel Sharon's campaign to persuade Bush to do the road map his way, we seem to be unable to say no to bad Israeli ideas.<br />Close coordination with Israelis on matters vital to their security is one thing. Allowing the Israelis to hijack American peacemaking and undermine our credibility is another matter. Far too often we end up being Israel's lawyer and not an advocate for both sides in a negotiation.<br />The other element in our exclusive relationship is our refusal to call the Israelis on behavior that undermines the very negotiating process we're trying to promote. Actually we're an equal opportunity employer on this one since over the years we've not been tough enough with the other side - Palestinians and Syrians - either.<br />Still, on settlement activity, bypass roads or land confiscation, we've given the Israelis a pass now for at least 16 years, imposed no accountability or transparency on policies that have nothing to do with Israeli security needs.<br />That we don't want to sanction the Israelis is understandable; they're a close ally. But we should make it unmistakably clear that we won't lend our authority or auspices to any peacemaking process in which Israeli or Palestinian behavior undermines it and destroys American credibility at the same time.<br />If Obama wants to have any chance of succeeding in Arab-Israeli diplomacy, he needs to get right with Israel. He needs to reassure Israel, a small country living in a dangerous neighborhood. But he also needs to be tough and tenacious in guarding America's role as an independent and fair mediator.<br />No one will plant a tree in his honor if he succeeds in brokering a peace agreement. Just ask Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter or James Baker. But he'll have done something quite remarkable for America - and in the process, despite the moans, for Israel as well.<br />Aaron David Miller advised Democratic and Republican U.S. secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations. He is currently a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edmiller.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/opinion/edmiller.php</a></div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div><strong>U.S. needs new China plan, former commander says<br /></strong>By Bryan BenderThe Boston Globe<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />WASHINGTON: In 2005, the top U.S. military commander in the Pacific confronted Pentagon hawks who insisted that he prepare for a future war with China, warning the defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, that the United States was headed for disaster if it insisted on confronting the Chinese militarily.<br />"There were people who warned me that you'd better get ready for the shoot 'em up here, because sooner or later we're going be at war with China," recalled the commander, William Fallon, a retired navy admiral. "I don't think that's where we want to go. And so I set about challenging all the assumptions."<br />In his first extensive interview since resigning from the navy this year, Fallon said that the United States desperately needed to come up with a strategy for dealing peacefully with a rising China.<br />Fallon, currently a fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies, is well known for his differences with the Bush administration, especially over Iran policy. He resigned unexpectedly in March as chief of the U.S. Central Command - responsible for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - after publicly voicing criticism over its refusal to engage diplomatically with Iran. An Esquire magazine profile of Fallon in March set off the media firestorm leading to his resignation.<br />But it is clear that Fallon clashed with top Bush administration officials bent on using U.S. military might over other levers of power, such as diplomacy and economic cooperation, several years before he took command of U.S. forces in the Middle East in March 2007.<br />In an interview Monday, Fallon recalled that after he became chief of the U.S. Pacific Command in 2005, "I came back here about once a month and sat down with Secretary Rumsfeld. I'd walk through what I was thinking, why I was thinking that way. There were people who didn't like that."<br />U.S.-China relations had soured in 2005 after the Pentagon issued a high-profile report highlighting a growing threat from China, and after Rumsfeld publicly rebuked China's military buildup in a speech in Singapore.<br />Describing the message he brought back from the region at the time, Fallon said he told his superiors: "What are the priorities, guys? Do you want to have a war? We can probably have one. But is that what you really want? Is that really in our interest? Because I don't think so."<br />The friction with some of his political bosses in Washington continued when Fallon, a former navy pilot, was picked by Rumsfeld's successor, Robert Gates, to run Central Command in 2007, just as the "surge" of additional U.S. combat forces was getting under way to try to quell skyrocketing violence, much of it said to be the fault of neighboring Iran.<br />Fallon said he quickly realized that dealing with Iraq's neighbors, including Iran and Syria, would be critical to bringing long-term security to Iraq - not a popular position in the Bush administration.<br />Fallon said that the Esquire article was "unfortunate."<br />"The story came out, and it was obviously a political attack on the president and used me to put the president in a very awkward position," he said. "The rest of the news hounds jumped all over it, and it became a free-for-all."<br />Looking ahead, Fallon said he believes the war in Iraq "is essentially over."<br />"We have some combat activity still ongoing occasionally up in the Mosul area, but other than that it's pretty much over and been over," he said.<br />But the war in Afghanistan, though showing some progress in recent months as a result of increased cooperation with neighboring Pakistan, is "probably a bigger challenge than Iraq," Fallon said.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/asia/fallon.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/asia/fallon.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>***************</div><div><strong>Obama recalls fondness for Indonesian food as a child</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />JAKARTA: U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Jakarta, told Indonesia's leader he would like to visit the Southeast Asian nation again and recalled a taste for local food.<br />Obama's remarks were recounted by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono after a six-inute phone call between the two leaders.<br />"He greeted me with 'apa kabar, Bapak Presiden' (How are you Mr. President) in fluent Indonesian," Yudhoyono was quoted as saying by the Koran Tempo daily.<br />Yudhoyono has just returned from a trip to the United States and South America, where he attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC).<br />"When I invited him to come to Jakarta during the APEC meeting in Singapore next year, he said coming to Indonesia is very important," Yudhoyono said.<br />The Indonesian president said that Obama also said that besides forging greater cooperation between the two nations, a visit would give him a chance to try local food again including meatball soup, nasi goreng and rambutan, the paper reported.<br />Nasi goreng is a fried rice dish popular in Indonesia, while rambutans are a tropical fruit with a sweet translucent flesh.<br />Obama, who will be sworn in as the 44th U.S. president in January spent four years in Indonesia after his American mother married Muslim Indonesian Lolo Soetoro following the end of her marriage to Obama's Kenyan father.