Constitutional Factors

Iraq's constitution contains no provisions for how the country is to be governed in the period between elections and government formation. Determining the status of the transitional government—and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's role in it—will therefore be the first challenge. If a new government is not formed quickly, the only way to avoid a constitutional crisis will be for the federal supreme court to issue a decision on the issue. Unfortunately, Iraq is unlikely to take such a step until a crisis has already developed. In short, resolving the transitional issue alone could cause a substantial delay in government formation if the political wrangling is heated enough.

Ottoman soldiers and mass hangings of Armenians Credit: James Nazer

In the book The Guilt of Nations, Elazar Barkan wrote, “For a ‘new’ history to become more than a partisan ‘extremist’ story, the narrative often has to persuade not only the members of the group that will ‘benefit’ from the new interpretation but also their ‘others,’ those whose own history will presumably be ‘diminished,’ or tainted by the new stories.” Clearly Turkey’s reaction to the vote by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the Armenian Genocide resolution shows that Turkey remains unpersuaded by its own guilt. This is painful to continue to witness.

Nearly a hundred years after the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by Turkish forces during World War One, Turkey, an otherwise moderate country, continues to deny what eyewitness accounts prove to be an undeniable fact. Turkey’s reaction in recalling its Ambassador to the United States is both heavy-handed and a touch of “thou protesth too much.”

In recent efforts to defeat similar resolutions, Turkey has enlisted the help of high-paid Washington lobbyists to cajole, persuade, and arm twist individual Members of Congress to make it impossible to pass the resolution recognizing this genocide. Threats of dire consequences to US-Turkish relations ensued, with cynical accusations of damaging the relationship over a resolution recognizing what the world already knew to be true. March 4th’s Turkish reaction is no different.

In 1918, U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau wrote, “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."

What happened to the Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, and who are the Armenians? The Armenians are an ancient people who have existed since before the first century C.E. Armenia has gained and lost a tremendous amount of territory throughout its long and turbulent history. Boundaries of the past have extended from that of the present-day Republic of Armenia and through most of modern day Turkey. The name “Armenia” was actually given to the country by its neighbors; inhabitants of Armenia refer to it as “Hayastan” derived from the name Haik, a descendent of Noah (from the Bible), and “stan” which means “land” in Persian. The Armenian language is unique from other Indo-European languages, with its own distinct letters and grammar.

Armenian Death March in Ottoman Turkey

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has lambasted U.S. lawmakers for pursuing a resolution that would label his country’s treatment of Armenians after World War I as a “genocide.” That declaration, approved Thursday by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, could only serve to damage U.S.-Turkish relations, the prime minister said. Erdogan later decried the effort as a “parody,” and he stressed his country would in no way be “deterred” by U.S. lawmakers’ forthcoming proclamation. “Let me say quite clearly that this resolution will not harm us,” he told a business group. “But it will damage bilateral relations between countries, their interests and their visions for the future. We will not be the losers.” Despite the issue’s high profile, there been little movement in the United States to recognize the killing of almost 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1917 as a genocide.

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and Hillary Clinton

On March 1, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton embarked on her five-day tour of Latin America. The trip came in the wake of immensely destructive earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, the legacy of an ousted constitutionally-elected president in Honduras, the threats raised by an Iran-Brazil nuclear partnership, and the first female president being elected in Costa Rica. Unfortunately, until these recent natural disasters grabbed the headlines, the United States’ presence in Latin American affairs had been reduced to a minor distraction by the Iraq war.

Beginning with the now all but forgotten Monroe Doctrine of 1823, and continuing with a constant assortment of invasions and covert operations, Latin America has long been considered the United States’ “backyard,” today an antique notion. However, coming with the presidency of Barack Obama, it seemed as if Washington would be turning its back on its legacy of manipulation and intervention. Sadly, up to this point, the Obama White House has not given the American people anything strikingly new or inspiring.

Family of Cambodian Child Rape Victim

Amnesty International says rape and sexual crimes committed mainly against women and children has become a growing problem in Cambodia. To mark the 100th International Women's Day, the human-rights group Amnesty International is releasing a report on the scourge of rape and sexual violence in Cambodia. Amnesty's report, called Breaking the Silence, criticizes what it says is a culture of impunity, corruption, and indifference to victims of sexual violence. The result is justice denied for Cambodian women, and increasingly for Cambodian girls.

During its research, Amnesty interviewed 30 victims of rape, as well as 50 non-government aid workers, police and government officials, and even a number of perpetrators. Brittis Edman, who wrote the report, explains its focus, “What we specifically looked at is the aftermath of rape, what are the obstacles that victims face when they seek justice and when they seek access to services.”

