http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/ What's on the minds of young leaders from around the globe? en-us http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/397861 On May 25, 1961 John F. Kennedy launched what he admitted was “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked” a manned expedition to the Moon.

Between 1968 and 1972, nine American spacecraft would go on that great adventure, most famously Apollo 11, crewed by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.

The men of the Apollo programme who have been interviewed for a remarkable documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon remain the only human beings to have visited another world.

Even today, as America and China eye a return trip, their achievement remains utterly breathtaking.

Yet Apollo almost never got off the ground. In 1967, during the build-up to the launch of Apollo 1, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were testing the command module that sat atop the spacecraft.

Just after 6.30pm, a voltage flicker was recorded, caused by a spark in the highly pressurised, pure oxygen environment.

Chaffee yelled: “We’ve got a bad fire! Let’s get out! We’re burning up! We’re on fire! Get us out of here!” Witnesses saw White on the television monitors, reaching for the hatch release handle.

Seconds later, the transmission ended abruptly with a scream. All three died.

“We’re burying our guys at Arlington and I wasn’t sure if we were burying the entire Apollo programme,” recalls Gene Cernan, who would be the last man to walk on the Moon.

But by December 1968, the Saturn V rocket was ready to carry a crew for the first time in an orbit around the Earth.

However, Nasa heard from the CIA that the Russians were preparing to send a manned spacecraft around the Moon to upstage them.

So the flight plan was hurriedly changed. “It was a bold move,” says Jim Lovell, who would later command Apollo 13. “It had some risks to it. But it was a time when we made bold moves.”

His team was mesmerised by their lunar encounter. “We were just 60 miles above the craters and we were like three schoolkids looking through the candy store window.

"We took photographs as much as we could and, of course, we took the photograph of the famous Earthrise around the Moon.”

On Christmas Eve, as they emerged from the Moon’s shadow, the astronauts began to read from the Book of Genesis, which they had stored on fireproof paper in their flight manual.

Ready to land

After two further test flights, Nasa felt ready to attempt the first landing in July 1969.

Aldrin felt a pang of sympathy for Collins, who would have to remain in the command module as he and Armstrong — described by Charlie Duke of Apollo 16 as “the coolest under pressure of anyone that I had ever had the privilege of flying with” — descended.

“I discovered later that I was described as the loneliest man ever in the universe ... ,” Collins says, “which really is a lot of baloney. I had Mission Control yakking in my ear half the time. Everything was going well with the command module, I had my happy little home, I had the bright lights on and everything was fine.”

The men knew they were going to make history. “I don’t think anybody slept too well the night before,” Aldrin says. “You’re just wondering whether you can get enough rest for what you need to possibly do.”

But once the mission was under way, there was no time to dwell on its wider significance.

Collins describes the frenetic initial stages: “You go up into Earth orbit and go around the Earth once. That’s a busy time because you want to make sure that everything on board is working properly before you set sail for the Moon.

"Then you get word that you’re going for TLI [trans-lunar injection], and that means you can ignite the motor and head off to the Moon. You do, you go, and that’s it.”

As he tells it, there was no fear, but lot of worry. “You’re not sure all these things are going to work properly ... a lot of them in a very fragile daisy chain. You don’t want any of those links to break, because downstream from that broken link they are all useless — so yes, you are worried.”

Once in orbit around the Moon, he still felt a sense of foreboding. “When the Sun is shining on the surface at a very shallow angle, the craters cast long shadows and the Moon’s surface seems very inhospitable. Forbidding, almost.”

Watching from above as the lander descended, Collins sensed something more — there was a problem.

“It seemed like Neil was having a difficult time finding a suitable spot to put it down. I got a little worried then because they didn’t have a lot of extra fuel.”

The guidance system was carrying them into a boulder field, so Armstrong had to traverse the landscape rapidly. “Some of these boulders were the size of Volkswagens. It was a little iffy right there at the very end.”

The world held its breath, but four days, six hours, 45 minutes and 39 seconds into the flight, the lander reached the surface safely. “Stand by,” Mission Control said.

Armstrong said: “I’m at the foot of the ladder. The LM [lunar module] foot pads are — only depressed about one to two inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine-grained ... OK, I’m going to step off the LM now.”

Then, that famous phrase: “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”

More pressing concerns

Aldrin’s response to reaching the lunar surface was altogether more down to earth.

“I decided to take that period of time … to take care of a bodily function ... so that I wouldn’t be troubled with having to do that later on. Everybody has their firsts on the Moon, and that one hasn’t been disputed by anybody.”

Collins was by now anxious about the next step: “I didn’t have any great feeling of ‘We’ve done it’ — I was a lot more worried about getting them up off the Moon than I was about getting them down … If something went wrong [with the motor on the lunar module] they were dead men: There was no other way for them to leave.”

Indeed, a speech had been prepared in case the module failed to lift off. Collins recalls the words: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace.

"These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery, but they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.”

But the launch from the lunar surface was flawless and Collins watched as the module returned to the mothership.

“Oh God, it’s beautiful ... you see the module, a little golden bug among the craters, and it gets slowly bigger and bigger…. Finally they got back into the command module and I grabbed Buzz by both ears and was going to kiss him on the forehead ....” Although he settled for a more manly greeting, there were few congratulations: “You don’t have time to sit around and reminisce, because you’ve got TEI [trans-Earth injection] coming up.”

There was one more critical point: during re-entry, when the command module roared back to Earth at up to 26,000 miles an hour.

“Your heat shield is on fire and its fragments are streaming out behind you. It’s like being inside a gigantic light bulb,” Collins says.

After the flight, the three went on a round-the-world trip. “Instead of saying ‘You Americans did it’, everywhere they said ‘We did it — we, humankind’,” Collins recalls.

“I’d never heard people in different countries use this word ‘we, we, we’ as emphatically… I thought that was a wonderful thing. Ephemeral, but wonderful.”

Directed by David Sington, In the Shadow of the Moon premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Audience Award.

]]> Sat, 28 Jun 2008 02:17:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/397861 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/397859
For her work as a journalist she has won several prizes, including Foreign Correspondent of the Year on four occasions.

And that is not all. Lamb is also an author and has written five books. Her latest offering, Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands, is a look back at her reporting from distant and often exotic corners of the globe.

As a child, Lamb had not thought of going off to be a journalist. At her home, what the neighbours were doing generated greater interest than what was in the paper.

“The only newspaper we got was the Daily Mail, which was for my dad to follow horse racing and to do the crosswords,” she says.

It was at the library that she discovered Hemingway and she started to write. At that stage, though, she was more interested in being a novelist than a journalist.

Life, however, had its own way of planning things. She went to study chemistry at Oxford University but realised she hated it.

So she switched to philosophy, politics and economics and ended up joining, and later editing, the university paper, Cherwell.

Later she worked as an intern at the Financial Times. There she was once sent to attend a lunch of South Asian politicians.

One thing led to another and Lamb managed to land an interview with the young and exiled Benazir Bhutto. And so began their famous and long friendship.

Off to Pakistan

“Benazir had a huge influence on my life,” she admits. Sometime after they had met, Lamb began work for the Central News in Birmingham.

"One day when she came home, there lay on her mat a gold inscribed letter that was the invitation to Benazir’s wedding. “It was something out of the Arabian Nights,” she says.

So Lamb took all the holiday she could, packed her bags and flew off. “It was an amazing introduction to Pakistan,” she says, describing the wedding in Karachi.

“Every evening after the ceremony was finished we would have all these discussions late into the night about how to deal with martial law because Pakistan was under General Zia.”

The trip to Pakistan had such an impact on Lamb that on her return to England she resigned from her job at Central News, flew back to Pakistan and based herself in Peshawar.

Those were the days of the Soviet invasion and she used to cross the border into Afghanistan to report for papers back in the United Kingdom.

And that is how Lamb entered the world of foreign reporting. Since her early days in Peshawar, she has reported from Brazil, Iraq, Nigeria, Bolivia, Argentina, Zimbabwe, South Africa ... the list goes on.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Lamb, major world events unfold in the places she travels to. Not long after she had been in Pakistan, General Zia was killed.

When she went to India on holiday, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. When she was in Brazil, a huge story broke as its president became the first in the country to get impeached.

Her first trip to Zimbabwe was in 1994 for a holiday when it was a success story, Lamb says. During a long weekend in Morocco, there was a bombing in Casablanca.

“You do start to think after awhile to not go where I go,” she adds.

Lamb, who has written a book on Zimbabwe, says she is determined to keep reporting from the country despite the threats from the Mugabe regime.

“It is very important that we still keep going into the country and reporting on what’s happening,” she says.

She was in Zimbabwe before the recent controversial general elections and says she never sleeps easy when she is there.

“I stayed the last couple of nights at a lodge that belongs to a friend in Harare,” she says. “The first morning there, she said to me that she has had phone calls from the secret police asking if there are any foreigners staying. She gave me the back-door keys so I could make an escape if I needed to.”

Lamb has interviewed many famous and fascinating personalities, including the late Princess Diana. “She went to Angola for the land mine issue,” she remembers.

“I thought she was very superficial and I was not very happy about going and covering her. Actually I changed my opinion because she was so impressive on that trip and she really worked very hard and I saw that she had something that I really saw with Nelson Mandela (another of her interviewees) — a kind of empathy with people terribly ill in hospital. She could bring a smile to people’s faces.”

Another well-known personality she interviewed was the acclaimed writer Paulo Coelho. The Brazilian author of the bestselling The Alchemist was so inspired by Lamb that he ended up writing a book about a female foreign correspondent in Kazakhstan.

“I am used to being somebody that writes for other people and I think I got a taste of my own medicine,” she confesses.

“One day I was in Portugal on holiday and got this e-mail from him with a long attachment and it was this book and it said I want you to read this because you inspired the main character.”

The book is called The Zahir and that was the first time she found out about it.

“I think it is a great advantage being a woman journalist because women are better listeners,” she laughs. Lamb is, in fact, optimistic and encouraging about being a female correspondent reporting from male-dominated societies.

“The great advantage in Islamic countries such as Afghanistan and others is that I can go and speak to women whereas my male colleagues are not able to go and speak to half the population,” she says.

Lamb takes care to dress in accordance with local customs and says she tries to respect different cultures. “I like wearing the salwar kameez — actually, very comfortable — and I think it looks good too,” she says.

She narrates an amusing incident that took place when she was living in Pakistan during the 1980s. She got an opportunity to interview General Zia but later realised her recorder had not picked up anything.

“So I had to phone his military attaché and say there were lots of bits I couldn’t hear. ... I think he realised I hadn’t got anything burnt. Fortunately — the advantage of it being a military regime — they had taped it too, so they sent me their copy.”

Besides being a foreign correspondent, Lamb is also a mother. Last October, when Benazir returned to Pakistan after an eight-year exile, Lamb was with her during the journey from Karachi airport when blasts occurred.

Her husband and son in England were very worried. “That was very difficult,” she says. “My husband told me that Lorenzo [her son] had asked: ‘Do you think mommy survived?’ It is horrible for a mother that you are putting your child in that position — when they are watching something and thinking my mother has been killed. I seriously thought about quitting over that.”