<br />Indonesians have followed Obama's political fortunes closely and the local media has been full of stories on his old school, the house he lived in, and the hopes of people in the world's fourth-most populous nation.<br />(Reporting by Olivia Rondonuwu; Editing by Ed Davies)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDONESIA-USA.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDONESIA-USA.php</a></div><div> </div><div>******************</div><div><strong>Iran reports rocket launch amid nuclear tension</strong><br />Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />TEHRAN: Iran has successfully launched a rocket called "Kavosh 2," Iran's state media reported on Wednesday, displaying the Islamic state's advances in ballistics at a time when the West is worried about its nuclear ambitions.<br />The launch follows an announcement earlier this month that Iran had test-fired a new generation of surface-to-surface missile, saying the Islamic Republic was ready to defend itself against any attacker.<br />Tensions between Iran and Israel have been running high in recent months amid speculation of possible U.S. or Israeli strikes against Tehran's nuclear facilities, which the West suspects form part of a covert weapons program.<br />Tehran insists its nuclear work is aimed at generating electricity to meet Iran's booming demand.<br />State television did not give any further details about "Kavosh 2," which means "Explorer 2," saying details about the home-made rocket will be announced later. "The rocket was launched to register and send correct environmental data and (to test) separation of the engine from the body," state radio said.<br />The long-range ballistic technology used to put satellites into space can also be used for launching weapons.<br />Iran caused international concern in February by testing a domestically made Explorer 1 rocket as part of its satellite programme. Tehran said it needed two more similar tests before putting a domestically made satellite into orbit.<br />The United States, the Islamic Republic's arch foe, called the February rocket test "unfortunate" and said it would only further isolate Tehran from the international community.<br />On August 17, Iran said it had put a dummy satellite into orbit on a domestically made rocket for the first time. U.S. officials said the attempted launch was a failure.<br />Western experts say Iran rarely gives enough details for them to determine the extent of its technological advances, and much Iranian technology consists of modifications of equipment supplied by China, North Korea and others.<br />(Writing by Parisa Hafezi)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-ROCKET.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-ROCKET.php</a></div><div> </div><div>****************</div><div><strong>3 Iranian militia members accused of spying for Israel</strong><br />By Nazila Fathi<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />TEHRAN: Iran has broken a spy ring working for the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, and will seek the death penalty for three suspects in custody, the Iranian prosecutor general announced.<br />The prosecutor general, Saeed Mortazavi, said Tuesday that the suspects, members of Baseej, Iran's volunteer militia, were expected to get close to senior Revolutionary Guard members so they could "assassinate military scientists and blow up strategic military and missile facilities."<br />At a news conference covered by the semiofficial Fars news agency, Mortazavi said they would be tried within a month, and, if convicted of "moharebeh," or crimes against Islam and the state, they would be sentenced to death. Conviction on lesser charges could mean 10 years in prison, he said.<br />Mortazavi said the suspects had been trained in 21 sessions to carry out assassinations, plant bombs, drive cars and motorcycles professionally and use special cameras, computers and satellite equipment. Three additional suspects are under surveillance, he said.<br />The leader of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mohammad Ali Jafari, said Monday that its intelligence bureau had detected the spy ring.<br />Mortazavi said Tuesday that the inquiry had started six months earlier.<br />He said evidence was found on the suspects' laptops and satellite phones. "They also had advanced and sophisticated digital cameras for taking still shots and videos," Fars quoted him as saying.<br />Assessing the strength of the government's case is difficult. The Israeli government has declined to comment on it, but Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently hinted at intelligence achievements, without elaborating. Mossad is widely considered one of the world's most effective intelligence organizations, but as such, its activities are secret.<br />Iran's announcement was made amid severe tension between Israel and Iran, which does not recognize Israel and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is hostile to it.<br />Israel, which has a nuclear arsenal, has said it is convinced that Iran will soon be able to make nuclear weapons.<br />Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear site in 1981 and what it suspected was a Syrian nuclear site in 2007. In June, Israel conducted a major military exercise that U.S. officials said appeared to have been a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.<br />Last week, Iran executed Ali Ashtari, who had been convicted of spying for Israel, and warned that its war with Israel had become "more serious."<br />Israel has said military action to halt Iran's nuclear progress should be a last resort, and it has pressed for tougher international sanctions. But on Sunday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that a "defense establishment paper" to be presented to the cabinet next month identified "Iran's threat to Israel's survival" as its top concern. It called international cooperation the priority but said that, if other countries gave up, Israel must have a military option.<br />On Tuesday, the supreme religious leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, discussed "the danger of Israel" with the Lebanese president, Michel Suleiman.<br />Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/mideast/spy.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/26/mideast/spy.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*****************</div><div><strong>Israeli attorney-general considers charging Olmert<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />By Ari Rabinovitch<br />Israel's attorney-general said on Wednesday he was considering indicting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for fraud, bribery and tax evasion in a case over fake travel expenses that has already forced him to resign.<br />Olmert is serving as caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed after a February 10 election, but an indictment could increase pressure on him to leave office earlier.<br />The announcement by the Justice Ministry came after Olmert wrapped up a visit to Washington where he met President George W. Bush and held out hope for a last-minute peace deal with the Palestinians.<br />Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz told Olmert he was "considering bringing criminal charges regarding suspicions of various violations as part of the Rishon Tours Affair," a statement said.<br />Olmert's lawyers responded in a statement that the prime minister "totally rejects the suspicions against him" and they were confident he would not be charged.<br />An official in Olmert's office said he had no intention of stepping down before a new government was formed.<br />The Justice Ministry said the charges being considered stemmed from allegations that Olmert submitted duplicate bills to various Jewish organisations abroad and inflated travel costs while serving as Jerusalem mayor and in another cabinet post.