The confrontation in the Indian subcontinent between al Qaeda, the Taliban and their allies on the one hand and the three democracies they target—Afghanistan, Pakistan and India—on the other hand, must be reevaluated in terms of international cooperation against the Jihadi threat. A regional system should be established to integrate the struggle against all Jihadi forces in the subcontinent. There needs to be a separation between the ethnical and territorial questions and the fight against Terrorism. Once that distinction is made, the possibilities of internationalization of counter terrorism will be high. Jihadists based in any country of the subcontinent must not be given legitimacy by any government on the ground of a local ethnic issue. Jihadi forces must be confronted collectively, while diplomacy and international mediation assist in solving the local problems.

December 2009 Toyota accelerator mishap

That Toyota brand and fleet of vehicles: Matrix, Sequoia, Highlander, RAV4, Camry, Avalon, Corolla, Tundra and Lexus. If any of you are the proud owner of one of these vehicles over the past few years, I’m certain some of you have horror story after horror story you could testify about before Congress, just as several have done in recent days. Do you ever wonder whether anyone was ever listening to your cry in the wilderness?

Many of us are just too personally familiar with the crisis Toyota now faces as a result of its clandestine relationship with our government which has seriously jeopardized or killed countless Americans on our highways. Toyota, which is headquartered in Japan, culturally addresses issues of irresponsibility and neglect in much harsher terms than the U.S. In fact, the Japanese have long been known as a group in which personal sacrifice (even suicide) is encouraged as part of one’s display of grief, regret and responsibility sharing.  Their culture is quick to issue apology after apology and show deep humiliation for their transgressions. Unfortunately in this latest episode, just simply apologizing repeatedly will not be enough to satisfy the tremendous harm and lack of sensitivity to those who have long prized the Toyota brand as the standard of the global auto market.

Nothing compares to the life of the touring musician, does it? ‘Life on the open road’, ‘the wind in your hair’, ‘the feel of the white desert sun beating down against your face.’ Ah… yes there’s nothing quite like the all too familiar loneliness of the lifeless highway after a ten hour drive. Playing a show to five hairless couples in a bowling alley for pittance. The glamour! The splendour! Still, for all its pitfalls this is the life that country musician and the film’s protagonist, ‘Bad’ Blake has chosen or rather one that he has found himself thrust into.

Based on the Thomas Cobb novel of the same name, Crazy Heart looks at the breakdown of an ‘old successful’ in much the same way Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler did. Whilst the film does not allude to one specific country musician, director Scott Cooper said that beardy types such as Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard all presented themselves as sources of inspiration for the film. Through the construction of  ‘Bad’ Blake, Cooper cleverly avoids committing to any one figure in particular, thus avoiding the backlash so prevalent within musical biopics. Instead, Cooper creates his own fictitious musicians living out their own dreams and dramas.

Blake, played by Jeff Bridges, is a country musician with a taste for alcohol and women. Whilst we aren’t really shown where he went wrong (apart from his four failed marriages of course) one can only imagine he spent his wealth on ladies and whiskey and then squandered the rest. We watch as world-weary Blake barely holds himself together, spitting bilious curds at his manager because of his current state of affairs.

The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States’ Rights. Frank Lambert. Oxford University Press. 2010.

Sometimes history turns a corner, and nobody notices. But such was certainly not the case in the fall of 1962, when James Meredith’s ultimately successful integration of the University of Mississippi involved a showdown between state and federal authorities, an on-campus riot featuring tear gas and gunfire, the presence of federal marshals and then federal troops, two fatalities and dozens injured. For a variety of reasons, the whole world was watching as President John Kennedy and Governor Ross Barnett jockeyed for position. The stakes for Meredith himself, the Kennedy administration, the burgeoning civil rights movement, and the South’s diehard segregationists couldn’t have been higher.

Yet today, almost 50 years later, the event is usually relegated to a paragraph or two in history textbooks, and although there have been some fine journalistic accounts—William Doyle’s “An American Insurrection” (2001) is probably the best—it has received relatively little scholarly attention. Until the last year or so, that is. In 2009, Charles Eagles, a historian at the University of Mississippi, published “The Price of Defiance,” a lengthy, detailed, authoritative account. Now Frank Lambert, professor of history at Purdue University, offers up a narrative of fewer than 180 pages that is, he says, “written primarily for students.” A part of Oxford’s series on “Critical Historical Encounters,” it is well suited for classroom use and should enable instructors to bring Meredith’s story to the center of the civil rights discussion.

The effects of plague on wildlife may have been underestimated in the past, according to new research. Plague, a flea-borne bacterial disease introduced to North America in the late 1800s, spreads rapidly across a landscape, causing devastating effects to wildlife and posing risks to people. Conservation and recovery efforts for imperiled species such as the black-footed ferret and Utah prairie dog are greatly hampered by the effects of plague. Eruptions of the fatal disease have wiped out prairie dog colonies, as well as dependent ferret populations, in many locations over the years.

The new findings demonstrates that plague continues to affect the black-footed ferret, one of the most critically endangered mammals in North America, as well as several species of prairie dogs, including the federally threatened Utah prairie dog—even when the disease does not erupt  into epidemic form.