Benazir and Lamb once fell out over critical reporting of Benazir’s government but Lamb managed to keep in touch with the Pakistan prime minister.

On Lamb’s wedding, the former Pakistani prime minister sent her a present.“That was like a peace offering almost and then we became friends again,” she says.

Recently two of Benazir’s friends were in London and they met Lamb. “We went to her apartment in Kensington and to a restaurant where she used to go and where I have had lunch with her. We were all talking about previous times. And that felt very strange — it really hit me that she was dead.”

On the mention of Afghanistan, Lamb’s eyes seem to light up: “I love Afghanistan,” she says. It is as if Afghanistan represents a gateway into another world. “The very proud but hospitable and noble people,” she says.

“The love of beauty and the way you see a soldier with a flower tied around the Kalashnikov. The values they still have that I think is forgotten a lot in the West. Respect for old people. Oral traditions.”

“It is the first place I went to as a foreign correspondent. It is like your first love affair that you always sing quite fondly of,” she says.

]]> Sat, 28 Jun 2008 02:13:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/397859 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/397857
The Arctic's thick, resilient multiyear sea ice (frozen sea surface), which usually accumulates and lasts through the annual melting season, has started to give way to thinner, vulnerable first-year ice.

Satellite data gathered by the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center showed that young sea ice, which is no more than about 60 inches deep and much more susceptible to melting away, now makes up only 72 percent of the Arctic ice sheet. Using that estimate, scientists at the center see a 50 percent chance that ice at the highest point in the Arctic will melt by the summer's end.

Andy Mahoney, a center researcher, has pinpointed this year in particular as having the "greatest chance" of being ice-free.

Such a scenario, however, will depend on the weather during the next couple of months. "It will probably come down to how cloudy it is this summer," Mahoney says. "If there's clear skies and if atmospheric patterns resemble last year's, you're going to see a lot more melt."

Increased rates of Arctic melt have altered the region in unprecedented ways. Arctic sea ice dwindled to a record low in September, clearing a route through the fabled Northwest Passage that runs from Greenland to Alaska. Opening of the path has provided ships a shorter, more direct route between Asia and Europe.

"It's got a shock level for people because there's always ice at the North Pole, but there are also real implications," Mahoney said. "If the North Pole melted out, the shipping industry would be paying very close attention to that."

Wieslaw Maslowski, who conducts Arctic ice research from his base at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., told ABC News last summer that there was a chance that the Arctic's entire ice sheet could vanish for the first time in just four or five years.

Such a statement was considered a daring projection at the time, given that climate prediction models estimated a few years before that it would take at least another 40 or 50 years before such a scenario is likely to occur.

But now, Maslowski says that "whether the Arctic sea ice disappears for the first time this summer or four or eight summers from now may be beside the point."

"The point," he noted, "is that we may well be passing through the sea-ice tipping point now. We'll just have to see what July and August weather have in store for the

The disappearance of Arctic sea ice may mean an even hotter planet, since the region's ice pack helps cool the earth by bouncing the sun's rays back into outer space. This reflective property, known as albedo, also prevents the rays from reaching the ocean, where heat is absorbed.

Less sea ice means more dark open water to absorb the heat, which melts the sea ice even further.

"Losing the ice sheet means losing an important way of cooling down," Mahoney said. "As a result, global warming would accelerate as the ice retreats."

]]> Sat, 28 Jun 2008 02:04:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/397857 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/360747

Given the size of the universe, it is unlikely that Earth is the only planet to develop some sort of life, Hawking told an audience at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He added that humanity must embrace space exploration, if only to ensure its long-term survival.


"While there may be primitive life in our region of the galaxy, there don't seem to be any advanced intelligent beings," said Hawking during a lecture as part of a series commemorating NASA's 50th anniversary this year.


The lack of success by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project to discover signals from an alien civilization suggests that none exist within several 100 light-years of Earth, Hawking said, though he offered three theories on the dearth of interplanetary communications.


The probability of primitive life developing on a suitable planet may be extremely low, or it may be high, but aliens intelligent enough to beam signals into space may also be smart enough to build civilization-destroying weapons like nuclear bombs, he said. More likely, he added, is that primitive life is likely to develop, but intelligent life as we know it is exceedingly rare.


"We don't appear to have been visited by aliens," Hawking said, adding that he discounts reports of UFOs. "Why would they only appear to cranks and weirdoes?"


Alien life aside, Hawking said humanity must pursue a long-term effort of space exploration that would span hundreds of years in order to ensure the survival of the species. He likened those opposed to spending money on space science and exploration to those who wrote off Christopher Columbus' trans-Atlantic Ocean voyage in 1492 as a waste of money.


"The discovery of the New World made a profound difference on the old. Just think, we wouldn't have had a Big Mac or KFC," Hawking said.


"Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect," he added. "It will completely change the future of the human race, and maybe determine whether we have any future at all."


Hawking, 66, is a renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist who suffers from the neurological disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He uses a wheelchair, communicates with the aid of a computer, and co-wrote a children's book about science - "George's Secret Key to the Universe" - with his daughter Lucy in the hope of inspiring youth to pursue studies in science and technology.


"We live in a society that is increasingly governed by science and technology," Hawking said. "Yet fewer and fewer people want to go into science."


Sending astronauts back to the moon, establishing a lunar base with a clear target of going on to Mars would do much to restore the public's support for spaceflight, he added.


"If the human race is to continue for another million years we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before," Hawking said.


]]> Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:29:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/360747 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/355813
The planet, "GJ 436T", was detected through a new technique which "will allow us to discover in less than 10 years the first planet resembling earth in terms of mass and orbit," said Ignasi Ribas of Spain's CSIC scientific research institute.

It was discovered by a team led by Ribas through its gravitational pull on other planets already discovered around the same star in the constellation of Leo.

"GJ 436T" has a mass five times the size of Earth, which makes it the smallest extrasolar planet among the roughly 300 identified so far, Ribas said in announcing the discovery.

He said the new planet is uninhabitable due to the distance that separates it from its star, which is far less than that between the earth and the sun.

To sustain life, a planet must have a mass similar to that of earth, liquid water on its surface, an atmosphere and a similar orbital distance from its star as that of the earth from the sun.

Initial calculations by the team indicated that "GJ 436T" rotates in 4.2 earth days and orbits its star every 5.2 days.

]]> Thu, 10 Apr 2008 06:42:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/355813 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348405 Published: March 01, 2008, 01:04

Opinions about Fidel Castro may vary but when it comes to Cuba, there can be no debating the fact that it is a great place to visit.

But now that the 82-year-old Cuban president has stepped down, the nation is poised to change rapidly.

So if you want to see the “real” Cuba — preserved in a time capsule from the 1950s — then now is the time to go. Put it off much longer and you will miss the boat.

Cuba is a rarity in the 21st century. Its fascinating history as one of the last outposts of One-Party Socialism has made it a tourist destination for those seeking something different.

Truly, this is a country where many sights seem to belong to another era. Where else are the taxis 1950s Dodges? Where else do Chevrolets come with shiny chrome fins?

Past preserved

Cuba’s past is as fascinating as its present. A Spanish colony until the end of the 19th century, it went on to be controlled by a number of rulers till Batista, aided by the United States, took over in the late 1940s.

Enter Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, who were determined to liberate the people and free Cuba. They succeeded, much to the dismay of the US.

Fidel remained in power since and, during the years of the Cold War, heavily leant on the Soviet Union for assistance.

Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the US ban on travel and business relations with Cuba, this little Caribbean island has been somewhat adrift. Help, in the form of investments, has, of course, trickled in from countries such as Spain and Brazil.

The usual suspects seen at all tourist destinations — American tourists, chain of burger restaurants, cola drinks — are prominent in their absence here.

In fact, it is a punishable offence for US residents to visit this country.

But all that will change with the policies and politics of this land. And once it does, Cuba will be only a short flight from most major US cities and will offer a great escape from the extended North American winters.

Capital of grandeur

A visit to Havana, Cuba’s decadent capital city, will take you back in time.

Once ranking among the wealthiest cities in the region, all that remains of its days of glory are magnificent public buildings, grand old hotels and wide tree-lined boulevards such as the Paseo del Prado, where Cubans still love to take their paseo or afternoon stroll.

Dominating the Havana skyline is the 62-metre-high dome of the Capitolio, which served as the Cuban parliament till 1959.
Though built on the lines of the US Capitol Building in Washington, it is richer in decoration and a truly impressive sight to behold.

The buildings, churches and forts that line Havana’s streets and squares have helped it earn the status of a World Heritage Site.

One of the greatest delights in Cuba is just sitting in the sun, either in a plaza or along the waterfront, and sharing the easygoing lifestyle of its people.

Debates still rage over whether the life led by Cubans is good. While it may be true that they do not have the spending power to match that of Westerners, the music scene and the happy faces speak for themselves.

Rundown appearance

Part of Havana’s allure is its rundown appearance. Huge neo-baroque buildings erected in the 1920s wear a poetically intriguing look today, with their faded paint, broken tiles and signs of constant human occupation.

Children who have never heard of Game-Boy, Play Station or MP3 play football in a car park where people exchange spare parts to keep their vintage vehicles running.

Near Catedral de San Cristobal, sweet songs spill out of a restaurant where musicians play for tips. Other Cubans hawk their wares — handmade souvenirs carved in wood, with “I Love Cuba” engraved on them, cigars and screen-printed T-shirts with Ernest Hemingway’s face across the front.

In part, Cuba owes its charm to the fact that it has not been overdeveloped like many other countries.

At the centre of the island in the Sancti Spiritus region, is the small town of Trinidad de Cuba. Considered a museum city, and now a site protected by the Unesco, a visit there is like living a history lesson.

Founded in 1515, it contains elements of beautiful 17th- and 18th-century Spanish-inspired architecture, complete with artful balconies, colonnaded patios, admirable ironwork, finely-wrought staircases and structures encased in verdant palm gardens.

A good place to start the tour of the town is the church of Santisima Trinidad. Climb to the top of the bell tower to get a bird’s-eye view of the town and the lush hills beyond.

Built in 1731, Santisima Trinidad is a beautiful colonial structure whose gold and silver statues and relics display the past wealth of the region.

Right kind of night

For a glimpse of the town’s past, head to the Romantic Museum in the Brunet Palace or the Guamuhaya Museum, which displays elements of the island’s aboriginal culture.

In essence, Trinidad is perfect for wandering around and soaking up the local colour. You could meet a fisherman heading home with the day’s catch or children who will be delighted to tell you all about their lives.

Of course, like all of Cuba, Trinidad de Cuba comes to life at night. Plaza Mayor , the central square, buzzes with life until late in the night.

One of the greatest pleasures in Trinidad is to stay in one of the town’s colonial mansions. As many of the large homes are now expensive to maintain, the owners, who still live there, rent out their spare rooms to guests.

In many ways, Cuba is still a unique country which has resisted the caprices of the modern world. Its charm comes from its coolness towards modernity and the openness of the people who can show us that happiness doesn’t always come from great riches.

