T his sit e uses cookies t o help deliver services. By using t his sit e, you agree t o t he use of cookies. Learn mo re Go t it

A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E T H I S B L O G I S N O W C L O S E D . I T WA S A P H O T O B L O G O F O N E Y E A R ( 2 0 0 8 ) O F M Y L I F E , M I X E D W I T H N E W S F R O M B E Y O N D T H E A U V E R G N E T H AT C A U G H T M Y E Y E . Y O U C A N F O L L O W T H E O D D T W I T T E R . N O M O R E B L O G G I N G F O R M E .

F R I D AY , 8 A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 T W I T T E R U P D AT E S : I A N WA L T H E W. . . Thursday, 7th August 2008 follow me on Twitter 0649 A day of days. Things fall apart, Especially the neat order of rules and laws. The way we look at the world Is the way we really are. See it from a fair garden and everything looks cheerful, Climb to a higher plateau and you'll see plunder and murder. Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago.

Bob Dylan.

Effort s begin t o salvage WT O deal C R I T I C S ' P I C K S : N I G H T O F T H E L I V I N G D E A D GENEVA: As efforts begin to salvage a deal from the wreckage of last month's global trade talks, experts say the first task is to untangle the confusion around a farm safeguard that became a stumbling block. The World Trade Organization's director general, Pascal Lamy, said the talks, now in their seventh year, were near agreement on 90 percent of the agenda, especially in the B L O G A R C H I V E core areas of agriculture and industrial goods. For many WTO members, it would be frustrating to discard that progress ► 2009 (2) because of a dispute about a technical but important measure ▼ 2008 (349) to help poor farmers withstand a flood of imports. ► December (18) "Almost everything was right for a conclusion when we had ► November (30) this impasse between the United States and India," the ► October (31) president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said Thursday in Beijing. "If we don't get back to the talks, and if we don't clinch ► September (31) a deal in the coming months, it will take four or five years ▼ August (29) more, and that would be a huge loss for everyone." A Place in the Auvergne, A senior U.S. trade official, Warren Maruyama, said Wednesday Friday 29th August 2008 that the differences between the United States and big A Place in the Auvergne: emerging countries like India and China were too complex to Thursday, 28th August be resolved quickly. He said there was no point bringing 200... ministers back together until such issues like the safeguard A Place in the Auvergne, had been sorted out. But trade diplomats point to several Wednesday, 27th August factors suggesting that the negotiations, part of the so-called 20... Doha round of talks, could be resumed soon even if a final deal must wait until after the U.S. elections: Tuesday, 26th August 2008 The U.S. trade representative, Susan Schwab, emphasized Monday, 25th August 2008 after the talks collapsed that U.S. offers remained on the table. Sunday, 24th August 2008

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/business/trade.php Saturday, 23rd August 2008 Friday, 22nd August 2008 ***************** Thursday, 21st August 2008 West ern invest ors discover Romania's underused rice Wednesday, 20th August paddies 2008

VLADENI, Romania: Romania's Communist leader Nicolae Tuesday, 19th August 2008 Ceausescu loved the Italian specialty risotto, but he probably Monday, 18th August 2008 would have hated to see Romania's rice farms being taken Sunday, 17th August 2008 over by Italian and other Western companies. Saturday, 16th August 2008 As the world price of rice has risen - tripling this year and leading to scarcity worries and export curbs by big producers Friday, 15th August 2008 in Asia - European farmers have begun to expand eastward. Thursday, 14th August 2008 In particular, they are buying up rice paddies in Romania, many Wednesday, 13th August of which were abandoned after the overthrow of Ceausescu 2008 and the end of Communism in Romania in 1989. This gives Tuesday, 12th August 2008 Romania, an impoverished Balkan state with water-rich lowlands, a hot climate and rich soil, the chance to become a Monday, 11th August 2008 top European rice producer in coming years. Sunday, 10th August 2008 "Western expertise gives rice a new future in Romania," said Saturday, 9th August 2008 Ion Dragusin, 63, who headed rice farming in Vladeni under Friday, 8th August 2008 Ceausescu. Rice has never been a popular food in Romania, where wheat Thursday, 7th August 2008 and corn are major crops. But Ceausescu was known to like Wednesday, 6th August risotto, and, according to a cook who prepared food for him at 2008 a hunting lodge in the Carpathian Mountains, he often enjoyed Tuesday, 5th August 2008 a bowl of rice pudding. Monday, 4th August 2008 In the 1970s, following the example of China and North Korea, Sunday, 3rd August 2008 Ceausescu forced thousands of newly landless peasants and Saturday, 2nd August 2008 convicts to work vast paddies around the village of Vladeni in Friday, 1st August 2008 eastern Romania, part of a grand plan to make Romania self- sufficient. ► July (36) Now, the rice days are returning. ► June (29) "Romania has a great potential," said Jean-Pierre Brun, ► May (42) president of the London Rice Brokers Association. "You need flat land, an easy source of water, which is the Danube, and ► April (12) warm weather. With all these available, Romania has very ► March (38) good conditions to produce rice." ► February (23) Rice also has potential, on a smaller scale, in Bulgaria, Ukraine ► January (30) and Hungary, Brun said. The Danube River has 20 times the water reserves of the Po Basin, which supplies Italy's paddies. That gives Romania a competitive advantage over Italy, the top European rice producer, and No.2 Spain. "We will produce at lower costs," Angelo Dario Scotti, chief V I S I T O R S executive of Riso Scotti, the first Western company to get a foothold in Romania. Since 2003, Riso Scotti, which is based in Italy, has invested tens of millions of euros to buy 7,000 hectares, or 17,300 A Place in the Auvergne is a acres, of fragmented plots in Romania and to build a daily photo and news journal of processing plant in Vladeni. the year 2008, compiled by Ian "We knew lots of abandoned land was available and the Walt hew, author of A Place in climate was perfect," said Ugo Perruca, a Riso Scotti My Country: In Search of a executive. "We aim to stop buying at 10,000 hectares by next Rural Dream. (Weidenfeld & year but the rest will be grabbed by Italian, French and local Nicolson, hardback 2007; Phoenix investors. We are in the process of convincing farmers to paperback, 2008). come to Romania." From 1st January, 2009 to date, A handful of Italian and Spanish farmers have begun to exploit Ian Walthew no longer reads smaller acreage near the Danube port of Braila, in eastern newspapers, magazines, blogs Romania, and in western Romania. Their rice is processed at and the Internet, nor listens to the Vladeni plant. Land prices have soared to €1,000, or radio news. He does not have a $1,530, a hectare from €200 five years ago, but they are still T.V. six times lower than in Italy. Most of the world's rice is grown and consumed in Asia. The

European Union produces around 2.2 million tons of rice a year A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E on 500,000 hectares of land, and imports an additional one Posts million tons. Perruca said Romania would produce 40,000 tons of rice this year, and estimated Romania's rice-growing land at Comments 40,000 to 50,000 hectares in the next five years. With the planned doubling of capacity at the Vladeni plant in the next five years, Romania could become an exporter of more than 100,000 tons a year, cutting EU imports by 10 percent. According to the Agriculture Ministry, Romania has 15 million hectares of arable land, of which around 3 million to 5 million are unused. But the cost of modern farming methods and the fragmentation of ownership that occurred when nationalized land was privatized after the fall of communism means it will Copyright Jean-Paul Guilloteau take time for Romanian farmers to embrace rice. 2008 The ministry is encouraging small holders to consolidate production. Riso Scotti spent up to €1,500 a hectare to improve the quality W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X of land, rebuild and expand a vast network of canals and P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 revive pumping equipment inherited from the Communist era. Without cash, owners of tiny patches of muddy soil will struggle to irrigate their land and are eager to sell, Dragusin said. Modern rice cultivation, using specially designed harvesters, employs only a handful of workers compared with the thousands of peasants working in Ceausescu's rice fields. "I remember seeding and harvesting by hand with the sickle," Dragusin said. "Walking barefoot through wet fields was very hard," he said. "Yields were large, but losses were huge. Those F I N A N C I A L T I M E S times are gone." ‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/business/rice.php executive with a career that took him round the world, who one ******************** day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned U.S. environment al agency won't ease requirement s and moved in. for et hanol in gas For the first few weeks he just WASHINGTON: The Environmental Protection Agency rejected lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his on Thursday a request to cut the quota for the use of ethanol neighbours and digging into the in cars, concluding, for the time being, that the goal of rich history of this beautiful part reducing the U.S.'s reliance on oil trumps any effect on food of England. Out of his inquiries prices from making fuel from corn. grew this affecting and inspiring The EPA administrator, Stephen Johnson, said that the memoir. mandate was "strengthening our nation's energy security and What sets it apart from others of supporting American farming communities," and that it was not its ilk is the author’s enviable causing "severe harm to the economy or the environment." immunity to cliché and his The effect of the decision on fuel and food markets is hard to determination to love his determine. Recently, high energy prices have led to even homeland better than he used more ethanol production than the quota required. On the other to. His elegiac account of hand, rising corn prices made some ethanol operations relearning how to be an unprofitable, especially as oil prices started to fall. Englishman should be required So ending the quota might not have reduced the use of reading for anyone who claims to ethanol, but it might decline even with the quotas remaining in know or love this country.’ place. Still, the debate is fraught with symbolism — as a sign of Financial T imes unease over government intervention in the energy and food markets, with all the unintended consequences that ensue. S U B S C R I B E T O U P D AT E S The decision is an indication that Washington is unwilling to retreat from a policy that is very popular among grain farmers, if not among ranchers. Companies that use corn to fatten livestock and poultry, along with others in the food business, had called for lifting the A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R N G E ( H O L I D AY R E N T A L ) requirements, saying that their costs were rising as millions of pounds of corn were diverted from feeding livestock to fueling cars. Farmers argued that the jump in corn prices was driven not so much by the demand for ethanol as by growing demand for grain-fed meat around the world, and their own higher costs for diesel fuel.

Governor Rick Perry of Texas, a leading cattle state as well as a bastion of the oil business, made the request in late April, and the EPA said it received 15,000 comments during its three-month-long review. The rules that the EPA reconsidered on Thursday set a floor for ethanol use, not a ceiling, and not even the floor was firm, Holiday house in the Auvergne because under the rules, the EPA could issue a waiver if the requirement became "onerous." Renewable fuel use in 2004 was 3.5 billion gallons, according to M O O N P H A S E the EPA — mostly ethanol, which is a form of alcohol, but including some biodiesel, which contains oil from crops. The CURRENT MOON goal for this year had been 5.4 billion gallons but in December, with the price of oil soaring, Congress raised the renewables quota to 9 billion gallons for this year, and laid out a schedule of annual increases that would bring it to 11.1 billion gallons in 2009. In 2022, the quota would be 36 billion gallons. The agency has not completed an analysis of the effect of the mandate as the quota rises. That target requires not only more ethanol but new cars and new filling station equipment, because nationally, gasoline lunar phase consumption of fuel for cars, vans, sport utility vehicles and motorcycles is only in the range of 140 billion gallons, and ordinary cars can burn ethanol in blends with gasoline no I N F O R M AT I O N E B R U higher than 10 percent. But ethanol is part of the auto Unless I was away from 'The industry's long-term strategy; General Motors plans that by Valley', or on an occassional 2012, half the vehicles it builds will be able to accept blends of 'newsfast' holiday (e.g between up to 85 percent ethanol. 8th -31st August, 2008), I placed The long-term hope, backed up with generous government information between the photos incentives, is to make motor fuel from "cellulosic," or non-food, of my daily life in the Auvergne. sources. Private companies are feverishly pursuing technologies for using wood chips, wheat straw, waste plastic This information comes from the and even municipal garbage to make ethanol and other liquid International Herald Tribune , vehicle fuels. But none of these is commercial at the moment. from the edition dated the day after the date of each post, http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/business/08ethanol.php given the nature of newspaper cycles. ***************** I tried to find connections Monsant o t o sell it s dairy hormone business between diverse information NEW YORK: After struggling to gain consumer acceptance, from around the world, to Monsanto has announced that it will try to sell its business of give the day's events a better sense of narrative. I producing an artificial growth hormone for dairy cows. called this 'information ebru'. The company, which made the announcement on Wednesday, will focus instead on its thriving business of selling genetically News is not news analysis, news modified seeds and developing ways to improve crops. analysis is not editorial, editorial The decision comes as more U.S. retailers, saying they are is not commentary (columnists) responding to consumer demand, are selling dairy products and commentary is not views from cows not treated with the artificial hormone. (contributors' views). All are Monsanto, the leader in agricultural biotechnology, said the differentiated accordingly. decision was not related to the retail trend and that business for the artificial hormone, sold under the brand name Posilac, The views, editorials and remained brisk. Monsanto, which is based in St. Louis, Missouri, commentary quoted do not and is the only commercial manufacturer of the hormone, necessarily reflect the views declined to provide sales numbers. and opinions of the publisher of this blog. Selling Posilac "will allow Monsanto to focus on the growth of its core seeds and traits business while ensuring that loyal dairy farmers continue to receive the value of Posilac in their operations," Carl Casale, Monsanto's executive vice president for strategy and operations, said.

The growth hormone, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1993, was one of the first applications of genetic engineering used in food production. When the artificial W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , hormone, which is made in genetically modified bacteria, is H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 injected into cows, it increases milk production by about a gallon, or four liters, a day. A 2007 survey by the Department of Agriculture said 17 percent of the dairy cows in the United States were receiving it. Despite the government's approval, many advocacy groups have long maintained that Posilac is bad for the health of cows.

Some even claim it could pose a cancer risk in people, though little scientific evidence has emerged to support that view.

Their concerns have been fueled by the refusal of many J E R E M Y I R O N S countries, including Canada and members of the European 'I read A Place in My Country with Union, to permit the use of the hormone. absolute unalloyed delight. A "I think they saw the handwriting on the wall and gave up," glorious book.' said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Jeremy Irons Food Safety, a consumer advocacy group based in Washington. "It's a major victory for consumers." Kimbrell said the original idea of marketing a growth hormone A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E for milk production was flawed because milk is so emblematic A feature article about Ian of childhood. Fear of the effects of the artificial hormone was Walthew (Daily Telegraph) one of the primary drivers behind the growth of the organic An interview with Ian Walthew dairy industry, he said. (www.thisfrenchlife.com) But Elena Gonser, a dairy farmer in Everson, Washington, An article by Ian Walthew contended that consumers had been misled by published in L'Express (in misinformation. She added that Posilac, which is also known as French) bovine somatotropin or BST, was safe and effective. An article by Ian Walthew "I believe it's just catering to ignorance to tell people it's BST- published in the IHT free, and it's better for you," said Gonser, who along with her husband runs a farm that has 70 cows.

But she added: "I'm not surprised to find they want to step E B R U back from it. It's gotten a bad rap for so long." Ebru is a Turkish art form, the Monsanto will continue to sell and market the product until a process of paper marbling that buyer is found, said Christie Chavis, who leads commercial produces constantly changing development and strategy for the company's animal interwoven patterns. agriculture business unit. Posilac is sold in 20 countries. Chavis said the artificial hormone was safe and also good for "We're not a mosaic, different the environment, saying that it takes fewer cows and less from one another and fixed in resources to produce the same volume of milk. glass," said Altinay, who earned http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/business/bovine.php her doctorate from Duke University. "Ebru is done on ***************** water. It is impossible to have clear lines or distinct borders." Nest le and Sara Lee profit s lift ed by price increases Source: IHT, 11/03/08 CHICAGO: Nestle , the world's largest food company, reported a first-half profit at the top of analysts expectations, aided by W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , price increases that offset rising commodity costs. H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X A similar strategy also helped U.S. foodmaker Sara Lee post a P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 higher-than-expected profit on Thursday as it raised prices to offset soaring costs for items such as wheat and energy. Sara Lee also forecast profit for the current fiscal year that is higher than some analysts' estimates. But investors are concerned that, as price increases for well- known brands such as Nescafe coffee are pushed through to the supermarket shelf, more consumers will look to lower- priced items. Reliance on price increases has already S U N D AY T E L E G R A P H pressured the volume of products sold by some companies. ‘Having lived and worked abroad "We believe it would be premature to call this a turning point as a director of the International for the company," JPMorgan analyst Terry Bivens wrote in a Herald Tribune for most of his note to clients on Sara Lee. adult life, Walthew, along with "Going forward, the company will face competitive pressures, his Australian wife, Han, made a pricing elasticity and tougher comps. All of these factors may snap decision, aged 34, to buy a blunt its volume growth." house in Gloucestershire, and embrace life in the country. Sara Lee shares fell 3.7 percent on the New York Stock This is familiar territory, but Exchange, adding to a nearly 10 percent drop to date in 2008. Walthew combines his own story Nestle shares rose 0.1 percent on the Swiss stock market - coming to terms with the after trading lower earlier and are down 9.3 percent for the untimely deaths of his father year. and brother - with that of the Sales volume growth in the first half of the year at Nestle land and the people who make slowed to 3.5 percent from the first-quarter's rate of 4.5 up village life. percent. Funny, touching and ultimately European foodmakers such as Nestle and Unilever have seen very moving, this is a beautiful, their stocks pressured because of concerns that price unsentimental account of a increases had gone too far. In contrast, U.S. food companies personal loss that is reflected in have in general seen their shares rise in recent weeks as a the rapidly changing texture of similar strategy, and cost cuts, succeeded in offsetting life in rural England.’ commodity costs. Sunday Telegraph MARKETING DIFFERENCES U.S. food companies also have been aggressively increasing spending on advertising to boost sales. H O W T O F I N D Y O U R WAY A R O U N D T H I S P L A C E But Nestle's marketing and administration spending as a This blog of one year's events percent of sales declined in the first half of the year. (2008) started in a free form "Marketing spending was down 120 basis points -- a bigger manner, but over time it has decline than Unilever's 70 basis points fall, which sent its adopted some basic structure. shares down 10 percent, and this may well be taken negatively for Nestle as some investors may take the view From May 2008, the following that marketing is being used to make the margin numbers," metathemes were generally RBS analyst Julian Hardwick said. placed under the same pictures Nestle said net profit rose to 5.2 billion Swiss francs (2.51 billion (unless I was away from 'The pounds) in the first six months of 2008, slightly ahead of Valley' or on a very occassional average analyst expectations of 5.05 billion Swiss francs and 'newsfast' holiday e.g. between at the top of a 4.88 billion to 5.21 billion range. 8th -31st August, 2008): Underlying sales, which exclude currency effects and acquisitions, rose 8.9 percent, in line with forecasts. But pricing Pict ure 1 and/or Pict ure of accounted for a higher-than-expected 5.4 percentage points. Beech t ree: The maker of Buitoni pasta, Nespresso coffee and Friskies cat Agriculture/Food/Water food gave a slightly more upbeat forecast, expecting Pict ure 2 and/or Pict ure of underlying growth in 2008 at least at the 2007 level of 7.4 Valley: The Environment percent, after previously saying it would "approach" that figure. Pict ure 3 and/or Pict ure of Nestle repeated it expects improved earnings before interest Silver Birch t ree and tax (EBIT) margins in 2008. Energy UNCOMMON CURRENCY Pict ure 4 and/or Pict ure of Unlike Nestle, Sara Lee benefited from a weak dollar, as did Forest other U.S. foodmakers with operations outside the United France States. Nestle profits were depressed by the strong Swiss T he Last Pict ure: franc. U.K The maker of Sara Lee bread, Ball Park hot dogs and Jimmy Dean sausage posted a fiscal fourth-quarter loss of $695 million, or 98 cents a share, as a result of previously disclosed Labels charges reflecting the reduced value of some bakery operations. The labels are a useful way of Before one-time items, it earned 28 cents a share, compared finding the themes and issues with the average analyst estimate of 25 cents a share. Sales that most held my attention. from continuing operations rose 12 percent to $3.51 billion. For fiscal 2009, the company forecast earnings of 90 cents to 98 cents a share, excluding a contingency payment from the 1999 sale of is tobacco business, or $1.12 to $1.20 a share W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , including the payment. H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X Analysts on average forecast $1.03 a share, according to P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 Reuters Estimates, although some include the tobacco payment and some do not. Sara lee said the average estimate of analysts that do not include the payment was 92 cents a share. http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/08/07/business/OUKB S-UK-NESTLE-SARALEE.php

H U G H - F E A R N L E Y W H I T T I N G S T A L L ‘When stressed out media exec Ian Walthew panic buys a Cotswold cottage as an escape route from the urban treadmill, he unwittingly acquires a window on a corner of rural Britain at work and at play, and his writer’s eye sees just what’s going on. Walthew has a genuine gift for bringing both people and places to life and marshals his runaway real life narratives with a novelist’s skill. The story of his surprising German t ownsfolk wonder: Is it possible t o be t oo friendship with his neighbour green? Norman - who is trying to keep MARBURG, Germany: This fairy-tale town is stuck in the middle his ramshackle farm and his of a utopian struggle over renewable energy. The town dignity together with a few council's decision to require solar-heating panels has thrown strands of baler twine, while his Marburg into a vehement debate over the boundaries of millionaire neighbours embrace the prairie concept of modern ecological good citizenship and led opponents to charge that industrial farming - is compelling their genteel town has turned into a "green dictatorship." and often deeply moving. And The town council took the significant step in June of moving Walthew’s own struggle with age- from merely encouraging citizens to install solar panels to old issues of identity, friendship, making them an obligation. The ordinance, the first of its kind community and a place to call community and a place to call in Germany, would require solar panels not only on new home are fresh, sympathetic and buildings, which fewer people oppose, but also on existing never trying. homes that undergo renovations or get new heating systems It’s not the sort of book you’d or roof repairs. pick up expecting a page-turner, To give the regulation teeth, a fine of €1,000, about $1,500, but that’s exactly what it turn's awaits those who do not comply. out to be. It even has a proper Critics howled that the rule constituted an attack on the rights ending.’ of property owners. The regional government in Giessen Hugh-Fearnley Whit t ingst all stepped in and warned that it would overturn the rule. http://www.rivercottage.net/ City officials in Marburg said, in turn, that they would take their case either to administrative court or all the way to the Hessian state capital, Wiesbaden, where they would try to get the state building code changed to protect their ordinance T H R E E I M P O RT A N T P L A C E S from officials in Giessen. A PLACE IN AFRICA In the middle of this political chess match sit homeowners like A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY Götz Schönherr. A PLACE IN PARIS From his deck, Schönherr can see the town's famous hilltop Gothic castle as well as two of its three power-generating windmills. On his roof, a solar panel glints in the sunlight. He W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , uses the solar energy to heat his water, allowing him to turn H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X off his boiler for roughly six months a year, a boon for his P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 pocketbook but a decision he said he made for the sake of the environment. And yet Schönherr opposes the new ordinance. Schönherr had hoped to reinsulate his home, but to do so, and satisfy the solar regulation, he would have to install a larger solar panel. It would have cost him close to $8,000. "That leads, in my case, and I would think in other cases as well, that people say, 'Well, let's just not reinsulate the roof,"' T H E O B S E RV E R Schönherr said. "So it's absolutely counterproductive." 'Stressed city couple seeks Officials in Giessen agree. "We have no problem with the use slower life in Cotswolds idyll'. of solar energy," said Manfred Kersten, press spokesman for The premise is so familiar the regional government in Giessen, "but this was a poorly there's even a predictably constructed ordinance." technical term for it: Germany is one of the world's top champions of reducing 'downshifting'. Yet it's hard to greenhouse gas emissions and promoting renewable energy. think in those terms about A Thanks to hefty federal subsidies, the country is by far the Place in My Country, given the largest market for photovoltaic systems, which convert care with which Ian Walthew has sunlight into electricity. skirted all the sprung traps of Marburg, a historic university town where the Brothers Grimm nostalgia and sentiment. A once studied, is a model of enlightened energy production and thoughtful observer and magpie- consumption. ish collector of oral history, In addition to the windmills and solar installations, the town's Walthew has a sharp sense of utility company buys hydroelectric power from Austria, is the absurdities and the assets of his native land, reinforced by transitioning its fleet of buses and other vehicles to natural gas years living overseas. In his and even lights footpaths with solar-powered lamps. country life, escaped cows and As a result, the Marburg dispute sometimes feels like an the hunt ball jostle for space argument between the enlightened environmentalists and the with barn raves and hawkish really enlightened environmentalists. property developers. Avoiding "Marburg is already a leader when it comes to the use of solar the usual bland elegy for the energy, but up until now they've always tried to convince rustic and redemptive, his book people rather than forcing them," said Hermann Uchtmann, is a valuable memoir, both the opposition politician behind the "green dictatorship" charge personal and social, a meditation who leads a local citizens political group, the Marburger on belonging in one of many Bürgerliste. Englands. Like Schönherr, who is also a member of the group, Uchtmann T he Observer hardly fits the predictable mold of the Luddite opponent of renewable energy. He is a chemist at the local university who once built a solar- powered desalinization plant for the town's sister city of Sfax, Tunisia. "It's unfortunate that they decided to compel people, because A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E I think you breed opponents that way rather than friends of solar energy," Uchtmann said. He said he found the demands too invasive for existing homes, especially in the case of older citizens who might not live long enough to justify the upfront costs of installing the solar systems.

"I'm right up against the border myself," said Uchtmann, who is 64. But he said he could support a solar-heating requirement for new buildings. Because the town of 80,000 has a level population and relatively few new homes are built here, restricting the measure to new construction would not go far enough for the politicians behind it. Holiday rental house in the "We have a serious energy problem with the older homes," Auvergne Marburg's deputy mayor, Franz Kahle, said in an interview at the historic town hall on the city's colorful market square. To make a real leap forward, he said, a dramatic step was W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X necessary. P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 "Before, solar installations were the exception, and their absence was the rule," Kahle said. "We want to get to the point where the opposite is the case." He pointed out that building codes constantly dictated what property owners could and could not do with their homes and said the solar regulation already offered exceptions for cases of hardship or alternatives for those living in the shadiest spots. 1 2 Next Page http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/europe/journal.php T I M E S L I T E R A RY S U P P L E M E N T ‘Even peripheral characters ************** …really come to life; as does the beauty of the Cotswolds and the GREEN T RAVELER ECO RENTALS harsh realities it conceals. A Taking it easy can be easy on t he planet Place in My Country is an When Mitch Thomson began searching on the Internet for a edifying consideration of the vacation rental this summer, he never imagined his stay at English countryside, its rich history and its attempt to adapt Kaweah Cottage, a two-bedroom retreat in the western in today’s world’ foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, would end up changing his T imes Lit erary Supplement family's lifestyle. "It was a work of serendipity," said Thomson, who was not specifically looking for a green home, though he happened to O T H E R P L A C E S be taking a green building class at the time. "We wanted a A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY week of peace and quiet and hiking with the kids, so I Googled A PLACE IN PARIS 'Sequoia Cabins,' and then this house popped up that looked fantastic with close proximity to a river. In fact, you can hear A PLACE IN AFRICA the river from the house." A PLACE WITHOUT TRUTH Thomson, his wife, Cheryl, and their two daughters and a son A PLACE WITHOUT OIL (ages 14, 11 and 8) ended up spending four days hiking in the mountains, swimming in the nearby ancient rock holes, and practicing what he called "off-the-grid living." W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X "We all unplugged," he explained. At night instead of watching P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 television (there was no TV, only a video monitor with a DVD and VHS player) or surfing the Web (there was Wi-Fi but no computer), they played the board games provided at the house and sat under the stars talking as a family. "Since the trip we have decided to spend one week each month not using electronic devices," said Thomson, who lives in Orange County, California "It will be our attempt to relive the vibe from Kaweah." Kaweah Cottage (www.KaweahCottage.com), with its T I M B U T C H E R American clay interior walls, formaldehyde-free plywood, dual- ‘I have been reading about the pane glazing and sustainably harvested wood, is just one of a British countryside all my life but growing number of green homes around the world now this is the first post-modern take available for vacation rentals. Just as Kaweah Cottage is on a national asset so routinely situated on a hillside near the Kaweah River with views of the taken for granted. Author Ian Sierra peaks, most eco homes are built into breathtakingly Walthew takes a 12-inch plough to the cosy complacency that so natural settings, so guests can enjoy both an indoor and many apply to the subject and outdoor green experience. Kaweah Cottage even has an reveals that 21st century rural organic garden where guests can pick fresh arugula, squash life is not a place for the genteel and tomatoes. - in a corner of Gloucestershire James and Kathleen Seligman, with their now grown daughter, most commonly viewed by have lived on the property for the past 20 years in a house outsiders from their 4x4s as they hurry to overpriced weekend about 150 feet from Kaweah Cottage (a yurt stands in retreats, he finds a farming between). The couple built the cottage in 2006 as a two- heartbeat that is proud and bedroom overflow for family and friends but then decided to defiant, defended by a cast of defiant, defended by a cast of rent it out to offset some of the costs. characters that outshine The Dana Mayer, the owner with her husband, Stephen Carroll, of Archers. A revelation of a book. ’ two eco-friendly vacation homes (one in Sedona, Arizona, and T im But cher one in St. Augustine, Florida) and the founder of Author of Blood River: A Journey Ecoluxurylodging.com, a Web site that bills its properties as to Africa's Broken Heart(Richard "healthy alternatives to big box condos and hotel gift shops," and Judy Galaxy Book of the Year said clients get a "bigger space with a smaller footprint" when 2008, 3rd Prize Winner) they rent a green home. Yet she does not want to market her properties only to what she calls "devotees" — hard-core green activists. "That's like preaching to the choir," said Mayer, A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E a Florida resident. "I offer a great place at the right price and the value added is that it is also eco-friendly," she said, adding that she will have another green rental available in 2009 — in Norway. To educate her guests, Mayer stocks her houses with a library of green books, videos and resource information, just in case they did not sufficiently check out her Web site, which explains that both properties are solar powered, furnished with organic and natural materials, landscaped with local plants and completely hypoallergenic. In addition, all appliances and fixtures are designed to reduce energy, waste and water use.

