This is an Open Thread:Time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin
Into the future
A Frail Economy Raises Pressure on Iran’s Rulers
TEHRAN – In one of the coldest winters Iranians have experienced in recent memory, the government is failing to provide natural gas to tens of thousands of people across the country, leaving some for days or even weeks with no heat at all. Here in the capital, rolling blackouts every night for a month have left people without electricity, and heat, for hours at a time.The heating crisis in this oil-exporting nation is adding to Iranians’ increasing awareness of the contrast between their growing influence abroad and frailty at home, according to government officials, diplomats and political analysts interviewed here.
From fundamentalists to reformists, people here are talking more loudly about the need for a more pragmatic approach, one that tones down the anti-Western rhetoric, at least a bit, and focuses more on improving management of the country and restoring Iran’s economic health.
USA
Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate
When residents in Illinois voiced outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation had not disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state’s freshman senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause.
Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.”“I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval.
Area Schools Set To Lose Millions Under Medicaid Policy Changes
Educators nationwide are protesting a Bush administration move to curtail hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid funding for disabled students that could force some schools already in budget straits to trim health services or cut back instructional programs.The shift in federal reimbursement policy threatens to strip about $635 million from schools in the next academic year and $3.6 billion over five years, with Washington area schools in line to lose millions of dollars. The rule, to take effect in June unless Congress intervenes, will bar schools from billing Medicaid for busing special education students to and from school and for certain administrative expenses, including enrolling children in Medicaid and coordinating and scheduling services.
Middle East
Former Hussein supporters live in fear in Iraq
Those who belonged to the dictator’s party watch in horror as fellow ex-Baathists are killed, even beheaded.
BAGHDAD — First, the attackers beat the retired Baghdad municipality worker, his wife and their daughter in their home last weekend. Then they beheaded them.The only clear motive people could think of for such brutality was that the dead man had belonged to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
“They didn’t care if he was a good or bad person,” his cousin Abu Abdullah said a few days later. “His job had required him to be a Baathist. He was never into it like others. He never hurt anyone.”
Ahmed Jawad Hashim’s killing was a gruesome reminder of the dangers lurking for former members of the Baath Party at a time when “de-Baathification” legislation, meant to promote reconciliation among those purged from government, mostly Sunnis, and the country’s Shiite religious elite, slowly makes its way into law.
Egypt reseals Gaza border breach
Egyptian troops have sealed the border with the Gaza Strip, ending 10 days of freedom of movement for Palestinians.The troops are still allowing Palestinians and Egyptians to return home, but have stopped allowing any new cross-border movement.
The border was breached when Hamas militants blew up sections of the wall to break a blockade imposed by Israel.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians took the opportunity to cross into Egypt to buy supplies.
Africa
Wave of anarchy blamed on Kenya’s ‘General Coward’
As the post-election death toll nears 1,000 and towns go up in flames, more Kenyans are saying the ‘holy’ President and his elite advisers are to blame
Xan Rice in Othaya
Sunday February 3, 2008
The ObserverMount Kenya rises in the distance, its glaciers reflecting the sharp morning light. Tea bushes cover the slopes around the huge estate, with its high walls and three separate entrances, one manned by heavily armed policemen. If the pre-election predictions had been followed, the 76-year-old golf-loving, aloof owner of the estate in Othaya should have been strolling in its neat gardens, enjoying his first month of retirement and reflecting on his legacy of furthering Kenya’s passage towards democracy.
Bryan Appleyard’s full account of his interview with Ishmael BeahIshmael Beah speaks fluent, clear English with wide open West African vowels. In Sierra Leone he was brought up speaking Mende and Creole. But, at school, he was taught very formal, correct English, memorising long speeches from Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare is quite a big thing in Sierra Leone,” he says, “anybody who went to school there – if you ask them, they will quote you a lot of Shakespeare.”
He’s 27 and he has a gentle, sweet, almost childlike face. When amused, he emits a strange, high-pitched giggle. He’s wearing the groovy, smart but toughish clothes of a winter in New York – he lives there now. As he speaks, he fixes his round eyes unwaveringly on mine. I find yourself
hanging on every word.