Scott Adams is a Madrid-based freelance writer

Play it again

Viva el rhythm ‘latino’: Music is as essential to the Cuban lifestyle as food and water. In every town, and at all hours, you’ll hear the rhythms.

But things really start to move after sunset.

Groups of enthusiastic and highly talented musicians perform on footpaths, in cafés and along the Havana waterfront.

And when there is music, there is dancing.

The music leans towards sassy Latin sounds with Bosanovas, Meringues and Buena Vista-style jazz, which invoke swing moves.

In Havana, Bar Monserrate, in Calle Obispo, is a great place to start to discover all that Cuban music has to offer.

Ernest invitation

The legend of Hemingway: Cubans claim the American writer Ernest Hemingway as one of their own.

They adopted him after he adopted Cuba and lived there through the 1930s and 1940s.

Here, as everywhere else he went, Hemingway cultivated a reputation as a man larger than life. A figure who could reel in bigger marlin than a professional fisherman.

The legend lives on in old haunts that play up their status as Hemingway landmarks.

Places such as the Hotel Ambos Mundos, where he finally completed the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. You can visit his room, which is now a museum.

The fifth floor, corner room, looking out past the San Cristobal cathedral to the sea, has been preserved just as he left it. La Floridita Bar, in Calle Obispo and also deserves a visit, with or without the lure of Hemingway lore.

The writer always sat at the same stool and read the newspaper while enjoying three or four or five refreshments. Today his stool is preserved in his, now roped-off, favourite corner.



Go there...Cuba...From the UAE

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Information courtesy: The Holiday Lounge
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]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:07:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348405 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348401 Published: February 25, 2008, 21:20

Havana: Raul Castro took over from his brother Fidel Castro as Cuban president on Sunday, ending the rule of the bearded rebel who defied the United States for five decades.

A former hardliner feared for his ruthlessness but who has adopted a more moderate tone in recent years, Raul Castro, 76, nodded and smiled as legislators applauded his selection by the rubber-stamp National Assembly.

He is expected to pursue limited economic reforms to tackle food shortages and poor living standards but in a sign that abrupt or major change is unlikely, Communist Party ideologue Jose Ramon Machado Ventura was named to the No. 2 job of first vice president.

In his first speech as president, Raul Castro said he would continue to consult his older brother on important issues.


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"The mandate of this legislature is clear; to continue strengthening the revolution at a historic moment," he said.

Fidel Castro, 81, stepped down on Tuesday due to ill health, ending his long rule of the West's last communist state.

Revolution

He overthrew US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in a 1959 revolution at the height of the Cold War and then survived assassination attempts, a CIA-backed invasion, the Soviet Union's collapse and a US economic embargo to rule for almost half a century.

He won support at home by providing health and education services for all Cubans but he also jailed his opponents and critics accuse him of imposing a dictatorship.

Raul Castro said he was accepting the presidency on the condition his brother continued to be the "commander in chief of the revolution" - a title created for him during his guerrilla uprising. "Fidel is Fidel. Fidel is irreplaceable."

Raul Castro lacks the oratorical flair of his brother, but he has encouraged ordinary Cubans in the last 19 months to air concerns over the economy, raising hopes of modest reforms.

The US government has dubbed Raul Castro "Fidel Lite" and dismisses the leadership change as the handing of power from one dictator to another.

"If you look at the nature of the people in charge, this is the Old Guard, it's the hard line and there is no reason for us to feel a sense of optimism for the Cuban people," US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said.

The appointment of Machado, a member of Raul Castro's inner circle, suggested change would be subtle.

"This is about signalling continuity externally and internally," said Julia Sweig, an expert on Cuba at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in Washington, although she said Cuba's leaders are well aware they need to address food shortages and other problems.


]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:00:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348401 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348399 The Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times and BBC.co.uk
Published: February 29, 2008, 00:29


In selecting Raul Castro as the new president of Cuba — after Fidel Castro resigned this past week after nearly 50 years at the post — Cuba’s power structure chose continuity and consistency.

Raul, 76, has effectively held the job for the past 19 months, since his brother Fidel Castro underwent abdominal surgery, with little disruption politically or socially.

Coming from the same ideological fold, Raul created the Cuban Revolution alongside his brother and has been his “right-hand man” ever since.

Raul is also known as a pragmatist and delegater, traits that fit his personality, analysts say. But, they note, he doesn’t command the same type of support that his brother has for a half century.

His first action as president was to propose, with unanimous endorsement of the parliament, that the 81-year-old Fidel retain an influential role in guiding the country.

The new president said he would consult his elder brother on issues of “special transcendence for the future of the nation, especially those having to do with national defence, foreign policy and economic development.”

‘Fidel is Fidel’

“I assume this responsibility knowing that as far as the commander in chief is concerned, there is only one. Fidel is Fidel,” Raul told the newly-sworn assembly. “All of us know he is irreplaceable.”

Cuba experts expect his presidency to be marked by a collaborative approach that draws on the expertise of those around him, including a rising cadre of younger leaders.

While no one expects much change, if any, on the political front, the new government is expected to inch towards economic reforms that many consider necessary to the viability of the island nation.

Faith in Raul’s ability to manage the economy emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, which was supplying Cuba with oil and was a key trade partner.

As a survival mechanism, Fidel called it a “special period” of austerity. But the era also included opening up state enterprises, particularly in tourism and agriculture.

The economy collapsed by more than 30 per cent in this period, and while poverty is still rampant, the economy eventually stabilised.

Many analysts expect Fidel to stand in the way of any deep reforms, as long as he continues to exert influence in essays published in the state-run media.

Raul has given speeches suggesting economic reforms or a willingness to negotiate with the US under certain terms, only to be contradicted by his older brother days later.

Raul was born in 1931 in the eastern province of Holguin, to Angel Castro and Lina Ruz, the youngest of three brothers — five years younger than Fidel.

He attended school first in Santiago and then in Havana, where as a university undergraduate he joined a communist youth group.

In 1953, he took part with Fidel in the assault on the Moncada barracks — an attempt to oust the authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista.

But the assault failed, and Raul served 22 months in jail alongside his brother. In 1955, the two were released, and went to Mexico to prepare the ship Granma for a revolutionary expedition to Cuba in late 1956.

During this time, Raul is said to have befriended Che Guevara, introducing him to Fidel. Upon their arrival back in Cuba, the band of revolutionaries conducted a guerrilla warfare campaign from the Sierra Maestra mountains, finally overthrowing Batista in early 1959.

That early guerrilla army has evolved under Raul’s leadership into a fighting force of nearly 50,000, which assisted pro-Soviet forces in conflicts in Angola and Ethiopia during the 1970s.

The army played a crucial role in peacetime efforts to prop up the ailing Cuban economy following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Through a state-run tourism company, Gaviota, it also plays a primary role in the — now key — sector of tourism.

Raul is also reported to have influenced financial policy from behind the scenes.

In 1959 Raul married Vilma Espin, a fellow revolutionary guerrilla fighter and high-level party official, who died in June 2007.

The couple had four children. Raul is said to be a doting father and enthusiastic climber.


]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:58:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348399 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348397 Stargazers will now be able to browse through millions of stars and galaxies from the comfort of their own homes.

Google Inc. on Tuesday launched a new version of Sky in Google Earth, an application that will allow scientists, students or even amateur stargazers to explore the universe from the computers.

The new improved version boasts a lot more services, including updates on cosmological events, historical maps and virtual sky tours.

Other features include podcasts on all things sky and a grand tour that takes users through 100 favourite spots of the sky.

Users can start exploring by logging on to www.earth.google.com and downloading the latest version of Google Earth with a simple click of a button.
]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:43:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348397 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348395 By Claire Holland, Financial Times
Published: March 20, 2008, 23:55


American photographer Diane Arbus once remarked that a photograph was “a secret about a secret — the more it tells you the less you know”.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at the exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery, London, of celebrity portraits from the archives of Vanity Fair.

The show opens on a high point, with Edward Steichen’s exquisite 1924 portrait of actress Gloria Swanson shrouded in a veil of black lace.

The accompanying text informs us that it was only at the end of their photographic session that Steichen took the lace and hung it in front of Swanson’s face. “Her eyes dilated and her look was that of a leopardess lurking behind leafy shrubbery, watching her prey,” he said.

Was she playing another theatrical part for the camera or did she drop her guard behind the protection of her gauzy camouflage to give Steichen his decisive moment? It is impossible to tell.

Either way, the image serves as a perfect allegory for the mask that rarely slips when celebrities find themselves before the portrait lens.


The first half of this show of two highly contrasting parts is devoted to Vanity Fair’s original incarnation, from 1914 to 1936. Many of its photographers (Steichen, Man Ray and Cecil Beaton among them) had trained as artists.

Much of the formal portraiture of the time on display here has a painterly touch, which bathes the sitter with a romantic allure.

Alfred Stieglitz’s elegant portrait of Georgia o’ Keefe in 1918 delicately highlights the artist’s profile, while Steichen’s classic portrait of Anna May Wong echoes Brancusi’s sculpture Sleeping Muse.

Others, while posing their subjects formally, appear to offer an insight into the sitter’s mind and are intensely meditative. D.H. Lawrence’s thoughts seem concentrated in his gaze in Nickolas Muray’s portrait, and E.O. Hoppè’s intimate shot of Thomas Hardy is studiously melancholic.

Elsewhere, modernist influences can be seen in the graphic lines of Lusha Nelson’s portrait of Peter Lorre surrounded by pointing fingers and in the geometric shadows of Steichen’s masterly image of John Barrymore.

In stark contrast to the stylish, predominantly monochrome images in the first half of the show, the second offers high drama in Technicolor.

The works in this section span the period from the title’s revival in the hedonistic, get-rich-quick 1980s to the present day.

Here, the reserved scrutiny of the early part of the last century is replaced by co-conspiratorial theatrical dramas, which are played out in front of the camera to enhance the sitter’s public image and revel in their own superficiality.

Some are spectacular: Julianne Moore, for example, is ravishing in photographer Michael Thompson’s sumptuously lit setting. Others, such as Michael Comte’s Marilynesque shot of Geena Davis, are glib.

But there are exceptions to this depressing pattern. Towards the end of the show, Mary Ellen Mark uses a more humanistic approach to capture something poignant in Liza Minelli’s sad, doe eyes, Nan Goldin shares a fleeting moment of candour with Rob Lowe, and Annie Leibovitz applies her delicate touch to an uncharacteristically stark studio shot of Robert de Niro.

Indeed, Leibovitz is the saving grace of this section. Her style embraces the glamour and pageantry of the celebrity world she inhabits, her lavish productions harking back to the golden age of Hollywood.

Leibovitz has been responsible for many of the iconic images that have become synonymous with Vanity Fair, although many of them do not appear here.

Those that do appear dominate the latter part of the show and are the most arresting. Her images are imbued with a sense of how the sitter’s talent and personality intersect.

A sense of the power and strength of Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong is harnessed in a shot in which every muscle is enhanced by shafts of light as he hunches over the handlebars of his racing bike.