Linda Moss, the author of "Organic Places to Stay in the U.K.," Holiday rental house in the in 1999 founded a Web site, www.organicholidays.co.uk, with Auvergne links to green rental homes and small inns in nearly 60 countries from Bali to Bulgaria. She said she has seen a huge increase in her Web traffic this past year. "I think people are W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , becoming nostalgic in this crazy age of technology," she said, H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 "searching for life as it used to be — more simple, more thoughtful about the way we treat the land we live on and more sensitive about the food we eat." One simple but stunning property on her Web site is Ravens Havens in Paradise Valley, British Columbia (www.ravenshavens.com), a 40-minute drive from Whistler in what is called the Sea to Sky Corridor, an area that includes two historic routes, the Pemberton Trail and the Gold Rush Heritage Trail. The two-bedroom cabin with salvaged hardwood D A I L Y T E L E G R A P H floors and hand-hewn timbers has both modern amenities and 'a poignant portrait of country rustic features: a gas oven as well as a woodstove, a shower life....the book could have been a and a claw-foot tub. rollicking, laugh-a-minute riff on 1 2 Next Page ignorant townies having to ask http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/travel/03green.php what exactly a heifer is. There are certainly some fine comic ****************** episodes.. but it quickly turns into something more sombre - High-speed trains are often the fastest way to travel, door to and more interesting...His door, between city centers in Europe, beating the airlines on beautifully written book is an journeys of up to 550 kilometers. elegy for an England that is Eurostar, linking London to Paris in 2 hours, 15 minutes, and to dying, or at least in terminal Brussels in 1 hour, 51 minutes, has captured more than 70 decline.' percent of the market from airlines. Max Davidson, Daily But when it comes to booking tickets, the train can be a pain. Telegraph Things we take for granted at airline Web sites - such as options for flights on either side of the date, or time, we wish to travel; multisector connections, often with several carriers; electronic tickets and the ability to print out your own boarding card - are light years ahead of rail. Yes, you can book rail ' T H E H O U R W E K N E W N O T H I N G O F E A C H O T H E R ' tickets online, but don't expect to be offered seat selection, and in most cases tickets are sent by snail mail or must be In a new play to the National retrieved at the station. Theatre in London, 27 actors perform for 90 minutes without Booking cross-border rail travel in Europe is frustrating uttering a word. The attraction is because the national rail operators' timetables do not match "The Hour We Knew Nothing of up, so you might have to wait for an hour or more to catch the Each Other," written by the next train. And standards of seating and service vary. Australian playwright Peter I was brought down to earth the other day when Madame was Handke in 1992. grounded with deep-vein thrombosis, which meant that we had to cancel our EasyJet flight to Switzerland, and go by train: The script has 60 pages of stage Eurostar from St. Pancras in London to Paris, a transfer from directions and no dialogue, the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, then the TGV to although there are bangs, Lausanne. My wife, a nimble navigator in cyberspace, reported Lausanne. My wife, a nimble navigator in cyberspace, reported crashes, screams, and laughter. that Eurostar (www.eurostar.com) could only book us tickets as far as Paris. After futile attempts to book the onward TGV on Handke said that the idea came Swiss Federal Railways (www.sbb.ch), she said she lost to in him in the 1980s when he confidence when confirming and paying, and finally called a found dramatic meaning in the local travel agent. comings and goings in a town square near Trieste, Italy. "Is Eurostar provides through bookings to about 68 cities in there much to discover in it?" he France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany; and from said of his play? "I don't know." several British regional cities to the Continent (but not to Lausanne). One can book online or at the Eurostar call center, Source: IHT 13/02/08 44-8705 186 186. Railteam (www.railteam.eu) is an alliance of Europe's seven high-speed rail operators: Eurostar (Britain, France and W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X Belgium), Deutsche Bahn (Germany), SNCF (France), NS P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 Hispeded (Netherlands), OBB (Austria), SBB (Switzerland), SNCB (Belgium), Thalys (a partnership between French, German and Dutch railways), and TGV Lyria (connecting France and Switzerland). It aims to offer seamless high-speed train travel across borders, with improved synchronization of timetables, better connection times, and more consistent pricing. Should you miss a connection because of a late-running train, Railteam will ensure a seat on the next train. Travelers should be able L U C Y WA D H A M to book tickets online across networks by the end of 2009. ‘This is a story about a man who Meanwhile, travelers can book high-speed trains and other rail leaves the reassuring numbness journeys at national rail sites or at Rail Europe, a subsidiary of of the rat race, in order to French Railways (www.sncf-voyages.com). relearn how to live. Not usually a "We can book 99 percent of rail travel, including Eurostar and non-fiction reader, I'm generally wary of 'confessional' books, overnight trains, like Elipsos between Barcelona, Paris and which I often find narcissistic and Milan and Madrid; and Artesia from Paris to Milan and Turin," dull. said Jo Wilcox, marketing manager for Rail Europe. "Enter your A Place in My Country is departure city and destination on our site, and we will give you beautifully written, poignant and prices for each segment of the journey, allowing you to mix wise and has all the narrative and match classes and fares with different carriers." pace of the best fiction. Rail Europe operates more than 20 booking sites, including For anyone who loves England www.raileurope.com (United States); www.raileurope.co.uk but doesn't necessarily know (Britain); and www.tgv-europe.com (Continental Europe). It has why.’ call centers in the United States, (1-800) 462 2577, Canada, Lucy Wadham (1-800) 361 7245 and Britain, (0844) 848 5848. Author of Lost, Castro’s Dream, "The Man in Seat 61: A Guide to Taking the Train Through Greater Love (Faber and Faber). Europe" by a railway enthusiast, Mark Smith, is an invaluable Her first novel, Lost, was guide to planning train journeys from London to 39 countries. It shortlisted for the Macallan Gold is packed with practical tips on inter-city travel within Europe: Dagger Award. advice on routes, timetables and connections; the best ways to buy tickets online or by phone; advice on the best deals and how to buy rail passes; and crucially, how to change trains W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , in cities like Brussels and Paris. H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X There are sections on traveling in sleeping cars or couchettes P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 ("A second class sleeper is far better than a first class couchette; and a second class couchette is streets ahead of a first class seat.") for journeys of up to 1,280 kilometers, or 800 miles; and scenic routes, such as the Glacier Express from Zermatt to St. Moritz in Switzerland and the classic Rhine Valley in Germany. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/08/travel/trfreq8.php S U N D AY T I M E S ****************** 'Far from being an idealistic paen OPINION to the English countryside, the book becomes a hard-edged and NANNY NAT ION moving account of life rural Britain today.' SEATTLE: Here on the West Coast, we sort our garbage - or Sunday T imes else. We rummage through our food scraps, just ahead of the worms. We take our little canvas bags to the grocery store lest we get caught with the embarrassment of a dreaded paper- or-plastic denouement, and the scorn of neighbors. W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , If we smoke cigarettes, we do it in the alley - huddled with the H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 other losers. We've banned junk food from our school vending machines and soon - in 32 square miles of Los Angeles where a moratorium on new fast food restaurants will be in place - it will be treated like tobacco: the cheeseburger as death-wich. We do this because we're so-o-o-o virtuous, and our self- regard is tied to the size of our curbside proclamations. Mostly, we do it for others - the poor, the fat, the ill-informed. Of course, we would never smoke, or get caught finger-licking the extra-crispy runoff from KFC, or tossing a foil wrap in the trash. C H R I S T C H U R C H P R E S S , N E W Z E A L A N D Nearly every week brings news of another act of forced high- mindedness. Last week it was San Francisco Mayor Gavin 'Well written and well Newsom with a plan to start inspecting people's garbage, on constructed, this is an enjoyable, the lookout to find someone who may have let a banana peel funny, often poignant book, and one that will resonate with many slip into the trash. Before that it was Seattle, which will soon New Zealanders.' charge people 20 cents a bag in the grocery checkout line. It's not just us Left Coasters. New York has begun enforcing an ordinance that requires fast-food chains to post the caloric W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , content of food on menus - in type as big as the menu item H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X itself. How enticing: a fistful of calories on a bed of cholesterol, P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 to go. Chicago, that city of deep-dish pizza and tailgate brats, has just been named the most meddlesome and restrictive in the country by the libertarian magazine Reason. Red states are more restrictive on sex and liquor; blue state prohibitionists tend to aim at garbage and tobacco. But as

Reason noted, "Chicago gets moral prudery and public health fanaticism - the worst of both worlds."

Seattle was only number two. We'll show them in my fair city, T H E S H O O T I N G T I M E S once we have to start sorting our food scraps next year. And, ‘A tale of moving to the country playing catch-up, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels tried to ban lap that even those who actually live dancers from moving within four feet of their customers, and work there might enjoy…’ unleashing police with tape measures. The voters, mercifully, T he Shoot ing T imes turned him down. In Portland, Oregon, which has somehow escaped excess civic nosiness, strip clubs proliferate in family-friendly W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , neighborhoods, as commonplace as a burger hut. What's H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X more, you can drink and gamble in the clubs. The city is said to P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 have more strip clubs per capita than any other in the country - including Las Vegas - in part because of Oregon's liberal free speech provisions in the state constitution. And yet, the city, has low crime, uber-fit citizens, and it's clean. They do it all by example, not mayoral fiat.

At a time when so many people are losing homes and jobs, and making tough decisions about whether to fill a gas tank or pay health insurance, city governments should avoid counting O X F O R D T I M E S calories and dispatching garbage police. 'Books about cosmopolitan Government should empower us - to use the word so favored urbanites discovering the joys of by activists. Make sure our food is safe. When products kill, country life are two a penny, but make companies pay. Show us the way to a cleaner garbage this one is worth a second stream. Lead by example. glance. Walthew's vivid But then, leave us alone. These dictates and fines and description of the moral stress inspectors - they only undermine larger efforts and encourage induced by his job as a high- ridicule. Conservative talk radio on the West Coast would have flying executive with the to go silent without the fodder of strong-armed earnestness International Herald Tribune from city halls in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle this newspaper is worth the cover summer. price alone. The story of finding San Francisco already has one of the highest recycling rates in the dream cottage, the impulse the country. Do they really need city inspectors out poking buy, and the last-minute panic through the trash can? Besides, if you make a fruit forbidden, it are standard for this genre, but only becomes more enticing. After Oakland schools banned Walthew has some more junk food from vending machines, I went there to have a look interesting things to say. His at lunch hour. Lo and behold, students walked more than half- outgoing personality - and a-mile - a sprint, almost - to make it to the nearest mini-mart perhaps his cosmopolitan background, and his Australian for their sugar highs and empty calories. At least the ban wife - allowed him to integrate encouraged exercise. into village life but keep an If blades of grass or apple cores find their way into my outsider's point of view. He garbage, I'm in trouble. But, ever thoughtful, Seattle officials gradually realised that the have given me a way out. It's now legal for city residents to villagers were far from the villagers were far from the own pygmy goats, which - we are told - can be used to united community of townies' process yard waste in an eco-friendly way. dreams, and that economics was Ba-a-a-ah. forcing drastic changes on traditional rural life. Highly http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/opinion/edegan.php recommended.' Oxford T imes

W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8

B B C C O U N T RY F I L E M A G A Z I N E ’Unlike many escape to the country books this is a revealing and sometimes painful account of life in 21st century English countryside. Walthew discovers how class and wealth splinter Oil rises on pipeline fire in Turkey rural communities but also finds NEW YORK: Oil rose on Thursday on expectations a one million personal contentment, if not a barrel per day pipeline that was attacked by Kurdish perfect idyll. It is beautifully separatists in Turkey could remain shut for up to two weeks. written and very moving. This is The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, which pumps the a great book, if you like to have more than 1 percent of world supply from fields in the Azeri your misconceptions about our land thoroughly challenged.’ sector of the Caspian Sea to the Turkish Mediterranean coast, BBC Count ryfile Magazine was still ablaze after the Tuesday night explosion. U.S. crude settled up $1.44 at $120.02, rebounding from three- month lows after concerns about faltering demand in the United States and Europe helped push oil off a July 11 record W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , of $147.27. H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X London Brent crude settled 86 cents higher at P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 $117.86.

"The loss of supply from Azerbaijan only adds to a new layer of worry to a market that has found ways to operate with multiple layers of worry, already," said Peter Beutel, president of trading consultants Cameron Hanover. Further support has come from ongoing supply disruptions from OPEC member Nigeria from militant attacks and escalating N F U C O U N T RY S I D E M A G A Z I N E tension between Iran and the West over Tehran's nuclear program. ‘All of life is here – birth, death, A top U.N. nuclear watchdog official began talks in Iran aimed at struggles with illness, hard work, improving cooperation with the International Atomic Energy lots of laughter. It will make you smile gently to yourself, laugh Agency over the program, which Iran insists is peaceful. out loud, shed a quiet tear and Diplomats in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, said the visit feel angry about the changes was a fresh effort to extract Iranian clarifications about happening in our countryside.’ intelligence reports suggesting it illicitly tried to design atomic NFU Count ryside Magazine bombs. In Nigeria, Royal Dutch Shell said repairs continued on a pipeline sabotaged last week.

Data from the U.S. government's Energy Information W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , Administration on Wednesday showed a much steeper than H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 expected build in crude stocks, the latest sign soaring fuel costs and an ailing economy have reduced oil demand. Crude oil inventories rose by 1.7 million barrels in the week to August 1, beating expectations of a 300,000-barrel build. Distillate stocks, including heating oil and diesel, rose by 2.8 million barrels, also above forecasts.

Gasoline stocks fell by 4.4 million barrels, much steeper than the 1.2 million barrel draw analysts had predicted.

C O U N T RY L I F E http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/08/07/business/OUKB ‘A riveting read....a warning to ‘A riveting read....a warning to S-UK-MARKETS-OIL.php newcomers about the dangers of *************** upsetting village hierarchies and sensibilities' High oil prices spur demand for low energy Count ry Life elect ronics

SEOUL: These days when customers walk into electronics stores, the first question they ask is how much electricity the W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , fridge, washing machine or laptop computer they are H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 contemplating buying consumes. "Energy savings were not exactly a hot topic among customers last year," said Kim Dong-han at South Korean electronics retailer Hi-Mart. "But this year, nine out of ten people ask point blank whether a product will help them save money."

With oil at around $145 a barrel and electricity costs jumping, consumers are becoming preoccupied with keeping down their power bills. Electronics makers that develop energy efficient M A I L O N S U N D AY product lines and market them effectively to customers may ‘One of “The Top Ten Summer get an edge in a gloomy global economy, firms say. Holiday Books You Must Own” "Going green is not only eco-friendly but crucial for business," Mail on Sunday said Kim Jik-soo, a spokesman at LG Electronics Inc . "This goes beyond just products, extending throughout the development and manufacturing process." From washing machines that use steam instead of hot water, W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , to fridges that use low energy compressors, to low power H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 computer screens, electronics firms are furiously developing energy efficient products and heavily promoting lines already on the market that use less electricity than competitors' brands.

"My electricity bill more than doubles in the summer as we turn on the air conditioner," said Park Yu-jin, 32, a housewife in Seoul with two kids.

"I also have to do lots of laundry for the kids. The bill now easily W W W. T H E B O O K B A G . C O . U K tops 170,000 won (86 pounds) a month." ‘At the age of 34 Ian Walthew Homemakers such as Park are increasingly buying front-load was the worldwide marketing washing machines, which use gravity to move water instead director of the International of agitators as in top loaders. Herald Tribune living in various And now, newfangled washers from LG Electronics Inc and parts of the world and leading a Whirlpool Corp offer an option to use steam instead of hot jet-set lifestyle. He was also on water, cutting water and power use by more than 70 percent the verge of a nervous compared with some top-load models. breakdown. Faced with a move "We will gradually shift to front loaders and the steam back to London, he resigned and technology will become more mainstream," said LG rather than buy a property in spokesman Kim. London he and his Australian LG expects four out of ten frontload washers it sells in North wife bought a cottage in the America to use steam technology by the end of this year, Cotswolds to give Ian the peace compared with two out of ten currently. which he needed to recuperate. Their biggest appliance plant in South Korea makes mostly The cottage was next door to front loaders, while recently built plants such as one in Russia Norman's farm. Norman was a bit fearsome until you got to have stopped manufacturing top loaders altogether. know him, but his struggles to USING LESS POWER keep the farm going in the face Among refrigerators, which consume 30 percent of overall of falling prices and competition power in a typical home, traditional compressors are giving from the highly mechanised way to linear compressors that use up to 40 percent less 'agri-business' arable farms kept power and make less noise. him under a lot of pressure. In the computing industry, power-saving has long been a key Little by little Ian and Han priority as bigger and hungrier gadgets challenge battery life. develop a relationship with PC makers from Apple Inc to the Lenovo Group are replacing Norman and the other characters screens lit by conventional cold cathode fluorescent lamps of this tightly-knit community. (CCFLs) with light emitting diode (LED) displays. When I started this book I did "LED saves up to 40 percent of the power used in traditional wonder if it was going to be an backlights," said Jeff Kim, an analyst at Hyundai Securities. English version of Peter Mayle’s "Next year they will be commonly found in notebook screens, A Year in Provence - an amusing and will be increasingly used in TV panels from 2010." and entertaining read but Market researcher DisplaySearch expects LED-backlit displays ultimately rather superficial. I to account for 50 percent of notebook panels in 2010, up from couldn't have been further from the truth. This isn't just the story 12 percent this year. By 2015, all laptop displays will use LEDs, the truth. This isn't just the story generating sales of $6 billion. of two people wanting an escape from the city; it's an examination LED is also set to claim traditional incandescent lamps in of the state of the British buildings and on streets. Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co countryside and a careful recently replaced lighting in the South Korean parliament consideration of whether or not building with new LED products and reported LED consumed the way of life is sustainable. At just one sixth the power of incandescent bulbs. times the writing had me close to HIGHER PRICE TAG tears. But too often, these energy-efficient products carry a hefty The stars of this book are the price premium to reflect the cost of developing new people. Although Ian narrates the technologies, which in turn hampers faster adoption. book he doesn't dominate it, but For instance, Whirlpool's washing machines with steam feature allows the villagers to shine are sold at $1,300-$1,500, compared with a traditional through. It was fascinating to see machine priced at $700. his relationship with them Still, makers argue that the lifetime savings from green develop after it was initially products could amount to the price of the appliance itself. assumed by some people in the "You could buy another 32-inch LCD TV within 3 years with the village that he and Han would be money saved on electricity from our 52-inch power-saving TV," part of a more upper-class set. said LG's Kim, referring to a new TV model with a sensor that The couple's growing relationship adjusts brightness to match surrounding light levels. with Norman sees him take a Sometimes a little incentive helps. fuller part in village life. Geoff, the larger than life landlord of Japanese electronics retailer Bic Camera Inc is running a the local pub becomes a firm campaign in which buyers of eco-friendly products get extra friend, but it's Tom, the ex- credit points that can be used for future purchases. gamekeeper, to whom Ian "That's a little nudge to help people buy products that are becomes closest and who more efficient, even if they are slightly more expensive," said introduces him to the real Naoko Ito, a Bic Camera spokeswoman. "Consumer interest is country way of life. high." It's several days now since I A U.S. survey by Forrester Research last year found that green finished the book, but I was so consumers, who agree to pay extra for electronics that use moved by it that I didn't feel less energy or come from an environmentally friendly maker, able to write about it are more brand-loyal than average consumers. immediately. It's by no means an 1 2 Next Page easy read, but it's one of the most rewarding books that I've http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/08/07/business/OUKB read for quite a while.’ S-UK-ENERGY.php www.t hebookbag.co.uk

A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E

Carla, not Nicolas, Sarkozy t o meet Dalai Lama

PARIS: President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who will attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics despite domestic Holiday rental house in the criticism, announced on Thursday that he would not meet the Auvergne Dalai Lama later this month in France. Instead, his office said, Sarkozy's wife, Carla, would meet with R E C O M M E N D E D the exiled Tibetan leader, taking part in a religious ceremony to open a Buddhist temple in southern France on Aug. 22. Aran Darling (Paris-based Sarkozy's political party, however, said that the French Canadian artist and cartoonist) president would meet the Dalai Lama before the end of the Best Cheese I have Ever Eaten ( year. & they do Mail Order) France is the current president of the European Union, and Celine Duval (Artist) Sarkozy is representing Europe in Beijing as well. In the name Daniel Altman's IHT 'Managing of the European Union, he has already sent a list of human- Globalization' Blog rights activists and prisoners of concern to the Chinese David Strathan's book 'The Last authorities, and he will have separate meetings on Friday with Oil Shock' President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Dr. Richard Rogers (Academic) After the Chinese crackdown on Tibetan protests earlier this Farm Blogs from Around the year, Sarkozy threatened to boycott the opening ceremony of World (by Ian Walthew) the games, but decided to go after representatives of China Gregor Dallas (Historian and and the Dalai Lama held formal, if inconclusive, talks. Other author) members of the European Union wanted him to attend as Hannah Velten's book 'Cow' and well, his office said. her blog France bristled when the Chinese ambassador to Paris warned Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall last month of "serious consequences" for Chinese-French (Writer and Broadcaster) relations if Sarkozy met the Dalai Lama here. Sarkozy's office, Lucy Wadham (Author) in a carefully worded statement, suggested that it was the Nick Davies' book 'Flat Earth Dalai Lama who decided the time was not right for a meeting News' this month. Richard Gibson (Horse trainer) http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/europe/08sarko.php Show of Hands (Music)

**************

W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , Sarkozy's son files suit over ant i-Semit ic graffit i H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 PARIS: French President Nicolas Sarkozy's son Jean Sarkozy has taken legal action over anti-Semitic graffiti in the Paris suburb where he is a local councillor, the website of the daily Le Parisien said on Thursday. The website said Jean Sarkozy had seen the words "Sarkozy, thieving jews" sprayed on the wall of a court building in Neuilly- sur-Seine and had filed a complaint with local police. It said the same tag was sprayed in three other locations. No comment was immediately available from Sarkozy's office. W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/08/07/europe/OUKWD P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 -UK-FRANCE-SARKOZY-ANTISEMITISM.php

**************

SURFACING MARSEILLE A spinning globe st ops here

The hilltop district of Cours Julien was what people expected from Marseille, France's Janus-faced second city. By day, it was the city's belly, dominated by a vibrant food market that sprawls from a central square. But by night, local gangs scrapped, and drug deals were done. AND A PLACE FOR 'THEM' TOO? Today, it is among the most dynamic neighborhoods in France, safe, prolifically diverse and a lot of fun. You'll find the spoils of decades of immigration to France's southern gateway — a W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X showcase of the fashions of the Maghreb of North Africa, the P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 cuisines of the Middle East and the music of southwest Africa. But it is perhaps Cours Julien's newest immigrants who have sealed its status as the alternative heart of the city: the so- called bobos, or France's bohemian bourgeoisie. On hot days, a proliferation of terraces unfold onto the Cours Julien main square. At La Baleine qui dit Vagues (59, cours Julien; 33-491-48-95-60, www.labaleinequiditvagues.org), students and grandmothers sip coffees side by side as the district's colorful cast of characters emerges. A busker dances A PLACE FOR THEM? around, guitar in hand, singing in smooth French patois. Amateur jugglers practice their routines, as punks gyrate with diabolo sticks. And when school lets out, scores of children W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X dangle from the cypress and olive trees. P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 Bobos, meanwhile, graze the clothing racks at Madame Zaza of Marseille (73, cours Julien; 33-491-59-28-48; www.zazaofmarseille.com), a fashionable boutique where the florid and flowing dresses suggest the swaying colors of North Africa (from 45 euros, or about $73 at $1.62 to the euro). East of the square, dozens of cafes, secondhand stores and boutiques are blanketed in a burst of graffiti. Among the trendiest is Be Myself (22, rue Bussy l'Indien; 33-491-88-01- 35-53; www.be-myself.net), a tiny boutique where the A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E designer, Marie-Christine Roura, hand paints sensual faces and loopy graphics onto T-shirts (29 euros).

In the evening, Cours Julien takes its place among the city's

coolest night spots, as young and old alike are drawn to the thick, aromatic waft of grilled meat that drifts from restaurants. Picking a cuisine is like spinning a globe and prodding a finger at it. Luckily, one of the most popular is also among the cheapest. Almost lost in a cluster of wine bars and terraces is La Pause (7, rue de Trois Mages; 33-06-21-39-34-92), a venerated shawarma café, where diners balance glasses of wine on Holiday rental house in the parked cars as obsessively seasoned meat is diced on a hot Auvergne plate, scooped on a grilled galette and served with red cabbage, mint and parsley (4 euros).

Afterward, the party moves back to the main square, where W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , lines form early outside L'Espace Julien (39, cours Julien; 33- H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X 491-24-34-10; www.espace-julien.com), a timeworn club and P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 concert spot where the live music is as likely to be French indie as it is Senegalese rap or even Balkan ska. It feels a million miles away from postcard Haussmannian boulevards of Paris or the dazzle of Cannes. But, in many ways, it feels more French. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/travel/03surfacing.php

IW: If you genuinely t hink t he world st ops spinning in A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E Marseille, you clearly have visit ed a place in t he Auvergne.

Holiday rental house in the Auvergne

There is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again. Eugene O'Neill

Pakist ani coalit ion increases pressure on Musharraf

ISLAMABAD: Impeachment threat implicit in united call for W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , confidence vote H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X Pakistan's usually fractious coalition government moved P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 decisively for the first time on Thursday to impeach President Pervez Musharraf, who has been an important U.S. ally in the campaign against terror but who has largely been pushed to the sidelines since his party lost elections in February. "It has become imperative to move for impeachment against

General Musharraf," said Asif Ali Zardari, head of the Pakistan People's Party, sitting beside Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, at a noisy news conference. A PLACE IN AFRICA The leaders of the two main parties in the coalition - who have barely been on speaking terms in recent weeks - announced their impeachment strategy at a news conference in I A N WA L T H E W ' S L I N K S Islamabad. A Place in My Country (hardback) http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/asia/pakistan.php A Place in My Country (paperback) ****************** A Place in Paris 25 milit ant s killed in Pakist an KHAR, Pakistan: At least 25 pro-Taliban militants and two Farm Blogs from Around the World Pakistani soldiers were killed in fierce clashes in a tribal region along the Afghan border, government officials said on Ian Walthew Thursday. Rising Fountains (a small African- The clashes erupted late on Wednesday when militants based aid organisation) intercepted a security vehicle in the Loi Sum area in Bajaur, a known sanctuary for al Qaeda and the Taliban militants. "We have reports of 25 militants. Two paramilitary soldiers W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X were also killed and three wounded," a senior government P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The fighting continued overnight as army helicopter gunships pounded militant hideouts in the mountainous region. Separately militants ambushed a security vehicle with a remote-controlled bomb early on Thursday near Khar, the main town of Bajaur, killing two soldiers, officials said citing an intelligence report. The security situation across the northwest has deteriorated in recent weeks amid mounting pressure by Western allies on A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E Pakistan to stop militants making cross-border attacks on their troops in Afghanistan. Violence had subsided in Pakistan's northwest after a new coalition government took office following elections in February and opened talks with the militants through tribal elders. But the lull seems to be over and militants have stepped up their activities after their top leader Baitullah Mehsud suspended talks in June. http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/08/07/asia/OUKWD- UK-PAKISTAN-VIOLENCE.php