By dipping ordinary paper or fabric in a special ink infused with nanoparticles, Stanford engineer Yi Cui has found a way to cheaply and efficiently manufacture lightweight paper batteries and supercapacitors (which, like batteries, store energy, but by electrostatic rather than chemical means), as well as stretchable, conductive textiles known as "eTextiles" – capable of storing energy while retaining the mechanical properties of ordinary paper or fabric.

While the technology is still new, Cui's team has envisioned numerous functional uses for their inventions. Homes of the future could one day be lined with energy-storing wallpaper. Gadget lovers would be able to charge their portable appliances on the go, simply plugging them into an outlet woven into their T-shirts. Energy textiles might also be used to create moving-display apparel, reactive high-performance sportswear and wearable power for a soldier's battle gear.

Elton Yarbrough was a young man seemingly on his way up: An economics major at Texas A&M University; a member of the university’s military cadet corps; a musician in the marching band; the pride of little Palestine, Texas; and soon to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force.

But police say he was also one other thing: A serial rapist.

The one-time Texas A&M senior is now sitting in a Texas prison until at least 2015 for felony sexual assault. Five women, including four female A&M students, testified Yarbrough raped or sexually assaulted them between 2003 and 2006, although he was only tried on one assault charge. Yarbrough says he is innocent.

Yarbrough is one of six alleged serial offenders at colleges across the country found during a year-long investigation of sexual assault on college campuses. The six were accused of assaulting multiple women in court records, campus records or other public documents.

However, students who reported being raped by fellow students told of at least five other men whom they suspected of, or had heard of, assaulting other women. Those men probably look a lot like Yarbrough did to Texas A&M administrators and to his fellow students: A promising young student with an outstanding resume of achievements. As one of his accusers would later write in a statement read at a university judicial proceeding, “If you cannot trust another student with a record which appears as impeccable as Elton’s, then who can we really trust in life?”

Walid Phares

In a discussion with American and European legislators as well as with counter terrorism experts from the Arab world, the formation of an “Anti-Terror Joint Force” was suggested as an appropriate response to the expansion of Terror organizations throughout the region backed by both al Qaeda and Iran. Over the past few years, I have given briefings to the Anti-Terror Caucus of the US House of Representatives as well as to several defense agencies on how such an initiative could start among Arab Governments and expand later to Muslim countries. These countries in the Arab world—Yemen, Saudi, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, and several Gulf states—are already fighting Terrorism in general and al Qaeda in particular. They are already confronting al Qaeda and Jihadi Takfiris in their homelands. and in some cases they are fighting networks backed by the Iranian regime, as is the case in Yemen, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Hence an Arab leadership on counter terrorism is the best idea to put all these resources together. The creation of an Arab special forces corps would benefit all countries involved and would be backed by many Western countries.

An Arab joint effort against terrorism is not only beneficial on military and security levels but also and mainly on ideological levels. Arab intellectuals and NGOs, when approached and supported seriously, can be efficient in countering radicalization and indoctrination by Jihadi Salafis and Khomeinists.

Furthermore, such a Trans Arab effort against Terrorism would enhance the image of Arab countries and societies in the West and at the international stage. After 9/11, connections were drawn between the Jihadists and entire Arab societies. With the rise of a common Anti Terror Arab force, these connections will be reversed as the international public opinion would then see these important efforts on behalf of several countries coming together to defeat a common enemy: al Qaeda and resist a global threat: Terrorism.

Some Measure of Justice—The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s. Michael Marrus. University of Wisconsin Press, October 2009. 184 pages.

Few would have been more receptive than I to the latest volume by Michael Marrus entitled Some Measure of Justice—The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s. I have enormous respect for Professor Marrus who is clearly one of the world’s most talented Holocaust historians. Robert A. Paxton, Marrus’s coauthor in the book Vichy France and the Jews, was one of four leading historians to vet my own work, IBM and the Holocaust, and was acknowledged by me in my book. Like many, I have been troubled by the chaotic mess of Holocaust restitution and I authored a syndicated article for the New York Jewish Week and other Jewish newspapers headlined “Holocaust ‘Industry’ More About Money Than Memory.” Moreover, I am fully versed in the war-time crimes and collaboration of such companies as IBM, GM, Ford, the Swiss banks, and the leading Holocaust-era insurance companies, all of which knowingly helped Hitler pauperize the Jews, systematize the persecution, and consciously helped empower the Third Reich’s war against humanity.

In my opinion, Marrus’s misguided volume seems to be so filled with selective facts and misplaced emphasis that the text creates a totally wrong impression and historical insight into this important topic. Marrus’s five-chapter volume, consisting of 127 pages plus front and back matter, displays no archival references or other primary documentation. Instead, I see a selective collage of secondary and tertiary opinions, journal articles, newspaper reports, essays, and editorials attributed to other thinkers and writers who are struggling with the difficult subject of Holocaust restitution. How Marrus arranges these second-hand and third-hand assessments can be troubling. 