Just as Steichen helped cement the magazine’s photographic reputation in the early years, Leibovitz’s have become the bedrock of its reputation for inventive celebrity portraiture.

The exhibition is on at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until May 26.

]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:32:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348395 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348393 By Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
Published: March 20, 2008, 23:55

Beijing’s new international air terminal, which opened recently — in time for the Summer Olympics surge — attracts and embodies superlatives.

It also embodies the new China — a country racing headlong into the future, fuelled by an economy on fire.

The airy glass-and steel structure, even at two miles long and half-a-mile wide, raced from design to take-off in four years.

Most airport projects take a decade or more to complete and usually involve lengthy reviews, detailed assessments, planning committees, public hearings and environmental-impact statements.

For many countries increasingly worried about how competitive and fast-moving China is, this $2.8 billion project provides one more reason to fret.

China’s authoritarian system can certainly move. At its peak, the construction site had 50,000 workers toiling day and night.

“Most Western politicians wouldn’t admit agreeing to that system, but they’re very jealous,” said Rory McGowan, Beijing-based director of global engineering company Ove Arup Partners, which worked on the project.

The Chinese “can react to decisions four or five times faster than we can [in the West] because China runs the way it does.”

China has a long history of awing visitors with structures that evoke size and power epitomised by the Forbidden City.

The new Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport is a modern counterpart, the gateway to a new China.

“This is the front door of China,” said Brian Timmoney, Beijing-based partner with architect Norman Foster, who is based in London.

The $2.8 billion terminal, designed by Foster and the Beijing Architectural Design and Research Institute, measures 1.3 million square metres and boasts a runway able to handle new Airbus A380 “superjumbo” aircraft.

It has got all the bells and whistles, including “barrier-free” facilities for the handicapped, floor tracking to guide the blind and multi-denominational prayer rooms in an officially atheist country.

It also has baby-changing facilities and 26 smoking rooms with advanced filtering systems. In short, a whole lot of stuff you probably will not see again during your stay in China.

The terminal’s designers put a premium on air, light, greenery and distinct Chinese characteristics.

The sloping roof is meant to evoke a dragon and its triangular skylights meant to resemble scales.

Feng shui principles were incorporated into the design while the interior is decorated in colours that hold special meaning for the Chinese.

“Feng shui has a scientific and a superstitious side,” said Shao Weiping, principal architect with Beijing Architectural Design. “We used the scientific side.”

Passengers entering the terminal are met with a blaze of red, reminiscent of celebration, good luck, joy and enthusiasm.

By the time you approach your gate over a mile away, preferably using an automated train, the interior has shaded to yellow.

This colour is associated with royalty, motherhood and Earth, which presumably act as a calming influence for your boarding experience.

Chinese officials tried to be diplomatic when comparing the terminal’s rapid construction schedule to London’s Heathrow’s Terminal 5, Europe’s busiest, for which planning took five years.

“Britain is relatively more forward-looking in planning,” Dong Zhiyi, the airport’s deputy general manager, told reporters, before adding: “The speed with which [the terminal] was built shows our capabilities.”



]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:27:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348393 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348391 By Henry Allen, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
Published: March 20, 2008, 23:55


Photography is a mystery that can never be resolved, only taken for granted.

It hovers like a blur of ectoplasm between medium and message, science and aesthetics, art and evidence — and the more you look at it, the more disquieting it gets.

It was a mystery right from the start, as demonstrated by a big, authoritative and disquieting show at the National Gallery of Art Impressed by Light: British Photographs From Paper Negatives, 1840-1860.

The show advertises itself as being a chronicle of technology, but there is a lot more going on.

It is an aristocrat’s world on view, under the white skies of 19th-century photography.

It is sepia hymns to ruins, beached fishing boats, castles, sublime mountains, haystacks, sun-struck gentlemen in top hats — and trees.

Here is The Fairy Tree, Colinton by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, and Alfred Capel Cure’s Blasted Tree at Badger, which presents the sublime lightning-split ruins of a lone tree in a big field, a metaphor of the horrors of war and the social upheaval in the industrial age.

Photography would later prove to be powerfully good for documenting the Dickensian squalor of the cities and urging reform. But there is little of that here.

The real depths and fires of the show are in the simple questions it provokes: How did these first photographers get so artful and so modern so fast?

How did photography instantly create a whole new way of seeing, a whole new way of thinking about composition and perspective?

Why, despite the nostalgic intentions of the photographers, is there a cold, even brutal frankness about these pictures?

Daguerreotype vs calotype

In January 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre invented the daguerreotype, a method of permanently fixing images on silver-plated copper.

Also disconcerted was William Henry Fox Talbot, a British scholar and scientist who had succeeded in fixing images on paper in 1834 but who, out of modesty, sluggishness, arrogance or whatever, hadn’t bothered to notify the world of his achievement.

Talbot never got as famous as his competitor, even though Daguerre’s technique was a dead end.

Daguerreotypes are relics — albeit mysterious, with the cold detailing that makes you feel as if they are staring back at you like a stray dog.

One problem was that daguerreotypes could not be reproduced.

By contrast, Talbot’s reproducible negatives led to glass plates that would lead to film and modern mass media. He exposed chemically treated paper to light that came through a lens.

The sun turned the bright parts of the subject dark and left the dark places light — a negative picture. Talbot would lay this negative on another piece of treated paper and expose them both to the sun.

Dark parts of the negative showed up light on the paper and light parts dark — a positive.

Talbot blew his last chance of becoming a household name when he refused to call his paper-negative pictures Talbotypes. Instead, he called them calotypes, from the Greek word kalos, meaning beautiful.

This show is about calotypes and their persistence among upper-class amateurs even after collodion glass plates had taken over.

Calotypists made pictures on their tours of Europe. But not all are fine art — some were snapshots, some failed attempts at beauty, some documents of rocks or coastlines.

Talbot and his followers may have been out to perpetuate the myths and glory of only the landed gentry, but even class warfare is not the most important here.

The subject is photography itself — its mysteriously sudden modern vision.

In Blasted Tree, Cure used a photographic style of composition that documented whatever caught the photographer’s eye.

It lopped the ends of the branches off the tree, the masts off the hull of a ship, the legs off torsos and the top off a haystack.

It is evidence and science, rather than beauty of the sort espoused in the mid-19th century.

The camera, with its miraculous ability to record things with a cool exactness, seems to have led photographers to emphasise that ability.

Hill and Adamson produced an utterly modern geometric exercise in the stones, shadows and arches of The Pends, St Andrews.

These pictures are assemblages of planes, of light and dark, horizontals and verticals, pictures that prefigure the flatness and abstraction of modern art to come.

Momentous tribute

This show, curated by British scholar Roger Taylor, along with the National Gallery’s Sarah Greenough and Metropolitan Museum’s Malcolm Daniel, is a tribute to Talbot and his followers.

In Family Group, Leith by John Muir Wood, a group of five upper-class people pose in a lawn.

They seem preoccupied, caught in the vanities of their posing, maybe even a little silly.

But what is recorded here is less the eternal meaning of their existence than the simple fact of it, preserved by a cool concatenation of chemicals, paper, glass, light and shadow.

This gathering of people happened there, then, and it is still happening — mysterious and disquieting.

Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860, will be on at the National Gallery
of Art, Washington, until May 4. Visit www.nga.gov


]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:22:00 EDT http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/348391 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/322099 By Francine Uenuma, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
Published: January 10, 2008, 23:32


Trained as a military propagandist in North Korea, Kim Seong Min has turned his skills against the government that once forced his allegiance.

From a small radio studio in Seoul, he and a handful of other North Korean defectors deliver daily broadcasts to people who remain behind in the isolated communist state run by Kim Jong Il.

“To give food provisions, if the Kim Jong Il regime still exists, is merely prolonging their lives in a state of slavery,” said Kim, founder and director of the station known as FNK, for Free North Korea Radio.

“But broadcasts ... give an opportunity to change their own future, and provide food for the spirit.”

The North’s estimated 23 million people have little accurate information about the outside world. Listening to foreign news sources is illegal, part of a government effort to block infiltration of subversive ideas.

But as more North Koreans buy low-cost radios brought in from China, violating that ban has become easier.

Kim said he fled to China in 1996 after attempts to contact a relative in Seoul were discovered.

As an illegal immigrant, he was apprehended by Chinese authorities, jailed and severely beaten. Sent back to North Korea for public trial (and almost certain execution), he made his second escape, he said, by jumping off a train travelling 50 miles per an hour.

For the next eight days, he ate grass roots and rode atop train cars to get back to China, where he lived for several years before making his way to Seoul.

Two-hour broadcasts

Now he passes his days trying to hasten the end of the government he built his career promoting. FNK’s two-hour daily broadcasts are a rare entity — by North Koreans, for North Koreans.

All told, Seoul has three privately run radio stations targeting the North: Open Radio for North Korea, Radio Free Chosun and Kim’s FNK, the only one run by defectors, with the help of a committed South Korean staff.

Washington-based Radio Free Asia and Voice of America also broadcast to the North.

“The problem in North Korea is the mind-set,” said Tae Keung-ha, president of Open Radio for North Korea. “Isolated for half a century, they have no ability to compare their situation with other countries and other people.”

His station’s broadcasts avoid overtly political messages in favour of cultural subjects. While for some North Koreans, “politics is a matter of life and death”, others turn away from it, he noted.

“We want to broaden our base as much as possible. For that purpose our radio programmes are soft.”

Kim Yun-tae, director of Radio Free Chosun, said his station takes a similar approach. “At first we were doing more propaganda broadcasting, but we changed our minds,” he said.

Added Kyounghee An, the station’s international manager, “We don’t think we can cause the collapse of the regime directly. ... We think after listening, people can compare their real situation to Kim Jong Il’s propaganda and can change their minds, step by step.”

Radio Free Chosun broadcasts North Korean domestic news as well as stories of escapes, revisions to North Korean textbooks and dramas about Kim Jong Il.

The two stations run by South Koreans have defectors on staff who try to make the broadcasts palatable to a North Korean audience, smoothing out political and cultural differences in language, for instance.

Tae, of Open Radio, said those staffers can help listeners make sense of such unknown words as “Starbucks”, or explain that in a capitalist economy, “a pizza deliveryman is not someone who is a slave but works for other consumers.”
Of the three, FNK is the most openly hostile to the North Korean government.

In the words of vice-director Lee Kuem Ryong, North Korea “is a big jail for everyone in the country”.

The stations have websites, but with internet access all but unknown in the North, the sites target South Koreans. “Our two main focuses are to tell the North Korean people the truth about South Korea, and the South Korean people the truth about North Korea,” said FNK’s Kim.

The South Korean government, eager to encourage good relations with the communist capital, Pyongyang, discontinued most of the programmes its Korean Broadcasting System aimed at the North.

But it has taken a hands-off approach to the private stations, broadcasters say, allowing them to operate but offering no financial support.

All three services indirectly receive about $200,000 in US government funds annually through the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy.

To qualify for the grants, the private broadcasters “had to get training on international standards of broadcasting,” said John Knaus, the endowment’s senior programme officer for Asia.