*************** Holiday rental house in the 500: Deadly U.S. milest one in Afghan war Auvergne

Not long after Staff Sergeant Matthew D. Blaskowski was killed by a sniper's bullet last Sept. 23 in eastern Afghanistan, his mother received an e-mail message with a link to a video on the Internet. A television reporter happened to have been filming a story at Blaskowski's small mountain outpost when it came under fire and the sergeant was shot. T H E W O R L D O U T S I D E T H E Since then, Blaskowski's parents, Cheryl and Terry Blaskowski VA L L Y : S N I P P E T S F R O M T H E of Cheboygan, Michigan, have watched their 27-year-old son I H T die over and over. Blaskowski has taken breaks from work to "Before t here was t he rich, watch it on her computer, sometimes several times a day, t he poor and people in t he studying her son's last movements. middle; now t here is nobody "Anything to be closer," she said. "To see what could have in t he middle," said been different, how it — " the bullet — "happened to find him." Muhammad Abdel Wahid, 36, For months, the Blaskowskis felt alone in watching their son an elevat or t echnician who die in an isolated and nearly forgotten war. And then, in June, earns less t han $50 a mont h. "T here are t he rich, the war in Afghanistan roared back into public view when t hey eat and drink; t here are American deaths from hostilities exceeded those in Iraq. In the t he poor, and t hey die." face of an expanding threat from the Taliban, the conflict is becoming deadlier and much more violent for American Newspaper advert ising troops, who three weeks ago reached their highest revenue in t he Unit ed St at es deployment levels ever, at 36,000. fell 7.9 percent in 2007, t he June was the second deadliest month for the military in second-worst year in more Afghanistan since the war began, with 23 American deaths t han half a cent ury, from hostilities, compared with 22 in Iraq. July was less deadly, according t o t he Newspaper with 20 deaths, compared with six in Iraq. On July 22, nearly Associat ion of America. seven years after the conflict began on Oct. 7, 2001, the United States lost its 500th soldier in the Afghanistan war. St uff Whit e People Like: (The Pentagon says that 563 American service members "T he No. 1 reason why whit e have died in Operation Enduring Freedom, the umbrella term people like not having a T V," for the global American-led antiterror campaign that has the reads t he explanat ion under Afghanistan war at its center and includes deployments in the ent ry No. 28, Not Having a Philippines and Africa. Of those deaths, according to an T V, "is so t hat t hey can t ell analysis by The New York Times, 510 have occurred in you t hat t hey don't have a Afghanistan or are directly linked to the war there.) T V." Now, a war that had long been overshadowed by the one in ASSET S managed by Iraq is back in public view, at the forefront of both news media sorverign wealt h funds will attention and the presidential campaign. The use of the t riple from last year's figure Afghanistan war for political purposes disheartens the t o more t han $10 t rillion by Blaskowskis, they say, but has at least one positive aspect. 20`5, fueled by foreign "The good thing about the heightened awareness now is that exchange reserves and rising at least some of these soldiers' names are getting out there," commodit y prices, t he Blaskowski said recently. "If anything good is coming out of that Int ernat ional Finacial Int ernat ional Finacial media attention, it's that people see that they are truly Services London predict ed. human. It's not just numbers. It's actually brothers and sons and fathers. They're human." Among t he 30 nat ions in t he The numbers, as impersonal as they may be, are quickly Organizat ion for Economic mounting, and more families each week are joining the Cooperat ion and Blaskowskis in their grief. Development , a club of During the first three years of the war, about two-thirds of all indust rial count ries, only American casualties came under so-called nonhostile Mexicans, Koreans and conditions — illnesses, vehicle crashes and accidental Greeks pay less in t axes discharges of weapons, for example. t han Americans, as a share But that pattern flipped in 2005. Since then, about 70 percent of t he economy. T he Unit ed St at es also ranks near t he of American casualties in Afghanistan have occurred under bot t om on public spending hostile conditions, like small-arms fire, rocket attacks and, on social programs: 19 increasingly, improvised mines and bombs. percent of t he nat ion's In 2007, 111 American service members were killed, the t ot al out put in 2003, highest annual toll so far in the war. So far this year, 91 compared wit h 29 percent in Americans have died, a rate faster than last year. At least 78 Sweden, 23 percent in of those deaths have come in combat; by comparison, 50 Port ugal and almost 30 were killed during the same period last year. percent in France. Though Afghan security forces have suffered the vast majority of fatalities in the war, exact numbers are hard to come by. In 1893, Friedrich Engels The Defense Ministry said that nearly 600 Afghan soldiers wrot e from London t o were killed from March 2005 to March 2008, the only period for Friedrich Adolph Sorge, which it provided statistics. The Afghan Interior Ministry, which anot her German Communist began recording police deaths in March 2007, said 1,119 police t hen living in New York, officers were killed from March 2007 to March 2008. lament ing how America's Late last month, the military released data showing that diversit y hindered effort s t o insurgent activity had soared, with attacks in eastern border est ablish a workers' part y in regions up nearly 40 percent from last year. t he Unit ed St at es. Was it "Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan," the possible t o unify Poles, Germans, Irish, "t he many Atlantic Council of the United States, a nongovernmental small groups, each of which organization dedicated to fostering ties between North underst ands only it self"? All America and Europe, warned in a report in January. "Unless this t he bourgeoisie had t o do reality is understood and action is taken promptly, the future was wait , "and t he dissimilar of Afghanistan is bleak." element s of t he working The report was actually one of the more positive assessments class fall apart again." among a deluge of critical reports on the war's progress issued this year by international study groups. "T here's t his not ion t hat Such dark warnings, along with years of low interest in the t here's an aut hent ic race conflict among many Americans and even political candidates, and you must fit it ," said have led the families and friends of fallen American service Brat t er, now an assist ant members to wonder whether they perished for a winning professor of sociology at cause, a losing one or, worse, a meaningless one. Rice Universit y in Houst on 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next Page who researches int erracial http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/america/07afghan.php families. "We're confront ed wit h t he lack of fit ."T he old cat egories are weakening, ****************F however, as immigrat ion and BOOK REVIEW t he advancing age of marriage in t he Unit ed My Guant ánamo Diary: T he Det ainees and t he St ories St at es fuel a rise in t he T hey Told Me. number of int erracial By Mahvish Rukhsana Khan. Illust rat ed. 302 pages. marriages. T he 2000 census $25.95. PublicAffairs count ed 3.1 million int erracial couples, or about 6 percent of married In 2005, while a law student at the University of Miami, couples. For t he first t ime, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan decided to volunteer as an interpreter t he census t hat year for Afghan detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The American allowed respondent s t o daughter of Afghan immigrants (her parents are Johns Hopkins- ident ify t hemselves as of educated physicians), Khan thought it unfair that the detainees "t wo or more races," a could not understand their lawyers, who did not speak Pashto, cat egory t hat now includes and although she didn't know whether they were guilty, she 7.3 million Americans, about believed they were entitled to prove their innocence. 3 percent of t he populat ion. But after more than three dozen visits to the Guantánamo prison camp, Khan writes, "I came to believe that many, By t he end of 2007, China perhaps even most" of the detainees were "innocent men firmly eclipsed Canada as who'd been swept up by mistake." A number of the men she t he No. 1 seller of goods t o met insisted they had been sold to the United States by t he Unit ed St at es. U.S.-China t rade relat ions are a one- t rade relat ions are a one- bounty hunters, after the American military dropped leaflets sided affair. It is an across Afghanistan promising up to $25,000, or nearly 100 asymmet rical relat ionship in times the annual per capita income, to anyone who would turn which t he colonial power in members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda. enjoys posit ive t erms of I began "My Guantánamo Diary" wondering whether Khan was t rade and balance of too credulous, especially after she conceded that "it may payment . Also, t he t op appear to some readers that I gave ample, and perhaps Chinese export s t o t he naïve, credence to the prisoners' points of view." But by the Unit ed St at es are no longer end, I was more or less persuaded by her conclusion that most garment s and t oys, but of the Afghans she met were not guilty of crimes against the machinery and indust rial United States, and for a simple reason: the military ultimately equipment . released most of them. Once you know the endings to Khan's stories, they read like In France t here are what t he the gripping narratives of the wrongly accused. There is Ali hist orian Pierre Nora calls Shah Mousovi, a pediatrician who says he returned to t he realms of memory, Afghanistan in 2003, following years of exile in Iran, to open a major sit es such as Verdun medical clinic and rebuild his country. Soon after his return, or t he Lascaux caves. But American soldiers broke down his door, accused him of t here are also unconsidered associating with the Taliban and took him to the Bagram Air places as crucial in t heir small way, such as Deyrolle, Base. There, he says, he was blindfolded, hooded, gagged and where for more t han a repeatedly kicked in the head by American soldiers, who spat cent ury people have come on him, cursed him and paraded him naked. t o savor t he must y delight s Flown to Guantánamo, he had to wait a year and a half for a of lions lying down wit h hearing, where he was told the evidence against him was lambs, spooky beet les and classified and was denied the right to call witnesses in his st range birds. More like an defense. He believed he had been sold by bounty-hunting 18t h-cent ury cabinet de political opponents, and as a Shiite Muslim was viewed by the curiosit és t han a simple Taliban as an infidel. "It's still not clear to me what I am being model of t he t axidermist 's charged with," he told his silent judges. Finally, after three art , it has at t ract ed years of numbing boredom and petty humiliations at scholars, grandparent s Guantánamo prison, Mousovi was released and returned to a buying post ers of Dangerous tearful reunion with his family in Iran. Plant s and t he Amazonian There is Haji Nusrat Khan, a detainee around 80 years old, who Forest , such Surrealist s as hobbles on a walker after having suffered a stroke. In Dali and Bret on, and decades Afghanistan in 2003, he went to the American authorities to of wide-eyed children. complain about the arrest of his son; days later, Nusrat himself was arrested, beaten at the Bagram Air Base and sent to Perhaps t he most ext reme Guantánamo - turned in, he said, by a bounty hunter. Accused, react ion t o t he burdens of wint er has been repeat ed like his son, of harboring a cache of weapons, he claimed that incident s of what t he police he and his son were supporters of the American-backed Karzai call snow rage. Most are government, which had paid them to guard arms seized from t errit orial disput es t hat the Soviets. In an intrepid and suspenseful chapter, Khan erupt when homeowners travels to Afghanistan to visit the family of another detainee who have run out of space and to bring back a home video of his family; later, when she on t heir propert y begin returns to Guantánamo and shows Nusrat's son a similar home t ossing snow ont o video of his children, he weeps. Nusrat was released in 2006. neighboring propert ies. Other Afghan detainees who languished for years at A defining moment occurred Guantánamo before being freed include a goatherd who was in Quebec Cit y, where a 63- turned over to the Americans by his cousin after they year-old man confront ed a quarreled and two poetry-writing members of the Pakistani 25-year-old woman from a opposition, who were turned in by their political rivals and commercial clearing service repeatedly questioned at Guantánamo about a joke they had who was blowing snow ont o told involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. his yard. Aft er banging on Khan captures the bizarre culture of Guantánamo, where her t ract or and shout ing at lawyers struggle to represent their clients - and to bring them her, t he man rushed back chai lattes from the Starbucks on the base - in the face of int o his house and ret urned military officials who try to obstruct her and the lawyers at wit h a shot gun t o reinforce his complaint . T he police every turn. Like Khan, many of the lawyers came to believe have charged him wit h that their clients were innocent men who had been swept up negligent use of a firearm by mistake. Khan says she has "made every effort to verify" and seized his collect ion of the prisoners' accounts, but her sources are sparse and most 13 guns. of them seem to be news media reports. She does not address the possibility that the subset of prisoners she met - Last year, according t o Afghans seized in Pakistan and sold by bounty hunters - were Agricult ure Depart ment more likely to be innocent than other detainees. dat a, average cropland rent s Nevertheless, her gut-wrenching first-person accounts of rose 7 percent t o $85 an detainee abuse by American soldiers at the Bagram Air Base acre.Rent s as a percent of are consistent with the findings of a recent report by the crop land value - a met ric inspector general of the Justice Department on detainee akin t o t he earnings yield on interrogations in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. F.B.I. a st ock - have declined over officials observed detainees being subjected to sexual t he past 10 years across humiliation, body cavity searches and other indignities similar t he count ry, from about to the abuses that Khan reports. 4.96 percent in 1998 t o 3.15 The fact that many of the prisoners Khan describes appear to percent last year. By have been innocent of the vague accusations against them, comparison, from January were imprisoned for years without formal charges or fair 1926 t hrough December 2007, t he annualized t ot al hearings and were eventually released by the United States ret urn for t he S&P 500- without apology or compensation makes the abuse they st ock index was 10.4 suffered during years of imprisonment all the more percent per year. So while outrageous. By giving us the perspective of the detainees, t he cost of U.S. farmland is "My Guantánamo Diary" provides a valuable account of what rising, t he real ret urn t hat we can now recognize as one of the most shameful episodes land generat es has fallen. in the war on terror. It is hard to read this book without a growing sense of embarrassment and indignation. During t he past decade, t he http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/08/arts/idbriefs9C.php average price of an acre of U.S. cropland has doubled, ***************** according t o t he U.S. Fingerprint t est t ells much more t han ident it y Depart ment of Agricult ure, With a new analytical technique, a fingerprint can reveal much from $1,340 in 1998 t o more than the identity of a person. It can also identify what $2,700 in 2007. Last year the person has been touching — drugs, explosives or poisons, alone, average prices for example. nat ionwide jumped 13 Writing in the Friday issue of the journal Science, R. Graham percent . Cooks, a professor of chemistry at Purdue University, and his colleagues describe how a laboratory technique known as Around t he beginning of t he 19t h cent ury, t he Brit ish mass spectrometry could find a wider application in crime polit ical economist T homas investigations. Malt hus said populat ion had The equipment to perform such tests is already commercially t he pot ent ial t o grow much available, although expensive. Smaller, cheaper, portable fast er t han food supply, a versions are probably only a couple of years away. predict ion t hat efficient In mass spectrometry, an electrical charge is added to a farming consist ent ly proved molecule, which is then accelerated by an electric field. The wrong. Now, at t he beginning molecule enters a magnetic field, causing its trajectory to of t he 21st cent ury, some bend. The amount of bending tells the molecule's mass-to- are revisit ing his predict ions. electric charge ratio. That is usually enough information to deduce what molecule it is. T hieves peeled long st rips of In Cooks' method, a tiny spray of electrically charged liquid – lead from t he roof of St . either water or water and alcohol – is sprayed on a tiny bit of Michael and All Angels, unt il the fingerprint. The droplets dissolve compounds in the a barking dog sent t hem fingerprints and splashes them off the surface into the fleeing from t his t iny analyzer. The liquid evaporates, and the electrical charge is Leicest ershire village. But by transferred to the fingerprint molecules, which are then t hen, t hey had left a hole of identified through mass spectrometry. about 100 square feet in "It's just that simple," Cooks said. The researchers call the t he t op of t he 800-year-old church. technique desorption electrospray ionization, or Desi, for short. In the experiments described in the Science paper, solutions I have t o confess, I don't containing tiny amounts of various chemicals including cocaine drink much California pinot and the explosive RDX were applied to the fingertips of noir. T he prevailing t hick, volunteers. The volunteers touched surfaces like glass, paper fruit -and-oak-drenched and plastic. The researchers then analyzed the fingerprints. st yle, oft en wit h a t ouch of Because the spatial resolution is on the order of the width of a sweet ness, does not appeal human hair, the Desi technique did not just detect the t o me.I find t hat t hese presence of, for instance, cocaine on the surface, but literally wines are clumsy at t he showed a pattern of cocaine in the shape of the fingerprint, t able, overwhelming and leaving no doubt who had left the cocaine behind. fat iguing. In short , many of Prosolia, Inc., a small company in Indianapolis, has licensed the t he leading California pinot Desi technology from Purdue and is already selling such noirs t oday seem t o me t o analyzers as add-ons to large laboratory mass spectrometers, be t he ant it hesis of what which cost several hundred thousand dollars each. pinot noirs ought t o be: Prosolia has so far sold "40 or so" of its analyzers, said Peter light , elegant , graceful and Kissinger, the company's chairman and chief executive. The refreshing most sophisticated version that would be needed for the fingerprint analysis went on sale only this year. Anot her, t he seemingly normal Julie Meyer, lives in an The fingerprint work "is a nice, quick dramatic indication of et ernal present imposed by what the possibilities are," Kissinger said. a cat ast rophic car accident However, fingerprints are not its main focus for Prosolia or t hat killed her daught er, t hat killed her daught er, Cooks. "This is really just an offshoot of a project that is really whom she cannot remember. aimed at trying to develop a methodology ultimately to be “When she at t empt s t o used in surgery." Cooks said. read, t he words vanish from If a Desi analyzer can be miniaturized and automated into a t he front of t he paragraph; surgical tool, a surgeon could, for example, quickly test for the when she wat ches a movie, presence of molecules associated with cancer. "That's the every scene is t he opening long-term aim of this work," Cooks said. scene,” Mr. Mason writ es. In unpublished research, the researchers have tested the Alt hough her procedural method with bladder tumors in dogs. memory is fine — she can Prosolia is collaborating with Griffin Analytical Technologies, a perform mechanical t asks subsidiary of ICx collaboraties, on a Desi analyzer that works like cooking or making a with a portable mass spectrometer. That product is probably a t elephone call — Ms. Meyer year or two away from mark, Kissinger said. has t o be reint roduced t o As it becomes cheaper and more widely available, the Desi her husband every t ime he technology has potential ethical implications, Cooks said. visit s t he hospit al. Like t he Instead of drug tests, a company could surreptitiously check main charact er in t he film “Mement o,” she keeps not es for illegal drug use of its employees by analyzing computer t o guide her t hrough t he keyboards after the employees have gone home, for instance. day and st udies, wit h "It's just one more test," Cooks said, "and it can reveal a whole ferocious int ensit y, facial lot of detail." expressions and behavior t o http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/healthscience/08finger.p separat e friends from hp st rangers. She fakes her way t hrough life. **************** Aust ralia police reopen 7,000 cases aft er DNA error Mao Zedong announced t he CANBERRA: Australian police will re-examine 7,000 crimes t une himself, in 1927, when solved through DNA evidence after a mistake forced he wrot e: "A revolut ion is detectives to free a suspect wrongly accused of murder. not a dinner part y, or Police in the southern city of Melbourne withdrew charges writ ing an essay or paint ing against Russell John Gesah, accused in July of the 1984 a pict ure or doing murders of a 35-year-old mother and her nine-year-old embroidery; it cannot be so daughter. refined, so leisurely and "It's obviously an embarrassment and we would rather not be gent le, so t emperat e, kind, in this position," Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Simon court eous, rest rained and Overland was quoted as saying in Australian media on magnanimous. A revolut ion is an insurrect ion, an act of Thursday. violence by which one class DNA is supposed to be the most accurate method of proving overt hrows anot her." guilt through evidence samples taken at crime scenes, with the likelihood of matching genetic markers among people said Elmaleh, 36, is a rest less to be around one in 7 billion or greater. int erviewee who slips in and Police last month said a DNA sample taken from the murder out of various voices, scene, where Margaret Tapp was strangled and her daughter endlessly curious - "T hat 's Seana raped and later killed, matched Gesah after comparison enough about me, let 's t alk with 400,000 other DNA profiles on a national database. about American women: Gesah was arrested and faced court, but a later check found T hey're really not int o the DNA evidence used against him was taken elsewhere and seduct ion are t hey?" He is a mistakenly tested with samples from the Tapp murder scene. compulsive observer, Overland said every crime solved by DNA in the state since addict ed t o list ening in on the testing technology was introduced 20 years ago would people's conversat ions.At a now be reviewed to check no other bungles had occurred. Right Bank café, his ears are "We need to refine our processes and our practices, and that t uned int o t he power is now happening as a result of this case," he said. breakfast at a neighboring Victorian Law Institute spokesman Michael Brett Young said t able. "I can't help it ," he Gesah had been wrongfully painted as a villain because of says. "Wow! I'm sorry. T hese people are selling police mistakes, possibly damaging public faith in the legal somet hing, but I can't make system at a time when corruption scandals were already it out . . . T his is how I get undermining authorities. my mat erial, how I writ e. I "Really he's been convicted in the court of public opinion due can't make up anyt hing, just to the actions of the police and the media," Young said on t he form." Thursday. Criminal lawyers said the mistake would almost guarantee In Poland, 22 percent of t he future challenges to the accuracy of police DNA evidence. work force is employed in http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/08/07/asia/OUKWD- agricult ure and t he count ry UK-AUSTRALIA-CRIME.php boast s by far t he highest number of farms in Europe. Most of t hem are t iny.T he average size is 7 hect ares, **************** or 17 acres, compared t o more t han 24 hect ares in Bin Laden's former driver sent enced t o 66 mont hs more t han 24 hect ares in GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba: Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the Spain, France and Germany, convicted former driver for Osama bin Laden, was sentenced t he Union's ot her large Thursday to 66 months in prison by the military panel that had agricult ure players. T here convicted him of a war crime Wednesday. are 1.5 million small farms in Poland. Only It aly, wit h it s The unexpectedly short sentence was far less than military proliferat ion of high-end, prosecutors had sought. Through more than five years of legal niche agricult ural product s proceedings against Hamdan, prosecutors had pursued a life compares wit h Poland in it s sentence, and earlier in the day, faced with Hamdan's abundance of small acquittal on the most serious charge against him, prosecutors producers. recommended a sentence of at least 30 years and said life might be appropriate. "What I like is t he poet ique After little more than an hour of deliberations on the sentence, of t he sit uat ion," he [Jean the panel of six senior military officers returned to the Nouvel] said. "I am a windowless tribunal room with their sentence on the single hedonist , and I want t o give war crimes charge for which they convicted him Wednesday, pleasure t o ot her people." providing material support to a terrorist organization. Hamdan's lawyers had recommended 45 months, or less than Lahiri shows t hat people four years, as a reasonable sentence. may be felled at any t ime by After the president of the panel, the most senior officer, read swift jabs of chance, the sentence, Hamdan rose at the defense table, collected wherever t hey happen t o himself for a moment and spoke. Referring to an apology he live. Uncont rollable event s had made to victims of terrorism Thursday morning in the may assail t hem. More same room, he began: "I would like to apologize one more oft en, t hey suffer less dramat ic reversals: failed time to all the members. And I would like to thank you for what love affairs, alcoholism, even you have done for me." simple passivit y - t he sort The military judge, Captain Keith Allred of the navy, had of t roubles t hat seem already said that he planned to give Hamdan credit for 61 avoidable t o everyone months he had been held, meaning that Hamdan could except t he person who complete his criminal sentence in five months. After that his succumbs t o t hem. Like future is unclear, because the administration of President Laura, t he well-meaning George W. Bush says that it can hold detainees here until the narrat or of "Brief end of the war on terror. Encount er," t he men and After Allred explained the sentence to Hamdan, he said he women of Lahiri's st ories was not certain of Hamdan's fate after the end of the criminal oft en find t hemselves sentence, in January. "After that, I don't know what happens," overwhelmed by unexpect ed said Allred, who had developed a warm relationship with passions. Hamdan during months of pre-trial hearings. In the courtroom after the military panel members filed out, Kevin Federline might play Hamdan, who was captured in the middle of the Afghan war on t he part of t he pauper t o Nov. 24, 2001, hugged the former American military lawyer, his pop princess ex-wife Charles Swift, who has represented him here for four years Brit ney Spears, but in Las and helped take his case to the Untied States Supreme Court. Vegas he is king.Federline spent over $43,000 on Las Hamdan, looking worn after a two-week trial, spoke in the Vegas hot els, dining and makeshift courtroom here, saying his ties to bin Laden were "a shopping bet ween May 2007 work relationship only" and claiming that he had been troubled and January of t his year, by the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in 2000 that according t o document s killed 17 sailors. filed by Federline's at t orney He said he had once had a relationship of mutual respect with in his cust ody bat t le wit h bin Laden but that after the Cole bombing, his views about his Spears. T he document s were boss "changed a lot." He said he needed money and had released by t he Superior returned to work with bin Laden because he felt he had few Court on T hursday.T he t abs options. included $1,445 for clot hing But a prosecutor, John Murphy, ridiculed the idea that a man at Gianni Versace, $3,863 at would work for a killer instead of seeking other employment. TAO night club, and $3,008 at He argued that there was no place for mercy, urging the panel t he Hard Rock Beach Club.He to impose a sentence of no less than 30 years and possibly appears det ermined not t o life, the maximum. be branded a cheap t ipper. "Your sentence," Murphy said, "should say the United States At Scores st rip club, he will hunt you down and give you a harsh but appropriate dropped a cool $2,000 on a sentence if you provide material support for terrorism." He $365 meal bill.Meanwhile, his argued for justice for the victims of Qaeda terror attacks. company, Gooseneck Product ions, Inc., spent A defense lawyer, Charles Swift, reminded the panel $841,129 in 2007 while members that Hamdan had cooperated with interrogators, earning $544,075, according providing information about places in Afghanistan linked to bin t o t he document s. Laden. He said a long sentence would discourage other potential "T he horizon is such a basic sources of information about terror organizations from working way of comprehending t he way of comprehending t he with American forces. "The reward for cooperation is life?" Swift space around us, asked. "Does that help us in this struggle?" comprehending our basic Swift, who has represented Hamdan through years of legal relat ionship t o t he globe," battles, did not offer a proposed sentence. But he noted that Leong said one recent the only detainee who has been sentenced by a military morning over t ea in commission here, Hicks, received a sentence of nine months. Manhat t an. Hicks pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism "In t erms of looking, t he last year and is now free. horizon is t he fart hest we Swift suggested that if the panel determined that Hamdan can see," he explained, yet in were five times more culpable than Hicks, the sentence would t erms of knowledge, it be 45 months, less than four years. reflect s t he "limit of Swift, a former navy lawyer, argued that a sentence in experience." proportion to Hamdan's participation as a driver would help "Males t ypically oversell make meaningful some future verdict against the planners of t heir abilit ies while women the 2001 terror attacks. undersell t hemselves," said "At some point," he said, "we will bring the people who Alex Tosolini, general conspired, the people who brought those buildings down, and manager at Proct er & that's going to be a great day." Gamble in Poland. Smart Swift said that a sentence that is modest by comparison to a leaders, he said, will "adjust potential sentence against the Sept. 11 plotters would help men's claims about give that eventual sentence its proper significance. "And it will t hemselves downward and be all the more meaningful because we got the guys who did women's upward t o get an it, not the driver." accurat e reading of realit y." http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/america/08gitmo.php Nearly a t hird of American high school st udent s don't ***************** graduat e (half in t he cit ies). Bin Laden's driver guilt y as ordered Sevent y percent of African- Now that was a real nail-biter. The court designed by the White American kids are born out House and its congressional enablers to guarantee convictions of wedlock. of detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba - using evidence obtained by torture and secret evidence as desired - has held T he premise of many good French movies t hat not its first trial. It produced ... a guilty verdict. everyone's decent or kind, The military commission of six senior officers found Salim t hat everyt hing may not Ahmed Hamdan, who worked as one of Osama bin Laden's t urn out great , and t hat drivers until 2001, guilty of one count of providing material nice doesn't aut omat ically support for terrorism. follow from funny, may be The rules of justice on Guantánamo are so stacked against t he key in making t hem a defendants that the only surprise was that Hamdan was hard sell away from home. actually acquitted on the more serious count of conspiring (it In fact , t his is exact ly t heir was unclear with whom) to kill Americans during the invasion uniqueness and what 's not of Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001. lost in t ranslat ion. The charge on which Hamdan was convicted seemed logical since he did work as bin Laden's driver. But it was still an odd As economies grow richer, prosecution. more buildings and Drivers of even the most heinous people are generally not infrast ruct ure are charged with war crimes. It is impossible, in any case, to judge const ruct ed t o make t hem the evidence against Hamdan because of the deeply flawed run. As cit izens become nature of this trial - the blueprint for which was the Military wealt hier, t hey acquire more Commissions Act of 2006, one of the worst bits of lawmaking of an appet it e for meat t o in American history. make t heir bodies run. As Alec Walsh, an analyst at At these trials, hearsay and secret documents are admissible. Harding, Loevner Hamdan's defense was actually required to began its case in a Management , not ed, secret session. The witness was a camp psychologist, consumpt ion of pork in presumably called to back Hamdan's account of being abused China has doubled since by his interrogators. 1990. And more meat means Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor in more grain: It t akes up t o Guantánamo, put the trial in a disturbing light. He testified that five t ons of grain t o he was informed by his superiors that only guilty verdicts produce a t on of would be tolerated. He also said that he was told to bring high- meat .Walsh invoked an profile cases quickly to help Republicans score a pre-election argument for higher grain public relations coup. prices t hat recalls t he one Davis gave up his position on Oct. 4, 2007. That, he wrote in long used t o promot e t he The Los Angeles Times in December, was "the day I virt ues of owning real concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under est at e: "T he amount of the current system." arable land t hat exist s for In his article, Davis described a highly politicized system in new crops is finit e." which people who were supposed to be neutral decision- Only 28 percent of makers were allied with the prosecutors. According to Davis, Only 28 percent of Defense Secretary Robert Gates pushed out a fair-minded Americans knew American casualt ies in Iraq were "convening authority" - the official who decides which cases go nearing 4,000 last mont h to trial, which charges will be heard and who serves on the [April 2008], according t o jury. t he Pew Research Cent er. That straight-shooting administrator was replaced by Susan T he Project for Excellence in Crawford who, Davis said, assessed evidence before charges Journalism found t hat by were filed, directed the prosecution's preparation and even March 2008 t he percent age drafted charges. This "intermingling" of "convening authority of prominent news st ories and prosecutor roles," Davis argued, "perpetuates the t hat were about Iraq had perception of a rigged process." fallen t o about one-fift h of Davis said the final straw for him was when he was placed what it was in January 2007. under the command of William Haynes, the Defense It 's a poignant comment ary Department's general counsel. Davis had instructed on t he whole war t hat Iraq prosecutors not to offer evidence obtained through the torture and Afghanist an Vet erans of technique known as waterboarding. Haynes helped draft the America, t he nonpart isan orders permitting acts, like waterboarding, that violate advocacy group, was American laws and the Geneva Conventions. reduced t o prot est ing t he We are not arguing that the United States should condone lack of coverage. terrorism or those who support it, or that the guilty should not be punished severely. But in a democracy, trials must be More t han 200,000 Michigan resident s worked for governed by fair rules, and judges must be guided by the law subsidiaries of foreign and the evidence, not pressure from the government. The companies as of 2005, military commission system, which falls far short of these according t o government standards, is a stain on the United States. dat a.Yet in a st at e t hat has http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/opinion/edguilty.php lost 300,000 manufact uring jobs since 2000, foreign invest ment has not been ****************** enough t o compensat e; OPINION indeed, it has somet imes HIV T RANSMISSIONA t ragedy, not a crime exacerbat ed t he erosion.

Edwin Cameron is a justice of South Africa's Supreme Court of T he economist Jeffrey D. Appeal. Michaela Clayton is director of the AIDS and Rights Sachs, head of t he Eart h Alliance of Southern Africa, Windhoek, Namibia. Scott Burris is Inst it ut e at Columbia law professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. Universit y, st at ed t he case blunt ly in a recent art icle in A few months ago in Dallas, Texas, Willie Campbell was Scient ific American: “Even convicted of assault with a "deadly weapon" against police wit h a cut back in wast eful officers who were arresting him for being drunk and disorderly. energy spending, our current t echnologies cannot support He was sentenced to 35 years in prison.Too bad, you may say, bot h a decline in carbon but so what? Well, Campbell has HIV, and the "deadly weapon" dioxide emissions and an was saliva, which he spat into the officers' faces. But saliva has expanding global economy. If never been shown to transmit HIV, so the "deadly weapon" we t ry t o rest rain emissions Campbell wielded was no more lethal than a toy pistol - and it wit hout a fundament ally wasn't even loaded.His sentence also reflected his criminal new set of t echnologies, we record, but there is no denying that Willie Campbell was will end up st ifling economic punished not just for what he did, but for the virus he growt h, including t he carried.He is not alone. Across the world, people with HIV are development prospect s for going to prison even when they have not transmitted the virus billions of people.”What is and never intended to.Bermuda recently jailed a man with HIV needed, Mr. Sachs and ot hers for 10 years for having unprotected sex with his girlfriend, say, is t he development of even though she has tested negative. A Swiss man was sent radically advanced low- to jail this year for infecting his girlfriend, even though he carbon t echnologies, which thought he was HIV-negative. t hey say will only come In Africa - which has about two-thirds of the world's HIV cases - about wit h great ly increased a U.S.-financed "model" statute that broadly criminalizes spending by det ermined transmission and exposure has been adopted by 11 countries, government s on what has and others may do the same. The law requires those who so far been an anemic commit ment t o research know they have HIV to inform "any sexual contact" in advance and development . A - without defining "sexual contact." (Does the definition, for Manhat t an-like Project , so example, include kissing?)Sierra Leone's version of the law t o speak. expressly brings a pregnant mother within its terms. She can be jailed if she does not "take all reasonable measures and T his year, governance precautions to prevent the transmission of HIV" to her unborn expert s say, t hey are livid. baby. “T hey are furious about t he So what is behind the drive to deal with HIV through criminal dichot omy of experiences — laws? It aims to stem the rising tide of infections, to protect t heir shares fall, yet C.E.O. those vulnerable to becoming infected - especially women, pay st ill rises,” said Paul who often fall prey to careless or unscrupulous men - and to Hodgson, a senior research encourage disclosure by those who know they have the associat e at t he Corporat e virus.Good intentions, but bad policy. Studies and more than Library, a governance two decades of experience show that making exposure and research group.T he accidental transmission into crimes does not change sexual compensat ion research firm behavior or stem the spread of HIV.Criminalization is a Equilar recent ly compiled misguided substitute for measures that really protect those at dat a about chief execut ive risk of contracting HIV: effective prevention, protection against pay at 200 companies t hat discrimination, efforts to reduce the stigma associated with filed t heir proxies by March 28 and had revenues of at AIDS, greater access to testing, and, most important, least $6.5 billion. And t he treatment for those who are dying of the disease.Far from dat a illust rat es Mr. protecting women, criminalization endangers them. In Africa, Hodgson’s point . It shows most people who know their HIV status are female because t hat average compensat ion most testing occurs at natal health-care sites. The result is for chief execut ives who had that most of those who will be prosecuted because they know held t he job at least t wo - or ought to know - their HIV status will be women.The years rose 5 percent in material circumstances in which many women find 2007, t o $11.2 million (If themselves - especially in Africa - make it difficult for them to new C.E.O.’s are count ed, negotiate safer sex, or to discuss HIV at all. These t hat number is $11.7 circumstances include social subordination, economic million). Even t hough dependence and traditional systems of property and performance-based bonuses inheritance that make them dependent on men. were down last year, t he Criminalization will make them more vulnerable to HIV, not value and prevalence of less.Moreover, criminalization is often unfairly and selectively discret ionary bonuses — enforced. Prosecutions and laws single out already vulnerable ones not linked t o groups - like prostitutes, men who have sex with men and, in performance — were up. A European countries, black males.Criminalization also places result is t hat C.E.O.’s who blame on one person instead of putting responsibility on two. have held t heir jobs for t wo years received an average Realistically, the risk of getting HIV (or any sexually t ot al bonus payout of $2.8 transmitted infection) must now be seen as an inescapable million, up 1.1 percent from facet of having sex. We cannot pretend that the risk is 2006. introduced into an otherwise safe encounter by the person who knows or should know he or she has HIV. The practical T he lesson from hist ory for responsibility for safer sex practices rests on everyone.These China's leaders is t hat laws are difficult and degrading to apply. Where sex is foreign int erference leads between two consenting adults, the apparatus of proof and t o polit ical inst abilit y. T here the necessary methodology of prosecution degrade the are t wo ways t o prevent parties and debase the law. What is more, the legal concepts t his: having influence in of negligence and even recklessness are incoherent in the foreign affairs and making realm of sexual behavior. We know that the "reasonable sure t here is no domest ic person" often has unprotected sex with partners of unknown opposit ion.T he leading sexual history in spite of the known risks - that's why we have West ern government s an HIV epidemic, and that's why interventions to reduce openly pressuring Beijing unsafe sex are so important.Criminalization increases stigma would not only be fut ile but and may well deter testing. Why would a woman in Sierra count erproduct ive. It would Leone want to have an HIV test that will, if positive, put her at sooner cause t he Chinese risk of a seven-year jail sentence if she becomes pregnant, or government t o furt her limit polit ical freedom, t han the next time she has sex? The laws put diagnosis, treatment, grant more of it . help and support further out of her reach. Frans-Paul van der Putten http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/opinion/edcameron.php The Hague

"When we argue t hat a woman owns t he ut erus, and it 's her right t o decide whet her t o deliver t he baby or not , people won't buy it ," said Yuan Xin, direct or of psychology at t he Consult ing Cent er of Nankai Universit y. "If you are a woman, your personal choice is monit ored and supervised by a lot of ot hers, and t hey expect you t o do what everyone else does."