Typhoon Morakot, the unusually strong tropical storm that hit South East Asia in mid-August 2009, displacing more than 1.5 million people in China alone, is only one of the most recent natural disasters that raise questions about environmental change and its link to migration. This link has increasingly attracted attention over the past few years, in particular since 2007, when the 4th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report confirmed that human migration would be one of the most important consequences of anthropogenic climate change. The manifestations of environmental change derived from human activities notably include sea level rise (SLR), intensified drought or rainfall, and the increasing attracted recurrence and strength of natural hazards such as hurricanes.

For the last several decades, the Turkish military was untouchable; no one dared to criticize the military or its top generals, lest they risk getting burned. The Turkish Armed Forces were the ultimate protectors of founding father Kemal Ataturk's secular legacy, and no other force in the country could seriously threaten its supremacy. Not anymore.

On Feb. 22, 49 officers -- including active-duty generals, admirals, and former commanders of the Turkish navy and air force -- were arrested on allegations of plotting a coup against the government. Specifically, the officers were charged with authoring a 5,000-page memo that was later published in Taraf, a paper whose editorial policy is singularly dedicated to bashing the military.

Among other things, the memo stated that the Turkish military was planning to bomb Istanbul's historic mosques and shoot down its own planes to justify a coup. When I asked a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey for his views on the news, he thought the scenario was ridiculous. "If the Turkish military was going to do a coup, they would not be writing a 5,000-page memo about it," he stated.

Recently, Hamas has gone to extraordinary lengths to prove that it did not attack civilian targets in Israel during the December 2008 to January 2009 Gaza conflict. But a review of the organization's own media—including the website of its military arm, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (www.qassam.ps), and the Hamas-associated monthly journal Filastin al-Muslima (www.fm-m.com)—shows that Hamas knowingly and repeatedly fired on Israeli population centers in southern Israel. To accept Hamas's latest claim that it did not launch rockets at civilians is to deny its numerous past claims to the contrary.

Claim vs. Conduct

On February 3, 2010, Hamas released a fifty-two-page response to the UN's Goldstone report regarding its conduct during the Gaza war (called the “Battle of al-Furqan” in the organization’s commentary). According to this document, the killing and wounding of Israeli civilians was unintentional—Hamas forces had targeted only military installations during the fighting. This claim was based on a supposed internal investigation conducted by Hamas and led by its justice minister, Faraj al-Ghoul.

A section of an ancient city wall of Jerusalem from the tenth century B.C.E.—possibly built by King Solomon—has been revealed in archaeological excavations directed by Dr. Eilat Mazar and conducted under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The section of the city wall revealed, 70 meters long and six meters high, is located in the area known as the Ophel, between the City of David and the southern wall of the Temple Mount. Uncovered in the city wall complex are: an inner gatehouse for access into the royal quarter of the city, a royal structure adjacent to the gatehouse, and a corner tower that overlooks a substantial section of the adjacent Kidron valley.

Abraham Foxman

Today it seems that films about the Holocaust and events surrounding it abound. Almost with a bizarre regularity they reach the big screen in twos or threes. They are made by major Hollywood studios and independents; they feature known and unknown actors. Most attempt to dramatize "true" events. It is hard to imagine there was a time when it was not so.

For many years after the end of World War II and the truth became known about the Final Solution it was a subject most filmmakers avoided. The horrors of the Holocaust were still too raw; the images seen in newsreels not yet ready to be placed on the big screen. Several Holocaust films that were made and had a profound impact, including The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), told their stories through words rather than images of the horror.

As the number of survivors and witnesses dwindled and we moved farther away from the Holocaust one filmmaker conceived of how to have an audience understand the history through dramatization. The filmmaker was Steven Spielberg; the film was Schindler's List, winner of seven Academy Awards, seen by millions and used as a teaching tool since it appeared in 1993.

After Spielberg's incredible portrayal of the horrors of the Holocaust one might have thought that the subject was exhausted for filmmakers. How else could they produce an account of the Holocaust in a way that had not been done before, through a story to which new and younger audiences could relate?

All 167 seats of the Venezuelan National Assembly will be in play this coming September, and the current 141-seat controlling stake of ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) appears to be at risk. Amid growing internal economic upheaval and violent street protests, Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s embattled president, is facing a sharp decline in his personal popularity and the possibility of a significant gain by the opposition in the upcoming legislative elections. Chávez has continued to use his soapbox to concoct fiery speeches, earning him additional enemies and alienating his friends due to his pugnacious style of rule and confrontational habits.

Leadership: Consolidation and Corruption

Shuffling his cabinet in recent weeks, Chávez has tightened his circle of advisers to an unprecedented degree in a very short span of time. As his strategy to restore public faith in his government’s qualifications and to continue to serve his fellow Venezuelans oscillates, his recent call to further consolidate power among his supporters in the country has prompted concern among those in the international community who refused to acknowledge any claims to his worthiness. Some are troubled by what they see as a trend towards burgeoning autocracy in the country. Following a local banking scandal in early December, in which his brother Arne was implicated as a major player, Science and Technology Minister Jesse Chacon resigned from his post. He had been a close confidant of Chávez for years.