Ishmael Beah is a former child solider from Sierra Leone who wrote a book about it A Long Way Gone. However a reporter from Australia doesn’t believe the story is true.
Latin America
Revealed: Chávez role in cocaine trail to Europe
The guerrilla group Farc has long been suspected of running the Colombian cocaine industry. But how does it move the drug so readily out of the country? In a special investigation, John Carlin in Venezuela reports on the remarkable collusion between Colombia’s rebels and its neighbour’s armed forces
Sunday February 3, 2008
The ObserverSome fighters desert from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) because they feel betrayed by the leadership, demoralised by a sense that the socialist ideals that first informed the guerrilla group have been replaced by the savage capitalism of drug trafficking. Others leave to be with their families. Still others leave because they begin to think that, if they do not, they will die. Such is the case of Rafael, who deserted last September after 18 months operating in a Farc base inside Venezuela, with which Colombia shares a long border.
No Body Left Untoned Preparing for Carnival
RIO DE JANEIRO – It was the last rehearsal of the Vila Isabel samba school at the famed Sambadrome, and Natalia Guimarães, Miss Brazil 2007, wondered if she was truly ready for Carnival.
She surveyed the high-energy samba dancers gliding down the avenue in five-inch high heels, sweat pouring off their bare stomachs as they gyrated their rear ends at dizzying speeds for an hour, with barely a minute’s rest.Had the 25 flights of stairs she climbed each day in her hotel and the countless hours training with a samba queen and lifting weights been enough to prepare her for her role as a drum corps queen?
Europe
Seducer Silvio Berlusconi to shower women with cabinet jobs
THE former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, known as “the Great Seducer”, is to lure women into his campaign for a spectacular political comeback by promising that at least a third of his ministers will be female.The former cruise ship crooner aims to torpedo efforts to set up an interim government following the collapse of Romano Prodi’s left-wing coalition.
Berlusconi, a 71-year-old billionaire, is so confident that he will force an election for mid-April that he is already working on his manifesto and planning the composition of his third administration. Opinion polls give him a lead of between 9% and 15%.
They’re back from the front line – so why are these ex-soldiers still fighting their own wars?
They fought and nearly died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once discharged from the army, these men face huge personal problems – homelessness, unemployment and depression – without adequate support. But after doing their bit for their country, shouldn’t their country do its bit for them? Report by Mark Townsend
Sunday February 3, 2008
The ObserverIt was, he admits, quite a shock. The sniper’s bullet ripped through his left cheek, gouging through both eye sockets before exiting below his right ear. Corporal Simon Brown remembers lying in a Basra backstreet trying to rearrange his face.
‘It had collapsed, the skin from my face was flopping down, blocking my airways. I could barely breathe,’ he says. Under relentless fire from insurgents, Brown wrapped a bandage around his broken features.
Asia
Seeking a Path in Democracy’s Dead End
KIEV, Ukraine
LATE in the afternoon of Jan. 24, an American military plane landed in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, carrying Adm. William J. Fallon, the commander of the United States Central Command.Admiral Fallon, who oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, had arrived for an introductory meeting with the Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, one of the post-Soviet world’s durable strongmen.
Relations with the United States have been largely frozen since 2005, when Uzbekistan, bristling under American censure for a bloody crackdown against anti-government demonstrators, evicted the Pentagon from an air base that had been used to support the war in Afghanistan.
Exclusive: Benazir Bhutto’s last testament
When Benazir Bhutto was assassinated she was putting the final touches to her hard-hitting memoirs. In this world exclusive extract, she makes shocking allegations from the grave – and urges reconciliation between Islam and the West
Like most women in politics, I am especially sensitive to maintaining my composure, to never showing my feelings. A display of emotion by a woman in politics or government can be misconstrued as a manifestation of weakness, reinforcing stereotypes and caricatures.But when I stepped down onto the tarmac at Quaid-e-Azam international airport in Karachi on October 18 last year, I was overcome with emotion. After eight lonely and difficult years of exile, I could not stop the tears pouring from my eyes.I felt that a terrible weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It was a sense of liberation. I was home at long last. I knew what I had to do.