<br />"Under Mr. Olmert's instruction and knowledge, the funding organisations were systematically shown false accounts," and Olmert collected $85,000 in profits he used to fund private trips for him and family members, the statement said.<br />Mazuz's statement, issued two months after police had recommended an indictment, said he offered Olmert the option of a hearing before deciding whether to charge him on four counts of bribery, fraud, false documentation and tax evasion.<br />Israeli media said the charges carry a maximum jail sentence of seven years.<br />Police have launched several corruption investigations into Olmert, who has denied any wrongdoing but resigned in September after his ruling Kadima party elected Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni as his successor.<br />An early national election was scheduled after Livni failed to form a new coalition last month.<br />Under Israeli law Olmert remains as caretaker until a new government is formed after the election. But analysts said he might be forced to step aside sooner, if he were charged before the election.<br />Olmert has also been questioned for allegedly accepting envelopes stuffed with cash from an American Jewish fundraiser and using a cabinet post to promote a friend's business interests.<br />(Additional reporting by Allyn Fisher-Ilan)<br />(Editing by Tim Pearce)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/africa/OUKWD-UK-ISRAEL-OLMERT.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/africa/OUKWD-UK-ISRAEL-OLMERT.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIDDs8ulEu4qD5a19LwC1hupDDSbkYabGvbjVQc54k48LITDLRqz76mDlZv9qpcfblheBfQHtyPXLqEFtu535ki6Jb0mzEpuQXyQbgcNNaBwVkndZ5uLAZxwWXMkasOIz4xU05ydnN4Eg/s1600-h/DSC02141.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244279924774002" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIDDs8ulEu4qD5a19LwC1hupDDSbkYabGvbjVQc54k48LITDLRqz76mDlZv9qpcfblheBfQHtyPXLqEFtu535ki6Jb0mzEpuQXyQbgcNNaBwVkndZ5uLAZxwWXMkasOIz4xU05ydnN4Eg/s320/DSC02141.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5fDJJbLALY8884CvcpTqgvuCTPZa7i-8egFXf48vjviOFIFnZvzLfheG6505oHficUAOVkD3mvdkMTHHohbtdB-0TN2j3H18BtnkKSi1FjB4udR_MqZrNnlQI9u8LJc6e8xGeg1sfw00/s1600-h/DSC02142.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244272642165042" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5fDJJbLALY8884CvcpTqgvuCTPZa7i-8egFXf48vjviOFIFnZvzLfheG6505oHficUAOVkD3mvdkMTHHohbtdB-0TN2j3H18BtnkKSi1FjB4udR_MqZrNnlQI9u8LJc6e8xGeg1sfw00/s320/DSC02142.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5E6-asveLcE_JSCJOMcyTB2X-DbxvrUFpCyu8hfD1ep50HK7NxiyzoDQRLRvjEqtJW9fyG0CW9g-zGn1-C6XtH3u8Y1neDSyZOy83GSzUnKQzyC_EkLvKN20CBx6oc341E_oIvT-p5nU/s1600-h/DSC02143.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244270447830258" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5E6-asveLcE_JSCJOMcyTB2X-DbxvrUFpCyu8hfD1ep50HK7NxiyzoDQRLRvjEqtJW9fyG0CW9g-zGn1-C6XtH3u8Y1neDSyZOy83GSzUnKQzyC_EkLvKN20CBx6oc341E_oIvT-p5nU/s320/DSC02143.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7ElYKomueRNFR7MjYHB8OtOcJbyDQwEPG0YUQYRrELgyRSvsptIlk37t3SZv7gaeM4xoDwUP9_g9QFf19HRYRAmc93kfCRPSUq_7URkKuwoRP6XwBNEdE__jSTmLlOXKd5aCiNjBsLyc/s1600-h/DSC02144.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273244002748090066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7ElYKomueRNFR7MjYHB8OtOcJbyDQwEPG0YUQYRrELgyRSvsptIlk37t3SZv7gaeM4xoDwUP9_g9QFf19HRYRAmc93kfCRPSUq_7URkKuwoRP6XwBNEdE__jSTmLlOXKd5aCiNjBsLyc/s320/DSC02144.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-iQJf5JffyHbRpCCvbno18b4_gNA7uAhLCQSTH1FPiTNLprqwMhXNjidCv440Mzp7tZ_H2Xvz1a6vtT9vypyLhYJRxFX-b0HEqcKewE67IOIRy-QtgT8qdcqckuhE_aF7zN2r0801AU8/s1600-h/DSC02145.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243996264680066" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-iQJf5JffyHbRpCCvbno18b4_gNA7uAhLCQSTH1FPiTNLprqwMhXNjidCv440Mzp7tZ_H2Xvz1a6vtT9vypyLhYJRxFX-b0HEqcKewE67IOIRy-QtgT8qdcqckuhE_aF7zN2r0801AU8/s320/DSC02145.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4MkShVeiC98iU_2Yyg2ccvt54Ztl1gurjjxlF-pRjfxuov1TlUYVO4R77RorKrKevndtsQchu5PJsB_r9T0Ipb0GUdDJNQZITnsZTWCxqzuaKrvdxL7Zynm4oz2g-cC64xh-Nn0IU7ew/s1600-h/DSC02146.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243988949766882" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4MkShVeiC98iU_2Yyg2ccvt54Ztl1gurjjxlF-pRjfxuov1TlUYVO4R77RorKrKevndtsQchu5PJsB_r9T0Ipb0GUdDJNQZITnsZTWCxqzuaKrvdxL7Zynm4oz2g-cC64xh-Nn0IU7ew/s320/DSC02146.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ5-LJTP5kZdz4QDZzsFgOOWYph9ijx8O8OqAOqUmj9B3EdN_01ldKoEHkls-pTOURsW963CNk6GGaAhARqHD4dJ5IZ-Li9YfVh4N6v5nN-gzyhfvFP5wWU5dCLa3uHBD3OgaeTlaIq5Y/s1600-h/DSC02148.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243985425597330" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ5-LJTP5kZdz4QDZzsFgOOWYph9ijx8O8OqAOqUmj9B3EdN_01ldKoEHkls-pTOURsW963CNk6GGaAhARqHD4dJ5IZ-Li9YfVh4N6v5nN-gzyhfvFP5wWU5dCLa3uHBD3OgaeTlaIq5Y/s320/DSC02148.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUatPE-TxNOrNYMYSwabo5JhX36m4RZ3ocqrgY0CX1RVSwssy_seFopJh_F9hUCwMCP-Zwd4aVxMFeHEB1EUXdSTLOdYMGSb-MGeI9gkv91heG6PXm5YfLuQpMV6BdeGmzBS_Xdkrg3TE/s1600-h/DSC02150.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243986727584882" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUatPE-TxNOrNYMYSwabo5JhX36m4RZ3ocqrgY0CX1RVSwssy_seFopJh_F9hUCwMCP-Zwd4aVxMFeHEB1EUXdSTLOdYMGSb-MGeI9gkv91heG6PXm5YfLuQpMV6BdeGmzBS_Xdkrg3TE/s320/DSC02150.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLLOu7qsbPRWTdQy_ohqcc5WMZVvP2sVNbRlX5KH7l-Pv6WNZtGriXfKxFTY3wjdXyuws3BR1Z2SLg6bXZIi07ypasM2CB6laZAhmvMw69umX-Z-CDSBshnycLoU6tO8vnQZsIIXciN4c/s1600-h/DSC02151.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243764052158530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLLOu7qsbPRWTdQy_ohqcc5WMZVvP2sVNbRlX5KH7l-Pv6WNZtGriXfKxFTY3wjdXyuws3BR1Z2SLg6bXZIi07ypasM2CB6laZAhmvMw69umX-Z-CDSBshnycLoU6tO8vnQZsIIXciN4c/s320/DSC02151.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqCC6OutDXopFdAo7tjUSeFktJFo-FcRMxLa-jF4PZf9XxrZOF1gBDz6O5noSIHgrKibQGhLAZOqCHfOvDi4X88AHgJm966owEsohIeoZFoSu6R8gUxkG0kkcHAj3WiVU4JdnlUosCmj8/s1600-h/DSC02152.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243761326214354" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 197px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqCC6OutDXopFdAo7tjUSeFktJFo-FcRMxLa-jF4PZf9XxrZOF1gBDz6O5noSIHgrKibQGhLAZOqCHfOvDi4X88AHgJm966owEsohIeoZFoSu6R8gUxkG0kkcHAj3WiVU4JdnlUosCmj8/s320/DSC02152.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw0e-q8xtyx7W5WXyvKw6lpXI1r08c9XsHzzwaK02ROlYAxJWILzD99SYB70SRMSMkhEnvav1QccYbb4KopO_cEk09BjpyOk0JtYVo1HALGw4N0xR0oURRzQguDFcek-zoSUIyBV7JYfQ/s1600-h/DSC02153.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243759285886898" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw0e-q8xtyx7W5WXyvKw6lpXI1r08c9XsHzzwaK02ROlYAxJWILzD99SYB70SRMSMkhEnvav1QccYbb4KopO_cEk09BjpyOk0JtYVo1HALGw4N0xR0oURRzQguDFcek-zoSUIyBV7JYfQ/s320/DSC02153.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHXKRDVkuPLrFYY9EMlm833BI_htdOKgHncWRMTFUpeAmHIDT6BXCsjInJXmX1MbIJZawKz6RQ1v_hTE7TbBZpvSn6fvggeYX01DE2ebybBnNAMd3Kz06G8JIZSuAkMJd2hyhiag4VcQE/s1600-h/DSC02154.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243757834484162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHXKRDVkuPLrFYY9EMlm833BI_htdOKgHncWRMTFUpeAmHIDT6BXCsjInJXmX1MbIJZawKz6RQ1v_hTE7TbBZpvSn6fvggeYX01DE2ebybBnNAMd3Kz06G8JIZSuAkMJd2hyhiag4VcQE/s320/DSC02154.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYEuz7eAnMEgeavrZBs1jK_4VC6VJILEPu8CeBtiI388YFpLqKqZ0MnQZiAV9__P1JHE99BMc_8jKsr7BUY3lYrklRsABr_yZD-CiEvqswNMiKMsOIc10sCN5sQJQDW1b13K8Ybjx1KJY/s1600-h/DSC02155.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243754283842114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYEuz7eAnMEgeavrZBs1jK_4VC6VJILEPu8CeBtiI388YFpLqKqZ0MnQZiAV9__P1JHE99BMc_8jKsr7BUY3lYrklRsABr_yZD-CiEvqswNMiKMsOIc10sCN5sQJQDW1b13K8Ybjx1KJY/s320/DSC02155.