2 killed in Russian resort blast During World War I, France mobilized about 600,000 MOSCOW: An explosion killed at least two people Thursday on colonial t roops, including a beach close to the resort town of Sochi, where Russia will many Muslims from Algeria host the 2014 Winter Olympics, the local police said. and Tunisia, of whom 78,000 The police said that "an unidentified explosive device" were killed. About 1.2 million detonated in the village of Loo, 24 kilometers, or 15 miles, French soldiers were killed in from Sochi, in a region on the Black Sea popular for its palm- t he war. lined beaches and snowy mountains. The blast occurred about France's est imat ed five 10 a.m. when few were out walking the beaches, a police million Muslims makes t hem statement said. Europe's largest Muslim communit y, making up about A 22-year-old woman from Kiev and 31-year-old man from 8 percent of t he populat ion. nearby Rostov-on-Don were killed, and at least four others were wounded, the police said. Vandals desecrat ed 148 It was unclear who might be behind the explosion, which graves in t he Muslim sect ion occurred at the height of the summer tourist season when of a milit ary cemet ery in hundreds of Russians flock to Sochi's resorts and sanatoriums nort hern France, hanging a famous since Soviet days. It is a favored vacation spot for pig's head on one of t he Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, an avid skier. headst ones, t he police said The police have offered an $85,000 reward for information that Sunday. would help solve the crime, a police spokesman told the Interfax news agency. President Dmitri Medvedev ordered his Elegant , nice and int elligent , representative to the Southern Federal District to personally but not yet a great first oversee the investigation, the Kremlin's Web site reported. lady. T hat was t he verdic of a CSA opinion poll on Carla The Kremlin has staked its reputation on the success of the Sarkozy published on Sunday Winter Games in Sochi, and plans to spend more than $10 [April 2008] by Le Parisien billion renovating the city's dilapidated infrastructure. newspaper. Security, however, has been a major concern. Sochi is about Ninet y t wo percent 25 kilometers from Abkhazia, a separatist enclave in the describing her as elegant , 89 former Soviet republic of Georgia that has seen a spike in percent as modern, 73 violence recently. A bombing at a café in Abkhazia killed four percent as nice and 69 people last month. percent as int elligent . Any major conflagration in the region could spill over the However, when asked which border and threaten the Games. first lady of t he modern era http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/europe/russia.php had respresent ed France well, she came in sixt h out ***************** of seven, receiving an approval rat ing of 43 10 killed in Sout h Osset ia clashes percent against 81 percent for Bernadet t e Chirac, wife TBILISI, Georgia: The capital of the separatist South Ossetia of t he previous president . region came under heavy fire early Friday, just hours after Georgia's president declared a cease-fire following days of T hai farmers harvest an sporadic fighting. average of 2.63 t ons per South Ossetia's leader accused Georgia of treachery, but the hect are, or about a t on per Georgian government said its troops were responding to rebel acre, compared wit h 6.22 attacks, news reports said. t ons per hect are in China, The new violence after a week of clashes escalated fears that 4.22 in Indonesia, 3.03 in the confrontation could escalate into an all-out war that might India and 7.55 in t he Unit ed engulf much of the Caucasus region and perhaps draw in St at es. T hese yields are not Russia, which has close ties with the separatists. only a measure of efficiency "The assault is coming from all directions" around Tskhinvali, but also reflect t he st rains the South Ossetia capital, said a brief statement on the of rice produced. separatist government's Web site. A statement from South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity "T he assumpt ion is t hat all said his forces were in combat with Georgian troops on the farmers are bet t er off when outskirts of the city. "There is a bitter fight going on and prices go up," said Robert Zeigler, direct or general of significant damage is inflicted on the enemy," he said. t he Int ernat ional Rice Georgia's government issued a statement saying the fighting Research Inst it ut e in t he started when separatists "began intensive firing on Georgian Philippines. "T he problem is villages" near Tskhinvali, the Interfax and ITAR-Tass news t hat a large proport ion of agencies reported. The statement said the military "was rice producers in t he world forced to take adequate measures." are act ually net rice buyers - t hey produce less t han t heir In a report from Tskhinvali, Interfax quoted Vladimir Ivanov, an act ual needs." official in a Russian peacekeeping force, as saying the fire Rice prices have been included salvos by truck-launched Grad rockets. creeping upward since t he Interfax quoted the president of North Ossetia, a Russian area beginning of t his decade, but bordering South Ossetia, as saying hundreds of volunteers it was not unt il February were heading to join the fight "and we can't stop them." As t hat t hey spiked sharply. t hat t hey spiked sharply. many as 1,000 volunteers from Abkhazia, another Georgian T he price of T hai B grade breakaway region with close ties to Russia, planned to go to rice, a widely t raded variet y, South Ossetia, Interfax quoted Abkhazian President Sergei reached $795 per t on last Bagapsh as saying. week [April 2008], an Hours before the new fighting, Georgian President Mikhail increase of 147 percent Saakashvili had announced a unilateral cease-fire in a from a year earlier. television broadcast during which he urged South Ossetian "Nobody has ever seen such leaders to enter talks on resolving the conflict. a jump in t he price of rice," He also proposed that Russia could become a guarantor of said Kwanchai Gomez, t he wide-ranging autonomy for South Ossetia, if the region execut ive direct or of t he remains under Georgian control. T hai Rice Foundat ion, a South Ossetia agreed to hold fire until a meeting Friday research cent er. "Cert ainly between its deputy prime minister and Georgia's top envoy not in my lifet ime, and t hat 's a long t ime." for separatist issues, Russian news agencies said, citing the She is 68 years old. head of the peacekeeping force in the region, Marat Kulakhmetov. Tu ne peux pas savoir mais j' Heavy shelling overnight Wednesday in South Ossetia killed at ai fait des et udes de least one person and wounded 22, officials said Thursday. It Geographie et d Hist oire was some of the most severe fighting reported since Aug. 1, avec une specialit e de when six people were reported killed in firing around Tskhinvali. Geographie Rurale; il me Most of South Ossetia, which is roughly 1.5 times the size of rest e peu de choses de Luxembourg, has been under the control of a separatist cet t e epoque de ma vie , government since a war there ended in 1992. Georgian troops mais je rest e t res hold several parts of the region. int eressée.Je viens de ret rouver dans ma http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/08/07/news/Georgia-South- bibliot hèque les Memoires d Ossetia.php un Village Anglais de Ronald Blyt he edit é en 1969 en GB. Cela concerne si ma memoire est bonne l East Anglia.Je l ai en français bien sur edit e par Plon dans la Collect ion Terre Humaine t raduit par Jacques B Hess; Je n ai pas ret rouve le t it re en anglais. Si t u as envie de le lire en francais , je peux t ' offrir le mien. Je suis sure qu 'il ira dans des mains et deav,nt des yeux int eressés. En France , il y a une LET T ER FROM INDIA excellent e serie de romans Everyt hing in India is changing but t reat ment of t he qui explique le developpement et la chut e poor d'une marge du Massif MUMBAI: Here in the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, the doyen of Cent ral; la Corrèze; Peut - this city's hotels, what you think of the new India may depend et re un peu facile, peut -et re on whether you are the person having soap squeezed onto un peu grand public, la saga your hands or the person squeezing the soap. de Claude Michelet mont re In every men's washroom at the Taj is a helper. As you bien ce qui s est passe dans les campagnes francaises approach the sink, he salutes you. Before you can turn on the ent re 1900 et 1960 depuis l tap, he does it for you. Before you can apply soap, he presses elect rificat ion en passant the dispenser. Before you can get a towel, he dangles one. As par la SNCF et la polit ique you leave, he salutes you again and mutters: "Right, sir. O.K., agricole europeenne. Claude sir. Thank you, sir." Michelet est un des fils d' un Step outside, and you see sedans reeking of new affluence. minist re de de Gaulle qui a Sleeping inside are drivers, many of them asleep because refuse de quit t er la t erre. they work 20-hour shifts, waking up at 6 a.m. to catch a train, taking the boss to and from work, then to his dinner, then to 'What went wrong at UBS" drinks, then dropping him home at 1 a.m. and taking a taxi (April 5) is no different from back to the tenements. what went wrong at At 1 a.m. back in the boss's apartment building, the hallways Cit igroup, Bear St earns, are often covered with bodies. They belong to servants and Merrill Lynch and so many sweepers who work inside by day but sleep outside by night, ot her banks. T he fault lies in who clean the toilets but would not dare use them. They learn t he syst em: Chief execut ives to sleep on cold tile, with tenants stepping over them when and high-ranking officers get returning from Champagne-soaked evenings out. huge salaries and bonuses India is changing so fast that it is starting to look like when t heir inst it ut ions make someplace else. Skyscrapers are sprouting. Towns are a profit , but don't pay a penalt y when shareholders penalt y when shareholders ballooning. The young date, drink, smoke freely. But many of get fleeced because of t heir the people who are making the new India new - from the poor decisions. T he syst em stockbrokers to the bedecked socialites - are responsible for encourages risk-t aking at preserving a certain gloomy element of the Indian past: a t he expense of prudence.Did tendency to treat the hired help like chattel, to taunt and any of t he chief execut ives humiliate and condescend to them, to behave as though at Cit i, Merril or UBS end up some humans were born to serve and others to be served. in t he doghouse? When t hings go well, t he chief "Indians are perhaps the world's most undemocratic people, execut ives are rewarded. living in the world's largest and most plural democracy," as When t hings go awry, it 's Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, two well-known scholars of t he market 's fault . Indian culture, put it in a recent book, "The Indians: Portrait of a Thomas Unger, São Paulo People." It is understandable that, in flush times, Indians would rather As a novice archit ect , talk about something else. Wit t genst ein obviously had But if a movie director in Mumbai has his way, before long large ambit ions. “I am not they will be talking about servants. In an attempt to expose int erest ed in erect ing a India's employer-servant relations in the way "Uncle Tom's building,” he once wrot e, Cabin" exposed American slavery, Raja Menon has made a “but in ... present ing t o provocative new film depicting India from a servant's-eye myself t he foundat ions of view. all possible buildings.” The movie, "Barah Aana," which translates roughly as Whet her or not his sist er’s "shortchanged," is currently being judged by festival juries in house approached t his high Toronto and Venice. ideal, Wit t genst ein himself It tells the story of three migrants to Mumbai from the ailing judged t he finished building villages of northern India. They work as a chauffeur, a waiter t o be aust ere and st erile. It has “good manners,” he and a security guard, sending most of their earnings home. lat er wrot e, but no They are heroes to their villages; but in Mumbai, they are “primordial life,” no “healt h. invisible men, enduring the callousness that comes with being ” an accessory to other people's boom times. In one scene, a wealthy homemaker, plump and accessorized A court in Spain says a boat by Louis Vuitton, zips through the city in the back of her black skipper has been sent enced SUV, pattering on her phone. Suddenly, her chauffeur slams on t o 16 years in prison for t he the brakes, jostling the woman and interrupting her deat h of 10 Africans who conversation. drowned while t rying t o "That beggar child came in front of my car," she explains reach Spain.T he Provincial indignantly to her friend in English after resuming her call. "That Court in t he Canary Islands idiotic driver just put the brake." says t he Moroccan skipper In another scene, a security guard discovers that his son is ill ordered people in t he and, without a $150 treatment, will die. Yadav goes around in crowded boat t o jump int o his building asking for loans from tenants who often drop $40 t he wat er 50 met ers (yards) on pizza. off t he island of Gran The tenants, glued to televisions, treat him like a puppy to be Canaria and swim ashore, shooed away. wit hout checking how deep That night, as he sits with friends filling himself with drink, he t he wat er was. contemplates what it would mean to bury a son. "Why is it," he "Working on Sundays calls wails, "that people can only feel their own pain, not others'?" int o quest ion t he very The director's answer is that India has something deeper than foundat ion of societ y," said a poverty problem. lawyer Vincent Lecourt , who It has, in his view, a "dehumanization" problem. In an interview, represent s t he Force he described India's employers and servants as living as "two Ouvrière union."It is a day different species." when we t ry t o consume The movie's first half chronicles India's small humiliations with less," he said, "when we t ry a chilling realism. The second half prophesies an outbreak of t o have values t hat are a violent revolts in a country whose elite has long comforted lit t le different ." itself with the thought that the poor will stoically accept their lots. In a writ t en judgment Menon's belief is that such stoicism is drying up in an age published Monday, t he court when the rich are more visibly rich and the left-behind are said Wilders' right t o free ever more aware of their deprivation. speech and role as a The poor were long told that their poverty was deserved, he polit ician allow him t o voice said. But now they see wealth everywhere, and they are his crit icisms of radical Islam starting to believe that poverty is circumstantial and can be and t he Quran.As a reversed. lawmaker, Wilders "must be able t o — somet imes in "That's when the dam bursts," he said, "the moment the sharp t erms — express his person feels, 'It's not true that this is my place."' opinions," t he ruling said. "In Such a moment seemed to occur one recent evening. The t his cont ext , it cannot be movie was screened before an audience of young, middle- said t hat (Wilders') movie was screened before an audience of young, middle- class Indians, representatives of the country's new prosperity. st at ement s — even t hough But one of them, Mitesh Thakkar, a 30-year-old marketing provocat ive — are an incit ement t o hat e or manager, arrived with a taxi driver he often employs, and he violence against Muslims." injected diversity into the screening by inviting the driver in to watch the film. T he lack of invest ment in Thakkar reacted as one might when one's social class has explorat ion and refineries been indicted. The film was good but "one-sided," he said: has left Mexico in dire "Maybe there are 70 percent of the people who treat them st rait s. Oil product ion has bad, but there are 30 percent who treat them good." been falling since 2005. Last But for the taxi driver, Javed Ali, the movie was an instant year alone, it dropped 5.3 classic. percent , t o about 3.1 billion "This story is the truth," he said. "Whatever was in my mind, barrels a day. the movie showed." Ali is a 20-year-old migrant worker, and he knew the film's "If yest erday sin had a humiliations up close. Sometimes people take his taxi and rat her individualist ic refuse to pay; sometimes they are drunk and mistreat him; dimension, t oday it has a sometimes they scream at him and say, "You're no good." value and resonance t hat is After the screening, some audience members, including above all social, because of Thakkar and Ali, went out for dinner. (Perhaps it was the film's t he great phenomenon of influence: To dine with a taxi driver in India is to cross a rarely globalizat ion," Girot t i t old traversed line.) t he newspaper L'Osservat ore Romano. The other diners wanted to know what Ali, the only working- class man at the table, thought of the film. Ali answered, "Forced Labor and t he rather casually, that he saw where the characters were Cat holic Church 1939-1945," coming from, that he understood their hunger, after so many is t he most t horough look years of humiliation, for revenge. at t he issue so far.T he 703- "He said the part where the driver kidnaps his female boss - page report document s t he that he did the right thing," Thakkar said later, recalling Ali's fat e of 1,075 prisoners of comments. "Even though he got caught, she needed that war and 4,829 civilians who kidnapping." were forced t o work for t he On that evening, at that unusually populated table, with Nazis in nearly 800 Cat holic prosperous and poor side by side, India's parallel realities inst it ut ions - mainly fleetingly, ominously collided. hospit als, homes and http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/asia/letter.php monast ery gardens - as part of t he war effort .T he ******************* church, which has financed over 200 "reconciliat ion" OLYMPICS MARKET ING project s, said exact numbers Shoppers, on your marks ... would never be known."It There should be a medal for this. should not be concealed It was obvious that the fashion quotient at the Olympic t hat t he Cat holic Church was blind for t oo long t o Games, already a five-ring circus of designer logos, had been t he fat e and suffering of raised when Polo Ralph Lauren was named to replace Roots, men, women and children the Canadian sportswear company of floppy beret fame, as from t he whole of Europe the official outfitter of the American team this year — who were cart ed off t o beginning with the "Chariots of Fire"-inspired ensembles for Germany as forced the opening ceremonies on Friday. laborers," Cardinal Karl Now Gucci is selling limited-edition watches marked 8-8-2008, Lehmann, t he count ry's with interlocking G's in place of the 0's; Puma is pushing a leading Roman Cat holic handbag shaped like a gold medal; and Lane Crawford, the prelat e unt il he st epped Hong Kong luxury store, has recruited designers like Stella down from his post as McCartney, Stefano Pilati and Christopher Bailey to design chairman of t he clothes inspired by specific sports. Congregat ion of German But in terms of dedication and endurance, Humberto Leon and Bishops in February, said at Carol Lim, the owners of the designer store Opening t he present at ion of t he Ceremony (so named after their love of the events), are report . attempting this weekend to set a record that a Speedo LZR swimsuit couldn't break. They plan to keep their store, in SoHo, Homosexualit y is not illegal New York, open for a 72-hour Olympics shopping marathon. in Egypt , t hough it is a "From the very beginning, one of the things we've talked convenient t arget , said Hani Shukrallah, execut ive about was that we would love a store that was open at one or direct or of t he Heikal two in the morning," Leon said. "Sometimes you feel like going Foundat ion for Arab out, but you don't want to go to a bar." Journalism in Going to a store that specializes in pricey, directional clothes Cairo."Meaningless might not be the wisest alternative, particularly if one is crackdowns have become a coming from a bar at 4 a.m. But Opening Ceremony is planning regular t hing," Shukrullah said. "If not gays, devil to entice night owls with taco and ice cream giveaways and a worshippers. If not devil worshippers. If not devil roster of events that include a 6 a.m. Scrabble match on worshippers, apost at es. T he Saturday and a 1 a.m. table tennis tournament, hosted by the government needs t o out bid jewelry designer Philip Crangi, on Sunday. Islamic opponent s as Leon is also planning to broadcast the actual Games in the guardian of morals." store. Of course, he is also selling something. For instance, the store has exclusive Nike items, like $250 gold and silver Why diners need t o be versions of the Air Max 1, plus a bunch of tchotchkes — key escort ed by whit e-gloved chains, coin purses and pocket turbo fans — as souvenirs. A at t endant s from t he lobby more permanent memory will also be available on Saturday at of t he new pyramid-shaped 9 a.m., when the New York tattoo artist Scott Campbell will Raffles Hot el t o t he elevat or offer Olympics designs. bank remains unclear. But "Luckily," Leon said, "the person giving the tattoos will have when you arrive at t he Fire had sleep." & Ice Rest aurant (Sheikh http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/sports/07row.php Rashid Road, Wafi; 971-4- 324-8888; ******************* www.dubai.raffles.com), t he place can only be described India t ries t o reach t he 'unbanked' wit h cellphone as warm and invit ing: signals exposed brick walls, leat her chairs and flat t ering light ing. NEW DELHI: It can scale mountains in a single bound and wend But it 's not wit hout it s its way down the most wretched roads. It is the mighty gimmicks. T he open-air cellphone signal - and the latest hope for bringing financial kit chen is ringed by fire, and services to the world's masses who do not have access to t he "ice t art ar" dishes are banks. inject ed wit h liquid nit rogen Grameen Solutions, an affiliate of the Grameen Bank that was so t hey emit a milky whit e created by the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, this vapor. week teamed with Obopay, a mobile payment company based in California, to provide banking to a billion poor people Once t he cow [a cow using cellphones. preserved in formaldehyde, "Today, it's difficult to reach these people," Aditya Menon, one of t he Brit ish art ist Obopay's executive director for India, said at a news Damien Hirst 's most famous conference in the Indian financial capital of Mumbai. "If you works] cleared cust oms, solve that problem, you are enabling them to enter the however, t he formaldehyde economy." was found t o be a problem. The joint venture plans to introduce pilot programs in India and T he original cow and calf Bangladesh in October and aims to reach a billion people had st art ed t o rot . T he globally by 2018, in large part by keeping costs ultra low - museum will be showing a possibly through the help of charitable foundations. new version. Obopay, whose partners include Verizon Wireless, Citigroup, No Palest inian st at e exist s the BlackBerry maker Research In Motion and AT&T, is already t o t his day, but t here has active in the United States, where customers who want to been an aut onomous Irish send money pay 10 cents for every transaction. After opening st at e since 1922. Most an Obopay account, you can transfer money between bank people now believe t hat accounts, credit cards and phones via text messages. t here should be a t wo-st at e set t lement in t he Holy Land, http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/business/phone.php but a t wo-st at e set t lement is what Ireland achieved more t han 80 years ago.T he equivalent of t he IRA's demand for a Unit ed Ireland, only put aside for t he moment , is t he one by Hamas for a Unit ed Palest ine. As Ahmed Yousef, a Palest inian adviser, has said, Hamas is endlessly t old t hat it must recognize Israel's right t o exist but , "Irish republicans cont inue t o aspire t o a unit ed Ireland . . . Why should more be demanded of t he Palest inians?"

T he way forward, Pet raeus said, should be "condit ions- based."Even in a place as prosaic as t he Senat e, t his news spurred exist ent ial angst .Senat or Evan Bayh summed up t he Dada nat ure of America's plan in Iraq: "We'll know when we get t here, and we don't know when we're going t o get t here."A confused Senat or Chuck Hagel asked t he pair: "So, where's t he surge? What are we doing? I don't see Secret ary Rice doing any Kissingeresque flying around. Where is t he diplomat ic surge? So, where is t he surge? What are you t alking about ?"

What exact ly is a Kurd? Much hinges on t he reply. For years t he Turkish government simply denied t he exist ence of it s millions of Kurds, calling t hem “mount ain Turks who have forgot t en t heir language.”In fact , t he Kurds are a dist inct , ancient et hnic group wit h t heir own non- Arabic language who inhabit part s of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. Like t he Palest inians, t hey are a people wit hout a homeland and are much less likely t han t he Palest inians t o get one.

"T he floor of t he hospit al is covered wit h t he blood of children," said Qasim al- Mudalla, manager of t he Imam Ali Hospit al in Sadr Cit y, where he said 4 children and 2 women were among 11 dead bodies brought in COLUMNIST Wednesday. "What is t he Kristof: An olive branch from the Dalai Lama world doing? T hey have seen When the Olympics open on Friday, the Dalai Lama won't be t he blood of our children there. Each side put out feelers about his attendance and was and are doing not hing." tantalized by the idea, but in the end the mutual distrust was "T here's a Chinese saying: too great to overcome. river wat er and well wat er Tibet is one of the major shadows over the Olympics and over don't mix," said Rose Pak, China's rise as a great power, sullying its international image t he general consult ant t o and triggering unrest that is likely to worsen in coming years. t he Chinese Chamber of Yet that doesn't have to be. Commerce, which support s In June, I sat down for a private meeting with the Dalai Lama, t he relay. "You do your t hing, and we talked at length about what kind of a deal he and and we do our t hing. Why is China might be willing to accept. He was far more flexible and it you have t o disrupt our pragmatic about a resolution of the Tibet question than public celebrat ion, when none of us statements had led me to believe. But he also wonders if his went and disrupt ed t heir engagement policy with China is getting anywhere: If the celebrat ion?" stalemate continues, he may just give up on Beijing. I have continued the discussion with Tibetan officials since A few years ago, Sot heby's then (just as I have had similar discussions with Chinese did not even hold auct ions officials), and China's perception of the Dalai Lama as sticking of Chinese cont emporary rigidly to old positions is mistaken. The Dalai Lama recognizes art . But last year, Sot heby's that time is running out, and he is signaling a willingness to sold nearly $200 million deal - comparable to the way President Richard Nixon sent wort h of Asian signals to Beijing that he was ready to rethink the China-U.S. cont emporary art , t he vast majorit y of t hat by Chinese relationship before his visit to China in 1972. art ist s. One signal is this: For the first time, the Dalai Lama is willing to state that he can accept the Socialist system in Tibet under Here's an arrest ing Communist Party rule. This is something that Beijing has allegat ion: More slaves are always demanded, and, after long discussion, the Dalai Lama now import ed (t hough t he has agreed to do so. current word for t his is The main thing is to preserve our culture, to preserve the t rafficked) int o t he Unit ed character of Tibet," the Dalai Lama told me. "That is what is St at es annually t han were most important, not politics." import ed in an average year That is a significant concession, and China must now during t he American colonial reciprocate. The present track of talks between the era.T hat is one of t he Communist Party's United Front Work Department and the t alking point s used lat ely by Dalai Lama's representatives will never get anywhere. The t he aut hor of an arrest ing only hope is for Beijing to pluck Tibetan affairs from the United new book on global slavery, Front officials and hold direct talks between the Dalai Lama and "A Crime So Monst rous: either President Hu Jintao or Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, Face-t o-Face wit h Modern- negotiating until a deal is reached. Day Slavery," by E. Benjamin In one sign that Chinese leaders are also thinking creatively Skinner. about new approaches, Beijing secretly raised the idea of the In t he Unit ed St at es, t he Dalai Lama visiting China and participating in a memorial best est imat es indicat e t hat service for those who died in May's Sichuan earthquake. That 40,000 t o 50,000 people are was bold; the Dalai Lama has not entered China since 1959. held in slavery at any given Both sides should now aim for a visit to mark the earthquake's t ime, wit h about 17,000 six-month anniversary in November, followed by serious people brought int o t he negotiations. count ry and forced t o work http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/opinion/edkristof.php for not hing every year. T he largest single cat egory of t hem are forced t o work as prost it ut es, but a majorit y are domest ic servant s or some ot her form of forced labor.

Expert s say t hat as many as 100,000 gang members rule t he st reet s of Cent ral America, most of t hem in Guat emala, El Salvador and Honduras. T he gangs have affiliat ed groups in Mexico and t he Unit ed St at es, creat ing an int ernat ional net of lawlessness. How many are girls is not clear, t hough a recent st udy said t hat as many as 40 percent of t he region's gang members may be females, showing off t heir sexualit y even as t hey learn t o st rut and t hrow a fierce punch.

T he line bet ween memory and memorializat ion is never easy t o draw, especially in France. In no ot her count ry, T homas agrees, could t he simple lit t le cake called a madeleine have t he resonance it acquired wit h Proust . As A.J. Liebling, t he American journalist and famously heart y eat er, remarked some years ago, t he madeleine is now as firmly est ablished in folklore as Newt on's apple. He went on t o wonder how anyone could be inspired by so small a cake:"In t he light of what Proust wrot e wit h so mild a st imulus, it is t he world's loss t hat he did not have a heart ier appet it e," he wrot e. "On a dozen Gardiners Island oyst ers, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of st eamers, some bay scallops, t hree saut eed soft shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a t hin swordfish st eak of generous area, a pair of lobst ers and a Long Island duck, he might have writ t en a mast erpiece."

In 2005, t he U.S. aut horit ies concluded t hat a Monsant o consult ant had visit ed t he home of an Indonesian official and, wit h t he approval of a senior company execut ive, handed over an envelope st uffed wit h hundred-dollar bills. T he money was meant as a bribe t o win looser environment al regulat ions for Monsant o's cot t on crops, according t o a court document . Monsant o was also caught concealing t he bribe wit h fake invoices.

Most Hait ians survive on less t han $2 a day, and riot ers say t he prices of st aples have spiraled so high t hat most people are going hungry.

"Sweet heart , not long t o go now," Khan says as he holds his daught er and kisses her. "And I'm going t o miss you a lot ." He concludes: "I'm doing what I'm doing for t he sake of Islam, not , you, know, it 's not for mat erialist ic or worldly benefit s."

In "Slavery by Anot her Name" Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerat es one of our schoolchildren's most basic assumpt ions: t hat slavery in America ended wit h t he Civil War. Blackmon uneart hs shocking evidence t hat t he pract ice persist ed well int o t he 20t h cent ury. And he is not simply referring t o t he virt ual bondage of black sharecroppers unable t o ext ricat e t hemselves economically from farming.He describes free men and women forced int o indust rial servit ude, bound by chains, faced wit h subhuman living condit ions and subject t o physical t ort ure. T hat plight was horrific. But unt il 1951, it was not out side t he law.

It aly has no minimum wage, and t here is st rong resist ance t o inst it ut ing one.

More t han one million people from neighbouring army- ruled Myanmar are est imat ed t o work in T hailand, most of t hem illegally in fact ories, rest aurant s, at pet rol pumps, and as domest ic helpers or crew on fishing t rawlers.