Despite the difficulties they face, the broadcasters say they remain committed to breaking through North Korea’s wall of silence. Kim Seong Min, who displays a stack of letters expressing gratitude and asking for help, says that each individual affected by his station is important: “We are going to keep broadcasting, even if one person listens to that radio.”


]]> Sun, 13 Jan 2008 08:12:00 EST http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/322099 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/322097 Published: January 10, 2008, 23:32

Squatting along the rocky banks of the Nmai Hka river, villagers labour from dawn till dusk over large wooden pans, scrounging for crumbs from the junta’s table.

Children, barely big enough to swirl the heavy slurry, toil alongside men and women, doing backbreaking work that exposes them to toxic mercury.

Every few minutes, they pause and tilt their dripping pans to catch the sunlight, hoping for the glint from a few golden flecks that haven’t been scooped up with the rest of Myanmar’s vast mineral wealth by the ruling generals and their cronies.

On a recent day by the river, Ja Bu, 46, strained to lift shovel-loads of slurry as a 10-year-old boy, ankle-deep in the cold, muddy water, worked a pan big enough for him to bathe in. Sixty miles west, Ja Bu’s younger brother was searching for jade in the drainage ditch of a mine exhausted years ago by the junta.

The few dollars that Ja Bu and her brother manage to scratch together each day from what the generals didn’t take, buys food, clothes and shelter for ten people.

During 45 years of military rule, the generals have steadily consolidated control over the country’s most lucrative mining areas. They have amassed enormous wealth from gems, minerals, timber and other vast natural resources, and left most of Myanmar’s people poor.

The junta tightly controls access to its large gem and jade mines but remote places such as Kharbar offer a glimpse of a struggling people’s helpless, yet strengthening, rage against the regime.

The junta’s violent crackdown against pro-democracy street demonstrations last September, the largest in two decades, sparked new calls for an international boycott of the regime’s biggest moneymakers, including rubies, sapphires, oil and natural gas.

US first lady Laura Bush has urged jewellers not to buy gems from Myanmar, also known as Burma. Some of the world’s biggest names in precious stones, such as Cartier, Bulgari and Tiffany, say they won’t sell Myanmar’s blood-tainted treasures anymore.

The US Senate recently passed legislation to tighten sanctions against the junta by banning imports of that country’s rubies and high-quality jade.

The House already passed its version of the bill but must act again on the Senate-passed version to approve minor differences.

But as Western shoppers shun Myanmar’s jewels, buyers from neighbouring China are rushing in to scoop up the country’s gold and jade, highly prized by the growing middle class and the fabulously wealthy, eager to find more ways to flaunt their new wealth.

It is one of the main reasons why the military junta is still going strong after years of sanctions: When Western countries try to tighten the economic noose, neighbours led by China, India and Thailand loosen the knot by increasing trade and investment in Myanmar.

Government officials say jade replaced rubies as the main attraction at a state-run auction held recently in Yangon, the capital, also known as Rangoon. The fourth auction of the year, it raised about $125 million for the junta in badly needed foreign currency.

No share in the pie

But the junta doesn’t let much trickle down to places such as Kharbar, a remote northern stretch near the Himalayan foothills, close to the Chinese border.

It is a spectacularly beautiful, unforgiving place where villagers live in thatched huts with walls woven from bamboo. Thin as cardboard, they are flimsy shelter against frigid winter winds.

And as the cost of food and fuel rises, so does the villagers’ resentment, which roils like the rapids of the Nmai Hka that taunts them with tiny gifts of gold.

Dong Shi, a wiry man in a green sweater splitting at the seams, has been working the brown slough and bamboo sluices in the area for three years.

On a good day, he finds $8 worth of gold flakes, the biggest about the size of a pinhead. Like other prospectors, he must pay $250, or more than half an average person’s annual income locally, to the owner of the land for permission to pan just 10 square feet of riverbank.

After Dong Shi pays his stake’s owner, his share of the diesel to run a generator and sluice pumps, school fees for his four children and other mounting expenses, he has little left.
“We eat all that I earn,” he said. “I have nothing left in my pocket. Tomorrow I go back to work on the river, just to have some more food.”

It is gruelling, risky work. To separate gold particles from the slurry, miners squeeze drops of mercury from strips of cloth soaked in the metal, exposing them as well as the river fish they eat to dangerous levels of metal poisoning, which can damage kidneys and the nervous system.

For all the prospectors’ pain and risk, most pans come up bust. So they dig deeper, push the limits harder.

Desperate to hit pay dirt, dreaming of finding a rare nugget instead of just flecks, some villagers rig up hand pumps onshore to homemade breathing hoses and wade into the middle of the river. They work for up to three hours at a time under water.

As the economic chasm widens between Myanmar’s people and their corrupt military rulers, places that were once synonymous with the sparkle of precious stones are now earning a darker reputation as hotbeds of political dissent.

One is Mogok, for centuries the entrance to the Valley of Rubies, which lies slightly more than 200 miles south of Kharbar but might as well be a thousand, because the regime rarely allows foreign visitors to see for themselves what is happening there.

Some of the earliest protests against rising fuel prices were held in Mogok before they spread to the capital and grabbed world attention.

Last November, over 50 Buddhist monks defied the junta’s crackdown and marched through Mogok.

Anger has been boiling beneath the surface there for years as the junta pushed out more small-scale miners, who are left to search the dregs of abandoned mines, said Soe Myint, a leader in exile of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy.

“Most of the gems are mined by government firms or those affiliated with the junta — the generals’ relatives and cronies,” added Myint, who was elected to Myanmar’s parliament in 1990 and then jailed for 14 years when the military rejected Suu Kyi’s victory at the polls.

“Whether it’s jade, rubies or sapphires, locals cannot mine them anymore. They only get a very small portion. That is why Mogok is at the forefront of the demonstrations. The local people have nothing else to do because all the land has been confiscated by the government and government companies.”

The trade in gemstones, the country’s third-largest source of revenue, is dominated by the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited, a consortium co-owned by the defence ministry and military officers who hold the bulk of the company’s shares.

Rage off restrictions

The regime tightly controls access to the country’s gem and jade mines but it is possible to get a hint of the suffering that has stirred so much anger against the junta by travelling north to the rough roads and fast-moving rivers around Kharbar.

Here, two rivers fed by Himalayan glaciers converge to give birth to the Irrawaddy River, the broad backbone of Myanmar.

Long canoes with ear-splitting motors are the only way into the region’s most promising gold panning sites, one of the last places where small-scale miners can legally eke out a living.

The area also is home to some of the world’s best jade deposits.

But the junta shut the biggest operations down two years ago and the flood of cash from Chinese businesspeople suddenly dropped off.

The local economy suffered more as most of the jade trade moved south to Mandalay, where more than 100 factories cut and polish the stones, mainly to supply growing demand in China.


]]> Sun, 13 Jan 2008 08:11:00 EST http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/322097 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/322093 By Megan K. Stack, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
Published: January 10, 2008, 23:32


The student activist in Moscow — looking bohemian with stylishly mussed hair, pointy black shoes and black jeans — had to beg off his appointment. He had just been summoned by “the authorities”.

But Nikita Borovikov didn’t seem particularly apprehensive. In fact, he seemed rather pleased.

As one of the leaders of a new wave of youth groups that are loudly rallying around Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, he has met the leader two times, he said.

“So what?” he added defensively. “Let me ask you a philosophical question: What’s bad about supporting the authorities?”

Meet Putin’s sidewalk avengers, scruffy cheerleaders and foot soldiers.

In the last few years of the powerful president’s reign, tens of thousands of Russian students have joined hastily organised youth groups and headed into the streets.

They believe the stability of their homeland depends upon squashing political opposition and propping up their beloved father figure.

Relentlessly capitalistic

Members of Borovikov’s organisation are bombarded with talk of the dangers of “fascists”, a term organisers throw around to refer to political rivals.

“We’re trying to tell people about the movements that don’t say they’re fascist, but they are,” said Borovikov, deputy head of Nashi, also known as Ours.

The youth groups were formed around the spring of 2005, after the pro-democracy “colour revolutions” swept through the former Soviet bloc.

In Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, massive street protests had shoved Kremlin-backed leaders out of power, installing governments that leaned more towards the West.

The groups are a symptom of the times in Russia, of the peculiar buzz around Putin that is somehow both neo-Soviet and relentlessly capitalistic.

Having reinvented himself from the unknown KGB spy to the revered and iconic leader, Putin is to leave the presidency in May.

He has announced his willingness to serve as prime minister and is expected to keep hold of his considerable power.

In Russia, they call these youths “Putin’s generation”:

A generation too young to remember much of Soviet times but old enough to recoil from memories of the tumultuous Boris Yeltsin years.

“Young people identify themselves with Putin and the regime and they don’t want any changes,” said Boris Dubin, senior researcher at the Levada Polling Centre.

“They support the interpretation of stability imposed on society by the mass media.”

Many Russians, particularly the older generations, are squeamish about the youth groups.

They have seen political heroes rise and fall and many remain suspicious of the extreme language they hear on the streets.

“I don’t know what they’re really up to but what they’re doing is a tone higher than normal. The wording is too sharp.

"They’re insulting,” said Nadezhda Bukhenskaya, a 55-year-old university professor who wandered past a recent Nashi demonstration, then stopped and frowned.

“Were they brought into politics by somebody else, or are they doing it by themselves?”

Talking to Nashi members offers a sample of the kaleidoscope of fears that swirl in Putin’s Russia.

An alleged US plot to infiltrate politics, get hold of natural resources and shatter mighty Russia into smaller, more easily managed countries is a recurring theme.

Most of the recent recruits are neophytes; often, they are unsophisticated youths from the provinces who are unable to articulate why they are chanting on the streets of Moscow.

“My boyfriend was a member and I joined him for one of the actions and I thought it was cool,” said a teenage girl with a pierced lip.

Another protest, at the Georgian Embassy, had just broken up.

The Kremlin and Nashi often try to play down their relationship.

But the youth group takes much of its funding from the Presidential Chamber, a board of hand-picked private citizens established by Putin.

Borovikov defends his alliance with the Kremlin.

“For some reason, it is bad to be connected with the authority or the state but the history of Russia shows the country was only successful when the state was strong,” he said.

“Career success was always connected to state service and there’s nothing shameful about that.”

Nashi, the largest and most prominent of the youth groups, is wrapped up in the concept of upward mobility. The youths view Nashi as an investment in their careers.

Not all the Kremlin-backed groups are so clean-cut.
Across town, in the headquarters of Young Russia, students are shooting pool and plotting their next scandal.

These are radical Putin activists, less squeamish about getting their hands dirty than their peers in Nashi.

Dangerous and powerful

They have taken over a prime piece of real estate, a sprawling building that was once a bar at the edge of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University campus.

“We kicked the owners out,” leader Maxim Mishchenko said casually.

Mishchenko doesn’t mind boasting about the influence and wealth commanded by his group members. His power flows from thuggery and connections.

Barely out of law school, Mishchenko is expected to get a seat in the parliament this coming term.