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtYUlq1I8ffrgLgFGApO1DYKy3zZ1aFpR-WxMuJDhmG4ZBmbqszWP9cilZ3PYeXR2gbRFfX8SwrN-bgqcMUfJd-iLw5gdOr9A3XkO343V3W6OoFESNOyK55p-JRkUrs26vfBIFvziVuII/s1600-h/DSC02156.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243512053896882" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtYUlq1I8ffrgLgFGApO1DYKy3zZ1aFpR-WxMuJDhmG4ZBmbqszWP9cilZ3PYeXR2gbRFfX8SwrN-bgqcMUfJd-iLw5gdOr9A3XkO343V3W6OoFESNOyK55p-JRkUrs26vfBIFvziVuII/s320/DSC02156.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRTckfKEGDlzxtDfla08XL3ZoTmDBIuB6YFlpcwTwd54PN8YaaxjcYS3fVUzV3sbdJhcjW9ZqJvqwJGV7-amh5kQKHROXS9irSsuUwwEX-VBWKeBnE729Is5MM5e4j-OC5WDdxozkgNGo/s1600-h/DSC02157.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243510053571042" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRTckfKEGDlzxtDfla08XL3ZoTmDBIuB6YFlpcwTwd54PN8YaaxjcYS3fVUzV3sbdJhcjW9ZqJvqwJGV7-amh5kQKHROXS9irSsuUwwEX-VBWKeBnE729Is5MM5e4j-OC5WDdxozkgNGo/s320/DSC02157.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb2AUpz3zznscGSnBP6pv9Wu_uqbuvBmarcVQmGKCnI7Jg7_Xolh0TITuVk5i-wmWfxE59Sn92ELWAoJN1OGw8y082_0bzmBq01kT5LSDNRbvEjoDuw6odaDHjnlOWvcKoFNXpCUfnPAg/s1600-h/DSC02158.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243510911723602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb2AUpz3zznscGSnBP6pv9Wu_uqbuvBmarcVQmGKCnI7Jg7_Xolh0TITuVk5i-wmWfxE59Sn92ELWAoJN1OGw8y082_0bzmBq01kT5LSDNRbvEjoDuw6odaDHjnlOWvcKoFNXpCUfnPAg/s320/DSC02158.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFaFKO-wrauC2MFmRJ108X3QS5Wl82jnbnZBKbd9Kz07BUXlep-TxyiY8BXjP2TRRi011uW_OixRUKk7NlZjAr5GJrpFhKluCShnOeztDY7Bvwj5DF4sY44_HVHkmUwFnz4ZqwfifULtw/s1600-h/DSC02160.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243504338820082" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFaFKO-wrauC2MFmRJ108X3QS5Wl82jnbnZBKbd9Kz07BUXlep-TxyiY8BXjP2TRRi011uW_OixRUKk7NlZjAr5GJrpFhKluCShnOeztDY7Bvwj5DF4sY44_HVHkmUwFnz4ZqwfifULtw/s320/DSC02160.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG2AFnsXkNaIhFWgAj000evyoiQeMeFrcMsR3ohfjWgwoVJEceMc_2R8jWArQU0au021Tpx7po8Ithh2982xnzUrRsbHxDWVC5UhsOP1lMqsDlGCk5VWm-dWYud9BNH_S-Wuuy3IoHrVg/s1600-h/DSC02161.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243506134846034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG2AFnsXkNaIhFWgAj000evyoiQeMeFrcMsR3ohfjWgwoVJEceMc_2R8jWArQU0au021Tpx7po8Ithh2982xnzUrRsbHxDWVC5UhsOP1lMqsDlGCk5VWm-dWYud9BNH_S-Wuuy3IoHrVg/s320/DSC02161.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVm-Q_KrALMpIn7EU2CC0POEtt6o0WEJ7iJSvOiHQDDfAlfTks_q1vAxWFrEfIb25Yxib2B6SprrMVmCbzwgqt12ihFI7n5IwEYJy9s32yFCsKuyPgf_a7alN0TPUB3Mm0Ock18TAItQs/s1600-h/DSC02163.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243255125015826" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVm-Q_KrALMpIn7EU2CC0POEtt6o0WEJ7iJSvOiHQDDfAlfTks_q1vAxWFrEfIb25Yxib2B6SprrMVmCbzwgqt12ihFI7n5IwEYJy9s32yFCsKuyPgf_a7alN0TPUB3Mm0Ock18TAItQs/s320/DSC02163.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5NE77PPXyb7NLRs9T41g9rs9cN3AXy3t023wwQ3OOLFpBG2i-6_TWXNshvxYmuDofRvTCXYrYSozN1Imd8cGzot5OQ2okeqVLC_1QVy8c2aSMFdrMUH2w3dKvVAlQp2NEryaSUNCvf0E/s1600-h/DSC02164.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243250350994898" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5NE77PPXyb7NLRs9T41g9rs9cN3AXy3t023wwQ3OOLFpBG2i-6_TWXNshvxYmuDofRvTCXYrYSozN1Imd8cGzot5OQ2okeqVLC_1QVy8c2aSMFdrMUH2w3dKvVAlQp2NEryaSUNCvf0E/s320/DSC02164.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggH34Km9QC41ZX-DKA15aQXDbtcHio4xqv1JlwDh71yUEJ_ZwK9JmOSe8MTIjDT2BVa3bXlqdnyrTLZJMReLQNyfhYjbysju0nWD8ieZZmCglUMlRzGsCDWqbmNLDWU4LyVNt8m51n7OA/s1600-h/DSC02166.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243253502604898" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggH34Km9QC41ZX-DKA15aQXDbtcHio4xqv1JlwDh71yUEJ_ZwK9JmOSe8MTIjDT2BVa3bXlqdnyrTLZJMReLQNyfhYjbysju0nWD8ieZZmCglUMlRzGsCDWqbmNLDWU4LyVNt8m51n7OA/s320/DSC02166.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje8SezqkeOyowO9KDzaGgjywSlH-NUUtyXwx7sXrVVIoNGZooYn2xQ2T_8gudfjzizWIQToS_d2jaW2U1lOKoVQU7EqzkRm6QQaLUIYcbx99xye3_mGgTW5wL1jitC9s5rLrM-r1jx_gU/s1600-h/DSC02167.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243248186902530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 190px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje8SezqkeOyowO9KDzaGgjywSlH-NUUtyXwx7sXrVVIoNGZooYn2xQ2T_8gudfjzizWIQToS_d2jaW2U1lOKoVQU7EqzkRm6QQaLUIYcbx99xye3_mGgTW5wL1jitC9s5rLrM-r1jx_gU/s320/DSC02167.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAq6s90qZM2xXruUnoBrsZ3UEvBcN4vJmpokANgexE0ybw0nx2jm-Uy_iApbgtLT_xPZNkIjSIq_kuqYaurGfwTByFybFyTkMU0J7qOkA7GJPNiwdC_aBRQimKDmVpXfTdGrIFDd_XKk4/s1600-h/DSC02168.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273243246534894290" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 212px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAq6s90qZM2xXruUnoBrsZ3UEvBcN4vJmpokANgexE0ybw0nx2jm-Uy_iApbgtLT_xPZNkIjSIq_kuqYaurGfwTByFybFyTkMU0J7qOkA7GJPNiwdC_aBRQimKDmVpXfTdGrIFDd_XKk4/s320/DSC02168.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcyWsLRbuQkbMWB28gXJ6f5zlrAGZw-52VpEFVL4PeO22N36PCgcAL6Ud-TjDYGqft-CeItXsFD_DxFmPT1SwDgfejC4NPZbk3KQ6uaVhb4PTM8Xs7CBmiUNPLMnQ2jpJj2a3iXrgQxiQ/s1600-h/DSC02170.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273242990514334418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcyWsLRbuQkbMWB28gXJ6f5zlrAGZw-52VpEFVL4PeO22N36PCgcAL6Ud-TjDYGqft-CeItXsFD_DxFmPT1SwDgfejC4NPZbk3KQ6uaVhb4PTM8Xs7CBmiUNPLMnQ2jpJj2a3iXrgQxiQ/s320/DSC02170.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT8XyueM6aALo0KYpX8luEsnAg7j556EgaPi8K2GWarY-iTgNqncnN9CgPD20KlZvSh68Qyq0ZGGbgytzRdVWvE6QNArZ_LOywW0yypRwJpf8N8F4WEqQhyRB45yo_eiCNKg_ts0fQ1NA/s1600-h/DSC02171.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273242987249784738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT8XyueM6aALo0KYpX8luEsnAg7j556EgaPi8K2GWarY-iTgNqncnN9CgPD20KlZvSh68Qyq0ZGGbgytzRdVWvE6QNArZ_LOywW0yypRwJpf8N8F4WEqQhyRB45yo_eiCNKg_ts0fQ1NA/s320/DSC02171.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNj8JAfm-XGqYv60fTHLC1a4RbB5Auf1PlEOesGwQ-npLIgmPHAUx26BN7Ar0tCX2GHXVAVzWnyf5a_En9OyFn_EkRaV99nn_x9WkqMZgo3gCIrNEDVqFr6Y3Pbqnbv92xCQgc0GgXhyphenhypheng/s1600-h/DSC02172.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273242977617495058" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNj8JAfm-XGqYv60fTHLC1a4RbB5Auf1PlEOesGwQ-npLIgmPHAUx26BN7Ar0tCX2GHXVAVzWnyf5a_En9OyFn_EkRaV99nn_x9WkqMZgo3gCIrNEDVqFr6Y3Pbqnbv92xCQgc0GgXhyphenhypheng/s320/DSC02172.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfqW2IZ7ydGRJQ-BBT2-grJwLesFKZQrkodxlED_ilMDtjKn12VnXWxjVQRQxMYWesdmpSQmg_2F22pnI86nuQ0VK5-7qTH0qtLXrsK5t5hHGs41zQgsrlUOqfgXN-XG9q-c2nAa2RZKc/s1600-h/DSC02175.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273242978244144578" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfqW2IZ7ydGRJQ-BBT2-grJwLesFKZQrkodxlED_ilMDtjKn12VnXWxjVQRQxMYWesdmpSQmg_2F22pnI86nuQ0VK5-7qTH0qtLXrsK5t5hHGs41zQgsrlUOqfgXN-XG9q-c2nAa2RZKc/s320/DSC02175.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqVejy-tXuZy8v8GTMMazhc73RLNY0jEhzm7XzqROqi1_r37YUOaQi7idPf3vewoT1guIGouT7Mg2x_1yhd2pqJNyHSD-CHRrvyPyiRVjRCxSm6w2iA4e7PVUugfy1Q9CtY2IvbP3Xptg/s1600-h/DSC02176.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273242969009416658" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqVejy-tXuZy8v8GTMMazhc73RLNY0jEhzm7XzqROqi1_r37YUOaQi7idPf3vewoT1guIGouT7Mg2x_1yhd2pqJNyHSD-CHRrvyPyiRVjRCxSm6w2iA4e7PVUugfy1Q9CtY2IvbP3Xptg/s320/DSC02176.jpg" border="0" /></a> </div><div><strong>NZ coach Henry urges England to respect haka<br /></strong>Reuters<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />LONDON: New Zealand head coach Graham Henry has urged England to respect the pre-match haka before Saturday's test at Twickenham (2:30 p.m.).