T he onrush of West ern sympat hy for t he cause of T ibet is well-int ent ioned but oft en naïve. T he way t he T ibet st ory has been reduced t o a binary mat t er, almost lit erally of T ibet an saint s and Han Chinese sinners, is problemat ic on many levels, not least because of hypocrisy implicit in t he West 's select ive out rage.

Rippert , t hen 22, found a P- 38 wit h French colors and shot it down.He described t he odd, evasive loops flown by Saint -Exupéry, who at t he t ime was 44, overweight and in pain from fract ures sust ained in numerous flying accident s. Several days lat er, when German radio int ercept ed American report s of a search for Saint -Exupéry, he suspect ed he may have shot down his idol.When Rippert t old him of learning t hat Saint - Exupéry was missing, "he had t ears in his eyes," von Gart zen said.

When an airplane carrying Lukoil workers crashed in t he far nort h of t his Arct ic region t hree years ago, killing 29 of 52 people on board, many blamed t he weat her.When, one year lat er, in March 2006, a helicopt er carrying vict ims' relat ives t o a commemorat ion ceremony at t he crash sit e also fell, killing anot her person, t he indigenous people t hought somet hing else was at play. T he land, t hey said, was cursed.One of t he newest oil-producing regions in Russia, t he Nenet s aut onomous dist rict is home t o lucrat ive project s for Lukoil and Rosneft . It is also home t o a populat ion of 7,000 indigenous Nenet s whose livelihood and semi- nomadic way of life are being increasingly t hreat ened by t he growing oil indust ry."T hey defied t he energy of t he land," said Kolya, a Nenet s shaman who at 39 looks at least 20 years older, speaking of t he crashes. Squat t ing in his t ent , called a choom, 5 kilomet ers, or 3 miles, from Naryan-Mar in t he snow- covered t undra one recent evening, he spoke slowly."T he eart h st art ed t o sink and all t he souls st art ed t o rise," he said.

Overseas aid by rich count ries fell 8.4 percent last year. Developed nat ions would have t o increase t heir aid budget s by 35 percent over t he next t hree years just t o meet t he commit ment s t hey made in 2005.

Washingt on provides a subsidy of 51 cent s a gallon t o et hanol blenders and slaps a t ariff of 54 cent s a gallon on import s.

Even t he poorest fift h of households in t he Unit ed St at es spend only 16 percent of t heir budget on food. In many ot her count ries, it is less of a given. Nigerian families spend 73 percent of t heir budget s t o eat , Viet namese 65 percent , Indonesians half.

According t o a recent est imat e by t he Urban Inst it ut e, t he lack of healt h insurance leads t o 27,000 prevent able deat hs in America each year.

Not long ago, a young Ohio woman named Trina Bacht el, who was having healt h problems while pregnant , t ried t o get help at a local clinic. Unfort unat ely, she had previously sought care at t he same clinic while uninsured and had a large unpaid balance. T he clinic wouldn't see her again unless she paid $100 per visit - which she didn't have.Event ually, she sought care at a hospit al 30 miles away. By t hen, however, it was t oo lat e. Bot h she and t he baby died.

Many of t he st ories about t he globalizat ion of baby product ion begin in India, where t he government seems t o regard t his as, lit erally, a growt h indust ry. In t he lit t le t own of Anand, dubbed "T he Cradle of t he World," 45 women were recent ly on t he books of a local clinic. For t he product ion and delivery of a child, t hey will earn $5,000 t o $7,000, a decade's wort h of women's wages in rural India.But even in America, some women, including Army wives, are supplement ing t heir income by cont ract ing out t heir wombs.

Cont rary t o convent ional wisdom, t he bulk of SWF invest ment is in fact channeled int o ot her emerging market s - Saudi Arabia, for example, has invest ed heavily in t he Turkish t elecom sect or and China has focused most of it s at t ent ion on Africa.

"Terror and Consent " is quit e simply t he most profound book t o have been writ t en on t he subject of American foreign policy since t he at t acks of 9/11 - indeed, since t he end of t he Cold War. It should be read by all t hree of t he remaining candidat es t o succeed George W. Bush as American president .Bobbit t 's originalit y lies in his almost unique abilit y t o synt hesize t hree quit e different t radit ions of scholarship. T he first is hist ory. T he second is law. T he t hird is milit ary st rat egy.

For t he past 43 years no Pakist an-made film had been dist ribut ed commercially t o cinemas in India unt il Mansoor's "Khuda Kay Liye" ("In t he Name of God") premiered here April 4 - a fact t hat has cont ribut ed t o widespread ignorance in India about modern Pakist an. At current rat es of migrat ion, t he Unit ed Nat ions Human Set t lement s Program has project ed t hat one-quart er of t he eart h’s populat ion will live in so- called slums by t he year 2020.

More t han t wo and a half billion people in t he world live in t he most abysmal st andards of hygiene and sanit at ion.

T here are 46 count ries, home t o 2.7 billion people, where climat e change and wat er-relat ed crises creat e a high risk of violent conflict .

A furt her 56 count ries, represent ing anot her 1.2 billion people, are at high risk of polit ical inst abilit y. T hat 's more t han half t he world.

James Cayne, chairman and former chief execut ive of t he collapsed bank Bear St earns was paid some $40 million in cash bet ween 2004 and 2006, t he last year on record, as well as st ocks and opt ions. In t he past few years, he has sold shares wort h millions more. He won't have t o ret urn t he money he made in t he good days when his bank bet t ed it self int o oblvion.

T he Abu Dhabi Invest ment Aut horit y is est imat ed t o have holdings of as much as $900 billion, making it t he largest sovereign wealt h fund in t he world.

For t he first t ime ever, t he number of billionaires Forbes could ident ify crossed int o four figures, reaching 1,125. T he t ot al net wort h of t he group is $4.4 t rillion, up $900 billion from last year.

In 2004, American credit card debt grew at a rat e of $6.25 billion a quart er. In just t he fourt h quart er of 2007, it grew by $20 billion. Tot al credit card debt st ands t oday at about $950 billion. T hat is st ill not close t o t he $11 t rillion in mort gages, but it ’s wit hin spit t ing dist ance of aut o loans. T he pension fund of t he Turkish Army (t he Ordu Yardimlasma Kurumu fund) is $25 billion.

An inescapable cycle of debt is fueling one of t he worst agrarian crises facing India, a crisis t hat has seen some 150,000 farmers commit suicide since 1997.

Worldwide, wat er bot t lers sold 47 billion gallons, or 178 billion lit ers, in 2006, up from 43 billion gallons in 2005.

Globally, t he bot t ling indust ry uses t he equivalent of nearly 100 million barrels of oil each year, excluding t ransport at ion.

Bot t led wat er is oft en 1,000 t imes more expensive t han t ap wat er.

In "Dandy of t he Underworld" Horsley, who is not orious in Brit ain, writ es of being raised by alcoholic, sexually promiscuous parent s and bouncing t hrough several schools. He det ails a debauched life of cocaine, heroin, opium and amphet amine use, writ ing t hat he spent more t han £100,000 (nearly $200,000) Bank execut ives' report t ries t o dissect financial on crack cocaine and melt down £100,000 t o consort wit h A group of Wall Street executives released a report on more t han 1,000 Wednesday that outlined how the industry failed to foresee prost it ut es. He also the financial meltdown of the last year and what companies chronicles his t rip t o t he Philippines t o be hung from can do to improve risk management. a cross, an event t hat was The 172-page report, written by chief risk officers and senior recorded by a phot ographer executives at banks like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and and videographer and Citigroup, also provides suggestions about technical issues at formed part of an art the same time as it offers a bit of a mea culpa. exhibit ion t hat was "Virtually everybody was frankly slow in recognizing that we ext ensively covered by t he were on the cusp of a really draconian crisis," said E. Gerald news media in his home Corrigan, a managing director at Goldman Sachs and a count ry. chairman of the Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group Carrie Kania, publisher of III , which released the report. Harper Perennial, said Wall Street failed to anticipate how wide-reaching problems Horsley's part y, which was with mortgage bonds would spread into seemingly distant scheduled for Wednesday in corners of the financial markets, the report said. Awash in easy Manhat t an, would go on money, banks doled out credit without sufficiently charging for wit hout him. "I believe t his the risk. Wall Street also created complex structures that book is very import ant ," masked connections between asset classes as well as Kania said. "It cert ainly compensation incentives that pushed traders to take risky moved me, and we're going steps for short-term gain. The industry's failings have now t o cont inue t o back it 100 translated into pain for the broader economy, the report said. percent ." In many ways, the report acknowledged shortcomings that T he product ion of one have already been raised by Wall Street's critics. kilogram of beef requires http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/business/07report.php 16,000 lit ers of wat er, according t o t o t he Unesco- **************** IHE Inst it ut e for Wat er IHE Inst it ut e for Wat er Aust ralian banks st ruggle t o raise capit al Educat ion. T hat compares SYDNEY: Australian banks are facing funding hurdles as the wit h 1,500 lit ers for a global credit crisis enters its second year, eroding their kilogram of grain. profitability and forcing them to find ever more exotic, and expensive, ways to raise capital. China...has a fift h of t he Australian banks are among the world's most profitable, but world's populat ion buy just 7 more drastic steps to raise money, like rights issues, could percent of t he wat er. cause further pain for their shareholders, who have already lost a third of their investment in bank stocks so far this year. A collapase of t he Indian The country's big four banks need to raise at least 100 billion summer monsoon from as Australian dollars, or $93 billion, this year, according to early as next year is one of company and market estimates, and have been hunting high t he world's most immediat e, and low for lenders. serious climat e risks. They managed to raise about two-thirds of that in the first half, An average European uses largely by selling costly senior debt to foreign investors in 150 t o 400 lit ers, or 40 t o Europe, the United States and Japan. 106 gallons, of wat er daily They also tapped Australian retail investors through listed for personal requirement s. hybrid securities with characteristics of both equity and debt, Consumpt ion in t he Unit ed and by starting dividend reinvestment plans. St at es is almost t wice as For the first time, the banks went in June to the country's own high, but in China t he figure sovereign wealth fund, quietly borrowing money from a pot is only 90 lit ers per day on set aside to cover civil servant pensions. average, while in many But analysts fear those wells may be running dry as investors developing count ries it is have little more appetite for Australian debt, especially after below t he "crit ical shock announcements by two major banks in recent weeks t hreshold" of 50 lit ers a day that credit losses were rising. That leaves lenders with a set by t he UN Food and shrinking number of options. Agricult ure Organizat ion. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/06/business/deal07.php "People want more t oys t o play wit h. T hat 's somet hing t hat drives it ," said Wim Koersvelt , direct or of Icon Yacht s in t he Net herlands. "Gyms were unusual 20 years ago, and no yacht is being built now wit hout a gym. T hey're buying t wo- t o four-person submarines, have four Jet Skis and lit t le sailboat s st ored on board, as well as helicopt er landing pads."

T he firearms-homicide rat e of about 3.42 per 100,000 cit izens is t he highest of any indust rialized count ry. It is about 100-fold t he gun- homicide rat e in Brit ain or Japan; only violence-prone developing nat ions like Colombia have a higher rat e.

Last year, more children died from gunfire t han from cancer and HIV/AIDS combined; t he firearms deat h rat e for kids under 15 is 12 t imes more t han t he 25 ot her largest indust rialized count ries combined, according t o t he Cent ers for Disease Cont rol and Prevent ion.

T he Unit ed St at es has t he highest concent rat ion of gun ownership in t he world, 283 million guns - a t hird of t hem handguns - owned by about a t hird of t he cit izenry.

"T here are 300 million people in China poised t o buy t heir very first car. In Russia t here are 70 million. And in Asia, 250 million people aspire t o mot orized mobilit y," t he VW chief execut ive, Mart in Wint erkorn, said at VW's annual news conference.

St eve Randy Waldman, who writ es at int erfluidit y.powerblogs.com, est imat es t hat aft er t he most recent $200 billion is exhaust ed, t he Fed will have $300 billion t o $400 billion left , unless it finds a way t o expand it s balance sheet . (14/03/08)

According t o a 2005 World Bank st udy, a whopping 47 percent of college-educat ed Ghanaians live abroad.

T he problem is especially acut e in medicine, where 54 percent of physicians who t rained here bet ween 1999 and 2004 left t o work elsewhere.

T hat 's in a count ry wit h just 2,000 doct ors, or one for every 11,000 inhabit ant s. By comparison, t he Unit ed St at es has one doct or for every 2,000 people. Some hospit als here have no doct or at all, while ot hers hire a single physician t o care for t housands of pat ient s.

Two-t hirds of Americans cannot name t he t hree branches of government or come up wit h t he name of a single Supreme Court just ice.

One survey finds t hat American 15-year-olds rank 24t h out of t hose from 29 count ries in mat hemat ical lit eracy, and anot her indicat ing t hat only 57 percent of adult Americans had read a nonfict ion book in a year.

Carlyle Group, t he U.S. privat e equit y firm run by David Rubenst ein, said Wednesday t hat losses at it s $16 billion mort gage- bond fund would not hurt t he company's 59 ot her privat e equit y and vent ure capit al funds."T he challenges facing CCC will have no measurable impact on any ot her fund, " Carlyle said. (12/03/08)

T he Unit ed St at es has a populat ion of 300 million. T hirt y-seven million, many of t hem children, live in povert y. Close t o 60 million are just one not ch above t he official povert y line. T hese near-poor Americans live in households wit h annual incomes t hat range from $20,000 t o $40,000 for a family of four.

While nat ural gas provides 22 percent of t he world's energy, compared wit h 23 It 's no Boo-Boo: Bandages as fashion accessories percent for coal and 40 WHEN Nicholas James Brown prepares to go out for cocktails at percent for oil, t he world's the Tribeca Grand or to a clambake in the Hamptons, he sticks known gas reserves may last on a few boldly patterned Band-Aids by the Brazilian fashion about 63 years, compared designer Alexandre Herchcovitch. wit h 41 for oil, t he BP To Brown, 24, who works at Esquire magazine in New York, the st at ist ics show. colorful strips are an important accessory, and he's careful to coordinate them with his Kris Van Assche sweater or his "Who is t his guy Margin t hat Balenciaga bag. He generally wears one on his left hand or keeps calling me?" arm and balances it out with two or three on his right leg. He doesn't put them on his face because, he said, "I don't When did charact er morph want people thinking, 'What happened?' " And if anyone does int o celebrit y, making t he fame game t he focus of ask what he's done to himself to need all of those bandages? magazine phot ography? "I'll lie and say, 'I have a cut,' " he said. For most everyone over the age of 5, it's unfathomable to use Brazil, a large agricult ural a bandage purely as body art. But since the adhesive strip has export er, says rich nat ions been upgraded by designers like Herchcovitch or studded with want t o keep t riple-digit Swarovski crystals, some adults have begun to view it as they t ariffs on some farm would a bracelet or spray tan, as adornment. product s, including a 1,720 "Even if you don't have a cut, bandages are a great way to percent t ariff on one make a statement that doesn't break the bank," said Chris Japanes product . Bick, an owner of FredFlare.com, which sells lip-shaped bandages. "It's kind of like a temporary tattoo that gets you Last mont h, a t eam of sympathy." American, Brit ish and http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/style/07skintwo.php Canadian researchers concluded t hat not a single square foot of ocean had been left unt ouched by modern societ y, and t hat humans had fouled 41 percent of t he seas wit h pollut ed runoff, overfishing and ot her abuses.

As t he newly urbanized and newly affluent seek more prot ein and more calories, a phenomenon called "diet globalizat ion" is playing out around t he world. Demand is growing for pork in Russia, beef in Indonesia and dairy product s in Mexico. Rice is giving way t o noodles, home-cooked food t o fast food.T hough racked wit h upheaval for years and wit h many millions st ill root ed in povert y, Nigeria has a growing middle class. Median income per person doubled in t he first half of t his decade, t o $560 in 2005. Much of t his increase is being spent on food.Nigeria grows lit t le wheat , but it s people have developed a t ast e for bread, in part because of market ing by American export ers. Bet ween 1995 and 2005, per capit a wheat consumpt ion in Nigeria more t han t ripled, t o 45 pounds, a year. Bread has been displacing t radit ional foods like eba, dumplings made from cassava root .

More t han 25,000 people die from hunger or a relat ed illness every day across t he world.

T he Unit ed Nat ions, having recorded more disappearances in Sri Lanka last year t han in any ot her count ry, pressed t o send human right s monit ors, a proposal t hat t he Unit ed St at es and many ot her count ries support ed. Rajapaksa's administ rat ion refused.

In 2005, 184,400 Americans admit t ed t o drug t reat ment programs - roughly 10 percent of t he t ot al - were over 50, up from 143,000, or 8 percent of t he t ot al, in 2001.T he same report , by t he Subst ance Abuse and Ment al Healt h Services Administ rat ion, foresees 4.4 million older subst ance abusers by 2020, compared wit h 1.7 million in 2001 - numbers t hat are "likely t o swamp t he current syst em," says Deborah Trunzo, who coordinat es research for t he agency.

Paul Virilio, t he philosopher who revealed t hat speed is a phenomenon of modern life, said t hat quick movers will dominat e slow movers.It is nat ure's law t hat if somet hing can go fast it will. If we can do somet hing fast er, we will. In fact , we are.

T he minimum wage in Brit ain will rise 3.8 percent t o £5.73, or $11.34, an hour st art ing in Oct ober.

Christ oph Büchel's legal bat t le becomes fodder for his art . A major underlying t heme for Büchel is what he called "t he creat ive economy," t he way t hat , in his view, museums - part icularly American ones - seem t o care less about t he art t han t hey do about t heir image, budget , at t endance and expansionist visions as t hey become ever more a part of an ent ert ainment cult ure.

T he number of children who die worldwide each year before t he age of 5 has dropped below 10 million for t he first t ime in recorded hist ory - compared wit h 20 million annually in 1960 - Unicef not ed in a report last mont h, "Child Survival." Now t he goal is t o cut t he deat h t oll t o 4 million by 2015.T hink about t hat accomplishment : T he lives of 10 million children saved each year, 100 million lives per decade.To put it anot her way, t he lat e James P. Grant , a lit t le-known American aid worker who headed Unicef from 1980 t o 1995 and launched t he child survival revolut ion wit h vaccinat ions and diarrhea t reat ment s, probably saved more lives t han were dest royed by Hit ler, Mao and St alin combined.Paul Virilio, t he philosopher who revealed t hat speed is a phenomenon of modern life, said t hat quick movers will dominat e slow movers.

It is nat ure's law t hat if somet hing can go fast it will. If we can do somet hing fast er, we will. In fact , we are.T he minimum wage in Brit ain will rise 3.8 percent t o £5.73, or $11.34, an hour st art ing in Oct ober.

Reproduct ive out sourcing is a new but rapidly expanding ent erprise in India. Clinics t hat provide surrogat e mot hers for foreigners say t hey have been inundat ed wit h request s from t he Unit ed St at es and Europe in recent mont hs, as word spreads of India's combinat ion of skilled medical professionals, relat ively liberal laws and low prices.

As lat e as 1980 t he U.S. Agency for Int ernat ional Development was st ill devot ing 25 percent of it s official development assist ance t o t he modernizat ion of farming, but t oday it is just 1 percent . Nearly 30 percent of World Bank lending once went t o agricult ural modernizat ion, but now it is just 8 percent .

In Tuscany's poorer areas, whole t owns are becoming depopulat ed and t housands of acres of agricult ural land falling int o disuse. T he t rend is part icularly severe in t he hilly land surronding t he Mont e Amit a.

Nearly $100,000 went for part y plat t ers and groceries before t he Iowa caucuses, even t hough t he part ying mood evaporat ed quickly. Rooms at t he Bellagio luxury hot el in Las Vegas consumed more t han $25,000; t he Four Seasons, anot her $5,000. And t op consult ant s collect ed about $5 million in January, a mont h of crucial expenses and t ough fund- raising. T he firm t hat includes Mark Penn, Clint on's chief st rat egist and pollst er, and his t eam collect ed $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in t ot al, including what t he campaign st ill owes, t he firm has billed more t han $10 million for consult ing, direct mail and ot her services, an amount ot her Democrat ic st rat egist s who are not affiliat ed wit h eit her campaign called st unning.

T he fact t hat 1 percent of t he people in t he world have 40 percent of t he wealt h, and 1 percent in t he Unit ed St at es have about one-fift h, renders argument s about what "we" can afford absurd. My husband and my children are my universe, but my parent s are my Nort h St ar. I have lived abroad for a decade, moving t o a new count ry as if it were a new st at e. "Home" for me remains t he house t hat my grandfat her built , which my mot her and fat her st ill live in. My brot hers and I know t hat even in t he middle of t he night we can come home and let ourselves in.

Of course t he idealized vision of t he incorrupt ible giRl-woman, which has been sampled add nauseam t hroughout t he years, should surprise no one.And isn't innocence t he ult imat e fleet ing moment - in ot her words, cat nip for an indust ry perennially in search of t he, well, moment ? Needless t o say, t ransgressive designers are most likely drawn t o virt ue because of t he possibilit y of it s being defiled. Aft er all, even t hose most above suspicion can t urn out t o be as sweet as sour milk.

T he model Liya Kebede has made great st rides for racial diversit y in fashion. Now, she's st art ing Lemlem, a most ly hand-woven line of children's clot hes made in Africa, in t he hope t hat a younger crowd will embrace her mult i-cult i ideas. T he out fit s have an Et hiopian vibe wit h a New World ease. Finicky t ot s will approve.

One of her (Lane Crawford's Sarah Rut son) favorit e accessories is invisible. Yu, a limit ed-edit ion perfume from Mane, cost s $5,000 and "cont ains rare, sust ainably harvest ed plant essences like Indonesian champak and Mysore sandalwood."

Undercover video t aken at t he West land/Hallmark Meat of Chino, California, shows workers shocking, kicking and shoving debilit at ed cat t le wit h forklift s, prompt ing t he government t o pull 143 million pounds, or 65 million kilograms, of t he company's beef.

A survey released t his year by Defra, t he Brit ish environment agency, found t hat 80 percent of people were concerned about climat e change, and t hree quart ers would be prepared t o change t heir behavior "in some way" t o limit climat e change.But not in t he ways t hat count most : Only 5 percent of car drivers said t hat t hey had driven less because of environment al concerns. Only 10 percent of people who had flown in t he past year said t hat t hey would fly less t his year because of climat e-change concerns.

T he Iraq Int erior Minist ry has ordered t he police t o round up beggars, vagabonds and ment ally disabled people from t he st reet s of Baghdad t o prevent t hem from being used by insurgent s as suicide bombers, T he Associat ed Press report ed Tuesday, BOOK REVIEW cit ing a minist ry spokesman. Tom Vanderbilt 's 'Traffic' Traffic: Why We Drive t he Way We Do (And What It A new report issued by t he Says About US). World Healt h Organizat ion By Tom Vanderbilt . 402 pages. $24.95.Alfred A. Knopf. offers t he first Traffic jams are not, by and large, caused by flaws in road comprehensive analysis of design but by flaws in human nature. While this is bad news for t obacco use and cont rol drivers - there's not much to be done about human nature - it effort s in 179 count ries. It is good news for readers of Tom Vanderbilt's new book. "Traffic" not es t hat t obacco will kill is not a dry examination of highway engineering; it's a more people t his year t han t uberculosis, AIDS and surprising, enlightening look at the psychology of human malaria combined. It warns beings behind the steering wheels. t hat unless government s do An alternate title for the book might be "Idiots." Vanderbilt, who more t o slow t he epidemic, writes regularly about design and technology, cites a finding t obacco could kill a billion that 12.7 percent of the traffic slowdown after a crash has people by t he end of t he nothing to do with wreckage blocking lanes; it's caused by cent ury, t he vast majorit y in gawkers. Rubberneckers attend to the spectacle so avidly that poor and middle-income they themselves then get into accidents, slamming into the count ries. car in front of them when it brakes to get a better look or dig out a cellphoneto take a picture. (This happens often enough I have grown used t o t he for traffic types to have coined a word for it: "digi-necking.") idea t hat nearly everyt hing Exasperated highway professionals have actually tried around me in nat ure erecting anti-rubbernecking screens around the scenes of happens unobserved and unrecorded. A snowy wint er accidents, but the vehicle toting the screen typically gets somet imes ret ains a caught in the traffic jam it's meant to prevent. t ranscript , but even t hose Moreover, Vanderbilt adds, "there is the interest in the screen are rare. T he bills of animal itself." Drivers will slow down to look at anything: "Something mort alit y are almost as simple as a couch dumped in a roadside ditch can send complet ely invisible minor shudders of curiosity through the traffic flow." "Traffic" is ot herwise. Who t hrives, who jammed with these delicious you've-got-to-be-kidding dies, t here is no account ing moments. at all, only t he fact of Even without home furnishings to distract us, we rarely seem t hriving and dying. to get anywhere fast at any time of day. One reason, Vanderbilt reports, is that people are driving to do things they Banerjee est imat es, once did at home or down the block. "It is not just that conservat ively, t hat $15 American households have more cars," he writes, "it is that billion a year out of roughly $100 billion in annual they are finding new places to take them." They're going they are finding new places to take them." They're going development aid worldwide someplace to eat. They're driving to Whole Foods because could be spent on programs they don't like the produce at their neighborhood supermarket. t hat have been proven t o They're going out to get coffee. (So much of Starbucks's work. Unfort unat ely, t he revenue now comes from drive-through lanes that the act ual figure is much closer company will put stores across the street from each other, t o zero t han t o $15 billion. sparing drivers "the agony of having to make a left turn during rush hour.") And they're parking. Or trying to. In a study of one T he t op supermarket chains 15-block area near U.C.L.A., cars were logging, on an average in t he European Union are day, 3,600 miles in pursuit of a place to park. It's not only the pot ent ially "abusing" t heir number of parkers on the roads that slows things down. It's the market clout t o drive down way they drive, crawling along, sitting and waiting and prices t o suppliers and engaging in other irritating examples of what one expert calls should be invest igat ed, t he European Parliament said on "parking foreplay." The answer? Sorry: more expensive street Monday. parking to encourage the circling hordes to use pay lots. A small number of t he Traffic does not yield to simple, appealing solutions. Adding largest supermarket chains lanes or roads is a short-lived fix. Widen one highway, and including Tesco of Brit ain drivers from another will defect. Soon that road is worse than it and Carrefour of France, was before. The most effective, least popular solution - aside were becoming from the currently effective, unpopular solution of $5-a-gallon "gat ekeepers", cont rollling gasoline - is congestion pricing: charging extra to use roads t he access of farmers and during rush hours. For unknown reasons, Americans will accept ot her suppliers t o a surcharge for peak-travel-time hotel rooms and airfares but consumers, t he declarat ion not for roads. said. If it's any consolation, traffic has always been bad. Vanderbilt It said evidence from begins with a short (I longed for more!) section on the history accross t he 27 EU member of traffic congestion. By studying chariot "rutways" and "wear count ries suggest ed t hat patterns on curbstones," archaeologists have determined that big supermarket s were the citizens of Pompeii had to contend with construction abusing t heir buying power detours and one-way streets. Meanwhile, in ancient Rome, t o force down prices paid t o "the chariot traffic grew so intense that Caesar ... declared a suppliers t o "unsust ainable" daytime ban on carts and chariots, 'except to transport levels and impose unfair condit ions on t hem." construction materials for the temples of the gods or for other great public works or to take away demolition materials."' I want my children and I was less surprised by all that than by the existence of so st udent s t o learn about a many traffic professionals. Given the seeming anarchy of past wit h causes and traffic, there are a surprising variety of experts employed to effect s. I do not want t o manage it. Vanderbilt has interviewed them all, from traffic send t hem fort h armed only "vision specialists" (who have, of late, taken to making road wit h emot ion and confusion. signs in "incident pink") to "one of the world's leading I want t hem equipped wit h a authorities on queues." (One of!) The author is an impressively secure and serene ident it y energetic researcher, even, at one point, tracking down the t hat permit s t hem t o person who programs the Hebrew calendar into about 75 recognize cruelt y, injust ice signal lights in Los Angeles. This is done to enable Sabbath- and falsehood and gives observant Jews to cross the street without pushing a button t hem t he st rengt h and pat ience t o st udy, t olerat e and violating the ban on operating machinery. (In New York it and defend t he ident it ies of isn't necessary, as most crossing buttons long ago stopped ot hers. T hey should know working.) Vanderbilt spends much time deconstructing crashes t he difference bet ween what - a problem even before there were cars. "In the New York of has happened t o t hem and 1867," he writes, "horses were killing an average of four what has happened t o pedestrians a week (a bit higher than today's rate of traffic ot hers. fatalities)." Nowadays, the cause of collisions, or one of them, is people believing they're better drivers than they are. We In Tanzania alone, malaria base our judgment on the number of crashes we've been in, kills about 100,000 people a rather than on the number of accidents we narrowly avoid, year. which, if we're being honest (or we're being me), happen just Most people in Shanghai about every time we drive. Compounding this vehicular hubris seem t o want t he glory t hat is the fact that most of the driving we do appears to be safer comes wit h showing off a than it is. Driving rarely commands 100 percent of our real iPhone t o friends."My attention, and so we feel comfortable multitasking: talking on friends envy me a lot ," said the phone, unfolding a map, taking in the Barca-Lounger on Pang, t he Web designer. the road's shoulder. Vanderbilt cites a statistic that nearly 80 "T hey say, 'Wow, you can get percent of crashes involve drivers not paying attention for up an iPhone.' " to three seconds. Thus the places that seem the most dangerous - narrow roads, hairpin turns - are rarely where England's enduring class syst em can be apt ly summed people mess up. "Most crashes," Vanderbilt writes, "happen on up in t wo words: public dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers." For this school. T hose who at t end reason, roads that could be straight are often constructed with English public schools - in curves - simply to keep drivers on the ball. curves - simply to keep drivers on the ball. realit y expensive privat e This basic truth - feeling safe kills - lies beneath many of the schools - inherit a kind of book's insights. Americans think roundabouts are more right t o rule. T hey learn how dangerous than intersections with traffic lights. Roundabouts t o survive in a world no less require you to adjust your speed, to merge, in short, to pay riven by compet it ion and attention. At an intersection, we simply watch the light. And so cruelt y t han societ y it self. we may not notice the red-light runner coming at us or the Aft er graduat ing, t hey can pedestrian stepping off the curb. A study that followed 24 forever recognize one intersections that had been converted from signals or stop anot her. Even t hose who signs to roundabouts showed an almost 90 percent drop in rebel are shaped by t he fatal crashes after the change. experience. To be an English For similar reasons, S.U.V.'s are more dangerous than cars. Not public schoolboy - yes, most just because they're slower to stop and harder to maneuver, are st ill boys - is t o belong but because - by conferring a sense of safety - they invite t o a cast e. careless behavior. "The safer cars get," Vanderbilt says, "the “We recognize t olerance as more risks drivers choose to take." (S.U.V. drivers are more a basic component of likely to not bother with their seat belts, to talk on cellphones, democracy,” he said. “God and to not wear seat belts while talking on cellphones.) So it has not creat ed all of us goes for much of the driving universe. More people are killed alike — we are different — while crossing in crosswalks than while jaywalking. Drivers pass human societ y is a pluralist ic bicyclists more closely on a road with bike lanes than on one societ y. In t he Koran, God is without. t elling us t hat man is My solution to America's vehicular woes would be to make this creat ed t o be free. So we good book required reading for anyone applying for a driver's are free t o t hink, and t hink license. Though you could then be sure that some percentage different . So t he aim of of car crashes in America would be caused by people trying to democracy is t o recognize skim "Traffic" while stuck in a bottleneck on their way to the t he pluralist ic nat ure of D.M.V. human societ y. T he second http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/08/arts/idbriefs9D.php it em is t olerance, I have t o t olerat e my opponent . Wit h t olerance comes compromise; wit hout compromise democracy doesn’t exist .”