“We’re talking here about a civilised protection racket,” Mishchenko says, cool as ice. “If they don’t give us money, we attack them.”

Attacks, he explains, entail blocking roads or holding protests outside shops until they are forced out of business.



]]> Sun, 13 Jan 2008 08:05:00 EST http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/322093 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318865
Dozens of stores have been looted, torched and smashed by rioters and then picked clean by an army of glue-sniffing street children searching for whatever was left. The scorched Ukwala supermarket looks as if a bomb blew up inside it. The gates of Zamana Electronic are mangled.

People here say this is just the beginning.

“We will never surrender!” yelled a man who attended a rally for opposition leaders on Saturday.

“We want guns, guns!” another man added.

While much of Kenya is trying to get back to normal after a week of post-election violence that has claimed more than 300 lives nationwide, Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city, is still quivering with anger. Few places have been so thoroughly gutted by the turbulence as here.

With Kenya’s leaders still at an impasse despite the efforts of Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for Africa who met with both sides on Saturday, it looks as if the tensions will linger dangerously for some time.

Kisumu is the stronghold of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who said he had been cheated out of the presidency, and the town’s main street is named after his father, a local hero.

The people here followed the election so closely that they remember the precise hour last weekend, on Saturday, when the vote count suddenly changed, and Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, went from trailing badly to winning with a suspiciously thin margin of victory.

The town exploded, and a furious mob stormed up Oginga Odinga street. The biggest businesses are now in ashes. Fuel, food and cellphone credit are in short supply. And around 2,000 people from Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, the Kikuyu, are camped out at the police station, trying to escape a wave of revenge killings.

“If I stay here, I’ll be lynched,” said Waweru Mburu, a Kikuyu, as he nervously waited outside a supermarket, one of the two open in this town of half a million people. His wife had been waiting for hours, trying to buy milk.

Trucks carrying Kikuyu and evacuees from another tribe, the Kisii, many of whom supported Mr. Kibaki, are jeered at as they pull out of town. Those doing the jeering are mostly Luo, like Mr. Odinga, who live here in great numbers.

“Traitors!” some Luo shouted on Saturday as a truck passed.

People on both sides said the tensions would not ease as long as Kenya’s political leaders refused to even speak to each other, which has been the situation since the election on Dec. 27.

On Saturday, Mr. Kibaki indicated that he was ready to form “a government of national unity.” Mr. Odinga did not reject that outright but said he would not entertain any offers until the two sides sat down in the presence of foreign mediators.

The government initially rebuffed outside help, but seems to have relented slightly and sent a diplomat to Ghana to discuss a role for the African Union, according to Reuters.

Ms. Frazer met separately with Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga and urged them to work together to solve the crisis, which has dented Kenya’s image as one of the most stable countries in Africa and could cause permanent economic damage if peace is not restored soon.

It seems that momentum is growing toward negotiations. “There is slow progress being made,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga.

Kenyans are waiting. Some areas, like the capital, have quieted down considerably. In the Rift Valley, the area most torn by violence, fewer killings have been reported in the past few days, but tens of thousands of people are displaced and in need of food.

In Kisumu, the killings have stopped, for the most part. But the banks are running out of money, few stores are open and the looting continues.

There is some opportunism to all this. The rage that swept through town was selective, striking at electronics shops, cellphone kiosks and shoe stores but leaving the drapery dealer alone.

On Saturday, Monica Awino tiptoed through the shattered interior of a Bata footwear store. Glass was everywhere. She used to work here and now is out of a job at the best time of year. No after-Christmas or back-to-school sales for her.

“I’m angry at everybody,” she said.

Up the street, Bernard Ndede, a high school English teacher, watched street children carefully sift through inches of rubble on the floor of a charred supermarket, as if they were urban archaeologists.

He said he did not approve of the looting, but he understood the anger.

“People woke up so early that day to vote for change,” he said, referring to election day and the millions of people who voted for Mr. Odinga. “They felt robbed.”

For some, the disappointment was lethal. On Saturday, Albert Ojonyo, an insurance agent, went to the city morgue to pick up the body of his brother, Daniel. More than 40 people were killed here in election-related violence. Many bodies have not been identified and wait in a sweltering room under strips of red cloth with their feet poking out.

Mr. Ojonyo said his brother, who was 27, had been shot in the head, most likely by police officers trying to quell the rioters.

“Daniel felt very strongly about these elections,” he said. “Afterward, he was a very bitter boy.”

]]> Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:07:00 EST http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318865 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318863 West teems with awful fallout of ethnic warfare
By Paul Salopek | Tribune foreign correspondent


BURNT FOREST DISTRICT, Kenya — The folksy name of these wooded hills in western Kenya holds a bleak new irony.

Trees aren't the only things that get charred in Burnt Forest anymore. Houses do too. So do crops and farm animals. And the human beings who raised them. Finally, a frail ideal also lies scattered in the ashes: Kenyan brotherhood.

"I realized that something was wrong when I saw strange lights appear in the darkness," Bennina Ouko, a farmer's wife, recalled of the night of Dec. 30, when the results of Kenya's presidential election were announced. "They were houses on fire. Raiders were burning them because they didn't like the way we voted. They were making us run for our lives."

A week after Kenya's most divisive national election ever, the reopening of blockaded roads in the country's ethnically tense western half is unveiling scenes of politically sparked tribal warfare and ethnic cleansing that surpass anything seen before in the crisis.

The Kenyan Red Cross estimates that at least 100,000 of the 250,000 people uprooted by the violence come from rural areas near the cities of Eldoret, Kericho and Kisumu, a western stronghold of opposition candidate Raila Odinga, who insists his loss in the Dec. 27 election was the result of vote-rigging.

As many as 350 people have died in the violence.

The majority of Odinga's supporters in the region are ethnic Luos and Kalenjins. Aid workers say it is those groups who are displacing ethnic Kikuyus, the dominant Kenyan tribe associated with re-elected President Mwai Kibaki.

A trip into the region Sunday revealed miles-long convoys of Kikuyu refugees, some protected by police escorts, trundling east on roads only recently cleared of militia-guarded roadblocks. Humanitarian and military helicopters thudded overhead. Local hospitals were swamped with casualties of ethnic fighting, many of them suffering burns and arrow wounds. Some hospitals were short of supplies and couldn't operate on the wounded.

In scenes reminiscent of notorious ethnic wars in Bosnia or Rwanda, tens of thousands of frightened, hungry people gathered around churches and hospitals to seek safety from bands of tribal militants supporting one party or the other. Babies were being born on the parched grass outside police stations.

And for the first time in history, for their safety, ordinary Kenyans had to ponder their tribal affiliations as they traveled across a huge chunk of their nation's territory.

"I will never be the same person again," said Paul Kamau, 35, a Kikuyu farmer from near Eldoret who says he watched seven family members and field hands get slaughtered by spear-wielding Kalenjin militants as he hid in a well. "Kenya will never be the same again either."

Kamau had taken refuge with a thousand other Kikuyus at the fairgrounds in the tourist town of Nakuru. A small knot of displaced Luos, mortified at being branded as aggressors, huddled on a far corner of the grounds.

Eldoret saw the worst atrocity of the current crisis so far—dozens of Kikuyus, including women and children, were burned to death in a church. Some 50,000 people are displaced in the city, according to the Kenyan Red Cross. Aid workers said that much of western Kenya now faces a hunger crisis.

But the UN food agency said its first emergency food deliveries were now reaching the west, after delays due to insecurity.

Probably no area has a better claim as the epicenter of election violence than Burnt Forest, an agricultural zone east of Eldoret that UN and Kenyan civil authorities say suffered brutal clashes between supporters of Odinga and Kibaki. Hundreds of homes were torched, Kenyan officials said. More than 20,000 people fled the area.

Along one nearby road, dozens of Kikuyu homes lay collapsed in piles of ash. Police had cleared away downed trees and other roadblocks erected by local militants. The only families remaining were opposition-backing Kalenjins.

"I agree that the ordinary Kikuyus didn't deserve this," said Joseph Tum, a Kalenjin teacher, waving off questions about Kalenjin families burning out their Kikuyu neighbors. "But Kibaki is to blame for this, not us. He stole the election."

A few miles away, Ouko, the Kikuyu farm wife who saw the village's burning huts light up the night, described a very organized operation in ethnic cleansing: Angry Kalenjin youths arrived by truck within hours of Kibaki being declared the election's winner. Toting bows and arrows, and with their faces smeared with mud to disguise their identities, they systematically burned Kikuyu property with jugs of gasoline.

Such tribal hardball isn't new, nor does it spring only from the grass roots, say political experts. For years, former Kenyan strongman Daniel arap Moi manipulated young Kalenjin men to moonlight as shock troops against his electoral opponents.

"This is worse because it isn't just intimidation—they really want us gone," said Linet Makhumbu, 30, a Kikuyu tailor whose shop in the Burnt Forest area was a pile of blackened tin.

Nervously, Makhumbu strode past her ruined shop to shake hands with a group of Kalenjin men she accused of destroying her livelihood. She meant the gesture as a peace offering.

"We're just waiting to see if Kibaki resigns," one of the men, Robert Tutuny, said, referring to negotiations between the two leaders in Nairobi. "If he doesn't, the war begins again."


]]> Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:02:00 EST http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318863 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318861 Last updated: Sun, Jan 06, 2008 13:49 PM (EAT)

Writing from afar, here in the US, but with a career-long interest in, and affection for Africa, here’s my list of New Year’s resolutions (aka wishlist) for Africa. After the the first, they are listed in no particular order.

1. Political Modus Viviendi in Kenya. In my columns so far, I have resisted writing about Kenya specifically because, friend of Kenya that I have always been, ultimately it is for Kenyans to sort out their problems and differences. But I have to put Kenya at the top of my New Year’s wish list for Africa. I read with distress about the violence attending the reported results of the 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections. I have no brief for any candidate or party or, rather, I hold a brief for all. I want to believe that, when all is said and done, all Kenyans really to agree on more than they disagree on, notwithstanding the depth and bitterness. So, I wish for enough reconciliation among rival parties and political actors that they can re-affirm, maybe rediscover, this common ground.

2. Peace and recovery in Darfur. I have little to add to all that has been said and written about this human catatastrophe. May there, finally, be agreement on a peacekeeping force, that suitably balances AU and UN participation, that can begin to restore peace, make possible the needed scale of humanitarian assistance, and contain the spread of the crisis to Central African Republic and Chad more than it already has.

3. Restoration of the Somali State. With former U.S. ambassador David Shinn, I wish for the new prime minister of the Transitional Federal Government in Somalia to find ways to broaden the basis of his government so that Somalia may move toward a restored state for the first time in nearly two decades. I take no position on what the possibilities are for reconciliation with at least some in the former Islamic Courts regime and with the leaders of Somaliland, because, frankly, I have no idea what they might be. I do know that the presence of Ethiopian troops in the country is ultimately untenable as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has implicitly confirmed. What is needed is a truly viable African Union force that includes more than a few troops from Uganda and Burundi, so that Somalis don’t have to trust their long time nemesis, Ethiopia, to do all the work of restoring peace.