<br />Last week Wales stood on the halfway line staring at the All Blacks after the traditional Maori war dance while referee Jonathan Kaplan attempted to get the game started.<br />After a minute's standoff at the Millennium stadium, New Zealand captain Richie McCaw intervened and the match began.<br />"The Welsh thought that was the best way to respond, I just wanted to know when the game was going to start," Henry told a news conference.<br />"It took someone with common sense, the All Blacks captain, to get things going. We don't need that every week. I hope a copycat situation doesn't occur."<br />"We've been there, it was interesting at the time but it's time to move on and be more sensible."<br />Centre Ma'a Nonu, who scored his second try in consecutive tests in the 29-9 win in Cardiff, said fans back in New Zealand would have been angered by the Welsh response.<br />"It was really hard," he said. "The haka is a war dance.<br />"People back home will have been hurt by what they decided to do. Standing in the way like they did is asking for a fight.<br />"My blood pressure was pretty high but then I regained my composure. I was a bit upset about it."<br />Victory on Saturday would complete a third grand slam of victories over the four home nations for the All Blacks, who started their tour by beating Australia in Hong Kong.<br />They have yet to concede a try in successive victories over Scotland, Ireland and Wales.<br />(Reporting by John Mehaffey; Editing by Alan Baldwin)</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/business/OUKBS-UK-RUGBY-ZEALAND.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/26/business/OUKBS-UK-RUGBY-ZEALAND.php</a></div><div> </div><div>*************</div><div><strong>Britain wonders why system did not stop rapist father<br /></strong>The Associated Press<br />Wednesday, November 26, 2008<br />LONDON: A man who fathered nine children with his two daughters had attracted official suspicion but avoided detection for decades by moving his family frequently and intimidating his victims into silence, British prosecutors say.<br />Authorities were investigating on Wednesday exactly how the rapist was never called to account by neighbors, teachers, doctors, social workers, police or his extended family. The 56-year-old man was only apprehended when his daughters finally broke their silence.<br />He was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison for what a judge said was "the worst (case) I have come across" in 40 years of judicial practice.<br />Prosecutors told the court that the man raped his daughters from the time they were 8 or 10 years old, beating them when they resisted. Over a 25-year period he impregnated them 19 times, and they bore seven surviving children. Two more infants died at birth, while the other pregnancies ended in abortion or miscarriage. None of the family can be named because of reporting restrictions to protect the identity of the victims and their children.<br />Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday that people "will rightly want to know how such abuse could go on for so long without the authorities and the wider public services discovering it and taking action,"<br />Britain's child welfare services are already under pressure after the case of "Baby P," a toddler who suffered months of abuse that led to his death, despite repeated visits by social services staff in London.<br />"If there is a change to be made in the system and the system has failed, we will change the system as a result of the inquiries," Brown said.<br />Authorities in Sheffield, the northern English city where the family lived for a time, said they had begun an investigation.<br />"Where were the medical professionals? Where were the social workers? What were they doing for the last 20 years?" said Nick Clegg, leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats, who represents a district of Sheffield.<br />One answer is that some people did notice. At various points police, schools and medical staff all asked questions about the daughters' situation but the daughters denied anything was wrong and the pieces were never put together.<br />The Sheffield case has echoes of the allegations against Josef Fritzl, the Austrian accused of keeping his daughter locked in a cellar for 24 years, fathering seven children by her. He is awaiting trial on charges of murder, rape, incest, false imprisonment and enslavement.<br />Unlike Fritzl, the British man moved his family frequently around northern and central England and lived in small villages to avoid drawing the attention of outsiders.<br />Prosecutors described how the defendant used intimidation, fear and evasiveness to keep his secret. He warned his children to keep quiet and when they were older he beat them. Each daughter said she was unaware the other was being abused until the pregnancies began.<br />"The defendant also ensured that his family were kept isolated and that there were very few visitors to the home," prosecutor Nicholas Campbell told Sheffield Crown Court.<br />"The victims were too frightened to tell anyone, even their mother," Campbell said. The court was told that the girls' mother left their father in the early 1990s, more than a decade after the abuse began, and it is unclear whether she knew what was going on.<br />The court heard that authorities at several points raised concerns about the family. A school asked questions about burn marks on one girl's arm, but it was attributed to bullying.<br />In 1997 the daughters' brother went to police to report the incest. But his sisters refused to cooperate and the investigation stalled.<br />Medical staff also had concerns about the high number of abnormalities in the women's pregnancies. One doctor even asked one of the women whether her father was the father of her children. She denied it.<br />But in June the women finally reported their abuse to social workers. Their father was arrested and last month pleaded guilty to 25 counts of rape. Judge Alan Goldsack sentenced him to 25 life sentences, to run concurrently, with no possibility of parole for almost 20 years.</div><div><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/26/europe/EU-Britain-Incest.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/26/europe/EU-Britain-Incest.php</a></div><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /> </div><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong>Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France</div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/">Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment<br /></div></a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2898149873556901321.post-56998657732843998512008-11-26T10:33:00.011+01:002008-11-27T12:00:47.976+01:00A Place in the Auvergne, Tuesday, 25th November 2008<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw-69Y9WKfTiods8lZvu2vM06iT7zN8hRvGQH_Mp-stmrGsuOz514bj60PgrKRoMQ_NdU4Ictb5-vaJlzIUfPBBrr4K-bUVebmOrqTIGH8C5gGvW0VAfogfmQpwd356gjjYdAL6drpwuE/s1600-h/DSC02066.jpg"></a><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><br /><br /><div align="center"><strong>0807 </strong></div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong></div><p></strong><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV4VshO_YffIgOaWWx53j5cV-czka0E9TcvifcmUtEo-9momwlv2KY85pe3ag2wfBD33Zzds3istzkNVi_DzlJJ51RRIHL9nclSkHgn_w3BPKmY0FN3OhjTAwnmzwacHZNSQZR9n_43u8/s1600-h/DSC02066.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272900531902818434" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV4VshO_YffIgOaWWx53j5cV-czka0E9TcvifcmUtEo-9momwlv2KY85pe3ag2wfBD33Zzds3istzkNVi_DzlJJ51RRIHL9nclSkHgn_w3BPKmY0FN3OhjTAwnmzwacHZNSQZR9n_43u8/s320/DSC02066.