"I had no idea about kidney t ransplant s, but when t hey made me lie down on t he st ret cher, I was t errified," he said. "I knew t hat t hese people meant t o do evil t o me. When I woke up a doct or said my kidney had been removed. He said I would be shot if I ever t old anyone what happened."

"I miss Yugoslavia," said Toha, a 33-year old Slovene ent repeneur.."We didn't have anyt hing," he said. "Neighbours baked each ot her cakes; we had a leader we t rust ed. I remember my mot her crying when T it o died. I was only 5, but I knew t he world was about t o change."

In t he last five mont hs alone, t he [Brazilain] government says, 1,250 square miles, or 320,000 hect ares, were lost .

T he world's t ot al meat supply was 71 million t ons in 1961. In 2007, it was est imat ed t o be 284 million t ons. Per capit a consumpt ion has more t han doubled over t hat period. (In doubled over t hat period. (In t he developing world, it rose t wice as fast , doubling in t he past 20 years.) World meat consumpt ion is expect ed t o double again by 2050, a project ion t hat one expert , Henning St einfeld of t he Unit ed Nat ions, said was result ing in a "relent less growt h in livest ock product ion."...

T hough some 800 million people now suffer from hunger or malnut rit ion, t he majorit y of corn and soy grown in t he world feeds cat t le, pigs and chickens. T his is t he case in spit e of t he inherent inefficiencies: About t wo t o five t imes more grain is required t o produce t he same amount of calories t hrough livest ock as t hrough direct grain consumpt ion, according t o Rosamond Naylor, an associat e professor of economics at St anford Universit y.

Under t he st ewardship of Dow Kim and T homas Myst ery disease kills dozens in remot e Venezuelan Maheras, Merrill Lynch and t ribe Cit igroup built posit ions in CARACAS, Venezuela: A mystery disease has killed dozens of subprime-relat ed securit ies Warao Indians in recent months in a remote area of t hat led t o $34 billion in northeastern Venezuela, according to indigenous leaders and writ e-downs last year. T he researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, who debacle cost chief informed health officials in the capital of the outbreak execut ives t heir jobs and Wednesday. brought t wo of t he world's At least 38 people have died, including 16 since the start of premier financial inst it ut ions June, said Charles Briggs, an anthropologist at Berkeley, and t o t heir knees.In any ot her Clara Mantini-Briggs, a medical researcher there. They are a indust ry, Kim and Maheras husband-and-wife team known for their research on a cholera would be pariahs. But in t he outbreak that killed 500 people in Venezuela in the early looking-glass world of Wall 1990s. St reet , t hey — and ot hers Preliminary studies of the latest outbreak indicate that it may like t hem — are hot be a type of infectious rabies transmitted by bites from bats, propert ies. T he t wo execut ives are well on t heir the researchers said. The symptoms, which last three to six way t o reviving t heir weeks, include partial paralysis, convulsions and an extreme careers, even as global fear of water, they said, and those who die become rigid just market s shudder at t he before death. The disease is believed to be fatal in most prospect t hat Merrill and cases. Cit igroup may report "The authorities must investigate this outbreak with extreme furt her subprime losses in urgency," said Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health t he coming mont hs. expert who has advised President Hugo Chávez's government Maheras, who left his job as on policies to combat dengue fever. "Fear about the disease co-president of Cit igroup's has intensified among the Warao while a preventative invest ment bank t his fall response is needed now." aft er being demot ed, has The disease is found in the swampy Delta Amacuro, near the had serious discussions wit h border with Guyana. The state is inhabited largely by Warao several invest ment banks, Indians, a nomadic indigenous group said to number more than including Bear St earns, 20,000. about t aking on a t op Recently, many animals in the area have died, the management posit ion, researchers said, but no correlation has been established people who have been between those deaths and the disease. briefed on t he sit uat ion Warao leaders, accompanied by the researchers, took photos said. And he has also been approached by invest ment and written testimonies documenting the disease to the firms willing t o back him t o Health Ministry here on Wednesday for a meeting with t he t une of $1 billion or t he t une of $1 billion or government epidemiologists. But they were kept waiting for more if he decides t o st art several hours. his own hedge fund, t hese "We traveled by bus 16 hours to Caracas to make the people said. Kim, who unt il authorities aware of the situation with the hope of getting last spring was a co- some response," said Norvelis Gómez, a Warao paramedic president at Merrill Lynch who was one of four community leaders in the group. "And we wit h oversight of t he firm's are met with disrespect on every level, as if the deaths of t rading and market indigenous people are not even worth noting." operat ions, has been Framing their concerns within the polarizing world of crisscrossing t he globe in Venezuelan politics, in which criticism of the government is recent mont hs raising often considered tantamount to betrayal, the Warao leaders money for his new hedge and the Berkeley researchers emphasized that they all fund, Diamond Lake Capit al. supported Chávez's policies and that their intent was not to On his blog, JSMineSet , smear his government. Sinclair has t old his readers "All we request is for authorities to respond to this disease as t hat as much as $450 t rillion they would if it occurred in a rich district of Caracas," said wort h of derivat ives could Enrique Moraleda, a Warao leader in Chávez's United Socialist disint egrat e, leading t o a far Party who was part of the group. great er, and in some ways The group was allowed to meet with the government unpredict able, epidemiologists on Wednesday evening, and members said calamit y...While t he views of officials promised them that the disease would be investigated Sinclair , a gold bug who as soon as possible. expect s t he price of gold t o http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/america/07venez.php go up t o $1,650, up from about $870 now, might be t aken wit h a grain of salt , ot her expert s have also begun t o warn of t he dire consequences of t he credit market collapse.

Povert y in Brit ain doubled under T hat cher, and t his figure has become permanent under New Labor. T he share of t he wealt h, excluding housing, enjoyed by t he bot t om half of t he populat ion has fallen from 12 percent in 1976 t o just 1 percent now. T hirt een million people now live in relat ive povert y.

Social mobilit y has declined t o pre-war levels.T he least able children from t he richest 20 percent of t he populat ion now overt ake t he most able children from t he bot t om 20 percent by t he age of seven. OLYMPICS DOPING Nearly half of t he richest Drug use brings doubt t o Olympic performances group go on t o get universit y degrees while only On an overcast afternoon in Mexico City in October 1968, a 10 percent of t he poorest skinny U.S. long jumper named Bob Beamon took 19 strides manage t o graduat e. down a runway, hit the takeoff board perfectly and lifted off at what seemed like an impossible trajectory. He flew so far that Across Europe, polit icians he exceeded the range of the optical sighting system that t ry t o be cult urally sensit ive t o Muslim cit izens, who measured the jumps, so officials in sport jackets and ties had t ot al 16 million, or 3 to scurry into the sand pit with a tape measure. percent , of t he 495 million Beamon, who was 22, thought at first that he might have people in t he 27-member broken the world record by a couple of inches. The length of European Union, according his jump, when first announced as 8.90 meters, did not fully t o Cent ral Inst it ut e Islam- register with him. When it was translated to him as 29 feet-2½ Archives in Germany. In - nearly 2 feet farther than anyone had ever jumped - he France, one in 10 inhabit ant s crumpled to the ground in shock. Fellow jumpers helped him is Muslim, t he highest up, and he began high-stepping around the pit as the crowd proport ion in t he EU. roared. A competitor, the defending gold medalist Lynn Davies of Britain, congratulated Beamon and told him, with a sense of T he average German or of Britain, congratulated Beamon and told him, with a sense of awe, "You have destroyed this event." Japanese uses lit t le more Now, for a moment, imagine some equivalent of Beamon's t han half t he energy consumed by an average "leap of the century" in Beijing. Let's say that the world record American. In Germany and in the men's 100 meters - recently lowered two-hundredths of Japan, per-capit a emissions a second, to 9.72 seconds, by Usain Bolt of Jamaica - is of carbon dioxide spewed by smashed by a full tenth of a second. Or that the Australian cars, power plant s and ot her swimmer Libby Trickett's new world record of 52.88 seconds in sources of energy are half the women's 100-meter freestyle falls to 51 seconds flat. Or t hose in t he Unit ed St at es. that Beamon's old record, finally broken 23 years later by In France, t hey are a t hird. Michael Powell - by two inches - is exceeded by a full foot. What would be our reaction? Skepticism, disbelief, perhaps T he average price of regular disgust. To break any record in such a Beamonesque manner gasoline in t he Unit ed would seem like an act of self-incrimination, and any rival who St at es has shot up t o a spoke of an event being "destroyed" would certainly mean it record $3.28 a gallon...In as an accusation. Brit ain, gas at t he pump cost s around $7.70 a gallon, Such is the legacy of decades of documented doping in of which about $4.90 is Olympic sport and of a particularly downbeat four years since t axes. In France, t axes the previous Games. From Marion Jones, Floyd Landis, Barry account for about $4.60 of Bonds, Balco and Roger Clemens to spying in the National t he ret ail price of $7.50 a Football League and charges of game fixing in the National gallon. (25/03/08) Basketball Association and Italian soccer, elite sport has been awash in accusations of cheating and lying. Soaring prices for rice, a Even the site of this year's Games contributes to a feeling of st aple for nearly half t he impending taint. Factories in China have long been the source world's populat ion, are of much of the raw material for steroids. The food industry is already causing hardship so poorly regulated that a food contractor for the U.S. Olympic across t he developing world, Committee speculated (without evidence) that athletes eating part icularly for urban Chinese chicken could test positive for banned performance workers. enhancers. Naeem Akht ar has an Sports and cynicism do not go well together. We watch to be improbable role in t he Indian uplifted, to witness some transcendent moment that we can government 's drive t o believe and fully embrace. revit alize Kashmir aft er 18 The Games are especially poisoned by doubts over the years of milit ant violence. integrity of the competition because their whole point is His t ask: rebrand t his heavily upward progression, the breaking of barriers. Citius, altius, milit arized Himalayan region fortius. Swifter, higher, stronger. If everyone is playing by an as a global golfing agreed-upon set of rules, that is. Certain assumptions can dest inat ion. safely be made about the drug scene in Beijing: some dopers In 2001, scrap met al sold for will be unmasked, shamed and sent home. Some will go $77 a t on; at t he end of undetected. Some "clean" athletes will fall short of their goals 2004, it was $300 per t on, and believe they've been cheated. and t oday it 's approaching All will compete, mostly invisibly, in a game within a game: the $480. Behind t he rise, say cat-and-mouse contest between the drug detectors and the t he analyst s, is China's chemist-coach-athlete cartel that seeks to get away with voracious demand for st eel. using banned substances. The Beijing organizing committee has announced that it will administer a record 4,500 tests T he Pet Inn Royal hot el will (urine and blood samples), up from 3,700 in Athens. In scary- unpack and microwave every sounding language - intentionally so, no doubt - a Chinese packet of food t hat t he mast er has carefully sports official said that vehicles transporting samples through prepared - a common Beijing's streets would be accompanied by armed guards pract ice in Japan, where it is before making deliveries at a new $10 million laboratory, also considered déclassé t o serve heavily guarded. pet food t o a Certain national sports federations have tended to breed pet ."Cust omers may ask, for doping offenders, suggesting they are either the most example, t o sprinkle cheese determined dopers or the least clever. The entire Bulgarian on t op of t he cooked rice weightlifting team of eight men and three women tested meal, prepare milk at positive in June for a banned steroid and was disqualified from cert ain t emperat ures or Beijing. Bulgarian lifters also tested positive in the run-up to give dessert ," said Chiyo the 2004 Games in Athens. Several had to return medals after Sakurai, general manager of testing positive at the 1988 and 2000 Games. t he hot el. The Chinese swim association announced in late June that one "It 's a principle of art ," of its top competitors had failed a drug test and would be Gnedovsky said. "T he worse banned for life - adding to an extensive history of doping by t he condit ions, t he bet t er Chinese swimmers. t he art ." He sighed. "Art ist s The outspoken former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, should be hungry."What t hen (WADA), Dick Pound, once told me that even when Olympic t o make of Gnedovsky's athletes tested positive, it "added luster to the Olympic brand" design for t he company's because it proved the International Olympic Committee was because it proved the International Olympic Committee was new seven-st ory t heat er, serious about policing the use of banned drugs. He had a point. open since January on t he Compared with just about any other sporting body worldwide, banks of t he Moscow River? the IOC is more rigorous. But that does not mean it's winning Do it s marble lobby, the game within the game. In fact, it may be falling farther spect acular views and large behind. hall t hat seat s 450 pose an I asked Anthony Butch, the director at the Olympic Analytical art ist ic hazard for t he Laboratory at the University of California at Los Angeles, who scrappy company?Not t o he thinks is winning. "It's impossible to answer," said Butch. worry, Gnedovsky said. "The reason we know we are making strides is we are Before he drew up t he plans, catching more people, but to catch them, you have to know he st udied everyt hing t hat what they're abusing. It's possible there is something out was wrong wit h t he old there that everyone is taking that's not on the radar screens t heat er. T hen he reproduced it in t he new one. of the doping labs. We are always behind. It is easier to take these things and get away with it than it is to figure out ways Each mont h, more t han half to catch them." of [t he Somali] The "designer steroid" that was peddled out of the Bay Area government 's revenue, Laboratory Cooperative, or Balco - a previously unknown most ly from port t axes, compound - was discovered only after an informant gave a disappears - st olen by "our syringe full of it to authorities. That the informant, the track people," t he prime minist er coach Trevor Graham, has since been convicted for making said.T hat leaves Nur wit h false statements to drug investigators pretty much sums up about $18 million a year in the "Maltese Falcon" atmosphere of top-level sprinting. government money t o run a Even tests for some of the most commonly used enhancers failed st at e of nine million may be less effective than authorities would like athletes to of some of t he world's believe. Synthetic erythropoietin, known as EPO, which neediest , most collect ively t raumat ized people. artificially boosts red-blood-cell production, is the drug of choice for endurance athletes. A study published in June by a Could a drug st ore sell t wo respected laboratory in Denmark indicated that it can probably ident ical t ubes of be used with impunity, because the methods to detect it are t oot hpast e, and charge 50 inadequate. cent s more for one of And while WADA has a new, better, more standardized test for t hem? Of course not .But , in human-growth hormone that allows it to screen many more effect , exact ly t hat has been athletes at the Olympics, the test is still not thought to be able happening - repeat edly and to detect use much beyond the previous 24 to 48 hours. myst eriously - in market s As the Olympics fill the world's television screens, I suspect I t hat set prices in t he Unit ed won't be the only viewer who makes choices influenced by St at es for corn, soybeans calculations about the integrity of the contests. I'll watch some and wheat . And even of the "minor" sports - kayaking, fencing, handball - because economist s who have been st udying t his phenomenon they seem closer to some ideal of pure competition. say t hey are at a loss t o I don't naïvely assume they're clean, but I don't know for sure explain it .What ever t he they're not. I'm looking forward to seeing Sheila Taormina, a reason, t he price for a remarkable 39-year-old American who won a gold medal as a bushel of grain est ablished swimmer in 1996, competed as a triathlete in 2000 and 2004 in t he public derivat ives and now will take part in the modern pentathlon - the very market s has been cool combo of shooting, swimming, fencing, riding and running. subst ant ially higher t han t he I'm curious to see if the U.S. men's basketball team can break price of t he same bushel of its international losing streak. In the current climate, this t he same grain at t he same competition involving NBA multimillionaires seems oddly moment in t he cash market . straightforward and respectable. I won't go out of my way to watch much athletics - even the In February, India's 100-meter races. It's not a moral judgment; I'm just not ambassador t o Bahrain, Balkrishna Shet t y, sought a interested in what I think may be a contest among chemists. minimum mont hly wage of Two men who set world records since 2002 have had their $265 for all unskilled Indian times expunged after positive drug tests, and numerous other workers, who are paid $160 top male sprinters have also been implicated. The world- t o $225 a mont h t here. record holder in the women's 100 meters is the late Florence Griffith-Joyner, whose sudden changes in physique and out-of- More t han half of t he wat er nowhere, near-half-second improvement at the 1988 Games in China - t he world's in Seoul remain sources of suspicion. fourt h-largest economy What's lost when drugs permeate sport is simple: authenticity aft er t he Unit ed St at es, and believability. For the price of a ticket, or even the Japan and Germany - is unfit investment of our time in front of the television, we don't want t o drink. Last year, around to have to wonder what has taken place in the shadows to 48 million people living t here influence the competition - or which athlete whose remarkable lacked sufficient drinking wat er. human achievement we have rejoiced in might soon be stripped of gold and marched before a grand jury. A virus called infect ious It sort of ruins the whole thing. salmon anemia, or ISA, is http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/sports/OLYDRUGS.php killing millions of salmon ************* dest ined for export t o It inerant workers encouraged t o leave Beijing during Japan, Europe and t he Unit ed Games St at es. T he spreading BEIJING: Li Tianchao is an itinerant worker who has spent much plague has sent shivers of his adult life toiling long hours, living in bleak worksite t hrough Chile's t hird-largest dormitories and chasing the next construction job in the next indust ry. boom town. A no-nonsense, weatherworn man, he is not quick "All t hese problems are to grouse. relat ed t o an underlying lack But as he waited for a train that would take him back to his of sanit ary cont rols," said hometown north of the capital, Li, 50, could not help but feel Felipe Cabello, a wistful. microbiologist at New York "The Olympics have finally come to China, and I won't even be Medical College in Valhalla here," he said, lounging on a woven plastic sack stuffed with t hat has st udied Chile's his possessions. He glanced up at the "Participate in the fishing indust ry. "Parasit ic Olympics, Enjoy the Fun" banner above his head and shrugged. infect ions, viral infect ions, Like thousands of others who packed the city's main train fungal infect ions are all station Thursday, Li has been forced to leave town by a lack of disseminat ed when t he fish work and an unwritten government policy encouraging migrant are st ressed and t he workers to clear out until the dignitaries and journalists have cent ers are t oo close gone home. t oget her.""It is simply not As the city readied itself for the pageantry and the fireworks possible t o produce fish on of Friday night's opening ceremony, Beijing's main train station an indust rial scale in a sust ainable way," said was packed with truck drivers, food vendors and factory Wolfram Heise, direct or of workers whose jobs had been sacrificed to the Olympics t he marine conservat ion juggernaut. The atmosphere was a mix of expectation and program at t he Pumalin boredom, but also disappointment and regret. Project , a privat e http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/asia/beijing.php conservat ion init iat ive in Chile. "You will never get it int o ecological balance."

In Oct ober 2006, Dr. Claudia Henschke of Weill Cornell Medical College jolt ed t he cancer world wit h a st udy saying t hat 80 percent of lung cancer deat hs could be prevent ed t hrough widespread use of CT scans.Small print at t he end of t he st udy, published in T he New England Journal of Medicine, not ed t hat it had been financed in part by a lit t le-known charit y called t he Foundat ion for Lung Cancer: Early Det ect ion, Prevent ion & Treat ment . But a review of t ax records by T he New York T imes shows t hat t he foundat ion was underwrit t en almost ent irely by $3.6 million in grant s from t he parent company of t he Ligget t Group, maker of Ligget t Select , Eve, Grand Prix, Quest and Pyramid cigaret t e brands.

In what is one of t he worst calamit ies t o hit bat populat ions in t he Unit ed St at es, on average 90 percent of t he hibernat ing bat s in four caves and mines in New York have died since last wint er.Wildlife biologist s fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sit es in Massachuset t s and Vermont . What ever is killing t he bat s leaves t hem unusually t hin and, in some cases, dot t ed wit h a whit e fungus. Bat expert s fear t hat what t hey call Whit e Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species t hat keep insect pest s under cont rol.

If t he world is going t o sharply reduce t he amount of carbon dioxide pumped int o t he at mosphere by midcent ury, t hen many businesses will have t o go carbon neut ral, bringing t heir net emissions of t he greenhouse gas t o zero.But some could go even furt her by removing more CO2 t han t hey produce. Inst ead of carbon neut ral, how about carbon negat ive?

Out side Nha Trang, t he beach t own and port where my cruise ship is due aft er Danang, t he Ana Mandara Six Senses Spa offers what it s Web sit e calls "t he ult imat e seclusion," because it is only accessible by boat . T he cost for a t wo-st ory villa, t he only kind of accommodat ion, is in t he neighborhood of $800 a night . My guidebook describes it as a magical place where dirt t racks bet ween buildings give t he illusion of a jungle village. But , clearly, it 's an ersat z jungle. It 's not Viet nam.

Bot swana, one of Africa's wealt hiest count ries per capit a t hanks t o diamonds, t ourism and sensible management , has enjoyed more t han four decades of honest , pract ical government under t hree popular president s. On Monday, Mogae will give way t o Vice President Ian Khama.Guided by Mogae and t wo ot her democrat ic president s, t he small count ry has flourished and become t he envy of all of Africa. Despit e high HIV numbers, it s hospit als and clinics provide ret roviral drugs t o all sufferers. It s schools and universit ies provide increasing numbers of local and neighboring Ageing Japan get s serious about immigrat ion peoples wit h inst ruct ion.Rule TOKYO: Jakarta nurse Yanti Kartina left her family in Indonesia of law is observed and and joined 200 other nurses moving to Japan where a rapidly corrupt ion hardly exist s. corrupt ion hardly exist s. growing elderly population has created a desperate need for Bot swana's secret is high carers in old age homes and hospitals. qualit y leadership, broad The nurses, who are expected to learn Japanese and requalify levels of polit ical as they work, are seen as an important test case as Japan part icipat ion, and ext ensive struggles with the world's fastest growing elderly population account abilit y. and a workforce that is forecast to shrink, potentially devastating the economy. "T he foreign t ourist s don't "Japan is the first developed country to face this kind of go t o t he t heat er as much," population crisis," said Hidenori Sakanaka, a former she [Fait h Hope Consolo, a immigration bureau chief in the capital of Tokyo who now chairwoman of t he ret ail leasing and sles division of heads a think tank. t he New York est at e With more than a quarter of Japanese expected to be aged company Prudent ial Douglas over 65 by 2015, the country faces serious economic Elliman] said. "T heir No. 1 consequences, including labour shortages that could weigh on past ime is shopping." GDP. http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/08/07/asia/OUKWD- T hat 's t he condit ion of t he UK-JAPAN-IMMIGRATION.php small nat ion. It 's a defense for everyone in t he globalized world.""I t hink t he goal of Czech myst ificat ion is t o show us t hat we live in a world cont inually myst ifying t o us - t he polit icians, t he advert isers."

"I had a cert ain fear of exposing myself t oo much in my work for a long t ime," he [Pat rick St ewart ] said. "A lot of what performing t o me had been was elaborat e, and at t imes quit e clever, concealment . Someone once said of act ing t hat it is 't elling beaut iful lies,' and well, it became just no longer sat isfact ory t o work t hat way."

"I miss Yugoslavia," said Toha, a 33-year old Slovene ent repeneur.."We didn't have anyt hing," he said. "Neighbours baked each ot her cakes; we had a leader we t rust ed. I remember my mot her crying when T it o died. I was only 5, but I knew t he world was about t o change."

T he world's t ot al meat supply was 71 million t ons in 1961. In 2007, it was est imat ed t o be 284 million t ons. Per capit a consumpt ion has more t han doubled over t hat period. (In t he developing world, it rose t wice as fast , doubling in t he past 20 years.) World meat consumpt ion is expect ed t o double again by 2050, a project ion t hat one expert , Henning St einfeld of t he Unit ed Nat ions, said was result ing in a "relent less growt h in livest ock product ion."...

T hough some 800 million people now suffer from hunger or malnut rit ion, t he majorit y of corn and soy grown in t he world feeds cat t le, pigs and chickens.

[In 2002] Saleh hit on an idea t hat he hoped would sat isfy bot h his American and Islamist part ners: "al hiwar al fikri," or int ellect ual dialogue. T his was an effort t o inculcat e t he idea t hat Islam, properly underst ood, does not condone t errorism.

[Paola Ant onelli of MoMa] also believes t hat t he yearning for privacy - or Exist enzmaximum, as she calls it - will be an increasingly import ant issue for designers in t he fut ure.

T he mainst ream music indust ry is coming t o recognize a price for a MEANWHILE digit al song t hat might be T he invisible woman good enough t o compet e A tiny woman with a black braid to her waist used to clean the wit h t he underground office before it opened in the mornings. She spoke almost no exchange of t unes on t he Int ernet : free. English, and we passed in the hallway with silent good wishes before other people arrived. She cleaned invisibly. I remember T he reader's suggest ions similar invisible cleaners running large humming machines, like included "Dipso, Fat so, Zamboni waxers, along the floors of my medical school each Bingo, Asbo, Tesco"; "One morning before classes started. After they left, students Might y Empire, Slight ly slipped and slid over shining tiles toward their lockers, without Used"; "We Apologize for t he a thought about who might have caused them to shine. Inconvenience"; and - t he The tiny woman had a master key and a rolling trash bin as choice favoured by 20.9 large as she was. Morning is a polite time of day - e-mails are percent of t he readers - "No still civil, phones are unlit, demands are self-imposed. I myself Mot t o, Please, We're do not like hours before 8 a.m. - a love of first light is not in my Brit ish." melatonin - but it is a necessary part of life's current schedule. Eric Kast ner, believed t o Neither she nor I had set it. We shared it with tacit have been Germany's last compatibility, though. World War I vet eran, died Sometimes I came to work earlier than usual, but no matter Jan. 1 in a nursing home in when I unlocked the hall door, she was already working. The Cologne at t he age of 107, earlier the hour, the tinier she looked. I once read that we are his son, Pet er Kast ner, said. taller in the morning and shorter at night, after the day has had a compressing effect, but she appeared to operate on a Federal agent s raided t he reverse schedule. Silk Roads Gallery in Los Angeles, t he Los Angeles Occasionally communication was necessary, not only with me, Count y Museum of Art , t he but with the entire office. She preferred the written form, Pacific Asia Museum in which a bilingual coworker would translate onto paper. Signs Pasadena, t he Bowers would appear, taped to the paper towel dispensers, with polite Museum in Sant a Anna and professional requests: Please do not dump coffee grounds into Mingei Int ernat ional Museum this sink for hand washings. Her name was signed at the in San Diego as part of a bottom, in tall letters out of proportion to her actual height. It five-year invest igat ion int o was a rare reminder of her person. Her job was made more t he smuggling of loot ed difficult by the dumpers of thoughtless coffee grounds in the ant iquit ies from T hailand, wrong places. Myanmar, China and Nat ive At Christmas, the staff took up a collection and gave her a gift American sit es. certificate. The office is full of thoughtful people, and though she was invisible, she was not ignored. Nat ional Priorit ies Project , a research group t hat It happens that this office was in the business of mental analyzes federal dat a, found health, where it is imperative to know a great deal about t hat nearly 71 percent of people's lives. But we did not always know as much about army recruit s graduat ed each other's lives, because diligence and hard work left little from high school in t he 2007 free time for asking about anyone outside of patients. In a budget year.T he army's goal way, we all passed in the halls with silent good wishes. Some is 90 percent high school of us just did so earlier in the day than others. graduat es, which it has not graduat es, which it has not One morning I was arranging charts in my office when she met since 2004. rolled into the alcove with her bin and master key. She rapped on the door for my wastebasket. She was singing. Why, I Saudi Arabia supplies t he asked. Unit ed St at es wit h about 1.4 "My girl. Her birthday," she said. It was the first piece of million barrels of crude oil a personal information I had ever heard about her. day, one-sevent h of U.S. import s and second only t o "Today?" She nodded. t he 1.9 million barrels from "How old is she?" I asked. Canada. "Thirty-two year," she said, beaming. With her long black braid she did not look old enough for this 26,000 children st ill die stage of motherhood. Without thinking, I asked the next every day from most ly question. prevent able causes, Unicef "Well, how old are you?" I said. not ed. Four million infant s "Forty-five," she said. die in t heir first mont h of We had worked together for years in a setting where the point life and up t o half of t hese is to ask questions. Histories are taken here in detail; personal in t heir first day. development, traumas, strengths, precipitating circumstances, On his blog, JSMineSet , emotional states of being, and of course, the roads by which Sinclair has t old his readers one leads to another. That's the job, with medications thrown t hat as much as $450 t rillion in. wort h of derivat ives could But sometimes we are too busy doing it. disint egrat e, leading t o a far Elissa Ely is a psychiatrist great er, and in some ways http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/opinion/edely.php unpredict able, calamit y...

Povert y in Brit ain doubled under T hat cher, and t his figure has become permanent under New Labor. T he share of t he wealt h, excluding housing, enjoyed by t he bot t om half of t he populat ion has fallen from 12 percent in 1976 t o just 1 percent now. T hirt een million people now live in relat ive povert y.

Social mobilit y has declined t o pre-war levels.T he least able children from t he richest 20 percent of t he populat ion now overt ake t he most able children from t he bot t om 20 percent by t he age of seven. Nearly half of t he richest group go on t o get universit y degrees while only 10 percent of t he poorest manage t o graduat e.

Around 300,000 Afghan children cannot at t end school because of violence in t he count ry's ot her provinces, President Hamid Karzai t old Parliament on it s opening day Monday.T he number of children unable t o go t o school is up by 50% from a year ago...

Iran has t he second-largest nat ural gas reservoir in t he world.