4. Reconciliation between Ethiopian and Eritrea. Much more than the border and the village of Badme are at issue between Ethiopia and Eritrea, as I wrote in a column earlier this past year. Each is disdainful, and fearful for its own interests, because of the constitutional structure each has chosen. Eritrea thinks Ethiopia’s confederal constitution threatens anarchy in the whole Horn of Africa, and Ethiopia rejects as inadequate Eritrea’s centralised government, which has tried to balance ethnic representation. There are also important economic issues. The rivalry via surrogates in Somalia deepens their antagonism. I thought there might be a basis for reconciliation — Ethiopia fulfills its pledge to sign off on the demarcation commission’s recommendations in return for Eritrea withdrawing its troops from what is supposed to be the demilitarised zone. But I was wrong. Might there be a committee of eminent (African) persons, acceptable to both countries who might be able to find the keys to at least some reconciliation?

5. Restoration of peace and progress in Zimbabwe. I haven’t forgotten Robert Mugabe’s indispensable role in bringing about Zimbabwean independence, but I am afraid there is no road to peace in the country that does not include his retirement. But Zimbabwe needs more. It needs an all-party negotiations, under international-AU auspices. on revised rules of the political game, restoring the country’s economic health, and compensation for victims of its descent into economic chaos. There are several models available that have helped Zimbabwe’s southern African neighbours. I am thinking particularly of the all-party roundtable under the auspices of the United Nations that facilitated Malawi's transition from Kamuzu Banda’s long authoritarian rule. South Africa, Namibia, and Mozambique all benefited from similar processes. Indeed, I have thought for some time that the key to democratic rule has more to do with the extent, quality, and depth of all-party negotiations on basic rules of the political game than has been generally recognised.

6. Peace in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Again, I have no expertise or insight to contribute here. DRC and Zimbabwe are potential economic powerhouses whose recovery can have multiplier effects well beyond the countries themselves. The devastation visited on untold tens of thousands of individuals and families must end, and adequate measures to aid these victims be instituted immediately.

7. Continued progress toward political stability in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Cote d’ Ivoire. A peace agreement struck between the parties themselves early in 2007 holds the promise of restored political stability in Cote’ d’ Ivoire, and delayed steps toward it have begun, as I write. Liberia and Sierra Leone have also made very promising advances toward peace and economic recovery. May each of these fragile processes gain strength in 2008.

8. Progress on the United Nations’ millennium development goals. Early reports have suggested, as I wrote in an earlier column, that progress toward these goals has been slower in Africa than it needs to be in order to stay on course to reach these goals by 2015. May progress on each of these goals be jump-started in 2008. Those goals, as we know, include ending poverty and hunger, universal primary education, gender equality, reduced child mortality and improved maternal health, combating HIV/Aids, achieving environmental sustainability, and forging a global partnership for development.

9. Development cooperation rather than competition on development between China and the G8 countries. New World Bank president Robert Zoellick has taken some hopeful initial steps along these lines with Chinese leaders. It’s not in any country’s best interests — African, G8, or China — for countries to work at cross purposes in promoting development.

10. Peace in the Anglican Communion. Finally, perhaps my readers will indulge me a New Year’s wish that is a little more particularistic and sectarian than all of the above. The Anglican Communion is facing serious schism because of the consecration of a gay Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire in the U.S. Some U.S. Episcopal dioceses are leaving to align themselves with African archbishops in Nigeria, Uganda, and elsewhere. As an Episcopalian, and having sung in All Saints Cathedral choir during my last tour in Kenya, this impending schism in the worldwide Anglican Communion is especially troubling, personally.


]]> Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:00:00 EST http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318861 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318795 By Craig Whitlock, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

Like countless other communities, the town of Bohmte in west Germany lived for years with a miserable traffic problem.

Each day, thousands of cars and big trucks barrelled along the two-lane main street, forcing pedestrians and cyclists to scamper for their lives.

The usual remedies — from safety crossings to speed traps — did no good. So the citizens of Bohmte decided to take a big risk.

Since September, they have been tearing up the pavements, removing kerbs and erasing street markers as part of a radical plan to abandon nearly all traffic regulations and force people to rely on common sense and courtesy instead.

This contrarian approach to traffic management, known as shared space, is gaining a foothold in Europe.

Towns in the Netherlands, Denmark, Britain and Belgium have tossed out their traffic lights and stop signs in a bid to reclaim the streets for everyone.

The assumption is that drivers are accustomed to owning the road and rarely pay attention to speed limits or caution signs anyway.

Removing traffic lights and erasing lane markers, the thinking goes, will cause drivers to get nervous and slow down.

“Generally speaking, what we want is for people to be confused,” said Willi Ladner, a deputy mayor in Bohmte.

“When they’re confused, they’ll be more alert and drive more carefully.”

The European Union has subsidised shared space programmes in seven cities in five countries.

Interest is spreading worldwide, with cities in countries from Australia to Canada sending emissaries to Europe to see whether the experiment works.

In Bohmte, a town of 13,000 people in the state of Lower Saxony, residents were tired of all the trucks whizzing along Bremen Street, the main route through the city.

Since the street is categorised as a state highway, the law prevented local officials from banning trucks.

They considered building a bypass instead, but merchants worried it would suck too many vehicles out of the city centre and hurt business.

In 2005, city leaders learnt about shared space and decided to give it a try.

One of the biggest obstacles was persuading regional traffic bureaucrats to approve the unorthodox approach. “They were grinding their teeth, but finally they agreed,” Ladner said.

On November 26, a small section of Bremen Street — minus the signs and kerbs — reopened to traffic.

With no marked spaces, people can park their cars wherever they want, as long as they don’t leave them in the middle of the road.

The new pavement is a reddish-brick colour, intended to send a subtle signal to drivers that they are entering a special zone.

Only two traffic rules remain. Drivers cannot go more than 30 miles per hour, the German speed limit for city driving.

And everyone has to yield to the right, regardless of whether it is a car, a motorcycle or a baby carriage.

Peter Hilbricht, a Bohmte police officer in charge of traffic planning, said the main intersection in town generated about 50 accidents a year before the changes.

He expects the number to plummet, citing the experience of other cities that have embraced the shared space approach.

In Haren, the Netherlands, for example, the number of accidents at one intersection dropped by 95 per cent, from 200 a year to about ten, Hilbricht said.

“You can’t deny the numbers,” he added. “Half the world is eager to see what’s going to happen with this programme.”

Old habits, however, can be hard to break. Especially in Germany, a rules-obsessed nation where people who dare to jaywalk can expect a loud scolding from other pedestrians, even if there are no cars in sight.

Asked to give a personal demonstration, Hilbricht put Bohmte’s lack of rules to the test.

Picking a random spot, he bravely stepped into oncoming traffic and across the road — an act that could have earned him a fine pretty much anywhere else in Germany.

Cars immediately slowed down and gave Hilbricht a wide berth, although he admitted that his police uniform may have worked to his advantage.

When a reporter tried the same thing, two approaching drivers barely hit their brakes, including one guy in a van who babbled away on his mobile phone as he sped past.

Ladner, the deputy mayor, acknowledged that it could take a year or two before residents get used to the changes.

But city officials are confident. They are spending $3.3 million to overhaul parts of Bremen Street by next summer and hope to expand the special zone over the next 10 to 20 years.

“We’re very optimistic,” Ladner said. “If others can do it, why not us? It will be difficult for some people, yes, but it can definitely be accomplished.”



]]> Sun, 06 Jan 2008 05:51:00 EST http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318795 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318793 By Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service


As a siren wailed across the city in remembrance of the dead, the revamped Nanjing museum in China opened to an expectant public with tens of thousands enduring waits of as long as two hours in the cold.

Once inside, there was little time for reflection, however, as guards chided visitors to keep moving.

Recently, this former Chinese capital marked the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing massacre, when tens of thousands of civilians and fleeing soldiers were killed by marauding Japanese soldiers.

History is a sensitive subject in North Asia — and this is ground zero in China’s bid to counter the small number of Japanese Right-wingers who downplay or deny the mass rampage that took place.

The anniversary gave China an opportunity to revamp its rather dowdy Nanjing massacre museum, placing it more on a par with Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki memorials and the many Holocaust remembrance centres around the world.

History brought alive

With growing wealth and global power comes a push to better showcase its pain and, by extension, to lay a stronger claim to history as it muscles its way into the world of global causes and ideas.

The refurbished museum is leaps ahead of its predecessor, which was badly organised and largely devoid of the personal stories that help bring history alive.

The $33 million, two-year upgrade includes multimedia exhibits, survivor accounts, dioramas of bombed out buildings and a glass bridge over a partially unearthed mass grave — hardly pretty viewing, but often powerful.

The crowd of mostly younger Chinese on the opening day was interspersed with a handful of survivors, included Lin Guofu, 74, dressed in a stained brown Mao suit and cotton shoes.

As a small circle of onlookers crowded around, Lin recounted how his grandparents raised him after Japanese soldiers murdered his parents.

“I was too young to understand how they were killed,” he said slowly through his few remaining teeth, “but I remember all the bombs falling.”

Japan’s reluctance to apologise for or fully acknowledge past atrocities and the high-profile official visits to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine by a former Japanese prime minister, where 12 top war criminals are memorialised, has rankled many Chinese.

“There are a lot of different views about what really happened” in Nanjing, Mistuo Sakaba, Japan’s foreign ministry spokesman, said recently.

This has spurred something of a numbers game.

The Chinese claim that 300,000 people were killed and 20,000 women violated in the city during a six-week period starting in late 1937 as the Japanese war machine surged across Asia.

Some Japanese sources put the death toll at 40,000. A wartime tribunal placed the figure at 142,000.

While inadequate records and wartime chaos suggest the truth will never be known, there is no ambiguity at the museum as giant “300,000 Victims” signs in 11 languages dominate the entrance.

Yet, Beijing also is walking a fine line amid efforts to craft a rapprochement between Tokyo and Beijing.

“I don’t think they want too much attention on this right now,” said Chen Shiwei, 40, a taxi driver whose father survived the Nanjing massacre.

Economic links with Japan are vital as part of a China bid to reduce tensions and focus on “harmonious” domestic development.

Approximately 150,000 Japanese live in China, and President Hu Jintao is scheduled to visit Japan next year.

Beijing, which can set the tone with a few calls from its propaganda department, sent few central government leaders to mark the anniversary and has given muted support to memorial events.

This stands in marked contrast to 2005, when it initially tolerated Chinese rioting in several major cities over Japanese textbooks.

But Nanjing, a walled city of beautiful parks and stately boulevards, is no stranger to Beijing’s changing moods.

In the decades after the Communists took over in 1949, the city was subtly and not-so-subtly discriminated against for its role as former capital of the hated Nationalist government, which fled to Taiwan.

Nanjing’s many residents from families linked to the Nationalists were persecuted in “struggle sessions” during the Cultural Revolution.

The American missionaries and European businessmen who saved thousands of Chinese during the Nanjing massacre were condemned during the height of Mao’s upheaval as foreign spies.