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><strong>An (edited) report on data breach at British far-right party<br /></strong>By Noam Cohen<br />Monday, November 24, 2008<br />A small computer file appeared on the Internet last week, purporting to list the 13,000 members of the British National Party, a racist, far-right political organization. The text file contained not just the names of the party's supporters but also their home addresses, home phone numbers and, in some cases, hobbies (including a fair sampling of model airplane and train collectors) and professions (including a few lawyers, doctors and teachers).<br />And all the queen's horses and all the queen's men have not managed to make that list disappear.<br />Make no mistake, the Web sites of the large newspapers, frequent victims of strict libel laws in Britain, have done their part. Reporting on what cannot be reported is something in which the British have much more experience.<br />"In the U.S., the starting point is that you have the right of freedom of expression," said James Edelman, a law professor at Oxford. "There are ways it can be curtailed, but that is the starting point. It is almost the opposite in the U.K."<br />Raising the stakes, on Friday there was a suspected firebomb attack on a car parked outside the home of one of the people named on the list (but unnamed in the papers), though the police emphasized that the connection to the party was only one line of investigation.<br />But so far, the only people mentioned by name in news accounts are the few controversial discoveries from the rolls - a sports-talk radio host and a police officer; both are in danger of losing their jobs over their affiliation with the British National Party, or BNP.<br />Instead, the papers have to play coy. At the Web site of The Guardian, for example, there is an interactive map showing the distribution of the membership across Britain, itemized locality by locality, but, not, say, block by block, under a note: "A court injunction prevents the distribution of the names on the BNP membership leaked online."<br />Jon Henley, in his first-person account on The Guardian Web site, reported: "Colleagues have pored in amazement over the records for their hometowns." He added: "A university friend said she had discovered to her not-altogether-immense surprise that her parents' next-door neighbors in Windsor were members. 'Crusty,' she said. 'And very cheap sherry at Christmas."'<br />This stance seems almost quaint in a world where the database is widely and easily available online, as the newspapers have pointed out. A host for the list is Wikileaks, a site that has become a home for orphaned material, including the e-mail messages of the former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin that were stolen by a hacker who obtained the password to her Yahoo account. (Palin and the British National Party confirmed that the material was genuine, though the party pointed out that its list, stolen by a disgruntled former member, was more than a year old and documented interaction with the party, not necessarily membership.)<br />Last week, when the interest in the British National Party membership list was most frenetic, servers at Wikileaks were overrun and inaccessible, despite 10 or so mirror sites worldwide replicating the material to lessen the traffic burden.<br />Wikileaks encouraged visitors to become supporters ($25 minimum for an individual and $1,280 for an organization) with the added benefit of being able "to access our subscriber priority servers for 12 months." (After much debate, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is unrelated to Wikileaks, has not linked to the material.)<br />The party list was easily obtained at another site that revels in publishing secrets online, cryptome.org. The man who operates cryptome.org, John Young, wrote that as of Thursday, he had 2,000 to 3,000 downloads of the party list file.<br />Asked if he had any limits on what personal material he would publish, Young wrote that his site focused on addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers "of public, mostly government, figures, and spies especially" - but usually not Social Security numbers.<br />Young argues that organizations like the British National Party often leak such material to get sympathy and show that their membership is full of regular people. "I would guess the BNP leak at 80 percent orchestrated," he wrote. "The Brits are experts at this, perhaps the best."<br />And true to that theory, the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, was quoted as saying that one good thing from the leaking of the list was that it proved that the stereotype of his supporter as "a skinhead oik" was not true. (Oik is slang for an obnoxious or unpleasant person.)<br />The list included some 45 names of people living in America - some described as British, some not.<br />One of those Americans, in a telephone interview, said he had learned about the spread of the party list through an e-mail message from Wikileaks. He said he knew the list had been stolen and was resigned to the situation on the Web.<br />"Once the cow is out of the barn, you can't shut the door," he said. "It's like identity theft in that I feel violated. My name and address and phone number are probably already on the Internet. But having my name associated with what could be considered a controversial organization is a different story. There is no other reason you would be calling me at this time."<br />But he emphasized that the list was misleading. He said he was not a member but a one-time contributor two years ago.<br />"I had donated money to them because they were fighting a legal battle," he said, noting that he had only spent three hours in Britain in his life, when he was switching flights in July. "Two years ago, some of their members were arrested on a freedom-of-speech issue. They don't have the United States kind of freedom of speech. I don't think it is right for someone to go to prison for expressing their political views."<br />He added: "I think I will feel better as time goes on. I am not losing sleep over it. I am just one of 12,000 people."</p><p><a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/24/technology/link.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/24/technology/link.php</a><br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQEciR0gwtp0p7Ahm8LBtJC-IfdA6zgk2NmsVsqmTIw1QcX-nx9a3v2QrAm6P0sKAIwDQ9VslsGJS_6Dqcoa9IyonwlyINwex_f-eQ72sHh8AfAM2tC-rBI9c6sm91xZ0Oj5LLM9wDN2g/s1600-h/DSC02067.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272900522406932146" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQEciR0gwtp0p7Ahm8LBtJC-IfdA6zgk2NmsVsqmTIw1QcX-nx9a3v2QrAm6P0sKAIwDQ9VslsGJS_6Dqcoa9IyonwlyINwex_f-eQ72sHh8AfAM2tC-rBI9c6sm91xZ0Oj5LLM9wDN2g/s320/DSC02067.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-SAQO8_FHSdA0GxTSuWA_A1Vqz0DZaX1kVIul7L6ZLq_PKVF-6ub1f70tYbNCmb0Ka8Ak1F2CHoqdnXdrFXjuZAgAKfBAg_HxNqsJVjHbbOPm8gAlUjpIMwyw8q3gap4uDrzu32YgE7A/s1600-h/DSC02068.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272900263257487330" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-SAQO8_FHSdA0GxTSuWA_A1Vqz0DZaX1kVIul7L6ZLq_PKVF-6ub1f70tYbNCmb0Ka8Ak1F2CHoqdnXdrFXjuZAgAKfBAg_HxNqsJVjHbbOPm8gAlUjpIMwyw8q3gap4uDrzu32YgE7A/s320/DSC02068.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272900258770670866" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4NTavU-kmegnBSs04qHa5zt_yWiidOGDIPMCDQSPjVW2_TlKtXGsaL37OSjd8b3bsk51zjuiPmez8btn7rdQYlyWLXmB2qMSrJNfyuqfzChE-zzGsMSbDpGKtbGNZabP3LnGAcLZmYrM/s320/DSC02069.jpg" border="0" /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272900260084069762" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgELUUTU7bgJh8WLfc8WRiT1CDCqEA0kFT6ANzKVvAKeExtMVLcD1IhdDSVkfu7_jCRYTlyGQMhg06Veg9gRnc9baHpSleRvH-XhPfmYJu89sswr8DB6DL5oCjziYpbXv1ozVMu4W1wzGM/s320/DSC02070.jpg" border="0" /><br /><div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4jNeJwmjgVxuHuWcu6Lzt855CPuacx4AO4qLkuRCh4zxCisGQuPbGZDb2SF4iecLcaIUbiWdeHPtK7_6AYIAAPFqZSzDk_z0IA6XNJ3T8YpR-SyAv1h9fhAHriOGyrb_97QlqmWfF8XE/s1600-h/DSC02071.