Eart h's basic problem is t hat t he Sun will gradually get larger and more luminous as it goes t hrough life, according t o widely held t heories of st ellar evolut ion. In it s first 4.5 billion years, according t o t he models, t he Sun has already grown about 40 percent bright er.Over t he coming eons, life on Eart h will become muggier and more uncomfort able and finally impossible.

Q.T he world seems t o be at some form of inflect ion point wit h a big shift in demand? A. Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of Royal Dut ch Shell: T he basic drivers are pret t y easy and t hey are t wo fold. You go from six billion people t o nine billion people, basically, in 2050. T his combinat ion of many more people climbing t he energy ladder, which is basically welfare for a lot of people who live in povert y, creat es t hat enormous demand for energy.

None of t he 23 count ries whose economies are dominat ed by ... "t he except ional curse of oil" are democracies.

Got z Aly is t he aut hor of "Hit ler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and t he Nazi Welfare St at e" in which he argued t hat ordinary Germans support ed t he Nazi regime not because t hey were inherent ly ant i-Semit ic, or blinded by Hit ler's charisma, but for t he relat ively mundane reason t hat t he Reich's policies raised t heir st andard of living.

T he most t elling st at ist ic in t he World Economic Forum's lat est Global Compet it iveness Report is t hat not a single Arab st at e made t he t op 25.

In a survey of 55 hospit als financed by a World Bank project in Orissa, invest igat ors "observed problems in 93 percent of t hem...India is t he bank's largest borrower wit h 75 act ive project s wort h a t ot al commit ment of $15.2 billion.

In only 80 years, Kenya's populat ion had jumped from 2.9 million t o 37 million. Had America grown at t he same rat e since 1928, when it had 120 million people, it would now have 1.56 billion cit izens.

Kenya belongs t o a group of some 40 count ries t hat have ext remely high populat ion growt h - rat es of increase t hat I call "demographic armament ." In a t ypical nat ion of t his group, every 1000 males aged 40-44 are succeeded by at least 2,500 boys aged 0 t o 4. In Kenya t here are 4,190 boys. By cont rast ...Brit ain wit h just 677 boys bet ween 0 and 4 replacing every 1,0000 males 40 t o 44, in t he cat egory of "demographic capit ulat ion."

Amongst t he poorest 20 percent of t he populat ion, half are illit erat e and barely 2 percent graduat e from high school, according t o [Indian] government dat a. By cont rast , among t he richest 20% of t he populat ion, nearly half are high school graduat es and only 2 percent illit erat e.

In a first , t he majorit y of birt hs in France last year were out of wedlock, t he nat ional st at ist ics agency announced Tuesday..."What 's led t he rise in out -of- wedlock birt hs is t hat a lifest yle t hat was once confined in Paris is now t he norm even in rural areas. Marriage is no longer considered indispensable t o form a family."

"What we need is a new narrat ive, a new 'we'. a mult icolored, mult icult ural European ident it y," [Tariq Ramadan] said. "Immigrat ion is a fact whet her you like it or not . Europeans need t o psychologically int egrat e t hat int o t heir world view."

"Can you imagine Jesus ignoring t he plight of t he disenfranchised and downt rodden while going aft er t he abort ionist ?" Scarborough wrot e on t he conservat ive Web sit e WorldNet Daily.com.

What do banks call it when a t roubled borrower abandons her home, sending t hem t he keys? "Jingle mail."

T he coast al st ock of bot t om-dwelling fish is just a quart er of what it was 25 years ago. Already, scient ist s say, t he sea's ecological balance has shift ed as species lower on t he food chain replace some above t hem.In Maurit ania, lobst ers vanished years ago. T he cat ch of oct opus - now t he most valuable species - is four-fift hs of what it should be. A 2002 st udy found t hat t he most market able fish off t he coast of Senegal were close t o collapse, essent ially, sliding t oward ext inct ion."T he sea is being empt ied," said Moct ar Ba, a consult ant who formerly headed scient ific research programs for Maurit ania and West Africa. "T he sit uat ion is very grave."

T here are more t han 2 million inmat es in American prisons and jails, and some st udies est imat e t hat as many as 5 percent may be innocent .

An individual's life is it self a narrat ive wit h a beginning, a middle and at least t he int imat ions of an end.

Sudan has seen war for all but 11 years since independence in 1956, wit h over t wo million dead; Somalia remains a failed st at e, t oo lawless for most aid agencies t o work in; Congo's war has left five million dead; and nort hern Uganda was, unt il last year, ravaged by a millenarian cult known as t he Lords Resist ance Army, best known for mut ilat ing villagers and abduct ing children as soldiers and sex slaves.

An annual income of $100,000 is enough for a comfort able life in Des Moines but barely enough t o get by in New York Cit y.

Eric Rognot , a longt ime st udent of ice sheet s at bot h poles for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laborat ory, said he hoped t hat t he public and policymakers did not int erpret t he uncert aint y in t he 21st -cent ury forecast as reason for complacency on t he need t o t o limit risks by cut t ing emissions.Rignot recent ly proposed t hat unabat ed warming could result in t hree feet of global sea rise just from wat er flowing off Greenland, t hree feet from Ant arct ica and 18 inches as t he remaining alpine glaciers shrivel away.

"We believe in a world where more t han t wo billion people are ent ering t he indust rial age." BHP Billit on's CEO, Marius Kloppers, speaking t o analyst s when unveiling his bid for mining t it an Rio T int o in November, 2007.

"St at us Despair"....t he feeling when, say, t he owner of a puny Gulfst ream privat e jet t akes in t he sight of Prince Alaweed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia barrelling down t he t he runway in his flying palace, t he cust omized double-decker A380 he had ordered from Airbus. Because t he consumpt ion st akes have been raised so high, more people in 2008 are likely t o feel st at us despair, Evers said. Some, part icularly in developed count ries, will divert from t he consumpt ion-as-st at us pat t ern and seek consumer grat ificat ion in new ways - by count ing t he number of views on t heir page on t he phot o-sharing sit e Flickr, for inst ance.

' A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E ' BY I A N WA L T H E W ( P U B L I S H E D I N L ' E X P R E S S I N F R E N C H , 3 1 / 0 7 / 0 8 ) Auvergnats always ask why you chose their ‘pays’, can’t understand how you could leave yours.

You don’t want to disappoint with the prosaic truth.

That you were searching for anywhere with a little land, south of an east-west axis traversing Lyon (the weather); more than 100 km from any airport that can take a Ryanair jet (to avoid their passengers).

Somewhere to hide from people talking about property prices, private schools and ‘plans for the weekend’.

That you were searching for a place where you could still smell the soil and the ‘fumier’ and the ‘cave’ on the clothes of your friends.

That you saw a house on the internet in a region called the Auvergne, a region you had never visited; that this house was too close to a RN, but the contours rolled well over the map, distant from the blue lines of autoroutes – you’d pass by this place on your way back to Paris from the south one day.

And we did.

People think they can find good houses, places, people. But you can’t. They find you. You set out, drift around, and wash up on a friendly shore.

Most people are scared of the open sea, the great expanse of the Auvergne, so they take the TGV to places they know, places where they have friends and acquaintances, places where they drop anchor with their urban determination to self- associate.

The Auvergne has no TGV, it’s poor. That’s why the people are so welcoming and hospitable, says my neighbor, Jean-Baptiste.

He’s 86 now, a retired ‘menusier’, the missing fingers to prove it. He speaks Oc, at the market – when it’s not too hot, too cold, too wet, too snowy, too foggy - when the ‘troisieme generation’ go down the mountain early in the morning to talk a lot and buy a little.

Rich people, rich places, they’re not so welcoming, they don’t give so much. Arms are held wide to greet you but the embrace never tightens.

My wife didn’t want to go too far south, to the land of two seasons and burnt, aching, brown grass. In the Auvergne, winter is long, but spring and autumn explode and implode in shades of colours too fleeting to paint; the summer is hot and languid, deserved by the trials of winter, not an easy given.

The Auvergnats like to think of themselves as reserved, cautious, private. They can’t show their endless curiosity about you, because here privacy is hallowed, so their questions are absurdly roundabout or so direct so as to appear unlike a question at all - more a statement of fact that you may wish to confirm or not. (I do, they don’t.)

But they do open up, and quicker than they like to acknowledge. They are a kind, warm people with a brusque façade but one which is easily chipped in the cold, melted in the heat of shared seasons.

How would you describe Auvergnats, Jean-Baptiste? ‘There aren’t many of us left.’ He pauses, sitting on a bench in his ‘potagère’, made of a piece of wood rested on two old oil drums, in the shade of June apple tree, green and hopeful. Reflecting. ‘Amoureux,’ he smiles. And their faults? ‘We have none. No, one mustn’t exaggerate. Of course, I’m sure we do.’ ‘Such as?’ He doesn’t like to say.

They’re not to be shared lightly, not with the readers of a magazine that Jean-Baptiste has only vaguely heard of, and certainly never read.

So this ‘foreigner’ (and here that word doesn’t mean coming from another nation) will tell you things you know but do not understand.

That ‘radinerie’ is a virtue, nothing is wasted. And you dare to speak of reducing consumption, of recycling and saving this planet.

That for the Auvergnats, land is an obsession: their willingness to argue over a 20 cm strip of useless ground; the story of a family picnic where two brothers end up fighting over who would sit under the shade of which of two trees.

So how did we get here? We stumbled, that’s the answer. Emotional refugees from a land of loss to the Auvergne, a place of endless discovery.

The EU and one arm of the government pours millions into the region to attract incomers like us, while another Minister closed the maternity ward and threatens Ambert hospital that brought us near this town, where our third child was born.

I asked Brice Hortefeux (when he was sent last year from a place called Paris to win over the bourgeoisie in the valley) why this was, why one hand could give so much while the other took away life, our future.

That’s a good question, he said.

(His suit looked very expensive in our marketplace, positively gleaming, his tie so fat and silky, his hair coiffured like a woman’s: that must be what they call ‘French flair’.)

So what’s the answer then?

His bodyguards hustled him away. He didn’t stay long.

The Auvergne: apparently a part of a country, ‘une et indivisible’. But I see no proof.

A place where the poor own their homes and their land, and have done for generations.

Where everyone has the right to build their own home on their own land, however ugly-pink and destructive to the Auvergne’s greatest asset – the ‘patrimoine’ that serves the tourists – and turn the roads leading to its towns into messy, elongated stains.

A place where Jean-Baptiste, the third generation of his family to live in his house, who has had three neighbouring families in his family’s life here, his place, greets an Anglo-Australian couple with two children and a removal fan from Brussels without missing a beat (nor when his dog kills our cat two days later, nor when our dog kills his chickens). Curious. Calm.

It was close to misery here; people got by on 3 or 4 cows. They ate beef only once a year, even the rich who could live well off 10-15 cows. The Fete du Pays, August 10th, a beef pot-au-feu.

We eat more beef now. There is little misery, not much money. But life in the Auvergne is a life apart: simple, straightforward, our table the farm food of ‘petits producteurs’ (still); clean air and cold water that slide off and out of primordial mountains; stories old and new, jokes, a small universe, an immense space of freedom.

Do we live in France? I’ve no idea.

[An edited and translated version of this text was published in L'Express on 31 July, 2008]

W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8

' T H E O L D S O L D I E R I N T H E H O S P I T A L ' BY I A N WA L T H E W ( P U B L I S H E D I N T H E I H T ; 1 7 T H A P R I L 2 0 0 8 )

PUY-DE-DÔME, France: The world has turned, the markets have dropped, panic is in the air. I suppose. Here, in our mountain home, we are sick with flu, first me, then my wife. The weather is closed in. Down the mountain, at the hospital in town for my monthly treatment - because of a medical condition, they need to top up my gamma globulins every month - I sleep so deeply that two of my bottles are changed without Pascale, the nurse, stirring me. When I awake, I have a roommate. The Auvergnat is old, frail. I am English and 42 years old. Normally I have a room to myself. When I lived in Brussels, the day treatment ward was shiny and new - 16 reclining seats, facing each other. I used to take the same chair by the window, with its view of the power station. If you shared the same treatment rhythm as someone, you could see their steady improvement, or more often their gradual decline. Four hours, once a month, watching the person opposite fade. Never did we speak. Here they closed the maternity ward, but the hospital remains open; two beds a room, a view of the church and the hills above. And people speak to each other. We strike up a conversation and I LET T ERS discover that my roommate shares the family name of one Go t o t he source of the masons working at our Your editorial "The other enemy in Afghanistan" (Aug. 6) rightly house. argued that the opium cultivation and trafficking problem in In these parts it is a common Afghanistan is bad and getting worse. The problem has global name. Despite this, he knows the implications because the abundance of opium drives down the mason, and his father and world price of heroin. mother, and where he lives and Worse than that, the opium trade has become the financial how their families are related. lifeblood of many of the enemies NATO is trying to defeat in Monsieur Beal has had six operations in as many years. He Afghanistan. used to weigh 86 kilograms, now The editorial criticizes Thomas Schweich, formerly of the U.S. he weighs just 48 kilograms, 106 State Department, for his proposal to spray the crops out of pounds. He has had a kidney existence. That solution would wreck the Afghan economy and removed, and half his pancreas, destroy any popularity the Western troops may have with the if I hear him right, and more, local population. It could also have terrible ecological and too. medical consequences. When I ask if I might take his The editorial is right to reject aerial spraying, but the counter- picture he stands tall, like the proposals are laughable. How could a country that is tribal, soldier he was. He did his impoverished and Medieval simply build "a criminal justice military service in the elite para system that can prosecute major drug traffickers"? Moreover, commandos under the command how do you expect to get farmers to "shift from poppies to of an infamous colonel. food crops" when they need much less water for poppies and Monsieur Beal did 26 combat the returns are several times that of food? drops in Algeria, mostly These ivory tower ideas would be fine in a civilized place like intercepting rebels on the New York, but they have no prospect of doing any good in a Tunisian and Moroccan borders. poor and broken place like Afghanistan. These proposals are When not fighting, he was the really more of the same failed approach the West now takes, colonel's driver: "It was like that. and that prompt radical but terrible ideas like Schweich's. At base we were drivers or cooks, but when we jumped we The most realistic solution to the Afghan opium trade is for the were all the same." Western powers to buy the opium at the source. The opium The colonel? "He was a great could then be destroyed, stockpiled or refined into medicine. man. For his 40th birthday, he By buying the opium, coalition forces would gain the loyalty of gave the entire regiment leave the farmers; eliminate the major source of the enemy's and we drank so much beer, we income; and stifle most of the world's supply of heroin. This is purged our bodies of the desert one problem that the rich West actually can, and should, get through every orifice." out of by spending money. What happened to the colonel? Z. Andretti, Rome "He was captured at Dien Bien Phu, but he escaped, pretending Brit ain's hurt ing milit ary to collapse, while crossing a Regarding the article "U.K. on the defensive over Basra single file wooden bridge, into a mistakes" (Aug. 7): The British government does not respect crocodile filled river." the country's armed forces. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Monsieur Beal likes the English. the defense minister, Desmond Browne, are running down the His regiment was deployed from military forces by overextending them around the world. It's Algeria to Cyprus. They weren't shameful. told why until a few days before The worst part of the problem has been the political the operation, but it was for the interference in military affairs; the Basra case described in the drop on the bridges over the Suez Canal, south of Port Said. article is a classic example. This has done more damage to "We had the easy bit, we French morale than our enemies have done. only had a couple of regiments Sadly, it's not only Labour. The Tory Party has been at best to spare, everyone else was in ineffective in exposing this disgraceful state of affairs. Poor Algeria. equipment, housing and medical care are the result of penny- "Resistance was low. The enemy pinching by the bloated bureaucracy at the Ministry of soldiers weren't soldiers, just Defense. men conscripted at the last Thank God for the media. minute, without shoes, without Rodney G. James Brasschaat, Belgium rifles. A few nests of resistance, ***************** some pill-boxes, it was over very Jewish set t lers at t ack Brit ish diplomat s in Hebron quickly. We found piles of HEBRON, West Bank: A small group of Jewish settlers attacked abandoned helmets that could a delegation of British diplomats during a visit to the West fill this room. The Israelis had Bank city of Hebron on Thursday, the British Consulate said. destroyed the Egyptian Air Force; The consulate in Jerusalem said the diplomats were attacked it was all done before we while touring the area in an armoured car. None were injured. dropped. A Palestinian security official in the city said one of the settlers "On sentry duty at the canal, the kicked the car after trying to open one of its doors. English guards never took out a Tension often runs high in Hebron, home to 180,000 pack of cigarettes without offering one of their fine smokes Palestinians and around 650 Jewish settlers who live in fortified to us French - the French Army enclaves guarded by Israeli troops. gave us straw to smoke. And the Diplomats regularly visit the flashpoint city to assess security English always poured us hot English always poured us hot conditions and the role of settlers. tea, with milk, without asking. The British diplomats were taking part in a tour by a group With Egyptian honey for sugar. called "Breaking the Silence". They were good men." Tours by the group, led by former Israeli soldiers, are often In Cyprus, Monsieur Beal and his attacked by some settlers who see them as siding with the fellow soldiers were given a tour Palestinians. of a British warship. As they The British consulate said Israeli police intervened after the went down the gangplank attack and an investigation was under way. afterwards, each of them were The Israeli government had no immediate comment. handed a cornet of frites - not a http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/08/07/europe/OUKWD little thing, like an ice cream, but -UK-ISRAEL-BRITAIN-SETTLERS.php a great big bag, hot and ****************** steaming. They were the best Brit ain's housing bust is bringing down t he economy frites he had ever eaten. He LEEDS, England: Down the road from the train station here is a never forgot those frites. gaping hole. At the height of the property boom, a developer The last poilu - the last French started to build what was to become one of the tallest and World War I infantryman - is dead. Now it is the men of most stylish apartment blocks, designed by Philippe Starck. Indochina and Algeria we shall But construction stopped abruptly last month when financing speak of. dried up because of the credit crunch. Now the abandoned site Why is the past always more stands as a stark symbol of the collapse of Britain's building interesting to me than the boom and how the credit market turmoil in the United States present? Why is the heard more has seeped across the Atlantic. It also suggests what lies rich than the read? ahead for a few other European economies where property Twenty-six combat drops. Suez. booms gave now debt-ridden consumers a false sense of The colonel. wealth and security. The colonel is still alive. And so In recent weeks, Britons have come to an uncomfortable is Monsieur Beal, next to me in a realization: After 17 years of uninterrupted growth, their hospital bed in the Auvergne. economy is moving closer to recession and may well already be in one. Home prices are dropping, sapping consumer Ian Walthew is the author of "A confidence, and even though repossessions, bankruptcies and Place in My Country." unemployment are still at relative lows, they have started to http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/0 creep up during the last three months. 4/17/opinion/edwalthew.php Just Thursday, figures released by HBOS, the largest mortgage lender in Britain, showed the housing market slump was gathering pace. The average price of a property fell 8.8 percent in the 12 months through July, the biggest drop since the company started to track prices in 1983. W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X But the Bank of England is caught in a bind. It is unable to P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8 lower interest rates to keep the economy growing because, at the same time, inflation looms. It left lending rates unchanged at its meeting on Thursday. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/07/business/pound.php

ALL PHOT OGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALT HEW 2008

P O S T ED BY IAN AT 1 3 :20 ' T H E B O O K S W E G E T T O L ABEL S : ABS U RD IT Y , AM ERIC AN EXC EP T IO N AL IS M , AU S T RAL IA, R E A D . . . . A N D W H Y ' BY D E B B I E BO O K , C O N S U M ERIS M , FIN AN C IAL M ELT D O WN , FRAN C E, H U M AN F R O S T . RIG H T S , IM M IG RAT IO N , P L AC E, S EC U RIT Y I’m not a journalist or a writer, and I don’t want to be. I didn’t last month and after a slow and NO C O MME NT S : illuminating journey up & over my latest learning curve I Post a Comment definitely don’t want to be this L INKS T O T HIS P O S T month or any other month. So I’m just Mrs Average who Create a Link probably reads a lot. Recently I Newer Post Home Older Post read a wonderful book, not an unusual experience but believe Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) me this one was genuinely and unusually excellent; “A Place in my Country” by Ian Walthew. I can recommend it to you – warm, funny, insightful, informative, sad, thought provoking and enlightening. I could go on but read it for yourself… Occasionally when I have read a particularly good book I track down the author’s website and drop them a note of thanks and encouragement to continue. When I wrote to Ian Walthew he wrote back – a first I think for me. He began by saying he had had a very difficult time with his publisher, so difficult in fact he was thinking of “not writing another book”. How could this crazy state of affairs come about? This is a précised version of some of the things he told me plus some additional bits and pieces I have subsequently established for myself, all of which are a total revelation, and probably would be to any of the British reading public – so why don’t we know this, and why aren’t the newspapers telling us?

I think all of us who read regularly recognise how hard it is for a first time non-celebrity author to break through into ‘the big time’ unless they somehow get picked up by Richard & Judy or get ‘scaled out’ in a large retail or well known internet outlet. But this is where it gets interesting – ‘scaled out’ means the publisher actually pays to have the authors’ book on the 3 for 2 tables. They do this by giving the retailers a discount – so leaving even less money for the authors – and by paying what some retailers call an ‘administrative charge’. For example, to be in a large book retailers window in London can, I understand, cost the publishers as much as £25,000 each week.

So, how does the 3 for 2 pile work – and, perhaps almost as important, have we ever thought about it before? Two thirds, more or less, of the table is devoted to big name or well known authors we are likely to buy anyway. The 3rd ‘third’ is then used for books that the publishers need to have there but which the retailer might not under normal circumstances have taken in large volume, perhaps because the book is by an unknown or relatively unknown author. According to a recent article in The Author being on the 3 for 2 pile can increase sales by a staggering 5,000%.

We, the book buyers go into the store, buy our two books from authors we like to follow and are then “teased” [that’s the polite word for it] into taking a browse through the books we don’t know because that third book will be, effectively, ‘free’.

But who do the publishers want to get on the 3 for 2 tables? Firstly good, big name, big selling authors but surprisingly [although perhaps not when you think about it] secondly, books they have paid a lot of money to acquire in the first place - in order to earn back the big advance. So the publishers aren’t necessarily, or even at all, pushing the books that have received the best reader reaction and the best reviews. In fact sometimes quite the opposite; they are pushing and paying the retailers to push, the books they need to earn their money back on, even if the book sold badly in paperback and was terribly reviewed.

For first time, or even second and third time authors who are paid very modest advances [which generally publishers earn back from hardback sales], it is virtually impossible to ‘get out there’ and so come to the attention of the book buying public like you and I.

If we condone this we are effectively allowing publishers and the big companies to control the books that get read by us, the wider public.

Are we are being spoon fed by the corporate publishing world without even knowing it… And, if so, what can we do about it?

By the way, on the subject of Richard & Judy’s Book Club there was a very informative article by Ciar Byrne in the Home section of the Independent on 7th June which you can still read on line at www.independent.co.uk/arts It goes into some detail about how the list is compiled, how influential the list has become and the problems this is creating for independent publishers and authors. The headline “Winners of the Literary Lottery..” says it all.

Having established how the 3 for 2 pile works, plus the internet equivalent and learnt a bit more about Richard & Judy’s list, it set me thinking – what else, where else, can we find out about ‘new’ books and ‘new’ authors. How about the review section of the weekend papers, a favourite place of mine..

More research later I now realise how incredibly difficult it is for authors to get reviewed in the national papers without some sort of personal contact with the literary editors or at least knowing a journalist on one of the papers who may bring their book to the right persons attention. So the books you see reviewed are not necessarily based on the quality or importance of the book but a whole range of other factors that are possibly at play; the quid pro quo, the friend of a friend, the old boy network or even perhaps, horror of horrors ‘revenge’ – the author of book X is also a reviewer who did a particularly critical review of the reviewers own book [are you still with me here..] and they want to get their own back!

If we relate this back to the 3 for 2 table and the relevance of the ‘big advance’, the first time non- celeb author, without a big advance bidding war behind them and therefore with limited publisher support and with no friends of friends contacts, has next to no chance of getting reviewed. However good the book…

And please bear in mind I am not even talking about how difficult it is for an author to find an agent or a publisher as a first time author in the current celeb driven memoir market – Katie Price, Jordan’s first piece of possibly ghost written fiction was the best selling fiction book in the UK in 2007. What does that say about us, the book buying public?

The final blow to my previously naive assumption that the review sections of the weekend nationals would be full of genuine attempts by the literary editors to bring to our attention worthwhile good books came when I realised the increasing power of The Famous.

Say publisher X has paid a fortune for the new book by a Very Famous Y – and, at roughly the same time, the features editors of all the Nationals will be dying to get an exclusive interview with him/her. So what the publishing PR people effectively say, in the nicest most subtle way, is ‘Look, if we give you an exclusive interview with Y this week then next week the quid pro quo is you give a big review to this first time author who we paid a fortune to because of a bidding war and we need to earn our money back’.

Add to this the limitations of space within which all literary editors are working, the obligations they have to review big name authors and the remaining space being used up by unspoken understandings and obligations to the PR people you can see how little genuine space there must be for first time authors.

Disillusioning isn’t it. Are we being spoon fed reviews based on the publishers commercial imperatives in return for the commercial imperatives of the national newspapers?

It seems to me that the entire book review infrastructure is profoundly flawed. Could it even be interpreted as intellectually bereft and perhaps lacking in integrity – and, surely, there is a better way?

Could ‘the better way’ be via one of the big online retailers? More research, more concerns, more disillusion later - did I know that one of the big .co.uk retailers is currently applying pressure on some large publishing groups to give them even better commercial terms than they currently receive – and how do they do this? By removing the Buy Button from some of the publisher’s books and removing some of their titles from promotions such as ‘Perfect Partners’ and ‘Recommendations for You’. And this when we have already established that large British book retailers, high street or web based, receive generous terms from publishers giving them already a large percentage of the available profit.

These sorts of sanctions are unlikely to hurt the publishers but they should surely effect reputations built on choice and recommendations to customers when their current actions represent reduced choice and distorted recommendations. But only if we know about their actions in the first place, only if we can read it or hear it for ourselves, only if we are told about it by the newspapers and other media can we make informed considered decisions.

And so to my conclusions – serious book lovers have to be very clever and very resourceful to find the best new books out there, and once we have chanced upon a brilliant new book, a new author like Ian Walthew, the single most important thing we can do, knowing everything we now know about the system and its potential to manipulate us, is tell everyone – use the power of the internet and the power of personal recommendation. Get clever in finding different, unbiased sources of new books and authors and recommend them to your friends, your family and even that bloke you see on the 7.45 train to work each morning. We need to be informed – and we need to use the power that information gives us.

In that spirit of recommendation my personal favourite source at the moment is a website run by two woman in Yorkshire & Devon; they aren’t part of the literary scene, have no features or exclusives to organise, no actual or metaphysical debts to pay and aren’t authors themselves. The reviews are written by book lovers and readers like you and I, who aren’t paid and have no vested interests in any specific book. Have a look at www.thebookbag.co.uk and when you’ve done that in return let me know your favourite places for unbiased, interesting, informed and intelligent recommendations or reviews.

Debbie Frost June/July 2008

W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8

A B O U T M E

I A N

A UV ER G N E, FR A N C E I'm an author and sometime media/marketing consultant. I've had one book published (A Place in My Country) and I'm finishing my first novel and researching my second.