And Beijing was for many years stingy with economic development money, residents say, even as its neighbours grew rich with China’s opening to the outside world.

More recently, however, Beijing has found the city increasingly useful.

Nanjing has played a role in boosting nationalism as Communism has become a less credible ideology.

“The government has emphasised Nanjing in its patriotic education,” said Huang Dahui, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing. “This brings people together, which every nation tries to do.”

Since 2005, Nanjing also has become increasingly useful as a place to host Taiwanese politicians eager to see the former capital, as Beijing has concluded that Taiwan’s once-hated Nationalists are far preferable to their independence-leaning rivals.

The museum and the massacre have also helped portray China as a victim, a helpful counter to foreign uneasiness with China’s rapid rise and a way to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Taiwanese by stressing the adversaries’ shared pain in the face of Japanese aggression.


]]> Sun, 06 Jan 2008 05:47:00 EST http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318793 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318789 By Anuj Chopra

The sun was beating down on Krishnan and his men. Wiping sweat from his chalky brow, he stood with his paraphernalia on an arid patch of farmland, preparing for what seemed like a military mission.

“They can sense us,” Krishnan said, pointing imperiously at a burrow nearby. “They are very clever creatures.”

Through a hand-operated air pump attached to a cylindrical device, he pumped a torrent of smoke into the burrow.

Seconds later, from a grey blanket of smoke, Krishnan pulled out a big, brown, mangy rat, by its tail.

In the impoverished tribal belt in rural Tamil Nadu in southern India, rat-catching has been, for centuries, the primary occupation of Irulas such as Krishnan.

The Irulas - a poor, disenfranchised community of 3 million that lies at the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy — have often found themselves on the brink of starvation.

However, the introduction of a modern, innovative rat-trap has made their work more productive, thus reversing their fortunes.

Their catch — and income — has tripled and they are successfully curbing the rodent menace on farms, earning more respect for themselves.

Irulas are often treated as untouchables and jeered at by locals as “rodent assassins”.

And the Irulas are welcoming this change.

Traditional technique

For ages, the Irulas have relied on a traditional fumigation technique — rats are caught by lighting a fire in a clay pot and positioning it to cover the mouth of a rat burrow.

The pot has an extra hole into which the Irulas blow, to pump the burrows with smoke. This suffocates and ultimately kills the rats.

But the catch is low — only about four or five a day — and the average rat catcher makes a paltry $1 per day.

Also, this method is hazardous as the Irulas suffer burn injuries and inhalation of the smoke results in respiratory and cardiac problems.

However, a Chennai-based NGO called Centre for Development of Disadvantaged People (CDDP) introduced a modern rat trap which has boosted the Irulas’ pickings and eliminated all health hazards.

In 2004, the NGO, with the help of a mechanical engineer, designed a steel rat-trap attached to a hand-operated air pump which eliminated the need to place their mouths on the hot pots to blow air, thus preventing burn injuries. The daily catch has now risen to 15-20 rats.

Over the years, this has proven to be far more than just another wishy-washy intervention by an NGO, meant only to supplement its income.

The Irulas — who once lived in caves — are proud of graduating to mechanised technology.

As incomes have tripled, the Irulas are using the extra money to send their children to school. The literacy rate of this community is just 1 per cent at present, according to CDDP.

More significantly, this innovation has brought a sense of pride to a community that seemed destined to remain wretched.

“Everyone wants to give up their lives as rat catchers — a miserable existence that only brings shame,” Krishnan says. “But this rat-trap gives a sense of hope to our community — that we, too, can lead productive lives.”

“The Irulas are a great example of how technology can help the rural poor improve their lives, one step at a time,” says Dr Siri Terjesen of Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, who visited the Irulas in India last year.

In December 2003, Sethu Sethunarayanan, the director of CDDP, presented the rat-trap project to the World Bank and received a grant for $98,500, enabling him to implement the project.

The funding made it possible for him to provide these traps free of cost to over 4,000 Irula families in villages across Tamil Nadu, such as Sirigumi, which is 80 kilometres from Chennai.

But the demand for these rat traps is great. There are an estimated 3 million Irula living in India, which includes 150,000 in the state of Tamil Nadu and 250,000 in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh — and Sethunarayanan’s ambition is to provide the new rat-traps to the entire community.

Although each rat-trap costs a mere $25, it is beyond the means of most Irulas, who live below the poverty line.
“Through microcredit,” Sethunarayanan hopes, “these rat-traps will be made available to all in the coming years.”

With over 100 million small farmers in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh seeking the help of these rat catchers, this trap is in great demand.

Rats, profligate breeders that wreak havoc on farms, are a nightmare for farmers. They multiply at an alarming pace — with each female rat producing up to 1,000 offspring in its lifetime of 2-3.5 years.

“By one estimate, if the rat menace were [brought under control], India would be able to feed its population thrice a day,” says Terjesen.

Rats are believed to be a menace in Indian cities as well and there is a growing demand for rat-control measures that don’t rely on poisons.

For instance, in Mumbai, India’s commercial hub, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation — the local civic authority — has a programme to exterminate rats by flooding their burrows with poisonous chemicals.

But the programme hasn’t yet been able to stem the menace. Although thousands of burrows are fumigated each month, the heaps of garbage infesting the city’s many slums provide the rats a safe sanctuary.

In Mizoram, a hilly northeastern state, the flowering of bamboo, called mautam in the local dialect, triggers an explosion of rodent population as the bamboo seeds provide a steady supply of food.

In October 2006, the government offered incentives to farmers for killing rats in large numbers. They also began purchasing rat tails from them to encourage them to kill the rodents. More than 500,000 rat tails were collected.

Farmers around Sirigumi have also tried fumigation and dropping garlic and chutney laced with poison into the burrows. But the poison reduced soil productivity and the rats quickly developed a resistance to it.

The best answer, local farmers say, seems to be to use a combination of traps and natural predators. And the Irulas are seen as both.

The rat may be the Irula’s only source of meat and grains (collected from the rodents’ burrows).

As shadows lengthen in Sirigumi, Krishnan walks home with his catch. He remembers the times in the past when there was nothing in his house to feed to fill the bellies of his nine children but wild fruit.

“My children don’t go hungry these days,” he said. “They feast.”


]]> Sun, 06 Jan 2008 05:39:00 EST http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/318789 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/317877 By Shahid Hussain, Correspondent

Islamabad: Pakistan was thrown into fresh turmoil and the prospect of a violent backlash on Thursday after charismatic opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in a gun and bomb attack as she left an election rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

The UAE strongly condemned the assassination and called for Pakistan to unite in the face of terrorism.

"The UAE has been tormented by this huge loss, which did not hit Pakistan only, but also affected the UAE," Shaikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Foreign Minister, said in a statement released by WAM.

"Words fail to express our strong condemnation of this cowardly criminal act and our bereavement at the loss of Benazir Bhutto," he said.

In Islamabad, an Interior Ministry spokesman, retired brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema, told Gulf News: "Benazir Bhutto has died in the attack."

Police said a suicide bomber fired shots at Bhutto, 54, as she was leaving the rally venue in a park before blowing himself up.

"The man first fired at Bhutto's vehicle. She ducked and then he blew himself up," said police officer Mohammad Shahid. Bhutto died in hospital.

Police officials said 16 people were killed in the blast, which occurred during campaigning for a January 8 national election. A Reuters witness at the scene said he had heard two shots moments before the blast.

Party sources told Gulf News PPP information secretary Sherry Rehman and Bhutto's close aide Nahid Khan were also wounded in the attack.

High-level meeting

The killing of Bhutto, the first female prime minister of a Muslim country and an icon for democracy in Pakistan, prompted worldwide outrage and condemnation, including from the US, Russia, Britain and nuclear neighbour India. The Vatican said the killing was "terrible and tragic".

Pakistan opposition leader Nawaz Sharif vowed to Bhutto's supporters to "fight your war from now on" and said: "Bhutto was also my sister, I will be with you to avenge her death."

As people cried and hugged each other outside the hospital where Bhutto died, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf appealed to the nation to remain peaceful "so that the evil designs of terrorists can be defeated," state TV said.

Musharraf also summoned a high-level meeting to discuss postponing the upcoming elections.

In Washington, the Bush administration scrambled to cope with the implications of the assassination after investing significant diplomatic capital in promoting reconciliation between her and Musharraf.

Bhutto, who came from a political family steeped in Pakistan's turbulent history and tragedies, ironically spoke of the risks she faced during the rally, minutes before her death: "I put my life in danger and came here because I feel this country is in danger ... We will bring the country out of this crisis."

Chequered: Life rocked by turmoil

Benazir Bhutto was born on June 21, 1953, into a wealthy landowning family. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founded the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and was president and later prime minister of Pakistan from 1971 to 1977.

After gaining degrees in politics at Harvard and Oxford universities, she returned to Pakistan in 1977, just before the military seized power from her father. She inherited the leadership of the PPP after her father's execution in 1979.

First voted in as prime minister in 1988, Bhutto was sacked by the then-president on corruption charges in 1990. She took power again in 1993 after her successor, Nawaz Sharif, was forced to resign after a row with the president. Bhutto was no more successful in her second spell as prime minister, and Sharif was back in power by 1996.

In 1999, both Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, were sentenced on charges of taking kickbacks from a Swiss company hired to fight customs fraud. A higher court later overturned the conviction as biased.

Geneva lawyers for Bhutto said last month they had lodged an appeal in a Swiss inquiry into alleged money laundering by Bhutto and her husband. The motion filed with Geneva's criminal appeals court could lead to hearings in the long-running case, but not before early 2008.

Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October from eight years of self-imposed exile after Musharraf, with whom she had been negotiating over Pakistan's transition to civilian-led democracy, granted her protection from prosecution in old corruption cases.

A blast in his reception rally killed nearly 140 people.

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]]> Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:49:00 EST http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/317877 http://Arsiema.tigblog.org/post/317865 Published: December 27, 2007, 20:10


China looks to make soldiers of university students to bolster its military might

The fliers circulating recently on the campuses of China’s most prestigious universities showed three soldiers positioned against a Chinese flag and an appeal that read in part: “Carry Your Pen to the Army to Become More Accomplished.”

In ancient times, the phrase was: “Throw Away Your Pen and Join the Army,” a challenge to China’s intellectuals to stop wasting time and help defend the country.

Now the People’s Liberation Army is recruiting college students in a modernisation programme designed to attract soldiers who can handle sophisticated equipment and transform the 2.3 million-strong force into a high-tech adversary.

“With the rise of China, China needs a powerful army,” said Tan Zhenwen, a junior at Tsinghua University in Beijing who recently headed to Guangdong province to join the South China Sea Fleet. “ ... I don’t worry about the low social status of soldiers. With more and more college students joining the army, the situation is changing and getting better.”

While China’s rising diplomatic power has helped fuel a desire for a more professional army, military commanders also need highly educated soldiers so that they can maintain the “information-based” military power that has become increasingly important — both internationally as well as a means to dissuade Taiwan from declaring independence.

Changing character

Domestically, the army already has come a long way. A milita