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272900260991675682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4jNeJwmjgVxuHuWcu6Lzt855CPuacx4AO4qLkuRCh4zxCisGQuPbGZDb2SF4iecLcaIUbiWdeHPtK7_6AYIAAPFqZSzDk_z0IA6XNJ3T8YpR-SyAv1h9fhAHriOGyrb_97QlqmWfF8XE/s320/DSC02071.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibval4Dx7sdzsw9XM9zL22pdm64NST49sbq34nQYlWFceHO0lyNuuLiYhjAPgA0aJ-ckksmET01hb9oikKILY_-rVLKAIglDpuYrbtKBxvUrIT-zMLoRoj1IrFFNbE4jk_4mJ8FmzZgIU/s1600-h/DSC02072.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272900250019866690" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibval4Dx7sdzsw9XM9zL22pdm64NST49sbq34nQYlWFceHO0lyNuuLiYhjAPgA0aJ-ckksmET01hb9oikKILY_-rVLKAIglDpuYrbtKBxvUrIT-zMLoRoj1IrFFNbE4jk_4mJ8FmzZgIU/s320/DSC02072.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBm71dF638215N9DDGDKF1CnCQxQLh2wlQQ1VEzn-_cdwupS8M1TV-9Cqu1X0_4jtTBT08wr2vLU9lQO15jbNr6N70UKqyeXIuNEqv0bK3KpsNVocb26F41NvDAc4zUGGuhc7qoKXTjTo/s1600-h/DSC02073.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272899748817611074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBm71dF638215N9DDGDKF1CnCQxQLh2wlQQ1VEzn-_cdwupS8M1TV-9Cqu1X0_4jtTBT08wr2vLU9lQO15jbNr6N70UKqyeXIuNEqv0bK3KpsNVocb26F41NvDAc4zUGGuhc7qoKXTjTo/s320/DSC02073.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2gL35G3PqovYjPKuoGXyvBD6bfDET3s6ohUZjVVmxfeYIewP35EH9Sk9sErLNUfc8yJe0JzsC7Q3qsv-svsfekMsuUHp4xvRjhF2y6FWgKmOS4YAtbiysY4ZQx5HtGZhd2kD96bLh7Bc/s1600-h/DSC02074.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272899742932598642" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2gL35G3PqovYjPKuoGXyvBD6bfDET3s6ohUZjVVmxfeYIewP35EH9Sk9sErLNUfc8yJe0JzsC7Q3qsv-svsfekMsuUHp4xvRjhF2y6FWgKmOS4YAtbiysY4ZQx5HtGZhd2kD96bLh7Bc/s320/DSC02074.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcb9WT1C3lhiU3JEVHAHhe5GhaLklSbUYzDJdNm_268nn377JFvRdm-NeHH7zrWdsLrW7Ed7UAUhwV3s1KElmuSa2wjHfJOmfo6XbiGLily60-e8Rt0Y6CBGOZmERfcOlnlTXokWKnvGE/s1600-h/DSC02075.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272899740805110210" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcb9WT1C3lhiU3JEVHAHhe5GhaLklSbUYzDJdNm_268nn377JFvRdm-NeHH7zrWdsLrW7Ed7UAUhwV3s1KElmuSa2wjHfJOmfo6XbiGLily60-e8Rt0Y6CBGOZmERfcOlnlTXokWKnvGE/s320/DSC02075.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglVjtxbz-SESv7vsHzyYr86J7cpwK2FAxxHJe8RYffIWfMia3wn-8NyOJkQaoYxC1BYPRSnSQvsE-GeT60diagops4jSdny7cQi89viAmo12aSHaxj6xwLNKgMWUTwTDmSIEq1y2v8O1Q/s1600-h/DSC02076.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272899737358199346" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglVjtxbz-SESv7vsHzyYr86J7cpwK2FAxxHJe8RYffIWfMia3wn-8NyOJkQaoYxC1BYPRSnSQvsE-GeT60diagops4jSdny7cQi89viAmo12aSHaxj6xwLNKgMWUTwTDmSIEq1y2v8O1Q/s320/DSC02076.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBBMEF9kxSyGXDVju8DvdELdYNm2GMivvdAL-W003juoAr_Sbi9MwCXIgdPHClZa0gwM9THvaxfLYrcRScUgBFHBR7GjIXMAWIcEIRm3iJfWXqqIHq71NtoIRQU_jsEVXMjlZQ_5pVLMQ/s1600-h/DSC02079.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272899725842461666" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 198px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBBMEF9kxSyGXDVju8DvdELdYNm2GMivvdAL-W003juoAr_Sbi9MwCXIgdPHClZa0gwM9THvaxfLYrcRScUgBFHBR7GjIXMAWIcEIRm3iJfWXqqIHq71NtoIRQU_jsEVXMjlZQ_5pVLMQ/s320/DSC02079.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-23bA3NlT2AFXaHUtXexibZ4FtY6JqwgDPerTLVM3XndYIJ59aahOHL7lxRmCRxfhAGAAPxhERINbD4BZTyMbvmCzZlGDQiMpIVGarJZQfccvr3x3-hZT7la4v-7SB0CxpLWjVmj_LbA/s1600-h/DSC02080.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272899312085897858" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-23bA3NlT2AFXaHUtXexibZ4FtY6JqwgDPerTLVM3XndYIJ59aahOHL7lxRmCRxfhAGAAPxhERINbD4BZTyMbvmCzZlGDQiMpIVGarJZQfccvr3x3-hZT7la4v-7SB0CxpLWjVmj_LbA/s320/DSC02080.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgickIB11-r4pqAjwiO5wC4PACc_rlPJXYkKLW_mWY78dU1gQ3nVBU8M7dDKZpTUBSLv_ZPxsEXE5kDo49TKJMVT3KU4VMxkUBDJIGhq4IBFf2nfjf_b6F5pztBgWfIzvG99NBdWoWmzVo/s1600-h/DSC02081.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272899308593778674" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgickIB11-r4pqAjwiO5wC4PACc_rlPJXYkKLW_mWY78dU1gQ3nVBU8M7dDKZpTUBSLv_ZPxsEXE5kDo49TKJMVT3KU4VMxkUBDJIGhq4IBFf2nfjf_b6F5pztBgWfIzvG99NBdWoWmzVo/s320/DSC02081.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiWrI9exZLma2026EyaRCPM5SX1HyrLPu8VyEgFTuLv0tC4J9J6WTEjEREKd6A_hrTZLs16Omme2CFBHiaPI3qN9tI7ywXWuKQSLceEDY1Y39SxhvqN2c-_-i5hRA15w_xpBMKDco62nI/s1600-h/DSC02085.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272899299968839746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiWrI9exZLma2026EyaRCPM5SX1HyrLPu8VyEgFTuLv0tC4J9J6WTEjEREKd6A_hrTZLs16Omme2CFBHiaPI3qN9tI7ywXWuKQSLceEDY1Y39SxhvqN2c-_-i5hRA15w_xpBMKDco62nI/s320/DSC02085.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie0S92iBSWKqvLdiiOJxNVR_9kMZb4eg-KZ9oen5jwyIl4LocaJTCpyKrsiknT6pGy6qPS1q2s94GDi9Vd06L1ffYCiF3tCEpurv3_ZwaJLijswmBBpQJLvUyG_pL5pNISK2HthotBjr8/s1600-h/DSC02086.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272899297175505010" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie0S92iBSWKqvLdiiOJxNVR_9kMZb4eg-KZ9oen5jwyIl4LocaJTCpyKrsiknT6pGy6qPS1q2s94GDi9Vd06L1ffYCiF3tCEpurv3_ZwaJLijswmBBpQJLvUyG_pL5pNISK2HthotBjr8/s320/DSC02086.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Wa33L5YCyf0KClwRrOfYCUb2BPWBgT92O40YugwtS8E8d2hewriMeGb-LWNJgyxdgYa6Deypt6VxzTkiXPJr7RnXUQ79SAV0YGQiRW0404PzGNXD5Iwo4VVeRAKeu_oUdsLD60ftlh4/s1600-h/DSC02088.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272899292451152002" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Wa33L5YCyf0KClwRrOfYCUb2BPWBgT92O40YugwtS8E8d2hewriMeGb-LWNJgyxdgYa6Deypt6VxzTkiXPJr7RnXUQ79SAV0YGQiRW0404PzGNXD5Iwo4VVeRAKeu_oUdsLD60ftlh4/s320/DSC02088.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ7OgwQw7-NnyVWEM_2DCbk26X38avxYdxo9jemEZmfPIe_SrRwoyahNfW17jP1hAVaFnRZlD5gI-asBWHqIHSWLetHtwpMBtXlYDo19u1dacq-otzqVzvddbvMcmRChY-vXhM5PfAEvA/s1600-h/DSC02089.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898893464405954" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ7OgwQw7-NnyVWEM_2DCbk26X38avxYdxo9jemEZmfPIe_SrRwoyahNfW17jP1hAVaFnRZlD5gI-asBWHqIHSWLetHtwpMBtXlYDo19u1dacq-otzqVzvddbvMcmRChY-vXhM5PfAEvA/s320/DSC02089.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc-BZN2vDLHEzZzeROfCKQlvHRupEnB0LMD6FP5ImFTB0DZr3tNebtKlcGmVWnExBmQo27e_0fsEt77HLWw29HZNWgv5c_CpL4ATGH9-YxArj6HzhOhH93Mdm2IE2QH-VKemOr9EaKff0/s1600-h/DSC02090.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898890992235138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc-BZN2vDLHEzZzeROfCKQlvHRupEnB0LMD6FP5ImFTB0DZr3tNebtKlcGmVWnExBmQo27e_0fsEt77HLWw29HZNWgv5c_CpL4ATGH9-YxArj6HzhOhH93Mdm2IE2QH-VKemOr9EaKff0/s320/DSC02090.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimYk-UOvSwfa-ikizSV5ZrSkt8pwwtGE1Z_dsIy50lEo05hyphenhyphenvj0OXDMUeGh_HRrp8fvW3vE0ZrraKiyOJ56GI2mq86dTeTbRmC31TRpy8dtl_5nt5iqEA0uTu44KjATclohtOjJ1Xk5eE/s1600-h/DSC02091.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898886364786642" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimYk-UOvSwfa-ikizSV5ZrSkt8pwwtGE1Z_dsIy50lEo05hyphenhyphenvj0OXDMUeGh_HRrp8fvW3vE0ZrraKiyOJ56GI2mq86dTeTbRmC31TRpy8dtl_5nt5iqEA0uTu44KjATclohtOjJ1Xk5eE/s320/DSC02091.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc3yaRTZ868SuqyYo_49CkG14lrUEE6oqZGv2pEw20hjj_KlSrFv-uou7fozO_BgaRYSDrmj5QVlcNbZ5Ajxg8DZbqKfAJ94mT0AW7uma2a0Z9Wgii4Iq3La7UGC4q9eIcR1K1vw7u6Cs/s1600-h/DSC02092.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898882291583938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc3yaRTZ868SuqyYo_49CkG14lrUEE6oqZGv2pEw20hjj_KlSrFv-uou7fozO_BgaRYSDrmj5QVlcNbZ5Ajxg8DZbqKfAJ94mT0AW7uma2a0Z9Wgii4Iq3La7UGC4q9eIcR1K1vw7u6Cs/s320/DSC02092.