Armstrong Williams

It is increasingly—and horrifyingly—commonplace in California to treat children diagnosed with deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, with marijuana. California voters passed a law allowing doctors to recommend medical marijuana to their patients, including those under the age of 18. The law allows doctors to recommend marijuana “for any... illness for which marijuana provides relief.” Under that broad umbrella, doctors are pushing pot to treat all kinds of maladies, including ADHD. Truly, this is horrifying.

ADHD is described as a neurological disorder that prevents children from focusing on a specific task. In essence, people with ADHD have difficulty with self-regulation and self-motivation, due to problems with distractibility, organization, and prioritization. Notably, these are the same functions that are most impaired by marijuana use.

Pot actually exacerbates problems with attention, memory and concentration that a treatment for ADHD should alleviate. That's why Stephen Hinshaw, Chairman of the Psychology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, called prescribing marijuana to treat ADHD “one of the worst ideas of all time.”

At very least, using marijuana to treat adolescents with ADHD is wildly irresponsible. First of all, the FDA has never conducted an approval process on marijuana and few institutions are willing to fund studies to show the effects of using marijuana as a remedy for ADHD.

Consequently, there are no reliable studies to show how the drug may affect ADHD. That means that all of the so-called evidence in support of prescribing marijuana to children is anecdotal; it is based completely on self-selecting and self-reporting. In other words, there is no reliable scientific basis for drugging these children into complacency. Nonetheless, doctors, school counselors, and misinformed parents are increasingly pushing marijuana to kids.

An artificial foot that recycles energy otherwise wasted in between steps could make it easier for amputees to walk, its developers say. University of Michigan researchers developed an artificial foot that recycles energy otherwise wasted in between steps. The device could make it easier for amputees to walk. "For amputees, what they experience when they're trying to walk normally is what I would experience if I were carrying an extra 30 pounds," said Art Kuo, professor in the University of Michigan departments of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering.

If you or the person you are traveling with has even the slightest mobility problem such as trouble walking or poor balance, avoid a cruise which calls at ports where the ship anchors off-shore rather than alongside a dock. When a cruise ship anchors off shore, the passengers must use the ship’s lifeboats or a tender from the host port to go ashore. Boarding and disembarking from these boats, even in relatively calm waters, can be quite challenging.

As a result, the elderly or the frail often miss going ashore when their ship is anchored. Since brochures rarely spell out this information, call the cruise company and ask them about this before making your booking.

Marcel Hotel New York City

This hotel could be a major address for the informed traveler on a budget. Certainly, the rooms in this beat-up building are updated, sleek, bright and even playful. Travelers will find the accommodations warm and cozy with a flare. Service is exemplary as the friendly staff tries hard. A rooftop patio has enormous potential.

But two major problems rule this property out as a first, second, or third choice. Management has chosen to make the coffee machine inoperable during the breakfast hours and turns it on only after say 10 AM or 11 AM. This means groggy people waking up with typical early morning departures or commitments cannot grab a cup of coffee easily as they would expect at the public access coffee machine. This is deliberate. Management wants to drive morning coffee and breakfast to the expensive restaurant connected to the property. Anyone who wants to go outside for coffee can cross a few busy intersections for a Starbucks--but this is not inviting as a wake-up. Hence, management is willing to inconvenience their customers to score a meal for the rental property.

When a cop or a fire fighter pulls out a radio in a television police drama, his message goes through, whether he’s in the basement of a building or deep in a forest. In the real world, clear communication is rarely so easy, particularly among first responders from different disciplines and jurisdictions. This reality was dramatically brought home at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, when crucial observations from the police department’s helicopters did not reach fire chiefs, commanders lost radio contact with responders who ascended the towers, and brigades in the north tower did not hear calls to evacuate.

Since then, an unprecedented amount of federal money has been spent on communications gear and technology, expenses traditionally borne by state and local governments. The goal is to fix the communication problems faced on 9/11 — to create “interoperability” that allows first responders from different disciplines and jurisdictions to communicate. From 2004 to 2008, the only years for which detailed figures are available, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) approved more than $4.3 billion in grant money to improve interoperability among first responders nationwide. DHS officials have said that more grant money has gone to interoperability than to any other initiative, and it continues to be a major focus for DHS grant programs, while also drawing funding from the economic stimulus package.

Dalai Lama Exits White House Among Garbage Bags

The unceremonious departure of the Dalai Lama from the White House on February 19 gained almost as much currency as the actual meeting between the Tibetan Buddhist leader and President Barack Obama. While leaving the Executive Mansion, the Dalai Lama was captured on film exiting through a door usually used by household staff where the West Wing meets the main presidential residence. The saffron-robed monk, a recipient of the Nobel Prize and revered icon for Buddhists and lovers of liberty was seen walking around trash bags in his sandals in chilly Washington DC.