VIEW M Y C O M P L ET E P RO FIL E

Copyright Jean-Paul Guilloteau 2008

W E I D E N F E L D & N I C O L S O N , H A R D B A C K 2 0 0 7 ; P H O E N I X P A P E R B A C K , 2 0 0 8

L I F E COMMON VARIABLE IMMUNE DEFICIENCY POST-HERPETIC NEURALGIA

Copyright Jean-Paul Guilloteau 2008

R E P O RT S O U N D S A L A R M O V E R B I O T E R R O R ( WA S H I N G T O N P O S T , N O V E M B E R 3 0 , 2 0 0 8 ) Bipartisan Study Finds Insufficient Laboratory Safeguards, Loose Regulation By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, November 30, 2008; Page A03 Seven years after the 2001 anthrax attacks, a congressionally ordered study finds a growing threat of biological terrorism and calls for aggressive defenses on par with those used to prevent a terrorist nuclear detonation. Due for release next week, a draft of the study warns that future bioterrorists may use new technology to make synthetic versions of killers such as Ebola, or genetically modified germs designed to resist ordinary vaccines and antibiotics. The bipartisan report faults the Bush administration for devoting insufficient resources to prevent an attack and says U.S. policies have at times impeded international biodefense efforts while promoting the rapid growth of a network of domestic laboratories possessing the world's most dangerous pathogens. The number of such "high- containment" labs in the United States has tripled since 2001, yet U.S. officials have not implemented adequate safeguards to prevent deadly germs from being stolen or accidentally released, it says. "The rapid growth in the number of such labs in recent years has created new safety and security risks which must be managed," the draft report states. The report is the product of a six-month study by the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Terrorism, which Congress created last spring in keeping with one of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. Drafts of chapters pertaining to bioterrorism were obtained by The Washington Post. The document cites progress in many areas of biodefense since the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, including major investments in research, stockpiling of drugs and development of a network of sensors designed to detect airborne viruses and bacteria. The Bush administration has spent more than $20 billion on such countermeasures, far more than any of its predecessors. But the report says the next administration must do much more to prevent dangerous pathogens from falling into the wrong hands in the first place. While politicians often warn about the dangers of nuclear terrorism, a serious biological attack would be easier to accomplish and deserves a top priority, it says. "The more probable threat of bioterrorism should be put on equal footing with the more devastating threat of nuclear terrorism," the draft states. It calls on the Obama administration to develop a comprehensive approach to preventing bioterrorism and to "banish the 'too-hard-to-do' mentality that has hobbled previous efforts." Some bioweapons specialists have argued that it is practically impossible to prevent a biological attack, because lethal strains of anthrax bacteria and other deadly microbes can be found in nature. But the report argues that it would be far easier for bioterrorists to obtain the seeds of an attack from laboratories that have ready supplies of "hot" strains. U.S. officials think an Army biodefense lab was the source of the anthrax spores used in the 2001 attacks that killed five people. The biodefense research industry that sprang up after 2001 offers potential solutions to a future attack, but also numerous new opportunities for theft or diversion of deadly germs, the report says. Today, about 400 research facilities and 14,000 people are authorized to work with deadly strains in the United States alone, and several of the new labs have been embroiled in controversies because of security breaches, such as the escape of lab animals. No single government agency has authority to oversee security at these U.S. labs, most of which are run by private companies or universities. Such facilities in the United States "are not regulated" unless they obtain government funding or acquire pathogens from the government's list of known biowarfare agents. Because of this gap, labs can work with "dangerous but unlisted pathogens, such as the SARS virus," which causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, without the government's knowledge. Internationally, the challenges are even greater. While the U.S. government continues to spend billions of dollars to secure Cold- War-era nuclear stockpiles, similar efforts to dismantle Soviet bioweapons facilities have been scaled back because of disagreements with the Russian government, the report notes. The only global treaty that outlaws the development of biological weapons has no mechanism for inspections or enforcement. Efforts to strengthen the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention were dealt a symbolic blow in 2001 when the Bush administration withdrew its support for a new accord that had been under negotiation for six years. Meanwhile, the growth in biodefense research seen in the United States has spread to dozens of countries, including developing nations such as Malaysia and Cuba that are investing heavily to develop world-class biotech industries. One of the fastest-growing technologies is DNA synthesis, which offers new capabilities to alter the genes of existing pathogens or synthesize them artificially. While governments, trade groups and professional organizations are experimenting with various voluntary controls over such new capabilities, the United States should lead a global effort to strengthen oversight and clamp down on the unregulated export of deadly microbes, the panel said. "Rapid scientific advances and the global spread of biotechnology equipment and know-how are currently outpacing the modest international attempts to promote biosecurity," the report says. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp- dyn/content/article/2008/11/29/AR 2008112901921.html

N U C L E A R O R B I O L O G I C A L AT T A C K C A L L E D L I K E L Y ( WA S H I N G T O N P O S T . D E C E M B E R 2 , 2 0 0 8 ) By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 2, 2008; Page A02 The odds that terrorists will soon strike a major city with weapons of mass destruction are now better than even, a bipartisan congressionally mandated task force concludes in a draft study that warns of growing threats from rogue states, nuclear smuggling networks and the spread of atomic know-how in the developing world. The sobering assessment of such threats, due for release as early as today, singled out Pakistan as a grave concern because of its terrorist networks, history of instability and arsenal of several dozen nuclear warheads. The report urged the incoming Obama administration to take "decisive action" to reduce the likelihood of a devastating attack. "No mission could be timelier," says the draft report of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, which spent six months preparing an assessment for Congress and the new president-elect. It adds: "In our judgment, America's margin of safety is shrinking, not growing." The report, ordered by Congress last year, concludes that terrorists are more likely to obtain materials for a biological attack than to buy or steal nuclear weapons. But it says the nuclear threat is growing rapidly, in part because of the increasing global supply of nuclear material and technology. Without greater urgency and decisive action by the world community, 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," says the draft report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. The Post reported excerpts from an earlier draft in Sunday's editions. The creation of the commission, chaired by former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), with former congressman James M. Talent (R- Mo.) serving as vice chairman, was one of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which explored the causes of the 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States. The new panel's bipartisan members and staff conducted more than 260 interviews with government officials and experts around the world to assess the problem of weapons of mass destruction as well as offer proposals for reducing the threat. While the panel found the risk of an attack with such weapons to be increasingly serious, "nuclear terrorism is still a preventable catastrophe," the report says. It calls for aggressive steps to secure unguarded stockpiles of nuclear weapons material such as uranium and plutonium, as well as coordinated international efforts to discover and disrupt smuggling rings that traffic in atomic technology. It also urges a dramatic overhaul of the international institutions and treaties that have sought to slow the spread of nuclear weapons since the 1950s. The landmark Non-Proliferation Treaty should be dramatically toughened, the report recommends, with the addition of real penalties for violators and a more robust International Atomic Energy Agency to carry out inspections and enforce the rules. The United States should push for a global consensus banning states such as Iran and North Korea from adding to their stockpiles of enriched uranium and plutonium, while also ensuring supplies of commercial reactor fuel for countries that renounce nuclear weapons, the report says. Commission members urged Barack Obama to take a tough line with both Iran and North Korea. If the president-elect seeks to engage the two countries diplomatically, they said, he should do so "from a position of strength, emphasizing both the benefits of them abandoning their nuclear programs and the enormous costs of failing to do so." Nuclear weapons in the hands of either regime not only pose a threat in their own right but also increase the chances of a destabilizing arms race, the report says. Pakistan's buildup of nuclear arms also threatens to exacerbate a regional arms race, while presenting opportunities for terrorists to acquire weapons parts and critical technology, the commissioners concluded. "Pakistan is our 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 says. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp- dyn/content/article/2008/12/01/AR 2008120102710.html?sub=new

H E A D L I N E S Q 4 2 0 0 5 Credit Suisse managers get top rating Hedge funds lick wounds after brutal October October was rocky for hedge funds Australia's oil-for-food inquiry Greenhouses in Gaza symbolize Palestinian hopes and barriers Congress irate over talks with India Vietnam asks for millions to fight bird flu's spread 3 in rioting in suburb of Paris get jail terms Traces from bombs tested in New Delhi Bomb kills 20 in Basra while U.S. toll spikes Ivory Coast struggles as ethnic strife spreads Sharon demands action on terror Report outlines disarray in Iraq Critique of intelligence on Vietnam kept secret UN Council demands Syria's full cooperation Race isn't always so black and H5N1 hysteria:Patent nonsense on avian flu Not our kind of people, 2005 Abuse of the Patriot Act Freddie Mac again finds flaws in its accounting The sickness in France's heartMeltdown in France; No more credibility Where are you now, antiwar activists? A White House tax panel tilts with the sacred cow of U.S. home ownership Key Qaeda-linked agent escaped, U.S. admits Editor of Financial Times resigns as paper seeks to regain footing Stocks: Indexes bounce back, led by media sector Pakistan raises official quake toll Chinese peasants to get more rights October ends as 4th deadliest month of the war for U.S. troops Centuries of warming envisioned for globeAsians told not to hide news of flu outbreaks Deal would create the largest gold-mining firm News Analysis:Fed in a fishbowl? An era of secrecy seems over Dollars, deficits and destiny Editorial Observer: Google needs a privacy upgrade The new Rwanda Anti-Americanism Société Générale makes derivatives its forte Greenspan's last act: Ending an era of cheap borrowing Open for business, in Afghanistan News Analysis: Quagmire of farm aid hinders U.S. trade deal Pentagon tightening interrogation rules Hazards in the hunt for flu bug Blogs and text messages spread call to violence Farmers lose ground to growth in new Beijing Official lets slip U.S. spy budget Eradicated, but polio returns to the U.S. 3 million still lack shelter in Kashmir Another blow to the Saddam trial In hurricane's wake, teaching compassion Three more years of Bush Stocks: Investors flee after home-building forecast India arrests Kashmiri rebel for New Delhi blast GM cuts hurt sales of parts 18 killed in hotel bombings in Jordan Report warned CIA about interrogations Republicans jolted by U.S. election results The revolt of ennui Judith Miller's farewell Times editor's memo to staff on Judith Miller Fannie Mae finds additional errors GM tumbles on accounting error Letter from Britain: Blair clout is battered by doubts on Iraq war Arctic drilling measure is dropped Nature's crime fighter: Hurricane Katrina Iran to get new offer from West Syria alleges it's targeted by U.S.- led campaign Silent night in wartime Violations are cited at Halliburton Senate votes to limit rights of Guantánamo detainees In Iraq, Rice defends U.S. approach to order Africa rising Trillion-dollar query: Will buyout bubble burst? Justifying monster pay packages at Delphi Delhi police say suspect was attack mastermind Panel calls Milosevic's health poor Rugby: With victory, England headed for showdown Rice rebukes Iranian leader over Israel remarks U.S. operation in Iraq kills 37 insurgents Google to offer its clientsfree trail of clicked-on ads Knight Ridder hires an adviser as it considers calls for its sale Good cheer for Wal-Mart French state of emergency may be extendedby 3 months Toasting age-old traditions in the vineyards of Georgia At Macquarie Bank, profit increases 88% to a record Russia wrestles with its windfall from oil Israel and Palestinians agree to open up Gaza Tourism chief: 'serious investment opportunities' Meanwhile: 007 and counting China confirms first human bird flu cases News Corp.'s slump is unjustified, Murdoch says Earnings: Home demand lifts profit 'Windfall' tax on big U.S. oil firms advances Britain approves Muslim's extradition French TV begins to display face of diversity Secret prison adds to divisions in Iraq America's future is stuck abroad China No. 1? Don't hold your breath An attack on all Arabs Report urges curbs on insurance sales to GIs Morgan Stanley trims Sharon agrees to early elections Iraq war of words heats up 2nd man charged in $13 million Iraq kickback case Sri Lankans vote in election China's Hu recommits to efforts on NKorea Masked man threatens U.S., allies in video Briefly: State Bank of India seeks Pakistan unit Merrill weighs Singapore casino odds Commentary:APEC's view on farm subsidies wields no clout Singapore raises 2005 growth target Web sites crash U.S. stores' party EU to set up blacklist of airlines Shopping on Internet spurned by Chinese Biotech cancer therapy gets approval in China Blu-ray alliance defies HP on software Oil costs lead EU to cut growth outlook Why high-tech jobs fly off to India U.S. Navy seeks hurricane aid for shipyard Oil testimony challenged Poland intends to cut reliance on Russian gas Floyd Norris: Anybody want to buy a paper? EU Parliament toughens laws on chemicals Italy arrests three Algerians suspected of terror links France closer to getting terror suspect Italy's left adjusts Iraq stand France's opposition struggles to cohere A new reason for riots: Polygamy A Springsteen classic born to endure China not a threat, Hu tells Koreans Europa:Ukrainian city wants to reclaim its past Charges point to vast kickback scheme in Iraq Indonesia television airs terror warning Immigrants in Italy: At home, but still apart Bush and Roh agree to differ on North CIA leak disclosure complicates inquiry Nixon-era files have eerie resonance with todayAmericans are more isolationist, poll finds Swiss move to lower barriers to foreigners Americans will examine all Iraqi- run prisons A spark for Mideast peace Liberia: A society at a crossroads Liberia's message for the women of Africa A timetable for Bush Letters: The Mideast shuttle The old Iraqi Army: Good riddance Assad of Syria: No more Mr. Nice Guy $100 laptops unveiled at UN summit London mayor considers investment in rail system At least 38 dead in mosque attacks near Iranian border Scores killed in suicide attacks across Iraq Boeing receives Chinese order for 150 jets U.S. Senate votes to renew tax cut Interest rate trends underpin the dollar Copper prices hit record after China trader's loss ECB makes clear it will raise rates Briefs: 4.8 million individuals order shares of French power utility EU-U.S. 'open skies' deal on takeoff roll For Chinese, U.S. products don't measure up Trouble brewing in oil-rich Norway ViewPoints: In Germany, the taxwoman cometh Asia-Pacific leaders call for greater flexibility on world trade Bodies of 9 migrants found off coast of Sicily News Analysis: Britain's multicultural experiment goes on UN envoy hopeful on Myanmar Bush backs Russia's bid to end Iran standoff UN rebuffs offer to visit Guantánamo Suspect in Iraq graft is no stranger to fraud Scores killed in Iraq as 2 mosques are hit U.S. seeking a Polish base Iraq dogging Bush on his Asian visit The woman who enrages Venezuela's leader Avian flu drug sets off alarms Sarkozy and the canceled book: Gallant or galling? Turkey charges publisher Building a better Internet boom Libya: Last hope for Bulgarian nurses Cowardly Congress Michael Vatikiotis: Iraq follows Bush to Asia Defending the French model Investing: More bang for the buck 'I think, therefore I earn' Spend/Thrift: Discount stores are tapping a rich vein Polls open in second round of Egyptian parliamentary vote Insurgent ambush northwest of Baghdad leaves 24 dead Bush calls on China to expand freedoms China to buy 70 Boeing 737 airliners Quake victims welcome US$5.8 billion in aid for Pakistan Around Asia's markets: Exporters swagger as the dollar rebounds China aims to loosen fund rules Emirates buys Boeings On Advertising: Drinkers get a warning in England L'Équipe looking beyond France As housing market cools off, so does employment growth Briefly: Ryanair chief quitting in 2008 In a class for diplomats, China cultivates African ties Spared from Katrina, city reaps aid China's global push for resources makes waves in Amazon basin Briefly: Mugabe says uranium won't be used for arms U.K. aide castigates ex-envoy China holds line during Bush visit Specialists warn of risk in China's bird flu planJapanese fad: Comics that degrade Chinese and Koreans Ugly debate over Iraq: An omen for Congress? U.S. pushes for revised Bosnia pact 2nd round of elections turns violent in Egypt Socialists in France bury their differences Insurgents raise stakes in Iraq Sharon loses 8 Labor ministers White House Letter: Bush- Cheney dynamic under scrutiny again Lawmakers on notice in lobbying inquiry Gadfly leader seeks Rio's reinvention U.S. military may add new core value Briefly: Change in mining law may aid developers News Analysis: China finds its wealth alters how it's treated Rumsfeld cites 'red herring' in Iraq war debate Putin seeks more trade with Japan Rightists mark Franco anniversary Violence alters Iraq, city by city Rail strike to disrupt transportation in France Full text of Bush and Hu's statement in Beijing 10 years afterDayton II: Lessons for fixing failed states AIDS testing at home Philip Bowring:Beyond that distraction in Pusan 10 years after Dayton I: Bosnia still has a way to go Chancellor Angela Merkel Rugby:England falls as New Zealand's latest victim A look at the career of Israel's Ariel Sharon Sharon calls for early elections Japan to back Russia's bid to join WTO Hard-line Sri Lankan president swears in hawkish prime minister Bush salutes Mongolia for assisting his democracy push in Mideast Commentary:Wall Street jumps on the Asian bondwagon Soft spending hurts Indonesian growth St. Google vs. the pop-up: A Web dragon slain Shoppers become venters on Amazon High prices fuel a nuclear power revival in U.S. A banker's 'nightmare' after Enron deal The New Age lifestyle finds an outlet Boeing builds up its lead over Airbus Want a $10,000 diamond ring? Wal-Mart aims for the luxury buyer 75 million pages lift lid on Guatemala's secrets AIDS shows no slowdown Briefly: Genocide trial begins over massacre of Kurds CIA's methods are 'unique' but not torture, director says Croatian president trusts judiciary A new age is dawning in Berlin GM cutting 30,000 jobs and closing auto plants Sharon quits 'squabbling' Likud France's transport strike in 1995: A preview? Muslim leaders unite against terror Iraqi factions display a rare unity To supply Japan with oil, Putin promises pipeline to Pacific coast An American in Asia: Bush finds respite, briefly, in Ulan Bator Former aide to DeLay admits role in bribery Cheney renews attack on prewar-data critics Stem-cell study paid 20 women for eggs With trial, Spain widens terror breadth New choices in print and broadcast media Rail strike in France is new test for leaders A challenge to Bush from 3 Republicans Mexico's new culture retreat: Oaxaca Turkish leader visits town fearful of police killings Army struggles to defend use of phosphorus A new generation in Germany Suicide bombers go global Protect the grizzlies Cold War China policy Iraqi detention centers: Accountability starts at home Letters: A French problem Sister act: Jimmy Choo hits Paris GM set to announce wide plant closures India plans ski resort in the Himalayas Stocks: Year-end rally warms up on economic report Key points of the proposed constitution Kenya's president concedes defeat 18-year-old high school student sworn in as mayor of U.S. city Strong exports prompt rosy estimate for Thai growth Hurricane and provisions erode Japanese insurer's profit forecast Commentary: U.S. offer on agriculture subsidies merits a quiet burial Korean oil refiners plan upgrades Indonesian confidence sags to 26-month low Bordeaux, by way of Xinjiang TechBrief: EDS to pay £71 million in U.K. case EU moves toward competitive bidding on arms N.Y. prosecutor drops charges against bank trader Now green costs less Fed members worry about too- high rates End of era for workers faced with GM's cuts Goldman Sachs spells out eco- friendly policy $3 million for global library And now, a hedge-type fund for the less wealthy Suit seeks to block copy of Nexium Briefly: U.K. factory orders remain low Airbus sells at least a dozen A350s E.ON abandons plan to take over Scottish Power A step closer to liberalizing EU services Google goes local with shopping The Workplace: Who wants to be a CEO millionaire? Merkel elected as Germany's first female chancellor Cheney escalates attack on war critics With style, Iraqi plays down torture Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide Bosnians reach deal to modify charter At U.S. entry points, new vigilance Chirac stresses TV to build diversity Merkel takes over as German leader Iraq hawk turned dove comes home a puzzle Bomber kills 17 in Kirkuk French riders aren't only ones frustrated Japan's LDP begins overhaul of pacifist Constitution Despair in Louisiana Kenyans hand president stinging defeat on charter Politicking, Iraqi style Lobbyist pleads guilty in bribe case Philippines insurgency takes toll Merkel's husband, a scientist, shuns the political limelight French rail strike winds down Uncertainty hovers over five-star hotel in Syria U.S. finally indicts 'enemy combatant' British Airways revamps its business-class cabins Gates takes on malaria Avian Flu: Why the chicken virus crossed the border The French riots: A higher calling for the courts Sharon, next installment Brisk pace for exports in Taiwan Around Asia's markets: Weak Australian dollar hints at global malaise Testing times drive Koreans abroad New Zealand business confidence sinks to 5-year low Exxon is still blocked in Indonesian project Commentary: Sri Lanka needs peace to prosper Inflation quickens in Singapore Air France-KLM's profit triples German auto-parts firm finds way to defy industry slump Arcelor bids to control Canadian steel maker Huge new wave of blogging in China Currencies: Dollar rises as traders reassess Fed's stance TechBrief: Rivals press EU on suing Microsoft Fed hints at end to rate increases WTO's marathon man chases trade deal Texas power deal nets $5 billion South Korea ratifies rice trade pact Free Flow: Rail freight in Europe falls off track Virus tied to bogus FBI and CIA e- mail spreads globally Vodafone's new soccer deal Book Review: Economic growth as an engine for social progress How the salons of Paris made social life an art Revisiting a Paris tasting from '76 UN cites progress on opium in Afghanistan Briefly: EU taking closer look at CIA detention charge Al Jazeera urges inquiry Chile charges Pinochet with tax fraud over $27 million in banks In China city of 4 million, no water Korean lab roiled by egg donor disclosures Election in Moscow tests national issues Entr'acte:If only French leaders listened to pop culture U.S. to allow sale of arms to Indonesia French police seize dozens in sweeps of suburbs Allies get speedy Merkel visit Reacting to change of heart on Iraq U.S. and Europe delay bid to refer Iran to UN Jury convicts U.S. citizen in terrorism case Iraq gunmen in uniforms kill Sunni Israel sets election date A son's jihad reaps only bitter teardrops UN envoy prepares for talks on Kosovo Italy and U.S. museum near art claim deal Israel saves hang glider who landed in LebanonNews Analysis:U.S. patches together policy against terror How hypnosis is gaining respect New looks at the types, and effects, of meditation Rail strike in France ends after weak show Taiwan vote seen as test for Chen Rice addresses calls for Iraq withdrawal Chacun à son goût,or why we eat turkey Starve WMD proliferators of financing China snubs human rights Protecting the world's economic arteries And the dirty bomb? Sharon's new politics Stocks: A rally on optimism for holiday spending Commentary:And all the world's currencies lived happily ever after Indonesia sees roomto trim interest rates Pentagon cuts may be held down by Congress Lending abroad lifts BNP profit Dresdner to merge two key units Economy throws a curve at ECB plans EU plans legal action against Italy over foreign takeovers of banks Interns in French firms stage protest Rosneft net soars after buying Yukos Bankers scramble to tap into Russia's boom China tightens rules for brokerages Over time, tax-cutting can also harm the rich 2 U.S. oil firms challenging Yemen Imports trim trade surplus in Japan Looking for the real 1968 revolution THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION The Conquest of the Middle East Soldiering in Africa, with a child's voice Guest Book: Location, location in London - Chic agency, low on stock UN reports progress in Afghan opium fight Blast near hospital kills 30 as Iraq attacks intensify Antigovernment strikers paralyze Bangladesh Research In Motion pares user forecasts Downsizing for Wall Street parties Old barrier is coming down in Nicosia Bubbles in Antarctic ice confirm extraordinary rise of CO in air Bird flu experts skeptical of China's current figures German leader moves to seize the initiative China blames oil firm for chemical spill Calcutta aims to ban the 'barbaric' rickshaw Referral of Iran to UN put off Car bomb kills at least 30 outside Iraqi hospital Kazakhstan, with its rough edges, faces electionPioneerin cloning apologizes EU critical of Israelis on East Jerusalem Fat of the land confronts the EU U.S. ducks testimony by 2 Qaeda members Pakistani convicted in U.S. of abetting Al Qaeda Poland and Brussels face clash of cultures In Rome, buyers need time and luck Picture Window: Luxury also rises in Kowloon Putin defends bill cracking down on NGOs Saddam's trial lawyers reported ending boycott In Iraq, one woman's agonizing search French lawmakers debate antiterror bill Oil and gas lead the way to prosperity Ambassadors praise president's commitment to democracy Sweeping reforms poised to start in 2006 Women wield power and influence On track to becoming world's fifth-largest oil producer Diversification to non-oil sectors is key Though polluted, Caspian is not dead Technologies boost oil sector Caspian oil development Bosnia, 10 years later Israel: Two drivers, one map Iraqis getting together Good news on Bosnia, but hold the bubbly Next for global trade talks Missing: 50 million Indian girls Annual Santa Claus alert Entrepreneurs grapple with price of growth Morgan looks for a hedge fund Stocks: Traders pull back on drop in confidence Celebrations mark opening of Gaza border The day the sea came Blogs woo advertisers away from old media In China, a drive to uproot the rust belt New Orleans bank finds little room for optimism Ford facing labor unrest in Russia U.S. retailers open shopping season EU negotiator defends plan to cut sugar price Sarkozy and Villepin draw battle lines over "positive discrimination" Museums grapple with transparency issue Paving the way for investors First Person: An ache in a faraway place Meet the family: Complexity and stress at holiday time China tried to keep benzene spill secret Briefly: Council of Europe starts inquiry on terror claims Jakarta plans yearlong bird flu fight Palestinians celebrate opening of Gaza border West opens a 'window' for Tehran Iraqi rebels open to role in political process, presidential aide says EU report criticizes Israel over East Jerusalem Linked to a bombing,Iraqi suspect goes free Putin backs scrutiny of aid groups Lower cost base gives an edge in China Snowstorm hits Europe Aceh can't forget the 'ghost in the sea' Report card from America A digital library My people deserve their independence Soccer great George Best dies at 59 Money, politics, oil Stocks: Wall Streets caps a 5th week of gains Investing: Defying gravity How do you manage: Not growing, and happy about it Funds: Active management wins out - in cycles Will it be Wall Street's turn in 2006? Earthquake in Iran kills 10, injures more than 50 Police clash with opposition protesters in Azerbaijani capital China quake kills 15; hundreds injured Aung San Suu Kyi to be detained another year Al Jazeera builds hub for region in Malaysia Commentary:A reality check on China: Germany will dig deeper to sell debt On Advertising:A race to connect in India Ex-AIG head'sgrowing woes How to balance the scales between bankers and clients Growth stocks are making a market comeback A more diverse corporate elite in America Pension plans pouring billions into hedge funds War-ravaged Chechnya chooses a parliament The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time Police in Azerbaijan attack rally The U.S. Fed 'rookie' who can't be ignored Briefs: 10 die in earthquake in the south of Iran Early discounts drive holiday sales in U.S. United States:Bull market about to peak? Romania quarantinesvillage and kills birds A move toward Iran talks Japan's confidence shaken by scandal Iran-North Korea talks may harden U.S. stance Saddam's trial dividing factions in Iraq U.S. courtsbypassed in terror case decisions Rugby: New Zealand dismantles Australia's dynasty, 24-0 Rugby: As gears mesh, French roll German woman and Iranian pilgrims abducted in IraqThe saga of a trade gone wrong Gold prices test highs not seen since the 1980s Goldman office breaks ground U.S. home sales fall France fines 5-star Paris hotels for collusion on room rates The Workplace: Headhunters trading in precious commodity Total settles rights caseOxfam warns U.S. and EU of legal challenges on farm subsidies Bush presses immigration plan Europe:Optimism in U.S. lifts shares, save for banks Funds:U.S. investors' year-end dilemma Issue of secret camps strains U.S.-EU relations U.S. reports progress against global warming Briefly: U.S. execution brings total since 1977 to 999 U.S. tries to reassure Europe on CIA flights Panel faults authorities in Russian school siege As winter looms Commentary:China flirts with deflation as economy cools Electricity chief warns of blackouts Briefs: Big fine for bag cartel Government wiretaps are easily blocked, U.S. researchers discover Mandelson rules out more EU farm tariff cuts French doctors claim world-first partial face transplantClinton sees gains in tsunami zone 'Easy' days over for hedge funds? Britain urged to raise retirement age Briefly: 2 women win election to chamber in Jidda Mass inoculations for bird flu challenge U.S. defends antiterrorism policy Belgium arrests 14 terror suspects Criticizing Bush's new Iraq strategy, Democrats call for 'real plan' Supreme Court hears a rare abortion case How immune systems are made overzealous A pandemic's second front Europe and the CIA: How close? A year after the tsunami, A year after the tsunami, Genocide today Obituary: Kerry Packer, Australia's richest man. Cowboys in love Britain sends France suspect in bombing News Analysis: Strategy filled with uncertainty White House agrees on torture ban House votes overwhelmingly to renew Patriot Act House ready to curb illegal immigrants Bush calls Iraqi vote a 'watershed' Bush extols progressahead of Iraq's election In Iraq vote, Bush sees a Mideast turning point In Latin America, a leftist vision is taking hold Rice calms NATO on treatment of suspects Iraq war intelligence linked to coercion House passes last piece of Bush tax cut U.S. rapped for stance on climate Rumsfeld criticizes press anew 9/11 panel finds Bush slow to act on terror U.S. takes hard line as Rice faces CIA storm U.S. applies new strategy in Iraq U.S. plants propaganda to tout democracy in Iraq Text of Bush's speech Bush confident in Iraq and Congress News Analysis: Bush goals lack any way to measure gains Anchoring inflation in Europe Japan finally putting nightmare of recession behind it The next retirement time bomb Briefs: S&P cuts GM ratingearlier than forecast S&P cuts GM debt status and harshly criticizes company EU growth forecasts up What will drive the U.S. economy as housing fades? Greenspan warns on U.S. deficit Britain sharply cuts back growth outlook Bankruptcy specter raised as rating on GM debt is cut anew Ex-chief of Enron claims he is a victim Bubble burst quickly, but the pain lingered In London pubs, 'tis the season to talk bonuses Recession coming? Maybe it's the wrong question With the markets roaring, skilled traders are a hot commodity A banner year for commodity traders Judge in Germany orders retrial on merger payouts ABN's bonuses returned after U.S. fine Spend/Thrift: Counting the ways to use that bonus Goldman and Bear Stearns post record profits Ex-Enron boss takes podium in his defense Corporations are under attack A stodgy City turns boom town Enron rears its head again Movers & Shakers 2005: Some highfliers brought low, some upstarts soared Good times get better at Lehman $440 million in mail in Wall Street payback Morgan Stanley profit rises 49% in quarter Great expectations (and more) ahead in 2006 Hedge fund investors moving to stocks This time, banks hit in Tokyo trade error Head of Tokyo exchange quits over trade mishap An unlikely trading hub in Asia $130 million rescue plan structured for fuel trader Deutsche chief looks at a legacy of change Europa: Predictions for 2006, dire and not so dire One year after the tsunami Congress reaches deal to extend Patriot Act Court rulings question Bush's wartime powers Secret spying startedright after 9/11 attacks Cheney visits Iraq to show headway Lone Senate foe of the Patriot Act gets backup U.S. judge rejects teaching of intelligent design Democrats vow to derail plan to drill in Arctic Cheney says 9/11 changed the rules Congress sets stage for civil liberties clash From insider to Iraq war critic History a complication as Congress wrestles with spy program Promoting U.S. proves a tough sell Europeans criticize U.S. sanctions as potential risk to Iran talks U.S. terrorism defendants to challenge wiretaps U.S. to investigate leak on spying program Moscow for millionaires A new urban lifestyle lures India's rural poor Breaking the oil curse In life's lottery, they won and lost big Israel threatens to limit Gaza trade Scot eyes a continent in turmoil Protecting the French farmer Iranian president says Holocaust is "myth" Chad breaks vow to use oil to fight poverty Laureate urges Westto eliminate poverty Lenders seek ways to save Southeast Asian forests Commentary:The world, alas, is still round Commentary: Education gaps jeopardize India's lead in outsourcing After 100 years, France questionsits secularity Sharon rushed to Israeli hospital for tests In Germany, immigrants face a tough road Indict Zimbabwe's demagogue The French tackle discrimination 'Easy' days over for hedge funds? Less demand for SUVs hurts U.S. sales Fed's 'oracle' advises his young successor Iran announces plans for a second nuclear power plant Europe: Stocks slide as oil trades above $60 Around Asia's markets:Are stocks now over the top in Australia? N.Y. Times to increase its ad rates by about 5% Briefly: J.P. Morgan buys carmaker's shares OPEC likely to trade boom for falling prices in 2006 Ford meeting will weigh details of overhaul plan Investing: Predictions for 2006 2006 World Cup draw Energy deals are set to get hotter in 2006 Commodities: Gold eases from highs on profit-taking in New York Media in Iraq: The fallacy of psy- ops Foreign buyout firms move into German housing For Indian diaspora, no place like home A glimpse behind the hedge fund curtain Bonds: Treasuries fall on increase in housing Funds: Making it look easy to beat the market The Workplace: A tough job for France - learn about apprentices Fed's latest statement leaves options open for Bernanke In the suburbs of Paris, 'the sun never shines' For France, the past is constantly present Construction stocks to build on Commentary: The danger of underestimating Japan's rebound The French tackle discrimination Booker winner relishes all the vilification The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time Britain's Tories vote to give party new face With interest: The case of the negative saving rate Funds: In Britain, indications of lower rates ahead Around the markets: A turn for worse in home loans

“ P R A I S E S O N G F O R T H E D AY " BY E L I Z A B E T H A L E X A N D E R Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other’s eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere, with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum, with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus. A farmer considers the changing sky. A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of some one and then others, who said I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road. We need to find a place where we are safe. We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand- lettered sign, the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national, love that casts a widening pool of light, love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, any thing can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E

HO LIDAY RENTAL HO US E IN THE AUVERGNE CO PYRIGHT JEAN-PAUL GUILLO TEAU 2008

A P L A C E I N T H E A U V E R G N E

VIEW FRO M HO LIDAY RENTAL HO US E IN THE AUVERGNE CO PYRIGHT JEAN-PAUL GUILLO TEAU 2008

T E C H N O R AT I