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy38O4K2FwD7TFhOnr31JIL5iYHM92Lt1wQ0v-ikey60oVDvJA0_Dvc-ShUy4zuAjT8X6fL_cs6bWKWteBOSXs6wAOWvKp0BmoMpHcuapbWUfPJulb3wu_n0e64RC64lv3TB76oBGTIFU/s1600-h/DSC02093.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898871024856738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy38O4K2FwD7TFhOnr31JIL5iYHM92Lt1wQ0v-ikey60oVDvJA0_Dvc-ShUy4zuAjT8X6fL_cs6bWKWteBOSXs6wAOWvKp0BmoMpHcuapbWUfPJulb3wu_n0e64RC64lv3TB76oBGTIFU/s320/DSC02093.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIv10VZL4qtnLW8qYYI-6pNK83-0t3HjAATEoJK86DC3szCm53LBDF_A_R_fWobpmVAeuuYWDpOJ3xy-JY4z0LiSYyvksZcRHHTQyG7YNN3ZETBNutJLfqRDaxUDT66pLDn26zIp45OYg/s1600-h/DSC02093.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898475241002802" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIv10VZL4qtnLW8qYYI-6pNK83-0t3HjAATEoJK86DC3szCm53LBDF_A_R_fWobpmVAeuuYWDpOJ3xy-JY4z0LiSYyvksZcRHHTQyG7YNN3ZETBNutJLfqRDaxUDT66pLDn26zIp45OYg/s320/DSC02093.jpg" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijaJ2z1X7b56cLvxLAwIEdcM4jPRfQg8f11S0SucvvIGBvHx8ac_XPmSGJDnQUloI7QGOLr-MtFttJYvO9rPB3eLjagyNGsJSj6QESFjSkeFqlBYcqmL14lQ8ZStKymdbEe7bs0VIU5oQ/s1600-h/DSC02095.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898455235214306" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijaJ2z1X7b56cLvxLAwIEdcM4jPRfQg8f11S0SucvvIGBvHx8ac_XPmSGJDnQUloI7QGOLr-MtFttJYvO9rPB3eLjagyNGsJSj6QESFjSkeFqlBYcqmL14lQ8ZStKymdbEe7bs0VIU5oQ/s320/DSC02095.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Y8HZ0klHFVKkGmJLydd2Zzjg9Q50Cddr0xWpRNGm-qNHcE-W879B6wHpLtgRZHXc2tASTSxCjDlsnhhNfZgse7ajXSgnMjExv_ZKGxcs9A2pVc8a4kXAv_8eNvocxgMpLuZ2ZRaVe1Y/s1600-h/DSC02096.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898458181276434" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Y8HZ0klHFVKkGmJLydd2Zzjg9Q50Cddr0xWpRNGm-qNHcE-W879B6wHpLtgRZHXc2tASTSxCjDlsnhhNfZgse7ajXSgnMjExv_ZKGxcs9A2pVc8a4kXAv_8eNvocxgMpLuZ2ZRaVe1Y/s320/DSC02096.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjn9vzgRo04TySNiH3dkbM-rwjbFf2J9RjkZpI8T5txPbgubzQVONqQ0V75h_CmcRIp-p_wuAD9G80wIHNJJcoxJaxxt1EnhlGj2dsgmhn2jlXt7jnwDzGQfFJfwTQ1HdeOCirpKSqeqw/s1600-h/DSC02097.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898453616654018" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjn9vzgRo04TySNiH3dkbM-rwjbFf2J9RjkZpI8T5txPbgubzQVONqQ0V75h_CmcRIp-p_wuAD9G80wIHNJJcoxJaxxt1EnhlGj2dsgmhn2jlXt7jnwDzGQfFJfwTQ1HdeOCirpKSqeqw/s320/DSC02097.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE1evAU8HK_ZxJ2CyZcPJGk64vt3PNVcJBOCGezzr3OWzHDiixJjJcGqq2pOsnSUxOQn2_QtYwpDBSfHfLzOM9xr9DyRWwuD7Ih9sRzcYNDILOVqAYHD7H8MGK4rkcxloThtZsHkhYozI/s1600-h/DSC02105.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898206667566418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE1evAU8HK_ZxJ2CyZcPJGk64vt3PNVcJBOCGezzr3OWzHDiixJjJcGqq2pOsnSUxOQn2_QtYwpDBSfHfLzOM9xr9DyRWwuD7Ih9sRzcYNDILOVqAYHD7H8MGK4rkcxloThtZsHkhYozI/s320/DSC02105.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH8qcrvqf-LllWFmUmhEGErjp7jXP6tyUY2KGFa6asyWW1osN3p3c33VjTcI9GEmtr4tsRDUx-aIwTS83m9yPfm1v2IskWHuAONPMXB4qbhfnmj2aPes3F16Mv_aQKB8q29swvpjT0ZPI/s1600-h/DSC02106.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898202705794770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH8qcrvqf-LllWFmUmhEGErjp7jXP6tyUY2KGFa6asyWW1osN3p3c33VjTcI9GEmtr4tsRDUx-aIwTS83m9yPfm1v2IskWHuAONPMXB4qbhfnmj2aPes3F16Mv_aQKB8q29swvpjT0ZPI/s320/DSC02106.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAQZBhUI5umc9H9-mWQCdni4Y6U2T62sbXI6-KzkuBLT0NYwzQTCXWdAEBhj294fvis7rMT1lWWPYc4VD2D2eC0BsDnbm7Cf9tBnIrDLZmaZTSzewpOKt2nddl9f8hnxMWIVuFQTx6F9w/s1600-h/DSC02107.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898199058981410" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAQZBhUI5umc9H9-mWQCdni4Y6U2T62sbXI6-KzkuBLT0NYwzQTCXWdAEBhj294fvis7rMT1lWWPYc4VD2D2eC0BsDnbm7Cf9tBnIrDLZmaZTSzewpOKt2nddl9f8hnxMWIVuFQTx6F9w/s320/DSC02107.jpg" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiQ5tmmTD1WT6d9SB1GD8vzJVBfNB6fBEUbauaPCtt6zSKNtULr9nfkm0FbwIGkOrZy5vXwnTZx5tRLmoFwqdxTl5IrTlk3skaY-uzNywXu3aGRHYQrvmOaGmtL7ZQ2RUrrAImBwyMK7U/s1600-h/DSC02108.jpg"></a><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7hBCdGXSldxyCwX7hlvkZjsPFFSIisE_Dt-pJIRUkrjvQldK0aqHUqoaEwjAX7hxlT082SaO4aRIHSwGWsXQhtzvYDJ5UX1KYY9PI11bVK-YbrJf4oS9bB-NsfldPqXr8mCYfrVenZ7I/s1600-h/DSC02109.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272898183782775154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7hBCdGXSldxyCwX7hlvkZjsPFFSIisE_Dt-pJIRUkrjvQldK0aqHUqoaEwjAX7hxlT082SaO4aRIHSwGWsXQhtzvYDJ5UX1KYY9PI11bVK-YbrJf4oS9bB-NsfldPqXr8mCYfrVenZ7I/s320/DSC02109.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHpgcRoCIi_U1P9m7pqHus86qcbbukRGQVvf5s__HcmGkNFi1uV91f-ujFsd4XlJSgjMqIXpM9nExO2vwEPoTU-1fyKgkU7tIucum20ZLjQBmG7PKGsVsFXyfqM7kOl_pG6lZgokI0B54/s1600-h/DSC02110.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272897912078039714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHpgcRoCIi_U1P9m7pqHus86qcbbukRGQVvf5s__HcmGkNFi1uV91f-ujFsd4XlJSgjMqIXpM9nExO2vwEPoTU-1fyKgkU7tIucum20ZLjQBmG7PKGsVsFXyfqM7kOl_pG6lZgokI0B54/s320/DSC02110.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqEIccMGl3z1tS197a1fEW3arL6aFqlNBwj75q0XwOhHZLx0CBkWVMx03Ja__fqnHbdXo3SQQ9QYMi3855_eCKYMny6SqhV49mPVZLk_RIajAAjKncV4GHZ_CjGiN40LjHqyd_NgO7eE4/s1600-h/DSC02111.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272897908368680578" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqEIccMGl3z1tS197a1fEW3arL6aFqlNBwj75q0XwOhHZLx0CBkWVMx03Ja__fqnHbdXo3SQQ9QYMi3855_eCKYMny6SqhV49mPVZLk_RIajAAjKncV4GHZ_CjGiN40LjHqyd_NgO7eE4/s320/DSC02111.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6C_gfCTxatzLy-MLiQEaaCSMeGvZgSxs1U3c2kgRmYg31tvBsL6DN9iEw9MuAhbweZFD_WvcWkxJabJCZGvcREE4F3egcTsuiCpvCiucasJBVT9K73uWnhvKEVgp0KH46BBbhkKsq5SA/s1600-h/DSC02112.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272897899292665394" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6C_gfCTxatzLy-MLiQEaaCSMeGvZgSxs1U3c2kgRmYg31tvBsL6DN9iEw9MuAhbweZFD_WvcWkxJabJCZGvcREE4F3egcTsuiCpvCiucasJBVT9K73uWnhvKEVgp0KH46BBbhkKsq5SA/s320/DSC02112.jpg" border="0" /></a> <div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkY9esro7NF2w60wfVM7Jd1pBKhlVfh2ackmn-nXq2dbHZqD4GlMdvtRJGSirm8Us15sSg6wzVL8zvE2G_AfT1OMLiLX_QrAKSZb2Snd6Lx16xX5t4J-IZX-esQZsC5JIi48w-8uJzHxw/s1600-h/DSC02113.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272897892048652450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkY9esro7NF2w60wfVM7Jd1pBKhlVfh2ackmn-nXq2dbHZqD4GlMdvtRJGSirm8Us15sSg6wzVL8zvE2G_AfT1OMLiLX_QrAKSZb2Snd6Lx16xX5t4J-IZX-esQZsC5JIi48w-8uJzHxw/s320/DSC02113.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsdYdNNpv5te8sY0lOggQw8elFC8AotyyeV-m-SMNAaaoHfpCGAAg1259PkxmSvVswUm3K_fllzy88qP8JzvXAsnLdHGG0NhUZ5CqM5VmcIOTCg0HwaRWQqnybxfR98DpvNwTfZzE5GS0/s1600-h/DSC02114.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272897879376927458" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsdYdNNpv5te8sY0lOggQw8elFC8AotyyeV-m-SMNAaaoHfpCGAAg1259PkxmSvVswUm3K_fllzy88qP8JzvXAsnLdHGG0NhUZ5CqM5VmcIOTCg0HwaRWQqnybxfR98DpvNwTfZzE5GS0/s320/DSC02114.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="center"><strong>ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008 </strong></div><strong><div><br /></strong>Auvergne<br />Auvergnate<br />Auvergnat<br />Auvergnats<br />France<br />Rural France<br />Living in France<br />Blogs about France </div><div align="center"><br /><a href="http://www.montmartreabbesses.com/"><strong>Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / Vacation apartment</strong></a> </div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">A Place in My Country
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14</div>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07857867583072689277noreply@blogger.com0