The photo promptly went all over the world, sparking criticism and bewilderment. For its part, the White House released only one photo of the actual meeting between the two leaders, showing them in conversation.

China, which has occupied the mountainous nation of Tibet since the 1950s, duly registered its diplomatic pique over the visit. The American ambassador in Beijing was summoned for a consultation with the Chinese foreign ministry in protest. A Chinese spokesman averred that the Tibetan spiritual leader’s visit with Obama had “seriously harmed” Sino-American relations. The Chinese registered its “solemn representation” to the U.S. diplomat that international relations had been damaged because of Obama’s refusal to heed Chinese warnings. “We believe the actions of the U.S. side have seriously interfered in Chinese internal affairs, seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people, and seriously undermined China-U.S. relations,” said the Chinese spokesman.

Dubai-based columnist Aijaz Zaka Syed recently penned an op-ed that appeared in multiple publications claiming that Israel was hypocritical for sending medical teams to earthquake-ravaged Haiti while ignoring the plight of Gazans.

“If the Israelis have reached out to the Haitians by swiftly dispatching a medical team, it’s laudable,” he wrote. “But why those moved by a tragedy on the other side of the world can’t see what’s been happening right under their noses for years?”

Syed also mentioned the “plane-loads of relief and aid supplies” that Arab and Muslim countries have sent, suggesting that the lack of publicity is not known because Arab countries are not particularly media-savvy.

Relations between Argentina and the United Kingdom have entered a period of renewed tension since Buenos Aires on February 16 began to restrict the travel of seagoing vessels between the South American republic and the archipelago known to the British as the Falkland Islands. Known to Argentina—and the rest of Latin America—as the Malvinas Islands, the tiny South Atlantic archipelago has long been disputed between the land of tango and Old Blighty and was the subject of a war in 1982. The British easily mopped up the “Argies” in two months: a defeat that hastened the end of the military dictatorship then reigning in Argentina.

The most current measure was taken just days before the arrival of a British oil drilling platform “Ocean Guardian,” owned by Desire Petroleum, that arrived in the area on February 20, some 30 to 60 miles from the storm-tossed Falklands/Malvinas.

Experts have been cited as saying that some 60 billion barrels of oil may be found in the strata around the islands. Desire Petroleum spokesmen say that they will drill despite objections by Argentina. There are reports that Argentine naval or coast guard vessels buzzed the oil rig on its way to the islands from Scotland.

Signed by President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the decree calls for “any seagoing ship or vessel that proposes to transit” between the ports on the shore of continental Argentina and those in the Falklands/Malvinas Islands, South Georgia and Sandwich Islands “must request previous authorization issued by a competent national authority.”

Federal Court Building Ninth Circuit

You may have seen a headline like the one above following a January 5 decision issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (usually shortened to "Ninth Circuit"), the federal appellate court which handles appeals from federal district (that is, trial) courts in the State of Washington, California, and other western states. The headline seemed, shall I say odd, so I was prompted to read this Ninth Circuit decision (Farrakhan v. Gregoire), as well as other decisions on the same problem issued by three other federal appellate courts: Johnson v. Governor of the State of Florida (Eleventh Circuit 2005); Hayden v. Pataki (Second Circuit 2006); and Simmons v. Galvin (First Circuit 2009).

As we all learned from the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case following the 2000 presidential election, most of the law governing the eligibility of individuals to vote is state, not federal, law. One such federal law, however, is the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was enacted to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, one of the amendments that followed the Civil War.

"Cars sit most of the time," said Jeff Stein, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Michigan. Stein added, "What if it could work for you while it sits there? If you could use a car for something more than just getting to work or going on a family vacation, it would be a whole different way to think about a vehicle, and a whole different way to think about the power grid, too." The University of Michigan is home of the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute, which develops, coordinates and promotes multidisciplinary energy research and education at the Ann Arbor-based institution.

Stein leads a National Science Foundation-funded team exploring plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) that not only use grid electricity to meet their power needs, but also the car's potential to store electricity from the wind or sun, or even feed electricity back into the grid, earning money for the owner.

On Thursday, Andrew Joseph Stack III flew a small plane into the IRS's four-story office building in Austin, killing himself and at least one federal employee. Before the incident, Stack allegedly left a series of messages on a website expressing his disgust with the IRS, saying at one point that “violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”

“Whenever an individual or group attacks civilians in order to make a political statement, that is an act of terror,” said Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

“Terrorism is terrorism, regardless of the faith, race or ethnicity of the perpetrator or the victims,” said Awad, adding in a statement that “if a Muslim had carried out the IRS attack, it would have surely been labeled an act of terrorism.”

UN Human Rights Council

In recent days, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren was heckled relentlessly and interrupted vociferously by members of University of California at Irvine's Muslim Student Union. Such negation of civility, discourse and decorum, which was noisily and gleefully celebrated by still other members of this group, is often defended by solemn-sounding references to United Nations resolutions.

This case was no exception. In a subsequent statement, the Muslim Student Union said it opposed having university departments sponsor a speaker representing a country that “is condemned by more UN Human Rights Council resolutions than all other countries in the world combined”—which is, in fact, the case. Those who use this type of argument rely on the halo effect of the United Nations, which is held, implicitly or explicitly, to embody “international opinion,” a term that can be invoked with reverential awe to dignify a bad, dishonest argument.

Professor Eske Willerslev and his PhD student Morten Rasmussen, from Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics, The Natural History Museum at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, led the international team of scientists responsible for the findings. Willerslev and his team grabbed international attention last year when they reconstructed the complete mitochondrial genomes of a woolly mammoth and an ancient human.

However, the current discovery is the first time scientists have been able to reconstruct the 80 percent of the nuclear genome that is possible to retrieve from fossil remains. From the genomic sequences, the team has managed to construct a picture of a male individual who lived in Greenland 4,000 years ago and belonged to the first culture to settle in the New World Arctic.

A Chinese university thought to be at the center of last month's cyberattack on Google is denying any involvement in the scheme.

Representatives from Shanghai Jiaotong University this weekend described those reports to Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, as "baseless allegations which may harm the university's reputation." While the school did admit its computers could have been involved in the plot, which targeted Google, other U.S. businesses and human rights activists in China, the university's spokesperson dismissed any possibility the attack started there.

Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones. Joseph Jaffe. Wiley, 2010. 286 pages.

It's bizarre and baffling to me that companies expend so much time, money and energy on customer acquisition and then follow it up with crappy service after the sale.

Think about it: Advertising, marketing, and sales departments are all geared toward convincing prospects to buy the company's products and services. But after asking for the order and getting it, the customer—especially if it's a consumer and not a business—is often ignored. Worse, they're frequently forced to deal with incompetent, unhelpful, or ignorant people several continents away when they have a problem.

There's nothing inherently wrong with outsourcing customer service to India or South America. For example, I've had exceptional service, in fact, from friendly and well informed people in those places. But I've had also awful ones, too. Every interaction with a customer holds the potential to not only serve their needs, but turn them into evangelists and advocates for your company and continued sources of sales and revenue. So why is this not obvious to every enterprise?

Joseph Jaffe wonders the same thing. In this new book, he looks at every aspect of the client experience, including, obviously, “customer service” interactions. But he goes well beyond that, too. Engaging people is the challenge. Your product is secondary. After all, they're not buying what you're selling; they're buying a solution to a problem or a fulfillment of a need.

Players on the football field have expressed similar concerns to real warriors on the battlefield, and have been rapidly learning that real strength comes from seeking help and returning to their team.

“The stigma around seeking care for PTSD, depression, TBI and related issues can be overcome,” says John Greden, M.D., executive director of the U-M Depression Center. “Players and veterans in sports, and soldiers and veterans in the military are learning that they are not alone, that treatment works, that buddies and teammates can help, and that getting help is a sign of real strength. As a center that has developed special programs specifically to help members of the military and athletes overcome these barriers, we are proud to be partnering with the Real Warriors Campaign.”

Ali Khameini

A few hours after the official demonstration marking the February 11 anniversary of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei stated, "Was the presence of tens of millions of motivated and aware people in the festival of the thirty-first anniversary of revolution enough to awaken [to their mistakes] the internal enemies and deceived individuals who sometimes hypocritically speak of 'the people'?" Khamenei had spent months worrying that the opposition Green Movement would hijack the anniversary. Yesterday, he seemed to regain his self-confidence by proving that he could manage Tehran's streets. In light of this development, how will the Supreme Leader deal with both Iran's political crisis and the nuclear dossier?

What Happened on February 11

By controlling a huge city like Tehran on such a sensitive day, Khamenei proved his operational capabilities as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. A few days before the anniversary, the regime clamped down on all communication channels, from internet to cell phones to satellite television, interrupting them or placing them under surveillance in order to diminish the opposition's ability to organize protests. It also raised the level of intimidation, making daily arrests of political and student activists as well as ordinary people and publishing wanted posters of individuals who had participated in the December 2009 Ashura demonstration.

A long-awaited Federal Election Commission ruling could dramatically impact how the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision affects the power of candidates to control campaign messages.

The FEC will set new rules this year to govern the coordination of communication between outside entities and candidates and parties. The proposed rulemaking was already in the works before the Citizens United decision, but this week the agency set a public hearing for March 2 and 3 and extended its public comment period on the issue to elicit comments addressing the impact of the high court’s decision.

Watchdog groups have long argued that the FEC’s coordination rules are too weak and ineffective but the Citizens United decision, which allows unfettered corporate and union money in elections as long as the spending is independent, is shining a new light on the importance of restrictions on coordination between candidates and outside entities.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has just handed a victory to ethanol producers by issuing final regulations that conclude corn-based fuels will meet greenhouse gas standards imposed under a 2007 energy law.

The release of the final regulations follows a fierce campaign by ethanol companies that alleged 2009 draft rules unfairly found that large volumes of ethanol production would not meet targets in the statute for reducing greenhouse gases.

The new rules state that corn-based ethanol will meet a requirement of the 2007 law that they must emit at least 20 percent less in “lifecycle” greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline.

The statute expanded the national biofuels use mandate to reach 36 billion gallons annually by 2022. If the EPA had ruled that corn-based fuels did not meet their emissions target, the fuels could have been frozen out of the market.

The issue has been vital to the ethanol lobby, which feared that an adverse finding could stymie investment and tarnish the fuel’s image.

However, the nation’s current ethanol production — about 12 billion gallons annually — was exempted from the law’s emissions mandate. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson on Monday denied the agency had bent to pressure, instead arguing that EPA employed better modeling when crafting the final regulations. “We have followed the science,” she told reporters on a conference call. “Our models have become more sophisticated. We have accrued better data.”

Over the past several months, a number of reports have circulated that address the subject of drug trafficking ties between South American narcotics trafficking interests and terrorist organizations, principally Al Qaeda and its smaller affiliates now known to be based in Northern Africa. These assessments have cited evidence pointing to a disturbing ring, an “unholy alliance,” which reflects alarming links between FARC exporters and Al Qaeda distributors according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s Jay Bergman.

This expanding nexus involves transporting drugs from South America to Africa and, once there, smuggling them over established land routes to EU countries. The stakes are too high to ignore, especially if the charges turn out to be true, and the consequences of this operation could further destabilize impoverished and relatively lawless regions of Africa. However, upon closer examination, much of the evidence cited in these articles turns out to be circumstantial at best.

The Evidence

On January 11, 2010 the German magazine Der Spiegel published an article titled, “Lebanese drug rings active in Germany said to have funded terrorism,” in which it accused Hezbollah (which is classified as a terrorist organization by United States authorities) of using immigrant rings based in Speyer, Germany as a money-laundering conduit for the illegal sale and distribution of cocaine. Der Spiegel speculates that these same rings may have channeled at least some of their profits to support Hezbollah terrorist activities in Lebanon.
Previously, on January 4, 2010, Reuters reported that the DEA had established that a drug-trafficking alliance existed between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and Al Qaeda. Details in the article were rapidly disseminated by various media channels, inspiring both shock and disbelief.

David Horovitz

Is Iran about to get the bomb? It's getting closer every day, and shows no signs of changing course.

The requirement is a legacy of the intelligence failures ahead of Yom Kippur, 1973, the last time that Israel's neighbors launched a concerted conventional attack on Israel—on an Israel unprepared.

The good news—this week—is that concerted conventional attack is not deemed imminent.

The bad news—this week and for many past weeks, months and years—is that concerted conventional attack is not what the defense establishment is most worried about. What keep the security chiefs burning the midnight oil are concerns about missiles and terrorism, about nonconventional payloads and secret programs, and about the vulnerability of the Israeli home front—the new battleground. And their focus is not primarily on the traditional military capacities of our immediate neighboring states, but rather on the nonconventional threat to do us harm as posed, in escalating order, by al-Qaida, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria... and Iran. All five of those players are incontrovertibly scheming, right now, to damage Israel. And there is another quintet—Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Libya—which, in the dispassionate, nondiplomatic analysis of the intelligence community, cannot be discounted as potentially joining them.

By our relative standards, things have been a whole lot better in the recent past. Just six, seven years ago, for instance, Syria was being forced out of Lebanon, Libya was stopping its nuclear program, Yasser Arafat was dying, the United States was disposing of Saddam Hussein, and Iran, fearing that the US was heading its way next, was freezing at least parts of its nuclear program.

Anti-Israel individuals and groups on college campuses are beginning to show a pattern underlying a shift in the form of their anti-Israel activities which attack the very core of what many consider the most important aspect of the university experience, the free flow of information and opinion. Just in the last week we have seen the following events take place at UC Irvine, UCLA, and York University in Canada, Cambridge and Oxford Universities in Great Britain.

On February 1, at York University in Toronto, 20 Jewish students who had gathered to raise awareness of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and terrorist acts committed by Hamas were surrounded by about 50 protestors chanting anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slurs. Two of the Jewish students were slapped, one on the arm and one across the face (http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=168116).

On February 3, during his lecture at Oxford University, Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon was heckled by a Muslim student who shouted, among other things, "Itbah Al-Yahud" - "kill the Jews" (http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=168320).

On February 7, the Israel Society at Cambridge University canceled a talk by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev historian Benny Morris after protesters accused him of "Islamophobia" and "racism" (http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=167972).